xiv. 158) as she looked upon Jupiter, enslaves him for the time through

a passion of which she is not herself the slave, but which she uses as her instrument for a great end of policy. She is, in short, a great, fervid, unscrupulous, and most able Greek patriot, exhibiting little of divine ingredients, but gifted with a marked and powerful human individuality.

It may be worth while to observe in passing, an indication as to the limited powers of locomotion which Homer ascribed to his deities. The horses of Juno, when she drives, cover at each step a space as great as the human eye can command looking along the sea. But when she has the two operations to perform on the same day, one upon the mother of Eurystheus, and the other on the mother of Hercules, she attends to the first in her own person, and apparently manages the other by command given to the Eilithuiæ (Il. xix. 119). If so, then she was evidently in the Poet’s mind subject to the laws of space and corporal presence: and his figure of the horse’s spring was one on which he would not rely for the management of an important piece of business.

There are three places, and three only, in the poems, which could connect Juno with the Trojans. One is the Judgment of Paris (Il. xxiv. 29). The others are no more than verbal only. Hector swears by Jupiter “the loud thundering husband of Here[360].” And again, he wishes he had as certainly Jupiter for his father, and Juno for his mother[361], as he is certain that the day will bring disaster to the Greeks. We cannot, then, say that she was absolutely unknown to the Trojans in her Hellenic form, while they may have been more familiar with her eastern prototypes[362]. It does not, however, follow, that she was a deity of established worship among them. There is no notice of any institution or act of religion on the one side, or of care on the other, between her and any member of their race. In the mention of her among the Trojans, we may perhaps have an instance of the very common tendency of the heathen nations to adopt, by sympathy as it were, deities from one another; independently of all positive causes, such as migration, or ethnical or political connection.

[360] Il. x. 329.

[361] Il. xiii. 827.

[362] See Il. iii. 104.

~_Her mythological origin._~

The origin of Juno, which would thus on many grounds appear to have been Hellenic, appears to be referable to the principle, which I have called œconomy, and under which the relations of deities were thrown into the known forms of the human family. This process, according to the symmetrical and logical turn of the Greek mind, began when it was needed for its purpose, and stopped when it had done its work. Gods, that were to generate or rear other gods, were coupled; and partners were supplied by simple reflection of the character of the male, where there was no Idea or Power ready for impersonation that would serve the turn. Thus, Ῥέα, Earth or Matter, found a suitable mate for Κρόνος, or Time. But to make a match for Oceanus, his own mere reflected image, or feminine, was called into being under the name of Tethys. Such was, but only after the time of Homer, Amphitrite for Neptune, and Proserpine for Hades. In Homer the latter is more, and the former less than this. It was by nothing less than an entire metamorphosis, that the Greek Juno was educed from, or substituted for, some old deification of the Earth. She is much more a creation than an adaptation. What she really represents in Olympus, is supernatural wifehood; of which the common mark is, the want of positive and distinct attributes in the goddess. With this may be combined a negative sign not less pregnant with evidence; namely, the derivation and secondary handling of the prerogatives of the husband. The case of Juno is clear and strong under both heads. Her grandeur arises from her being clothed in the reflected rays of her husband’s supremacy, like Achilles in the flash of the Ægis. But positive divine function she has none whatever, except the slender one of presiding over maternity by her own agency, and by that of her figurative daughters, the Eilithuiæ. She is, when we contemplate her critically, the goddess of motherhood and of nothing else. And in truth, as the fire made Vulcan, and war made Mars, her mythological children, so motherhood made Juno, and is her type in actual nature. She became a goddess, to give effect to the principle of œconomy, to bring the children of Jupiter into the world, to enable man, in short, to construct that Olympian order, which he was to worship. Having been thus conceived, she assumed high powers and dignities in right of her husband, whose sister she was fabled to be, upon becoming also his wife, because either logical instinct, or the ancient traditions of our race rendered it a necessity for the Greeks to derive the divine, as well as the human, family from a single pair.

However strictly Hellenic may have been the position of Juno, we must reckon her as the sister of Jupiter to have been worshipped, in Homer’s time, from beyond the memory of man. For she carries upon her no token, which can entitle us to assign to her a recent origin. Recent, I mean, in her Hellenic form: apart from the fact that she was not conceived by the Greeks, so to speak, out of nothing; and that she, in common with many other deities, represents the Greek remodelling, in this case peculiarly searching and complete, of eastern traditions. The representation in theology of the female principle was eastern, and, as we have seen, even Jewish. Had Juno been simply adopted, she would probably have been an elemental power, corresponding with Earth in the visible creation. In lieu of this she became Queen of Olympus, and, in relation to men, goddess of Greece. Earth remains, in Homer, almost unvivified in consequence. But it may have been on account of this affinity, as well as of her relation to Jupiter, that she has been so liberally endowed with power over nature.

_Neptune._

~_The Neptune of Homer._~

Neptune is one of three sons of Κρόνος and Ῥέα, and comes next to Jupiter in order of birth. In the Fifteenth Iliad he claims an equality of rank, and avers that the distribution of sovereignties among the three brothers was made by lot. The Sea is his, the Shades are subject to Aides, Jupiter has the Heaven and Air; Earth and Olympus are common to them all. Wherefore, says Neptune, I am no mere satellite of Jupiter: great as he is, let him rest content with his own share; and if he wants somebody to command, let him command his own sons and daughters. Perhaps there may here be conveyed a taunt at Jupiter with respect to the independent and adverse policy of Minerva. This very curious speech is delivered by Neptune in reply to the command of Jupiter, that he should leave the field of battle before Troy, which was backed by threats. Iris, the messenger, who hears him, in her reply founds the superiority of Jupiter on his seniority only. To this Neptune yields: but reserves his right of resentment if Jupiter should spare Troy[363]. Nor does Jupiter send down Apollo to encourage the Trojans, until Neptune has actually retired: he then expresses great satisfaction at the withdrawal of Neptune without a battle between them, which would have been heard and felt in Tartarus; possibly implying that Neptune would have been hurled into it[364], but referring distinctly to the certain difficulty of the affair;

[363] Il. xv. 174-217.

[364] Vid. Il. viii. 13.

ἐπεὶ οὔ κεν ἀνιδρωτί γ’ ἐτελέσθη[365].

[365] Il. xv. 220-35.

We have now clearly enough before us the very singular combination of ideas that entered into the conception of the Homeric Neptune, and we may pronounce, with tolerable confidence, upon the manner in which each one of them acquired its place there. They are these:

1. As one of the trine brotherhood, who are jointly possessed of the highest power over the regions of creation, he is part-representative of the primeval tradition respecting the Divine Nature and Persons.

2. As god of the Sea, he provides an impersonation to take charge of one of the great domains of external nature.

3. As the eldest and strongest, next to Jupiter, of the Immortal family, he represents the nucleus of rivalry and material, or main-force, opposition to the head of the Olympian family.

~_His traits chiefly mythological._~

With respect to the first, the proposition itself seems to contain nearly all that can be said to belong to Neptune in right of primitive tradition, except indeed as to certain stray relics. One of these seems to hang about him, in the form of an extraordinary respect paid to him by the children of Jupiter. Apollo is restrained by this feeling (αἰδὼς) from coming to blows with him[366]: a similar sentiment restrains Minerva, not only from appearing to Ulysses in her own Phæacian ἄλσος[367], but even, as she says, from assisting him at all during his previous adventures[368]. But this is all. The prerogatives which are so conspicuous in Apollo and Minerva, and which establish their origin as something set higher than the lust of pure human invention, are but rarely and slightly discernible in Neptune. In simple strength he stands with Homer next to Jupiter, for to no other deity would Jupiter have paid the compliment of declaring it a serious matter to coerce him. But there is no sign of intellectual or moral elevation about him. Of the former we may judge from his speeches; for the speeches of gods are in Homer nearly as characteristic as those of heroes. As to the latter, his numerous human children show that he did not rise above the mythological standard; and his implacable resentment against Ulysses was occasioned by a retribution that the monster Polyphemus had received, not only just in itself, but even relatively slight.

[366] Il. xxi. 468.

[367] Od. vi. 329.

[368] Od. xiii. 341.

It does not appear that prayer is addressed to him except in connection with particular places, or in virtue of special titles; as when the Neleids, his descendants, offer sacrifice to him on the Pylian shore[369], or the Phæacians[370] seek to avert threatened disaster, or when Polyphemus his son roars to him for help[371]. The sacrifices to him have apparently a local character: at Onchestus is his ἄλσος[372], and Juno appeals to him in the name of the offerings made to him by the Greeks at Helice and Ægæ[373]. The Envoys of the Ninth Iliad pray to him for the success of their enterprise; but it is while their mission is leading them along the sea-beach[374]. He can assume the form of a man; can carry off his friends in vapour, or lift them through the air[375]; can inspire fire and vigour into heroes, yet this is done only through a sensible medium, namely, by a stroke of his staff[376]. He blunts, too, the point of an hostile spear[377]. But none of these operations are of the highest order of power. And when Polyphemus faintly expresses the idea that Neptune can restore his eye, (which however he does not ask in prayer,) Ulysses taunts him in reply with it as an undoubted certainty, that the god can do no such thing. With this we may contrast the remarkable bodily changes operated by Minerva upon Ulysses: they do not indeed involve the precise point of restoring a destroyed member; but they are far beyond anything which Homer has ascribed to his Neptune. Nor does the Poet ever speak of any operation of this kind as exceeding the power of Minerva; who enjoyed in a larger form, and by a general title, something like that power of transformation, which was the special gift and function of Circe and the Sirens. The discussion of the prerogatives of that half-sorceress, half-goddess, will throw some further light upon the rank of Neptune.

[369] Il. xi. 728. Od. iii. 5.

[370] Od. xiii. 181.

[371] Od. ix. 526.

[372] Il. ii. 506.

[373] Il. viii. 203.

[374] Il. ix. 183.

[375] Il. xiii. 43, 216. xiv. 135. xi. 752. xx. 321-9.

[376] Il. xiii. 59.

[377] xiii. 562.

Except, then, in his position as brother and copartner, Neptune is very feebly marked with the traditional character. Again, in no deity is the mere animal delight in sacrifice more strongly developed. By offerings, his menaced destruction of the Phæacian city seems to be averted. His pleasure in the sacrifice of bulls is specially recorded[378]: and his remarkable fondness for the Solyman mountains, and the Ethiopian quarter, is perhaps connected with the eminent liberality of that people at their altars.

[378] Il. xx. 405.

One traditive note, however, we find upon him, when we regard him as god of the sea: and it is this, that he is provided with a Secondary. It seems as though it was felt, that he did not wholly satisfy the demands of the mere element: and accordingly a god simply elemental has been provided in the person of Nereus, who is the centre of the submarine court, and who appears never to quit the depths. Nereus is the element impersonated: Neptune is its sovereign, has not his origin in it, but comes to it from without.

Neither is his command over the waters quite exclusive. He can of course raise a storm at sea. He can break off fragments, as the sea does, from rocks upon the coast[379]: and he threatens to overwhelm the Phæacian city by this means[380]. In conjunction with his power over the sea, he can let loose the winds, and darken the sky. On the other hand, not Jupiter only, but Juno and Minerva, can use the sea independently of him, as an instrument of their designs.

[379] Od. iv. 506.

[380] Od. xiii. 152.

Again, while not fully developed as the mere elemental sea-god, he has clinging to him certain traditions which it is very difficult to attach to any portion whatever of his general character. I do not find any key to his interest in Æneas, whom he rescues from Achilles: unless it may possibly be, that the gods, in the absence of any particular motive the other way, took a common interest in the descendants of their race, or of Jupiter as its head. Still less is it feasible to explain the legend of his service under Laomedon in company with Apollo, so as to place it in any clear relation to the other traditions respecting him. He has, again, a peculiar relation to the horse, for though a sea-god, he employs the animal to transport him to Troas; and it was he, who presented Xanthus and Balius to Peleus[381]. Again, he, in conjunction with Jupiter[382], conferred the gift of managing the horse on his descendant Antilochus.

[381] Il. xxiii. 277.

[382] Ibid. 307.

In the legend of the Eighth Odyssey, he does not share the unbecoming laughter of the other deities at the ridiculous predicament and disgrace of Mars, but earnestly labours for his release, and actually becomes his security for the damages due[383]. What was the cause of this peculiar interest? It is difficult to conceive the aim of the Poet in this place. Some have suggested the comic effect[384] which he has produced by putting the petition in the mouth of Neptune, whose mere opinion that Mars would pay was valueless, inasmuch as he was far too powerful to be called to account by Vulcan for any thing which he might have said. It seems to me more likely that, as being, in the possible absence of Jupiter as well as the goddesses, the senior and gravest of the deities, he becomes the official guardian of Olympian decorum; and that he acts here as the proper person to find an escape from a dilemma which, while ludicrous, is also embarrassing, and requires poetically a solution.

[383] Od. viii. 344-59.

[384] Nitzsch in loc.

Amphitrite, the wife of Neptune in the later mythology, is not so named in Homer, by whom she is but doubtfully personified. Yet there is, as it were, an anticipation of the union, in the passage where he tells us that she rears monster-fishes to do the will of Neptune. Or it may be meant here, that she is the wife of Nereus.

~_His relation to the Phœnicians._~

The connection of Neptune with the sea naturally raises the question, whether the introduction of his worship into Greece can have been owed to the Phœnicians. For an auxiliary mark, we have the fact that Ino, of Phœnician extraction, is a strictly maritime deity[385],

[385] Od. v. 335.

νῦν δ’ ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσι θεῶν ἐξέμμορε τιμῆς.

The very frequent intrigues of Neptune with women may be the mythical dress of the adventures of Phœnician sailors in this kind: such as that which is recounted[386] in the story of Eumæus. We may notice, too, that in the Iliad, he does not particularly love the Greeks, but simply hates the Trojans. He, with Jupiter, we are told, loved Antilochus[387]. Jupiter, no doubt, because he had a regard for him as a Greek: Neptune, plainly, because he was his descendant. And in this way perhaps we may best explain the connection between Neptune and some abode in the East, far away from his own domain. He is absent from the Assembly of the First Odyssey[388], among the Ethiopians: and he sees Ulysses, on his voyage homewards, from afar, namely off the Solyman mountains; with which we must suppose he had some permanent tie, as no special cause is stated for his having been there. It little accords with his character as a marine god: but it is in harmony with the view of him as belonging to the circle of the Phœnician traditions, that he should visit a nation, of which Homer, I believe, conceived as being but a little beyond Phœnicia.

[386] Od. xv. 420.

[387] Il. xxiii. 277.

[388] Od. i. 22.

But we have still to consider the fragments of information which concern Neptune, under the third of the heads above given.

~_And to the tradition of the Evil One._~

No ancient tradition appears to have been split and shivered into so many fragments in the time of Homer, as that which related to the Evil Principle. This was the natural prelude to its becoming, as it shortly afterwards did, indiscernible to the human eye[389]. Among these rivulets of tradition, some of the most curious connect themselves with the name of Neptune, who was, in his mythological character, prepared to be its recipient: for in that character he was near to Jupiter in strength, while his brotherly relation by no means implied any corresponding tie of affection.

[389] Vid. sup. Sect. ii. p. 44.

With Juno and Minerva, he took part in the dangerous rebellion recorded in the First Iliad. He refuses to join in a combination of Hellenizing gods against him, on the ground of its hopelessness: but afterwards, when all others acquiesce in the prohibition, he alone comes down to aid and excite the Greeks. The Juno of the Iliad is the active and astute intriguer against her husband: but it is Neptune, on whom in effect the burden and responsibility of action chiefly fall. Still, his principal points of contact with the traditions of resistance to the Supreme Will are mediate; and the connection is through his offspring.

In his favourite son, the Cyclops, we have the great atheist of the poems. It is Providence, and not idols only, that he rejects, when saying[390],

[390] Od. ix. 275.

οὐ γὰρ Κύκλωπες Διὸς αἰγιόχου ἀλέγουσιν, οὐδὲ θεῶν μακάρων· ἐπειὴ πολὺ φέρτεροί εἰμεν.

The whole of this dangerous class, the kindred of the gods, seem to have sprung from Neptune[391]. The Læstrygones, indeed, are not expressly said to be his children. But they are called οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν: and the Giants are expressly declared to be divinely descended in a speech of Alcinous[392]:

[391] Od. x. 120.

[392] Od. vii. 205.

ἐπεί σφισιν ἐγγύθεν εἰμὲν, ὥσπερ Κύκλωπές τε καὶ ἄγρια φῦλα Γιγάντων.

Neptune was the father of Nausithous and the royal house of Scheria, through Peribœa: but she was daughter of Eurymedon, and Eurymedon was king of the Giants, and was the king who led them, with himself, evidently by rebellion, into ruin[393];

[393] Od. vii. 60.

ἀλλ’ ὁ μὲν ὤλεσε λαὸν ἀτάσθαλον, ὤλετο δ’ αὐτός.

Thus we have Neptune placed in the relation of ancestor to the rebellious race, whom it is scarcely possible to consider as other than identical with the Titans condemned to Tartarus[394].

[394] Il. xiv. 274, 9.

But we have one yet more pointed passage for the establishment of this strange relationship. In the νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, Ulysses sees, among other Shades, Iphimedea, the wife of Aloeus, who bore to Neptune two children[395], Otus and Ephialtes; hugest of all creatures upon earth, and also most beautiful, after Orion. They, the sons of Neptune, while yet children, threatened war against Olympus, and planned the piling of the mountains: but Apollo slew them. Thus this, the most characteristic of all the traditions in Homer relating to the Evil One, hangs upon the person of Neptune, doubtless because his mythological place best fitted him for the point of junction. It must be observed, that Homer has, in bringing these young giants before us, used a somewhat artificial arrangement. He does not place them in the realm of Aides and Persephone, though he describes them to us, in connection with the figures in that gloomy scene, as the children of Iphimedea, who appears there in the first or feminine division. That he does not bring them before us in conjunction with Tityus and the other sufferers of that region, can only be because he did not intend them to be understood as belonging to it: and it is clear, therefore, that he means us to conceive of them as having their abode in Tartarus, among the Titans, doubtless by the side of Eurymedon and his followers.

[395] Od. xi. 505-20.

We may perceive with peculiar clearness, in the case of Neptune, the distinction between the elevated prerogatives of such a deity within his own province, and his comparative insignificance beyond it. When he traverses the sea, it exults to open a path for him, and the huge creatures from its depths sport along his wake. Such is its sympathy with him, that when he is exciting the Greeks to war, it too boils and foams upon the shore of the Hellespont. And not only is maritime nature thus at his feet, but he has the gift of vision almost without limit of space, and of knowledge of coming events, so long as they are maritime. He who knows nothing of the woes of his son Polyphemus till he is invoked from the sea-shore, yet can discern Ulysses on his raft from the far Solyman mountains, and even is aware that he will escape from his present danger (ὀϊζὺς ἥ μιν ἱκάνει) by reaching the shore of Scheria. This knowledge is shared by the minor goddess Leucothee: and doubtless on the same principle, namely, that it is marine knowledge. So he can predict to Tyro that there will be more than one child born to her: here, too, he speaks of what is personal to himself. When we take Neptune out of his province, we find none of these extraordinary gifts, no sign of a peculiar subjugation of nature or of man to him. He shares in the government of the world only as a vast force, which it will cost Jupiter trouble to subdue. Even within his own domain some stubborn phenomena of nature impose limits on his power: for we are told he would not be able, even were he willing, to save Ulysses from Charybdis[396].

[396] Od. xii. 107.

Thus it was that the sublime idea of one Governor of the universe, omnipotent over all its parts, was shivered into many fragments, and these high prerogatives, distributed and held in severalty, are the fragments of a conception too weighty and too comprehensive for the unassisted human mind to carry in its entireness.

~_His grandeur is material._~

Upon the whole, the intellectual spark in Neptune is feeble, and the conception is much materialized. Ideally he has the relation to Jupiter, which the statue of the Nile bears to one of Jupiter’s statues. Within these limits, his position is grand. The ceaseless motion, the unconquerable might, the wide extent, of the θάλασσα, compose for him a noble monarchy. At first sight, when we read of the lottery of the universe, we are startled at finding the earth left without an owner. It was not so in the Asiatic religions. But mark here the influence of external circumstances. The nations of Asia inhabited a vast continent; for them land was greater by far than sea. The Greeks knew of nothing but islands and peninsulas of limited extent, whereas the Sea for them was infinite; since, except round the Ægean, they knew little or nothing of its farther shores. Thus the sceptre of Neptune reaches over the whole of the Outer Geography; while Earth, as commonly understood, had long been left behind upon the course of the adventurous Ulysses.

_Aidoneus._

~_The Aidoneus of Homer._~

There is a marked contrast between the mere rank of Aides or Aidoneus, and his want of substance and of activity, in the poems. He is one of the three Kronid Brothers, of whom Neptune asserts--and we are nowhere told that it is an unwarrantable boast--that they are of equal dignity and honour. He bears the lofty title of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος: and he is the husband of Persephone the Awful. It is plain that he belonged of right to the order of Olympian deities, because Dione states that he repaired to the divine abode, to have the wounds healed there by Paieon, which he had received from Hercules: but it is very doubtful whether we ought to understand him to have attended even the great Chapter, or Assembly, of the Twentieth Iliad. His ordinary residence is exclusively in the nether world. At the same time there is, in his position, and in that of Persephone, a remarkable independence. This the very title of subterranean Jupiter is enough to indicate. Neptune is never called the Jupiter of the sea. And it is quite plain that the power of Jupiter over the dead was limited. We cannot say it was null: for Castor and Pollux after death are still τιμὴν πρὸς Ζῆνος ἔχοντες, and they live accordingly on alternate days. But it was Minerva who interfered to carry Hercules safely through the Shades, and bring him back; and it appears that but for her Jupiter would not have been able to give effect to his design[397].

[397] Od. xi. 302, 626. Il. viii. 366-9.

But the share of action ascribed to this divinity in any part of the poems is a very small one. In the Twentieth Iliad, the tramp of the Immortals, when engaged in fight, and the quaking of the earth under the might of Neptune, cause him to tremble. And his having received wounds from Hercules, though he shared this indignity with Juno, detracts from his mythological greatness.

Love of symmetry has sometimes led writers on the Greek mythology to find matrimonial arrangements for Jupiter’s brothers similar to his own, by giving to Neptune Amphitrite, and to Aidoneus Persephone, for their respective wives. The former of these two unions has no foundation in Homer; and the latter bears little analogy to that of Jupiter and Juno. For Proserpine is the real Queen of the Shades below: all the higher traditions and active duties of the place centre around her, while he appears there as a sort of King-Consort. There is no sign whatever of his exercising any influence over her, far less of her acting in the capacity of his organ. And while she has a cult or worship on earth, he apparently has none.

Under these circumstances, we do not expect to find her exhibiting any tokens of derivation from, or ideal dependance on him. They would appear to be respectively derived from traditions of independent origin.

Homer has not attached marks to Aidoneus which would enable us to trace him to any particular source beyond the limits of the Olympian system. It would be natural to seek his prototype among the darkest and earthiest of the elemental powers. But he appears before us in the poems rather as an independent and Hellenic creation, metaphysical in kind, and representing little beyond (1), a place in the trine number of the Kronid Brothers, which appears to be the Hellenic form of a great primitive tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead; and (2), the consciousness that there was a city and a government of the dead, and that a ruler must be provided for them, while the idea of the Supreme Deity had not retained enough of force and comprehensiveness to seem sufficient for the purpose.

As the representative of inexorable death, Aidoneus was the opposite of the bright and life-giving Apollo: and was naturally the most hateful to mortals of all the Olympian deities[398]. But the place in which the idea of punishment centres is the domain of Κρόνος rather than that of Aides: and he is the ruler over a state of the dead which is generally neither bliss nor acute suffering, but which is deeply overspread with chillness and gloom.

[398] Il. ix. 159.

I shall refer hereafter[399] to the peculiar relation which appears to subsist between Aidoneus, together with Persephone, and the mysterious Ἐρινύες.

[399] Inf. sect. iv.

_Demeter, or Ceres._

~_The Ceres or Demeter of Homer._~

The goddess Demeter, the Ceres of the Latins, though afterwards of considerable dignity and importance, is but a feeble luminary in the Homeric heavens. That there are in the Iliad[400] only two distinct notices of her personality, might of itself be compatible with a contrary supposition: for in the _Troica_ he introduces his divine personages on account of their relation to the subject, rather than for their general importance; and corn, which feeds man, has little affinity with war, which destroys him. But her weight is, if possible, even smaller in the Odyssey, where she is noticed but once[401], and that incidentally.

[400] Il. ii. 696. xiv. 326.

[401] Od. v. 125.

The use of the phrase Δημήτερος ἀκτὴ for corn, like the φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο for Vulcan, and Ἄρης for the spear, or for the battle, tends to indicate imperfect personality; to show that the deity was indistinctly realized; that the personal name was either recent or at least unfamiliar; and that it was used, not so much to designate a being, as to give life to an idea.

Homer has not asserted any connection between Demeter and Persephone: and the idea of it in later times may have arisen simply from the observation that in the poems Demeter stands as a mother without a child, and Persephone as a daughter without a mother.

Possibly, however, the connection may have been suggested by the name; which seems manifestly to be equivalent to Γῆ μήτηρ or Mother-Earth. And though the original reference was to the production of food by which man lives, the word might be susceptible of another sense, connecting it with the nether world, which had a material relation to Earth, and which, even in Homer, Tityus the son of Γαῖα, and in the later tradition the earth-born race generally, were reputed to inhabit.

The name in its proper sense indicates first the idea, and then the goddess of agriculture: and points to a Pelasgian, and perhaps farther back an Egyptian, rather than an Hellenic or a Phœnician connection. In Egypt, according to the reports collected by Diodorus[402], Isis was held nearly to correspond with her.

[402] Diod. i. 13.

With this supposition agree the only notices contained in the poems that tend to attach the goddess Demeter to a particular locality. Her connection with Iasion was probably in Crete or Cyprus, or at any rate (from the name) in some country occupied, and ruled too, by Pelasgians. Her τέμενος[403] or dedicated lands in Thessaly, the Pelasgic Argos, suggest a similar presumption. In Middle Greece and Peloponnesus we never hear of her. The very solemn and ancient observance of her worship in Attica, which was so eminently a Pelasgian state in the time of Homer, entirely accords with the indications of the Homeric text.

[403] Il. ii. 696.

The slight notice she obtains from Homer, compared with the dignity to which other tokens would tend to show that she was entitled, may have been owing to the incomplete amalgamation in his time of Hellenic and Pelasgian institutions.

Upon this goddess, as upon so many others, sensual passion had laid hold. This is decidedly confirmatory of her Pelasgian or eastern, as opposed to properly Hellic associations. We see Venus coming from the east and worshipped in Pelasgian countries: of the three persons whom Aurora appropriates, Orion is pretty evidently the subject of a naturalized eastern tradition, and Tithonus is Asiatic: Calypso and Circe belong to the east by Phœnicia: it is in Troas and Asia that no less than three Nymphs appear as the bearers of children, fighting on the Trojan side, to human fathers[404]. Whereas among the more Hellenic deities, we have Minerva and Proserpine wholly exempt; and Juno using sensual passion it is true, but only for a political end. This assemblage of facts further confirms the supposition, that Ceres ought to be set down as a Pelasgian deity. Orion and Ino, shining in the heavens, seem to belong to the more astronomical form of eastern religion: Ceres to that which was probably transmitted through fertile and well-cultivated Egypt.

[404] Il. vi. 21, xiv. 444, and xx. 384.

~_Her place in Olympus._~

The title of Demeter to rank with the Olympian deities of Homer is not so absolutely clear, as that of many among them: but it may on the whole be sufficiently inferred from the arrangement of the passage in the Fourteenth Odyssey, where Jupiter recites a list of the various partners to whom he owed his offspring. The three first are women, who bore sons never deified, Pirithous, Perseus, and Minos: the two next are women, of whom one gave birth to Dionysus a god, the other to the substantially deified Hercules. The sixth and seventh are Demeter, or Ceres, and Latona; the children of neither are mentioned. Besides that Demeter is called καλλιπλόκαμος ἄνασσα, the two seem to be coupled together as goddesses. The structure of the passage is not chronological, but depends upon dignity advancing regularly towards a climax; so purposely indeed, that Dionysus, always an immortal, is mentioned after Hercules, a mortal born, though Semele had been named before Alcmene. All this appears to require the adoption of the conclusion, that Demeter was reckoned as an Olympian goddess in the Homeric system.

There is, however, another and more comprehensive solution of the question which arises out of the faint notices of Δημήτηρ in Homer. We ought, perhaps, to consider her as the Pelasgian, and Juno as the Hellenic, reproduction of those eastern traditions, which gave mythological impersonation to the female principle. They naturally centred upon the Earth as the recipient of productive influences, and as the great nurse and feeder of man, the τραφερὴ, the πολύφορβος, the πουλυβότειρα, the ζείδωρος. The Pelasgic Demeter may be a very fair and close copy, in all probability, from these traditions as they existed in Egypt. But when the same materials were presented to the Hellenic mind, they could not satisfy its active and idealizing fancy. For the Hellene, man was greater than nature: so that the great office of Jupiter as king of air was subordinated to his yet more august function as the supreme superintendent and controller of human affairs. As the political idea thus predominated in the chief of the Hellenic Immortals, it was requisite that a similar predominance of the intellectual and organizing element should be obtained in his divine Mate. Traditions, however, that had their root in earth, were of necessity wholly intractable for such a purpose, although the lighter and more spirit-like fabric of air was less unsuited to it. Earth was heavy, inactive; and was the prime representative of matter as opposed to mind. Hence the personality of the tradition was severed by the Greeks from its material groundwork; and Earth, the Nature-power, remained beneath, while the figure of Juno, relieved from this incumbrance, and invested with majestic and vigorous attributes, soared aloft and took the place of eldest sister and first wife of Jupiter. Hence doubtless it is that the Γαῖα of Homer is so inanimate and weakling: because she was but the exhausted residue of a tradition, from which the higher life had escaped. But the Ἥρη and the Γαῖα, according to this hypothesis, made up between them a full representation of the traditions from the East, relating to the chief female form of deity. This being so, no legitimate place was left in the mythology of Homer for Ceres; as she had nothing to represent but the same tradition in a form far less adapted to the Hellenic mind, a form indeed which it had probably repudiated. Hence while the Olympian system was young, and Juno not wholly severed from her Oriental origin, the Γῆ μήτηρ could not but remain a mere outlier. But as the poetry of the system was developed, and its philosophy submerged and forgotten, this difficulty diminished, and the later mythology found an ample space for Ceres as a great elemental power.

I may, then, observe, in conclusion, that the whole of this hypothesis is eminently agreeable to the Homeric representation of Ceres in its four main branches, (1) as Pelasgian, (2) as subject to lustful passion, (3) as a secondary wife of Jupiter, and (4) as immediately associated with productive Earth.

_Persephone._

~_The Persephone of Homer._~

Although the Persephone of Homer is rarely brought before us, and our information respecting her is therefore slight, there seems to be sufficient ground for asserting that she is not the mere female reflection of Hades or Aidoneus.

It is only for those deities from whom other deities are drawn by descent, that we find in Homer a regular conjugal connection provided. Thus Neptune, as we have seen, cannot be said to have a wife in Homer. Amphitrite appears in the poems with a faint and indeed altogether doubtful personality, though she afterwards grew into his spouse. Now Neptune was a deity much more in view than Aides: and it is not likely that we should have found Persephone more fully developed than Amphitrite, had she not represented some older and more independent tradition.

Again, in cases where the female deity is the mere reflection of the male, we do not find her invested with a share in his dominion, although, as in the case of Juno, she may occasionally and derivatively exercise some of the prerogatives, which in him have a higher and more unquestionable activity. Thus Tartarus is the region of Κρόνος, not of Ῥέα; air is the realm of Jupiter, not of Jupiter and Juno. But Persephone appears by the side of Hades as a substantive person; she is invoked with him by Althea to slay Meleager, in the Legend of the Ninth Iliad[405]: and the region in which she dwells is not less hers than his[406],

[405] Il. ix. 569.

[406] Od. x. 491.

εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους καὶ ἐπαινῆς Περσεφονείης.

Indeed her personality is the better developed of the two: for no personal act is ascribed in the poems to Aides, except the indeterminate one of trembling, at the battle of the gods, lest the crust of earth should be broken through: and the name given him in the Iliad of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος, subterranean Jupiter, may possibly suggest that he was sometimes viewed as hardly more than a form or function of the highest god: whereas, in the under-world of the Eleventh Odyssey, all the active functions of sovereignty are placed in her hands. It is she who gathers the women-shades for Ulysses: and it is she who disperses them when they have been passed in review. It is by her that Ulysses apprehends the head of Gorgo may be sent forth to drive him off, should he linger too long; it is by her that he apprehends he may have been deluded with an εἴδωλον or shade, instead of a substance; most of all, it is she who endows Tiresias, alone among the dead, with the character of the Seer[407]. In fine, the whole of the active duties of the nether kingdom appear to be in her hands.

[407] Od. xi. 226, 385, 639, 213, and x. 494.

That she was generally worshipped by the Hellenic tribes we must infer from the cases mentioned in the Ninth Iliad, the one in Ætolia, the other farther North[408]; as well as from her office in regard to the thoroughly national region of the Shades.

[408] Il. x. 457, 569.

~_Her marked and substantive character._~

She has her own strongly marked set of epithets. Of these, one is ἁγνὴ, the severely pure; for with Homer ἁγνὸς is exclusively applicable to divine womanhood, and is given only to Diana and Persephone: then she is ἀγαυὴ, the dread: and lastly, she is ἐπαινὴ, an epithet appropriated to her exclusively, which appears to be Homer’s favourite method for sharply marking out individuality of character. Buttmann has also well observed, that she has this epithet only when mentioned along with Hades, that is, when shown very strictly in her official character; and that ἀγαυὴ is used when she appears alone. Upon this he observes; ‘this way of joining the name of Proserpine with that of Pluto was an old epic formula, handed down even to Homer and our oldest Greek poets from still earlier times, and which they used unchanged[409].’ He would read ἐπ’ αἰνὴ, instead of ἐπαινὴ, but this neither affects the sense (awful, terrible) nor the force of the exclusive appropriation.

[409] Buttmann’s Lexil. p. 62. _in voc._ αἶνος.

There is another sign confirmatory of the belief that the origin of this mythical person must be sought, not in the necessity of finding a queen for Aidoneus, but in an anterior and distinct tradition. Namely, this; that, though she is a daughter of Jupiter[410], she is not provided with a mother. Thus she seems as if she were older than the Olympian œconomy. Venus, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, are all equipped with a full parentage. The later tradition, which made Persephone the daughter of Ceres, has no other support from Homer than this, that we are left to suppose that Ceres had some offspring by Jupiter, while none is named[411].

[410] Od. xi. 217.

[411] Il. xiv. 326.

The chain of presumptions appears to me to become complete, when we take into view two other pieces of evidence supplied by the poems. In the far East[412], beyond the couch of the morning Sun, some distance up the stream of the great river Ocean, but to the south of the point where it is entered, and at a spot where the shore narrows very much--immediately, in short, before the point of descent--are the groves of Persephone. According to the general rules of interpretation applicable to Homer, this appears to convey to us that the seat of her worship was in the far Southern East, and that her office, as there understood, was that of the goddess or queen of Death. And if she is indeed the reflection, in the mirror of the lower world, of any other known deity, then, both from this great office, and from the peculiar epithet ἁγνὴ, it is most likely to be of Diana, with whom, in the later mythology, she was identified; and, again, through Diana, of Apollo, from whom the light of Diana herself was derived. Or, in other words, she may be for the lower world that reflection of Apollo, which the Homeric Diana was for this earth: and it is worth observation, that the gift of second sight, which she allows to Tiresias, and which therefore is at her disposal beneath ground[413], is the peculiar and exclusive property of Apollo.

[412] Od. x. 506 _seqq._ xi. 1 _seqq._ xii. _1 seqq._

[413] Od. x. 492-5.

Let us now lastly consider, what light the etymology of her remarkable name may afford us. Its meaning appears to be, either destruction by slaughter; from two roots, one that represented in ἔπερσα, from the verb πέρθω, and the other φόνη; or else, that of the destruction or slaughter of Persians. In the former view, the evidence leaves us where we were, or brings us a point nearer to Diana, whose function was not that of all death whatever, but of such death as might be called slaughter, because not due to disease, but brought about at the moment by a sudden process, though often the mildest of all ways of dying[414]. But the other etymology may be worth some further attention.

[414] Od. xv. 409.

~_Her connection with the East_.~

Besides that cluster of traditions, relating to remote places, which the Greeks derived from the Phœnician navigators, and which cannot but have included some eastward wanderings in the Black Sea, as well as westward experience in the Mediterranean, they must in all likelihood have had oriental traditions properly their own, brought by their Hellic forefathers with them from their cradle. We have already seen that that cradle was probably Persia; and we have found traces of the connection in the name of the great pre-Achæan hero, Perseus, and in the continuing use of that name in the high Achæan family of Nestor, as well as at much later historic dates. Another link, connecting the Homeric traditions with this name, and both with the East, is found in the name of Perse, who was the mother of Circe, an Eastern goddess; and who was the daughter of Ocean, and the wife of the Sun[415].

