viii. 362;

4. Of Spercheius in Thessaly, with an altar, Il. xxiii. 148. As respects this case, we have indeed found, that the imaginative deification of Nature appears to have been Hellenic, and not Pelasgian. Still, with the case of Scamander before us, and considering that we find the τέμενος attached to Spercheius in an eminently Pelasgian district, while there is no example of such an inheritance for the deities among the Hellic tribes, it seems most rational to consider the appropriation of it as belonging to the Pelasgian period, and as having simply lived over into the Hellenic age.

3. The ἄλσος of Homer appears to be quite different from the τέμενος: and to mean rather what we should call a site for religious worship, as distinguished from an endowment which, as such, would produce the means of subsistence. Such places were required by the spirit of Hellenic religion, as much as by the Pelasgian worship, and we find them accordingly disseminated as follows: we have

1. In Scheria, the ἄλσος of Minerva, Od. vi. 291, 321.

2. At Ismarus, the ἄλσος of Apollo, in which dwelt Maron the priest, Od. ix. 200.

3. In Ithaca, the ἄλσος of the Nymphs, with an altar, beside the fountain, where all passers-by offered sacrifice, Od. xvii. 205-11.

4. In Ithaca again, the ἄλσος of Apollo, where public sacrifice was performed in the city on his feast-day, Od. xx. 277, 8.

5. In Bœotia, Onchestus is called the ἄγλαον ἄλσος of Neptune, Il. ii. 506.

6. The ἄλσεα of Persephone are on the beach beyond Oceanus, and are composed of poplars and willows, Od. x. 509.

7. In the great Assembly of gods before the Theomachy, all the Nymphs are summoned, who inhabit ἄλσεα as well as fountains and meadows, Il. xx. 8. But here the meaning includes any grove, dedicated or not. And again,

8. The attendants of Circe are such as inhabit ἄλσεα, groves, or fountains, or rivers, Od. x. 350.

Thus the ἄλσος, when used in the religious sense, means a grove or clump of trees, sometimes with turf, or with a fountain; set apart as a place for worship, and inhabited by a deity or his ministers, yet quite distinct from a property capable of supporting them. These clumps appear to be so appropriated more commonly by Hellenic, than by Pelasgian practice.

~_As to statues of the gods._~

4. We will take next the case of statues of the gods.

In the opinion of Mure, the metaphor which represents human affairs as resting in the lap of the gods (θεῶν ἐν γούνασι), gives conclusive evidence that the custom of making statues of the deities prevailed among the Greeks. I do not however see why this particular figure should bear upon the question, more than any of the other very numerous representations which treat them as endowed with various members of the body. If this evidence be receivable at all, it is overwhelming. But it is open to some doubt, whether, because gods are mentally conceived according to the laws of anthropomorphism, we may therefore assume that they were also materially represented under the human form.

We have, I believe, no more than one single piece of direct evidence on the subject, and it is this; that, when the Trojan matrons carry their supplication to the temple of Minerva, together with the offering of a robe, they deposit it on her knees (Il. vi. 303), Ἀθηναίης ἐπὶ γούνασιν ἠϋκόμοιο. This appears to be quite conclusive as to the existence of a statue of Minerva at Troy: but it leaves the question entirely open, whether it was an Hellenic, as well as a Pelasgian, practice thus to represent the gods.

It is quite plain, I think, that the practice was not one congenial or familiar to the mind of Homer. Had it been so, he surely must have made large poetic use of it. Whereas on the contrary it is by inference alone, though certainly by unavoidable inference, from language which he uses without that intention, that we become assured even of their existence in his time. He speaks, indeed, more than once of placing ἀγάλματα in temples, or of suspending them in honour of the gods[360]: but our title to construe this of statues appears to be wholly conjectural.

[360] Od. iii. 438. xii. 347.

It would seem inexplicable that a poet, who enlarges with so much power, not only on the Shield of Agamemnon and the Arms of Achilles, but on the ideal Ægis of Minerva, the chariot of Juno, the bow of Apollo, and the metallic handmaids of Vulcan, should entirely avoid description of the statues of the Olympian gods, if they were habitually before his eyes.

I have argued elsewhere that we see in Homer the Hellenic, not the Pelasgian, mind. And if it be so, then I think we are justified in associating with his Hellenism, as one among many signs, this remarkable silence. The ritual and external development of Pelasgian religion would delight in statues as visible signs: the Hellenic idealism would not improbably eschew them. Hence we may treat this practice of the period as belonging to Pelasgian peculiarities.

If this be so, then I think we may pass on to the conclusion, that the original tendency to produce visible forms of the Divinity was not owing to, and formed no part of, the efforts of the human imagination, so largely developed in Homer, to idealize religion, and to beautify the world by its imagery. But, on the contrary, so far as we can judge from Homer, it first prevailed among a race inclined to material and earthy conceptions in theology, and from them it spread to others of higher intelligence. It was a crutch for the lameness of man, and not a wing for his upward aspirations.

And indeed, as it appears to me, this proposition is sustained even by the past experience and present state of Christendom. When faith was strongest, images were unknown to the faithful. Nor is it art, which produces them: it is merely a kind of corporal and mechanical imitation. No considerable work of art is at this moment, I believe, in any Christian country, an object of religious worship. The sentiment which craves for material representations of such objects in order to worship them, appears also commonly to exact that they should be somewhat materialized. The higher office of art, in connection with devout affection, seems to be that it should point our veneration onwards, not arrest it. It holds out the finger which we are to follow, not the hand which we are to kiss.

~_As to Seers or Diviners._~

The order of Seers or Diviners was common to Greeks, Trojans, and probably we may add, from its being known among the Cyclopes, to all contemporary races. It is singular that we should find here, and not among the priesthood, the traces of caste, or the hereditary descent of the gift. In all other points, this function stands apart from hierarchical developments. For the μάντις, except as to his gift, is like other men. Melampus engages to carry off oxen. Polypheides migrates upon a quarrel with his father. Cleitus is the lover of Aurora. Theoclymenus has committed homicide[361]. Teiresias is called ἄναξ, a lord or prince[362]. We do not know that Calchas fought as well as prophesied, but it may have been so, since Helenus, the son of Priam, and Eunomus, the Mysian leader, were seers or augurs not less than warriors. But the most instructive specimen of this order among the Greeks is the Suitor Leiodes[363], who was also θυοσκόος, or inspector of sacrifices, to the body of Suitors. Now Ulysses had, in consideration of a ransom, spared Maron the priest of Apollo at Ismarus[364]. But, far from recognising in the professional character of Leiodes a title to immunity, he answers the plea with characteristic and deadly repartee. And this, notwithstanding that Leiodes was, as we learn, distinguished from the rest of the Suitors by the general decency of his conduct.

[361] Od. xv. 224 _et seqq._

[362] Od. xi. 150.

[363] Od. xxii. 310-29. xxi. 144.

[364] Od. ix. 197-201.

The θυοσκόος apparently inspected sacrifices, but did not offer them; for this character is clearly distinguished in the Iliad[365] from that of the priest. Indeed, the word θύειν in Homer appears properly to apply to those minor offices of sacrifice, which did not involve the putting to death of victims; as in Il. ix. 219, where, it may be observed, the function is not performed by the principal person, but is deputed by Achilles to Patroclus. The inspection of slain animals would probably stand in the same category, among divine offices, as the interpretation of other signs and portents.

[365] Il. xxiv. 221.

The members of this class are, upon the whole, as broadly distinguished from the priests in Homer, as are the prophets of the Old Testament from the Levitical priesthood.

They were called by the general name of μάντις, or by other names, some of them more limited: such as θεόπροπος, ὑποφήτης, οἰωνόπολος, ὀνειρόπολος. They sometimes interpreted from signs and omens; sometimes, as in Il. vi. 86, and vii. 44, without them.

The diffusion of the gift among the royal house of Troy, where Polydamas had it as well as Helenus, and possibly also Hector, is less marked than the great case of the family of Melampus. The augur was in all respects a citizen, while possessed of a peculiar endowment: and the ὑποφῆται[366] mentioned in the invocation of Achilles, whether they were the royal house, or persons dispersed through the community, evidently formed a more conspicuous object among the Helli than we find in any Pelasgian race. Again; in Greece we find the oracles of Delphi and Delos, as well as of Dodona; but there is no similar organ for the delivery of the divine will reported to us in Troy.

[366] Il. xvi. 235.

~_As to the Priesthood._~

We come now to the last and most important point connected with the outward development of the religious system, that of the priesthood: and here I shall endeavour to describe distinctly the evidence with regard to both nations. First, let us consider the case of priesthood as it respects the Greeks.

We have at least one instance before us in the Iliad, where a combined religious action of Greeks and Trojans is presented to us. In the Third Book, Priam comes from Troy to an open space between the armies, and meets Agamemnon and Ulysses. The honour of actually offering the sacrifice is allotted to the Greeks. No priest appears; and the function is performed by the King, Agamemnon. It is therefore natural to suppose that the Greeks have with them in Troas no sacrificing priest. On every occasion, the Greek Sovereign offers sacrifice for himself and for the army. So also do the soldiery[367] at large for themselves;

[367] Il. ii. 400.

ἄλλος δ’ ἄλλῳ ἔρεζε θεῶν αἰειγενετάων.

There was an altar[368] for the very purpose in the part of the camp appropriated for Assemblies; a fact which, though it does not demonstrate, accords with the union of the regal and sacerdotal functions. Nor can we account for the absence of priests from the camp, on the same principle as for that of bards; since poems were a luxury, but sacrifices a necessity. And we find Calchas representing the class of religious functionaries that the Greek nation did acknowledge; namely, the Seers, who interpreted the divine will, without any fixed ministry belonging to any particular place, although the gift was generally derived from Apollo, as one among his peculiar attributes.

[368] Il. xi. 807, 8.

In the remarkable passage, which enumerates for us the principal trades and professions of Greece in the heroic age[369], we find mentioned the prophet, the physician, the artificer, the divinely prompted bard; but not the priest. Yet, had such an order existed, it could not well, on account of its importance, have been omitted. For in truth this enumeration is, as we have before seen, nearly exhaustive, as applied to an age when there was no professional soldier, when the husbandman, fisherman, or herd, could not be called a δημιοεργὸς, for he had no relation to the public, and when commerce was confined to foreigners like the Phœnicians, or pirates like the Taphians, and formed no part of the business of the settled communities of Greece.

[369] Od. xvii. 384-6.

On the other hand, in the Legend of Phœnix concerning Meleager, we have a notice of priests as having existed at that time in Ætolia. The embassy, which was sent to conciliate Meleager, consisted of elders and of the best, or most distinguished, among the priests;

τὸν δὲ λίσσοντο γέροντες Αἰτωλῶν, πέμπον δὲ θεῶν ἱερῆας ἀρίστους. Il. ix. 574.

Now, the word Αἰτωλὸς, I apprehend, indicates an Hellenic race, for Tydeus is Αἰτώλιος; and it is worth notice, that in this passage the elders are called Ætolian, but not the priests.

Again, this event took place during the reign of Œneus, two generations before the Trojan war[370]. At that time the Hellenic influence was quite recent in Middle and in Southern Greece. The family of Sisyphus had indeed arrived there at least two generations before, but it disappeared, and it had never risen to great power. It was the date of Augeias, of Neleus, and of Pelops; all of them, apparently, the first of their respective families in Peloponnesus. So again the name Portheus, assigned to the father of Œneus, probably marks him as the first Hellenic occupant of the country.

[370] Il. ix. 535.

Plato observes, that new settlers might naturally remain for a time without religious institutions[371] of their own.

[371] Legg. vi. 7.

The Hellenes, then, had recently come into Ætolia at the time, and even on this ground were less likely to have had priests of their own institution. But it is not to be supposed that, finding a hierarchy among the Pelasgian tribes, devoted to the worship of such deities (Minerva and Apollo for example) as they themselves acknowledged, they would extirpate such a body. The most probable supposition is, that it would continue in all cases for a time. The person of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, was respected, at least for the moment, even by Agamemnon[372] in his displeasure. Fearless of his threats, the injured priest immediately appealed to his god for aid. We cannot doubt that interests thus defended would be generally left intact. Still, as priests were, in the language of political economy, unproductive labourers, and as they seem to have held their offices not by descent but by election, we can easily perceive a road, other than that of violence, to the extinction of the order among a people that set no store by its services.

[372] Il. i. 28.

There is yet another place, in which the name is mentioned among the Greeks. It is in the Assembly of the First Iliad, held while the plague is raging. Achilles says, ‘Let us inquire of some prophet, or priest, or interpreter of dreams (for dreams too are from Jupiter), who will tell us, why Apollo is so much exasperated[373].’ But the allusion here seems plainly to be to Chryses, who had himself visited the camp, and had appeared with the insignia of his priestly office in a previous Assembly of the Greeks[374]. Being now in possession of the whole open country, they of course had it in their power to consult either him or any other Trojan priest not within the walls. We cannot, therefore, argue from this passage, that priesthood was a recognised Hellenic institution at the period.

[373] Il. i. 62.

[374] Il. i. 15.

In the Odyssey, we find Menelaus engaged in the solemn rites of a great nuptial feast; and Nestor in like manner offering sacrifice to Neptune, his titular ancestor, in the presence of thousands of the people. In neither of these cases is there any reference to a priest: and on the following day Nestor with his sons offers a new sacrifice, of which the fullest details are given.

Again, had there been priests among the Homeric Greeks, it is hardly possible but that we must have had some glimpse of them in Ithaca, where the order of the community and the whole course of Greek life are so clearly laid open.

An important piece of negative evidence to the same effect is afforded by the great invocation of Achilles in the Sixteenth Iliad. It will be remembered, that we there find the rude highland tribe of the Helli in possession of the country where Dodona was seated, together with the worship of the Pelasgian Jupiter; and themselves apparently exercising the ministry of the god. Now that ministry was not priesthood, but interpretation; for they are ὑποφῆται, not ἱερῆες[375].

[375] Il. xvi. 235.

It therefore appears clear, that the Hellenic tribes of Homer’s day did not acknowledge a professional priesthood of their own; that there was no priest in the Greek armament before Troy; that the priest was not a constituent part of ordinary Greek communities: and that, if he was any where to be found in the Homeric times, it was as a relic, and in connection with the old Pelasgian establishments of the country.

At a later period, when wealth and splendour had increased, and when the increased demand for them extended also to religious rites, the priesthood became a regular institution of Greece. It is reckoned by Aristotle, in the Politics, among the necessary elements of a State; while he seems also to regard it as the natural employment of those, who are disqualified by age from the performance of more active duties to the public, either in war or in council. The priest was, even in Homer’s time, a distinctly privileged person. Like other people, he married and had children: but his burdens were not of the heaviest. He would live well on sacrifices, and the proceeds of glebe-land: and it is curious, that Maron the priest had the very best wine of which we hear in the poems[376]. The priest formed no part of the teaching power of the community, either in this or in later ages. Döllinger makes the observation[377], that Plutarch points out as the sources of religious instruction three classes of men, among whom the priests are not even included. They are (1) the poets, (2) the lawgivers, and (3) the philosophers: to whom Dio Chrysostom adds the painters and sculptors. So that Isocrates may well observe, that the priesthood is anybody’s affair. Plato[378] in the Νόμοι requires his priests, and their parents too, to be free from blemish and from crime: but carefully appoints a separate class of ἐξηγηταὶ, to superintend and interpret the laws of religion; as well as stewards, who are to have charge of the consecrated property.

[376] Od. ix. 205.

[377] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. iv. 1.

[378] Plat. Legg. vi. 7. (ii. 759.)

The priest of the heroic age would however appear to have slightly shared in the office of the μάντις, although the μάντις had no special concern with the offering of sacrifice. The inspection of victims would fall to priests, almost of course, in a greater or a less degree; and there is some evidence before us, that they were entitled to interpret the divine will. It is furnished by the speech of Achilles[379], which appears to imply some professional capacity of this kind: and, for Troy at least, by the declaration[380] of Priam, who mentions priests among the persons, that might have been employed to report to him a communication from heaven.

[379] Il. i. 62.

[380] Il. xxiv. 22.

We have now seen the case of priesthood among the Greeks. With the Trojans it is quite otherwise. We are introduced, at the very beginning of the Iliad, to Chryses[381] the priest (ἱερεὺς) of Apollo. In the fifth Iliad we have a Trojan[382], Dares, who is priest of Vulcan; and we have also Dolopion, who, as ἀρητὴρ[383] of the Scamander, filled an office apparently equivalent. Chryses the priest is also called an ἀρητήρ[384]; and though, on the other hand, it was the duty of Leiodes in the Odyssey to offer[385] prayer on behalf of the Suitors, yet he is never termed ἀρητήρ. In the Sixth Iliad appears Theano, wife of Antenor, and priestess of Minerva[386]. And in the Sixteenth, we have Onetor[387], priest of Idæan Jupiter. Again, while Eumæus in the Odyssey does not recognise the priest among the Greek professions, but substitutes the prophet, Priam, on the contrary, in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, says he would not have obeyed the injunction to go to the Greek camp if conveyed to him by any mortal, of such as are in these professions[388],

[381] Il. i. 23.

[382] Il. v. 9.

[383] Ibid. 76.

[384] Il. i. 11.

[385] Od. xxii. 322.

[386] Il. vi. 298.

[387] Il. xvi. 604.

[388] Il. xxiv. 221.

ἢ οἳ μάντιές εἰσι, θυοσκόοι, ἢ ἱερῆες,

where it might be questioned, whether μάντις and θυοσκόος are different persons, or whether he speaks of the μάντις θυοσκόος; but in either case it is equally clear that he names the priest, ἱερεὺς, apart from either. The speech of Mentes, in Od. i. 202, probably suffices to draw the line between the μάντις and the θυοσκόος.

It further appears that among the allies of Troy, as well as in the country, the priest was known; for in the Ninth Odyssey we find Maron, son of Euanthes the priest of Apollo at Ismarus[389], among the Cicones. The city they inhabited was sacked by Ulysses on his way from Troy, and on this account we must infer that, as they were allies of Troy (Il. ii. 846), so likewise they belonged to the family of Pelasgian tribes.

[389] Od. ix. 196-9.

To these priests, personally engaged in the service of the deities, a personal veneration, and an exemption from military service, appear to have attached, which were not enjoyed by the μάντιες. This is plainly developed in the case of Chryses. The offence is not that of carrying off a captive, for there could be no guilt in the act, as such matters were then considered, but rather honour: it is the insult offered to Apollo in the person of his servant, by subjecting his daughter to the common lot of women of all ranks, including the highest, that draws down a frightful vengeance on the army. So, again, the priest never fought; Dolopion, Dares, and Onetor, all become known to us through their having sons in the army, whose parentage is mentioned. And as to the priest Maron, Ulysses says he was spared from a feeling of awe towards the god, in whose wooded grove, or portion, he resided[390]:

[390] Ibid. 199-201.

οὕνεκά μιν σὺν παιδὶ περισχόμεθ’ ἠδὲ γυναικὶ ἁζόμενοι· ᾤκει γὰρ ἐν ἄλσεϊ δενδρήεντι Φοίβου Ἀπόλλωνος.

But it does not appear that the μάντις, though he was endowed with a particular gift, bore, in respect of it, such a character, as would suffice to separate him from ordinary civil duties, and to make him, like the priest, a clearly privileged person.

Upon the other hand, we should not omit to notice that we are told in the case of Theano, though she was of high birth and the wife of Antenor, that she was made priestess by the Trojan people. The same fact is probably indicated in the case of Dolopion, who, we are told, had been made or appointed ἀρητὴρ to Scamander (ἀρητὴρ ἐτέτυκτο Il. v. 77). And the appearance of the sons of priests in the field appears to show, that there was nothing like hereditary succession in the order; which was replenished, we may probably conclude, by selections having the authority or the assent of the public voice. Thus the body was popularly constituted, and was in thorough harmony with the national character. It does not, on that account, constitute a less important element in the community, but rather the reverse.

Now, whatever might be the other moral and social consequences of having in the community an order of men set apart to maintain the solemn worship of the gods, it must evidently have exercised a very powerful influence in the maintenance of abundance and punctuality in ritual observances. There can be no doubt, that the priest lived by the altar which he served, and lived the better in proportion as it was better supplied. Besides animals, cakes of flour too, and wine, were necessary for the due performance of his office[391]; and in the case of Maron this wine was so good, that the priest kept it secret from his servants, and that it has drawn forth the Poet’s most genial praise[392]:

[391] Il. i. 458, 462.

[392] Od. ix. 205.

ἡδὺν, ἀκηράσιον, θεῖον ποτόν·

He was rich too; for he had men and women servants in his house. So was Dares, the priest of Vulcan[393]. So probably was Dolopion, priest of Scamander; at any rate his station was a high one; as we see from the kind of respect paid to him (θεὸς δ’ ὡς τίετο δήμῳ); and we have another sign in both these cases of the station of the parents, from the position of the sons in the army, which is not among the common soldiery (πληθὺς), but among the notables. The sons of Dares fight in a chariot; and the name of Hypsenor, son of Dolopion, by its etymology indicates high birth.

[393] Il. v. 9, 78.

~_Comparative observance of Sacrifice._~

In point of fact the Homeric poems exhibit to us, together with the existence and influence of a priestly order, a very marked distinction in respect to sacrifice between the Trojans and the Greeks: a state of things in entire conformity with what we might thus expect.

In no single instance do we hear of a Trojan chief, who had been niggardly in his banquets to the gods. Hector[394] is expressly praised for his liberality in this respect by Jupiter, and Æneas by Neptune[395]. The commendation, however, extends to the whole community. In the Olympian Assembly of the Fourth Book, Jupiter says that, of all the cities inhabited by men, Troy is to him the dearest; for there his altar never lacked the sacrifice, the libation and the savoury reek, which are the portion of the gods[396]:

[394] Il. xxii. 170. xxiv. 168.

[395] Il. xx. 298.

[396] Il. iv. 48.

οὐ γάρ μοί ποτε βωμὸς ἐδεύετο δαιτὸς ἐΐσης, λοιβῆς τε κνίσης τε· τὸ γὰρ λάχομεν γέρας ἡμεῖς.

But the Greeks, thus destitute of priests, often fail, as we might expect, in the regularity of their religious rites. Ulysses[397], indeed, is in this, as in all the points of excellence, unimpeachable. But his was not the rule of all. Œneus, two generations before the _Troica_, while sacrificing to the other deities, either forgot or did not think fit (ἢ λάθετ’ ἢ οὐκ ἐνόησεν) to sacrifice to Diana[398]; hence the devastations of the Calydonian boar. Nor is his the only case in point.

[397] Od. i. 61.

[398] Il. ix. 523.

The account given by Nestor to Telemachus in the Third Odyssey is somewhat obscure in this particular. He says that, after the Greeks embarked, the deity dispersed them; and that then Jupiter ordained the misfortunes of their return, since they were not all intelligent and righteous[399]. It appears to be here intimated, that the Greeks in the first flush of victory forgot the influence of heaven; and that an omission of the proper sacrifices was the cause of the first dispersion.

[399] Od. iii. 131.

After they collect again in Troas, the Atreid brothers differ, as Menelaus proposes to start again, and Agamemnon to remain, and offer sacrifices in order to appease Minerva; but, as Nestor adds, the deities are not so soon appeased. Agamemnon, therefore, seems to have been too late with his celebration; and Menelaus, again, to have omitted it altogether.

The party who side with Menelaus offer sacrifices on their arrival at Tenedos, seemingly to repair the former error: but Jupiter is incensed, and causes them to fall out anew among themselves. A portion of them return once more to Agamemnon[400].

[400] Ibid. 164.

Menelaus finds his way to Lesbos, and then sails as far as Malea. Here he encounters a storm, and with part of his ships he gets to Egypt: where he is again detained by the deities, because he did not offer up the proper hecatombs[401]. Such remissness is the more remarkable, because Menelaus certainly appears to be one of the most virtuous characters in the Greek host.

[401] Ibid. 135.

The course, however, of the siege itself affords a very marked instance, in which the whole body of the Greeks was guilty of omitting the regular sacrifices proper to be used in the inauguration of a great undertaking. In the hasty construction of the trench and rampart, they apparently forgot the hecatombs[402]. Neptune immediately points out the error in the Olympian Court; and uses it in aid of his displeasure at a work, which he thinks will eclipse the wall of Troy, executed for Laomedon by himself in conjunction with Apollo. Jupiter forthwith agrees[403], that after the siege he shall destroy it. And the Poet, returning to the subject at the commencement of the Twelfth Book, observes that the work could not last, because it was constructed without enlisting in its favour the good will of the Immortals[404]. This omission of the Greeks is the more characteristic and remarkable, because the moment when they erected the rampart was a moment of apprehension, almost of distress.

[402] Il. vii. 450.

[403] Ibid. 459.

[404] Il. xii. 3, 9.

Thus, then, it appears that, as a nation, the Trojans were much more given to religious observances of a positive kind, than the Greeks. They were, like the Athenians[405] at a later epoch, δεισιδαιμονέστεροι. And, again, as between one Greek and another, there is no doubt that the good are generally, though not invariably, scrupulous in this respect, and the bad commonly careless. Thus much is implied particularly in Od. iii. 131, as well as conclusively shown in the general order of the Odyssey. But, as between the two nations, we cannot conceive that the Poet had any corresponding intention. Although a more scrupulous formality in religion marks the Trojans than the Greeks, and although in itself, and _cæteris paribus_, this may be the appropriate sign of piety, yet it is a sign only; as a sign it may be made a substitute, and, as a substitute, it becomes the characteristic of Ægisthus and Autolycus, no less than it is of Eumæus and Ulysses. As between the two nations, the difference is evidently associated with other differences in national character and morality. We must look therefore for broader grounds, upon which to form an estimate of the comparative virtue of the two nations, than either the populousness of Olympus on the one side, or the array of priests and temples on the other.

[405] Acts xvii. 22.

Nowhere do the signs of historic aim in Homer seem to me more evident, than in his very distinct delineations of national character on the Greek and the Trojan part respectively. But this is a general proposition; and it must be understood with a certain reservation as to details.

~_Two modes of handling for Greece and Troy._~

It does not appear to me that Homer has studied the more minute points of consistency in motive and action among the Trojans of the poem, in the same degree as among the Greeks. He has (so to speak) manœuvred them as subsidiary figures, with a view to enhancing and setting off those in whom he has intended and caused the principal interest to centre; not so as to destroy or diminish effects of individual character, but so as to give to the collective or joint action on the Trojan side a subordinate and ministerial function in the machinery of the poem. As Homer sung to Greeks, and Greeks were his judges and patrons as well as his theme, nay rather as his heart and soul were Greek, so on the Greek side the chain of events is closely knit; if its direction changes, there is an adequate cause, as in the vehemence of Achilles, or the vacillation of Agamemnon. But he did not sing to Trojans; and so, among the Trojans of the Iliad, there are as it were stitches dropped in the web, and the connection is much less carefully elaborated. Thus they acquiesce in the breach of covenant after the single combat of the Third Book, although the evident wish among them, independent of obligation, was for its fulfilment[406]. Then in the Fourth Book, after the treachery of Pandarus, the Trojans not only do not resent it, but they recommence the fight while the Greek chiefs are tending the wounded Menelaus[407]; which conduct exhibits, if the phrase may be permitted, an extravagance of disregard to the obligations of truth and honour. Hector, in the Sixth Book, quits the battle field upon an errand, to which it is hardly possible to assign a poetical sufficiency of cause, unless we refer it to the readiness which he not unfrequently shows to keep himself out of the fight. Again, there is something awkward and out of keeping in his manner of dealing with the Fabian recommendations of Polydamas when the crisis approaches. Some of these he accepts, and some he rejects, without adequate reason for the difference, except that he is preparing himself as an illustrious victim for Achilles, and that he must act foolishly in order that the superior hero, and with him the poem itself, may not be baulked of their purpose.

