READING HALL. HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE : LEGENDARY GREECE FROM THE GODS AND HEROES TO THE FOUNDATION OF THE OLIMPIC GAMES (776 BC)

THE Hesiodic theogony gives no account of anything like a creation of man, nor does it seem that such an idea was much entertained in the legendary vein of Grecian imagination; which commonly carried back the present men by successive generations to some primitive ancestor, himself sprung from the soil, or from a neighboring river, or mountain, or from a god, a nymph, &c. But the poet of the Hesiodic “Works and Days” has given us a narrative conceived in a very different spirit respecting the origin of the human race, more in harmony with the sober and melancholy ethical tone which reigns through that poem.

First (he tells us) the Olympic gods made the golden race,—good, perfect, and happy men, who lived from the spontaneous abundance of the earth, in ease and tranquility, like the gods themselves: they suffered neither disease nor old-age, and their death was like a gentle sleep. After death they became, by the award of Zeus, guardian terrestrial demons, who watch unseen over the proceedings of mankind—with the regal privilege of dispensing to them wealth, and taking account of good and bad deeds.

Next, the gods made the silver race,—unlike and greatly inferior, both in mind and body, to the golden. The men of this race were reckless and mischievous towards each other, and disdainful to the immortal gods, to whom they refused to offer either worship or sacrifice. Zeus in his wrath buried them in the earth; but there they still enjoy a secondary honor, as the Blest of the underworld.

Thirdly, Zeus made the brazen race, quite different from the silver. They were made of hard ash-wood, pugnacious and terrible: they were of immense strength and adamantine soul, neither raising nor touching bread. Their arms, their houses, and their implements were all of brass: there was then no iron. This race, eternally fighting, perished by each other's hands, died out, and descended without name or privilege to Hades.

Next, Zeus made a fourth race, far juster and better than the last preceding. These were the Heroes or demigods, who fought at the sieges of Troy and Thebes. But this splendid stock also became extinct: some perished in war, others were removed by Zeus to a happier state in the islands of the Blest. There they dwell in peace and comfort, under the government of Kronos, reaping thrice in the year the spontaneous produce of the earth.

The fifth race, which succeeds to the Heroes, is of iron: it is the race to which the poet himself belongs, and bitterly does he regret it. He finds his contemporaries mischievous, dishonest, unjust, ungrateful, given to perjury, careless both of the ties of consanguinity and of the behests of the gods: Nemesis and Edo’s (Ethical Self-reproach) have left earth and gone back to Olympus. How keenly does he wish that his lot had been cast either earlier or later! This iron race is doomed to continual guilt, care, and suffering, with a small infusion of good; but the time will come when Zeus will put an end to it. The poet does not venture to predict what sort of race will succeed.

Such is the aeries of distinct races of men, which Hesiod, or the author of the “Works and Days”, enumerates as having existed down to his own time. I give it as it stands, without placing much confidence in the various explanations which critics have offered. It stands out in more than one respect from the general tone and sentiment of Grecian legend: moreover, the sequence of races is neither natural nor homogeneous,—the heroic race not having any metallic denomination, and not occupying any legitimate place in immediate succession to the brazen. Nor is the conception of the daemons in harmony either with Homer or with the Hesiodic theogony. In Homer, there is scarcely any distinction between gods and daemons: farther, the gods are stated to go about and visit the cities of men in various disguises for the purpose of inspecting good and evil proceedings. But in the poem now before us, the distinction between gods and demons is generic. The latter are invisible tenants of earth, remnants of the once happy golden race whom the Olympic gods first made: the remnants of the second or silver race are not daemons, nor are they tenants of earth, but they still enjoy an honorable posthumous existence as the Blest of the underworld. Nevertheless the Hesiodic daemons are in no way authors or abettors of evil: on the contrary, they form the unseen police of the gods, for the purpose of repressing wicked behavior in the world.

We may trace, I think, in this quintuple succession of earthly races, set forth by the author of the “Works and Days”, the confluence of two veins of sentiment, not consistent one with the other, yet both co-existing in the author’s mind. The drift of his poem is thoroughly didactic and ethical. Though deeply penetrated with the injustice and suffering which darken the face of human life, he nevertheless strives to maintain both in himself and in others, a conviction that on the whole the just and laborious man will come off well, and he enforces in considerable detail the lessons of practical prudence and virtue. This ethical sentiment, which dictates his appreciation of the present, also guides his imagination as to the past. It is pleasing to him to bridge over the chasm between the gods and degenerate man, by the supposition of previous races,—the first altogether pure, the second worse than the first, and the third still worse than the second; and to show further how the first race passed by gentle death-sleep into glorious immortality; how the second race was sufficiently wicked to drive Zeus to bury them in the underworld, yet still leaving them a certain measure of honor; while the third was so desperately violent as to perish by its own animosities, without either name or honor of any kind. The conception of the golden race passing after death into good guardian daemons, which some supposed to have been derived from a comparison with oriental angels, presents itself to the poet partly as approximating this race to the gods, partly as a means of constituting a triple gradation of post-obituary existence, proportioned to the character of each race whilst alive. The denominations of gold and silver, given to the two first races, justify themselves, like those given by Simonides of Amorgos and by Phokylides to the different characters of women, derived from the dog, the bee, the mare, the ass, and other animals; and the epithet of brazen is specially explained by reference to the material which the pugnacious third race so plentifully employed for their arms and other implements.

So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing vein: we find the revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an ethical lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present. But fourth in the list comes “the divine race of Heroes” and here a new vein of thought is opened by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past is broken up, in order to make way for these cherished beings of the national faith. For though the author of the “Works and Days” was himself of a didactic cast of thought, like Phokylides, or Solon, or Theognis, yet he had present to his feelings, in common with his countrymen, the picture of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in the current myths, and still more in Homer and those other epical productions which were then the only existing literature and history. It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch of the past, either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these poems ennobled; and even if he himself could have consented to such an exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his bearers. But the chiefs who figured before Thebes and Troy could not be well identified either with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race: moreover, it was essential that they should be placed in immediate contiguity with the present race, because their descendants, real or supposed, were the most prominent and conspicuous of existing men. Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the fourth place in the series, and to interrupt the descending ethical movement in order to interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither of which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet himself unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the heroic, but of the brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating pugnacity which characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests an aggregate of smaller and meaner vices and mischiefs, It will not perish by suicidal extinction—but it is growing worse and worse, and is gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will not vouchsafe to preserve much longer such a race upon the earth.

I conceive that the series of races imagined by the poet of the “Works and Days” is the product of two distinct and incongruous veins of imagination,—the didactic or ethical blending with the primitive mythical or epical. His poem is remarkable as the most ancient didactic production of the Greeks, and as one of the first symptoms of a new tone of sentiment finding its way into their literature, never afterwards to become extinct. The tendency of the “Works and Days” is antiheroic: far from seeking to inspire admiration for adventurous enterprise, the author inculcates the strictest justice, the most unremitting labor and frugality, and a sober, not to say anxious, estimate of all the minute specialties of the future. Prudence and probity are his means,—practical comfort and happiness his end. But he deeply feels, and keenly exposes, the manifold wickedness and shortcomings of his contemporaries, in reference to this capital standard. He turns with displeasure from the present men, not because they are too feeble to hurl either the spear of Achilles or some vast boundary-stone, but because they are rapacious, knavish, and unprincipled.

The daemons first introduced into the religious atmosphere of the Grecian world by the author of the “Works and Days”—as generically different from the gods, but essentially good, and forming the intermediate agents and police between gods and men,—are deserving of attention. They are the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent many changes, and became of great importance, first as one of the constituent elements of pagan faith, then as one of the helps to its subversion. It will be recollected that the buried remnants of the half-wicked silver race, though they are not recognized as demons, are still considered as having a substantive existence, a name, and dignity, in the underworld.

The step was easy, to treat them as demons also, but as demons of a defective and malignant character: this step was made by Empedocles and Xenocrates, and to a certain extent countenanced by Plato. There came thus to be admitted among the pagan philosophizers daemons both good and bad, in every degree: and these daemons were found available as a means of explaining many phenomena for which it was not convenient to admit the agency of the gods. They served to relieve the gods from the odium of physical and moral evils, as well as from the necessity of constantly meddling in small affairs. The objectionable ceremonies of the pagan religion were defended upon the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of such malignant beings be appeased. The demons were most frequently noticed as causes of evil, and thus the name came insensibly to convey with it a bad sense,—the idea of an evil being as contrasted with the goodness of a god. So it was found by the Christian writers when they commenced their controversy with paganism. One branch of their argument led them to identify the pagan gods with demons in the evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the word lent them a specious assistance.

For they could easily show, that not only in Homer, but in the general language of early pagans, all the gods generally were spoken of as demons—and therefore, verbally speaking, Clemens and Tatian seemed to affirm nothing more against Zeus or Apollo than was involved in the language of paganism itself. Yet the audience of Homer or Sophocles would have strenuously repudiated the proposition, if it had been put to them in the sense which the word demon bore in the ago and among the circle of these Christian writers.

In the imagination of the author of the “Works and Days”, the demons occupy an important place, and are regarded as being of serious practical efficiency. When he is remonstrating with the rulers around him upon their gross injustice and corruption, he reminds them of the vast number of these immortal servants of Zeus who are perpetually on guard amidst mankind, and through whom the visitations of the gods will descend even upon the most potent evil-doers. His supposition that the demons were not gods, but departed men of the golden race, allowed him to multiply their number indefinitely, without too much cheapening the divine dignity.

As this poet, enslaved by the current legends, has introduced the heroic race into a series to which they do not legitimately belong—so he has under the same influence inserted in another part of his poem the myth of Pandora and Prometheus, as a means of explaining the primary diffusion, and actual abundance, of evil among mankind. Yet this myth can in no way consist, with his quintuple scale of distinct races, and is in fact a totally distinct theory to explain the same problem,—the transition of mankind from a supposed state of antecedent happiness to one of present toil and suffering. Such an inconsistency is not a sufficient reason for questioning the genuineness of either passage; for the two stories, though one contradicts the other, both harmonies with that central purpose which governs the author’s mind,—a querulous and didactic appreciation of the present. That such was his purpose appears not only from the whole tenor of his poem, but also from the remarkable fact that his own personality, his own adventures and kindred, and his own sufferings figure in it conspicuously. And this introduction of self-imparts to it a peculiar interest. The father of Hesiod came over from the Eolic Kyme, with the view of bettering his condition, and settled at Askra in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. After his death his two sons divided the family inheritance: but Hesiod bitterly complains that his brother Perses cheated and went to law with him, and obtained through corrupt judges an unjust decision. He farther reproaches his brother with a preference for the suits and unprofitable bustle of the agora, at a time when he ought to be laboring for his subsistence in the field. Askra indeed was a miserable place, repulsive both in summer and winter. Hesiod had never crossed the sea, except once from Aulis to Euboea, whither he went to attend the funeral-games of Amphidamas, the chief of Chalcis: he sung a hymn, and gained as prize a tripod, which he consecrated to the muses in Helicon.

These particulars, scanty as they are, possess a peculiar value, as the earliest authentic memorandum respecting the doing or suffering of any actual Greek person. There is no external testimony at all worthy of trust respecting the age of the “Works and Days” Herodotus treats Hesiod and Homer as belonging to the same age, four hundred years before his own time; and there are other statements besides, some placing Hesiod at an earlier date than Homer, some at a later. Looking at the internal evidences, we may observe that the pervading sentiment, tone, and purpose of the poem is widely different from that of the Iliad and Odyssey, and analogous to what we read respecting the compositions of Archilochus and the Amorgian Simonides. The author of the “Works and Days” is indeed a preacher and not a satirist: but with this distinction, we find in him the same predominance of the present and the positive, the same disposition to turn the muse into an exponent of his own personal wrongs, the same employment of Aesopic fable by way of illustration, and the same unfavorable estimate of the female sex, all of which may be traced in the two poets above-mentioned, placing both of them in contrast with the Homeric epic. Such an internal analogy, in the absence of good testimony, is the best guide which we can follow in determining the date of the “Works and Days”, which we should accordingly place shortly after the year 700 BC. The style of the poem might indeed afford a proof that the ancient and uniform hexameter, though well adapted to continuous legendary narrative or to solemn hymns, was somewhat monotonous when called upon either to serve a polemical purpose or to impress a striking moral lesson. When poets, then the only existing composers, first began to apply their thoughts to the cut and thrust of actual life, aggressive or didactic, the verse would be seen to require a new, livelier, and smarter metre; and out of this want grew the elegiac and the iambic verse, both seemingly contemporaneous, and both intended to supplant the primitive hexameter for the short effusions then coming into vogue.

LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS

THE sons of the Titan god Iapetus, as described in the Hesiodic theogony, are Atlas, Mencetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus. Of these, Atlas alone is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and even he not as the son of Iapetus: the latter himself is named in the Iliad as existing in Tartarus along with Kronos. The Homeric Atlas “knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps by himself those tall pillars which hold the heaven apart from the earth”.

As the Homeric theogony generally appears much expanded in Hesiod, so also does the family of Iapetus, with their varied adventures. Atlas is here described, not as the keeper of the intermediate pillars between heaven and earth, but as himself condemned by Zeus to support the heaven on his head and hands; while the fierce Menoetius is pushed down to Erebus as a punishment for his ungovernable insolence. But the remaining two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, are among the most interesting creations of Grecian legend, and distinguished in more than one respect from all the remainder.

First, the main battle between Zeus and the Titan gods is a contest of force purely and simply—mountains are hurled and thunder is launched, and the victory remains to the strongest. But the competition between Zeus and Prometheus is one of craft and stratagem: the victor does indeed remain to the former, but the honors of the fight belong to the latter. Secondly, Prometheus and Epimetheus (the fore-thinker and the after-thinker) are characters stamped at the same mint, and by the same effort, the express contrast and antithesis of each other. Thirdly, mankind are here expressly brought forward, not indeed as active partners in the struggle, but as the grand and capital subjects interested,—as gainers or sufferers by the result. Prometheus appears in the exalted character of champion of the human race, even against the formidable superiority of Zeus.

In the primitive or Hesiodic legend, Prometheus is not the creator or molder of man; it is only the later additions which invest him with this character. The race are supposed as existing, and Prometheus, a member of the dispossessed body of Titan gods, comes forward as their representative and defender. The advantageous bargain which he made with Zeus on their behalf, in respect to the partition of the sacrificial animals, has been recounted in a preceding chapter. Zeus felt that he had been outwitted, and was exceeding wroth. In his displeasure he withheld from mankind the inestimable comfort of fire, so that the race would have perished, had not Prometheus stolen fire, in defiance of the Supreme Ruler, and brought it to men in the hollow stem of the plant called giant-fennel.

Zeus was now doubly indignant, and determined to play off a still more ruinous stratagem. Hephaestus, by his direction, molded the form of a beautiful virgin; Athene dressed her, Aphrodite and the Charites bestowed upon her both ornament and fascination, while Hermes infused into her the mind of a dog, a deceitful spirit, and treacherous words. The messengers of the gods conducted this “fascinating mischief” to mankind, at a time when Prometheus was not present. Now Epimetheus had received from his brother peremptory injunctions not to accept from the hands of Zeus any present whatever; but the beauty of Pandora (so the newly-formed female was called) was not to be resisted. She was received and admitted among men, and from that moment their comfort and tranquility was exchanged for suffering of every kind. The evils to which mankind are liable had been before enclosed in a cask in their own keeping; Pandora in her malice removed the lid of the cask, and out flew these thousand evils and calamities, to exercise for ever their destroying force. Hope alone remained imprisoned, and therefore without efficacy, as before—the inviolable lid being replaced before she could escape. Before this incident (says the legend) men had lived without disease or suffering; but now both earth and sea are full of mischiefs. Maladies of every description stalk abroad by day as well as by night, without any hope fox man of relief to come.

The Theogony gives the legend here recounted, with some variations—leaving out the part of Epimetheus altogether, as well as the cask of evils. Pandora is the ruin of man, simply as the mother and representative of the female sex. And the variations are thus useful, as they enable us to distinguish the essential from the accessory circumstances of the story.

“Thus (says the poet, at the conclusion of his narrative) it is not possible to escape from the purposes of Zeus”. His myth, connecting the calamitous condition of man with the malevolence of the supreme god, shows, first, by what cause such an unfriendly feeling was raised; next, by what instrumentality its deadly results were brought about. The human race are not indeed the creation, but the protected flock of Prometheus, one of the elder or dispossessed Titan gods. When Zeus acquires supremacy, mankind along with the rest become subject to him, and are to make the best bargain they can, respecting worship and service to be yielded. By the stratagem of their advocate Prometheus, Zeus is cheated into such a partition of the victims as is eminently unprofitable to him; whereby his wrath is so provoked, that he tries to subtract from man the use of feeling of fire. Here, however, his scheme is frustrated by the theft of Prometheus: but his second attempt is more successful, and he in his turn cheats the unthinking Epimetheus into the acceptance of a present (in spite of the peremptory interdict of Prometheus) by which the whole of man’s happiness is wrecked. This legend grows out of two feelings; partly as to the relations of the gods with man, partly as to the relation of the female sex with the male. The present gods are unkind towards man, but the old gods, with whom man's lot was originally cast, were much kinder—and the ablest among them stands forward as the indefatigable protector of the race. Nevertheless, the mere excess of his craft proves the ultimate ruin of the cause which he espouses. He cheats Zeus out of a fair share of the sacrificial victim, so as both to provoke and justify a retaliation which he cannot be always at hand to ward off; the retaliation is, in his absence, consummated by a snare laid for Epimetheus and voluntarily accepted. And thus, though Hesiod ascribes the calamitous condition of man to the malevolence of Zeus, his piety suggests two exculpatory pleas for the latter; mankind have been the first to defraud Zeus of his legitimate share of the sacrifice—and they have moreover been consenting parties to their own ruin. Such are the feelings, as to the relation between the gods and man, which have been one of the generating elements of this legend. The other element, a conviction of the vast mischief arising to man from women, whom yet they cannot dispense with, is frequently and strongly set forth in several of the Greek poets—by Simonides of Amorgos and Phokylidis, not less than by Euripides.

But the miseries arising from woman, however great they might be, did not reach Prometheus himself. For him, the rash champion who had ventured “to compete in sagacity” with Zeus, a different punishment was in store. Bound by heavy chains to a pillar, he remained fast imprisoned for several generations: every day did an eagle prey upon his liver, and every night did the liver grow afresh for the next day’s suffering. At length Zeus, eager to enhance the glory of his favorite son, Heracles, permitted the latter to kill the eagle and rescue the captive.

Such is the Promethean myth as it stands in the Hesiodic poems; its earliest form, as far as we can trace. Upon it was founded the sublime tragedy of Aeschylus, “The Enchained Prometheus”, together with at least one more tragedy, now lost, by the same author. Aeschylus has made several important alterations; describing the human race, not as having once enjoyed and subsequently lost a state of tranquility and enjoyment, but as originally feeble and wretched. He suppresses both the first trick played off by Prometheus upon Zeus respecting the partition of the victim—and the final formation and sending of Pandora—which are the two most marked portions of the Hesiodic story; while on the other hand he brings out prominently and enlarges upon the theft of fire, which in Hesiod is but slightly touched. If he has thus relinquished the antique simplicity of the story, he has rendered more than ample compensation by imparting to it a grandeur of ideal, a large reach of thought combined with appeals to our earnest and admiring sympathy, and a pregnancy of suggestion in regard to the relations between the gods and man, which soar far above the Hesiodic level, and which render his tragedy the most impressive, though not the most artistically composed, of all Grecian dramatic productions. Prometheus there appears not only as the heroic champion and sufferer in the cause and for the protection of the human race, but also as the gifted teacher of all the arts, helps, and ornaments of life, amongst which fire is only one: all this against the will and in defiance of the purpose of Zeus, who, on acquiring his empire, wished to destroy the human race and to beget some new breed. Moreover, new relations between Prometheus and Zeus are superadded by Aeschylus. At the commencement of the struggle between Zeus and the Titan gods, Prometheus had vainly attempted to prevail upon the latter to conduct it with prudence; but when he found that they obstinately declined all wise counsel, and that their ruin was inevitable, he abandoned their cause and joined Zeus. To him and to his advice Zeus owed the victory; yet the monstrous ingratitude and tyranny of the latter is now manifested by nailing him to a rock, for no other crime than because he frustrated the purpose of extinguishing the human race, and furnished to them the means of living with tolerable comfort. The new ruler Zeus, insolent with his victory over the old gods, tramples down all right, and sets at naught sympathy and obligation, as well towards gods as towards man. Yet the prophetic Prometheus, in the midst of intense suffering, is consoled by the foreknowledge that the time will come when Zeus must again send for him, release him, and invoke his aid, as the sole means of averting from himself dangers otherwise insurmountable. The security and means of continuance for mankind have now been placed beyond the reach of Zeus—whom Prometheus proudly defies, glorying in his generous and successful championship, despite the terrible price which he is doomed to pay for it.

As the Aeschylean Prometheus, though retaining the old lineaments, has acquired a new coloring, soul, and character, so he has also become identified with a special locality. In Hesiod there is no indication of the place in which he is imprisoned; but Aeschylus places it in Scythia, and the general belief of the Greeks supposed it to be on Mount Caucasus. So long and so firmly did this belief continue, that the Roman general Pompey, when in command of an army in Colchis, made with his companion, the literary Greek Theophanes, a special march to view the spot in Caucasus where Prometheus had been transfixed.

III

HEROIC LEGENDS.—GENEALOGY OF ARGOS.

HAVING briefly enumerated the gods of Greece, with their chief attributes as described in legend, we come to those genealogies which connected them with historical men.

In the retrospective faith of a Greek, the ideas of worship and ancestry coalesced. Every association of men, large or small, in whom there existed a feeling of present union, traced back that union to some common initial progenitor; that progenitor being either the common god whom they worshipped, or some semi-divine person closely allied to him. What the feelings of the community require is, a continuous pedigree to connect them with this respected source of existence, beyond which they do not think of looking back. A series of names, placed in filiation or fraternity, together with a certain number of family or personal adventures ascribed to some of the individuals among them, constitute the ante-historical past through which the Greek looks back to his gods. The names of this genealogy are, to a great degree, gentile or local names familiar to the people,—rivers, mountains, springs, lakes, villages, demes, &c.,—embodied as persons, and introduced as acting or suffering. They are moreover called kings or chiefs, but the existence of a body of subjects surrounding them is tacitly implied rather than distinctly set forth ; for their own personal exploits or family proceedings constitute for the most part the whole matter of narrative. And thus the genealogy was made to satisfy at once the appetite of the Greeks for romantic adventure, and their demand for an unbroken line of filiation between themselves and the gods.

The eponymous personage, from whom the community derive their name, is sometimes the begotten son of the local god, even if it could be ascertained, we must at once set it historical aside, if we wish to look at the genealogy in the point of view of the Greeks. For to them, not only all the members were alike real, but the gods and heroes at the commencement were in a certain sense the most real; at least, they were the most esteemed and indispensable of all. The value of the genealogy consisted, not in its length, but in its continuity; not (according to the feeling of modern aristocracy) in the power of setting out a prolonged series of human fathers and grandfathers, but in the sense of ancestral union with the primitive god. And the length of the series is traceable rather to humility, inasmuch as the same person who was gratified with the belief that he was descended from a god in the fifteenth generation, would have accounted it, criminal insolence to affirm that a god was his father or grandfather. In presenting to the reader those genealogies which constitute the supposed primitive history of Hellas, I make no pretense to distinguish names real and historical from fictitious creations; partly because I have no evidence upon which to draw the line, and partly because by attempting it I should altogether depart from the genuine Grecian point of view.

Nor is it possible to do more than exhibit a certain selection of such as were most current and interesting; for the total number of them which found place in Grecian faith exceeds computation. As a general rule, every deme, every gens, every aggregate of men accustomed to combined action, religious or political, had its own. The small and unimportant demes into which Attica was divided had each its ancestral god and heroes, just as much as the great Athens herself. Even among the villages of Phocis, which Pausanias will hardly permit himself to call towns, deductions of legendary antiquity were not wanting. And it is important to bear in mind, when we are reading the legendary genealogies of Argos, or Sparta, or Thebes, that these are merely samples amidst an extensive class, all perfectly analogous, and all exhibiting the religious and patriotic retrospect of some fraction of the Hellenic world. They are no more matter of historical tradition than any of the thousand other legendary genealogies which men delighted to recall to memory at the periodical festivals of their gees, their deme, or their village.

With these few prefatory remarks, I proceed to notice the most conspicuous of the Grecian heroic pedigrees, and first, that of Argos.

The earliest name in Argeian antiquity is that of Inachus, the son of Oceanus and Tethys, who gave his name to the Argeian river flowing under the walls of the town. According to the chronological computations of those who regarded the mythical genealogies as substantive history, and who allotted a given number of years to each generation, the reign of Inachus was placed 1986 BC, or about 1100 years prior to the commencement of the recorded Olympiads.

The sons of Inachus were Phoroneus and Egialeus; both of whom however were sometimes represented as autochthonous or indigenous men, the one in the territory of Argos, the other in that of Sicyon. Egialeus gave his name to the north-western region of the Peloponnesus, on the southern coast of the Corinthian Gulf. The name of Phoreneus was of great celebrity in the Argeian mythical genealogies, and furnished both the title and the subject of the ancient poem called Phoronis, in which he is styled “the father of mortal men”. He is said to have imparted to mankind, who had before him lived altogether isolated, the first notion and habits of social existence, and even the first knowledge of fire: his dominion extended over the whole Peloponnesus. His tomb at Argos, and seemingly also the place, called the Phoronic city, in which he formed the first settlement of mankind, were still shown in the days of Pausanias. The offspring of Phoroneus, by the nymph Teledike, were Apis and Niobe. Apis, a harsh ruler, was put to death by Thelxion and Telchin, having given to Peloponnesus the name of Apia: he was succeeded by Argos, the son of his sister Niobe by the god Zeus. From this sovereign Peloponnesus was denominated Argos. By his wife Evadne, daughter of Strymon, he had four sons, Ekbasus, Peiras, Epidaurus, and Kriasus. Ekbasus was succeeded by his son Agenor, and he again by his son Argos Panoptes, a very powerful prince, who is said to have bad eyes distributed over all his body, and to have liberated Peloponnesus from several monsters and wild animals which infested it: Akusilaus and Aeschylus make this Argos an earthborn person, while Pherekydes reports him as son of Arestor. Iasus was the son of Argos Panoptes by Ismene, daughter of Asopus. According to the authors whom Apollodorus and Pausanias prefer, the celebrated Io was his daughter: but the Hesiodic epic (as well as Akusilaus) represented her as daughter of Peiras, while Aeschylus and Kastor the chronologist affirmed the primitive king Inachus to have been her father. A favorite theme, as well for the ancient genealogical poets as for the Attic tragedians, were the adventures of Io; of whom, while priestess of Hera, at the ancient and renowned Heraeon between Mycenae and Tiryns, Zeus became amorous. When Hera discovered the intrigue and taxed him with it, he denied the charge, and metamorphosed Io into a white cow. Here, requiring that the cow should be surrendered to her, placed her under the keeping of Argos Panoptes; but this guardian was slain by Hermes, at the command of Zeus; and Hera then drove the cow Io away from her native land by means of the incessant stinging of a gadfly, which compelled her to wander without repose or sustenance over an immeasurable extent of foreign regions. The wandering Io gave her name to the Ionian Gulf, traversed Epirus and Illyria, passed the chain of Mount Haemus and the lofty summits of Caucasus, and swam across the Thracian or Cimmerian Bosporus (which also from her derived its appellation) into Asia. She then went through Scythia, Cimmeria, and many Asiatic regions, until she arrived in Egypt, where Zeus at length bestowed upon her rest, restored her to her original form, and enabled her to give birth to his black son Epaphos.

Such is a general sketch of the adventures which the ancient poets, epic, lyric, and tragic, and the logographers after them, connect with the name of the Argeian Io—one of the numerous tales which the fancy of the Greeks deduced from the amorous dispositions of Zeus and the jealousy of Hera. That the scene should be laid in the Argeian territory appears natural, when we recollect that both Argos and Mycenae were under the special guardianship of Here, and that the Heraeon near Mycenae was one of the oldest and most celebrated temples in which she was worshipped. It is useful to compare this amusing fiction with the representation reported to us by Herodotus, and derived by him as well from Phoenician as from Persian antiquarians, of the circumstances which occasioned the transit of Io from Argos to Egypt—an event recognized by all of them as historical matter of fact. According to the Persians, a Phoenician vessel had arrived at the port near Argos, freighted with goods intended for sale to the inhabitants of the country. After the vessel had remained a few days, and disposed of most of her cargo, several Argeian women, and among them Io the king’s daughter, coming on board to purchase, were seized and carried off by the crew, who sold Io in Egypt. The Phoenician antiquarians, however, while they admitted the circumstance that Io had left her own country in one of their vessels, gave a different color to the whole by affirming that she emigrated voluntarily, having been engaged in an amour with the captain of the vessel, and fearing that her parents might come to the knowledge of her pregnancy. Both Persians and Phoenicians described the abduction of Io as the first of a series of similar acts between Greeks and Asiatics, committed each in revenge for the preceding. First came the rape of Europe from Phoenicia by Grecian adventurers—perhaps, as Herodotus supposed, by Cretans: next, the abduction of Medeia from Colchis by Jason, which occasioned the retaliatory act of Paris, when he stole away Helena from Menelaos. Up to this point the seizures of women by Greeks from Asiatics, and by Asiatics from Greeks, had been equivalent both in number and in wrong. But the Greeks now thought fit to equip a vast conjoint expedition to recover Helen, in the course of which they took and sacked Troy. The invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes were intended, according to the Persian antiquarians, as a long-delayed retribution for the injury inflicted on the Asiatics by Agamemnon and his followers.

The account thus given of the adventures of Io, when contrasted with the genuine legend, is interesting, as it tends to illustrate the phenomenon which early Grecian history is constantly presenting to us—the way in which the epical furniture of an unknown past is recast and newly colored so as to meet those changes which take place in the retrospective feelings of the present. The religious and poetical character of the whole legend disappears: nothing remains except the names of persons and places, and the voyage from Argos to Egypt: we have in exchange a sober, quasi-historical narrative, the value of which consists in its bearing on the grand contemporary conflicts between Persia and Greece, which filled the imagination of Herodotus and his readers.

To proceed with the genealogy of the kings of Argos, Iasus was succeeded by Krotopus, son of his brother Agenor; Krotopus by Sthenelas, and he again by Gelanor. In the reign of the latter, Danaos came with his fifty daughters from Egypt to Argos; and here we find another of those romantic adventures which so agreeably decorate the barrenness of the mythical genealogies. Danaos and Egyptos were two brothers descending from Epaphos, son of Io: Egyptos had fifty sons, who were eager to marry the fifty daughters of Danaos, in spite of the strongest repugnance of the latter. To escape such a necessity, Danaos placed his fifty daughters on board of a penteconter (or vessel with fifty oars) and sought refuge at Argos; touching in his voyage at the island of Rhodes, where he erected a statue of Athena at Lindos, which was long exhibited as a memorial of his passage. Egyptos and his sons followed them to Argos, and still pressed their suit, to which Danaos found himself compelled to assent; but on the wedding night he furnished each of his daughters with a dagger, and enjoined them to murder their husbands during the hour of deep. His orders were obeyed by all, with the single exception of Hypermnestra, who preserved her husband Lynkeus, incurring displeasure and punishment from her father. He afterwards, however, pardoned her; and when, by the voluntary abdication of Gelamor, he became king of Argos, Lynkeus was recognized as his son-in-law, and ultimately succeeded him. The remaining daughters, having been purified by Athena and Hermes, were given in marriage to the victors in a gymnic contest publicly proclaimed. From Danaos was derived the name of Danai, applied to the inhabitants of the Argeian territory, and to the Homeric Greeks generally.

From the legend of the Danaides we pass to two barren names of kings, Lynkeus and his son Abas. The two sons of Abas were Akrisios and Proetos, who, after much dissension, divided between them the Argeian territory; Akrisios ruling at Argos, and Proetos at Tiryns. The families of both formed the theme of romantic stories. To pass over for the present the legend of Bellerophon, and the unrequited passion which the wife of Proetos conceived for him, we are told that the daughters of Proetos, beautiful, and solicited in marriage by suitors from all Greece, were smitten with leprosy and driven mad, wandering in unseemly guise throughout Peloponnesus. The visitation had overtaken them, according to Hesiod, because they refused to take part in the Bacchic rites; according to Pherekydes and the Argeian Akusilaus, because they had treated scornfully the wooden statue and simple equipments of Hera: the religious character of the old legend here displays itself in a remarkable manner. Unable to cure his daughters, Proetos invoked the aid of the renowned Pylian prophet and leech, Melampus son of Amythaon, who undertook to remove the malady on condition of being rewarded with the third part of the kingdom. Proetos indignantly refused these conditions : but the state of his daughters becoming aggravated and intolerable, he was compelled again to apply to Melampus; who, on the second request, raised his demands still higher, and required another third of the kingdom for his brother Bias. These terms being acceded to, he performed his part of the covenant. He appeased the wrath of Hera by prayer and sacrifice; or, according to another account, he approached the deranged women at the head of a troop of young men, with shouting and ecstatic dance—the ceremonies appropriate to the Bacchic worship of Dionysos,—and in this manner effected their cure. Melampus, a name celebrated in many different Grecian myths, is the legendary founder and progenitor of a great and long-continued family of prophets. He and his brother Bias became kings of separate portions of the Argeian territory: he is recognized as ruler there even in the Odyssey, and the prophet Theoklymenos, his grandson, is protected and carried to Ithaca by Telemachus. Herodotus also alludes to the cure of the women, and to the double kingdom of Melampus and Bias in the Argeian land: recognizing Melampus as the first person who introduced to the knowledge of the Greeks the name and worship of Dionysos, with its appropriate sacrifices and phallic processions. Here again he historicizes various features of the old legend in a manner not unworthy of notice.

But Danae, the daughter of Akrisios, with her son Perseus, acquired still greater celebrity than her cousins the Proetides. An oracle had apprised Akrisios that his daughter would give birth to a son by whose hand he would himself be slain. To guard against this danger, he imprisoned Danae in a chamber of brass underground. But the god Zeus had become amorous of her, and found means to descend through the roof in the form of a shower of gold: the consequence of his visits was the birth of Perseus. When Akrisios discovered that his daughter had given existence to a son, he enclosed both the mother and the child in a coffer, which he cast into the sea. The coffer was carried to the isle of Seriphos, where Diktys, brother of the king Polydektes, fished it up, and rescued both Danae and Perseus. The exploits of Perseus, when he grew up, against the three Phorkydes or daughters of Phorkys, and the three Gorgons, are among the most marvelous and imaginative in all Grecian legend: they bear a stamp almost Oriental. I shall not here repeat the details of those unparalleled hazards which the special favor of Athene enabled him to overcome, and which ended in his bringing back from Libya the terrific head of the Gorgon Medusa, endued with the property of turning everyone who looked upon it into stone. In his return he rescued Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, who had been exposed to be devoured by a sea-monster, and brought her back as his wife. Akrisios trembled to see him after this victorious expedition, and retired into Thessaly to avoid him; but Perseus followed him thither, and having succeeded in calming his apprehensions, became competitor in a gymnic contest where his grandfather was among the spectators. By an incautious swing of his quoit, he unintentionally struck Akrisios, and caused his death: the predictions of the oracle were thus at last fulfilled. Stung with remorse at the catastrophe, and unwilling to return to Argos, which had been the principality of Akrisios, Perseus made an exchange with Megapenthes, son of Proetos king of Tiryns. Megapenthes became king of Argos, and Perseus of Tiryns: moreover the latter founded, within ten miles of Argos, the far-famed city of Mycenae. The massive walls of this city, like those of Tiryns, of which a large portion yet remains, were built for him by the Lycian Cyclopes.

We here reach the commencement of the Perseid dynasty of Mycenae. It should be noticed, however, that there were among the ancient legends contradictory accounts of the foundation of this city. Both the Odyssey and the great Eoiai enumerated, among the heroines, Mykene, the Eponyma of the city; the former poem classifying her with Tyre and Alkmene, the latter describing her as the daughter of Inachus and wife of Arestor. And Akusilaus mentioned an Eponymous Mykeneus, the son of Sparton and grand-son of Phoreneus.

The prophetic family of Melampus maintained itself in one of the three parts of the divided Argeian kingdom for five generations, down to Amphiaraos and his sons Alkmaeon and Amphilochos. The dynasty of his brother Bias, and that of Megapenthes, son of Proetos, continued each for four generations: a list of barren names fills up the interval. The Perseids of Mykenae boasted a descent long and glorious, heroic as well as historical, continuing down to the last kings of Sparta. The issue of Perseus was numerous: his son Alkaeos was father of Alkmene; a third, Sthenelos, father of Eurysthenes.

After the death of Perseus, Alkaeos and Amphitryon dwelt at Tiryns. The latter became engaged in a quarrel with Elektryon respecting cattle, and in a fit of passion killed him; moreover the piratical Taphians from the west coast of Acarnania invaded the country, and slew the sons of Alektryon, so that Alkmene alone was left of that family. She was engaged to wed Amphitryon; but she bound him by oath not to consummate the marriage until he had avenged upon the Teleboae the death of her brothers. Amphitryon, compelled to flee the country as the murderer of his uncle, took refuge in Thebes, whither Alkmene accompanied him: Sthenelos was left in possession of Tiryns. The Cadmeians of Thebes, together with the Lokrians and Phokians, supplied Amphitryon with troops, which he conducted against the Teleboae and the Taphians: yet he could not have subdued them without the aid of Komaetho, daughter of the Taphian king Pterelaus, who conceived a passion for him, and cut off from her father’s head the golden lock to which Poseidon had attached the gift of immortality. Having conquered and expelled his enemies, Amphitryon returned to Thebes, impatient to consummate his marriage: but Zeus on the wedding-night assumed his form and visited Alkmene before him: he had determined to produce from her a son superior to all his prior offspring—“a specimen of invincible force both to gods and men”. At the proper time Alkmene was delivered of twin sons: Heracles, the offspring of Zeus, and the inferior and unhonoured Iphikles, offspring of Amphitryon.

When Alkmene was on the point of being delivered at Thebes, Zeus publicly boasted among the assembled gods, at the instigation of the mischief-making Ate, that there was on that day about to be born on earth, from his breed, a son who should rule over all his neighbors. Hera treated this as an empty boast, calling upon him to bind himself by an irremissible oath that the prediction should be realized. Zeus incautiously pledged his solemn word; upon which Hera darted swiftly down from Olympus to the Achaic Argos, where the wife of Sthenelos (son of Perseus, and therefore grandson of Zeus) was already seven months gone with child. By the aid of the Eileithyiae, the special goddesses of parturition, she caused Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelos, to be born before his time on that very day, while she retarded the delivery of Alkmene. Then returning to Olympus, she announced the fact to Zeus: “The good man Eurystheus, son of the Perseid Sthenelos, is this day born of thy loins: the scepter of the Argeians worthily belongs to him”. Zeus was thunderstruck at the consummation which he had improvidently bound himself to accomplish. He seized Ate his evil counselor by the hair, and hurled her for ever away from Olympus: but he had no power to avert the ascendency of Eurystheus and the servitude of Herakles. “Many a pang did he suffer when he saw his favorite son going through his degrading toil in the tasks imposed upon him by Eurystheus”.

The legend, of unquestionable antiquity, here transcribed from the Iliad, is one of the most pregnant and characteristic in the Grecian mythology. It explains, according to the religious ideas familiar to the old epic poets, both the distinguishing attributes and the endless toils and endurances of Heracles—the most renowned and most ubiquitous of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellenes—a being of irresistible force, and especially beloved by Zeus, yet condemned constantly to labor for others and to obey the commands of a worthless and cowardly persecutor. His recompense is reserved to the close of his career, when his afflicting trials are brought to a close: he is then admitted to the god-head and receives in marriage Hebe. The twelve labors, as they are called, too notorious to be here detailed, form a very small fraction of the exploits of this mighty being, which filled the Herakleian epics of the ancient poets. He is found not only in most parts of Hellas, but throughout all the regions then known to the Greeks, from Gades to the river Thermodon in the Euxine and to Scythia, overcoming all difficulties and vanquishing all opponents. Distinguished families are everywhere to be traced who bear his patronymic, and glory in the belief that they are his descendants. Among Achaeans, Cadmeians, and Dorians, Heracles is venerated: the latter especially treat him as their principal hero—the Patron Hero-God of the race: the Herakleids form among all Dorians a privileged gens, in which at Sparta the special lineage of the two kings was included.

His character lends itself to myths countless in number, as well as disparate in their character. The irresistible force remains constant, but it is sometimes applied with reckless violence against friends as well as enemies, sometimes devoted to the relief of the oppressed. The comic writers often brought him out as a coarse and stupid glutton, while the Keian philosopher Prodikos, without at all distorting the type, extracted from it the simple, impressive, and imperishable apologue still known as the choice of Hercules.

After the death and apotheosis of Heracles, his son Hyllos and his other children were expelled and persecuted by Eurystheus; the fear of whose vengeance deterred both the Trachinian king Keyx and the Thebans from harboring them. The Athenians alone were generous enough to brave the risk of offering them shelter. Eurystheus invaded Attica, but perished in the attempt by the hand of Hyllos, or by that of Iolaos, the old companion and nephew of Heracles. The chivalrous courage which the Athenians had on this occasion displayed on behalf of oppressed innocence was a favorite theme for subsequent eulogy by Attic poets and orators.

All the sons of Eurystheus lost their lives in the battle along with him, so that the Perseid family was now represented only by the Herakleids, who collected an army and endeavored to recover the possessions from which they had been expelled. The united forces of Ionians, Achaeans, and Arcadians, then inhabiting Peloponnesus, met the invaders at the isthmus, when Hyllos, the eldest of the sons of Heracles, proposed that the contest should be determined by a single combat between himself and any champion of the opposing army. It was agreed that if Hyllos were victorious, the Herakleids should be restored to their possessions—if he were vanquished, that they should forego all claim for the space of a hundred years, or fifty years, or three generations,—for in the specification of the time accounts differ. Echemos, the hero of Tegea, in Arcadia, accepted the challenge, and Hyllos was slain in the encounter; in consequence of which the Herakleids retired, and resided along with the Dorians under the protection of Egimios, son of Dorus. As soon as the stipulated period of truce had expired, they renewed their attempt upon Peloponnesus, conjointly with the Dorians, and with complete success: the great Dorian establishments of Argos, Sparta, and Messenia were the result. The details of this victorious invasion will be hereafter recounted.

Sicyon, Phlios, Epidauros, and Troezen all boasted of respected eponyms and a genealogy of dignified length, not exempt from the usual discrepancies—but all just as much entitled to a place on the tablet of history as the more renowned Eolids or Herakleids. I omit them here because I wish to impress upon the reader's mind the salient features and character of the legendary world,—not to load his memory with a full list of legendary names.

DEUKALION, HELLEN, AND SONS OF HELLEN.

IN the Hesiodic theogony, as well as in the “Works and Days”, the legend of Prometheus and Epimetheus presents an import religious, ethical, and social, and in this sense it is carried forward by Aeschylus; but to neither of the characters is any genealogical function assigned. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women brought both of them into the stream of Grecian legendary lineage, representing Deucalion as the son of Prometheus and Pandora, and seemingly his wife Pyrrha as daughter of Epimetheus.

Deucalion is important in Grecian mythical narrative under two points of view. First, he is the person specially saved at the time of the general deluge: next, he is the father of Hellen, the great eponym of the Hellenic race: at least this was the more current story, though there were other statements which made Hellen the son of Zeus.

The name of Deucalion is originally connected with the Lokrian towns of Kynos and Opus, and with the race of the Leleges, but he appears finally as settled in Thessaly, and ruling in the portion of that country called Phthiotis. According to what seems to have been the old legendary account, it is the deluge which transferred him from the one to the other; but according to another statement, framed in more historicizing times, he conducted a body of Kuretes and Leleges into Thessaly, and expelled the prior Pelasgian occupants.

The enormous iniquity with which earth was contaminated—as Apollodorus says, by the then existing brazen race, or as others say, by the fifty monstrous sons of Lykaon—provoked Zeus to send a general deluge? An unremitting and terrible rain laid the whole of Greece under water, except the highest mountain tops, whereon a few stragglers found refuge. Deukalion was saved in a chest or ark, which he had been forewarned by his father Prometheus to construct. After floating for nine days on the water, he at length landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. Zeus having sent Hermes to him, promising to grant whatever he asked, he prayed that men and companions might be sent to him in his solitude: accordingly Zeus directed both him and Pyrrha to cast stones over their heads: those cast by Pyrrha became women, those by Deucalion men. And thus the “stony race of men” (if we may be allowed to translate an etymology which the Greek language presents exactly, and which has not been disdained by Hesiod, by Pindar, by Epicharmus, and by Virgil) came to tenant the soil of Greece. Deucalion on landing from the ark sacrificed a grateful offering to Zeus Phyxios, or the god of escape; he also erected altars in Thessaly to the twelve great gods of Olympus.

The reality of this deluge was firmly believed throughout the historical ages of Greece; the chronologers, reckoning up by genealogies, assigned the exact date of it, and placed it at the same time as the conflagration of the world by the rashness of Phaethon, during the reign of Krotopos, king of Argos, the seventh from Inachus. The meteorological work of Aristotle admits and reasons upon this deluge as an unquestionable fact, though he alters the locality by placing it west of Mount Pindus, near Dodona and the river Achelous. He at the same time treats it as a physical phenomenon, the result of periodical cycles in the atmosphere—thus departing from the religious character of the old legend, which described it as a judgment inflicted by Zeus upon a wicked race. Statements founded upon this event were in circulation throughout Greece even to a very late date. The Megarians affirmed that Megaros, their hero, son of Zeus by a local nymph, had found safety from the waters on the lofty summit of their mountain Geraneia, which had not been completely submerged. And in the magnificent temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens a cavity in the earth was shown, through which it was affirmed that the waters of the deluge had retired. Even in the time of Pausanias, the priest poured into this cavity holy offerings of meal and honey. In this, as in other parts of Greece, the idea of the Deukalionian deluge was blended with the religious impressions of the people, and commemorated by their sacred ceremonies.

Hellen and Amphiktion

The offspring of Deucalion and Pyrrha were two sons, Hellen and Amphiktyon, and a daughter, Protogeneia, whose son by Zeus was Aethlius: it was however maintained by many that Helen was the son of Zeus and not of Deucalion. Hellen had by a nymph three sons, Dorus, Xuthus, and Eolus. He gave to those who had been before called Greeks the name of Hellenes, and partitioned his territory among his three children. Eolus reigned in Thessaly; Xuthus received Peloponnesus, and had by Kreusa as his sons Achaeus and Ion; while Dorus occupied the country lying opposite to the Peloponnesus, on the northern side of the Corinthian Gulf. These three gave to the inhabitants of their respective countries the names of Aeolians, Achaeans and Ionians, and Dorians.

Such is the genealogy as we find it in Apollodorus. In so far as the names and filiation are concerned, many points in it are given differently, or implicitly contradicted by Euripides and other writers. Though as literal and personal history it deserves no notice, its import is both intelligible and comprehensive. It expounds and symbolizes the first fraternal aggregation of Hellenic men, together with their territorial distribution and the institutions which they collectively venerated.

There were two great holding-points in common for every section of Greeks. One was the Amphiktyonic assembly, which met half-yearly, alternately at Delphi and at Thermopylae; originally and chiefly for common religious purposes, but indirectly and occasionally embracing political and social objects along with them. The other was the public festivals or games, of which the Olympic came first in importance; next the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian—institutions which combined religions solemnities with recreative effusion and hearty sympathies, in a manner so imposing and so unparalleled. Amphiktyon represents the first of these institutions, and Aethlius the second. As the Amphiktyonic assembly was always especially connected with Thermopylae and Thessaly, Amphiktyon is made the son of the Thessalian Deucalion; but as the Olympic festival was nowise locally connected with Deucalion, Aethlius is represented as having Zeus for his father, and as touching Deucalion only through the maternal line. It will be seen presently that the only matter predicated respecting Aethlius is, that he settled in the territory of Elis, and begat Endymion: this brings him into local contact with the Olympic games, and his function is then ended.

Division of Hellas: Eolians, Dorians, Ionians

Having thus got Hellas as an aggregate with its main cementing forces, we march on to its sub-division into parts, through Eolus, Dorus, and Xuthus, the three sons of Hellen, a distribution which is far from being exhaustive: nevertheless, the genealogists whom Apollodorus follows recognize no more than three sons.

The genealogy is essentially post-Homeric; for Homer knows Hellas and the Hellenes only in connection with a portion of Achaia Phthiotis. But as it is recognized in the Hesiodic Catalogue—composed probably within the first century after the commencement of recorded Olympiads, or before 676 BC—the peculiarities of it elating from so early a period, deserve much attention. We may remark, first, that it seems to exhibit to us Dorus and Eolus as the only pure and genuine offspring of Hellen. For their brother Xuthus is not enrolled as an eponymous; he neither founds nor names any people; it is only his sons Achaeus and Ion, after his blood has been mingled with that of the Erechtheid Kreusa, who become eponyms and founders, each of his own separate people. Next, as to the territorial distribution, Xuthus receives Peloponnesus from his father, and unites himself with Attica (which the author of this genealogy seems to have conceived as originally unconnected with Hellen) by his marriage with the daughter of the indigenous hero Erechtheus. The issue of this marriage, Achaeus and Ion, present to us the population of Peloponnesus and Attica conjointly as related among themselves by the tie of brotherhood, but as one degree more distant both from Dorians and Eolians. Eolus reigns over the regions about Thessaly, and calls the people in those parts Aeolians; while Dorus occupies “the country over against Peloponnesus on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf”, and calls the inhabitants after himself Dorians. It is at once evident that this designation is in no way applicable to the confined district between Parnassus and Eta, which alone is known by the name of Doris, and its inhabitants by that of Dorians, in the historical ages. In the view of the author of this genealogy, the Dorians are the original occupants of the large range of territory north of the Corinthian Gulf, comprising Phocis, and the territory of the Ozolian Lokrians. And this farther harmonizes with the other legend noticed by Apollodorus, when he states that Etolus, son of Endymion, having been forced to expatriate from Peloponnesus, crossed into the Kuretid territory, and was there hospitably received by Dorus, Laodokus, and Polypcetes, sons of Apollo and Phthia. He slew his hosts, acquired the territory, and gave to it the name of Etolia; his son Pleuron married Xanthippe, daughter of Dorus; while his other son, Kalydon, marries Eolia, daughter of Amythaon. Here again we have the name of Dorus, or the Dorians, connected with the tract subsequently termed Etolia. That Dorus should in one place be called the son of Apollo and Phthia, and in another place the son of Hellen by a nymph, will surprise no one accustomed to the fluctuating personal nomenclature of these old legends: moreover the name of Phthia is easy to reconcile with that of Hellen, as both are identified with the same portion of Thessaly, even from the days of the Iliad.

This story, that the Dorians were at one time the occupants, or the chief occupants, of the range of territory between the river Achelous and the northern shore of the Corinthian gulf, is at least more suitable to the facts attested by historical evidence than the legends given in Herodotus, who represents the Dorians as originally in the Phthiotid; then as passing under Dorus, the son of Hellen, into the Histiotid, under the mountains of Ossa and Olympus; next, as driven by the Kadmeians into the regions of Pindus; from thence passing into the Dryopid territory, on Mount Eta; lastly, from thence into Peloponnesus. The received story was, that the great Dorian establishments in Peloponnesus were formed by invasion from the north, and that the invaders crossed the gulf from Naupaktus,—a statement which, however disputable with respect to Argos, seems highly probable in regard both to Sparta and Messenia. That the name of Dorians comprehended far more than the inhabitants of the insignificant tetrapolis of Doris Proper must be assumed, if we believe that they conquered Sparta and Messenia: both the magnitude of the conquest itself and the passage of a large portion of them from Naupaktus, harmonize with the legend as given by Apollodorus, in which the Dorians are represented as the principal inhabitants of the northern shore of the gulf.

The statements which we find in Herodotus, respecting the early migrations of the Dorians, have been considered as possessing greater historical value than those of the fabulist Apollodorus. But both are equally matter of legend, while the brief indications of the latter seem to be most in harmony with the facts which we afterwards find attested by history.

It has already been mentioned that the genealogy which makes Eolus, Xuthus, and Dorus sons of Hellen, is as old as the Hesiodic Catalogue; probably also that which makes Hellen son of Deucalion. Aethlius also is an Hesiodic personage; whether Amphiktion be so or not, we have no proof. They could not have been introduced into the legendary genealogy until after the Olympic games and the Amphiktyonic council had acquired an established and extensive reverence throughout Greece.

Respecting Dorus the son of Hellen, we find neither legends nor legendary genealogy; respecting Xuthus, very little beyond the tale of Kreusa and Ion, which has its place more naturally among the Attic fables. Achaeus, however, who is here represented as the son of Xuthus, appears in other stories with very different parentage and accompaniments. According to the statement which we find in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Achaeis, Phthius, and Pelasgus are sons of Poseidon and Larissa. They migrate from Peloponnesus into Thessaly, and distribute the Thessalian territory between them, giving their names to its principal divisions: their descendants in the sixth generation were driven out of that country by the invasion of Deucalion at the head of the Kuretes and the Leleges. This was the story of those who wanted to provide an eponymus for the Achaeans in the southern districts of Thessaly: Pausanias accomplishes the same object by different means, representing Achaeus the son of Xuthus as having gone back to Thessaly and occupied the portion of it to which his father was entitled. Then, by way of explaining how it was that there were Achaeans at Sparta and at Argos, he tells us that Archander and Architeles the sons of Achaeus, came back from Thessaly to Peloponnesus, and married two daughters of Danaus: they acquired great influence at Argos and Sparta, and gave to the people the name of Achaeans after their father Achaeus.

Euripides also deviates very materially from the Hesiodic genealogy in respect to the eponymous persons. In the drama called Ion, he describes Ion as son of Kreusa by Apollo, but adopted by Xuthus: according to him, the real sons of Xuthus and Kreusa are Dorus and Achaeus,—eponyms of the Dorians and Achaeans in the interior of Peloponnesus. And it is a still more capital point of difference that he omits Hellen altogether—making Xuthus an Achaean by race, the son of Eolus, who is the son of Zeus. This is the more remarkable, as in the fragments of two other dramas of Euripides, the Melanippe and the Eolus, we find Hellen mentioned both as father of Eolus and son of Zeus. To the general public even of the most instructed city of Greece, fluctuations and discrepancies in these mythical genealogies seem to have been neither surprising nor offensive.

THE AEOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF AEOLUS.

IF two of the sons of Hellen, Dorus and Xuthus, present to us families comparatively unnoticed in mythical narrative, the third son, Aeolus, richly makes up for the deficiency. From him we pass to his seven sons and five daughters, amidst a great abundance of heroic and poetical incident.

In dealing, however, with these extensive mythical families, it is necessary to observe, that the legendary world of Greece, in the manner in which it is presented to us, appears invested with a degree of symmetry and coherence which did not originally belong to it. For the old ballads and stories which were sung or recounted at the multiplied festivals of Greece, each on its own special theme, have been lost: the religious narratives, which the Exegetes of every temple had present to his memory, explanatory of the peculiar religious ceremonies and local customs in his own town or deme, had passed away. All these primitive elements, originally distinct and unconnected, are removed out of our sight, and we possess only an aggregate result, formed by many confluent streams of fable, and connected together by the agency of subsequent poets and logographers. Even the earliest agents in this work of connecting and systematizing—the Hesiodic poets—have been hardly at all preserved. Our information respecting Grecian mythology is derived chiefly from the prose logographers who followed them, and in whose works, since a continuous narrative was above all things essential to them, the fabulous personages are woven into still more comprehensive pedigrees, and the original isolation of the legends still better disguised. Hekataeus, Pherekydes, Hellanikus, and Akusilaus lived at a time when the idea of Hellas as one great whole, composed of fraternal sections, was deeply rooted in the mind of every Greek, and when the hypothesis of a few great families, branching out widely from one common stem was more popular and acceptable than that of a distinct indigenous origin in each of the separate districts. These logographers, indeed, have themselves been lost; but Apollodorus and the various scholiasts, our great immediate sources of information respecting Grecian mythology, chiefly borrowed from them: so that the legendary world of Greece is in fact known to us through them, combined with the dramatic and Alexandrine poets, their Latin imitators, and the still later class of scholiasts—except indeed such occasional glimpses as we obtain from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the remaining Hesiodic fragments, which exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity when confronted with the narratives of the logographers.

Though Aeolus (as has been already stated) is himself called the son of Hellen along with Dorus and Xuthus, yet the legends concerning the Aeolids, far from being dependent upon this genealogy, are not all even coherent with it: moreover the name of Aeolus in the legend is older than that of Hellen, inasmuch as it occurs both in the Iliad and Odyssey. Odysseus sees in the underworld the beautiful Tyre, daughter of Salmoneus, and wife of Kretheus, son of Aeolus.

Aeolus is represented as having reigned in Thessaly: his seven sons were Kretheus, Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmoneus, Deion, Magnes, and Perieres: his five daughters, Canace, Alcyone, Peisidike, Calyce, and Perimede. The fables of this race seem to be distinguished by a constant introduction of the god Poseidon, as well as by an unusual prevalence of haughty and presumptuous attributes among the Aeolid heroes, leading them to affront the gods by pretenses of equality, and sometimes even by defiance. The worship of Poseidon must probably have been diffused and pre-eminent among a people with whom those legends originated.

Salmoneus is not described in the Odyssey as son of Aeolus, but he is so denominated both in the Hesiodic Catalogue and by the subsequent logographers. His daughter Tyro became enamored of the river Enipeus, the most beautiful of all streams that traverse the earth; she frequented the banks assiduously, and there the god Poseidon found means to indulge his passion for her, assuming the character of the river-god himself. The fruit of this alliance were the twin brothers, Pelias and Neleus: Tyro afterwards was given in marriage to her uncle Kretheus, another son of Aolus, by whom she had Aeson, Pheres, and Amythaon—all names of celebrity in the heroic legends. The adventures of Tyro formed the subject of an affecting drama of Sophocles, now lost. Her father had married a second wife, named Sidero, whose cruel counsels induced him to punish and torture his daughter on account of her intercourse with Poseidon. She was shorn of her magnificent hair, beaten and ill-used in various ways, and confined in a loathsome dungeon. Unable to take care of her two children, she had been compelled to expose them immediately on their birth in a little boat on the river Enipeus; they were preserved by the kindness of a herdsman, and when grown up to manhood, rescued their mother, and revenged her wrongs by putting to death the iron-hearted Sidero. This pathetic tale respecting the long imprisonment of Tyro is substituted by Sophocles in place of the Homeric legend, which represented her to have become the wife of Kretheus, and mother of a numerous offspring.

Her father, the unjust Salmoneus, exhibited in his conduct the most insolent impiety towards the gods. He assumed the name and title even of Zeus, and caused to be offered to himself the sacrifices destined for that god: he also imitated the thunder and lightning, by driving about with brazen caldrons attached to his chariot, and casting lighted torches towards heaven. Such wickedness finally drew upon him the wrath of Zeus, who smote him with a thunderbolt, and effaced from the earth the city which he had founded, with all its inhabitants. Pelias and Neleus, “both stout vassals of the great Zeus”, became engaged in dissension respecting the kingdom of Iolkos in Thessaly. Pelias got possession of it, and dwelt there in plenty and prosperity; but he had offended the goddess Hera by killing Sidero upon her altar, and the effects of her wrath were manifested in his relations with his nephew Jason.

Neleus quitted Thessaly, went into Peloponnesus, and there founded the kingdom of Pylos. He purchased, by immense marriage presents, the privilege of wedding the beautiful Chloris, daughter of Amphion, king of Orchomenos, by whom he had twelve sons and but one daughters—the fair and captivating Pero, whom suitors from all the neighborhood courted in marriage. But Neleus, “the haughtiest of living men”, refused to entertain the pretensions of any of them: he would grant his daughter only to that man who should bring to him the oxen of Iphiklos, from Phylake in Thessaly. These precious animals were carefully guarded, as well by herdsmen as by a dog whom neither man nor animal could approach.

Nevertheless, Bias, the son of Amythaon, nephew of Neleus, being desperately enamored of Pero, prevailed upon his brother Melampus to undertake for his sake the perilous adventure in spite of the prophetic knowledge of the latter, which forewarned him that though he would ultimately succeed, the prize must be purchased by severe captivity and suffering. Melampus, in attempting to steal the oxen, was seized and put in prison; from whence nothing but his prophetic powers rescued him. Being acquainted with the language of worms, he heard these animals communicating to each other, in the roof over his head, that the beams were nearly eaten through and about to fall in. He communicated this intelligence to his guards, and demanded to be conveyed to another place of confinement, announcing that the roof would presently fall in and bury them. The prediction was fulfilled, and Phylakos, father of Iphiklos, full of wonder at this specimen of prophetic power, immediately caused him to be released. He further consulted him respecting the condition of his son Iphiklos, who was childless; and promised him the possession of the oxen on condition of his suggesting the means whereby offspring might be ensured. A vulture having communicated to Melampus the requisite information, Podarkes, the son of Iphiklos, was born shortly afterwards. In this manner Melampus obtained possession of the oxen, and conveyed them to Pylos, ensuring to his brother Bias the hand of Pero. How this great legendary character, by miraculously healing the deranged daughters of Proetos, procured both for himself and for Bias dominion in Argos, has been recounted in a preceding chapter.

Of the twelve sons of Neleus, one at least, Periklymenos,—besides the ever memorable Nestor,—was distinguished for his exploits as well as for his miraculous gifts. Poseidon, the divine father of the race, had bestowed upon him the privilege of changing his form at pleasure into that of any bird, beast, reptile, or insects He had occasion for all these resources, and he employed them for a time with success in defending his family against the terrible indignation of Herakles, who, provoked by the refusal of Neleus to perform for him the ceremony of purification after his murder of Iphitus, attacked the Neleids at Pylos. Periklymenos by his extraordinary powers prolonged the resistance, but the hour of his fate was at length brought upon him by the intervention of Athene, who pointed him out to Heracles while he was perched as a bee upon the hero’s chariot. He was killed, and Heracles became completely victorious, overpowering Poseidon, Here, Ares, and Hades, and even wounding the three latter, who assisted in the defence. Eleven of the sons of Neleus perished by his hand, while Nestor, then a youth, was preserved only by his accidental absence at Gerena, away from his father's residence.

The proud house of the Neleids was now reduced to Nester; but Nestor singly sufficed to sustain its eminence. He appears not only as the defender and avenger of Pylos against the insolence and rapacity of his Epeian neighbors at Elis, but also as aiding the Lapithae in their terrible combat against the Centaurs, and as companion of Theseus, Peirithous, and the other great legendary heroes who preceded the Trojan war. In extreme old age his once marvelous power of handling his weapons has indeed passed away, but his activity remains unimpaired, and his sagacity as well as his influence in counsel is greater than ever. He not only assembles the various Grecian chiefs for the armament against Troy, perambulating the districts of Hellas along with Odysseus, but takes a vigorous part in the siege itself, and is of pre-eminent service to Agamemnon. And after the conclusion of the siege, he is one of the few Grecian princes who returns to his original dominions. He is found, in a strenuous and honored old age, in the midst of his children and subjects,—sitting with the scepter of authority on the stone bench before his house at Pylos,—offering sacrifice to Poseidon, as his father Neleus had done before him,—and mourning only over the death of his favorite son Antilochus, who had fallen along with so many brave companions in arms in the Trojan war.

After Nestor the line of the Neleids numbers undistinguished names,—Borus, Penthilus, and Andropompus,—three successive generations down to Melanthus, who on the invasion of Peloponnesus by the Herakleids, quitted Pylos and retired to Athens, where he became king, in a manner which I shall hereafter recount. His son Kodrus was the last Athenian king; and Neleus, one of the sons of Kodrus, is mentioned down to as the principal conductor of what is called the Ionic emigration from Athens to Asia Minor. It is certain that during the historical age, not merely the princely family of the Kodrids in Miletus, Ephesus, and other Ionic cities, but some of the greatest families even in Athens itself, traced their heroic lineage through the Neleids up to Poseidon; and the legends respecting Nestor and Periklymenos would find especial favor amidst Greeks with such feelings and belief. The Kodrids at Ephesus, and probably some other Ionic towns, long retained the title and honorary precedence of kings, even after they had lost the substantial power belonging to the office. They stood in the same relation, embodying both religious worship and supposed ancestry, to the Neleids and Poseidon, as the chiefs of the Aeolic colonies to Agamemnon and Orestes. The Athenian despot Peisistratus was named after the son of Nestor in the Odyssey; and we may safely presume that the heroic worship of the Neleids was as carefully cherished at the Ionic Miletus as at the Italian Metapontum.