[415] Od. x. 135-9.

We must take these circumstances into view along with the force of the name Persephone, and with the evidence we have already had of the antiquity of the traditions relating to her. To this we have to add the absence of any Homeric evidence connecting her with any other local source. There is no sign of any institution, that belonged to her worship, except in those groves planted in the far East; and no sign of any other particular locality marked as her peculiar abode, which we have found to be a mark of such invented deities generally as had a well developed personality. There is no note of her whatever in Troas; and nothing to connect her with Egypt, or with the Pelasgians in any quarter. It is not likely that she came in with the Phœnicians, as she would then have had signs of a recent origin, and would not have attained to so august and mysterious a position as she actually holds. The two distinct notices of her worship are both in the Homeric Hellas; not in Southern Greece, nor in the islands.

It seems, therefore, on every ground reasonable to suppose, that the tradition of Proserpine was an original Hellic tradition brought into the country from the East, probably by the Hellic tribes, and from among their Persian forefathers; and that the name of the deity, as we find it in Homer, affords a new indication of the extraction of the race.

Accordingly, the unusually substantive aspect of her position in the nether world, which makes her relation to Aidoneus so different from that of the other mythological wives, or feminines, to their respective husbands, is such, that it seems most reasonable, instead of deriving her from him, as Juno was derived from Jupiter, or Tethys from Ocean, to consider them as representing the union of two independent impersonations, associated together primarily by their common subject matter. For there does not seem to be any thing improbable in the hypothesis, that Persephone may, in the belief of some country and age, have served alone for the ruler of the region of the dead. Just as so many subordinate ministers of Doom, the Fates, the Erinues, and the Harpies, assumed the female form in the process of impersonation, so it may have been with their sovereign. And if we are to look farther for the metaphysical groundwork of such a tradition, we may perhaps find it as follows. There is a relation of analogy between each function and its converse: and as in the pure mythology, all that gave life was feminine, so conversely, all that represented the destroying agency might assume a similar form.

~_Her relation to Olympus_.~

In her case, as in that of one or two others, it is difficult to discover whether Homer meant a particular deity to be included, or not, among the Olympian gods of the ordinary or smaller assembly. There is no indication in the poems, which directly connects Persephone with Olympus; and that celestial palace may seem to belong to the government of the living world, and to be almost incapable of relations with that of the departed. Nor is she connected specially with the Olympian system, like Aidoneus, by the position which birth confers. The ἄλσος, and the worship paid her there, can hardly belong to the departed spirits on their way to their abode, and more probably indicate an ancient tradition deriving her worship from the far East. On the other hand, her dignity and majesty in the poems are unquestionable, and indeed superior to those of any Olympian deity, after some five or six. I do not find materials for a confident judgment on the Homeric view of her place in his theo-mythology, with reference to this particular point of connection with Olympus.

Founding conjecture upon the facts before us, I venture, however, on a further extension of these hypotheses with respect to Persephone. We perceive in Persephone and Diana that kind of likeness which may be due to their common origin; if, as we suppose, both were images of Apollo. But it is not likely that two such images should have been formed by the same race for itself. Can we then, probably refer Diana and Persephone to different sources ethnically?

It is plain that Diana was worshipped in Troy and Greece. Persephone, so far as we know, in Greece only. This would agree with the supposition that Diana was originally Pelasgian, Persephone only Hellic.

Again, Diana was an earthly, Persephone a subterraneous reflection of Apollo. Now the Hellic tribes were lively believers in a future state: as we see from the communion of Achilles with the soul of Patroclus, and from many places in the Odyssey. But we have nowhere in Homer the slightest allusion among the Trojans to the belief in a future state, beyond the mere formula of entering the region of Aïdes. Neither the succinct account of the funeral rites of Hector, nor any one of the three addresses over his remains, contain the slightest allusion to his separate existence as a spirit. There is, indeed, mention of wine used to extinguish the flame of the funeral pile, but none of invocation along with it, as there is in the case of Patroclus[416]. And as we have no less than an hundred lines spoken over or otherwise bestowed upon the dead Hector, the omission is singular. It becomes still more significant, when we recollect that the Greeks, and their goddess Juno, invoke the deities of the under-world, and the powers connected with a future state, in their solemn oaths and imprecations[417]; but when Hector swears to Dolon, (our only example of a Trojan oath,) he adjures Jupiter alone[418]. Now it may be that the religion of Troy did not include so distinct a reference to a future state, as that of Greece, and that the Trojans knew nothing of Persephone, or of any deity holding her place. This hypothesis would at once accord with the features of the Homeric portrait, and with the striking absence among the Trojans of all pointed reference to a future life, or to the disembodied spirit. Nor need we consider it to be at all shaken by slight and formal allusions, or by the words in which Homer on his own part dismisses to Hades the spirit of the slain Hector[419]. The hypothesis which the circumstances appear to suggest is, not that the Trojans disbelieved a future existence, but that they neither felt keenly respecting it, nor gave a mythological development to the doctrine.

[416] Il. xxiii. 218-21.

[417] Il. iii. 278. ix. 454. 569. xiv. 271-4. xv. 36-40. xix. 258-60.

[418] Il. x. 329.

[419] Il. xvi. 856, 7, and xxii. 362, 3.

_Mars._

~_The Mars of Homer._~

Even in Homer, Mars is externally the most imposing figure among the masculine deities of pure invention. The greatest of war-bards could not but find him a fine subject for poetical amplification. But in the Roman period he had far outgrown the limits of his Homeric position. With the lapse of time, the forces and passions, which gave to this impersonation its hold upon human nature, were sure to prevail in a considerable degree over the finer elements from which Apollo was moulded. It requires an effort of mind to liberate ourselves from the associations of the later mythology, and contract our vision for the purpose of estimating the Mars of Homer as he really is.

Notwithstanding his stature, beauty, hand and voice, which constitute, taken together, a proud appearance, it seems as if Mars had stood lower in the mind of Homer than any Olympian deity who takes part in the Trojan war, except Venus only.

The Odyssey never once brings Mars before us, even by way of allusion, except in the licentious lay of Demodocus; and the spirit of that lay certainly seems to aim at making him ridiculous, especially in the manner of his release and withdrawal. In the Iliad his part is, of course, more considerable; but on no occasion whatever does Homer apparently seek to set him off, or give him a commanding attitude in comparison with other deities.

We have nowhere any account of any act of reverence or worship done to him, either in or out of Greece. For instance, he is never, even in the contingencies of war, the object of prayer. He never shows command over the powers of nature, or the mind of man; which he nowhere attempts to influence by suggestion. It is said, indeed, that he entered into Hector, as that warrior was putting on the armour of Achilles;

δῦ δέ μιν Ἄρης δεινὸς Ἐνυάλιος[420].

[420] Il. xvii. 210.

But no words could more conclusively fix his place in the Homeric system as the mere impersonation of a Passion. For with Homer no greater deity, indeed, no other of the Olympian gods, is ever said to enter into the mind of a mortal man. In the Fifth Book he stirs up the warlike passion of Menelaus; having, like Venus, a limited hold upon a particular propensity. His climax of honour in this department is his giving θάρσος to the Pseudo-Ulysses; but this he does only in conjunction with Minerva[421].

[421] Od. xiv. 216.

~_His limited worship and attributes._~

His possession of the attributes of deity appears to have been most limited. The use of the word Ἄρης not only for the passion of war, but even for its weapons, shows us that the impersonation was in this case as yet very partially disengaged from the metaphysical ideas, or the material objects, in which it took its rise.

His function as god of war was confined to the merely material side of war, and had nothing to do with that aspect, in which war enlists and exhausts all the higher faculties of the human mind; so much so, indeed, that to be a great general is almost necessary in order to enter the first rank of greatness at all. Even of war in the lower sense he had not, as a god, exclusive possession, but he administered his office in partnership with a superior, Minerva. Besides being every thing else that she was, she presided, along with him, over war. On the shield of Achilles, he and Minerva lead the opposing hosts[422]. Over the body of Patroclus the struggle was one of which, says the Poet, neither Mars nor Minerva could think lightly[423]. Achilles, when pursuing the Trojans, calls for assistance; for, says he, neither Mars nor Minerva could undertake to dispose of such a multitude[424]. Mars and Minerva, says Jupiter, will take charge of the concerns of war[425].

[422] Il. xviii. 516.

[423] xvii. 398.

[424] xx. 359.

[425] Il. v. 430.

But that in this partnership he was an inferior, and not an equal, is clear from the manner in which he is habitually handled by Minerva. She wounds him through the spear of Diomed, when, unless saved by flight, he himself apprehends he might have perished[426]. In the Theomachy, she twice over strikes him powerless to the ground. In the Olympian meeting of the Fifteenth Book, when his intended visit to the battlefield menaces the gods with trouble from the displeasure of Jupiter, Minerva strips his armour off his back, scolds him sharply, and replaces him in his seat[427]. And she is pointed out by Jupiter as the person, whose habitual duty it was to keep him in order by the severest means[428];

[426] Il. v. 885-7.

[427] Il. xv. 110-42.

[428] Il. v. 766.

ἥ ἑ μάλιστ’ εἴωθε κακῇς ὀδύνῃσι πελάζειν.

In the Fifth Iliad, he stirs up the Trojans, and envelopes the fight in darkness: but here he is acting under ἐφετμαὶ, or injunctions from Apollo[429], who thus appears, like Minerva, in the light of a superior to him, even in his own department.

[429] Il. v. 508.

We learn, again, that he was overcome and imprisoned by the youths Otus and Ephialtes, whom Apollo subdued: he was in bondage for thirteen months, and would have perished, had not Mercury released him[430].

[430] Il. v. 385.

He is able to assume the human figure, and, as we have seen, to bring darkness over contending hosts: but, when in Olympus, he remains ignorant[431] of the death of his son Ascalaphus, until he receives the information from Juno; as it was only from his Nymphs that the Sun learned the slaughter of his oxen. Nay, Minerva even puts on a particular helmet, in order that it may secure her from being recognised by Mars when within his view[432].

[431] Il. xiii. 521. xv. 110 _et seqq._

[432] Il. v. 845.

Mars in the Olympian court bears some resemblance to Ajax among the Grecian heroes. But the intellectual element, which appears to be simply blunt in Ajax, in Mars seems to be wholly wanting: so that he represents an animal principle in its crudest form: and is not so much an Ajax, as a Caliban.

We are not told that he is greedy of sacrifices, for no _cultus_ is assigned to him: but he is represented as greedy of blood, and as capable of being satiated with it[433].

[433] Il. v. 289.

Except with Venus for his mere person, he has no favour with any other Olympian deities[434]. Juno describes him as lawless and as a fool: and Jupiter tells him that, were he the son of any other deity but himself, he would long ago have been ejected from his place in heaven[435].

[434] Od. viii. 310.

[435] v. 831, 97.

On one occasion, his name is associated with those of Agamemnon and Neptune: but the due relation between them is still preserved. Agamemnon is compared with Jupiter as to his face and head; with Neptune as to his chest; and with Mars as to his waist. The eyes of Hector on the field of battle were like the Gorgon, and like Mars[436].

[436] Il. ii. 478, and viii. 349.

From the repeated allusions to contingencies in which he would have perished, there seems to be something more or less equivocal even about his title to immortality. If more, he is also much less, than man. He is perhaps the least human of the Olympian family; and is a compound between deity and brute.

The exhibitions of Mars, as wounded by Diomed for the Iliad, and in the lay of Demodocus for the Odyssey, seem to imply that this deity could not, in the time of Homer, have become an object of general or established religious worship in Greece.

~_Mars as yet scarcely Greek._~

He is a local deity, and his abode is in Thrace. From thence he issues forth with his mythical son Terror to make war upon the Ephyri: a race whose name has a strong Greek savour, and whose hostile relation to Mars thus exhibited, tends, with other evidence, to place him in the category of foreign deities, not yet naturalized in the country, though made available by Homer for his Olympian Court. After the detection in the palace of Vulcan, it is to Thrace that he again repairs.

We are not to consider this paramount Thracian relation as absolutely separating him from Greece: Thracians, like Pelasgi, had links with both parties in the war, though the stronger ones are apparently those which connect them with Troy.

He has among the deities the nickname of ἀλλοπρόσαλλος, or turncoat, because of his vacillation between the two parties. This singular epithet, applied to the Thracian god, conveys the idea that Homer, knowing of the sympathies of the name with both sides, was puzzled as to placing him decisively on either. Now the Thracians of Homer were ἀκρόκομοι[437], while the Achæans were καρηκομόωντες. And it is worth notice that the Germans of Tacitus, among whom we find marked signs of resemblance to the Hellenic tribes, wore in general flowing hair, but the Suevi, one particular tribe of them, on the contrary, gathered it into a knot[438].

[437] Il. iv. 533.

[438] Tac. Germ. c. 38. Il. xx. 413.

Mars, however, incurs the particular wrath of Juno by abandoning the party of the Greeks, and siding with the Trojans. But in the Fifteenth Book, where Juno acquaints him of the death of his son, who had fought in the Greek ranks, she evidently does it in the expectation that grief and resentment will once more make him a foe to the Trojans. And her calculation is well founded: for he is setting out with that intention, when Minerva follows, and roughly brings him back.

He only appears once in a pre-Troic legend. This appearance, too, is beyond the borders of Greece. In Lycia he, or, it may be, simply warlike passion which he represents, slays Isander, the son of Bellerophon and uncle of Glaucus, in battle with the Solymi. Still he is the father by Astyoche, of Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Minyeian Orchomenus, or else farther towards the north of Greece.

The Homeric indications, on the whole, as well as the general conceptions of the character, represent Mars as neither a deity indigenous to the country, nor one belonging to the Hellenic traditions: while the Poet perhaps intends us to understand that he had points of contact or affinity with Greece, which are represented in his wavering attitude between the two parties to the war. It is probable that the Poet himself may have been a principal agent in the introduction of Mars to Hellenic worship. The machinery of the Iliad required him to find an array of gods, who should be champions on each side respectively. It also required that these gods should be united round a centre, which he provided for them in Olympus and in its Court, under the presidency of Jupiter. Both Mars and Venus may thus have made good a title, which before was doubtful and imperfect, through the place to which they were promoted in the Iliad, combined with the place which the Iliad itself won for itself in the national understanding and affections.

_Mercury._

~_The Mercury of Homer._~

The Homeric signs respecting Mercury are sufficient to fix his character and origin. The small part, which this deity plays in the poems, is indeed in remarkable contrast with the extended popularity to which at a later period he attained: but his character in Homer is one which accounts in a natural manner for the subsequent increase in his importance.

He is the son of Maias, Od. xiv. 435; and of Jupiter, Od. viii. 335.

He is the man of business for the Olympian deities, διάκτορος. Od. viii. 335. v. 28[439].

[439] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. p. 74.

He is the giver of increase, δῶτορ ἐάων. Od. viii. 335. Il. xiv. 490.

He is the most sociable of deities, Il. xxiv. 334. σοὶ γάρ τε μάλιστά γε φίλτατόν ἐστιν ἀνδρὶ ἑταίρισσαι.

The extraction of Mercury stands somewhat obscurely in Homer: his mother Maias is but once mentioned, and then without any clue. But, in the ancient hymn to Mercury, she is declared to be the daughter of Atlas: and if this be so, we shall be justified in considering him as the child of a Phœnician tradition[440]. This is also clear on Homeric grounds. Although Homer does not expressly connect him with Atlas, he makes Calypso, the daughter of that personage, address him as αἰδοῖός τε φίλος τε. These expressions are usually applied by him where there is some special relation of consanguinity, affinity, or guestship: as between Jupiter and his adopted child[441] and particular friend Thetis. It is therefore probable that Homer took Mercury’s mother Maias to be, as the after-tradition made her, the sister of Calypso, and the daughter of Atlas. All the other Homeric signs of him are in complete harmony with this hypothesis of a Phœnician origin for Mercury.

[440] See sup. Ethnology, sect. iv.

[441] Il. xxiv. 111.

We thus understand how he becomes the general agent for the gods: because the Phœnicians supplied the first and principal means of communication between the several nations in the heroic age: they were the men-of-business for the world[442].

[442] Od. ix. 124.

It thus becomes plain, again, how he can with propriety be called the giver of comforts or blessings; because the basis of commerce is this, that each person engaged in it parts with something which he does not want, and receives what he does want in return.

The apparent anomaly, which makes the god of increase also the god of thievery, is thus explained: because, from its nature, commerce is ever apt to degenerate partially into fraud; and because, in days of the strong hand, force as well as intelligence would often make it easy for the maritime merchants to change their vocation, for the occasion, into that of plunder[443].

[443] Od. viii. 161-4. and xv. 416.

His proper office in regard to the ἔργα of men seems not to be industry, nor skill in production or manufacture; but handiness and tidiness in the performance of services. He, says Ulysses, gives to the ἔργα, which may mean both the deeds and the industrial productions of men, their χάρις and κῦδος, their grace and credit or popularity[444].

[444] Od. xiv. 319.

~_Mercury the god of increase._~

This idea of increase forms the common or central element of the various attributes assigned to Mercury. It takes two principal forms, one that of increase in material goods, the other that of the propagation of the race. This latter, which was elsewhere grossly exhibited, is veiled by Homer with his almost unfailing sense of delicacy, and may not, indeed, have been fully developed in his time. It is perhaps however traceable in two passages of the poems: first, that of the Sixteenth Iliad, where we are told that he corrupted the virgin Polymele[445], though she belonged to the train of Diana. The other is in the episode of Venus and Mars, where Apollo selects him as the deity to whom to put the question, whether he would like to take the place of the adulterer, and he replies in the affirmative[446]. Each of these incidents seems to appertain to something distinctive in his character.

[445] Il. xvi. 179-86.

[446] Od. viii. 334-42.

That character, again, imports the extended intercourse with mankind, and the knowledge of the world, which causes him to be chosen, in the Twenty-Fourth Iliad, for the difficult office of conducting Priam to the abode of Ulysses. Moreover, the great balance of material benefit which commerce brings gives him, its patron, as a general rule, a genial and philanthropic aspect. In Homer we have nowhere any sign of his vengeance, anger, or severity. He neither punishes, hates, nor is incensed with any one. A passionless and prudent deity, he not only declines actual fighting with Latona, as she is a wife of Jupiter, but spontaneously gives her leave to boast among the gods that she has engaged and worsted him.

~_Mercury Hellenic and Phœnician._~

The Phœnician origin of Mercury will also account for his position in the poems, in relation to the Trojans and Greeks respectively. Not simply is he one of the five Hellenizing deities: for his talents would naturally with Homer tend to place him on that side. But he appears almost wholly unknown to the Trojans. The abundance of the flocks of Phorbas is indeed referred to his love (Il. xiv. 490): and he reveals himself to Priam by his name (Il. xxiv. 460): but it is remarkable, and contrary to the general rule of the poems, that Priam, notwithstanding his great obligations, takes no notice whatever of his deity, either upon his first revelation and departure, or when a second time he appears, and afterwards quits him anew (682-94).

On the other hand, we have abundant signs of his familiarity with the Greeks. He conveys the sceptre from Jupiter to Pelops: he carries the warning of the gods to Ægisthus: sacrifice is offered to him in Ithaca: and he is liberally treated with sacrifices by Autolycus in Parnesus, where he repays his worshipper by bestowing on him the arts of perjury and purloining[447].

[447] Od. xiv. 435, and xix. 394-8.

Now it is plain, from many places in the poems, that the Greeks had much intercourse with the Phœnicians. On the other hand, the Trojans, wealthy by internal products and home trade, seem to have known little or nothing of maritime commerce. Their intercourse with Thrace, the fertile Thrace that furnished a contingent of allies, required no more than that they should have the means of crossing the Straits of Gallipoli. We nowhere hear that they had a port or harbour. A Phœnician deity would therefore, of course, be on the Achæan side during the war.

Independently of such an origin, he might, in his usual capacity of agent, have been with perfect propriety sent to Calypso: but his mythical relationship to her as a nephew, and her evident connection with Phœnician traditions, give a peculiar propriety to his employment on this errand.

Another passage of the Odyssey seems, however, to place this relationship beyond doubt. Ulysses, in the Twelfth Book, recounts to Alcinous the transaction that occurred in the Olympian Assembly after his crew had slain the oxen of the Sun. On that occasion, the offended deity declared that, unless he got compensation, he would go down and shine in the realm of Aides; upon which Jupiter at once promised to destroy the ship of Ulysses. ‘This,’ adds Ulysses, ‘I heard from Calypso, and she told me that she had herself heard it from Mercury[448].’

[448] Od. xii. 389, 90.

Now this was no affair of Calypso’s; none, that is, on which the gods could make a communication to her in regard to Ulysses: but it was one in which, from her passion for the hero, she would take a natural interest, and on which she might well obtain information from a deity who was her relative. Nor does it appear on what other ground Mercury should be named, as the person who brought her this extra-official report.

Again, it is probably on account of his Phœnician connection, that the intervention of Mercury is employed in the Tenth Odyssey[449], to supply Ulysses with the instructions that were necessary, in order to enable him to cope with Circe.

[449] Od. x. 275-307.

For we are here in the midst of a cluster of traditions, which we have every reason to presume to be wholly Phœnician[450]. It is the cluster, which occupies the outer circle of the geography of the Odyssey: and it is severed from the Grecian world and experience, not only by a geographical line, but by an entire change in mythological relations. From the time when Ulysses enters that circle in the beginning of the Ninth Book, until his appearance near Scheria, on the outskirt of the known familiar sphere, his ancient friend Minerva nowhere attends him: and there are four whole books without even a mention of the goddess, who, except for this interval, stands prominently forth in almost every page of the Odyssey. The divine aid is given to him, during this period, through Circe and Calypso; while Mercury is appointed to command the latter, and to enable Ulysses to overcome the former. Both the company and the traditions, amidst which Mercury is found, thus invite us to presume that he is a deity of Phœnician importation into Greece.

[450] See ‘Achæis, or Ethnology,’ sect. iv.

~_Mercury recent in Greece._~

There is one other point connected with him, which, tending to mark that he had somewhat recently become known to the Greeks, agrees with other indications of his introduction from beyond sea. He figures, indeed, in legends as old as Hercules and Pelops[451]; and we do not receive any account of his infancy, as we do of the infancy of Dionysus and of Vulcan. But we may observe that, whenever he assumes human form, it is the form of one scarcely emerging from boyhood. In the last Iliad, he is a πρῶτον ὑπηνήτης, in the fairest flower of youth[452]. And in the Tenth Odyssey, where he makes his second and only other appearance to a mortal, the same line is repeated in order to describe his appearance, as if it were an established formula for himself, and not merely adapted to a particular occasion. Indeed it may reasonably be questioned, whether such adaptation exists at all. A very young person was not the most appropriate conductor for Priam, on such an errand as that which he had undertaken: nor the best instructor in the mode of coping with the formidable Circe. Therefore, without laying too much stress upon the point, the meaning of the youthful appearance seems to be, that he was young in the Greek Olympus.

[451] Il. ii. 104. Od. xi. 626.

[452] Il. xxiv. 348. Od. x. 279.

There is yet another sign by which I think we may identify Mercury as, in the estimation of Homer, a deity known to be of foreign introduction. The list given by Jupiter in the Fourteenth Iliad of his intrigues, includes no reference to Maias, the mother of Mercury, or to Diana the mother of Venus. Yet it is a large and elaborately constructed list, ending with Juno herself: and the question arises, on what principle was it constructed? I think the answer must be that, as it was addressed to Juno, the most Hellenic of all the Olympian deities, with whom he wished to be on good terms at the moment, so also it was intended, if not to give a full account of his Greek intrigues, yet at any rate that no tradition should appear in it, except such as Homer considered to be either native, or fully naturalized. It contains no reference, for example, to the mother of Sarpedon, the mother of Dardanus, the mother of Amphion and Zethus, the mother of Tantalus, (whom we have however only presumptions for reckoning as by Homeric tradition a son of Jupiter,) or even the mother of Æolus; whom it is possible that Homer may have regarded as Hellic, rather than properly Greek, though the father of illustrious Greek houses. If this be the rule, under which the Poet has framed the list, then the exclusion of Maias and her son remarkably coincides with the other evidence that tends to define his position as a deity of known and remembered foreign origin.

~_His Olympian office and that of Iris._~

It may be convenient to notice in this place the statement which is commonly made, that Iris is the messenger of the gods in the Iliad, but that Mercury, except only in the Twenty-fourth Book of that Poem, is confined in this capacity to the Odyssey: a statement, on which has been founded a standing popular argument against the unity of authorship in the two poems, and also against the genuineness of the Twenty-fourth Iliad itself.

The statement, however, appears to rest upon a pure misapprehension; for it assumes the identity of the character of Iris and Mercury respectively as messengers. Whereas there is really a difference, corresponding with the difference in dignity between the two deities: and Homer is in regard to them perfectly consistent with himself.

Mercury is sometimes a messenger in the proper sense, and sometimes an agent, or an agent and messenger combined. It is not true that, so far as the Iliad is concerned, he only appears in the last Book in one of these capacities. For in the Second Book[453] we find, that he carried the Pelopid sceptre from Jupiter to Pelops: which may mean either simply, that he was the bearer of it, or that by a commission he assisted Pelops in acquiring, or rather in founding, the Achæan throne in the Peloponnesus. In the Twenty-fourth Iliad, Mercury is not really a messenger at all[454]; but he is an agent, intrusted by Jupiter on the ground of special fitness with the despatch of a delicate and important business, the bringing Priam in safety to the presence of Achilles, and afterwards the withdrawing him securely from a position of the utmost danger. This is an office like that undertaken by Minerva in the Fourth Book, when, as she was commissioned to bring about a breach of the Pact by the Trojans, she repaired to Pandarus for the purpose. But the function of Iris is simply to carry messages, and chiefly from one deity to another; she is not only ἄγγελος, but μετάγγελος[455]; she is not intrusted in any case with the conduct of transactions among men, or responsible for their issue, although in the Fifteenth Book she spontaneously advises the god Neptune in the sense of the message she has brought. It is not for Jupiter only that she acts: she also conveys a message, and a clandestine one, for Juno[456]. Nay, on one occasion, without any divine charge, hearing the prayer of Achilles to two of the Winds, she spontaneously carries it to the palace, where they were all feasting together[457].

[453] Il. ii. 104.

[454] Il. xxiv. 334.

[455] Il. xxiii. 199.

[456] Il. xviii. 165-8.

[457] Il. xxiii. 199.

Only in the Odyssey do we find Mercury unquestionably and simply discharging the duty of a messenger; and this on two occasions: the first, when he brought to Ægisthus the warning that his crimes, if committed, would be followed by retribution from the hand of Orestes; the second, when he communicated to Calypso the command to release Ulysses.

But there is in reality no discrepancy whatever between the two poems: inasmuch as Mercury and Iris, though both messengers, act in different characters. Iris is in one case the spontaneous messenger, who carries a hero’s wish to subordinate deities; but she uniformly has this mark, that she never rises higher than to be the personal messenger of Jupiter. On the other hand, Mercury in the Odyssey is the official messenger, not of Jupiter individually, but in both cases of the Assembly of the gods: and the care, with which the distinction seems to be drawn, is very remarkable. It is true, the message to Calypso is called Ζηνὸς ἀγγελίη: but it became the message of Jupiter, because it was a proposal made by Minerva in the Olympian Assembly, and made on the part of all in the plural number, which was then duly adopted by Jupiter as the executive head of the body[458]:

[458] Od. i. 84.

Ἑρμείαν μὲν ἔπειτα, διάκτορον Ἀργειφόντην, νῆσον ἐς Ὠγυγίην ὀτρύνομεν.

The message in the case of Ægisthus is equally well defined[459]:

[459] Od. i. 38.

πρό οἱ εἴπομεν ἡμεῖς Ἑρμείαν πέμψαντες.

It would have been out of keeping, therefore, with the character and rank of the Homeric Iris, to give her the charge of the messages carried by Mercury. The only case at all analogous in the Iliad is that of the decision in the Fourth Book: and there not Iris, but Minerva is employed. It is not, however, true that we have in the Odyssey no recognition of the character of Iris as a messenger. We find one, and that the plainest of all, in the etymology of the name of Ἶρος the beggar. His proper name was Arnæus[460]; and he was called Irus, because he was a messenger:

[460] Od. xviii. 6.

Ἶρον δὲ νέοι κίκλησκον ἅπαντες, οὕνεκ’ ἀπαγγέλλεσκε κιὼν, ὅτε πού τις ἀνώγοι.

There is yet another illustration of the view which has here been given. In the Assembly of the Twenty-fourth Iliad, Jupiter, in order to give effect to the general desire of the gods, has occasion to wish for the presence of Thetis: and it has at first sight an odd appearance that he does not, as in other cases where he is acting singly, call Iris and bid her go: but he says, with a mode of expression not found elsewhere,

ἀλλ’ εἴ τις καλέσειε θεῶν Θέτιν....

And Iris, hearing him, sets forth without being personally designated. The peculiar language seems as if it had been employed for the especial purpose of keeping Iris within her own province, and of preventing the possibility of the confusion between her office and that of deities superior in rank, which might have arisen if she had regularly received an errand in the midst of the Olympian Court.

Thus, then, it would appear, that the apparent discrepancy between the various parts of the poems, when closely examined, really yields to us fresh evidence of their harmony. Nor let it be thought unworthy of Homer thus minutely to preserve the precedence and relative dignity of his deities. With our views of the Olympian scheme, it may require an effort to assume his standing-ground: but when he was dealing with the actual religion of his country, it was just as natural and needful for him to maintain the ranks and distinctions of the gods, as of men in their various classes. Mythology might, indeed, afford ample scope to his fancy for free embellishment and enlargement of the established traditions; but these processes must always be in the sense of harmonious development, not of discord.

Another question may indeed be asked: whence came this idea of twofold messengership, higher and lower? and would it not have been more natural if the whole of this function had been intrusted to one deity? This question is, I believe, just, and requires that a special account should be given of an arrangement apparently anomalous. Such an account I have endeavoured to supply in treating of Iris, by shewing that she owes her place to a primeval tradition, while Mercury owes his to an ideal conformity with the laws of the Olympian system.

And in truth there is no single deity, on whom the stamp of that system has been more legibly impressed. It might be said of the Homeric Mercury, that he exceeds in humanism (to coin a word for the purpose) the other Olympian gods, as much as they excel the divinities of any other system. His type is wholly and purely inventive, without a trace of what is traditional. He represents, so to speak, the utilitarian side of the human mind, which was of small account in the age of Homer, but has since been more esteemed. In the limitation of his faculties and powers, in the low standard of his moral habits, in the abundant activity of his appetites, in his indifference, his ease, his good nature, in the full-blown exhibition of what Christian Theology would call conformity to the world, he is, as strictly as the nature of the case admits, a product of the invention of man. He is the god of intercourse on earth; and thus he holds in heaven by mythological title, what came to Iris by primitive tradition. The proof must, I think, be sufficiently evident, from what has been and will be adduced piecemeal and by way of contrast, in the accounts of other and, for that period at least, more important divinities.

_Venus._

~_The Venus of Homer._~

There is no deity, except perhaps Dionysus, of whom the position and estimation in Homer are so vividly contrasted with those, to which he or she attained in later paganism, as Venus. The Venus of Virgil, the Venus of Lucretius, are separated by an immeasurable interval from the Aphrodite of Homer. And the manner in which she is treated throughout the Iliad and Odyssey is not only curious, as indicating the nature and origin of her divinity, but is of very high interest as illustrative of the great Poet’s tone of mind and feeling.

There is no act of worship or reverence, no sign of awe or deference, shown to her in any part of either of the poems. Yet her rank is indisputably elevated. It is beyond doubt that she belongs to the Olympian family. She appears in Olympus, not as specially sent for, but as entitled ordinarily to be there: she takes a side in the war: she makes the birth of Æneas more glorious on the mother’s side than that of Achilles, who was sprung from Thetis, the daughter of Nereus, and a deity of inferior dignity to hers. Not only is Jupiter her father, but her mother Dione is an Olympian goddess. Yet her Olympian rank is ill sustained by powers and prerogatives: and she probably owed it to the poetical necessity, which obliged Homer to have an array of divinities on each side in the war, with some semblance of equality at least between the rival divisions.

The indications of the poem may lead us to believe that her name and worship were of recent origin. That a worship of her had begun is obvious: for in Paphos, a town of Cyprus, and the only one named by Homer, she had both an altar, and a τέμενος, or dedicated estate; and she bears the name of Cypris[461]. But we have only the very slightest mention of her, or of any thing connected with her, in Greece proper. We have seen much reason to assume that Cyprus was essentially Pelasgian, and ethnically more akin to Troy than to Greece. In Troy we find various signs of her influence. She sent to Andromache the marriage gift of her κρήδεμνον[462]. She made to Paris the fatal present of his lust[463]. She fell in love with Anchises, and became the mother of Æneas[464]. She led Helen away from the roof of Menelaus[465], and was an object of dread to her when in Troy[466]. Minerva, in taunting her bitterly about her wound, supposes she may have got it by a scratch from a golden buckle, in undressing some Greek woman that she had persuaded to elope with one of the Trojans whom she so signally loves[467]. Again, it appears from a speech of Helen, that she was worshipped in Phrygia and Mæonia[468]. The only token of her influence in Greece is, that she is twice in the Odyssey called Κυθέρεια. Thus we see her not strictly within Greece, but rather advanced some steps on her way to it. And it is easy to suppose that, in the race of corruption, her worship would run among the fastest.

[461] Il. v. 422 _et alibi_.

[462] Il. xxii. 470.

[463] Il. xxiv. 30.

[464] Il. ii. 820.

[465] Il. iii. 400.

[466] Il. iii. 418; also 395, where ὀρίνω, as most commonly in Homer, means to excite with fear.

[467] Il. v. 422-5.

[468] Il. iii. 402.

~_Venus as yet scarcely Greek._~

The negative evidence, then, thus far tends to the belief that Venus was not yet established among the regular deities of the Poet’s countrymen: and it is supported by positive testimony. For some of the functions, that must in the post-Homeric view of her office have belonged to her, Homer studiously makes other provision. Of this there is a most remarkable case in the Odyssey. He designs that the Suitors, before they are put to death, shall be made to yield of their substance to the house of Ulysses, in the form of gifts to Penelope. For this purpose he arrays her in all her charms, and brings her forth in appearance like Diana, or golden Venus[469]. It is not a common practice with Homer to compare a beautiful Greek woman to Venus; especially when it is one so matronlike as Penelope. On the other hand, the comparison of Cassandra to Venus[470] is entirely in keeping with the Asiatic character of the deity. But the intention of the allusion here is manifest: for when the Suitors see her, it is passion which prompts them to vie with one another in courting her favour through the medium of costly gifts. How, then, came the sad Penelope thus to deck herself? It was not her own thought: it was the suggestion of a deity, and if Venus had been recognised by Homer as an established object of worship in Greece, Venus would most properly have made the suggestion: for she, says Achilles, is supreme in beauty, as Minerva is in industry and skill[471]. But it is Minerva who instils this suggestion into the mind of Penelope; though in a form which conveys no taint to her mind[472]. She goes, however, beyond this: for she sends Penelope to sleep, and then, to enhance her beauty, applies to her face a wash, of the kind that Venus herself uses when she goes among the Graces. Yet this is not procured from Venus, as Juno in the Iliad procures the _cestus_ from her on Mount Olympus; nor is her agency or aid in any manner employed. Thus she is not allowed, as it were, to have to do in any manner with Penelope; a clear indication, I think, that though known, she was not yet worshipped in Greece proper.

[469] Od. xvii. 37. xix. 54.

[470] Il. xxiv. 699. I think the case of Hermione (Od. iv. 14.) is an exception.

[471] Il. ix. 389.

[472] Od. xviii. 158-68.

She appears, indeed, in the legend of the daughters of Pandareus[473]: but the scene of this legend is not stated by Homer to be in Greece, and by general tradition it is placed in Crete or in Asia Minor.

[473] Od. xix. 67, 73.

Again, the predicaments in which she is exhibited in the poems are of a kind hardly reconcilable with the supposition, that she was an acknowledged Greek deity at the time. In the lay of Demodocus, the Poet seems to intend to make the guilty pair ridiculous, from his sending them off, when released, so rapidly and in silence. It is true that he exhibits to us in the Iliad the sensual passion of Jupiter: but he has wreathed the passage where it is described in imagery, both of wonderful beauty, and rather more elaborate than is his wont[474]. But whatever may be thought of the Eighth Odyssey, the Fifth and Twenty-first Iliad seem, so far as Venus is concerned, only to permit one construction. In the former, she is, after being wounded, both menaced and ridiculed by Diomed[475]. In the latter, for no other offence than leading the battered Mars off the field, she is followed by Minerva, and struck to the ground by a blow upon the breast. As in the case of Mars, so and more decidedly in the case of Venus, it appears as if the ignominious treatment in the Theomachy was difficult, and the wounding and treatment by Diomed quite impossible, to reconcile with the idea that it could have been devised by a Poet, and recited to audiences, for whom the personages so handled formed a part of the established objects of religious veneration. Even Helen is permitted to taunt her bitterly: to recommend her becoming the wife, or even the slave, of Paris, and her ceasing to make pretensions to play the part of a deity:

[474] Il. xiv. 346-51.