[406] Il. iii. 451-4.

[407] Il. iv. 220.

Thus, again, Homer has given us a pretty clear idea even of the respective ages of the Greek chiefs. It can hardly be doubted that Nestor stands first, Idomeneus second, Ulysses third: while Diomed and Antilochus are the youngest; Ajax and Achilles probably the next. But as to Paris, Helenus, Æneas, Sarpedon, Polydamas, we find no conclusion as to their respective ages derivable from the poem.

Yet though Homer may use a greater degree of liberty in one case, and a lesser in another, as to the mode of setting his jewels, he always adheres to the general laws of truth and nature as they address themselves to his poetical purpose. Thus there may be reason to doubt, whether he observed the same rigid topographical accuracy in dealing with the plain of Troy, as he has evinced in the Greek Catalogue: but he has used materials, all of which the region supplied; and he has arranged them clearly, as a poetic whole, before the mental eye of those with whom he had to do. Even so we may be prepared to find that he deals with the moral as with the material Troas, allowing himself somewhat more of license, burdening himself with somewhat less of care. And then we need not be surprised at secondary or inferential inconsistencies in the action, as respects the Trojan people, because it has not been worth his while to work the delineation of them, in its details, up to his highest standard; yet we may rely upon his general representations, and we are probably on secure ground in contemplating all the main features of Trojan life and character as not less deliberately drawn, than those of the Greeks. For, in truth, it was requisite, in order to give full effect among his countrymen to the Greek portrait, that they should be able, at least up to a certain point, to compare it with the Trojan.

~_Moral superiority of his Greeks._~

Regarding the subject from this point of view, I should say that Homer has, upon the whole, assigned to the Greeks a moral superiority over the Trojans, not less real, though less broad and more chequered, than that which he has given them in the spheres of intellectual and of military excellence. But, in all cases alike, he has pursued the same method of casting the balance. He eschews the vulgar and commonplace expedient of a formal award: he decides this and every other question through the medium of action. The first thing, therefore, to be done is, to inquire into the morality of his contemporaries, as it is exhibited through the main action of the poems.

It is admitted on all hands that, in the ethical picture of the Odyssey, the distinctions of right and wrong are broad, clear, and conspicuous. But the case of the Iliad is not so simple. The conduct of Paris, which leads to the war, is so flagrant and vile, and the conduct of the Greeks in demanding the restoration of Helen before they resort to force, so just and reasonable, that it is not unnaturally made matter of surprise that any war could ever have arisen upon such a subject, except the war of a wronged and justly incensed people against mere ruffians, traitors, and pirates. The Trojans appear at first sight simply as assertors of a wrong the most gross and aggravated, even in its original form; their iniquity is further darkened by obstinacy, and their cause is the cause of enmity to every law, human and divine. Yet the Greeks do not assume to themselves, in connection with the cause of the war, to stand upon a different level of morality: and the amiable affections, with the sense of humanity, if not the principles of honour and justice, are exhibited in the detail of the Iliad as prevailing among the Trojans, little less than among the Greeks.

Now, let us first endeavour to clear away some misapprehensions that simply darken the case: and after this let us inquire what exhibition Homer has really given us of the moral sense of the Greeks and the Trojans respectively, in connection with the crime of Paris.

In the first place, something is due to the falsification by later poets of the Homeric tradition: and to the reflex affiliation upon Homer of those traits which, through the influence first of the Cyclic poets, probably exaggerating the case in order to conceal their relative want of strength, and then of the tragedians and Virgil, have come to be taken for granted as genuine parts of the original portraiture.

According to the Argument of the Κύπρια Ἔπη, as it has been handed down to us, Paris, having been received in hospitality by Menelaus, was left by him under the friendly care of his wife, on his setting out for Crete. He then corrupted Helen; and induced her, after being corrupted, to elope with him, and with the greater part of the moveable goods of Menelaus.

Upon this tale our ideas have been formed, and, this being so, we marvel why Homer does not make the Greeks feel more indignation at a proceeding which simply combined treachery, robbery, and adultery. As he prizes so highly the rights of guests, and pitches their gratitude accordingly, we cannot understand how he should be so insensible to the grossest imaginable breach of their obligations.

~_Homer’s account of the abduction._~

Homer is here made responsible for that which, in part, he does not tell us, and which is positively, as well as inferentially, at variance with what he does tell us. He tells us absolutely, that Helen was not inveigled into leaving Sparta, but carried off by force: and that the crime of adultery was committed after, and not before, her abduction.

This difference alters the character of the deed of Paris, in a manner by no means so insignificant according to the heroic standard of morality, as according to ours. As it seems plain from Homer’s expression, ἁρπάξας[408], that Paris carried off Helen in the first instance by an act of violence, so also it is probable that, when the first adultery was committed in the island of Cranae, he was her ravisher much more than her corrupter. Her offence appears to have consisted mainly in the mere acceptance, at what precise date we know not, of the relation thus brought into existence between them, and in compliances that with the lapse of time naturally followed, such as the visit to the Trojan horse. It would have been, however, under all the circumstances, an act of superhuman rather than of human virtue, if she had refused, through the long years of her residence abroad, to recognise Paris as a husband: and accordingly the light, in which she is presented to us by the Poet, is that of a sufferer infinitely more than of an offender[409].

[408] Il. iii. 444.

[409] See inf. Aoidos, sect. vi.

When we regard Helen from this point of view, we perceive that Homer’s narrative is at least in perfect keeping with itself. The Greeks have made war to avenge the wrongs of Helen not less than those of Menelaus: nay, Menelaus himself, the keenest of them all, is keen on her behalf even more than on his own[410]. He regards her as a person stolen from him: and the Greeks regard Paris only as the robber.

[410] Il. ii. 589.

We have no reason to suppose the Cyprian Epic to be a trustworthy supplement to the narrative of Homer. We have seen some important points of discrepancy from the Iliad. And there are others. For instance, this poem makes Pollux immortal and Castor only mortal, while Homer acquaints us in the Iliad with the interment of both, and in the Odyssey with their restoration on equal terms to an alternate life. It gives Agamemnon four daughters, the Iliad but three. It brings Briseis from Pedasus, the Iliad brings her from Lyrnessus. And there is other matter in the plot, that does not appear to correspond at all with the modes of Homeric conception[411]. Had Homer told us the same story as the Cyprian Epic, he would perhaps have made his countrymen express all the indignation we could desire.

[411] Düntzer, pp. 9-16. Fragm. iv. xi. xv.

And now let us consider what is the view taken of the abduction in the Iliad by the various persons whose sentiments are made known to us: and how far that view can be accounted for by the general tone of the age, or by what was peculiar to the character and institutions of each people respectively.

Helen herself nowhere utters a word of attachment or of respect to Paris. Even of his passions she appears to have been the reluctant, rather than the willing instrument. She thinks alike meanly of his understanding[412] and of his courage[413]: and he shares[414] in the rebukes which she everywhere heaps upon herself; though, with the delicacy and high refinement of her irresolute but gentle character, she never reproaches him in the presence of his parents, by whom he continued to be loved.

[412] Il. vi. 352.

[413] Il. iii. 428-36, and vi. 351.

[414] Il. vi. 356.

To the Trojan people he was unequivocally hateful[415]. They would have pointed him out to Agamemnon, if they could: for they detested him like black Death. It was by a mixture of bribery and the daring assertion of authority, that he checked those movements in the Assembly, which had it for their object to enforce the restoration of Helen to Menelaus[416]. Of all his countrymen, Hector appears to have been most alive to his guilt, and is alone in reproaching him with it[417]. It is under the influence of a sharp rebuke from Hector, that he proposes to undertake a single combat with Menelaus[418].

[415] Il. iii. 453.

[416] Il. vii. 354-64, and xi. 123.

[417] Il. iii. 46-53.

[418] Ibid. 68-75.

~_The Greek estimate of Paris._~

The only persons on the Greek side, who utter any strong sentiment in respect to Paris, are Diomed and Menelaus. This is singular; for when we consider what was the cause of war, we might have expected, perhaps, that recurrence to it would be popular and constant among the Greeks. Nor is this all that may excite surprise. Diomed is unmeasured in vituperating Paris, but it is for his cowardice and effeminacy. The only word, which comes at all near the subject of his crime, is παρθενοπῖπα: and by mocking him as a dangler after virgins, the brave son of Tydeus shows how small a place the original treachery of Paris occupied in his mind.

Menelaus, indeed, has a keen sense of the specific nature and malignity of the outrage. He beseeches Jupiter to strengthen his hand against the man who has done such deadly wrong, not to him only, but to all the laws which unite mankind:

ὄφρα τις ἐρρίγῃσι καὶ ὀψιγόνων ἀνθρώπων ξεινοδόκον κακὰ ῥέξαι, ὅ κεν φιλότητα παράσχῃ[419].

[419] Ibid. 351-4.

But then Homer has already, in the Catalogue, introduced Menelaus to us as distinguished from the rest of his countrymen, by his greater keenness to revenge the wrongs and groans of Helen[420]. Accordingly, the injured husband returns on other occasions to the topic: calls the Trojans κακαὶ κύνες, and invokes upon them the anger of Ζεὺς ξείνιος, the Jupiter of hospitality[421];

[420] Il. ii. 588-90.

[421] Il. xiii. 620-7.

οἵ μευ κουριδίην ἄλοχον καὶ κτῄματα πολλὰ μὰψ οἴχεσθ’ ἀνάγοντες, ἐπεὶ φιλέεσθε παρ’ αὐτῇ.

Thus it is plain, that Menelaus resents not only a privation and an act of piracy, but a base and black breach of faith. It is quite plain, on the other hand, that in this respect he stands alone among his countrymen. They, regarding the matter more crudely, and from a distance, appear to see in it little beyond a violent abduction, which it is perfectly right, for those who can, to resent and retrieve, but which implies no extraordinary and damning guilt in the perpetrator.

Hence probably that singular appearance of apathy on the part of the Greeks, which might at first sight seem to entail on them a moral reproach, in some degree allied to that which justly attaches itself to the Trojan community. It is not possible, indeed, to take a full measure of their state of mind in regard to the crime of Paris, without condemning the views and propensities to which it was due. But the causes were various: and the blame they may deserve is both very different from that which must fall upon the Trojans, and is also different in a mode, which may help to illustrate some main distinctions in the two national characters.

I speak here, as everywhere, of the adjustment of acts and motives in the poem as poetical facts, that is to say, as placed relatively to one another with care and accuracy in order to certain effects; and as liable to be tried under the law of effect, just as, in a simple history, all particulars alleged are liable to be tried under the law of fact. The assumption of truth or fable in the poem does not materially widen or narrow the field of poetical discussion. The critic looks for consistency as between motive and action, causes and effects, in the voyage to Lilliput or Laputa, as well as in Thucydides or Clarendon. The difference is that, in the one case, our discussion terminates with the genius of the inventor; in the other we are verifying the life and condition of mankind.

If then we admit the abduction, and inquire for what probable cause it is that the wrong, being so obvious and gross, was not more prominent in the mind of the people who had endured it, a part at least of the answer is this. We do not require to go back three thousand years in the history of the world in order to learn how often it happens that, when a conflict has arisen between nations, the original causes of quarrel tend irresistibly to become absorbed and lost in its incidents. As long as honour and security are held to depend more on strength than on right, relative strength must often prevail over relative right in the decision of questions, where the arbitrement of battle has been invoked. Both the willingness of the Trojans to restore, and the willingness of the Greeks to accept the atonement, may be expedients of the Poet to give a certain moral harmony to his work; of which it is a marked feature that it artfully divides our sympathies throughout, so far at least as is needed for the interest of the poem. On the one side, the ambition and rapacity of Agamemnon may have induced him not only not to seek, but even to decline or discourage accommodation; which, we may observe, he never promotes in the Iliad. Having got a fair cause of war, he may have been bent on making the most of it, and confident, as Thucydides believes he was, in his power to turn it to account. While, on the other hand, Troy was not so far from or so strange to Greece, as to be exempt from the fear of appearing afraid; and, until it had become too late, she may have thought her safety would be compromised by the surrender of Helen.

Here may be reasons why restitution was neither given on the one side, nor steadily kept in view on the other: especially as it was of course included in the idea of the capture of the city. But it is not clear that this was enough to account for the apathy of the Greeks in general with respect to the crime of Paris, which we might have expected to find a favourite and familiar topic with his enemies at large, instead of being confined, as it is, to the immediate sufferer by the wrong.

~_Its relation to prevailing views of marriage._~

Now, the answer to this question must after all be sought partly in the prevalent ideas of the heroic age; and partly in those which were peculiar more or less to the Greek people.

According to Christian morality, the abduction and appropriation of a married woman is not simply a crime when committed, but it is a crime that is aggravated by every day, during which her relation with her seducer or ravisher is continued. This was not so in the heroic age.

We have examples in the poems of what Homer considers to be a continued course of crime. Such is the conduct of the Suitors in the Odyssey, who for years together waste the substance of Ulysses, woo his wife, oppress his son, and cohabit with the servants. This was habitual crime, crime voluntarily and deliberately persevered in, when it might at any time have been renounced.

This vicious course of the Suitors is never called by Homer an ἄτη; it is described by the names of ἀτασθαλίαι and ὑπερβασίη[422]. So likewise the series of enormities committed by Ægisthus, the corruption of Clytemnestra, the murder of her husband, the expulsion of Orestes and prolonged usurpation of the throne; these are never called by the name of ἄτη; but ἄτη, and not one of the severer names quoted above, is the appellation always given by Homer to the crime of Paris.

[422] Od. xxi. 146. xxiii. 67. xiii. 193. xxii. 64. See Olympus, sect. ii. p. 162.

The ἄτη of a man is a crime so far partaking of the nature of error, that it is done under the influence of passion or weakness; perhaps excluding premeditation, perhaps such that its consequences follow spontaneously in its train, without a new act of will to draw them, so that the act, when once committed, is practically irretrievable. Something, according to Homer, was evidently wanting in the crime of Paris, to sink it to the lower depths of blackness. Perhaps we may find it partly in the nature of marriage, as it was viewed by his age.

Having taken Helen to Troy, he made her his wife, and his wife she continued until the end of the siege. We should of course say he did not make her his wife, for she was the wife of another man. But the distinction between marriage _de facto_ and marriage _de jure_, clear to us in the light of Divine Revelation, was less clear to the age of Homer. Helen was to Paris the mistress of his household; the possessor of his affections, such as they were; the sole sharer, apparently, of his dignities and of his bed. To the mind of that period there was nothing dishonourable in the connection itself, apart from its origin; while, to our mind, every day of its continuance was a fresh accumulation of its guilt. The higher wrong of wounded and defrauded affections was personal to Menelaus. In the aspect it presented to the general understanding, the act of Paris, once committed, and sealed by the establishment of the _de facto_ conjugal relation, remained an act of plunder and nothing else.

~_And to Greek views of homicide._~

To comprehend these notions, so widely differing from our own, we may seek their further illustration by a reference to the established view of homicide. He, who had taken the life of a fellow creature, was bound to make atonement by the payment of a fine. If he offered that atonement, it was not only the custom, but the duty, of the relations of the slain man to accept it. So much so, that the blunt mind of Ajax takes this ground as the simplest and surest for argument with Achilles, whom he urges not to refuse reparation offered by Agamemnon, in consideration that reparation (ποίνη) covers the slaughter of a brother or a son. Beforehand, the Greek would have scorned to accept a price for life. But, the deed being done, it came into the category of exchangeable values. Even so the abstraction of Helen, once committed, assumed for the common mind the character of an act of plunder, differing from the case of homicide, inasmuch as the thing taken could be given back, but not differing from it as to the essence of its moral nature, however aggravated might have been the circumstances with which it was originally attended.

Now, wherever the moral judgment against plunder has been greatly relaxed, that of fraud in connection with it is sure to undergo a similar process; because, in the same degree in which acts of plunder are acquitted as lawful acquisition, fraud is sure to come into credit by assuming the character of stratagem. We may, I think, find an example of this rule in the Thirteenth Odyssey; where, with an entire freedom from any consciousness of wrong, Ulysses feigns to have slaughtered Orsilochus at night by ambush, in consequence of a quarrel that had previously occurred about booty[423].

[423] Od. xiii. 258 et seqq.

Here then we reach the point, at which we must take into view the peculiar ideas and tendencies of the Greek mind in the heroic age, as they bear necessarily upon its appreciation of an act like that of Paris. The Greeks, of whom we may fairly take Diomed as the type, detest and despise him for affectation, irresolution, and poltroonery: these are the ideas uppermost in their mind: we are not to doubt that, besides seeking reparation for Menelaus, they condemned morally the act which made it needful; what we have to account for is, that they did not condemn it in such a manner as to make this moral judgment the ruling idea in their minds with regard to him.

We have seen that, according to Homer, instead of Helen’s having been originally the willing partner of the guilt of Paris, he was, under her husband’s roof, her kidnapper and not her corrupter. Her offence seems to have consisted in this, that she gave a half-willing assent to the consequences of the abduction. Though never escaping from the sense of shame, always retaining along with a wounded conscience her original refinement of character, and apparently fluctuating from time to time in an alternate strength and weakness of homeward longings[424], the specific form of her offence, according to the ideas of the age, was rather the preterite one of unresisting acquiescence, than the fact of continuing to recognise Paris as a husband during the lifetime of Menelaus. It was the having changed her husband, not the living with a man who was not her husband; and hence we find that she was most kindly treated in Troy by that member of the royal house, namely Hector, who was himself of the highest moral tone.

[424] See Il. iii. 139. Od. iv. 259-61.

The offence of Paris, though also (except as to the mere restitution of plundered goods) a preterite offence, was more complex. He violated the laws of hospitality, as we find distinctly charged upon him by Menelaus[425]. He assumed the power of a husband over another man’s wife. This he gained by violence. Now, paradoxical as it may appear, yet perhaps this very ingredient of violence, which we look upon as even aggravating the case, and which in the view of the Greeks was the proper cause of the war, (for their anxiety was to avenge the forced journey and the groans of Helen,) may nevertheless have been also the very ingredient, which morally redeemed the character of the proceeding in the eyes of Greece. This it might do by lifting it out of the region of mere shame and baseness, into that class of manful wrongs, which they habitually regarded as matters to be redressed indeed by the strong hand, but never as merely infamous. Hence, when we find the Greeks full of disgust and of contempt towards Paris, it is only for the effeminacy and poltroonery of character which he showed in the war. His original crime was probably palliated to them by its seeming to involve something of manhood and of the spirit of adventure. So that we may thus have to seek the key to the inadequate sense among the Greeks of the guilt of Paris in that which, as we have seen, was the capital weakness of their morality; namely, its light estimation of crimes of violence, and its tendency to recognise their enterprise and daring as an actual set-off against whatever moral wrong they might involve.

[425] Il. iii. 354.

The chance legend of Hercules and Iphitus, in the Odyssey, affords the most valuable and pointed illustration of the great moral question[426] between Paris and Menelaus, which lies at the very foundation of the great structure of the Iliad. For in that case also, we seem to find an instance of abominable crime, which notwithstanding did not destroy the character of its perpetrator, nor prevent his attaining to Olympus; apparently for no other reason, than that it was a crime such as had probably required for its commission the exercise of masculine strength and daring.

[426] Vid. Od. xxi. 22-30.

There remained, however, even according to contemporary ideas, quite enough of guilt on the part of Paris. The abduction and corruption of a prince’s wife, combined with his personal cowardice, his constant levity and vacillation, and his reckless indifference to his country’s danger and affliction, amply suffice to warrant and account for Homer’s having represented him as a personage hated, hateful, and contemptible. But while the foregoing considerations may explain the feelings and language of the Greeks, otherwise inexplicable, there still remains enough of what at first sight is puzzling in the conduct, if not in the sentiments, of the Trojans.

~_The Trojan estimate of Paris._~

We ask ourselves, how could the Trojans endure, or how could Homer rationally represent them as enduring, to see the glorious wealth and state of Priam, with their own lives, families, and fortunes, put upon the die, rather than surrender Helen, or support Paris in withholding her? The people hate him: the wise Antenor opens in public assembly the proposal to restore Helen to the Greeks: Hector, the prince of greatest influence, almost the actual governor of Troy, knew his brother’s guilt, and reproached him with it[427]. How is it that, of all these elements and materials, none ever become effective?

[427] Il. iii. 46-57.

We must, I think, seek the answer to the questions partly in the difference of the moral tone, and the moral code, among Greeks and Trojans; partly in the difference of their political institutions.

We shall find it probable that, although the ostensible privileges of the people were not less, yet the same spirit of freedom did not pervade Trojan institutions; that their kings were followed with a more servile reverence by the people; that authority was of more avail, apart from rational persuasion; that amidst equally strong sentiments of connection in the family and the tribe, there was much less of moral firmness and decision than among the Greeks, and perhaps also a far less close adherence to the great laws of conjugal union, which had been violated by the act of Paris. Indeed it would appear from the allusion of Hector to a tunic of stone[428], that Paris was probably by law subject to stoning for the crime of adultery: a curious remnant, if the interpretation be a correct one, of the stern traits of pristine justice and severity, still remembered amidst a prevalent dissolution of the stricter moral ties.

[428] Il. iii. 57.

Although it results from our previous inquiries that the plebeian _substratum_, so to speak, of society, was perhaps nearly the same in both countries, yet the opinions of the masses would not then have the same substantiveness of character, nor so much independence of origin, as in times of Christianity, and of a more elaborate development of freedom and its main conditions. Then, much more than now, the first propelling power in the formation of public opinion would be from the high places of society: and in the higher sphere of the community, if not in the lower, Greece and Troy were, while ethnically allied, yet materially different as to moral tone. It is remarkable, that there is no Τὶς in Troy.

~_The Trojans more sensual and false._~

If we may trust the general effect of Homer’s representations, we shall conclude that the Trojans were more given to the vices of sensuality and falsehood, the Greeks, on the other hand, more inclined to crimes of violence: in fact, the latter bear the characteristics of a more masculine, and the former of a feebler, people. In the words of Mure, the contrast shadows forth ‘certain fundamental features of distinction, which have always been more or less observable, between the European and Asiatic races[429].’

[429] Greek Lit. vol. i. p. 339.

On looking back to the previous history of Troy, we find that Laomedon defrauded Neptune and Apollo of their stipulated hire: and Anchises surreptitiously obtained a breed of horses from the sires belonging to Laomedon, who was his relative[430]. The conditions of the bargain, under which Paris fought with Menelaus, are shamelessly and grossly violated. Pandarus, in the interval of truce, treacherously aims at and wounds Menelaus with an arrow; but no Trojan disapproves the deed. Euphorbus comes behind the disarmed Patroclus, and wounds him in the back; and even princely Hector, seeing him in this condition, then only comes up and dispatches him. That these were not isolated acts, we may judge from the circumstance that Menelaus, ever mild and fair in his sentiments, when he accepts the challenge of Paris, requires that Priam shall be sent for to conclude the arrangement, because his sons--and he makes no exceptions--are saucy and faithless, ὑπερφίαλοι καὶ ἄπιστοι[431]. This must, I think, be taken as characteristic of Troy; though he mildly proceeds to take off the edge of his reproach by a γνώμη about youth and age. But the most scandalous of all the Trojan proceedings seems to have been the effort made, though unsuccessfully, to have Menelaus put to death, when he came on a peaceful mission to demand the restoration of his wife[432].

[430] Il. v. 269.

[431] Il. iii. 105.

[432] Il. xi. 139.

Nothing of this admiration for fraud apart from force appears either in the conduct of the Greeks during the war, or in their prior history: and the passage respecting Autolycus, which, more than any other, appears to give countenance to knavery, takes his case out of the category of ordinary human action by placing it in immediate relation to a deity; so that it illustrates, not the national character as it was, but rather the form to which the growing corruptions of religion tended to bring it. Yet, while Homer gives to the Trojans alone the character of faithlessness, he everywhere, as we must see, vindicates the intellectual superiority of the Greeks in the stratagems of the war. And if, as I think is the case, I have succeeded in proving above that the doctrine of a future state was less lively and operative among the Trojans than among the Greeks, it is certainly instructive to view that deficiency in connection with the national want of all regard for truth. This difference teaches us, that the imprecations against perjurers, and the prospects of future punishment, were probably no contemptible auxiliaries in overcoming the temptations to present falseness, with which human life is everywhere beset.

As respects sensuality, the chief points of distinction are, that we find a particular relation to this subject running down the royal line of Troy; and that, whereas in Greece we are told occasionally of some beautiful woman who is seduced or ravished by a deity, in Troas we find the princes of the line are those to whose names the legends are attached. The inference is, that in the former case a veil was thrown over such subjects, but that in the latter no sense of shame required them to be kept secret. The cases that come before us are those of Tithonus, who is said to become the husband of Aurora; of Anchises, for whom Venus conceives a passion; and of Paris, on whom the same deity confers the evil gift of desire[433], and to whom she promises the most beautiful of women, the wife of Menelaus. All these are stories, which seem to have tended to the fame of the parties concerned on earth, and by no means to their discredit with the Immortals. And again, if, as some may take to be the case, we are to interpret the three νύμφαι[434] of Troas as local deities, how remarkable is the fact that Homer should thus describe them as tainted with passions, which nowhere appear among the corresponding order within the Greek circle! There, male deities alone are licentious. Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Persephone, whom alone we can call properly Greek goddesses of the period, have no such impure connection with mortals, as the goddesses both of the Trojan and of the Phœnician traditions.

[433] Il. xxiv. 30.

[434] Sup. p. 162.

We hear indeed of Orion[435], who was also the choice of Aurora: but we cannot tell whether he belonged more to the Trojan than to the Greek branch of the common stem. To the Greek race he cannot have been alien, as he is among Greek company in the Eleventh Odyssey: but then he is not there as an object of honour; he appears in a state of modified suffering, engaged in an endless chase[436]. We also find Iasion, probably in Crete, who is reported to have been loved by Ceres[437]: but he was immediately consumed for it by the thunderbolt of Jupiter. And so the detention of Ulysses by the beautiful and immortal Calypso is not in Homer a glory, but a calamity; and it allays none of the passionate longings of that hero for his wife and home.

[435] Od. v. 121.

[436] Od. xi. 572.

[437] Od. v. 128.

The marked contrast, which these groups of incidents present, is perhaps somewhat heightened by the enthusiastic observation of the Trojan Elders on the Wall in the Third Iliad[438]. Though susceptible of a good sense, yet, when the old age of the persons is taken into view, the passage seems to be in harmony with the Trojan character at large, rather than the Greek: and perhaps it may bear some analogy to the licentious glances of the Suitors[439]. If so, it is very significant that Homer should assign to the most venerable elders of Troy, what in Greece he does not think of imputing except to libertines, who are about to fall within the sweep of the divine vengeance.

[438] Il. iii. 154-60.

[439] Od. xviii. 160-212.

The difference between the races in this respect seems to have been deeply rooted, for there is evidently some corresponding difference between their views and usages in respect to marriage.

~_Trojan ideas and usages of marriage._~

The character of Priam, which has been so happily conceived by Mure[440], undoubtedly bears on its very surface the fault of over indulgence, along with the virtues of gentleness and great warmth and keenness of the affections. But it may be doubted, whether the poems warrant our treating him as individually dissolute. His life was a domestic life: but the family was one constructed according to Oriental manners. According to those manners, polygamy and wholesale concubinage were in some sense the privilege, in another view almost the duty, of his station; confined, as these abuses must necessarily be from their nature (and as they even now are in Turkey), to the highest ranks wherever they prevail. The household of Priam, notwithstanding his diversified relations to women, is as regularly organized as that of Ulysses: and when he speaks of his vast family, constituted as it was, he makes it known to Achilles, in a moment of agonizing sorrow, and evidently by way of lodging a claim for sympathy[441], though the effect upon modern ears may be somewhat ludicrous. ‘I had,’ he says, ‘fifty sons: nineteen from a single womb: the rest from various mothers in my palace.’ He might have added that he had also twelve daughters[442], whom he probably does not need to mention on the occasion, as in this department he was not a bereaved parent.