Having pursued the line of Salmoneus and Neleus to the end of its legendary career, we may now turn back to that of another son of Aeolus, Kretheus, a line hardly less celebrated in respect of the heroic names which it presents. Alcestis, the most beautiful of the daughters of Pelias, was promised by her father in marriage to the man who could bring him a lion and a boar tamed to the yoke and drawing together. Admetus, son of Pheres, the eponymous of Pherae in Thessaly, and thus grandson of Kretheus, was enabled by the aid of Apollo to fulfill this condition, and to win her; for Apollo happened at that time to be in his service as a slave (condemned to this penalty by Zeus for having put to death the Cyclopes), in which capacity he tended the herds and horses with such success, as to equip Eumelus (the son of Admetus) to the Trojan war with the finest horses in the Grecian army. Though menial duties were imposed upon him, even to the drudgery of grinding in the mill, he yet carried away with him a grateful and friendly sentiment towards his mortal master, whom he interfered to rescue from the wrath of the goddess Artemis, when she was indignant at the omission of her name in his wedding sacrifices.

Admetus was about to perish by a premature death, when Apollo, by earnest solicitation to the Fates, obtained for him the privilege that his life should be prolonged, if he could find any person to die a voluntary death in his place. His father and his mother both refused to make this sacrifice for him, but the devoted attachment of his wife Alcestis disposed her to embrace with cheerfulness the condition of dying to preserve her husband. She had already perished, when Heracles, the ancient guest and friend of Admetus, arrived during the first hour of lamentation; his strength and daring enabled him to rescue the deceased Alcestis even from the grasp of Thanatos (Death), and to restore her alive to her disconsolate husband.

The son of Pelias, Akastus, had received and sheltered Peleus when obliged to fly his country in consequence of the involuntary murder of Eurytion. Kretheis, the wife of Akastus, becoming enamored of Peleus, made to him advances which he repudiated. Exasperated at his refusal, and determined to procure his destruction, she persuaded her husband that Peleus had attempted her chastity: upon which Akastus conducted Peleus out upon a hunting excursion among the woody regions of Mount Pelion, contrived to steal from him the sword fabricated and given by Hephestos, and then left him, alone and unarmed, to perish by the hands of the Centaurs or by the wild beasts. By the friendly aid of the Centaur Cheiron, however, Peleus was preserved, and his sword restored to him: returning to the city, he avenged himself by putting to death both Akastus and his perfidious wife.

But amongst all the legends with which the name of Pelias is connected, by far the most memorable is that of Jason and the Argonautic expedition. Jason was son of Aeson, grandson of Kretheus, and thus great-grandson of Eolus. Pelias, having consulted the oracle respecting the security of his dominion at Iolkos, had received in answer a warning to beware of the man who should appear before him with only one sandal. He was celebrating a festival in honor of Poseidon, when it so happened that Jason appeared before him with one of his feet unsandaled: he had lost one sandal in wading through the swollen current of the river Anauros. Pelias immediately understood that this was the enemy against whom the oracle had forewarned him. As a means of averting the danger, he imposed upon Jason the desperate task of bringing back to Iolkos the Golden Fleece,—the fleece of that ram which had carried Phryxos from Achaia to Colchis, and which Phryxos had dedicated in the latter country as an offering to the god Ares. The result of this injunction was the memorable expedition—of the ship Argo and her crew called the Argonauts, composed of the bravest and noblest youths of Greece—which cannot be conveniently included among the legends of the Aeolids, and is reserved for a separate chapter.

The voyage of the Argo was long protracted, and Pelias, persuaded that neither the ship nor her crew would ever return, put to death both the father and mother of Jason, together with their infant son. Aeson, the father, being permitted to choose the manner of his own death, drank bull’s blood while performing a sacrifice to the gods. At length, however, Jason did return, bringing with him not only the golden fleece, but also Medea, daughter of Aetes, king of Colchis, as his wife,—a woman distinguished for magical skill and cunning, by whose assistance alone the Argonauts had succeeded in their project. Though determined to avenge himself upon Pelias, Jason knew that he could only succeed by stratagem. He remained with his companions a short distance from Iolkos, while Medea, feigning herself a fugitive from his ill-usage, entered the town alone, and procured access to the daughters of Pelias. By exhibitions of her magical powers she soon obtained unqualified ascendancy over their minds. For example, she selected from the flocks of Pelias a ram in the extremity of old age, cut him up and boiled him in a caldron with herbs, and brought him out in the shape of a young and vigorous lamb: the daughters of Pelias were made to believe that their old father could in like manner be restored to youth. In this persuasion they cut him up with their own hands and cast his limbs into the caldron, trusting that Medea would produce upon him the same magical effect. Medea pretended that an invocation to the moon was a necessary part of the ceremony she went up to the top of the house as if to pronounce it, and there lighting the fire-signal concerted with the Argonauts, Jason and his companions burst in and possessed themselves of the town. Satisfied with having thus revenged himself, Jason yielded the principality of Iolkos to Akastus, son of Pelias, and retired with Medea to Corinth. Thus did the goddess gratify her ancient wrath against Pelias: she had constantly watched over Jason, and had carried the “all-notorious” Argos through its innumerable perils, in order that Jason might bring home Medea to accomplish the ruin of his uncle. The misguided daughters of Pelias departed as voluntary exiles to Arcadia: Akastus his son celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of his deceased father.

Jason and Medea retired from Iolkos to Corinth where they resided ten years: their children were—Medeius, whom the Centaur Cheiron educated in the regions of Mount Pélion,—and Mermerus and Pheres, born at Corinth. After they had resided there ten years in prosperity, Jason set his affections on Glauke, daughter of Kreon, king of Corinth; and as her father was willing to give her to him in marriage, he determined to repudiate Medea, who received orders forthwith to leave Corinth. Stung with this insult and bent upon revenge, Medea prepared a poisoned robe, and sent it as a marriage present to Glauke: it was unthinkingly accepted and put on, and the body of the unfortunate bride was burnt up and consumed. Kreon, her father, who tried to tear from her the burning garment, shared her fate and perished. The exulting Medea escaped by means of a chariot with winged serpents furnished to her by her grandfather Helios: she placed herself under the protection of Aegeus at Athens, by whom she had a son named Medus. She left her young children in the sacred enclosure of the Akraean Here, relying on the protection of the altar to ensure their safety; but the Corinthians were so exasperated against her for the murder of Kreon and Glauke, that they dragged the children away from the altar and put them to death. The miserable Jason perished by a fragment of his own ship Argo, which fell upon him while he was asleep under it, being hauled on shore, according to the habitual practice of the ancients.

The first establishment at Ephyre, or Corinth, had been founded by Sisyphus, another of the sons of Aeolus, brother of Salmoneus and Kretheus. The Aeolid Sisyphus was distinguished as an unexampled master of cunning and deceit. He blocked up the road along the isthmus, and killed the strangers who came along it by rolling down upon them great stones from the mountains above. He was more than a match even for the arch thief Autolykus, the son of Hermes, who derived from his father the gift of changing the color and shape of stolen goods, so that they could no longer be recognized: Sisyphus, by marking his sheep under the foot, detected Autolykus when he stole them, and obliged him to restore the plunder. His penetration discovered the amour of Zeus with the nymph Aegina, daughter of the river-god Aesopus. Zeus had carried her off to the island of Oenone (which subsequently bore the name of Aegina); upon which Aesopus, eager to recover her, inquired of Sisyphus whither she was gone; the latter told him what had happened, on condition that he should provide a spring of water on the summit of the Acro-Corinthus. Zeus, indignant with Sisyphus for this revelation, inflicted upon him in Hades the punishment of perpetually heaving up a hill a great and heavy stone, which, so soon as it attained the summit, rolled back again, in spite of all his efforts, with irresistible force into the plain.

In the application of the Aeolid genealogy to Corinth, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, appears as the first name: but the old Corinthian poet Eumelus either found or framed an heroic genealogy for his native city, independent both of Aeolus and Sisyphus. According to this genealogy, Ephyre, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, was the primitive tenant of the Corinthian territory, Aesopus of the Sicyonian: both were assigned to the god Helios, in adjusting a dispute between him and Poseidon, by Briareus. Helios divided the territory between his two sons Aetes and Aloeus: to the former he assigned Corinth, to the latter Sicyon. Aetes, obeying the admonition of an oracle, emigrated to Colchis, leaving his territory under the rule of Bunos, the son of Hermes, with the stipulation that it should be restored whenever either he or any of his descendants returned. After the death of Bunos, both Corinth and Sicyon were possessed by Epopeus, son of Aloeus, a wicked man. His son Marathon left him in disgust, and retired into Attica, but returned after his death and succeeded to his territory, which he in turn divided between his two sons, Corinthos and Sicyon, from whom the names of the two districts were first derived. Korinthos died without issue, and the Corinthians then invited Medea from Iolkos as the representative of Aetes: she, with her husband Jason, thus obtained the sovereignty of Corinth. This legend of Eumelus, one of the earliest of the genealogical poets, so different from the story adopted by Neophron or Euripides, was followed certainly by Simonides, and seemingly by Theopompus. The incidents in it are imagined and arranged with a view to the supremacy of Medea; the emigration of Aetes and the conditions under which he transferred his scepter, being so laid out as to confer upon Medea an hereditary title to the throne. The Corinthians paid to Medea and to her children solemn worship, either divine, or heroic, in conjunction with Here Akraea, and this was sufficient to give to Medea a prominent place in the genealogy composed by a Corinthian poet, accustomed to blend together gods, heroes, and men in the antiquities of his native city. According to the legend of Eumelus, Jason became (through Medea) king of Corinth; but she concealed the children of their marriage in the temple of Here, trusting that the goddess would render them immortal. Jason, discovering her proceedings, left her, and retired in disgust to Iolkos; Medea also, being disappointed in her scheme, quitted the place, leaving the throne in the hands of Sisyphus, to whom, according to the story of Theopompus, she had become attached. Other legends recounted that Zeus had contracted a passion for Medea, but that she had rejected his suit from fear of the displeasure of Here; who, as a recompense for such fidelity, rendered her children immortal: moreover, Medea had erected, by special command of Here, the celebrated temple of Aphrodite at Corinth.

The tenor of these fables manifests their connection with the temple of Here, and we may consider the legend of Medea as having been originally quite independent of that of Sisyphus, but fitted on to it, in seeming chronological sequence, so as to satisfy the feelings of those Aeolids of Corinth who passed for his descendants.

Sisyphus had for his sons Glaukos and Ornytion. From Glaukos sprang Bellerophon, whose romantic adventures commence with the Iliad, and are further expanded by subsequent poets: according to some accounts, he was really the son of Poseidon, the prominent deity of the Aeolid family. The youth and beauty of Bellerophon rendered him the object of a strong passion on the part of Anteia, wife of Proetos, king of Argos. Finding her advances rejected, she contracted a violent hatred towards him, and endeavored, by false accusations, to prevail upon her husband to kill him. Proetos refused to commit the deed under his own roof, but dispatched him to his son-in-law, the king of Lykia in Asia Minor, putting into his hands a folded tablet full of destructive symbols. Conformably to these suggestions, the most perilous undertakings were imposed upon Bellerophon. He was directed to attack the monster Chimaera and to conquer the warlike Solymi as well as the Amazons: as he returned victorious from these enterprises, an ambuscade was laid for him by the bravest Lycian warriors, all of whom he slew. At length the Lycian king recognized him “as the genuine son of a god”, and gave him his daughter in marriage together with half of his kingdom. The grand-children of Bellerophon, Glaukos and Sarpedon,—the latter a son of his daughter Laodameia by Zeus,—combat as allies of Troy against the host of Agamemnon.

We now pass from Sisyphus and the Corinthian fables to another son of Eolus, Athamas, whose family history is not less replete with mournful and tragical incidents, abundantly diversified by the poets. Athamas, we are told, was king of Orchomenos; his wife Nephele was a goddess, and he had by her two children, Phryxus and Helle. After a certain time he neglected Nephele, and took to himself as new wife Ino, the daughter of Kadmus, by whom he had two sons, Learchus and Melikertes. Ino, looking upon Phryxus with the hatred of a stepmother, laid a snare for his life. She persuaded the women to roast the seed-wheat, which, when sown in this condition, yielded no crop, so that famine overspread the land. Athamas, sending to Delphi to implore counsel and a remedy, received for answer, through the machinations of Ino with the oracle, that the barrenness of the fields could not be alleviated except by offering Phryxus as a sacrifice to Zeus. The distress of the people compelled him to execute this injunction, and Phryxus was led as a victim to the altar. But the power of his mother Nephele snatched him from destruction, and procured for him from Hermes a ram with a fleece of gold, upon which he and his sister Helle mounted and were carried across the sea. The ram took the direction of the Euxine sea and Colchis: when they were crossing the Hellespont, Helle fell off into the narrow strait, which took its name from that incident. Upon this, the ram, who was endued with speech, consoled the terrified Phryxus, and ultimately carried him safe to Colchis: Aetes, king of Colchis, son of the god Helios, and brother of Circe, received Phryxus kindly, and gave him his daughter Chalkiope in marriage. Phryxus sacrificed the ram to Zeus Phyxios, suspending the golden fleece in the sacred grove of Ares.

Athamas—according to some both Athamas and Ino—were afterwards driven mad by the anger of the goddess Here; insomuch that the father shot his own son Learchus, and would also have put to death his other son Melikertes, if Ino had not snatched him away. She fled with the boy across the Megarian territory and Mount Geraneia, to the rock Moluris, overhanging the Saronic Gulf: Athamas pursued her, and in order to escape him she leaped into the sea. She became a sea-goddess under the title of Leukothea; while the body of Melikertes was cast ashore on the neighboring territory of Schoenus, and buried by his uncle Sisyphus, who was directed by the Nereids to pay to him heroic honours under the name of Palaemon. The Isthmian games, one of the great periodical festivals of Greece, were celebrated in honor of the god Poseidon, in conjunction with Palaemon as a hero. Athamas abandoned his territory, and became the first settler of a neighboring region called from him Athamantia, or the Athamantian plain.

The legend of Athamas connects itself with some sanguinary religious rites and very peculiar family customs, which prevailed at Alos in Achaia Phthiotis, down to a time later than the historian Herodotus, and of which some remnant existed at Orchomenos even in the days of Plutarch. Athamas was worshipped at Alos as a hero, having both a chapel and a consecrated grove, attached to the temple of Zeus Laphystios. On the family of which he was the heroic progenitor, a special curse and disability stood affixed. The eldest of the race was forbidden to enter the prytaneion or government-house: if he was found within the doors of the building, the other citizens laid hold of him on his going out, surrounded him with garlands, and led him in solemn procession to be sacrificed as a victim at the altar of Zeus Laphystios. The prohibition carried with it an exclusion from all the public meetings and ceremonies, political as well as religious, and from the sacred fire of the state: many of the individuals marked out had therefore been bold enough to transgress it. Some had been seized on quitting the building and actually sacrificed; others had fled the country for a long time to avoid a similar fate.

The guides who conducted Xerxes and his army through southern Thessaly detailed to him this existing practice, coupled with the local legend, that Athamas, together with Ino, had sought to compass the death of Phryxus, who however had escaped to Colchis; that the Achaeans had been enjoined by an oracle to offer up Athamas himself as an expiatory sacrifice to release the country from the anger of the gods; but that Kytissoros, son of Phryxus, coming back from Colchis, had intercepted the sacrifice of Athamas, whereby the anger of the gods remained still unappeased, and an undying curse rested upon the family.

That such human sacrifices continued to a greater or less extent, even down to a period later than Herodotus, among the family who worshipped Athamas as their heroic ancestor, appears certain: mention is also made of similar customs in parts of Arcadia, and of Thessaly, in honor of Peleus and Cheiron. But we may reasonably presume, that in the period of greater humanity which Herodotus witnessed, actual sacrifice had become very rare. The curse and the legend still remained, but were not called into practical working, except during periods of intense national suffering or apprehension, during which the religious sensibilities were always greatly aggravated. We cannot at all doubt, that during the alarm created by the presence of the Persian king with his immense and ill-disciplined host, the minds of the Thessalians must have been keenly alive to all that was terrific in their national stories, and all that was expiatory in their religious solemnities. Moreover, the mind of Xerxes himself was so awe-struck by the tale, that he reverenced the dwelling-place consecrated to Athamas. The guides who recounted to him the romantic legend gave it as the historical and generating cause of the existing rule and practice: a critical inquirer is forced (as has been remarked before) to reverse the order of precedence, and to treat the practice as having been the suggesting cause of its own explanatory legend.

The family history of Athamas and the worship of Zeus Laphystios are expressly connected by Herodotus with Alos in Achaea Phthiotis—one of the towns enumerated in the Iliad as under the command of Achilles. But there was also a mountain called Laphystion, and a temple and worship of Zeus Laphystios between Orchomenos and Koroneia, in the northern portion of the territory known in the historical ages as Boeotia. Here too the family story of Athamas is localised, and Athamas is presented to us as king of the districts of Koreneia, Haliartus and Athamas in Mount Laphystion: he is thus interwoven with the Orchomenian genealogy. Andreus (we are told), son of the river Peneios, was the first person who settled in the region: from him it received the name Andreis. Athamas, coming subsequently to Andreus, received from him the territory of Koreneia and Haliartus with Mount Laphystion: he gave in marriage to Andreus Euippe, daughter of his son Leucon, and the issue of this marriage was Eteokles, said to be the son of the river Kephisos. Koronos and Haliartus, grandsons of the Corinthian Sisyphus, were adopted by Athamas, as he had lost all his children. But when his grandson Presbem, son of Phryxus, returned to him from Kolchis, he divided his territory in such manner that Koronos and Haliartus became the founders of the towns which bore their names. Almon, the son of Sisyphus, also received from Eteokles a portion of territory, where he established the village Almones.

With Eteokles began, according to a statement in one of the Hesiodic poems, the worship of the Charites or Graces, so long and so solemnly continued at Orchomenos in the periodical festival of the Charitesia, to which many neighbouring towns and districts seem to have contributed. He also distributed the inhabitants into two tribes—Eteokleia and Kephisias. He died childless, and was succeeded by Almos, who had only two daughters, Chryse and Chrysogeneia. The son of Chryse by the god Ares was Phlegyas, the father and founder of the warlike and predatory Phlegyae, who despoiled everyone within their reach, and assaulted not only the pilgrims on their road to Delphi, but even the treasures of the temple itself. The offended god punished them by continued thunder, by earthquakes, and by pestilence, which extinguished all this impious race, except a scanty remnant who fled into Phocis.

Chrysogeneia, the other daughter of Almos, had for issue, by the god Poseidon, Minyas: the son of Minyas was Orchomenos. From these two was derived the name both of Minyae for the people, and of Orchomenos for the town. During the reign of Orchomenos, Hyettus came to him from Argos, having become an exile in consequence of the death of Molyros: Orchomenos assigned to him a portion of land, where he founded the village called Hyettus. Orchomenos, having no issue, was succeeded by Klymenos, son of Presbon, of the house of Athamas: Klymenos was slain by some Thebans during the festival of Poseidon at Onchestos; and his eldest son, Erginus, to avenge his death, attacked the Thebans with his utmost force;—an attack in which he was so successful, that the latter were forced to submit, and to pay him an annual tribute.

The Orchomenian power was now at its height: both Minyas and Orchomenos had been princes of surpassing wealth, and the former had built a spacious and durable edifice which he had filled with gold and silver. But the success of Erginus against Thebes was soon terminated and reversed by the hand of the irresistible Heracles, who rejected with disdain the claim of tribute, and even mutilated the envoys sent to demand it: he not only and the emancipated Thebes, but broke down and impoverished Orchomenos.

Erginus in his old age married a young wife, from which match sprang the illustrious heroes, or gods, Trophonius and Agamedes; though many (amongst whom is Pausanias himself) believed Trophonius to be the son of Apollo. Trophonius, one of the most memorable persons in Grecian mythology, was worshipped as a god in various places, but with especial sanctity as Zeus Trophonius at Lebadeia: in his temple at this town, the prophetic manifestations outlasted those of Delphi itself. Trophonius and Agamedes, enjoying matchless renown as architects, built the temple of Delphi, the thalamus of Amphitryon at Thebes, and also the inaccessible vault of Hyrieus at Hyria, in which they are said to have left one stone removable at pleasure so as to reserve for themselves a secret entrance. They entered so frequently, and stole so much gold and silver, that Hyrieus, astonished at his losses, at length spread a fine net, in which Agamedes was inextricably caught: Trophonius cut off his brother's head and carried it away, so that the body, which alone remained, was insufficient to identify the thief. Like Amphiaraos, whom he resembles in more than one respect, Trophonius was swallowed up by the earth near Lebadeia.

From Trophonius and Agamedes the Orchomenian genealogy passes to Askalaphos and Ialmenos, the sons of Ares by Astyoche, who are named in the Catalogue of the Iliad as leaders of the thirty ships from Orchomenos against Troy. Azeus, the grandfather of Astyoche in the Iliad, is introduced as the brother of Erginus by Pausanias, who does not carry the pedigree lower.

The genealogy here given out of Pausanias is deserving of the more attention, because it seems to have been copied from the special history of Orchomenos by the Corinthian Kallippus, who again borrowed from the native Orchomenian poet, Chersias the works of the latter had never come into the hands of Pausanias. It illustrates forcibly the principle upon which these mythical genealogies were framed, for almost every personage in the series is an Eponymous. Andreus gave his name to the country, Athamas to the Athamantian plain; Minyas, Orchomenos, Koronus, Haliartus, Almos, and Hyettos, are each in like manner connected with some name of people, tribe, town, or village; while Chryse and Chrysogeneia have their origin in the reputed ancient wealth of Orchomenos. Abundant discrepancies are found, however, in respect to this old genealogy, if we look to other accounts. According to one statement, Orchomenos was the son of Zeus, by Isione, daughter of Danaus; Minyas was the son of Orchomenos (or rather Poseidon) by Hermippe, daughter of Boetos; the sons of Minyas were Presbon, Orchomenos, Athamas, and Diochthondas. Others represented Minyas as son of Poseidon by Kallirrhoe, an Oceanic nymph, while Dionysius called him son of Ares, and Aristodemus, son of Aleas; lastly, there were not wanting authors who termed both Minyas and Orchomenos sons of Eteokles. Nor do we find in any one of these genealogies the name of Amphion the son of Iasus, who figures so prominently in the Odyssey as king of Orchomenos, and whose beautiful daughter Chloris is married to Neleus. Pausanias mentions him, but not as king, which is the denomination given to him in Homer.

The discrepancies here cited are hardly necessary in order to prove that these Orchomenian genealogies possess no historical value. Yet some probable inferences appear deducible from the general tenor of the legends, whether the facts and persons of which they are composed be real or fictitious. Throughout all the historical age, Orchomenos is a member of the Boeotian confederation. But the Boeotians are said to have been immigrants into the territory which bore their name from Thessaly; and prior to the time of their immigration, Orchomenos and the surrounding territory appear as possessed by the Minyae, who are recognized in that locality both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, and from whom the constantly recurring Eponymous, king Minyas, is borrowed by the genealogists. Poetical legend connects the Orchomenian Minyae, on the one side, with Pylos and Triphylia in Peloponnesus; on the other side, with Phthiotis and the town of Polkos in Thessaly; also with Corinth, through Sisyphus and his sons. Pherekydes represented Neleus, king of Pylos, as having also been king of Orchomenos. In the region of Triphylia, near to or coincident with Pylos, a Minyeian river is mentioned by Homer; and we find traces of residents called Minyae even in the historical times, though the account given by Herodotus of the way in which they came thither is strange and unsatisfactory.

Before the great changes which took place in the inhabitants of Greece from the immigration of the Thesprotians into Thessaly, of the Boeotians into Boeotia, and of the Dorians and Aetolians into Peloponnesus, at a date which we have no means of determining, the Minyae and tribes fraternally connected with them seem to have occupied a large portion of the surface of Greece, from Iolkos in Thessaly to Pylos in the Peloponnesus. The wealth of Orchomenos is renowned even in the Iliad; and when we study its topography in detail, we are furnished with a probable explanation both of its prosperity and its decay. Orchomenos was situated on the northern bank of the lake Kopais, which receives not only the river Kephisos from the valleys of Phocis, but also other rivers from Parnassus and Helicon. The waters of the lake find more than one subterranean egress—partly through natural rifts and cavities in the limestone mountains, partly through a tunnel pierced artificially more than a mile in length—into the plain on the northeastern side, from whence they flow into the Euboean sea near Larymna. And it appears that, so long as these channels were diligently watched and kept clear, a large portion of the lake was in the condition of alluvial land, pre-eminently rich and fertile. But when the channels came to be either neglected, or designedly choked up by an enemy, the water accumulated to such a degree as to occupy the soil of more than one ancient town, to endanger the position of Kopae, and to occasion the change of the site of Orchomenos itself from the plain to the declivity of Mount Hyphanteion. An engineer, Krates, began the clearance of the obstructed water-courses in the reign of Alexander the Great, and by his commission—the destroyer of Thebes being anxious to re-establish the extinct prosperity of Orchomenos. He succeeded so far as partially to drain and diminish the lake, whereby the site of more than one ancient city was rendered visible: but the revival of Thebes by Cassander, after the decease of Alexander, arrested the progress of the undertaking, and the lake soon regained its former dimensions, to contract which no further attempt was made.

According to the Theban legend, Heracles, after his defeat of Erginus, had blocked up the exit of the waters, and converted the Orchomenian plain into a lake. The spreading of these waters is thus connected with the humiliation of the Minyae; and there can be little hesitation in ascribing to these ancient tenants of Orchomenos, before it became boeotised, the enlargement and preservation of the protective channels. Nor could such an object have been accomplished without combined action and acknowledged ascendency on the part of that city over its neighbors, extending even to the sea at Larynma, where the river Kephisos discharges itself. Of its extended influence, as well as of its maritime activity, we find a remarkable evidence in the ancient and venerated Amphiktyony at Kalauria.

The little island so named, near the harbor of Troezen, in Peloponnesus, was sacred to Poseidon, and an asylum of inviolable sanctity. At the temple of Poseidon, in Kalauria, there had existed, from unknown date, a periodical sacrifice, celebrated by seven cities in common—Hermione, Epidaurus, Aegina, Athens, Prasiae, Nauplia, and the Minyeian Orchomenos. This ancient religious combination dates from the time when Nauplia was independent of Argos, and Prasiae of Sparta: Argos and Sparta, according to the usual practice in Greece, continued to fulfill the obligation each on the part of its respective dependent. Six out of the seven states are at once sea-towns, and near enough to Kalauria to account for their participation in this Amphiktyony. But the junction of Orchomenos, from its comparative remoteness, becomes inexplicable, except on the supposition that its territory reached the sea, and that it enjoyed a considerable maritime traffic—, a fact which helps to elucidate both its legendary connection with Iolkos, and its partnership in what is called the Ionic emigration.

The great power of Orchomenos was broken down and the city reduced to a secondary and half-dependent position by the Boeotians of Thebes; at what time and under what circumstances, history has not preserved. The story that the Theban hero, Heracles, rescued his native city from servitude and tribute to Orchomenos, since it comes from a Cadmeian and not from an Orchomenian legend, and since the details of it were favorite subjects of commemoration in the Theban temples, affords a presumption that Thebes was really once dependent on Orchomenos. Moreover the savage mutilations inflicted by the hero on the tribute-seeking envoys, so faithfully portrayed in his surname Rhinokoloustes, infuse into the myth a portion of that bitter feeling which so long prevailed between Thebes and Orchomenos, and which led the Theban, as soon as the battle of Leuktra had placed supremacy in their hands, to destroy and depopulate their rival. The ensuing generation saw the same fate retorted upon Thebes, combined with the restoration of Orchomenos. The legendary grandeur of this city continued, long after it had ceased to be distinguished for wealth and power, imperishably recorded both in the minds of the nobler citizens and in the compositions of the poets: the emphatic language of Pausanias shows how much he found concerning it in the old epic.

With several of the daughters of Aeolus memorable mythical pedigrees and narratives are connected. Alcyone married Keyx, the son of Eosphoros, but both she and her husband displayed in a high degree the overweening insolence common in the Aeolic race. The wife called her husband Zeus, while he addressed her as Here, for which presumptuous act Zeus punished them by changing both into birds.

Canace had by the god Poseidon several children, amongst whom were Epopeus and Aloeus. Aloeus married Iphimedea, who became enamored of the god Poseidon, and boasted of her intimacy with him. She had by him two sons, Otos and Ephialtes, the huge and formidable Aloids,—Titanic beings, nine fathoms in height and nine cubits in breadth, even in their boyhood, before they had attained their full strength. These Aloids defied and insulted the gods in Olympus. They paid their court to Here and Artemis; moreover they even seized and bound Ares, confining him in a brazen chamber for thirteen months. No one knew where he was, and the intolerable chain would have worn him to death, had not Eriboea, the jealous stepmother of the Aloids, revealed the place of his detention to Hermes, who carried him surreptitiously away when at the last extremity. Ares could obtain no atonement for such an indignity. Otos and Ephialtes even prepared to assault the gods in heaven, piling up Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa, in order to reach them. And this they would have accomplished had they been allowed to grow to their full maturity; but the arrows of Apollo put a timely end to their short-lived career.

The genealogy assigned to Kalyke, another daughter of Aeolus, conducts us from Thessaly to Elis and Aetolia. She married Aethlius (the son of Zeus by Protogeneia, daughter of Deucalion and sister of Hellen), who conducted a colony out of Thessaly, and settled in the territory of Elis. He had for his son Endymion, respecting whom the Hesiodic Catalogue and the Eoiai related several wonderful things. Zeus granted him the privilege of determining the hour of his own death, and even translated him into heaven, which he forfeited by daring to pay court to Here: his vision in this criminal attempt was cheated by a cloud, and he was cast out into the underworld. According to other stories, his great beauty caused the goddess Selene to become enamored of him, and to visit him by night during his sleep:—the sleep of Endymion became a proverbial expression for enviable, undisturbed, and deathless repose. Endymion had for issue (Pausanias gives us three different accounts, and Apollodorus a fourth, of the name of his wife), Epeios, Etolus, Paeon, and a daughter Eurykyde. He caused his three sons to run a race on the stadium at Olympia, and Epeios, being victorious, was rewarded by becoming his successor in the kingdom: it was after him that the people were denominated Epeians.

Epeios had no male issue, and was succeeded by his nephew Eleios, son of Eurykyde by the god Poseidon: the name of the people was then changed from Epeians to Eleians. Etolus, the brother of Epeios, having slain Apis, son of Phoroneus, was compelled to flee from the country: he crossed the Corinthian gulf, and settled in the territory then called Buretis, but to which he gave the name of Aetolia.

The son of Eleios,—or, according to other accounts, of the god Helios, of Poseidon, or of Phorbas,—is Augeas, whom we find mentioned in the Iliad as king of the Epeians or Eleiaus. Augeas was rich in all sorts of rural wealth, and possessed herds of cattle so numerous, that the dung of the animals accumulated in the stable or cattle-enclosures beyond all power of endurance. Eurystheus, as an insult to Heracles, imposed upon him the obligation of cleansing this stable: the hero, disdaining to carry off the dung upon his shoulders, turned the course of the river Alpheios through the building, and thus swept the encumbrance away. But Augeas, in spite of so signal a service, refused to Heracles the promised reward, though his son Phyleus protested against such treachery, and when he found that he could not induce his father to keep faith, retired in sorrow and wrath to the island of Dulichion. To avenge the deceit practiced upon him, Heracles invaded Elis; but Augeas had powerful auxiliaries, especially his nephews, the two Molionids (sons of Poseidon by Molione, the wife of Akteir), Eurytos, and Kteatos. These two miraculous brothers, of transcendant force, grew together,—having one body, but two heads and four arms. Such was their irresistible might, that Heracles was defeated and repelled from Elis: but presently the Eleians sent the two Mollonid brothers as Theori (sacred envoys) to the Isthmian games, and Heracles, placing himself in ambush at Kleonae, surprised and killed them as they passed through. For this murderous act the Eleians in vain endeavored to obtain redress both at Corinth and at Argos; which is assigned as the reason for the self-ordained exclusion, prevalent throughout all the historical age, that no Eleian athlete would ever present himself as a competitor at the Isthmian games. The Molionids being thus removed, Heracles again invaded Elis, and killed Augeas along with his children,—all except Phyleus, whom he brought over from Dulichion, and put in possession of his father's kingdom. According to the more gentle narrative which Pausanias adopts, Augeas was not killed, but pardoned at the request of Phyleus. He was worshipped as a hero even down to the time of that author.

It was on occasion of this conquest of Elis, according to the old myth which Pindar has ennobled in a magnificent ode, that Heracles first consecrated the ground of Olympia and established the Olympic games. Such at least was one of the many fables respecting the origin of that memorable institution.

It has already been mentioned that Etolus, son of Endymion, quitted Peloponnesus in consequence of having slain Apis. The country on the north of the Corinthian gulf, between the rivers Euenus and Achelous, received from him the name of Aetolia, instead of that of Kuretis: he acquired possession of it after having slain Doruis, Laodokus, and Polypoetes, sons of Apollo and Phthia, by whom he had been well received. He had by his wife Pronoe (the daughter of Phorbas) two sons, Pleuron and Kalyden, and from them the two chief towns in Aetolia were named. Pleuron married Xanthippe, daughter of Dorus, and had for his son Agenor, from whom sprang Portheus, or Porthaon, and Demonike: Euenos and Thestius were children of the latter by the god Ares.

Portheus had three sons, Agrius, Melas, and Eneus: among the off spring of Thestius were Althea. and Leda,—names which bring us to a period of interest in the legendary history. Leda marries Tyndareus and becomes mother of Helena and the Dioskuri; Althea marries Eneus, and has, among other children, Meleager and Deianeira; the latter being begotten by the god Dionysus, and the former by Ares. Tydeus also is his son, and the father of Diomedes: warlike eminence goes hand in hand with tragic calamity among the members of this memorable family.

We are fortunate enough to find the legend of Althea and Meleager set forth at considerable length in the Iliad, in the speech addressed by Phoenix to appease the wrath of Achilles. Eneus, king of Kalydon, in the vintage sacrifices which he offered to the gods, omitted to include Artemis: the misguided man either forgot her or cared not for her; and the goddess, provoked by such an insult, sent against the vineyards of Eneus a wild boar of vast size and strength, who tore up the trees by the root, and laid prostrate all their fruit. So terrible was this boar, that nothing less than a numerous body of men could venture to attack him: Meleager, the son of Eneus, however, having got together a considerable number of companions, partly from the Kuretes of Pleuron, at length blew him. But the anger of Artemis was not yet appeased. She raised a dispute among the combatants respecting the possession of the boar's head and hide—the trophies of victory. In this dispute Meleager slew the brother of his mother Althea, prince of the Kuretes of Pleuron: these Kuretes attacked the Etolians, of Kalydon in order to avenge their chief. So long as Meleager contended in the field the Etolians had the superiority. But he presently refused to come forth, indignant at the curses imprecated upon him by his mother. For Althea, wrung with sorrow for the death of her brother, flung herself upon the ground in tears, beat the earth violently with her hands, and implored Hades and Persephone to inflict death upon Meleager,—a prayer which the unrelenting Erinnyes in Erebus heard but too well. So keenly did the hero resent this behavior of his mother, that he kept aloof from the war. Accordingly, the Kuretes not only drove the Etolians from the field, but assailed the walls and gates of Kalydon, and were on the point of overwhelming its dismayed inhabitants. There was no hope of safety except in the arm of Meleager; but Meleager lay in his chamber by the side of his beautiful wife Cleopatra, the daughter of Idas, and heeded not the necessity. While the shouts of expected victory were heard from the assailants at the gates, the ancient men of Etolia and the priests of the gods earnestly besought Meleager to come forth, offering him his choice of the fattest land in the plain of Kalydon. His dearest friends, his father Eneus, his sisters, and even his mother herself, added their supplications—but he remained inflexible. At length the Kuretes penetrated into the town and began to burn it: at this last moment, Cleopatra his wife addressed to him her pathetic appeal to avert from her and from his family the desperate horrors impending over them all. Meleager could no longer resist: he put on his armor, went forth from his chamber, and repelled the enemy. But when the danger was over, his countrymen withheld from him the splendid presents which they had promised, because he had rejected their prayers, and had come forth only when his own haughty caprice dictated.

Such is the legend of Meleager in the Iliad: a verse in the second book mentions simply the death of Meleager, without farther details, as a reason why Thoas appeared in command of the Aetolians before Troy. Later poets both enlarged and altered the fable. The Hesiodic Eoiai, as well as the old poem called the Minyas, represented Meleager as having been slain by Apollo, who aided the Kuretes in the war; and the incident of the burning brand, though quite at variance with Homer, is at least as old as the tragic poet Phrynichus, earlier than Eschylus. The Fates, presenting themselves to Althea shortly after the birth of Meleager, predicted that the child would die so soon as the brand then burning on the fire near at hand should be consumed. Althea snatched it from the flames and extinguished it, preserving it with the utmost care, until she became incensed against Meleager for the death of her brother. She then cast it into the fire, and as soon as it was consumed the life of Meleager was brought to a close.

We know from the censure of Pliny, that Sophocles heightened the pathos of this subject by his account of the mournful death of Meleager’s sisters, who perished from excess of grief. They were changed into the birds called Meleagrides, and their never-ceasing tears ran together into amber. But in the hands of Euripides whether originally through him or not, we cannot tell—Atalanta became the prominent figure and motive of the piece, while the party convened to hunt the Kalydonian boar was made to comprise all the distinguished heroes from every quarter of Greece. In fact, as Heyne justly remarks, this event is one of the four aggregate dramas of Grecian heroic life, along with the Argonautic expedition, the siege of Thebes, and the Trojan war.

To accomplish the destruction of the terrific animal which Artemis in her wrath had sent forth, Meleager assembled not merely the choice youth among the Kuretes and Aetolians (as we find in the Iliad), but an illustrious troop, including Castor and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus, Peleus and Telamon, Theseus and Peirithous, Ankaeus and Kepheus, Jason, Amphiaraus, Admetus, Eurytion and others. Nestor and Phoenix, who appear as old men before the walls of Troy, exhibited their early prowess as auxiliaries to the suffering Kalydonians. Conspicuous amidst them all stood the virgin Atalanta, daughter of the Arcadian Schoeneus; beautiful and matchless for swiftness of foot, but living in the forest as a huntress and unacceptable to Aphrodite. Several of the heroes were slain by the boar; others escaped, by various stratagems: at length Atalanta first shot him in the back, next Amphiaraus in the eye, and, lastly, Meleager killed him. Enamored of the beauty of Atalanta, Meleager made over to her the chief spoils of the animal, on the plea that she had inflicted the first wound. But his uncles, the brothers of Thestius, took them away from her, asserting their rights as next of kin, if Meleager declined to keep the prize for himself: the latter, exasperated at this behavior, slew them. Althea, in deep sorrow for her brothers and wrath against her son, is impelled to produce the fatal brand, which she had so long treasured up, and consign it the flames. The tragedy concludes with the voluntary death both of Althea and Cleopatra.

Interesting as the Arcadian huntress, Atalanta, is in herself, she is an intrusion, and not a very convenient intrusion, into the Homeric story of the Kalydonian boar-hunt, wherein another female, Cleopatra, already occupied the foreground. But the more recent version became accredited throughout Greece, and was sustained by evidence which few persons in those days felt any inclination to controvert. For Atalanta carried away with her the spoils and head of the boar into Arcadia; and there for successive centuries hung the identical hide and the gigantic tusks, of three feet in length, in the temple of Athene Alea at Tegea. Kallimachus mentions them as being there preserved, in the third century before the Christian era; but the extraordinary value set upon them is best proved by the fact that the emperor Augustus took away the tusks from Tegea, along with the great statue of Athene Alea, and conveyed them to Rome, to be there preserved among the public curiosities. Even a century and a half afterwards, when Pausanias visited Greece, the skin worn out with age was shown to him, while the robbery of the tusks had not been forgotten. Nor were these relics of the boar the only memento preserved at Tegea of the heroic enterprise. On the pediment of the temple of Athene Alea, unparalleled in Peloponnesus for beauty and grandeur, the illustrious statuary Skopas had executed one of his most finished reliefs, representing the Kalydonian hunt. Atalanta and Meleager were placed in the front rank of the assailants; while Ankaeus, one of the Tegean heroes, to whom the tusks of the boar had proved fatal, was represented as sinking under his death-wound into the arms of his brother Epochos. And Pausanias observes that the Tegeans, while they had manifested the same honorable forwardness as other Arcadian communities in the conquest of Troy, the repulse of Xerxes, and the battle of Dipaea against Sparta—might fairly claim to themselves, through Ankaeus and Atalanta, that they alone amongst all Arcadians had participated in the glory of the Kalydonian boar-hunt. So entire and unsuspecting is the faith both of the Tegeans and of Pausanias in the past historical reality of this romantic adventure. Strabo indeed tries to transform the romance into something which has the outward semblance of history, by remarking that the quarrel respecting the boar's head and hide cannot have been the real cause of war between the Kuretes and the Aetolians; the true ground of dispute (he contends) was probably the possession of a portion of territory. His remarks on this head are analogous to those of Thucydides and other critics, when they ascribe the Trojan war, not to the rape of Helen, but to views of conquest or political apprehensions. But he treats the general fact of the battle between the Kuretes and the Aetolians, mentioned in the Iliad, as something unquestionably real and historical—recapitulating at the same time a variety of discrepancies on the part of different authors, but not giving any decision of his own respecting their truth or falsehood.

In the same manner as Atalanta was intruded into the Kalydonian hunt, so also she seems to have been introduced into the memorable funeral games celebrated after the decease of Pelias at Iolkos, in which she had no place at the time when the works on the chest of Kypselus were executed. But her native and genuine locality is Arcadia; where her race-course, near to the town of Methydrion, was shown even in the days of Pausanias. This race-course had been the scene of destruction for more than one unsuccessful suitor. For Atalanta, averse to marriage, had proclaimed that her hand should only be won by the competitor who would surpass her in running: all who tried and failed were condemned to die, and many were the persons to whom her beauty and swiftness, alike unparalleled, had proved fatal. At length Meilanion, who had vainly tried to win her affections by assiduous services in her hunting excursions, ventured to enter the perilous lists. Aware that he could not hope to outrun her except by stratagem, he had obtained, by the kindness of Aphrodite, three golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, which he successively let fall near to her while engaged in the race. The maiden could not resist the temptation of picking them up, and was thus overcome: she became the wife of Meilanion, and the mother of the Arcadian Parthenopaeus, one of the seven chiefs who perished in the siege of Thebes.

We have yet another female in the family of Eneus, whose name the legend has immortalized. His daughter Deianeira was sought in marriage by the river Achelous, who presented himself in various shapes, first as a serpent and afterwards as a bull. From the importunity of this hateful suitor she was rescued by the arrival of Heracles, who encountered Achelous, vanquished him and broke off one of his horns, which Achelous ransomed by surrendering to him the horn of Amaltheia, endued with the miraculous property of supplying the possessor with abundance of any food and drink which he desired. Herakles, being rewarded for his prowess by the possession of Deianeira, made over the horn of Amaltheia as his marriage-present to Eneus. Compelled to leave the residence of Eneus, in consequence of having in a fit of anger struck the youthful attendant Eunomus, and involuntarily killed him, Heracles retired to Trachin, crossing the river Euenus at the place where the Centaur Nessus was accustomed to carry over passengers for hire. Nessus carried over Deianeira, but when he had arrived on the other side, began to treat her with rudeness, upon which Heracles slew him with an arrow tinged by the poison of the Lernaean hydra. The dying Centaur advised Deianeira to preserve the poisoned blood which flowed from his wound, telling her that it would operate as a philtre to regain for her the affections of Heracles, in case she should ever be threatened by a rival. Some time afterwards the hero saw and loved the beautiful Iole, daughter of Eurytos, king of Echali : he stormed the town, killed Eurytos, and made Iole his captive. The misguided Deianeira now had recourse to her supposed philter: she sent as a present to Heracles a splendid tunic, imbued secretly with the poisoned blood of the Centaur. Heracles adorned himself with the tunic on the occasion of offering a solemn sacrifice to Zeus on the promontory of Kennon in Euboea: but the fatal garment, when once put on, clung to him indissolubly, burnt his skin and flesh, and occasioned an agony of pain from which he was only relieved by death. Deianeira slew herself in despair at this disastrous catastrophe.

We have not yet exhausted the eventful career of Eneus and his family—ennobled among the Etolians especially, both by religious worship and by poetical eulogy—and favorite themes not merely in some of the Hesiodic poems, but also in other ancient epic productions, the Alkmeonis and the Cyclic Thebais. By another marriage, Eneus had for his son Tydeus, whose poetical celebrity is attested by the many different accounts given both of the name and condition of his mother. Tydeus, having slain his cousins, the sons of Melas, who were conspiring against Eneus, was forced to become an exile, and took refuge at Argos with Adrastus, whose daughter Deipyle he married. The issue of this marriage was Diomedes, whose brilliant exploits in the siege of Troy were not less celebrated than those of his father at the siege of Thebes. After the departure of Tydeus, Eneus was deposed by the sons of Agrios. He fell into extreme poverty and wretchedness, from which he was only rescued by his grandson Diomedes, after the conquest of Troy. The sufferings of this ancient warrior, and the final restoration and revenge by Diomedes, were the subject of a lost tragedy of Euripides, which even the ridicule of Aristophanes demonstrates to have been eminently pathetic.

Though the genealogy just given of Eneus is in part Homeric, and seems to have been followed generally by the mythographers, yet we find another totally at variance with it in Hekataeus, which he doubtless borrowed from some of the old poets: the simplicity of the story annexed to it seems to attest its antiquity. Orestheus, son of Deucalion, first passed into Aetolia, and acquired the kingdom: he was father of Phytios, who was father of Eneus. Etolus was son of Eneus.

The original migration of Etolus from Elis to Aetolia—and the subsequent establishment in Elis of Oxylus, his descendant in the tenth generation, along with the Dorian invaders of Peloponnesus—were commemorated by two inscriptions, one in the Agora of Elis, the other in that of the Aetolian chief town, Thermum, engraved upon the statues of Etelus and Oxylus respectively.

THE PELOPIDS.

AMONG the ancient legendary genealogies, there was none which figured with greater splendor, or which attracted to itself a higher degree of poetical interest and pathos, than that of the Pelopids: Tantalus, Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes, Agamemnon and Menelaus and Egisthus, Helen and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Elektra and Hermione. Each of these characters is a star of the first magnitude in the Grecian hemisphere: each name suggests the idea of some interesting romance or some harrowing tragedy: the curse, which taints the family from the beginning, inflicts multiplied wounds at every successive generation. So, at least, the story of the Pelopids presents itself, after it had been successively expanded and decorated by epic, lyric, and tragic poets. It will be sufficient to touch briefly upon events with which every reader of Grecian poetry is more or less familiar, and to offer some remarks upon the way in which they were colored and modified by different Grecian authors.

Pelops is the eponym or name-giver of the Peloponnesus: to find an eponym for every conspicuous local name was the invariable turn of Grecian retrospective fancy. The name Peloponnesus is not to be found either in the Iliad or the Odyssey, nor any other denomination which can be attached distinctly and specially to the entire peninsula. But we meet with the name in one of the most ancient post-Homeric poems of which any fragments have been preserved—the Cyprian Verses—a poem which many (seemingly most persons) even of the contemporaries of Herodotus ascribed to the author of the Iliad, though Herodotus contradicts the opinion. The attributes by which the Pelopid Agamemnon and his house are marked out and distinguished from the other heroes of the Iliad, are precisely those which Grecian imagination would naturally seek in an eponymous superior wealth, power, splendor and regality. Not only Agamemnon himself, but his brother Menelaus, is “more of a king” even than Nestor or Diomedes. The gods have not given to the king of the much-golden Mycenae greater courage, or strength, or ability, than to various other chiefs; but they have conferred upon him a marked superiority in riches, power and dignity, and have thus singled him out as the appropriate leader of the forces. He enjoys this preeminence as belonging to a privileged family and as inheriting the heaven-descended scepter of Pelops, the transmission of which is described by Homer in a very remarkable way. The scepter was made “by Hephaestus, who presented it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Hermes, Hermes to the charioteer Pelops; Pelops gave it to Atreus, the ruler of men; Atreus at his death left it to Thyestes, the rich cattle-owner; Thyestes in his turn left it to his nephew Agamemnon to carry, that he might hold dominion over many islands and over all Argos”.

We have here the unrivalled wealth and power of the “king of men, Agamemnon”, traced up to his descent from Pelops, and accounted for, in harmony with the recognized epical agencies, by the present of the special scepter of Zeus through the hands of Hermes; the latter being the wealth-giving god, whose blessing is most efficacious in furthering the process of acquisition, whether by theft or by accelerated multiplication of flocks and herds. The wealth and princely character of the Atreids were proverbial among the ancient epic poets. Paris not only carries away Hellen, but much property along with her: the house of Menelaus, when Telemachus visits it in the Odyssey, is so resplendent with gold and silver and rare ornament, as to strike the beholder with astonishment and admiration. The attributes assigned to Tantalus, the father of Pelops, are in conformity with the general idea of the family—superhuman abundance and enjoyments, and intimate converse with the gods, to such a degree that his head is turned, and he commits inexpiable sin. But though Tantalus himself is mentioned, in one of the most suspicious passages of the Odyssey (as suffering punishment in the under-world), he is not announced, nor is anyone else announced, as father of Pelops, unless we are to construe the lines in the Iliad as implying that the latter was son of Hermes. In the conception of the author of the Iliad, the Pelopids are, if not of divine origin, at least a mortal breed specially favored and ennobled by the gods—beginning with Pelops, and localized at Mycenae. No allusion is made to any connection of Pelops either with Pisa or with Lydia.

The legend which connected Tantalus and Pelops with Mount Sipylus may probably have grown out of the Eolic settlements at Magnesia and Kyme. Both the Lydian origin and the Pisatic sovereignty of Pelops are adapted to times later than the Iliad, when the Olympic games had acquired to themselves the general reverence of Greece, and had come to serve as the religious and recreative center of the Peloponnesus—and when the Lydian and Phrygian heroic names, Midas and Gyges, were the types of wealth and luxury, as well as of chariot driving, in the imagination of a Greek. The inconsiderable villages of the Pisatid derived their whole importance from the vicinity of Olympia: they are not deemed worthy of notice in the Catalogue of Homer. Nor could the genealogy which connected the eponym of the entire peninsula with Pisa have obtained currency in Greece unless it had been sustained by pre-established veneration for the locality of Olympia. But if the sovereign of the humble Pisa was to be recognized as forerunner of the thrice-wealthy princes of Mycenae, it became necessary to assign some explanatory cause of his riches. Hence the supposition of his being an immigrant, son of a wealthy Lydian named Tantalus, who was the offspring of Zeus and Plouto. Lydian wealth and Lydian chariot-driving rendered Pelops a fit person to occupy his place in the legend, both as ruler of Pisa and progenitor of the Mycenaean Atreids. Even with the admission of these two circumstances there is considerable difficulty, for those who wish to read the legends as consecutive history, in making the Pelopids pass smoothly and plausibly from Pisa to Mycenae.

I shall briefly recount the legends of this great heroic family as they came to stand in their full and ultimate growth, after the localization of Pelops at Pisa had been tacked on as a preface to Homer's version of the Pelopid genealogy.

Tantalus, residing near Mount Sipylus in Lydia, had two children, Pelops and Niobe. He was a man of immense possessions and preeminent happiness, above the lot of humanity: the gods communicated with him freely, received him at their banquets, and accepted of his hospitality in return. Intoxicated with such prosperity, Tantalus became guilty of gross wickedness. He stole nectar and ambrosia from the table of the gods, and revealed their secrets to mankind: he killed and served up to them at a feast his own son Pelops. The gods were horror-struck when they discovered the meal prepared for them: Zeus restored the mangled youth to life, and as Demeter, then absorbed in grief for the loss of her daughter Persephone, had eaten a portion of the shoulder, he supplied an ivory shoulder in place of it. Tantalus expiated his guilt by exemplary punishment. He was placed in the under-world, with fruit and water seemingly close to him, yet eluding his touch as often as he tried to grasp them and leaving his hunger and thirst incessant and unappeased. Pindar, in a very remarkable passage, finds this old legend revolting to his feelings: he rejects the tale of the flesh of Pelops having been served up and eaten, as altogether unworthy of the gods.

Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, was married to Amphion, and had a numerous and flourishing offspring of seven sons and seven daughters. Though accepted as the intimate friend and companion of Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, she was presumptuous enough to triumph over that goddess, and to place herself on a footing of higher dignity, on account of the superior number of her children. Apollo and Artemis avenged this insult by killing all the sons and all the daughters: Niobe, thus left a childless and disconsolate mother, wept herself to death, and was turned into a rock, which the later Greeks continued always to identify on Mount Sipylus.

Some authors represented Pelops as not being a Lydian, but a king of Paphlagonia; by others it was said that Tantalus, having become detested from his impieties, had been expelled from Asia, by Ilus the king of Troy—an incident which served the double purpose of explaining the transit of Pelops to Greece, and of imparting to the siege of Troy by Agamemnon the character of retribution for wrongs done to his ancestor. When Pelops came over to Greece, he found Enomaus, son of the god Ares and Harpinna, in possession of the principality of Pisa, immediately bordering on the district of Olympia. Enomaus, having been apprized by an oracle that death would overtake him if he permitted his daughter Hippodameia to marry, refused to give her in marriage except to some suitor who should beat him in a chariot-race from Olympia to the isthmus of Corinth; the ground here selected for the legendary victory of Pelops deserves attention, inasmuch as it is a line drawn from the assumed centre of Peloponnesus to its extremity, and thus comprises the whole territory with which Pelops is connected as eponym. Any suitor overmatched in the race was doomed to forfeit his life; and the fleetness of the Pisan horses, combined with the skill of the charioteer Myrtilus, had already caused thirteen unsuccessful competitors to perish by the lance of Enomaus. Pelops entered the lists as a suitor: his prayers moved the god Poseidon to supply him with a golden chariot and winged horses; or according to another story, he captivated the affections of Hippodameia herself, who persuaded the charioteer Myrtilus to loosen the wheels of Enomaus before he started, so that the latter was overturned and perished in the race. Having thus won the hand of Hippodameia, Pelops became Prince of Pisa. He put to death the charioteer Myrtilus, either from indignation at his treachery to Enomaus, or from jealousy on the score of Hippodameia: but Myrtilus was the son of Hermes, and though Pelops erected a temple in the vain attempt to propitiate that god, he left a curse upon his race which future calamities were destined painfully to work out.

Pelops bad a numerous issue by Hippodameia: Pittheus, Troezen and Epidaurus, the eponyms of the two Argolic cities so called, are said to have been among them: Atreus and Thyestes were also his sons, and his daughter Nikippe married Sthenelus of Mycenae, and became the mother of Eurystheus. We hear nothing of the principality of Pisa afterwards: the Pisatid villages became absorbed into the larger aggregate of Elis, after a vain struggle to maintain their separate right of presidency over the Olympic festival. But the legend ran that Pelops left his name to the whole peninsula: according to Thucydides, he was enabled to do this because of the great wealth which he had brought with him from Lydia into a poor territory. The historian leaves out all the romantic interest of the genuine legends —preserving only this one circumstance, which, without being better attested than the rest, carries with it, from its common-place and prosaic character, a pretended historical plausibility.

Besides his numerous issue by Hippodameia, Pelops had an illegitimate son named Chrysippus, of singular grace and beauty, towards whom he displayed so much affection as to rouse the jealousy of Hippodameia and her sons. Atreus and Thyestes conspired together to put Chrysippus to death, for which they were banished by Pelops and retired to Mycenae,—an event which brings us into the track of the Homeric legend. For Thucydides, having found in the death of Chrysippus a suitable ground for the secession of Atreus from Pelops, conducts him at once to Mycenae, and shows a train of plausible circumstances to account for his having mounted the throne. Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, was the maternal nephew of Atreus: when he engaged in any foreign expedition, he naturally entrusted the regency to his uncle; the people of Mycenae thus became accustomed to be governed by him, and he on his part made efforts to conciliate them, so that when Eurystheus was defeated and slain in Attica, the Mycenaean people, apprehensive of an invasion from the Herakleids, chose Atreus as at once the most powerful and most acceptable person for his successor. Such was the tale which Thucydides derived “from those who had learnt ancient Peloponnesian matters most clearly from their forefathers”. The introduction of so much sober and quasi-political history, unfortunately unauthenticated, contrasts strikingly with the highly poetical legends of Pelops and Atreus, which precede and follow it.

Atreus and Thyestes are known in the Iliad only as successive possessors of the scepter of Zeus, which Thyestes at his death bequeaths to Agamemnon. The family dissensions among this fated race commence, in the Odyssey, with Agamemnon the son of Atreus, and Egisthus the son of Thyestes. But subsequent poets dwelt upon an implacable quarrel between the two fathers. The cause of the bitterness was differently represented: some alleged that Thyestes had intrigued with the Cretan Aerope, the wife of his brother; other narratives mentioned that Thyestes procured for himself surreptitiously the possession of a lamb with a golden fleece, which had been designedly introduced among the flocks of Atreus by the anger of Hermes, as a cause of enmity and ruin to the whole family. Atreus, after a violent burst of indignation, pretended to be reconciled, and invited Thyestes to a banquet, in which he served up to him the limbs of his own son, and the father ignorantly partook of the fatal meal. Even the all-seeing Helios is said to have turned back his chariot to the east in order that he might escape the shocking spectacle of this Thyestean banquet: yet the tale of Thyestean revenge—the murder of Atreus perpetrated by Egisthus, the incestuous offspring of Thyestes by his daughter Pelopia is no less replete with horrors.

Homeric legend is never thus revolting. Agamemnon and Menelaus are known to us chiefly with their Homeric attributes, which have not been so darkly overlaid by subsequent poets as those of Atreus and Thyestes. Agamemnon and Menelaus are affectionate brothers: they marry two sisters, the daughters of Tyndareus king of Sparta, Clytemnestra and Helen; for Helen, the real offspring of Zeus, passes as the daughter of Tyndareus. The “king of men” reigns at Mycenae; Menelaus succeeds Tyndareus at Sparta. Of the rape of Helen, and the siege of Troy consequent upon it, I shall speak elsewhere: I now touch only upon the family legends of the Atreids. Menelaus, on his return from Troy with the recovered Helen, is driven by storms far away to the distant regions of Phoenicia and Egypt, and is exposed to a thousand dangers and hardships before he again sets foot in Peloponnesus. But at length he reaches Sparta, resumes his kingdom, and passes the rest of his days in uninterrupted happiness and splendor: being moreover husband of the godlike Helen and son-in-law of Zeus, he is even spared the pangs of death. When the fullness of his days is past he is transported to the Elysian fields, there to dwell along with “the golden-haired Rhadamanthus” in a delicious climate and in undisturbed repose.

Far different is the fate of the king of men, Agamemnon. During his absence, the unwarlike Egisthus, son of Thyestes, had seduced his wife Clytemnestra, in spite of the special warning of the gods, who, watchful over this privileged family, had sent their messenger Hermes expressly to deter him from the attempt. A venerable bard had been left by Agamemnon as the companion and monitor of his wife, and so long as that guardian was at hand, Egisthus pressed his suit in vain. But be got rid of the bard by sending him to perish in a desert island, and then won without difficulty the undefended Clytemnestra. Ignorant of what had passed, Agamemnon returned from Troy victorious and full of hope to his native country; but he had scarcely landed when Egisthus invited him to a banquet, and there with the aid of the treacherous Clytemnestra, in the very ball of festivity and congratulation, slaughtered him and his companions “like oxen tied to the manger”. His concubine Cassandra, the prophetic daughter of Priam, perished along with him by the hand of Clytemnestra herself. The boy Orestes, the only male offspring of Agamemnon, was stolen away by his nurse, and placed in safety at the residence of the Phokian Strophius.

For seven years Egisthus and Clytemnestra reigned in tranquility at Mycenae on the throne of the murdered Agamemnon. But in the eighth year the retribution announced by the gods overtook them: Orestes, grown to manhood, returned and avenged his father by killing Egisthus, according to Homer; subsequent poets add, his mother also. He recovered the kingdom of Mycenae, and succeeded Menelaus in that of Sparta. Hermione, the only daughter of Menelaus and Helen, was sent into the realm of the Myrmidons in Thessaly, as the bride of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, according to the promise made by her father during the siege of Troy.

Here ends the Homeric legend of the Pelopids, the final act of Orestes being cited as one of unexampled glory. Later poets made many additions: they dwelt upon his remorse and hardly earned pardon for the murder of his mother, and upon his devoted friendship for Pylades; they wove many interesting tales, too, respecting his sisters Iphigenia and Elektra and his cousin Hermione,—names which have become naturalized in every climate and incorporated with every form of poetry.

These poets did not at all scruple to depart from Homer, and to give other genealogies of their own, with respect to the chief persons of the Pelopid family. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Agamemnon is son of Atreus. In Homer he is specially marked as reigning at Mycenae; but Stesichorus, Simonides and Pindar represented him as having both resided and perished at Sparta or at Amyklae. According to the ancient Cyprian Verses, Helen was represented as the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis: in one of the Hesiodic poems she was introduced as an Oceanic nymph, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. The genealogical discrepancies, even as to the persons of the principal heroes and heroines, are far too numerous to be cited, nor is it necessary to advert to them, except as they bear upon the unavailing attempt to convert such legendary parentage into a basis of historical record or chronological calculation.

The Homeric poems probably represent that form of the legend, respecting Agamemnon and Orestes, which was current and popular among the Eolic colonists. Orestes was the great heroic chief of the Eolic emigration; he, or his sons, or his descendants, are supposed to have conducted the Achaeans to seek a new home, when they were no longer able to make head against the invading Dorians: the great families at Tenedos and other Eolic cities even during the historical era, gloried in tracing back their pedigrees to this illustrious source. The legends connected with the heroic worship of these mythical ancestors form the basis of the character and attributes of Agamemnon and his family, as depicted in Homer, in which Mycenae appears as the first place in Peloponnesus, and Sparta only as the second: the former the special residence of “the king of men”; the latter that of his younger and inferior brother, yet still the seat of a member of the princely Pelopids, and moreover the birth-place of the divine Helen. Sparta, Argos and Mycenae are all three designated in the Iliad by the goddess Here as her favorite cities; yet the connection of Mycenae with Argos, though the two towns were only ten miles distant, is far less intimate than the connection of Mycenae with Sparta. When we reflect upon the very peculiar manner in which Homer identifies Here with the Grecian host and its leader, —for she watches over the Greeks with the active solicitude of a mother, and her antipathy against the Trojans is implacable to a degree which Zeus cannot comprehend, and when we combine this with the ancient and venerated Heraeon, or temple of Here, near Mycenae, we may partly explain to ourselves the preeminence conferred upon Mycenae in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Heraeon was situated between Argos and Mycenae; in later times its priestesses were named and its affairs administered by the Argeians: but as it was much nearer to Mycenae than to Argos, we may with probability conclude that it originally belonged to the former, and that the increasing power of the latter enabled them to usurp to themselves a religious privilege which was always an object of envy and contention among the Grecian communities. The Eolic colonists doubtless took out with them in their emigration the divine and heroic legends, as well as the worship and ceremonial rites, of the Heraeon; and in those legends the most exalted rank would be assigned to the close-adjoining and administering city.

Mycenae maintained its independence even down to the Persian invasion. Eighty of its heavy-armed citizens, in the ranks of Leonidas at Thermopile, and a number not inferior at Plataea, upheld the splendid heroic celebrity of their city during a season of peril, when the more powerful Argos disgraced itself by a treacherous neutrality. Very shortly afterwards Mycenae was enslaved and its inhabitants expelled by the Argeians. Though this city so long maintained a separate existence, its importance had latterly sunk to nothing, while that of the Thirian Argos was augmented very much, and that of the Dorian Sparta still more.