[475] Il. v. 335, 348.

ἧσο παρ’ αὐτὸν ἰοῦσα, θεῶν δ’ ἀπόεικε κελεύθου[476].

[476] Il. iii. 406.

~_Her advance from the East._~

In entire harmony with these suppositions is, first, the side taken by her in the war; and secondly, the geographical indications of her worship. It appears to have moved from the East along that double line, by which we have found it probable that the Pelasgians flowed into Europe: one the way of the islands at the base of the Ægean, the other by the Hellespont. We know, from other sources, that the East engendered at a very early date creations of this kind. Under the names of Astarte, Mylitta, Mitra, and the like, we seem to encounter so many separate forms or versions of the Greek Venus. We may indeed observe that Astarte was commonly associated with the Moon, and it would be a matter of interest to know the original relation between the popular or promiscuous Venus (πάνδημος), and the celestial one. In Homer we find them completely severed: we perceive Artemis with many traces of the older, and Aphrodite fully representing the more recent and carnal conception. There still remains one sign of correspondence; it is the standing epithet of χρυσέη for Aphrodite, compared with the cluster of golden epithets[477] applied to Diana. We may not unreasonably, I think, take Artemis as the probable prototype; and Aphrodite as the sensual image, into which the old and pure conception had already degenerated, before the time when the two fell, as poetic material, each for its own purpose, into the moulding hand of Homer. While such a source is every way probable, our reference to it is the more natural, because it is not very easy to attribute to the Greeks of the heroic age the original conception of such a divinity as Venus. For though they were of social and therefore somewhat jovial habits, and though they were a race of ready hand, given to crimes of violence, yet they were not, on the whole, by any means a sensual race, in relation to the standard which seems to have governed the Asiatic nations, whether we estimate these latter the Trojans, the Assyrians, or the Jews.

[477] Sup. sect. ii. p. 146.

The marriage with Vulcan, and the relation to a mother Dione, invented apparently for the purpose of maternity, are marks of recency. If I have rightly referred Vulcan to the Phœnician order, this marriage may be an indication that Venus likewise had a place in it: and again, considering her station in Troas, it seems not impossible that the worship of Vulcan may have been introduced there the more readily, because of his being reputed to be her husband.

Like Maias the mother of Mercury, Dione, the mother of Venus, is excluded from the list of Jupiter’s amorous or matrimonial connections in the Fourteenth Iliad (312-28). This leads to the conclusion, either that the tradition respecting her was known only as a foreign one, or else that it was recent, slight, and as yet unauthenticated in popular belief. In either view it coincides with the other indications as to Venus.

~_Her rank and personal character._~

The primary function of Venus, apart from Asia, appears to lie among the Olympian deities. That she was, as a member of that family, in actual exercise of her prerogatives, we see plainly from the application made by Juno to her in order to obtain the grace and attractiveness, by which she hoped to act upon the mind of Jupiter. As a mythological conception, she exhibits to us on the page of Homer the union of the most finished material beauty with strong sensuality, and the entire absence of all traces of the ethical element. She represents two things, form and passion; the former refined, the latter not so. In her character, as conceived by Homer, we see how that which is divine, when it has ceased to be divine, becomes, not human, but something much worse and baser: as he that falls from a height cannot stop half-way down the precipice at his will, but must reach the ground. Even feminine tenderness does not cling to the character of Venus. She is effeminate, indeed, for when wounded she lets her son Æneas fall: but gentle she is not, for in the scene of the Third Iliad with Helen her conduct is harsh even to brutality, and she drives the reluctant princess into sensuality only by the cruel threat of violence and death[478].

[478] Il. iii. 414-7.

In Venus we see the power of an Immortal reduced to its minimum. Even the faculty of self-transformation seems to have been in her case but imperfectly exercised[479]. She does not pretend to give strength or courage to her son Æneas, but is represented simply as carrying him off in her arms. It is here worthy of remark, that she has not even the ability, like the greater deities, to envelop him in cloud: she has no command over nature, only over the corrupt and rebellious impulses of man: she has power to carry Æneas away, but he is folded in her mantle[480]. In fact, her privileges in general appear to be like those of the inferior orders of deity, held and used for her own enjoyment; but they do not carry the power of acting upon man or nature, except in a particular and prescribed function. Her capacity of locomotion is limited in a peculiar degree. Mars, though no great deity, went, when wounded, up to heaven on the clouds. But Venus required to borrow the disengaged chariot of Mars for the purpose, when in the same predicament[481].

[479] Il. iii. 396.

[480] Il. v. 311-18.

[481] Il. v. 355-64. 363.

It is no wonder that the ancient, probably the earliest Greek, account of her origin which is given by Hesiod[482], should mark her as of entirely animal extraction.

[482] Theog. 188-98.

Another peculiarity in the case of Venus is, that she already takes her name, and not only receives mere epithets, from two particular spots where she is worshipped. Cyprus makes her Κύπρις in the Iliad, and from Cythera she is also Cytherea in the Odyssey. She thus stands distinct from Juno: to whom the Argeian name is simply an appendage, though one of a most characteristic force, and one involving important inferences as to her origin. Nor is she less distinct from Minerva, whose name is not derivative in form when she is called Ἀθήνη, and whom we must consider as the eponymist of Athens, and not its namesake. No indication could be of greater force, than this marked localism, in stamping the ideas about Venus as purely human in their origin.

~_Venus unable to confer beauty._~

It would be an error to consider the Venus of Homer as even the goddess of beauty. She was endowed with it personally, and she possessed the _cestus_ of fascination and desire: but she had no capacity to make mortals beautiful, such as Minerva exercised upon Penelope and Ulysses, and Juno upon the virgin daughters of Pandareus. She is there passed by in such a manner as to make it plain that she did not possess any power of imparting this gift. Her δῶρα, in Il. iii. 65, do not appear to include it; or Paris would not say, ‘no one would spontaneously seek them.’ For beauty of person was among the recognised and highly valued gifts of heaven[483].

[483] Od. viii. 167-77.

We are told, in the Twentieth Odyssey, that Venus fed the orphan girls of Pandareus with cheese, honey, and wine; and, continues the passage, Juno gave them extraordinary beauty and prudence, Diana lofty stature, Minerva industrial skill. Afterwards, they being thus equipped, Venus went up to Olympus to pray Jupiter that he would make arrangements for their marriage[484]. Thus her operations in a work of good are wholly ministerial and inferior: and not only does she not confer beauty herself, but she sees it conferred by Juno. This again shows that the Venus of Homer, except for evil, has no power to work upon the body or mind of man.

[484] Od. xx. 66-75.

But we must not omit to mark that sign of the real chastity of Homer’s mind which he has given us by his method of handling the character of Venus; a deity whom the nature of his subject in the Iliad would have led almost any other heathen, and many Christian, poets to magnify.

In not a single instance does Homer exhibit this divinity to us in an amiable or engaging light, or invest her with the attractions of power, glory, and success.

When Minerva advises Diomed in the Fifth Iliad[485], she says, Do _not_ attack any of the immortals; but if you happen to see Venus, her you may wound. We seem to have a clear indication, that Homer introduced this passage simply in order to throw contempt on Venus; because afterwards, when Mars is in the field, and Diomed pleads the inhibition he had received as a reason for his inaction, Minerva at once removes it, and bids the warrior assail that god without scruple[486].

[485] Il. v. 131. cf. 330.

[486] Il. v. 818, 27.

Again, when Diomed wounds Mars, it is because Minerva invisibly directs and impels his lance[487]: but he wounds Venus without any aid. In the Theomachy, she appears upon the list of deities enumerated as taking the Greek and Trojan side respectively; but when the Poet comes to match the others for fight, she disappears from his mind; as though it would have been an insult to any other member of the Olympian family to be pitted against her effeminacy. Accordingly, no antagonist is named for her.

[487] Il. v. 856.

She is sometimes made contemptible, as in the foregoing instances. She is at other times silly and childish, as under the bitter taunt of Minerva and the admonition of Jupiter[488], and again, when she falls into the trap cunningly laid by Juno[489]. Odious in the interview with Helen in the Third Book, she is never better than neutral, and never once so handled by the Poet as to attract our sympathies.

[488] Il. v. 421-30.

[489] Il. xiv. 190-224.

~_Never made attractive in Homer._~

Again, there is not, throughout the Odyssey or Iliad, a single description of the beauty of Venus, such as Homer has given us of the dress of Juno, or the arms of Minerva. It is never, either directly or indirectly, set off for the purpose of creating interest and favour. One exception may perhaps be alleged: but, if it is such, at least it affords the most marked illustration of the rule. Once he does praise the exceeding beauteous neck, the lovely breast, the sparkling eyes of Venus; but it is when he has clothed her in the withered form of the aged spinstress that had attended upon Helen from Sparta, and through whose uninviting exterior such glimpses of the latent shape of Venus are caught by Helen as to enable her, but no one else, to recognise the deity.

How different is this from the case of Virgil, who has introduced a most beautiful and winning description of her in the Second Æneid[490], just when he brings her into action that she may acquit both Helen and Paris of all responsibility for the fall of Troy. It would have been not only natural for Homer, but, unless he was restrained by some strong reason, we may almost say it would have been inevitable, that he should have done for Venus what has been done in our own day, with very high classical effect, by Tennyson in his Œnone:

[490] Æn. ii. 589-93.

Idalian Aphrodite beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new bathed in Paphian wells, With rosy slender fingers backward drew From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And shoulder: from the violets her light foot Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form Between the shadows of the vine-branches Floated the glowing sun-light as she moved.

Upon the whole, I should confidently cite the treatment of Venus in the poems as being among the most satisfactory indications of the state of heroic Greece, and one of the most honourable tokens of the disposition of her Poet.

_Vulcan._

~_The Vulcan of Homer._~

Besides Juno and Bacchus, Hephæstus or Vulcan is the only Homeric deity who bears upon him this unequivocal, or at least significant, mark of novelty, that we are supplied with a distinct tradition of his childhood[491]. In his youth he was rickety and lame. His mother Juno wished to conceal him, and she let him fall into the sea. Here Thetis and Eurynome received him, and reared him in a submarine cave, not, however, under the Mediterranean, but the Ocean; and in that cave for nine years the boy-smith employed himself in making ornaments for women.

[491] Od. viii. 311: and Il. xviii. 395.

He is thus associated by his traditions with the two opposing elements of water and fire; with water by the history of his childhood, and with fire as the grand instrument and condition of his art. The latter was by much the stronger association, for it was continually fed by the history and progress of the art itself; so that he became the impersonation of that element itself, and in the phrase φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο it is his name which gives the distinctive force; for φλὸξ in Homer seems to mean the flame or light of fire[492], and is not used to signify fire proper, except with some other word in conjunction to it or near it. But the explanation of the seeming contrariety is probably to be found in the hypothesis, that his worship was of Phœnician introduction; as the Phœnicians seem to have made the Greeks acquainted with the use of fire in working metals. If they made the deity known to the Greeks, this will account for his association with the idea of fire: and as accounts and traditions, which they had supplied, were evidently the source of all the more remote maritime delineations of Homer, (since they alone frequented Ocean and the distant seas,) this is the natural and easy explanation for the tradition of his childish arts in the oceanic cave. That he is thus, like the Phœnicians, for Homer, the meeting point of fire and water, appears clearly to stamp him as Phœnician or oriental in his origin, relatively to Greece.

[492] Thus, in Il. xviii. 206, it means that blaze without heat, as from shining armour, with which Minerva invested Achilles when he went forth unarmed. The name Ἥφαιστος also stands alone for fire in Il. ii. 426.

Accordingly, true to the association between Phœnician and Hellenic elements, he is one of the five Hellenizing deities in the Trojan war; in which, as the element of fire, he opposes and subdues the river Xanthus. He was not, however, unknown to the Trojans; for Dares, his priest, had two sons in their army. His introduction to Troas may have been due to his conjugal connection with Venus; or it may have been due to the neighbourhood of Lemnos, the island on which, when hurled from Olympus by Jupiter, he fell, and which thenceforward formed his favourite earthly habitation. With Lemnos and other isles Troy was in communication, at least from the time of Laomedon, for that prince threatened to seize Apollo and to sell him, νήσων ἔπι τηλεδαπάων[493]. A regular commerce was established between Lemnos and the camp during the Trojan war[494].

[493] Il. xxi. 453.

[494] Il. vii. 467.

Among the deities of Vulcan’s generation we find but one married couple, and they are a strangely assorted pair, Vulcan himself and Venus. Neither character nor occupation will account for this singular union: on the contrary, there is no case in which the extremes of repugnance must so decidedly be supposed. It is questionable whether the hypothesis, that Venus represents the beauty which gives perfection to works of art, is in entire keeping with the tone of the Homeric system. Indeed Venus with Homer represents absolutely nothing, except sensual passion in a fine exterior form which can hardly be severed from it. One explanation, and one only, may suggest itself as more natural. It is this: that the worship of Vulcan and that of Venus came in, not distinctly connected with those of any other deity, at about the same time, and from the same quarter. We have already seen upon Venus those marks of comparative modernism, and of an eastern extraction, which we now find in Vulcan; and here probably is to be found, either wholly or in part, the actuating suggestion of their ill-starred wedlock.

Though we find the works of Vulcan scattered promiscuously abroad, there is no notice of his worship, or of any site or endowment belonging to him in the Greece of Homer. He was available to the Poet for embellishment, but he probably had not become for the Greek nation a regular object of adoration.

I think we may trace the tokens of his eastern origin in the legend of his infancy. It was into the sea that he was thrown: but, as we have seen, the cave in which he was reared was a cave of Ocean[495].

[495] Il. xviii. 402.

περὶ δὲ ῥόος Ὠκεανοῖο ἀφρῷ μορμύρων ῥέεν ἄσπετος·

Also, by a rather singular arrangement, there are two deities, not one only, employed in taking him up and watching over his childhood. Nor are the two naturally associated together: for Thetis is a daughter of Nereus, and belongs to the Thalassian family; Eurynome is a child of Ocean. The connection with Thetis and the sea is appropriate enough in the case of any child of Juno, for the wife of Peleus, as his nurse, seems to give him an Hellenic character: but it seems hard to explain the appointment of a colleague belonging to the race of Ocean, and for the situation of the cave in its bed, except as having been due to the eastern origin of the divinity, of which the mark had not yet been effaced.

~_His marriage with Venus._~

The marriage of Venus and Vulcan, metaphysically interpreted, represents the union of strength and skill in the production of works of art: but though this may have been a Greek application of eastern traditions originally independent, there is no distinct trace of it in Homer; while it may seem strange that, if the Poet had had such an idea before his mind, his only picture of their conjugal relation should have been the one given in the Eighth Odyssey. Still, he may have had that idea.

Vulcan’s other wife, Charis, represents an exactly similar conception; and here there is a more obvious probability that the combination was Greek, and was one intended, or even devised, by Homer.

It is common to treat the handling of this subject in the Iliad as in contradiction with that of the Odyssey; and to use the assumption of discrepancy either in support of the doctrine of the Chorizontes, or in proof that the Olympian lay of Demodocus is spurious.

Without entering into that controversy, I venture to urge that the proof is insufficient. Why should the Vulcan of Homer be limited to a single spouse? Jupiter has three, probably four; namely, Juno, Latona, Dione, and Ceres. No other Olympian deity, until we come down to Vulcan, has any. The question then arises, Why should the poets, or even the religion of the day, be limited in this case to monogamy, which has no place elsewhere in the Olympian family? Why should the reasons, which induced the framers of the religion to give him a wife at all, forbid them absolutely from giving him more than one? Nay more; why, if the original object of the Greek mind in this marriage was to symbolize the union of manual skill and beauty, and if the materials of the received mythology were in a state of growth and progress, might it not happen that in the youth of Homer Charis was, all things considered, suited to afford the most appropriate means of representing the idea, and yet that in his later age he might amend his own plan, and make Venus the wife of Vulcan, without at all troubling himself to consider what was to become of the slightly sketched image that he had previously presented in the Iliad? I say this, because the assumed contradiction of these legends appears to me to proceed upon another assumption of a false principle; namely, that, though the mythology was continually changing with the progress of the country, yet each poet was bound, even in its secondary and in its most poetical parts, to a rigid uniformity of statement. No one, I think, who considers how the current of the really theistic and religious ideas runs upon a very few of the greater gods, can fail to see that with Homer the religious meaning of his Vulcan, and of the other gods of the second order, was very slight. A sufficient proof of this may be found in the fact, that of no one of them, excepting Mercury alone, does he mention the actual worship in his own country.

Moreover, two things may deserve remark with reference to the variation which makes Charis the wife of Vulcan in the Iliad, and Venus in the Odyssey.

First, from the plan of the Iliad, which placed Venus and Vulcan in the sharpest opposition, the conjugal relation between them would have been, for that poem, inadmissible. The Poet could not have introduced Venus, where he has introduced Charis: and he must thus have given up a strikingly poetical picture, and one most descriptive of the works of high art in metal.

Secondly, it may not be certain, but it is by no means improbable, that the worship of Venus may have attained to much wider vogue in Greece when Homer composed the Odyssey, than at the period when he gave birth to the Iliad. We have seen already the signs that it was a recent worship. We have seen it in Cyprus and then more advanced in Cythera, not in continental Greece. Now it was in the Iliad that Venus had the name of Cypris; in the Odyssey this is exchanged for Cytherea: that is to say, she was known sometime before as a goddess worshipped in Cyprus and not properly Greek; but she was now, such is the probable construction, known also as a goddess worshipped in Cythera, and therefore become Greek. On this account, as well as because the opposition between them had disappeared, she might with poetical propriety be made to bear a character in the Odyssey, which could not attach to her during the continuance of the great Trojan quarrel.

~_Vulcan in and out of his art._~

Beyond his own function as god of fire, and of metallic art in connection with it, Vulcan is nobody. But within it he is supreme, and no deity can rival him in his own kind. His animated works of metal are among the boldest figures of poetry. Even his lameness is propped by bronze damsels of his own manufacture. And the lock, which he puts for Juno on her chamber-door, is one that not even any other deity can open[496]. But this is not so much an exemplification of the power and elevation of mythological godhead, as of the skill and exclusive capacity of a professional person in his own art.

[496] Il. xiv. 168.

Finally, the Vulcan of Homer conforms in all respects to the inventive, as opposed to the traditional type of deity.

_Ἠέλιος, or the Sun._

~_The Ἠέλιος of Homer._~

In the case of Ἠέλιος, or the Sun, as in various others, we appear to see the curious process by which the Greek mythology was constructed, not only in its finished result, but even during the several stages of its progress. It lies before us like the honeycomb in the glass beehive; and it tends strongly to the conclusion that the Poet is himself the queen bee. The Philosopher did not then exist. The Priest, we know, was not a religious teacher. The Seer or Prophet interpreted the Divine will only for the particular case, and did not rise to generalization. Who was it, then, that gathered up the thoughts and arrested the feelings of the general mind, and that, reducing the crude material to form and beauty, made it a mythology? The answer can only be, that for the heroic age it was the Bard.

In some of the varying statements of the poems, where others have seen the proof of varying authorship, either for the whole or for particular parts, I cannot but rather see the formative mind exercising its discretion over a subject-matter where it was as yet supreme: namely, over that large class of objects which afforded fitting clay for the hand of the artist, but which had not yet become a stamped and recognised image for popular veneration. In the Charis, who is the wife of Hellenizing Vulcan, so long as Venus is at war with the Greeks; in the Winds, who, according to the Odyssey, inhabit a bag under the custody of a living person, possibly a mortal, but who in the Iliad beget children, enjoy banquets, and receive a _cultus_; we find Homer, as I conceive, following the genial flow of his thought, according as his subject prompted him, and awarding honour and preferment, or withholding it, as occasion served. Perhaps Mercury or Vulcan, perhaps even Juno or Neptune, may owe him some advancement: but, at any rate, he seems almost as distinctly to show us Ἠέλιος in two different stages of manufacture, as a sculptor shows a bust in his studio this month in the clay, and next month in the marble.

In the Iliad we find the Sun personified, though in the faintest manner, and by inference only. His office of vision, which he enjoys habitually in the Odyssey, and once in the Iliad[497], is inseparably wedded to a living intelligence by its combination with the function of hearing. He is addressed as the

[497] Il. iii. 277.

Ἠέλιός θ’, ὃς πάντ’ ἐφορᾷς καὶ πάντ’ ἐπακούεις.

Now poetry may, under the shield of custom, make the Sun see, by a figure which shall not carry the full consequence of impersonation; but the representation, that he also hears, seems necessarily to involve it.

Again, Jupiter has decreed, that Hector and the Trojans shall prevail until the setting sun. After that, there was to be no more of light or hope for them. Juno desires on this account to close the day, and dismisses the Sun prematurely to his rest. But this, as the Poet adds, was done against his own will[498]:

[498] Il. xviii. 239.

Ἠέλιον δ’ ἀκάμαντα βοῶπις πότνια Ἥρη πέμψεν ἐπ’ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥοὰς ἀέκοντα νέεσθαι.

Upon the two words, ἀέκοντα and ἐπακούεις, rests, I think, the whole case in the Iliad for the Sun’s personality.

But in the Odyssey it is more advanced and developed. In the matter of the intrigue of Mars with Venus, he acts as informer to the husband, and subsequently assumes the part of spy[499]. Although thus able, however, to discern what is passing even in the secret chambers of Olympus, when set on guard for the purpose, he cannot see so far as to Thrinacia, any more than he can penetrate the cloud which envelopes Jupiter and Juno[500].

[499] Od. viii. 270, 302.

[500] Il. xiv. 344.

It is from the Nymphs, Phaethusa and Lampetie, whom he had set to watch, that he receives the intelligence of the slaughter of his oxen by the companions of Ulysses in their hunger. He immediately addresses Jupiter and the assembled gods, in a passage which proves that Homer meant to represent him as having a place in Olympus, for only if there could he speak to them without undertaking a journey for the purpose[501]. He makes his appeal to them for retribution; and he backs his application with the threat that, unless it is granted, he will go down to the Shades, and shine there. A menace which to our ears may sound ludicrous enough; but it is perhaps well conceived in the case of a chrysalis deity, not yet really worshipped by the Greeks: and there is a certain propriety in it, when we recollect that on the way to the descent into the Shades lay his place of rest. He is the father of the Nymphs, who watch on his behalf in Thrinacia; he is also the father of Circe and Æetes, and his couch is at Ææa[502].

[501] Od. xii. 374-88.

[502] Od. xii. 4.

During the time when the slaughter of the oxen is effected, Ulysses is asleep: and it seems just possible that Homer may by this circumstance have meant to signify that it was night when the catastrophe occurred, which would save the dignity of this deity in respect to vision.

~_Is of the Olympian Court._~

The Olympian rank of the Sun is clear; but there seem to be ascriptions made to him, which can only be reconciled by the supposition, in itself far from improbable, that he was separately known of, as an object of worship, through two different sets of traditions; one of them referable to Pelasgian sources, and entailing Trojan sympathies, the other of an Hellenic, or very probably a Phœnician, cast, and tending to rank him with the Hellenes. For in the Iliad his unwillingness to set, when his setting was to bring the glories of the Trojans to an end, seems very strongly to imply that he had a Pelasgian origin. In the Odyssey, his siding with Vulcan against Mars and Venus would show, so far as it goes, a Hellenizing turn; but what is more important is this, that, as the father of Circe and Æetes, of whom the latter bears the exclusively Phœnician epithet ὀλοόφρων, and the former has her abode close by his ἀντολαὶ, or point of rising, he is at once thrown into the Phœnician or the Persian connection. As the Sun-worship was so general in the East, it seems quite possible that it might come into Greece by more channels than one: and as the process of personification might in one set of traditions be more, and in another less complete, we may here find a possible clue to Homer’s reason for treating it differently in the two poems. Particularly as the poem where he is least personal, the Iliad, is also that where he is most Pelasgian: for we have found reason to ascribe to the Pelasgians less of lively and creative power in the realms of the imagination, than to the Hellenes, and to such races as had stronger affinities with them.

So distinct is the Sun from Apollo in the Odyssey, that they appear as separate _dramatis personæ_ in the Lay of Demodocus. Yet there are some latent signs of sympathy between them. Apollo tends the oxen of Laomedon: the Sun delights, morning and evening, in his own oxen in Thrinacie. It is difficult to avoid supposing some kind of relation to be conveyed by Homer between the rays of the sun, and the arrows of Apollo in the Plague. The extension of his sympathies to both races is another sign of resemblance. Again, we have a promise from Eurylochus, one of the crew of Ulysses, to build a temple to the Sun upon his safe return to Ithaca[503]. Now we have seen that the only instances of temples, which we can certainly declare to be named in the poems, are temples either of Minerva or of Apollo. Thus this vow of Eurylochus looks like another anticipation of the subsequent absorption of the Sun into the person and deity of Apollo: and on the whole, we are left to infer that beginnings of that process may have been already visible. Homer, perhaps, did not care to advance it. At least, it does not appear to me that either he or his nation were friendly to the conception of mere elemental gods. Gods who preside over external nature he presents to us in abundance; but gods, who are the mere organs of external nature, are alien to the Greek genius as candidates for the higher posts, and are relegated to subordinate places in the system. Only Vulcan and Ceres really appear with him to bear decisively the stamp of this character: and both of them seem as if they were already in part detached from it, and developing in another direction. For in Vulcan the human faculty of skill already predominates over fire, and Ceres impersonates the vegetable product of Earth, and not the mere dead mass.

[503] Od. xii. 345.

The connection of the Sun with Pelasgian traditions according to the Egyptian type is, I think, strongly signified by the legend of the oxen and sheep, in which he takes so much delight.

In the time of Homer he was, as it were, a probationer in the ἄγων of the Grecian gods. The main facts before us are simply these: first, his unformed separate state at that epoch; secondly, his absorption in Apollo. The lesson taught by both is the repugnance of the Greeks to mere Nature-worship. The signification of the second, in particular, appears to be this, that as Ἠέλιος could not stand alone, and needed to be absorbed, so he could find no place for his absorption so fitting as in that deity, of whom, as well as of the more venerable traditions that he represented, brightness was an inseparable and original characteristic.

~_His incorporation with Apollo._~

In this view, the mythological absorption of the Sun in Apollo is a most striking trait of the ancient mythology: and it even recalls to mind that sublime representation of the Prophet, ‘The sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory[504].’

[504] Isaiah lx: compare Rev. xxi. 23.

_Dionysus or Bacchus._

~_The Dionysus of Homer._~

The Dionysus of Homer, or Bacchus, has all the marks of a deity, whose name and worship were of recent introduction into Greece, and were not yet fully established there; while in connection with the Trojans we have no notice of him whatever.

The eastern origin of this god seems in an unusual degree to have been remembered in the later popular tradition: and from the slight Homeric notices we may find confirmation for the common idea; inasmuch as the poems appear both to mark him as not originally Greek nor Pelasgian, and likewise rather faintly to connect him with the Phœnicians.

His father was Jupiter, and his mother Semele. Her name occurs in a Catalogue, of which the first part is composed of women, the second of goddesses; she appears among the women. The lines, in which she is mentioned may be rendered, ‘nor when (I was enamoured) of Semele, nor (when) of Alcmene, in Thebes; and Alcmene had stout-hearted Hercules for her son, but Semele bore Dionysus, joy of men.’ These words appear probably to mean that Semele, as well as Alcmene, was in Thebes: and this supports the post-Homeric, but ancient, tradition of the hymn to Bacchus[505], which makes Semele the daughter of Cadmus. Now, Cadmus, according to every reasonable presumption, was Phœnician. We have thus a fixed chronological epoch, to which the god was junior. That is, we have a period fixed, which may be called historical, when his name and worship had not yet been brought into Greece.

[505] Ver. 57.

The only note that we possess of the worship of Dionysus, as one established in Homer’s time among the Greeks, is in the obscure allusion of the Eleventh Odyssey to Ariadne[506], who was put to death by Diana in the island of Dia, on her way from Crete to Athens, at the instance of Dionysus, Διονύσου μαρτυρίῃσιν. The most probable interpretation of this passage seems to be, that Theseus, when on his voyage, landed with Ariadne in Dia to consummate the marriage, just as Paris[507], on his way from Sparta, landed in Cranae with Helen: but that, since the island was dedicated to Dionysus, this was punished as a desecration.

[506] Od. xi. 322-5.

[507] Il. iii. 445.

We thus see Dionysus taking root for the first time upon the natural line of communication, namely that by the islands, between Phœnicia and Greece: and his possession of this island is in harmony with the tradition of the Hymn, which represents him as having first been seen upon the sea-shore[508].

[508] Hymn. ad Bacch. v. 2.

In the Twenty-fourth Odyssey we are told that Thetis supplied the Greeks with a gilded urn, in which to store the ashes of Achilles, together with wine and some unguent, probably fat. The passage to which these verses belong is perhaps the least trustworthy in the poems: nor is it in complete agreement with the Iliad, which mentions fat only as used on the occasion. But I refer to it because it is stated there, that this urn was reported by Thetis to be the work of Vulcan, and also to be the gift of Dionysus[509]. Her possession of a gift from him is in harmony with Il. v. 136, which represents her as having sheltered him, when, through fear, he plunged into the sea: while his possession of a work of art in metal is best explained by the supposition that Homer regarded him as a Phœnician deity, since it was from that race that such productions were commonly, though we cannot say exclusively, derived.

[509] Od. xxiv. 74.

It is not difficult to understand why, as the god of wine and inebriety, Dionysus does not appear in the theotechny of the Iliad; but it would seem that the feasts of the dissolute Suitors in the Odyssey afforded a series of occasions, upon any of which the mention of his name would have been highly suitable. We may perhaps even say that it could hardly have been omitted, if his worship had been general and familiar in the country. Again, Dionysus is nowhere mentioned in connection with Olympus.

The remaining Homeric notice of this deity which is also the most curious, sustains what has already been advanced. The Arcadian king, Lycoorgus, scourged, and pursued over the hill Nyseion, the μαινομένοιο Διωνύσοιο τιθήνας, the nurses of the frantic Bacchus; they in dismay cast down their vine branches (θυσθλὰ), while he plunged into the sea, and Thetis gave him refuge[510]. Jupiter, in retribution, struck Lycoorgus blind, and cut short his days. Whatever explanation may be adopted of its details, this legend seems to signify, beyond all doubt, that some forty or fifty years before the _Troica_ (for Lycoorgus was contemporary with the youth of Nestor[511]), the introduction of the drunken worship of Bacchus was resisted by the Pelasgians of Arcadia, and was for a time, at least, expelled by them. The mention of Dionysus as a child probably imports a further reference to the recency of his worship: and there is something remarkable and significant in this apparent commencement of violent opposition to it at the point when women were beginning to be corrupted by excess of liquor.

[510] Il. vi. 130-40.

[511] Il. vi. 132.

Even the later tradition of Hesiod, which makes Dionysus the husband of Ariadne, by thus giving him a Phœnician connection, so far sustains his Phœnician origin[512].

[512] Hes. Theog. 947.

~_Dionysus is of the lowest inventive type._~

As Dionysus is one of the most recent of the Homeric deities, so likewise is he one of the most purely heathenish[513]. He has not, even in Homer, a divine maternity assigned to him, and he is the only one of the Homeric deities who stands in this predicament[514]. The anomaly was felt and provided for, in the later traditions at least, by the deification of Semele after death. But perhaps another mode of statement may be adopted. As it is evident that the original tradition made him the son of a woman, and as all those with whom he is classed in Homer are probably historical personages, it seems possible that he may have been one of our own race, whose discovery or extension of the use of wine may, by its rapid and powerful effect upon the countries which it had reached, have led to his adoption into the order of the Immortals, by a process more rapid than took place in the case of Hercules or any other person. Upon this supposition, he stands altogether alone among the gods of Homer. But, be this as it may, he is, when considered in the capacity of a deity, the representation of an animal instinct in its state of gross excess, and of nothing more. He is the god of drunkenness, as Mars is the god of violence, and Venus the goddess of lust: and there are no three other deities, from whom Homer has so remarkably withheld all signs of his reverence.

[513] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. p. 80.

[514] See the accounts of Pindar, Pausanias, and Apollodorus.

Though I state this as an historical possibility, I think it is certain that, according to the Poet, Dionysus was from his birth one of the Immortals: but it is also very doubtful whether he was one, to whom a place belonged in the smaller Olympian Assembly. Even in later times, he was not one of the _Dii Majores_: and his being the son of a mortal in Homer would tend to make it probable that he was not invested by the Poet with Olympian dignity. Again, he is only four times mentioned in the whole of the poems; nor is a single act of his manhood recorded, except his information against Ariadne. That information seems to imply, that a known Greek island was sacred to him; and it was followed by the death of Ariadne under the darts of Diana. These circumstances may perhaps raise a presumption of his Olympian rank, equal to the adverse one which has been stated above. So far as this inquiry is concerned, the question must remain unsolved. But little of interest can attach to these, the shameful parts of the Greek mythology, which boast, as if it were our strength, of what can scarcely be excused as our weakness, and which treat our shame as our joy. The real point of interest is to learn whether there was a time when man, even though he had lost the clear view of the guiding hand from above, yet revolted against, or had not become familiar with, the deification of vicious passion. And we seem to find the note of such a time in Homer. Only one laudatory phrase is applied throughout the poems to Dionysus; it is the χάρμα βροτοῖσιν, and these words are not the sentiment of the Poet, or of any character that represents his mind; they are put into the mouth of Jupiter, when he is speaking under a paroxysm of sensual passion.

I have not adverted to the tradition which places the Lycoorgus of Il. vi. in Thrace, but have simply followed what appears to be the suggestion of the Homeric text.

SECT. IV.

_The Composition of the Olympian Court: and the Classification of the whole Supernatural Order in Homer._

In the full Olympian Assembly, or Great Chapter of the Immortals, we find a collection of deities, who are respectively the representatives, in the main, of Elemental Powers, of Human Passions or Ideas, and of Historical Traditions, either single or intermixed. Among the simple examples, we may cite the Rivers and Nymphs for the first, Mars and Venus for the second, the goddess Themis for the third, Latona and Iris for the last. In Jupiter, the chief of all, these elements are blended together.

~_Principal cases of exclusion from Olympus._~

But we must also consider those who do not appear in Olympus, and why they are excluded. If, as is perhaps the case, Aidoneus and Persephone are not there, it is because of the separateness of their work, and the remoteness of their kingdom. They had servants, guards, and a judge, in short, a sort of polity of their own. Atlas, Proteus, Calypso, Circe, and the other purely local deities, so far as we know, are not there; probably because they do not enter into the national religion, but are little more than convenient symbols[515] of geographical points known or conceived through maritime, that is, without doubt, through Phœnician report. Again, we do not hear in Olympus of Destiny, Sleep, Night, Dream, Terror, Panic, Uproar, and the rest; probably because these had not attained to practical impersonation in the religion of the people, but were merely objects of the poetical faculty. So likewise with respect to the Winds, who stand as receivers of worship and sacrifice in Il. xxiii. 195. The different treatment which they receive in the Iliad and Odyssey, like their non-appearance in the Great Chapter[516] of Olympus, unless referable to the peculiarities of the Outer Geography, shows that they had not a developed and established godhead, but might be dealt with by the Poet at his will. In these imperfect impersonations, it has been well observed, sometimes the mere elemental power, sometimes the superinduced personality prevails. Again, Ἄτη the temptress, and Ἐρινύες the avengers, might stand excluded, both on the same ground of inadequate impersonation, and on other grounds. Nereus and the purely elemental deities of the sea are not summoned to the Assembly, apparently because he too had his own submarine palace. It answered to Olympus; and here he sat in state amidst his numerous Court of Nymphs. Even Thetis was fetched from thence to attend the last Assembly of the gods in the Twenty-Fourth Iliad. Κρόνος and Ῥέα are not in the divine meetings, firstly, because he, probably with her as his reflected image, is penally confined in Tartarus; but secondly, because, the first representing Time, and the second Matter, they are the primary ideas in the metaphysical order, which comprehended all others, and from which all others were derivative. And as they stood in the metaphysical _nexus_ of ideas, so stood Oceanus and his feminine, Tethys, in the terrestrial order; where Oceanus was the all-inclosing, all-containing; the Form, within which every terrestrial existence was cast, and beyond which even Thought could not pass. Hence the curious and marked exception of him from the summons of Themis to the Great Assembly of the Twentieth Book[517].

[515] Nägelsbach, ii. 9.

[516] Il. xx. 4-9.

[517] Il. xx. 7.

οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην, νόσφ’ Ὠκεανοῖο, οὔτ’ ἄρα Νυμφάων.

He is the father of the rivers, and the feeder of the Sea. Even of the gods he is the ‘Genesis,’ perhaps as their physical source, or as affording material for their formation; perhaps as the outer band of that world to which they belong, as much as we do, and outside of which there was no attempt to conceive them as existing. Lastly, it is perhaps because Homer meant to assign to Oceanus and Tethys the actual first parentage of the gods. This supposition is favoured by the fact that Juno applies the name μήτηρ[518] to Tethys, in a connection which may make it equivalent to ‘_our_ Mother Tethys.’