[440] Lit. Greece, vol. i. p. 341 and _seqq._

[441] Il. xxiv. 493-7.

[442] Il. vi. 248.

Hecuba, the mother of the nineteen, was evidently possessed of rights and a position peculiar to herself. The very passage last quoted distinguishes her from the γυναῖκες, and throughout the poem she moves alone[443].

[443] See particularly vi. 87 and seqq. 364 and seqq.

~_The family of Priam._~

Of the children of Priam we meet with a great number in various places of the poem.

There are, I think, five expressly mentioned as children of Hecuba.

Hector, Il. vi. 87. Helenus, ibid. Laodice, vi. 252. Deiphobus, Il. xxii. 333. Paris, (because Hecuba was ἑκυρὴ to Helen,) Il. xxiv.

Next, we have two children of Laothoe, daughter of Altes, lord of the Lelegians of Pedasus.

Lycaon, Il. xxi. 84. Polydorus, ibid. 91.

Next Gorgythion, son of Kastianeira, who came from Aisume, (Il. viii. 302).

Then we have, without mention of the mother,

Agathon } Pammon } Il. xxiv. Antiphonos } 249-51. Hippothoos } Dios } Cassandra, xxiv. 699. Mestor, xxiv. 257. Troilos, Il. xxiv. 257. Echemmon[444], v. 159. Chromios[444], ibid. Antiphos, iv. 490. xi. 101. Cebriones, viii. 318. Polites, ii. 791.

[444] Possibly one of these is νόθος, illegitimate: for they are together in the same chariot, as Antiphus and Isus were. One of the two would be the charioteer; who was commonly, though not always, an inferior.

And, lastly, illegitimate (νόθοι),

Isos, Il. xi. 101. Doryclos, xi. 489. Democoon, iv. 499. Medesicaste, xiii. 173.

The most important conclusion derivable from the comparison of the names thus collected is, that the children of Priam, and consequently their mothers, fell into three ranks:

1. The children of Hecuba.

2. The children of his other wives.

3. The children of concubines, or of chance attachments, who were, νόθοι, bastards.

The name νόθος with Homer, at least among the Greeks, ordinarily marks inferiority of condition. The mothers of the four νόθοι are never named. This may, however, be due to accident. At any rate Lycaon appears to have the full rank of a prince: he was once ransomed with the value of a hundred oxen, and, when again taken, he promises thrice as much; again, in describing himself as the half-brother of Hector, he avows nothing like spurious birth. The reference to him by Priam explains his position more clearly, and places it beyond doubt that Laothoe was recognised as a wife, for she brought Priam a large dowry[445]; and if her sons be dead, says the aged king, ‘it will be an affliction to me and to their mother.’ The language used in another passage about Polydorus is also conclusive[446]. He is described as the youngest and dearest of the sons of Priam, which evidently implies his being in the fullest sense a member of the family. Again, in the palace of Priam there were separate apartments, not for the nineteen only, but for the fifty. Thus they seem to have included all the three classes. So that it is probable enough that the state of illegitimacy did not draw the same clear line as to rank in Troy, which it drew in Greece.

[445] Il. xxii. 51, 3.

[446] Il. xx. 407. xxi. 79, 95.

Laothoe, mother of Lycaon and Polydorus, was a woman of princely rank: and when Lycaon says that Priam had many more besides her[447],

[447] Il. xxi. 88.

τοῦ δ’ ἔχε θυγατέρα Πρίαμος, πολλὰς δὲ καὶ ἄλλας,

he probably means many more of the same condition, wives and other well-born women, who formed part of his family.

So that Homer, in all likelihood, means to describe to us the threefold order,

1. Hecuba, as the principal queen.

2. Other wives, inferior but distinctly acknowledged.

3. Either concubines recognised as in a position wholly subordinate, or women who were in no permanent relation of any kind with Priam.

Beyond the case of Priam, we have slender means of ascertaining the usages and ideas of marriage among the Trojans. We have Andromache, wife of Hector; Helen, a sort of wife to Paris; Theano, wife to Antenor, and priestess of Minerva; who also took charge of and brought up his illegitimate son Pedæus[448]. The manner in which this is mentioned, as a favour to her husband, certainly shows that the mark of bastardy was not wholly overlooked, even in Troy. But, besides this Pedæus, we meet in different places of the Iliad no less than ten other sons of Antenor, all, I think, within the fighting age. This is not demonstrative, but it raises a presumption that some of them were probably the sons of other wives than Theano; who is twice described as Theano of the blooming cheeks, and can hardly therefore be supposed to have reached a very advanced period of life[449].

[448] Il. v. 71.

[449] Il. vii. 298. xi. 224.

But it is clear from the important case of Priam, even if it stands alone, that among the Trojans no shame attaches to the plurality of wives, or to having many illegitimate children, the birth of various mothers. It is possible that the manners of Troy, with regard to polygamy, were at this time the same (unless as to the reason given,) with those which Tacitus ascribes to the Germans of his own day: _Singulis uxoribus contenti sunt; exceptis admodum paucis, qui, non libidine, sed ob nobilitatem, plurimis nuptiis ambiuntur_[450]. We must add to this, that Paris, in detaining as his wife the spouse of another man still living, does an act of which we have no example, to which we find no approximation, in the Greek manners of the time. Its significance is increased, when we find that after his death she is given to Deiphobus: for this further union alters the individual trait into one which is national. Her Greek longings, as well as her remorse for the surrender of her honour to Paris, afford the strongest presumption that the arrangement could hardly have been adopted to meet her own inclination; and that it must have been made for her without her choice, as a matter of supposed family or political convenience.

[450] Tac. Germ. c. 18.

We seem therefore to be justified in concluding that, as singleness did not enter essentially into the Trojan idea of marriage, so neither did the bond with them either possess or even approximate to the character of indissolubility. The difference is very remarkable between the horror which attaches to the first crime of Ægisthus in Greece, the corruption of Clytemnestra, though it was analogous to the act of Paris, and the indifference of the Trojans to the offence committed by their own prince. We have no means indeed of knowing directly how Ægisthus was regarded by the Greeks around him, during the period which preceded the return and murder of Agamemnon. But we find that Jupiter, in the Olympian Court, distinctly describes his adultery as a substantive part of his sin[451];

[451] Od. i. 35.

ὡς καὶ νῦν Αἴγισθος ὑπέρμορον Ἀτρείδαο γῆμ’ ἄλοχον μνηστὴν, τὸν δ’ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα.

And I think we may rest assured, that Jupiter never would give utterance on Olympus to any rule of matrimonial morality, higher than that which was observed among the Greeks on earth.

So again, it was a specific part of the offence of the Suitors in the Odyssey, that they sought to wed Penelope while her husband was alive[452]; that is to say, before his death was ascertained, though it was really not extravagant to presume that it had occurred.

[452] Od. xxii. 37.

~_Stricter ideas among the Greeks._~

From both these instances, and more especially from the last, we must, I think, reasonably conclude that the moral code of Greece was far more adverse to the act of Paris, considered as an offence against matrimonial laws, than the corresponding rule in Troy.

In connection with this topic, we may notice, how Homer has overspread the Dardanid family, at the epoch of the war as well as in former times, with redundance of personal beauty. Of Paris we are prepared to hear it as a matter of course; but Hector has also the εἶδος ἀγητόν[453]; and, even in his old age, the ὄψις ἀγαθὴ of Priam was admired by Achilles[454]. Deiphobus again is called θεοείκελος and θεοειδὴς[455], and on two of Priam’s daughters severally does Homer bestow the praise of being each the most beautiful[456] among them all. With this was apparently connected, in many of them, effeminacy, as well as insolence and falseness of character; for we must suppose a groundwork of truth in the wrathful invective of their father, who describes his remaining sons as (Il. xxiv. 261.)

[453] Il. xxii. 370.

[454] Il. xxiv. 632.

[455] Il. xii. 94. and Od. iv. 276. See also the case of Euphorbus, Il. xvii. 51.

[456] The sense of ἄριστος in Homer, though emphatic, is not absolute.

ψευσταί τ’ ὀρχησταί τε, χοροιτυπίῃσιν ἄριστοι, ἀρνῶν ἠδ’ ἐρίφων ἐπιδήμιοι ἁρπακτῆρες.

An invective, which completely corresponds with the Greek belief concerning their general character in the Third Book[457]. The great Greek heroes are also beautiful; but their mere beauty, particularly in the Iliad, is for the most part kept carefully in the shade.

[457] Il. iii. 106.

~_Trojan polity less highly organized._~

We will turn now to the political institutions of Troy. Less advanced towards organization, and of a less firm tone than in Greece, they will help to explain how it could happen that a people should bear prolonged calamity and constant defeat, and could pass on to final ruin, for the wicked and wanton wrong of an individual prince.

It has been noticed, that the idea of hereditary succession was definite, as well as familiar, in Greece. In Troy it appears to have been less so. And this is certainly what we might expect from the recognition in any form, however qualified, of polygamy. It tends to confound the position of any one wife, although supposed supreme, with that of others; and in confounding the order of succession, as among the issue of different wives, it altogether breaks up the simplicity of the rule of primogeniture.

And again, if, as we shall presently see, the Trojan race had a less developed capacity for political organization, they would be less likely to establish a clear rule and practice of succession, which is a primary element of political order in well-governed countries.

The evidence as to the Asiatic rule of inheritance is, I admit, indirect and scanty: nor do I attempt to place what I have now to offer in a rank higher than that of probable conjecture.

1. Sarpedon was clearly leader of the Lycians, with some kind of precedence over Glaucus.

The general tenour of the poem clearly gives this impression. He speaks and acts as the person principally responsible[458]. But by birth he was inferior to Glaucus; for he was the grandson of Bellerophon only in the female line through Laodamia, while Glaucus stood alone in the male line through Hippolochus. I do not venture to rely much on the mere order of the names; and therefore I do not press the fact, which indeed is not needed for the argument, that it makes Laodamia junior to Hippolochus. It will be said that Sarpedon was in chief command, because he was of superior merit. But among the Greeks we have no instance in which superior merit gives preeminence as against birth. And the reputation of divine origin clearly could not put aside the prior right of succession.

[458] See Il. v. 482.

Again, both Sarpedon and Glaucus are both expressly called βασιλῆες[459], kings. Now, they were first cousins, and they belonged to the same kingdom. Hippolochus was perhaps still alive[460]; for he gave Glaucus a parting charge, and his death is not mentioned. In Greece we find the heir apparent called king, namely, Achilles: but the title is never given to more than one person standing in the line of succession. A possible explanation, I think, is, that the Lycian kingdom had been divided[461]: but if this be not so, then the use of the term seems to prove that in Asia all the children of the common ancestor stood, or might stand, upon the same footing by birth: and as if it was left to other causes, instead of to a definite and single rule, to determine who should succeed to the throne.

[459] Il. xii. 319.

[460] Il. vi. 207.

[461] Il. vi. 193.

2. In a former part of this work[462], I have stated reasons for supposing that Æneas represented the elder branch of the house of Dardanus. But, whether he did so or not, it is sufficiently clear from the Iliad that he was not without pretensions to the succession. The dignity of his father Anchises is marked by his remaining at Dardania, and not appearing in the court of Priam. Æneas habitually abstains from attending the meetings or assemblies for consultation, in which Priam, where they are civil, and Hector, where they are military, takes the lead. Achilles taunts him expressly with looking forward to the succession after the death of Priam, and with the anticipation of public lands which he was to get from the Trojans forthwith, if he could but slay the great Greek warrior. The particular succession, to which the taunt refers, is marked out; it is the dominion, not over the mere Dardanians, but over the Τρῶες ἱππόδαμοι[463]. In following down the genealogy, Æneas does not adhere to either of the two lines (from Ilus and Assaracus respectively) throughout, as senior, and therefore supreme; but, after putting the line of Ilus first in the earlier part of the chain, he places his own birth from Anchises before that of Hector from Priam.

[462] On the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, see Achæis, sect. ix.

[463] xx. 180.

Apart from the question _which_ was the older line, the effect of all these particulars, taken together, is to show an indeterminateness in the rule of succession, of which we have no indication among the Greeks. Even the incidental notice of the right of Priam to give it to Æneas, if he pleased, is as much without example in anything Homer tells us of the Greek manners, as the corresponding power conferred by the Parliament on the Crown in the Tudor period was at variance with the general analogies of English history and institutions.

~_Succession to the Throne of Priam._~

3. The third case before us is one in the family of Priam itself. It appears extremely doubtful whether we can, upon the authority of the poems, confidently mark out one of his sons as having been the eldest, or as standing on that account in the line of succession to the throne of Priam. The evidence, so far as it goes, seems rather to point to Paris; while the question lies between him and Hector.

Theocritus[464] indeed calls Hector the eldest of the twenty children of Hecuba. But this is an opinion, not an authority; and the number named shows it to be unlikely that he was thinking of historic accuracy, for Homer says, Hecuba had nineteen sons, while she had also several daughters[465].

[464] Idyll. xv. 139.

[465] Il. xxiv. 496. vi. 252.

There can be no doubt whatever, that Hector was the most conspicuous person, the most considerable champion of the city. He was charged exclusively with the direction of the war, and with the regulation of the supplies necessary to feed the force of Trojans and of allies. Polydamas, who so often takes a different view of affairs, and Sarpedon, when having a complaint to make, alike apply to him. Æneas is the only person who appears upon the field in the same rank with him, and he stands in a position wholly distinct from the family of Priam. As among the members of that family, there can be no doubt of the preeminence of Hector. He was, indeed, in actual exercise of the heaviest part of the duties of sovereignty. Æneas, in the genealogy, finishes the line of Assaracus with himself; and, to all appearance, as not less a matter of course, the line of Ilus with Hector[466]. Again, the name Astuanax, conferred by the people on his son, appears to show that the crown was to come to him. But all this in no degree answers the question, whether Hector held his position as probable king-designate by birth, or whether it was rather due to his personal qualities, and his great and unshared responsibilities and exertions. There are several circumstances, which may lead us to incline towards the latter alternative.

[466] Il. xx. 240.

(1.) When his parents and widow bewail his loss, it is the loss of their great defender and chief glory[467], not of one who by death had vacated the place of known successor to the sovereignty.

[467] Il. xxii. 56, 433, 507. xxiv. 29.

(2.) Had Hector been by birth assured of the seat of Priam, his right would have been sufficient cause for giving to his son at once the name of Astuanax. But this we are told the people did for the express reason, that Hector was the only real bulwark of Troy. It seems unlikely that in such a case his character as heir by birth would have been wholly passed by. The name, therefore, appears to suggest, that it was by proving himself the bulwark of the throne that Hector had become as it were the presumptive heir to it[468].

[468] Il. vi. 402, and xxii. 506.

When Hector takes his child in his arms, he prays, on the infant’s behalf, that he may become, like himself[469],

[469] Il. vi. 477.

ἀριπρεπέα Τρώεσσιν, ὧδε βίην τ’ ἀγαθὸν, καὶ Ἰλίου ἶφι ἀνάσσειν·

that is, that he may become distinguished and valiant, and may mightily rule over the Trojans. This seems to point to succession by virtue of personal qualities rather than of birth.

~_Paris most probably the eldest-born._~

There are also signs that Paris, and not Hector, may have been the eldest son of Priam, and may have had that feebler inchoate title to succession, which, in the day of necessity, his brother’s superior courage and character was to set aside.

This supposition accords better with the fact of his having had influence sufficient to cause the refusal of the original demand for the restitution of Helen, peacefully made by the Greek embassy; and the endurance of so much evil by his country on his behalf.

It explains the fact of his having had a palace to himself on Pergamus; a distinction which he shared with Hector only[470], for the married sons as well as daughters of Priam in general slept in apartments within the palace of their father[471]. And also it accords with his original expedition, which was evidently an affair of great pains and cost; and with his being plainly next in military rank to Hector among the sons of Priam.

[470] Il. vi. 313, 317, 370.

[471] Ibid. 242-50.

Further, it would explain the fact, otherwise very difficult to deal with, that alone among the children of Priam, Paris or Alexander is honoured with the significant title of βασιλεύς. Helenus is called ἄναξ, and Hector ποίμην λαῶν, but neither expression is of the same rank, or has a similar effect. This exclusive application of the term βασιλεὺς is a very strong piece of evidence, if, as I believe to be the case, it is nowhere else applied in the Iliad to a person thus selected, without indicating either the possession, or the hereditary expectancy of a throne.

And indeed, even if we could show that Homer had applied the name βασιλεὺς to two brothers in one family, the result would be the same, as far as the main argument is concerned, for there is no such pronounced mark of equality found among brothers in any of the royal families of Greece.

Again; in considering the law of succession among the Greeks, we have found four cases in the Catalogue, where contingents were placed under the command of two leaders seemingly co-ordinate; they are in every instance brothers, and the four dual commands occur in a total of twenty-nine. Or let us state the case in another form, so as to include the cases of Bœotia and Elis. Among sixteen Trojan contingents, there are but six where the chief authority is plainly in a single hand; out of twenty-nine Greek contingents, there are twenty-three, and, of the remaining six, four are the cases of brothers. This fact is material, as tending to show a looser and less effective military organization in the ranks of the Trojans and their allies, than in those of the Greeks; a circumstance which does not prove, but which harmonizes with, the hypothesis that they were wanting also in a defined order of succession to the seat of political power.

There are other reasons, immediately connected with Hector, for supposing that Homer intended to represent Paris as older than his brother[472]. Paris had been in manhood for at least twenty years, according to the letter of the poem, which must at least represent a long period of time. But Hector has one child only, a babe in arms, which is in itself a presumption of his being less advanced in life. Again, we must suppose his age probably to be not very different from that of Andromache. But it is quite plain that she was a young mother; since after the slaughter of Eetion, her father, Achilles shortly took a ransom for her mother, who thereupon went back to the house of her own father, Andromache’s maternal grandfather, and subsequently died there[473]. If then the grandfather of Andromache was alive when Thebe was taken, and Hector’s age was in due proportion to her own, he must in all likelihood have been younger than Paris. Again, it may be noticed that the term ἥβη is nowhere ascribed to Paris, but it is assigned to Hector at his death[474]. Notwithstanding its complimentary use for Ulysses in Od. viii. 135, that word has a certain leaning to early life. But we have a stronger, and indeed I think a conclusive argument in the speech of Andromache after his death[475];

[472] Il. xxiv. 765.

[473] Il. vi. 426-8.

[474] Il. xxii. 363.

[475] Il. xxiv. 725.

ἆνερ, ἀπ’ αἰῶνος νέος ὤλεο.

Thus he is distinctly called young. And we may consider it almost certain, under these circumstances, that Paris was the first-born son of Priam[476], but that his right of succession oozed away like water from a man’s hand.

[476] Possibly Horace meant to convey this opinion in the words _Quid Paris? ut salvus regnet, vivatque beatus, Cogi posse negat_. Epist. I. ii. 10.

The relations of race between the Trojans and the Greeks have already been examined, in connection with the great Homeric title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν[477]; under some difficulties, which resolve themselves into this, that Homer, on almost every subject so luminous a guide, is in all likelihood here, as it were, retained on the side of silence; and that we have no information, except such as he accidentally lets fall. But he was under no such preoccupation with regard to the institutions of Troy; so that, while he had no occasion for the same amount of detail as he has given us with reference to the Greeks, or the same minute accuracy as he has there observed, enough appears to supply a tolerably clear and consistent outline.

[477] Achæis, sect. ix. p. 492.

We have been accustomed too negligently to treat the Homeric term Troy, as if it designated only or properly a single city. But in Homer it much more commonly means a country, with the city sometimes called Troy for its capital, and containing many other cities beside it. The proper name, however, of the city in the poems is Ἴλιος, not Τροίη. Ilios is used above an hundred and twenty times in the Iliad and Odyssey, and always strictly means the city. The word Τροίη is used nearly ninety times, and in the great majority of cases it means the country. Often it has the epithets εὐρεῖα, ἐρίβωλος, ἐριβώλαξ, which speak for themselves. But more commonly it is without an epithet; and then too it very generally means the country. When the Greeks speak, for example, of the voyage Τροίηνδε, this is the natural sense, rather than to suppose it means a city not on the sea shore, and into which, till the end of the siege, they did not find their way at all[478].

[478] One only of the epithets of the word Ilios seems to point out that it may too mean the district. It is εὔπωλος, used Il. v. 551, and in four other places.

~_Priam and his dynasty in Troas._~

According to the genealogical tree in the Twentieth Iliad, Dardanus built Dardania among the mountains: his son Erichthonius became wealthy by possessions in the plain; and Tros, the son of Erichthonius, was the real founder of the Trojan state and name[479].

[479] Il. xx. 230.

Τρῶα δ’ Ἐριχθόνιος τέκετο Τρώεσσιν ἄνακτα.

Thus the name of Troes at that time covered the whole race. But the town of Ilios must, from its name, have been built not earlier than the time of Ilus, the son of Tros. And now the dynasty separates into two lines, as Assaracus, the brother of Ilus, continues to reign in Dardania. Thus the local existence of the Dardanian name is prolonged; for it is plain that the Dardanian throne was associated, at least in dignity, with a rival, and not a subordinate, sovereignty. Still it does not extend beyond the hills. It was over these that Æneas fled from Achilles[480]. But even the Dardanians did not wholly cease to be known by the appellation of Trojans; for not only does Homer frequently use the dominant name Troes for the entire force opposed to the Greeks, which is naming the whole from the principal part, but he also uses the word Troes to signify all that part of the force, which was under the house of Dardanus in either branch; and he distinguishes this portion from the rest of the force described under the name ἐπίκουροι, at the opening of the Trojan Catalogue:

[480] Ibid. 189.

ἔνθα τότε Τρῶές τε διέκριθεν, ἠδ’ ἐπίκουροι[481].

[481] Il. ii. 815. So likewise Il. vi. 111. xiii. 755. xvii. 14. xviii. 229.

This line is followed by an account of the whole force opposed to the Greeks, in sixteen divisions. Of these the eleven last bear each their own national name, beginning with the Pelasgians of Larissa, and ending with the Lycians; and they are under leaders, whom the whole course of the poem marks as not being Trojan, but independent. These eleven evidently were the ἐπίκουροι of ver. 815.

The five first contingents are introduced and commanded as follows:

1. Troes under Hector[482]:

[482] Ver. 816.

Τρωσὶ μὲν ἡγεμόνευε μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ.

2. Dardanians, under Æneas, with two of the (ten) sons of Antenor, Archelochus and Acamas, for his colleagues[483]:

[483] Ver. 819.

Δαρδανίων αὖτ’ ἦρχεν ἐῢς παῖς Ἀγχίσαο.

3. Trojans of Zelea, at the extreme spur of Ida, under Pandarus[484]:

[484] Ver. 824-6.

οἳ δὲ Ζέλειαν ἔναιον ὑπαὶ πόδα νείατον Ἴδης Τρῶες.

4. People of Adresteia and other towns, under Adrestus and Amphius, sons of Merops of Percote[485]:

[485] Ver. 828.

οἳ δ’ Ἀδρήστειάν τ’ εἶχον, κ. τ. λ.

5. People of Percote and other towns, under Asius:

οἳ δ’ ἄρα Περκώτην, κ. τ. λ.

And then begins the enumeration of the Allies, each under their respective national names.

It seems evident, that these five first-named contingents comprise the whole of the subjects of the race of Dardanus. First come the Trojans of the capital and its district, under Hector. Then, taking precedence on account of dignity, the Dardanian division of Æneas. In the third contingent the Poet returns to the name Troes, which, I think, plainly enough overrides the fourth and fifth, just as in the Greek Catalogue the name Pelasgic Argos[486] introduces and comprehends a number of contingents that follow, besides that of Achilles.

[486] ii. 681.

There are several reasons, which tend plainly to this conclusion. The sense of διέκριθεν (815) and the reference to the diversity of tongues spoken (804) almost require the division of the force between Troes and allies; it is also the most natural division. The fourth and fifth contingents are not indeed expressly called Troes, but this name, already given to the third, may include them. We must, I think, conclude that it does so, when we find clear proof that they were not independent national divisions: for the troops of Percote were in the fifth, but the sons of Percosian Merops command the fourth, a fact inexplicable if these were the forces of independent States, but natural enough if they were all under the supremacy of Priam and his house.

In the great battle of the Twelfth Iliad, the Trojans are πένταχα κοσμηθέντες (xii. 87). Sarpedon commands the allies with Glaucus and Asteropæus (v. 101), thus accounting for eleven of the sixteen divisions in the Catalogue. Æneas, with two sons of Antenor, commands the Dardanians, thus disposing of a twelfth. Again, Hector, with Polydamas and Cebriones, commands the πλεῖστοι καὶ ἄριστοι, evidently the division standing first in the Catalogue. This makes the number thirteen. The three remaining contingents of the Catalogue are

1. Zelean Troes, under Pandarus, (since slain,) Il. ii. 824-7.

2. Adresteans &c. under Adrestus and Amphius, (828-34,) both slain, Il. v. 612. vi. 63.

3. Percotians &c. under Asius (835-9).

These three remaining divisions of the Catalogue evidently reappear in the second and third of the five Divisions of the Twelfth Book. The Second is under Paris, with Alcathous, son-in-law of Antenor, and Agenor, one of his sons. In the command of the Third, Helenus and Deiphobus, two sons of Priam, are associated with, and even placed before, Asius. The position given in these divisions to the family of Priam appears to prove, that the troops forming them were among his proper subjects.

Again, the territorial juxtaposition of these districts, between Phrygia, which lay behind the mountains of Ida, on the one side, and the sea of Marmora with the Ægæan on the other, perfectly agrees with the description in the Twenty-fourth Iliad[487] of the range of country within which Priam had the preeminence in wealth, and in the vigour and influence of his sons. Strabo quotes this passage as direct evidence that Priam reigned over the country it describes, which is rather more than it actually states; and he says that Troas certainly reached to Adresteia and to Cyzicus.

[487] Il. xxiv. 543-5.

Again, we have various signs in different passages of a political connection between the towns we have named and the race of Priam. Melanippus, his nephew, was employed before the war at Percote[488]. Democoon[489], his illegitimate son, tended horses at Abydus; doubtless, says Strabo[490], the horses of his father.

[488] Il. xv. 548.

[489] Il. iv. 99.

[490] P. 585.

The partial inclusion of the Dardanians within the name of Troes is further shown by the verse[491],

[491] Il. xiii. 463.

Αἰνεία, Τρώων βουληφόρε·

and by the appeal of Helenus to Æneas and Hector jointly, as the persons chiefly responsible for the safety of the Troes and Lycians: the name Lycians being taken here, as in some other places[492], to denote most probably a race akin to and locally interspersed with the Trojans.

[492] See Il. iv. 197, 207. xv. 485.

But the Dardanians have more commonly their proper designation separately given them. It never includes the Troes. And we never find the two appellations, Troes and Dardans, covering the entire force. Whenever the Dardans are named with the Troes, there is also another word, either ἐπίκουροι, or Λύκιοι.

The word Troes, it is right to add, is sometimes confined strictly to the inhabitants of the city: but the occasions are rare, and perhaps always with contextual indications that such is the sense.