The name of Mycenae is imperishably enthroned in the Iliad and Odyssey; but all the subsequent fluctuations of the legend tend to exalt the glory of other cities at its expense. The recognition of the Olympic games as the grand religious festival of Peloponnesus gave vogue to that genealogy which connected Pelops with Pisa or Elis and withdrew him from Mycenae. Moreover, in the poems of the great Athenian tragedians, Mycenae is constantly confounded and treated as one with Argos. If any one of the citizens of the former, expelled at the time of its final subjugation by the Argeians, had witnessed at Athens a drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, or the recital of an ode of Pindar, he would have heard with grief and indignation the city of his oppressors made a partner in the heroic glories of his own. But the great political ascendency acquired by Sparta contributed still farther to degrade Mycenae, by disposing subsequent poets to treat the chief of the Grecian armament against Troy as having been a Spartan. It has been already mentioned that Stesichorus, Simonides and Pindar adopted this version of the legend: we know that Zeus Agamemnon, as well as the here Menelaus, was worshipped at the Dorian Sparta, and the feeling of intimate identity, as well as of patriotic pride, which had grown up in the minds of the Spartans connected with the name of Agamemnon, is forcibly evinced by the reply of the Spartan Syagrus to Gelon of Syracuse at the time of the Persian invasion of Greece. Geron was solicited to lend his aid in the imminent danger of Greece before the battle of Salamis: he offered to furnish an immense auxiliary force, on condition that the supreme command should be allotted to him. “Loudly indeed would the Pelopid Agamemnon cry out (exclaimed Syagrus in rejecting this application), if he were to learn that the Spartans had been deprived of the headship by Geon and the Syracusans”. Nearly a century before this event, in obedience to the injunctions of the Delphian oracle, the Spartans had brought back from Tegea to Sparta the bones of “the Laconian Orestes”, as Pindar denominates him: the recovery of these bones was announced to them as the means of reversing a course of ill-fortune, and of procuring victory in their war against Tegea. The value which they set upon this acquisition, and the decisive results ascribed to it, exhibit a precise analogy with the recovery of the bones of Theseus from Skyros by the Athenian Cimon shortly after the Persian invasion. The remains sought were those of a hero properly belonging to their own soil, but who had died in a foreign land, and of whose protection and assistance they were for that reason deprived. And the superhuman magnitude of the bones, which were contained in a coffin seven cubits long, is well suited to the legendary grandeur of the son of Agamemnon.

VII

LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.

THE earliest names in Laconian genealogy are an indigenous Lelex and a Naiad nymph Kleochareia. From this pair sprung a son Eurotas, and from him a daughter Sparta, who became the wife of Lacedaemon, son of Zeus and Taygete, daughter of Atlas. Amyklas, son of Lacedaemon, had two sons, Kynortas and Hyacinthus—the latter a beautiful youth, the favorite of Apollo, by whose hand he was accidentally killed while playing at quoits: the festival of the Hyacinthia, which the Lacedaemonians generally, and the Amyklaeans with special solemnity, celebrated throughout the historical ages, was traced back to this legend. Kynortas was succeeded by his son Perieres, who married Gorgophone, daughter of Perseus, and had a numerous issue—Tyndareus, Ikarius, Aphareus, Leukippus, and Hippokoon. Some authors gave the genealogy differently, making Perieres, son of Eolus, to be the father of Kynortas, and Ebalus son of Kynortas, from whom sprung Tyndareus, Ikarius and Hippokoon.

Both Tyndareus and Ikarius, expelled by their brother Hippokoon, were forced to seek shelter at the residence of Thestius, king of Kalydon, whose daughter, Leda, Tyndareus espoused. It is numbered among the exploits of the omnipresent Heracles, that he slew Hippokoon and his sons, and restored Tyndareus to his kingdom, thus creating for the subsequent Herakleidan kings a mythical title to the throne. Tyndareus, as well as his brothers, are persons of interest in legendary narrative: he is the father of Castor, of Timandra, married to Echemus, the hero of Tegea, and of Clytemnestra, married to Agamemnon. Pollux and the ever-memorable Helen are the offspring of Leda by Zeus. Ikarius is the father of Penelope, wife of Odysseus: the contrast between her behavior and that of Clytemnestra and Helen became the more striking in consequence of their being so nearly related. Aphareus is the father of Idas and Lynkeus, while Leukippus has for his daughters, Phoebe and Ilaeira. According to one of the Hesiodic poems, Castor and Pollux were both sons of Zeus by Leda, while Helen was neither daughter of Zeus nor of Tyndareus, but of Oceanus and Tethys.

The brothers Castor and (Polydeukes, or) Pollux are no less celebrated for their fraternal affection than for their great bodily accomplishment: Castor, the great charioteer and horse-master; Pollux, the first of pugilists. They are enrolled both among the hunters of the Kalydonian boar and among the heroes of the Argonautic expedition, in which Pollux represses the insolence of Amykus, king of the Bebrykes, on the coast of Asiatic Thrace—the latter, a gigantic pugilist, from whom no rival has ever escaped, challenges Pollux, but is vanquished and killed in the fight.

The two brothers also undertook an expedition into Attica, for the purpose of recovering their sister Helen, who had been carried off by Theseus in her early youth, and deposited by him at Aphidna, while he accompanied Perithous to the underworld, in order to assist his friend in carrying off Persephone. The force of Castor and Pollux was irresistible, and when they redemanded their sister, the people of Attica were anxious to restore her: but no one knew where Theseus had deposited his prize. The invaders, not believing in the sincerity of this denial, proceeded to ravage the country, which would have been utterly ruined, had not Dekelus, the eponymous of Dekeleia, been able to indicate Aphidna as the place of concealment. The indigenous Titakus betrayed Aphidna to Castor and Pollux, and Helen was recovered: the brothers in evacuating Attica, carried away into captivity Ethra, the mother of Theseus. In after-days, when Castor and Pollux, under the title of the Dioskuri, had come to be worshipped as powerful gods, and when the Athenians were greatly ashamed of this act of Theseus—the revelation made by Dekelus was considered as entitling him to the lasting gratitude of his country, as well as to the favorable remembrance of the Lacedaemonians, who maintained the Dekeleians in the constant enjoyment of certain honorary privileges at Sparta, and even spared that dome in all their invasions of Attica. Nor is it improbable that the existence of this legend had some weight in determining the Lacedaemonians to select Dekelia as the place of their occupation during the Peloponnesian war.

The fatal combat between Castor and Polydeukes on the one side, and Idas and Lynkeus on the other, for the possession of the daughters of Leucippus, was celebrated by more than one ancient poet, and forms the subject of one of the yet remaining Idylls of Theocritus. Leucippus had formally betrothed his daughters to Idas and Lynkeus; but the Tyndarids, becoming enamored of them, outbid their rivals in the value of the customary nuptial gifts, persuaded the father to violate his promise, and carried off Phoebe and Ilaeira as their brides. Idas and Lynkeus pursued them and remonstrated against the injustice: according to Theocritus, this was the cause of the combat. But there was another tale, which seems the older, and which assigns a different cause to the quarrel. The four had jointly made a predatory incursion into Arcadia, and had driven off some cattle, but did not agree about the partition of the booty—Idas carried off into Messenia a portion of it which the Tyndarids claimed as their own. To revenge and reimburse themselves, the Tyndarids invaded Messenia, placing themselves in ambush in the hollow of an ancient oak. But Lynkeus, endued with preternatural powers of vision, mounted to the top of Taygetus, from whence, as he could see over the whole Peloponnesus, he detected them in their chosen place of concealment. Such was the narrative of the ancient Cyprian Verses. Castor perished by the hand of Idas, Lynkeus by that of Pollux. Idas, seizing a stone pillar from the tomb of his father Aphareus, hurled it at Pollux, knocked him down and stunned him; but Zeus, interposing at the critical moment for the protection of his son, killed Idas with a thunderbolt. Zeus would have conferred upon Pollux the gift of immortality, but the latter could not endure existence without his brother: he entreated permission to share the gift with Castor, and both were accordingly permitted to live, but only on every other day.

The Dioskuri, or sons of Zeus,—as the two Spartan heroes, Castor and Pollux, were denominated,—were recognized in the historical days of Greece as gods, and received divine honors. This is even noticed in a passage of the Odyssey, which is at any rate a very old interpolation, as well as in one of the Homeric hymns. What is yet more remarkable is, that they were invoked during storms at sea, as the special and all-powerful protectors of the endangered mariner, although their attributes and their celebrity seem to be of a character so dissimilar. They were worshipped throughout most parts of Greece, but with preeminent sanctity at Sparta.

Castor and Pollux being removed, the Spartan genealogy passes from Tyndareus to Menelaus, and from him to Orestes.

Originally it appears that Messene was a name for the western portion of Laconia, bordering on what was called Pylos: it is so represented in the Odyssey, and Ephorus seems to have included it amongst the possessions of' Orestes and his descendants. Throughout the whole duration of the Messenico-Dorian kingdom, there never was any town called Messene: the town was first founded by Epaminondas, after the battle of Leuctra. The heroic genealogy of Messenia starts from the same name as that of Laconia—from the autochthonous Lelex: his younger son, Polykaon marries Messene, daughter of the Argeian Triopas, and settles the country. Pausanias tells us that the posterity of this pair occupied the country for five generations; but he in vain searched the ancient genealogical poems to find the names of their descendants. To them succeeded Perieres, son of Eolus; and Aphareus and Leukippus, according to Pausanias, were sons of Perieres.

Aphareus, after the death of his sons, founded the town of Arene, and made over most part of his dominions to his kinsman Neleus, with whom we pass into the Pylian genealogy.

VIII

ARCADIAN GENEALOGY

THE Arcadian divine or heroic pedigree begins with Pelasgus, whom both Hesiod and Asius considered as an indigenous man, though Akusilaus the Argeian represented him as brother of Argos and son of Zeus by Niobe, daughter of Phoroneus. Akusilaus wished to establish a community of origin between the Argeians and the Arcadians.

Lykaon, son of Pelasgus and king of Arcadia, had, by different wives, fifty sons, the most savage, impious and wicked of mankind: Maenalus was the eldest of them. Zeus, in order that he might himself become a witness of their misdeeds, presented himself to them in disguise. They killed a child and served it up to him for a meal; but the god overturned the table and struck dead with thunder Lykaon and all his fifty sons, with the single exception of Nyktimus, the youngest, whom he spared at the earnest intercession of the goddess Gaea (the Earth). The town near which the table was overturned received the name of Trapezus (Tabletown).

This singular legend (framed on the same etymological type as that of the ants in Aegina, recounted elsewhere) seems ancient, and may probably belong to the Hesiodic Catalogue. But Pausanias tells us a story in many respects different, which was represented to him in Arcadia as the primitive local account, and which becomes the more interesting, as he tells us that he himself fully believes it. Both tales indeed go to illustrate the same point—the ferocity of Lykaon’s character, as well as the cruel rites which he practiced. The latter was the first who established the worship and solemn games of Zeus Lykaeus: he offered up a child to Zeus, and made libations with the blood upon the altar. Immediately after having perpetrated this act, he was changed into a wolf.

“Of the truth of this narrative (observes Pausanias) I feel persuaded: it has been repeated by the Arcadians from old times, and it carries probability along with it. For the men of that day, from their justice and piety, were guests and companions at table with the gods, who manifested towards them approbation when they were good, and anger if they behaved ill, in a palpable manner: indeed at that time there were some, who having once been men, became gods, and who yet retain their privileges as such Aristaeus, the Cretan Britomartis, Heracles son of Alkmena, Amphiaraus the son of Oikles, and Pollux and Castor besides. We may therefore believe that Lykaon became a wild beast, and that Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, became a stone. But in my time, wickedness having enormously increased, so as to overrun the whole earth and all the cities in it, there are no farther examples of men exalted into gods, except by mere title and from adulation towards the powerful: moreover the anger of the gods falls tardily upon the wicked, and is reserved for them after their departure from hence”.

Pausanias then proceeds to censure those who, by multiplying false miracles in more recent times, tended to rob the old and genuine miracles of their legitimate credit and esteem. The passage illustrates forcibly the views which a religious and instructed pagan took of his past time—how inseparably he blended together in it gods and men, and how little he either recognized or expected to find in it the naked phenomena and historical laws of connection which belonged to the world before him. He treats the past as the province of legend, the present as that of history; and in doing this he is more skeptical than the persons with whom he conversed, who believed not only in the ancient, but even in the recent and falsely reported miracles. It is true that Pausanias does not always proceed consistently with this position: he often rationalizes the stories of the past, as if he expected to find historical threads of connection; and sometimes, though more rarely, accepts the miracles of the present. But in the present instance he draws a broad line of distinction between present and past, or rather between what is recent and what is ancient: his criticism is, in the main, analogous to that of Arrian in regard to the Amazons —denying their existence during times of recorded history, but admitting it during the early and unrecorded ages.

In the narrative of Pausanias, the sons of Lykaon, instead of perishing by thunder from Zeus, become the founders of the various towns in Arcadia. And as that region was subdivided into a great number of small and independent townships, each having its own eponym, so the Arcadian heroic genealogy appears broken up and subdivided. Pallas, Orestheus, Phigalus, Trapezeus, Maenalus, Mantineus, and Tegeates, are all numbered among the sons of Lykaon, and are all eponyms of various. Arcadian towns.

The legend respecting Kalliste and Arkas, the eponym of Arcadia generally, seems to have been originally quite independent of and distinct from that of Lykaon. Eumelus, indeed, and some other poets made Kallisto daughter of Lykaon; but neither Hesiod, nor Asius, nor Pherekydes, acknowledged any relationship between them. The beautiful Kallisto, companion of Artemis in the chase, had bound herself by a vow of chastity. Zeus, either by persuasion or by force, obtained a violation of the vow, to the grievous displeasure both of Here and Artemis. The former changed Kallisto into a bear, the latter when she was in that shape killed her with an arrow. Zeus gave to the unfortunate Kallisto a place among the stars, as the constellation of the Bear: he also preserved the child Arkas, of which she was pregnant by him, and gave it to the Atlantid nymph Maia to bring up.

Arkas, when he became king, obtained from Triptolemus and communicated to his people the first rudiments of agriculture; he also taught them to make bread, to spin, and to weave. He had three sons—Azan, Apheidas, and Elatus: the first was the eponym of Azania, the northern region of Arcadia; the second was one of the heroes of Tegea; the third was father of Ischys (rival of Apollo for the affections of Koronis), as well as of Epytus and Kyllen: the name of Epytus among the heroes of Arcadia is as old as the Catalogue in the Iliad.

Aleus, son of Apheidas and king of Tegea, was the founder of the celebrated temple and worship of Athena Alea in that town. Lycurgus and Kepheus were his sons, Auge his daughter, who was seduced by Heracles, and secretly bore to him a child: the father, discovering what had happened, sent Auge to Nauplius to be sold into slavery: Teuthras, king of Mysia in Asia Minor, purchased her and made her his wife: her tomb was shown at Pergamum on the river Kaikus even in the time of Pausanias.

From Lykurgus, the son of Aleus and brother of Auge, we pass to his son Ankaeus, numbered among the Argonauts, finally killed in the chase of the Kalydonian boar, and father of Agapenor, who leads the Arcadian contingent against Troy,—(the adventurers of his niece, the Tegeatic huntress Atalanta, have already been touched upon),—then to Echemus, son of Aöropus and grandson of the brother of Lycurgus, Kepheus. Echemus is the chief heroic ornament of Tegea. When Hyllus, the son of Herakles, conducted the Herakleids on their first expedition against Peloponnesus, Echemus commanded the Tegean troops who assembled along with the other Peloponnesians at the isthmus of Corinth to repel the invasion: it was agreed that the dispute should be determined by single combat, and Echemus, as the champion of Peloponnesus, encountered and killed Hyllus.

Pursuant to the stipulation by which they had bound themselves, the Herakleids retired, and abstained for three generations from pressing their claim upon Peloponnesus. This valorous exploit of their great martial hero was cited and appealed to by the Tegeates before the battle of Plataea, as the principal evidence of their claim to the second post in the combined army, next in point of honor to that of the Lacedaemonians, and superior to that of the Athenians: the latter replied to them by producing as counter-evidence the splendid heroic deeds of Athens,—the protection of the Herakleids against Eurystheus, the victory over the Kadmeians of Thebes, and the complete defeat of the Amazons in Attica. Nor can there be any doubt that these legendary glories were both recited by the speakers, and heard by the listeners, with profound and undoubting faith, as well as with heart-stirring admiration.

One other person there is—Ischys, son of Elatus and grandson of Arkas—in the fabulous genealogy of Arcadia whom it would be improper to pass over, inasmuch as his name and adventures are connected with the genesis of the memorable god or hero Esculapius, or Asklepius. Koronis, daughter of Phlegyas, and resident near the lake Boebeis in Thessaly, was beloved by Apollo and became pregnant by him: unfaithful to the god, she listened to the propositions of Ischys son of Elatus, and consented to wed him: a raven brought to Apollo the fatal news, which so incensed him that he changed the color of the bird from white, as it previously had been, into black. Artemis, to Avenge the wounded dignity of her brother, put Koronis to death; but Apollo preserved the male child of which she was about to be delivered, and consigned it to the Centaur Cheiron to be brought up. The child was named Asklepius or Aesculapius, and acquired, partly from the teaching of the beneficent leech Cheiron, partly from inborn and superhuman aptitude, a knowledge of the virtues of herbs and a mastery of medicine and surgery, such as had never before been witnessed. He not only cured the sick, the wounded, and the dying, but even restored the dead to life. Kapaneus, Eriphyle, Hippolytus, Tyndareus and Glaukus were all affirmed by different poets and logographers to have been endued by him with a new life. But Zeus now found himself under the necessity of taking precautions lest mankind, thus unexpectedly protected against sickness and death, should no longer stand in need of the immortal gods: he smote Asclepius with thunder and killed him. Apollo was so exasperated by this slaughter of his highly-gifted son, that he killed the Cyclopes who had fabricated the thunder, and Zeus was about to condemn him to Tartarus for doing so; but on the intercession of Latona he relented, and was satisfied with imposing upon him a temporary servitude in the house of Admetus at Pherae.

Asclepius was worshipped with very great solemnity at Trikka, at Kos, at Cnidus, and in many different parts of Greece, but especially at Epidaurus, so that more than one legend had grown up respecting the details of his birth and adventures: in particular, his mother was by some called Arsinoe. But a formal application had been made on this subject (so the Epidaurians told Pausanias) to the oracle of Delphi, and the god in reply acknowledged that Asclepius was his son by Koronis. The tale above recounted seems to have been both the oldest and the most current. It is adorned by Pindar in a noble ode, wherein however he omits all mention of the raven as messenger —not specifying who or what the spy was from whom Apollo learnt the infidelity of Koronis. By many this was considered as an improvement in respect of poetical effect, but it illustrates the mode in which the characteristic details and simplicity of the old fables came to be exchanged for dignified generalities, adapted to the altered taste of society.

Machaon and Podaleirius, the two sons of Asclepius, command the contingent from Trikka, in the north-west region of Thessaly, at the siege of Troy by Agamemnon. They are the leeches of the Grecian army, highly prized and consulted by all the wounded chiefs. Their medical renown was further prolonged in the subsequent poem of Arktinus, the Iliu-Persis, wherein the one was represented as unrivalled in surgical operations, the other as sagacious in detecting and appreciating morbid symptoms. It was Podaleirius who first noticed the glaring eyes and disturbed deportment which preceded the suicide of Ajax.

Galen appears uncertain whether Asclepius (as well as Dionysus) was originally a god, or whether he was first a man and then became afterwards a god; but Apollodorus professed to fix the exact date of his apotheosis. Throughout all the historical ages the descendants of Asclepius were numerous and widely diffused. The many families or gentes called Asklepiads, who devoted themselves to the study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the temples of Asclepius, whither sick and suffering men came to obtain relief—all recognized the god not merely as the object of their common worship, but also as their actual progenitor. Like Solon, who reckoned Neleus and Poseidon as his ancestors, or the Milesian Hekataeus, who traced his origin through fifteen successive links to a god—like the privileged gens at Pelion in Thessaly, who considered the wise Centaur Cheiron as their progenitor, and who inherited from him their precious secrets respecting the medicinal herbs of which their neighborhood was full,—Asklepiads, even of the later times, numbered and specified all the intermediate links which separated them from their primitive divine parent. One of these genealogies has been preserved to us, and we may be sure that there were many such, as the Asklepiads were found in many different places. Among them were enrolled highly instructed and accomplished men, such as the great Hippocrates and the historian Ktesias, who prided themselves on the divine origin of themselves and their gens—so much did the legendary element pervade even the most philosophical and positive minds of historical Greece. Nor can there be any doubt that their means of medical observation must have been largely extended by their vicinity to a temple so much frequented by the sick, who came in confident hopes of divine relief, and who, whilst they offered up sacrifice and prayer to Aesculapius, and slept in his temple in order to be favored with healing suggestions in their dreams, might, in case the god withheld his supernatural aid, consult his living descendants. The sick visitors at Kos, or Trikka, or Epidaurus, were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklepiads.

The genealogical descent of Hippocrates and the other Asklepiads from the god Asclepius is not only analogous to that of Hekataeus and Solon from their respective ancestral gods, but also to that of the Lacedaemonians kings from Heracles, upon the basis of which the whole supposed chronology of the ante-historical times has been built, from Eratosthenes and Apollodorus down to the chronologers of the present century. I shall revert to this hereafter.

EAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS : EGINA, SALAMIS, AND PITHIA.

THE memorable heroic genealogy of the Eakids establishes a fabulous connection between Aegina, Salamis, and Pithia, which we can only recognize as a fact, without being able to trace its origin.

Eakus was the son of Zeus, born of Aegina, daughter of Asopus, whom the god had carried off and brought into the island to which he gave her name: she was afterwards married to Aktor, and had by him Menoetius, father of Patroclus. As there were two rivers named Asopus, one between Phlius and Sicyon, and another between Thebes and Plataea—so the Aeginetans heroic genealogy was connected both with that of Thebes and with that of Phlius: and this belief led to practical consequences in the minds of those who accepted the legends as genuine history. For when the Thebans, in the 68th Olympiad, were hard-pressed in war by Athens, they were directed by the Delphian oracle to ask assistance of their next of kin: recollecting that Thebe and Aegina had been sisters, common daughters of Asopus, they were induced to apply to the Aeginetans as their next of kin, and the Aeginetans gave them aid, first by sending to them their common heroes, the Eakids, next by actual armed force. Pindar dwells emphatically on the heroic brotherhood between Thebes, his native city, and Aegina.

Eakus was alone in Aegina: to relieve him from this solitude, Zeus changed all the ants in the island into men, and thus provided him with a numerous population, who, from their origin, were called Mylmidons. By his wife Endeis, daughter of Cheiron, Eakus had for his sons Peleus and Telamon: by the Nereid Psamathe, he had Phokus. A monstrous crime had then recently been committed by Pelops, in killing the Arcadian prince, Stymphalus, under a simulation of friendship and hospitality: for this the gods had smitten all Greece with famine and barrenness. The oracles affirmed that nothing could relieve Greece from this intolerable misery except the prayers of Eakus, the most pious of mankind. Accordingly envoys from all quarters flocked to Aegina, to prevail upon Eakus to put up prayers for them: on his supplications the gods relented, and the suffering immediately ceased. The grateful Greeks established in Aegina the temple and worship of Zeus Panhellenius, one of the lasting monuments and institutions of the island, on the spot where Eakus had offered up his prayer. The statues of the envoys who had come to solicit him were yet to be seen in the Eakeium, or sacred edifice of Eakus, in the time of Pausanias: and the Athenian Isocrates, in his eulogy of Evagoras, the despot of Salamis in Cyprus (who traced his descent through Teukrus to Eakus), enlarges upon this signal miracle, recounted and believed by other Greeks as well as by the Aeginetans, as a proof both of the great qualities and of the divine favor and patronage displayed in the career of the Eakids. Eakus was also employed to aid Poseidon and Apollo in building the walls of Troy.

Peleus and Telamom, the sons of Eakus, contracting a jealousy of their bastard brother, Phokus, in consequence of his eminent skill in gymnastic contests, conspired to put him to death. Telamon flung his quoit at him while they were playing together, and Peleus dispatched him by a blow with his hatchet in the back. They then concealed the dead body in a wood, but Eakus, having discovered both the act and the agents, banished the brothers from the island. For both of them eminent destinies were in store.

While we notice the indifference to the moral quality of actions implied in the old Hesiodic legend, when it imputes distinctly and nakedly this proceeding to two of the most admired persons of the heroic world —it is not less instructive to witness the change of feeling which had taken place in the age of Pindar. That warm eulogist of the great Eakid race hangs down his head with shame, and declines to recount, though he is obliged darkly to glance at the cause which forced the pious Eakus to banish his sons from Aegina. It appears that Kallimachus, if we may judge by a short fragment, manifested the same repugnance to mention it.

Telamon retired to Salamis, then ruled by Kychreus, the son of Poseidon and Salamis, who had recently rescued the island from the plague of a terrible serpent. This animal, expelled from Salamis, retired to Eleusis in Attica, where it was received and harbored by the goddess Demeter in her sacred domicile. Kychreus dying childless left his dominion to Telamon, who, marrying Periboea, daughter of Alkathoos, and grand-daughter of Pelops, had for his son the celebrated Ajax. Telamon took part both in the chase of the Kalydonian boar and in the Argonautic expedition: he was also the intimate friend and companion of Heracles, whom he accompanied in his enterprise against the Amazons, and in the attack made with only six ships upon Laomedon, king of Troy. This last enterprise having proved completely successful, Telamon was rewarded by Heracles with the possession of the daughter of Laomedon, Hesione—who bore to him Teukros, the most distinguished archer amidst the host of Agamemnon, and the founder of Salamis in Cyprus.

Peleus went to Pithia, where he married the daughter of Eurytion, son of Aktor, and received from him the third part of his dominions. Taking part in the Kalydonian boar-hunt, he unintentionally killed his father-in-law Eurytion, and was obliged to flee to Iolkos, where he received purification from Akastus, son of Pelias: the danger to which lie became exposed by the calumnious accusations of the enamored wife of Akastus has already been touched upon in a previous section. Peleus also was among the Argonauts; the most memorable event in his life however was his marriage with the sea-goddess Thetis. Zeus and Poseidon had both conceived a violent passion for Thetis. But the former, having been forewarned by Prometheus that Thetis was destined to give birth to a son more powerful than his father, compelled her, much against her own will, to marry Peleus; who, instructed by the intimations of the wise Cheiron, was enabled to seize her on the coast called Sepias in the southern region of Thessaly. She changed her form several times, but Peleus held her fast until she resumed her original appearance, and she was then no longer able to resist. All the gods were present, and brought splendid gifts to these memorable nuptials: Apollo sang with his harp, Poseidon gave to Peleus the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius, and Cheiron presented a formidable spear, cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pelion. We shall have reason hereafter to recognize the value of both these gifts in the exploits of Achilles.

The prominent part assigned to Thetis in the Iliad is well known, and the post-Homeric poets of the Legend of Troy introduced her as actively concurring first to promote the glory, finally to bewail the death of her distinguished son. Peleus, having survived both his son Achilles and his grandson Neoptolemus, is ultimately directed to place himself on the very spot where he had originally seized Thetis, and thither the goddess comes herself to fetch him away, in order that he may exchange the desertion and decrepitude of age for a life of immortality along with the Nereids. The spot was indicated to Xerxes when he marched into Greece by the Ionians who accompanied him, and his magi offered solemn sacrifices to her as well as to the other Nereids, as the presiding goddesses and mistresses of the coast.

Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, too young to engage in the commencement of the siege of Troy, comes on the stage after the death of his father as the indispensable and prominent agent in the final capture of the city. He returns victor from Troy, not to Pithia, but to Epirus, bringing with him the captive Andromache, widow of Hector, by whom Molossus is born to him. He himself perishes in the full vigor of life at Delphi by the machinations of Orestes, son of Agamemnon. But his son Molossus —like Fleance, the son of Banquo, in Macbeth—becomes the father of the powerful race of Molossian kings, who played so conspicuous a part during the declining vigor of the Grecian cities, and to whom the title and parentage of Eakids was a source of peculiar pride, identifying them by community of heroic origin with genuine and undisputed Hellenes.

The glories of Ajax, the second grandson of Eakus, before Troy, are surpassed only by those of Achilles. He perishes by his own hand, the victim of an insupportable feeling of humiliation, because a less worthy claimant is allowed to carry off from him the arms of the departed Achilles. His son Philaeus receives the citizenship of Athens, and the gens or deme called Philaidae traced up to him its name and its origin moreover the distinguished Athenians, Miltiades and Thucydides, were regarded as members of this heroic progeny.

Teukrus escaped from the perils of the siege of Troy as well as from those of the voyage homeward, and reached Salamis in safety. But his father Telamon, indignant at his having returned without Ajax, refused to receive him, and compelled him to expatriate. He conducted his followers to Cyprus, where he founded the city of Salamis: his descendant Evagoras was recognized as a Teukrid and as an Eakid even in the time of Isocrates.

Such was the splendid heroic genealogy of the Eakids,—family renowned for military excellence. The Eakeion at Aegina, in which prayer and sacrifice were offered to Eakus, remained in undiminished dignity down to the time of Pausanias. This genealogy connects together various eminent gentes in Achaia Phthioitis, in Aegina, in Salamis, in Cyprus, and amongst the Epirotic Molossians. Whether we are entitled to infer from it that the island of Aegina was originally peopled by Myrmidones from Achaia Phthiotis, as Muller imagines, I will not pretend to affirm. These mythical pedigrees seem to unite together special clans or gentes, rather than the bulk of any community—just as we know that the Athenians generally had no part in the Eakid genealogy, though certain particular Athenian families laid claim to it. The intimate friendship between Achilles and the Opuntian hero Patroclus—and the community of name and frequent conjunction between the Locrian Ajax, son of Oileus, and Ajax, son of Telamon connect the Eakids with Opus and the Opuntian Locrians, in a manner which we have no farther means of explaining. Pindar too represents Menoetius, father of Patroclus, as son of Aktor and Aegina, and therefore maternal brother of Eakus.

ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES

THE most ancient name in Attic archaeology, as far as our means of information reach, is that of Erechtheus, who is mentioned both in the Catalogue of the Iliad and in a brief allusion of the Odyssey. Born of the Earth, he is brought up by the goddess Athene, adopted by her as her ward, and installed in her temple at Athens, where the Athenians offer to him annual sacrifices. The Athenians are styled in the Iliad, “the people of Erechtheus”. This is the most ancient testimony concerning Erechtheus, exhibiting him as a divine or heroic, certainly a superhuman person, and identifying him with the primitive germination (if I may use a term, the Grecian equivalent of which would have pleased an Athenian ear) of Attic man. And he was recognized in this same character, even at the close of the fourth century before the Christian era, by the Butadae, one of the most ancient and important Gentes at Athens, who boasted of him as their original ancestor: the genealogy of the great Athenian orator Lycurgus, a member of this family, drawn up by his son Abron, and painted on a public tablet in the Erechtheion, contained as its first and highest name, Erechtheus, son of Hephaestos and the Earth. In the Erechtheion, Erechtheus was worshipped conjointly with Athene: he was identified with the god Poseidon, and bore the denomination of Poseidon Erechtheus: one of the family of the Butadae, chosen among themselves by lot, enjoyed the privilege and performed the functions of his hereditary priest. Herodotus also assigns the same earth-born origin to Erechtheus but Pindar, the old poem called the Danais, Euripides and Apollodorus—all name Erichthonius, son of Hephaestos and the Earth, as the being who was thus adopted and made the temple-companion of Athene, while Apollodorus in another place identifies Erichthonius with Poseidon. The Homeric scholiast treated Erechtheus and Erichthonius as the same person under two names: and since, in regard to such mythical persons, there exists no other test of identity of the subject except perfect similarity of the attributes, this seems the reasonable conclusion.

We may presume, from the testimony of Homer, that the first and oldest conception of Athens and its sacred acropolis places it under the special protection, and represents it as the settlement and favorite abode of Athene, jointly with Poseidon; the latter being the inferior, though the chosen companion of the former, and therefore exchanging his divine appellation for the cognomen of Erechtheus. But the country called Attica, which, during the historical ages, forms one social and political aggregate with Athens, was originally distributed into many independent demes or cantons, and included, besides, various religious clans or hereditary sects (if the expression may be permitted); that is, a multitude of persons not necessarily living together in the same locality, but bound together by an hereditary communion of sacred rites, and claiming privileges, as well as performing obligations, founded upon the traditional authority of divine persons for whom they had a common veneration. Even down to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the demots of the various Attic demes, though long since embodied in the larger political union of Attica, and having no wish for separation, still retained the recollection of their original political autonomy. They lived in their own separate localities, resorted habitually to their own temples, and visited Athens only occasionally for private or political business, or for the great public festivals. Each of these aggregates, political as well as religious, had its own eponymous god or hero, with a genealogy more or less extended, and a train of mythical incidents more or less copious, attached to his name, according to the fancy of the local exegetes and poets. The eponymous heroes Marathon, Dekelus, Kollinus, or Phlyus, had each their own title to worship, and their own position as themes of legendary narrative, independent of Erechtheus, or Poseidon, or Athena, the patrons of the acropolis common to all of them.

But neither the archaeology of Attica, nor that of its various component fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece. Theseus is noticed both in the Iliad and Odyssey as having carried off from Crete Ariadne, the daughter of Minos — thus commencing that connection between the Cretan and Athenian legends which we afterwards find so largely amplified—and the sons of Theseus take part in the Trojan war. The chief collectors and narrators of the Attic myths were, the prose logographers, authors of the many compositions called Atthides, or works on Attic archaeology. These writers—Hellanikus, the contemporary of Herodotus, is the earliest composer of an Atthis expressly named, though Pherekydes also touched upon the Attic fables — these writers, I say, interwove into one chronological series the legends which either greatly occupied their own fancy, or commanded the most general reverence among their countrymen. In this way the religious and political legends of Eleusis, a town originally independent of Athens, but incorporated with it before the historical age, were worked into one continuous sequence along with those of the Erechtheids. In this way, Kekrops, the eponymous hero of the portion of Attica called Kekropia, came to be placed in the mythical chronology at a higher point even than the primitive god or hero Erechtheus.

Ogyges is said to have reigned in Attica 1020 years before the first Olympiad, or 1796 years BC. In his time happened the deluge of Deucalion, which destroyed most of the inhabitants of the country: after along interval, Kekrops, an indigenous person, half man and half serpent, is given to us by Apollodorus as the first king of the country: he bestowed upon the land, which had before been called Akte, the name of Kekropia. In his day there ensued a dispute between Athene and Poseidon respecting the possession of the acropolis at Athens, which each of them coveted. First, Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, and produced the well of salt water which existed in it, called the Erechtheis: next came Athene, who planted the sacred olive-tree ever afterwards seen and venerated in the portion of Erechtheion called the cell of Pandrosus. The twelve gods decided the dispute; and Kekrops having testified before them that Athene had rendered this inestimable service, they adjudged the spot to her in preference to Poseidon. Both the ancient olive-tree and the well-produced by Poseidon were seen on the acropolis, in the temple consecrated jointly to Athene and Erechtheus, throughout the historical ages. Poseidon, as a mark of his wrath for the preference given to Athens, inundated the Thriasian plain with water.

During the reign of Kekrops, Attica was laid waste by Carian pirates on the coast, and by invasions of the Aonian inhabitants from Boeotia. Kekrops distributed the inhabitants of Attica into twelve local sections—Kekropia, Tetrapolis, Epakria, Dekeleia, Eleusis, Aphidna, Thorikus, Brauron, Kytherus, Sphettus, Kephisius, Phalerus. Wishing to ascertain the number of inhabitants, he commanded each man to cast a single stone into a general heap: the number of stones was counted, and it was found that there were twenty thousand.

Kekrops married the daughter of Aktaeus, who (according to Pausanias’s version) had been king of the country before him, and had called it by the name of Aktaea. By her he had three daughters, Aglaurus, Erse and Pandrosus, and a son, Erysichthon.

Erysichthon died without issue, and Kranaus succeeded him, another autochthonous person and another eponymous,—for the name Kranai was an old denomination of the inhabitants of Attica. Kranaus was dethroned by Amphiktyon, by some called an autochthonous man; by others, a son of Deucalion Amphityon in his turn was expelled by Erichthonius, son of Hephaestus and the Earth,—the same person apparently as Erechtheus, but inserted by Apollodorus at this point of the series. Erichthonius, the pupil and favored companion of Athene, placed in the acropolis the original Palladium or wooden statue of that goddess, said to have dropped from heaven: he was moreover the first to celebrate the festival of the Panatherinae. He married the nymph Pasithea, and had for his son and successor Pandion. Erichthonius was the first person who taught the art of breaking in horses to the yoke, and who drove a chariot and four.

In the time of Pandion, who succeeded to Erichthonius, Dionysus and Demeter both came into Attica: the latter was received by Keleos at Eleusis. Pandion married the nymph Zeuxippe, and had twin sons, Erechtheus and Butes, and two daughters, Prokne and Philomela. The two latter are the subjects of a memorable and well-known legend. Pandion having received aid in repelling the Thebans from Tereus, king of Thrace, gave him his daughter Prokne in marriage, by whom he had a son, Itys. The beautiful Philomela, going to visit her sister, inspired the barbarous Thracian with an irresistible passion: he violated her person, confined her in a distant pastoral hut, and pretended that she was dead, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from revealing the truth. After a long interval, Philomela found means to acquaint her sister of the cruel deed which had been perpetrated; she wove into a garment words describing her melancholy condition, and dispatched it by a trusty messenger. Prokne, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger, took advantage of the free egress enjoyed by women during the Bacchanalian festival to go and release her sister: the two sisters then revenged themselves upon Tereus by killing the boy Itys, and serving him up for his father to eat: after the meal had been finished, the horrid truth was revealed to him. Tereus snatched a hatchet to put Prokne to death: she fled, along with Philomela, and all the three were changed into birds —Prokne became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Tereus an hoopoe. This tale, so popular with the poets, and so illustrative of the general character of Grecian legend, is not less remarkable in another point of view—that the great historian Thucydides seems to allude to it as an historical fact, not however directly mentioning the final metamorphosis.

After the death of Pandion, Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom, and his brother, Butes, became priest of Poseidon Erichthonius, a function which his descendants ever afterwards exercised, the Butadae or Eteobutadae. Erechtheus seems to appear in three characters in the fabulous history of Athens—as a god, Poseidon Erechtheus—as a hero, Erechtheus, son of the Earth—and now, as a king, son of Pandion: so much did the ideas of divine and human rule become confounded and blended together in the imagination of the Greeks in reviewing their early times.

The daughters of Erechtheus were not less celebrated in Athenian legend than those of Pandion. Prokris, one of them, is among the heroines seen by Odysseus in Hades: she became the wife of Kephalus, son of Deiones, and lived in the Attic dome of Thorikus. Kephalus tried her fidelity by pretending that he was going away for a long period; but shortly returned, disguising his person and bringing with him a splendid necklace. He presented himself to Prokris without being recognized, and succeeded in triumphing over her chastity. Having accomplished this object, he revealed to her his true character: she earnestly besought his forgiveness, and prevailed upon him to grant it. Nevertheless he became shortly afterwards the unintentional author of her death: for he was fond of hunting, and staid out a long time on his excursions, so that Prokris suspected him of visiting some rival. She determined to watch him by concealing herself in a thicket near the place of his midday repose; and when Kephalus implored the presence of Nephele, (a cloud) to protect him from the sun's rays, she suddenly started from her hiding-place: Kephalus, thus disturbed, cast his hunting-spear unknowingly into the thicket and slew his wife. Erechtheus interred her with great magnificence, and Kephalus was tried for the act before the court of Areopagus, which condemned him to exile.

Kreusa, another daughter of Erechtheus, seduced by Apollo, becomes the mother of Ion, whom she exposes immediately after his birth in the cave north of the acropolis, concealing the fact from every one. Apollo prevails upon Hermes to convey the new-born child to Delphi, where he is brought up as a servant of the temple, without knowing his parents. Kreusa marries Xuthus, son of Eolus, but continuing childless, she goes with Xuthus to the Delphian oracle to inquire for a remedy. The god presents to them Ion, and desires them to adopt him as their son: their son Achaeus is afterwards born to them, and Ion and Achaeus become the eponyms of the Ionians and Achaeans.

Oreithyia, the third daughter of Erechtheus, was stolen away by the god Boreas while amusing herself on the banks of the Ilissus, and carried to his residence in Thrace. The two sons of this marriage, Zetes and Kalais, were born with wings: they took part in the Argonautic expedition, and engaged in the purrsuit of the Harpie: they were slain at Tenos by Heracles. Cleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia, was married to Phineus, and had two sons, Plexippus and Pandion; but Phineus afterwards espoused a second wife, Idaea, the daughter of Dardanus, who, detesting the two sons of the former bed, accused them falsely of attempting her chastity, and persuaded Phineus in his wrath to put out the eyes of both. For this cruel proceeding he was punished by the Argonauts in the course of their voyage.

On more than one occasion the Athenians derived, or at least believed themselves to have derived, important benefits from this marriage of Boreas with the daughter of their primeval hero: one inestimable service, rendered at a juncture highly critical for Grecian independence, deserves to be specified. At the time a of the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, the Grecian fleet was assembled at Chalcis and Artemision in Euboea, awaiting the approach of the Persian force, so overwhelming in its numbers as well by sea as on land. The Persian fleet had reached the coast of Magnesia and the south-eastern corner of Thessaly without any material damage, when the Athenians were instructed by an oracle “to invoke the aid of their son-in-law”. Understanding the advice to point to Boreas, they supplicated his aid and that of Oreithyia, most earnestly, as well by prayer as by sacrifice, and the event corresponded to their wishes. A furious north-easterly wind immediately arose, and continued for three days to afflict the Persian fleet as it lay on an unprotected coast: the number of ships driven ashore, both vessels of war and of provision, was immense, and the injury done to the armament was never thoroughly repaired. Such was the powerful succor which the Athenians derived, at a time of their utmost need, from their son-in-law Boreas; and their gratitude was shown by consecrating to him a new temple on the banks of the Ilissus.

The three remaining daughters of Erechtheus—he had six in all—were in Athenian legend yet more venerated than their sisters, on account of having voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the safety of their country. Eumolpus of Eleusis was the son of Poseidon and the eponymous hero of the sacred gens called the Eumolpids, in whom the principal functions, appertaining to the mysterious rites of Demeter at Eleusis, were vested by hereditary privilege: he made war upon Erechtheus and the Athenians, with the aid of a body of Thracian allies; indeed it appears that the legends of Athens, originally foreign and unfriendly to those of Eleusis, represented him as having been himself a Thracian born and an immigrant into Attica. Respecting Eumolpus however and his parentage, the discrepancies much exceed even the measure of license usual in the legendary genealogies, and some critics, both ancient and modern, have sought to reconcile these contradictions by the usual stratagem of supposing two or three different persons of the same name. Even Pausanias, so familiar with this class of unsworn witnesses, complains of the want of native Eleusinian genealogists, and of the extreme license of fiction in which other authors had indulged.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the most ancient testimony before us,—composed, to all appearance, earlier than the complete incorporation of Eleusis with Athens,—Eumolpus appears (to repeat briefly what has been stated in a previous chapter) as one of the native chiefs or princes of Eleusis, along with Triptolemus, Diokles, Polyxeinus and Dolichus; Keleos is the king, or principal among these chiefs, the son or lineal descendant of the eponymous Eleusis himself. To these chiefs, and to the three daughters of Keleos, the goddess Demeter comes in her sorrow for the loss of her daughter Persephone; being hospitably entertained by Keleos she reveals her true character, commands that a temple shall be built to her at Eleusis, and prescribes to them the rites according to which they are to worship her. Such seems to have been the ancient story of the Eleusinians respecting their own religious antiquities; Keleos, with Metaneira his wife, and the other chiefs here mentioned, were worshipped at Eleusis, and from thence transferred to Athens as local gods or heroes. Eleusis became incorporated with Athens, apparently not very long before the time of Solon; and the Eleusinian worship of Demeter was then received into the great religious solemnities of the Athenian state, to which it owes its remarkable subsequent extension and commanding influence. In the Atticized worship of the Eleusinian Demeter, the Eumolpids and the Kerykes were the principal hereditary functionaries: Eumolpus, the eponym of this great family, came thus to play the principal part in the Athenian legendary version of the war between Athens and Eleusis. An oracle had pronounced that Athens could only be rescued from his attack by the death of the three daughters of Erechtheus; their generous patriotism consented to the sacrifice, and their father put them to death. He then went forth confidently to the battle, totally vanquished the enemy, and killed Eumolpus with his own hand. Erechtheus was worshipped as a god, and his daughters as goddesses, at Athens. Their names and their exalted devotion were cited along with those of the warriors of Marathon, in the public assembly of Athens, by orators who sought to arouse the languid patriot, or to denounce the cowardly deserter; and the people listened both to one and the other with analogous feelings of grateful veneration, as well as with equally unsuspecting faith in the matter of fact.

Though Erechtheus gained the victory over Eumolpus, yet the story represents Poseidon as having put an end to the life and reign of Erechtheus, who was (it seems) slain in the battle. He was succeeded by his son Kekrops II, and the latter again by his son Pandion two names unmarked by any incidents, and which appear to be mere duplication of the former Kekrops and Pandion, placed there by the genealogizers for the purpose of filling up what seemed to them a chronological chasm.

Apollodorus passes at once from Erechtheus to his son Kekrops II, then to Pandion II, next to the four sons of the latter, Egeus, Pallas, Mins and Lykus. But the tragedians here insert the story of Xuthus, Kreusa and Ion; the latter being the son of Creusa by Apollo, but given by the god to Xuthus, and adopted by the latter as his own. Ion becomes the successor of Erechtheus, and his sons (Teleon, Hoples, Argades and Aigikores) become the eponyms of the four ancient tribes of Athens, which subsisted until the revolution of Kleisthenes. Ion himself is the eponym of the Ionic race both in Asia, in Europe, and in the Aegean islands: Dorus and Achaeus are the sons of Kreusa by Xuthus, so that Ion is distinguished from both of them by being of divine parentage. According to the story given by Philochorus, Ion rendered such essential service in rescuing the Athenians from the attack of the Thracians under Eumolpus, that he was afterwards made king of the country, and distributed all the inhabitants into four tribes or castes, corresponding to different modes of life, — soldiers, husbandmen, goatherds, and artisans. And it seems that the legend explanatory of the origin of the festival Boedromia, originally important enough to furnish a name to one of the Athenian months, was attached to the aid thus rendered by Io.

We pass from Ion to persons of far greater mythical dignity and interest,—Egeus and his son Theseus.

Pandion had four sons, Egeus, Nisus, Lykus, and Pallas, between whom he divided his dominions. Nisus received the territory of Megaris, which had been under the sway of Pandion, and there founded the seaport of Nistea. Lykus was made king of the eastern coast, but a dispute afterwards ensued, and he quitted the country altogether, to establish himself on the southern coast of Asia Minor among the Termilae, to whom he gave the name of Lykians. Egeus, as the eldest of the four, became king of Athens; but Pallas received a portion both of the southwestern coast and the interior, and he as well as his children appear as frequent enemies both to Egeus and to Theseus. Pallas is the eponym of the deme Pallene, and the stories respecting him and his sons seem to be connected with old and standing feuds among the different demes of Attica, originally independent communities. These feuds penetrated into the legend, and explain the story which we find that Egeus and Theseus were not genuine Erechtheids, the former being denominated a suppositious child to Pandion.

Egeus has little importance in the mythical history except as the father of Theseus: it may even be doubted whether his name is anything more than a mere cognomen of the god Poseidon, who was (as we are told) the real father of this great Attic Heracles. As I pretend only to give a very brief outline of the general territory of Grecian legend, I cannot permit myself to recount in detail the chivalrous career of Theseus, who is found both in the Kalydonian boar-hunt and in the Argonautic expedition —his personal and victorious encounters with the robbers Siunis, Procrustes, Periphetes, Sciron and others — his valuable service in ridding his country of the Krommyonian sow and the Maratonian bull—his conquest of the Minotaur in Crete, and his escape from the dangers of the labyrinth by the aid of Ariadne, whom he subsequently carries off and abandons—his many amorous adventures, and his expeditions both against the Amazons and into the under-world along with Peirithous.

Thucydides delineates the character of Theseus as a man who combined sagacity with political power, and who conferred upon his country the inestimable benefit of uniting all the separate and self-governing demes of Attica into one common political society. From the well-earned reverence attached to the assertion of Thucydides, it has been customary to reason upon this assertion as if it were historically authentic, and to treat the romantic attributes which we find in Plutarch and Diodorus as if they were fiction superinduced upon this basis of fact. Such a view of the case is in my judgment erroneous. The athletic and amorous knight-errant is the old version of the character—the profound and long-sighted politician is a subsequent correction, introduced indeed by men of superior mind, but destitute of historical warranty, and arising out of their desire to find reasons of their own for concurring in the veneration which the general public paid more easily and heartily to their national hero. Theseus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, fights with the Lapithae against the Centaurs : Theseus, in the Hesiodic poems, is misguided by his passion for the beautiful Egle, daughter of Panopeus: and the Theseus described in Plutarch’s biography is in great part a continuation and expansion of these same or similar attributes, mingled with many local legends, explaining, like the Fasti of Ovid, or the lost Aitia of Callimachus, the original genesis of prevalent religious and social customs. Plutarch has doubtless greatly softened down and modified the adventures which he found in the Attic logographers as well as in the poetical epics called Theseis. For in his preface to the life of Theseus, after having emphatically declared that he is about to transcend the boundary both of the known and the knowable, but that the temptation of comparing the founder of Athens with the founder of Rome is irresistible, he concludes with the following remarkable words: “I pray that this fabulous matter may be so far obedient to my endeavors as to receive, when purified by reason, the aspect of history: in those cases where it haughtily scorns plausibility and will admit no alliance with what is probable, I shall beg for indulgent hearers, willing to receive antique narrative in a mild spirit”. We see here that Plutarch sat down, not to recount the old fables as he found them, but to purify them by reason and to impart to them the aspect of history. We have to thank him for having retained, after this purification, so much of what is romantic and marvelous; but we may be sure that the sources from which he borrowed were more romantic and marvelous still. It was the tendency of the enlightened men of Athens, from the days of Solon downwards, to refine and politicize the character of Thesuas : even Peisistratus expunged from one of the Hesiodic poems the line which described the violent passion of the hero for the fair Egle : and the tragic poets found it more congenial to the feelings of their audience to exhibit him as a dignified and liberal sovereign, rather than as an adventurous single-handed fighter. But the logographers and the Alexandrine poets remained more faithful to the old fables. The story of Hekale, the hospitable old woman who received and blessed Theseus when he went against the Marathonian bull, and whom he found dead when he came back to recount the news of his success, was treated by Callimachus : and Virgil must have had his mind full of the unrefined legends when he numbered this Attic Heracles among the unhappy sufferers condemned to endless penance in the under-world.

Two however among the Theseian fables cannot be dismissed without some special notice,—the war against the Amazons, and the expedition against Crete. The former strikingly illustrates the facility as well as the tenacity of Grecian legendary faith; the latter embraces the story of Daedalus and Minos, two of the most eminent among Grecian ante-historical personages.

The Amazons, daughters of Ares and Harmonia, are both early creations and frequent reproductions of the ancient epic—which was indeed, we may generally remark, largely occupied both with the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and daughters of the Grecian heroes—and which recognized in Pallas Athene the finished type of an irresistible female warrior. A nation of courageous, hardy and indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men, permitting only a short temporary intercourse for the purpose of renovating their numbers, and burning out their right breast with a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely,—this was at once a general type stimulating to the fancy of the poet and a theme eminently popular with his hearers. Nor was it at all repugnant to the faith of the latter—who had no recorded facts to guide them, and no other standard of credibility as to the past except such poetical narratives themselves — to conceive communities of Amazons as having actually existed in anterior time. Accordingly we find these warlike females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally accepted as past realities. In the Iliad, when Priam wishes to illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phrygia, on the banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable Amazons. When Bellerophon is to be employed on a deadly and perilous undertaking, by those who indirectly wish to procure his death, he is dispatched against the Amazons. In the Ethiopis of Arktinus, describing the post-Homeric war of Troy, Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons, appears as the most effective ally of the besieged city, and as the most formidable enemy of the Greeks, succumbing only to the invincible might of Achilles. The Argonautic heroes find the Amazons on the river Thermadon, in their expedition along the southern coast of the Euxine. To the same spot Heracles goes to attack them, in the performance of the ninth labor imposed upon him by Eurystheus, for the purpose of procuring the girdle of the Amazonian queen, Hippolyte; and we are told that they had not yet recovered from the losses sustained in this severe aggression when Theseus also assaulted and defeated them, carrying off their queen, Antiope. This injury they avenged by invading Attica,—an undertaking (as Plutarch justly observes) "neither trifling nor feminine," especially if according to the statement of Hellanikus, they crossed the Cimmerian Bosporus on the winter ice, beginning their march from the Asiatic side of the Pallus Maeotis. They overcame all the resistances and difficulties of this prodigious march, and penetrated even into Athens itself, where the final battle, hard-fought and at one time doubtful, by which Theseus crushed them, was fought—in the very heart of the city.

Attic antiquaries confidently pointed out the exact position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons rested upon the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the Amazoneion; the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held. The details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the final triumph and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as complete faith and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Plataea by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb or pillar of Antiope near the western gate of the city—the spot called the Horkomosion near the temple of Theseus—even the hill of Areiopagus itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the Amazons at the periodical festival of the Theseia—were all so many religious mementos of this victory; which was moreover a favorite subject of art both with the sculptor and the painter, at Athens as well as in other parts of Greece.

No portion of the ante-historical epic appears to have been more deeply worked into the national mind of Greece than this invasion and defeat of the Amazons. It was not only a constant theme of the logographers, but was also familiarly appealed to by the popular orators along with Marathon and Salamis, among those antique exploits of which their fellow-citizens might justly be proud. It formed a part of the retrospective faith of Herodotus, Lysias, Plato and Isocrates, and the exact date of the event was settled by the chronologists. Nor did the Athenians stand alone in such a belief. Throughout many other regions of Greece, both European and Asiatic, traditions and memorials of the Amazons were found. At Megara, at Troezen, in Laconia near Cape Taenarus, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, and in more than one part of Thessaly, sepulchers or monuments of the Amazons were preserved. The warlike women (it was said), on their way to Attica, had not traversed those countries, without leaving some evidences of their passage.

Amongst the Asiatic Greeks the supposed traces of the Amazons were yet more numerous. Their proper territory was asserted to be the town and plain of Themiskyra, near the Grecian colony of Amisus, on the river Thermodon, a region called after their name by Roman historians and geographers. But they were believed to have conquered and occupied in early times a much wider range of territory, extending even to the coast of Ionia and Eolis. Ephesus, Smyrna, Kyme, Myrina, Paphos and Sinope were affirmed to have been founded and denominated by them. Some authors placed them in Libya or Ethiopia; and when the Poetic Greeks on the north-western shore of the Euxine had become acquainted with the hardy and daring character of the Sarmatian maidens,—who were obliged to have slain each an enemy in battle as the condition of obtaining a husband, and who artificially prevented the growth of the right breast during childhood,—they could imagine no more satisfactory mode of accounting for such attributes than by deducing the Sarmatians from a colony of vagrant Amazons, expelled by the Grecian heroes from their territory on the Thermodon. Pindar ascribed the first establishment of the memorable temple of Artemis at Ephesus to the Amazons. And Pausanias explains in part the preeminence which this temple enjoyed over every other in Greece by the widely diffused renown of its female founders, respecting whom he observes (with perfect truth, if we admit the historical character of the old epic), that women possess an unparalleled force of resolution in resisting adverse events, since the Amazons, after having been first roughly handled by Heracles and then completely defeated by Theseus, could yet find courage to play so conspicuous a part in the defense of Troy against the Grecian besiegers.

It is thus that in what is called early Grecian history, as the Greeks themselves looked back upon it, the Amazons were among the most prominent and undisputed personages. Nor will the circumstance appear wonderful if we reflect, that the belief in them was first established at a time when the Grecian mind was fed with nothing else but religious legend and epic poetry, and that the incidents of the supposed past, as received from these sources, were addressed to their faith and feelings, without being required to adapt themselves to any canons of credibility drawn from present experience. But the time came when the historians of Alexander the Great audaciously abused this ancient credence. Amongst other tales calculated to exalt the dignity of that monarch, they affirmed that after his conquest and subjugation of the Persian empire, he had been visited in Hyrcania by Thalestris, queen of the Amazons, who admiring his warlike prowess, was anxious to be enabled to return into her own country in a condition to produce offspring of a breed so invincible. But the Greeks had now been accustomed for a century and a half to historical and philosophical criticism —and that uninquiring faith, which was readily accorded to the wonders of the past, could no longer be invoked for them when tendered as present reality. For the fable of the Amazons was here reproduced in its naked simplicity, without being rationalized or painted over with historical colors.

Some literary men indeed, among whom were Demetrius of Skepsis, and the Mitylenaean Theophanes, the companion of Pompey in his expeditions, still continued their belief both in Amazons present and Amazons past; and when it becomes notorious that at least there were none such on the banks of the Thermodon, these authors supposed them to have migrated from their original locality, and to have settled in the unvisited regions north of Mount Caucasus. Strabo, on the contrary, feeling that the grounds of disbelief applied with equal force to the ancient stories and to the modern, rejected both the one and the other. But he remarks at the same time, not without some surprise, that it was usual with most persons to adopt a middle course,—to retain the Amazons as historical phenomena of the remote past, but to disallow them as realities of the present, and to maintain that the breed had died out. The accomplished intellect of Julius Cesar did not scruple to acknowledge them as having once conquered and held in dominion a large portion of Asia; and the compromise between early, traditional, and religious faith on the one hand, and established habits of critical research on the other, adopted by the historian Arrian, deserves to be transcribed in his own words, as illustrating strikingly the powerful sway of the old legends even over the most positive-minded Greeks:—“Neither Aristobulus nor Ptolemy (he observes), nor any other competent witness, has recounted this visit of the Amazons and their queen to Alexander: nor does it seem to me that the race of the Amazons was preserved down to that time, nor have they been noticed either by any one before Alexander, or by Xenophon, though he mentions both the Phasians and the Kolchians, and the other barbarous nations which the Greeks saw both before and after their arrival at Trapezus, in which marches they must have met with the Amazons, if the latter had been still in existence. Yet it is incredible to me that this race of women, celebrated as they have been by authors so many and so commanding, should never have existed at all. The story tells of Heracles, that he set out from Greece and brought back with him the girdle of their queen Hippolyte; also of Theseus and the Athenians, that they were the first who defeated in battle and repelled these women in their invasion of Europe; and the combat of the Athenians with the Amazons has been painted by Mikon, not less than that between the Athenians and the Persians. Moreover Herodotus has spoken in many places of these women, and those Athenian orators who have pronounced panegyrics on the citizens slain in battle, have dwelt upon the victory over the Amazons as among the most memorable of Athenian exploits. If the satrap of Media sent any equestrian women at all to Alexander, I think that they must have come from some of the neighboring tribes, practiced in riding and equipped in the costume generally called Amazonian”.

There cannot be a more striking evidence of the indelible force with which these ancient legends were worked into the national faith and feelings of the Greeks, than these remarks of a judicious historian upon the fable of the Amazons. Probably if any plausible mode of rationalizing it, and of transforming it into a quasi-political event, had been offered to Arrian, he would have been better pleased to adopt such a middle term, and would have rested comfortably in the supposition that he believed the legend in its true meaning, while his less inquiring countrymen were imposed upon by the exaggerations of poets. But as the story was presented to him plain end unvarnished, either for acceptance or rejection, his feelings as a patriot and a religious man prevented him from applying to the past such tests of credibility as his untrammeled reason acknowledged to be paramount in regard to the present. When we see moreover how much his belief was strengthened, and all tendency to skepticism shut out by the familiarity of his eye and memory with sculptured or painted Amazons—we may calculate the irresistible force of this sensible demonstration on the convictions of the unlettered public, at once more deeply retentive of passive impressions, and unaccustomed to the countervailing habit of rational investigation into evidence. Had the march of an army of warlike women, from the Thermodon or the Tanais into the heart of Attica, been recounted to Arrian as an incident belonging to the time of Alexander the Great, he would have rejected it no less emphatically than Strabo; but cast back as it was into an undefined past, it took rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic antiquity, — gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument.

CRETAN LEGENDS.—MINOS AND HIS FAMILY.

To understand the adventures of Theseus in Crete, it will be necessary to touch briefly upon Mines and the Cretan heroics genealogy.

Minos and Rhadamanthus, according to Homer, are sons of Zeus, by Europe, daughter of the widely-celebrated Phoenix, born in Crete. Minos is the father of Deucalion, whose son Idomeneus, in conjunction with of Zeus, conducts the Cretan troops to the host of Agamemnon before Troy. Minos is ruler of Knossos, and familiar companion of the great Zeus. He is spoken of as holding guardianship in Crete not necessarily meaning the whole of the island : he is farther decorated with a golden scepter, and constituted judge over the dead in the under-world to settle their disputes, in which function Odysseus finds him —this however by a passage of comparatively late interpolation into the Odyssey. He also had a daughter named Ariadne, for whom the artist Daedalus fabricated in the town of Knossos the representation of a complicated dance, and who was ultimately carried off by Theseus: she died in the island of Dia, deserted by Theseus and betrayed by Dionysos to the fatal wrath of Artemis. Rhadamanthus seems to approach to Minos both in judicial functions and posthumous dignity. He is conveyed expressly to Euboea, by the semi-divine sea-carriers the Phaeacians, to inspect the gigantic corpse of the earth-born Tityus the longest voyage they ever undertook. He is moreover after death promoted to an abode of undisturbed bliss in the Elysian plain at the extremity of the earth.

According to poets later than Homer, Europe is brought over by Zeus from Phoenicia to Crete, where she bears to him three sons, Mines, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. The latter leaves Crete and settles in Lycia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions of Asia Minor, is connected by various mythical genealogies with Crete, though the Sarpedon of the Iliad has no connection with Crete, and is not the son of Europe. Sarpedon having become king of Lycia, was favored by his father, Zeus, with permission to live for three generations. At the same time the youthful Miletus, a favorite of Sarpedon, quitted Crete, and established the city which bore his name on the coast of Asia Minor. Rhadamanthus became sovereign of and lawgiver among the islands in the Aegean: he subsequently went to Boeotia, where he married the widowed Alcmene, mother of Heracles.

Europe finds in Crete a king Asterius, who marries her and adopts her children by Zeus: this Asterius is the son of Kres, the eponym of the island, or (according to another genealogy by which it was attempted to be made out that Mines was of Arian race) he was a son of the daughter of Kres by Tektamus, the son of Dorus, who had migrated into the island from Greece.

Minos married Pasiphae, daughter of the god Helios and Perseis, by whom he had Katreus, Deucalion, Glaukus, Androgeos,—names marked in the legendary narrative,— together with several daughters, among whom were Ariadne and Phaedra. He offended Poseidon by neglecting to fulfill a solemnly-made vow, and the displeased god afflicted his wife Pasiphae with a monstrous passion for a bull. The great artist Daedalus, son of Eupalamus, a fugitive from Athens, became the confidant of this amour, from which sprang the Minotaur, a creature half man and half bull. This Minotaur was imprisoned by Minos in the labyrinth, an inextricable enclosure constructed by Dedalus for that express purpose, by order of Minos.

Minos acquired great nautical power, and expelled the Carian inhabitants from many of the islands of the Aegean, which he placed under the government of his sons on the footing of tributaries. He undertook several expeditions against various places on the coast—one against Nisus, the son of Pandion, king of Megara, who had amongst the hair of his head one peculiar lock of a purple color: an oracle had pronounced that his life and reign would never be in danger so long as he preserved this precious lock. The city would have remained inexpugnable, if Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, had not conceived a violent passion for Minos. While her father was asleep, she cut off the lock on which his safety hung, so that the Cretan king soon became victorious. Instead of performing his promise to carry Scylla away with him to Crete, he cast her from the stern of his vessel into the sea: both Scylla and Nisus were changed into birds.

Androgeos, son of Minos having displayed such rare qualities as to vanquish all his competitors at the Panathenaic festival in Athens, was sent by Egeus the Athenian king to contend against the bull of Marathon,—an enterprise in which he perished, and Minos made war upon Athens to avenge his death. He was for a long time unable to take the city: at length he prayed to his father Zeus to aid him in obtaining redress from the Athenians, and Zeus sent upon them pestilence and famine. In vain did they endeavor to avert these calamities by offering up as propitiatory sacrifices the four daughters of Hyacinthus. Their sufferings still continued, and the oracle directed them to submit to any terms which Minos might exact. He required that they should send to Crete a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, periodically, to be devoured by the Minotaur,—offered to him in a labyrinth constructed by Dadalus, including countless different passages, out of which no person could escape.

Every ninth year this offering was to be dispatched. The more common story was, that the youths and maidens thus destined to destruction were selected by lot—but the logographer Hellanikus said that Minos came to Athens and chose them himself. The third period for dispatching the victims had arrived, and Athens was plunged in the deepest affliction, when Theseus determined to devote himself as one of them, and either to terminate the sanguinary tribute or to perish. He prayed to Poseidon for help, and the Delphian god assured him that Aphrodite would sustain and extricate him. On arriving at Knossos he was fortunate enough to captivate the affections of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, who supplied him with a sword and a duo of thread. With the former he contrived to kill the Minotaur, the latter served to guide his footsteps in escaping from the labyrinth. Having accomplished this triumph, he left Crete with his ship and companions unhurt, carrying off Ariadne, whom however he soon abandoned on the island of Naxos. On his way borne to Athens, he stopped at Delos, where he offered a grateful sacrifice to Apollo for his escape, and danced along with the young men and maidens whom he had rescued from the Minotaur, a dance called the Geranus, imitated from the twists and convolutions of the Cretan labyrinth. It had been concerted with his father Egeus, that if he succeeded in his enterprise against the Minotaur, he should on his return hoist white sails in his ship in place of the black canvas which she habitually carried when employed on this mournful embassy. But Theseus forgot to make the change of sails; so that Egeus, seeing the ship return with her equipment of mourning unaltered, was impressed with the sorrowful conviction that his son had perished, and cast himself into the sea. The ship which made this voyage was preserved by the Athenians with careful solicitude, being constantly repaired with new timbers, down to the time of the Phalerian Demetrius: every year she was sent from Athens to Delos with a solemn sacrifice and specially-nominated envoys. The priest of Apollo decked her stern with garlands before she quitted the port, and during the time which elapsed until her return, the city was understood to abstain from all acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was unlawful to put to death any person even under formal sentence by the dikastery. This accidental circumstance becomes especially memorable, from its having postponed for thirty days the death of the lamented Socrates.

