CHAPTER XV

ATTIC _versus_ ACHAEAN TRADITIONS

The mixed multitude of Ionian settlers in Asia must have had mixed traditions, not the legends of Athens alone, but those of the towns of the Calaurian amphictyony, and of many other regions, Cretan, Boeotian, Euboean, and so on. The dominant legends, however, in poetry, as known to us, were those of Athens, which are comparatively jejune, being often constructed, perhaps out of the competing variants of the Attic demes, to prove the legitimacy of one or another dynastic claim to the kingship of Athens. We are so familiar with the traditions as manipulated by the great tragedians, that we scarcely notice how absolutely Athens lies outside of the heroic myths of the rest of Greece.

Grote has justly observed that "neither the archaeology" (ancient traditions) "of Attica, nor that of its component fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece." He might have stated the case much more strongly, for he says, "Theseus is noticed both in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ as having carried off from Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos ... and the sons of Theseus take part in the Trojan war." But Demophon and Acamas, as sons of Theseus, appear, _not in the Iliad_, but only _in the Ionian Cyclic poems_; and if Theseus carries off Ariadne in the _Odyssey_,[1] not in the _Iliad_, the passage is of the most dubious, and the myth is obscure.

"Homer is," says Mr. Leaf, "of course, ignorant of the Theseus myth in all its branches."[2] "There is no trace," says Mr. Monro, "in Homer of acquaintance with the group of legends to which the story of Aethra" (mother of Theseus) "belongs."[3] No acknowledged fact can more perfectly demonstrate the difference between Attic and Homeric or Achaean tradition than the circumstance that Homer, while he ignores Theseus, takes a view of Minos and of the Cretan empire directly opposed to Attic legend. This was perfectly plain to educated Athenians of Plato's age.

Thus in the Platonic or pseudo-Platonic dialogue, _Minos_, Socrates points out that to no other hero does Homer give the same praise as to Minos, as not only a _son_, but a pupil of _Zeus_ (_Od_. xix. 178-180). Says Socrates, "Minos every ninth year conversed with Zeus, and went to be instructed by his wisdom,"--"this is marvellous praise." It is thus that Socrates understands the Homeric world. Μίνως ἐννέωρος βασίλευε Διὸς μεγάλου ὀαριστής: "Minos was king, who every nine years conversed with Zeus." "Every nine years Minos went to the cave of Zeus to be instructed," adds Socrates; but of the cave of Zeus, Homer says nothing.

The companion of Socrates then asks how Minos got such a bad name as "an uneducated ruffian"? "Because he made war on us of Athens," answered Socrates; "and we are strong in poets, especially in that delight of the populace, tragic poetry, which is very ancient with us; and on the stage we avenged ourselves on Minos."

In truth, while Homer presented Minos as a son and pupil of Zeus, as no god himself, but a mortal man, whose sceptred spirit administered justice to the souls in Hades, it was impossible for educated Athenians not to recognise that their own wild tales (how wild few knew), were partisan fabrications.

Not only Homer, but Hesiod took the favourable view of Minos, as against the hostile Attic legends; "and these two are more worthy of belief than all the tragic poets together," says Socrates (_Minos_, 318 d).

The Athenians heaped not only Minos, but his wife and his brother Rhadamanthus, under a pile of ordure. Helbig, who emphatically insists on the gulf between Attic and Homeric accounts of Minos, may be consulted for the abominable anti-Minoan stories.[4]

In Homer, Cretan Idomeneus (_Iliad_, xiii. 450) gives his genealogy as--

Zeus | Minos | Deucalion (Not he of the Deluge) | Idomeneus.