Another sign that Priam exercised a direct sovereignty over the territory which yielded the five contingents may perhaps be found in the fact, that we do not find any of his nephews in command of them. They were led by their local officers, while the brothers of Priam constituted a part of the community of Troy, and chiefly influenced the Assembly: and their sons, though apparently more considerable persons than most of those local officers in general, simply appear as acting under Hector without special command. The brothers of Priam are Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon. His nephews and other relatives are Dolops the son of Lampus; Melanippus the son of Hiketaon; Polydamas, Hyperenor, and Euphorbus, the sons of Panthous and his wife Phrontis.

Had the senior members of the family held local sovereignties, we should have found their sons in local commands. But we find only two sons of Antenor in command, as either colleagues or lieutenants of Æneas, over the Dardans, whom we have no reason to suppose they had any share in ruling.

Strabo, indeed, contends, that there are nine separate δυναστεῖαι immediately connected with Troy[493], besides the ἐπίκουροι. Of these states one he thinks was Lelegian, and was ruled over by Altes, father of Laothoe, one of Priam’s wives. Another by Munes, husband of Briseis. Another, Thebe, by Eetion, father of Andromache. Others he considers to be represented by Anchises and Pandarus: but this does not well agree with the structure of the Catalogue. He refers also to Lyrnessus and Pedasus; which are nowhere mentioned by Homer as furnishing contingents, but they had apparently been destroyed, as well as taken, by Achilles. He places several of the dynasties in cities thus destroyed: and they all, according to him, lay beyond the limits marked out in the Twenty-fourth Iliad.

[493] Strabo xiii. 7. p. 584.

This assemblage of facts appears to point to a very great diversity of relations subsisting between Priam, with his capital, and the states, cities, and races, of which we hear as arrayed on his side in the war. There are first the cities of Troas, or Troja proper, furnishing the five, or if we except Dardania four out of the five, first contingents of the Catalogue. Over these Priam was sovereign.

There are next the cities, so far as they can be traced, under the δυναστεῖαι mentioned by Strabo, such as Thebe, and the cities of Altes and Munes. These were probably in the same sort of relation to the sceptre of Priam, as the Greek states in general to that of Agamemnon.

Thirdly, there are the independent nations. Of these eleven named in the Catalogue; others are added as newly arrived in the Tenth Book[494], and further additions were subsequently made, such as the force under Memnon, and the Keteians under Eurypylus[495]. Nothing perhaps tends so much, as the powerful assistance lent to Priam by numerous and distant allies, to show how justly in substance Horace has described the Trojan war as the conflict between the Eastern and the Western world. The two confederacies, which then came into collision, between them absorbed the whole known world of Homer; and foreshadowed the great conflicts of later epochs.

[494] Il. x. 428-30.

[495] Od. xi. 519-22.

~_Political institutions of Troy._~

We may now proceed to consider the political institutions of the kingdom of Priam, which has thus loosely been defined.

The Βασιλεὺς of the Trojans is less clearly marked, than he is among the Greeks: for (as we shall find) they had no Βουλὴ, and therefore we have not the same opportunities of seeing the members of the highest class collected for separate action in the conduct of the war. Still, however, the name is distinctly given to the following persons on the Trojan side, and to no others.

1. Priam, Il. v. 464, xxiv. 630. 2. Paris, iv. 96. 3. Rhesus, x. 435. 4. Sarpedon, xii. 319. xvi. 660. 5. Glaucus, xii. 319.

Among the Trojans, as among the Greeks, it was the custom for the kings, as they descended into the vale of years, to devolve the more active duties of kingship on their children, and to retain, perhaps only for a time, those of a sedentary character. Hence Hector at least shares with Priam the management of Assemblies, as it is he[496] who dissolves that of the Second Book, and calls the military one of the Eighth. Hence, too, he speaks of himself as the person responsible for the burdens entailed by the war upon the Trojans. ‘I did not,’ he says to the allies, ‘bring you from your cities to multiply our numbers, but that you might defend for me the wives and children of Trojans; with this object in view, I exhaust the people for your pay and provisions[497].’ Hence we have Æneas leading the Dardanians, while his father Anchises nowhere appears, and, as it must be presumed, remains in his capital. Hence, while ten or twelve sons of Antenor bear arms for Troy, and two of them are the colleagues of Æneas in the command of the Dardanian contingent, their father appears among the δημογέροντες, who were chief speakers in the Assembly within the city. We do not know that Antenor was a king; more probably he held a lordship subordinate to Priam, in a relation somewhat more strict than that between Agamemnon and the Greek chieftains, and rather resembling that between Peleus and Menœtius; but the same custom of partial retirement seems to have prevailed in the case of subaltern rulers, as indeed it would be dictated by the same reasons of prudence and necessity.

[496] Il. ii. 808. viii. 489.

[497] Il. xvii. 223-6.

The βασιλήϊς τιμὴ of Troy was not, any more than those of Greece, an absolute despotism. In Troy, as in Greece, the public affairs were discussed and settled in the Assemblies, though with differences, which will be noticed, from the Greek manner of procedure. It was in the Assembly that Iris, disguised as Polites, addressed Priam and Hector to advise a review of the army[498]. And it was again in an Assembly that Antenor proposed, and that Paris refused, to give up Helen: whereupon Priam proposed the mission of Idæus to ask for a truce with a view to the burial of the dead, and the people assented to the proposal[499];

[498] Il. ii. 795.

[499] Il. vii. 379.

οἱ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ μάλα μὲν κλύον ἠδ’ ἐπίθοντο.

It was in the Assembly, too, that those earlier proposals had been made, of which the same personage procured the defeat by corruption.

Lastly, in the Eighth Book, Hector[500], as we have seen, holds a military ἀγορὴ of the army by the banks of the Scamander. At this he invites them to bivouac outside the Greek rampart, and they accept his proposal by acclamation. This Assembly on the field of battle is an argument _a fortiori_ to show, that ordinary affairs were referred among the Trojans to such meetings. We have, indeed, no detail of any Trojan Assembly except these three. But we have references to them, which give a similar view of their nature and functions. Idæus, on his return, announces to the Assembly that the truce is granted[501]. It is plain that the restoration of Helen was debated before, as well as during the war, in the Assembly of the people; because Agamemnon slays the two sons of Antimachus on the special ground that the father had there proposed that Menelaus, if not Ulysses, should be murdered[502], when they came as Envoys to Troy, for the purpose of demanding her restoration. This Antimachus was bribed by Paris, as the Poet tells us, to oppose the measure[503]. Again, Polydamas, in one of his speeches, charges Hector with having used him roughly, when he had ventured to differ from him in the Assemblies, upon the ground that he ought not, as a stranger to the Trojan δῆμος, to promote dissension among them[504].

[500] Il. viii. 489, 542.

[501] Il. vii. 414-7.

[502] Il. xi. 138.

[503] Ibid. 123.

[504] Il. xii. 211-14.

Trojan institutions do not, then, present to our view a greater elevation of the royal office. On the contrary, it is remarkable, that the title of δημογέρων, which Homer applies to the chief speakers of the Trojan Assembly, not being kings, is also used by him to describe Ilus the founder of the city[505]. It is, however, possible, perhaps even likely, that this title may be applied to Ilus as a younger son, if his brother Assaracus was the eldest and the heir[506].

[505] Il. xi. 37.

[506] Il. xx. 232.

But although it thus appears that monarchy was limited in Troy, as it was in Greece, and that public affairs were conducted in the assemblies of the people, the method and organization of these Assemblies was different in the two cases.

1. The guiding element in the Trojan government seems to have been age combined with rank; while among the Greeks, wisdom and valour were qualifications, not less available than age and rank.

2. The Greeks had the institution of a βουλὴ, which preceded and prepared matter for their Assemblies. The Trojans had not.

3. The Greeks, as we have seen, employed oratory as a main instrument of government; the Trojans did not.

4. The aged members of the Trojan royal family rendered their aid to the state, not as counsellors of Priam in private meetings, but only in the Assembly of the people.

A few words on each of these heads.

~_The greater weight of Age in Troy._~

1. The old men who appear on the wall with Priam, in the Third Book, are really old, and not merely titular or official γέροντες; they are[507],

[507] Il. iii. 150.

γήραϊ δὴ πολέμοιο πεπαυμένοι.

There are no less than seven of them, besides Priam. Three are his brothers, Lampus, Clytius, Hiketaon; the others probably relatives, we know not in what precise degree: Panthous, Thymœtes, Ucalegon, Antenor. They are called collectively the Τρώων ἡγήτορες, as well as the ἀγορηταὶ ἐσθλοί; and they were manifestly habitual speakers in the Assembly.

There is nothing in the Greek life of the Homeric poems that comes near this aggregation of aged men. Now we have no evidence, that their being thus collected was in any degree owing to the war. Theano, wife of Antenor, was priestess of Minerva in Troy; which makes it most probable that he resided there habitually, and not only on account of the war.

The only group at all approaching this is, where we see Menœtius and Phœnix at the Court of Peleus; but we cannot say whether this was a permanent arrangement. Phœnix, as we know, was lord of the Dolopians, and if so, could not have been a standing assistant at the court of Peleus; we do not know that the Trojan elders held any such local position apart from Troy, even in any single case; and on the other hand, we have no knowledge whether Phœnix and Menœtius, even when at the court of Peleus, took any share in the government of his immediate dominions. The name γέροντες, as usually employed among the Greeks to describe a class, had no necessary relation to age whatever.

Of the respect paid to age in Greece, we have abundant evidence; but we find nothing like this gathering together of a body of old men to be the ordinary guides of popular deliberation in the Assemblies.

It is true that we hear by implication of both Hector and Polydamas, who were not old, as taking part in affairs: but all the indications in the Iliad go to show that Hector’s share in the government of Troy, though not limited to the mere conduct of the forces in the field, yet arose out of his military office, and probably touched only such matters as were connected with the management of the war. Polydamas evidently was treated as more or less an interloper.

But even if it were otherwise, and if the middle-aged men of high station and ability took a prominent part in affairs, the existence of this grey-headed company, with apparently the principal statesmanship of Troy in their hands, forms a marked difference from Greek manners. For in Greece at peace we have nothing akin to it; while in Greece at war upon the plain of Troy, we see the young Diomed as well as the old Nestor, and the rather young Achilles and Ajax, as well as the elderly Idomeneus, associated with the middle-aged men in the government of the army and its operations.

~_The absence of a Βουλὴ in Troy._~

First then, I think it plain that the Trojans had no βουλὴ, for the following reasons:

1. That although we often hear of deliberations and decisions taken on the part of the Trojans, and we have instances enough of their holding assemblies of the people, yet we never find mention of a βουλὴ, or Council, in connection with them.

2. In the Second Book, Homer describes the Trojan ἀγορὴ thus (Il. ii. 788, 9):

οἱ δ’ ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον ἐπὶ Πριάμοιο θύρῃσιν πάντες ὁμηγερέες, ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες.

This latter line is only to be accounted for by the supposition, that Homer meant to describe a difference between the usages of the Trojans, and those of the Greeks; whose γέροντες were recognised as members of the βουλὴ, even when in the Assemblies.

Of the separate place of the Greek γέροντες in the Assemblies, we have conclusive proof from the Shield of Achilles (xviii. 497, 503):

λαοὶ δ’ εἰν ἀγορῇ ἔσαν ἄθροοι·

and afterwards,

οἱ δὲ γέροντες εἵατ’ ἐπὶ ξεστοῖσι λίθοις, ἱερῷ ἐνὶ κύκλῳ.

And again, where the Ithacan γέροντες make way for Telemachus, as he passes to the chair of his father.

But in Troy the γέροντες (such is probably the meaning of Il. ii. 789.) have no separate function: the young and the old meet together: while in Greece, besides distinct places in the Assembly, the γέροντες had an exclusive function in the βουλὴ, at which they met separately from the young.

3. It would appear that the ἀγορὴ was with the Trojans not occasional, as with the Greeks, for great questions, but habitual. And this agrees with the description in Il. ii. 788. For when Jupiter sends Iris to Troy, she finds the people in Assembly, but apparently for no special purpose, as she immediately, in the likeness of Polites, begins to address Priam, and we do not hear of any other business. So, when Idæus came back from the Greeks, he found the Trojan Assembly still sitting. All this looks as if the entire business of administering the government rested with that body only.

I draw a similar inference from the remarkable expression in Il. ii. 788, ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον. This seems to express that there was a standing, probably a daily, assembly of the Trojans, not formally summoned, and open to all comers, which acted as the governing body for the state. The line would then mean, not simply ‘the Trojans were holding an assembly,’ but ‘the Trojans were holding their assembly as usual.’

The names βουλευτὴς and ἀγορητὴς appear to have been merely descriptive, and not titular. Both are applied to the Trojan elders.

And so βουλαὶ, βουλεύειν, βουληφόροι, are constantly used without any, so to speak, official meaning. In Il. x. 147, the expression βουλὰς βουλεύειν can hardly mean ‘to attend the βουλὴ,’ for the singular number would be the proper term for the βουλὴ specially convoked: and I interpret it as meaning, to attend at or to hold the usual council. This is among the Greeks. Among the Trojans, in Il. x. 415-17, Dolon says,

Ἕκτωρ μὲν μετὰ τοῖσιν, ὅσοι βουληφόροι εἰσὶν, βουλὰς βουλεύει θείου παρὰ σήματι Ἴλου, νόσφιν ἀπὸ φλοίσβου.

Now the word βουληφόρος is applied, Il. xii. 414, to Sarpedon, as well as in xiii. 463 and elsewhere to Æneas. Neither were among the γέροντες βουλευταί. But further, it is applied, Od. ix. 112, to the ἀγορὴ itself:

τοῖσιν δ’ οὔτ’ ἀγοραὶ βουληφόροι, οὔτε θέμιστες

And therefore the word, though it means councillor in a general sense, does not mean officially member of a βουλὴ, as opposed to an ἀγορὴ or Assembly.

The phrase βουλὰς βουλεύει, in the passage Il. x. 415-17, does not oppose, but supports what has now been said. It is quite plain that this of Hector’s was a small military meeting, or council of war, just as in viii. 489 he held an ἀγορὴ, or assembly of the army, both Trojans and allies; it was not a meeting of a βουλὴ of Troy, because it was held in the field, far from the city, and without any of the Elders, who were the great ἀγορηταὶ and βουλευταὶ of Troy; for Hector had already arranged (Il. viii. 517-19) that the old men should remain in the city, to defend the walls from any night attack: most of all however because, as we hear of no βουλὴ before the military Assembly in the Eighth Book, so we hear of no Assembly following the meeting for deliberation in the Tenth. Generals in modern times hold councils of war: but no parallel can be drawn between them, and Councils for dispatching the affairs of a State.

As we never have occasion to become acquainted with Trojan politics in peace, we can only argue the case as to the nonexistence of a council from the state of war. But in Greece, it will be remembered, both war and peace present their cases of the use of this institution, as one regularly established, and apparently invested with both a deliberative and an executive character.

~_The greater weight of oratory in Greece._~

It is next to be inquired, whether the Trojans, like the Greeks, employed eloquence, detailed argument as furnishing, and the other parts of oratory, a main instrument of government.

I think it is plain, that the decisions of their Assemblies were governed rather by simple authority; by the ἀναποδεικταὶ φάσεις, the simple declarations, of persons of weight.

The report of the re-assembled ἀγορὴ of the Greeks in the Second Book begins with the 211th line, and ends with the 398th: occupying 188 lines. But the Trojan ἀγορὴ of the same Book is despatched in twenty-one lines (788-808).

A more remarkable example is afforded by the second Trojan Assembly (Il. vii. 345-379). For this ἀγορὴ is described as δεινὴ, τετρηχυῖα; and well it might be, in circumstances so arduous. The Elders in the Third Book were of opinion that, beautiful as Helen was, it was better to restore her, than to continue the sufferings and dangers of the war. Accordingly, Antenor urged in this Assembly that she should be restored, together with the plundered property. He referred also to the recent breach of a sworn covenant on the Trojan side, and said no good could come of it. This he effects in a speech of six lines; the first of which is the mere vocative address to the Assembly, and the last is marked as surplusage with the _obelos_ (348-53).

Paris, the person mainly concerned, replies. He does not address himself to the Assembly at all, but to Antenor: and he disposes of the subject of debate in eight lines (357-64). Four of them are given to the announcement of his intentions, and four to abuse of Antenor.

It was impossible to conceive a subject more likely to cause debate; and excitement we see there was, but after the speech of Paris, nothing more was said about Helen, either for or against the restoration. Priam then arose, and in a speech of eleven lines (368-78) laid down another plan of proceeding, namely, by a message to the Greeks for a truce with a view to funeral obsequies, which was at once accepted.

~_Oratory of greater weight in Greece._~

Nowhere, in short, among the Trojans have we any example, I do not say of multiplied or lengthened speeches, but of real reasoning and deliberation in the conduct of business: though Glaucus tells his story at great length to Diomed on the field of battle (Il. vi. 145-211), and Æneas to Achilles (Il. xx. 199-258) nearly equals him. Indeed, it may almost be said, the Trojans are long speakers when in battle, and short when in debate: the Greeks copious in debate, but very succinct in battle.

Again, we may observe the different descriptions which the Poet has given of the elocution of Nestor, and of that of the Trojan δημογέροντες in their respective ἀγοραί. To Nestor (Il. i. 248, 9) he seems to assign a soft continuous flow indefinitely prolonged. Theirs he describes as resembling the ὄπα λειριόεσσαν of grasshoppers (Il. iii. 151, 2), a clear trill or thread of voice, not only without any particular idea of length attached to it, but apparently meant to recall a sharp intermittent chirp. Yet there is an odd proof that to Priam at least, as one of these old men, there was attached, by the younger ones, the imputation of favouring either too many or else too long orations. For, in the ἀγορὴ of the Second Book, Iris in the character of Polites, though there is no account of what had preceded her arrival, objurgates Priam as both then encouraging what may be called indiscriminate speaking, and as having formally, before the war, been addicted to the same practice[508];

[508] Il. ii. 796.

ὦ γέρον, αἰεί τοι μῦθοι φίλοι ἄκριτοί εἰσιν, ὥς ποτ’ ἐπ’ εἰρήνης.

Upon the whole, I think it must have been Homer’s intention, while representing both Trojans and Greeks as carrying on public affairs in their public Assemblies, to draw a very marked distinction between them in regard to the use of that powerful engine of oratory, which played so conspicuous a part in the former, as well as in the later stages of the Greek history.

And it is important, that nowhere does a sentiment escape the lips of a Trojan chieftain, which indicates a consciousness of the political value of oratory. Ulysses, in a state of peace, describes before the Phæacians beauty and eloquence as the noblest gifts of the gods to man[509]: and employs ἔπεα and νόος, eloquence and intelligence, as convertible terms. Polydamas, when rebuking Hector in the Thirteenth Iliad, delivers a passage in many respects strikingly analogous. He speaks, however, of νόος and βουλὴ, mind and counsel[510]; he does not drop a word relating to public speech or to eloquence as instruments of government, though he describes the mental quality and the habit which he names as of priceless value for the benefit of States.

[509] Od. viii. 170, 5, 7.

[510] Il. xiii. 726-34.

The phrases applied to the Trojan elders appear to indicate, that they derived their political character from taking a prominent part in the Assembly, and from that alone. For the word δημογέρων indicates an elder acting in and among the δῆμος, or people. And this name the Poet uses but twice: once in Il. iii. 149, where he enumerates the eight persons, who bore that character in Troy; and once with reference to Ilus (Il. ii. 372). Homer nowhere employs this term for any of the Greeks.

The want of the βουλὴ shows us, that there was no balance of forces in the Trojan polity, less security against precipitate action, more liability to high-handed insolence and oppression of the people, and, on the other hand, unless the danger had been neutralized by mildness or lethargy of character, likewise in all likelihood to revolutionary change.

~_Trojans less gifted with self-command._~

Again, on the Trojan side we do not find the silence and self-possession of the Greeks. After the enumeration in the Third Book, at its opening, we find that the Trojans marched with din and buzz:

Τρῶες μὲν κλαγγῇ τ’ ἐνοπῇ τ’ ἴσαν, ὄρνιθες ὥς·

but as to the Greeks, we are told that they marched in profound silence: and the Poet skilfully heightens the contrast by mentioning that they breathed forth what they did not articulate, and that they were steeled with firm resolution to stand by one another[511]:

[511] Il. iii. 2, 8.

οἱ δ’ ἄρ’ ἴσαν σιγῇ μένεα πνείοντες Ἀχαιοὶ, ἐν θυμῷ μεμαῶτες ἀλεξέμεν ἀλλήλοισιν.

We are finally told that each leader indeed gave the word to his men, while all beside were mute[512]:

[512] Il. iv. 429.

οἱ δ’ ἄλλοι ἀκὴν ἴσαν, οὐδέ κε φαίης τόσσον λαὸν ἕπεσθαι ἔχοντ’ ἐν στήθεσιν αὐδὴν, σιγῇ δειδιότες σημάντορας·

but from the Trojans there arose a sound, like that of sheep bleating for their lambs[513]:

[513] Ibid. 436.

ὣς Τρώων ἀλαλητὸς ἀνὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν ὀρώρει.

And, again, we find the relation of the burning of the dead given with the usual consistency of the Poet. The men of the two armies met: and on both sides they shed tears as they lifted their lifeless comrades on the wagons: but, he adds, there was silence among the Trojans,

οὐδ’ εἴα κλαίειν Πρίαμος μέγας·

and it was because the king had felt that there would be indecency in a noisy show of sorrow: while the Greeks needed not the injunction (Il. vii. 426-32), from their spontaneous self-command.

When the Poet speaks of the Trojan Assembly in the Seventh Book as δεινὴ τετρηχυῖα, he evidently means to describe an excitement tending to disorder: and one contrasted in a remarkable manner with the discipline of the Greeks, who were summoned to meet silently in the night, that they might not, in gathering, arouse the enemy outside the ramparts. Even in their respective modes of expressing approbation, Homer makes a shade of difference. When the Greeks applaud, it is ἐπίαχον υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, or what we call loud or vehement cheering: but when the Trojans, it is ἐπὶ δὲ Τρῶες κελάδησαν, which signifies a more miscellaneous and tumultuous noise.

In short, it would appear to be the intention of Homer to represent the Greeks as possessed of a higher intelligence throughout. In the Odyssey, we find that Ulysses made his way into Troy disguised as a beggar, communicated with Helen, duly informed himself (κατὰ δὲ φρόνιν ἤγαγε πολλήν[514]), and contrived to despatch certain of the Trojans before he departed. In the Iliad we are supplied with abundant instances of the superior management of the Greeks, and likewise of their auxiliary gods, in comparison with those of the Trojans. Juno outwits Venus in obtaining from her the cestus, and then proceeds to outwit Jupiter in the use of it. Minerva, on observing that the Greeks are losing, (Il. vii. 17) betakes herself to Troy, where Apollo proposes just what she wants, namely, a cessation of the general engagement, with a view to a personal encounter between Hector and some chosen chieftain: she immediately adopts the plan; and he causes it to be executed through Helenus. It both stops the general havoc among the Greeks, and redounds greatly to the honour of their champion Ajax. At the end of the day, however, Nestor suggests to the Greek chiefs, on account of their heavy losses (Il. vii. 328), that they should, on the occasion of raising a mound over their dead, likewise dig and fortify a trench, which might serve to defend the ships and camp. In the mean time the Trojans are made to meet; and they send to propose the very measure, namely, an armistice for funeral rites, which the Greeks desire, in order, under cover of it, to fortify themselves (Il. vii. 368-97). And this accordingly Agamemnon is enabled to grant as a sort of favour to the Trojans (Il. vii. 408):

[514] Od. iv. 258.

ἀμφὶ δὲ νεκροῖσιν κατακαιέμεν οὔτι μεγαίρω.

This superior intelligence is probably meant to be figured by the exchange of arms between Glaucus and Diomed. And, again, when Hector attempts anything in the nature of a stratagem, as the mission of Dolon by night, it is only that he may fall into the hands of Diomed and Ulysses. But there does not appear to be in any of these cases a violation of oath, compact, or any absolute rule of equity by the Greeks.

Of all these traits, however, it may be said, that they are of no value as evidence, if taken by themselves. They are means which would obviously occur to the Poet, zealous for his own nation. It is their accordance with other indications, apparently undesigned, which warrants our relying upon them as real testimonies, available for an historic purpose.

~_Difference in pursuits of high-born youth._~

Although, on the whole, we seem to have the signs of greater wealth among the Trojans than the Greeks, yet in certain points also their usages were more primitive and simple. Thus we find the youths of the house of Nestor immediately about his person; and Patroclus, as well as Achilles, was apparently brought up at the court of Peleus. Again, the youthful Nestor travels into Thessaly for a campaign: Ulysses goes to hunt at the Court of his grandfather Autolycus. The Ithacan Suitors employ themselves in manly games. But we frequently come upon passages where we are incidentally informed, that the princes of the house of Dardanus were occupied in rustic employments. Thus Melanippus, son of Hiketaon, and cousin of Hector, who was residing in Priam’s palace, and treated as one of his children, had before the war tended oxen in Percote[515]. Æneas, the only son and heir of Anchises, had been similarly occupied among or near the hills, at the time when he had a narrow escape from capture by Achilles[516]. Lycaon, son of Priam, was cutting the branches of the wild fig for the fellies of chariot-wheels when Achilles took him for the second time: on the first occasion, he had been at work in a vineyard[517]. Antiphos and Isos, sons of Priam, had been captured by Achilles whilst they were acting as shepherds[518]. Anchises was acting as a herdsman, when he formed his connection with Venus[519]. The name of Boucolion, an illegitimate son of Laomedon, seems to indicate that he was bred for the like occupation[520].

[515] Il. xv. 546-51.

[516] Il. xx. 188.

[517] Il. xxi. 37. 77.

[518] Il. xi. 105.

[519] Il. ii. 821. v. 313.

[520] Il. vi. 25.

From the force, variety, and extreme delicacy of his uses of the word, it is evident that Homer set very great store by the sentiment which is generally expressed through the word αἰδώς, and which ranges through all the varieties of shame, honour, modesty, and reverence. Though a minute, it is a remarkable circumstance, that he confines the application of this term to the Greeks; except, I think, in one passage, where he bestows it upon his particular favourites the Lycians[521], and a single other one, where Æneas[522] employs it under the immediate inspiration of Apollo, with another sense, in an appeal to Hector and his brother chiefs, not to the soldiery at large.

[521] Il. xvi. 422.

[522] Il. xvii. 336.

With the Greeks it supplies the staple of military exhortation[523] from the chiefs to the army; Αἰδὼς, Ἀργεῖοι.

[523] Il. v. 787. viii. 228. _et alibi_.

But quite a different form of speech is uniformly addressed to the Trojans proper: it is

ἀνέρες ἔστε, φίλοι, μνήσασθε δὲ θουρίδος ἀλκῆς,

which is below the other, and appeals to a less peculiar and refined frame of intelligence and of sentiment.