The legend respecting Theseus, and his heroic rescue of the seven noble youths and maidens from the jaws of the Minotaur, was thus both commemorated and certified to the Athenian public, by the annual holy ceremony and by the unquestioned identity of the vessel employed in it. There were indeed many varieties in the mode of narrating the incident; and some of the Attic logographers tried to rationalize the fable by transforming the Minotaur into a general or a powerful athlete, named Taurus, whom Theseus vanquished in Crete. But this altered version never overbore the old fanciful character of the tale as maintained by the poets. A great number of other religious ceremonies and customs, as well as several chapels or sacred enclosures in honor of different heroes, were connected with different acts and special ordinances of Theseus. To every Athenian who took part in the festivals of the Oschophoria, the Pyanepsia, or the Kybernesia, the name of this great hero was familiar, and the motives for offering to him solemn worship at his own special festival of the Theseia, became evident and impressive.

The same Athenian legends which ennobled and decorated the character of Theseus, painted in repulsive colors the attributes of Minos; and the traits of the old Homeric comrade of Zeus were buried under those of the conqueror and oppressor of Athens. His history like that of the other legendary personages of Greece, consists almost entirely of a string of family romances and tragedies. His son Katreus, father of Aerope, wife of Atreus, was apprized by an oracle that he would perish by the hand of one of his own children: he accordingly sent them out of the island, and Althemenes, his son, established himself in Rhodes. Katreus having become old, and fancying that he had outlived the warning of the oracle, went over to Rhodes to see Althemenes. In an accidental dispute which arose between his attendants and the islanders, Althemenes inadvertently took part and slew his father without knowing him. Glaukus, the youngest son of Minos, pursuing a mouse, fell into a reservoir of honey and was drowned. No one knew what had become of him, and his father was inconsolable; at length the Argeian Polyeidus, a prophet wonderfully endowed by the gods, both discovered the boy and restored him to life, to the exceeding joy of Minos.

The latter at last found his death in an eager attempt to overtake and punish Thedalus. This great artist, the eponymous hero of the Attic gens or deme called the Dedalids, and the descendant of Erechtheus through Metion, had been tried at the tribunal of Areiopagus and banished for killing his nephew Talos, whose rapidly improving skill excited his envy. He took refuge in Crete, where he acquired the confidence of Minos, and was employed (as has been already mentioned) in constructing the labyrinth; subsequently however he fell under the displeasure of Minos, and was confined as a close prisoner in the inextricable windings of his own edifice. His unrivalled skill and resource however did not forsake him. He manufactured wings both for himself and for his son Ikarus, with which they flew over the sea: the father arrived safely in Sicily at Kamikus, the residence of the Sikulian king Kokalus, but the son, disdaining paternal example and admonition, flew so high that his wings were melted by the sun and he fell into the sea, which from him was called the Ikarian sea.

Dedalus remained for some time in Sicily, leaving in various parts of the island many prodigious evidences of mechanical and architectural skill. At length Minos bent upon regaining possession of his person, undertook an expedition against Kokalus with a numerous fleet and army. Kokalus affecting readiness to deliver up the fugitive, and receiving Minos with apparent friendship, ordered a bath to be prepared for him by his three daughters, who, eager to protect Dedalus at any price, drowned the Cretan king in the bath with hot water. Many of the Cretans who had accompanied him remained in Sicily and founded the town of Minoa, which they denominated after him. But not long afterwards Zeus roused all the inhabitants of Crete (except the towns of Polichna and Presus) to undertake with one accord an expedition against Kamikus for the purpose of avenging the death of Minos. They besieged Kamikus in vain for five years, until at last famine compelled them to return. On their way along the coast of Italy, in the Gulf of Tarentum, a terrible storm destroyed their fleet and obliged them to settle permanently in the country: they founded Hyria with other cities, and became Messapian Iapygians. Other settlers, for the most part Greeks, immigrated into Crete to the spots which this movement had left vacant, and in the second generation after Minos occurred the Trojan war. The departed Minos was exceedingly offended with the Cretans for cooperating in avenging the injury to Menelaus, since the Greeks generally had lent no aid to the Cretans in their expedition against the town of Kamikus. He sent upon Crete, after the return of Idomeneus from Troy, such terrible visitations of famine and pestilence, that the population again died out or expatriated, and was again renovated by fresh immigrations. The intolerable suffering thus brought upon the Cretans by the anger of Minos, for having cooperated in the general Grecian aid to Menelaus, was urged by them to the Greeks as the reason why they could take no part in resisting the invasion of Xerxes; and it is even pretended that they were advised and encouraged to adopt this ground of excuse by the Delphian oracle.

Such is the Minos of the poets and logographers, with his legendary and romantic attributes: the familiar comrade of the great Zeus,—the judge among the dead in Hades,—the husband of Pasiphae, daughter of the god Helios,—the father of the goddess Ariadne, as well as of Androgeos, who perishes and is worshipped at Athens, and of the boy Glaukus, who is miraculously restored to life by a prophet,—the person beloved by Scylla, and the amorous pursuer of the nymph or goddess Britomartis,—the proprietor of the Labyrinth and of the Minotaur, and the exacter of a periodical tribute of youths and maidens from Athens as food for this monster,—lastly, the follower of the fugitive artist Dedalus to Kamikus, and the victim of the three ill-disposed daughters of Kokalus in a bath. With this strongly-marked portrait, the Minos of Thucydides and Aristotle has scarcely anything in common except the name. He is the first to acquire Thalassocracy, or command of the Aegean sea: he expels the Carian inhabitants from the Cyclades islands, and sends thither fresh colonists under his own sons; he puts down piracy, in order that he may receive his tribute regularly; lastly, he attempts to conquer Sicily, but fails in the enterprise and perishes. Here we have conjectures, derived from the analogy of the Athenian maritime empire in the historical times, substituted in place of the fabulous incidents, and attached to the name of Minos.

In the fable, a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens is paid to him periodically by the Athenians; in the historicized narrative this character of a tribute-collector is preserved, but the tribute is money collected from dependent islands; and Aristotle points out to us how conveniently Crete is situated to exercise empire over the Aegean. The expedition against Kamikus, instead of being directed to the recovery of the fugitive Dedalus, is an attempt on the part of the great thalassocrat to conquer Sicily. Herodotus gives us generally the same view of the character of Minos as a great maritime king, but his notice of the expedition against Kamicus includes the mention of Dedalus as the intended object of it. Ephorus, while he described Minos as a commanding and comprehensive lawgiver imposing his commands under the sanction of Zeus, represented him as the imitator of an earlier lawgiver named Rhadamanthus, and also as an immigrant into Crete from the Eolic-Mount Ida, along with the priests or sacred companions of Zeus called the Ideai Dactyli. Aristotle too points him out as the author of the Syssitia, or public meals common in Crete as well as at Sparta,—other divergences in a new direction from the spirit of the old fables.

The contradictory attributes ascribed to Minos, together with the perplexities experienced by those who wished to introduce a regular chronological arrangement into these legendary events, has led both in ancient and in modern times to the supposition of two kings named Minos, one the grandson of the other,—Minos I, the son of Zeus, lawgiver and judge,—Minos II, the thalassocrat,—a gratuitous conjecture, which, without solving the problem required, only adds one to the numerous artifices employed for imparting the semblance of history to the disparate matter of legend. The Cretans were at all times, from Homer downward, expert and practiced seamen. But that they were ever united under one government, or ever exercised maritime dominion in the Aegean is a fact which we are neither able to affirm nor to deny. The Odyssey, in so far as it justifies any inference at all, points against such a supposition, since it recognizes a great diversity both of inhabitants and of languages in the island, and designates Minos as king specially of Knossos: it refutes still more positively the idea that Minos put down piracy, which the Homeric Cretans as well as others continue to practice without scruple.

Herodotus, though he in some places speaks of Minos as a person historically cognizable, yet in one passage severs him pointedly from the generation of man. The Samian despot “Polycrates (he tells us) was the first person who aspired to nautical dominion, excepting Mineos of Knossos, and others before him (if any such there ever were) who may have ruled the sea; but Polycrates is the first of that which is called the generation of man who aspired with much chance of success to govern Ionia and the islands of the Aegean”. Here we find it manifestly intimated that Minos did not belong to the generation of man, and the tale given by the historian respecting the tremendous calamities which the wrath of the departed Mineos inflicted on Crete confirms the impression. The king of Knossos is a god or a hero, but not a man; he belongs to legend, not to history. He is the son as well as the familiar companion of Zeus; he marries the daughter of Helios, and Ariadne is numbered among his offspring. To this superhuman person are ascribed the oldest and most revered institutions of the island, religious and political, together with a period of supposed ante-historical dominion. That there is much of Cretan religious ideas and practice embodied in the fables concerning Minos can hardly be doubted: nor is it improbable that the tale of the youths and maidens sent from Athens may be based in some expiatory offerings ordered to a Cretan divinity. The orgiastic worship of Zeus, solemnized by the armed priests with impassioned motions and violent excitement, was of ancient date in that island, as well as the connection with the worship of Apollo both at Delphi and at Delos. To analyze the fables and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic invention, and the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must forever remain indissolubly amalgamated as the poet originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his auditors. Hoeck, in his instructive and learned collection of facts respecting ancient Crete, construes the mythical genealogy of Minos to denote a combination of the orgiastic worship of Zeus, indigenous among the Eteokretes, with the worship of the moon imported from Phoenicia, and signified by the names Europe, Pasiphae, and Ariadne. This is specious as a conjecture, but I do not venture to speak of it in terms of greater confidence.

From the connection of religious worship and legendary tales between Crete and various parts of Asia Minor,—the Troad, the coast of Miletus and Lycia, especially between Mount Ida in Crete and Mount Ida in Elis—it seems reasonable to infer an ethnographical kindred or relationship between the inhabitants anterior to the period of Hellenic occupation. The tales of Cretan settlement at Minoa and Engyon on the south-western coast of Sicily, and in Iapygia on the Gulf of Tarentum, conduct us to a similar presumption, though the want of evidence forbids our tracing it farther. In the time of Herodotus, the Eteokretes, or aboriginal inhabitants of the island, were confined to Polichna and Presus; but in earlier times, prior to the encroachments of the Hellenes, they had occupied the larger portion, if not the whole of the island. Mines was originally their hero, subsequently adopted by the immigrant Hellenes,—at least Herodotus considers him as barbarian, not Hellenic.

XII

ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.

THE ship Argo was the theme of many songs during the oldest periods of the Grecian epic, even earlier than the Odyssey. The king Aetes, from whom she is departing, the hero Jason, who commands her, and the goddess Here, who watches over him, enabling the Argo to traverse distances and to escape dangers which no ship had ever before encountered, are all circumstances briefly glanced at by Odysseus in his narrative to Alkinous. Moreover, Euneus, the son of Jason and Hypsipyle. governs Lemnos during the siege of Troy by Agamemnon, and carries on a friendly traffic with the Grecian camp, purchasing from them their Trojan prisoners.

The legend of Halus in Achaia Phthiotis, respecting the religious solemnities connected with the family of Athamas and Phryxus (related in a previous chapter), is also interwoven with the voyage of the Argonauts; and both the legend and the solemnities seem evidently of great antiquity. We know further, that the adventures of the Argo were narrated not only by Hesiod and in the Hesiodic poems, but also by Eumelus and the author of the Naupactian verses — by the latter seemingly at considerable length. But these poems are unfortunately lost, nor have we any means of determining what the original story was; for the narrative, as we have it, borrowed from later sources, is enlarged by local tales from the subsequent Greek colonies—Kyzikus, Herakleia, Sinope, and others.

Jason, commanded by Pelias to depart in quest of the golden fleece belonging to the speaking ram which had carried away Phryxus and Helle, was encouraged by the oracle to invite the noblest youth of Greece to his aid, and fifty of the most distinguished amongst them obeyed the call. Heracles, Theseus, Telamon and Peleus, Castor and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus—Zete and Kalias, the winged sons of Boreas— Meleager, Amphiaraus, Kepheus, Laertes, Autolykus, Menoetius, Aktor, Erginus, Euphemus, Ankaeus, Poeas, Periklymenus, Augeas, Eurytus, Admetus, Akastus, Kaeneus, Euryalus, Pencleos and Leitus, Askalaphus and Ialmenus, were among them. Argus the son of Phryxus, directed by the promptings of Athene, built the ship, inserting in the prow a piece of timber from the celebrated oak of Dodona, which was endued with the faculty of speech: Tiphys was the steersman, Idmon (the son of Apollo) and Mopsus accompanied them as prophets, while Orpheus came to amuse their weariness and reconcile their quarrels with his harp.

First they touched at the island of Lemnos, in which at that time there were no men; for the women, infuriated by jealousy and ill-treatment, had put to death their fathers, husbands and brothers. The Argonauts, after some difficulty, were received with friendship, and even admitted into the greatest intimacy. They staid some months, and the subsequent population of the island was the fruit of their visit. Hypsipyle, the queen of the island, bore to Jason two sons.

They then proceeded onward along the coast of Thrace, up the Hellespont, to the southern coast of the Propontis, inhabited by the Doliones and their king Kyzikus. Here they were kindly entertained, but after their departure were driven back to the same spot by a storm; and as they landed in the dark, the inhabitants did not know them. A battle took place, in which the chief, Kyzikus, was killed by Jason; whereby much grief was occasioned as soon as the real facts became known. After Kyzikus had been interred with every demonstration of mourning and solemnity, the Argonauts proceeded along the coast of Ilysia. In this part of the voyage they left Heracles behind. For Hylas, his favorite youthful companion, had been stolen away by the nymphs of a fountain, and Heracles, wandering about in search of him, neglected to return. At last he sorrowfully retired, exacting hostages from the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Kius that they would persist in the search.

They next stopped in the country of the Bebrykians, where the boxing contest took place between the king Amykus and the Argonaut Pollux: they then proceeded onward to Bithynia, the residence of the blind prophet Phineus. His blindness had been inflicted by Poseidon as a punishment for having communicated to Phryxus the way to Colchis. The choice had been allowed to him between death and blindness, and he had preferred the latter. He was also tormented by the harpies, winged monsters who came down from the clouds whenever his table was set, snatched the food from his lips and imparted to it a foul and unapproachable odor. In the midst of this misery, he hailed the Argonauts as his deliverers—his prophetic powers having enabled him to foresee their coming. The meal being prepared for him, the harpies approached as usual, but Zetes and Kalias, the winged sons of Boreas, drove them away and pursued them. They put forth all their speed, and prayed to Zeus to be enabled to overtake the monsters; when Hermes appeared and directed them to desist, the harpies being forbidden further to molest Phineus, and retiring again to their native cavern in Crete.

Phineus, grateful for the relief afforded to him by the Argonauts, forewarned them of the dangers of their voyage and of the precautions necessary for their safety; and through his suggestions they were enabled to pass through the terrific rocks called Symplegades. These were two rocks which alternately opened and shut, with a swift and violent collision, so that it was difficult even for a bird to fly through during the short interval. When the Argo arrived at the dangerous spot, Euphemus let loose a dove which flew through and just escaped with the loss of a few feathers of her tail. This was a signal to the Argonauts, according to the prediction of Phineus, that they might attempt the passage with confidence. Accordingly they rowed with all their might, and passed safely through: the closing rocks, held for a moment asunder by the powerful arms of Athene, just crushed the ornaments at the stern of their vessel. It had been decreed by the gods, that so soon as any ship once got through, the passage should forever afterwards be safe and easy to all. The rocks became fixed in their separate places, and never again closed.

After again halting on the coast of the Maryandinians, where their steersman Tiphys died, as well as in the country of the Amazons, and after picking up the sons of Phryxus, who had been cast away by Poseidon in their attempt to return from Colchis to Greece, they arrived in safety at the river Phasis and the residence of Aetes. In passing by Mount Caucasus, they saw the eagle which gnawed the liver of Prometheus nailed to the rock, and heard the groans of the sufferer himself. The sons of Phryxus were cordially welcomed by their mother Chalciope. Application was made to Aetes, that he would grant to the Argonauts, heroes of divine parentage and sent forth by the mandate of the gods, possession of the golden fleece: their aid in return was proffered to him against any or all of his enemies. But the king was wroth, and peremptorily refused, except upon conditions which seemed impracticable. Hephaestus had given him two ferocious and untamable bulls, with brazen feet, which breathed fire from their nostrils: Jason was invited, as a proof both of his illustrious descent and of the sanction of the gods to his voyage, to harness these animals to the yoke, so as to plough a large field and sow it with dragon’s teeth. Perilous as the condition was, each one of the heroes volunteered to make the attempt. Idmon especially encouraged Jason to undertake it and the goddesses Here and Aphrodite made straight the way for him. Medea, the daughter of Aetes and Eidyia, having seen the youthful hero in his interview with her father, had conceived towards him a passion which disposed her to employ every means for his salvation and success. She had received from Hekate preeminent magical powers, and she prepared for Jason the powerful Prometheian unguent, extracted from an herb which had grown where the blood of Prometheus dropped. The body of Jason having been thus pre-medicated, became invulnerable either by fire or by warlike weapons. He undertook the enterprise, yoked the bulls without suffering injury, and ploughed the field: when he had sown the dragon’s teeth, armed men sprung out of the furrows. But he had been forewarned by Medea to cast a vast rock into the midst of them, upon which they began to fight with each other, so that he was easily enabled to subdue them all.

The task prescribed had thus been triumphantly performed. Yet Aetes not only refused to hand over the golden fleece, but even took measures for secretly destroying the Argonauts and burning their vessel. He designed to murder them during the night after a festal banquet; but Aphrodite, watchful for the safety of Jason, inspired the Kolchian king at the critical moment with an irresistible inclination for his nuptial bed. While he slept, the wise Idmon counseled the Argonauts to make their escape, and Medea agreed to accompany them. She lulled to sleep by a magic potion the dragon who guarded the golden fleece, placed that much-desired prize on board the vessel, and accompanied Jason with his companions in their flight, carrying along with her the young Apsyrtus, her brother.

Aetes, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the stratagem of Medea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Aetes on reaching the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped. The spot on which the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi. This fratricide of Medea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation of Zeus, that he condemned the Argo and her crew to a trying voyage, full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home. The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until its junction with the Nile, they came down the Nile into Egypt, from whence they carried the Argo on their shoulders by a fatiguing land-journey to the lake Tritonis in Libya. Here they were rescued from the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god Triton, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphemus a clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed by the flourishing and powerful city of Cyrene, whose princes the Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphemus.

Refreshed by the hospitality of Triton, the Argonauts found themselves again on the waters of the Mediterranean in their way homeward. But before they arrived at Iolkos they visited Circe, at the island of Aeaea, where Medea was purified for the murder of Apsyrtus: they also stopped at Corcyra, then called Drepane, where Alkinous received and protected them. The cave in that island where the marriage of Medea with Jason was consummated, was still shown in the time of the historian Timaeus, as well as the altars to Apollo which she had erected, and the rites and sacrifices which she had first instituted. After leaving Korkyra, the Argo was overtaken by a perilous storm near the island of Thera. The heroes were saved from imminent peril by the supernatural aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an arrow which pierced the waves like a track of light, caused a new island suddenly to spring up in their track and present to them a port of refuge. The island was called Anaphé; and the grateful Argonauts established upon it an altar and sacrifices in honor of Apollo Aegletés, which were ever afterwards continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating adventure.

On approaching the coast of Crete, the Argonauts were prevented from landing by Talos; a man of brass, fabricated by Hephaestus, and presented by him to Minos for the protection of the island. This vigilant sentinel hurled against the approaching vessel fragments of rock, and menaced the heroes with destruction. But Medea deceived him by a stratagem and killed him; detecting and assailing the one vulnerable point in his body. The Argonauts were thus enabled to land and refresh themselves. They next proceeded onward to Aegina, where however they again experienced resistance before they could obtain water—then along the coast of Euboea and Locris back to Iolkos in the gulf of Pagasae, the place from whence they hail started. The proceedings of Pelias during their absence, and the signal revenge taken upon him by Medea after their return, have already been narrated in a preceding section. The ship Argo herself; in which the chosen heroes of Greece had performed so long a voyage and braved so many dangers, was consecrated by Jason to Poseidon at the isthmus of Corinth. According to another account, she was translated to the stars by Athene, and became a constellation.

Traces of the presence of the Argonauts were found not only in the regions which lay between Iolkos and Colchis, but also in the western portion of the Grecian world— distributed more or less over all the spots visited by Grecian mariners or settled by Grecian colonists, and scarcely less numerous than the wanderings of the dispersed Greeks and Trojans after the capture of Troy. The number of Jasonia, or temples for the heroic worship of Jason, was very great, from Abdera in Thrace, eastward along the coast of the Euxine, to Armenia and Media. The Argonauts had left their anchoring stone on the coast of Bebrykia, near Kyzikus, and there it was preserved during the historical ages in the temple of the Jasonian Athene. They had founded the great temple of the Idaen mother on the mountain Dindymon, near Kyzikus, and the Hieron of Zeus Urios on the Asiatic point at the mouth of the Euxine, near which was also the harbor of Phryxus. Idmon, the prophet of the expedition, who was believed to have died of a wound by a wild boar on the Maryandynian coast, was worshipped by the inhabitants of the Pontic Herakleia with great solemnity, as their Heros Poliuchus, and that too by the special direction of the Delphian god. Autolykus, another companion of Jason, was worshipped as Oekist by the inhabitants of Sinope. Moreover, the historians of Herakleia pointed out a temple of Hekate in the neighboring country of Paphlagonia, first erected by Medea; and the important town Pantikapaeon, on the European side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, ascribed its first settlement to a son of Aetes. When the returning ten thousand Greeks sailed along the coast, called the Jasonian shore, from Sinope to Herakleia, they were told that the grandson of Aetes was reigning king of the territory at the mouth of the Phasis, and the anchoring-places where the Argo had stopped were specially pointed out to them. In the lofty regions of the Moschi, near Colchis, stood the temple of Leukothea, founded by Phryxus, which remained both rich and respected down to the times of the kings of Pontus, and where it was an inviolable rule not to offer up a ram. The town of Dioskurias, north of the river Phasis, was believed to have been hallowed by the presence of Castor and Pollux in the Argo, and to have received from them its appellation. Even the interior of Media and Armenia was full of memorials of Jason and Medea and their son Medus, or of Armenus the son of Jason, from whom the Greeks deduced not only the name and foundation of the Medes and Armenians, but also the great operation of cutting a channel through the mountains for the efflux of the river Araxes, which they compared to that of the Peneius in Thessaly. And the Roman general Pompey, after having completed the conquest and expulsion of Mithridates, made long marches through Colchis into the regions of Caucasus, for the express purpose of contemplating the spots which had been ennobled by the exploits of the Argonauts, the Dioskuri and Heracles.

In the west, memorials either of the Argonauts or of the pursuing Kolchians were pointed out in Corcyra, in Crete, in Epirus near the Akrokeraunian mountains, in the islands called Apsyrtides near the Illyrian coast, at the bay of Caieta as well as at Poseidonia on the southern coast of Italy, in the island of Aethalia or Elba, and in Libya.

Such is a brief outline of the Argonautic expedition, one of the most celebrated and widely-diffused among the ancient tales of Greece. Since so many able men have treated it as an undisputed reality, and even made it the pivot of systematic chronological calculations, I may here repeat the opinion long ago expressed by Heyne, and even indicated by Burmann, that the process of dissecting the story, in search of a basis of fact, is one altogether fruitless. Not only are we unable to assign the date or identify the crew, or decipher the log-book, of the Argo, but we have no means of settling even the preliminary question, whether the voyage be matter of fact badly reported, or legend from the beginning. The widely-distant spots in which the monuments of the voyage were shown, no less than the incidents of the voyage itself, suggests no other parentage than epical fancy. The supernatural and the romantic not only constitute an inseparable portion of the narrative, but even embrace all the prominent and characteristic features; if they do not comprise the whole, and if there be intermingled along with them any sprinkling of historical or geographical fact, — a question to us indeterminable, — there is at least no solvent by which it can be disengaged, and no test by which it can be recognized. Wherever the Grecian mariner sailed, he carried his religious and patriotic myths along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of the long wanderings of Jason, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Dionysus, Triptolemus or Io; it was pleasing to him in success, and consoling to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular with the seaman, than the history of the primeval ship Argo and her distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and especially the Tyndarids Castor and Pollux, the heavenly protector: invoked during storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argo in the minds of future corners or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvelous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.

The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown space in the same manner as with past and unrecorded time. They created a mythical geography for the former, and a mythical history for the latter. But there was this material difference between the two: that while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as authentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old myths; and this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians and geographers of antiquity,—for it was painful to them to abandon any portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable basis of truth.

Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod, and the other Greek poets and logographers,—Erytheia, the garden of the Hesperides, the garden of Phoebus, to which Boreas transported the Attic maiden Orithyia, the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, the Elysian plain, the fleeting island of Aeolus, Thrinakia, the country of the Ethiopians, the Laestrygones, the Cyclopes, the Lotophagi, the Sirens, the Cimmerians and the Gorgons, etc. These are places which (to use the expression of Pindar respecting the Hyperboreans) you cannot approach either by sea or by land: the wings of the poet alone can carry you thither. They were not introduced into the Greek mind by incorrect geographical reports, but, on the contrary, had their origin in the legend, and passed from thence into the realities of geography, which they contributed much to pervert and confuse. For the navigator or emigrant, starting with an unsuspicious faith in their real existence, looked out for them in his distant voyages, and constantly fancied that he had seen or heard of them, so as to be able to identify their exact situation. The most contradictory accounts indeed, as might be expected, were often given respecting the latitude and longitude of such fanciful spots, but this did not put an end to the general belief in their real existence.

In the present advanced state of geographical knowledge, the story of that man who after reading Gulliver's Travels went to look in his map for Lilliput, appears an absurdity. But those who fixed the exact locality of the floating island of Aeolus or the rocks of the Sirens did much the same; and, with their ignorance of geography and imperfect appreciation of historical evidence, the error was hardly to be avoided. The ancient belief which fixed the Sirens on the islands of Sirenusae off the coast of Naples —the Cyclopes, Erytheia, and the Laestrygones in Sicily—the Lotophagi on the island of Meninx near the Lesser Syrtis—the Phaeakians at Korkyra,—and the goddess Circe at the promontory of Circeium—took its rise at a time when these regions were first Hellenized and comparatively little visited. Once embodied in the local legends, and attested by visible monuments and ceremonies, it continued for a long time unassailed; and Thucydides seems to adopt it, in reference to Corcyra and Sicily before the Hellenic colonization, as matter of fact generally unquestionable, though little avouched as to details. But when geographical knowledge became extended, and the criticism upon the ancient epic was more or less systematized by the literary men of Alexandria and Pergamus, it appeared to many of them impossible that Odysseus could have seen so many wonders, or undergone such monstrous dangers, within limits so narrow, and in the familiar track between the Nile and the Tiber. The scene of his weather-driven course was then shifted further westward. Many convincing evidences were discovered, especially by Asklepiades of Myrlea, of his having visited various places in Iberia: several critics imagined that he had wandered about in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Strait of Gibraltar, and they recognized a section of Lotophagi on the coast of Mauritania, over and above those who dwelt on the island of Meninx. On the other hand, Eratosthenes and Apollodorus treated the places visited by Odysseus as altogether unreal, for which skepticism they incurred much reproach.

The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed Geryon with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extraterrestrial, on the farther side of the circuinfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartessus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gades. But the historian Hekataeus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Herakles should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryon to Eurystheus at Mycenae, and he pronounced Geryon to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Mycenae (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian, who cites this passage from Hekataeus, concurs in the same view,— an illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.

Both the track and the terminus of the Argonautic voyage appear in the most ancient epic as little within the conditions of reality, as the speaking timbers or the semi-divine crew of the vessel. In the Odyssey, Aetes and Circe (Hesiod names Medea also) are brother and sister, offspring of Helios. Aeaean island, adjoining the circumfluous ocean, “where the house and dancing-ground of Eos are situated, and where Helios rises”, is both the residence of Circe and of Aetes, inasmuch as Odysseus, in returning from the former, follows the same course as the Argo had previously taken in returning from the latter. Even in the conception of Mimnermus, about 600 BC, Aea still retained its fabulous attributes in conjunction with the ocean and Helios, without having been yet identified with any known portion of the solid earth; and it was justly remarked by Demetrius of Skepsis in antiquity (though Strabo cries to refute him), that neither Homer nor Mimnermus designates Colchis either as the residence of Aetes, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But some of the poems ascribed to Eumelus were the first which mentioned Aetes and Colchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian mythical genealogy. These poems seem to have been composed subsequent to the foundation of Sinope, and to the commencement of Grecian settlement on the Borysthenes, between the years 600 and 500 BC. The Greek mariners who explored and colonized the southern coast of the Euxine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and its barbarous inhabitants: it was the easternmost point which Grecian navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained, and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus. They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found “the house of Eos (the morning) and the rising place of the sun”, and that the river Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct them to the circumfluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of Aea, and the Fabulous and real title gradually became associated together into one compound appellation,—the Colchian Aea, or Aea of Colchis. While Colchis was thus entered on the map as a fit representative for the Homeric “house of the morning”, the narrow strait of the Thracian Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplegades, or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argo had been the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Herakleia and Sinope, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to give this direction to the voyage; so that in the time of Hekataeus it had become the established belief that the Argo had started from Iolkos and gone to Colchis.

Aetes thus received his home from the legendary faith and fancy of the eastern Greek navigators: his sister Circe, originally his fellow-resident, was localized by the western. The Hesiodic and other poems, giving expression to the imaginative impulses of the inhabitants of Cumae and other early Grecian settlers in Italy and Sicily, had referred the wanderings of Odysseus to the western or Tyrrhenian sea, and had planted the Cyclopes, the Laestrygones, the floating island of Aeolus, the Lotophagi, the Phaeacians, etc., about the coast of Sicily, Italy, Libya, and Corcyra. In this way the Aeaean island,— the residence of Circe, and the extreme point of the wanderings of Odysseus, from whence he passes only to the ocean and into Hades — came to be placed in the far west, while the Aea of Aetes was in the far east,— not unlike our East and West Indies. The Homeric brother and sister were separated and sent to opposite extremities of the Grecian terrestrial horizon.

The track from Iolkos to Colchis, however, though plausible as far as it went, did not realize all the conditions of the genuine fabulous voyage: it did not explain the evidences of the visit of these maritime heroes which were to be found in Libya, in Crete, in Anaphe, in Corcyra, in the Adriatic Gulf, in Italy and in Aethalia. It became necessary to devise another route for them in their return, and the Hesiodic narrative was (as I have before observed), that they came back by the circumfluous ocean; first going up the river Phasis into the circumfluous ocean; following that deep and gentle stream until they entered the Nile, and came down its course to the coast of Libya. This seems also to have been the belief of Hekataeus. But presently several Greeks (and Herodotus among them) began to discard the Idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, which had pervaded their old geographical and astronomical fables, and which explained the supposed easy communication between one extremity of the earth and another. Another idea was then started for the returning voyage of the Argonauts. It was supposed that the river Ister, or Danube, flowing from the Rhipaean mountains in the north-west of Europe, divided itself into two branches, one of which fell into the Euxine Sea, and the other into the Adriatic.

The Argonauts, fleeing from the pursuit of Aetes, had been obliged to abandon their regular course homeward, and had gone from the Euxine Sea up the Ister; then passing down the other branch of that river, they had entered into the Adriatic, the Kolchian pursuers following them. Such is the story given by Apollanius Rhodius from Timagetus, and accepted even by so able a geographer as Eratosthenes—who preceded him by one generation, and who, though skeptical in regard to the localities visited by Odysseus, seems to have been a firm believer in the reality of the Argonautic voyage. Other historians again, among whom was Timaeus, though they considered the ocean as an outer sea, and no longer admitted the existence of the old Homeric ocean-stream, yet imagined a story for the return-voyage of the Argonauts somewhat resembling the old tale of Hesiod and Hekataeus. They alleged that the Argo, after entering into the Palus Maeotis, had followed the upward course of the river Tanais; that she had then been carried overland and launched in a river which had its mouth in the ocean or great outer sea. When in the ocean, she had coasted along the north and west of Europe until she reached Gades and the Strait of Gibraltar, where she entered into the Mediterranean, and there visited the many places specified in the fable. Of this long voyage, in the outer sea to the north and west of Europe, many traces were affirmed to exist along the coast of the ocean. There was again a third version, according to which the Argonauts came back as they went, through the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont. In this way geographical plausibility was indeed maintained, but a large portion of the fabulous matter was thrown overboard.

Such were the various attempts made to reconcile the Argonautic legend with enlarged geographical knowledge and improved historical criticism. The problem remained unsolved, but the faith in the legend did not the less continue. It was a faith originally generated at a time when the unassisted narrative of the inspired poet sufficed for the conviction of his hearers; it consecrated one among the capital exploits of that heroic and superhuman race, whom the Greek was accustomed at once to look back upon as his ancestors and to worship conjointly with his gods: it lay too deep in his mind either to require historical evidence for its support, or to be overthrown by geographical difficulties as they were then appreciated. Supposed traces of the past event, either preserved in the names of places, or embodied in standing religious customs with their explanatory comments, served as sufficient authentication in the eyes of the curious inquirer. And even men trained in a more severe school of criticism contented themselves with eliminating the palpable contradictions and softening down the supernatural and romantic events, so as to produce an Argonautic expedition of their own invention as the true and accredited history. Strabo, though he can neither overlook nor explain the geographical impossibilities of the narrative, supposes himself to have discovered the basis of actual fact, which the original poets had embellished or exaggerated. The golden fleece was typical of the great wealth of Colchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by the rivers; and the voyage of Jason was in reality an expedition at the head of a considerable army, with which he plundered this wealthy country and made extensive conquests in the interior. Strabo has nowhere laid down what he supposes to have been the exact measure and direction of Jason’s march, but he must have regarded it as very long, since he classes Jason with Dionysus and Heracles, and emphatically characterizes all the three as having traversed wider spaces of ground than any moderns could equal. Such was the compromise which a mind like that of Strabo made with the ancient legends. He shaped or cut them down to the level of his own credence, and in this waste of historical criticism, without any positive evidence, he took to himself the credit of greater penetration than the literal believers, while he escaped the necessity of breaking formally with the bygone heroic world

XIII

LEGENDS OF THEBES.

THE Boeotians generally, throughout the historical age, though well-endowed with bodily strength and courage, are represented as proverbially deficient in intelligence, taste and fancy. But the legendary population of Thebes, the Kadmeians, are rich in mythical antiquities, divine as well as heroic. Both Dionysus and Heracles recognize Thebes as their natal city. Moreover, the two sieges of Thebes by Adrastus, even taken apart from Cadmus, Antiope, Amphion and Zethus, etc., are the most prominent and most characteristic exploits, next to the siege of Troy, of that preexisting race of heroes who lived in the imagination of the historical Hellenes.

It is not Cadmus, but the brothers Amphion and Zethus, who are given to us in the Odyssey as the first founders of Thebes and the first builders of its celebrated walls. They are the sons of Zeus by Antiope, daughter of Asopus. The scholiasts who desire to reconcile this tale with the more current account of the foundation of Thebes by Cadmus, tell us that after the death of Amphion and Zethus, Eurymachus, the warlike king of the Phlegyae, invaded and ruined the newly-settled town, so that Cadmus on arriving was obliged to refound it. But Apollodorus, and seemingly the older logographers before him, placed Cadmus at the top, and inserted the two brothers at a lower point in the series. According to them, Belus and Agenor were the sons of Epaphus, (son of the Argeian Io), by Libya. Agenor went to Phoenicia and there became king: he bad for his offspring Cadmus, Phoenix, Kilix, and a daughter Europa; though in the Iliad Europa is called daughter of Phoenix. Zeus fell in love with Europa, and assuming the shape of a bull, carried her across the sea upon his back from Egypt to Crete, where she bore to him Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. Two out of the three sons sent out by Agenos in search of their lost sister, wearied out by a long-protracted as well as fruitless voyage, abandoned the idea of returning home: Kilix settled in Cilicia, and Cadmus in Thrace. Thasus, the brother or nephew of Cadmus, who had accompanied them in the voyage, settled and gave name to the island of Phasus.

Both Herodotus and Euripides represent Cadmus as an emigrant from Phoenicia, conducting a body of followers in quest of Europa. The account of Apollodorus describes him as having come originally from Libya or Egypt to Phoenicia: we may presume that this was also the statement of the earlier logographers Pherekydes and Hellanikus. Conon, who historicizes and politicizes the whole legend, seems to have found two different accounts; one connecting Cadmus with Egypt, another bringing him from Phoenicia. He tries to melt down the two into one, by representing that the Phoenicians, who sent out Cadmus, had acquired great power in Egypt—that the seat of their kingdom was the Egyptian Thebes — that Cadmus was dispatched, under pretense indeed of finding his lost sister, but really on a project of conquest—and that the name Thebes, which he gave to his new establishment in Boeotia, was borrowed from Thebes in Egypt, his ancestorial seats

Cadmus went from Thrace to Delphi to procure information respecting his sister Europa, but the god directed him to take no further trouble about her; he was to follow the guidance of a cow, and to found a city on the spot where the animal should lie down. The condition was realized on the site of Thebes. The neighboring fountain Areia was guarded by a fierce dragon, the offspring of Ares, who destroyed all the persons sent to fetch water. Cadmus killed the dragon, and at the suggestion of Athena sowed his teeth in the earth, there sprang up at once the armed men called the Sparti, among whom he flung stones, and they immediately began to assault each other until all were slain except five. Ares, indignant at this slaughter, was about to kill Cadmus; but Zeus appeased him, condemning Cadmus to an expiatory servitude of eight years, after which he married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite—presenting to her the splendid necklace fabricated by the hand of Hephaestus, which had been given by Zeus to Europa. All the gods came to the Cadmeia, the citadel of Thebes, to present congratulations and gifts at these nuptials, which seem to have been hardly less celebrated in the mythical world than those of Peleus and Thetis. The issue of the marriage was one son, Polyderus, and four daughters, Autonoe, Ino, Semele and Agave.

From the five who alone survived of the warriors sprung from the dragon’s teeth, arose five great families or gentes in Thebes; the oldest and noblest of its inhabitants, coeval with the foundation of the town. They were called Sparti, and their name seems to have given rise, not only to the fable of the sowing of the teeth, but also to other etymological narratives.

All the four daughters of Cadmus are illustrious in fabulous history. The, wife of Athamas, the son of Aeolus, has already been included among the legends of the Aeolids. Semele became the mistress of Zeus, and inspired Here with jealousy. Misguided by the malicious suggestions of that goddess, she solicited Zeus to visit her with all the solemnity and terrors which surrounded him when he approached Here herself. The god unwillingly consented, and came in his chariot in the midst of thunder and lightning, under which awful accompaniments the mortal frame of Semele perished. Zeus, taking from her the child of which she was pregnant, sewed it into his own thigh: after the proper interval the child was brought out and born, and became the great god Dionysus or Bacchus. Hermes took him to Ino and Athamas to receive their protection. Afterwards, however, Zeus having transformed him into a kid to conceal him from the persecution of Here, the nymphs of the mountain Nysa became his nurses.

Autonoe, the third daughter of Cadmus, married the pastoral hero or god Aristaeus, and was mother of Aktaeon, a devoted hunter and a favorite companion of the goddess Artemis. She however became displeased with him—either because he looked into a fountain while she was bathing and saw her naked—or according to the legend set forth by the poet Stesichorus, because he loved and courted Semele—or according to Euripides, because he presumptuously vaunted himself as her superior in the chase. She transformed him into a stag, so that his own dogs set upon and devoured him. The rock upon which Aktaeon used to sleep when fatigued with the chase, and the spring whose transparent waters had too clearly revealed the form of the goddess, were shown to Pausanias near Plataea, on the road to Megara.

Agave, the remaining daughter of Cadmus, married Echion, one of the Sparti. The issue of these nuptials was Pentheus, who, when Cadmus became old succeeded him as king of Thebes. In his reign Dionysus appeared as a god, the author or discoverer of the vine with all its blessings. He had wandered over Asia, India and Thrace, at the head of an excited troop of female enthusiasts—communicating and inculcating everywhere the Bacchic ceremonies, and rousing in the minds of women that impassioned religious emotion which led them to ramble in solitary mountains at particular seasons, there to give vent to violent fanatical excitement, apart from the men, clothed in fawn skins and armed with the thyrsus. The obtrusion of a male spectator upon these solemnities was esteemed sacrilegious. Though the rites had been rapidly disseminated and fervently welcomed in many parts of Thrace, yet there were some places in which they had been obstinately resisted and their votaries treated with rudeness; especially by Lycurgus, king of the Edonian Thracians, upon whom a sharp and exemplary punishment was inflicted by Dionysus.

Thebes was the first city of Greece to which Dionysus came, at the head of his Asiatic troop of females, to obtain divine honors and to establish his peculiar rites in his native city. The venerable Cadmus, together with his daughters and the prophet Teiresias, at once acknowledged the divinity of the new god, and began to offer their worship and praise to him along with the solemnities which he enjoined. But Pentheus vehemently opposed the new ceremonies, reproving and maltreating the god who introduced them: nor was his unbelief at all softened by the miracles which Dionysus wrought for his own protection and for that of his followers. His mother Agave, with her sisters and a large body of other women from Thebes, had gone out from Thebes to Mount Cithaeron to celebrate their solemnities under the influence of the Bacchic frenzy. Thither Pentheus followed to watch them, and there the punishment due to his impiety overtook him. The avenging touch of the god having robbed him of his senses, he climbed a tall pine for the purpose of overlooking the feminine multitude, who detected him in this position, pulled down the tree, and tore him in pieces. Agave, mad and bereft of consciousness, made herself the foremost in this assault, and carried back in triumph to Thebes the head of her slaughtered son. The aged Cadmus, with his wife Harmonia, retired among the Illyrians, and at the end of their lives were changed into serpents, Zeus permitting them to be transferred to the Elysian fields.

Polydorus and Labdakus successively became kings of Thebes: the latter at his death left an infant son, Laius, who was deprived of his throne by Lykus. And here we approach the legend of Antiope, Zethus and Amphion, whom the fabulists insert at this point of the Theban series. Antiope is here the daughter of Nykteus, the brother of Lykus. She is deflowered by Zeus, and then, while pregnant, flies to Epopeus king of Sicyon: Nykteus dying entreats his brother to avenge the injury, and Lykus accordingly invades Sicyon, defeats and kills Epopeus, and brings back Antiope prisoner to Thebes. In her way thither, in a cave near Eleutherae, which was shown to Pausanias, she is delivered of the twin sons of Zeus—Amphion and Zethus—who, exposed to perish, are taken up and nourished by a shepherd, and pass their youth amidst herdsmen, ignorant of their lofty descent.

Antiope is conveyed to Thebes, where, after undergoing a long persecution from Lykus and his cruel wife Dirke, she at length escapes, and takes refuge in the pastoral dwelling of her sons, now grown to manhood. Dirke pursues and requires her to be delivered up; but the sons recognize and protect their mother, taking an ample revenge upon her persecutors. Lykus is slain, and Dirke is dragged to death, tied to the horns of a bull.

Amphion and Zethus, having banished Laius, become kings of Thebes. The former, taught by Hermes, and possessing exquisite skill on the lyre, employs it in fortifying the city, the stones of the walls arranging themselves spontaneously in obedience to the rhythm of his song.

Zethus marries Aedon, who, in the dark and under a fatal mistake, kills her son Itylus: she is transformed into a nightingale, while Zethus dies of grief. Amphion becomes the husband of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, and the father of a numerous offspring, the complete extinction of which by the bands of Apollo and Artemis has already been recounted in these pages.

Here ends the legend of the beautiful Antiope and her twin sons—the rude and unpolished, but energetic, Zethus and the refined and amiable, but dreamy, Amphion. For so Euripides, in the drama of Antiope unfortunately lost, presented the two brothers, in affectionate union as well as in striking contrast. It is evident that the whole story stood originally quite apart from the Cadmeian family, and so the rudiments of it yet stand in the Odyssey; but the logographers, by their ordinary connecting artifices, have opened a vacant place for it in the descending series of Theban myths. And they have here proceeded in a manner not usual with them. For whereas they are generally fond of multiplying entities, and supposing different historical personages of the same name, in order to introduce an apparent smoothness in the chronology—they have here blended into one person Amphion the son of Antiope and Amphion the father of Chleris, who seem clearly distinguished from each other in the Odyssey. They have further assigned to the same person all the circumstances of the legend of Niobe, which seems to have been originally framed quite apart from the sons of Antiope.

Amphion and Zethus being removed, Laius became king of Thebes. With him commences the ever-celebrated series of adventures of Oedipus and his family. Laius forewarned by the oracle that any son whom he might beget would kill him, caused Oedipus as soon as he was born to be exposed on Mount Cithaeron. Here the herdsmen of Polybus king of Corinth accidentally found him and conveyed him to their master, who brought him up as his own child. In spite of the kindest treatment, however, Oedipus when he grew up found himself exposed to taunts on the score of his unknown parentage, and went to Delphi to inquire of the god the name of his real father. He received for answer an admonition not to go back to his country; if he did so, it was his destiny to kill his father and become the husband of his mother. Knowing no other country but Corinth, he accordingly determined to keep away from that city, and quitted Delphi by the road towards Boeotia and Phocis. At the exact spot where the roads leading to these two countries forked, he met Laius in a chariot drawn by mules, when the insolence of one of the attendants brought on an angry quarrel, in which Oedipus killed Laius, not knowing him to be his father.

On the death of Laius, Kreon, the brother of Yokasta, succeeded to the kingdom of Thebes. At this time the country was under the displeasure of the gods, and was vexed by a terrible monster, with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a lion, called the Sphinx—sent by the wrath of Here, and occupying the neighboring mountain of Phikium. The Sphinx had learned from the Muses a riddle, which she proposed to the Thebans to resolve: on every occasion of failure she took away one of the citizens and ate him up. Still no person could solve the riddle; and so great was the suffering occasioned, that Kreon was obliged to offer both the crown and the nuptials of his sister Yokasta to anyone who could achieve the salvation of the city. At this juncture Oedipus arrived and solved the riddle: upon which the Sphinx immediately threw herself from the acropolis and disappeared. As a recompense for this service, Oedipus was made king of Thebes, and married Yokasta, not aware that she was his mother.

These main tragic circumstances—that Oedipus had ignorantly killed his father and married his mother—belong to the oldest form of the legend as it stands in the Odyssey. The gods (it is added in that poem) quickly made the facts known to mankind. Epikasta (so Yokasta is here called) in an agony of sorrow hanged herself: Oedipus remained king of the Cadmeians, but underwent many and great miseries, such as the Erinnyes, who avenge an injured mother, inflict. A passage in the Iliad implies that he died at Thebes, since it mentions the funeral games which were celebrated there in honor of him. His misfortunes were recounted by Nestor, in the old Cyprian verses, among the stories of aforetime. A fatal curse hung both upon himself and upon his children, Eteokles, Polynikes, Antigone and Ismene. According to that narrative which the Attic tragedians have rendered universally current, they were his children by Yokasta, the disclosure of her true relationship to him having been very long deferred. But the ancient epic called Oedipodia, treading more closely in the footsteps of Homer, represented him as having after her death married a second wife, Euryganeia, by whom the four children were born to him: and the painter Onatas adopted this story in preference to that of Sophocles.

The disputes of Eteokles and Polynikes for the throne of their father gave occasion not only to a series of tragic family incidents, but also to one of the great quasi-historical events of legendary Greece—the two sieges of Thebes by Adrastus, king of Argos. The two ancient epic poems called the Thebais and the Epigoni (if indeed both were not parts of one very comprehensive poem) detailed these events at great length, and as it appears, with distinguished poetical merit; for Pausanias pronounces the Cyclic Thebais (so it was called by the subsequent critics to distinguish it from the more modern Thebais of Antimachus) inferior only to the Iliad and Odyssey; and the ancient elegiac poet Kallinus treated it as an Homeric composition. Of this once-valued poem we unfortunately possess nothing but a few scanty fragments. The leading points of the legend are briefly glanced at in the Iliad; but our knowledge of the details is chiefly derived from the Attic tragedians, who transformed the narratives of their predecessors at pleasure, and whose popularity constantly eclipsed and obliterated the ancient version. Antimachus of Kolophon, contemporary with Euripides, in his long epic, probably took no less liberties with the old narrative. His Thebaid never became generally popular, but it exhibited marks of study and elaboration which recommended it to the esteem of the Alexandrine critics, and probably contributed to discredit in their eyes the old cyclic poem.

The logographers, who gave a continuous history of this siege of Thebes, had at least three preexisting epic poems—the Thebais, the Oedipodia, and the Alkmaeonis,— from which they could borrow. The subject was also handled in some of the Hesiodic poems, but we do not know to what extent. The Thebais was composed more in honor of Argos than of Thebes, as the first line of it, one of the few fragments still preserved, betokens.

The legend, about to recount fraternal dissension of the most implacable kind, comprehending in its results not only the immediate relations of the infuriated brothers, but many chosen companions of the heroic race along with them, takes its start from the paternal curse of Oedipus, which overhangs and determines all the gloomy sequel.

Oedipus, though king of Thebes and father of four children by Euryganeia (according to the Oedipodia), has become the devoted victim of the Erinnyes, in consequence of the self-inflicted death of his mother, which he has unconsciously caused, as well as of his unintentional parricide. Though he had long forsworn the use of all the ornaments and luxuries which his father had inherited from his kingly progenitors, yet when through age he had come to be dependent upon his two sons. Polynikes one day broke through this interdict, and set before him the silver table and the splendid wine-cup of Cadmus, which Laius had always been accustomed to employ. The old king had no sooner seen these precious appendages of the regal life of his father, than his mind was overrun by a calamitous frenzy, and he imprecated terrible curses on his sons, predicting that there would be bitter and endless warfare between them. The goddess Erinnys heard and heeded him; and he repeated the curse again on another occasion, when his sons, who had always been accustomed to send to him the shoulder of the victims sacrificed on the altar, caused the buttock to be served to him in place of it. He resented this as an insult, and prayed the gods that they might perish each by the hand of the other. Throughout the tragedians as well as in the old epic, the paternal curse, springing immediately from the misguided Oedipus himself, but remotely from the parricide and incest with which he has tainted his breed, is seen to domineer over the course of events—the Erinnys who executes that curse being the irresistible, though concealed, agent. Aeschylus not only preserves the fatal efficiency of the paternal curse, but even briefly glances at the causes assigned for it in the Thebais, without superadding any new motives. In the judgment of Sophocles, or of his audience, the conception of a father cursing his sons upon such apparently trifling grounds was odious; and that great poet introduced many aggravating circumstances, describing the old blind father as having been barbarously turned out of doors by his sons to wander abroad in exile and poverty. Though by this change he rendered his poem more coherent and self-justifying, yet he departed, from the spirit of the old legend, according to which Oedipus has contracted by his unconscious misdeeds an incurable taint destined to pass onward to his progeny. His mind is alienated, and he curses them, not because he has suffered seriously by their guilt, but because he is made the blind instrument of an avenging Erinnys for the ruin of the house of Laius.

After the death of Oedipus and the celebration of his funeral games, at which amongst others, Argeia, daughter of Adrastus (afterwards the wife of Polynikes), was present, his two sons soon quarreled respecting the succession. The circumstances are differently related; but it appears that, according to the original narrative, the wrong and injustice was on the part of Polynikes, who, however, was obliged to leave Thebes and to seek shelter with Adrastus, king of Argos. Here he met Tydeus, a fugitive, at the same time, from Aetolia: it was dark when they arrived, and a broil ensued between the two exiles, but Adrastus came out and parted them. He had been enjoined by an oracle to give his two daughters in marriage to a lion and a boar, and he thought this occasion had now arrived, inasmuch as one of the combatants carried on his shield a lion, the other a boar. He accordingly gave Deipyle in marriage to Tydeus, and Argeia to Polynikes: moreover, he resolved to restore by armed resistance both his sons-in-law to their respective countries.

On proposing the expedition to the Argeian chiefs around him he found most of them willing auxiliaries; but Amphiaraus—formerly his bitter opponent, but now reconciled to him, and husband of his sister Eriphyle—strongly opposed him. He denounced the enterprise as unjust and contrary to the will of the gods. Again, being of a prophetic stock, descended from Melampus, he foretold the certain death both of himself and of the principal leaders, should they involve themselves as accomplices in the mad violence of Tydeus or the criminal ambition of Polynikes. Amphiaraus, already distinguished both in the Kalychinian boar-hunt and in the funeral games of Pelias, was in the Theban war the most conspicuous of all the heroes, and absolutely indispensable to its success. But his reluctance to engage in it was invincible, nor was it possible to prevail upon him except through the influence of his wife Eriphyle. Polynikes, having brought with him from Thebes the splendid robe and necklace given by the gods to Harmonia on her marriage with Cadmus, offered it as a bribe to Eriphyle, on condition that she would influence the determination of Amphiaraus. The sordid wife, seduced by so matchless a present, betrayed the lurking-place of her husband, and involved him in the fatal expedition. Amphiaraus, reluctantly dragged forth, and foreknowing the disastrous issue of the expedition both to himself and to his associates, addressed his last injunctions, at the moment of mounting his chariot, to his sons Alkmaeon and Amphilochus, commanding Alkmaeon to avenge his approaching death by killing the venal Eriphyle, and by undertaking a second expedition against Thebes.

The Attic dramatists describe this expedition as having been conducted by seven chiefs, one to each of the seven celebrated gates of Thebes. But the Cyclic Thebais gave to it a much more comprehensive character, mentioning auxiliaries from Arcadia, Messene, and various parts of Peloponnesus; and the application of Tydeus and Polynikes at Mycenae in the course of their circuit made to collect allies, is mentioned in the Iliad. They were well received at Mycenae; but the warning signals given by the gods were so terrible that no Mycenaean could venture to accompany them. The seven principal chiefs however were Adrastus, Amphiaraus, Kapaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, Tydeus and Polynikes.

When the army had advanced as far as the river Asifipus, a halt was made for sacrifice and banquet; while Tydeus was sent to Thebes as envoy to demand the restoration of Polynikes to his rights. His demand was refused; but finding the chief Cadmeians assembled at the banquet in the house of Eteoklus, he challenged them all to contend with him in boxing or wrestling. So efficacious was the aid of the goddess Athene that he overcame them all; and the Cadmeians were so indignant at their defeat, that they placed an ambuscade of fifty men to intercept him in his way back to the army. All of them perished by the band of this warrior, small in stature and of few words, but desperate and irresistible in the fight. One alone was spared in consequence of special signals from the gods.

The Cadmeians, assisted by their allies the Phocaeans and the Phlegyae, marched out to resist the invaders, and fought a battle near the Ismenian hill, in which they were defeated and forced to retire within the walls. The prophet Teiresias acquainted them that if Menoekeus, son of Kreon, would offer himself as a victim to Ares, victory would be assured to Thebes. The generous youth, as soon as he learnt that his life was to be the price of safety to his country, went and slew himself before the gates. The heroes along with Adrastus now commenced a vigorous attack upon the town, each of the seven selecting one of the gates to assault. The contest was long and strenuously maintained but the devotion of Menoekeus had procured for the Thebans the protection of the gods. Parthenopaeus was killed with a stone by Periklymenus; and when the furious Kapaneus, having planted a scaling-ladder, had mounted the walls, he was smitten by a thunderbolt from Zeus and cast down dead upon the earth. This event struck terror into the Argeians, and Adrastus called back his troops from the attack. The Thebans now sallied forth to pursue them, when Eteokles, arresting the battle, proposed to decide the controversy by single combat with his brother. The challenge, eagerly accepted by Polynikes, was agreed to by Adrastus: a single combat ensued between the two brothers, in which both were exasperated to fury and both ultimately slain by each other's hand. This equal termination left the result of the general contest still undetermined, and the bulk of the two armies renewed the fight. In the sanguinary struggle which ensued the sons of Astakus on the Theban side displayed the most conspicuous and successful valor. One of them, Melanippus, mortally wounded Tydeus — while two others, Leades and Amphidikus, killed Eteoklus and Hippomedon. Amphiaraus avenged Tydeus by killing Melanippus; but unable to arrest the rout of the army, he fled with the rest, closely pursued by Periklymenus. The latter was about to pierce him with his spear, when the beneficence of Zeus rescued him from this disgrace—miraculously opening the earth under him, so that Amphiaraus with his chariot and horses was received unscathed into her bosom. The exact spot where this memorable incident happened was indicated by a sepulchral building, and shown by the Thebans down to the days of Pausanias—its sanctity being attested by the fact, that no animal would consent to touch the herbage which grew within the sacred inclosure. Amphiaraus, rendered immortal by Zeus, was worshipped as a god at Argos, at Thebes and at Orepus —and for many centuries gave answers at his oracle to the questions of the pious applicant.

Adrastus, thus deprived of the prophet and warrior whom he regarded as “the eye of his army”, and having seen the other chiefs killed in the disastrous fight, was forced to take flight singly, and was preserved by the matchless swiftness of his horse Areion, the offspring of Poseidon. He reached Argos on his return, bringing with him nothing except “his garments of woe and his black-manned steed”.

Kreon, father of the heroic youth Menoekeus, succeeding to the administration of Thebes after the death of the two hostile brothers and the repulse of Adrastus, caused Eteokles to be buried with distinguished honor, but cast out ignominiously the body of Polynikes as a traitor to his country, forbidding everyone on pain of death to consign it to the tomb. He likewise refused permission to Adrastus to inter the bodies of his fallen comrades. This proceeding, so offensive to Grecian feeling, gave rise to two further tales; one of them at least of the highest pathos and interest. Antigone, the sister of Polynikes, heard with indignation the revolting edict consigning her brother’s body to the dogs and vultures, and depriving it of those rites which were considered essential to the repose of the dead. Unmoved by the dissuading counsel of an affectionate but timid sister, and unable to procure assistance, she determined to brave the hazard and to bury the body with her own hands. She was detected in the act; and Kreon, though forewarned by Teiresias of the consequences, gave orders that she should be buried alive, as having deliberately set at naught the solemn edict of the city. His son Haemon, to whom she was engaged to be married, in vain interceded for her life. In an agony of despair he slew himself in the sepulcher to which the living Antigone had been consigned; and his mother Eurydike, the wife of Kreon, inconsolable for his death, perished by her own hand. And thus the new light which seemed to be springing up over the last remaining scion of the devoted family of Oedipus, is extinguished amidst gloom and horrors—which overshadowed also the house and dynasty of Kreon.

The other tale stands more apart from the original legend, and seems to have had its origin in the patriotic pride of the Athenians. Adrastus, unable to obtain permission from the Thebans to inter the fallen chieftains, presented himself in suppliant guise, accompanied by their disconsolate mothers, to Theseus at Eleusis. He implored the Athenian warrior to extort from the perverse Thebans that last melancholy privilege which no decent or pious Greeks ever thought of withholding, and thus to stand forth as the champion of Grecian public morality in one of its most essential points, not less than of the rights of the subterranean gods. The Thebans obstinately persisting in their refusal, Theseus undertook an expedition against their city, vanquished them in the field, and compelled them by force of arms to permit the sepulture of their fallen enemies. This chivalrous interposition, celebrated in one of the preserved dramas of Euripides, formed a subject of glorious recollection to the Athenians throughout the historical age: their orators dwelt upon it in terms of animated panegyric; and it seems to have been accepted as a real fact of the past time, with no less implicit conviction than the battle of Marathon. But the Thebans, though equally persuaded of the truth of the main story, dissented from the Athenian version of it, maintaining that they had given up the bodies for sepulture voluntarily and of their own accord. The tomb of the chieftains was shown near Eleusis even ill the days of Pausanias.

The defeat of the seven chiefs before Thebes was amply avenged by their sons, again under the guidance of Adrastus: Egialeus son of Adrastus, Thersander son of Polynikes, Alkmaeon and Amphilochus, sons of Amphiaraus, Diomedes son of Tydeus, Sthenelus son of Kapaneus, Promachus son of Parthenopaeus, and Euryalus son of Mekistheus, joined in this expedition. Though all these youthful warriors, called the Epigoni, took part in the expedition, the grand and prominent place appears to have been occupied by Alkmaeon, son of Amphiaraus. Assistance was given to them from Corinth and Megara, as well as from Messena and Arcadia; while Zeus manifested his favorable dispositions by signals not to be mistaken. At the river Glisas the Epigoni were met by the Theban in arms, and a battle took place in which the latter were completely defeated. Laodamas, son of Eteokles, killed Egialeus, son of Adrastus; but he and his army were routed and driven within the walls by the valor and energy of Alkmaeon. The defeated Cadmeians consulted the prophet Teiresias, who informed them that the gods had declared for their enemies, and that there was no longer any hope of successful resistance. By his advice they sent a herald to the assailants offering to surrender the town, while they themselves convoyed away their wives and children, and fled under the command of Laodamas to the Illyrians, upon which the Epigoni entered Thebes, and established Thersander, son of Polynikes, on the throne.

Adrastus, who in the former expedition had been the single survivor amongst so many fallen companions, now found himself the only exception to the general triumph and joy of the conquerors: he had lost his son Egialeus, and the violent sorrow arising from the event prematurely cut short his life. His soft voice and persuasive eloquence were proverbial in the ancient epic. He was worshipped as a hero both at Argos and at Sicyon, but with especial solemnity in the last-mentioned place, where his Heroum stood in the public agora, and where his exploits as well as his sufferings were celebrated periodically in lyric tragedies. Melanippus, son of Astakus, the brave defender of Thebes, who had slain both Tydeus and Mekistheus, was worshipped with no less solemnity by the Thebans. The enmity of these two heroes rendered it impossible for both of them to be worshipped close upon the same spot. Accordingly it came to pass during the historical period, about the time of the Solonian legislation at Athens, that Kleisthenes, despot of Sicyon, wishing to banish the hero Adrastus and abolish the religious solemnities celebrated in honor of the latter by the Sicyonians, first applied to the Delphian oracle for permission to carry this banishment into effect directly and forcibly. That permission being refused, ho next sent to Thebes an intimation that he was anxious to introduce their hero Melanippus into Sicyon. The Thebans willingly consented, and he assigned to the new hero a consecrated spot in the strongest and most commanding portion of the Sicyonian prytaneium. He did this (says the historian) “knowing that Adrastus would forthwith go away of his own accord; since Melanippus was of all persons the most odious to him, as having slain both his son-in-law and his brother”. Kleisthenes moreover diverted the festivals and sacrifices which had been offered to Adrastus, to the newly established hero Melanippus; and the lyric tragedies from the worship of Adrastus to that of Dionysus. But his dynasty did not long continue after his decease, and the Sicyonians then reestablished their ancient solemnities.

Near the Proetid gate of Thebes were seen the tombs of two combatants who had hated each other during life even more than Adrastus and Melanippus the two brothers Eteokles and Polynikes. Even as heroes and objects of worship, they still continued to manifest their inextinguishable hostility: those who offered sacrifices to them observed that the flame and the smoke from the two adjoining altars abhorred all communion, and flew off in directions exactly opposite. The Theban exegetes assured Pausanias of this fact. And though he did not himself witness it, yet having seen with his own eyes a miracle not very dissimilar at Pionis in Mysia, he had no difficulty in crediting their assertion.

Amphiaraus when forced into the first attack of Thebes—against his own foreknowledge and against the warnings of the gods had enjoined his sons Alkmaeon and Amphilochus not only to avenge his death upon the Thebans, but also to punish the treachery of their mother, “Eriphyle, the destroyer of her husband”. In obedience to this command, and having obtained the sanction of the Delphian oracle, Alkmaeon slew his mother; but the awful Erinnys, the avenger of matricide, inflicted on him a long and terrible punishment, depriving him of his reason, and chasing him about from place to place without the possibility of repose or peace of mind. He craved protection and cure from the god at Delphi, who required him to dedicate at the temple, as an offering, the precious necklace of Cadmus, that irresistible bribe which had originally corrupted Eriphyle. He further intimated to the unhappy sufferer, that though the whole earth was tainted with his crime, and had become uninhabitable for him, yet there was a spot of ground which was not under the eye of the sun at the time when the matricide was committed, and where therefore Alkmaeon yet might find a tranquil shelter. The promise was realized at the mouth of the river Achelous, whose turbid stream was perpetually depositing new earth and forming additional islands. Upon one of these, near Eniadae, Alkmaeon settled, permanently and in peace: he became the primitive hero of Acarnania, to which his son Acarnan gave name. The necklace was found among the treasures of Delphi, together with that which had been given by Aphrodite to Helen, by the Phokian plunderers who stripped the temple in the time of Philip of Macedon. The Phokian women quarreled about these valuable ornaments: and we are told that the necklace of Eriphyle was allotted to a woman of gloomy and malignant disposition, who ended by putting her husband to death; that of Helen to a beautiful but volatile wife, who abandoned her husband from preference for a young Epirot.