[518] Il. xiv. 201.

It is clearly on a principle that Oceanus is not summoned to Olympus, and not from mere defect or immaturity of personality. For in conjunction with his wife Tethys, he took over the infant Juno from Rhea, at the time when there was trouble between Jupiter and his father; and afterwards he reared the child in his own domain. He can be lulled into slumber by Ὕπνος like any other deity: he has a daughter, Eurynome[519]: and he is capable of conjugal quarrels[520].

[519] Il. xviii. 398.

[520] Il. xiv. 200. seqq. 245.

Again, Ocean is water, and Oceanus is the father of all the Rivers: but yet he was not included in the great lottery which divided the world between the Kronid brothers. This shows us afresh, that he is outside and independent of their rule: he forms the framework of the visible creation, while they are parts of the picture that is within the framework.

The same thing is true of Κρόνος and Ῥέα in the metaphysical order. They represent anterior conditions of thought and of existence to all other Beings, human and divine. Their personality is established; but it is, even more than that of Oceanus, in abeyance: for Oceanus is at least ever-flowing, while Time, and Space, or Matter, are with Homer wholly passionless, mute, and still. When once the Kronid family has been brought into existence, and the attempt of Time to impose the law of death on Deity has been put down by Jupiter, then the impersonations are virtually withdrawn from him and his partner, and they relapse into the torpid state of purely abstract ideas.

The Elemental Powers have nowhere what may be called a strong position in Homer, except in the invocations of solemn swearing; where they give force to the Oath, because they are the avengers of perjury. Thus their connection is not with deity in general, but with that nether world, which the ideas of mankind have always associated with the lower parts of the Earth[521].

[521] Il. iii. 276-8. xix. 258-60.

Even on grounds larger than those derived from a particular phrase, it may be probable, that we ought to consider Oceanus as the Homeric parent of all the deities, Κρόνος and Ῥέα included. To a state of the human mind not yet familiar with abstractions, Time and Place, imperfectly conceived, might be more limited, less comprehensive, than the great all-infolding Ocean, which encircled and wrapped in the world. And in this conception there may lie hid the embryo of what afterwards grew into the aquarian cosmogony, a system which appears not to be without support from other passages of the poem, especially from the very curious verse (Il. vii. 99),

ἀλλ’ ὑμεῖς μὲν πάντες ὕδωρ καὶ γαῖα γένοισθε.

If, however, this idea was really in the mind of the Poet, still we should consider it as having been with him an instinct rather than a theory.

~_Dî majores of the later tradition._~

The Olympian deities of Pagan antiquity are commonly represented as twelve in number; and the names are

1. Jupiter. 2. Juno. 3. Neptune. 4. Minerva, or Pallas Athene. 5. Phœbus Apollo. 6. Diana. 7. Mercury. 8. Histie, or Vesta. 9. Mars. 10. Venus. 11. Vulcan. 12. Ceres.

But Homer knows nothing of this number or arrangement of the gods; or of the distinction between _Dii majores_ and _Dii minores_. Nor does he enable us with precision to substitute any other number for it. He gives us, however, his idea, at least by approximation, of the number of the Olympian gods. For when Thetis visits Vulcan, to obtain new armour for Achilles, she finds the deity at work upon twenty τρίποδες[522], to stand round the wall of the well-built hall, which he is carefully fitting with wheels, in order that they may automatically take their places in the assembly of the gods. Whatever these τρίποδες be, the number is probably meant to correspond with that of the ordinary Olympian meeting for festivity or deliberation. They are commonly supposed to be bowls or vessels for wine set on three-legged stands; but there are two reasons, suggested by the language of the passage, which seem to recommend our understanding the word to mean seats, such as that of the priestess of Apollo at Delphi: one is, their being intended to stand around the apartment, along the wall: and the other is, that they were to place themselves for the divine assembly[523];

[522] Il. xviii. 373.

[523] Il. xviii. 376.

ὄφρα οἱ αὐτόματοι θεῖον δυσαίατ’ ἀγῶνα, ἠδ’ αὖτις πρὸς δῶμα νεοίατο.

This idea of the great bowls placing themselves, one apparently for each deity to draw from, does not correspond with the classical representation of the cupbearer filling the cup of each, as he moves from the left towards the right. Nor does the word ἄγων seem to be suitable for a merely convivial meeting: and we ought, I presume, to consider the meetings on Olympus as in theory political councils for the government of the world, only relieved by meat and drink. If we take τρίποδες as signifying the seats, it has of course a reference to the number of gods who constituted the ordinary Olympian family; a reference which indeed it may probably have, even if the other signification be preferred.

And the text of the poems affords sufficient evidence, that twenty was about the number of the Olympian gods of Jupiter.

~_Deities of Olympian rank in Homer._~

Of the Olympian twelve recognised in later times, all, except Vesta and Ceres, must at once and indubitably be pronounced Olympian in Homer. For all take part in the Trojan war, and likewise make their appearance in Olympus. Thus we have ten Olympian deities of Homer already ascertained. And there are several others whom we can have no doubt in adding to the list. These we will proceed to consider:

1. Latona is clearly Olympian; from her great dignity as an unquestioned wife of Jupiter (ἄλοχος Διὸς, Il. xxi. 499); and from the fact that her position entitled her to take a side in the Trojan war, where none but Olympian deities were engaged, with the single exception of the formidable local power, Xanthus or Scamander. Another reason is, because the title of Dione, as we shall see, is clear; who is a deity in some respects similar, but decidedly inferior, to Latona.

2. Dione the mother of Venus is in the same order. For she receives her child, when she repairs wounded to Olympus, and in her speech of consolation distinctly describes herself as one of the Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες, Il. v. 383. She is called in this passage δῖα θεάων: a title twice given to Minerva, but also, sometimes, to very secondary deities, such as Calypso and Circe. Either as insignificant, or possibly as being foreign and not sufficiently naturalized, she finds no place in the Catalogue of Mothers in the Fourteenth Iliad.

3. Iris, the messenger-goddess. The grounds of her title may be found among the remarks upon this deity[524].

[524] See sup. p. 156.

4. Themis, although not a party in the war, has the office of Pursuivant or Summoner to the Olympian Assembly: and her ordinary presence there is distinctly proved by the Fifteenth Iliad, where she is the first to welcome Juno on her entrance into the circle.

5. It will be seen from a brief statement elsewhere relating to Aidoneus or Aides, that he is clearly of Olympian rank and character.

6. Next to Aidoneus, we may take the claim of Hebe. She is not indeed an important, nor a very prominent, person in the poems: but there is no room for doubt as to her Olympian dignity. We find her officiating as cupbearer in the Olympian Court of the Fourth Iliad. Her connection with Olympus is further established by her assisting Juno in the preparation of her chariot: and by her assisting Mars in the bath, when that deity has betaken himself into the presence of Jupiter, to complain of his wound. Again, her personality is quite clear. Nor can her divinity be questioned. She is pronounced in the Eleventh Odyssey to be the daughter of Jupiter and Here. The verse is suspected; but the suspicion itself may be suspected in its turn. Further, the case rests not on the particular account given of her parentage, but, in connection with the context, on her appearing as the wife of Hercules at all. Nor is she anywhere connected with the idea of a mortal origin[525].

[525] Il. iv. 2. v. 721, 905. Od. xi. 603.

7. A second divinity of somewhat similar rank is Paieon. On two occasions, he heals in Olympus the wounds of deities; first of Aidoneus, then of Mars. He is summoned to the exercise of his function as a person within call, and habitually present there. After the rebuke of Jupiter to Mars, the line that follows is[526],

[526] Il. v. 899.

ὣς φάτο, καὶ Παιήον’ ἀνώγει ἰήσασθαι.

There is no doubt therefore either of his personal, or of his Olympian character; and none but divine persons are capable of bearing the Olympian offices. Ganymede, for instance, though carried up to dwell among the Immortals in order to pour out wine, has no function assigned to him in the poems. The Egyptians, indeed, are stated to be of the race of Paieon[527]; but we must probably understand this with respect to their royal family, just as the same thing is said of the Phæacians with respect to Neptune, because their kingly house had sprung from him[528]. In the later mythology he appears to be absorbed, like the Sun, in Apollo; but in the Homeric poems there is no confusion, or approach to confusion, of the persons. Paieon has the relation to Apollo with respect to surgery or medicine, which Vulcan has to Minerva with respect to manual art: and, apparently by a mixture of distinct traditions, he is also connected with Apollo, by being the synonyme for the hymn of victory, of which Apollo is doubtless supposed to be in a peculiar manner the giver.

[527] Od. iv. 232.

[528] Od. xiii. 130.

To all these deities the poems appear to give a title to seats in Olympus, unquestionable as well as direct. By a somewhat less clear and simple process, we may, I think, arrive at a similar conclusion as to the views of Homer regarding two other deities.

8. The first of these is Demeter, or Ceres, whose Olympian rank is considered, and I think established, in the remarks elsewhere upon her individual divinity[529].

[529] See sup. sect. iii. p. 215.

9. The second is Ἠέλιος, the Sun. His share in the episode of Mars and Venus[530] does not indeed absolutely imply his residing on Olympus. But this is clearly involved in the account of his receiving the intelligence, that his oxen had been consumed by the companions of Ulysses. For, upon hearing it, he instantly proceeds to address the company of the Immortals assembled there[531], and is answered by Jupiter. He must therefore unquestionably stand as one of the Olympian gods of Homer.

[530] Od. viii. 270, 302.

[531] Od. xii. 374-88.

There are but three other personages named in Homer, with respect to whom there is room for the supposition, that he may have intended them to rank as Olympian deities. They are Dionysus, Persephone, and Eris. For Histie, or Vesta, is so entirely wanting in personality, that she cannot possibly belong to that order. She is invoked indeed in company with Jupiter; but with these two is likewise combined the ξενίη τράπεζα, the table of hospitality. In the hymn to Venus[532] she has become fully personified, and is celebrated as the eldest of the daughters of Κρόνος. But this imagery probably belongs to a different stage of Greek society and Greek poetry.

[532] Hymn. v. 22.

1. 2. The case of Dionysus and that of Persephone, very different, but both on this point doubtful, have been stated elsewhere[533].

[533] See sect. iii. pp. 269, and 223.

~_The Eris of Homer._~

3. The case of Eris is different. She is the sister and also the mistress of Mars[534]. And in the fierce battle of the Eleventh Book, Eris alone is present to enjoy it, while all the other deities, inhibited from action by Jupiter, have betaken themselves to their several abodes on Olympus.

[534] Il. iv. 440.

Again, Jupiter sends her down to the camp at the beginning of the Eleventh Iliad, where she stands on the ship of Ulysses, and raises a mighty shout to stir up the Greeks for the contest[535]. The word is, indeed, the common and established word for strife in Homer, and it is applied even to the conflict of the gods[536], θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνιόντων. But this use of it is probably to be compared with that of Ἄρης for a spear, and of Ἀφροδίτη (in later Greek) for the sensual function of that deity. She is, on the whole, less a figure than a person, though standing upon the border between the two respectively; and though, as she never actually performs what may be called a personal action, she is only by a few degrees removed from the family of Terror, Din, Panic, and the rest. The first of these, Φόβος, as he is the son of Mars[537], and attends him in fight against the Ephyri, is as distinctly personified as Eris in one passage; but the effect of it is neutralized by others, where he passes into sheer figure. She rejoices in seeing the slaughter[538] wrought in battle: and an intense eagerness is imputed to her[539], of course meaning an eagerness for blood.

[535] Il. xi. 3.

[536] Il. xx. 66.

[537] Il. xiii. 299.

[538] Il. xi. 74.

[539] Il. iv. 440.

But another form of this deity is probably exhibited to us under another name, that of the πτολίπορθος Ἐνύω. Enuo is mentioned together with Pallas as being a warlike deity, in contrast with the effeminate Venus[540]: and she leads the Trojans to the fight in concert with Mars: but while he has a huge spear in his hands, she holds or leads, instead, another form more shadowy than her own, that of Κύδοιμος or Tumult. Yet the mode in which she is joined with Pallas proves her impersonation. The fundamental identity of her name with Ἐνυάλιος, the second name of Mars, and her joining him in leading on the Trojans, place her in some very close relation to him: and that close relation cannot well be other than the twofold one of sister and mistress, which had been assigned to Ἔρις.

[540] Il. v. 333, 592.

When it is said, that ‘she alone of the gods was present, as the others had retired to their respective mansions on Olympus,’ the most natural inference certainly is, that she too is meant to be described as belonging to the Olympian Court.

Upon the whole, it seems pretty clear, that if the Poet intended to limit absolutely the number of the Olympian Court or Minor Assembly to the exact figure twenty, then the choice for the twentieth place will more justly fall on his Eris, than either his Dionysus, or even his Persephone. It appears to me, however, that so strict a numerical precision is not in the manner of Homer; that he intended the twenty tripods to be a general indication of the number of the Court, and that with this indication the facts of the poems substantially, though indeterminately, agree.

Such is the composition of the Olympian Court, or smaller Assembly.

~_Classification of the Supernatural Order._~

The Deities who, in virtue of belonging to that Court, may be most properly called Olympian, may be divided into the following classes:

I. Deities having their basis, and the general outline of their attributes and character, from tradition.

1. Pallas Athene, or Minerva. 2. Phœbus Apollo. 3. Latona. 4. Iris.

II. Deities of traditional basis, but with development principally mythological or inventive.

1. Jupiter. 2. Neptune. 3. Aidoneus, or Pluto. 4. Diana. 5. Persephone.*

III. Deities of invention, or mythology proper.

1. Juno. 2. Mars. 3. Mercury. 4. Vulcan. 5. Venus. 6. Demeter. 7. Themis. 8. Ἠέλιος. 9. Paieon. 10. Dione. 11. Hebe. 12. Eris, or Enuo.* 13. Dionysus.*

Those three names, which are marked with an asterisk, appear to have only a more or less disputable title to a seat in Olympus.

Outside, so to speak, of Olympus and its Court, we may classify the superhuman intelligences of Homer as follows: observing, however, that the minor deities who represent natural powers, if thoroughly personified, give their attendance in Olympus on high occasions, and help to form its great Chapter or Parliament.

They may be thrown into the six following classes:

1. The greater impersonations of natural powers, and of ideas; with their reflections, where such have been formed, in the feminine. These are

Oceanus and Tethys.

Κρόνος and Ῥέα.

Ouranos and Gaia (not Earth, but rather Land).

Nereus and Amphitrite.

We are not authorized by Homer to associate either of these last couples as husband and wife. We have to add:

Destiny, (which also has a place in the fifth class,) Dream, Sleep, Death, Terror, Panic, Rumour, Din, Uproar.

The process of impersonation is with some of these fully developed, with others scarcely begun, and wholly poetical; therefore as yet in no degree mythological. In one place, Il. xiii. 299, Φόβος is the son of Mars, in another Φόβος and Δεῖμος are his horses (xiii. 119.); and in a third they appear along with Ἔρις, in a shape hovering between personality and allegory. Ἔρις herself, at times fully personified, in one passage is simply a figure on the Ægis of Minerva, perhaps, however, as an animated work of art, Il. v. 740. In all these cases we see the work of poetical fabrication actually going on.

Perhaps the best example of a merely poetical, as distinguished from a religious or practical impersonation, is to be found in Æschylus, who makes Dust the brother of Mud[541].

[541] Æsch. Ag. 480.

This class was greatly augmented in the later Theogonies, beginning with Hesiod.

2. The minor impersonations of natural powers, such as

(1) The Winds. (2) The Rivers. (3) The Nymphs of meadows. (4) The Nymphs of fountains. (5) The Nymphs of groves. (6) The Nymphs of hills. (7) The Sea Nymphs.

3. I place in a different class all those deities, who appear in Homer as the subjects of foreign fable not fully naturalized. These are they who dwell in the Outer sphere of the marvellous Geography in the Odyssey, and with whom Menelaus and Ulysses are brought into contact. They are wholly exterior to the system of Homer, and we cannot safely give them a position implying any defined relation to it. But there are certain links supplied by the Poet himself, as when he makes Circe child of the Sun, and Mercury presumptively nephew of Calypso: by these he shows us the connection of the Greek mythology with Eastern sources, and the partial assimilation of the materials they supplied.

These deities are:

1. Proteus. 2. Leucothee. 3. Æolus (perhaps). 4. The Sirens. 5. Calypso. 6. Atlas. 7. Circe. 8. Œetes. 9. Maias. 10. Perse. 11. Eidothee. And several Nymphs[542].

[542] Od. i. 71. xii. 132, 3.

4. Those impersonations which represent, each in its several part, or its peculiar aspect, the tradition of the Evil One, have been considered along with the deities of tradition.

5. Of ministers of doom or justice, real or reputed, and less than divine, yet belonging to the metaphysical or moral order, we have in Homer:

1. The Fates, Κῆρες, who fall within the range of ideas described by his Αἶσα and his Μοῖρα.

2. The Ἁρπυῖαι.

3. The Ἐρινύες.

6. Besides all these, we have yet another class with subdivisions of its own, composed of beings who stand within the interval between Deity and Humanity.

There are some observations to be made on several of these classes.

~_Destiny or Fate in Homer._~

It is much easier to obtain a just perception of the manner in which Homer handles the subject of Destiny or Fate, than to represent it in a system. The conflict which it involves, either of ideas, or at least of the words denoting them, was certain to give occasion to argument and difference of opinion in a case where a poet is of necessity called to take his trial at the bar of philosophy[543].

[543] The subject has been treated with great ability by Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol., Abschnitt iii.

Besides the θέσφατον, on which I shall make a remark hereafter, there are five forms of speech which are employed by Homer to express the idea of Destiny; they are, Κατακλῶθες, Κήρ, Μοῖρα, Μόρος, and Αἶσα: the two last in the singular number only, the two preceding it in the singular or plural, and the Κατακλῶθες only in the plural.

Of these, the Κῆρες and the Κατακλῶθες have undergone the most effective process of personification; but, brought more distinctly into the sphere of life and action, these phrases have a much less profound root in the order of ideas, and scarcely touch the great questions, whether destiny is a power separate from the human will, separate from the Divine will, and superior to either or to both.

The fundamental idea both of Μοῖρα and Αἶσα, traced from their original source, is not a part merely, but rather a portion or share allotted according to some rule or law. But, though of similar origin, some distinctions obtain between the uses of the two words. And first as to Αἶσα.

~_Under the form of Αἶσα._~

We have in Il. xviii. 327, ληΐδος αἶσα; in Od. xix. 24, ἐλπίδος αἶσα; in Il. ix. 378, τίω δέ μιν ἐν καρὸς αἴσῃ. In all these cases it is plain, that the word means not a mere part, but a part assigned upon some given principle. Hence it comes to mean either the whole share or lot assigned to a man, or the law according to which it is assigned, that is, the law under which the moral government of human life, and the distribution of good and evil, are conducted. Accordingly, we have these several senses in which it is employed.

1. The αἶσα, as the entire destiny, of an individual man, Il. i. 416. Ἐπεί νύ τοι αἶσα μίνυνθά περ, οὔτι μάλα δήν.

2. A notable part of that destiny, as his death: Τῷ οἱ ἀπεμνήσαντο καὶ ἐν θανάτοιό περ αἴσῃ. Il. xxiv. 428.

3. The moral law for the government of conduct, as in Ἕκτορ, ἐπεί με κατ’ αἶσαν ἐνίπαπες, οὐδ’ ὑπὲρ αἶσαν. Il. iii. 59.

4. That moral law as it is supposed to proceed from Jupiter; the Διὸς αἶσα, or dispensation of Jupiter; the δαίμονος αἶσα, or dispensation of Providence.

5. That same law, as it is supposed to proceed from some other source, or to speak more correctly, for Homer, as the power which administers it is separately personified. This we have in the passage ἅσσα οἱ Αἶσα γεινομένῳ ἐπένησε λίνῳ, ὅτε μιν τέκε Μήτηρ, Il. xx. 127; or, again, as in Od. vii. 197; where Αἶσα is assisted in the spinning process by the Κατακλῶθες βαρεῖαι, as if it was felt that she was not strong enough to make a Destiny.

Upon the whole it appears to me that there is in the word Αἶσα only the minutest savour of the proper idea of Fate. For Fate involves these things: 1. a power dominant over man: 2. a power independent of the divinity: and 3. a power standing ideally apart from right.

Now αἶσα does not fully answer even to the first of these conceptions, since αἶσα, even when it is backed by the gods, may be overcome by the energies of man. Jupiter in the Iliad[544] ordained glory to Hector and success to the Trojans until the sunset of the day when the battle of the ships was fought: yet just before the death of Patroclus the Greeks prevailed, Il. xvi. 780.

[544] Il. xi. 192-4 and xviii. 455.

καὶ τότε δή ῥ’ ὑπὲρ αἶσαν Ἀχαιοὶ φέρτεροι ἦσαν.

The only instances in which we find αἶσα endowed with any thing in the nature of an inexorable force are such as that quoted from Il. xx. 127. In this passage it is said by Juno, ‘We will give Achilles glory; thereafter let him suffer what αἶσα has appointed for him.’ Now this refers not to a course of life that he was to pass through, but simply to the crisis of his death. In Od. vii, the speaker is Alcinous; and his sentiment is, ‘Let us carry our guest safe home and then leave him to whatever αἶσα and the κατακλῶθες have ordained for him.’ Probably this is only an euphemism, and means death, as Juno meant it; but, in any case, proceeding from another mortal, it is a mere form of speech perfectly compatible in itself with the idea that the gods are superior to αἶσα, nay, that man may upon occasion surmount it. In the other case it is not so; we must understand Juno to recognise the αἶσα or dispensation as absolute; but then it is the dispensation of death; and it is, I think, the clear doctrine of the poems that that dispensation cannot be cancelled or averted from mortals, though there are various modes in which it may be escaped or baffled: one of them, that of postponement, which is temporary: another, that of translation out of the mortal state, as in the case of Ganymede: and a third, that of revival, as in the cases of Castor and Pollux. To Minerva alone is ascribed a power over death: and this seems to be a power of subsequent rescue, and not one of absolute exemption. Euryclea comforts Penelope with the exhortation to pray to Minerva about Ulysses[545], as she can afterwards deliver him;

[545] Od. iv. 753.

ἡ γάρ κέν μιν ἔπειτα ἐκ θανάτοιο σαώσαι.

The stress is evidently to be laid upon the word ἔπειτα.

Another passage, which may at first sight present a different appearance, will, I think, on examination, be found to harmonize completely with what has been said. When in the Sixteenth Iliad, Jupiter perceives that his cherished son Sarpedon is about to meet his death by encountering Patroclus, he laments that it should be the destiny of one to him the dearest of men, to be slain by that warrior. Then he proceeds to consider whether he shall remove him from the scene of danger, though he was fated to die, or whether he shall subdue him by the hands of Patroclus[546],

[546] Il. xvi. 438.

ἢ ἤδη ὑπὸ χερσὶ Μενοιτιάδαο δαμάσσω.

Thus, in the space of a few lines, 1. he seems to recognise destiny as a power superior to his own will; then, 2. he debates whether he shall overrule this superior power; and lastly, 3. he treats the execution of its decree as the act of that very will of his. And on this course, advised by Juno, he finally decides.

He desists from executing this plan, not because it is impossible, but apparently for two reasons: the first, that it may cause discontent and spleen among the gods; the second, that by similar interferences, on behalf each of his own child, they too may trouble the order of nature. His power, therefore, to execute the scheme is clearly implied. But what scheme? Not one for repealing the law of death, so far as Sarpedon is concerned[547]; but simply for adjourning the evil by removing him to his home, and so putting him far beyond the reach of the chances of the war.

[547] Il. xvi. 436.

When Vulcan is asked by Thetis to provide arms for Achilles, he replies, Would that I could hide him from his fated hour, even as I can and will provide him with arms! Here, indeed, the expression is not to save, but to hide him; yet even this is beyond his power:

αἲ γάρ μιν θανάτοιο δυσηχέος ὧδε δυναίμην νόσφιν ἀποκρύψαι, ὅτε μιν μόρος αἰνὸς ἱκάνοι[548].

[548] Il. xviii. 464.

Vulcan indeed is a deity of limited powers; but in this case he seems to express a general law.

~_Death inexorable to Fate or Deity._~

The death, therefore, at some time within a given space, of every person remaining in the state of a mortal man, was a point settled and immovable, and so was accordingly the αἶσα of death: but it was that the αἶσα was fixed, because death was fixed, and not that death was fixed, because αἶσα ordained it. We must distinguish between a single incident of a mortal career, an order which nothing can infringe, unchangeable but uncaused, and the supposition of a power, which causes that, and likewise all other parts of it, irrespective of personal will, whether in the gods or in men.

It appears, I think, on the whole, that αἶσα has but a limited and equivocal connection with the idea of fate; it seems never to mean more than the fate of a single individual, never to signify the large-handed destiny that grasps nations and the world. It may be overridden, as by the Greeks, after the battle of the ships. And the reason of this seems to be that its meaning has so strong a bias to the side of a moral law, as opposed to a mere force. This comes out clearly in the sense of the word αἴσιμος: αἴσιμα εἴδειν is little less or more, than to be a good man. Its predominating sense is the ordained law of right; and as such, it is a law very liable to be broken.

~_Destiny under the form of Μοῖρα._~

It is in the Μοῖρα, if anywhere, that we must seek for destiny, in the sense which approximates to fatalistic ideas. Here, far differently from αἶσα, the moral idea is subordinate in nearly all cases, and in some it is wholly suppressed.

Like αἶσα, μοῖρα, properly means a portion or share, a part accruing to some one under a law. Thus we have οὐδ’ αἰδοῦς μοῖραν ἔχουσιν Od. xx. 171; and παρώχηκεν δὲ πλέων νὺξ τῶν δύο μοιράων, τριτάτη δ’ ἔτι μοῖρα λέλειπται (Il. x. 252). Thus it appears to pass into the following senses, which may be usefully compared with those of αἶσα.

The scope of its meaning is far wider: it hardly stoops to signify the destiny of a single man; Homer could not well have said (see Il. i. 416.) ἐπεί νύ τοι μοῖρα μίνυνθά περ: although he can make μοῖρα as a power, appoint a destiny _for_ a man, (Il. xxiv. 209.) it is not the μοῖρα _of_ a man. But it is

1. The appointing power as separate from any thing else. It hovers between the state of an abstraction and of a person: and it comes nearer to the latter than αἶσα. Not only have we μοῖρα κραταιὴ γεινομένῳ ἐπένησε λίνῳ, (Il. xxiv. 209.) but especially,

τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν[549].

[549] Il. xxiv. 49.

A passage by which, unless its effect were modified from elsewhere, the μοῖραι seem in principle to take the whole administration of moral government into their hands, by fixing dispositions as well as outward actions.

2. Besides being thus personal, μοῖρα reaches to mankind at large, and expresses a general law, in the passage last quoted.

This may be a law of good fortune, as in Od. xx. 76[550]:

[550] Cf. Il. iii. 182, μοιρηγενές.

μοῖράν τ’ ἀμμοριήν τε καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.

3. Or, with an epithet, it may mean ill fortune; as in μοῖρα δυσώνυμος, Il. xii. 116.

4. It seems very strongly to signify death, when used simply, and without addition, as τεῒν δ’ ἐπὶ μοῖραν ἔθηκε, in Od. xi. 560.

5. Or when in apposition, as μοῖρα θανάτοιο, Od. ii. 100, or again as in Il. iii. 101, θάνατος καὶ μοῖρα.

6. Or any thing ordained for mankind at large, as Od. xix. 592, the μοῖρα ὕπνου. You must sleep, says Penelope; for the gods have so ordained it, (ἐπὶ γάρ τοι ἑκάστῳ μοῖραν ἔθηκαν ἀθάνατοι θνητοῖσιν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν).

7. Μοῖρα, like αἶσα, may be the embodied will, decree, or dispensation of the gods. Thus we have μοῖρα θεοῦ, Od. xi. 292, where θεὸς is either Jupiter or possibly Apollo: and μοῖρα θεῶν, Od. iii. 269, and xxii. 413. Now the names θεὸς and θεοὶ seem to be higher with Homer than any mythological name. They are his most solemn forms for the expression of the idea of deity. Thus it is remarkable that he never attaches μοῖρα directly to any Olympian person. This testifies to its signifying something larger than is conveyed by αἶσα. But it also seems to indicate that, even if it were capable of being placed in antagonism to the will of one of the mythological persons, into whose forms theistic ideas had passed by degeneracy, yet it was not conceived as opposite to or separate from the divine principle, but rather as a power associated with it.

8. Though in general μοῖρα means the thing ordained without reference to moral ideas, yet it is not always so. Μόρσιμος ordinarily means destined, while αἴσιμος means right. But the ideas of right and might were not yet wholly parted. In Od. xxii. 413 it is plain that μοῖρα θεῶν, pronounced by Ulysses over the Suitors, contains a moral element: for he goes on to say, οὔτινα γὰρ τίεσκον κ.τ.λ.: and so Eurymachus, when he means to acknowledge that the death of Antinous was morally just, says,

νῦν δ’ ὁ μὲν ἐν μοίρῃ πέφαται[551].

[551] Od. xxii. 54.

The presence of the moral element in this word is entirely adverse to the theory, that it was used in the sense of fatalism. Power apart from a personal deity has been conceived by the human mind: but moral power, I think, in such a state of severalty, has never been made the subject of serious speculation.

9. Μοῖρα has yet another sense, that of κοσμὸς, order. The force of the term κατὰ μοῖραν is generally ‘with propriety,’ while κατ’ αἶσαν is ‘with right.’

Thus in Il. xix. 256 the Greeks sit still, κατὰ μοῖραν, in order to hear Agamemnon: and we have an instance of κατὰ μοῖραν meaning ‘with propriety’ in Il. x. 169. Here Nestor has been chidden by Diomed, not for a moral offence, but for over-activity: and he replies,

ναὶ δὴ ταῦτά γε πάντα, φίλος, κατὰ μοῖραν ἔειπες.

He could not here have said κατ’ αἶσαν.

~_Under the form of μόρος._~

Lastly, we come to the word μόρος. There are several shades of distinction between it and μοῖρα.

1. It is never personified in Homer, nor even approaches to impersonation.

2. It draws peculiarly to the dispensation of death, in conformity with the law by which in Latin it became _mors_. See Il. xviii. 465. xxi. 133: and, except in this connection, it does not seem to be used to express individual destiny.

3. Accordingly it is never associated with deity; in conformity with the fixed character of the dispensation of death. We have no μόρος θεῶν, μόρος Διός.

4. Yet this is not because μόρος is stronger than μοῖρα. On the contrary, we have no case in Homer of a thing done ὑπὲρ μοῖραν, though it is sometimes apprehended. Thus in Il. xx. 335 Neptune warns Æneas to retire from before Achilles,

μὴ καὶ ὑπὲρ μοῖραν δόμον Ἄϊδος εἰσαφικήαι.

But μόρος receives the sense of αἶσα as the law of right: a relationship curiously maintained in _mos_, _moris_, compared with _mors_, _mortis_. Men bring woe upon themselves ὑπέρμορον, by obstinate wickedness: and the crimes of Ægisthus (Od. i. 35.) have been committed ὑπέρμορον.

~_General view of the Homeric Destiny._~

We thus see that, on the whole, the force of destiny, as it appears in Homer, although it commonly prevails, is not uniformly irresistible. We never find the deities actually fighting against it, or it against them. So full and large were Homer’s conceptions of the freedom of the human will, that fate is sometimes on the point of giving way before the energy of his heroes, and this even when the strength of some god is brought in aid of it. Thus Jupiter fears, lest ὑπὲρ μόρον Achilles should dash the Trojan walls[552] to the ground. Apollo enters the city[553], lest the Greeks should take it ὑπὲρ μόρον on the day of the battle with Hector. In the Second Book, after the rush from the assembly, the Greeks would ὑπέρμορα have returned home, unless Juno had urged Minerva to bestir herself by influence among them. Many things are done contrary to αἶσα, or the ordained law of right; whereas, although μοῖρα is not in the abstract insurmountable, yet in fact it rarely is surmounted. But then the Fate of Homer, the thing spoken, is not in conflict with him that speaks it.

[552] Il. xx. 30.

[553] Il. xxi. 517.

We do not find in Homer the curious distinction which the speculative mind of the Greeks afterwards worked out, between a fate representing the mere will of the gods, and a fixed fate higher and stronger than they:

εἰ δὲ μὴ τεταγμένα Μοῖρα τὰν ἐκ θεῶν εἶργε μὴ πλέον φέρειν[554].

[554] Æsch. Ag. 993.

And again in Herodotus[555]: τὴν πεπρωμένην μοίρην ἀδύνατά ἐστιν ἀποφυγέειν καὶ θεῷ.

[555] Herod. i. 91.

While this, on the one side, was the course of speculation, the course of poetic thought was towards a complete impersonation of Destiny in the three Fates, representing an image so congenial, as a poetic image only, to the human mind, that it found its way into the romance poetry of Christian Italy.

Upon the whole, it appears at any rate most probable, that Homer had not formed the conception of a law extrinsic to all volition human and divine, and so powerful as to override it.

It is hardly to be conceived that Homer would have treated a successful resistance to the laws of Destiny as lying within the possible reach of mankind, had he deemed it to be a power independent of, and superior to, the Divine Will; because he always represents the latter as decisive and supreme over human fortunes.

I think that the primary ideas conveyed in the terms μοῖρα and Fatum will not be found, when examined, to agree. _Fatum_ is the decree without reason; the _sic volo sic jubeo_; and the idea of it is the result of the long, wearisome, despairing experience of bewildered man, after the world has lost the freshness and the joy of its childhood. The μοῖρα, or share, is a distribution made according to a law or moral purpose: it cannot, without parting from its nature, be blind: its tendency in Homer rather is, as we see in Il. xxiv. 49, to grow into a sort of rival Providence.

The arguments to an opposite effect are surely inconclusive[556]. The question raised by the Scales of Jupiter is, not what the springs may be which determine the movement of the world, but simply what is his foreknowledge of the direction it will take. These representations would be perfectly consistent with belief in the supremacy (so to speak) of Chance: and while we may admit that, inasmuch as they are not produced for the information of men, they must indicate a limitation in Jupiter, we should not mistake the nature of that limitation.

[556] Enumerated in Nägelsbach, iii. 7-9.

Again, we must not suppose that because some particular deity deplores the course of destiny, therefore that course is in opposition to the general deliberation and decision of Olympus.

And when, as is commonly the case, we find the deities cooperating with μοῖρα, the assumption that they are its servants, seems to be wholly unwarranted. It seems much more natural to suppose that the μοῖρα, to which they are giving effect, is simply the divine will: especially as, though we find single gods, Neptune or Apollo, for example, cooperating with μοῖρα, I doubt whether this is ever represented of the gods at large and their supreme decrees.

In order to solve the general question, what after all can be more reasonable than to look to the main action of the poems, and inquire what power or what counsel it is which takes effect through the medium of their machinery as a whole? If this be the test, there is no room for doubt upon the issue. In the Iliad it is the Διὸς βουλὴ (Il. i. 5): the determination of Olympus, into which Jupiter had wisely allowed his own opposite inclinations to merge. In the Odyssey[557], it is the decision of the same tribunal, at the instance of Minerva, and with Neptune alone dissentient. Upon the whole, for the poems and the day of Homer, I cannot but think that both the supremacy of godhead as a whole, and the freedom of man remain, if somewhat darkened, yet certainly unsubverted. The μοῖρα of Homer may, it is probable, be no more and no less in the main than that θέσφατον, or divinely uttered decree, which he sometimes uses in such a manner as to admit of the supposition that they were really synonymous.

[557] Od. i. 20, 45, 77. xxiv. 479.

At the same time we do not find, nor could we expect to find, in Homer any clear assertion of the majesty of the true Divine Will, as the mainspring that moves the universe. That is emphatically a Christian sentiment, which is conveyed in the lofty formula of Dante:

Così si vuol colà, dove si puote Ciò che si vuole.

So is it willed above, where He, that wills, Can what he wills.

The Fate of Homer may indeed logically embrace a germ, which will afterwards expand into the idea of a power extrinsic to Deity, and able to overrule it. We may argue to show that the representation, perseveringly developed, means as much as this. But then such representations in Homer are not perseveringly, much less are they unilaterally, developed. They have not been thought through even to their legitimate consequences, and far less to those which appear to arise from the following out, not of a full truth, but of some particular and severed aspect of it. Taken at the worst, Destiny in Homer broods like a cloud in a distant quarter of the sky, silently gathering the might which, when ripe, is to engage in obstinate and unending conflict with deity. But for this work the material is not yet prepared; and practically neither μοῖρα nor αἶσα much crosses the work of Divine government, such as it is conceived and exhibited in Homer. I pass on to the second Class.