~_Summary of differences._~

Whatever may be thought of the degree of detail into which (guided as I think by the text) I have ventured to carry this discussion, and of the particularity of some of the inferences that have been drawn, I venture to hope few will quit the subject without the conviction that Homer has worked with the purpose and precision which are his wont, in the diversities which mark the general outline of his Greeks and his Trojans, and of the institutions of each respectively; and that he has not altogether withheld from his national portraits the care, which he is admitted to have applied to his individual characters on both sides with such extraordinary success. If we look to the institutions of the two countries, although the comparison is diversified, we must upon the whole concede to the Greeks, that they had laid more firmly than their adversaries those great corner stones of human society, which are named in their language, θέμις, ὅρκος, and γάμος. In the polity of Troy we find more scope for impulse, less for deliberation and persuasion; more weight given to those elements of authority which do not depend on our free will and intelligence, less to those which do; less of organization and of diversity, less firmness and tenacity of tissue, in the structure of the community. We are told of no φῦλα and no φρῆτραι, no intermediate ranks of officers in the army; no order of nobles or proprietors, such as that which furnished the Suitors of Ithaca. There are, in short, fewer secondary eminences; it is a state of things, more resembling the dead level of the present Oriental communities subject to a despotic throne, though such was not the throne of Priam. Among the people themselves, there is more of religious observance and apparatus, but not more of morality: less tendency indeed to crimes of violence and turbulence, but also less of truth, of honour, above all of personal self-mastery and self-command. The Greeks never would have produced the Paris of the Iliad; for on behalf of no such dastard would they have been induced to bleed. But if they had engendered such a creature, they would not have paid the penalty: for man in the Trojan type would not have had the energy to recover it from the warrior-statesmen of the Achæan race, and under no circumstances could the really extravagant sentiment put by Virgil into the mouth of Diomed[524] have been fulfilled:

[524] Æn. xi. 286.

ultro Inachias venisset ad urbes Dardanus, et versis lugeret Græcia fatis.

III. THALASSA.

THE OUTER GEOGRAPHY OF THE ODYSSEY.

The legendary Geography of the Odyssey may in one sense be compared with that of Ariosto, and that of Bojardo. I should be the first, indeed, to admit that a disquisition, having for its object to establish the delimitation of the Geography of either of those poets, and to fix its relation to the actual surface of the earth, was but labour thrown away. For two thousand years, however, perhaps for more, the Geography of the Odyssey has been a subject of interest and of controversy. In entering upon that field I ask myself, why the case of Homer is in this respect so different from that of the great Italian romancers? It is not only that, great as they were, we are dealing with one before whom their greatness dwindles into comparative littleness. Nor is it only, though it seems to be in part, because the adventures of Ulysses are, or appear to be, much more strictly bound up with place, than those of Orlando, Rinaldo, or Ruggiero. The difference, I think, mainly lies in this, that an intense earnestness accompanies Homer every where, even through his wild and noble romance. Cooped up as he was within a narrow and local circle--for such it was, though it was for so many centuries the centre of the whole greatness of the world--here is his effort to pass the horizon ‘by strength of thought;’ to pierce the mist; to shape the dim, confused, and conflicting reports he could pick up, according to the best of his knowledge and belief, into land and sea; to people its habitable spots with the scanty material he could command, every where enlarged, made good, and adorned out of the wealth of his vigorous imagination; and to form, by effort of the brain, for the first time as far as we know in the history of our race, an idea of a certain configuration for the surface of the Earth.

Hence, perhaps, may have flowed the potency of the charm, which has attended the subject of Homer’s Outer Geography. The subject has, however, in my belief, its utility too. It is rarely otherwise than well worth while to trace even the erroneous thoughts of powerful minds. But, moreover, in the present instance, I apprehend we can learn, through the Outer Geography of Homer, important and interesting matter of history, which is not to be learned from any other source. For the Poet has embedded into his imaginative scheme a multitude of real geographical and physical traditions; and by means of these, upon comparing them with their proper originals, we can judge with tolerable accuracy what were the limits of human enterprise on the face of earth in the heroic age.

The question before us is, what map of the earth did Homer shape in his own mind, that he might adjust to it the voyages and tours of his heroes Menelaus and Ulysses, particularly the latter? And in order to a legitimate inquiry the first step to be taken is negative. Do not let us engage in the vain attempt to construct the Geography of the Odyssey upon the basis of the actual distribution of the earth’s surface. Such a process can lead to no satisfactory result. Whatever materials Homer may have obtained to assist him, we must consider as so many atoms; I speak of course, as to all that lay beyond the narrow sphere of his Greek knowledge and experience. He had no adequate means of placing the different parts of the accounts which reached him in their true geographical relations to one another. The outer world was for him broken up into fragments, and these fragments were rearranged at his pleasure, with the aid of such lights only, as his limited physical knowledge could afford him.

~_Principal heads of the inquiry._~

Assuming for the present that the Phœnicianism of the Outer Geography has been on the whole sufficiently proved, I proceed to a more exact examination of the subject itself; and I propose to inquire into the following questions.

1. Has Homer two modes of dealing with the subject of locality, considered at large? if so, can it be shown that he applies them to two distinct geographical regions; one the circumscribed central tract of land and sea within which he lived, the other a wider and larger zone, which lay beyond it in all directions; and can a line be drawn with reasonable confidence and precision between these geographical regions accordingly?

2. If it be established that Homer has a system of Outer Geography, severed by a sufficiently-defined barrier from his Inner Geography, then are there any, and if so what, keys, or leading ideas of local arrangement for the former scheme, which, themselves derived from the evidence of his text, should be used for the adjustment of its details?

3. Under the system thus ascertained, what was the route of Menelaus, and more especially of Ulysses, as these presented themselves to the mind of Homer?

I set out from the proposition, which, as I conceive, rests upon universal consent, that within a certain sphere the poems may be considered as a record of experimental geography; and one sometimes carried down into detail with so much of accuracy, that it embraces even the miniature of that branch of knowledge, to which we usually give the name of topography.

By way of example for the former, I should say that when Homer describes the Bœotian towns, when he measures the distance over the Ægean, nay, when he makes Ulysses represent that he floated in ten days from some point near Crete to the Thesprotian coast, he is a geographer. Again, in his variously estimated account of the interior of Ithaca, he is a topographer. He is the same on the whole, though probably with greater license, when he is dealing with the Plain of Troy.

~_The two spheres of Geography._~

In speaking of the experimental geography of Homer, of course I do not intend to imply that he had, even within his narrow sphere, the means that later science has afforded of establishing situations and distances with absolute precision. He could only proceed by the far ruder testimony of the senses, trained in the school of experience. Neither do I mean that the experience was in every case his own, though to a great extent his geographical information was probably original, and acquired by him principally in the exercise of his profession as an itinerating Bard. But by the experimental and real geography of Homer, I mean these two things; first, that the Poet believed himself to be describing _pro tanto_ points upon the earth’s surface as they actually were; secondly, that his means of information were for practical purposes adequate. The evidence of the passage containing the simile of the Thought (Il. xv. 580) would suffice, were there none other, to show that he was himself a traveller; he also lived among a people already accustomed to travel, and familiar with the navigation of a certain portion of the earth’s surface. In a former part of this work I have given several instances to illustrate the disposition of the early Greeks with respect to travel[525]. A people of habits like theirs was well qualified to supply a practical system of geography for the whole sphere with which it was habitually conversant.

[525] Achæis, or Ethnology; sect. vii. p. 336.

But the boldness and maturity of navigation may be measured pretty nearly by the length of its voyages. The geographical particulars of the Wanderings, however dislocated and distorted, show us that the people who had supplied them had acquired a considerable acquaintance with all the waters within, and probably also, nay, I should be disposed to say certainly, some that were without, the Straits of Gibraltar. But in all the poems of Homer we find the traces of Greek knowledge and resort become fainter and fainter, as we pass beyond certain points. On the Greek Peninsula, to the south of the Ambracian gulf on the west and of Mount Olympus on the east, we have the signs of a constant intercourse to and fro. The same tokens extend to the islands immediately surrounding it, and reaching at least as far as Crete. Indeed, apart from particular signs, we may say that, without familiar and frequent intercourse among the members that composed it, the empire of Agamemnon could not have subsisted.

But, at certain distances, the mode of geographical handling becomes faint, mistrustful, and indistinct. Distances are misstated, or cease to be stated at all. The names of countries are massed together in such a way as to show that the Poet had no idea of a particular mode of juxtaposition for them. Topographical or local features, of a character such as to identify a description with some particular place or region as its prototype in nature, are erroneously transposed to some situation which, from general indications, we can see must be upon a different and perhaps distant part of the surface of the globe. Again, by ceasing to define distances and directions, he shows from time to time that he has lost confidence in his own collocation, that he is not willing to challenge a comparison with actual nature, and that, from want of accurate knowledge, he feels he must seek some degree of shelter in generalities.

It is obvious that, under the circumstances as they have thus far been delineated, the geography of the poems, with a centre fixed for it somewhere in Greece, say at Olympus or Mycenæ, might be first of all divided into three zones, ranging around that centre. The first and innermost would be that of the familiar knowledge and experience of his countrymen. The second would be that of their rare and occasional resort. The third would be a region wholly unknown to them, and with respect to which they were wholly dependent on foreign, that is on Phœnician, report; much as a Roman, five hundred years ago, would practically depend upon the reports of Venetians and Genoese mariners for all or nearly all his ultra-marine knowledge.

Now, though we may not be able to mark positively at every point of the compass the particular spot at which we step from the first zone to the second, and from the second to the third, yet there is enough of the second zone discernible to make it serve for an effectual delimitation between the first and the third; between the region of experience and that of marvel; of foreign, arbitrary, unchecked, and semifabulous report. Just as we are unable to fix the moment at which night passes into dawn, and dawn into day; but yet the dawn of morning, and the twilight of evening are themselves the lines which broadly separate between the day and the night, lying respectively at the extremities of each. So with the poems of Homer, it may be a question whether a given place, say Phœnicia, is in the first or the second zone; or whether some other, such as Scheria, or as the Bosphorus, is in the second or the third; but it will never be difficult to affirm of any important place named in the poems _either_ that it is not in the zone of common experience, or else that it is not in the zone of foreign fable.

~_Limits of the Inner Geography._~

Let me now endeavour to draw the lines, which thus far have been laid down only in principle.

1. And first it seems plain, that the experimental knowledge of Homer extended over the whole of the continental territory embraced within the Greek Catalogue, including, along with the continent, those islands which he has classed with his mainland, and not in his separate insular group[526].

[526] Il. ii. 645-80.

2. It may be slightly doubtful whether he had a similar knowledge of the islands forming the base of the Ægean. There is a peculiarity in the Cretan description (Il. ii. 645-52), namely, that after enumerating certain cities he closes with general words (649),

ἄλλοι θ’, οἳ Κρήτην ἑκατόμπολιν ἀμφενέμοντο.

Still he uses characteristic epithets: and in another place (Od. xiv. 257), he defines (of course by time) the distance from Crete to Egypt. So again in Rhodes (656), Camirus has the characteristic epithet of ἀργινόεις. On the whole we may place this division within the first zone of Homeric geography.

3. Homer would appear to have had an accurate knowledge of the positions of the islands of Lemnos, Samothrace, Imbros, Lesbos, Samos, and Chios[527]. These we may consider, without further detail, as answering practically for the whole Ægean sea.

[527] Il. xiv. 225-30. xiii. 10-16, 33. xiv. 281. xxiv. 78, 753, 434. Od. iii. 169-72.

4. Homer knew the positions of Emathia and Pieria, relatively to one another and to Greece; and the general course of the southern ranges of the Thracian mountains[528]. The Trojan Catalogue appears to show that he also knew the coast-line westward from the Dardanelles, as far as to the river Axius. There we may consider that his Pieria begins, with Greece upon its southern and western border.

[528] Il. xiv. 225-30. Od. v. 50.

5. It would appear that Homer had a pretty full knowledge of the southern coast-line of the Propontis. He seems to place the Thracians of the Trojan Catalogue on the northern side of that sea, but his language is quite general with respect to this part of it. On the south side, however, and in the whole north-western corner of Asia Minor, we appear to find him at home[529]. Thus much we may safely conclude from the detail of the Trojan Catalogue; from the particular account of the Idæan rivers in the Twelfth Iliad[530]; from the latter part of the journey of Juno in the Fourteenth[531]; and from the speech of Achilles in the Twenty-fourth[532], which fixes the position of Phrygia relatively to Troy.

[529] Forbiger thinks he knew the southern coast of the Black sea to a certain extent. Handbuch der Alten Geographie, sect. 4. p. 10.

[530] Il. xii. 17-24.

[531] Il. xiv. 280-4.

[532] Il. xxiv. 543-6.

6. From the point of Lectum to the southward, Homer shows a knowledge of the coast-line as far as Lycia in the south-western quarter of Asia Minor. But here we must close his inner sphere. The Solyman mountains supply the only local notice in the poems which can be said to belong to the interior country, and of these his conceptions are evidently as far as possible from geographical. In the Sixth Iliad[533] he appears to conceive of the Solyman people as bordering upon Lycia. Although the name has suggested to some a connection with Jerusalem, we ought to consider it as representing that for which it stands in geography, a part of the grand inland mass of Asiatic mountains. But from the proximity of the Solymi to Lycia, Homer would appear to have moved them greatly westward. Again, when Neptune in the Fifth Odyssey sees Ulysses from the Solyman mountains on his way from Ogygia, we must suppose that Homer conceived them to command some point of a neighbouring and continuous line of sea, which would allow of such a prospect. He would hardly have made Neptune see Ulysses from Lycia, or from a point across the mountains of Thrace, or from one on the other side of the actual Mount Taurus.

[533] Il. vi. 184.

We have now, I think, made the circuit of the whole zone, and it is a small one, of the real or experimental geography of Homer.

~_The intermediate or doubtful Zone._~

Let us take next the intermediate zone, which marks the extreme and infrequent points of Greek resort.

Beginning in the west and north-west, we have found Sicania (now Upper Calabria), Epirus, and the country of the Thesprotians[534], marking the points of this intermediate region. To the northward, we may fix it at Emathia. In the north-east, it seems to be bounded by the northern shore of the Sea of Marmora. The Thracians of Homer inhabit a country which he calls ἐριβώλαξ, Il. xx. 485, and which the Hellespont enclosed (ἐέργει), that is to say, washes on two sides at least. The Hellespont, as in this place it is termed ἀγάῤῥοος, signifies to the Eastern part of its waters in particular; and the name probably includes the Propontis (which he might well suppose to have a strong current throughout, like the Straits of Gallipoli), together with the northern Ægean between Chalcidice and the Thracian Chersonese. He has described these Thracians in very vague terms[535], and without any local circumstance, in the Catalogue: but the form of the coast-line apparently implied in the word ἐέργει, and the epithet of fertility, appear to indicate the plain of Adrianople and the Maritz. But this inclosure on two sides terminates when the northern shore begins to trend directly to the eastward: and the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus, which no man but Jason ever succeeded in passing, are to be considered as in the zone of a semifabulous or exterior chorography.

[534] Achæis, or Ethnology, sect. iv. p. 235.

[535] Il. ii. 844, 5.

When we pass into the south-east, we find that Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt may perhaps most properly be placed in the doubtful zone. We have seen that Cyprus was known as a stage on the passage to the East, and as within the possible military reach of Agamemnon. But its lord did not join in the war: and Homer has no details about the island, beyond the specification of Paphos as the seat of the residence, and of the principal worship, of Venus.

We have no instance of any visit paid by Greeks to Phœnicia under ordinary circumstances. The tour of Menelaus is, like that of Ulysses, outside the sphere of ordinary life. He describes himself in it to Telemachus as πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ’ ἐπαληθεὶς[536], which may be compared with Od. i. 4. respecting Ulysses. We hear of the Taphians there; for it was at Sidon that they kidnapped the nurse of Eumæus. Piracy in those times probably reached somewhat further than trade. These same Taphians appear to be of doubtful Hellenism. On the one hand, Mentes their leader was a ξεῖνος to Ulysses[537]. But (1) we thus find them in Phœnicia[538], which is not a place of usual Greek resort. (2) They sail to Temese in foreign parts, ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους (Od. i. 183), which we do not find elsewhere said of Greeks. The case of the pseudo-Ulysses cannot stand as a precedent for the rest of Greece, nor even for the rest of Crete[539]. (3) The father of Mentes had given Ulysses poison for his arrows, which Ilus, the Hellene, had from motives of religion refused him. This at once supplies a particular reason for the xenial bond between them, and suggests that this Taphian prince may have been, though a ξεῖνος, yet of a different religion and race. (4) The absence of the Taphians from the war, especially as a tribe so much given to navigation, further strengthens the presumption that they were not properly Greeks.

[536] Od. iv. 83.

[537] Od. i. 105.

[538] Sup. Ethnology, sect. iv.

[539] Ibid.

Phœnicia, then, hangs doubtfully on the outer verge of the Greek world, and belongs to the intermediate zone. Yet more decidedly is this the case with Egypt. For Ulysses means something unusual, when he describes the voyage as one lasting for five days across the open sea, even with the very best wind all the way, from Crete; and it is elsewhere described as at a distance formidably great. Such is the idea apparently intended by the statement, that the very birds do but make the journey once a year over so vast a sea[540]. No ordinary Greek ever goes to Egypt: and when the pseudo-Ulysses planned his voyage thither, it was under a sinister impulse from Jupiter, who meant him ill[541]:

[540] Od. iii. 320-2.

[541] Od. xiv. 243.

αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ δειλῷ κακὰ μήδετο μητίετα Ζεύς.

Again, the Poet appears to have entirely misconceived the distance of Pharos from the coast. He places it at a day’s sail from Αἴγυπτος, meaning probably by that name the Nile. Vain attempts have been made to get rid by explanation of this geographical error. Nitzsch[542] says truly, that for the geography of this passage Homer was dependent on the gossip of sailors, and compares it with that of Ogygia, Scheria, and the rest. When Menelaus went to Egypt, it was involuntarily, as we are assured by Nestor[543];

[542] On Od. iv. 354.

[543] Od. iii. 299.

ἀτὰρ τὰς πέντε νέας κυανοπρῳρείους Αἰγύπτῳ ἐπέλασσε φέρων ἄνεμός τε καὶ ὕδωρ.

Beyond the circumscriptions which have thus been drawn, lie the countries of the Outer Geography. Outwards their limit in the mind of Homer was either the great River Ocean, or else the land immediately bordering upon it. Their inner line, that is, the line nearest to the known Greek or Homeric world, may be defined by a number of points specified in the poems. We have, for example, the Lotophagi and Libya in the south; the land of the Cyclops on the west; (I pass by Sicily, because it can, I think, be shown, that Homer transplanted it into another quarter;) Scheria to the north-west, the Abii, Glactophagi, and Hippemolgi, to the north. Then come the Strait of the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus, pretty accurately conceived as to its site; next towards the east, the Amazons and the Solymi with their mountains; in the south-east the Ἐρεμβοὶ, and then the widely spread Αἰθίοπες. All the places and people visited by Ulysses after the Lotophagi, that have not been named, must be conceived to lie yet further outwards.

I have now explained the grounds on which I assume the existence of two great zones, the one of a real, the other of an imaginative, fluctuating, and semi-fabulous Geography in Homer; and of a third zone, drawn as a somewhat indeterminate border-ground between them.

~_Sphere of the Outer Geography._~

I come now to consider what are the keys or leading ideas of local arrangement which we can first obtain from the particulars of the Outer Geography of Homer, and which we may then apply to the solution of such questions of detail as it presents.

It is plain that we have real need of some such keys. To ascertain the general direction of the movements of the Wanderings of Ulysses, and the general idea entertained by the Poet of the distribution of land and sea, is an essential preliminary to the solution of such questions as, Where were the Sirens? or, Where were the Læstrygones? According to the statement I have recently given, many of the points, that Ulysses in the Wanderings visited by sea, would appear to have been so fixed by Homer, as to imply his belief that the chieftain sailed over what we know to be the European continent.

The two propositions, which I have already ventured to state as being the keys to the Outer Geography of the Odyssey, are in the following terms[544]:

[544] See Ethnology, sect. iv. p. 304.

1. That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating with the Euxine; or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards the East; and that he made it communicate, by the gulfs of Genoa and Venice, with the southern Mediterranean.

2. That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of it in the North-East.

In the first place, I assume that it would be a waste of time to enter upon an elaborate confutation of the traditional identifications, which the pardonable ambition of after-times has devised for the various points of the wanderings. According to those expository figments, we must believe that the land of the Cyclops is an island, that it is the same island which reappears at a later date as Thrinacie, that Æolia is Stromboli in sight of that island of the Cyclops, (though it took Ulysses nine days of fair wind to sail from it to within sight of Ithaca,) and that Ulysses could sail straight across the sea from Æolia to Ithaca. We must look for the Læstrygones and their perpetual day in the latitudes of the Mediterranean. We must either place the ocean northward, (but wholly without any prototype in nature,) and the under-world on the west coast of Italy, where there is no stream whatever, and seek, too, for fogs and darkness in the choicest atmospheres of the world; or else we must remove the Ocean-mouth to a distance about four times as far from the island of Circe, as that island is from Greece, whereas the poem evidently presumes their comparative proximity. But in truth, it is useless to go on accumulating single objections, for it is not upon these that the confutation principally depends. The confutation of these pardonable but idle traditions rests on broader grounds. The grounds are such as really these, that in no one particular do these Italian fables--for such I must call them, notwithstanding the partial countenance they receive from the chaotic and seemingly adulterated parts of the Theogony of Hesiod[545]--satisfy the letter of the text of Homer; that in the attempt to give it a geographical character, they misconceive its spirit; and that they oblige us to override and nullify not only the facts of actual geography, for that we might do without violating any law of reason and likelihood under the conditions of the case, but also the positive indications which Homer has given us from phenomena that lay within his knowledge and experience. In fact, they would oblige us to condemn Homer as geographically unworthy of trust, within the sphere of the every day life and resort of the Greeks, as well as in regions, which he and his countrymen never visited.

[545] Hes. Theog. 1011-15.

And the result of all the violence thus done to Homer would be, that we should have sacrificed at once his language and his imagination, in the attempt to struggle with contradictions to the actual geography which defy every attempt at reconciliation.

At the outset, according to my view, both admissions must be made, and principles must be laid down, as cardinal and essential to the conduct of the inquiry we have now in hand.

~_Dislocation of actual nature._~

It must, I think, be admitted,

1. That Homer has dislocated or transplanted the traditions he had received. For example, he has either carried the Bosphorus westwards[546], or else the Straits of Messina eastwards.

[546] Müller’s Orchomenos, p. 274.

2. That therefore as we are on this occasion inquiring not into the geographical information Homer can give us, but into the errors he had embraced, we must not be surprised if we fail to arrive at any conclusions, either wholly self-consistent or demonstratively clear. We must exact from his text, with something less than geographical rigour, even the conditions of inward harmony.

It may then reasonably be asked, if this be so, how are we to find any clue to his meaning.

My answer is, by laying down rules which will enable us to discriminate between his primary and his secondary statements; between the results of his knowledge, and the fruits of his fancy.

By his knowledge I mean, what he had seen, what he had travelled over, what was familiarly and habitually known to his countrymen, so as to give him ample opportunities of refreshing recollection, of enlarging knowledge, and of correcting error.

By the fruits of his fancy I mean, the forms he has thought fit to give to statements of geography lying outside the world of his own experience, and that of the Greeks in general. These statements, gathered here and there as time and opportunity might serve, he could hardly have moulded into a correct and consistent scheme. Emancipating himself wholly from obligations which it was impossible for him to fulfil, he has treated them simply as the creatures of his poetic purpose, and has analysed, shifted, and recombined them into a world of his own, in the creation and adjustment of which, the principal factor has of necessity been his own will.

~_Postulates for the inquiry._~

I therefore lay down the following postulates:

1. That, Homer having an Inner or known and an Outer or imagined world, between which a line may be drawn with tolerable certainty, the voyage of Ulysses, from the Lotophagi to Scheria inclusive, lies in the Outer world.

2. That we may not only implicitly accept the geographical statements of Homer, when they lie within his own horizon or the Inner world, but may fearlessly argue from them.

3. That arguments so drawn are available and paramount, as far as they go, for governing the construction of passages relating to the geography of the Outer world.

4. That we have no title to argue, when we find a point in the Outer world described in such a manner as to correspond with some spot now known, that Homer gave to that tract or region in his own mind, the site which we may now know it to occupy, but that he is quite as likely to have placed it elsewhere.

5. That arguments grounded on the physical knowledge of the Poet are to be trusted. I would name by way of example, (subject only to a certain latitude for inexactness,) such arguments as are drawn from the directions of winds, and from other patent and cardinal facts of common experience, for example, the distances which may be traversed within given times.

6. So likewise are the indications, which harmonize with known or reasonably presumed historical and ethnological views, to be trusted as good evidence on questions relating to his geographical meaning.

In order, however, to be in a condition to make use of indications supplied by the Winds, we must consider what the Winds of Homer are.

~_The Winds of Homer._~

The Winds of Homer are only four in number, and the manner of their physical arrangement is rude. It by no means corresponds with our own, but varies from it greatly, just as his points of the compass varied from ours. And though he names only four winds, yet I apprehend we must consider that upon the whole he uses them with such latitude, as to express under the name of some one of them every gale that blew.

As to some of these winds, Homer has provided us with an abundance of trustworthy _data_ for their point of origin: and through them the evidence as to the rest may be enlarged.

Homer’s governing points, from which to measure arcs of the horizon were, as is evident, the sunrise and the sunset. This is clearly shown by his expressions, such as πρὸς ἠῶ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε, for the east, and then in opposition to this, ποτὶ ζόφον ἠερόεντα[547] for the west. Again, when Ulysses urges upon his companions that he has lost all means of forming a judgment of their position, his mode of expression is this, that he does not know where is dusk or where is dawn; where the joy-giving sun rises, or where he sinks[548]. We must therefore dismiss from our minds the four cardinal points to which we are accustomed. They were not cardinal points for Homer. We must also remember not only (1) that Homer had only two[549], but also (2) that his two did not correspond with any of our four, and (3) that from the variation of sunrise and sunset with the seasons of the year a certain amount of vagueness was of necessity introduced into his conceptions of the point of origin for each of the different winds.

[547] Il. xii. 239, 40.

[548] Od. x. 190-2.

[549] Wood (Genius of Homer, p. 23,) says, ‘only four,’ meaning only four winds. But it is pretty clear that Homer’s four winds were not at anything like ninety degrees from one another. There is in Homer no word meaning strictly either south, or north. _Daksha_, however, from whence is derived δεξιὸς, means _southerly_ as well as _on the right_: but probably S. E. rather than S. Pott, Etymolog. Forschungen, II. 186, 7.

We should not, however, exaggerate this vagueness. It had its cause in the variations of the ecliptic, and, like its cause, it was limited. I suppose, however, that the eye guesses rudely at the deviations of the ecliptic, and that we must take N.W. and S.E. for the two cardinal points of Homer.

Homer’s west then ranged to the north of west, and Homer’s east to the south of east. But although this must be borne in mind when we translate his winds into our language, yet of course the winds themselves were arranged, not technically so as each to cover a certain arc on the horizon, but with reference to the directions in which they were found by experience commonly to blow. And in associating each wind with a particular point of the horizon, we must bear in mind that such a point is to be regarded as its centre, and that the same name would be given to a wind within a number of points on either side of it.

As to the respective prevalence of the different winds, the criterion is certainly a rude one, still it is a criterion, which is provided for us by the comparative frequency of the occasions on which they are mentioned. Eurus is mentioned in the poems seven times, Notus fifteen; Boreas twenty-seven, subject to a small deduction for cases where he is simply a person; and Zephyr twenty-six. The latter pair are the leading Winds of the poem: not necessarily that they indicated the prevailing currents of air, but that they represented such currents of air as usually prevailed with force sufficient to make them good poetical agents.

We may also learn, from the epithets given to the winds, the impressions which they respectively made upon the mind of Homer.

Eurus never has a character attached to it. Notus seldom has any epithet; but still it is mentioned, by the comrade of Ulysses in Od. xii. 289, as one of the most formidable winds. This may probably have been on account of its direction relatively to the place of the speaker; because from that point it blew right upon Scylla[550]. Again, as Zephyr and Notus are nowhere else associated by the Poet, the presumption arises on that ground also that here Notus is put in for a special and local reason. It is called ἀργέστης, and is so essentially allied with the idea of moisture, that νότιος stands simply for wet (νότιος ἱδρὼς, Il. xi. 810).