There were several other legends respecting the distracted Alkmaeon, either appropriated or invented by the Attic tragedians. He went to Phegeus, king of Psophis in Arcadia, whose daughter Arsinoe he married, giving as a nuptial present the necklace of Eriphyle. Being however unable to remain there, in consequence of the unremitting persecutions of the maternal Erinnys, he sought shelter at the residence of king Acheous, whose daughter Kallirhoe he made his wife, and on whose soil he obtained repose. But Kallirhoe would not be satisfied without the possession of the necklace of Eriphyle, and Alkmaeon went back to Psophis to fetch it, where Phegeus and his sons slew him. He had left twin sons, infants, with Kallirhoe, who prayed fervently to Zeus that they might be preternaturally invested with immediate manhood, in order to revenge the murder of their father. Her prayer was granted, and her sons Amphoterus and Acarnan, having instantaneously sprung up to manhood, proceeded into Arcadia, slew the murderers of their father, and brought away the necklace of Eriphyle, which they carried to Delphi

Euripides deviated still more widely from the ancient epic, by making Alkmaeon the husband of Manto, daughter of Teiresias, and the father of Amphilochus. According to the Cyclic Thebais, Manto was consigned by the victorious Epigoni as a special offering to the Delphian god; and Amphilochus was son of Amphiaraus, not son of Alkmaeon. He was the eponymous hero of the town called the Amphilochian Argos, in Acarnania, on the shore of the Gulf of Ambrakia. Thucydides tells us that he went thither on his return from the Trojan war, being dissatisfied with the state of affairs which he found at the Peloponnesian Argos. The Acarnanians were remarkable for the numerous prophets which they supplied to the rest of Greece: their heroes were naturally drawn from the great prophetic race of the Melampodids.

Thus ends the legend of the two sieges of Thebes; the greatest event, except the siege of Troy, in the ancient epic; the greatest enterprise of war, between Greeks and Greeks, during the time of those who are called the Heroes.

XIV

LEGEND OF TROY.

WE now arrive at the capital and culminating point of the Grecian epic,—the two sieges and capture of Troy, with the destinies of the dispersed heroes, Trojan as well as Grecian, after the second and most celebrated capture and destruction of the city. It would require a large volume to convey any tolerable idea of the vast extent and expansion of this interesting fable, first handled by so many poets, epic, lyric and tragic, with their endless additions, transformations and contradictions,—then purged and recast by historical inquirers, who under color of setting aside the exaggerations of the poets, introduced a new vein of prosaic invention,—lastly, moralized and allegorized by philosophers. In the present brief outline of the general field of Grecian legend, or of that which the Greeks believed to be their antiquities, the Trojan war can be regarded as only one among a large number of incidents upon which Hekataeus and Herodotus looked back as constituting their foretime. Taken as a special legendary event, it is indeed of wider and larger interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it out from the rest as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy basis. I must therefore confine myself to an abridged narrative of the current and leading facts; and amidst the numerous contradictory statements which are to be found respecting every one of them, I know no better ground of preference than comparative antiquity, though even the oldest tales which we possess— those contained in the Iliad—evidently presuppose others of prior date.

The primitive ancestor of the Trojan line of kings is Dardanus, son of Zeus, founder and eponymous of Dardania: in the account of later authors, Dardanus was called the son of Zeus by Elektra, daughter of Atlas, and was further said to have come from Samothrace, or from Arcadia, or from Italy but of this Homer mentions nothing. The first Dardanian town founded by him was in a lofty position on the descent of Mount Ida; for he was not yet strong enough to establish himself on the plain. But his son Erichthonius, by the favor of Zeus, became the wealthiest of mankind. His flocks and herds having multiplied, he had in his pastures three thousand mares, the offspring of some of whom, by Boreas, produced horses of preternatural swiftness. Tros, the son of Erichthonius, and the eponym of the Trojans, had three sons—Ilus, Assaracus, and the beautiful Ganymedes, whom Zeus stole away to become his cup-bearer in Olympus, giving to his father Tros, as the price of the youth, a team of immortal horses.

From Ilus and Assaracus the Trojan and Dardanian lines diverge; the former passing from Ilus to Laomedon, Priam and Hector; the latter from Assaracus to Capys, Anchises and Aeneas. Ilus founded in the plain of Troy the holy city of Ilium; Assaracus and his descendants remained sovereigns of Dardania.

It was under the proud Laomedon, son of Ilus, that Poseidon and Apollo underwent, by command of Zeus, a temporary servitude; the former building the walls of the town, the latter tending the flocks and herds. When their task was completed and the penal period had expired, they claimed the stipulated reward; but Laomedon angrily repudiated their demand, and even threatened to cut off their ears, to tie them hand and foot, and to sell them in some distant island as slaves. He was punished for this treachery by a sea-monster, whom Poseidon sent to ravage his fields and to destroy his subjects. Laomedon publicly offered the immortal horses given by Zeus to his father Tros, as a reward to anyone who would destroy the monster. But an oracle declared that a virgin of noble blood must be surrendered to him, and the lot fell upon Hesione, daughter of Laomedon himself. Heracles arriving at this critical moment, killed the monster by the aid of a fort built for him by Athena and the Trojans, so as to rescue both the exposed maiden and the people; but Laomedon, by a second act of perfidy, gave him mortal horses in place of the matchless animals which had been promised. Thus defrauded of his due, Heracles equipped six ships, attacked and captured Troy and killed Laomedon, giving Hesione to his friend and auxiliary Telamon, to whom she bore the celebrated archer Teukros. A painful sense of this expedition was preserved among the inhabitants of the historical town of Ilium, who offered no worship to Heracles.

Among all the sons of Laomedon, Priam was the only one who had remonstrated against the refusal of the well-earned guerdon of Heracles; for which the hero recompensed him by placing him on the throne. Many and distinguished were his sons and daughters, as well by his wife Hecuba, daughter of Kisseus, as by other women. Among the sons were Hector, Paris, Daiphobus, Helenus, Troilus, Polites, Polyderus; among the daughters Laodike, Kreusa, Polyxena, and Cassandra.

The birth of Paris was preceded by formidable presages; for Hecuba dreamt that she was delivered of a firebrand, and Priam, on consulting the soothsayers, was informed that the son about to be born would prove fatal to him. Accordingly he directed the child to be exposed on Mount Ida; but the inauspicious kindness of the gods preserved him, and he grew up amidst the flocks and herds, active and beautiful, fair of hair and symmetrical in person, and the special favorite of Aphrodite.

It was to this youth, in his solitary shepherd's walk on Mount Ida, that the three goddesses Here, Athene, and Aphrodite were conducted, in order that he might determine the dispute respecting their comparative beauty, which had arisen at the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis,—a dispute brought about in pursuance of the arrangement, and in accomplishment of the deep-laid designs, of Zeus. For Zeus, remarking with pain the immoderate numbers of the then existing heroic race, pitied the earth for the overwhelming burden which she was compelled to bear, and determined to lighten it by exciting a destructive and long-continued war.

Paris awarded the palm of beauty to Aphrodite, who promised him in recompense the possession of Helena, wife of the Spartan Menelaus,—the daughter of Zeus and the fairest of living women. At the instance of Aphrodite, ships were built for him, and be embarked on the enterprise so fraught with eventual disaster to his native city, in spite of the menacing prophecies of his brother Helenus, and the always neglected warnings of Cassandra.

Paris, on arriving at Sparta, was hospitably entertained by Menelaus as well as by Castor and Pollux, and was enabled to present the rich gifts which he had brought to Helen. Menelaus then departed to Crete, leaving Helen to entertain his Trojan guest—a favorable moment which was employed by Aphrodite to bring about the intrigue and the elopement. Paris carried away with him both Helen and a large sum of money belonging to Menelaus— made a prosperous voyage to Troy—and arrived there safely with his prize on the third day.

Menelaus, informed by Iris in Crete of the perfidious return made by Paris for his hospitality, hastened home in grief and indignation to consult with his brother Agamemnon, as well as with the venerable Nestor, on the means of avenging the outrage. They made known the event to the Greek chiefs around them: among whom they found universal sympathy: Nestor, Palamedes and others went round to solicit aid in a contemplated attack of Troy, under the command of Agamemnon, to whom each chief promised both obedience and unwearied exertion until Helen should be recovered. Ten years were spent in equipping the expedition. The goddesses Here and Athene, incensed at the preference given by Paris to Aphrodite, and animated by steady attachment to Argos, Sparta and Mycenae, took an active part in the cause; and the horses of Here were fatigued with her repeated visits to the different parts of Greece.

By such efforts a force was at length assembled at Aulis in Boeotia, consisting of 1186 ships and more than 100,000 men,—a force outnumbering by more than ten to one anything that the Trojans themselves could oppose, and superior to the defenders of Troy even with all her allies included. It comprised heroes with their followers from the extreme points of Greece—from the north-western portions of Thessaly under Mount Olympus, as well as the western islands of Dulichium and Ithaca, and the eastern islands of Crete and Rhodes. Agamemnon himself contributed 100 ships manned with the subjects of his kingdom of Mycenae, besides furnishing 60 ships to the Arcadians, who possessed none of their own. Menelaus brought with him 60 ships, Nestor from Pylus 90, Idomeneus from Crete and Diomedes from Argos 80 each. Forty ships were manned by the Eleians, under four different chiefs; the like number under Meges from Dulichium and the Echinades, and under Thoas from Kalydon and the other Aetolian towns. Odysseus from Ithaca, and Ajax from Salamis, brought 12 ships each. The Abantes from Euboea, under Elephenor, filled 40 vessels; the Boeotians, under Peneleus and Leitus, 50; the inhabitants of Orchomenus and Aspledon, 30; the light-armed Locrians, under Ajax son of Oileus, 40; the Phokians as many. The Athenians, under Menestheus, a chief distinguished for his skill in marshaling an army, mustered 50 ships; the Myrmidons from Phthia and Hellas, under Achilles, assembled in 50 ships; Protesilaus from Phylake and Pyrasus, and Eurypylus from Ormenium, each came with 40 ships; Machaon and Podaleirius, from Trikka, with 30; Aumelus, from Pherae and the lake Boebeis, with 11; and Philoktetes from Meliboea with 7: the Lapitha, under Polypcetes, son of Peirithous, filled 40 vessels; the Enianes and Perrhaebians, under Guneus, 22; and the Magnetes under Prothous, 40; these last two were from the northernmost parts of Thessaly, near the mountains Pelion and Olympus. From Rhodes, under Tlepolemus, son of Heracles, appeared 9 ships; from Syme, under the comely but effeminate Nireus, 3; from Kos, Krapathus and the neighboring islands, 30, under the orders of Pheidippus and Antiphus, sons of Thessalus and grandsons of Heracles.

Among this band of heroes were included the distinguished warriors Ajax and Diomedes, and the sagacious Nestor; while Agamemnon himself, scarcely inferior to either of them in prowess, brought with him a high reputation for prudence in command. But the most marked and conspicuous of all were Achilles and Odysseus; the former a beautiful youth born of a divine mother, swift in the race, of fierce temper and irresistible might; the latter not less efficient as an ally from his eloquence, his untiring endurance, his inexhaustible resources under difficulty, and the mixture of daring courage with deep-laid cunning which never deserted him: the blood of the arch-deceiver Sisyphus, through an illicit connection with his mother Antikleia, was said to flow in his veins, and he was especially patronized and protected by the goddess Athene. Odysseus, unwilling at first to take part in the expedition, had even simulated insanity; but Palamedes, sent to Ithaca to invite him, tested the reality of his madness by placing in the furrow where Odysseus was ploughing, his infant son Telemachus. Thus detected, Odysseus could not refuse to join the Achaean host, but the prophet Halitherses predicted to him that twenty years would elapse before he revisited his native land. To Achilles the gods had promised the full effulgence of heroic glory before the walls of Troy; nor could the place be taken without both his cooperation and that of his son after him. But they had forewarned him that this brilliant career would be rapidly brought to a close; and that if he desired a long life, he must remain tranquil and inglorious in his native land. In spite of the reluctance of his mother Thetis, he preferred few years with bright renown, and joined the Achaean host. When Nestor and Odysseus came to Phthia to invite him, both he and his intimate friend Patroclus eagerly obeyed the call.

Agamemnon and his powerful host set sail from Aulis; but being ignorant of the locality and the direction, they landed by mistake in Teuthrania, a part of Mysia near the river Kaikus, and began to ravage the country under the persuasion that it was the neighborhood of Troy. Telephus, the king of the country, opposed and repelled them, but was ultimately defeated and severely wounded by Achilles. The Greeks now, discovering their mistake, retired; but their fleet was dispersed by a storm and driven back to Greece. Achilles attacked and took Skyrus, and there married Deidamia, the daughter of Lycomedes. Telephus, suffering from his wounds, was directed by the oracle to come to Greece and present himself to Achilles to be healed, by applying the scrapings of the spear with which the wound had been given: thus restored, he became the guide of the Greeks when they were prepared to renew their expedition.

The armament was again assembled at Aulis, but the goddess Artemis, displeased with the boastful language of Agamemnon, prolonged the duration of adverse winds, and the offending chief was compelled to appease her by the well-known sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. They then proceeded to Tenedos, from whence Odysseus and Menelaus were dispatched as envoys to Troy, to redemand Helen and the stolen property. In spite of the prudent counsels of Antenor, who received the two Grecian chiefs with friendly hospitality, the Trojans rejected the demand, and the attack was resolved upon. It was foredoomed by the gods that the Greek who first landed should perish: Protesilaus was generous enough to put himself upon this forlorn hope, and accordingly fell by the hand of Hector.

Meanwhile the Trojans had assembled a large body of allies from various parts of Asia Minor and Thrace: Dardanians under Aeneas, Lycians under Sarpedon, Mysians, Carians, Maeonians, Alizonians, Phrygians, Thracians, and Paeonians. But vain was the attempt to oppose the landing of the Greeks: the Trojans were routed, and even the invulnerable Cycnus, son of Poseidon, one of the great bulwarks of the defense, was slain by Achilles. Having driven the Trojans within their walls, Achilles attacked and stormed Lyrnessus, Pedasus, Lesbos and other places in the neighborhood, twelve towns on the sea-coast and eleven in the interior; he drove off the oxen of Aeneas and pursued the hero himself, who narrowly escaped with his life: he surprised and killed the youthful Troilus, son of Priam, and captured several of the other sons, whom he sold as prisoners into the islands of the Aegean. He acquired as his captive the fair Briseis, while Chryseis was awarded to Agamemnon: he was moreover eager to see the divine Helen, the prize and stimulus of this memorable struggle; and Aphrodite and Thetis contrived to bring about an interview between them.

At this period of the war the Grecian army was deprived of Palamedes, one of its ablest chiefs. Odysseus had not forgiven the artifice by which Palamedes had detected his simulated insanity, nor was be without jealousy of a rival clever and cunning in a degree equal, if not superior, to himself; one who had enriched the Greeks with the invention of letters, of dice for amusement, of night-watches, as well as with other useful suggestions. According to the old Cyprian epic, Palamedes was drowned while fishing, by the hands of Odysseus and Diomedes. Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey does the name of Palamedes occur: the lofty position which Odysseus occupies in both those poems—noticed with some degree of displeasure even by Pindar, who described Palamedes as the wiser man of the two—is sufficient to explain the omission. But in the more advanced period of the Greek mind, when intellectual superiority came to acquire a higher place in the public esteem as compared with military prowess, the character of Palamedes, combined with his unhappy fate, rendered him one of the most interesting personages in the Trojan legend. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides each consecrated to him a special tragedy; but the mode of his death as described in the old epic was not suitable to Athenian ideas, and accordingly he was represented as having been falsely accused of treason by Odysseus, who caused gold to be buried in his tent, and persuaded Agamemnon and the Grecian chiefs that Palamedes had received it from the Trojans. He thus forfeited his life, a victim to the calumny of Odysseus and to the delusion of the leading Greeks. In the last speech made by the philosopher Socrates to his Athenian judges, he alludes with solemnity and fellow-feeling to the unjust condemnation of Palamedes, as analogous to that which he himself was about to suffer, and his companions seem to have dwelt with satisfaction on the comparison. Palamedes passed for an instance of the slanderous enmity and misfortune which so often wait upon superior genius.

In these expeditions the Grecian army consumed nine years, during which the subdued Trojans dared not give battle without their walls for fear of Achilles. Ten years was the fixed epical duration of the siege of Troy, just as five years was the duration of the siege of Kamikus by the Cretan armament which came to avenge the death of Minos: ten years of preparation, ten years of siege, and ten years of wandering for Odysseus, were periods suited to the rough chronological dashes of the ancient epic, and suggesting no doubts nor difficulties with the original hearers. But it was otherwise when the same events came to be contemplated by the historicizing Greeks, who could not be satisfied without either finding or inventing satisfactory bonds of coherence between the separate events. Thucydides tells us that the Greeks were less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being moreover very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions: hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to employ a part of it in cultivating the Chersonese,—a part in marauding expeditions over the neighborhood. Could the whole army have been employed against Troy at once (he says), the siege would have been much more speedily and easily concluded. If the great historian could permit himself thus to amend the legend in so many points, we might have imagined that the simpler course would have been to include the duration of the siege among the list of poetical exaggerations, and to affirm that the real siege had lasted only one year instead of ten. But it seems that the ten years’ duration was so capital a feature in the ancient tale, that no critic ventured to meddle with it.

A period of comparative intermission however was now at hand for the Trojans. The gods brought about the memorable fit of anger of Achilles, under the influence of which he refused to put on his armor, and kept his Myrmidons in camp. According to the Cypria, this was the behest of Zeus, who had compassion on the Trojans: according to the Iliad, Apollo was the originating cause, from anxiety to avenge the injury which his priest Chryses had endured from Agamemnon. For a considerable time, the combats of the Greeks against Troy were conducted without their best warrior, and severe indeed was the humiliation which they underwent in consequence. How the remaining Grecian chiefs vainly strove to make amends for his absence how Hector and the Trojans defeated and drove them to their ships—how the actual blaze of the destroying flame, applied by Hector to the ship of Protesilaus, roused up the anxious and sympathizing Patroclus, and extorted a reluctant consent from Achilles, to allow his friend and his followers to go forth and avert the last extremity of ruin—how Achilles, when Patroclus had been killed by Hector, forgetting his anger in grief for the death of his friend, reentered the fight, drove the Trojans within their walls with immense slaughter, and satiated his revenge both upon the living and the dead Hector—all these events have been chronicled, together with those divine dispensations on which most of them are made to depend, in the immortal verse of the Iliad.

Homer breaks off with the burial of Hector, whose body has just been ransomed by the disconsolate Priam; while the lost poem of Arktinus, entitled the Ethiopis, so far as we can judge from the argument still remaining of it, handled only the subsequent events of the siege. The poem of Quintus Smyrnaeus, composed about the fourth century of the Christian era, seems in its first books to coincide with the Ethiopis, in the subsequent books partly with the Ilias Minor of Lesches.

The Trojans, dismayed by the death of Hector, were again animated with hope by the appearance of the warlike and beautiful queen of the Amazons, Penthesileia, daughter of Ares, hitherto invincible in the field, who came to their assistance from Thrace at the head of a band of her countrywomen. She again led the besieged without the walls to encounter the Greeks in the open field; and under her auspices the latter were at first driven back, until she too was slain by the invincible arm of Achilles. The victor, on taking off the helmet of his fair enemy as she lay on the ground, was profoundly affected and captivated by her charms, for which he was scornfully taunted by Thersites: exasperated by this rash insult, he killed Thersites on the spot with a blow of his fist. A violent dispute among the Grecian chiefs was the result, for Diomedes, the kinsman of Thersites, warmly resented the proceeding; and Achilles was obliged to go to Lesbos, where he was purified from the act of homicide by Odysseus.

Next arrived Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos, the most stately of living men, with a powerful band of black Ethiopians, to the assistance of Troy. Sallying forth against the Greeks, he made great havoc among them: the brave and popular Antilochus perished by his hand, a victim to filial devotion in defense of Nestor. Achilles at length attacked him, and for a long time the combat was doubtful between them: the prowess of Achilles and the supplication of Thetis with Zeus finally prevailed; whilst Eos obtained for her vanquished son the consoling gift of immortality. His tomb, however, was shown near the Propontis, within a few miles of the mouth of the river Esepus, and was visited annually by the birds called Memnonides, who swept it and bedewed it with water from the stream. So the traveler Pausanias was told, even in the second century after the Christian era, by the Hellespontine Greeks.

But the fate of Achilles himself was now at hand. After routing the Trojans and chasing them into the town, he was slain near the Skaean gate by an arrow from the quiver of Paris, directed under the unerring auspices of Apollo. The greatest efforts were made by the Trojans to possess themselves of the body, which was however rescued and borne off to the Grecian camp by the valor of Ajax and Odysseus. Bitter was the grief of Thetis for the loss of her son: she came into the camp with the Muses and the Nereids to mourn over him; and when a magnificent funeral-pile had been prepared by the Greeks to burn him with every mark of honor, she stole away the body and conveyed it to a renewed and immortal life in the island of Leuke in the Euxine Sea. According to some accounts he was there blest with the nuptials and company of Helen.

Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and offered the unrivalled panoply, which Hephaestus had forged and wrought for him, as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when Athena, together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which of the two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in favor of the former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and humiliation: in a fit of frenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for the men who had wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.

Odysseus now learnt from Helenus son of Priam, whom he had captured in an ambuscade, that Troy could not be taken unless both Philoktetes, and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, could be prevailed upon to join the besiegers. The former, having been stung in the foot by a serpent, and becoming insupportable to the Greeks from the stench of his wound, had been left at Lemnus in the commencement of the expedition, and had spent ten years in misery on that desolate island; but he still possessed the peerless bow and arrows of Heracles, which were said to be essential to the capture of Troy. Diomedes fetched Philoktetes from Lemnus to the Grecian camp, where he was healed by the skill of Machaon, and took an active part against the Trojans—engaging in single combat with Paris, and killing him with one of the Herakleian arrows. The Trojans were allowed to carry away for burial the body of this prince, the fatal cause of all their sufferings; but not until it had been mangled by the hand of Menelaus. Odysseus went to the island of Skyrus to invite Neoptolemus to the army. The untried but impetuous youth gladly obeyed the call, and received from Odysseus his father’s armor, while on the other hand, Eurypylus, son of Telephus, came from Mysia as auxiliary to the Trojans and rendered to them valuable service—turning the tide of fortune for a time against the Greeks, and killing some of their bravest chiefs, amongst whom was numbered Peneleos, and the unrivalled leech Maehaon. The exploits of Neoptolemus were numerous, worthy of the glory of his race and the renown of his father. He encountered and slew Eurypylus, together with numbers of the Mysian warriors: he routed the Trojans and drove them within their walls, from whence they never again emerged to give battle: nor was he less distinguished for his good sense and persuasive diction, than for forward energy in the field.

Troy however was still impregnable so long as the Palladium, a statue given by Zeus himself to Dardanus, remained in the citadel; and great care had been taken by the Trojans not only to conceal this valuable present, but to construct other statues so like it as to mislead any intruding robber. Nevertheless the enterprising Odysseus, having disguised his person with miserable clothing and self-inflicted injuries, found means to penetrate into the city and to convey the Palladium by stealth away: Helen alone recognized him; but she was now anxious to return to Greece, and even assisted Odysseus in concerting means for the capture of the town.

To accomplish this object, one final stratagem was resorted to. By the hands of Epeius of Panopeus, and at the suggestion of Athene, a capacious hollow wooden horse was constructed, capable of containing one hundred men: the élite of the Grecian heroes, Neoptolemus, Odysseus, Menelaus and others, concealed themselves in the inside of it, and the entire Grecian army sailed away to Tenedos, burning their tents and pretending to have abandoned the siege. The Trojans, overjoyed to find themselves free, issued from the city and contemplated with astonishment the fabric which their enemies had left behind: they long doubted what should be done with it; and the anxious heroes from within heard the surrounding consultations, as well as the voice of Helen when she pronounced their names and counterfeited the accents of their wives. Many of the Trojans were anxious to dedicate it to the gods in the city as a token of gratitude for their deliverance; but the more cautious spirits inculcated distrust of an enemy’s legacy; and Laocoon, the priest of Poseidon, manifested his aversion by striking the side of the horse with his spear. The sound revealed that the horse was hollow, but the Trojans heeded not this warning of possible fraud; and the unfortunate Laocoon, a victim to his own sagacity and patriotism, miserably perished before the eyes of his countrymen, together with one of his sons, —two serpents being sent expressly by the gods out of the sea to destroy him. By this terrific spectacle, together with the perfidious counsels of Sinon, a traitor whom the Greeks had left behind for the special purpose of giving false information, the Trojans were induced to make a breach in their own walls, and to drag the fatal fabric with triumph and exultation into their city.

The destruction of Troy, according to the decree of the gods, was now irrevocably sealed. While the Trojans indulged in a night of riotous festivity, Sinon kindled the fire-signal to the Greeks at Tenedos, loosening the bolts of the wooden horse, from out of which the enclosed heroes descended. The city, assailed both from within and from without, was thoroughly sacked and destroyed, with the slaughter or captivity of the larger portion of its heroes as well as its people. The venerable Priam perished by the hand of Neoptolemus, having in vain sought shelter at the domestic altar of Zeus Herkeios; but his son Deiphobus, who since the death of Paris had become the husband of Helen, defended his house desperately against Odysseus and Menelaus, and sold his life dearly. After he was slain, his body was fearfully mutilated by the latter.

Thus was Troy utterly destroyed — the city, the altars and temples, and the population. Aeneas and Antenor were permitted to escape, with their families, having been always more favorably regarded by the Greeks than the remaining Trojans. According to one version of the story, they had betrayed the city to the Greeks: a panther’s skin had been hung over the door of Antenor’s house as a signal for the victorious besiegers to spare it in the general plunder. In the distribution of the principal captives, Astyanax, the infant son of Hector, was cast from the top of the wall and killed, by Odysseus or Neoptolemus: Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, was immolated on the tomb of Achilles, in compliance with a requisition made by the shade of the deceased hero to his countrymen; while her sister Cassandra was presented as a prize to Agamemnon. She had sought sanctuary at the altar of Athene, where Ajax, the son of Oileus, making a guilty attempt to seize her, had drawn both upon himself and upon the army the serious wrath of the goddess, insomuch that the Greeks could hardly be restrained from stoning him to death. Andromache and Helenus were both given to Neoptolemus, who, according to the Ilias Minor, carried away also Aeneas as his captive.

Helen gladly resumed her union with Menelaus: she accompanied him back to Sparta, and lived with him there many years in comfort and dignity, passing afterwards to a happy immortality in the Elysian fields. She was worshipped as a goddess with heir brothers the Dioskuri and her husband, having her temple, statue and altar at Theraptnae and elsewhere, and various examples of her miraculous interventions were cited among the Greeks. The lyric poet Stesichorus had ventured to denounce her, conjointly with her sister Clytemnestra, in a tone of rude and plain-spoken severity, resembling that of Euripides and Lycophron afterwards, but strikingly opposite to the delicacy and respect with which she is always handled by Homer, who never admits reproaches against her except from her own lips. He was smitten with blindness, and made sensible of his impiety; but having repented and composed a special poem formally retracting the calumny, was permitted to recover his sight. In his poem of recantation (the famous palinode now unfortunately lost) he pointedly contradicted the Homeric narrative, affirming that Helen had never been to Troy at all, and that the Trojans had carried thither nothing but her image. It is, probably, to the excited religious feelings of Stesichorus that we owe the first idea of this glaring deviation from the old legend, which could never have been recommended by any considerations of poetical interest.

Other versions were afterwards started, forming a sort of compromise between Homer and Stesichorus, admitting that Helen had never really been at Troy, without altogether denying her elopement. Such is the story of her having been detained in Egypt during the whole term of the siege. Paris, on his departure from Sparta, had been driven thither by storms, and the Egyptian king Proteus, hearing of the grievous wrong which he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him away from the country with severe menaces, detaining Helen until her lawful husband should come to seek her. When the Greeks reclaimed Helen from Troy, the Trojans assured them solemnly, that she neither was, nor ever had been, in the town; but the Greeks, treating this allegation as fraudulent, prosecuted the siege until their ultimate success confirmed the correctness of the statement, nor did Menelaus recover Helen until, on his return from Troy, he visited Egypt. Such was the story told by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, and it appeared satisfactory to his historicizing mind. “For if Helen had really been at Troy (he argues) she would certainly have been given up, even had she been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her: their misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that such was the fact”. Assuming the historical character of the war of Troy, the remark of Herodotus admits of no reply; nor can we greatly wonder that he acquiesced in the tale of Helen's Egyptian detention, as a substitute for the “incredible insanity” which the genuine legend imputes to Priam and the Trojans. Pausanias, upon the same ground and by the same mode of reasoning, pronounces that the Trojan horse must have been in point of fact a battering-engine, because to admit the literal narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the defenders of the city. And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as the real cause of the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext of it; for he thinks that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans could have been so mad and silly as to endure calamities of such magnitude “for one little woman”. Mr. Knight suggests various political causes as substitutes; these might deserve consideration, either if any evidence could be produced to countenance them, or if the subject on which they are brought to bear could be shown to belong to the domain of history.

The return of the Grecian chiefs from Troy furnished matter to the ancient epic hardly less copious than the siege itself, and the more susceptible of indefinite diversity, inasmuch as those who had before acted in concert were now dispersed and isolated. Moreover the stormy voyages and compulsory wanderings of the heroes exactly fell in with the common aspirations after an heroic founder, and enabled even the most remote Hellenic settlers to connect the origin of their town with this prominent event of their ante-historical and semi-divine world. And an absence of ten years afforded room for the supposition of many domestic changes in their native abode, and many family misfortunes and misdeeds during the interval. One of these heroic “Returns”, that of Odysseus, has been immortalized by the verse if Homer. The hero, after a series of long-protracted suffering and expatriation, inflicted on him by the anger of Poseidon, at last reaches his native island, but finds his wife beset, his youthful son insulted, and his substance plundered, by a troop of insolent suitors; he is forced to appear as a wretched beggar, and to endure in his own person their scornful treatment; but finally, by the interference of Athene coming in aid of his own courage and stratagem, he is enabled to overwhelm his enemies, to resume his family position, and to recover his property. The return of several other Grecian chiefs was the subject of an epic poem by Hagias, which is now lost, but of which a brief abstract or argument still remains: there were in antiquity various other poems of similar title and analogous matter.

As usual with the ancient epic, the multiplied sufferings of this back-voyage are traced to divine wrath, justly provoked by the sins of the Greeks; who, in the fierce exultation of a victory purchased by so many hardships, had neither respected nor event spared the altars of the gods in Troy; and Athene, who had been their most zealous ally during the siege, was so incensed by their final recklessness, more especially by the outrage of Ajax, son of Oileus, that she actively harassed and embittered their return, in spite of every effort to appease her. The chiefs began to quarrel among themselves; their formal assembly became a scene of drunkenness; even Agamemnon and Menelaus lost their fraternal harmony, and each man acted on his own separate resolution. Nevertheless, according to the Odyssey, Nestor, Diomedes, Neoptolemus, Idomeneus and Philoktetes reached home speedily and safely: Agamemnon also arrived in Peloponnesus, to perish by the hand of a treacherous wife; but Menelaus was condemned to long wanderings and to the severest privations in Egypt, Cyprus and elsewhere, before he could set foot in his native land. The Lokrian Ajax perished on the Gyraean rock. Though exposed to a terrible storm, he had already reached this place of safety, when he indulged in the rash boast of having escaped in defiance of the gods: no sooner did Poseidon hear this language, than he struck with his trident the rock which Ajax was grasping and precipitated both into the sea. Kalchas the soothsayer, together with Leonteus and Polypoetes, proceeded by land from Troy to Kolophon.

In respect however to these and other Grecian heroes, tales were told different from those in the Odyssey, assigning to them a long expatriation and a distant home. Nestor went to Italy, where he founded Metapontum, Pisa and Herakleia: Philoktetes also went to Italy, founded Petilia and Krimisa, and sent settlers to Egesta in Sicily. Neoptolemus, under the advice of Thetis, marched by land across Thrace, met with Odysseus, who had come by sea, at Maroneia, and then pursued his journey to Epirus, where he became king of the Molossians. Idomeneus came to Italy, and founded Uria in the Salentine peninsula. Diomedes, after wandering far and wide, went along the Italian coast into the innermost Adriatic gulf, and finally settled in Daunia, founding the cities of Argyrippa, Beneventum, Atria and Diomedeia: by the favor of Athene he became immortal, and was worshipped as a god in many different places. The Lokrian followers of Ajax founded the Epizephyrian Lokri on the southernmost corner of Italy, besides another settlement in Libya.

I have spoken in another place of the compulsory exile of Teukros, who, besides founding the city of Salamis in Cyprus, is said to have established some settlements in the Iberian peninsula. Menestheus the Athenian did the like, and also founded both Elaea in Mysia and Skylletium in Italy. The Arcadian chief Agamenor founded Paphus in Cyprus. Epeius, of Panopeus in Phocis, the constructor of the Trojan horse with the aid of the goddess Athene, settled at Lagaria near Sybaris on the coast of Italy; and the very tools which he had employed in that remarkable fabric were shown down to a late date in the temple of Athene at Metapontum. Temples, altars and towns were also pointed out in Asia Minor, in Samos and in Crete, the foundation of Agamemnon or of his followers. The inhabitants of the Grecian town of Scyon, in the Thracian peninsula called rankle or Pellene, accounted themselves the offspring of the Pellenians from Achaea, in Peloponnesus, who had served under Agamemnon before Troy, and who on their return from the siege had been driven on the spot by a storm and there settled. The Pamphylians, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, deduced their origin from the wanderings of Amphilochus and Kalchus after the siege of Troy: the inhabitants of the Amphilochian Argos on the Gulf of Ambrakia revered the same Amphilochus as their founder. The Orchomenians under Ialmenus, on quitting the conquered city, wandered or were driven to the eastern extremity of the Euxine Sea; and the barbarous Achaeans under Mount Caucasus were supposed to have derived their first establishment from this source. Meriones with his Keeton followers settled at Engyion in Sicily, along with the preceding Cretans who had remained there after the invasion of Minos. The Elyminians in Sicily also were composed of Trojans and Greeks separately driven to the spot, who, forgetting their previous differences, united in the joint settlements of Eryx and Egesta. We hear of Podaleirius both in Italy and on the coast of Caria; of Akamas, son of Theseus, at Amphipolis in Thrace, at Soli in Cyprus, and at Synnada in Phrygia; of Guneus, Prothous and Eurypylus, in Crete as well as in Libya. The obscure poem of Lycophron enumerates many of these dispersed and expatriated heroes, whose conquest of Troy was indeed a Cadmeian victory (according to the proverbial phrase of the Greeks), wherein the sufferings of the victor were little inferior to those of the vanquished. It was particularly among the Italian Greeks, where they were worshipped with very special solemnity, that their presence as wanderers from Troy was reported and believed.

I pass over the numerous other tales which circulated among the ancients, illustrating the ubiquity of the Grecian and Trojan heroes as well as that of the Argonauts,—one of the most striking features in the Hellenic legendary world. Amongst them all, the most interesting, individually, is Odysseus, whose romantic adventures in fabulous places and among fabulous persons have been made familiarly known by Homer. The goddesses Kalypso and Circe; the semi-divine mariners of Pheacia, whose ships are endowed with consciousness and obey without a steersman; the one-eyed Cyclopes, the gigantic Laestrygones, and the wind-ruler Eolus; the Sirens who ensnare by their song, as the Lotophagi fascinate by their food—all these pictures formed integral and interesting portions of the old epic. After the suitors had been buried by their relatives, he offered sacrifice to the Nymphs, and then went to Elis to inspect his herds of cattle there pasturing: the Eleian Polyxenus welcomed him hospitably, and made him a present of a bowl: Odysseus then returned to Ithaca, and fulfilled the rites and sacrifices prescribed to him by Teiresias in his visit to the underworld. This obligation discharged, he went to the country of the Thesprotians, and there married the queen Kallidike: he headed the Thesprotians in a war against the Brygians, the latter being conducted by Ares himself, who fiercely assailed Odysseus; but the goddess Athene stood by him, and he was enabled to make head against Ares until Apollo came and parted them. Odysseus then returned to Ithaca, leaving the Thesprotian kingdom to Polypcetes, his son by Kallidike.

Homer leaves Odysseus reestablished in his house and family; but so marked a personage could never be permitted to remain in the tameness of domestic life: the epic poem called the Telegonia ascribed to him a subsequent series of adventures. Telegonus, his son by Circe, coming to Ithaca in search of his father, ravaged the island and killed Odysseus without knowing who he was. Bitter repentance overtook the son for his undesigned parricide: at his prayer and by the intervention of his mother Circe, both Penelope and Telemachus were made immortal: Telegonus married Penelope, and Telemachus married Circe.

We see by this poem that Odysseus was represented as the mythical ancestor of the Thesprotian kings, just as Neoptolemus was of the Molossian.

It has already been mentioned that Antenor and Aeneas stand distinguished from the other Trojans by a dissatisfaction with Priam and a sympathy with the Greeks, which is by Sophocles and others construed as treacherous collusion,—a suspicion indirectly glanced, though emphatically repelled, by the Aeneas of Virgil. In the old epic of Arktinus, next in age to the Iliad and Odyssey, Aeneas abandons Troy and retires to Mount Ida, in terror at the miraculous death of Laocoon, before the entry of the Greeks into the town and the last night-battle: yet Lesches, in another of the ancient epic poems, represented him as having been carried away captive by Neoptolemus. In a remarkable passage of the Iliad, Poseidon describes the family of Priam as having incurred the hatred of Zeus, and predicts that Aeneas and his descendants shall reign over the Trojans: the race of Dardanus, beloved by Zeus more than all his other sons, would thus be preserved, since Aeneas belonged to it. Accordingly, when Aeneas is in imminent peril from the hands of Achilles, Poseidon specially interferes to rescue him, and even the implacable miso-Trojan goddess Here assents to the proceeding. These passages have been construed by various able critics to refer to a family of philo-Hellenic or semi-Hellenic Eneads, known even in the time of the early singers of the Iliad as masters of some territory in or near the Troad, and professing to be descended from, as well as worshipping, Aeneas. In the town of Skepsis, situated in the mountainous range of Ida, about thirty miles eastward of Ilium, there existed two noble and priestly families who professed to be descended, the one from Hector, the other from Eneas. The Skepsian critic Demetrius (in whose time both these families were still to be found) informs us that Skamandrius son of Hector, and Ascanius son of Eneas, were the archegets or heroic founders of his native city, which had been originally situated on one of the highest ranges of Ida, and was subsequently transferred by them to the less lofty spot on which it stood in his time. In Arisbe and Gentinus there seem to have been families professing the same descent, since the same archegets were acknowledged. In Ophrynium, Hector had his consecrated edifice, and in Ilium both he and Aeneas were worshipped as gods: and it was the remarkable statement of the Lesbian Menekrates, that Eneas, “having been wronged by Paris and stripped of the sacred privileges which belonged to him, avenged himself by betraying the city, and then became one of the Greeks”.

One tale thus among many respecting Aeneas, and that too the most ancient of all, preserved among the natives of the Troad, who worshipped him as their heroic ancestor, was, that after the capture of Troy he continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans, on friendly terms with the Greeks. But there were other tales respecting him, alike numerous and irreconcilable: the hand of destiny marked him as a wanderer, and his ubiquity is not exceeded even by that of Odysseus. We hear of him at Aenus in Thrace, in Pallene, at Eneia in the Thermaic Gulf, in Delus, at Orchomenus and Mantineia in Arcadia, in the islands of Kythera and Zakynthus, in Leukas and Ambrakia, at Buthrotum in Epirus, on the Salentine peninsula and various other places in the southern region of Italy; at Drepana and Segesta in Sicily, at Carthage, at Cape Palinurus, Cumae, Misenum, Caieta, and finally in Latium, where he lays the first humble foundation of the mighty Rome and her empire. And the reason why his wanderings were not continued still further was, that the oracles and the pronounced will of the gods directed him to settle in Latium. In each of these numerous places his visit was commemorated and certified by local monuments or special legends, particularly by temples and permanent ceremonies in honor of his mother Aphrodite, whose worship accompanied him everywhere: there were also many temples and many different tombs of Aeneas himself. The vast ascendency acquired by Rome, the ardor with which all the literary Romans espoused the idea of a Trojan origin, and the fact that the Julian family recognized Aeneas as their gentile primary ancestor,—all contributed to give to the Roman version of his legend the preponderance over every other. The various other places in which monuments of Aeneas were found came thus to be represented as places where he had halted for a time on his way from Troy to Latium. But though the legendary pretensions of these places were thus eclipsed in the eyes of those who constituted the literary public, the local belief was not extinguished: they claimed the hero as their permanent property, and his tomb was to them a proof that he had lived and died among them.

Antenor, who shares with Aeneas the favorable sympathy of the Greeks, is said by Pindar to have gone from Troy along with Menelaus and Helen into the region of Cyrene in Libya. But according to the more current narrative, he placed himself at the head of a body of Eneti or Veneti from Paphlagonia, who had come as allies of Troy, and went by sea into the inner part of the Adriatic Gulf, where he conquered the neighboring barbarians and founded the town of Patavium (the modern Padua); the Veneti in this region were said to owe their origin to his immigration. We learn further from Strabo, that Opsikellas, one of the companions of Antenor, had continued his wanderings even into Iberia, and that he had there established a settlement bearing his name.

Thus ended the Trojan war; together with its sequel, the dispersion of the heroes, victors as well as vanquished. The account here given of it has been unavoidably brief and imperfect; for in a work intended to follow consecutively the real history of the Greeks, no greater space can be allotted even to the most splendid gem of their legendary period. Indeed, although it would be easy to fill a large volume with the separate incidents which have been introduced into the “Trojan cycle”, the misfortune is that they are for the most part so contradictory as to exclude all possibility of weaving them into one connected narrative. We are compelled to select one out of the number, generally without any solid ground of preference, and then to note the variations of the rest. No one who has not studied the original documents can imagine the extent to which this discrepancy proceeds; it covers almost every portion and fragment of the tale.

But though much may have been thus omitted of what the reader might expect to find in an account of the Trojan war, its genuine character has been studiously preserved, without either exaggeration or abatement. The real Trojan war is that which was recounted by Homer and the old epic poets, and continued by all the lyric and tragic composers. For the latter, though they took great liberties with the particular incidents, and introduced to some extent a new moral tone, yet worked more or less faithfully on the Homeric scale: and even Euripides, who departed the most widely from the feeling of the old legend, never lowered down his matter to the analogy of contemporary life. They preserved its well-defined object, at once righteous and romantic, the recovery of the daughter of Zeus and sister of the Dioskuri—its mixed agencies, divine, heroic and human—the colossal force and deeds of its chief actors—its vast magnitude and long duration, as well as the toils which the conquerors underwent, and the Nemesis which followed upon their success. And these were the circumstances which, set forth in the full blaze of epic and tragic poetry, bestowed upon the legend its powerful and imperishable influence over the Hellenic mind. The enterprise was one comprehending all the members of the Hellenic body, of which each individually might be proud, and in which, nevertheless, those feelings of jealous and narrow patriotism, so lamentably prevalent in many of the towns, were as much as possible excluded. It supplied them with a grand and inexhaustible object of common sympathy, common faith, and common admiration; and when occasions arose for bringing together a Pan-Hellenic force against the barbarians, the precedent of the Homeric expedition was one upon which the elevated minds of Greece could dwell with the certainty of rousing an unanimous impulse, if not always of counterworking sinister by motives, among their audience. And the incidents comprised in the Trojan cycle were familiarized, not only to the public mind but also to the public eye, by innumerable representations both of the sculptor and the painter,—those which were romantic and chivalrous being better adapted for this purpose, and therefore more constantly employed, than any other.

Of such events the genuine Trojan war of the old epic was for the most part composed. Though literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend and nothing more. If we are asked whether it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth,—whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Eos, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war,—like the mutilated trunk of Deiphobus in the underworld; if we are asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records indeed, the Homeric epic in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity would probably never have come into existence. Whoever therefore ventures to dissect Homer, Arktinus and Lesches, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions. Among many attempts, ancient as well as modern, to identify real objects in this historical darkness, that of Dio Chrysostom deserves attention for its extraordinary boldness. In his oration addressed to the inhabitants of Ilium, and intended to demonstrate that the Trojans were not only blameless as to the origin of the war, but victorious in its issue—he overthrows all the leading points of the Homeric narrative, and re-writes nearly the whole from beginning to end: Paris is the lawful husband of Helen, Achilles is slain by Hector, and the Greeks retire without taking Troy, disgraced as well as baffled. Having shown without difficulty that the Iliad, if it be looked at as a history, is full of gaps, incongruities and absurdities, he proceeds to compose a more plausible narrative of his own, which he tenders as so much authentic matter of fact. The most important point, however, which his Oration brings to view is, the literal and confiding belief with which the Homeric narrative was regarded, as if it were actual history, not only by the inhabitants of Ilium, but also by the general Grecian public.

The small town of Ilium, inhabited by Eolic Greeks and raised into importance only by the legendary reverence attached to it, stood upon an elevated ridge forming a spur from Mount Ida, rather more than three miles from the town and promontory of Sigeium, and about twelve stadia, or less than two miles, from the sea at its nearest point. From Sigeium and the neighboring town of Achilleium (with its monument and temple of Achilles), to the town of Rhoeteium on a hill higher up the Hellespont (with its monument mid chapel of Ajax called the Aianteium), was a distance of sixty stadia, or seven miles and a half in the straight course by sea: in the intermediate space was a bay and an adjoining plain, comprehending the embouchure of the Skamander, and extending to the base of the ridge on which Ilium stood. This plain was the celebrated plain of Troy, in which the great Homeric battles were believed to have taken place: the portion of the bay near to Sigeium went by the name of the Naustathmon of the Achaeans (i.e. the spot where they dragged their ships ashore), and was accounted to have been the camp of Agamemnon and his vast army.

Historical Ilium was founded, according to the questionable statement of Strabo, during the last dynasty of the Lydian kings, that is, at some period later than 720 BC. Until after the days of Alexander the Great—indeed until the period of Roman preponderance —it always remained a place of inconsiderable power and importance, as we learn not only from the assertion of the geographer, but also from the fact that Achilleium, Sigeium and Rhoeteium were all independent of it. But inconsiderable as it might be, it was the only place which ever bore the venerable name immortalized by Homer. Like the Homeric Ilium, it had its temple of Athene, wherein she was worshipped as the presiding goddess of the town: the inhabitants affirmed that Agamemnon had not altogether destroyed the town, but that it had been reoccupied after his departure, and had never ceased to exist. Their acropolis was called Pergamum, and in it was shown the house of Priam and the altar of Zeus Herkeius where that unhappy old man had been slain: moreover there were exhibited, in the temples, panoplies which had been worn by the Homeric heroes, and doubtless many other relics appreciated by admirers of the Iliad.

These were testimonies which few persons in those ages were inclined to question, when combined with the identity of name and general locality; nor does it seem that any one did question them until the time of Demetrius of Skepsis. Hellanikus expressly described this Ilium as being the Ilium of Homer, for which assertion Strabo (or probably Demetrius, from whom the narrative seems to be copied) imputes to him very gratuitously an undue partiality towards the inhabitants of the town. Herodotus relates, that Xerxes in his march into Greece visited the place, went up to the Pergamum of Priam, inquired with much interest into the details of the Homeric siege, made libations to the fallen heroes, and offered to the Athene of Ilium his magnificent sacrifice of a thousand oxen: he probably represented and believed himself to be attacking Greece as the avenger of the Priamid family. The Lacedaemonian admiral Mindarus, while his fleet lay at Abydus, went personally to Ilium to offer sacrifice to Athene, and saw from that elevated spot the battle fought between the squadron of Dorieus and the Athenians, on the shore near Rhoeteium. During the interval between the Peloponnesian war and the Macedonian invasion of Persia. Ilium was always garrisoned as a strong position; but its domain was still narrow, and did not extend even to the sea which was so near to it. Alexander, on crossing the Hellespont, sent his army from Sestus to Abydus, under Parmenio, and sailed personally from Elaeus in the Chersonese, after having solemnly sacrificed at the Elaeuntian shrine of Protesilaus, to the harbor of the Achaeans between Sigeium and Rhoeteium. He then ascended to Ilium, sacrificed to the Eliean Athene, and consecrated in her temple his own panoply, in exchange for which he took some of the sacred arms there suspended, which were said to have been preserved from the time of the Trojan war. These arms were carried before him when he went to battle by his armor-bearers. It is a fact still more curious, and illustrative of the strong working of the old legend on an impressible and eminently religious mind, that he also sacrificed to Priam himself, on the very altar of Zeus Herkeius from which the old king was believed to have been torn by Neoptolemus. As that fierce warrior was his heroic ancestor by the maternal side, he desired to avert from himself the anger of Priam against the Achilleid race.

Alexander made to the inhabitants of Ilium many munificent promises, which he probably would have executed, had he not been prevented by untimely death: for the Trojan war was amongst all the Grecian legends the most thoroughly Pan-Hellenic, and the young king of Macedon, besides his own sincere legendary faith, was anxious to merge the local patriotism of the separate Greek towns in one general Hellenic sentiment under himself as chief. One of his successors, Antigonus, founded the city of Alexandreia in the Troad, between Sigeium and the more southerly promontory of Lektum; compressing into it the inhabitants of many of the neighboring Eolic towns in the region of Ida, — Skepsis, Kebren, Hamaxitus, Kolonae, and Neandria, though the inhabitants of Skepsis were subsequently permitted by Lysimachus to resume their own city and autonomous government. Ilium however remained without any special mark of favor until the arrival of the Romans in Asia and their triumph over Antiochus (about 190 BC). Though it retained its walls and its defensible position, Demetrius of Skepsis, who visited it shortly before that event, described it as being then in a state of neglect and poverty, many of the houses not even having tiled roofs. In this dilapidated condition, however, it was still mythically recognized both by Antiochus and by the Roman consul Livius, who went up thither to sacrifice to the Iliean Athene. The Romans, proud of their origin from Troy and Aeneas, treated Ilium with signal munificence; not only granting to it immunity from tribute, but also adding to its domain the neighboring territories of Gergis, Rhoeteium and Sigeium—and making the Ilieans masters of the whole coasts from the Peraea (or continental possessions) of Tenedos (southward of Sigeium) to the boundaries of Dardanus, which had its own title to legendary reverence as the special sovereignty of Eneas. The inhabitants of Sigeium could not peaceably acquiesce in this loss of their autonomy, and their city was destroyed by the Ilians.

The dignity and power of Ilium being thus prodigiously enhanced, we cannot doubt that the inhabitants assumed to themselves exaggerated importance as the recognized parents of all-conquering Rome. Partly, we may naturally suppose, from the jealousies thus aroused on the part of their neighbors at Skepsis and Alexandreia Troas—partly from the pronounced tendency of the age (in which Krates at Pergamum and Aristarchus at Alexandria divided between them the palm of literary celebrity) towards criticism and illustration of the old poets—a blow was now aimed at the mythical legitimacy of Ilium. Demetrius of Skepsis, one of the most laborious of the Homeric critics, had composed thirty books of comment upon the Catalogue in the Iliad: Hestiaea, an authoress of Alexandreia Troas, had written on the same subject: both of them, well-acquainted with the locality, remarked that the vast battles described in the Iliad could not be packed into the narrow space between Ilium and the Naustathmon of the Greeks; the more so, as that space, too small even as it then stood, had been considerably enlarged since the date of the Iliad by deposits at the mouth of the Skamander. They found no difficulty in pointing out topographical incongruities and impossibilities as to the incidents in the Iliad, which they professed to remove by the startling theory that the Homeric Ilium had not occupied the site of the city so called. There was a village, called the village of the Ilieans, situated rather less than four miles from the city in the direction of Mount Ida, and further removed from the sea; here, they affirmed the “holy Troy” had stood.

No positive proof was produced to sustain the conclusion, for Strabo expressly states that not a vestige of the ancient city remained at the Village of the Ilieans: but the fundamental supposition was backed by a second accessory supposition, to explain how it happened that all such vestiges had disappeared.

Nevertheless Strabo adopts the unsupported hypothesis of Demetrius as if it were an authenticated fact—distinguishing pointedly between Old and New Ilium, and even censuring Hellanikus for having maintained the received local faith. But I cannot find that Demetrius and Hestiaea have been followed in this respect by any other writer of ancient times excepting Strabo. Ilium still continued to be talked of and treated by everyone as the genuine Homeric Troy: the cruel jests of the Roman rebel Fimbria, when he sacked the town and massacred the inhabitants—the compensation made by Sylla, and the pronounced favor of Julius Caesar and Augustus,—all prove this continued recognition of identity. Arrian, though a native of Nicomedia, holding a high appointment in Asia Minor, and remarkable for the exactness of his topographical notices, describes the visit of Alexander to Ilium, without any suspicion that the place with all its relics was a mere counterfeit: Aristides, Dio Chrysostom, Pausanias, Appian, and Plutarch hold the same language. But modern writers seem for the most part to have taken up the supposition from Strabo as implicitly as he took it from Demetrius. They call Ilium by the disrespectful appellation of New Ilium—while the traveler in the Troad looks for Old Ilium as if it were the unquestionable spot where Priam had lived and moved; the name is even formally enrolled on the best maps recently prepared of the ancient Troad.

Strabo has here converted into geographical matter of fact an hypothesis purely gratuitous, with a view of saving the accuracy of the Homeric topography; though in all probability the locality of the pretended Old Ilium would have been found open to difficulties not less serious than those which it was introduced to obviate. It may be true that Demetrius and he were justified in their negative argument, so as to show that the battles described in the Iliad could not possibly have taken place if the city of Priam had stood on the hill inhabited by the Ilieans. But the legendary faith subsisted before, and continued without abatement afterwards, notwithstanding such topographical impossibilities. Hellanikus, Herodotus, Mindarus, the guides of Xerxes, and Alexander, had not been shocked by them: the case of the latter is the strongest of all, because he had received the best education of his time under Aristotle—he was a passionate admirer and constant reader of the Iliad—he was moreover personally familiar with the movements of armies, and lived at a time when maps, which began with Anaximander, the disciple of Thales, were at least known to all who sought instruction. Now if, notwithstanding such advantages, Alexander fully believed in the identity of Ilium, unconscious of these many and glaring topographical difficulties, much less would Homer himself, or the Homeric auditors, be likely to pay attention to them, at a period, five centuries earlier, of comparative rudeness and ignorance, when prose records as well as geographical maps were totally unknown. The inspired poet might describe, and his hearers would listen with delight to the tale, how Hector, pursued by Achilles, ran thrice round the city of Troy, while the trembling Trojans were all huddled into the city, not one daring to come out even at this last extremity of their beloved prince—and while the Grecian army looked on, restraining unwillingly their uplifted spears at the nod of Achilles, in order that Hector might perish by no other hand than his; nor were they, while absorbed by this impressive recital, disposed to measure distances or calculate topographical possibilities with reference to the site of the real Ilium. The mistake consists in applying to Homer and to the Homeric siege of Troy, criticisms which would be perfectly just if brought to bear on the Athenian siege of Syracuse, as described by Thucydides; in the Peloponnesian war— but which are not more applicable to the epic narrative than they would be to the exploits of Amadis or Orlando.

There is every reason for presuming that the Ilium visited by Xerxes and Alexander was really the “holy Ilium” present to the mind of Homer; and if so, it must have been inhabited, either by Greeks or by some anterior population, at a period earlier than that which Strabo assigns. History recognizes neither Troy the city, nor Trojans, as actually existing; but the extensive region called Trills, or the Tread (more properly Troias), is known both to Herodotus and to Thucydides: it seems to include the territory westward of an imaginary line drawn from the northeast corner of the Adramyttian gulf to the Propontis at Parium, since both Antandrus, Kolenae, and the district immediately round Ilium, are regarded as belonging to the Troad. Herodotus further notices the Teukrians of Gergis (a township conterminous with Ilium, and lying to the eastward of the road from Ilium to Abydus), considering them as the remnant of a larger Teukrian population which once resided in the country, and which had in very early times undertaken a vast migration from Asia into Europe. To that Teukrian population he thinks that the Homeric Trojans belonged: and by later writers, especially by Virgil and the other Romans, the names Teukrians and Trojans are employed as equivalents. As the name Trojans is not mentioned in any contemporary historical monument, so the name Teukrians never once occurs in the old epic. It appears to have been first noticed by the elegiac poet Kallinus, about 660 BC, who connected it by an alleged immigration of Teukrians from Crete into the region round about Ida. Others again denied this, asserting that the primitive ancestor, Teukrus, had come into the country from Attica, or that he was of indigenous origin, born from Skamander and the nymph Idaea—all various manifestations of that eager thirst after an eponymous hero which never deserted the Greeks. Gergithians occur in more than one spot in Aeolis, even so far southward as the neighborhood of Kyme: the name has no place in Homer, but he mentions Gorgythion and Kebriones as illegitimate sons of Priam, thus giving a sort of epical recognition both to Gergis and Kebren. As Herodotus calls the old epical Trojans by the name Teukrians, so the Attic Tragedians call them Phrygians; though the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite represents Phrygians and Trojans as completely distinct, specially noting the diversity of language; and in the Iliad the Phrygians are simply numbered among the allies of Troy from the far Ascania, without indication of any more intimate relationship. Nor do the tales which connect Dardanus with Samothrace and Arcadia find countenance in the Homeric poems, wherein Dardanus is the son of Zeus, having no root anywhere except in Dardania. The mysterious solemnities of Samothrace, afterwards so highly venerated throughout the Grecian world, date from a period much later than Homer; and the religious affinities of that island as well as of Crete with the territories of Phrygia and Eolis, were certain, according to the established tendency of the Grecian mind, to beget stories of a common genealogy.

To pass from this legendary world,—an aggregate of streams distinct and heterogeneous, which do not willingly come into confluence, and cannot be forced to intermix,—into the clearer vision afforded by Herodotus, we learn from him that in the year 500 BC the whole coast-region from Dardanus southward to the promontory of Lektum (including the town of Ilium), and from Lektum eastward to Adramyttium, had been Aeolized, or was occupied by Eolic Greeks—likewise the inland towns of Skepsist and Kreben. So that if we draw a line northward from Adramyttium to Kyzikus on the Propontis, throughout the whole territory westward from that line, to the Hellespont and the Egean Sea, all the considerable towns would be Hellenic, with the exception of Gergis and the Teukrian population around it,—all the towns worthy of note were either Ionic or Eolic. A century earlier, the Teukrian population would have embraced a wider range—perhaps Skepsis and Kreben, the latter of which places was colonized by Greeks from Kyme: a century afterwards, during the satrapy of Pharnabazus, it appears that Gergis had become Hellenized as well as the rest. The four towns, Ilium, Gergis, Kebren and Skepsis, all in lofty and strong positions, were distinguished each by a solemn worship and temple of Athene, and by the recognition of that goddess as their special patroness.

The author of the Iliad conceived the whole of this region as occupied by people not Greek,—Trojans, Dardanians, Lycians, Lelegians, Pelasgians, and Cilicians. He recognizes a temple and worship of Athene in Ilium, though the goddess is bitterly hostile to the Trojans: and Arktinus described the Palladium as the capital protection of the city. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of identity between the Homeric and the historical Aeolis, is, the solemn and diffused worship of the Sminthian Apollo. Chryse, Killa and Tenedos, and more than one place called Sminthium, maintain the surname and invoke the protection of that god during later times, just as they are emphatically described to do by Homer.

When it is said that the Post-Homeric Greeks gradually Hellenized this entire region, we are not to understand that the whole previous population either retired or was destroyed. The Greeks settled in the leading and considerable towns, which enabled them both to protect one another and to gratify their predominant tastes. Partly by force—but greatly also by that superior activity, and power of assimilating foreign ways of thought to their own, which distinguished them from the beginning—they invested all the public features and management of the town with an Hellenic air, distributed all about it their gods, their heroes and their legends, and rendered their language the medium of public administration, religious songs and addresses to the gods, and generally for communications wherein any number of persons were concerned. But two remarks are here to be made: first, in doing this they could not avoid taking to themselves more or less of that which belonged to the parties with whom they fraternized, so that the result was not pure Hellenism; next, that even this was done only in the towns, without being fully extended to the territorial domain around, or to those smaller townships which stood to the town in a dependent relation. The and Ionic Greeks borrowed from the Asiatics whom they had Hellenized, musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and melody, which they knew how to turn to account: they further adopted more or less of those violent and maddening religion rites, manifested occasionally in self-inflicted suffering and mutilation, which were indigenous in Asia Minor in the worship of the Great Mother. The religion of the Greeks in the region of Ida as well as at Kyzilus was more orgiastic than the native worship of Greece Proper, just as that of Lampsacus, Priapus and Parium was more licentious. From the Teukrian region of Gergis, and from the Gergithes near Kyme, sprang the original Sibylline prophecies, and the legendary Sibyll who plays so important a part in the tale of Aeneas. The myth of the Sibyl, whose prophecies are supposed to be heard in the hollow blast bursting out from obscure caverns and apertures in the rocks, was indigenous among the Gergithian Teukrians, and passed from the Kymaeans in Aeolis, along with the other circumstances of the tale of Aeneas, to their brethren the inhabitants of Cumae in Italy. The date of the Gergithian Sibyl, or rather of the circulation of her supposed prophecies, is placed during the reign of Croesus, a period when Gergis was thoroughly Teukrian. Her prophecies, though embodied in Greek verses, had their root in a Teukrian soil and feelings; and the promises of future empire which they so liberally make to the fugitive hero escaping from the flames of Troy into Italy, become interesting from the remarkable way in which they were realized by Rome.

GREEK MYTHS, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT AND INTERPRETED BY THE GREEKS THEMSELVES

THE preceding sections have been intended to exhibit a sketch of that narrative matter, so abundant, so characteristic and so interesting, out of which early Grecian history and chronology have been extracted. Raised originally by hands unseen and from data unassignable, it existed first in the shape of floating talk among the people, from whence a large portion of it passed into the song of the poets, who multiplied, transformed and adorned it in a thousand various ways.

These myths or current stories, the spontaneous and earliest growth of the Grecian mind, constituted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to which they belonged. They are the common root of all those different ramifications into which the mental activity of the Greeks subsequently diverged; containing, as it were, the preface and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology and the professed romance, which we shall hereafter trace each in its separate development. They furnished aliment to the curiosity, and solution to the vague doubts and aspirations of the age; they explained the origin of those customs and standing peculiarities with which men were familiar; they impressed moral lessons, awakened patriotic sympathies, and exhibited in detail the shadowy, but anxious presentiments of the vulgar as to the agency of the gods : moreover they satisfied that craving for adventure and appetite for the marvelous, which has in modern times become the province of fiction proper.

It is difficult, we may say impossible, for a man of mature age to carry back his mind to his conceptions such as they stood when he was a child, growing naturally out of his imagination and feelings, working upon a scanty stock of materials, and borrowing from authorities whom he blindly followed but imperfectly apprehended. A similar difficulty occurs when we attempt to place ourselves in the historical and quasi-philosophical point of view which the ancient myths present to us. We can follow perfectly the imagination and feeling which dictated these tales, and we can admire and sympathize with them as animated, sublime, and affecting poetry; but we are too much accustomed to matter of fact and philosophy of a positive kind, to be able to conceive a time when these beautiful fancies were construed literally and accepted as serious reality.

Nevertheless it is obvious that Grecian myths cannot be either understood or appreciated except with reference to the system of conceptions and belief of the ages in which they arose. We must suppose a public not reading and writing, but seeing, hearing and telling — destitute of all records, and careless as well as ignorant of positive history with its indispensable tests, yet at the same time curious and full of eagerness for new or impressive incidents — strangers even to the rudiments of positive philosophy and to the idea of invariable sequences of nature either in the physical or moral world, yet requiring some connecting theory to interpret and regularize the phenomena before them. Such a theory was supplied by the spontaneous inspirations of an early fancy, which supposed the habitual agency of beings intelligent and voluntary like themselves, but superior in extent of power, and different in peculiarity of attributes. In the geographical ideas of the Homeric period, the earth was flat and round, with the deep and gentle ocean-stream flowing around and returning into itself: chronology, or means of measuring past time, there existed none; but both unobserved regions might be described, the forgotten past unfolded, and the unknown future predicted—through particular men specially inspired by the gods, or endowed by them with that peculiar vision which detected and interpreted passing signs and omens.