~_Minor impersonations from Nature._~

Among the Greeks, and even in Homer, every tree, every fountain, all things inanimate, that either vegetated or moved, had their indwelling deity. Homer, however, represents the infancy of that system, and though he impersonates many other local agencies, he gives to none so active a personality as to Rivers. Ulysses in his distress addresses the god of the Scherian river[558]; and is answered by the staying of the current. Simois is addressed personally by Xanthus[559]; and Xanthus himself, by virtue of his local power, is promoted to the honour of contending with Vulcan, the god of fire, a member of the Olympian Court, and a son of Jupiter and Juno. So the Spercheus[560] is invoked, and, what is more, invoked so far off as in Troas, by Achilles.

[558] Od. v. 445. 451.

[559] Il. xxi. 308.

[560] Il. xxiii. 144.

The perpetual movement which inheres in the essence of a river, combined with the visibility which separates it from mere atmospherical currents, seems to connect it more closely than any other natural object with the idea of life. It is most interesting to observe how the sentiment here expressed seems to have worked in ages widely distant, upon great poets of differing nations, temperaments, and circumstances, after their differing manners. Homer does not impute feelings to a River; but he impersonates it with a treatment different to that which he applies to groves, fountain, or meadow. Now these personifications though not yet disused (especially in the English poetry of the last century), have become far less real and effective for the human mind, since the Gospel opened to us the unseen world with its crowd of ethereal inhabitants. Observe, accordingly, how a feeling identical with that of Homer, a tendency to invest outward nature with vitality and action, in these more recent times takes a different form. The great Dante, more than two thousand years later in the line of human descent, without personifying, yet ascribes feeling to a river; he imagines the Po, after its tumultuous headlong descent with all its feeders from the mountains, longing for peace, and seeking it by repairing to the sea. Francesca da Rimini thus describes her birth-place;

Siede la Terra, dove nata fui, Sulla marina, dove ’l Po discende Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.

And one of lesser indeed, (for who is not less than such as these?) but yet of both high and honoured poetic name, our own Wordsworth, in his Sonnet[561] on the River Thames, seen from London Bridge at sunrise, has the well known line,

[561] Miscellaneous Sonnets, Part II. No. xxix.

The river wanders at his own sweet will.

He may also be claimed as a witness to what has been said of the truth and power of these personifications to the ancients. For in another noble Sonnet, where he complains of the deadening power and weight of worldly life, and intends to show that a system of shadows, when men really appropriate and digest the truth it has, is better for them than to have a system of substances around them, and yet to remain unpenetrated by it, he describes that system of shadows by recalling two of its vivid personifications[562].

[562] Ibid. Part I. No. xxxiii:

‘The world is too much with us.’

But while Homer brings into action no personifications of this class, except those of Rivers, he peoples each with its appropriate Genius, the fountains, the grassy meadows, and the groves. In the Great Parliament of the supernal world at the beginning of the Twentieth Iliad, all are represented. Even here, however, the distinction is preserved: the Rivers attend as it were in person; but the rest by deputy, that is, by their proper indwelling and presiding Spirits;

οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην νόσφ’ Ὠκεανοῖο, οὔτ’ ἄρα Νυμφάων, αἵτ’ ἄλσεα καλὰ νέμονται, καὶ πηγὰς Ποταμῶν, καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα[563].

[563] Il. xx. 7-9.

Thus the first are impersonations: the second only residences for persons to dwell in.

~_The Harpies of Homer._~

The Harpies, Ἁρπυῖαι, of Homer have been, I think, truly described as ‘nothing but personified storm-winds[564].’ They have no connection, when jointly viewed, with the moral order, except that they may, as mere carriers, take a subordinate part in the fulfilment of a moral purpose, which is quite as true of the Winds, personified or unpersonified. The Harpy Ποδάργη is personified individually, as the mother who bears to Zephyr the two deathless horses of Achilles, Xanthus and Balius[565]; but apparently for no other purpose than one purely relative. The classical passage respecting the Harpies is that in Od. xx. 61-79, which forms a part of the prayer of Penelope to Diana. The object of the matron’s petition is that, wearied out with her sorrows, she may die, and this in one of two modes: either by the arrows of the goddess; or else, that a hurricane may seize her, and, driving her along the paths of air, deposit her in the channels of Ocean, that is to say, the place of the dead. Then she proceeds to illustrate this last mode of death, of which she has named θύελλα as the instrument, by the tale of the daughters of Pandareus, who, having lost their parents, were in an extraordinary manner petted by the goddesses. Aphrodite fed them, Here gave them sense and beauty, Artemis stature, Pallas endowed them with skill. And, lastly, Aphrodite went to Olympus to induce Jupiter to provide for their marriage. But while she was away on this errand, the Harpies carried off these maidens, and gave them to the Ἐρινύες, ἀμφιπολεύειν, to be their servants, as it is sometimes rendered, but, as I should venture to construe it, ‘for them, i. e. the Ἐρινύες, to deal with.’ It is evident that, in this curious legend, the Harpies are introduced to exemplify nothing more than the part which Penelope had previously referred to the θύελλα; and these powers, who represent Hurricane or Squall, and in whose agency lies the gist of the story, appear to have been in this matter the ministers of the Ἐρινύες, beings of a very different order. These beings are evidently introduced, though entirely beyond the parallel of the θύελλα, in order to complete the moral. The only other case in which Homer introduces the Harpies is in a line, twice repeated, where Penelope supposes that they may have carried Ulysses off (ἀκλειῶς) ingloriously[566], i. e. so as to rob him in death of his due meed of fame. And this Friedreich well compares with part of a passage in the Book of Job, which is as follows, chap. xxvii. 20, 21. ‘A tempest stealeth him away in the night: the east wind carrieth him away, and he departeth; and as a storm hurleth him out of his place.’

[564] Smith’s Dict. art. Harpyiæ. On the same subject, see Nägelsbach Hom. Theol. ii. 12. Friedreich, Realien, p. 667. Crusius on Od. xx. 77; and Voss as there quoted, whose opinion is, I think, quite erroneous.

[565] Il. xvi. 150. xix. 400.

[566] Od. i. 241. xiv. 371.

~_The Erinues of Homer._~

The Ἐρινύες are of much greater importance; and their position deserves the more careful inquiry, because it has, I think, been often misunderstood, perhaps from being appreciated only through the delusive medium of the later tradition, which appears to me to have let drop all the finer elements of the conception, by a process similar to that which it effected upon the great Homeric characters of Achilles, Helen, and Ulysses.

It is quite insufficient to say of these personages, by way of description, that they are the avengers of crime[567], or that they grudge the bliss of mortals, or that they defend the authority of parents[568]: and it is wholly erroneous, in my opinion, to treat them as ‘originally nothing but a personification of curses pronounced upon a guilty criminal[569].’

[567] Friedreich, Realien, (p. 677.) §. 198.

[568] Ibid. (p. 220.) §. 61.

[569] Smith’s Dict. art. Eumenides.

Let us first collect the facts respecting their position in Homer.

1. In the narrative of Phœnix we find that when, at the instigation of his mother, he had sought the embraces of a παλλακὶς, for whom his father had a passion, the father, incensed, invoked the Ἐρινύες to make him childless. ‘This curse,’ he says, ‘the gods (θεοὶ) accomplished, and the subterranean Jupiter, and awful Persephone,’ Il. ix. 449-57.

2. The mother of Meleager, on account of his having slaughtered her brother, invoked Aïdes and Persephone, beseeching them to slay that hero: whereupon the Erinūs, here called ἠεροφοῖτις, ‘that walketh in darkness,’ heard her from Erebus, and the city was besieged. But here the Erinūs appears to act, if not wholly in favour of Meleager, yet against his mother. The city is assaulted, forced, and set on fire. The family, including the mother who had cursed him, entreat Meleager to deliver them, and attempt to attract his favour by splendid promises of a demesne, to be conferred on him by the public. Only when the palace itself is assailed does he consent. He repels the enemy; the demesne is not given him: and, on account of his thus relenting only at the last moment, Phœnix quotes him as a warning example, for Achilles to avoid. (Il. ix. 565-603.)

3. In Il. xv. 204, when Neptune seems inclined to be refractory, Iris reminds him that the Erinūs will act with Jupiter, because he is the elder brother:

οἶσθ’, ὡς πρεσβυτέροισιν Ἐρινύες αἰὲν ἕπονται.

And upon this hint Neptune at once alters his tone, allows that she has spoken κατὰ μοῖραν, and complies with the command that she has brought.

4. In Il. xix. Agamemnon, while he admits his ἄτη, (v. 87), throws, we might say shuffles off, the blame of it upon Jupiter, Destiny, and Erinūs:

ἐγὼ δ’ οὐκ αἴτιός εἰμι, ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς καὶ Μοῖρα καὶ ἠεροφοῖτις Ἐρινύς.

5. In vv. 258-60 of the same Book, the same personage invokes as witnesses to his asseveration concerning Briseis, 1. Jupiter, 2. the Earth, 3. the Sun, 4. the Ἐρινύες, ‘who dwell beneath the earth, and punish the perjured.’

6. In v. 418 of the same Book, after the horse Xanthus, receiving a voice by the gift of Juno, has given to Achilles a dark indication of his coming fate, the Erinues interfere to prevent any further disclosures:

ὣς ἄρα φωνήσαντος Ἐρινύες ἔσχεθον αὐδήν.

7. When, in the Theomachy, Minerva has laid Mars prostrate by a blow, she taunts him by telling him he may in his overthrow recognise the Ἐρινύες of his mother Juno, invoked upon him for having changed sides in the contest (Il. xxi. 410-14).

8. In the Odyssey (ii. 135), Telemachus apprehends that, if he dismisses his mother, he will have to encounter, among other evils, the Erinuës whom she will invoke upon him.

9. Epicaste, the mother of Œdipus, is speedily removed from the face of earth for her hapless incest. Œdipus himself lives and reigns: but suffers many sorrows, which the Erinuës of Epicaste (μητρὸς Ἐρινύες, as in Il. xx. 412) bring upon him.

10. Melampus, a rich subject of Neleus in Pylos, is imprisoned for a whole year in the house of Phylacus, and has his property seized or confiscated, on account of the daughter of Neleus, and of his grievous ἄτη, which the goddess, the hard-striking[570] Erinūs, brought into his mind (Od. xv. 233):

[570] From δα and πλήσσω: Liddell and Scott: also Schol. H. _in loc._ Or, μεγάλως ἐμπελάζουσα, Schol. V. The meaning may be close-nearing, with formidable inward action.

εἵνεκα Νηλῆος κούρης, ἄτης τε βαρείης, τήν οἱ ἐπὶ φρεσὶ θῆκε θεὰ δασπλῆτις Ἐρινύς.

But he escaped from death, and paid, i.e. accomplished, the strange act that Neleus had imposed as the condition of obtaining the command over his daughter’s hand. He thus procured it for his brother, termed in the post-Homeric tradition Bias. This condition was, that he should bring off to Pylos the cows which were the property of Iphicles (and apparently of Phylacus). He was caught at Phylace in the attempt: but after a year Iphicles released him, apparently in consideration of benefit derived from his prophetic knowledge, Od. xv. 228-38, and xi. 287-97.

11. In Od. xvii. 475, 6, Ulysses, when Antinous had hurled the stool at him, invokes upon that Suitor in return the anger of the gods and Erinuës (εἴ πού γε εἰσὶν, if such there be) of the poor.

12. Lastly, in Od. xx. 78, as we have seen, the Harpies deliver the daughter of Pandareus into the hands of the Erinuës.

We have thus a very copious supply of information from Homer, in no less than twelve passages, every one of which represents the action of these singular beings in a fresh and varied light: and the question is, what is the one common idea, which is sufficiently comprehensive to include them all, and is also in harmony with the purport of each?

~_Vindicators of the moral order._~

I answer, that the Erinuës are, in the Homeric system, the never-failing champions, because they are the practical avengers, of the natural and moral order, at all times, under all circumstances, and against all persons whatsoever. They have nothing to do with the prevention of crime: but they appear to be the principal instruments for its punishment, especially here, but likewise hereafter. This, however, is only a part of their function. They are the sworn servants of a fixed order of the universe, apart from, anterior to, and independent of, all volition, divine or human: and they avenge the infraction of that order, not merely as a law of right opposed to wrong, but as a law of order opposed to disorder; they are goddesses themselves, but they are wholly apart from the Olympian dispensation, sometimes put in conjunction with deities of the mythology, sometimes apart from, sometimes in opposition to them. They are, in short, an early and poetical expression of that philosophy, which even in Christian times has seemed to seek a foundation for the supreme laws more or less dissociated from, and wholly exterior to, the Divine Will: the philosophy, not of Destiny, but of the ‘Immutable Morality’ of Cudworth and his school: the philosophy harmonizing with the Ideas of the Platonists: the philosophy of which we have a distant glimpse in the words of St. Bernard, _incommutabile est, quod ne ipsi quidem Deo mutare liberum est_[571]: and which Butler has presented to us in the mild forms of his admirably balanced wisdom.

[571] De Præcepto et Dispensatione, sect. 8.

I will take first, as the criteria of this proposition, the remarkable cases in which we find the Erinuës of Homer in qualified conflict with Deity. It is commonly held, that in the Nineteenth Iliad the Erinuës interfere to prevent Xanthus from telling too much to Achilles. No doubt Homer effects this purpose by their means: but they never interfere with the aim of prevention. It is the natural order which had been broken by the act of Juno in conferring the gift of speech upon a horse, and which they by their interposition mean to vindicate and reestablish.

They play the same part in the case of the daughters of Pandareus. It is plain that the goddesses of Olympus had vied with one another, after an unprecedented and abnormal manner, in loading these damsels with an extraordinary accumulation of gifts. Everything, even food, came to them by the direct and immediate agency of their Immortal handmaids: and at last Jupiter was actually besought to find them husbands. All this lay far beyond, and was therefore in derogation of the ordinary laws for the government of the world: it left no space for human volition, effort, or discipline: it thus struck at the root of the moral order; and on this ground the Erinuës interfere, apparently employing the Hurricanes as their agents, to remove these maidens from the earth, and to deposit them upon the Ocean stream, by the place of the dead.

~_Their operation upon the Immortals._~

I do not know whether, over and above the infraction of natural order which I have mentioned, there may not have been another cause for their intervention in the special manner in which the endowments had been conveyed: for where we find Juno granting to them ‘beauty and sense beyond all other women[572],’ it appears as if she had travelled into the province not only of Venus, but of the great Minerva, with whose prerogatives I doubt whether we ever find any similar interference allowed by Homer. It is therefore just possible that the Erinuës may here interpose on behalf of the laws and arrangements of Olympus, as well as of those belonging to Earth.

[572] Od. xx. 70.

The explanation which I have proposed will entirely fit the warning of Iris to Neptune. The natural order, which assigns the prerogatives of government to the elder, in other words, the right of primogeniture, is a rule for the Immortals, as well as for mankind, since it is taken to be founded upon a basis more profound than will, which was not, and could hardly be for Homer, even when divine, either the source or the master of creation. But while the Erinuës are thus on the side of Jupiter, and while the recollection of them at once induces Neptune to succumb, they are not on that account in any sense or degree his ministers.

On the same side with him we find them, where they are invoked by Ulysses, as the Erinuës, together with the gods, of the poor: or as when Agamemnon lays upon Erinūs, along with Jupiter and Destiny, the blame of errors, for which notwithstanding the Greeks rightly held him[573], and even he could not deny himself to be, responsible. Yet we are never told that the Erinuës move at the bidding of Jupiter, or of any other Olympian deity. Here we seem to have a glimpse into the deeper truths of the heroic age. Theology had already wandered from its orbit: it was fast losing all the severity and majesty of truth; but the deep roots which God had given to the sense of responsibility, and the expectation of retribution, in the human mind, had not yet been wholly plucked up; and Homer’s fine sense of truth forbade him to connect the most practical, and at the same time, the sternest parts of his religious system, with the gorgeous glare of his Olympus, and with the moral delinquencies of many among its inhabitants.

[573] Il. xix. 85, 6.

As the seniority of Jupiter is upheld by the Erinuës, so in like manner are the parental rights of Juno, which had been infringed by Mars, when he changed sides in the war. Here again, however, it appears as if more than the mere wish or influence of Juno had been set aside: for Mars had given a positive promise to fight for the Greeks, and it is probable that the breach of this engagement constituted the chief part of the offence that they were to punish[574].

[574] Il. v. 832-4.

~_Their connection with Aides and Persephone._~

Where the Erinuës touch upon the province of other deities at all, it is upon that of Persephone and of Aïdes. If Homer associated Persephone, as I believe he did, with the Eastern nursery of his race, it was natural enough that, as has been the case, this part of his theo-mythology should remain comparatively untainted. And certainly the Homeric relation between the Erinuës and the sovereigns of the nether world is a close one. When, in the Ninth Iliad, Althea, grasping the earth in her vehemence, as if to lay the strong hand upon the object of her prayer, invoked Aidoneus and Persephone to put her son to death, the Poet proceeds to say that the Erinūs heard her: the Erinūs who stalks in the darkness heard her, and heard her out of Erebus[575]. In the case of Phœnix and Amyntor we have exactly the converse. Here the Erinūs was invoked, and it was Aides with Persephone that answered the prayer. In both these instances it must moreover be remembered, that the question is about present and even immediate, not about posthumous retribution. We cannot, then, refuse to admit, that in this manner Persephone with Aidoneus is placed in an intimate relation with the administration of retributive justice on earth, and during the course of human life there: and if the Erinuës are to be considered as abstractions, having their basis only in some ulterior impersonation, Persephone and Aidoneus offer the only objects on whom we can suppose them to depend. It seems to me, however, that they are not reciprocally identified, although they are profoundly connected, and although we read in the connection a very ancient testimony to a primitive conviction in mankind, that they must look to the powers of the other world to redress the deranged balances of this.

[575] Il. ix. 569-72.

Conformably to these ideas, we find that, in the Nineteenth Iliad, the abode of the Erinuës is fixed ὑπὸ γαῖαν: and it is made clear from the passage (259, 60,) that their avenging office, which is so commonly exercised in this world, reaches also to the other.

From the character of the Erinuës, as vindicators of an order having deeper foundations than those which any volition could either lay or shake, there arises that natural association of them with Destiny, which we see expressed in the speech of Agamemnon[576]. Both have in common this idea, that they are not dependent on mere volition. They differ in these points; that Destiny prescribes and effectuates action, while the Erinuës only punish transgression; and that Destiny is but feebly moral, whereas the Erinuës are profoundly charged with ethical colouring. They represent that side of the idea of Destiny which alone can, after being resolutely scrutinized, retain a hold upon our interest.

[576] Il. xix. 87.

~_Their operation upon man._~

All the residue of the threads will, I think, run out easily. It follows from what has been said, that in their aspect towards man, the Erinuës are not indeed administrators of the moral laws themselves, but administrators of their sanctions. So they punish the infraction of the rights inhering in all natural relations: the rights of the poor, as Ulysses protests to Antinous; of a father, as in the case of Amyntor; of a mother, as in the case of Penelope. But they do much more than punish the infraction of the rights of persons; it is the infraction of right as right, which they resent as a substantive offence. Let us accordingly notice the function of the Erinūs in those cases where there has been fault on both sides. An offender is not therefore secure, because the person who invokes the Erinūs upon him is an offender too. The father of Phœnix gave the original occasion to his offence, by an offence of his own: but Phœnix is punished at his instance notwithstanding, because the thing which he implores is not a personal favour, but is a vindication of the ὑψίποδες νόμοι[577], violated by the incest of his son; a thing right to be done, whether asked or not. The case of Althea and Meleager illustrates this truth in a manner still more lively. When she obtained the intervention of the Erinūs, she at once suffered by it. The city of Œneus was all but subjected to the horrors of capture: she was brought, in bitter humiliation, to supplicate the aid of the son, on whose head she had just invoked the stroke of doom. From this we must conclude, which indeed is not difficult, that the Poet regarded her prayer as in itself unnatural and cruel; so that the fulfilment of it involved immediate suffering to herself. But, on the other hand, Meleager had offended too, in the slaughter of a near relative. Therefore, although his pride might well be gratified when he saw king, priest, and people, with his humbled mother, at his feet, and proffering their choicest gift in order to appease him, yet for that original offence, and for his obstinately refusing to arm until fire was in the city, he must receive his punishment likewise, in vindication of the moral laws; accordingly, after he had repulsed the enemy, he never received the demesne[578].

[577] Soph. Œd. Rex, 866.

[578] Il. ix. 598.

The case of Meleager assists to illustrate that of Œdipus and Epicaste. Both of these unhappy persons had offended against the moral laws, though it was unwittingly (ἀϊδρείῃσι νόοιο); one, the mother-bride, was immediately put out of the way: the survivor was still pursued by the μητρὸς Ἐρινύες. We see here how insufficient the idea of a curse, invoked at will, is to explain the action of these remarkable Powers; for it does not appear that there was any mother’s curse in the case: but, because the natural laws were broken in a matter where the mother was the occasion, therefore, while both suffer, the sufferings of the son are attributed to the Erinuës of the mother; the defenders, because the avengers, of the sanctity of a mother’s place in relation to her son.

In the case of Melampus, it appears that his undertaking to obtain the cows of Iphicles or Phylacus was an ἄτη βαρεῖα, a grave error, beginning in a temptation suggested to him by the Erinūs, and ending in calamity. The seizure of these animals would probably be regarded as no moral offence: and if so, any error that could lie in the engagement to seize them would be, according to Homeric estimate, in the nature of folly rather than of crime. We seem to see, then, in this place, that the range of Erinūs, like that of Atè, embraced at a certain point the prudential as well as the strictly moral laws: nor is there involved in this idea any violent departure from the true standard, for great imprudences are most commonly, and almost invariably, in near connection with some form of moral defect.

It is however also to be observed, that in this place the Erinūs suggests the ἄτη. The idea lying at the root of this representation appears to be the profound one, that the exercise of an evil will is in itself penal: and that when the mind is already disposed to offend, retributive justice may take the form of a permission, encouragement, or incitement, to commit the offence. We have already seen a very remarkable development of this idea in the hardening agency of Minerva upon the Suitors[579].

[579] Sup. sect. ii. p. 117-9.

According to the view of them which has here been given, though I could not class the Erinuës with the traditive deities, it is clear that they must represent, under metamorphosis, an important association of ideas belonging to primitive tradition.

Let us now turn to the Sixth Class.

~_The translation of mortals._~

Those for whom it was a mental necessity to animate with deity even the mute powers of nature, could not but find modes of associating man, who stood nearer to the Immortals, with them and their conditions of existence.

These modes were chiefly three:

The first, that of translation during life.

The second, that of deification after death.

The third, the conception of races intermediate between deity and humanity.

And it was perhaps not the simple working of a fervid imagination, but also an offshoot from this profound and powerful tendency, which has filled the pages of Homer with continual efforts to deify what was most excellent, or most conspicuous, in the mind or in the person of living man.

The mode of translation during life was early in date, and was rarely used, for not only are the Homeric examples of it few, but he records no contemporary instance.

Ganymede[580], the son of Tros, was taken up to heaven by the Immortals on account of his beauty, that he might live among them. Tithonus, his grand-nephew, son of Laomedon, was, as we are left to infer, similarly translated during life, to be the husband of Aurora (in Homer Eos), or the morning: for Homer makes him known to us in that capacity, though he does not mention the translation. In like manner, she carried up, and placed among the Immortals for his beauty, Cleitus, one of the descendants of Melampus[581]. A similar operation to that which was performed upon Tithonus may have been designed in the case of Orion, who was the choice of Aurora, and whose career, in consequence of the jealousy of the Immortals, was cut short by the arrows of Diana[582]. The course of these legends seems to stop suddenly in the Greek mythology at the point where they are replaced by deification: and the connection of Aurora, as the principal agent, with three out of the four, (the other, too, is Asiatic, as being in the family of Dardanus,) seems to be an unequivocal sign of their eastern character. Homer places the dwelling of Ἤως at a distant point of the East, near the place where θάλασσα communicates with Ocean.

[580] Il. xx. 233.

[581] Od. xv. 250.

[582] Od. v. 120.

~_The deification of mortals._~

In the age of Homer the very first names have hardly been entered in the class of deified heroes. Ino, the daughter of Cadmus, may be said to stand at the head of the list, from the distinct assertion of her translation, and from her being placed, as the ally of Ulysses, in continued relations with mortal men[583]. Of her also it is said that she had obtained divine honours; and nearly the same assertion is made of Castor and Pollux. But they perform no offices towards man while yet in this life. Of this Ino is the only instance. She appears to be Phœnician rather than Greek, and thus to belong perhaps to an older, clearly to a distinct mythology. Hercules, the only one of these persons who entirely fulfils the conditions of a hero, is admitted to the banquets of the gods, and united with Hebe[584]: yet he is not all in Olympus, for his εἴδωλον, endowed with voice and feeling, and bearing martial accoutrements, is the terror of the Dead. It is not easy to explain fully this divided state. I cannot but think, however, that we see here at work that principle of disintegration, which solved all riddles of character by making one individual into more than one: beginning, at least for earth, with that Helen in Egypt, who was made the depository of the better qualities that post-Homeric times could not recognise in Helen of Troy. Although the son of Jupiter, Hercules had on earth, through a sheer mistake, been subject to a destiny of grinding toil. His original extraction and personality stand in sharp contrast with the restless and painful destiny of his life. Death severs these one from the other, but Homer, contemplating each as a whole, endows the last also with personality, and gives it a reflection in the lower world of its earthly course and aspect: while the Jove-born Hercules, as it were by a natural spring, mounts up to heaven[585]. At the same time there is no more conspicuous example than Hercules, of that counter-principle of accumulation, by which legendary tradition heaps upon favourite heroes all acts not distinctly otherwise appropriated, which appear to harmonize with their characters; and thus often makes an historical personage into one both fabulous and impossible.

[583] Od. v. 333, 461.

[584] Od. xi. 601.

[585] I have alluded elsewhere (sect. ii. p. 169) to another possible explanation: two aspects of character may be exhibited in the two images.

It must not be forgotten that this passage respecting Hercules was sharply challenged by the Alexandrian critics. This challenge is discussed, and its justice affirmed by Nitzsch[586]. Such authorities must not be defrauded of their weight. But for my own part, I do not find a proof of spuriousness even in the real inconsistencies of Homer, where he is dealing with subjects beyond the range of common life and experience. Still less can it be universally admitted, that what are called his inconsistencies are really such. They will often be found to require nothing but the application of a more comprehensive rule for their adjustment.

[586] ad Odyss. xi. 601-4.

It is more difficult still to understand the case of Orion, who is at once a noted star in heaven, and a sufferer below in the Shades. There he appears not wholly unlike the shade of Hercules, a dreamy image of the sufferings of earth, and at the same time he ranks among the splendours at least of the material heaven.

Minos, who is placed in the Shades to exercise royal functions there, and Rhadamanthus, who has his happy dwelling on the Elysian plain, are approximative examples of deification.

It would be hazardous to build any opinion exclusively on the two verses Il. ii. 550, 551, relating to the worship of Erechtheus: but they are not altogether at variance with what we see elsewhere.

~_Growth of material for its extension._~

Such is the rather slender list of personages in Homer, who approximate in any degree to what was afterwards the order of deified Heroes. There are, however, some other indications, that belong immediately to the living, and that point the same way. Such is the promise to Menelaus[587], that instead of dying he should be translated to Elysium, because he was the son-in-law of Jupiter. And this suggests other notes of preparation already found in Homer. Ulysses[588] promises Nausicaa that, when he has reached his own country, he will continue to invoke her all his life long, _like a god_. The invocation of the Dead was common. It was not practised only in illustrious cases like that of Patroclus. After their battle with the Cicones, Ulysses[589] and his crews thrice invoked their slaughtered comrades. A system of divine parentage was the fit, one might almost say the certain preparation for a scheme of divine honours after death; and of such parentage many of Homer’s heroes could boast. Again, Peleus was married to a goddess, and the gods in mass attended the wedding. By thus bringing the inhabitants of Olympus down to the earth, Homer laid the ground for bringing the denizens of earth into Olympus.

[587] Od. iv. 561.

[588] Od. viii. 467.

[589] Od. ix. 65.

There is yet a further sign, which, though perhaps the least palpable, is, when well considered, the most striking of all. It is this; that sacrifice is offered, in the Odyssey, to the Shades of the departed. It is not indeed animal sacrifice that is actually offered. The gift consists of honey and milk, with wine, water, and flour[590]: but Ulysses distinctly promises that, on his return to Ithaca, he will supply this defect by offering a heifer in their honour, and a sheep all black to Tiresias in particular. Moreover, he distinctly recognises the idea of worshipping them[591];

[590] Od. xi. 26.

[591] Od. xi. 29.

πολλὰ δὲ γουνούμην νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα.

It does not destroy the force of this proceeding, that they were supposed to need or to enjoy the thing sacrificed; for the Immortals of Olympus did the latter at least, and there are even traces of the former. Together with the mixed offering above described, and the promise of a regular sacrifice on his return home, Ulysses permitted the Shades to drink of the blood of the sheep which he immolated on the spot to Aidoneus and Persephone, after he had fulfilled the main purpose of his visit by consulting Tiresias[592].

[592] Od. xi. 153, 230.

The dead then have consciousness and activity. They are invoked by man. They can appear to him. They are capable of having sacrifices offered to them. They can confer benefit on the living. Here, gathered out of different cases, were the materials of full deification. All that was yet wanting was, that they should be put together according to rule.

~_The kindred of the gods._~

We have now, lastly, to consider the kindred of the gods, or races intermediate between deity and humanity, which Homer has introduced in the Odyssey exclusively.

These are certainly three, perhaps four;

1. The Cyclopes. 2. The Læstrygonians. 3. The Phæacians.

It may also be probable that we should add

4. Æolus Hippotades and his family.

Among them all, the Cyclopes, children of Neptune, offer, as a work of art, by far the most successful and satisfactory result. In every point they are placed at the greatest possible distance from human society and its conventions. Man is small, the Cyclops huge. Man is weak, the Cyclops powerful. Man is gregarious, the Cyclops is isolated. Man, for Homer, is refined; the Cyclops is a cannibal. Man inquires, searches, designs, constructs, advances, in a word, is progressive: the Cyclops simply uses the shelter and the food that nature finds for him, and is thoroughly stationary. Yet, while man is subject to death, the Cyclops lives on, or vegetates at least, and transmits the privileges of his race by virtue of its high original. The relaxed morality of the divine seed, as compared with man, is traceable even in their slight customs. They are polygamous:

θεμιστεύει δὲ ἕκαστος παίδων ἠδ’ ἀλόχων[593].

[593] Od. ix. 115.

From their personal characters the moral element has been entirely dismissed. Polyphemus is a huge mass of force, seasoned perhaps with cunning, certainly with falseness. This union of a superhuman life with the brutal, that dwells in solitude, and has none of its angles rubbed down by the mutual contact between members of a race, produces a mixed result of extreme ferocity, childishness, and a kind of horrible glee, which as a work of art is most striking and successful. We may justly think much of Caliban: but Caliban cannot for a moment be compared to Polyphemus. It is equitable, however, to remember that contrast with Ariel, which must have been a governing condition in the creation of Shakespeare, required a nature which should be fatuous and grovelling, as well as coarse.

To feed Polyphemus, what lies nearest him, namely, the Læstrygonian adventure, has, perhaps, been starved. Again we are introduced to cruel Giants and to cannibalism, but with a great scantiness of detail. Their individuality is scarcely established. Their only marked qualities they hold in common with the Cyclopes, except as to a single point, namely, that they live gregariously. We see their city, and are introduced to their king, their queen, and their princess[594]. But a too great likeness to the Cyclops still suggests itself; and it is probable that in both the one and the other Homer set before him, among the materials of his work, that old tradition of powerful beings, allied to the deity, and yet rebellious against him, which meets us in so many forms, dispersed about the Homeric poems, and which the later tradition, by further multiplication and variety, resolved into a living chaos.

[594] Od. x. 105-15.

The Phæacians appear to stand quite in another category. While the Cyclops has no trace of deity but in superhuman force, the Phæacians have no pretensions of this kind. They are not even immortal, nor are they wholly removed from man, for they are accustomed to carry passengers by sea; they seem really to be meant in a measure to represent the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες. We must not look too rigidly in them for notes of the divine character, but rather for the abundance, opulence, ease, and refinement of the divine condition. Hence Homer lavishes all the simple wealth of his imagination upon the palace and garden of Alcinous, which far exceeds any possessions he has assigned to ordinary men. This additional splendour of itself proves, if proof were wanted, that the picture is ideal. The same amount of ornament assigned to the palace of Menelaus would, from the contrast with fact, probably have been frigid to his hearers.

From the games and athletic exercises of this people all the ruder and more violent sports are excluded. Navigation, to others so formidable, for them is conducted by a spontaneous force and intelligence residing in their ships; which annihilates distance, and at last excites even the jealousy of Neptune (Od. viii. 555-69). We find in the island and in its history no poverty, no grief, no care, no want; all is fair to see and to enjoy. But we feel thankful to Homer that he has not here, as in the case of the Cyclops, made kin with the gods entail a marked moral or intellectual inferiority upon the sons of men; no purer or more graceful piece of humanity is to be found among the creations of the human brain, than his picture of Nausicaa. She combines in herself all that earth could suggest of bright, and pure, and fair. Still it cannot be denied that levity and vanity are rather conspicuous in the Phæacian men. They shew off, among other sports, their boxing and wrestling, before they know what Ulysses is made of. When they know it, Alcinous informs him in an off-hand way that they do not pretend to excellence in that class of sports[595]. After the dancers have performed, Ulysses with great tact at once passes a high compliment upon them. Alcinous, delighted with the praise, cries aloud, ‘Phæacian chiefs! this stranger appears to me to be an extremely sensible man[596].’

[595] Od. viii. 102. 246.

[596] Ibid. 378-88.

It appears, however, most likely that, besides the mythical element in two of them, Homer may have had some basis of maritime report, and thus of presumed fact, for his delineations of all these three races; that, with an unlimited license of embellishment, he, nevertheless, may have intended in each case to keep unbroken the tie between his own tale, and the voyages of Ulysses, founded upon Phœnician geography, as reported in his time. I form this opinion partly from some singularities in the Phæacian character, which, as they are not in keeping with any poetic idea, may probably have had an historic aim, though I cannot be persuaded that they afford a foundation broad enough for the full theory of Mure[597], if he conceives the Phæacians of the Odyssey to be strictly a portrait of the Phœnicians. Partly I draw the inference from the want of clear severance in the ideals, on which the characters of the Cyclops and the Læstrygones are severally founded. The remarkable natural characteristic of Læstrygonia which he has given us, its perpetual day, supports the same hypothesis. What would otherwise amount to poverty in the imagery is sufficiently accounted for, if we assume that he meant to describe two savage tribes, that inhabited the latitudes with which he was dealing; and that, feeling himself bound to brutality in each case, he has, under these unfavourable circumstances, varied it as much as he could. Unless it had been to preserve an historical or mythological tradition, the Læstrygonian adventure might hardly have deserved introduction into the Odyssey. Plainly, on the other hand, he is not to be held responsible for all that he has put down while he believed himself to be conforming to narratives of fact, in the same manner and degree as if he had been presenting us with a picture in which his fancy had only to work at will.

[597] Lit. Greece, vol. i. p. 510.

The remaining case is slight, and may speedily be dismissed. Æolus is φίλος ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι, and is intrusted with the charge of the winds; and his six sons are married to his six daughters, as αἰδοίαι ἄλοχοι[598]. The word φίλος may bear the sense of relationship: immortality seems to be of necessity involved in the charge over the winds, who are themselves in the Iliad (in this point varying poetically from the Odyssey) invested with deity[599]: and the marriage of the sons to the daughters affords another absolute proof: for this, which would have been incest, μέγα ἔργον, among men, is evidently set down as in their case a legitimate connection. The great example in the Kronid family would give it full sanction for the Immortals.

[598] Od. x. 2, 21, 11.

[599] Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol. II. 12, holds the opposite opinion.

The character of Æolus, if he be human, is one kindly to his fellow-men; and he inquires carefully respecting the fate of the Greeks and their chieftains. But it is very difficult to understand his place in the poem, and the reasons of it. The gift of Zephyr, and the folly of the crew in letting out the whole pack of winds, end only in the return of Ulysses to Æolia, and in his being dismissed from thence as one hateful to the gods, which he was not. This Æolus neither seems to be required for, nor to contribute to, the general purpose of the poem: nor to represent any ancient tradition: nor can we in any manner connect him with Æolus, the great national personage whose descendants were so illustrious, for that Æolus was clearly taken to be the son or immediate descendant of Jupiter; so that he could not have been called the son of Hippotas. Perhaps the origin of his place in the Odyssey was to be found in some Phœnician report about storms in the northern seas, where Æolia is evidently placed in complete isolation, figured by the sheer and steep rock of the coast, and by the metal wall which runs round it. It may have a partial prototype in Stromboli misplaced, the appearance of which from a distance entirely accords with this particular of inaccessibility. The whole picture, representing as it does, first, the ferocity of the winds, and, secondly, the existence of an efficient control over them, evidently embodies two features which could not but enter variously and prominently into the tales of Phœnician mariners; first, the fierceness of the gales prevailing in those outer latitudes, to deter others from attempting them; and secondly, their successful contest with the difficulty thus created in order to glorify themselves.