[550] Od. xii. 427.

The characteristic epithets of Boreas are μέγας, ὀπώρινος, and αἰθρηγένης. The first of these indicates that he blew hard: and we know the same thing from the facts, that Achilles desired him to contribute towards rapidly consuming the pyre of Patroclus, and that he is often used for a storm[551].

[551] Il. xxiii. 194.

But, of all the winds, the Zephyr evidently was the most prominent in the view of Homer. It is μέγας (Od. xiv. 458), λαβρὸς ἐπαιγίζων (Il. ii. 148), κελαδεινὸς (Il. xxiii. 208), δυσαὴς (Il. xxiii. 200, and Od. xii. 289), κεκληγὼς (Od. xii. 408); and it alone of the winds roars, ζεφύροιο ἰώη (Il. iv. 276). In Od. xii. 289, it is mentioned with Notus: they are the winds most apt to destroy ships even despite or without the gods. For Notus, as I have said, this character seems to be local: but the Zephyr is here called δυσαὴς, and the sense of the passage is in accordance with his general reputation. He, with Boreas, is invoked for the pyre of Patroclus: and these two are the only winds which are ever employed singly to make foul weather. Homer’s other modes of creating a tempest by the agency of the winds are (1) to make a combination of all or several of them, (2) to cover the matter in a generality by speaking of the ὀλοοὶ ἄνεμοι without distinction.

There is, however, in Homer a faint trace of the milder character, which was afterwards more fully recognised in Zephyr, when he had moved down from the north, and become a simple west wind. In the description of the Elysian plain, we find that it is never vexed with tempest or with rain, but that the happy spirits dwelling there are incessantly refreshed with the Zephyrs which spring from Ocean[552]. But even here the breezes are λιγυπνείοντες: and this word means what is called blowing _fresh_. And the conception of the wind here is rather as a sea-wind, and therefore not a cold one, than as being soft and gentle.

[552] Od. iv. 565-9.

Of these four Winds, Homer has made, on various occasions, two couples. He repeatedly associates Boreas and Zephyr in the same work[553]:

[553] Il. ix. 4.

ὡς δ’ ἄνεμοι δύο πόντον ὀρίνετον ἰχθυόεντα, Βορέης καὶ Ζέφυρος, τώτε Θρῄκηθεν ἄητον.

And again, for the purposes of Achilles, the two come together over the sea, and quickly fall to, that the pyre may be consumed; even as the prayer of the hero had been addressed to them in common[554].

[554] Il. xxiii. 194, 212.

In the same way, Eurus and Notus are associated together as exciting the Icarian Sea. This passage is curiously illustrative of Homer’s distinctions between the winds. He has two successive similes, both describing the agitation of the same Assembly[555]. In the first it is compared to the Icarian Sea lashed by Eurus, and by Notus charging from the clouds. In the second, to a corn-field, on which Zephyr powerfully sweeps down[556].

[555] Il. ii. 144-6, 147-9.

[556] The arrangement of these similes tells powerfully against the ingenious argument of Mr. Wood concerning the birthplace of Homer. Genius of Homer, pp. 7-33.

From a just consideration of these passages, it becomes clear that the four winds of Homer were not at equidistant points of the compass, but that each two of them were capable of association, while neither member of one pair is ever described, except in a single passage, which I will presently notice, as cooperating with one of the other. Of course I do not refer to those cases, where the Poet raises all the four winds at once, simply to create a hurricane; no bad conjecture, I will add, for those times, in anticipation of the modern discovery that hurricanes are eddies, and that it is their circular motion which makes them seem to blow almost simultaneously in all directions[557].

[557] See General Reid’s Law of Storms and Variable Winds. London. 1849.

Let us now inquire what can be done towards ascertaining more particularly the leading points of these winds, of which we have surveyed the general descriptions.

~_Points of origin for Zephyr and Boreas._~

I begin with the more prevailing pair, Zephyr and Boreas.

There can, I think, be no hesitation in deriving Ζέφυρος from ζόφος. It may be well to remind the reader that ζόφος is the same word in substance with κνέφας and νέφος[558].

[558] Buttmann. Lexil. voc. κέλαινος.

Thus the north-west is his cradle. But he is so closely associated with Thrace and with Boreas, the former being his residence, and the latter[559] his companion, that though he may mean any wind from west up to north, we must consider him as usually leaning from the north-west towards the north, while he properly belongs to the north-west rather than any other given point of the compass.

[559] Il. xxiii. 214.

The position of Boreas is the best defined of all the winds of Homer. He cannot come from any point to the west of due north: for all that space is appropriated to Zephyr. He is equally well defined on the other side. For he blows from Thrace, both generally, as in Il. ix. 5, and particularly on the Plain of Troy[560]. I hold to be of no authority, as fixing the direction of this wind, the Boreas which carries the pseudo-Ulysses from Crete to Egypt[561]: for there Homer is already beyond the Inner World, and he only knows the position of Egypt from Phœnician report. But we have other trustworthy indications from within the sphere of Greek nautical knowledge, in his carrying Hercules from Ilium to Cos[562], in his preventing a voyage from Crete to Ilium[563], and in the fate of Ulysses, who, in rounding Malea, is carried off by Boreas to the westward of Cythera[564]. All these operations can be performed only by a wind blowing from the quarter between east and north-east.

[560] Il. xxiii. 214, as above.

[561] Od. xiv. 253.

[562] Il. xiv. 255. xv. 26.

[563] Od. xix. 200.

[564] Od. ix. 81.

Putting together these indications, I think we must conclude that the Boreas of Homer is a wind to the east of north. But it seems plain that he does not embrace nearly the whole quadrant from north to east. For, like and even more than Zephyr on the other side of the pole, he has a leaning towards the polar side, and, in the absence of more particular marks, Homer should be taken to mean by him a N.N.E. wind, that is, a wind ranging principally or wholly from N. to N.E.

I take the line Il. ix. 5, which many have treated as a difficulty, for a sound and valuable geographical indication. Boreas and Zephyr blow from Thrace. To a Greek, say at Mycenæ, Thrace, which reaches from the Adriatic to the Euxine, covers more than ninety degrees of the horizon. It is from within those ninety degrees that every Boreas, and probably every Zephyr, of Homer can be shown to blow. These are facts which we may hold in deposit, ready for service in the explanation of the movements of the Outer Geography.

And along with them we must keep in mind the Homeric affinity and sympathy established between Boreas and Zephyr. It is so considerable, and they are especially in such local proximity, that practically we should not go far wrong were we to say Homer divides the whole circumference of his horizon into three nearly equal arcs of 120 degrees, more or less. The first of these, beginning from due west, is given to Zephyr and to Boreas. The next, reaching to within 30° of the South Pole, to Eurus: and the third, embracing the residue of the circle, to Notus.

~_Points of the Compass for Notus and Eurus._~

Notus is the great southern wind, Eurus being comparatively of little account. Now, one of the chief _data_ applicable to determining the direction of these winds is the passage Il. ii. 144-6. Here they are described as disturbing the Icarian Sea, which was within the sphere of Greek navigation. Now the position of that sea, on the coast of Asia Minor to the south of Samos, shows,

1. That both these winds in Homer have a decidedly southern character.

2. That one, of course Eurus, must come from the east, and the other, Notus, in that place, from the west of south. Because the conflict of the two winds presumes a considerable space between the points from which they blow, while the position of the Icarian Sea requires both to be southern. But in the Fifth Odyssey, too, Notus is treated as the proper antagonist of Boreas. His centre therefore lies a little to the westward of due south; but Eurus does not approach the South Pole, and every wind from about S.S.E. to W. will probably fall within the Homeric description of Notus.

The associations of Notus and Eurus are frequent[565]. On one occasion, however, Notus is combined with Zephyr, though there is no corresponding case of junction between Eurus and Boreas. Notus and Zephyr are sent from the sea by Juno to blast the Trojan army with heat. Boreas would of course be a cold wind: and Eurus would be cold on the plain of Troy, from passing over the chain of Ida: though in Greece he melts the snow that Zephyr has brought. Differences of season, as well as of situation, may have to do with these varieties of operation.

[565] Il. ii. 144-6. xvi. 765. Od. v. 330. xii. 326.

Though less strong than Zephyr and Boreas, Notus is a stronger wind than Eurus. And though generally the counterpart of Boreas, his power of cooperating with Zephyr shows that he must reach over the quadrant from the South pole to West, whereas we have no Boreas coming down from the North pole as far as East.

As the opposite of Zephyr, Eurus blows principally from the south-eastern quarter; and hence is in frequent cooperation with Notus, but never with any other wind. He must, however, be understood to cover the whole space from the rigidly northern Boreas down to Notus, or from about N.E. to within 30° of the South pole. Boreas is inflexibly confined by all the evidence of the poems to a very narrow space: and Eurus, his neighbour eastward, does not much frequent those points of the compass that lie nearest to him.

The accompanying sketch expresses what I believe to be in the main Homer’s arrangement of the Winds. At the same time, I do not know that we have any practical example of any wind in Homer which blows from within forty-five degrees on either side of due East, or from within about the same number of degrees on either side of due West. Perhaps it was from their local infrequency, that he does not appear to have put such winds in requisition[566].

[566] Friedreich has discussed the winds of Homer (Realien der Il. und Od. §. 3). His results are to me unsatisfactory: but the fault seems to lie in his basis. For (1) he fixes the four Winds of Homer as the four cardinal points: and (2) he finds _data_ for ascertaining the Winds in the Passages of the Outer Geography, instead of determining those Passages themselves by the Winds, after these latter have been ascertained from evidence belonging to the sphere of Homer’s own experience.

The name Eurus is further attached to the point of sunrise by the root ἔως, to which it is traced[567]. The tracts of Aides are with Homer σμερδάλεα εὐρώεντα (Il. xx. 65). May not this εὐρωεὶς come from the same source? The Cimmerian darkness of Homer is close to the mouth of Ocean, and _near_ that chamber of the Sun, which is at Ææa[568]. Viewing dawn as the middle point between night and day, Homer possibly connected it with each. It seems further possible, that he connected the Eastern with the Western darkness: both because this would bring his two regions of the future world into relations with each other, and because he makes the Sun disport himself with his oxen on the same spot in Thrinacie after his setting in the evening, and before his rising in the morning: a passage, which for its full explanation might require the supposition, that Homer believed the earth to be cylindrical in form, and thus the extremes of East and West to meet[569]. There will shortly be occasion to revert to this subject, in further considering what were the constituent parts of Homer’s East.

[567] Liddell and Scott _in voc._

[568] Od. xi. 13-16. xii. 1-4.

[569] See Friedreich, Realien, §. 9. p. 19.

_Homeric distances and rates of speed._

I shall trust mainly then to winds, thus ascertained from Homer’s Inner world, as the means of indicating the directions of the movements described in his Outer one. But besides directions, we have distances to consider. And here too we have some evidence, supplied by his experimental knowledge, to guide us.

By combining the inner-world _data_ of distance with those of direction, we shall obtain the essential conditions of decision for the outer-world problems. Conditions both essential and sufficient, when we can lay hold upon them; but we shall still have to contend with this difficulty, that in one or two remarkable cases the Poet takes refuge in language wholly vague, and leaves us no guide for our conjectures, except the rule of making the unascertained conform in spirit to what has been made reasonably certain.

The distances of which I now speak are sea-distances. It is a somewhat remarkable fact, that Homer scarcely gives us land-distances at all. Telemachus and Pisistratus drive in two days from Pylus to Sparta: but it is not the wont of the Poet to describe places, which communicate over land, by the number of days occupied in travelling between them. This circumstance is illustrative of a trait, which assumes great importance in Homer’s Outer Geography, namely, the miniature scale of his conceptions as to all land-spaces; a trait, I may add, to which we shall have occasion to revert.

The sea-distances of Homer are performed in no less than six different modes.

1. By ordinary sailing. 2. By ordinary rowing. 3. By rafts, Od. v. 251. 4. By drifting on a timber, Od. xiv. 310-15. 5. By floating and swimming, Od. v. 374, 5, 388, 399.

Sixthly, and lastly, the ships of the Phæacians perform their voyages by an inward instinct, and with a rapidity described as marvellous.

~_Evidence as to rates of motion._~

The language of the poems nowhere takes cognizance of any difference in speed as between sailing and rowing. For example, when Achilles speaks of the time of his voyage to Phthia as dependent upon εὐπλοίη, which the favour of Neptune could give, he evidently means a good sea and the absence of tempest, and does not at all bargain for a wind from a particular quarter, which was not a matter lying within Neptune’s especial province. Nor does there seem to be, on general grounds, any cause for assuming a difference between the average speeds of rowing and of sailing, when we consider, in favour of the first, that the crew rowed almost to a man, with little cargo to carry; and, to the prejudice of the second, that the science and art of building quick sailers could not then have been understood. I therefore take rowing and sailing as equal in celerity. So that we have in reality no more than five different cases to consider.

But, again, I think there is no reason why we should assume a difference in speed between drifting on a piece of timber, and making way by floating and swimming only. In practicability there may be a considerable difference: but that is not the point before us.

The four methods now remaining seem to require the assumption of different speeds respectively.

Now Homer has supplied us with the times necessary for performing known distances in two cases; and has also given us a third case, which may be used for checking one of the other instances.

A case of known distance is that from the mouth of the Straits of Gallipoli to Phthia. This, according to Achilles in the Ninth Iliad[570], would, with favourable weather, be performed so as to arrive on the third day. It may amount to a little more than three degrees, and may be taken at two hundred and twenty miles. The time is three days and two nights. So that, for ordinary sailing or rowing, a day and a night may be taken at about ninety miles, of course without any pretension to minute accuracy.

[570] Il. ix. 362.

Secondly. With a good passage, a ship sailing from Crete to Egypt arrives on the fifth day (Od. xiv. 257). But we cannot consider Homer’s opinion of the distance between Crete and Egypt as entitled to the full weight of his experimental knowledge. Again, it is to be borne in mind, that here the north wind, which carries the ship, was a prime one (ἀκραὴς καλὸς, 253). Lastly, much might depend on the part of Crete, from which we suppose the vessel to have sailed.

As respects the last-named question, we must, from the habits of ancient navigation, suppose the eastern extremity of the island to have been the point of departure; because no sailor would have committed himself to Boreas on the open sea, as long as he could make way under cover of a shore lying to windward.

The distance between the eastern point of Crete and the western mouth of the Nile is about three hundred and fifty miles; the time five days and four nights. This would give a somewhat less rate of progress _per diem_ than the last case; but then it is likely that Homer took the distance to be greater in that almost unknown sea (see Od. iii. 320.) than it really is; so that we have cause to view the two computations as in substance accordant. And even if they had clashed, the former would still be entitled to our acceptance.

What, however, does appear to be the case is, that Homer mistook the course from Crete to Egypt. It is really S. W.: he has defined it by the wind Boreas, which never blows from a point westward, or at the very uttermost never from one materially westward, of N. So that the course must have been about S. Now, as Homer knew the position of Crete, this would show that he brought Egypt too much to the westward, by shortening the eastern recess or arm of the Mediterranean; an error in exact conformity, I conceive, with all his operations in imagining the geography of the east. But this by the way.

The third test of sea-distances is supplied by the pretended passage of Ulysses, on a mast, from a point just out of sight of Crete[571] to Thesprotia[572]. He arrives on the tenth night. The distance exceeds, by about one half, the voyage from Troas to Phthia. The time is nearly four times as long. But then some allowance may be made for delay on the score of the irregular winds (ὀλοοὶ ἄνεμοι) which prevailed. We may therefore justly calculate the rate of a floating or drift-passage at about one half that of a sailing passage, or two miles an hour instead of four. And here our direct evidence closes.

[571] Od. xiv. 301.

[572] Ibid. 310-15.

At an intermediate point between these, we may place the mode of passage by raft, which brought Ulysses from Ogygia. For merchant ships were built broad in the beam; and the raft was as broad as a merchant ship[573]. Thus constructed, and with its flat bottom, it must have been very greatly slower than an ordinary sailing vessel, and I venture to put it by conjecture as low as two and a half miles an hour.

[573] Od. v. 249-51.

Lastly, we have to consider the rates of the Scherian ships. About these the only thing that is clear is, that Homer meant to represent them as far exceeding all known speed of the kind. They went, says Alcinous, to Eubœa, or as the verse may be rendered, to Eubœa and back, in a day[574]: they are like a chariot with four horses scouring the plain; the hawk, swiftest of birds, could not keep up with them[575]. We cannot, I think, pretend to appreciate with great precision Homer’s meaning in this point; but it is plain that, as he had a map of some kind in his head, he must have had some meaning with respect to the distance performed by the ship from Scheria, though probably a vague one. I think we may venture to take it at three times the speed of the ordinary sailing vessel, or at about twelve miles an hour.

[574] Od. vii. 325.

[575] Od. xiii. 81, 86.

Thus, taking drift-speed for our unit, we have the following scale approximately established:

1. Drift = 2 miles per hour = 48 miles per day of 24 hours.

2. Raft = 1¼ drift = 2½ miles per hour = 60 miles per day of 24 hours.

3. Sailing or rowing ship = 2 drift = 4 miles per hour = 96 miles per day of 24 hours.

4. Hawk-ship of Scheria = 3 sailing ship = 6 drift = 12 miles per hour = 288 miles per day of 24 hours.--

Let us next proceed to consider, whether there are any cardinal ideas of particular places or arrangements in the Outer Geography of Homer, which govern its general structure. For such ideas may, together with the _data_ that we have now drawn from the circle of his Inner or Experimental Geography, assist us in the examination of what undoubtedly at first sight appear to be almost chaotic details.

~_Northward sea-route to the Euxine._~

Setting out from this point, my first business is to show, that Homer believed in a sea-route from the Mediterranean to the Euxine, other than that of the Straits of Gallipoli and the Bosphorus. This route was formed in his mind, as I shall endeavour to prove, by cutting off the land from east to west, a little to the north of the Peninsula of Greece, all the way from the Adriatic to the Euxine. Thus we practically substitute an expanse of sea for the mass of the European continent; and we must not conceive of any definite boundary to this θάλασσα, other than the mysterious one which may finally separate it from Ocean. Or, in other words, we must give to the Black Sea an indefinite extension to the west and north-west, perhaps also shortening it in the direction of the East. This is the one master variation from nature in Homer’s ideal geography[576]; and, when his belief on this subject has been sufficiently proved, almost every thing else will fall into its place with comparative ease.

[576] On this hypothesis is founded the Homeric _Erdkarte_ of Forbiger, Handbuch der Alt. Geogr. I. 4.

I will endeavour to illustrate and sustain this hypothesis from the positive evidence, either direct or inferential, of the poems: and I hope to show that it stands upon grounds independent of the negative argument, that it is absolutely necessary in order to supply a key to the Wanderings. At the same time, I hold that that negative argument, if made good, would suffice: for, though we do no violence to probability in imputing to the geography of the Odyssey any amount of variance, however great, from actual nature, yet we should sorely offend against reason, if we supposed that Homer had constructed a route so elaborate and detailed, without laying it out before his own mental vision, and presenting it to that of his hearers, after the fashion of something like a map. This was alike demanded by the realism (so to speak) of the time, and needful for the complete comprehension and easy enjoyment of the romance.

The indications on this subject, apart from the evidence of the Wanderings themselves, are as follows:

1. When, in the Thirteenth Iliad[577], Jupiter turns away his eyes from the battle by the Ships, he turns them towards the north-east: in the direction, that is, in which, according to the hypothesis above stated, there was for Homer not, as we now know to be the case, a wide expanse of land capable of containing a countless multitude of tribes, but, after a certain interval, a vast and unexplored sea. Now the Poet tells us, not that Jupiter looked over an indefinite mass of continent, or the ἀπείρονα γαῖαν; but that he looked over the country of the Thracians, the Mysians, the Hippemolgi, the Glactophagi, and the Abii. Moreover, he indicates, by giving characteristic epithets to each of these nations, that they lay more or less within the sphere of contact with Greek intercourse and experience, and therefore at no great distance to the northward: for not only are the Thracians riders of horses, but the Mysians are fighters hand to hand, the Hippemolgi are formidable or venerable, and the Abii are the most righteous of men. The Glactophagi are defined by their name as feeders upon milk. This limited and characteristic enumeration is in conformity, at the very least, with the hypothesis, that Homer imagined in that direction no continuous succession of land and of inhabitants, but a sea circumscribing the country of Thrace to the north.

[577] Il. xiii. 1.

2. A more marked indication is, I think, yielded by the passage of the Odyssey, in which Alcinous says to Ulysses, ‘We will convey you to your home, even though it should be more distant than Eubœa, the furthest point that has been visited by our people; of whom some saw it, when they carried Rhadamanthus thither, in the matter of Tityus, son of the Earth[578].’

[578] Od. vii. 19-26.

It appears to me evident, that Homer means in this place to suppose a maritime route between Scheria and Eubœa, to the North of Thrace. He is not, we must remember, experimentally informed as to the position of Scheria itself, and probably he conceived it to lie quite outside the sphere of Greece, at a considerable distance to the northward. Though he brings Ulysses from thence to Ithaca in a day, this is effected by the privileged and miraculous rapidity of passage, which was the distinguishing gift of the Phæacians, as the kin of the Immortals. They are indeed in contact, according to the poem, with the habitable world, but they are strictly upon the outer line of it. They are of the race of Neptune: related to the Cyclops and the Giants: their ordinary life and their maritime routes could not, without doing utter violence to the conceptions of the Poet, be brought within the sphere of ordinary Greek experience. We cannot, therefore, be intended to suppose them to have carried the ancient Rhadamanthus past every known town, port, and point in Greece; past Ithaca, Dulichium, the Cephallenes, Pylus, and the rest. Nor would Eubœa, thus approached, be to Ulysses, who had himself visited Aulis on his way to Troy, a good type of remoteness: nor does it answer that description for the Phæacians themselves, if we consider it according to geographic prose; for though the way to it is long, it is not so distant in a direct line as other parts of Greece, Crete for example; and any people who had made a voyage to Eubœa by sea, round the peninsula, would know very well that the proper way to it was by land. We must, in short, presume such a position for the Scheria of Homer, as to imply a communication by sea between it and Eubœa, other than that through the known waters of Greece.

But if we suppose a maritime passage from the Adriatic round Thrace to exist, then we keep the Phæacians entirely in their own element, as borderers between the world of Greek experience, and the world of fable. They still, when they carry Rhadamanthus, as in all other cases, hang upon the skirt, as it were, of actual humanity. And, thus viewed, Eubœa might fairly stand for a type of extreme remoteness.

3. Another passage of Homer, when understood according to its geographical bearings, appears to me, of itself, nearly conclusive upon this question.

When Mercury is ordered to carry the message of the gods from Olympus to Calypso[579], his proceedings are carefully described. He equipped himself with his foot-wings (Od. v. 44), took in hand his wand (47), and got upon the wing (49). The next step in the narrative is,

[579] Od. v. 43-58.

Πιερίην δ’ ἐπιβὰς, ἐξ αἰθέρος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ· (50.)

He then bounded along the wave (51), reached the remote island (55), landed on the beach (56), and finally arrived at the cave (57). I think no one can read this description, which extends over sixteen verses, without feeling that it is meant to convey to us, that Mercury moved with great rapidity in a right line, the shortest by which he could reach his destination. But now, if this be so, then, as Pieria lies to the northward of Olympus, we have only to ask how does he pursue his further route? From Pieria he sweeps down upon the sea, and rides upon the waves (54) all the way to Ogygia. It is hopeless to fit this even by a moderate deviation either way to any existing sea: we have only, therefore, to conclude, in conformity with the other indications, that Homer believed in a θάλασσα to the northward of Pieria. We cannot take refuge in the plea, that Homer did not know where Pieria lay. First, because it was on the Olympian border of Thessaly, and as Homer knew that region well, he must have known that Pieria lay to the north of it. Secondly, it was probably within the circle of Greek traditions; since it is sometimes read for Πηρείῃ in Il. ii. 766, and at any rate they seem to be in all likelihood different forms of the same word. Thirdly, a complete proof is given by the route of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad. She passes, in accordance with the actual geography, from Olympus to Pieria, from Pieria (apparently verging eastwards) to Emathia, and so by the Thracian mountains, evidently of Chalcidice, to Lemnos[580].

[580] Il. xiv. 225-30.

4. There is another passage which may be cited in direct corroboration of these views[581]. The spirits of the Suitors passed (1) the stream of Ocean, and (2) the Leucadian rock; and also passed (3) the gates of the Sun, and (4) the people of Dream Land.

[581] Od. xxiv. 11.

~_Northward route to the Euxine._~

Now it may be observed, that to pass the Leucadian rock is not the way from Ithaca to the Straits of Gibraltar: the course would lie round either the north or the south point of Cephallonia. Neither is it the way to the Bosphorus and Black Sea; which must be sought by steering first in a southerly direction. But it is the way to Ocean, and the nether Shades, if I am correct in my belief that Homer believed the route to lie along the Adriatic, and round the north of Thrace. Nor am I aware of any other view of his geography, on which this passage can be explained. The evidence, which it affords, is at first sight conclusive in support of the proposition, that Homer’s route to the Ocean-mouth lay up the Adriatic. But there are two grounds, on which a scruple may be felt about its reception. First, it stands in the second Νεκυΐα, the only considerable portion of either poem which appears, to me at least, open to the suspicion that it may have been seriously tampered with. Secondly, the order of the passage is singular, as it runs thus: they passed, or they went towards, the channels of Ocean, and the Leucadian rock, and the gates of the Sun: while, according to Homer’s geography, the Leucadian rock would come first, the gates of the Sun second, and Ocean-mouth would be the last of the three points.

But in answer to the first, the suspicions affecting this passage are too vague and indeterminate to warrant our rejecting its evidence, where it is in harmony with the general testimony of Homer. Even if these lines were interpolated, they would be remarkable as embodying an ancient, probably a very ancient opinion, as to Homer’s geographical view on the point at issue.

As regards the second, we may cite the parallel case of Menelaus in his narrative of his own tour. After Cyprus and Phœnicia, he describes his visits in the following order: (1) Egypt, (2) Ethiopians, (3) Sidonians, (4) Erembi, (5) Libya. It is evident that this cannot be intended to be understood as the order in which the several places were actually visited[582].

[582] Od. iv. 83-5.

We have thus, I hope, secured for Ulysses, without drawing upon the Wanderings for testimony, what seamen call a good or wide berth; room enough for the disposition of his marvels, and the mystery of the distances between them. In this northern division of the θάλασσα we may imagine Homer to have placed, without any impropriety, or any violence done to his experience of his own latitude, both the double day of the Læstrygones, and the fogs of the Cimmerians. Into it he might well drive Ulysses by the force of the south wind[583], and from it bring him back by the strength of Zephyr or of Boreas[584]. Lastly, by means of this θάλασσα, we can avoid placing Circe and the Sunrise to the west of Homer’s own country; and we are not obliged to find his representation of the Πλαγκταὶ involving him in the hopeless absurdity of contradiction to his own experimental knowledge of the general direction of Jason’s course with the ship Argo.

[583] Od. xii. 325, 427.

[584] Od. v. 485. x. 25. xii. 407.

~_Amalgamated reports of the Ocean-mouth._~

I now pass on to the second of the two propositions, on which it appears to me that a reasonable interpretation of the Outer Geography is to be founded.

It is this: that the Poet has compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, one of them originally proceeding from, or belonging to, the West, and the other to the North-east: and that he has chosen the north-eastern site as the ground on which to fix the scene of his amalgamated representation.