If even the rudiments of scientific geography and physics, now so universally diffused and so invaluable as a security against error and delusion, were wanting in this early stage of society, their place was abundantly supplied by vivacity of imagination and by personifying sympathy. The unbounded tendency of the Homeric Greeks to multiply fictitious persons, and to construe the phenomena which interested them into manifestations of design, is above all things here to be noticed, because the form of personal narrative, universal in their myths, is one of its many manifestations. Their polytheism (comprising some elements of an original fetichism, in which particular objects had themselves been supposed to be endued with life, volition, and design) recognized agencies of unseen beings identified and confounded with the different localities and departments of the physical world. Of such beings there were numerous varieties, and many gradations both in power and attributes; there were differences of age, sex and local residence, relations both conjugal and filial between them, and tendencies sympathetic as well as repugnant. The gods formed a sort of political community of their own, which had its hierarchy, its distribution of ranks and duties, its contentions for power and occasional revolutions, its public meetings in the agora of Olympus, and its multitudinous banquets or festivals. The great Olympic gods were in fact only the most exalted amongst an aggregate of quasi-human or ultra-human personages, —daemons, heroes, nymphs, eponymous (or name-giving) genii, identified with each river, mountain, cape, town, village, or known circumscription of territory,—besides horses, bulls, and dogs, of immortal breed and peculiar attributes, and monsters of strange lineaments and combinations, “Gorgons and Harpies and Chimeras dire”. As there were in every gens or family special gentile deities and foregone ancestors who watched over its members, forming in each the characteristic symbol and recognized guarantee of their union, so there seem to have been in each guild or trade peculiar beings whose vocation it was to cooperate or to impede in various stages of the business.

We read in the Iliad that Asteropaeus was grandson of the beautiful river Axius, and Achilles, after having slain him, admits the dignity of this parentage, but boasts that his own descent from Zeus was much greater, since even the great river Achelous and Oceanus himself is inferior to Zeus. Skamander fights with Achilles, calling his brother Simois to his aid. Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, falls in love with Enipeus, the most beautiful of rivers. Achelous appears as a suitor of Deianira.

There cannot be a better illustration of this feeling than what is told of the New Zealanders at the present time. The chief Heu-Hen appeals to his ancestor, the great mountain Tonga Riro: “I am the Heu-Heu, and rule over you all, just as my ancestor Tonga Riro, the mountain of snow, stands above all this land”. Heu-Heu refused permission to anyone to ascend the mountain, on the ground that it was his tipuna or ancestor: "he constantly identified himself with the mountain and called it his sacred ancestor". The mountains in New Zealand are accounted by the natives masculine and feminine: Tonga Riro, and Taranaki, two male mountains, quarreled about the affections of a small volcanic female mountain in the neighborhood.

The religious imagination of the Hindoos also (as described by Colonel Sleeman in his excellent work, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official), affords a remarkable parallel to that of the early Greeks. Colonel Sleeman says, "Any Englishman can easily conceive a poet in his highest calenture of the brain, addressing the Ocean as a steed that knows his rider, and patting the crested billow as his flowing mane. But he must come to India to understand how every individual of a whole community of many millions can address a fine river as a living being—a sovereign princess who hears and understands all they say, and exercises a kind of local superintendence over their affairs, without a single temple in which her image is worshipped, or a single priest to profit by the delusion. As in the case of the Ganges, it is the river itself to whom they address themselves, and not to any deity residing in it, or presiding over it—the stream itself is the deity which fills their imaginations, and receives their homage. Compare also the remarks in the same work on the sanctity of Mother Nerbudda; also of the holy personality of the earth. "The land is considered as the MOTHER of the prince or chief who holds it, the great parent from whom he derives all that maintains him, his family, and his establishments. If well-treated, she yields this in abundance to her son; but if he presumes to look upon her with the eye of desire, she ceases to be fruitful ; or the Deity sends down hail or blight to destroy all that she yields. The measuring the surface of the fields, and the frequently inspecting the crops by the chief himself or his immediate agents, were considered by the people in this light— either it should not be done at all, or the duty should be delegated to inferior agents, whose close inspection of the great parent could not be so displeasing to the Deity".

The extensive and multiform personifications, here faintly sketched, pervaded in every direction the mental system of the Greeks, and were identified intimately both with their conception and with their description of phenomena, present as well as past. That which to us is interesting as the mere creation of an exuberant fancy, was to the Greek genuine and venerated reality. Both the earth and the solid heaven (Gea and Uranos) were both conceived and spoken of by him as endowed with appetite, feeling, sex, and most of the various attributes of humanity. Instead of a sun such as we now see, subject to astronomical laws, and forming the center of a system the changes of which we can ascertain and foreknow, he saw the great god Helios, mounting his chariot in the morning in the east, reaching at midday the height of the solid heaven, and arriving in the evening at the western horizon, with horses fatigued and desirous of repose.

Helios, having favorite spots wherein his beautiful cattle grazed, took pleasure in contemplating them during the course of his journey, and was sorely displeased if any man slew or injured them: he had moreover sons and daughters on earth, and as his all-seeing eye penetrated everywhere, he was sometimes in a situation to reveal secrets even to the gods themselves—while on other occasions he was constrained to turn aside in order to avoid contemplating scenes of abomination. To us these now appear puerile, though pleasing fancies, but to an Homeric Greek they seemed perfectly natural and plausible. In his view, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious. Even in later times, when the positive spirit of inquiry had made considerable progress, Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred the charge of blasphemy for dispersonifying and trying to assign invariable laws to the solar phenomena. Personifying fiction was in this way blended by the Homeric Greeks with their conception of the physical phenomena before them, not simply in the way of poetical ornament, but as a genuine portion of their every-day belief.

It was in this early state of the Grecian mind, stimulating so forcibly the imagination and the feelings, and acting through them upon the belief, that the great body of the myths grew up and obtained circulation. They were, from first to last, personal narratives and adventures; and the persons who predominated as subjects of them were the gods, the heroes, the nymphs, etc., whose names were known and reverenced, and in whom everyone felt interested. To every god and every hero it was consistent with Grecian ideas to ascribe great diversity of human motive and attribute : each indeed has his own peculiar type of character, more or less strictly defined; but in all there was a wide foundation for animated narrative and for romantic incident. The gods and heroes of the land and the tribe belonged, in the conception of a Greek, alike to the present and to the past : he worshipped in their groves and at their festivals; he invoked their protection, and believed in their superintending guardianship, even in his own day : but their more special, intimate, and sympathizing agency was cast back into the unrecorded past. To give suitable utterance to this general sentiment, to furnish body and movement and detail to these divine and heroic pre-existences, which were conceived only in shadowy outline, to lighten up the dreams of what the past must have been, in the minds of those who knew not what it really had been — such was the spontaneous aim and inspiration of productive genius in the community, and such were the purposes which the Grecian myths preeminently accomplished.

The love of antiquities, which Tacitus notices as so prevalent among the Greeks of his day, was one of the earliest, the most durable, and the most widely diffused of the national propensities. But the antiquities of every state were divine and heroic, reproducing the lineaments, but disregarding the measure and limits, of ordinary humanity. The gods formed the starting-point, beyond which no man thought of looking, though some gods were more ancient than others : their progeny, the heroes, many of them sprung from human mothers, constitute an intermediate link between god and man. The ancient epic usually recognizes the presence of a multitude of nameless men, but they are introduced chiefly for the purpose of filling the scene, and of executing the orders, celebrating the valor, and bringing out the personality, of a few divine or heroic characters. It was the glory of bards and storytellers to be able to satisfy those religious and patriotic predispositions of the public, which caused the primary demand for their tales, and which were of a nature eminently inviting and expansive. For Grecian religion was many-sided and many colored; it comprised a great multiplicity of persons, together with much diversity in the types of character; it divinized every vein and attribute of humanity, the lofty as well as the mean—the tender as well as the warlike—the self-devoting and adventurous as well as the laughter-loving and sensual. We shall hereafter reach a time when philosophers protested against such identification of the gods with the more vulgar appetites and enjoyments, believing that nothing except the spiritual attributes of man could properly be transferred to superhuman beings, and drawing their predicates respecting the gods exclusively from what was awful, majestic and terror-striking in human affairs. Such restrictions on the religious fancy were continually on the increase, and the mystic and didactic stamp which marked the last century of paganism in the days of Julian and Libanius, contrasts forcibly with the concrete and vivacious forms, full of vigorous impulse and alive to all the capricious gusts of the human temperament, which people the Homeric Olympus. At present, however, we have only to consider the early, or Homeric and Hesiodic paganism, and its operation in the genesis of the mythical narratives. We cannot doubt that it supplied the most powerful stimulus, and the only one which the times admitted, to the creative faculty of the people; as well from the sociability, the gradations, and the mutual action and reaction of its gods and heroes, as from the amplitude, the variety, and the purely human cast, of its fundamental types.

Though we may thus explain the mythopoeic fertility of the Greeks, I am far from pretending that we can render any sufficient account of the supreme beauty of their chief epic and artistical productions. There is something in the first-rate productions of individual genius which lies beyond the compass of philosophical theory : the special breath of the Muse (to speak the language of ancient Greece) must be present in order to give them being. Even among her votaries, many are called, but few are chosen; and the peculiarities of those few remain as yet her own secret.

We shall not however forget that Grecian language was also an indispensable requisite to the growth and beauty of Grecian myths — its richness, its flexibility and capacity of new combinations, its vocalic abundance and metrical pronunciation: and many even among its proper names, by their analogy to words really significant, gave direct occasion to explanatory or illustrative stories. Etymological myths are found in sensible proportion among the whole number.

To understand properly then the Grecian myths, we must try to identify ourselves with the state of mind of the original mythopoeic age; a process not very easy, since it requires us to adopt a string of poetical fancies not simply as realities, but as the governing realities of the mental system; yet a process which would only reproduce something analogous to our own childhood. The age was one destitute both of recorded history and of positive science, but full of imagination and sentiment and religious impressibility; from these sources sprung that multitude of supposed persons around whom all combinations of sensible phenomena were grouped, and towards whom curiosity, sympathies, and reverence were earnestly directed. The adventures of such persons were the only aliment suited at once both to the appetites and to the comprehension of an early Greek; and the myths which detailed them, while powerfully interesting his emotions, furnished to him at the same time a quasi-history and quasi-philosophy: they filled up the vacuum of the unrecorded past, and explained many of the puzzling incognita of the present. Nor need we wonder that the same plausibility which captivated his imagination and his feelings was sufficient to engender spontaneous belief; or rather, that no question as to truth or falsehood of the narrative suggested itself to his mind. His faith is ready, literal and uninquiring, apart from all thought of discriminating fact from fiction, or of detecting hidden and symbolized meaning; it is enough that what he hears be intrinsically plausible and seductive, and that there be no special cause to provoke doubt. And if indeed there were, the poet overrules such doubts by the holy and all-sufficient authority of the Muse, whose omniscience is the warrant for his recital, as her inspiration is the cause of his success.

The state of mind, and the relation of speaker to hearers, thus depicted, stand clearly marked in the terms and tenor of the ancient epic, if we only put a plain meaning upon what we read. The poet—like the prophet, whom he so much resembles—sings under heavenly guidance, inspired by the goddess to whom he has prayed for her assisting impulse : she puts the word into his mouth and the incidents into his mind : he is a privileged man, chosen as her organ and speaking from her revelations. As the Muse grants the gift of song to whom she will, so she sometimes in her anger snatches it away, and the most consummate human genius is then left silent and helpless. It is true that these expressions, of the Muse inspiring and the poet singing a tale of past times, have passed from the ancient epic to compositions produced under very different circumstances, and have now degenerated into unmeaning forms of speech; but they gained currency originally in their genuine and literal acceptation. If poets had from the beginning written or recited, the predicate of singing would never have been ascribed to them; nor would it have ever become customary to employ the name of the Muse as a die to be stamped on licensed fiction, unless the practice had begun when her agency was invoked and hailed in perfect good faith. Belief, the fruit of deliberate inquiry and a rational scrutiny of evidence, is in such an age unknown : the simple faith of the time slides in unconsciously, when the imagination and feeling are exalted; and inspired authority is at once understood, easily admitted, and implicitly confided in.

The word myth (fabula, story), in its original meaning, signified simply a statement or current narrative, without any connotative implication either of truth or falsehood. Subsequently the meaning of the word (in Latin and English as well as in Greek) changed, and came to carry with it the idea of an old personal narrative, always uncertified, sometimes untrue or avowedly fictitious. And this change was the result of a silent alteration in the mental state of the society, — of a transition on the part of the superior minds (and more or less on the part of all) to a stricter and more elevated canon of credibility, in consequence of familiarity with recorded history, and its essential tests, affirmative as well as negative. Among the original hearers of the myths, all such tests were unknown; they had not yet learned the lesson of critical disbelief; the myth passed unquestioned from the mere fact of its currency, and from its harmony with existing sentiments and preconceptions. The very circumstances which contributed to rob it of literal belief in after-time, strengthened its hold upon the mind of the Homeric man. He looked for wonders and unusual combinations in the past; he expected to hear of gods, heroes and men, moving and operating together upon earth; he pictured to himself the foretime as a theatre in which the gods interfered directly, obviously and frequently, for the protection of their favorites and the punishment of their foes. The rational conception, then only dawning in his mind, of a systematic course of nature was absorbed by this fervent and lively faith. And if he could have been supplied with as perfect and philosophical a history of his own real past time, as we are now enabled to furnish with regard to the last century of England or France, faithfully recording all the successive events, and accounting for them by known positive laws, but introducing no special interventions of Zeus and Apollo — such a history would have appeared to him not merely unholy and unimpressive, but destitute of all plausibility or title to credence. It would have provoked in him the same feeling of incredulous aversion as a description of the sun (to repeat the previous illustration) in a modern book on scientific astronomy.

To us these myths are interesting fictions; to the Homeric and Hesiodic audience they were rerum divinarum et humanarum scientia, an aggregate of religious, physical and historical revelations, rendered more captivating, but not less true and real, by the bright coloring and fantastic shapes in which they were presented. Throughout the whole of "myth-bearing Hellas" they formed the staple of the uninstructed Greek mind, upon which history and philosophy were by so slow degrees superinduced; and they continued to be the aliment of ordinary thought and conversation, even after history and philosophy had partially supplanted the mythical faith among the leading men, and disturbed it more or less in the ideas of all. The men, the women, and the children of the remote domes and villages of Greece, to whom Thucydides, Hippocrates, Aristotle, or Hipparchus were unknown, still continued to dwell upon the local fables which formed their religious and patriotic antiquity. And Pausanias, even in his time, heard everywhere divine or heroic legends yet alive, precisely of the type of the old epic; he found the conceptions of religious and mythical faith, coexistent with those of positive science, and contending against them at more or less of odds, according to the temper of the individual. Now it is the remarkable characteristic of the Homeric age, that no such coexistence or contention had yet begun. The religious and mythical point of view covers, for the most part, all the phenomena of nature; while the conception of invariable sequence exists only in the background, itself personified under the name of the Moerae, or Fates, and produced generally as an exception to the omnipotence of Zeus for all ordinary purposes. Voluntary agents, visible and invisible, impel and govern everything. Moreover this point of view is universal throughout the community, adopted with equal fervor, and carried out with equal consistency, by the loftiest minds and by the lowest. The great man of that day is he who, penetrated like others with the general faith, and never once imagining any other system of nature than the agency of these voluntary Beings, can clothe them in suitable circumstances and details, and exhibit in living body and action those types which his hearers dimly prefigure. Such men were the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey; embodying in themselves the whole measure of intellectual excellence which their age was capable of feeling: to us, the first of poets —but to their own public, religious teachers, historians, and philosophers besides—inasmuch as all that then represented history and philosophy was derived from those epical effusions and from others homogeneous with them. Herodotus recognizes Homer and Hesiod as the main authors of Grecian belief respecting the names and generations, the attributes and agency, the forms and the worship of the gods.

History, philosophy, etc., properly so called and conforming to our ideas (of which the subsequent Greeks were the first creators, never belonged to more than a comparatively small number of thinking men, though their influence indirectly affected more or less the whole national mind. But when positive science and criticism, and the idea of an invariable sequence of events, came to supplant in the more vigorous intellects the old mythical creed of omnipresent personification, an inevitable scission was produced between the instructed few and the remaining community. The opposition between the scientific and the religious point of view was not slow in manifesting itself: in general language, indeed, both might seem to stand together, but in every particular case the admission of one involved the rejection of the other. According to the theory which then became predominant, the course of nature was held to move invariably on, by powers and attributes of its own, unless the gods chose to interfere and reverse it; but they had the power of interfering as often and to as great an extent as they thought fit. Here the question was at once opened, respecting a great variety of particular phenomena, whether they were to be regarded as natural or miraculous. No constant or discernible test could be suggested to discriminate the two : every man was called upon to settle the doubt for himself, and each settled it according to the extent of his knowledge, the force of his logic, the state of his health, his hopes, his fears, and many other considerations affecting his separate conclusion. In a question thus perpetually arising, and full of practical consequences, instructed minds, like Pericles, Thucydides, and Euripides, tended more and more to the scientific point of view, in cases where the general public were constantly gravitating towards the religious.

The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition of thought is the really mythopoeic age; in which the creative faculties of the society know no other employment, and the mass of the society no other mental demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in its full peculiarity and grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey, — poems of which we cannot determine the exact date, but which seem both to have existed prior to the first Olympiad, 776 BC, our earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some time after that event, the mythopoeic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Lesches, Eumelus, and seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or shortly after the first century of recorded Olympiads); but from and after this first century, we may trace the operation of causes which gradually enfeebled and narrowed them, altering the point of view from which the myths were looked at. What these causes were, it will be necessary briefly to intimate.

The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian intellect itself, — a quality in which this remarkable people stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if not all nations have had myths, but no nation except the Greeks have imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest; and the same mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the early faith in which the myths had been generated and accredited.

One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual expansion, was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, positive and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genuine Grecian epic, the theme was an unknown and aoristic past; but even as early as the Works and Days of Hesiod, the present begins to figure: the man who tills the earth appears in his own solitary nakedness, apart from gods and heroes—bound indeed by serious obligations to the gods, but contending against many difficulties which are not to be removed by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in the strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back with reverential envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy and Thebes. Yet bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to look at it along with him, and to prescribe rules for human life—with the assurance that if a man be industrious, frugal, provident, just and friendly in his dealings, the gods will recompense him with affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain, while holding out such promise, to cast herself into the most homely details of present existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt the poet of the Helots; and the contrast between the two is certainly a remarkable proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present and the positive.

Other manifestations of the same tendency become visible in the age of Archilochus (680-660 BC). In an age when metrical composition and the living voice are the only means whereby the productive minds of a community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms of song and recitation, at diversified accompaniments, constitute an epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric poetry, from Archilochus downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and impressibilities of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic. In all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of present time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the Homeric hexameter the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical Muse—the hearers are content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents of a foregone world, and the tale is hardly less suitable to one time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was first suggested to Archilochus by the bitterness of his own private antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted by his lampoons, upon the individuals against whom they were directed, still remain attested, though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according to the well-known judgment of Aristotle) most nearly approaching to common speech, and well suited both to the coarse vein of sentiment, and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor. Simonides of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of Archilochus, employed the same metre, with less bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not less decided. His remaining fragments present a mixture of teaching and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing upon actual life, and carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the Hesiodic Works and Days. Of Alkaeus and Sappho, though unfortunately we are compelled to speak of them upon hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private or public with the contemporary world, constituted the soul of those short effusions which gave them so much celebrity : and in the few remains of the elegiac poets preserved to us —Kallinus, Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus — the impulse of some present motive or circumstance is no less conspicuous. The same may also be said of Solon, Theognis and Phokylides, who preach, encourage, censure, or complain, but do not recount—and in whom a profound ethical sensibility, unknown to the Homeric poems, manifests itself: the form of poetry (to use the words of Solon himself) is made the substitute for the public speaking of the agora.

Doubtless all these poets made abundant use of the ancient myths, but it was by turning them to present account, in the way of illustration, or flattery, or contrast,—a tendency which we may usually detect even in the compositions of Pindar, in spite of the lofty and heroic strain which they breathe throughout. That narrative or legendary poetry still continued to be composed during the seventh and sixth centuries before the Christian era is not to be questioned; but it exhibited the old epical character without the old epical genius; both the inspiration of the composer and the sympathies of the audience had become more deeply enlisted in the world before them, and disposed to fasten on incidents of their own actual experience. From Solon and Theognis we pass to the abandonment of all metrical restrictions and to the introduction of prose writing,—a fact, the importance of which it is needless to dwell upon—, marking as well the increased familiarity with written records, as the commencement of a separate branch of literature for the intellect, apart from the imagination and emotions wherein the old legends had their exclusive root.

Egypt was first unreservedly opened to the Greeks during the reign of Psammetichus, about BC 660; gradually it became much frequented by them for military or commercial purposes, or for simple curiosity, and enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations, while it also imparted to them that vein of mysticism, which overgrew the primitive simplicity of the Homeric religion, and of which I have spoken in a former chapter. They found in it a long-established civilization, colossal wonders of architecture, and a certain knowledge of astronomy and geometry, elementary indeed, but in advance of their own. Moreover it was a portion of their present world, and it contributed to form in them an interest for noting and describing the actual realities before them. A sensible progress is made in the Greek mind during the two centuries from 700 to 500 BC, in the record and arrangement of historical facts: an historical sense arises in the superior intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between fact and fiction. And this progressive tendency was further stimulated by increased communication and by more settled and peaceful social relations between the various members of the Hellenic world, to which may be added material improvements, purchased at the expense of a period of turbulence and revolution, in the internal administration of each separate state. The Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games became frequented by visitors from the most distant parts of Greece : the great periodical festival in the island of Delos brought together the citizens of every Ionic community, with their waves and children, and an ample display of wealth and ornaments.

Numerous and flourishing colonies were founded in Sicily, the south of Italy, the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea : the Phocaeans explored the whole of the Adriatic, established Massilia, and penetrated even as far as the south of Iberia, with which they carried on a lucrative commerce. The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both expanded and rectified : the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander the disciple of Thales, is an epoch in the history of science. We may note the ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people called Hyperboreans and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, as demonstrating the progress of the age in this department of inquiry. And even earlier than Herodotus, Xanthus had noticed the occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior of Asia Minor, which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth's surface with respect to land and water.

If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed between the commencement of the Olympic era and the age of Herodotus and Thucydides, we shall discern a striking advance in the Greeks, — ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydides, the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never since surpassed. Men’s minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster cast; and acts come to be criticized with reference to their bearing on the internal happiness of a well-regulated community, as well as upon the standing harmony of fraternal states. While Thucydides treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly alluded to in the Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts described in the old heroic and Theogonic legends were found not less repugnant to this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the gods with the Giants and Titans, — the castration of Uranus by his son Cronus,— the cruelty, deceit and licentiousness, often supposed both in the gods and heroes, provoked strong disapprobation. And the language of the philosopher Xenophanes, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express purpose of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that of the Christian writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attacked the whole scheme of paganism.

Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that Xenophanes stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad — Thales and Pythagoras being the others — who, in the sixth century before the Christian era, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy which occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual energy. Of the material differences between the three I do not here speak; I regard them only in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic philosophy which preceded them, and from which all three deviated .by a step, perhaps the most remarkable in all the history of philosophy. In the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the Hesiodic Theogony (as has been already stated), we find nature distributed into a variety of personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of different Beings more or less analogous to man—each of these Beings having his own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and pleasure, and his own especial sympathies or antipathies with human individuals; each being determined to act or forbear, to grant favor or inflict injury in his own department of phenomena, according as men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to himself; might conciliate or offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those who bore a proper name and received some public or family worship,) were the most commanding and capital members amidst this vast network of agents visible and invisible, spread over the universe. The whole vie of nature was purely religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of the early mind. It proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the feelings and imagination to transport, to the world without, the familiar type of free-will and conscious personal action : above all, it took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely extended sympathy which it so perpetually called forth between man and nature.

The first attempt to disenthrall the philosophic intellect from this all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a method of interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of untaught minds, is to be found in Thales, Xenophanes and Pythagoras, in the sixth century before the Christian era. It is in them that we first find the idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal Nature conceived as the object of study. The divine husband and wife, Oceanus and Tethys, parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs, together with the avenging goddess Styx, are translated into the material substance water, or, as we ought rather to say, the Fluid : and Thales set himself to prove that water was the primitive element, out of which all the different natural substances had been formed. He, as well as Xenophanes and Pythagoras, started the problem of physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws, to be discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human intellect. The Greek word Physic, denoting nature, and its derivatives physics and physiology, unknown in that large sense to Homer or Hesiod, as well as the word Cosmos, to denote the mundane system, first appears with these philosophers. The elemental analysis of Thales — the one unchangeable cosmic substance, varying only in appearance, but not in reality, as suggested by Xenophanes,—and the geometrical and arithmetical combinations of Pythagoras, — all these were different ways of approaching the explanation of physical phenomena, and each gave rise to a distinct school or succession of philosophers. But they all agreed in departing from the primitive method, and in recognizing determinate properties, invariable sequences, and objective truth, in nature — either independent of willing or designing agents, or serving to these latter at once as an indispensable subject-matter and as a limiting condition. Xenophanes disclaimed openly all knowledge respecting the gods, and pronounced that no man could have any means of ascertaining when he was right and when he was wrong, in affirmations respecting them : while Pythagoras represents in part the scientific tendencies of his age, in part also the spirit of mysticism and of special fraternities for religious and ascetic observance, which became diffused throughout Greece in the sixth century before the Christian era. This was another point which placed him in antipathy with the simple, unconscious and demonstrative faith of the old poets, as well as with the current legends.

If these distinguished men, when they ceased to follow the primitive instinct of tracing the phenomena of nature to personal and designing agents, passed over, not at once to induction and observation, but to a misemployment of abstract words, substituting metaphysical eidola in the place of polytheism, and to an exaggerated application of certain narrow physical theories— we must remember that nothing else could be expected from the scanty stock of facts then accessible, and that the most profound study of the human mind points out such transition as an inevitable law of intellectual progress. At present, we have to compare them only with that state of the Greek minds which they partially superseded, and with which they were in decided opposition. The rudiments of physical science were conceived and developed among superior men; but the religious feeling of the mass was averse to them; and the aversion, though gradually mitigated, never wholly died away. Some of the philosophers were not backward in charging others with irreligion, while the multitude seems to have felt the same sentiment more or less towards all—or towards that postulate of constant sequences, with determinate conditions of occurrence, which scientific study implies, and which they could not reconcile with their belief in the agency of the gods, to whom they were constantly praying for special succor and blessings.

The discrepancy between the scientific and the religious point of view was dealt with differently by different philosophers. Thus Socrates openly admitted it, and assigned to each a distinct and independent province. He distributed phenomena into two classes : one, wherein the connection of antecedent and consequent was invariable and ascertainable by human study, and therefore future results accessible to a well-instructed foresight; the other, and those, too, the most comprehensive and important, which the gods had reserved for themselves and their own unconditional agency, wherein there was no invariable or ascertainable sequence, and where the result could only be foreknown by some omen, prophecy, or other special inspired communication from themselves. Each of these classes was essentially distinct, and required to be looked at and dealt with in a manner radically incompatible with the other. Socrates held it wrong to apply the scientific interpretation to the latter, or the theological interpretation to the former. Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena, in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.

On the other hand, Hippocrates, the contemporary of Socrates, denied the discrepancy, and merged into one those two classes of phenomena, the divine and the scientifically determinable,—which the latter had put asunder. Hippocrates treated all phenomena as at once both divine and scientifically determinable. In discussing certain peculiar bodily disorders found among the Scythians, he observes, “The Scythians themselves ascribe the cause of this to God, and reverence and bow down to such sufferers, each man fearing that he may suffer the like; and I myself think too that these affections, as well as all others, are divine : no one among them is either more divine or more human than another, but all are on the same footing, and all divine; nevertheless each of them has its own physical conditions, and not one occurs without such physical conditions”.

A third distinguished philosopher of the same day, Anaxagoras, allegorizing Zeus and the other personal gods, proclaimed the doctrine of one common pervading Mind, as having first established order and system in the mundane aggregate, which had once been in a state of chaos—and as still manifesting its uninterrupted agency for wise and good purposes. This general doctrine obtained much admiration from Plato and Aristotle; but they at the same time remarked with surprise, that Anaxagoras never made any use at all of his own general doctrine for the explanation of the phenomena of nature,—that he looked for nothing but physical causes and connecting laws,—so that in fact the spirit of his particular researches was not materially different from those of Democritus or Leucippus, whatever might be the difference in their general theories. His investigations in meteorology and astronomy, treating the heavenly bodies as subjects for calculation, have been already noticed as offensive, not only to the general public of Greece, but even to Socrates himself among them : he was tried at Athens, and seems to have escaped condemnation only by voluntary exile.

The three eminent men just named, all essentially different from each other, may be taken as illustrations of the philosophical mind of Greece during the last half of the fifth century BC. Scientific pursuits had acquired a powerful hold, and adjusted themselves in various ways with the prevalent religious feelings of the age. Both Hippocrates and Anaxagoras modified their ideas of the divine agency so as to suit their thirst for scientific research. According to the former, the gods were the really efficient agents in the production of all phenomena,—the mean and indifferent not less than the terrific or tutelary. Being thus alike connected with all phenomena, they were specially associated with none—and the proper task of the inquirer was, to find out those rules and conditions by which (he assumed) their agency was always determined, and according to which it might be foretold. And this led naturally to the proceeding which Plato and Aristotle remark in Anaxagoras,—that the all-governing and Infinite Mind, having been announced in sublime language at the beginning of his treatise, was afterward left out of sight, and never applied to the explanation of particular phenomena, being as much consistent with one modification of nature as with another.

Now such a view of the divine agency could never be reconciled with the religious feelings of the ordinary Grecian believer, even as they stood in the time of Anaxagoras; still less could it have been reconciled with those of the Homeric man, more than three centuries earlier. By him Zeus and Athene were conceived as definite Persons, objects of special reverence, hopes, and fears, and animated with peculiar feelings, sometimes of favor, sometimes of wrath, towards himself or his family or country. They were propitiated by his prayers, and prevailed upon to lend him succor in danger—but offended and disposed to bring evil upon him if he omitted to render thanks or sacrifice. This sense of individual communion with, and dependence upon them was the essence of his faith; and with that faith, the all-pervading Mind proclaimed by Anaxagoras—which had no more concern with one man or one phenomenon than with another,—could never be brought into harmony. Nor could the believer, while ho prayed with sincerity for special blessings or protection from the gods, acquiesce in the doctrine of Hippocrates, that their agency was governed by constant laws and physical conditions.

That radical discord between the mental impulses of science and religion, which manifests itself so decisively during the most cultivated ages of Greece, and which harassed more or less so many of the philosophers, produced its most afflicting result in the condemnation of Socrates by the Athenians. According to the remarkable passage recently cited from Xenophon, it will appear that Socrates agreed with his countrymen in denouncing physical speculations as impious,—that he recognized the religious process of discovery as a peculiar branch, coordinate with the scientific,—and that he laid down a theory, of which the basis was, the confessed divergence of these two processes from the beginning—thereby seemingly satisfying the exigencies of religious hopes and fears on the one hand, and those of reason, in her ardor for ascertaining the invariable laws of phenomena, on the other. We may remark that the theory of this religious and extra-scientific process of discovery was at that time sufficiently complete; for Socrates could point out, that those anomalous phenomena which the gods had reserved for themselves, and into which science was forbidden to pry, were yet accessible to the seekings of the pious man, through oracles, omens, and other exceptional means of communication which divine benevolence vouchsafed to keep open. Considering thus to how great an extent Socrates was identified in feeling with the religious public of Athens, and considering moreover that his performance of open religious duties was assiduous—we might wonder, as Xenophon does wonder, how it could have happened that the Athenian dikasts mistook him at the end of his life for an irreligious man. But we see, by the defense which Xenophon as well as Plato gives for him, that the Athenian public really considered him, in spite of his own disclaimer, as homogeneous with Anaxagoras and the other physical inquirers, because he had applied similar scientific reasonings to moral and social phenomena. They looked upon him with the same displeasure as he himself felt towards the physical philosophers, and we cannot but admit that in this respect they were more unfortunately consistent than he was. It is true that the mode of defense adopted by Socrates contributed much to the verdict found against him, and that he was further weighed down by private offence given to powerful individuals and professions; but all these separate antipathies found their best account in swelling the cry against him as an over-curious skeptic, and an impious innovator.

Now the scission thus produced between the superior minds and the multitude, in consequence of the development of science and the scientific point of view, is a fact of great moment in the history of Greek progress, and forms an important contrast between the age of Homer and Hesiod and that of Thucydides; though in point of fact even the multitude, during this later age, were partially modified by those very scientific views which they regarded with disfavor. And we must keep in view the primitive religious faith, once universal and unobstructed, but subsequently disturbed by the intrusions of science; we must follow the great change, as well in respect to enlarged intelligence as to refinement of social and ethical feeling, among the Greeks, from the Hesiodic times downward, in order to render some account of the altered manner in which the ancient myths came to be dealt with. The myth, the spontaneous growth of a creative and personifying interpretation of nature, had struck root in Grecian associations at a time when the national faith required no support from what we call evidence. They were now submitted, not simply to a feeling, imagining, and believing public, but also to special classes of instructed men, —philosophers, historians, ethical teachers, and to a public partially modified by their ideas as well as improved by a wider practical experience. They were not intended for such an audience; they had ceased to be in complete harmony even with the lower strata of intellect and sentiment,—much more so with the higher. But they were the cherished inheritance of a past time; they were interwoven in a thousand ways with the religious faith, the patriotic respect, and the national worship, of every Grecian community; the general type of the myth was the ancient, familiar, and universal form of Grecian thought, which even the most cultivated men bad imbibed in their childhood from the poets and by which they were to a certain degree unconsciously enslaved. Taken as a whole the myths and acquired prescriptive and ineffaceable possession : to attack, call in question, or repudiate them, was a task painful even to undertake, and far beyond the power of any one to accomplish.

For these reasons the anti-mythic vein of criticism was of no effect as a destroying force, but nevertheless its dissolving decomposing and transforming influence was very considerable. To accommodate the ancient myths to an improved tone of sentiment and a newly created canon of credibility, was a function which even the wisest Greeks did not disdain, and which occupied no small proportion of the whole intellectual activity of the nation.

The myths were looked at from a point of view completely foreign to the reverential curiosity and literal imaginative faith of the Homeric man; they were broken up and recast in order to force them into new molds such as their authors had never conceived. We may distinguish four distinct classes of minds, in the literary age now under examination, as having taken them in hand — the poets, the logographers, the philosophers, and the historians.

With the poets and logographers, the mythical persons are real predecessors, and the mythical world an antecedent fact; but it is divine and heroic reality, not human; the present is only half-brother of the past (to borrow an illustration from Pindar in his allusion to gods and men), remotely and generically, but not closely and specifically, analogous to it. As a general habit, the old feelings and the old unconscious faith, apart from all proof or evidence, still remain in their minds; but recent feelings have grown up which compel them to omit, to alter, sometimes even to reject and condemn, particular narratives.

Pindar repudiates some stories and transforms others, because they are inconsistent with his conceptions of the gods. Thus he formally protests against the tale that Pelops had been killed and served up at table by his father, for the immortal gods to eat; he shrinks from the idea of imputing to them so horrid an appetite; he pronounces the tale to have been originally fabricated by a slanderous neighbor. Nor can he bring himself to recount the quarrels between different gods. The amours of Zeus and Apollo are no way displeasing to him; but he occasionally suppresses some of the simple details of the old myth, as deficient in dignity : thus, according to the Hesiodic narrative, Apollo was informed by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Koronis : but the mention of the raven did not appear to Pindar consistent with the majesty of the god, and he therefore wraps up the mode of detection in vague and mysterious language. He feels considerable repugnance to the character of Odysseus, and intimates more than once that Homer has unduly exalted him, by force of poetical artifice. With the character of the Eakid Ajax, on the other hand, he has the deepest sympathy, as well as with his untimely and inglorious death, occasioned by the undeserved preference of a less worthy rival. He appeals for his authority usually to the Muse, but sometimes to “ancient sayings of men”, accompanied with a general allusion to story-tellers and bards,—admitting, however, that these stories present great discrepancy, and sometimes that they are false. Yet the marvelous and the supernatural afford no ground whatever for rejecting a story. Pindar makes an express declaration to this effect in reference to the romantic adventures of Perseus and the Gorgon's head. He treats even those mythical characters, which conflict the most palpably with positive experience, as connected by a real genealogical thread with the world before him. Not merely the heroes of Troy and Thebes, and the demigod seamen of Jason and the ship Argo, but also the Centaur Cheiron, the hundred-headed Typhos, the giant Alkyoneus, Antaeus, Bellorophon and Pegasus, the Chimaera, the Amazons and the Hyperboreans—all appear painted on the same canvas, and touched with the same colors, as the men of the recent and recorded past, Phalaris and Croesus; only they are thrown back to a greater distance in the perspective. The heroic ancestors of those great Eginetan, Thessalian, Theban, Argeian, etc. families, whose present members the poet celebrates for their agonistic victories, sympathize with the exploits and second the efforts of their descendants : the inestimable value of a privileged breed and of the stamp of nature is powerfully contrasted with the impotence of unassisted teaching and practice. The power and skill of the Argeian Theaeus and his relatives as wrestlers, are ascribed partly to the fact that their ancestors Pamphaes in aforetime had hospitably entertained the Tyndarids Castor and Pollux. Perhaps however the strongest proof of the sincerity of Pindar's mythical faith is afforded when he notices a guilty incident with shame and repugnance, but with an unwilling confession of its truth, as in the case of the fratricide committed on Phokus by his brothers Peleus and Telamon.

Aeschylus and Sophocles exhibit the same spontaneous and uninquiring faith as Pindar in the legendary antiquities of Greece, taken as a whole; but they allow themselves greater license as to the details. It was indispensable to the success of their compositions that they should recast and group anew the legendary events, preserving the names and general understood relation of those characters whom they introduced. The demand for novelty of combination increased with the multiplication of tragic spectacles at Athens : moreover the feelings of the Athenians, ethical as well as political, had become too critical to tolerate the literal reproduction of many among the ancient stories.

Both of them exalted rather than lowered the dignity of the mythical world, as something divine and heroic rather than human. The Prometheus of Aeschylus is a far more exalted conception than his keen-witted namesake in Hesiod, and the more homely details of the ancient Thebais and Edipodia were in like manner modified by Sophocles. The religious agencies of the old epic are constantly kept prominent, and the paternal curse, —the wrath of deceased persons against those from whom they have sustained wrong,—the judgments of the Erinnys against guilty or foredoomed persons, sometimes inflicted directly, sometimes brought about through dementation of the sufferer himself (like the Homeric Atê),—are frequent in their tragedies.

Aeschylus in two of his remaining pieces brings forward the gods as the chief personages, and far from sharing the objection of Pindar to dwell upon dissensions of the gods, he introduces Prometheus and Zeus in the one, Apollo and the Eumenides in the other, in marked opposition. The dialogue, first superinduced by him upon the primitive Chorus, gradually became the most important portion of the drama, and is more elaborated in Sophocles than in Aeschylus. Even in Sophocles, however, it still generally retains its ideal majesty as contrasted with the rhetorical and forensic tone which afterwards crept in; it grows out of the piece, and addresses itself to the emotions more than to the reason of the audience. Nevertheless, the effect of Athenian political discussion and democratic feeling is visible in both these dramatists. The idea of rights and legitimate privileges as opposed to usurping force, is applied by Aeschylus even to the society of the gods : the Eumenides accuse Apollo of having, with the insolence of youthful ambition, "ridden down" their old prerogatives — while the Titan Prometheus, the champion of suffering humanity against the unfriendly dispositions of Zeus, ventures to depict the latter as a recent usurper reigning only by his superior strength, exalted by one successful revolution, and destined at some future time to be overthrown by another, — a fate which cannot be averted except through warnings communicable only by Prometheus himself.

It is commonly understood that Aeschylus disapproved of the march of democracy at Athens during his later years, and that the Eumenides is intended as an indirect manifestation in favor of the senate of Areiopagus. Without inquiring at present whether such a special purpose can be distinctly made out, we may plainly see that the poet introduces, into the relations of the gods with each other, a feeling of political justice, arising out of the times in which he lived and the debates of which he was a witness. But though Aeschylus incurred reproaches of impiety from Plato, and seemingly also from the Athenian public, for particular speeches and incidents in his tragedies, and though he does not adhere to the received vein of religious tradition with the same strictness as Sophocles — yet the ascendency and interference of the gods is never out of sight, and the solemnity with which they are represented, set off by a bold, figurative, and elliptical style of expression (often but imperfectly intelligible to modern readers), reaches its maximum in his tragedies. As he throws round the gods a kind of airy grandeur, so neither do his men or heroes appear like tenants of the common earth : the mythical world from which he borrows his characters is peopled only with the immediate seed of the gods, in close contact with Zeus, in whom the divine blood has not yet had time to degenerate en his individuals are taken, not from the iron race whom Hesiod acknowledges with shame as his contemporaries, but from the extinct heroic race which had fought at Troy and Thebes. It is to them that his conceptions aspire, and he is even chargeable with frequent straining, beyond the limits of poetical taste, to realize his picture. If he does not consistently succeed in it, the reason is because consistency in such a matter is unattainable, since, after all, the analogies of common humanity, the only materials which the most creative imagination has to work upon, obtrude themselves involuntarily, and the lineaments of the man are thus seen even under a dress which promises superhuman proportions.

Sophocles, the most illustrious ornament of Grecian tragedy, dwells upon the same heroic characters, and maintains their grandeur, on the whole, with little abatement, combining with it a far better dramatic structure, and a wider appeal to human sympathies. Even in Sophocles, however, we find indications that an altered ethical feeling and a more predominant sense of artistic perfection are allowed to modify the harsher religious agencies of the old epic; occasional misplaced effusions of rhetoric, as well as of didactic prolixity, may also be detected. It is Aeschylus, not Sophocles, who forms the marked antithesis to Euripides; it is Aeschylus, not Sophocles, to whom Aristophanes awards the prize of tragedy, as the poet who assigns most perfectly to the heroes of the past those weighty words, imposing equipments, simplicity of great deeds with little talk, and masculine energy superior to the corruptions of Aphrodite, which beseem the comrades of Agamemnon and Adrastus.

How deeply this feeling, of the heroic character of the mythical world, possessed the Athenian mind, may be judged by the bitter criticisms made on Euripides, whose compositions were pervaded, partly by ideas of physical philosophy learnt under Anaxagoras, partly by the altered tone of education and the wide diffusion of practical eloquence, forensic as well as political, at Athens. While Aristophanes assails Euripides as the representative of this "young Athens", with the utmost keenness of sarcasm, — other critics also concur in designating him as having vulgarized the mythical heroes, and transformed them into mere characters of common life, —loquacious, subtle, and savoring of the market-place. In some of his plays, skeptical expressions and sentiments were introduced, derived from his philosophical studies, sometimes confounding two or three distinct gods into one, sometimes translating the personal Zeus into a substantial Ether with determinate attributes. He put into the mouths of some of his unprincipled dramatic characters, apologetic speeches which were denounced as ostentatious sophistry, and as setting out a triumphant case for the criminal. His thoughts, his words, and the rhythm of his choric songs, were all accused of being deficient in dignity and elevation. The mean attire and miserable attitude in which he exhibited Aeneas, Telephus, Thyestes, Ino, and other heroic characters, were unmercifully derided, though it seems that their position and circumstances had always been painfully melancholy; but the effeminate pathos which Euripides brought so nakedly into the foreground, was accounted unworthy of the majesty of a legendary hero. And he incurred still greater obloquy on another point, on which he is allowed even by his enemies to have only reproduced in substance the preexisting tales, —the illicit and fatal passion depicted in several of his female characters, such as Phaedra and Sthenoboea. His opponents admitted that these stories were true, but contended that they ought to be kept back and not produced upon the stage,—a proof both of the continued mythical faith and of the more sensitive ethical criticism of his age. The marriage of the six daughters to the six sons of Eolus is of Homeric origin, and stands now, though briefly stated, in the Odyssey : but the incestuous passion of Macareus and Canace, embodied by Euripides in the lost tragedy called Eolus, drew upon him severe censure. Moreover, he often disconnected the horrors of the old legends with those religious agencies by which they had been originally forced on, prefacing them by motives of a more refined character, which carried no sense of awful compulsion : thus the considerations by which the Euripidean Alkmaeon was reduced to the necessity of killing his mother appeared to Aristotle ridiculous. After the time of this great poet, his successors seem to have followed him in breathing into their characters the spirit of common life, but the names and plot were still borrowed from the stricken mythical families of Tantalus, Cadmus, etc.: and the heroic exaltation of all the individual personages introduced, as contrasted with the purely human character of the Chorus, is still numbered by Aristotle among the essential points of the theory of tragedy.

The tendency then of Athenian tragedy—powerfully manifested in Aeschylus, and never wholly lost—was to uphold an unquestioning faith and a reverential estimate of the general mythical world and its personages, but to treat the particular narratives rather as matter for the emotions than as recitals of actual fact. The logographers worked along with them to the first of these two ends, but not to the second. Their grand object was, to cast the myths into a continuous readable series, and they were in consequence compelled to make selection between inconsistent or contradictory narratives; to reject some narratives as false, and to receive others as true. But their preference was determined more by their sentiments as to what was appropriate, than by any pretended historical test. Pherekydes, Akusilaus and Hellanikus did not seek to banish miraculous or fantastic incidents from the mythical world; they regarded it as peopled with loftier beings, and expected to find in it phenomena not paralleled in their own degenerate days. They reproduced the fables as they found them in the poets, rejecting little except the discrepancies, and producing ultimately what they believed to be not only a continuous but an exact and trustworthy history of the past—wherein they carry indeed their precision to such a length, that Hellanicus gives the year, and even the day of the capture of Troy.

Hecataeus of Miletus (500 BC), anterior to Pherekydes and Hellanikus, is the earliest writer in whom we can detect any disposition to disallow the prerogative and specialty of the myths, and to soften down their characteristic prodigies, some of which however still find favor in his eyes, as in the case of the speaking ram who carried Phryxus over the Hellespont. He pronounced the Grecian fables to be “many and ridiculous”; whether from their discrepancies or from their intrinsic improbabilities we do not know: and we owe to him the first attempt to force them within the limits of historical credibility; as where he transforms the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of Hades, into a serpent inhabiting a cavern on Cape Taenarus—and Geryon of Erytheia into a king of Epirus rich in herds of oxen. Hecataeus traced the genealogy of himself and the gens to which he belonged through a line of fifteen progenitors up to an initial god,— the clearest proof both of his profound faith in the reality of the mythical world, and of his religious attachment to it as the point of junction between the human and the divine personality.

We have next to consider the historians, especially Herodotus and Thucydides. Like Hecataeus, Thucydides belonged to a gens which traced its descent from Ajax, and through Ajax to Eakus and Zeus. Herodotus modestly implies that he himself had no such privilege to boast of. Their curiosity respecting the past had no other materials to work upon except the myths; but these they found already cast by the logographers into a continuous series, and presented as an aggregate of antecedent history, chronologically deduced from the times of the gods. In common with the body of the Greeks, both Herodotus and Thucydides had imbibed that complete and unsuspecting belief in the general reality of mythical antiquity, which was interwoven with the religion and the patriotism, and all the public demonstrations of the Hellenic world. To acquaint themselves with the genuine details of this foretime, was an inquiry highly interesting to them : but the increased positive tendencies of their age, as well as their own habits of personal investigation, had created in them an historical sense in regard to the past as well as to the present. Having acquired a habit of appreciating the intrinsic tests of historical credibility and probability, they found the particular narratives of the poets and logographers, inadmissible as a whole even in the eyes of Hecataeus, still more at variance with their stricter canons of criticism. And we thus observe in them the constant struggle, as well as the resulting compromise, between these two opposite tendencies; on one hand a firm belief in the reality of the mythical world, on the other hand an inability to accept the details which their only witnesses, the poets and logographers, told them respecting it.

Each of them however performed the process in his own way Herodotus is a man of deep and anxious religious feeling; he often recognizes the special judgments of the gods as determining historical events : his piety is also partly tinged with that mystical vein which the last two centuries had gradually infused into the religion of the Greeks—for he is apprehensive of giving offence to the gods by reciting publicly what he has heard respecting them; he frequently stops short in his narrative and intimates that there is a sacred legend, but that he will not tell it: in other cases, where he feels compelled to speak out, he entreats forgiveness for doing so from the gods and heroes. Sometimes he will not even mention the name of a god, though he generally thinks himself authorized to do so, the names being matter of public notoriety. Such pious reserve, which the open-hearted Herodotus avowedly proclaims as chaining up his tongue, affords a striking contrast with the plain-spoken and unsuspecting tone of the ancient epic, as well as of the popular legends, wherein the gods and their proceedings were the familiar and interesting subjects of common talk as well as of common sympathy, without ceasing to inspire both fear and reverence.

Herodotus expressly distinguishes, in the comparison of Polycrates with Minos, the human race to which the former belonged, from the divine or heroic race which comprised the latter. But he has a firm belief in the authentic personality and parentage of all the names in the myths, divine, heroic and human, as well as in the trustworthiness of their chronology computed by generations. He counts back 1600 years from his own day to that of Semele, mother of Dionysus; 900 years to Heracles, and 800 years to Penelope, the Trojan war being a little earlier in date. Indeed even the longest of these periods must have seemed to him comparatively short, seeing that he apparently accepts the prodigious series of years which the Egyptians professed to draw from a recorded chronology--17,000 years from their god Heracles, and 15,000 years from their god Osiris or Dionysus, down to their king Amasis (550 BC). So much was his imagination familiarized with these long chronological computations barren of events, that he treats Homer and Hesiod as "men of yesterday", though separated from his own age by an interval which he reckons as four hundred years.

Herodotus had been profoundly impressed with what he saw and heard in Egypt. The wonderful monuments, the evident antiquity, and the peculiar civilization of that country, acquired such preponderance in his mind over his own native legends, that he is disposed to trace even the oldest religious names or institutions of Greece to Egyptian or Phoenician original, setting aside in favor of this hypothesis the Grecian legends of Dionysus and Pan. The oldest Grecian mythical genealogies are thus made ultimately to lose themselves in Egyptian or Phoenician antiquity, and in the full extent of these genealogies Herodotus firmly believes. It does not seem that any doubt had ever crossed his mind as to the real personality of those who were named or described in the popular myths : all of them have once had reality, either as men, as heroes, or as gods. The eponyms of cities, demos and tribes, are all comprehended in this affirmative category; the supposition of fictitious personages being apparently never entertained. Deucalion, Helen, Dorus,—Ion, with his four sons, the eponyms of the old Athenian tribes,—the autochthonous Titakus and Dekelus,—Danaus, Lynkeus, Perseus, Amphitryon, Alkmena, and Heracles,—Tathybius, the heroic progenitor of the privileged heraldic gens at Sparta,—the Tyndarids and Helena,—Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Orestes,—Nester and his son Peisistratus,—Asopus, Thebe, and Egina,—Inachus and Io, Aetes and Medea,—Melanippus, Adrastus, and Amphiaraus, as well as Jason and the Argo,—all these are occupants of the real past time, and predecessors of himself and his contemporaries. In the veins of the Lacedaemonian kings flowed the blood both of Cadmus and of Danaus, their splendid pedigree being traceable to both of these great mythical names : Herodotus carries the lineage up through Heracles first to Perseus and Dame, then through Danae to Akrisius and the Egyptian Danaus; but he drops the paternal lineage when he comes to Perseus (inasmuch as Perseus is the son of Zeus by Danae, without any reputed human father, such as Amphitryon was to Heracles), and then follow the higher members of the series through Danae alone. He also pursues the same regal genealogy, through the mother of Eurysthenes and Procles, up to Polynikes, (Edipus, Laius, Labdakus, Polyarus and Kadmus; and he assigns various ancient inscriptions which he saw in the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, to the ages of Laius and Edipus. Moreover, the sieges of Thebes and Troy, —the Argonautic expedition,—the invasion of Attica by the Amazons,—the protection of the Herakleids, and the defeat and death of Eurystheus, by the Athenians,—the death of Mekisteus and Tydeus before Thebes by the hands of Melanippus, and the touching calamities of Adrastus and Amphiaraus connected with the same enterprise,—the sailing of Castor and Pollux in the Argo,—the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea and Helena,—the emigration of Cadmus in quest of Europa, and his coming to Boeotia, as well as the attack of the Greeks upon Troy to recover Helen,—all these events seem to him portions of past history, not less unquestionably certain, though more clouded over by distance and misrepresentation, than the battles of Salamis and Mycale.

But though Herodotus is thus easy of faith in regard both to the persons and to the general facts of Grecian myths, yet when he comes to discuss particular facts taken separately, we find him applying to them stricter tests of historical credibility, and often disposed to reject as well the miraculous as the extravagant. Thus even with respect to Heracles, he censures the levity of the Greeks in ascribing to him absurd and incredible exploits; he tries their assertion by the philosophical standard of nature, or of determinate powers and conditions governing the course of events. “How is it consonant to nature (he asks), that Heracles, being, as he was, according to the statement of the Greeks, a man, should kill many thousand persons? I pray that indulgence may be shown to me both by gods and heroes for saying so much as this”. The religious feelings of Herodotus here told him that he was trenching upon the utmost limits of admissible skepticism.

Another striking instance of the disposition of Herodotus to rationalize the miraculous narratives of the current myths, is to be found in his account of the oracle of Dodona and its alleged Egyptian origin. Here, if in any case, a miracle was not only in full keeping, but apparently indispensable to satisfy the exigencies of the religious sentiment; anything less than a miracle would have appeared tame and unimpressive to the visitors of so revered a spot, much more to the residents themselves. Accordingly, Herodotus heard, both from the three priestesses and from the Dodonaeans generally, that two black doves had started at the same time from Thebes in Egypt : one of them went to Libya, where it directed the Libyans to establish the oracle of Zeus Ammon; the other came to the grove of Dodona, and perched on one of the venerable oaks, proclaiming with a human voice that an oracle of Zeus must be founded on that very spot. The injunction of the speaking dove was respectfully obeyed.

Such was the tale related and believed at Dodona. But Herodotus had also heard, from the priests at Thebes in Egypt, a different tale, ascribing the origin of all the prophetic establishments, in Greece as well as in Libya, to two sacerdotal women, who had been carried away from Thebes by some Phoenician merchants and sold, the one in Greece, the other in Libya. The Theban priests boldly assured Herodotus that much pains had been taken to discover what had become of these women so exported, and that the fact of their having been taken to Greece and Libya had been accordingly verified.

The historian of Halicarnassus cannot for a moment think of admitting the miracle which harmonized so well with the feelings of the priestesses and the Dodonaeans. “How (he asks) could a dove speak with human voice?” But the narrative of the priests at Thebes, though its prodigious improbability hardly requires to be stated, yet involved no positive departure from the laws of nature and possibility, and therefore Herodotus makes no difficulty in accepting it. The curious circumstance is, that he turns the native Dodonaean legend into a figurative representation, or rather a misrepresentation, of the supposed true story told by the Theban priests. According to his interpretation, the woman who came from Thebes to Dodona was called a dove, and affirmed to utter sounds like a bird, because she was non-Hellenic and spoke a foreign tongue : when she learned to speak the language of the country, it was then said that the dove spoke with a human voice. And the dove was moreover called black, because of the woman’s Egyptian color.

That Herodotus should thus bluntly reject a miracle, recounted to him by the prophetic women themselves as the prime circumstance in the origins of this holy place, is a proof of the hold which habits of dealing with historical evidence had acquired over his mind; and the awkwardness of his explanatory mediation between the dove and the woman, marks not less his anxiety, while discarding the legend, to let it softly down into a story quasi-historical and not intrinsically incredible.

We may observe another example of the unconscious tendency of Herodotus to eliminate from the myths the idea of special aid from the gods, in his remarks upon Melampus. He designates Melampus “as a clever man, who had acquired for himself the art of prophecy”; and had procured through Cadmus much information about the religious rites and customs of Egypt, many of which he introduced into Greece—especially the name, the sacrifices, and the phallic processions of Dionysus : he adds, “that Melampus himself did not accurately comprehend or bring out the whole doctrine, but wise men who came after him made the necessary additions”. Though the name of Melampus is here maintained, the character described is something in the vein of Pythagoras—totally different from the great seer and leech of the old epic myths—the founder of the gifted family of the Amythaonids, and the grandfather of Amphiaraus. But that which is most of all at variance with the genuine legendary spirit, is the opinion expressed by Herodotus (and delivered with some emphasis as his own), that Melampus “was a clever man, who had acquired for himself prophetic powers”. Such a supposition would have appeared inadmissible to Homer or Hesiod, or indeed to Solon, in the preceding century, in whose view even inferior arts come from the gods, while Zeus or Apollo bestows the power of prophesying. The intimation of such an opinion by Herodotus, himself a thoroughly pious man, marks the sensibly diminished omnipresence of the gods, and the increasing tendency to look for the explanation of phenomena among more visible and determinate agencies.

We may make a similar remark on the dictum of the historian respecting the narrow defile of Tempe, forming the embouchure of the Peneus and the efflux of all the waters from the Thessalian basin. The Thessalians alleged that this whole basin of Thessaly had once been a lake, but that Poseidon had split the chain of mountains and opened the efflux; upon which primitive belief, thoroughly conformable to the genius of Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus comments as follows: “The Thessalian statement is reasonable. For whoever thinks that Poseidon shakes the earth, and that the rifts of an earthquake are the work of that god, will, on seeing the defile in question, say that Poseidon has caused it. For the rift of the mountains is, as appeared to me (when I saw it), the work of an earthquake”. Herodotus admits the reference to Poseidon, when pointed out to him, but it stands only in the background : what is present to his mind is the phenomenon of the earthquake, not as a special act, but as part of a system of habitual operations.

Herodotus adopts the Egyptian version of the legend of Troy, founded on that capital variation which seems to have originated with Stesichorus, and according to which Helen never left Sparta at all —her eidolon had been taken to Troy in her place. Upon this basis a new story had been framed, midway between Homer and Stesichorus, representing Paris to have really carried off Helen from Sparta, but to have been driven by storms to Egypt, where she remained during the whole siege of Troy, having been detained by Proteus, the king of the country, until Menelaus came to reclaim her after his triumph. The Egyptian priests, with their usual boldness of assertion, professed to have heard the whole story from Menelaus himself— the Greeks had besieged Troy, in the full persuasion that Helen and the stolen treasures were within the walls, nor would they ever believe the repeated denials of the Trojans as to the fact of her presence. In intimating his preference for the Egyptian narrative, Herodotus betrays at once his perfect and unsuspecting confidence that he is dealing with genuine matter of history, and his entire distrust of the epic poets, even including Homer, upon whose authority that supposed history rested. His reason for rejecting the Homeric version is that it teems with historical improbabilities. If Helen had been really in Troy (he says), Priam and the Trojans would never have been so insane as to retain her to their own utter ruin: but it was the divine judgment which drove them into the miserable alternative of neither being able to surrender Helen, nor to satisfy the Greeks of the real fact that they had never had possession of her—in order that mankind might plainly read, in the utter destruction of Troy, the great punishments with which the gods visit great misdeeds. Homer (Herodotus thinks) had heard this story, but designedly departed from it, because it was not so suitable a subject for epic poetry.

Enough has been said to show how wide is the difference between Herodotus and the logographers with their literal transcript of the ancient legends. Though he agrees with them in admitting the full series of persons and generations, he tries the circumstances narrated by a new standard. Scruples have arisen in his mind respecting violations of the laws of nature : the poets are unworthy of trust, and their narratives must be brought into conformity with historical and ethical conditions, before they can be admitted as truth. To accomplish this conformity, Herodotus is willing to mutilate the old legend in one of its most vital points: he sacrifices the personal presence of Helena in Troy, which ran through every one of the ancient epic poems belonging to the Trojan cycle, and is indeed, under the gods, the great and present moving force throughout.

Thucydides places himself generally in the same point of view as Herodotus with regard to mythical antiquity, yet with some considerable differences. Though manifesting no belief in present miracles or prodigies, he seems to accept without reserve the preexistent reality of all the persons mentioned in the myths, and of the long series of generations extending back through so many supposed centuries : in this category, too, are included the eponymous personages, Hellen, Kekrops, Eumolpus, Pandion, Amphilochus the son of Amphiaraus, and Akarnan. But on the other hand, we find no trace of that distinction between a human and an heroic ante-human race, which Herodotus still admitted,—nor any respect for Egyptian legends. Thucydides, regarding the personages of the myths as men of the same breed and stature with his own contemporaries, not only tests the acts imputed to them by the same limits of credibility, but presumes in them the same political views and feelings as he was accustomed to trace in the proceedings of Peisistratus or Pericles. He treats the Trojan war as a great political enterprise, undertaken by all Greece; brought into combination through the imposing power of Agamemnon, not (according to the legendary narrative) through the influence of the oath exacted by Tyndareus. Then he explains how the predecessors of Agamemnon arrived at so vast a dominion —beginning with Pelops, who came over (as he says) from Asia with great wealth among the poor Peloponnesians, and by means of this wealth so aggrandized himself, though a foreigner, as to become the eponym of the peninsula. Next followed his son Atreus, who acquired after the death of Eurystheus the dominion of Mycenae, which had before been possessed by the descendants of Perseus : here the old legendary tale, which described Atreus as having been banished by his father Pelops in consequence of the murder of his elder brother Chrysippus, is invested with a political bearing, as explaining the reason why Atreus retired to Mycenae. Another legendary tale—the defeat and death of Eurystheus by the fugitive Heracleides in Attica, so celebrated in Attic tragedy as having given occasion to the generous protecting intervention of Athens—is also introduced as furnishing the cause why Atreus succeeded to the deceased Eurystheus: “for Atreus, the maternal uncle of Eurystheus, had been entrusted by the latter with his government during the expedition into Attica, and had effectually courted the people, who were moreover in great fear of being attacked by the Heracleides”. Thus the Pelopids acquired the supremacy in Peloponnesus, and Agamemnon was enabled to get together his 1200 ships and 100,000 men for the expedition against Troy. Considering that contingents were furnished from every portion of Greece, Thucydides regards this as a small number, treating the Homeric catalogue as an authentic muster-roll, perhaps rather exaggerated than otherwise. He then proceeds to tell us why the armament was not larger : many more men could have been furnished, but there was not sufficient money to purchase provisions for their subsistence; hence they were compelled, after landing and gaining a victory, to fortify their camp, to divide their army, and to send away one portion for the purpose of cultivating the Chersonese, and another portion to sack the adjacent towns. This was the grand reason why the siege lasted so long as ten years. For if it had been possible to keep the whole army together, and to act with an undivided force, Troy would have been taken both earlier and at smaller cost.

Such is the general sketch of the war of Troy, as given by Thucydides. So different is it from the genuine epical narrative, that we seem hardly to be reading a description of the same event; still less should we imagine that the event was known, to him as well as to us, only through the epic poets themselves. The men, the numbers, and the duration of the siege, do indeed remain the same; but the east and juncture of events, the determining forces, and the characteristic features, are altogether heterogeneous. But, like Herodotus, and still more than Herodotus, Thucydides was under the pressure of two conflicting impulses—he shared the general faith in the mythical antiquity, but at the same time he could not believe in any facts which contradicted the laws of historical credibility or probability. He was thus under the necessity of torturing the matter of the old myths into conformity with the subjective exigencies of his own mind: he left out, altered, recombined, and supplied new connecting principles and supposed purposes, until the story became such as no one could have any positive reason for calling in question : though it lost the impressive mixture of religion, romance, and individual adventure, which constituted its original charm, it acquired a smoothness and plausibility, and a poetical ensemble, which the critics were satisfied to accept as historical truth. And historical truth it would doubtless have been, if any independent evidence could have been found to sustain it. Had Thucydides been able to produce such new testimony, we should have been pleased to satisfy ourselves that the war of Troy, as he recounted it, was the real event; of which the war of Troy, as sung by the epic poets, was a misreported, exaggerated, and ornamented recital. But in this case the poets are the only real witnesses, and the narrative of Thucydides is a mere extract and distillation from their incredibilities.