In the _Odyssey_, xi. 321-325, Minos is named as father of Ariadne, whose tale is alluded to in a puzzling way: the other heroines of the passage are Attic, Phaedra (wife of Theseus) and Procris. In xi. 568571, Minos, "splendid son of Zeus," is seen administering justice to the dead. In a false tale of Odysseus he calls himself a Cretan of the stock of Minos. In xix. 178, Minos is father of Deucalion, and in some way is "the nine years old," or is "at periods of nine years," the companion (_ὀαριστής_) of Zeus. There is in Homer nothing about the Attic fables of bulls, the Minotaur, or Minoan cruelty. Homeric tradition accepts and glories in the just king Minos: Athenian tradition, in which Attica suffers grievous things at the hands of Crete, heaps hatred and contumely on him, fixing on him the world-wide _Märchen_ of the evil being whose fair daughter befriends the adventurous hero; and adding the _Märchen_ of the black-sailed ship which should have borne white sails of good tidings to Aegeus.

It is not merely the Attic myths of Theseus of Crete, and of the character of Minos, that differ from the Homeric. Attic legends are quite un-Homeric in character.[5] Two Attic characteristics may be noted. "The story of the sacrifice of a maiden" (or of several maidens at once) "appears and reappears in Attic tradition.... We have it in Iphigeneia...."[6] But we have it not in Homer. Again, among the royal family of Athens, in Attic tradition, it was chronic to be metamorphosed into birds. The stories were meant, originally, to account for the colours and habits of birds; such tales are numberless in the legends of Australian and other savages, who have a whole mythology of primal fowls, which is restated in the _parabasis_ of _The Birds_ of Aristophanes. Homer tells but one such bird myth. In _Odyssey_, xix. 518, Penelope speaks of the daughter of Pandareus, the brown bright nightingale, lamenting "Itylus, whom she slew with the sword unwittingly; Itylus, son of Zethus the prince." "The story has, _as would be expected in a Homeric myth, nothing whatever to do with Athens_."[7] The Attic story, much more horrible, is that of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus: it is as bad as _Titus Andronicus_. The Ionians transferred the scene to Miletus, Colophon, and Ephesus.[8] Homer wholly abstains from Attic myths, except for the mention of their heroines in a dubious passage of the eleventh book of the _Odyssey_.

Thus the Ionians, though they have adopted Homeric traditions, have counter-Homeric traditions, just as they have and retain the customs and rites of "the conquered race." These are demonstrable facts. On the other side, the Homeric poet ignores Ionian legends, and Ionians and Athenians have been unable to interweave Ionian tradition into the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. There is no doubt about this matter; Homer has no Ionian, the Ionians had no Homeric traditions. This abstinence from Attic legends is not peculiar to Homer. The greatest Achaean tradition, after the Tale of Troy, was the Tale of Thebes. The Attic tragedians have so Atticised it, especially in the _Oedipous Coloncus_ and the _Suppliants_ of Euripides, that we think of the hapless Theban king as a patron saint of Athens; and of Theseus as his host and as the heroic friend of Thebes.

But the ancient epos of Thebes knew no more of Athens than did the ancient epos of Troy. The Athenians could not and did not pretend, like the Argives, Arcadians, and other Peloponnesians, to have taken part in the first great collective Achaean attack on Thebes, an attack led by Adrastus, Tydeus, father of Diomede, Polynices, and the rest.[9] Neither did they pretend, though Ionians dwelt near the Theban Cadmeians in Boeotia, to have aided Thebes in her peril. Athens did allege that the useful Theseus led her army to rescue the unburied body of Polynices, or the bodies of him and Eteocles; it was her favourite boast.[10]

But this tale, as Grote says, "seems to have had its origin in the patriotic pride of the Athenians," in their ceaseless efforts to attach themselves to the great traditions that steadily ignore them. Adrastus, chief of the army which failed at Thebes, came, said the Athenians, as a suppliant to the useful Theseus at Eleusis. Then Theseus, with an Athenian force, vanquished the Thebans, and gave due burial to the dead. Euripides and Isocrates boast of this Flower of Chivalry, Theseus;[11] and Pausanias saw the tombs of Eteocles and Polynices--at Eleusis in Attica.[12] The Thebans denied the fable.