The argument, which has recently been adduced for another purpose from the Twenty-fourth Odyssey, is available to show that the Ocean-mouth of Homer is towards the north: but it does not suffice to decide the question between North-east and North-west, nor does it decide whether Homer simply transplanted the Straits of Gibraltar, or whether he mixed together the accounts of it and of some other strait, and welded them into one.

This question we must examine from the evidence concerning the Ocean-mouth supplied by the Wanderings themselves.

Ulysses and his companions, when they enter the great River Ocean, enter it at a point far north, by the city and country of the Cimmerians, who are enveloped in cloud and vapour[585]: and they are carried up or against the stream (παρὰ ῥόον), by the breath of Boreas[586], to the mouth of the _Inferno_. Returning from thence, they come down the stream (κατὰ ῥόον Od. xi. 639) back to the sea (θάλασσα); and they there find themselves at the isle of Circe, where is the dwelling of Ἠὼς, and where is also the couch, from which the sun rises in the morning.

[585] Od. xi. 13, 21.

[586] Od. X. 507.

In this account it is not difficult to trace certain outlines of truth. The ideas of Homer respecting the gates of Ocean would be drawn from reports which may have related _primâ facie_ to any one of several geographical points; to the Straits of Gibraltar, to the Bosphorus, to the Straits of Yenikalè leading into the Sea of Azof, or to all the three. At one and all of these there appears to be a continual stream flowing inwards in the direction of the Mediterranean or θάλασσα. One and all, as sea-straits, present the character of a vast marine river. In exact accordance with these physical facts, Homer makes the ship of Ulysses, entering the great River Ocean, sail up the stream. We may observe in passing, that he describes his θάλασσα as εὐρύπορος, in evident contrast with the Ocean, which is marked, therefore, by a contraction of shores.

Further, Homer had conceived the existence of what we may call ultra-terrene parts, both westwards and eastwards. On the one hand, Menelaus, after death, is to be carried to the Elysian plain, where Zephyrs continually blow, springing fresh from the bed of western Ocean. On the other hand, the groves of Persephone are on the beach of Ocean, but in the furthest East.

Still it does not at all follow from this, that he had in his mind the idea of a double egress from the Mediterranean, or, the θάλασσα at large, to the Ocean. On the contrary, we never hear of any mode of access to it except one; and his placing the point where Ulysses enters it amidst mist and cloud, and his calling in the aid of Boreas to carry the ship to the groves of Persephone and mouth of the Shades (which he probably intended to be the exact counterpart in position of the Elysian plain), lead to the belief that his egress from sea to Ocean was in the north, and that the further route to the Shades lay, for the most part, in a southerly direction.

~_Open-sea Passage to Ocean-mouth._~

The reader of the Odyssey will observe, that Ulysses encounters on his passage tempests indeed, but yet nothing in the nature of a dangerous maritime passage, before he has entered the Ocean-river, and then, completing his excursion to the nether world, has returned to the island of Circe[587]. Therefore we may say with certainty, that the mouth of Oceanus is, according to the ideas of Homer, accessible by the broad and open sea. Thus we have attained a first condition for the determination of its site.

[587] Od. xii. 3.

But, before he sets out a second time from Ææa, Circe, now his friend, directs him as to his onward and homeward course. First, he was to reach the island of the Sirens[588]. After passing beyond this, the deity no longer lays before him a single and continuous route[589]: but indicates to him two alternatives, each involving a most dangerous passage. The first is described in the lines Od. xii. 59-72, beginning ἔνθεν μὲν γάρ. The second, which she recommends in vv. 73-110, begins with οἱ δὲ δύω σκόπελοι: where the δὲ is the _apodosis_ to the μὲν of v. 59. Now, it must be remembered, that physically there was nothing to prevent his returning by the way he came, and thus avoiding both of these passages. Why then does Homer expose him to such extraordinary danger, leaving him no option but either total destruction, or the certain loss, at the least, of six men of his crew[590]?

[588] Ibid. 39, 167.

[589] Ibid. 56.

[590] Ibid. 109, 10.

The voyage of Ulysses might have been given us by the Poet as the execution of a divine plan, comprehensively premeditated as a whole: but it is not so: it is shown us as simply prolonged from time to time by some error of his own or of his companions, or by the spite of Neptune, or by the vengeance which the Sun demanded and obtained[591]. At Ææa he has nothing to do, but to take the best way home. Tiresias had indeed prophesied that he would come to Thrinacie[592], but nowhere intimates that he was to be divinely compelled to do this, or that he would take that route for any other reason than according to his own best judgment. Why then does he not return, as he had come, by the open sea, instead of tempting either of the two passages of peril?

[591] Od. i. 75. xii. 373 _et seqq._

[592] Od. xi. 104-7.

The answer I believe to be this. He was subject to the resentment of Neptune, who operates by storm in the open sea. Otium divos rogat in _patenti_ prensus Ægæo. As in the heroic age, every wound, generally speaking, is death, so storm either invariably or commonly means foundering or shipwreck. Thus then Ulysses might prudently keep to landlocked waters and narrow seas, even with a crisis of great danger before him, rather than face the angry Sea-god on the long passages over the open main, by which he had come to the land of the Cyclops, and so onwards to Ææa.

Rationalized, and reduced to its simplest form, this seems to imply that the routes pointed out to him by Circe, and perhaps especially that which he was to prefer, were short cuts either to his home, or at least back into the Inner or Greek world. And in conformity with this supposition, the whole prediction of Circe appears to presume that a passage of moderate length would bring him back within the known world; for it never speaks of the breadth of any unknown sea to be crossed, which to the navigators of that day was always its most formidable feature.

In the mental view of Homer, then, the passage of Scylla could not lie much beyond the horizon of his own Greek world and of geography proper. This was the more eligible of the two routes. The other was that of the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus. It was rejected as involving certain destruction: for only Jason had safely passed it by the aid of Juno, and Pallas was not now at hand to succour Ulysses; since he was outside that Greek world, to which her action has been restricted, generally speaking, and in all likelihood for poetical reasons, in the Odyssey. Now, since both these passages are spoken of as apparently lying near the island of the Sirens, which is itself separated, as far as we can judge, by no long interval from Ææa and Circe, the next inferences we have to draw are two of very great importance. The first is, that although the one strait of Homer physically corresponds with the Straits of Messina, while by the other he plainly means the Bosphorus, yet he conceived of these as within no great distance of one another. The second inference is that, according to the belief of Homer, the waters beyond the Bosphorus were accessible by some channel other than that of the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmora: for otherwise Ulysses could not have placed himself on the farther side of those terrible narrows, except by navigating one of them.

~_Three maritime routes to Ocean-mouth._~

There were therefore three maritime routes by which Homer conceived that mouth of Ocean, which Ulysses entered, to be approachable:

1. The route by which the hero actually arrived there:

2. The route of Scylla and Charybdis, by which he returned from it:

3. The route of the Bosphorus, by which Jason had passed, and which Ulysses might, according to the description of Circe, have attempted.

But now, what in the view of Homer was this mouth of Ocean? that is, on what geographical basis rested the reports or descriptions which he adopted for the groundwork of his picture? We cannot but admire, as we pass along, the manner in which the Phœnicians guarded the treasures of their distant markets: no way lay to them except through a choice of terrors; terror in the boundless expanse of devouring waters; terror in shipwreck by the Πλαγκταὶ, which none but Jason (so says Circe, the Phœnician witness) had escaped; terror in certain loss of men by the voracious maw of Scylla. What, however, was this Ocean-mouth that lay beyond them?

My answer is, that there are two mouths of Ocean, either of which might tolerably correspond with the Homeric picture, if tried only by its relation to the intermediate points that are represented by these dangerous passages.

Firstly, the Straits of Gibraltar, leading to the Atlantic.

Secondly, the Straits of Kertch or Yenikalè, leading to the Sea of Azof.

~_Straits of Gibraltar as Ocean-mouth._~

1. As regards the Straits of Gibraltar, they correspond with the Homeric description in respect of their great distance from Ithaca: of their current ever setting inwards to the Mediterranean: of their being accessible, without previously leaving the wide or open sea for any narrow passage: of their being, we may confidently believe, within the maritime experience of the Phœnicians. Further, on the route to them there lies an island triangular in form, which was already described by the name Thrinacie[593]. Again, it would appear that there were other islands between Thrinacie and this Ocean-mouth. For both Circe and the Sirens inhabit islands. Even the nearest of the Balearic isles, namely, Ibiza, is from the Straits of Gibraltar about as far as Crete from Egypt, which we know to have been estimated by the Poet at five days’ sail. It seems, however, not unlikely that Homer, having received a notice of the Balearic isles in the Phœnician reports concerning the Pillars of Atlas, carried them over, together with Atlas himself, into the eastern situation, where he blends two sets of traditions into one. He may therefore have been supplied from this source with materials for his island of Circe and island of the Sirens.

[593] Od. xii. 127.

Lastly, although the misty Cimmerians are close by the Ocean-mouth, while the atmosphere of Gibraltar is warm and sunny, yet even the fogs may find their prototype in St. George’s Channel[594], or in the Straits of Dover, and it may also be said that, in the hazy distance of a Phœnician captain’s tale, they might from Homer’s point of view seem to stand nearly together. But still this is a difficulty. There are other more serious impediments, which make it absolutely impossible for us to say that the Homeric mouth of Ocean corresponds with the Straits of Gibraltar. This one especially: that he has, by a multitude of ties, fastened down his mouth of Ocean to an eastern rather than a western site; for there, at least hard by, is the dwelling of Aurora; there is the morning couch of the Sun; there is Circe, sister of Æetes, to whose country Jason sailed through the Bosphorus; and these both have had the Sun for their father, and Perse, daughter of Ocean, without doubt an eastern and not a western personage, for their mother[595]. The site of Ææa will, however, together with that of Ogygia, receive presently a fuller consideration.

[594] Quart. Rev. vol. 102. p. 324.

[595] Od. x. 135-9, and xii. 1-4.

~_Straits of Yenikalè as Ocean-mouth._~

Let us turn then to the other alternative in the inquiry.

2. As the Straits of Gibraltar offer a resemblance to the Homeric picture, by their lying beyond the Straits of Messina, so do the Straits of Yenikalè, by their lying beyond the Bosphorus. The perpetual current inwards[596] is another feature of correspondence, such as may apply to both the cases, and such as probably assisted the process at which I shall presently glance. The whole group of Oriental conditions, attaching to Homer’s Ocean-mouth, appear to be exactly realized in the straits of Yenikalè.

[596] Danby Seymour’s Black Sea and Sea of Azof, ch. xvii.

The Cimmerian country of Homer is represented down to the present day by the Crimea, one of the most ancient passages from Asia into Europe, and probably known to the Phœnicians, who could well enough pass the Bosphorus themselves, while making it a bugbear to others. The cloud, in which these Cimmerians are wrapped, finds its counterpart in the notoriously frequent winter fogs of the Euxine. The peninsula, lying on the very Straits themselves, is in exact correspondence with the passage (Od. xi. 13),

ἡ δ’ εἰς πείραθ’ ἵκανε βαθυρρόου Ὠκεανοῖο· ἔνθα δὲ Κιμμερίων ἀνδρῶν δῆμός τε πόλις τε.

The only point of the description which is less faithfully represented at this point than at the other, is the epithet βαθύρροος. This agrees better with the deep water of Gibraltar, than with the (now at least) shallow current of Yenikalè[597].

[597] Ibid. The _minimum_ appears to be fourteen feet: but it seems to have been much deeper in old times.

Nor is it unnatural, that near the Cimmerian darkness he should place the home of Aurora and the Eastern Sun: for it is out of darkness that dawn and day must ever rise; and we have occasion to notice, in various forms, the association in Homer’s mind of ideas belonging to darkness with the East. Again, there is a combination of a northerly with an easterly direction in the conditions of the Homeric description, which is exactly met by the position of these Straits relatively to Greece.

But if we say, that these Straits form the single prototype of the Homeric description, we are again met by hopeless contradictions. For there does not lie any triangular island close by the Bosphorus, which might answer to Thrinacie: and there is no free maritime passage whatever, other than the Bosphorus, by which the Ocean-mouth, that is, the mouth of the _Palus Mæotis_, can be attained by a person who has Troy for his point of departure.

These facts appear to direct us plainly towards one satisfactory, and as it seems inevitable, conclusion. It is exhibited in the sentences that immediately follow.

First, it seems at once clear that Homer either knew, or else dimly figured to himself by Phœnician report, certain geographical facts, including those which follow:--

1. That there was an island, whose figure was defined by a word signifying three promontories, and which was accessible by a passage on the western side of Greece.

2. That near this island, there lay on one side the jaw of a dangerous narrow.

3. That either on the other side of it or in some other neighbouring quarter lay the open sea, and a route along it, by which the further side of the island might be reached, without traversing the narrow.

4. That at a point beyond both these openings (I say nothing for the present of the points of the compass) there lay a great stream such as he called Ὠκεανὸς, flowing always inwards to the θάλασσα, which he supposed to be fed by it (Il. xxi. 196).

5. That there was likewise a passage, which Homer called the Πλαγκταὶ, accessible from the eastern side of Greece; and through which Jason, and as he believed Jason alone, had sailed.

6. That at a point beyond this passage too, there lay an expanse of sea, θάλασσα, and again a great stream, such as he called Ὠκεανὸς, flowing always inwards to the θάλασσα.

Now we have seen that he gives us in the poem one mouth, and one mouth only, of Ὠκεανὸς, which corresponds with every one of these propositions taken singly: it is, according to him, beyond Thrinacie, beyond the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis, attainable by an open sea passage, and beyond the Πλαγκταὶ or Bosphorus.

It seems to follow almost mathematically, that he believed in an open sea route, which must have lain to the north, and which established a communication, independent of the Bosphorus, between the Mediterranean and the Euxine.

~_He blends two sets of reports into one._~

It also hereby appears that he had received from the Phœnicians two sets of reports, one relating to western, and the other to north-eastern navigation, but both involving a description of a great inward flowing stream as an ultimate point, agreeably to his idea of the River Ocean. These two ulterior points, obtained respectively from each set of reports, Homer, led by the similarity of features, has blended into one. We can even now take his untrue representation to pieces, and can see where and how it separates into two, each of them geographically true. In his one mouth of Ocean he has combined the conditions, that in nature belong to two separate geographical points. Both the north-eastern report and the western report he has amalgamated, by carrying the remote point of the former round, so to speak, in order to meet the latter: and having thus made his Ocean-mouth northern, as well as eastern, he consistently calls in Boreas to take the ship of Ulysses to the mouth of the Shades below, so as to fix that point in the east, because it was the counterpart to his Elysian fields which lay in the west. The two sets of Phœnician reports are in this way oddly brought to integrate one another. The Ocean mouth in the Euxine gets the benefit of the open sea route; and the Ocean mouth at Gibraltar has credit for being placed in a northern latitude and eastern longitude; each report thus throwing its own separate attributes into the common stock.

The effect of thus forcing Yenikalè and Gibraltar to meet, naturally enough brings the Faro of Messina and the Bosphorus near to one another: and hence Circe, in the Twelfth Book, names them to Ulysses as alternative routes, both apparently lying in the same region.

But again I say, that in order to comprehend the Outer or imaginary geography of the Odyssey, we must entirely dismiss from our minds the map of Europe as it is. We must treat as having been a real map to Homer only the little sphere which was embraced within the resort of ordinary Greek navigation. Beyond that narrow range, we must consider him as distributing land and sea in the manner he best could, by the aid of reports, necessarily in that age most indistinct, and in all likelihood exaggerated, and even wilfully darkened to boot, by trading craft. Sometimes therefore he puts a people upon poetical _terra firma_ at points, where it fortunately but accidentally turns out that nature has provided an antitype for the imagery of the Poem. Sometimes he lodges them where there is none; _ubi nîl nisi pontus et aer_. But though details are to be thus disposed of, still the one master variation from actual nature is this; the sea extended from the Mediterranean to the Euxine, behind, i. e. to the north of, the Bosphorus and of Thrace. This gives us that open passage into the Euxine, by which Homer supposed Ulysses to have reached the maritime region, that Jason had sought and found through the Bosphorus.

In sum; it is too plain to require much of the detailed proof which I have tried to give, that Homer believed in a great expanse of waters lying somewhere to the north. The probability is, that from some Phœnician source he had heard rumours of the great German Ocean. It need not to us appear strange that his mind did not readily conceive an extent of land like that of the continent of Europe, when we notice that his experience made him conversant partly with islands, partly with countries in minute subdivisions, and of small breadth from sea to sea. This great imaginary mass of waters he included within the θάλασσα, to which everything belonged as far as the point where the great River Oceanus was reached.

I think then that we have now found the two keys to the Outer Geography,

1. In the sea-route north of Thrace;

2. In the amalgamation of the western with the north-eastern report of the Ocean-mouth.

From the site of the Ocean-mouth of Homer, we may most naturally proceed to examine the site of Ææa; which, as being within one day’s sail, is a kind of porter’s lodge to it[598], and is a point of the utmost importance in the system. Hitherto I have proceeded only by assertion, so far as the site of the Homeric Ææa is conceived. But to defend the second main proposition or key to the system, in the face of counter-theories, it will be necessary to examine, with as much care as may be, all the Homeric evidence that bears either upon this question, or upon the kindred one of the site of Ogygia.

[598] Od. xii. 10-13.

We have then to inquire, subject to the rules which have been laid down, first, whether Ææa, the island of Circe, is to be placed, its northward direction being generally admitted, in the north-west or in the north-east?

Secondly, as dependent very much upon the prior question, and as entering at the same time largely into the proof of it, what is the site of Ogygia, the island of Calypso?

~_North-western hypothesis for the site of Ææa._~

Now I think that the arguments, which have been used for the north-western theory, have been principally founded,

1. Upon precipitate inferences, drawn from some one or more of Homer’s outer-world statements, and then illegitimately used in order to govern the rest of them;

2. Upon the course of the later tradition, which was led, probably by the course of colonization, to identify and appropriate the particulars of the Outer Geography rather in the West than in the East. For Sicily and Italy became at an early period familiar to the Greeks; but it was long before they grew to be well acquainted with the more dangerous, remote, and isolated navigation of the Black Sea[599]. Perhaps, indeed, the main reason for placing the tour of Ulysses all along in the West has been no better than this; that Homer has given us an account of an island apparently corresponding in form with Sicily; which it may very well do, and yet the conception of the site may be totally erroneous. Again, with respect to traditional authority, I apprehend it may be asserted, that the Fragment of Mimnermus[600], which carries Jason to the East, to the chamber of the Sun, and to the city of Æetes, as to one and the same point, expresses an universal tradition, so far as the voyage of the Argonauts is concerned. And I would also observe, that the current local appropriations about the coast of Italy seem to be given up on all hands as geographically worthless: the only question is, not so much that of removal, as into which of two quarters they shall be transplanted. On the other hand, the principal arguments for the north-eastern hypothesis are, as I conceive, founded upon legitimate inferences, drawn from the inner-world or experimental statements of Homer, and then applied, by a law essentially sound, to determine the cardinal problems of his Outer Geography.

[599] Müller’s Orchomenos, p. 269.

[600] Mimn. Fragm. x. quoted in Strabo, i. p. 67.

~_North-eastern hypothesis._~

For example, much will depend upon the answer to the question, whether we are to carry the Straits of Messina, or rather the fable of Scylla and Charybdis, taken to represent them, eastwards, or whether we are in preference to move the Bosphorus westwards.

I answer without hesitation, that it is much more reasonable to construe Homer as shifting essentially the site of Scylla and Charybdis, than the site of the Bosphorus; and for the following reasons.

We have not the slightest reason to suppose that either Sicily or the Scylla passage came within the experimental knowledge of Homer and the Greeks of his time, either as to the island and the Strait themselves, or as to the direction in which they lay.

We find indeed that a continuance of winds, which ranged between E. and S. W. detained Ulysses in Thrinacie or Trinacria. It has from this been, as I think by much too hastily, inferred that Thrinacie lay to the north-west of Ithaca[601]. Even if it did so, we should still miss the true bearing of Sicily, which is west, with all inclination to the south, and not north-west, from Ithaca. But the assumption is in fact unwarranted. The wind, which principally held Ulysses fast in Thrinacie, was, as is evident from the passage, Notus, a southerly wind. Eurus plays a secondary part there[602]. Besides this, the wind, which Ulysses needed, may have been needed to bring him not to Ithaca, but to some point on his way to Ithaca, from whence his bearings would be known; to some point at which, from the Outer, it would have been practicable for him to re-enter the Inner or Greek world. The needful conditions would be satisfied if, for instance, Thrinacie lay either north-west or north-east from the Dardanelles; and then Ulysses would want either Zephyr or else Boreas to get there. And the opposite theory proceeds upon the entirely arbitrary, nay, untrue, assumption, that the way back through the Narrows was, like the way by which Ulysses had come to Ææa, an open-sea route, and not one in which the course would have to be governed by fixed points of land lying along the course.

[601] Müller’s Orchomenos, p. 272. Nitzsch, Od. xii. 361.

[602] Od. xii. 325, 6.

There is then no middle term between Thrinacie and any fixed point of the Inner Homeric world, from which we can by direct inference argue as to its site. And the winds, which detain Ulysses in Thrinacie, go far of themselves to show that this island is not on the site of Sicily.

The case is far otherwise in regard to the Bosphorus, or Πλαγκταὶ, of the Odyssey. For here we know,

1. That Homer was familiar with the Dardanelles, a stage on the way to it, and not very far from it:

2. That he makes Jason pass the Bosphorus:

3. That he also makes Jason settle at Lemnos, and become sovereign of the island, evidently in connection with his route from Thessaly to the East.

But Thessaly, and Lemnos too, are places of the inner world: with Lemnos the Poet appears to have been accurately acquainted; and the line between that island and the home of Jason determines absolutely so much as this; that the general direction of his voyage was known by Homer, at least up to this point, to have lain to the north-eastward through the Straits of Gallipoli.

I hold therefore that the passage of the Πλαγκταὶ is fixed immovably, by known-world evidence, as to its general direction: that to transplant it to the west, is to break up the foundations of Homer’s experimental knowledge, which is always to be trusted: whereas to move his Thrinacie eastward is merely to suppose that he gave the site which was poetically most convenient to a tradition which, as it came to him, had no site at all, no positive local or geographical determination.

~_Character and site of Thrinacie._~

Again, I take the island Thrinacie by itself; and I contend that, although the report on which this delineation was founded may probably have had its origin in Sicily, yet the Thrinacie of Homer is associated rather with the East than with the West.

For, though he has given us no geographical means for directly determining the site, he has supplied us with other means that belong, not to Phœnician rumour or fireside tale, but to his own knowledge and experience. Since nothing can be more certain, than that the leading local association of the Sun, for Homer as for all mankind, is with the east. It is true that he is in the west just as often as in the east; but we certainly hold Napoleon to belong more to Corsica than to Saint Helena; and so the mind connects the Sun with the place of his daily birth, and not with that of his daily death. Now, without entering upon any other question for the present, I only observe, that in Thrinacie are the oxen with which the Sun disports himself when not engaged in his daily labours; that is, as he himself supplies the explanation, both before they begin, and after they are ended[603]. In deference, then, to those associations, founded on actual nature, which for the present purpose are strictly facts, I cannot hesitate to maintain, that the island of Thrinacie is upon the whole, relatively to Greece, an eastern island.

[603] Od. xii. 380.

A like inference may be drawn from the names Lampetie (λάμπειν) and Phaethusa (φάος), which he has given to the Nymphs of the Sun. Had the island been in his intention western, he would have called them by names of a different etymology.

And as the Scylla passage, which is on its coast, is near the Πλαγκταὶ, I think we shall pretty closely conform to the views of Homer, if we make Thrinacie form the western side of the Bosphorus, and if we separate it by an imaginary or poetical Scylla from the main land of Turkey in Europe.

Again, it is admitted that Αἰήτης has his name from Αἰαίη. From the personal relations of Æetes, as well as from those of his daughter Circe, we may therefore argue respecting the site of Ææa, provided we can attach them to any known and fixed point of the system of Homeric ideas.

Now their parentage furnishes a point of this kind, on both the father’s and the mother’s side. Their father is the Sun: a divinity not, like the Apollo or Minerva[604], de-localized, but one having his daily sojourn (out of work-hours) in the east. The mother is Perse: and enough, I think, has been shown with respect to the import of this name for the Achæan mind[605], to make it pretty certain that, when Homer gives a residence to the children of Perse, he intends it to be in the east.

[604] See Olympus, sect. iii. p. 82.

[605] See Achæis, or Ethnology, sect. x; and Olympus, sect. iv. p. 220, on Persephone.

It is now time to bring more directly into the discussion a point much contested--the situation of the island of Calypso. The usual modes of solution, which place the original of this picture on the Bruttian coast or in Malta[606], are inadmissible in spirit as well as in the letter. For very great remoteness is the most essential point in the description, and to bring it near would wholly change its character. It requires eighteen days of favourable wind[607] to come by raft within sight of Scheria from Ogygia: while even the distance from Crete to Egypt, a greater one than from the Bruttian coast to Greece, might be performed, as Homer thinks, in five[608]. It is the midpoint, or ὄμφαλος[609], of a vast expanse of sea: and Mercury, passing thither from Olympus, mentions the route as one which traverses a mighty space of water, without habitations of men between[610]. Again, the name of Calypso (καλύπτειν) places it wholly beyond the circle of Greek maritime experience: as does her relation to Atlas, who holds the pillars, that is, stands at the extremity, of earth and sea. The first and cardinal point to be fixed therefore is its decided, if not extreme remoteness.

[606] Schönemann de Geogr. Hom. p. 20. Nitzsch on Od. v. 50, n.

[607] Od. v. 268-75.

[608] Od. xiv. 257.

[609] Od. i. 50.

[610] Od. v. 100-2.

Next, if it is thus remote, we find by a process of exhaustion that it must be in the north. As far as we know, Homer recognised the African coast by placing the Lotophagi upon it, and the Ethiopians inland from the East all the way to the extreme West. In that direction there is no more θάλασσα, or sea. And again, as Nitzsch truly remarks, Scheria is on the proper homeward line of the voyage of Ulysses[611]. Consequently he cannot pass, nor can he even approach, Ithaca while on his way to Scheria: I add, he must come to it down the Adriatic on his way to Ithaca.

[611] Nitzsch on Od. v. 276-8.

~_Site of Ogygia to the East of North._~

Now we are provided with an important argument, drawn, like some preceding ones, from what we may fairly call Homer’s experience, and tending to fix the site of Ogygia in the north or north-east. It is derived from the route taken by Mercury, when he carries the message of the Immortals to Calypso, which in another point of view we have already had to examine[612]:

[612] Od. v. 50.

Πιερίην δ’ ἐπιβὰς, ἐξ αἰθέρος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ.

We are obliged to suppose, as has been observed, that Mercury, who does not march, but flies like a bird wont to hunt for fish[613], must move in a direct line towards his object. But Pieria is a district stretching along the shore of Macedonia; it begins in the south, to the eastward of Olympus, and then extends due north of it. Its limits are variously defined[614]; but the only question about it could be, whether it verges, not to the westward, but to the eastward of North. Again, from the route of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad[615], no question can arise, except what would tend to give Pieria an eastward turn.

[613] Ibid. 51-3.

[614] Cramer’s Greece, i. 204.

[615] Il. xiv. 226.

A line drawn from Olympus over the centre of Pieria would carry Mercury to the North. It might, consistently with the condition of crossing Pieria, diverge a little either to the east or the west of due North, but only a little. Consequently the island of Calypso may be affirmed to be, according to the intention of Homer, in the North, and not very far from due North.