A few other instances may be mentioned to illustrate the views of Thucydides respecting various mythical incidents. 1. He treats the residence of the Homeric Phaeakians at Corcyra as an undisputed fact, and employs it partly to explain the efficiency of the Corcyraean navy in times preceding the Peloponnesian war. He notices, with equal confidence, the story of Tereus and Prokne, daughter of Pandion, and the murder of the child Itys by Prokne his mother, and Philomela; and he produces this ancient myth with especial reference to the alliance between the Athenians and Teres, king of the Odrysian Thracians, during the time of the Peloponnesian war, intimating that the Odrysian Teres was neither of the same family nor of the same country as Tereus the husband of Prokne. The conduct of Pandion, in giving his daughter Prokne in marriage to Tereus, is in his view dictated by political motives and interests. 3. He mentions the Strait of Messina as the place through which Odysseus is said to have sailed. 4. The Cyclopes and the Laestrygones (he says) were the most ancient reported inhabitants of Sicily; but he cannot tell to what race they belonged, nor whence they came. 5. Italy derived its name from Italus, king of the Sikels. 6. Eryx and Egesto in Sicily were founded by fugitive Trojans after the capture of Troy; also Skione, in the Thracian peninsula of Pallene, by Greeks from the Achaean town of Pellene, stopping thither in their return from the siege of Troy: the Amphilochian Argos in the Gulf of Ambrakia was in like manner founded by Amphilochus son of Amphiaraus, in his return from the same enterprise. The remorse and mental derangement of the matricidal Alkmaeon, son of Amphiarus, is also mentioned by Thucydides, as well as the settlement of his son Akarnan in the country called after him Akarnania.

Such are the special allusions made by this illustrious author in the course of his history to mythical events. From the tenor of his language we may see that he accounted all that could be known about them to be uncertain and unsatisfactory; but he has it much at heart to show, that even the greatest were inferior in magnitude and importance to the Peloponnesian war. In this respect his opinion seems to have been at variance with that which was popular among his contemporaries.

To touch a little upon the later historians by whom these myths were handled, we find that Anaximenes of Lampsacus composed a consecutive history of events, beginning from the Theogony down to the battle of Mantineia. But Ephorus professed to omit all the mythical narratives which are referred to times anterior to the return of the Herakleids, (such restriction would of course have banished the siege of Troy,) and even reproved those who introduced myths into historical writing; adding, that everywhere truth was the object to be aimed at. Yet in practice he seems often to have departed from his own rule. Theopompus, on the other hand, openly proclaimed that he could narrate fables in his history better than Herodotus, or Ktesias, or Hellanicus. The fragments which remain to us, exhibit some proof that this promise was performed as to quantity; though as to his style of narration, the judgment of Dionysius is unfavorable. Xenophon ennobled his favorite amusement of the chase by numerous examples chosen from the heroic world, tracing their portraits with all the simplicity of an undiminished faith. Callisthenes, like Ephorus, professed to omit all myths which referred to a time anterior to the return of the Herakleids; yet we know that he devoted a separate book or portion of his history to the Trojan war. Philistus introduced some myths in the earlier portions of his Sicilian history; but Timaeus was distinguished above all others for the copious and indiscriminate way in which he collected and repeated such legends. Some of these writers employed their ingenuity in transforming the mythical circumstances into plausible matter of history : Ephorus, in particular, converted the serpent Pythel, slain by Apollo, into a tyrannical king.

But the author who pushed this transmutation of legend into history to the greatest length, was the Messenian Euemerus, contemporary of Cassander of Macedon. He melted down in this way the divine persons and legends, as well as the heroic — representing both gods and heroes as having been mere earthborn men, though superior to the ordinary level in respect of force and capacity, and deified or heroified after death as a recompense for services or striking exploits. In the course of a voyage into the Indian sea, undertaken by command of Cassander, Euemerus professed to have discovered a fabulous country called Panchaia, in which was a temple of the Triphylian Zeus : he there described a golden column, with an inscription purporting to have been put up by Zeus himself, and detailing his exploits while on earth. Some eminent men, among whom may be numbered Polybius, followed the views of Euemerus, and the Roman poet Ennius translated his Historia Sacra; but on the whole he never acquired favor, and the unblushing inventions which he put into circulation were of themselves sufficient to disgrace both the author and his opinions. The doctrine that all the gods had once existed as mere men offended the religious pagans, and drew upon Euemerus the imputation of atheism; but, on the other hand, it came to be warmly espoused by several of the Christian assailants of paganism, by Minucius Felix, Lactantius, and St. Augustin, who found the ground ready prepared for them in their efforts to strip Zeus and the other pagan gods of the attributes of deity. They believed not only in the main theory, but also in the copious details of Euemerus; and the same man whom Strabo casts aside as almost a proverb for mendacity, was extolled by them as an excellent specimen of careful historical inquiry.

But though the pagan world repudiated that “lowering tone of explanation”, which effaced the superhuman personality of Zeus and the great gods of Olympus, the mythical persons and narratives generally came to be surveyed more and more from the point of view of history, and subjected to such alterations as might make them look more like plausible matter of fact. Polybius, Strabo, Dioderus, and Pausanias, cast the myths into historical statements—with more or less of transformation, as the case may require, assuming always that there is a basis of truth, which may be discovered by removing poetical exaggerations and allowing for mistakes. Strabo, in particular, lays down that principle broadly and unequivocally in his remarks upon Homer. To give pure fiction, without any foundation of fact, was in his judgment utterly unworthy of so great a genius; and he comments with considerable acrimony on the geographer Eratosthenes, who maintains the opposite opinion. Again, Polybius tells us that the Homeric Eolus, the dispenser of the winds by appointment from Zeus, was in reality a man eminently skilled in navigation, and exact in predicting the weather; that the Cyclopes and Laestrygones were wild and savage real men in Sicily; and that Scylla and Charybdis were a figurative representation of dangers arising from pirates in the Strait of Messina. Strabo speaks of the amazing expeditions of Dionysus and Heracles, and of the long wanderings of Jason, Menelaus, and Odysseus, in the same category with the extended commercial range of the Phoenician merchant-ships : he explains the report of Theseus and Poirithous having descended to Hades, by their dangerous earthly pilgrimages, — and the invocation of the Dioskuri as the protectors of the imperiled mariner, by the celebrity which they had acquired as real men and navigators.

Diodorus gave at considerable length versions of the current fables respecting the most illustrious names in the Grecian mythical world, compiled confusedly out of distinct and incongruous authors. Sometimes the myth is reproduced in its primitive simplicity, but for the most part it is partially, and sometimes wholly, historicized. Amidst this jumble of dissentient authorities we can trace little of a systematic view, except the general conviction that there was at the bottom of the myths a real chronological sequence of persons, and real matter of fact, historical or ultra-historical. Nevertheless, there are some few occasions on which Diodorus brings us back a step nearer to the point of view of the old logographers. For, in reference to Heracles, he protests against the scheme of cutting down the myths to the level of present reality, and contends that a special standard of ultra-historical credibility ought to be constituted, so as to include the myth in its native dimensions, and do fitting honor to the grand, beneficent, and superhuman personality of Heracles and other heroes or demi-gods. To apply to such persons the common measure of humanity (he says), and to cavil at the glorious picture which grateful man has drawn of them, is at once ungracious and irrational. All nice criticism into the truth of the legendary narratives is out of place : we show our reverence to the god by acquiescing in the incredibilities of his history, and we must be content with the best guesses which we can make, amidst the inextricable confusion and numberless discrepancies which they present. Yet though Diodorus here exhibits a preponderance of the religious sentiment over the purely historical point of view, and thus reminds us of a period earlier than Thucydides—he in another place inserts a series of stories which seem to be derived from Euemerus, and in which Uranus, Kronus, and Zeus appear reduced to the character of human kings celebrated for their exploits and benefactions. Many of the authors, whom Diodorus copies, have so entangled together Grecian, Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan fables, that it becomes impossible to ascertain how much of this heterogeneous mass can be considered as at all connected with the genuine Hellenic mind.

Pausanias is far more strictly Hellenic in his view of the Grecian myths than Diodorus : his sincere piety makes him inclined to faith generally with regard to the mythical narratives, but subject nevertheless to the frequent necessity of historicizing or allegorizing them. His belief in the general reality of the mythical history and chronology is complete, in spite of the many discrepancies which he finds in it, and which he is unable to reconcile.

Another author who seems to have conceived clearly, and applied consistently, the semi-historical theory of the Grecian myths, is Palaephatus, of whose work what appears to be a short abstract has been preserved. In the short preface of this treatise concerning Incredible Tales, he remarks, that some men, from want of instruction, believe all the current narratives; while others, more searching and cautious, disbelieve them altogether. Each of these extremes he is anxious to avoid. On the one hand, he thinks that no narrative could ever have acquired credence unless it had been founded in truth; on the other, it is impossible for him to accept so much of the existing narratives as conflicts with the analogies of present natural phenomena. If such things ever had been, they would still continue to be — but they never have so occurred; and the extra-analogical features of the stories are to be ascribed to the license of the poets. Palaephatus wishes to adopt a middle course, neither accepting all nor rejecting all : accordingly, he had taken great pains to separate the true from the false in many of the narratives; he had visited the localities wherein they had taken place, and made careful inquiries from old men and others. The results of his researches are presented in a new version of fifty legends, among the most celebrated and the most fabulous, comprising the Centaurs, Pasiphae, Aktaeon, Cadmus and the Sparti, the Sphinx, Cycnus, Daedalus, the Trojan horse, Eolus, Scylla, Geryon, Bellorophon, etc.

It must be confessed that Palaephatus has performed his promise of transforming the “incredibilia” into narratives in themselves plausible and unobjectionable, and that in doing so he always follows some thread of analogy, real or verbal. The Centaurs (he tells us) were a body of young men from the village of Nephele in Thessaly, who first trained and mounted horses for the purpose of repelling a herd of bulls belonging to Ixion king of the Lapithae, which had run wild and done great damage : they pursued these wild bulls on horseback, and pierced them with their spears, thus acquiring both the name of Prickers and the imputed attribute of joint body with the horse. Aktaeon was an Arcadian, who neglected the cultivation of his land for the pleasures of hunting, and was thus eaten up by the expense of his hounds. The dragon whom Cadmus killed at Thebes, was in reality Drako, king of Thebes; and the dragon's teeth which he was said to have sown, and from whence sprung a crop of armed men, were in point of fact elephants’ teeth, which Cadmus as a rich Phoenician had brought over with him : the sons of Drako sold these elephants' teeth and employed the proceeds to levy troops against Cadmus. Dedalus, instead of flying across the sea on wings, had escaped from Crete in a swift sailing-boat under a violent storm : Kottus, Briareus, and Gyges were not persons with one hundred hands, but inhabitants of the village of Hekatoncheiria in Upper Macedonia, who warred with the inhabitants of Mount Olympus against the Titans : Scylla, whom Odysseus so narrowly escaped, was a fastsailing piratical vessel, as was also Pegasus, the alleged winged horse of Bellorophon.

By such ingenious conjectures, Palaephatus eliminates all the incredible circumstances, and leaves to us a string of tales perfectly credible and commonplace, which we should readily believe, provided a very moderate amount of testimony could be produced in their favor. If his treatment not only disenchants the original myths, but even effaces their generic and essential character, we ought to remember that this is not more than what is done by Thucydides in his sketch of the Trojan war. Palaephatus handles the myths consistently, according to the semi-historical theory, and his results exhibit the maximum which that theory can ever present. By aid of conjecture, we get out of the impossible, and arrive at matters intrinsically plausible, but totally uncertified; beyond this point we cannot penetrate, without the light of extrinsic evidence, since there is no intrinsic mark to distinguish truth from plausible fiction.

It remains that we should notice the manner in which the ancient myths were received and dealt with by the philosophers. The earliest expression which we hear, on the part of philosophy, is the severe censure bestowed upon them on ethical grounds by Xenophanes of Kolophon, and seemingly by some others of his contemporaries. It was apparently in reply to such charges, which did not admit of being directly rebutted, that Theagenes of Rhegium (about 520 BC) first started the idea of a double meaning in the Homeric and Hesiodic narratives,— an interior sense, different from that which the words in their obvious meaning bore, yet to a certain extent analogous, and discoverable by sagacious divination. Upon this principle, he allegorized especially the battle of the gods in the Iliad. In the succeeding century Anaxagoras and Metrodorus carried out the allegorical explanation more comprehensively and systematically; the former representing the mythical personages as mere mental conceptions, invested with name and gender, and illustrative of ethical precepts, — the latter connecting them with physical principles and phenomena. Metrodorus resolved not only the persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but also those of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector, into various elemental combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts concealed under the veil of allegory. Empedocles, Prodikus, Antisthenes, Parmenides, Heracleides of Pontus, and in a later age, Chrysippus, and the Stoic philosophers generally, followed more or less the same principle of treating the popular gods as allegorical personages; while the expositors of Homer (such as Stesimbrotus, Glaukon, and others, even down to the Alexandrine age), though none of them proceeded to the same extreme length as Metrodorus, employed allegory amongst other media of explanation for the purpose of solving difficulties, or eluding reproaches against the poet.

In the days of Plato and Xenophon, this allegorizing interpretation was one of the received methods of softening down the obnoxious myths —though Plato himself treated it as an insufficient defense, seeing that the bulk of youthful hearers could not see through the allegory, but embraced the story literally as it was set forth. Pausanias tells us, that when he first began to write his work, he treated many of the Greek legends as silly and undeserving of serious attention; but as he proceeded, he gradually arrived at the full conviction, that the ancient sages had designedly spoken in enigmatical language, and that there was valuable truth wrapped up in their narratives : it was the duty of a pious man, therefore, to study and interpret, but not to reject stories current and accredited respecting the gods. And others,—arguing from the analogy of the religious mysteries, which could not be divulged without impiety to any except such as had been specially admitted and initiated,—maintained that it would be a profanation to reveal directly to the vulgar, the genuine scheme of nature and the divine administration : the ancient poets and philosophers had taken the only proper course, of talking to the many in types and parables, and reserving the naked truth for privileged and qualified intelligences. The allegorical mode of explaining the ancient fables became more and more popular in the third and fourth centuries after the Christian era, especially among the new Platonic philosophers; being both congenial to their Orientalized turn of thought, and useful as a shield against the attacks of the Christians.

It was from the same strong necessity, of accommodating the old myths to a new standard both of belief and of appreciation, that both the historical and the allegorical schemes of transforming them arose; the literal narrative being decomposed for the purpose of arriving at a base either of particular matter of fact, or of general physical or moral truth. Instructed men were commonly disposed to historicize only the heroic legends, and to allegorize more or less of the divine legends : the attempt of Euemerus to historicize the latter was for the most part denounced as irreligious, while that of Metrodorus to allegorize the former met with no success. In allegorizing, moreover, even the divine legends, it was usual to apply the scheme of allegory only to the inferior gods, though some of the great Stoic philosophers carried it farther, and allegorized all the separate personal gods, leaving only an all-pervading cosmic Mind, essential as a coefficient along with Matter, yet not separable from Matter. But many pious pagans seem to have perceived that allegory pushed to this extent was fatal to all living religious faith, inasmuch as it divested the gods of their character of Persons, sympathizing with mankind and modifiable in their dispositions according to the conduct and prayers of the believer: and hence they permitted themselves to employ allegorical interpretation only to some of the obnoxious legends connected with the superior gods, leaving the personality of the latter unimpeached.

One novelty, however, introduced seemingly by the philosopher Empedocles and afterwards expanded by others, deserves notice, inasmuch as it modified considerably the old religious creed by drawing a pointed contrast between gods and daemons, — a distinction hardly at all manifested in Homer, but recognized in the Works and Days of Hesiod. Empedocles’ widened the gap between the two, and founded upon it important consequences. The gods were good, immortal, and powerful agents, having freewill and intelligence, but without appetite, passion, or infirmity : the daemons were of a mired nature between gods and men, ministers and interpreters from the former to the latter, but invested also with an agency and dispositions of their own. They were very long-lived, but not immortal, and subject to the passions and propensities of men, so that there were among them beneficent and maleficent demons with every shade of intermediate difference.

It had been the mistake (according to these philosophers) of the old myths to ascribe to the gods proceedings really belonging to the Demons, who were always the immediate communicants with mortal nature, inspiring prophetic power to the priestesses of the oracles, sending dreams and omens, and perpetually interfering either for good or for evil. The wicked and violent demons, having committed many enormities, had thus sometimes incurred punishment from the gods : besides which, their bad dispositions had imposed upon men the necessity of appeasing them by religious ceremonies of a kind acceptable to such beings: hence, the human sacrifices, the violent, cruel, and obscene exhibitions, the wailings and fastings, the tearing and eating of raw flesh, which it had become customary to practice on various consecrated occasions, and especially in the Dionysian solemnities. Moreover, the discreditable actions imputed to the gods,—the terrific combats, the Typhonic and Titanic convulsions, the rapes, abductions, flight, servitude, and concealment,—all these were really the doings and sufferings of bad demons, placed far below the sovereign agency—equable, undisturbed, and unpolluted—of the immortal gods. The action of such demons upon mankind was fitful and intermittent : they sometimes perished or changed their local abode, so that oracles which had once been inspired became after a time forsaken and disfranchised.

This distinction between gods and demons appeared to save in a great degree both the truth of the old legends and the dignity of the gods : it obviated the necessity of pronouncing either that the gods were unworthy, or the legends untrue. Yet although devised for the purpose of satisfying a more scrupulous religious sensibility, it was found inconvenient afterwards, when assailants arose against paganism generally. For while it abandoned as indefensible a large portion of what had once been genuine faith, it still retained the same word demons with an entirely altered signification. The Christian writers in their controversies found ample warrant among the earlier pagan authors for treating all the gods as demons — and not less ample warrant among the later pagans for denouncing the demons generally as evil beings.

Such were the different modes in which the ancient myths were treated, during the literary life of Greece, by the four classes above named—poets, logographers, historians, and philosophers.

Literal acceptance, and unconscious, uninquiring faith, such as they had obtained from the original auditors to whom they were addressed, they now found only among the multitude—alike retentive of traditional feelings and fearful of criticizing the proceedings of the gods. But with instructed men they became rather subjects of respectful and curious analysis—all agreeing that the Word as tendered to them was inadmissible, yet all equally convinced that it contained important meaning, though hidden yet not undiscoverable. A very large proportion of the force of Grecian intellect was engaged in searching after this unknown base, by guesses, in which sometimes the principle of semi-historical interpretation was assumed, sometimes that of allegorical, without any collateral evidence in either case, and without possibility of verification. Out of the one assumption grew a string of allegorized phenomenal truths, out of the other a long series of seeming historical events and chronological persons, —both elicited from the transformed myths and from nothing else

The utmost which we accomplish by means of the semi-historical theory, even in its most successful applications, is, that after leaving out from the mythical narrative all that is miraculous or high-colored or extravagant, we arrive at a series of credible incidents—incidents which may, perhaps, have really occurred, and against which no intrinsic presumption can be raised. This is exactly the character of a well-written modern novel (as, for example, several among the compositions of Defoe), the whole story of which is such as may well have occurred in real life: it is plausible fiction, and nothing beyond. To raise plausible fiction up to the superior dignity of truth, some positive testimony or positive ground of inference must be shown; even the highest measure of intrinsic probability is not alone sufficient. A man who tells us that, on the day of the battle of Plataea, rain fell on the spot of ground where the city of New York now stands, will neither deserve nor obtain credit, because he can have had no means of positive knowledge; though the statement is not in the slightest degree improbable. On the other hand, statements in themselves very improbable may well deserve belief, provided they be supported by sufficient positive evidence; thus the canal dug by order of Xerxes across the promontory of Mount Athos, and the sailing of the Persian fleet through it, is a fact which I believe, because it is well-attested—notwithstanding its remarkable improbability, which so far misled Juvenal as to induce him to single out the narrative as a glaring example of Grecian mendacity. Again, many critics have observed that the general tale of the Trojan war (apart from the superhuman agencies) is not more improbable than that of the Crusades, which everyone admits to be an historical fact. But (even if we grant this position, which is only true to a small extent), it is not sufficient to show an analogy between the two cases in respect to negative presumptions alone; the analogy ought to be shown to hold between them in respect to positive certificate also. The Crusades are a curious phenomenon in history, but we accept them, nevertheless, as an unquestionable fact, because the antecedent improbability is surmounted by adequate contemporary testimony. When the like testimony, both in amount and kind, is produced to establish the historical reality of a Trojan war, we shall not hesitate to deal with the two events on the same footing.

In applying the semi-historical theory to Grecian mythical narrative, it has been often forgotten that a certain strength of testimony, or positive ground of belief, must first be tendered, before we can be called upon to discuss the antecedent probability or improbability of the incidents alleged. The belief of the Greeks themselves, without the smallest aid of special or contemporary witnesses, has been tacitly assumed as sufficient to support the case, provided only sufficient deduction be made from the mythical narratives to remove all antecedent improbabilities. It has been taken for granted that the faith of the people must have rested originally upon some particular historical event, involving the identical persons, things, and places which the original myths exhibit, or at least the most prominent among them. But when we examine the pyschagogic influences predominant in the society among whom this belief originally grew up, we shall see that their belief is of little or no evidentiary value, and that the growth and diffusion of it may be satisfactorily explained without supposing any special basis of matters of fact. The popular faith, so far as it counts for anything, testifies in favor of the entire and literal myths, which are now universally rejected as incredible. We have thus the very minimum of positive proof, and the maximum of negative presumption : we may diminish the latter by conjectural omissions and interpolations, but we cannot by any artifice increase the former: the narrative ceases to be incredible, but it still remains uncertified,—a mere commonplace possibility. Nor is fiction always, or essentially, extravagant and incredible. It is often not only plausible and coherent, but even more like truth (if a paradoxical phrase may be allowed) than truth itself. Nor can we, in the absence of any extrinsic test, reckon upon any intrinsic mark to discriminate the one from the other.

In the semi-historical theory respecting Grecian mythical narrative, the critic unconsciously transports into the Homeric age those habits of classification and distinction, and that standard of acceptance or rejection, which he finds current in his own. Amongst us, the distinction between historical fact and fiction is highly valued as well as familiarly understood : we have a long history of the past, deduced from a study of contemporary evidences; and we have a body of fictitious literature, stamped with its own mark and interesting in its own way. Speaking generally, no man could now hope to succeed permanently in transferring any striking incident from the latter category into the former, nor could any man deliberately attempt it without incurring well-merited obloquy. But this historical sense, now so deeply rooted in the modern mind that we find a difficulty in conceiving any people to be without it, is the fruit of records and inquiries, first applied to the present, and then preserved and studied by subsequent generations; while in a society which has not yet formed the habit of recording its present, the real facts of the past can never be known; the difference between attested matter of fact and plausible fiction—between truth and that which is like truth—can neither be discerned nor sought for. Yet it is precisely upon the supposition that this distinction is present to men's habitual thoughts, that the semi-historical theory of the myths is grounded.

It is perfectly true, as has often been stated, that the Grecian epic contains what are called traditions respecting the past — the larger portion of it, indeed, consists of nothing else. But what are these traditions? They are the matter of those songs and stories which have acquired hold on the public mind; they are the creations of the poets and storytellers themselves, each of whom finds some preexisting, and adds others of his own, new and previously untold, under the impulse and authority of the Inspiring Muse. Homer doubtless found many songs and stories current with respect to the siege of Troy; he received and transmitted some of these traditions, recast and transformed others, and enlarged the whole mass by new creations of his own. To the subsequent poets, such as Arktinus and Lesches, these Homeric creations formed portions of preexisting tradition, with which they dealt in the same manner; so that the whole mass of traditions constituting the tale of Troy became larger and larger with each successive contributor. To assume a generic difference between the older and the newer strata of tradition—to treat the former as morsels of history, and the latter as appendages of fiction — is an hypothesis gratuitous at the least, not to say inadmissible. For the further we travel back into the past, the more do we recede from the clear day of positive history, and the deeper do we plunge into the unsteady twilight and gorgeous clouds of fancy and feeling. It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic, that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhipaean mountains, would in time reach the delicious country and genial climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans—the votaries and favorites of Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north beyond the chilling blasts of Boreas. Now the hope that we may, by carrying our researches up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less illusory than leis northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean Elysium.

The general disposition to adopt the semi-historical theory as to the genesis of Grecian myths, arises in part from reluctance in critics to impute to the mythopoeic ages extreme credulity or fraud; together with the usual presumption, that where much is believed some portion of it must be true. There would be some weight in these grounds of reasoning, if the ages under discussion had been supplied with records and accustomed to critical inquiry. But amongst a people unprovided with the former and strangers to the latter, credulity is naturally at its maximum, as well in the narrator himself as in his hearers: the idea of deliberate fraud is moreover inapplicable, for if the hearers are disposed to accept what is related to them as a revelation from the Muse, the oestrus of composition is quite sufficient to impart a similar persuasion to the poet whose mind is penetrated with it. The belief of that day can hardly be said to stand apart by itself as an act of reason. It becomes confounded with vivacious imagination and earnest emotion; and in every case where these mental excitabilities are powerfully acted upon, faith ensues unconsciously and as a matter of course. How active and prominent such tendencies were among the early Greeks, the extraordinary beauty and originality of their epic poetry may teach us.

It is, besides, a presumption far too largely and indiscriminately applied, even in our own advanced age, that where much is believed, something must necessarily be true — that accredited fiction is always traceable to some basis of historical truth. The influence of imagination and feeling is not confined simply to the process of retouching, transforming, or magnifying narratives originally founded on fact; it will often create new narratives of its own, without any such preliminary basis. Where there is any general body of sentiment pervading men living in society, whether it be religious or political—love, admiration, or antipathy — all incidents tending to illustrate that sentiment are eagerly welcomed, rapidly circulated and (as a general rule) easily accredited. If real incidents are not at hand, impressive fictions will be provided to satisfy the demand. The perfect harmony of such fictions with the prevalent feeling stands in the place of certifying testimony, and causes men to hear them not merely with credence, but even with delight: to call them in question and require proof, is a task which cannot be undertaken without incurring obloquy. Of such tendencies in the human mind, abundant evidence is furnished by the innumerable religious legends which have acquired currency in various parts of the world, and of which no country was more fertile than Greece —legends which derived their origin, not from special facts misreported and exaggerated, but from pious feelings pervading the society, and translated into narrative by forward and imaginative minds — legends, in which not merely the incidents, but often even the personages are unreal, yet in which the generating sentiment is conspicuously discernible, providing its own matter as well as its own form. Other sentiments also, as well as the religious, provided they be fervent and widely diffused, will find expression in current narrative, and become portions of the general public belief — every celebrated and notorious character is the source of a thousand fictions exemplifying his peculiarities. And if it be true, as I think present observation may show us, that such creative agencies are even now visible and effective, when the materials of genuine history are copious and critically studied—much more are we warranted in concluding that, in ages destitute of records, strangers to historical testimony, and full of belief in divine inspiration both as to the future and as to the past, narratives purely fictitious will acquire ready and uninquiring credence, provided only they be plausible and in harmony with the preconceptions of the auditors.

The allegorical interpretation of the myths has been by several learned investigators, especially by Creuzer, connected with the hypothesis of an ancient and highly instructed body of priests, having their origin either in Egypt or in the East, and communicating to the rude and barbarous Greeks religious, physical, and historical knowledge under the veil of symbols. At a time (we are told) when language was yet in its infancy, visible symbols were the most vivid means of acting upon the minds of ignorant hearers: the next step was to pass to symbolical language and expressions—for a plain and literal exposition, even if understood at all, would at least have been listened to with indifference, as not corresponding with any mental demand. In such allegorizing way, then, the early priests set forth their doctrines respecting God, nature, and humanity — a refined monotheism and a theological philosophy—and to this purpose the earliest myths were turned. But another class of myths, more popular and more captivating, grew up under the hands of the poets—myths purely epical, and descriptive of real or supposed past events. The allegorical myths, being taken up by the poets, insensibly became confounded in the same category with the purely narrative myths—the matter symbolized was no longer thought of, while the symbolizing words came to be construed in their own literal meaning—and the basis of the early allegory, thus lost among the general public, was only preserved as a secret among various religious fraternities, composed of members allied together by initiation in certain mystical ceremonies, and administered by hereditary families of presiding priests. In the Orphic and Bacchic sects, in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries, was thus treasured up the secret doctrine of the old theological and philosophical myths, which had once constituted the primitive legendary stock of Greece, in the hands of the original priesthood and in ages anterior to Homer. Persons who had gone through the preliminary ceremonies of initiation, were permitted at length to hear, though under strict obligation of secrecy, till ancient religious and cosmogonic doctrine, revealing the destination of man and the certainty of posthumous rewards and punishments — all disengaged from the corruptions of poets, as well as from the symbols and allegories under which they still remained buried in the eyes of the vulgar. The mysteries of Greece were thus traced up to the earliest ages, and represented as the only faithful depository channels of that purer theology and physics which had originally been communicated, though under the unavoidable inconvenience of a symbolical expression, by an enlightened priesthood coming from abroad to the then rude barbarians of the country.

But this theory, though advocated by several learned men, has been shown to be unsupported and erroneous. It implies a mistaken view both of the antiquity and the purport of the mysteries, which cannot be safely carried up even to the age of Hesiod, and which, though imposing and venerable as religious ceremonies, included no recondite or esoteric teaching.

The doctrine, supposed to have been originally symbolized and subsequently overclouded, in the Greek myths, was in reality first intruded into them by the unconscious fancies of later interpreters. It was one of the various roads which instructed men took to escape from the literal admission of the ancient myths, and to arrive at some new form of belief, more consonant with their ideas of what the attributes and character of the gods ought to be. It was one of the trays of constituting, by help of the mysteries, a philosophical religion apart from the general public, and of connecting that distinction with the earliest periods of Grecian society. Such a distinction was both avowed and justified among the superior men of the later pagan world. Varro and Scaevola distributed theology into three distinct departments,—the mythical or fabulous, the civil, and the physical. The first had its place in the theatre, and was left without any interference to the poets; the second belonged to the city of political community as such,—it comprised the regulation of all the public worship and religious rites, and was consigned altogether to the direction of the magistrate; the third was the privilege of philosophers, but was reserved altogether for private discussion in the schools, apart from the general public. As a member of the city, the philosopher sympathized with the audience in the theatre, and took a devout share in the established ceremonies, nor was he justified in trying what he heard in the one or saw in the other by his own ethical standard. But in the private assemblies of instructed or inquisitive men, he enjoyed the fullest liberty of canvassing every received tenet, and of broaching his own theories unreservedly, respecting the existence and nature of the gods. By these discussions, the activity of the philosophical mind was maintained and truth elicited; but it was such truth as the body of the people ought not to hear, lest their faith in their own established religious worship should be overthrown. In thus distinguishing the civil theology from the fabulous, Varro was enabled to cast upon the poets all the blame of the objectionable points in the popular theology, and to avoid the necessity of pronouncing censure on the magistrates, who (he contended) had made as good a compromise with the settled prejudices of the public as the case permitted.

The same conflicting sentiments which led the philosophers to decompose the divine myths into allegory, impelled the historians to melt down the heroic myths into something like continuous political history, with a long series of chronology calculated upon the heroic pedigrees. The one process as well as the other was interpretative guesswork, proceeding upon unauthorized assumptions, and without any verifying test or evidence : while it frittered away the characteristic beauty of the myth into something essentially anti-mythical, it sought to arrive both at history and philosophy by impracticable roads. That the superior men of antiquity should have striven hard to save the dignity of legends which constituted the charm of their literature as well as the substance of the popular religion, we cannot be at all surprised; but it is gratifying to find Plato discussing the subject in a more philosophical spirit. The Platonic Socrates, being asked whether he believed the current Attic fable respecting the abduction of Oreithyia (daughter of Erechtheus) by Boreas, replies, in substance,—“It would not be strange if I disbelieved it, as the clever men do; I might then show my cleverness by saying that a gust of Boreas blew her down from the rocks above while she was at play, and that, having been killed in this manner, she was reported to have been carried off by Boreas. Such speculations are amusing enough, but they belong to men ingenious and busy-minded overmuch, and not greatly to be envied, if it be only for this reason, that, after having set right one fable, they are under the necessity of applying the same process to a host of others—Hippo-centaurs, Chimeras, Gorgons, Pegasus, and numberless other monsters and incredibilities. A man, who, disbelieving these stories, shall try to find a probable basis for each of them, will display an ill-placed acuteness and take upon himself an endless burden, for which I at least have no leisure : accordingly, I forego such researches, and believe in the current version of the stories”.

These remarks of Plato are valuable, not simply because they point out the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of truth in the myths, but because they at the same time suggest the true reason for mistrusting all such tentatives. The myths form a class apart, abundant as well as peculiar : to remove any individual myth from its own class into that of history or philosophy, by simple conjecture, and without any collateral evidence, is of no advantage, unless you can perform a similar process on the remainder. If the process be trustworthy, it ought to be applied to all; and e converso, if it be not applicable to all, it is not trustworthy as applied to any one specially; always assuming no special evidence to be accessible. To detach any individual myth from the class to which it belongs, is to present it in an erroneous point of view; we have no choice except to admit them as they stand, by putting ourselves approximately into the frame of mind of those for whom they were destined and to whom they appeared worthy of credit.

If Plato thus discountenances all attempts to transform the myths by interpretation into history or philosophy, indirectly recognizing the generic difference between them—we find substantially the same view pervading the elaborate precepts in his treatise on the Republic. He there regards the myths, not as embodying either matter-of-fact or philosophical principle, but as portions of religious and patriotic faith, and instruments of ethical tuition. Instead of allowing the poets to frame them according to the impulses of their own genius, and with a view to immediate popularity, he directs the legislator to provide types of his own for the characters of the gods and heroes, and to suppress all such divine and heroic legends as are not in harmony with these pre-established canons. In the Platonic system, the myths are not to be matters of history, nor yet of spontaneous or casual fiction, but of prescribed faith : he supposes that the people will believe, as a thing of course, what the poets circulate, and he therefore directs that the latter shall circulate nothing which does not tend to ennoble and improve the feelings. He conceives the myths as stories composed to illustrate the general sentiments of the poets and the community, respecting the character and attributes of the gods and heroes, or respecting the social relations, and ethical duties as well as motives of mankind : hence the obligation upon the legislator to prescribe beforehand the types of character which shall be illustrated, and to restrain the poets from following out any opposing fancies. “Let us neither believe ourselves (he exclaims), nor permit any one to circulate, that Theseus son of Poseidon and Peirithous son of Zeus, or any other hero or son of a god, could ever have brought themselves to commit abductions or other enormities such as are now falsely ascribed to them. We must compel the poets to say, either that such persons were not the sons of gods, or that they were not the perpetrators of such misdeeds”.

Most of the myths which the youth hear and repeat (according to Plato) are false, but some of them are true: the great and prominent myths which appear in Homer and Hesiod are no less fictions than the rest. But fiction constitutes one of the indispensable instruments of mental training as well as truth; only the legislator must take care that the fiction so employed shall be beneficent and not mischievous. As the mischievous fictions (he says) take their rise from wrong preconceptions respecting the character of the gods and heroes, so the way to correct them is to enforce, by authorized compositions, the adoption of a more correct standard.

The comments which Plato has delivered with so much force in his Republic, and the enactments which he deduce from them, are in the main an expansion of that sentiment of condemnation, which he shared with so many other philosophers, towards a large portion of the Homeric and Hesiodic stories. But the manner in which he has set forth this opinion, unfolds to us more clearly the real character of the mythical narratives. They are creations of the productive minds in the community, deduced from the supposed attributes of the gods and heroes : so Plato views them, and in such character he proposes to amend them. The legislator would cause to be prepared a better and truer picture of the foretime, because he would start from truer (that is to say, more creditable) conceptions of the gods and heroes. For Plato rejects the myths respecting Zeus and Here, or Theseus and Peirithous, not from any want of evidence, but because they are unworthy of gods and heroes : he proposes to call forth new myths, which, though he admits them at the outset to be fiction, he knows will soon be received as true, and supply more valuable lessons of conduct.

We may consider, then, that Plato disapproves of the attempt to identify the old myths either with exaggerated history or with disguised philosophy. He shares in the current faith, without any suspicion or criticism, as to Orpheus, Palamedes, Daedalus, Amphion, Theseus, Achilles, Cheiron, and other mythical personages; but what chiefly fills his mind is, the inherited sentiment of deep reverence for these superhuman characters and for the age to which they belonged, — a sentiment sufficiently strong to render him not only an unbeliever in such legends as conflict with it, but also a deliberate creator of new legends for the purpose of expanding and gratifying it. The more we examine this sentiment, both in the mind of Plato as well as in that of the Greeks generally, the more shall we be convinced that it formed essentially and inseparably a portion of Hellenic religious faith. The myth both presupposes, and springs out of, a settled basis, and a strong expansive force of religious, social, and patriotic feeling, operating upon a past which is little better than a blank as to positive knowledge. It resembles history, in so far as its form is narrative; it resembles philosophy, in so far as it is occasionally illustrative; but in its essence and substance, in the mental tendencies by which it is created as well as in those by which it is judged and upheld, it is a popularized expression of the divine and heroic faith of the people.

Grecian antiquity cannot be at all understood except in connection with Grecian religion. It begins with gods and it ends with historical men, the former being recognized not simply as gods, but as primitive ancestors, and connected with the latter by a long mythical genealogy, partly heroic and partly human. Now the whole value of such genealogies arises from their being taken entire; the god or hero at the top is in point of fact the most important member of the whole for the length and continuity of the series arises from anxiety on the part of historical men to join themselves by a thread of descent with the being whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices. Without the ancestral god, the whole pedigree would have become not only acephalous, but worthless and uninteresting. The pride of the Heracleides, Asclepiads, Neleids, Daedalids, etc. was attached to the primitive eponymous hero and to the god from whom they sprung, not to the line of names, generally long and barren, through which the divine or heroic dignity gradually dwindled down into common manhood. Indeed, the length of the genealogy (as I have before remarked) was an evidence of the humility of the historical man, which led him to place himself at a respectful distance from the gods or heroes; for Hecataeus of Miletus, who ranked himself as the fifteenth descendant of a god, might perhaps have accounted it an overweening impiety in any living man to claim a god for his immediate father.

The whole chronology of Greece, anterior to 776 BC, consists of calculations founded upon these mythical genealogies, especially upon that of the Spartan kings and their descent from Heracles, — thirty years being commonly taken as the equivalent of a generation, or about three generations to a century. This process of computation was altogether illusory, as applying historical and chronological conditions to a case on which they had no bearing. Though the domain of history was seemingly enlarged, the religious element was tacitly set aside: when the heroes and gods were chronologized, they became insensibly approximated to the limits of humanity, and the process indirectly gave encouragement to the theory of Euemerus. Personages originally legendary and poetical were erected into definite landmarks for measuring the duration of the foretime, thus gaining in respect to historical distinctness, but not without loss on the score of religious association. Both Euemerus and the subsequent Christian writers, who denied the original and inherent divinity of the pagan gods, had a great advantage in carrying their chronological researches strictly and consistently upwards —for all chronology fails as soon as we suppose a race superior to common humanity.

Moreover, it is to be remarked that the pedigree of the Spartan kings, which Apollodorus and Eratosthenes selected as the basis of their estimate of time, is nowise superior in credibility and trustworthiness to the thousand other gentile and family pedigrees with which Greece abounded; it is rather indeed to be numbered among the most incredible of all, seeing that Heracles as a progenitor is placed at the head of perhaps more pedigrees than any other Grecian god or hero. The descent of the Spartan king Leonidas from Heracles rests upon no better evidence than that of Aristotle or Hippocrates from Asclepius,—of Evagoras or Thucydides from Eakus,—of Socrates from Dadalus, — of the Spartan heraldic family from Talthybius,—of the prophetic Iamid family in Elis from Iamus,—of the root-gatherers in Pelion from Cheiron,—and of Hekataeus and his gens from some god in the sixteenth ascending line of the series. There is little exaggeration in saying, indeed, that no permanent combination of men in Greece, religious, social, or professional, was without a similar pedigree; all arising out of the same exigencies of the feelings and imagination, to personify as well as to sanctify the bond of union among the members. Every one of these gentes began with a religious and ended with an historical person. At some point or other in the upward series, entities of history were exchanged for entities of religion; but where that point is to be found we are unable to say, nor had the wisest of the ancient Greeks any means of determining. Thus much, however, we know, that the series taken as a whole, though dear and precious to the believing Greek, possesses no value as chronological evidence to the historian.

When Hecataeus visited Thebes in Egypt, he mentioned to the Egyptian priests, doubtless with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, the imposing pedigree of the gens to which he belonged,—with fifteen ancestors in ascending line, and a god as the initial progenitor. But he found himself immeasurably overdone by the priests “who genealogized against him”. They showed to him three hundred and forty-one wooden colossal statues, representing the succession of chief priests in the temple in uninterrupted series from father to son, through a space of 11,300 years. Prior to the commencement of this long period (they said), the gods dwelling along with men, had exercised sway in Egypt; but they repudiated altogether the idea of men begotten by gods or of heroes.

Both these counter-genealogies, are, in respect to trustworthiness and evidence, on the same footing. Each represents partly the religious faith, partly the retrospective imagination, of the persons from whom it emanated; in each, the lower members of the series (to what extent we cannot tell) are real, the upper members fabulous; but in each also the series derived all its interest and all its imposing effect from being conceived unbroken and entire. Herodotus is much perplexed by the capital discrepancy between the Grecian and Egyptian chronologies, and vainly employs his ingenuity in reconciling them. There is no standard of objective evidence by which either the one or the other of them can be tried : each has its own subjective value, in conjunction with the faith and feelings of Egyptians and Greeks, and each presupposes in the believer certain mental prepossessions which are not to be found beyond its own local limits. Nor is the greater or less extent of duration at all important, when we once pass the limits of evidence and verifiable reality. One century of recorded time, adequately studded with authentic and orderly events, presents a greater mass and a greater difficulty of transition to the imagination than a hundred centuries of barren genealogy. Herodotus, in discussing the age of Homer and Hesiod, treats an anterior point of 400 years as if it were only yesterday; the reign of Henry VI is separated from us by an equal interval, and the reader will not require to be reminded how long that interval now appears.

The mythical age was peopled with a mingled aggregate of gods, heroes, and men, so confounded together that it was often impossible to distinguish to which class any individual name belonged. In regard to the Thracian god Zalmoxis, the Hellespontic Greeks interpreted his character and attributes according to the scheme of Euemerism. They affirmed that be had been a man, the slave of the philosopher Pythagoras at Samos, and that he had by abilities and artifice established a religious ascendency over the minds of the Thracians, and obtained from them divine honors. Herodotus cannot bring himself to believe this story, but he frankly avows his inability to determine whether Zalmoxis was a god or a man, nor can he extricate himself from a similar embarrassment in respect to Dionysus and Pan. Amidst the confusion of the Homeric fight, the goddess Athens confers upon Diomedes the miraculous favor of dispelling the mist from his eyes, so as to enable him to discriminate gods from men; and nothing less than a similar miracle could enable a critical reader of the mythical narratives to draw an ascertained boundary-line between the two. But the original hearers of the myths felt neither surprise nor displeasure from this confusion of the divine with the human individual. They looked at the past with a film of faith over their eyes —neither knowing the value, nor desiring the attainment, of an unclouded vision. The intimate companionship, and the occasional mistake of identity between gods and men, were in full harmony with their reverential restrospect. And we, accordingly, see the poet Ovid in his Fasti, when he undertakes the task of unfolding the legendary antiquities of early Rome, reacquiring, by the inspiration of Juno, the power of seeing gods and men in immediate vicinity and conjunct action, such as it existed before the development of the critical and historical sense.

To resume, in brief, what has been laid down in this and the preceding chapters respecting the Grecian myths :

1. They are a special product of the imagination and feelings, radically distinct both from history and philosophy : they cannot be broken down and decomposed into the one, nor allegorized into the other. There are indeed some particular and even assignable myths, which raise intrinsic presumption of an allegorizing tendency; and there are doubtless some others, though not specially assignable, which contain portions of matter of fact, or names of real persons, embodied in them. But such matter of fact cannot be verified by any intrinsic mark, nor we are entitled to presume its existence in any given case unless some collateral evidence can be produced.

2. We are not warranted in applying to the mythical world the rules either of historical credibility or chronological sequence. Its personages are gods, heroes, and men, in constant juxtaposition and reciprocal sympathy; men, too, of whom we know a large proportion to be fictitious, and of whom we can never ascertain how many may have been real. No series of such personages can serve as materials for chronological calculation.

3. The myths were originally produced in an age which had no records, no philosophy, no criticism, no canon of belief, and scarcely any tincture either of astronomy or geography—but which, on the other hand, was full of religious faith, distinguished for quick and susceptible imagination, seeing personal agents where we look only for objects and connecting laws;— an age, moreover, eager for new narrative, accepting with the unconscious impressibility of children (the question of truth or falsehood being never formally raised) all which ran in harmony with its preexisting feelings, and penetrable by inspired prophets and poets in the same proportion that it was indifferent to positive evidence. To such hearers did the primitive poet or story-teller address himself: it was the glory of his productive genius to provide suitable narrative expression for the faith and emotions which he shared in common with them, and the rich stock of Grecian myths attests how admirably he performed his task. As the gods and the heroes formed the conspicuous object of national reverence, so the myths were partly divine, partly heroic, partly both in one. The adventures of Achilles, Helen, and Diomedes, of Edipus and Adrastus, of Meleager and Althea, of Jason and the Argo, were recounted by the same tongues, and accepted with the same unsuspecting confidence, as those of Apollo and Artemis, of Ares and Aphrodite, of Poseidon and Heracles.

4. The time however came, when this plausibility ceased to be complete. The Grecian mind made an important advance, socially, ethically, and intellectually. Philosophy and history were constituted, prose writing and chronological records became familiar; a canon of belief more or less critical came to be tacitly recognized. Moreover, superior men profited more largely by the stimulus, and contracted habits of judging different from the vulgar : the god Elenchus (to use a personification of Menander) the giver and prover of truth, descended into their minds. Into the new intellectual medium, thus altered in its elements, and no longer uniform in its quality, the myths descended by inheritance; but they were found, to a certain extent, out of harmony even with the feelings of the people, and altogether dissonant with those of instructed men. But the most superior Greek was still a Greek, and cherished the common reverential sentiment towards the foretime of his country. Though he could neither believe nor respect the myths as they stood, he was under an imperious mental necessity to transform them into a state worthy of his belief and respect. Whilst the literal myth still continued to float among the poets and the people, critical men interpreted, altered, decomposed, and added, until they found something which satisfied their minds as a supposed real basis. They manufactured some dogmas of supposed original philosophy, and a long series of fancied history and chronology, retaining the mythical names and generations even when they were obliged to discard or recast the mythical events. The interpreted myth was thus promoted into a reality, while the literal myth was degraded into a fiction.

The habit of distinguishing the interpreted from the literal myth has passed from the literary men of antiquity to those of the modern world, who have for the most part construed the divine myths as allegorized philosophy, and the heroic myths as exaggerated, adorned, and over-colored history. The early ages of Greece have thus been peopled with quasi-historical persons and quasi-historical events, all extracted from the myths after making certain allowances for poetical ornament. But we must not treat this extracted product as if it were the original substance; we cannot properly understand it except by viewing it in connection with the literal myths out of which it was obtained, in their primitive age and appropriate medium, before the superior minds had yet outgrown the common faith in an all-personified Nature, and learned to restrict the divine free-agency by the supposition of invariable physical laws. It is in this point of view that the myths are important for anyone who would correctly appreciate the general tone of Grecian thought and feeling; for they were the universal mental stock of the Hellenic world—common to men and women, rich and poor, instructed and ignorant; they were in every one's memory and in every one's mouth,1 while science and history were confined to comparatively few. We know from Thucydides how erroneously and carelessly the Athenian public of his day retained the history of Peisistratus, only one century past; but the adventures of the gods and heroes, the numberless explanatory legends attached to visible objects and periodical ceremonies, were the theme of general talk, and any man unacquainted with them would have found himself partially excluded from the sympathy of his neighbors. The theatrical representations, exhibited to the entire city population, and listened to with enthusiastic interest, both presupposed and perpetuated acquaintance with the great lines of heroic fable: indeed, in later times even the pantomimic dancers embraced in their representations the whole field of mythical incident, and their immense success proves at once how popular and how well known such subjects were. The names and attributes of the heroes were incessantly alluded to in the way of illustration, to point out a consoling, admonitory, or repressive moral: the simple mention of any of them sufficed to call up in every one's mind the principal events of his life, and the poet or rhapsode could thus calculate on touching chords not less familiar than susceptible.

A similar effect was produced by the multiplied religious festivals and processions, as well as by the oracles and prophecies which circulated in every city. The annual departure of the Theoric ship from Athens to the sacred island of Delos, kept alive, in the minds of Athenians generally, the legend of Theseus and his adventurous enterprise in Crete; and in like manner most of the other public rites and ceremonies were of a commemorative character, deduced from some mythical person or incident familiarly known to natives, and forming to strangers a portion of the curiosities of the place. During the period of Grecian subjection under the Romans, these curiosities, together with their works of art and their legends, were especially clung to as a set-off against present degradation. The Theban citizen who found himself restrained from the liberty enjoyed by all other Greeks, of consulting Amphiaraus as a prophet, though the sanctuary and chapel of the hero stood in his own city, could not be satisfied without a knowledge of the story which explained the origin of such prohibition, and which conducted him back to the originally hostile relations between Amphiaraus and Thebes. Nor can we suppose among the citizens of Sicyon anything less than a perfect and reverential conception of the legend of Thebes, when we read the account given by Herodotus of the conduct of the despot Kleisthenes in regard to Adrastus and Melanippus. The Troezenian youths and maidens, who universally, when on the eve of marriage, consecrated an offering of their hair at the Hellion of Hippolytus, maintained a lively recollection of the legend of that unhappy recusant whom Aphrodite had so cruelly punished. Abundant relics preserved in many Grecian cities and temples, served both as mementos and attestations of other legendary events; and the tombs of the heroes counted among the most powerful stimulants of mythical reminiscence. The scepter of Pelops and Agamemnon, still preserved in the days of Pausanias at Chaeroneia in Boeotia, was the work of the god Hephaestus. While many other alleged productions of the same divine hand were preserved in different cities of Greece, this is the only one which Pausanias himself believed to be genuine : it had been carried by Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon to Phocis, and received divine honors from the citizens of Chaeronea. The spears of Meriones and Odysseus were treasured up at Engyium in Sicily, that of Achilles at Phaselis; the sword of Memmon adorned the temple of Asklepius at Nicomedia; and Pausanias, with unsuspecting confidence, adduces the two latter as proofs that the arms of the heroes were made of brass. The hide of the Kalydonian boar was guarded and shown by the Tegeates as a precious possession; the shield of Euphorbus was in like manner suspended in the temple of Branchids near Miletus, as well as in the temple of Here in Argos. Visible relics of Epeius and Philoktetes were not wanting, while Strabo raises his voice with indignation against the numerous Palladia which were shown in different cities, each pretending to be the genuine image from Troy. It would be impossible to specify the number of chapels, sanctuaries, solemnities, foundations of one sort or another, said to have been first commenced by heroic or mythical personages,—by Heracles, Jason, Medea, Alkmaeon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Danaus, and his daughters, etc. Perhaps in some of these cases particular critics might raise objections, but the great bulk of the people entertained a firm and undoubted belief in the current legend.

If we analyze the intellectual acquisitions of a common Grecian townsman, from the rude communities of Arcadia or Phocis even up to the enlightened Athens, we shall find that, over and above the rules of art or capacities requisite for his daily wants, it consisted chiefly of the various myths connected with his gens, his city, his religious festivals, and the mysteries in which he might have chosen to initiate himself, as well as with the works of art and the more striking natural objects which he might see around him,—the whole set off and decorated by some knowledge of the epic and dramatic poets. Such was the intellectual and imaginative reach of an ordinary Greek, considered apart from the instructed few : it was an aggregate of religion, of social and patriotic retrospect, and of romantic fancy, blended into one indivisible faith. And thus the subjective value of the myths, looking at them purely as elements of Grecian thought and feeling, will appear indisputably great, however little there may be of objective reality, either historical or philosophical, discoverable under them.

Nor must we omit the incalculable importance of the myths as stimulants to the imagination of the Grecian artist in sculpture, in painting, in carving, and in architecture. From the divine and heroic legends and personages were borrowed those paintings, statues, and reliefs, which rendered the temples, porticos, and public buildings, at Athens and elsewhere, objects of surpassing admiration; and such visible reproduction contributed again to fix the types of the gods and heroes familiarly and indelibly on the public mind. The figures delineated on cups and vases, as well as on the walls of private houses, were chiefly drawn from the same source — the myths being the great storehouse of artistic scenes and composition.

To enlarge on the characteristic excellence of Grecian art would here be out of place. I regard it only in so far as, having originally drawn its materials from the myths, it reacted upon the mythical faith and imagination—the reaction imparting strength to the former as well as distinctness to the latter. To one who saw constantly before him representations of the battles of the Centaurs or the Amazons, of the exploits performed by Perseus and Bellerophon, of the incidents composing the Trojan war or the Kalydonian boar-hunt—the process of belief, even in the more fantastic of these conceptions, became easy in proportion as the conception was familiarized. And if any person had been slow to believe in the efficacy of the prayers of Eakus, whereby that devout hero once obtained special relief from Zeus, at a moment when Greece was perishing with long-continued sterility, his doubts would probably vanish when, on visiting the Eakeium at Egina, there were exhibited to him the statues of the very envoys who had come on the behalf of the distressed Greeks to solicit that Eakus would pray for them. A Grecian temple was not simply a place of worship, but the actual dwelling-place of a god, who was believed to be introduced by the solemn dedicatory ceremony, and whom the imagination of the people identified in the most intimate manner with his statue. The presence or removal of the statue was conceived as identical with that of the being represented,—and while the statue was solemnly washed, dressed, and tended with all the respectful solicitude which would have been bestowed upon a real person, miraculous tales were often rife respecting the manifestation of real internal feeling in the wood and the marble. At perilous or critical moments, the statue was affirmed to have sweated, to have wept, to have closed its eyes, or brandished the spear in its hands, in token of sympathy or indignation. Such legends, springing up usually in times of suffering and danger, and finding few men bold enough openly to contradict them, ran in complete harmony with the general mythical faith, and tended to strengthen it in all its various ramifications. The renewed activity of the god or hero both brought to mind and accredited the preexisting myths connected with his name. When Boreas, during the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and in compliance with the fervent prayers of the Athenians, had sent forth a providential storm, to the irreparable damage of the Persian armada, the skeptical minority (alluded to by Plato), who doubted the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia, and his close connection thus acquired with Erechtheus, and the Erechtheids generally, must for the time have been reduced to absolute silence.

XVI.

PRE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.

I HAVE already remarked that the existence of that popular narrative talk, which the Germans express by the significant word Sage or Volks-Sage, in a greater or less degree of perfection or development, is a phenomenon common to almost all stages of society and to almost all quarters of the globe. It is the natural effusion of the unlettered, imaginative, and believing man, and its maximum of influence belongs to an early state of the human mind; for the multiplication of recorded facts, the diffusion of positive science, and the formation of a critical standard of belief, tend to discredit its dignity and to repress its easy and abundant flow. It supplies to the poet both materials to recombine and adorn, and a basis as well as a stimulus for further inventions of his own; and this at a time when the poet is religious teacher, historian, and philosopher, all in one,—not, as he becomes at a more advanced period, the mere purveyor of avowed, though interesting, fiction.

Such popular stories, and such historical songs (meaning by historical, simply that which is accepted as history) are found in most quarters of the globe, and especially among the Teutonic and Celtic populations of early Europe. The old Gothic songs were east into a continuous history by the historian Ablavius; and the poems of the Germans respecting Tuisto the earth-born god, his son Mannus, and his descendants the eponyms of the various German tribes, as they are briefly described by Tacitus, remind us of Hesiod, or Eumelus, or the Homeric Hymns. Jacob Grimm, in his learned and valuable Deutsche Mythologic, has exhibited copious evidence of the great fundamental analogy, along with many special differences, between the German, Scandinavian, and Grecian mythical world; and the Dissertation of Mr. Price (prefixed to his edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry) sustains and illustrates Grimm’s view. The same personifying imagination, the same ever-present conception of the will, sympathies, and antipathies of the gods as the producing causes of phenomena, and as distinguished from a course of nature with its invariable sequence, the same relations between gods, heroes, and men, with the like difficulty of discriminating the one from the other in many individual names, a similar wholesale transfer of human attributes to the gods, with the absence of human limits and liabilities, a like belief in Nymphs, Giants, and other beings, neither gods nor men, the same coalescence of the religious with the patriotic feeling and faith, these are positive features common to the early Greeks with the early Germans: and the negative conditions of the two are not less analogous, the absence of prose writing, positive records, and scientific culture. The preliminary basis and encouragements for the mythopoeia faculty were thus extremely similar.

But though the prolific forces were the same in kind, the results were very different in degree, and the developing circumstances were more different still.

First, the abundance, the beauty, and the long continuance of early Grecian poetry, in the purely poetical age, is a phenomenon which has no parallel elsewhere.

Secondly, the transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive state was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force—aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked, from without. From the poetry of Homer, to the history of Thucydides and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, was a prodigious step, but it was the native growth of the Hellenic youth into an Hellenic man; and what is of still greater moment, it was brought about without breaking the thread either of religious or patriotic tradition—without any coercive innovation or violent change in the mental feelings. The legendary world, though the ethical judgments and rational criticisms of superior men had outgrown it, still retained its hold upon their feelings as an object of affectionate and reverential retrospect.

Far different from this was the development of the early Germans. We know little about their early poetry, but we shall run no risk of error in affirming that they had nothing to compare with either Iliad or Odyssey. Whether, if left to themselves, they would have possessed sufficient progressive power to make a step similar to that of the Greeks, is a question which we cannot answer. Their condition, mental as well as political, was violently changed by a foreign action from without.

The influence of the Roman empire introduced artificially among them new institutions, new opinions, habits, and luxuries, and, above all, a new religion; the Romanized Germans becoming themselves successively the instruments of this revolution with regard to such of their brethren as still remained heathen. It was a revolution often brought about by penal and coercive means: the old gods Thor and Woden were formally deposed and renounced, their images were crumbled into dust, and the sacred oaks of worship and prophecy hewn down. But even where conversion was the fruit of preaching and persuasion, it did not the less break up all the associations of a German with respect to that mythical world which he called his past, and of which the ancient gods constituted both the charm and the sanctity: he had now only the alternative of treating them either as men or as daemons.

That mixed religious and patriotic retrospect, formed by the coalescence of piety with ancestral feeling, which constituted the appropriate sentiment both of Greeks and of Germans towards their unrecorded antiquity, was among the latter banished by Christianity: and while the root of the old myths was thus cankered, the commemorative ceremonies and customs with which they were connected, either lost their consecrated character or disappeared altogether. Moreover, new influences of great importance were at the same time brought to bear. The Latin language, together with some tinge of Latin literature—the habit of writing and of recording present events—the idea of a systematic law and pacific adjudication of disputes,—all these formed a part of the general working of Roman civilization, even after the decline of the Roman empire, upon the Teutonic and Celtic tribes. A class of specially-educated men was formed, upon a Latin basis and upon Christian principles, consisting too almost entirely of priests, who were opposed, as well by motives of rivalry as by religious feeling, to the ancient bards and storytellers of the community: the “lettered men” were constituted apart from “the men of story”, and Latin literature contributed along with religion to sink the myths of untaught heathenism. Charlemagne, indeed, at the same time that he employed aggressive and violent proceedings to introduce Christianity among the Saxons, also took special care to commit to writing and preserve the old heathen songs. But there can be little doubt that this step was the suggestion of a large and enlightened understanding peculiar to himself. The disposition general among lettered Christians of that age is more accurately represented by his son Louis le Debonnaire, who, having learned these songs as a boy, came to abhor them when he arrived at mature years, and could never be induced either to repeat or tolerate them.

According to the old heathen faith, the pedigree of the Saxon, Anglian, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish kings,—probably also those of the German and Scandinavian kings generally,—was traced to Odin, or to some of his immediate companions or heroic sons. I have already observed that the value of these genealogies consisted not so much in their length, as in the reverence attached to the name serving as primitive source. After the worship attached to Odin had been extinguished, the genealogical line was lengthened up to Japhet or Noah,—and Odin, no longer accounted worthy to stand at the top, was degraded into one of the simple human members of it. And we find this alteration of the original mythical genealogies to have taken place even among the Scandinavians, although the introduction of Christianity was in those parts both longer deferred, so as to leave time for a more ample development of the heathen poetical vein—and seems to have created a less decided feeling of antipathy (especially in Iceland) towards the extinct faith. The poems and tales composing the Edda, though first committed to writing after the period of Christianity, do not present the ancient gods in a point of view intentionally odious or degrading.

The transposition above alluded to, of the genealogical root from Odin to Noah, is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates the genuine character of these genealogies, and shows that they sprung, not from any erroneous historical data, but from the turn of the religious feeling; also that their true value is derived from their being taken entire, as connecting the existing race of men with a divine original. If we could imagine that Grecian paganism had been superseded by Christianity in the year 500 BC, the great and venerated gentile genealogies of Greece would have undergone the like modification; the Herakleids, Pelopids, Eakids, Asklepiads, &c., would have been merged in some larger aggregate branching out from the archeology of the Old Testament. The old heroic legends connected with these ancestral names would either have been forgotten, or so transformed as to suit the new vein of thought; for the altered worship, ceremonies, and customs would have been altogether at variance with them, and the mythical feeling would have ceased to dwell upon those to whom prayers were no longer offered. If the oak of Dodona had been cut down, or the Theoric ship had ceased to be sent from Athens to Delos, the myths of Theseus and of the two black doves would have lost their pertinence, and died away. As it was, the change from Homer to Thucydides and Aristotle took place internally, gradually, and imperceptibly. Philosophy and history were superinduced in the minds of the superior few, but the feelings of the general public continued unshaken—the sacred objects remained the same both to the eye and to the heart—and the worship of the ancient gods was even adorned by new architects and sculptors who greatly strengthened its imposing effect.

While then in Greece the mythopoeic stream continued in the same course, only with abated current and influence, in modern Europe its ancient bed was blocked up, and it was turned into new and divided channels. The old religion—though as an ascendant faith, unanimously and publicly manifested, it became extinct—still continued in detached scraps and fragments, and under various alterations of name and form. The heathen gods and goddesses, deprived as they were of divinity, did not pass out of the recollection and fears of their former worshippers, but were sometimes represented (on principles like those of Euemerus) as having been eminent and glorious men—sometimes degraded into daemons, magicians, elfs, fairies, and other supernatural agents, of an inferior grade and generally mischievous cast. Christian writers, such as Saxo Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson, committed to writing the ancient oral songs of the Scandivian Scalds, and digested the events contained in them into continuous narrative—performing in this respect a task similar to that of the Grecian logographers Pherekydes and Hellanikus, in reference to Hesiod and the Cyclic poets. But while Pherekydes and Hellanikus compiled under the influence of feelings substantially the same as those of the poets on whom they bestowed their care, the Christian logographers felt it their duty to point out the Odin and Thor of the old Scalds as evil daemons, or cunning enchanters, who had fascinated the minds of men into a false belief in their divinity. In some cases, the heathen recitals and ideas were modified so as to suit Christian feeling. But when preserved without such a change, they exhibited themselves palpably, and were designated by their compilers, as at variance with the religious belief of the people, and as associated either with imposture or with evil spirits.

A new vein of sentiment had arisen in Europe, unsuitable indeed to the old myths, yet leaving still in force the demand for mythical narrative generally. And this demand was satisfied, speaking generally, by two classes of narratives,—the legends of the Catholic Saints and the Romances of Chivalry, corresponding to two types of character, both perfectly accommodated to the feelings of the time,—the saintly ideal and the chivalrous ideal.

Both these two classes of narrative correspond, in character as well as in general purpose, to the Grecian myths—being stories accepted as realities, from their full conformity with the predispositions and deep-seated faith of an uncritical audience, and prepared beforehand by their authors, not with any reference to the conditions of historical proof, but for the purpose of calling forth sympathy, emotion, or reverence. The type of the saintly character belongs to Christianity, being the history of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels, and that of the prophets in the Old Testament; whilst the lives of holy men, who acquired a religious reputation from the fourth to the fourteenth century of the Christian era, were invested with attributes, and illustrated with ample details, tending to assimilate them to this revered model. The numerous miracles, the cure of diseases, the expulsion of demons, the temptations and sufferings, the teachings and commands, with which the biography of Catholic saints abounds, grew chiefly out of this pious feeling, common to the writer and to his readers. Many of the other incidents, recounted in the same performances, take their rise from misinterpreted allegories, from ceremonies and customs of which it was pleasing to find a consecrated origin, or from the disposition to convert the etymology of a name into matter of history : many have also been suggested by local peculiarities, and by the desire of stimulating or justifying the devotional emotions of pilgrims who visited some consecrated chapel or image. The dove was connected, in the faith of the age, with the Holy Ghost, the serpent with Satan; lions, wolves, stags, unicorns, etc. were the subjects of other emblematic associations; and such modes of belief found expression for themselves in many narratives which brought the saints into conflict or conjoint action with these various animals. Legends of this kind, so indefinitely multiplied and so preeminently popular and affecting, in the Middle Ages, are not exaggerations of particular matters of fact, but emanations in detail of some current faith or feeling, which they served to satisfy, and by which they were in turn amply sustained and accredited.