In the return match of the Epigonoi against Thebes, the Athenians did not pretend to have played a part. In the lists of heroes who take a share in the Argonautic expedition, and in the hunt of the Calydonian boar, the name of Theseus appears; but he did no more than Menestheus achieved at Troy. The Ionians in Asia made a desperate effort to connect themselves with the Trojan war by borrowing the descendants of Nestor, the Nelidae, who fled from the Dorians to Athens, obtained the throne, and led the Ionian migration into Asia.[13] The very fact that they had to borrow these refugees, in order to connect themselves with Achaean "saga," proves the Athenian lack of genuine mythical connection with the united efforts of the rest of Greece against Troy.

The burial of Oedipous at Colonus, the topic of the noble tragedy of Sophocles, is, poetry apart, mere body-snatching. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,[14] and even Hesiod,[15] know nothing of a sepulchral connection of Oedipous with Athens. Oedipous's funeral feast was held at Thebes. These sepulchral connections of Athens with the tale of Thebes are necessarily un-Homeric, for they are based on the very fanaticism of hero-worship, and fall into line with the craze of historic Greece for securing the relics of heroes, who will defend a city if duly propitiated.

Remote Aetolia is far more closely connected with the Tales of Thebes and of Troy than is Athens. For some reason, then, Athens, and with her the Ionians, is "not of the centre," is out of the central legends, and her efforts to attach herself to them are late, and are wholly un-Homeric. Naturally the really old Epic poets knew nothing of these Ionian pretensions, which are the work of Ionian Burkes tampering with the Homeric "Peerage." Athens wished to "have it both ways," to appear as a city that had always been held by the same race,[16] that stood apart, and had been the asylum of exiles from the rest of Greece; and also as a city that took a great part in the legendary history of the rest of Greece, whose traditions did not recognise her share.

Thus it seems probable that Attica was the seat of a people standing somewhat apart, and possessing an older stratum of inhabitants than the makers of Achaean saga. But Athens and the Ionians were not content with this respectable antiquity. The Ionians of Asia, first, in the Cyclic poems (750-600 B.C.) tried to prove that they and neighbouring and friendly peoples had their share in the Trojan war; and, next, the tragedians of Athens carried on this pseudo-tradition in regard to Thebes as well as to Troy. Their versions led the world captive for 2000 years. The oldest indications of the Ionian attempts to connect heroes of Athens and of her neighbours and friends with the Trojan affair are to be read in the fragments and summaries of the Cyclic poems.

Next, we find this cause taken up by the Athenian tragedians; and, lastly, we find in later sources the fables which the tragedians handled with poetic freedom; while, in the pseudo-Dictys of Crete, we have legends derived from the Cyclic poets, from other sources, and from the author's own fancy. The Roman poets, like Virgil, also reflect the Ionian and Athenian traditions, and their hostility to Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and Diomede, with their partiality for Aias, claimed as a neighbour of Athens, and for the ill-used Philoctetes, and the martyr sage, Palamedes of Nauplia. Homer mentions neither him nor his city.[17]

[1] xi. 321-325.

[2] Leaf, Note to _Iliad_, iii. 144.

[3] Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 370.

[4] Roscher's _Lexikon_, under "Minos."

[5] See Miss Harrison's _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_, London, 1890.

[6] _Ibid_., p. 56, note. For human sacrifice see "The Cyclic Poems," later.

[7] _Ibid_. p. lxxxvi.

[8] _Ibid_. p. lxxxvii.

[9] Pausanias, from the _Thebais_, ii. 20. 4, ix. 9. 1.

[10] Hdt. ix. 27.

[11] _Suppliants_, Isoc., _Oral. Panegyr_. p. 196. Auger.

[12] Pausanias, i. 28. 7.

[13] Hdt. v. 65.

[14] _Iliad_, xxiii. 679; _Odyssey_, xi. 271-280.

[15] Scholiast. _Iliad_, xxiii. 679.

[16] Thucydides, i. 2.

[17] See "The Story of Palamedes."