SECT. V.

_The Olympian Community and its Members, considered in themselves._

The substitution of polytheism for the monotheistic principle not only brought down deity in the measure of its attributes or faculties towards man, but created a necessity for a divine economy or polity, which should regulate the relations of the Immortals. This polity could be no other than human, and no other, as it seems, than a somewhat deteriorated copy from its earthly original.

~_The family order in Olympus._~

Accordingly, the Olympian Immortals of Homer are combined in a society. They are not a mere aggregate of beings, classed together by the mind in virtue of the possession of common properties, but they live in twofold relations: first, those of the family, or at least of descent and consanguinity; secondly, those established by a political organization, which is modelled according to the forms of the Greek polities subsisting in the Homeric age.

The government of Olympus is, though the use of the word may at first excite a smile, in principle constitutional. Jupiter is its head. Its ordinary council or aristocracy is represented by the body of such deities as have palaces there, constructed for them by Vulcan, who exercises in the community the double function at once of architect and artificer[600].

[600] Il. i. 606-8.

The immediate relationship of nearly all these divinities to Jupiter is recorded.

As his brothers, we have Neptune, and Aidoneus, or Pluto.

As his wives, we have Juno, the chief; Latona, Dione, and probably Demeter, secondary.

As his children, we have Minerva, Apollo and Diana, Mars and Vulcan, Venus, Mercury, Hebe.

Of the Nineteen Deities who appear to be certainly Olympian, there are only four that do not fall at once into the family order: they are Themis, Ἠέλιος, Iris, and Paieon. There may have been a relationship credited in these cases also, though it is not recorded. It should be observed, that Jupiter is expressly invested with the title of Father of the gods. And perhaps the idea intended to be conveyed is that of a family which has grown into a sept or clan, having this for its distinctive character, that all the members of it, great and small, have either a nearer or a more remote relationship to the head. Of the minor deities, in various cases it is recorded, that they are daughters of Jupiter; such as the Muses, the Prayers, and the Nymphs of most orders. But these have the appearance of belonging to Homer’s poetry, more than to his mythology. Among male deities, the sons of Jupiter are all in Olympus: those of Neptune take lower rank.

Whatever be its relation to the family _nucleus_, the community of Olympus is fully formed. Besides Jupiter the head, and the ordinary assembly, its Council or Court, which answers to the βουλὴ of the Greeks, it has its Agorè, a greater Assembly or Parliament called together upon crises of extraordinary solemnity, such as the decision by main force of the fate of Troy.

But as we have no example, except the factious and utterly odious Thersites, of any one of the commonalty who takes an actual part in debate among men, so the minor deities, too, are mute in heaven.

Nay, the resemblance is even closer than this. The Greek βουλὴ, and also the ἀγορὴ, have their speaking or leading personages, and they likewise have each their silent members. The leaders are Agamemnon, Nestor, Ulysses, and Diomed; the last-named chieftain always with modesty, as a person lately come to full age. Achilles doubtless would have had to be added, if the action of the poem had permitted him to appear throughout its debates. But we never hear of the Ajaxes, Idomeneus, or chiefs like Eurypylus, as taking any active share in the proceedings. Even so the discussions of Olympus appear to be conducted commonly by Jupiter, Juno, Neptune[601], Minerva, and Apollo[602]. Once Vulcan interposes, in his mother’s interest: possibly he may have been suggested to the Poet by Thersites[603] as a terrestrial counterpart. The Sun appeals to the Assembly in the Odyssey, as a party in his own cause: but neither he nor Venus, nor Mars, nor Mercury, nor any other subordinate deity, ever appears as taking part in a discussion.

[601] Il. vii. 445.

[602] Il. xxiv. 33.

[603] Il. i. 571.

The term ἀγορὴ, or assembly, is used in Homer for the meetings of the deities only on certain occasions: namely, at the openings of the Eighth and Twentieth Books[604]. The other, or ordinary meetings, have no distinctive name. We may know them by their not depending on any summons or introduction, and by the frequent mention, either of the banquet as proceeding, or of the cup as in the hands of the deities. They were standing assemblages of the deities, the law of whose life was leisure, with prolonged though not intemperate feasting; and its ordinary scene Olympus. Their correspondence with the βουλὴ must not be pressed too far, for they do not, like the Greek βουλὴ, commonly precede an Assembly. It is to be remembered, that the βουλὴ was an Hellenic institution, and that the gods were not exclusively Hellenic, though Olympus was essentially national.

[604] Il. viii. 2. and xx. 4.

~_The political order in Olympus._~

The analogy between the divine and the human ἀγοραὶ is established in a pointed form by the Poet himself; who makes Themis the pursuivant or Summoner[605] for the former; and also says of her, with respect to the latter,

[605] Il. xx. 4.

ἥτ’ ἀνδρῶν ἀγορὰς ἠμὲν λύει, ἠδὲ καθίζει[606].

[606] Od. ii. 69.

The acknowledgment of a rule of right, extrinsic and superior to ourselves, is general in the Assemblies of men in Homer, when meeting for business. This there could not be in the Assemblies of the Olympian gods. Neither does respect for authority and for tradition well harmonize with the idea of beings, who are possessed of unbounded, or at the least of greatly extended intelligence. Thus, like the individual deities, the divine Assemblies, and the entire Polity, are deprived of the greatest moral safeguards of their counterparts on earth. The consequence is, that their ethical tone is much lower. Force is the only effective sanction of authority among the Immortals. This is curiously exhibited in the Theomachy: for that battle takes place when the fate of Troy, which formed the matter in dispute, has already been long ago decided. Whenever a difficulty arises, which will bear that mode of treatment, Jupiter resorts to the threat of using it, even against divinities so dignified and powerful as Minerva, Neptune, and Juno. Sometimes, indeed, he parades it by anticipation, even when no symptom of disaffection has yet been exhibited.[607] So, on the other hand, fraud is the resource of the weak, as violence is of the strong. Juno, unable to organize a combination against her husband, devises a trick.

[607] Il. viii. 10.

The deities, then, are not under any effective ethical restraint; and the only instances in which the highly moral sentiment of αἰδὼς is mentioned as governing them in their reciprocal conduct are cases of the two great traditive divinities, Minerva and Apollo, with reference to their uncle Neptune, and of Jupiter, in whose case it is a sentiment of politeness rather than of duty, with reference to Thetis[608].

[608] Il. xxiv. 111.

But, although moral principle and religious reverence are absent, two principles of considerable value and utility remain. One of them is a certain courtesy or comity, which prevails in the absence of strong countervailing causes. Secondly, the power of intelligence is very visible in the working of their polity. It is not the mere wish of Jupiter, it is his counsel, which is fulfilled in the Trojan war. And again, it is not his individual counsel, but it is the decision which he adopts in compliance with the general sentiment of the gods[609]. He could be well content to let Troy stand, because of the abundance of its offerings; but he sees that if he attempts to give effect to such a plan as he would personally prefer, he must encounter the stubborn resistance of the three strongest deities, Neptune, Juno, and Minerva. Perhaps this difference of opinion might issue in the shape of a war in heaven, and that war might follow the same course as the one happily arrested by Briareus: therefore he avoids the issue, makes the concession without letting himself seem to make it, and thus preserves his general position at the head of the Olympian body.

[609] Il. iv. 43.

~_Courtesy and Intelligence among the Immortals._~

Speaking of mythological deity as such, the difference of celestial from human intelligence is a difference of degree rather than of kind. The process of deliberation in the mind of a mortal, and the state of suspense before decision, are frequent subjects of Homeric description. And he sometimes places individual deities before us with the same, or nearly the same, detail, as in cases occurring among men, of doubt preceding determination. The essence and foundation of the process are similar, as we see in the case of Juno, and again in the instance of Jupiter himself. She ponders the question how she shall delude Jupiter[610]:

[610] Il. xiv. 159-61.

μερμήριξε δ’ ἔπειτα βοῶπις πότνια Ἥρη ὅππως ἐξαπάφοιτο Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο.

And then she decides;

ἥδε δέ οἱ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀρίστη φαίνετο βουλὴ, κ.τ.λ.

So he[611], in his turn, considers long, before determining that Patroclus shall carry the war from the ships to the walls. Again, for the great decrees which are to have an extensive influence on human destiny, to argue and consider seem to be a moral necessity among the gods, as much as important subjects require public debate among men.

[611] Il. xvi. 646-55.

The method of reflecting Earth in the Olympian life is sometimes carried by the Poet down to the details of social intercourse. Thus it is a terrestrial custom of the heroic age, that strangers are entertained before they are called upon to give an account of their business[612]. And this hospitable practice extends even to the treatment of those who are charged with important communications; so that Bellerophon is entertained for nine full days by the king of Lycia, while he has in his pocket the roll containing a request for him to be put to death[613]. In exact conformity with this manner of proceeding, Mercury[614] is feasted by Calypso in Ogygia, before he delivers the weighty message, with which he had been intrusted by Jupiter in the name of the whole Olympian court.

[612] Od. iii. 69.

[613] Il. vi. 174.

[614] Od. v. 91-6.

Although we have found it difficult in one or two cases to pronounce with respect to certain divine personages, whether they are Olympian or not, yet in principle the line is clearly drawn, which marks off the superiority of the members of the Olympian Court. We find it in the express declaration of Calypso[615]. We find it perhaps yet more clearly noted in the comparison between Venus and Thetis: for we have seen, as to the former of these deities, her extreme feebleness and incapacity in everything, except as regards the particular impulse that she represents. Thetis, on the other hand, is full of activity and intelligence; and is gifted with bodily powers sufficient to fly like a hawk from Olympus, when carrying the celestial arms (whose inherent buoyancy, however, must not be forgotten[616]). Yet, doubtless because not Olympian, she yields the palm to Venus: for Apollo says to Æneas of Achilles[617];

[615] Od. v. 169, 70.

[616] Il. xix. 386.

[617] Il. xx. 105.

καὶ δέ σέ φασι Διὸς κούρης Ἀφροδίτης ἐκγεγάμεν· κεῖνος δὲ χερείονος ἐκ θεοῦ ἐστίν.

~_Their unity imperfect._~

Though the body of θεοὶ serve as an unity to point a moral in the abstract, there is practically a wonderful want of unity and of common or corporate feeling among them. This is figured in the Judgment of Paris: in the love of Neptune for the Cyclops, who renounce the authority of Jupiter: again in his aversion to the Phæacians, who are so beloved by the gods in general, that they appear in their proper shape at the religious festivals of those favoured islanders[618].

[618] Od. vii. 201-3.

But notwithstanding this want of the genuine corporate spirit, and notwithstanding the prevalence of essentially selfish appetite as the rule of life with the greater part, at any rate, of the Immortals, it would not be just to say that the principle of unity in the Divine Government is wholly destroyed by the Homeric polytheism. The superiority of Jupiter, though it does not amount to supremacy in the stricter sense[619], is yet sufficiently decided to place him far above any other single deity in sheer power. Therefore, when considered as the executive of the Olympian system, he is upon the whole equal to his work. He may be deceived, and so baffled for a moment, as by Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad; but it is for a moment only. Or the insubordination of some particular divinity may approach to resistance, like that of Neptune in the Fifteenth: but, upon admonition, conscious inferiority soon brings the matter to a close. So much for the execution of divine behests. As to the legislative process, however, heaven strictly follows earth, with only such exceptions as are accounted for by the difference in the constituent elements.

[619] Nägelsbach carries it even to this point. Hom. Theol. Abschn. II. 17.

The influence or even the menaces of a powerful leader, the moral force of persuasion, the comparison of the means of coercive action on this side and on that, and again the composition of wills and opinions to obtain a joint result, all these, the leading processes by which free institutions work on earth, with substantial identity, though with more awkwardness of form and less of genial freedom, as might be expected in transplanted ideas, are also the processes by which supreme and providential decrees are arrived at. Of the degree to which this principle of free polity prevails, we can have no better criterion than in the fate of Troy. It fell, not merely from the personal prudence of Jupiter, but because acting as a βασιλεὺς in heaven, like Agamemnon upon earth, he yielded to the preponderating influence of that section in Olympus, which was indeed apparently less numerous, but of commanding strength, influence, and activity.

Nor would it be just to Homer and his Olympus to forget, that in yielding to the powerful party led by Juno, Neptune, and Minerva, Jupiter was also yielding up the vicious, and sealing the triumph of the virtuous cause.

Thus, then, while we see the spirit of anthropophuism breaking down the principle of the Unity of God, from its being too feeble and too blind to maintain the pure traditions in which it was conveyed, it is still curious to the last degree to observe the order and symmetry of the Greek mind, even in its destructive processes. For, as we have found, it arranges its groups of deities around a centre, by the principle that creates a Family: and then gives them community of counsel, and unity of action, by the principle that maintains a State. What is this, but to bring in the resources and expedients, which our human state supplied, to repair, after a sort, the havock which it had made in the Divine Idea?

~_The system not uniform._~

But although symmetry was thus far, if not studied, yet spontaneously produced, we have ample proof that Homer neither inherited nor invented for his gods any uniform and consistent code of rules, intellectual, moral, or political. Neither, again, in the region of sense did he make any general provision to determine the conditions of divine being and action for his gods as an order, or even for particular classes of them. The want of such consistency is, indeed, among the striking proofs of the profound dualism of origin in his Theo-mythology. All that we can do is to observe his prevailing modes of treatment, and collect a general meaning from them. Proceeding thus, we shall find that the class of Immortals enjoys in various ways a marked superiority to man; but the degrees of this superiority, as they are nowhere precisely defined, so they vary greatly in the cases of the different deities: and when, striking off all the particular characteristics of individual members of the system, we attempt to embody what is common to them all, we leave but a slight and jejune residuum.

Nor is the classification of the differences a regular one. If we compare his delineations of some lower with some higher deities, we must be struck with finding considerable appearances of want of analogy between them. Some inferior persons of the same order, as we shall see, may excel in particular gifts, even those who are on the whole their superiors. Thus Circe, and even the Sirens, have powers greater apparently than, in the same subject-matter, Mercury or Vulcan. Heterogeneous origin, and imperfect assimilation, afford the true explanation of these phenomena.

It may be laid down as a general rule, that the divine life of Olympus, wherever it reproduces the human, reproduces it in a degraded form. Enjoyment and indulgence, when carried from earth to heaven, lose that limit of honourable relation to labour as necessary restoratives, which alone makes them respectable on earth.

In general, the chief note of deity with Homer is emancipation from the restraints of the moral law. Though the Homeric gods have not yet ceased to be the vindicators of morality upon earth, they have personally ceased to observe its rules either for or among themselves.

As compared with men in conduct, they are generally characterised by superior force and intellect, but by inferior morality.

They do not appear to have been governed in their relations towards one another by any motives drawn either from the law of right and justice, or from that of affection: unless--an exception which confirms the rule--where the attachment belonging to the human relation of parent and child is faintly reflected among the Immortals, as when Jupiter calls Minerva or Diana φίλον τέκος[620], and Venus τέκνον ἐμόν[621]: again, in the care taken of Venus after she is wounded by her mother Dione[622], and, more slightly indicated, in that of Diana by Latona[623]. In the conduct of Mars on the death of Ascalaphus, the impulse is momentary, and it has a strong animal tinge which seems to overpower, like a fit of drunkenness, the little reason that he possesses. The grief of Jupiter for Sarpedon is the only case of an intense affection among the Immortals. And it is remarkable, that this is felt towards, not a brother or sister divinity, but a mortal; towards one of those Lycians, whom Homer regards with such extraordinary and unvarying favour.

[620] Il. viii. 39. xxi. 509.

[621] Il. v. 428.

[622] Ibid. 370.

[623] Il. xxi. 504.

~_Force and fraud their chief instruments._~

The general principles of government, then, among the Immortals themselves are simply those of force and terror, on the one hand, or fraud and wheedling on the other. For example, Terror subdues the adverse will of Juno[624] in the First Book, of Juno and Minerva in the Eighth[625], and of Neptune, not without much reluctance on his part, in the Fifteenth. Thetis wheedles Jupiter in the First Book[626]; Juno entirely beguiles him, besides outwitting Venus, in the Fourteenth; Minerva entraps Apollo in the Seventh into the plan of a single combat, which saves the Greeks from an impending defeat. And the difference of opinion respecting Troy in the divine Assembly does not at the last come to effect without a contest of main strength, although the virtual decision of the Olympian body had long ago been taken. Nay, these principles of force and fraud are the real principles of action, even when not altogether on the surface. When Mercury declines battle with Latona, it is because he fears the consequences of a contest with a wife of Jupiter[627]. In a manner still more curious, when Apollo has declined battle with Neptune, professedly on the ground that it is not worth the while of deities to fight about the affairs of wretched mortals, the Poet explains his conduct by a sentiment partly of deference arising out of a relationship recognised among men:

[624] Il. i. 568.

[625] Il. viii. 457.

[626] Il. i. 501.

[627] Il. xxi. 499.

αἴδετο γάρ ῥα πατροκασιγνήτοιο μιγήμεναι ἐν παλάμῃσιν[628].

[628] Ibid. 468.

But here there may possibly have been some mixture of fear, because, as he withdraws, he is reproached bitterly by Diana, called a baby for his cowardice, and reminded, that he had himself volunteered the boast in heaven, that he was ready to fight against Neptune.

As these moral elements had been almost wholly eliminated from the general principles which govern the Homeric gods in their relations to one another, so likewise we look almost in vain for the traces of them in their individual conduct. They observe, when acting for themselves, neither courage, justice, nor prudence; but it is in regard to moral temperance or self-control, that they fall furthest below the standard even of human virtue. The Mahometan heaven of men was the heaven of the Homeric gods. Their standing employment, except when troubled by human affairs, is simply in perpetual, though not drunken or brutal, feasting; sometimes in grosser indulgences. If, says Vulcan to his mother, you quarrel about mortals, it will be a pestilent business, for there will be no pleasure in our banquets[629]. If Neptune in the Odyssey is gone among the Ethiopians[630], it is for a hecatomb of bulls and lambs. If Jupiter and all the gods make a journey to the same quarter in the Iliad, it is for a feast[631], which apparently was to last for eleven days. If Hercules has earned the reward of his labours by being taken up to heaven, his life there is described as a life entitling him to enjoy banquets among the Immortals[632]. If Ganymede is received into their company, it is that he may discharge for Jupiter the duty of cup-bearer[633], in which it would appear that both Vulcan and Hebe were likewise employed. Of all the phrases characteristic of the Homeric gods and their life, there is none that sits better than the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες.

[629] Il. i. 573-6.

[630] Od. i. 22.

[631] Il. i. 423.

[632] Od. xi. 602.

[633] Il. xx. 234.

~_Their dominant selfishness._~

Deeper, even than their collective devotion to mere enjoyment, lies their intense and profound selfishness. We cannot fail to note the absence of those sentiments of justice and self-sacrifice, and those high enthusiastic emotions, which do so much to ennoble the human life of the heroic age. There is truth in the assertion that they establish and administer a one-sided law:

ὣς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι, ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις· αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν[634].

[634] Il. xxiv. 525.

But beyond this, there lies a deep meaning in the sentiment of an Italian poet, Guarini[635]:

[635] Pastor Fido.

Guarda, che nel disumanarti Non divenga una fera, anzi che un Dio.

The Greek mythology, departing from the very basis of the Divine idea in the conception of its gods, converts them, by a moral necessity, not into man, but into something which is morally beneath man. There is not among all the deities what we can call one full unbroken development of noble character. They are, as a general rule, except so far as they are modified by the traditive element, Titanic creations of intellect or power, or both, without virtue. Even where, as in the cases of Minerva and Diana, they are pure, their purity does not inspire or impress the Poet with half the force and fire which he must have felt when he drew the matron Andromache, or the maid Nausicaa. But this is not the common case. With great reservation indeed as to the traditional, in comparison with the mythical divinities, and likewise as to the female deities, in comparison with the gods, we must admit that, as a general rule, the Immortals of Homer, when brought to the bar of a cool inquiry, are in their own personal conduct impure voluptuaries, and that the laws, which formed the basis of family life, and which in Homer’s time still kept human society from total corruption, for them had no restraining power, indeed no recognised existence.

There is no sense of shame accompanying the excesses of the gods, such as Homer has marked, not without tenderness, in regard to the trespass of Astyoche[636];

[636] Il. ii. 514.

παρθένος αἰδοίη, ὑπερώϊον εἰσαναβᾶσα.

On the contrary, Jupiter refers with marked self-satisfaction to his affairs of this kind in the Fourteenth Iliad; and shows the very temper, described by Saint Paul as that of the most advanced depravity, which not only yields to temptation, but seals its own offence with habitual and deliberate approval[637]: Οὐ μόνον αὐτὰ ποιοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ συνευδοκοῦσι τοῖς πράσσουσιν.

[637] Rom. i. 32.

~_Cruelty of Calypso in her love._~

We may take Calypso as no unfair specimen of the ethics of the Immortals. In the hope of sensual pleasure, she keeps Ulysses a prisoner in her far island. She sees him pining in wretchedness for his home and family from day to day; and well knows the distress that his absence must cause to a virtuous wife and son, as well as the public evils, sure to arise from the prolonged absence of a wise and able sovereign. Yet she never relents, but still in her odorous cavern she sings to the movement of her golden distaff. (Od. v. 59.) When Hermes makes known to her the decree that she cannot resist for his return, she complains of the cruelty of the upper gods, but adds, ‘as I cannot help myself, let him perish if Zeus will.’ She promises, however, to send him off in safety, and keeps her word; but it is when she has been well warned by Mercury of the consequences of disobedience, and firmly bound by Ulysses with the oath which was terrible even to the Immortals. (Od. v. 146, 184.)

The sentiment of envy, which they had begun to entertain towards men, appears also to have been felt towards members of the divine order. It was envy with which the gods viewed the happiness enjoyed by Aurora in her union with Orion, till it ended with his death; and that moved Jupiter to destroy Iasion, the object of the choice of Demeter[638]. But this (so says Calypso) was envy of the male towards the female deities. There is no reciprocal sentiment: and it is curious here to observe the inequality of the sexes, together with so many other signs and beginnings of corruption, established among the Immortals in a manner unknown to human society at the time.

[638] Od. v. 118-29.

Calypso may or may not be justified in the charge she makes against the gods; but, at least, it seems clear that, though they have some regard to the prevalence of moral laws as between one man and another, they by no means impute any moral guilt to her in her cruel detention of Ulysses, even while they rectify a wrong by their decree.

The inferiority of the moral standard, which marks the order of gods, is likewise traceable in the various races which are described by Homer as claiming a special relationship to them; the Cyclopes, the Læstrygonians, and even perhaps the Phæacians. Against the last of these we can certainly charge no more than an epicurean and inglorious ease: but the two former not only do not forfeit, they even prove, their relationship to the gods by being at once more strong and more vicious than common men.

And, as it affects the kindred of the Immortals in common with themselves, so also does it extend from the sphere of morals into that of manners. While Hephæstus was ministering to them the festal cup, they laughed ungovernably at his personal deformity[639]. Now, the Greeks laugh at Thersites[640] when he has been beaten, but it is in immediate connection with his misconduct, and it has nothing whatever to do with his ugliness. Laughter at mere deformity is nowhere found in Homer: and would entirely jar with the tone of feeling that pervades Homeric manners. The action that offers the nearest approach to it confirms the spirit of this observation. It is the hurling of the stool by the Suitor Antinous[641] at the apparently decrepit Ulysses; which is sternly registered, along with the other outrages of that depraved company, for the coming day of retribution.

[639] Il. i. 599.

[640] Il. ii. 270-7.

[641] Od. xvii. 465.

~_Olympian as compared with heroic life._~

In a word, still setting aside in some considerable degree the deities of traditive origin, who enter little into the general picture, but have their own portraiture apart, there are to be found in Olympus, as well as in the lower earth, the relations of degree in power and intelligence; and the gods with whom it is peopled, on the whole, possess it in large measure; but the law and purpose of their life is summed up in self-will and self-indulgence. They do not debate their own duties, or even those of men, to one another: rarely, if ever, those of men even towards themselves, except with reference to the quantity of libation poured out, of flesh offered, and of steam reeking from the altars. There is a mixture in their enjoyments: some are refined, others sensual, but both are alike selfish, and the latter are wholly unrestrained. It is said by Heyne, and with much of literal truth, that the description of the day’s employment in Olympus, which the first Iliad supplies, is a transcript of hero-life[642]; but it is of one part of hero-life only; it is of hero-life in its moments of indulgence and relaxation, which exhibit to us its lower and less noble side, without any view of its great sentiments and great duties, its sense of honour, its fine feeling, its reciprocal affections as developed in the relations of consanguinity and affinity, of friendship, of guestship, of sovereign and subject, and even of master and serf. What a wretched spectacle would Hector, Achilles, Diomed, Nestor, Ulysses, and the rest present to us, were their existence devoted simply to quaffing goblets and scenting or devouring the flesh of slain animals, even though with this there were present the mitigating refinement of perpetual harp and song. And yet such is the picture offered by the Homeric mythology.

[642] Heyne on Il. i. 603.

Upon the whole, while it remains true that the deification of heroes, or their promotion to a happy immortality, in Homer’s time, depended upon virtue and merit; those who thus obtained admission to Olympus really found themselves introduced to a new and far lower law of life, upon taking their places there, than that to which they had been accustomed upon earth. Thus, for example, it is with Hercules; he has indeed a reward beyond the grave; but it consists simply in a life divested of the virtues of patience, obedience, valour, and struggle by which it had itself been earned.

The superiority, however, of the intellectual over the material element, except in the matter of self-indulgence, is, as we might have expected, decisively maintained in the Grecian mythology. It is exhibited most clearly, perhaps, in the triumph of Jupiter and Olympus over the brute might of the Titans. It is also palpable, when we find that the strength of Mars, who represents nothing except fighting force, does not always insure his victory, even in contests of mere strength, but that he is overthrown by Minerva in the battle of the gods, corrected at will by her on all other occasions[643], and wounded, with her aid, by the hero Diomed beneath the walls of Troy. But when we speak of intellect as opposed to matter, the case stands so differently with respect to different deities, that it is necessary to attempt a stricter appreciation than we have yet aimed at obtaining, of their common character.

[643] Il. x. 765. 6.

~_Their exemption from Death uniform._~

The great and perhaps only essential property by which the Homeric gods are distinguished, is that expressed in their very common appellation of ἀθάνατος: they are immortal.

There is something curious in the question, why it is that they are endowed uniformly and absolutely with this gift, but not with others; why the limitation of Death is removed from them, and yet other limitations are allowed in so many respects to remain.

It seems as if we had here an independent and impartial testimony to the truth of the representation conveyed in Holy Writ, that death has been the specific punishment ordained for sin: and that therefore in passing beyond the human order we, as a matter of course, pass beyond its range.

Had the preternatural system of the Poet exhibited to us only such divinities as are the representatives of primeval tradition, it would have been easy to account for the attribute of immortality. But here are a multitude of deities, the creatures of human invention; why was this gift bestowed on them, when others were withheld? It may be, again, because that which came last into man’s condition should, in the logical and moral order, go first out of it: that in framing the conception of an existence higher than that of man, the first step properly was, before dealing with the more positive faults or imperfections inherent in his nature, to set aside that which did not belong to it, but had been set upon it as a note of shame for a special cause, like letters branded on a deserter or a slave.

In Homer it appears that every deity, great and small alike, is exempt from death. A Fragment of Hesiod[644] proceeds on a basis abstractedly different, and by an ingenious multiplication, from the term assigned to man upwards, ascribes to the Nymphs a life of 291,600 years. In all likelihood the meaning of this passage may be not to curtail immortality, but to enlarge the practical conception of it, by carrying life up to a number which would impress the minds of a generation rude in arithmetic far more, than a merely abstract assertion of immortality: just as to us the sand of the sea, or even the hairs of the head, may more impressively convey the idea of unlimited numbers than does the phrase innumerable, although in reality the effect of either figure is to limit them.

[644] Fragm. 50. ap. Plut. ii. 415 C.

Calypso is of the lower and of the most earthy order of the Homeric divinities. She recognises in plain terms her inferiority to the Olympian gods, by stating that she will send with Ulysses a favourable breeze, which will carry him safely home, provided _they_ permit it, who are so far her superiors, both in planning, and in executing what they plan[645]:

[645] Od. v. 169, 70.

αἴ κε θεοί γ’ ἐθέλωσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν, οἵ μευ φέρτεροί εἰσι νοῆσαί τε κρῆναί τε.

Yet she distinctly contrasts herself with Penelope, in the very point that she is immortal: and the reply of Ulysses recognises this as the essential difference[646];

[646] Od. v. 213, 218.

ἡ μὲν γὰρ βροτός ἐστι, σὺ δ’ ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως.

The only cases, perhaps, in which Homer glances at the possibility of putting a period to the existence of a god, are two, in which the semi-brutal Mars is concerned. When Otus and Ephialtes put him in chains, it seems that, but for Eeriboia, he would have perished[647]: the expressions are,

[647] Il. v. 388.

καί νύ κεν ἔνθ’ ἀπόλοιτο Ἄρης ἆτος πολέμοιο.

And again, under the assault of Diomed, though the Poet does not bring this last extremity into view, he might, had he not fled, perhaps have been as good as dead (ζὼς ἀμένηνος, Il. v. 887). This is not death, but it is at any rate the suspension of life, apparently without limit. A third alternative is opened in the severe reply of Jupiter, who observes to him, that he might have been thrust down into Tartarus, but for the fortunate accident of his high parentage; veiling the idea under the modest words[648],

[648] Il. v. 898.

καί κεν δὴ πάλαι ἦσθα ἐνέρτερος Οὐρανιώνων.

Thus then the divine life, which, however, certainly with Ares is lodged in one of its least godlike receptacles, is liable to degradation, and to abeyance, even possibly to a lingering, though probably in no case to a rapid, process of extinction. But this last is rather the limit of calamity only, in the mathematical sense; that is to say, a limit which is never actually reached, though there is nothing short of it which may not be reached and even passed.

~_Exemption from other limitations partial._~

So much for the great gift of immortality. With reference to all the other limitations imposed upon finite being, the position of the Immortals, infinitely diversified according to the two great classes, and to individual cases, has this one feature applying to it as a whole, that it is a position of preference, not of independence.

Every deity has some extension of personal liberties and powers beyond what men enjoy. But it is in general such as we should conceive to be rather characteristic of intermediate orders of creation, than properly attaching to the divine nature. We must however distinguish between these three things: 1. The personal exemptions of a divinity from the restraints of time and place, and other limiting conditions; 2. The general powers capable of being exercised over other gods, over man, over animal or inanimate nature; 3. The powers enjoyed within the particular province over which a divinity presides.

Thus for example Calypso, though, as we have seen she is of inferior rank, yet exercises very high prerogatives. She sends with Ulysses a favourable breeze: and she predicts calamity, which is to smite him before he reaches his home. Circe transforms men into beasts, and then restores them to forms of greater beauty and stature[649]. She is cognizant of events in the world beneath, and of what will occur on the arrival of Ulysses there. She then sends a favourable breeze to impel his vessel[650]; and on his return predicts to him the circumstances of his homeward voyage[651]. And Proteus delivers a similar prediction to Menelaus, to which he adds a declaration of his destiny after death[652]: he also converts himself into a multitude of forms.

[649] Od. x. 396, 490-5, 529.

[650] Od. xi. 7.

[651] Od. xii. 25, 37 _et seqq_.

[652] Od. iv. 475 and 561.

Now no Homeric deities order winds to blow, except Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Minerva; none issue predictions to men except Minerva and Apollo, the latter mediately, through Seers or through Oracles; of absolute transformation we have no example; but Minerva, and she alone, transforms Ulysses from one human form to another. I mean absolute transformation effected upon others: all the deities, apparently, can transform themselves at will; for even Venus appears to Helen disguised, though it would seem imperfectly, in the form of an aged attendant[653].

[653] Il. iii. 386.

This gift of knowledge of the future is the more remarkable, when we consider that some of the Olympian deities were without knowledge even of what had just happened; as Mars, on the occasion of the death of his son Ascalaphus[654]. Even Jupiter, with the rest of the gods, was wholly unaware of the clandestine mission of Iris by Juno to Achilles[655].

[654] Il. xiii. 521.

[655] Il. xviii. 165-8.

~_Cases of minor deities with major powers._~

The great powers of these secondary deities may be accounted for, I think, by two considerations:

1. These divinities belong to the circle of outer or Phœnician traditions, and the Poet is not therefore, in treating them, subject to the same laws as those by which he regulates the Olympian order. They are brought upon the stage with reference to Ulysses or Menelaus, and in the Wanderings only; thus they are adopted by Homer for this special purpose, and endowed with whatever gifts they require for it, just as strangers, while they remain, are treated more liberally in a house than the children of the family, for the very reason that they are strangers, and have no concern with the regular organization and continuing life of the household.

2. Another principle of the mythology conducts us by another road to the same end. Every deity is liberally endowed within his own province. Now the province of Proteus, Calypso, and Circe, is the Outer sphere of Geography. Within the range of that sphere, the ordinary agency of the Olympian deities individually is suspended. Homer prefers to leave it to be governed by the divinities, whom he can frame out of his Phœnician materials for the purpose. In this way he is enabled to enlarge the circle of variety, and to draw new and salient lines of distinction between the two worlds. Neptune indeed is there perforce; for navigation is the staple of its theme, and the θάλασσα pervades it, from no portion of which can he possibly be excluded. The Olympian Court, too, oversee it, and their orders are conveyed thither by Mercury their agent. But, except Neptune for the reason given, the ordinary action of the deities individually is suspended[656], not on account of any limitation of power, for instance in Minerva, but for a poetical purpose, and with the excuse, that the whole sphere is removed beyond common life and experience. Hence, just as Vulcan works professionally the most extraordinary miracles, though he is but a secondary deity, because they are in the domain of metallic art, so Circe and the rest are empowered to do the like within a domain of which they are the rooted zoophytes and exclusive occupants.

[656] See sup. sect. iii. p. 201.

It may be well, before passing to the general limitations upon divine capacity in Homer, to illustrate a little farther this law of special endowment.

Venus is among gods what Nireus was among men: ἄναλκις ἔην θεός[657]. Yet she overcomes the resistance of Helen[658]: and we have also the express record of her girdle as invincible in its operation[659]. The case of Mars is peculiar: for he is brought upon the stage to be beaten in his own province, as the exigencies of the poem require it: but inferior, nay pitiful, as he is in every point of mind and character, yet as to imposing personal appearance, he is made to take rank in a comparison with Jupiter and Neptune, between whose names his is placed[660]. Neptune exhibits vast power, and on his own domain, the sea, appears even to have an inkling of providential foreknowledge[661]: he is conscious that Ulysses will reach Scheria. Except upon the sea, he exhibits no such attributes of intelligence, though he always remains possessed of huge force. Mercury, again, shows in locomotion a greater independence of the laws of place, than some deities who are of a rank higher than his own: and doubtless it is because he is professionally an agent or messenger. Even so the journeys of Iris are no sooner begun than they are accomplished.

[657] Il. v. 331.

[658] Il. iii. 418-20.

[659] Il. xiv. 198, 9.

[660] Il. ii. 478, 9.

[661] Od. v. 378.

~_Divine faculties an extension of human._~

But the general rule is, that the divine faculties represent, in regard to all the conditions of existence, no more than an improvement and extension of the human[662]. Man is the point of origin: and from this pattern invention strives to work upward and outward. The great traditive deities indeed are on a different footing, and appear rather to be the reductions and depravations of an ideal modelled upon the infinite. But the general rule holds good, in regard both to bodily and mental laws, for the mass of the Olympian Court.

[662] Friedreich, Realien 187. p. 599.

Thus deities are subject to sleep, both ordinarily, and under the special influences of Ὕπνος, the god of sleep. We are furnished with a reason for Jupiter’s not being asleep at a given moment[663]; it is the special anxiety which presses on him. He had been asleep just before. Their bodies are not ethereal, but are capable of constraint by manacles. They are capable also of wounds; and they suffer pain even so as to scream under it: but their blood is ichor, and their hurts heal with great rapidity[664]. They eat ambrosia, and drink nectar. They also receive a sensible pleasure from the savour of sacrifices and libations[665]. Nor is this pleasure alone, it is also nourishment and strength, for Mercury speaks of it as highly desirable for support on any long journey. He, too, practises according to his precept, for he seems greatly to relish the meal of ambrosia and nectar, which is afforded him by the hospitality of Calypso[666].

[663] Il. ii. 1-4, and i. 609-11.

[664] Il. v. 416, 900-4.

[665] Il. xxiv. 69.

[666] Od. v. 100-2.

As regards the percipient organs, the Olympian gods appear to depend practically on the eye. Minerva alone has a perfect and unfailing acquaintance with whatever it concerns her to know. For even Jupiter, as we have seen, is not exempt from limitation in this point[667]. Juno sends Iris to Achilles in the Eighteenth Iliad without his knowledge, κρυβδὰ Διὸς ἄλλων τε θεῶν. Apollo does not immediately perceive the expedition of Ulysses and Diomed in the Doloneia. Being here opposed to Minerva, he could not but be worsted. Generally, even these great traditive deities perceive not by a gift of universal vision, but by attention[668]:

[667] Il. xviii. 166-8.