This conclusion is confirmed by two other arguments; which are both of the class which I have described as legitimate, because they are founded on Homer’s physical knowledge of the direction of the winds.

After the storm has destroyed the ship of Ulysses to the south of Thrinacie, Notus, a wind of decidedly southerly character, carries him back again to Scylla, Od. xii. 426: and again, when he has passed it, he proceeds thus[616]:

[616] Od. xii. 447.

ἔνθεν δ’ ἐννῆμαρ φερόμην, δεκάτῃ δέ με νυκτὶ νῆσον ἐς Ὠγυγίην πέλασαν θεοί.

Now there is no mention between these two passages either of any change of wind, or of any particular wind. Consequently it seems rational to assume that Homer meant us to understand a continuance of the wind just named, namely Notus. Even independently of this collocation, we should be thrown back upon the general rule of the Wanderings, which is that southerly winds blow Ulysses away from home, while northerly ones bring him back again.

Consequently, the natural construction to put upon the passage is, that it was a south wind, whether a little east or west of south matters not much, which continued to blow, and which drifted Ulysses away from Ithaca to the island of Calypso. This is in entire accordance with the passage which describes him as windbound by Eurus and Notus at Thrinacie; since the way from home is presumably the exact reverse of the way towards it. But it will be said, this implies that he made westing on his way to Ogygia from Ææa. I answer, that this is probably so: for Circe is described as immediately connected with the east, while Calypso is far, as Mercury complains, from all land and habitation: so that apparently her island is, in the intention of Homer, materially to the westward, as well as greatly to the northward, of Ææa. But the main direction taken from Scylla is northward; and, since Scylla is near the Πλαγκταὶ, and the Πλαγκταὶ are the Bosphorus of actual nature, it must be taken from a point near the Bosphorus, along the imaginary expanse of an enlarged and westward-reaching Euxine.

According to this argument, then, Ogygia might lie upon a line drawn from Mount Olympus in a direction not very wide either way of St. Petersburgh.

Nor are we wholly without means of measuring the distance. He floats (from Scylla) for nine days, and arrives on the tenth. Now this is just what happened to the pseudo-Ulysses[617], who in the same space of time drifted from a point near Crete to the country of the Thesprotians. We may therefore fix Ogygia as (in the intention of the Poet), at about the same distance from Scylla, which we measure from the south of Epirus to a point near, yet not in sight of, Crete. But this in passing.

[617] Od. xiv. 310-15. 301-4.

The corresponding argument is derived from the homeward passage of Ulysses, and stands as follows:

For seventeen days Ulysses pursues his raft-voyage from Ogygia to Scheria; and the raft threatens to founder on the eighteenth. He then floats, by the aid of the girdle he had received from Ino. Up to this point there is no positive indication of the wind; the argument from the relation between his course and the stars I will consider shortly. But after he has put on the girdle, and when Neptune withdraws his persecution, since he is now approaching the horizon of the Inner world again, Minerva’s agency revives, and she sends a north wind or a north-north-east wind, Boreas, to bring him to Scheria.

Now there is no reason for our supposing that Homer meant to represent Ulysses as changing his general direction at this particular point. The orders of Circe with respect to the stars all indicate a single right line from Ogygia to Scheria, and neither the wind nor his course alter, until he has seen the island on the far horizon. The natural inference therefore is, that Boreas, the N. or N. N. E. wind, which at last drifted him in, was the wind which had brought him all the way from the island of Calypso, over an unbroken and unincumbered expanse of sea.

We appear to have seen, thus far, that Ogygia is greatly to the northward, and probably somewhat to the westward, of the Strait of Scylla. We shall obtain further light upon the site of that island, if we can more precisely define the position of Scylla with regard to what lay southward, as well as with respect to what lay northward, from it.

Our _data_ are as follows:

1. Thrinacie appears to be close to Scylla, for it is reached αὐτίκα (xii. 261).

2. The comrades of Ulysses, when they arrive at the island, and when he attempts to dissuade them from landing, reply by asking what is to become of them if they set sail at night, and are then caught by a squall of Eurus or of Zephyr (284-93).

3. The ship is windbound in Thrinacie for a month by Eurus and Notus; which may be taken in Homer as the winds that cover the whole horizon from a point north of east to the western quarter[618].

[618] See sup. p. 274.

4. When they finally set sail, we are not told with what wind it was: but, after they have got out of sight of the island, the sky darkens, and mischief follows[619];

[619] Od. xii. 403-8.

αἶψα γὰρ ἦλθεν κεκληγὼς Ζέφυρος, μεγάλῃ σὺν λαίλαπι θύων·

and the ship goes to pieces in the tempest. At length Zephyr ceases, and Notus blows Ulysses back upon Scylla.

5. If it was the intention of Homer to place Thrinacie by the Bosphorus, then the next point which Ulysses had to make was the Dardanelles.

~_Scylla and the Dardanelles._~

The question therefore is, what conclusion can we draw from the evidence now before us as to the position of Scylla relatively to the Dardanelles? I think a pretty clear one.

We have at least two of those statements, which may be called experimental, now before us. Homer knew the position of the mouth of the Dardanelles. He knew the nature of the wind Notus. And there is a third piece of evidence not unimportant, which we may here properly bring into view. We have seen that, in Il. ii. 845, Homer confines or contains his Thracians (ἔντος ἐέργει) by the Hellespont: and the Hellespont with him means all the waters from the Sea of Marmora to the northern Ægæan inclusive. Now by this he intends only a part of the Thracians, those, say, of the plain of Adrianople. It is presumable therefore that he believed the configuration of the coast at the two extremities of the Dardanelles to be something like at least two of the sides of a square, running N. and W. respectively: for unless it formed a portion of some marked figure, it would not answer his description of including a certain district, and the words would become applicable to the whole of Thrace alike. Therefore it appears that Homer thought the northern coast of the Sea of Marmora trended, from its western point, more rapidly to the north, than is really the case.

The most decisive evidence, however, is that which had been previously named.

When the storm came, which shattered the ship, Ulysses was on the true course from Thrinacie to the Dardanelles. But if we know the point for which he was making in a right line from point _x_, and if we also know the wind which carried him back to point _x_, then the line on which point _x_ itself lies is also known. In other words, as Notus, or say the S.S.W. wind, carried him back upon Scylla, Scylla lies to the N.N.E. of the inner mouth of the Dardanelles: and the unnamed wind which takes him back to Scylla is Notus, which we are entitled to consider as blowing (even as Boreas, its counterpart, blows from due N. to the eastward) from any point between the limit of Eurus on the East of South, and 45 or even 90 degrees beyond South to the westward.

Ææa, then, is in the East; with somewhat of an inclination, as measured from Greece, towards the north. Ulysses has much westing to make, in order to get to Scheria. Part of this is made on his passages between Ææa and Ogygia in the farther north. The rest in the course of his long seventeen days’ voyage from the north, which is propelled, as it would appear, by Boreas, and therefore includes also a slight westerly inclination.

All these arguments converge towards the same conclusions, and all of them are mainly founded, not on Homer’s outer-world representations, but upon indications drawn from his knowledge of nature, or else from his experimental or otherwise familiar acquaintance with the Inner world: that is, they are built not on the figures of his fancy, but on the facts of his own and his countrymen’s every-day experience.

And now let us consider the adverse construction put upon the text of the Odyssey; particularly with regard to the island of Ææa.

~_Why Ææa cannot lie North-westward._~

It is quite plain, from the accounts given of the route both ways, that the Ocean-mouth is meant by Homer to be near the island of Ææa; that is, within a day’s sail[620] of that island. How is this reconcilable with the doctrine, which places the island in the far north-west? In the north-east we have an Ocean-mouth, the situation of which the Poet, guided up to a certain point by his inner-world knowledge, has not very inaccurately conceived. In the north-west there is no Ocean-mouth. The Straits of Gibraltar, though they lie rather to the south of west from Ithaca, must be carried far into the north for the purpose; in what form, or with what accompaniments, it is hard to conceive. To attempt such a transposition would involve the complete abandonment of all actual geography, and would after all leave us involved in hopeless confusion in the effort to construct any tolerable scheme from the text of Homer.

[620] Od. xi. 11.

~_Construction of_ Od. xii. 3, 4.~

At the mere transportation, indeed, we need not scruple overmuch, if we could justify the proceeding by other clear indications of Homer’s intention. But there is no such justification. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the violence done to the text of Od. xii. 3, 4, by the interpretation which Nitzsch (following, as I admit, Eustathius), puts upon it. The ship, leaving the stream of Ocean, reaches the sea and the island[621]:

[621] Od. xii. 3.

νῆσόν τ’ Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ’ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης οἰκία καὶ χοροί εἰσι, καὶ ἀντολαὶ Ἠελίοιο.

The ἀντολαὶ, the rising, or rising-point of the sun, does not, he says, mean the east, but only the first appearance of the sun on their return from darkness, which is a kind of dawning on them. And the dwelling of the early-born Dawn, and the place (such appears to be the meaning of χόροι) of the Dances of her kindred or attendant Nymphs--who in later mythology became the virgin train of Hours, that now delight us in the frescoes of Guido and Guercino--not only do not mean anything eastern, but apparently in this place are conceived to have no meaning whatever, and to be an idle, indeed a most inconvenient and bewildering, pleonasm. And thus the magic poetry of this passage and all the curious traditions it involves, are destroyed, in order to make room--for what? For the hypothesis that Homer places the dwelling of Morning and the chamber of the rising Sun far to the westward of the country that he himself inhabited[622]!

[622] In the well known case of a noble description in the Antiquary, Walter Scott has made the sun set on the east coast of Great Britain: but _this_ was unawares and not on purpose. Had he recited instead of writing, the error could not have escaped correction.

There is, I confess, something almost of _naïveté_ in the confession of Nitzsch, that ‘it sounds rather strange to interpret ἀνατολαὶ without any reference to sunrise, since it is the customary counterpart to δύσις, the sunset.’ But fortunately there is no Homeric evidence against it: as indeed there cannot well be, since the word occurs in no other passage. With respect to Ἠὼς, Nitzsch contends that it means not dawn, but light: and he quotes the passages which say, ‘your glory shall reach as far as Ἠὼς,’ and ‘horses, the best to be found beneath the Sun and Ἠώς.’ Certainly it is most allowable, (though I by no means think the sense of dawn inadmissible in these two passages,) especially as day goes nowhere except preceded by dawn, to generalize the word Ἠὼς so as to make it equivalent to light. But the fatal flaw in the interpretation is this, that when Ἠὼς is thus used, it is invariably apart from any circumstances which can give a local colour to its meaning. But wherever there is any thing local implied, as is admitted to be in the case before us, the ἠὼς uniformly means the east, though with a certain indefiniteness perhaps as to northward and southward inclination. For instance, when Homer speaks of omen-birds flying eastwards, he describes them as flying πρὸς ἠώ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε, and the opposite movement as ποτὶ ζόφον, which here evidently means north-west, although it too may signify darkness in general. The whole aim of the passage (Od. xii. 1-5) is, to fix locality; and it is in the teeth of all Homeric usage to deprive ἠὼς in such a passage of local force, while it confessedly can have no local meaning but an eastern one.

To me, I confess, it appears that Homer has nowhere done more, and rarely so much, in a single passage, as in this, with a view of declaring his intention. The island Ææa, irrespective of all geographical argument, is, as we have seen, directly bound and fastened to an eastern site by four separate cords. First, as the rising point of the Sun. Secondly, as the residence of Dawn. Thirdly, because Circe, its mistress, has the Sun, the most eastern of all mythological conceptions except the Dawn, for her father. Fourthly, because she has also Perse, whose name indicates a trans-Phœnician origin, for her mother. And further, I am convinced we cannot alter the place of Ææa without uprooting the whole Phœnician scheme of the Outer Geography.

The scope and range thus given to the adventures of Ulysses confines them without doubt to the northern semi-circle, but allows them to reach, within that semi-circle, to its eastern and to its western extremities, as they are imagined by the Poet. Æolus and the Læstrygonians are evidently placed by him in the north-west. The hypothesis, which has here been maintained for Ææa and Calypso, supplies an effectual counterpart, and properly fills up the eastern corner. But, independently of all other objections, the north-western hypothesis for these islands jumbles them, if I may so speak, in one heap with the others, and leaves the eastern quarter towards the North wholly unoccupied. And yet that East was, for a Greek, the source and the scene of the richest legendary and mythological representations. Such an incongruous view of the question would not, I think, be at all in keeping with Homer’s ordinary modes of conceiving, handling, and presenting his materials.

~_Construction of_ Od. v. 276, 7.~

But I am aware that, up to this time, we have left out of view a passage, of which I freely admit that the prevailing, and in so far the most obvious, interpretation is against me. Ulysses sails over the sea from Ogygia, governing the rudder of his raft with art, and watching the stars, especially the Great Bear; which at that period, I believe, was nearer the Pole, and was a more conspicuous and splendid astronomical object, than it now is. It was with respect to this constellation that he had received a particular order from Calypso[623]:

[623] Od. v. 276.

τὴν γὰρ δή μιν ἄνωγε Καλυψὼ, δῖα θεάων, ποντοπορευέμεναι ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἔχοντα.

Or, according to the common construction of the words, he was to keep that constellation on the left during his voyage. But if his course lay in the direction of a right line drawn from St. Petersburgh to Corfu, it appears that Arctus, when visible to him, would be visible on the right, and not on the left.

I could not, however, accommodate myself to this passage at such a cost as that of oversetting an interpretation of the general scheme, which is so deeply rooted both in the letter and spirit of the poem, as is the eastern, and likewise somewhat north-eastern, hypothesis for Ææa, together with a northern site for Ogygia. These two, it may be observed, stand together. It is plain, from the times occupied by the several stages between Ææa and Ogygia, and from the language used where no precise time is stated, that the Poet conceived the distance between them to be limited, though very considerable. And indeed the north-western hypothesis for Ææa would do nothing for the passage I have quoted, unless we also carry Ogygia into the north-west, in order that Ulysses, on his way home from it, may have Arctus on his left. Inasmuch, however, as the admission of the received sense for the lines would involve us in a new series of the most complicated and hopeless contradictions, we must look for relief in some other direction.

~_On the genuineness of the passage._~

I desire to eschew, as a general rule, the dangerous and seductive practice of questioning the genuineness of the text because it seems to stand in conflict with a favoured interpretation. I may however state, without unduly relying on them, one or two particulars which, drawn from the poem itself, may show that these two lines are not unjustly open to the suspicion of interpolation.

1. The two lines are wholly void of any necessary connection with what precedes and follows them, and the text is complete without them. We should not break up the passage generally by removing them. This argument, however, is one purely negative.

2. These lines tell us, that Calypso had bid Ulysses keep Arctus on his left. Now Homer has given us a speech of Calypso[624] on the subject of this voyage, in which she promises to send, from behind him, a breeze which shall carry him home. But there is in this speech no order to him whatever about observing the stars; and the promise of the wind in some degree, though not perhaps quite conclusively, tends to show that no such injunction was needed. For it is plain that, if the wind blew fair across the open sea, he did not depend at all upon the helm, and noticing the stars would be of no assistance to him. I rely, however, more upon this, that there is here a sort of patchwork, very unlike Homer’s usual method, in the mode in which the injunction is recorded. Clearly, if Calypso gave a direction respecting the stars, the proper place for it was in the speech where she delivered to Ulysses what may be called his general instruction for the voyage. And I am not sure whether another instance can be found in the whole of the poems, where an omission of something relevant and material in one of the speeches is supplied by a recital in the subsequent narrative. It is wholly contrary to the manner of Homer, who so uniformly throws into speech and the dramatic form whatever is susceptible of being thus handled.

[624] Od. v. 160-70.

3. The expression ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς is found nowhere else in Homer, though the phrase ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ occurs many times.

4. There is no other passage in the Wanderings, or elsewhere in the poems, which describes the conduct of navigation by means of the stars. In the Iliad we have the mention of a star in connection with sea-travelling; but it is simply as a portent, (ναύτῃσι τέρας, Il. iv. 76). On this, however, if it stood alone, I should place no commanding stress: and it should also be observed that the objection is one which, if admitted, would displace eight lines.

So much for the genuineness of the passage.

As respects the grammatical meaning of the phrase, I have endeavoured to discuss it at large in a separate paper; and to show that its real sense is in fact the reverse of that which is ordinarily assumed. It means, I believe, a star looking _towards_ the left, and therefore a star looking _from_ and situated _on_ the right hand in the sky.

In no case, however, can I admit it to be the true meaning of Homer, that Ulysses is to follow a south-westward course from Ogygia to Scheria; because this is at variance with all the trustworthy, I must add with the consentient, indications of Homer’s intention in the whole arrangement of the tour, as well as in the particular description of Circe’s island. It is also in contradiction to those indications, drawn from his inner or experimental geography, which determine at certain points the bearings applicable to the Outer or Phœnician sphere.

Before proceeding to draw up in propositions the whole outline of the interpretation which I venture to give to the route of Ulysses, I would call attention to the means, which the Poet has adopted to signify to us his own doubt and incertitude respecting its actual bearings at several important points.

By means of the wind Boreas he indicates to us the direction, not however the distance, of the Lotophagi. After leaving them, he tells us nothing either of distance or direction between their country and that of the Cyclopes. From this point he provides us with certain aids until we reach Æolia. When in Æolia, Ulysses is to the north-west of Ithaca: for the Zephyr given by Æolus, he says, would have carried him home. From this isle, six days of rowing take him to Læstrygonia. Another passage of indefinite length next carries him to Ææa; and, arriving here, he is entirely out of his bearings; he cannot tell where is east or west[625], the point of dusk or the point of dawn, until he has been duly instructed by Circe: but he sees an unbounded sea (πόντος ἀπείριτος) on every side of him.

[625] Od. x. 190.

~_Homer’s geographical misgivings._~

This expression of ignorance, put into the mouth of Ulysses, probably conveys the true sense of the Poet; who, more or less puzzled with even his own method of harmonizing the Phœnician reports, and suspecting that it might not bear the test of application to actual nature, shielded himself by anticipation, through giving us to understand that he did not mean to submit Circe’s isle to the strict rules of geographical measurement.

And indeed it was no wonder that he felt some diffidence, when we recollect that he had to concentrate in a single point facts or traditions that embraced east, north, and west. Eastern his site must be to allow of the rising of the sun, and the accompanying legends: he may have had misgivings, lest his Thrinacie, and also other traditions of which he had to work up the materials, should in reality lie westward from Greece: lastly, an appreciable northern element was involved in the general direction of the navigation through the Bosphorus, which in fact supplies a kind of meeting-point for the two former. The remedy is, thus to hang the island of Circe in a vague and shadowy distance, which gives the nearest practicable approach to an exemption from the laws imposed by any determinate configuration of the earth.

Nor are these the only cases, in which Homer has afforded us tokens of his own want of clear knowledge and confidence in regard to the scenes through which he has carried his hero. On the contrary, he has indicated the haziness of his views, and the insecurity of the ground he trod, by forbearing in several other instances to fix with precision the particular winds which favoured or opposed the voyage of Ulysses, or to particularize the distances he travelled.

~_Homeward route of Ulysses._~

We are now at liberty to approach the last portion of our subject. We have, I trust, fixed the distinction of the Inner and Outer Geography; ascertained the keys of the outer system, and fixed its governing points. It remains to inquire what, according to the data ascertained, did the Poet intend to be the route of Ulysses over the face of his ideal map; and then, finally, to show its relation to that of Menelaus, and to Homer’s general conception of the configuration and distribution of the surface of the earth.

I. His first halting-place, after quitting Troy, is with the Cicones, in Thrace. This visit was paid with scarcely a deviation from his homeward route: and therefore it does not belong to the Outer Geography. The Cicones of the Odyssey were probably placed near the northernmost point of the Ægæan sea (Od. ix. 39).

II. From the country of the Cicones, he sails southward, under a heavy north-north-east gale (Od. ix. 67), which lasts for three days. He has then fair weather, till he gets to Cape Malea. But, as he is rounding Cape Malea, the north-north-easter returns, and drives him down the west coast of Cythera (now Cerigo), and so out to sea (79-81). After nine days’ sail, with ὀλοοὶ ἄνεμοι, he reaches the land of the Lotophagi (82-4). Now, as it took five days of the best possible wind to sail from Crete to Egypt (Od. xiv. 253), we may perhaps assume that, in the ten days of veering gales, about an equal distance was made in the general direction of south-south-east indicated for us by the Boreas of v. 82. This will place the Lotophagi on the Syrtis Major, now the Gulf of Sidra. Here the region of the marvel-world begins: and the mention of the ὀλοοὶ ἄνεμοι, in lieu of the pure Boreas, may be taken as fair notice from the Poet, that he had no precise knowledge on what portion of the coast of Africa Ulysses was to set his foot.

The Lotophagi are full of Egyptian resemblances: and it appears that, as Egypt and Phœnicia were for Homer the two greatest border-lands between the real and the imagined worlds, therefore Ulysses makes his first step into the Outer world through a quasi-Egyptian people, and his last step out of it among a quasi-Phœnician people.

III. The voyage from the land of the Lotophagi to the next stage, the country of the Cyclopes, is without the smallest indication either of distance or direction (103-5). But as, within the Outer sphere, northern winds are always homeward, and southern ones carry Ulysses outward, we may assume that Homer here intended some southern wind; though, as he breaks at this juncture the last link with the known world, he could not venture to state any thing like the precise point of the compass.

Shall we place the Cyclopes of Homer on any point of _terra firma_, or must we imagine a country for them?

Tradition has answered this question by commonly placing them in Sicily. But a vague tradition, as we have seen, is of little authority in regard to Homeric questions; and in this instance, I think, it may be shown to be in error, for the following reasons:

1. The country of the Cyclopes is not an island: it is mainland (γαίη Κυκλώπων, 106), with an island near to it, 105. By the expression γαίη, Homer sometimes means a great island such as Crete: but we have no authority for supposing he would apply it to Sicily.

2. It can hardly be doubted that the little which Homer probably did know of Sicily is represented to us by his Thrinacie. And all this consists in two points: the first, that it was an island (Od. xii. 127): the second, that it was triangular, and derived its name from its form. But his Thrinacie he has given to the oxen of the Sun: and therefore he certainly does not mean it to be the land of the Cyclopes, or he would have given it the same name on both occasions. Indeed, on the contrary, he has actually given another name to the land of the Cyclopes: it is the εὐρύχορος Ὑπέρεια of Od. vi. 4. I may add, that the epithet εὐρύχορος is not generally applicable to Sicily, which is channelled all through with hill and dale, and which nowhere, unless perhaps between Syracuse and Catania, seems to present any great breadth of plain.

3. Besides this, Ulysses traverses very long distances[626], in order to reach Ææa from Hypereia: but Thrinacie, on the other hand, is very near Ææa, so that he has not retraced his distance, and therefore cannot be in Sicily.

[626] See Od. x. 28 and 80.

Where then were situated these Cyclopes, to whose country Ulysses came after quitting the Lotophagi? It is plain that they were not within the Greek maritime world, or Homer would, we may be sure, have indicated their position by the time of the voyage, or by the quarter from which the wind blew to take him there.

I submit that Homer meant to place the Cyclopes in Iapygia, the heel of Italy; a region nearly corresponding, on the west of the Ionian sea, with the position of Scheria on the east. This hypothesis is consistent with the whole evidence in the case, and might well stand on that ground only. But it is, I think, also sustained by a separate argument from the migration of the Phæacians[627].

[627] Od. vi. 4.

The Phæacians, descended like the Cyclopes from Neptune, were recent inhabitants of Scheria; they formerly dwelt near the Cyclopes in Hypereia, and were dislodged from thence by the violence of their brutal neighbours. They removed under Nausithous, and settled in Scheria.

They were flying from a race who had no ships with which to follow them. If Hypereia in which they lived was Iapygia, any place in the situation of Scheria, or near it, would be a natural place of refuge for them. But if they had been in Sicily, Homer in all likelihood would not have carried them beyond the neighbouring coast of Italy, which would have afforded them the security they desired.

IV. From Iapygia or Hypereia, the country of the Cyclopes, Ulysses proceeds to pay his double visit to Æolia. We are not assisted in the first instance (Od. ix. 565. x. 1.) by any indication of wind or distance. It is not unfair to presume that Stromboli, with its active volcano, was the prototype of this gusty island. But, like other places, it is not on the site of its prototype. For Æolus gives Ulysses a Zephyr or north-west wind, which would have carried him home, had it not been for the folly of his comrades (Od. x. 25, 46). The Æolia of Homer then must conform to these two conditions:

1. It must lie north-west of Ithaca.

2. There must be a continuous open sea between them; and one uninterrupted by land, so that one and the same wind may carry a ship all the way.

To meet these conditions, we have only to move Æolia northward. For the northern part of Italy has no existence in the Outer Geography. It is swept away, along with the great mass of the European continent, and the θάλασσα covers all.

After the opening of the bag (x. 48, 54) the ship is driven back by a θύελλα upon Æolia. But here we have had another valuable indication. They had enjoyed the Zephyr nine full days, and they were in sight of home on the tenth (v. 28, 9), when the folly was committed. Therefore Æolia is between nine and ten days’ sail to the north-west of Ithaca: or, with an allowance of fifty miles for the distance to the horizon, there will be about one thousand miles between them.

V. The fifth stage is Læstrygonia: and it is reached after seven days’ rowing (x. 80). There is no indication of direction in the voyage: but we have a sure proof that the prototype of this place was far north; namely, that there is here perpetual day;

ποιμένα ποιμὴν ἠπύει εἰσελάων, ὁ δέ τ’ ἐξελάων ὑπακούει.

It cannot, I think, be doubted that Homer obtained information of a region displaying this natural peculiarity from Phœnician mariners, who had penetrated into the German Ocean to the northward of the British Isles. His retentive mind has, then, made an early record of this, along with so many other singular reports, out of which a large proportion have been verified.

There is another proof that we are here nearly, or rather quite, at the furthest bound of distance ever reached by Ulysses. For the united distances (1) from within sight of Ithaca to Æolia, and (2) from Æolia to Læstrygonia, make seventeen days, the same number occupied in a much slower craft on the voyage from Ogygia to Scheria.

It will be found, under the rules of calculation which have been adopted, that we may place Læstrygonia at near seventeen hundred miles from Iapygia. If we are to suppose that by the name Artacie, given to the fountain in Læstrygonia, he means an allusion to a place of that name in the Euxine, I take this as a new sign of his dim and confused extension of that sea to the westward.

The name Læstrygonia appears to belong to a city, not to a country. It is τηλέπυλος, and it is also Λάμου αἰπὺ πτολίεθρον. Homer avoids calling it either a land (γαίη) or an island (νῆσος). By the former term he sometimes designates large islands as well as portions of a continent. The epithet αἰπὺ points to a steep and rocky site: but his forbearing to fix it as continent or island seems to show, that he was himself in doubt upon the point. The trait of perpetual day, however, speaks most explicitly for the _bona fides_ of the tradition on which the Poet proceeds, and for the latitude from whence it came: and it seems far from improbable that Iceland may have been the dimly perceived original of Læstrygonia; of which the site in the Odyssey is near the actual site of Denmark.

VI. The sixth stage is Ææa. This could only be reached by a long passage from Læstrygonia. The Poet has not ventured to define its extent or direction. But he leaves himself an ample margin by the declaration from the mouth of Ulysses, that he knew nothing on his arrival of the latitude or longitude (Od. x. 190-2): and he is content with planting it immovably near the point of sunrise, though with a great vagueness of conception (Od. x. 135-9; xii. 1-4).

There is indeed something near a verbal contradiction between the declaration of Ulysses in Od. x., that he, being then at Ææa, did not know where to look for sunrise or for sunset, and his narrative in