[668] Il. x. 515.

οὐδ’ ἀλαοσκοπίην εἶχ’ ἀργυρότοξος Ἀπόλλων.

Juno, keenly alive with anxiety, perceives from Olympus the slaughter that Hector and Mars are making on the plain of Troy; and likewise from the same spot watches Jupiter sitting upon Ida[669]. These four deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Apollo, appear to be endowed with by far the largest range of vision. Even to Neptune no such powers are assigned, as to them; for we are never given to understand that any amount of mere distance is too great for their ken. But Neptune only sees the state of the battle before Troy by coming to Samothrace, apparently to bring it within view, and by looking from thence: nor is the Poet content without adding the reason;

[669] Il. v. 711, and xiv. 157.

ἔνθεν γὰρ ἐφαίνετο πᾶσα μὲν Ἴδη φαίνετο δὲ Πριάμοιο πόλις καὶ νῆες Ἀχαιῶν[670]·

[670] Il. xiii. 13.

a passage which seems to imply, that his vision was much the same as that of mankind even in degree.

~_General prevalence of limitation._~

In the Odyssey, Ulysses pursues his voyage on the raft without the knowledge of Neptune, although on the proper domain of the god, until the eighteenth day. Then he discovers him, but it is only because, coming up from the Ethiopian country, on reaching the Solyman mountains, he is supposed to have got within view of the hero. Being here, without special directions, in the zone of the Outer Geography, we have no means of measuring the terrestrial distance with precision, and the Poet has not informed us what interval of space he intended us to suppose.

The inventive deities of the second order in Olympus are very slightly gifted in this matter. So much we perceive from the ignorance of Mars about the death of his son Ascalaphus. When Venus observes, that Æneas has been wounded, Homer does not name the spot from which she looked; but the general range of the powers of this divinity is so narrow, that we must suppose he means to place her immediately over the field of battle before Troy.

Of the powers of Apollo or Minerva, as hearers of prayer irrespectively of distance, I have already spoken; but the local idea enters more freely into the anomalous character of the head of Olympus. In the First Iliad, Thetis explains to her son that she cannot introduce to Jupiter the matter of his wrongs, until he returns from the country of the Ethiopians, whither he has repaired with the other Immortals to a banquet[671]. This may mean either that he is too far off to attend to the business, or that he must not be disturbed while inhaling the odours of a hecatomb.

[671] Il. i. 521-7.

Very great diversity in individual cases, but at the same time a general and pervading law of restraint, are evident in the descriptions of the deities with respect to their powers of locomotion. Facility of movement accrues to them variously according to 1. their peculiar work and office; 2. their general dignity and freedom from merely mythological traits; 3. the exigencies of the particular situation. As to the first, I have noticed that Mercury and Iris have a rapidity as messenger-gods, which in their simple capacity as gods they could scarcely possess. Yet even Mercury follows a route: from Olympus he strikes across Pieria, and next descending skims the surface of the sea; then at length passes to the beach of the island, and so onwards to the cave of the Nymph[672]. Minerva, on the other hand, in virtue not of any special function, but of her general power and grandeur, is conceived as swifter still. The journeys of Apollo, in like manner, are conceived of as instantaneous: the rule in both cases being subject to poetical exceptions only. The chariots of Juno and of Neptune[673], again, proceed with measured pace. Each step of Juno’s horses covers the distance over which a man can see[674]. Neptune himself passes in four steps from Samothrace to Ægæ[675]. The driving of Jupiter from Olympus to Ida is described in terms before used for Juno’s journey[676]. Juno travels at another time from Olympus to Lemnos by Pieria, Emathia, and the tops of the Thracian mountains. Here Homer seems to supply her with a sort of made road on which to tread: for the route is a little circuitous[677]. Mars, when wounded, takes wing to Olympus: but Venus, though only hurt in the wrist, cannot get thither until she obtains the aid of his chariot, which happily for her was then waiting on the field[678].

[672] Od. v. 50-57.

[673] Il. xiii. 29.

[674] Il. v. 770.

[675] Il. xiii. 20.

[676] Il. viii. 41-6.

[677] Il. xiv. 226.

[678] Il. v. 864, 355-67.

But poetical utility, so to speak, enters very largely into the whole subject of Olympian locomotion, and makes it difficult to draw with rigour the proper mythological conclusions. This may be sufficiently illustrated by the following cases. We have seen the majestic march of Juno from one hill top to another, and the measured though speedy course of her chariot. Yet, under the pressure of urgent considerations, she flies from Ida to Olympus, as the bearer of Jupiter’s message, with a rapidity that Homer illustrates by the remarkable simile of the travelling of Thought[679]. Again, where an imposing magnificence is the object, measure is introduced into the movement of Apollo himself by the clang of the darts upon his shoulder as he goes[680]. And, even more, Venus, whom we have seen so impotent on the field of Troy, after her exposure in the Eighth Odyssey, flies at once all the way to Paphos; as does Mars to Thrace[681]. This in both cases is probably because the occasion did not admit of ornamental enlargements, such as befitted the journey of a god. And when Vulcan is represented as actually engaged in falling during the whole day from Olympus down into Lemnus[682], a poetical allusion to his lameness may probably be intended.

[679] Il. xv. 79-84.

[680] Il. i. 44-8.

[681] Od. viii. 361-3.

[682] Il. i. 590-3.

~_Chief heads of superiority to mankind._~

Thus we see not the mental only, but also the corporeal existence of the mythological god hemmed in on every side. A great force of appetite, and a disposition to give it unbridled indulgence, can hardly be reckoned among elevating gifts. But if it be asked, wherein does Homer enlarge and improve for his mythical gods the human conditions of being, besides,

(1.) The one grand point of immortality, I should answer, in

(2.) An unlimited abundance of the means of corporal enjoyment, and a general freedom from the interruptions of care.

(3.) A liberal dispensation of the somewhat vulgar commodities of physical strength and stature; and of the higher gift of absolute beauty, into which the idea of stature, however, materially enters.

The former of these two we learn from the fact, that the banquet is the habitual and normal occupation of the Olympian Court. In the First Book, the fray between Jupiter and Juno passes off naturally, and as a matter of course, into a feast that lasts all day[683]. And when Juno, in the Fifteenth Book, reaches Olympus with a message from Jupiter, Thetis, whom she meets first, salutes her by offering the cup[684].

[683] Il. i. 596-604.

[684] Il. xv. 87.

There is also among the gods a kind of ‘high life below stairs.’ When Iris repairs on behalf of Achilles to the Winds, she finds them too banqueting in the palace of Zephyr, probably their chief[685]; but she hastes away, when her message is delivered, to feast in preference among divinities of her own rank upon an Ethiopian sacrifice.

[685] Il. xxiii. 300.

~_Their stature and beauty._~

As regards size and stature, these gifts are so freely bestowed as to be almost without measure: nor does the Poet even care in such cases to be at strict unity with himself. Mars, who in the Fifth Book, draws no very peculiar notice on the battle field from his size, in the Theomachy, when laid prostrate, covers seven acres. Eris, treading on the earth, strikes heaven with her head. The helmet of Minerva would suffice for the soldiery of a hundred cities; the golden tassels of her ægis, a hundred in number, and each worth a hundred oxen, after every allowance for mere laxity in the use of numbers, would imply vast weight and bulk. Accordingly, the axle of Juno’s chariot may well groan beneath the weight of Pallas[686]. Apollo, without the smallest seeming effort, stops Diomed and Patroclus in mid-career; and overthrows the Greek wall as easily as a child overthrows his plaything heap of sand[687]. Other signs might be quoted, such as the tread that shakes the earth, and the voices of Mars and Neptune, equal to those of nine or ten thousand[688] mortals.

[686] Il. xxi. 407. iv. 443. v. 744. ii. 448. v. 837.

[687] Il. v. 437. xvi. 774. xv. 361.

[688] Il. v. 860. xiv. 148.

With the one marked exception of Vulcan, beauty is generally indicated as the characteristic of the Olympian deities. Among the gods, it extends even to Mars[689]. It is sufficiently indicated for the goddesses by their habitual epithets. Even Minerva, in whom personal charms are as it were eclipsed by the sublime gifts of the mind, is sometimes called ἠΰκομος and ἐϋπλόκαμος (Il. vi. 92. Od. vii. 40): and Calypso declares the superiority of goddesses to women in beauty, as a general proposition[690],

[689] Od. viii. 310.

[690] Od. v. 212.

ἐπεὶ οὔπως οὐδὲ ἔοικεν θνητὰς ἀθανάτῃσι δέμας καὶ εἶδος ἐρίζειν.

The mythological or invented deities generally, but none of the strictly traditive deities, appear to be tainted with libertinism. Among the former we may, however, observe degrees. Jupiter and Venus stand at the head. Neptune, Mars, Mercury, Ceres, Aurora, follow. Juno evidently treats the passion simply as an instrument for political ends. Of this Homer has given us a very remarkable indication. For when she sees Jupiter on Ida, though she is just then conceiving her design, she views him with disgust: στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔπλετο θυμῷ[691]. So careful is the Poet that we shall not imagine her to have been under the gross influence of a merely sensual passion. Thetis suggests a remedy of that nature to her son for his grief[692]. In mere impersonations, not yet endowed with the strong human individuality of the Greek Olympus, such as Themis and Helios, we do not expect to find this trait. But of all the fully personified deities of invention, Vulcan alone, privileged by Labour and Ugliness, appears in Homer to be exempt. The Hellenic goddesses generally do not, however, like the more Pelasgian Venus, Ceres, and probably Aurora, debase themselves by intrigues with mortal men.

[691] Il. xiv. 158.

[692] Il. xxiv. 130.

The chastity of the traditive deities, Minerva, Diana, Latona, and probably Apollo, I take for one of the noblest and most significant proofs of the high origin of the materials which they respectively embody.

There is also in the deities of Homer not merely a dependance upon physical nourishment, but even a passion of gluttony connected with it. The basis of this idea is laid in the conception which made feasting the normal occupation of Olympus. It followed that they were not only bound by something in the nature of necessity to food, but also enslaved to it by greediness as a rooted habit.

~_Nature of their regard for sacrifice._~

Of this we find traces all through the poems, in the course which divine favour usually takes. When Homer speaks of the gods in the sense of Providential governors, it is the just man that they regard, and the unjust that they visit with wrath. But when he carries us into Olympus, and we behold them in the living energy of their individualities, it is sacrifice which they want, and which forms their share in the fruits of earth and of human labour, as we learn from the emphatic words of Jupiter himself;

τὸ γὰρ λάχομεν γέρας ἡμεῖς[693].

[693] Il. iv. 49. xxiv. 70. xxii. 170.

It was the bounty of Autolycus in lambs and kids which induced Mercury to bestow on him in return the gifts of thievery and perjury[694].

[694] Od. xix. 395-8.

Moral retribution in Homer lags and limps at a great distance behind the offence, but the omission to sacrifice is visited condignly and at once. Again, in the case of Troy, liberality in this particular even seems to create a party in Olympus on behalf of an offending race. On the erection of the rampart by the Greeks, Neptune immediately urges the omission of the regular hecatombs against them. It is punished by Diana in Ætolia, by the gods generally on the departure from Troas; and Menelaus in like manner is for this offence wind-bound in Pharos[695].

[695] Il. ix. Od. i. iv.

The reason of this preeminence of sacrifices, both as to punishment and as to reward, may lie partly in the tendency of man (though, as we shall presently see, the practice had its moral side also) to substitute positive observances for moral obedience; but partly, likewise, in the importance of sacrifices to the anthropophuism of the Olympian deities themselves.

Putting out of view what each deity can do in his particular domain, we shall find that but little of power over nature--whether human, animal, or inanimate--attaches to the Homeric gods as such. Juno conveys a suggestion to the mind of Agamemnon[696], and gives, with Minerva, courage to a warrior; but this is the whole of her immediate action, I mean action without a mean, in this department, exhibited by any passage in the Poems. Indeed, no other mythological deity ascends to agency of this kind at all.

[696] Il. viii. 218. ix. 254.

Upon animal and inanimate nature Juno exercises the highest powers. When she thunders with Minerva, sends cloud to impede the flying Trojans, retards the sunset, and assists the voyage of Jason, we may consider her as in the reflex use of the atmospheric powers of her husband: but the gift of a voice to the horse Xanthus, apparently can lie within her reach only by derivation from the higher or traditive element in his character, as representing the idea of supreme deity.

Among the deities of invention, the general rule is, with respect to the exercise of power over nature or the human mind, that it is confined to matters in immediate connection with their several specialties. Two extraordinary acts of power over nature appear, however, to be within the competency of them all. One is the production of a patch of cloud or vapour at will; the other is that of assuming the human form for themselves, either generally or in the likeness of some particular person. I do not, however, recollect any instance in which this power is exercised by a deity of invention in the manner in which Minerva employs it in the First Iliad[697], that is, under the condition of being visible only to one person out of many who are present. In that image we seem to find a figure, perhaps a traditionary remnant, of that inward and personal communication between the Almighty and the individual soul, which constitutes a high distinguishing note of the true religion.

[697] Il. v. 198.

There would appear to have been certain visible marks which went to distinguish a god, up to a certain point, from men. Hector in the Fifteenth Iliad knows Apollo to be a god[698], but does not know what god. Minerva clears the vision of Diomed, that he may be able to discriminate between gods and men[699]. Pandarus, eyeing Diomed, is uncertain whether he is a mortal or a god[700]. The recognition of Venus by Helen may, indeed, have been due to the imperfectness of her power of self-transformation[701]; but it may also have been owing to these general traces of resemblance to the divine order, which subsisted even under the human disguise.

[698] Il. xv. 246.

[699] Il. v. 128.

[700] Il. v. 183.

[701] Il. iii. 396.

Homer represents Minerva as weighing down the chariot of Diomed, and making the axle creak[702];

[702] Ibid. 838.

μέγα δ’ ἔβραχε φήγινος ἄξων βριθοσύνῃ· δεινὴν γὰρ ἄγεν θεὸν, ἄνδρα τ’ ἄριστον.

This passage may be taken as a proof, since it applies to the most spiritual of the Homeric divinities, how far the Poet was from considering that they were endowed with the properties of pure spirit.

~_Parts of the body, how ascribed._~

Of this he has given us farther proof by his free and constant reference, wherever occasion serves, to the parts and organs of the body as appertaining to the gods.

I think that references of this kind in Holy Scripture usually bear a mark, which yields decisive witness to the fact that their use is wholly relative and analogical: as, for example, the eye of God, namely, the instrument by which He watches us, the mouth of God, by which He instructs us, the hand and the arm of God, by which He sustains, or delivers, or corrects, or crushes us. It does not therefore appear that we could justly and fully draw our conclusions as to the corporeal constitution of an Olympic deity from the mere circumstance that we are told of the knees or lap of the gods, by which it might be figuratively expressed, that the disposal of human affairs rests with them[703]; or because of that gorgeous description, which the Poet has given us, of the head and nod, meaning the decree of Jupiter. For all these allusions are capable of explanation on the same principle with those of Holy Scripture, namely, as being relative and explanatory to man.

[703] Mure, however, in his History of Greek Literature, refers the origin of the metaphor to the practice of representation by statues.

But he has a multitude of other references to parts of the body, which do not at all belong to the use of them as organs for communication with the imperfect apprehensions of mankind. Thus:

1. Thetis takes hold of the chin of Jupiter, Il. i. 501.

2. Diomed wounds Venus on the wrist, Il. v. 336.

3. And Mars in the abdomen, Il. v. 857; whom Minerva likewise overthrows by a blow on the neck, Il. xxi. 406.

4. Hercules wounds Juno in the right breast, Il. v. 393; and we have her hair, flesh, chest, and feet, in the toilette of Il. xiv. 170-86.

5. Helen discovers the neck and breast as well as eyes of Venus, Il. iii. 396. See Il. xxi. 424.

6. The legs of Vulcan are weak, his neck strong, and his chest shaggy, Il. xviii. 411-15.

7. Mercury attaches wings to his feet, Od. v.

8. Juno seizes the wrists of Diana, takes the bow and arrows from her back, and beats her about the ears, Il. xxi. 489-91.

9. The arrows rattle on the shoulder of Apollo, Il. i. 46.

10. The arming of Minerva introduces her shoulders, head, and feet, Il. v. 738-45.

We need not, however, be surprised at failing to find in Homer any conception approaching to that of pure spirit, or any thing resembling that refined discernment, which has led Christian Art to represent the figure of our Lord alone as self-poised and self-supported in the air, while all other human forms, even when transfigured, have a ground beneath their feet, though it be but made of cloud. Even in some of the very highest among Christian writers, such as Dante and St. Bernard, the human being, after the soul has gone through dismissal from the flesh, still appears to be invested with a lighter form and species of body, apparently on the assumption that the two elements of matter and spirit are not only essentially, but inseparably wedded in our nature.

~_Examples of miracle in Homer._~

Full as they are of preternatural signs and operations, the poems of Homer do not, nevertheless, deal much with miracle, with the specific purpose of which he had no concern.

By miracle I understand, speaking generally, not the mere use of the common natural powers, accumulated or enlarged, but an operation involving what, I suppose, would be called medically an organic departure from her customary laws: an operation too, which must absolutely be performed, upon man himself or some other object, after some manner which shall be appreciable in its results by his faculties, and calculated to satisfy them, when in their greatest vigilance, that it is a real experience, and not a mere delusion of the senses.

Thus understood, the miracles of Homer are, I think, scarcely more numerous than the following: for, under this definition, the ambrosia of Simois and the flowers of Ida are not miracles[704].

[704] Il. v. 777. xiv. 347.

1. The crawling and lowing of the oxen of the Sun after their death, Od. xii. 395, 6.

2. The acceleration of the Sunset, Il. xviii. 239.

3. The retardation of the dawn, Od. xxiii. 241.

4. The speaking horse, Il. xix. 407.

3. The εἴδωλον of Æneas, Il. v. 449.

6. The portents of the banquet night in Od. xx. 347-62. I feel some doubt, however, whether this is objective, or whether it is only an impression on the senses.

7. The transformation and re-transformation of Ulysses[705], Od. xiii. 398, 429, and xxiii. 156-63.

[705] Nägelsbach, i. 10. p. 25.

8. Perhaps, also, the εἴδωλον of Iphthime, Od. ix. 797.

9. The gouts of blood, shed down from the air by Jupiter, Il. xi. 53.

10. The transformation of the serpent into a stone in the sight of all the Greeks; ἡμεῖς δ’ ἑσταότες θαυμάζομεν οἷον ἐτύχθη, Il. ii. 320.

The first seems due to the divine power as a whole; the second and fourth to Juno; the third and seventh and eighth to Minerva; the fifth and sixth are the works of Apollo; the ninth and tenth of Jupiter. I do not add as an eleventh the conversion of the Phæacian ship into a rock, by Neptune, in the sight of the people; because this is rather of the class of marvels which appertained to other, even secondary gods, such as Vulcan, in their own particular domains, Od. xiii. 159-87.

The buoyant arms of Achilles (Il. xix. 386), and other works of Vulcan, might at first sight seem to belong to the list, but it is doubtful whether they are not poetical rather than mythological representations, and in any case they would appear as gifts strictly professional, exercised in the ordinary administration of his peculiar function.

Telemachus appears to recognise the existence of miraculous powers in the passage[706],

[706] Od. xvi. 196.

οὐ γάρ πως ἂν θνητὸς ἀνὴρ τάδε μηχανόῳτο ᾧ αὐτοῦ γε νόῳ, ὅτε μὴ θεὸς αὐτὸς ἐπελθὼν ῥηϊδίως ἐθέλων θήσει νεὸν ἠὲ γέροντα.

But this is spoken of the Godhead rather than of any particular deity, and cannot by Homeric analogy be applied except to those of the highest natures.

~_Their operation on the human mind._~

It will however be observed, that several of these prodigies are not stated to have challenged human observation when performed: and unless they submit themselves to the test of the senses they are not properly miracles at all. Others of them entirely comply with the condition, as especially that of Il. ii. 320.

The retardation of sunset and sunrise, and the rain of blood, appear to pass wholly unobserved. Prodigies not setting out from a basis in nature, such as the tears of blood shed by Jupiter[707], are wholly beyond the scope of these observations.

[707] Il. xvi. 459.

On the whole, we find stringent limitation prevailing in this province, as regards the majority of the gods.

Indeed the forces of nature, which the mythological divinities in part represent, were sometimes too strong for them: for Homer tells us that Notus and Zephyr[708] sometimes shatter vessels at sea without or against the will of the gods:

[708] Od. xii. 290.

θεῶν ἀέκητι ἀνάκτων.

Even man, and that without impiety, can occasionally think of resistance. When Menelaus, alone in the field, decides on retiring before Hector (who fights ἐκ θεόφιν), rather than contend πρὸς δαίμονα, he looks around for Ajax, and observes that, could he but see him, they two would fight καὶ πρὸς δαίμονά περ, even with the deity opposed to them, in order to recover the body of Patroclus[709].

[709] Il. xvii. 98-101.

There is, however, I think, another reason, besides feebleness in his conception of the gods, which prevents the Greek Poet from representing them as omnipotent in regard to the operations of the human mind; and that is, his profound sense of the free agency of man. This principle with him, as it were, confronts the deity on every side; who respects its dignity, and never really invades its sphere, but pursues his work by means compatible with its essential character. The idea of the deity pervading the poems is mainly that of a cooperative power, who helps us when and as we help ourselves. It is expressed with an unrivalled simplicity when Telemachus, coming as a young man into the presence of Nestor, feels oppressed with a nervous shyness; and Minerva encourages him by telling him that he can of himself find something to say, and that the divinity will prompt more to him[710],

[710] Od. iii. 26.

ἄλλα μὲν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ φρεσὶ σῇσι νοήσεις, ἄλλα δὲ καὶ δαίμων ὑποθήσεται.

Heavenly influence never overpowers or suppresses the will, but sometimes suggests thoughts to the mind, and sometimes diverts it, not perhaps from the thought of an object already perceived, but from the chance of perceiving it. Thus, when Euryclea, through surprise on beholding the scar, and so recognising Ulysses, oversets the foot-bath, Penelope, who is present, might naturally have observed the miscarriage; but Minerva interposes to abstract her attention from what was passing, lest she should recognise her husband prematurely:

ἡ δ’ οὔτ’ ἀθρῆσαι δύνατ’ ἀντίη, οὔτε νοῆσαι, τῇ γὰρ Ἀθηναίη νόον ἔτραπεν[711].

[711] Od. xix. 478.

With the exception of Juno, who in some sense reflects the majesty of Jupiter, and becomes entitled as a wife to handle his prerogatives, it may be stated generally respecting the deities of invention properly so called, that, except within the limits of their particular domain or office, they scarcely at all modify the laws of nature, never set in motion or direct her greater forces, nor act in an extraordinary manner on the mind or body of man. Each in his own province can stimulate a particular animal propensity, or improve a particular gift of mind or body: and that is all.

While therefore the strength of the Olympian deities lies in knowledge and in power, we find upon the whole that even in these particularly they are subject to manifold limitation. They could translate mortals out of this world in which the rule of Death prevails, as we see in the cases of Ganymede, and of Tithonus; but it does not appear that, if we except the traditive ideas represented in Minerva and Apollo, they could either raise men from the grave, prevent their dying in the course of nature, heal their wounds or diseases, or set their broken limbs. When even Latona and Diana heal Æneas[712], they do it apparently with greater speed indeed, but in other respects much as it would have been done by Podaleirius or Machaon.

[712] Il. v. 488.

~_They do not discern the thoughts._~

Nor, again, does it appear that even the most exalted of their number had the knowledge of inward thoughts, otherwise than as they may be discovered by persons of particular sagacity. When Minerva detects the false accounts given of himself by Ulysses[713], no more is declared than the simple fact that she has a sufficient knowledge of his personal identity. Hence, with respect to the fraud of Laomedon upon Neptune and Apollo, Saint Augustine sarcastically wonders that even Apollo the diviner should not have known that Laomedon meant to cheat him[714]; and that one of such dignity as Neptune should have been in a like state of ignorance. With this we may compare the taunts of Elijah[715] against the priests of Baal.

[713] Od. xiii. 291.

[714] De Civ. Dei, iii. 2.

[715] 1 Kings xviii. 27.

While, then, the gift of anything like general foreknowledge appears to be withheld from all the deities of invention, that of the ‘discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,’ is nowhere found; nor was it believed of any member of the Olympian community, as it was said of One greater than they[716]: ‘He knew all men; and needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man.’

[716] John ii. 24, 25.

Such, as far as I am able to present it, is the internal view of the Olympus of Homer: a scheme eminently national, and eminently poetical. Egypt, Persia, Phœnicia, the old Pelasgians, doubtless contributed materials towards its formation: but I have a lively conviction that Homer was (so to speak) the theo-mythologer who moulded these materials into system, the substitute for unity, invested them with the forms and colours of brilliant beauty, and gave them their hold in their historic shape upon the mind of his countrymen; with the sublime Olympus, so near the old Dodona, of which he probably contrived it as the rival, for their centre of life and power.

SECT. VI.

_The Olympian Community and its Members, considered in their influence on human society and conduct._

We have thus far considered the deities of Homer as they are, or are represented by him to be, in themselves individually, and in their mutual relations. We have now to consider the relation which subsisted between them and the race of man, especially on its human side; the state of religious sentiment and obligation, and of the moral law, both as towards heaven and likewise as between man and man, so far as it is immediately associated with the system of which they are the representatives. Another large part of morals, which was already in great part detached from visible relation to religion, will remain for separate consideration.

And here we may remark, that the Homeric Greeks apparently knew nothing of any periodical religious observance of commanding authority, such as to form a centre either for national union, or for the life of the individual. Had there been such an observance, we must, without doubt, have found a trace of it on the Shield of Achilles. The only festival, of which we have clear information, is that of Apollo in the Odyssey, on the first day of the month. More obscurely, one of Minerva appears to be indicated in Il. ii. 551. No religious worship, properly to be so called, accompanied the funeral of Patroclus, or the games which followed it. The Winds[717] were called in aid for a special purpose. The invocation of Spercheus[718] is an apology for devoting to Patroclus the hair which Peleus had, on his son’s behalf, vowed to that River-god. Neither is there any notice whatever of religion in the brief summary of the proceedings in Troy after the ransom of the corpse of Hector[719].

[717] Il. xxiii. 194.

[718] Ibid. 144.

[719] Il. xxiv. 788-800.

But although not sustained or organized by the self-acting machinery of periodical celebrations, nor by the appropriation of the services of a particular class of society, the life, thoughts, and actions of the better Greeks were in a close and pervading proximity, so to speak, to their religion. I say of the better Greeks; for there is an almost total absence of reference to the gods in the language, as well as in the actions, of the profligate Suitors of the Odyssey. When it first appears, it is ironical[720]: and only in the last distress does it assume any other character.

[720] Od. xviii. 37.

In general terms, every thing was ascribed to the gods. They know all things, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα ἴσασιν[721]: They can do every thing, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα δύνανται[722]; and δύναται γὰρ ἅπαντα[723] is said of Jupiter, in the character of Providence. They are the givers of all blessings, mental as well as corporal[724]; the disposers of events; the ordainers, or even authors of calamities. They are said also to do for us what we ourselves have done for ourselves; as where Ulysses tells Eumæus, that the gods broke his bonds, and the gods hid him[725]; acts which he himself had performed. Also what they effect, they commonly effect with ease, as in both the last-mentioned cases.

[721] Od. x. 306.

[722] Od. iv. 379, 468.

[723] Ibid. 237.

[724] Od. xxiii. 11. This is fully set forth in Nägelsbach, i. 33, p. 54 _et seqq._

[725] Od. xiv. 348, 57.

~_The Religion was still a real power._~

However faulty, and however feeble, the religion of the Greeks had not yet ceased to be a religion; for it was believed in. Men might resent or fear the communications made to them on the part of the deity; but they did not venture to repudiate their authority.

In Homer, except with the dissolute Suitors, (Od. ii. 180, 201.) the Seer stands as the faithful exponent of the will of Heaven; and Agamemnon, even when smarting under the declarations of Calchas, and reviling him accordingly in his individual capacity (i. 106), does not presume to intimate any suspicion that what he has said is of his own invention. But time passed on: corruption accumulated, and festered more and more. Accordingly in Euripides, Agamemnon and Menelaus seem to speak of the whole class of prophets as if they deserved no belief. See the Iphigenia in Aulis, v. 10, 11. So in the same play, vv. 783-9, the Chorus speaks of the birth of Helen from Leda and Jupiter, with the proviso, ‘whether it were true or whether fabulous.’

Again, we have in the same play, vv. 945-7:

τίς δὲ μάντις ἔστ’; ἀνὴρ ὃς ὀλίγ’ ἀληθῆ, πολλὰ δὲ ψευδῆ, λέγει, τυχών· ὅταν δὲ μὴ τύχῃ, διοίχεται.

The mind of man had travelled far onward in its career, and great changes had passed upon his moral tone, before the place of the Prophet, in the estimation of the public, could be so strikingly reversed as we find from these quotations.

In the Homeric age, religion was a real power; and the veneration paid to deity extended so far, at least, to the persons of its ministers, that scarce any human thought could conceive the possibility of their falsifying the awful communications of which they were the vehicles.

But it will be replied, if religion was a power, if whatever it covered with its mantle was accepted and held in honour, then what a deluge of corruption must have spread over Greece from a religion of which Jupiter was the head, and which had Venus for one of its recognised divinities!

Now the age of Homer shows us the religion of Olympus in a state, in which it had not yet become sufficiently the object of scrutiny to suggest, on a large scale, either the depraved imitation which was to be its too speedy result, or the unbelief which formed, in the moral chain of cause and effect, its necessary consummation.

~_Corruptions of the gods not yet fully felt._~

In fact, we do not find that the corrupting influence of the Greek mythology on manners had been fully felt in the time of Homer. Though vices are in particular cases represented as the gifts of particular deities to particular individuals, it does not appear that these were yet regarded as examples for general imitation[726]. But the beginnings of mischief, so vigorous and abundant, did not fail in time to produce their fruit: and in the historic ages of Greece, the models supplied by the conduct of deities were freely pleaded in defence of debauchery and crime[727].

[726] Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol. on the case of Autolycus.

[727] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. v. i. p. 255. Plato Legg. i. p. 636.

This is in conformity with ordinary experience. The vices of the great are first passed by, as if it were profane to suffer the eye to rest upon them; then they are regarded for a time with depraved admiration; and when the last stage is reached, they are too faithfully copied by the small.

It was hardly possible that men could be effectually swayed for a length of time by the moral government of deities, themselves privileged by human invention for unbounded immorality: but it was naturally the first stage of the destructive process to vitiate the character of the gods, and the next and later one to break down the credit of their administration of human affairs, which only became incredible even to the enlightened part of the community after their moral worthlessness had been fully and long developed.

The Homeric poems expose to our view two standards not mutually accordant, the objective and the subjective. If we pay attention to the impressions current among men respecting the gods, they are the guardians of some moral and social principles of the highest order. But if we take their own word for it, the mere Olympian deities seem ordinarily to appreciate no quality or conduct, except the practice of offering up numerous and well fed animals in sacrifice, each with the accompanying tribute of the appointed portion; that so they may draw, not a moral but a physical, though a comparatively refined, gratification from the savour and the taste[728].

[728] Vid. Il. iv. 48. xxii. 170. xxiv. 69. and 33.

The protection, too, which the deities usually accord to man, is not only given on selfish principles, but is liable to be withdrawn for causes wholly independent of his deserts. Quarrels about men are settled, not by each foregoing his animosities, but by each surrendering and abandoning his clients. ‘I will give up Troy to you,’ says Jupiter; ‘but mind that I shall be at liberty to destroy the cities which you love, when I may be so minded[729].’ ‘You are quite welcome,’ answers Juno, ‘and indeed I could not prevent you: but let me have Troy destroyed.’ Why, says even Apollo to Neptune, should we quarrel about miserable mortals? It is not worth our while: let us leave them to themselves[730]. No Homeric deity ever will be found to make a personal sacrifice on behalf of a human client.

[729] Il. iv. 39. and seqq.

[730] Il. xxi. 461-7.

In the next Section, I shall endeavour to show that the practice of sacrifice was not so entirely disconnected from morality, as we are perhaps too apt to suppose. I think we may, on the contrary, find in it at least a witness to the essential harmony between morality and divine worship, and to the difficulty of tearing them asunder.

We are here met, indeed, by the case of Autolycus, which proves to us that the better elements of this practice were already on their way to corruption, inasmuch as in that instance they had reached it. It was a case, let it be remembered, of sacrifices, not to the gods in general, nor to the higher or the better deities, but to Mercury, a purely mythical divinity; and therefore what we see in it is, a false religion in a state of ripeness at one particular point. Now the worship of Mercury, the god of gain, was perhaps the first point at which the morality of the system might be expected to give way: and it is therefore quite in the natural course that a case like that of Autolycus should be presented to us without any corresponding case for any other deity[731]. As it stands in Homer, it represents what was then the exception, though it was gradually to become the rule.

[731] Od. xxiv. 514.

~_A moral tone occasionally perceptible._~

There are, however, in particular connection with one of the great traditive deities, glimpses of better things, even in Olympus. When urged by Minerva on behalf of Ulysses in the Odyssey, Jupiter half rebukes her for having insinuated a doubt, by replying, ‘How could I forget Ulysses, who excels others both in his intellect, and in the sacrifices which he offers to the gods?’[732]

[732] Od. i. 65.

It may indeed be said that in this passage, if it be construed strictly, it is mental power or intelligence, and not any moral quality, which, as second to liberality in sacrifice, is recognised as fit to be taken into account by the gods.

Still it is, I think, manifest that Homer, like the Holy Scripture, includes a moral element in the idea of wisdom, which is represented by the word νόος, commonly or always used of men in a good sense.

And in the second divine Council of the Odyssey, the moral tone rises higher. Minerva, grown more daring, pleads plainly the discouraging effect which the indifference of the gods, if continued, will have upon the moral conduct of sovereigns. ‘Let them,’ she says, ‘cast away all moral restraint: for the virtuous Ulysses is forgotten by his people, and is detained in great affliction by Calypso[733].’

[733] Od. v. 7. and seqq.

For us, in the present inquiry, the main question evidently is, not what are the sentiments which the Poet has represented as proceeding from his divinities on Olympus, but what are those which the people at large believed them to entertain. There is a considerable difference between these two standards: and it is the latter one by which we have now to abide.

~_Prevalent belief concerning them._~

The deities of Homer, thus measured, are susceptible of various forms of sentiment in contemplating the fortunes and deeds of men.

1. In general, they regard virtue and obedience with approbation.

2. They regard crime with dissatisfaction and a disposition to punish it.

3. But they also observe any excess, or marked continuity, of good fortune in the virtuous man with a kind of envy: as if they could not permit the human race, on any conditions, to attain to a prosperity or abundance which should have any semblance of rivalling their own.

As respects the first, it is indeed a pale and feeble sentiment; but still it exists. They listen readily to those who obey them[734]. Prayer appeases them, as well as sacrifice[735]. They love not perverse deeds like those of the Suitors, but they honour justice and righteousness[736]. Upon the whole it may be observed, that much more just and elevated sentiments are predicated of the gods as a body, than when they appear as individuals. For it is as a body that they still retain a certain relation to true Godhead.

[734] Il. i. 218.

[735] Il. ix. 497.

[736] Od. xiv. 83.

As respects the second proposition, they wander in disguise to examine the conduct of men[737]. A man who is hardly used may become to his oppressor a θεῶν μήνιμα, an occasion of divine vengeance. They view iniquity with a sentiment sometimes called by Homer ὄπις, an after-regard that remembers and avenges it. For this ὄπις the wicked do not care[738], and such indifference is a chief sign of their depravity. Especially they watch, backed by the Ἐρινύες, over wrongs done to the poor[739]; and Jupiter interferes by storm and flood to testify his displeasure at unrighteous governors, who administer crooked judgments[740]. Ægisthus is warned and punished by them. It is Minerva who plans the vengeance upon the Suitors[741]. At the same time, revenge for affronts is a much more powerful and common motive with them, than zeal for the administration of justice. The latter is lazy and doubtful; but their sentiments in regard to the former are of keen edge, and have an irrepressible promptitude and activity.

[737] Od. xvi. 485.

[738] Il. xvi. 388. Od. xiv. 82. xx. 215. xxii. 39. ii. 66, 134. iii. 132.

[739] Od. xvii. 475.

[740] Il. xvi. 384-9.

[741] Od. xxiv. 479.

As respects the third point, the gods grudged to Ulysses and Penelope an unbroken continuance of the blessings of their domestic life[742]. It is in like manner, as it would seem, that, after a long course of prosperity, the gallant and good Bellerophon became odious, on account of his good fortune only, to the gods[743]. And this same idea is perhaps the groundwork of the alternative destinies of Achilles, either a long life without great glory, or transcendent glory and a short career[744].

[742] Od. xxiii. 211.

[743] Il. vi. 200.

[744] Il. ix. 410-16.

While in the later stages of heathen religion the former and nobler ideas gradually lost ground, this less worthy one became more and more pronounced; and Solon, in Herodotus, describes himself as knowing τὸ θεῖον πᾶν ἐὸν φθονερόν τε καὶ ταραχῶδες[745].

[745] Herod. i. 32.

In vague and general terms, the gods of Homer are represented as givers of blessings, particularly of external goods. Sometimes they are rashly and wildly charged as the authors of calamities[746], which the folly of man himself has caused. But according to the more grave and serious teaching of the day, they were conceived to enforce, as against mortals, laws from which they were certainly themselves exempt; and allow to mankind no alternative, except that of mixed good or else unmixed evil. Two caskets stand upon the floor by Jupiter: one of them is filled with wretchedness and shame; the other is vicissitude, which oscillates incessantly between prosperity and sorrow. And there rankles in the mind of mankind a sentiment, which tells them that the gods, while they thus dispense afflictions upon earth which are neither sweetened by love, nor elevated by a distinct disciplinary purpose, take care to keep themselves beyond all touch of grief or care[747]:

[746] Od. i. 32.

[747] Il. xxiv. 525.

ὣς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι, ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις· αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν.

~_It lent considerable support to virtue._~

The best thing that can be said for their fainthearted encouragement to virtue is, that the good man is certainly understood in most cases, though not always, to prosper in the end: let us take, for example, Nestor, Menelaus, or Ulysses. Ajax and Agamemnon meet unhappy ends; but Ajax was stern and sullen, while Agamemnon cannot be acquitted of cupidity and selfishness. On the other hand, as punishers of wrong, the gods of Olympus do not visit all wrongs and all vices alike. Especially they take little notice, in their moral government as in their lives, of the law of purity: there is no express notice of their displeasure against the crime of Paris; and Jupiter, the guardian of the judgment seat, the friend of the suppliant, the stranger, and the poor, makes no pretension to defend the marriage bed from the contamination he had himself so often wrought. However, in a very aggravated instance, namely, that of Ægisthus, his adulterous marriage with Clytemnestra[748] is noticed explicitly in the Olympian Council, as contributing to the enormity of his offence. But in such a case many other elements, besides that of purity, are involved: the whole social and political order of the world is at stake.

[748] Od. i. 37-40.

Thus upon the whole there was but little more in the sentiments than in the conduct of the Immortals, to maintain among men a sense of piety towards Heaven. Yet a good deal of authority and support were lent to important principles of relative duty, by the belief that the deities would or might avenge its infraction. We must in short fully embrace the fact that man, as represented in Homer, was inconsistent with respect to his religion, in the sense opposite to that in which inconsistency commonly affects that relation. He had more still remaining in him of ancient and natural morality, than his belief could either adequately account for in theory, or permanently sustain in action.

It should at the same time be borne in mind, that, while the vices of Olympus appertain to the individual deities, its obscure and qualified virtues, in the championship of duty, and the avenging of crime upon earth, are not the properties of this or that mythological impersonation, but either of the deities considered as a whole with one united will, or else of those among them in whose characters Homer still enables us to read the vestiges of primitive tradition.

~_Their course with respect to Troy._~

Saint Augustine observes[749], that some defenders of the Pagan mythology in later times quoted the fall of Troy as an instance of Divine retribution coming upon the descendants of Laomedon for his perjury, and some, to the same effect, as a punishment of the adultery committed by Paris. To which he replies truly, that the heathen deities had no right to punish in Paris an act which had the sanction of Venus, as she bore Æneas to Anchises, and of Mars as the father of Romulus: Æneas and Romulus being the two great reputed fountain-heads of the highest Roman lineage.

[749] De Civ. Dei, iii. 3.

Now, though Homer has practically represented the gods as avenging the pollution of the nuptial bed, it may be observed that he nowhere seems to put prominently forward the adultery of Paris as the main gist of his offence. In fact, the idea of adultery is very much absorbed, as we shall see, according to the poems, in the act of violent abduction. The Greeks on their side, with the single exception of Menelaus himself, treat Paris as a robber, or else a coward; not as one who had, like Ægisthus with Clytemnestra, corrupted the wife of one of their princes. And so Hector is, I think, not quite accurately criticized by Mure[750] for failing to find fault with Paris on the ground of adultery. Hector does reproach his brother for having abused the friendly intercourse of life to carry off another man’s wife, and then not having the courage to meet the husband in the field. This seems to me in perfect keeping with the ideas of the time, especially if I am right in the view, which I shall endeavour to sustain by argument, that Hector himself is not the elder, but the younger brother of the two. What did the Greeks aim at avenging? Not, we shall find, the wrong done to Menelaus in his conjugal character, but the sorrows and sufferings of Helen were evidently the prominent and conspicuous idea in the mind of the Poet, and in the mind, as he represents it, of the Greeks. So that, while Menelaus himself is the only person who in the Iliad shows a resentment of his own conjugal wrongs, the Greeks appear to think partly of Helen, partly of their nation’s honour, partly of their allegiance to the Pelopids; and partly, perhaps chiefly, of the booty which, in requital of their arduous labours, they are to gain upon the sack of Troy[751].

[750] Mure’s Lit. Greece, vol. i. on the character of Hector, Il. iii. 46-57.

[751] Il. ii. 355.

The defence, therefore, of the heathen deities which St. Augustine notices as having been put forward, was a late afterthought. The Poet appears indeed to treat the lustful effeminacy of Paris in general with a grave and marked contempt; but this is rather his own personal sentiment, than a result directly connected with his religious belief or system. And, more at large, I do not find it clear that in any place of the Poems any deity appears, either as the guardian of purity, or as the avenger of its infraction. Under these circumstances we shall have the more cause to wonder, that that virtue could still have been held, as it was held, by Homer and the Greeks, in partial but evidently real admiration.

Although retribution was limited to public and social sins, and did not touch the inner and finer parts of human conduct, it is not difficult to trace the advantages which flowed from that sensible remainder of religion which still subsisted in the Heroic age; not from those parts of the system which were due to human invention, but from the elements which it still contained of the ancient theism, and which invention had not yet wholly smothered.

Thus, for example, it was thought that the anger of the gods might be brought down upon a country by the misconduct of its governors[752];

οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολιὰς κρίνωσι θέμιστας·

and the fear of the temporal calamities thus to be incurred would, naturally, tend to the maintenance of integrity in the administration of justice.

[752] Il. xvi. 387.

As between governors and governed, so between rich and poor. We cannot doubt that the worthy Eumæus expresses the general sentiment of his age, when, having been reproached by the haughty Suitor Antinous with having invited a beggar into the palace of Ulysses, he answers, not by denial, but by showing that the idea is self-condemned by its absurdity. Those indeed, he replies, may be solicited to come to a house who exercise the agreeable or the useful professions; the Seer, the Doctor, the Artificer, the Bard, these are the people who get invited all over the world;

πτωχὸν δ’ οὐκ ἄν τις καλέοι, τρύξοντα ἓ αὐτόν;

Who would be such a fool as to invite a beggar?[753]

[753] Od. xvii. 382-7.

With this standard of sentiment, not peculiar to that age, except in the simple frankness with which it is avowed, it was surely of the utmost importance for the needy and afflicted, that they should be placed by the popular belief in the special charge of the deity;

πρὸς γὰρ Διός εἰσιν ἅπαντες ξεῖνοί τε πτωχοί τε.

So that, though none would invite them, yet few would take the responsibility of rejecting their supplications for what was needful to supply their wants.

And the standing distinction in the Odyssey between a virtuous and a vicious people is, that the former is insolent, fierce, and unrighteous, while the latter is kind to strangers and of god-fearing mind[754];

[754] Od. vi. 120. viii. 576. ix. 176. xiii. 202.

ἦ ῥ’ οἵγ’ ὑβρισταί τε καὶ ἄγριοι, οὐδὲ δίκαιοι, ἠὲ φιλόξεινοι, καί σφιν νόος ἐστὶ θεουδής;

~_Bearing of the religion on social ties._~

It was thus a clear fact in the heroic age, that religious belief was a foundation and support to the exercise of charitable offices between man and man. I think we may further assert, that it is a fact of all time; that in all ages and countries the strength and liveliness of belief in God is a measure which determines the aggregate amount and activity of mutual love. Hence, as the Olympian religion became more and more hollow, public oppression increased, and private charity and hospitality declined. Yet, even in its most corrupt and decrepit period, it was on the steps of temples that the congregations of mendicants assembled; spontaneous and unconscious witnesses to the fact that, next to God their Friend in heaven, the reflection of God, however faint, in the mind of man, is their best friend on earth. And of the many great social results of Christianity, one standing in the very foremost rank has been, that it has for the first time made the rights of the poor a social axiom, which, though it may in practice be evaded, none are hardy enough to deny. Perhaps the very strongest of all the proofs of the connection between religious belief, and duties to the needy, is to be found in the instinctive horror which is created in the minds of men, when a prominent profession of the first is accidentally and occasionally exhibited by persons, who show a palpable disregard of the second.

Side by side with the powerful obligation, of the indeterminate species, which binds man to man in the name of charity or brotherly kindness, stands the corresponding determinate principle of truth and justice, which aims at preserving entire to each individual the definite rights to which he is entitled.

An important part of these definite rights belongs immediately to the relations between the private person and the civil power. But the capacity of any human authority to do justice, even where the will cannot be found fault with, is of necessity defective: and no government can do its duties for a day, irrespective of the aid which each private person renders to it in reference to every other. Nor is this enough; it wants, and cannot dispense with, the assistance of an auxiliary within the breast, in order to guard itself against delusion, and to secure the requisite conformity between thought, word, and act. In other words, the state wants an instrument by which to induce men to speak the truth.

No such end can be reached by force. Force, in the shape of torture, will doubtless in the long run avail to make men asseverate that, be it what it may, by which they may obtain release from an intolerable suffering. But the first effect of torture is to make the sufferer indifferent to the truth or falsehood of his confessions, so he can but obtain relief by means of them. The second, and still more detrimental effect, must be to undermine the very basis of inward truthfulness, and to create a mental habit of indifference as between what is true and what is false.

~_And on political relations._~

Hence, the _desideratum_ for the state can only be found in some power which works in and with the will of the private person.

It has indeed been argued, and I believe with justice, that the atheist ought on his own principles to speak the truth; that is, if he does not shut his eyes to the testimony borne by the daily experience of life to the existence of a moral government in the world, even on this side of the grave. But this supposes, at any rate, some degree of mental culture; and it is essential to public order to find the means of operating upon those who have received no such training.

The question is how to obtain the voluntary disclosure of truth, in cases where neither interest or inclination are of themselves sufficient to secure it.

To this question the experience of the world, up to this time, renders one and but one answer. The requisite influence may be found, and can only be found, in an appeal to the Majesty on high, and to the sanctions of a future life.

Here, then, does the Venerable Oath stand forth in all its majesty. The act of calling the Deity in the most solemn of its various forms to witness, has been found at once to make the word of a man the stoutest bond of human society: for the perjurer strips himself of all divine aid[755];

[755] Il. iv. 235.

οὐ γὰρ ἐπὶ ψευδέσσι πατὴρ Ζεὺς ἔσσετ’ ἀρωγὸς,

and exposes himself to the most terrible penalties[756];

[756] Il. xix. 264.

εἰ δέ τι τῶνδ’ ἐπίορκον, ἐμοὶ θεοὶ ἄλγεα δοῖεν πολλὰ μάλ’, ὅσσα διδοῦσιν, ὅτις σφ’ ἀλίτηται ὀμόσσας.

Under the operation of the oath, the chances, so to speak, are doubled in favour of the veracity of the witness: first, he may not be wicked enough to forswear himself; and secondly, if he is wicked enough, yet he may not have the requisite amount of daring in his wickedness.

These views will, I think, receive material confirmation when we come to consider the relative positions of the oath in Greece and in Troy. For the present, I leave the subject with the observation, that four short words describe the props of human society: they are, γάμος, ὅρκος, θέμις, θεός.

All these sanctions, however partial and remote, thus given to human duty by belief in the gods, could not but be of great practical value.

And indeed it may with truth be said, that the mere idea of the presence of an overruling power in the world was of inestimable advantage in repressing human passion, in moderating desire, and in limiting the excesses of caprice, wilfulness, and violence.

But it is obvious that these beneficial results from belief in the gods belonged not to the particular development, but to the theistical principle which lay within and under it. The idea of a moral Governor of the universe was, and ever will be, an unfailing seed of good wherever it may exist. The Pagan mythology, at every step of its unfolding into detail, enfeebled and degraded that great idea, but it could not be destroyed all at once. _Nemo repente fuit turpissimus_; and a system, like a man, requires time to reach the extreme of depravation. As, among men, a judge is not supposed to lose all regard for justice, because it may be that in some particular of private life he has transgressed, so the Olympian divinities might have credit as administrators of moral government, even after they had begun to be charged with instances of immorality. But an unscrupulous order and succession of judges, would in time put an end to the idea of public justice; and so the continuing and growing degradation of the Immortals, in time put an end to the sense of religion, and made even its fanes[757] smoky, and its pomps contemptible.

[757] Propertius, El. II. v. 27. Hor. Od. III. vi. 3, 4. Sat. II. ii. 103-5.

And certainly, when we look at the evils, of which the mythological system was the source, we cannot but be struck with their overwhelming magnitude, and with the highly instructive fact, that in every case they so manifestly belong, not to the original principle of belief and worship due from man to his Creator, but to the departure from a pure, and the lapse into an impure belief.

~_Moral bearing of the Religion on the poems._~

The credit for moral results, which has thus been allowed to the probable operation of the Homeric Theo-mythology in the world, must be steadily denied to its influence upon the poems, where it appears before us as in the main a lowering and corrupting agency. In fact, the religion and the morality of the Homeric poems appear to separate, and to run in opposite directions. The rights of the question at issue, in an ethical point of view, are plainly with the Greeks: they vindicate by arms not one only, but two principles, both of them vital to the order of society, and to individual happiness and virtue: the sanctity, first, of the family and of marriage ties; secondly, of the relation created by the rites of hospitality. And with the rights go the fortunes of the cause. The capture and fall of Troy constitute a great triumph of justice over wrong.

But the mythological elements of the question are cast in a mould entirely different. The royal family of Troy has been all along in singular favour with the deities, notwithstanding the perjury of Laomedon; and that favour does not appear to be in any degree diminished by the gross and shameful crimes that stand against Paris in the poem, or by the unfailing and extraordinary obtuseness of his moral sense. Ganymede, Tithonus, Anchises, as well as Paris, have all been especial objects of divine regard. Not only did a full half of the other deities take part with the Trojans in the war, but Jupiter himself, apart from his concession to Thetis, was concerned for them, and says[758], ‘They interest me even while they perish’ (μέλουσί μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ).

[758] Il. xx. 21.

Again, in the meeting of the gods, he describes Hector[759] as dear to them for his regular and abundant sacrifices, taking no note whatever of his personal virtues. Of the three deities who were actively hostile to Troy, Neptune, Juno, and Minerva, all had personal causes of offence: the first, the fraud of Laomedon, which, however, was also an offence against the moral law; both the others had the _spretæ injuria formæ_, and Juno had also special predilections to gratify. The fall of Ilios, and the death of Hector, are just: but the wonder is, with the favourable relations that subsisted between the Trojans and the father of gods, as well as men, which were in no respect impaired by crime, how Hector came to die, or Troy to fall. While the fall of Troy is justice, it does not seem to come about because it is agreeable to justice, but rather as the result of the balance of force among the gods, and of their remembrance of personal injuries. It appears all along, as though it were the right-mindedness of the Poet which keeps the wheels of the machine going, while those who should be the drivers are at fault.

[759] Il. xxiv. 66. xxii. 170.

Again, in the Odyssey, the Providence of the poem, if we may so speak, is on the side of Virtue; and a prosperous remainder of life, with a happy death, is promised to the hero. Of this providence Minerva, with the approval of Jupiter, is the wise and indefatigable organ. But while the general idea of providence moves in the right direction, the polytheistic formations work powerfully in a wrong one. David and his companions ate the show-bread in the temple, and were blameless, because it was to relieve a hunger that they had no other means of satisfying: but even impending famine does not excuse or palliate the offence of the companions of Ulysses, who use for food a portion of the oxen of the Sun. The jealousy and cruelty of Neptune, the gifts of Mercury to Autolycus, the savage crimes of Polyphemus, which do not detract from his relation to a deity of the highest rank, the disparagement of the highest human virtues in Calypso, the hostility to human peace and happiness in Circe and the Sirens, place the divine life of the Odyssey on a much lower level than the human and heroic, and to a certain extent depress by their admixture the sound ethical tone of the poem. All along, while Homer luxuriates, poetically, in the abundance and brilliancy of his materials, he has morally to repair their deficiencies, and to contend with and overrule their bias.

I cannot therefore but differ greatly from Nitzsch, who, in his Essay on the Anger of Neptune[760], seems to elevate it to the dignity of a providential resentment, and to conceive of the sufferings of Ulysses as a punishment for a moral offence in the treatment of Polyphemus. In this way I grant that a sort of parallel is established between his case and the chastisements which Achilles receives in the Iliad, through the death of Patroclus, and the surrender of the body of Hector. Both heroes seem thus to stand upon a level: both favoured children of the gods, honoured in the main, but chastised for their faults. But even this seeming parallelism fails when we remember the respective sequels. The curtain of the Iliad falls on the eve of the premature death of Achilles: as that of the Odyssey is dropping over the head of Ulysses, we perceive, in perspective, the picture of his serene old age.

[760] Nitzsch, Odyssee, Vol. III. p. xiv.

As regards the important question of purity, the impression made on my own mind in reading the poems of Homer is this: that, but for his mythology, they would have been unimpeachable, at least in one point of virtue; they would have been absolutely pure. Whatever is dissolute in their moral tendency as regards this particular subject, evidently and directly flows from that source. We rarely meet a sentiment that can arouse anything like revulsion: the worst by far that has struck me is the advice given to Achilles by his mother Thetis (Il. xxiv. 130), as a mode of solace for his grief. The narrative of the Net of Vulcan in the Odyssey is one, that Homer would have been far too modest to recite with reference to human beings: and the only other passage, which seems to be marked with a tinge of grossness, is that which relates to the stratagem of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad.

~_Its bearing as to poetic effect._~

We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation, to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution. Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if the scene were too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.

~_Its earliest and latest forms._~

It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already risen Sun.

In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active share in the government of the world, and men look up to them, collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed, both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force, and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.

In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil of the ancient system: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]: ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because the name of Τύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the truth, the ὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages, which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those which relate to the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, the αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν. Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.

[761] De Aud. Poet. 20.

[762] Ibid. 23.

There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and his agency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion, and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In the _De Naturâ Deorum_, where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.

[763] Lucret. i. 57-62.

~_Its gloomy view of human destiny._~

Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The picture which I have rudely drawn, and which is not wholly a joyless picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth. One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade. ‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master, upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed[764]:’

[764] Od. xi. 488.

μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ· βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ ἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη, ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.

A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world, that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies; and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian plains, and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.

It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.

[765] Il. xxiv. 525.

The second passage is one spoken by Jupiter himself. As the commonest epithets used by Homer for βροτοὶ, mortals, are δειλοὶ and οἰζυροὶ, so the highest god lays down the law of their condition, describing it as that than which there is nothing more wretched among all that live and move upon the earth[766]:

[766] Il. xvii. 446. Compare Od. xvii. 129, where ἀκιδνότερον is substituted.

οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸς πάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.

Such as we have seen, and so glorious, was the wisdom, and the valour, and the beauty, and the power, that dwelt in man; but only that through life he might, upon the whole, be paramount in woe above all meaner creatures, and then that he might die in a gloom unrelieved by hope. None have illustrated this piercing truth by contrasts so sharp as Homer, between the chill and dismal tone of the general destiny of man on the one hand, and on the other, the joy and cheerfulness which the effort of an elastic spirit can for a time create. But the woe which he could only exhibit, it was reserved for One greater than he, yet only by sorrow and suffering, to remove.

~_The personal belief of Homer._~

I have forborne in this Essay from entering at large into the often agitated question, whether Homer believed in the deities of whom he speaks so largely. He may express his own childlike creed; and such a creed by no means requires for its support in the individual mind, that it should have been visibly represented by facts within its own experience. Or he may use as the material of poetry that which, without approving itself to his own heart, was, nevertheless, to his hearers in general, a real and substantial system of religion. Nay, he might even be dealing with what had ceased to be believed in his day, but had still a retrospective life, because it had been the hearty, and was still the conventional, worship of the people. The truth may lie in, or it may lie between, any of these suppositions. The one thing of which I feel most assured is, that he was not, as to his religion, a mere allegorist when speaking of his Jupiter and Minerva, any more than he was a mere hypocrite, when he ascribed occurrences in human life to Providence under the name of ‘the deity,’ or ‘the deities.’ He represents what either was or had been, for his people, a belief in the unseen under particular forms, and what still in some way represented a reality for them and for himself. It is this belief of which I have spoken throughout, and which, under any of the suppositions I have made, seems to me to warrant all the stress I have laid upon it.

To attempt a formal solution of the question, whether he believed or not in the dress of his religion, as well as in the religion itself, would, I fear, be frivolous. It is a case in some degree parallel to the disputes whether Shakspeare adhered, in the controversies of the sixteenth century, to the side of the Romish or the Reformed. Neither Shakspeare nor Homer ought to be judged as if they had been theologians _ex professo_. Both followed the law of their sublime art, and represented in forms of beauty and delight, or of majesty and gloom, as the case required, such materials as they found ready to hand. Critical analysis, nice equipoises, strict definitions, were for neither the one nor the other. But in the works of neither do the cold tones of scepticism find an echo: and probably the mental frame of both with reference to the substance of their religion may have been not very different from that of the poor, the maidens, and the children of their day.

SECT. VII.

_On the traces of an origin abroad for the Olympian Religion._

Let me now attempt to divide the principal deities of Homer with reference to their origin, or to the channel of their introduction into Greece; premising, however, that all such classification of them is admitted to be founded upon evidence, at best presumptive, and often also slight.

The classes will be as follows:

1. Of those who were worshipped by the Hellenic and Pelasgian races, and probably by all others known in the inner Homeric world.

These were,

1. Jupiter. 2. Minerva. 3. Apollo. 4. Latona. 5. Diana. 6. Neptune.

The three first of these may be considered as deities of immemorial and universal worship. Neptune was far more Hellenic than Pelasgian: and indeed his place in the list is doubtful.

2. Of immemorial Hellenic worship.

1. Juno. 2. Persephone. 3. Pluto or Aidoneus.

3. Of established Pelasgian worship.

1. Demeter or Ceres. 2. Venus, more recent than the former.

4. Of worship introduced to the Greek races within the memory of man.

_a._ Brought in from Phœnicia, or through the channel of the Phœnicians.

1. Hermes, or Mercury. 2. Hephæstus, or Vulcan. 3. Dionysus, or Bacchus.

_b._ From Thrace.

Mars.

_c._ Paieon has no note of country, except in so far as he may be connected with Egypt by the declaration that the Egyptians were of his race.

Ἠέλιος, the Sun, appears to be placed in connection, by the various notes he bears, both with Egypt and with the Persian name.

All these deities were, with some others, more or less naturalized among the Greeks within Homer’s lifetime. Themis was probably a pure Hellenic creation, as Vesta seems to have been Pelasgian: the latter exhibiting the genius of domestic order, the former, its fuller development in political society. But Vesta is, though an Homeric idea, not an Homeric goddess.

Now while Homer fails, or more probably avoids, to give us any direct information about the derivation of the Greek races or deities, he notwithstanding establishes by partial and incidental notices many traces of exterior affinity, not always the less secure and trustworthy because they are negative.

While going through the divinities in detail, I have remarked upon such traits of their character, history, or worship, as appeared to connect them with any particular origin; but the question remains, can we find, through however rude a resemblance, any general model abroad for the Olympian system, or, in the absence of such a model, any presumptive evidence from Homer, which may serve to connect it with any national or local root or roots in particular?

~_The Olympian Gods and the Ethiopians._~

It is well worthy of remark, that he has associated the body of the Greek deities, as a body, with one, and one only, point, exterior to the Greek nation. That point is the country of the Ethiopians.

Homer has shown a peculiar interest in these Ethiopians. They are ἀμύμονες: an epithet which he appears to connect especially with purity of blood. In the First Iliad, the whole body of the gods are absent from Olympus for eleven days, to enjoy the sacrifices offered by that people. In the Twenty-second Iliad, the statement is less express as to time; but again they are apparently enjoying themselves in the same quarter, during the funeral rites of Patroclus, and Iris is in haste to go thither, that she may not lose her share. In the First Odyssey, Neptune is among the same people for the same purpose, while the other deities are in Olympus. In the Fifth Odyssey, he is coming from among them, when he espies Ulysses on his raft. The time intervening is so considerable, that we must presume the two last-mentioned passages to refer to two separate visits.

The following points may be considered as established:

1. The Ethiopians, visited as above, must be supposed by Homer in the main to worship the same body of deities as the Greeks.

2. The Ethiopians extend from the rising to the setting sun; but those Ethiopians of whom Homer speaks particularly, are in connection with sacrifices in the East; for the Solyman mountains[767], as conceived by him, probably border upon Lycia, and they are on Neptune’s route[768], from the Ethiopian country back to the sea, which, as I hope to show elsewhere, runs along the double line of the Mediterranean and the Euxine.

[767] Il. vi. 184.

[768] Od. v. 282.

3. They are further fixed in a southern country by their name, which indicates darkness or swarthiness of countenance, and by the visit of Menelaus to them in the course of his adventures, which lay exclusively to the southward.

4. They are evidently distinguished by great liberality or high favour in the sacrificial service of the gods.

5. They are defined to be by the Ocean, and thus in the farthest situation to the South-east that was conceived of by Homer and the Greeks.

6. At the same time, although they are the farthest men in that direction[769], they are nowhere described as lying at a very great absolute distance. They are simply τηλόθ’ ἐόντες.

[769] Od. i. 23.

Now it is not only possible, but on every ground likely, that in his conception of the South-eastern Ethiopians, Homer mixed up together various traditions, belonging to different places and nations. Even as, in his conception of the Mouth of Ocean, which is with him always one single mouth, he seems to have blended and amalgamated geographical reports founded upon more than one original, or prototype, in nature.

The Solyman name has suggested to some critics a connection with the Salem of the Hebrews. But the name is much more likely to be derived from the Soliman Koh, a ridge of mountains running to the south-west from Caubul, and sometimes defined as extending into Persia. The liberality in sacrifice ill accords with the early Persian religion, but finds a probable original in that of the Medes with their order of Magians. But upon the whole, it would seem that Homer must have had a reason for the peculiar prominence he has given to these South-eastern Ethiopians, in connection with the gods of Olympus; for the association, unless suggested by a reason, is neither natural, nor in the manner of the Poet. Could it have been any other than this, that he regarded their country, however indeterminate its place in his imagination, as the original seat of the religion of his own, and that he therefore referred it thither bodily without notice of details? Now this would mean as the original seat, also, of the ancestors of the Hellenic tribes. We are not, in the event of accepting such a supposition, to imagine that he intended to make the assertion that the Olympian system had been derived from Persia and Media as it stood, but only to imply that there, according to national tradition, lay its root. The Trojans, it will be remembered, have their not Olympian but Idæan Jove: and the Ethiopians are the only foreign race, with whom he associates Olympus and its band of Immortals.

I have already stated elsewhere grounds for supposing that the Achæans, as they were immediately an Hellenic, were also primarily, as well as the other Hellenes, a Persian race. We have seen the existence of the Persian name in Greece, and its connection, according to Homer, with what Homer thought the remotest East, by the shore of Ocean. We have also seen its connection with the Sun, the prime deity of the Persians. This visible head of creation, standing next to the Supreme Being, we find that the Greeks speedily identify with their Apollo, who is so prominent as the son of Jupiter, in dignity, in obedience, and in his father’s favour, as to stand in a class entirely distinct from that of his other sons.

On the one hand, we seem to find here matter confirmatory of the Persian origin of the Hellenic tribes; and on the other, a general indication of the derivation of the earliest Greek religion from a certain part of the East. But still we must beware of any over-broad inference. The religion, it is likely, grew largely as it travelled, and was developed freely after it had reached its home in the Greek peninsula. And it would be contrary to all reason to suppose that Homer was in a condition to refer back to each of the Eastern races their proper contribution towards the aggregate, though we may justly suppose him able to draw some kind of line between the system as it was flourishing in Greece, with all its additions, elaborations and refinements, and the crude undigested materials as they had been imported from abroad; perhaps we might say, between the system as he found it, and the same system as he left it.

Considering, however, that Homer had a quasi-geographical knowledge of Egypt, I do not suppose that that country enters at all into his conception of the Ethiopians. If so, then the representation of an unity of religion with the Ethiopians, affords a presumption, conformable undoubtedly to such other presumptions as we have been able to gather from the poems, that Homer did not regard Egypt as the principal source of the religious system of Greece.

~_Herodotus on the Scythian religion._~

I do not pretend to find, in any ancient system handed down to us, even a skeleton of the Olympian scheme; and I conclude it to be most probable, that the Greeks had to form, or to reform, various members of it, as well as merely to clothe and embellish them. Yet it appears well worth while to refer to the account of the Scythian religion given by Herodotus, whose works form the great depository of knowledge of this kind beyond the borders of Greece.

The ordinary Scythians, it will be remembered, seem to be of the same race with the Medes, and to form the stock from which the Pelasgians separated to turn towards the south of Europe for settlements. They lived in that pastoral state, anterior to tillage, which Mommsen observes, through the forms of the Latin language, to have marked the point before the severance[770]. From the sign of feeding on milk, the Glactophagi and Hippemolgi of Il. xiii. 5, 6, would appear to belong to them, and the peaceful habits of the Pelasgians are also represented in the character that Homer gives, in the same passage, to their neighbours the Abians.

[770] Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, vol. I. ch. ii.

The gods of the Scythians, according to Herodotus[771], were:

[771] Herod. iv. 59.

1. Vesta. 2. Jupiter. 3. Earth, the supposed wife of Jupiter. 4. Apollo. 5. Celestial Venus. 6. Hercules. 7. Mars.

Even in this very late picture, we find a strong resemblance to what, from the Homeric text, would appear to have been the primitive cluster of the Pelasgian divinities. Earth is represented in Demeter, (Γῆ μήτηρ,) who appears in Il. xiv. 326 as one of the wives of Jupiter. The Celestial Venus may include traditions of Minerva, and of Artemis,--for the Scythians called her Artimpasa,--along with those which came to be represented in the Greek Ἀφροδίτη. All the deities, which from Homer’s text have appeared to be especially Hellenic, are also, it will be observed, absent from this list: Juno, Neptune, Aidoneus, Persephone, Vulcan, and Mercury.

But there were among these Scythians a tribe, called the Βασιλήϊοι Σκύθαι. It would seem plain from the name, that these must have held among the Scythians a position, in great measure analogous to that of the Hellenic tribes among the mass of the Pelasgian population. And certainly it is not a little curious, that these kingly Scythians added to the list of properly Pelasgian deities the worship of Thamimasidas, a god of the sea, apparently equivalent to the Hellenic Poseidon.

Again, let us take the account given by Herodotus of the information he obtained in Egypt about the Greek mythology. He states to us that, with certain exceptions, the names of the Greek deities had been known in Egypt from time immemorial. His exceptions are, Neptune and Juno, the Dioscuri, Vesta, Themis, the Graces and the Nereids. The statement may at least be accepted as good to this extent, that the deities here named were not drawn from Egypt. They include, as will be seen, only one personification of an idea which we have found cause to consider Pelasgian, namely, Ἱστίη or _home_; with this Neptune and Juno, who were Hellic deities; the Dioscouroi, representing in an early stage the deification of national heroes; the Graces, or the impersonations of ideas; and the Nereids, or the personification of natural objects. All of these persons and processes we have already referred to the influence of the Hellic tribes.

Upon the whole, we appear to have in these accounts a much clearer representation of the contribution made by the Pelasgian part of the nation to the Olympian system than we can find gathered elsewhere. The Egyptian resemblances are chiefly isolated, though it may have been from that quarter that Pelasgian Attica learned the name and worship of the deity, which was afterwards developed into the Homeric Pallas-Athene: but among these Scythians we appear to find a group, who exhibit to us in combination nearly all that we have reason to believe specially Pelasgian, and, with the obscure exception of Hercules, nothing besides. While this group, as being Scythian, would have the Arian country for its point of origin, it may still be probable that other parts of the Olympian religion, besides the worship of Neptune, such as the Juno and the Persephone in particular, had come from the ‘Kingly’ Arians of the hills.

Thus far as to the relation between the Homeric theo-mythology and any religious system or combination to be found elsewhere. Let us now consider how it stands with reference to each of the principal elements, out of which the religions of the world were habitually formed.

~_Four several bases of religious systems._~

There appear to be four leading forms in which, either single or combined, religion has attracted, and more or less commanded, the mind of man. It is scarcely needful to add that one alone of these is genuine, and that the three others are essentially depraved, and finally self-destructive.

The first is the worship of the Divine Being: of which the Holy Scriptures form, down to the period with which they close, the principal record.

The second is the worship of man; founded, of course, upon his deification. Of this the Greek mythology affords the most conspicuous and weighty instance.

The third is the worship of external and inanimate nature, which I mention next, not because of its place in the order of ideas, but because of its great extension and influence over races of vast numerical strength, antiquity, and importance.

The fourth is the worship of the inferior creation, or of animate nature in its lower ranks.

We have considered, in a former section, how far the Greek mythology was indebted to the first of these sources, the true and pure one.

The second, or anthropophuism, appears to have formed its most proper and distinctive characteristic. Further, it was the intellectual rather than the carnal nature of man, which originally determined a law for the construction of the Olympian system. The great traditive deities were remodelled according to what Scripture calls the ‘lust of the mind,’ long before the ‘lust of the flesh’ had touched them. We see, too, that, of the deities of invention, those which were purely Hellenic, such as Juno and Themis in particular, represent either noble and commanding, or else pure, ideas, connected with the development of human life and society; while it is generally in deities that have not undergone a full Hellenic remodelling, that we see animal passion prevail; such as Mars, Venus, Ceres, and Aurora.

~_Nature-worship._~

The third basis of religion is admirably described, together with its apology, and its condemnation, in the Book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon[772]:

[772] Wisdom xiii. 1-9.

‘Neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster; but deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods which govern the world. With whose beauty if they being delighted took them to be gods; let them know how much better the Lord of them is: for the first author of beauty hath created them. But if they were astonished at their power and virtue, let them understand by them, how much mightier he is that made them. For, by the greatness and beauty of the creatures, proportionably the maker of them is seen. But yet for this they are the less to be blamed; for they peradventure err, seeking God, and desirous to find him. For, being conversant in his works, they search him diligently, and believe their sight: because the things are beautiful that are seen. Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned. For if they were able to know so much, that they could aim at the world; how did they not sooner find out the Lord thereof?’

And then the Wise Man proceeds to show, that far inferior, again, to this, is the worship of mere images as gods.

The worship of the elemental powers enters, I think, only as a very secondary ingredient into the Homeric or Olympian system: it is everywhere surmounted and circumscribed by developments drawn from tradition or from the principle of anthropophuism.

It is true that most of the great physical agents are either personified by him, or else are in immediate connection with some one of his deities: but there is every appearance that the Greeks sometimes expelled, sometimes reduced and depressed the principle of Nature-worship, in their adaptation of foreign materials to Hellenic uses.

1. Jupiter and Neptune, as we have seen, preside over elements, but they are not elemental. Their relations to air and sea are entirely different from those of Vulcan to fire, and yet even he very greatly transcends the dimensions of a merely elemental god. Their brotherhood with Aidoneus, who is not elemental at all, indicates, together with all other signs, that the air and sea are their respective territories, and are not the basis of their divinity.

2. It seems quite impossible but that, if Nature-worship had been the basis of the system, the Sun, as the visible king of nature, must have had a prominent and commanding position in the system; whereas his place in Homer is even less than secondary. Looking at the realm of nature, to search out a varied organism, which would supply a powerful apparatus of instruments operative upon man to a presiding intelligence, the Greek naturally made Ζεὺς the king of Air. But had he merely wanted a symbol by which nature itself was to speak, how could he have forborne to choose the Sun?

3. There is, indeed, an extended use in Homer of the imagery of Nature-Powers. But however prominent as poetry, this is altogether subordinate as religion. His Nymphs and River-gods people the unseen, adorn his verse, and even supply a kind of drapery to the scheme of religious observances; but it is not by them that the world is governed. And with them may very well be classed, as far as the present argument is concerned, the crowd of Homer’s metaphysical impersonations.

4. That Neptune in particular is not properly an elemental power, seems to be made clear by three things at the least:

a. He can act by land as well as sea; witness his building the wall of Troy, and appearing as a warrior on the battle-field.

b. The θάλασσα, with which he is connected, is decidedly inferior, in its merely elemental character, to Oceanus; yet Oceanus has no share in the government of the world, and no moral personality, while Neptune has equal dignity with Jupiter, and is not far behind him in strength.