Readers of Pausanias will recognize the great general analogy between the stories recounted to him at the temples which he visited, and these legends of the Middle Ages. Though the type of character which the latter illustrate is indeed materially different, yet the source as well as the circulation, the generating as well as the sustaining forces, were in both cases the same. Such legends were the natural growth of a religious faith earnest, unexamining, and interwoven with the feelings at a time when the reason does not need to be cheated. The lives of the Saints bring us even back to the simple and ever-operative theology of the Homeric age; so constantly is the hand of God exhibited even in the minutest details, for the succor of a favored individual,—so completely is the scientific point of view, respecting the phenomena of nature, absorbed into the religious. During the intellectual vigor of Greece and Rome, a sense of the invariable course of nature and of the scientific explanation of phenomena had been created among the superior minds, and through them indirectly among the remaining community; thus limiting to a certain extent the ground open to be occupied by a religious legend. With the decline of the pagan literature and philosophy, before the sixth century of the Christian era, this scientific conception gradually passed out of sight, and left the mind free to a religious interpretation of nature not less simple and nay than that which had prevailed under the Homeric paganism. The great religious movement of the Reformation, and the gradual formation of critical and philosophical habits in the modern mind, have caused these legends of the Saints,—once the charm and cherished creed of a numerous public, to pass altogether out of credit, without even being regarded, among Protestants at least, as worthy of a formal scrutiny into the evidence,—a proof of the transitory value of public belief, however sincere and fervent, as a certificate of historical truth, if it be blended with religious predispositions.

The same mythopoeic vein, and the same susceptibility and facility of belief, which had created both supply and demand for the legends of the Saints, also provided the abundant stock of romantic narrative poetry, in amplification and illustration of the chivalrous ideal. What the legends of Troy, of Thebes, of the Kalydonian boar, of Edipus, Theseus, etc. were to an early Greek, the tales of Arthur, of Charlemagne, of the Niebelungen, were to an Englishman, or Frenchman, or German, of the twelfth or thirteenth century. They were neither recognized fiction nor authenticated history: they were history, as it is felt and welcomed by minds unaccustomed to investigate evidence, and unconscious of the necessity of doing so. That the Chronicle of Turpin, a mere compilation of poetical legends respecting Charlemagne, was accepted as genuine history, and even pronounced to be such by papal authority, is well known; and the authors of the Romances announce themselves, not less than those of the old Grecian epic, as being about to recount real matter of fact. It is certain that Charlemagne is a great historical name, and it is possible, though not certain, that the name of Arthur may be historical also. But the Charlemagne of history, and the Charlemagne of romance, have little except the name in common nor could we ever determine, except by independent evidence (which in this case we happen to possess), whether Charlemagne was a real or a fictitious person. That illustrious name, as well as the more problematical Arthur, is taken up by the romancers, not with a view to celebrate realities previously verified, but for the purpose of setting forth or amplifying an ideal of their own, in such manner as both to rouse the feelings and captivate the faith of their hearers.

To inquire which of the personages of the Carolingian epic were real and which were fictitious,—to examine whether the expedition ascribed to Charlemagne against Jerusalem had ever taken place or not,—to separate truth from exaggeration in the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table,—these were problems which an audience of that day had neither disposition to undertake nor means to resolve. They accepted the narrative as they heard it, without suspicion or reserve; the incidents related, as well as the connecting links between them, were in full harmony with their feelings, and gratifying as well to their sympathies as to their curiosity: nor was anything farther wanting to induce them to believe it, though the historical basis might be ever so slight or even non-existent.

The romances of chivalry represented, to those who heard them, real deeds of the foretime—“glories of the foregone men”, to use the Hesiodic expression—at the same time that they embodied and filled up the details of an heroic ideal, such as that age could conceive and admire—a fervent piety, combined with strength, bravery, and the love of adventurous aggression, directed sometimes against infidels, sometimes against enchanters or monsters, sometimes in defence of the fair sex. Such characteristics wore naturally popular, in a century of feudal struggles and universal insecurity, when the grand subjects of common respect and interest were the Church and the Crusades, and when the latter especially were embraced with an enthusiasm truly astonishing.

The long German poem of the Niebelungen Lied, as well as the Volsunga Saga and a portion of the songs of the Edda, relate to a common fund of mythical, superhuman personages, and of fabulous adventure, identified with the earliest antiquity of the Teutonic and Scandinavian race, and representing their primitive sentiment towards ancestors of divine origin. Sigurd, Brynhilde, Gudrun, and Atle, are mythical characters celebrated as well by the Scandinavian Scalds as by the German epic poets, but with many varieties and separate additions to distinguish the one from the other. The German epic, later and more elaborated, includes various persons not known to the songs in the Edda, in particular the prominent name of Dieterich of Bern—presenting, moreover, the principal characters and circumstances as Christian, while in the Edda there is no trace of anything but heathenism. There is, indeed, in this the old and heathen version, a remarkable analogy with many points of Grecian mythical narrative. As in the case of the short life of Achilles, and of the miserable Labdakids of Thebes—so in the family of the Volsungs, though sprung from and protected by the gods—a curse of destiny hangs upon them and brings on their ruin, in spite of preeminent personal qualities. The more thoroughly this old Teutonic story has been traced and compared, in its various transformations and accompaniments, the less can any well-established connection be made out for it with authentic historical names or events. We must acquiesce in its personages as distinct in original conception from common humanity, and as belonging to the subjective mythical world of the race by whom they were sung.

Such were the compositions which not only interested the emotions, but also satisfied the undistinguishing historical curiosity, of the ordinary public in the middle ages. The exploits of many of these romantic heroes resemble in several points those of the Grecian the adventures of Perseus, Achilles, Odysseus, Atalanta, Bellerophon, Jason, and the Trojan war, or Argonautic expedition generally, would have fitted in perfectly to the Carolingian or other epics of the period. That of the middle ages, like the Grecian, was eminently expansive in its nature: new stories were successively attached to the names and companions of Charlemagne and Arthur, just as the legend of Troy was enlarged by Arktinus, Lesches, and Stesichorus,—that of Thebes, by fresh miseries entailed on the fated head of Edipus,—and that of the Kalydonian boar, by the addition of Atalanta. Altogether, the state of mind of the hearers seems in both cases to have been much the same,—eager for emotion and sympathy, and receiving any narrative attuned to their feelings, not merely with hearty welcome, but also with unsuspecting belief.

Nevertheless, there were distinctions deserving of notice, which render the foregoing proposition more absolutely exact with regard to Greece than with regard to the middle ages. The tales of the epic, and the myths in their most popular and extended signification, were the only intellectual nourishment with which the Grecian public was supplied, until the sixth century before the Christian era: there was no prose writing, no history, no philosophy. But such was not exactly the case at the time when the epic of the middle ages appeared. At that time, a portion of society possessed the Latin language, the habit of writing, and some tinge both of history and philosophy : there were a series of chronicles, scanty, indeed, and imperfect, but referring to contemporary events and preventing the real history of the past from passing into oblivion: there were even individual scholars, in the twelfth century, whose acquaintance with Latin literature was sufficiently considerable to enlarge their minds and to improve their judgments. Moreover, the epic of the middle ages, though deeply imbued with religious ideas, was not directly amalgamated with the religion of the people, and did not always find favor with the clergy; while the heroes of the Grecian epic were not only linked in a thousand ways with existing worship, practices, and sacred localities, but Homer and Hesiod pass with Herodotus for the constructors of Grecian theology. We thus see that the ancient epic was both exempt from certain distracting influences by which that of the middle ages was surrounded, and more closely identified with the veins of thought and feeling prevalent in the Grecian public. Yet these counteracting influences did not prevent Pope Calixtus II from declaring the Chronicle of Turpin to be a genuine history.

If we take the history of our own country (England) as it was conceived and written from the twelfth to the seventeenth century by Hardyng, Fabyan, Grafton, Hollinshed, and others, we shall find that it was supposed to begin with Brute the Trojan, and was carried down from thence, for many ages and through a long succession of kings, to the times of Julius Caesar. A similar belief of descent from Troy, arising seemingly from a reverential imitation of the Romans and of their Trojan origin, was cherished in the fancy of other European nations. With regard to the English, the chief circulator of it was Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it passed with little resistance or dispute into the national faith—the kings from Brute downward being enrolled in regular chronological series with their respective dates annexed. In a dispute which took place during the reign of Edward I (AD 1301) between England and Scotland, the descent of the kings of England from Brute the Trojan was solemnly embodied in a document put forth to sustain the rights of the crown of England, as an argument bearing on the case then in discussion: and it passed without attack from the opposing party,—an incident which reminds as of the appeal made by Aschines, in the contention between the Athenians and Philip of Macedon, respecting Amphipolis, to the primitive dotal rights of Akamas son of Theseus —and also of the defense urged by the Athenians to sustain their conquest of Sigeium, against the reclamations of the Mityleneans, wherein the former alleged that they had as much right to the place as any of the other Greeks who had formed part of the victorious armament of Agamemnon.

The tenacity with which this early series of British kings was defended, is no less remarkable than the facility with which it was admitted. The chroniclers at the beginning of the seventeenth century warmly protested against the intrusive skepticism which would cashier so many venerable sovereigns and efface so many noble deeds. They appealed to the patriotic feelings of their hearers, represented the enormity of thus setting up a presumptuous criticism against the belief of ages, and insisted on the danger of the precedent as regarded history generally. How this controversy stood, at the time and in the view of the illustrious author of Paradise Lost, I shall give in his own words, at they appear in the second page of his History of England. After having briefly touched upon the stories of Samothes son of Japhet, Albion son of Neptune, etc., he proceeds :

“But now of Brutus and his line, with the whole progeny of kings to the entrance of Julius Caesar, we cannot so easily be discharged : descents of ancestry long continued, laws and exploits not plainly seeming to be borrowed or devised, which on the common belief have wrought no small impression: defended by many, denied utterly by few. For what though Brutus and the whole Trojan pretense were yielded up, seeing they, who first devised to bring us some noble ancestor, were content at first with Brutus the Consul, till better invention, though not willing to forego the name, taught them to remove it higher into a more fabulous age, and by the same remove lighting on the Trojan tales, in affectation to make the Briton of one original with the Roman, pitched there: Yet those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long had been remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity. For these, and those causes above mentioned, that which had received approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow: so far as keeps aloof from impossible or absurd, attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of story”.

Yet in spite of the general belief of so many centuries—in spite of the concurrent persuasion of historians and poets—in spite of the declaration of Milton, extorted from his feelings rather than from his reason, that this long line of quasi-historical kings and exploits could not be all unworthy of belief—in spite of so large a body of authority and precedent, the historians of the nineteenth century begin the history of England with Julius Caesar. They do not attempt either to settle the date of king Bladud’s accession, or to determine what may be the basis of truth in the affecting narrative of Lear. The standard of historical credibility, especially with regard to modern events, has Indeed been greatly and sensibly raised within the last hundred years.

But in regard to ancient Grecian history, the rules of evidence still continue relaxed. The dictum of Milton, regarding the ante-Caesarian history of England, still represents pretty exactly the feeling now prevalent respecting the mythical history of Greece: “Yet those old and inborn kings (Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Jason, Adrastus, Amphiaraus, Meleager, etc.), never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity”. Amidst much fiction (we are still told), there must be some truth: but how is such truth to be singled out? Milton does not even attempt to make the severance: he contents himself with “keeping aloof from the impossible and the absurd”, and ends in a narrative which has indeed the merit of being sober-colored, but which he never for a moment thinks of recommending to his readers as true. So in regard to the legends of Greece,—Troy, Thebes, the Argonauts, the Boar of Kalydom, Heracles, Theseus, Oedipus,—the conviction still holds in men's minds, that there must be something true at the bottom; and many readers of this work may be displeased, I fear, not to see conjured up before them the Eidolon of an authentic history, even though the vital spark of evidence be altogether wanting.

I presume to think that our great poet has proceeded upon mistaken views with respect to the old British fables, not less in that which he leaves out than in that which he retains. To omit the miraculous and the fantastic, (it is that which he really means by “the impossible and the absurd”), is to suck the lifeblood out of these once popular narratives,—to divest them at once both of their genuine distinguishing mark, and the charm by which they acted on the feelings of believers. Still less ought we to consent to break up and disenchant in a similar manner the myth of ancient Greece,—partly because they possess the mythical beauties and characteristics in far higher perfection, partly because they sank deeper into the mind of a Greek, and pervaded both the public and private sentiment of the country to a much greater degree than the British fables in England.

Two courses, and two only, are open; either to pass over the myths altogether, which is the way in which modern historians treat the old British fables, or else to give an account of them as myths; to recognize and respect their specific nature, and to abstain from confounding them with ordinary and certifiable history. There are good reasons for pursuing this second method in reference to the Grecian myths; and when so considered, they constitute an important chapter in the history of the Grecian mind, and indeed in that of the human race generally. The historical faith of the Greeks, as well as that of other people, in reference to early and unrecorded times, is as much subjective and peculiar to themselves as their religious faith: among the Greeks, especially, the two are confounded with an intimacy which nothing less than great violence can disjoin. Gods, heroes, and men—religion and patriotism—matters divine, heroic, and human—were all woven together by the Greeks into one indivisible web, in which the threads of truth and reality, whatever they might originally have been, were neither intended to be nor were actually, distinguishable. Composed of such materials, and animated by the electric spark of genius, the mythical antiquities of Greece formed a whole at once trustworthy and captivating to the faith and feelings of the people; but neither trustworthy nor captivating, when we sever it from these subjective conditions, and expose its naked elements to the scrutiny of an objective criticism. Moreover the separate portions of Grecian mythical foretime ought to be considered with reference to that aggregate of which they form a part : to detach the divine from the heroic legends, or some one of the heroic legends from the remainder, as if there were an essential and generic difference between them, is to present the whole under an erroneous point of view. The myths of Troy and Thebes are no more to be handled objectively, with a view to detect an historical base, than those of Zeus in Crete, of Apollo and Artemis in Delos, of Hermes, or of Prometheus. To single out the siege of Troy from the other myths, as if it were entitled to pre-eminence as an ascertained historical and chronological event, is a proceeding which destroys the true character and coherence of the mythical world: we only transfer the story (as has been remarked in the preceding chapter) from a class with which it is connected by every tie both of common origin and fraternal affinity, to another with which it has no relationship, except such as violent and gratuitous criticism may enforce.

By drawing this marked distinction between the mythical and the historical world, between matter appropriate only for subjective history, and matter in which objective evidence is attainable, we shall only carry out to its proper length the just and well-known position long ago laid down by Varro. That learned man recognized three distinguishable periods preceding his own age: “First, the time from the beginning of mankind down to the first deluge; a time wholly unknown. Secondly, the period from the first deluge down to the first Olympiad, which is called the mythical period, because many fabulous things are recounted in it. Thirdly, the time from the first Olympiad down to ourselves, which is called the historical period, because the things done in it are comprised in true histories”.

Taking the commencement of true or objective history at the point indicated by Varro, I still consider the mythical and historical periods to be separated by a wider gap than he would have admitted. To select any one year as an absolute point of commencement, is of course not to be understood literally: but in point of fact, this is of every little importance in reference to the present question, seeing that the great mythical events the sieges of Thebes and Troy, the Argonautic expedition, the Kalydonian boar-hunt, the return of the Herakleids, &c. are all placed long anterior to the first Olympiad, by those who have applied chronological boundaries to the mythical narratives. The period immediately preceding the first Olympiad is one exceedingly barren of events; the received chronology recognizes 400 years, and Herodotus admitted 500 years, from that date back to the Trojan war.

CLOSING EVENTS OF LEGENDARY GREECE. PERIOD OF INTERMEDIATE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN OF HISTORICAL GREECE.

IN one of the preceding chapters, we have traced the descending series of the two most distinguished mythical families in Peloponnesus,—the Perseids and the Pelopids: we have followed the former down to Heracles and his son Hyllus, and the latter down to Orestes son of Agamemnon, who is left in possession of that ascendancy in the peninsula which had procured for his father the chief command in the Trojan war. The Herakleids, or sons of Heracles, on the other hand, are expelled fugitives, dependent upon foreign aid or protection: Hyllus had perished in single combat with Echemus of Tegea, (connected with the Pelopids by marriage with Timandra sister of Clytemnestra,) and a solemn compact had been made, as the preliminary condition of this duel, that no similar attempt at an invasion of the peninsula should be undertaken by his family for the space of one hundred years. At the end of the stipulated period the attempt was renewed, and with complete success; but its success was owing, not so much to the valor of the invaders as to a powerful body of new allies. The Herakleids reappear as leaders and companions of the Dorians,— a northerly section of the Greek name, who now first come into importance,—poor, indeed, in mythical renown, since they are never noticed in the Iliad, and only once casually mentioned in the Odyssey, as a fraction among the many-tongued inhabitants of Crete,—but destined to form one of the grand and predominant elements throughout all the career of historical Hellas.

The son of Hyllus—Kleodeus—as well as his grandson Aristomachus, were now dead, and the lineage of Heracles was represented by the three sons of the latter,—Temenus, Kresphontes, and Aristodemus, and under their conduct the Dorians penetrated into the peninsula. The mythical account traced back this intimate union between the Herakleids and the Dorians to a prior war, in which Heracles himself had rendered inestimable aid to the Dorian king Egimius, when the latter was hard pressed in a contest with the Lapithae. Heracles defeated the Lapithae, and slew their king Koronus; in return for which Egimius assigned to his deliverer one third part of his whole territory, and adopted Hyllus as his son. Heracles desired that the territory thus made over might be held in reserve until a time should come when his descendants might stand in need of it; and that time did come, after the death of Hyllus. Some of the Herakleids then found shelter at Trikorythus in Attica, but the remainder, turning their steps towards Egimius, solicited from him the allotment of land which had been promised to their valiant progenitor. Egimius received them according to his engagement, and assigned to them the stipulated third portion of his territory and from this moment the Herakleids and Dorians became intimately united together into one social communion. Pamphylus and Dymas, sons of Egimius, accompanied Temenus and his two brothers in their invasion of Peloponnesus.

Such is the mythical incident which professes to explain the origin of those three tribes into which all the Dorian communities were usually divided,—the Hylleis, the Phamphyli, and the Dymanes,—the first of the three including certain particular families, such as that of the kings of Sparta, who bore the special name of Herakleids. Hyllus, Pamphylus, and Dymas are the eponymous heroes of the three Dorian tribes.

Temenus and his two brothers resolved to attack Peloponnesus, not by a land-march along the Isthmus, such as that in which Hyllus had been previously slain, but by sea, across the narrow inlet between the promontories of Rhium and Antirrhium, with which the Gulf of Corinth commences. According to one story, indeed,—which, however, does not seem to have been known to Herodotus,—they are said to have selected this line of march by the express direction of the Delphian god, who vouchsafed to expound to them an oracle which had been delivered to Hyllus in the ordinary equivocal phraseology. Both the Ozolian Lokrians, and the Etolians, inhabitants of the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth, were favorable to the enterprise, and the former granted to them a port for building their ships, from which memorable circumstance the port ever afterwards bore the name of Naupaktus. Aristodemus was here struck with lightning and died, leaving twin sons, Eurysthenes and Prokles; but his remaining brothers continued to press the expedition with alacrity.

At this juncture, an Acarnanians prophet named Carnus presented himself in the camps under the inspiration of Apollo, and uttered various predictions: he was, however, so much suspected of treacherous collusion with the Peloponnesians, that Hippotes, great-grandson of Heracles through Phylas and Antiochus, slew him. His death drew upon the army the wrath of Apollo, who destroyed their vessels and punished them with famine. Temenus, in his distress, again applying to the Delphian god for succor and counsel, was made acquainted with the cause of so much suffering, and was directed to banish Hippotes for ten years, to offer expiatory sacrifice for the death of Carnus, and to seek as the guide of the army a man with three eyes. On coming back to Naupaktus, he met the Etolian Oxyltis, son of Andraemon, returning to his country, after a temporary exile in Elis, incurred for homicide: Oxylus had lost one eye, but as he was seated on a horse, the man and the horse together made up the three eyes required, and he was adopted as the guide prescribed by the oracle. Conducted by him, they refitted their ships, landed on the opposite coast of Achaia, and marched to attack Tisamenus, son of Orestes, then the great potentate of the peninsula. A decisive battle was fought, in which the latter was vanquished and slain, and in which Pamphylus and Dymas also perished. This battle made the Dorians so completely masters of the Peloponnesus, that they proceeded to distribute the territory among themselves. The fertile land of Elis had been by previous stipulation reserved for Oxylus, as a recompense for his services as conductor: and it was agreed that the three Herakleids,—Temenus, Kresphontes, and the infant sons of Aristodemus,—should draw lots for Argos, Sparta, and Messene. Argos fell to Temenus, Sparta to the sons of Aristodemus, and Messene to Kresphontes; the latter having secured for himself this prize, the most fertile territory of the three, by the fraud of putting into the vessel out of which the lots were drawn, a lump of clay instead of a stone, whereby the lots of his brothers were drawn out while his own remained inside. Solemn sacrifices were offered by each upon this partition: but as they proceeded to the ceremony, a miraculous sign was seen upon the altar of each of the brothers,—a toad corresponding to Argos, a serpent to Sparta, and a fox to Messene. The prophets, on being consulted, delivered the import of these mysterious indications: the toad, as an animal slow and stationary, was an evidence that the possessor of Argos would not succeed in enterprises beyond the limits of his own city; the serpent denoted the aggressive and formidable future reserved to Sparta; the fox prognosticated a career of wile and deceit to the Messenian.

Such is the brief account given by Apollodorus of the Return of the Herakleids, at which point we pass, as if touched by the wand of a magician, from mythical to historical Greece. The story bears on the face of it the stamp, not of history, but of legend,— abridged from one or more of the genealogical poets, and presenting such an account as they thought satisfactory, of the first formation of the great Dorian establishments in Peloponnesus, as well as of the semi-Aetolian Elis. Its incidents are so conceived as to have an explanatory bearing on Dorian institutions,—upon the triple division of tribes, characteristic of the Dorians,—upon the origin of the great festival of the Karneia at Sparta, alleged to be celebrated in expiation of the murder of Carnus,—upon the different temper and character of the Dorian states among themselves,—upon the early alliance of the Dorians with Elis, which contributed to give ascendency and vogue to the Olympic games,—upon the reverential dependence of Dorians towards the Delphian oracle,—and, lastly, upon the etymology of the name Naupaktus. If we possessed the narrative more in detail, we should probably find many more examples of coloring of the legendary past suitable to the circumstances of the historical present.

Above all, this legend makes out in favor of the Dorians and their kings a mythical title to their Peloponnesian establishments; Argos, Sparta, and Messene are presented as rightfully belonging, and restored by just retribution, to the children of Heracles. It was to them that Zeus had especially given the territory of Sparta; the Dorians came in as their subjects and auxiliaries. Plato gives a very different version of the legend, but we find that he, too, turns the story in such a manner as to embody a claim of right on the part of the conquerors. According to him, the Achaeans, who returned from the capture of Troy, found among their fellow-citizens at home—the race which had grown up during their absence—an aversion to readmit them: after a fruitless endeavor to make good their rights, they were at last expelled, but not without much contest and bloodshed. A leader named Dorieus, collected all these exiles into one body, and from him they received the name of Dorians instead of Achaeans; then marching back, under the conduct of the Herakleids into Peloponnesus, they recovered by force the possessions from which they had been shut out, and constituted the three Dorian establishments under the separate Herakleid brothers, at Argos, Sparta, and Messene. These three fraternal dynasties were founded upon a scheme of intimate union and sworn alliance one with the other, for the purpose of resisting any attack which might be made upon them from Asia, either by the remaining Trojans or by their allies. Such is the story as Plato believed it; materially different in the incidents related, yet analogous in mythical feeling, and embodying alike the idea of a rightful reconquest. Moreover, the two accounts agree in representing both the entire conquest and the triple division of Dorian Peloponnesus as begun and completed in one and the same enterprise,—so as to constitute one single event, which Plato would probably have called the Return of the Achaeans, but which was commonly known as the Return of the Herakleids. Though this is both inadmissible and inconsistent with other statements which approach close to the historical times, yet it bears every mark of being the primitive view originally presented by the genealogical poets: the broad way in which the incidents are grouped together, was at once easy for the imagination to follow, and impressive to the feelings.

The existence of one legendary account must never be understood as excluding the probability of other accounts, current at the same time, but inconsistent with it: and many such there were as to the first establishment of the Peloponnesian Dorians. In the narrative which I have given from Apollodorus, conceived apparently under the influence of Dorian feelings, Tisamenus is stated to have been slain in the invasion. But according to another narrative, which seems to have found favor with the historical Achaeans on the north coast of Peloponnesus, Tisamenus, though expelled by the invaders from his kingdom of Sparta or Argos, was not slain: he was allowed to retire under agreement, together with a certain portion of his subjects, and he directed his steps towards the coast of Peloponnesus south of the Corinthian Gulf, then occupied by the Ionians. As there were relations, not only of friendship, but of kindred origin, between Ionians and Achaeans, (the eponymous heroes Ion and Achaeus pass for brothers, both sons of Xuthus), Tisamenus solicited from the Ionians admission for himself and his fellow-fugitives into their territory. The leading Ionians declining this request, under the apprehension that Tisamenus might be chosen as sovereign over the whole, the latter accomplished his object by force. After a vehement struggle, the Ionians were vanquished and put to flight, and Tisamenus thus acquired possession of Helike, as well as of the northern coast of the peninsula, westward from Sicyon; which coast continued to be occupied by the Achaeans, and received its name from them, throughout all the historical times. The Ionians retired to Attica, many of them taking part in what is called the Ionic emigration to the coast of Asia Minor, which followed shortly after. Pausanias, indeed, tells us that Tisamenus, having gained a decisive victory over the Ionians, fell in the engagement, and did not himself live to occupy the country of which his troops remained masters. But this story of the death of Tisamenus seems to arise from a desire, on the part of Pausanias, to blend together into one narrative two discrepant legends; at least the historical Achaeans in later times continued to regard Tisamenus himself as having lived and reigned in their territory, and as having left a regal dynasty which lasted down to Ogyges, after whom it was exchanged for a popular government.

The conquest of Temenus, the eldest of the three Herakleids, originally comprehended only Argos and its neighborhood; it was from thence that Troezen, Epidaurus, Egina, Sikyon, and Phlius were successfully occupied by Dorians, the sons and son-in-law of Temenus—Deiphontes, Phalkes, and Keisus—being the leaders under whom this was accomplished. At Sparta, the success of the Dorians was furthered by the treason of a man named Philonomus, who received as recompense the neighboring town and territory of Amyklae. Messenia is said to have submitted without resistance to the dominion of the Herakleid Kresphontes, who established his residence at Stenyklarus: the Pylian Melanthus, then ruler of the country, and representative of the great mythical lineage of Neleus and Nestor, withdrew with his household gods and with a portion of his subjects to Attica.

The only Dorian establishment in the peninsula not directly connected with the triple partition is Corinth, which is said to have been Dorized somewhat later and under another leader, though still a Herakleid. Hippotes—descendant of Heracles in the fourth generation, but not through Hyllus,—had been guilty (as already mentioned) of the murder of Karnus the prophet at the camp of Naupaktus, for which he had been banished and remained in exile for ten years; his son deriving the name of Aletes from the long wanderings endured by the father. At the head of a body of Dorians, Aletes attacked Corinth: he pitched his camp on the Solygeian eminence near the city, and harassed the inhabitants with constant warfare until he compelled them to surrender. Even in the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Corinthians professed to identify the hill on which the camp of these assailants had been placed. The great mythical dynasty of the Sisyphids was expelled, and Aletes became ruler and Ekist of the Dorian city; many of the inhabitants, however, Eolic or Ionic, departed.

The settlement of Oxylus and his Etolians in Elis is said by some to have been accomplished with very little opposition; the leader professing himself to be descended from Etolus, who had been in a previous age banished from Elis into Etelia, and the two people, Epeians and Etolians, acknowledging a kindred origin one with the other. At first, indeed, according to Ephorus, the Epeians appeared in arms, determined to repel the intruders, but at length it was agreed on both sides to abide the issue of a single combat. Degmenus, the champion of the Epeians, confided in the long shot of his bow and arrow; but the Etolian Pyraichmes came provided with his sling,—a weapon then unknown and recently invented by the Etolians,—the range of which was yet longer than that of the bow of his enemy: he thus killed Degmenus, and secured the victory to Oxylus and his followers. According to one statement, the Epeians were expelled; according to another, they fraternized amicably with the new-comers: whatever may be the truth as to this matter, it is certain that their name is from this moment lost, and that they never reappear among the historical elements of Greece: we hear from this time forward only of Eleians, said to be of Etolian descent.

One most important privilege was connected with the possession of the Eleian territory by Oxylus, coupled with his claim on the gratitude of the Dorian kings. The Eleians acquired the administration of the temple at Olympia, which the Achaeans are said to have possessed before them; and in consideration of this sacred function, which subsequently ripened into the celebration of the great Olympic games, their territory was solemnly pronounced to be inviolable. Such was the statement of Ephorus: we find, in this case as in so many others, that the Return of the Herakleids is made to supply a legendary basis for the historical state of things in Peloponnesus.

It was the practice of the great Attic tragedians, with rare exceptions, to select the subjects of their composition from the heroic or legendary world, and Euripides had composed three dramas, now lost, on the adventures of Temenus with his daughter Hyrnetho and his son-in-law Deiphontes,—on the family misfortunes of Kresphontes and Merope,—and on the successful valor of Archelaus the son of Temenus in Macedonia, where he was alleged to have first begun the dynasty of the Temenid kings. Of these subjects the first and second were eminently tragical, and the third, relating to Archelaus, appears to have been undertaken by Euripides in compliment to his contemporary sovereign and patron, Archelaus king of Macedonia: we are even told that those exploits which the usual version of the legend ascribed to Temenus, were reported in the drama of Euripides to have been performed by Archelaus his son. Of all the heroes, touched upon by the three Attic tragedians, these Dorian Herakleids stand lowest in the descending genealogical series—one mark amongst others that we are approaching the ground of genuine history.

Though the name Achaeans, as denoting a people, is henceforward confined to the North-Peloponnesian territory specially called Achaia, and to the inhabitants of Achaea, Phthiotis, north of Mount Eta,—and though the great Peloponnesian states always seem to have prided themselves on the title of Dorians—yet we find the kings of Sparta, ever in the historical age taking pains to appropriate to themselves the mythical glories of the Achaeans, and to set themselves forth as the representatives of Agamemnon and Orestes. The Spartan king Kleomenes even went so far as to disavow formally any Dorian parentage; for when the priestess at Athens refused to permit him to sacrifice in the temple of Athene, on the plea that it was peremptorily closed to all Dorians, he replied: "I am no Dorian, but an Achaean." Not only did the Spartan envoy, before Gelon of Syracuse, connect the indefeasible title of his country to the supreme command of the Grecian military force, with the ancient name and lofty prerogatives of Agamemnon—but, in farther pursuance of the same feeling, the Spartans are said to have carried to Sparta both the bones of Orestes from Tegea, and those of Tisamenus from Helike, at the injunction of the Delphian oracle. There is also a story that Oxylus in Elis was directed by the same oracle to invite into his country an Achaean, as Ekist conjointly with himself; and that he called in Agorius, the great-grandson of Orestes, from Helike, with a small number of Achaeans who joined him. The Dorians themselves, being singularly poor in native legends, endeavored, not unnaturally, to decorate themselves with those legendary ornaments which the Achaeans possessed in abundance.

As a consequence of the Dorian establishments in Peloponnesus, several migrations of the preexisting inhabitants are represented as taking place:

1. The Epeians of Elis are either expelled, or merged in the new-comers under Oxylus, and lose their separate name.

2. The Pylians, together with the great heroic family of Neleus and his son Nester, who preside over them, give place to the Dorian establishment of Messenia, and retire to Athens, where their leader, Melanthus, becomes king: a large portion of them take part in the subsequent Ionic emigration.

3. A portion of the Achaeans, under Penthilus and other descendants of Orestes, leave Peloponnesus, and form what is called the Eolic emigration, to Lesbos, the Troad, and the Gulf of Adramyttium: the name Eolians, unknown to Homer, and seemingly never applied to any separate tribe at all, being introduced to designate a large section of the Hellenic name, partly in Greece Proper, and partly in Asia.

4. Another portion of Achaeans expel the Ionians from Achaia, properly so called, in the north of Peloponnesus; the Ionians retiring to Attica.

The Homeric poems describe Achaeans, Pylians, and Epeians, in Peloponnesus, but take no notice of Ionians in the northern district of Achaia: on the contrary, the Catalogue in the Iliad distinctly includes this territory under the dominions of Agamemnon. Though the Catalogue of Homer is not to be regarded as an historical document, fit to be called as evidence for the actual state of Peloponnesus at any prior time, it certainly seems a better authority than the statements advanced by Herodotus and others respecting the occupation of northern Peloponnesus by the Ionians, and their expulsion from it by Tisamenus. In so far as the Catalogue is to be trusted, it negatives the idea of Ionians at Helike, and countenances what seems in itself a more natural supposition—that the historical Achaeans in the north part of Peloponnesus are a small undisturbed remnant of the powerful Achaean population once distributed throughout the peninsula, until it was broken up and partially expelled by the Dorians.

The Homeric legends; unquestionably the oldest which we possess, are adapted to a population of Achaeans, Danaeans, and Argeians, seemingly without any special and recognized names, either aggregate or divisional, other than the name of each separate tribe or kingdom. The post-Homeric legends are adapted to a population classified quite differently—Hellens, distributed into Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians. If we knew more of the time and circumstances in which these different legends grew up, we should probably be able to explain their discrepancy; but in our present ignorance we can only note the fact.

Whatever difficulty modern criticism may find in regard to the event called “The Return of the Herakleids”, no doubt is expressed about it even by the best historians of antiquity. Thucydides accepts it as a single and literal event, having its assignable date, and carrying at one blow the acquisition of Peloponnesus. The date of it he fixes as eighty years after the capture of Troy. Whether he was the original determiner of this epoch, or copied it from some previous author, we do not know. It must have been fixed according to some computation of generations, for there were no other means accessible—probably by means of the lineage of the Herakleids, which, as belonging to the kings of Sparta, constituted the most public and conspicuous thread of connection between the Grecian real and mythical world, and measured the interval between the Siege of Troy itself and the first recorded Olympiad. Heracles himself represents the generation before the siege, and his son Tlepolemus fights in the besieging army. If we suppose the first generation after Heracles to commence with the beginning of the siege, the fourth generation after him will coincide with the ninetieth year after the same epoch; and therefore, deducting ten years for the duration of the struggle, it will coincide with the eightieth year after the capture of the city; thirty years being reckoned for a generation. The date assigned by Thucydides will thus agree with the distance in which Temenus, Kresphontes, and Aristodemus, stand removed from Heracles. The interval of eighty years, between the capture of Troy and the Return of the Herakleids, appears to have been admitted by Apollodorus and Eratosthenes, and some other professed chronologists of antiquity: but there were different reckonings which also found more or less of support.

In the same passage in which Thucydides speaks of the Return of the Herakleids, he also marks out the date of another event a little antecedent, which is alleged to have powerfully affected the condition of Northern Greece. “Sixty years after the capture of Troy (he tells us) the Boeotians were driven by the Thessalians from Arne, and migrated into the land then called Kadmeis, but now Boeotia, wherein there had previously dwelt a section of their race, who had contributed the contingent to the Trojan war”."

The expulsion here mentioned, of the Boeotians from Arne “by the Thessalians”, has been construed, with probability, to allude to the immigration of the Thessalians, properly so called, from the Thesprotid in Epirus into Thessaly. That the Thessalians had migrated into Thessaly from the Thesprotid territory, is stated by Herodotus, though he says nothing about time or circumstances. Antiphus and Pheidippus appear in the Homeric Catalogue as commanders of the Grecian contingent from the islands of Kos and Karpathus, on the south-east coast of Asia Minor: they are sons of Thessalus, who is himself the son of Heracles. A legend ran that these two chiefs, in the dispersion which ensued after the victory, had been driven by storms into the Ionian Gulf, and cast upon the coast of Epirus, where they landed and settled at Ephyre in the Thesprotid. It was Thessalus, grandson of Pheidippus, who was reported to have conducted the Thesprotians across the passes of Pindus into Thessaly, to have conquered the fertile central plain of that country, and to have imposed upon it his own name instead of its previous denomination Aeolis.

Whatever we may think of this legend as it stands, the state of Thessaly during the historical ages renders it highly probable that the Thessalians, properly so called, were a body of immigrant conquerors. They appear always as a rude, warlike, violent, and uncivilized race, distinct from their neighbors the Achaeans, the Magnetes, and the Perrhaebians, and holding all the three in tributary dependence: these three tribes stand to them in a relation analogous to that of the Lacedoemonian Perioeki towards Sparta, while the Penestae, who cultivated their lands, are almost an exact parallel of the Helots. Moreover, the low level of taste and intelligence among the Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume, assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to Hellens. Their position in Thessaly is in many respects analogous to that of the Spartan Dorians in Peloponnesus, and there seems good reason for concluding that the former, as well as the latter, were originally victorious invaders, though we cannot pretend to determine the time at which the invasion took place. The great family of the Aleuads, and probably other Thessalian families besides, were descendants of Heracles, like the kings of Sparta.

There are no similar historical grounds, in the case of the alleged migration of the Boeotians from Thessaly to Boeotia, to justify a belief in the main fact of the legend, nor were the different legendary stories in harmony one with the other. While the Homeric Epic recognizes the Boeotians in Boeotia, but not in Thessaly, Thucydides records a statement which he had found of their migration from the latter into the former; but in order to escape the necessity of flatly contradicting Homer, he inserts the parenthesis that there had been previously an outlying fraction of Boeotians in Boeotia at the time of the Trojan war, from whom the troops who served with Agamemnon were drawn. Nevertheless, the discrepancy with the Iliad, though less strikingly obvious, is not removed, inasmuch as the Catalogue is unusually copious in enumerating the contingents from Thessaly, without once mentioning Boeotian. Homer distinguishes Orchomenus from Boeotia, and be does not specially notice Thebes in the Catalogue: in other respects his enumeration of the towns coincides pretty well with the ground historically known afterwards under the name of Boeotia.

Pausanias gives us a short sketch of the events which he supposes to have intervened in this section of Greece between the Siege of Troy and the Return of the Herakleids. Peneleos, the leader of the Boeotians at the siege, having been slain by Eurypylus the son of Telephus, Tisamenus, son of Thersander and grandson of Polynikes, acted as their commander, both during the remainder of the siege and after their return. Autesion, his son and successor, became subject to the wrath of the avenging Erinnyes of Laius and Edipus: the oracle directed him to expatriate, and he joined the Dorians. In his place, Damasichthon, son of Opheltas and grandson of Peneleos, became king of the Boeotians: he was succeeded by Ptolemnus, who was himself followed by Xanthus. A war having broken out at that time between the Athenians and Boeotians, Xanthus engaged in single combat with Melanthus son of Andropompus, the champion of Attica, and perished by the cunning of his opponent. After the death of Xanthus, the Boeotians passed from kingship to popular government. As Melanthus was of the lineage of the Neleids, and had migrated from Pylus to Athens in consequence of the successful establishment of the Dorians in Messenia, the duel with Xanthus must have been of course subsequent to the Return of the Herakleids.

Here, then, we have a summary of alleged Boeotian history between the Siege of Troy and the Return of the Herakleids, in which no mention is made of the immigration of the mass of Boeotians from Thessaly, and seemingly no possibility left of fitting in so great and capital an incident. The legends followed by Pausanias are at variance with those adopted by Thucydides, but they harmonize much better with Homer.

So deservedly high is the authority of Thucydides, that the migration here distinctly announced by him is commonly set down as an ascertained datum, historically as well as chronologically. But on this occasion it can be shown that he only followed one amongst a variety of discrepant legends, none of which there were any means of verifying.

Pausanias recognized a migration of the Boeotians from Thessaly, in early times anterior to the Trojan war; and the account of Ephorus, as given by Strabo, professed to record a series of changes in the occupants of the country. First, the non-Hellenic Aones and Temmikes, Leleges and Hyantes; next, the Kadmeians, who, after the second siege of Thebes by the Epigoni, were expelled by the Thracians and Pelasgians, and retired into Thessaly, where they joined in communion with the inhabitants of Arne— the whole aggregate being called Boeotians. After the Trojan war, and about the time of the Eolic emigration, these Boeotians returned from Thessaly and reconquered Boeotia, driving out the Thracians and Pelasgians—the former retiring to Parnassus, the latter to Attica. It was on this occasion (he says) that the Minyae of Orchomenus were subdued, and forcibly incorporated with the Boeotians. Ephorus seems to have followed, in the main, the same narrative as Thucydides, about the movement of the Boeotians out of Thessaly; coupling it, however, with several details current as explanatory of proverbs and customs.

The only fact which we make out, independent of these legends, is, that there existed certain homonymies and certain affinities of religious worship, between parts of Boeotia and parts of Thessaly, which appear to indicate a kindred race. A town named Arne, similar in name to the Thessalian, was enumerated in the Boeotian Catalogue of Homer, and antiquaries identified it sometimes with the historical town Charroneia, sometimes with Akraephium. Moreover, there was near the Boeotian Koroneia a river named Kuarius, or Koralius, and a venerable temple dedicated to the Itonian Athene, in the sacred ground of which the Pambeotia, or public council of the Boeotian name, was held; there was also a temple and a river of similar denomination in Thessaly, near to a town called Iton, or Itonus. We may from these circumstances presume a certain ancient kindred between the population of these regions, and such a circumstance is sufficient to explain the generation of legends describing migrations backward and forward, whether true or not in point of fact.

What is most important to remark is, that the stories of Thucydides and Ephorus bring us out of the mythical into the historical Boeotia. Orchomenus is Boeotized, and we hear no more of the once-powerful Minyae: there are no more Kadmeians at Thebes, nor Beotians in Thessaly. The Minyaa and the Kadmeians disappear in the Ionic emigration, which will be presently adverted to. Historical Beotia is now constituted, apparently in its federative league, under the presidency of Thebes, just as we find it in the time of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.

To complete the transition of Greece from its mythical to its historical condition, the secession of the races belonging to the former must follow upon the introduction of those belonging to the latter. This is accomplished by means of the Eolic and Ionic migrations.

The presiding chiefs of the Aeolic emigration are the representatives of the heroic lineage of the Pelopids: those of the Ionic emigration belong to the Neleids; and even in what is called the Doric emigration to Thera, the Ekist Theras is not a Dorian but a Kadmeian, the legitimate descendant of Edipus and Kadmus.

The Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric colonies were planted along the western coast of Asia Minor, from the coasts of the Propontis southward down to Lycia (I shall in a future chapter speak more exactly of their boundaries); the Eolic occupying the northern portion, together with the islands of Lesbos and Tenedos; the Doric occupying the southernmost, together with the neighboring islands of Rhodes and Kos; and the Ionic being planted between them, comprehending Chios, Samos, and the Cyclades islands.

The Aeolic emigration was conducted by the Pelopids: the original story seems to have been, that Orestes himself was at the head of the first batch of colonists, and this version of the event is still preserved by Pindar and by Hellanikus. But the more current narratives represented the descendants of Orestes as chiefs of the expeditions to Aeolis—his illegitimate son Penthilus, by Erigone daughter of Egisthus, together with Echelatus and Gras, the son and grandson of Penthilus, together with Kleues and Malaus, descendants of Agamemnon through another lineage. According to the account given by Strabo, Orestes began the emigration, but died on his route in Arcadia; his son Penthilus, taking the guidance of the emigrants, conducted them by the long land-journey through Boeotia and Thessaly to Thrace; from whence Archelaus, son of Penthilus, led them across the Hellespont, and settled at Daskylium on the Propontis. Gras, son of Archelaus, crossed over to Lesbos and possessed himself of the island. Kleues and Malaus, conducting another body of Achaeans, were longer on their journey, and lingered a considerable time near Mount Phrikium, in the territory of Lokris; ultimately, however, they passed over by sea to Asia and took possession of Kyme, south of the Gulf of Adramyttium, the most considerable of all the Aeolic cities on the continent. From Lesbos and Kyme, the other less considerable Aeolic towns, spreading over the region of Ida as well as the Troad, and comprehending the island of Tenedas, are said to have derived their origin.

Though there are many differences in the details, the accounts agree in representing these Aeolic settlements as formed by the Achaeans expatriated from Laconia under the guidance of the dispossessed Pelopids. We are told that in their journey through Boeotia they received considerable reinforcements, and Strabo adds that the emigrants started from Aulis, the port from whence Agamemnon departed in the expedition against Troy. He also informs us that they missed their course and experienced many losses from nautical ignorance, but we do not know to what particular incidents he alludes.

The Ionic emigration is described as emanating from and directed by the Athenians, and connects itself with the previous legendary history of Athens, which must therefore be here briefly recapitulated.

The great mythical hero Theseus, of whose military prowess and errant exploits we have spoken in a previous chapter, was still more memorable in the eyes of the Athenians as an internal political reformer. He was supposed to have performed for them the inestimable service of transforming Attica out of many states into one. Each deme, or at least a great many out of the whole number, had before his time enjoyed political independence under its own magistrates and assemblies, acknowledging only a federal union with the rest under the presidency of Athens: by a mixture of conciliation and force, Theseus succeeded in putting down all these separate governments, and bringing them to unite in one political system, centralized at Athens. He is said to have established a constitutional government, retaining for himself a defined power as king, or president, and distributing the people into three classes: Eupatridae, a sort of sacerdotal noblesse; Geomori and Demiurgi, husbandmen and artisans. Having brought these important changes into efficient working, he commemorated them for his posterity by introducing solemn and appropriate festivals. In confirmation of the dominion of Athens over the Megarid territory, he is said farther to have erected a pillar at the extremity of the latter towards the Isthmus, marking the boundary between Peloponnesus and Ionia.

But a revolution so extensive was not consummated without creating much discontent; and Menestheus, the rival of Theseus — the first specimen, as we are told, of an artful demagogue—took advantage of this feeling to assail and undermine him. Theseus had quitted Attica, to accompany and assist his friend Peirithous, in his journey down to the underworld, in order to carry off' the goddess Persephon,—or (as those who were critical in legendary story preferred recounting) in a journey to the residence of Aidoneus, king of the Molossians in Epirus, to carry off his daughter. In this enterprise, Peirithous perished, while Theseus was cast into prison, from whence he was only liberated by the intercession of Heracles. It was during his temporary absence, that the Tyndarids Castor and Pollux invaded Attica for the purpose of recovering their sister Helen, whom Theseus had at a former period taken away from Sparta and deposited at Aphidnae; and the partisans of Menestheus took advantage both of the absence of Theseus and of the calamity which his licentiousness had brought upon the country, to ruin his popularity with the people. When he returned, be found them no longer disposed to endure his dominion, or to continue to him the honors which their previous feelings of gratitude had conferred. Having, therefore, placed his sons under the protection of Elephenor, in Euboea, he sought an asylum with Lykomedes, prince of Scyros, from whom, however, he received nothing but an insidious welcome and a traitorous death.

Menestheus, succeeding to the honors of the expatriated hero, commanded the Athenian troops at the Siege of Troy. But though he survived the capture, he never returned to Athens—different stories being related of the place where he and his companions settled. During this interval, the feelings of the Athenians having changed, they restored the sons of Theseus, who had served at Troy under Elephenor, and had returned unhurt, to the station and functions of their father. The Theseids Demophoon, Oxyntas, Apheidas, and Thymoetes had successively filled this post for the space of about sixty years when the Dorian invaders of Peloponnesus (as has been before related) compelled Melanthus and the Neleid family to abandon their kingdom of Pylus. The refugees found shelter at Athens, where a fortunate adventure soon raised Melanthus to the throne. A war breaking out between the Athenians and Boeotians, respecting the boundary tract of Enoe, the Boeotian king Xanthus challenged Thymoetes to single combat: the latter declining to accept it, Melanthus not only stood forward in his place, but practiced a cunning stratagem with such success as to kill his adversary. He was forthwith chosen king, Thymoetes being constrained to resign .

Melanthus and his son Kodrus reigned for nearly sixty years, during which time large bodies of fugitives, escaping from the recent invaders throughout Greece, were harbored by the Athenians: so that Attica became populous enough to excite the alarm and jealousy of the Peloponnesian Dorians. A powerful Dorian force, under the command of Aletes from Corinth and Althaemenes from Argos, were accordingly dispatched to invade the Athenian territory, in which the Delphian oracle promised them success, provided they abstained from injuring the person of Kodrus. Strict orders were given to the Dorian army that Kodrus should be preserved unhurt; but the oracle had become known among the Athenians, and the generous prince determined to bring death upon himself as a means of salvation to his country. Assuming the disguise of a peasant, he intentionally provoked a quarrel with some of the Dorian troops, who slew him without suspecting his real character. No sooner was this event known, than the Dorian leaders, despairing of success, abandoned their enterprise and evacuated the country. In retiring, however, they retained possession of Megara, where they established permanent settlers, and which became from this moment Dorian—seemingly at first a dependency of Corinth, though it afterwards acquired its freedom and became an autonomous community. This memorable act of devoted patriotism, analogous to that of the daughters of Erechtheus at Athens, and of Menoekeus at Thebes, entitled Kodrus to be ranked among the most splendid characters in Grecian legend.

Kodrus is numbered as the last king of Athens: his descendants were styled Archons, but they held that dignity for life—a practice which prevailed during a long course of years afterwards. Medon and Neileus, his two sons, having quarreled about the succession, the Delphian oracle decided in favor of the former; upon which the latter, affronted at the preference, resolved upon seeking a new home. There were at this moment many dispossessed sections of Greeks, and an adventitious population accumulated in Attica, who were anxious for settlements beyond sea. The expeditions which now set forth to cross the Aegean, chiefly under the conduct of members of the Kodrid family, composed collectively the memorable Ionic Emigration, of which the Ionians, recently expelled from Peloponnesus, formed a part, but, as it would seem, only a small part; for we hear of many quite distinct races, some renowned in legend, who withdraw from Greece amidst this assemblage of colonists. The Kadmeians, the Minyae of Orchomenus, the Abantes of Euboea, the Dryopes; the Molossi, the Phokians, the Boeotians, the Arcadian Pelasgians, and even the Dorians of Epidaurus — are represented as furnishing each a proportion of the crews of these emigrant vessel. Nor were the results unworthy of so mighty a confluence of different races. Not only the Cyclades islands in the Aegean, but the great islands of Samos and Chios, near the Asiatic coast, and ten different cities on the coast of Asia Minor, from Miletus in the south to Phocaea in the north, were founded, and all adopted the Ionic name. Athens was the metropolis or mother city of all of them: Androklus and Neileus, the Ekists of Ephesus and Miletus, and probably other Ekists also, started from the Prytaneium at Athens, with those solemnities, religions and political, which usually marked the departure of a swarm of Grecian colonists.

Other mythical families, besides the heroic lineage of Neleus and Nestor, as represented by the sons of Kodrus, took a leading part in the expedition. Herodotus mentions Lykian chiefs, descendants from Glaukus son of Hippolochus, and Pausanias tells us of Philotas descendant of Peneleos, who went at the head of a body of Thebans: both Glaukus and Peneleos are commemorated in the Iliad. And it is a remarkable fact mentioned by Pausanias (though we do not know on what authority), that the inhabitants of Phocaea,— which was the northernmost city of Ionia on the borders of Eolis, and one of the last founded — consisting mostly of Phokian colonists under the conduct of the Athenians Philogenes and Daemen, were not admitted into the Pan-Ionic Amphiktyony until they consented to choose for themselves chiefs of the Kodrid family. Prokles, the chief who conducted the Ionic emigrants from Epidaurus to Samos, was said to be of the lineage of Ion, son of Xuthus.

Of the twelve Ionic states constituting the Pan-Ionic Amphiktyony—some of them among the greatest cities in Hellas —I shall say no more at present, as I have to treat of them again when I come upon historical ground.

The Aeolic and Ionic emigrations are thus both presented to us as direct consequences of the event called the Return of the Herakleids: and in like manner the formation of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-western corner of Asia Minor: Kos, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, and Rhodes, with its three separate cities, as well as the Dorian establishments in Krete, Melos, and Thera, are all traced more or less directly to the same great revolution.

Thera, more especially, has its root in the legendary world. Its Ekist was Theras, a descendant of the heroic lineage of Edipus and Kadmus, and maternal uncle of the young kings of Sparta, Eurysthenes and Prokles, during whose minority he had exercised the regency. On their coming of age, his functions were at an end: but being unable to endure a private station, he determined to put himself at the head of a body of emigrants: many came forward to join him, and the expedition was farther reinforced by a body of interlopers, belonging to the Minyae, of whom the Lacedaemonians were anxious to get rid. These Minyae had arrived in Laconia, not long before, from the island of Lemnos, out of which they had been expelled by the Pelasgian fugitives from Attica. They landed without asking permission, took up their abode and began to “light their fires” on Mount Taygetus. When the Lacedaemonians sent to ask who they were, and wherefore they had come, the Minyae replied that they were sons of the Argonauts who had landed at Lemnos, and that being expelled from their own homes, they thought themselves entitled to solicit an asylum in the territory of their fathers: they asked, withal, to be admitted to share both the lands and the honors of the state. The Lacedaemonians granted the request, chiefly on the ground of a common ancestry— their own great heroes, the Tyndarids, having been enrolled in the crew of the Argo: the Minyae were then introduced as citizens into the tribes, received lots of land, and began to intermarry with the preexisting families. It was not long, however, before they became insolent: they demanded a share in the kingdom (which was the venerated privilege of the Herakleids), and so grossly misconducted themselves in other ways, that the Lacedaemonians resolved to put them to death, and began by casting them into prison. While the Minyae were thus confined, their wives, Spartans by birth, and many of them daughters of the principal men, solicited permission to go in and see them: leave being granted, they made use of the interview to change clothes with their husbands, who thus escaped and fled again to Mount Taygetus. The greater number of them quitted Laconia, and marched to Triphylia, in the western regions of Peloponnesus, from whence they expelled the Paroreatae and the Kaukones, and founded six towns of their own, of which Lepreum was the chief. A certain proportion, however, by permission of the Lacedaemonians, joined Theras, and departed with him to the island of Kalliste, then possessed by Phoenician inhabitants, who were descended from the kinsmen and companions of Kadmus, and who had been left there by that prince, when he came forth in search of Europa, eight generations preceding. Arriving thus among men of kindred lineage with himself, Theras met with a fraternal reception, and the island derived from him the name, under which it is historically known, of Thera.

Such is the foundation-legend of Thera, believed both by the Lacedaemonians and by the Theraeans, and interesting as it brings before us, characteristically as well as vividly, the persons and feelings of the mythical world — the Argonauts, with the Tyndarids as their companions and Minyae as their children. In Lepreum, as in the other towns of Triphylia, the descent from the Minyae of old seems to have been believed in the historical times, and the mention of the river Minyeius in those regions by Homer tended to confirm it. But people were not unanimous as to the legend by which that descent should be made out; while some adopted the story just cited from Herodotus, others imagined that Cloris, who had come from the Minyeian town of Orchomenus as the wife of Neleus to Pylus, had brought with her a body of her countrymen.

These Minyae from Lemnos and Imbros appear again as portions of another narrative respecting the settlement of the colony of Melos. It has already been mentioned, that when the Herakleids and the Dorians invaded Laconia, Philonomus, an Achean, treacherously betrayed to them the country, for which he received as his recompense the territory of Amyklae. He is said to have peopled this territory by introducing detachments of Minyae; from Lemnos and Imbros, who, in the third generation after the return of the Herakleids, became so discontented and mutinous, that the Lacedaemonians resolved to send them out of the country as emigrants, under their chiefs Polis and Delphos. Taking the direction of Crete, they stopped in their way to land a portion of their colonists on the island of Melos, which remained throughout the historical times a faithful and attached colony of Lacedaemon. On arriving in Crete, they are said to have settled at the town of Gortyn. We find, moreover, that other Dorian establishments, either from Lacedaemon or Argos, were formed in Crete; and Lyktos in particular, is noticed, not only as a colony of Sparta, but as distinguished for the analogy of its laws and customs. It is even said that Crete, immediately after the Trojan war, had been visited by the wrath of the gods, and depopulated by famine and pestilence; and that, in the third generation afterwards, so great was the influx of emigrants, the entire population of the island was renewed, with the exception of the Eteokretes at Polichnae and Praesus.

There were Dorians in Crete in the time of the Odyssey: Homer mentions different languages and different races of men, Eteokretes, Kydones, Dorians, Achaeans, and Pelasgians, as all coexisting in the island, which he describes to be populous and to contain ninety cities. A legend given by Andron, based seemingly upon the statement of Herodotus, that Dorus the son of Hellen had settled in Histiaeotis, ascribed the first introduction of the three last races to Tektaphus son of Dorus—who had led forth from that country a colony of Dorians, Achaeans, and Pelasgians, and had landed in Crete during the reign of the indigenous king Kres. This story of Andron so exactly fits on to the Homeric Catalogue of Cretan inhabitants, that we may reasonably presume it to have been designedly arranged with reference to that Catalogue, so as to afford some plausible account, consistently with the received legendary chronology, how there came to be Dorians in Crete before the Trojan war— the Dorian colonies after the return of the Herakleids being of course long posterior in supposed order of time. To find a leader sufficiently early for his hypothesis, Andron ascends to the primitive Eponymus Dorus, to whose son Tektaphus he ascribes the introduction of a mixed colony of Dorians, Achaeans, and Pelasgians into Crete: these are the exact three races enumerated in the Odyssey, and the king Kres, whom Andron affirms to have been then reigning in the island, represents the Eteokretes and Kydenes in the list of Homer. The story seems to have found favor among native Cretan historians, as it doubtless serves to obviate what would otherwise be a contradiction in the legendary chronology.

Another Dorian emigration from Peloponnesus to Crete, which extended also to Rhodes and Kos, is farther said to have been conducted by Althaemenes, who had been one of the chiefs in the expedition against Attica, in which Krodus perished. This prince, a Herakleid, and third in descent from Temenus, was induced to expatriate by a family quarrel, and conducted a body of Dorian colonists from Argos first to Crete, where some of them remained; but the greater number accompanied him to Rhodes, in which island, after expelling the Karian possessors, he founded the three cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Kamairus.

It is proper here to add, that the legend of the Rhodian archaeologists respecting their ekist Althaemenes, who was worshipped in the island with heroic honors, was something totally different from the preceding. Althaemenes was a Cretan, son of the king Katreus, and grandson of Minos. An oracle predicted to him that he would one day kill his father: eager to escape so terrible a destiny, he quitted Crete, and conducted a colony to Rhodes, where the famous temple of the Atabyrian Zeus, on the lofty summit of Mount Atabyrum, was ascribed to his foundation, built so as to command a view of Crete. He had been settled on the island for some time, when his father Katreus, anxious again to embrace his only son, followed him from Crete: he landed in Rhodes during the night without being known, and a casual collision took place between his attendants and the islanders. Althaeenes hastened to the shore to assist in repelling the supposed enemies, and in the fray had the misfortune to kill his aged father.

Either the emigrants who accompanied Althaeenes, or some other Dorian colonists afterwards, are reported to have settled at Cnidus, Karpathos, and Halicarnassus. To the last mentioned city, however, Anthes of Troezen is assigned as the ekist: the emigrants who accompanied him were said to have belonged to the Dymanian tribe, one of the three tribes always found in a Doric state: and the city seems to have been characterized as a colony sometimes of Troezen, sometimes of Argos!

We thus have the Aeolic, the Ionic, and the Doric colonial establishments in Asia, all springing out of the legendary age, and all set forth as consequences, direct or indirect, of what is called the Return of the Herakleids, or the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus. According to the received chronology, they are succeeded by a period, supposed to comprise nearly three centuries, which is almost an entire blank, before we reach authentic chronology and the first recorded Olympiad,—and they thus form the concluding events of the mythical world, out of which we now pass into historical Greece, such as it stands at the last-mentioned epoch. It is by these migrations that the parts of the Hellenic aggregate are distributed into the places which they occupy at the dawn of historical daylight,—Dorians, Arcadians, Aetolo-Eleians, and Achaeans, sharing Peloponnesus unequally . among them — Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians, settled both in the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor. The Return of the Herakleids, as well as the three emigrations, Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric, present the legendary explanation, suitable to the feelings and belief of the people, showing how Greece passed from the heroic races who besieged Troy and Thebes, piloted the adventurous Argo, and slew the monstrous boar of Kalydon - to the historical races, differently named and classified, who furnished victors to the Olympic and Pythian games.

A patient and learned French writer, M. Raoul Rochette —who construes all the events of the heroic age, generally speaking, as so much real history, only making allowance for the mistakes and exaggerations of poets — is greatly perplexed by the blank and interruption which this supposed continuous series of history presents, from the Return of the Herakleids down to the beginning of the Olympiads. He cannot explain to himself so long a period of absolute quiescence, after the important incidents and striking adventures of the heroic age; and if there happened nothing worthy of record during this long period—as he presumes, from the fact that nothing has been transmitted—he concludes that this must have arisen from the state of suffering and exhaustion in which previous wars and revolution had left the Greeks: a long interval of complete inaction being required to heal such wounds.

Assuming M. Rochette’s view of the heroic ages to be correct, and reasoning upon the supposition that the adventures ascribed to the Grecian heroes are matters of historical reality, transmitted by tradition from a period of time four centuries before the recorded Olympiads, and only embellished by describing poets — the blank which he here dwells upon is, to say the least of it, embarrassing and unaccountable. It is strange that the stream of tradition, if it had once begun to flow, should (like several of the rivers in Greece) be submerged for two or three centuries and then reappear. But when we make what appears to me the proper distinction between legend and history, it will be seen that a period of blank time between the two is perfectly conformable to the conditions under which the former is generated. It is not the immediate past, but a supposed remote past, which forms the suitable atmosphere of mythical narrative—a past originally quite undetermined in respect to distance from the present, as we see in the Iliad and Odyssey. And even when we come down to the genealogical poets, who affect to give a certain measure of bygone time, and a succession of persons as well as of events, still, the names whom they most delight to honor and upon whose exploits they chiefly expatiate, are those of the ancestral gods and heroes of the tribe and their supposed contemporaries; ancestors separated by a long lineage from the present hearer. The gods and heroes were conceived as removed from him by several generations, and the legendary matter which was grouped around them appeared only the more imposing when exhibited at a respectful distance, beyond the days of father and grandfather, and of all known predecessors. The Odes of Pindar strikingly illustrate this tendency. We thus see how it happened that, between the times assigned to heroic adventure and those of historical record, there existed an intermediate blank, filled with inglorious names; and how, amongst the same society which cared not to remember proceedings of fathers and grandfathers, there circulated much popular and accredited narrative respecting real or supposed ancestors long past and gone. The obscure and barren centuries which immediately precede the first recorded Olympiad, form the natural separation between the legendary return of the Herakleids and the historical wars of Sparta against Messene— between the province of legend, wherein matter of fact (if any there be) is so intimately combined with its accompaniments of fiction, as to be undistinguishable without the aid of extrinsic evidence,—and that of history where some matters of fact can be ascertained, and where a sagacious criticism may be usefully employed in trying to add to their number.

XVIII
APPLICATION OF CHRONOLOGY TO GRECIAN LEGEND.

I NEED not repeat, what has already been sufficiently set forth in the preceding pages, that the mass of Grecian incident anterior to 776 BC appears to me not reducible either to history or to chronology, and that any chronological systems which may be applied to it must be essentially uncertified and illusory. It was however chronologised in ancient times, and has continued to be so in modern; and the various schemes employed for this purpose may be found stated and compared proposed in the first volume (the last published) of Mr. Fynes Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici. There were among the Greeks, and there still are among modern scholars, important differences as to the dates of the principal events. Eratosthenes dissented both from Herodotus and from Phanias and Callimachus, while Larcher and Raoul Rochette (who follow Herodotus) stand opposed to O. Müller and to Mr. Clinton. That the reader may have a general conception of the order in which these legendary events were disposed, I transcribe from the Fasti Hellenici a double chronological table, in which the dates are placed in series, from Phoroneus to the Olympiad of Corcebus in BC 776 - in the first column according to the system of Eratosthenes, in the second according to that of Kallimachus.

“The following table (says Mr. Clinton) offers a summary view of the leading periods from Phoroneus to the Olympiad of Coroebus, and exhibits a double series of dates, the one proceeding from the date of Eratosthenes, the other from a date founded on the reduced calculations of Phanias and Callimachus, which strike out fifty-six years from the amount of Eratosthenes. Phanias, as we have seen, omitted fifty-five years between the Return and the registered Olympiads; for so we may understand the account : Callimachus, fifty-six years between the Olympiad in which Coroebus won. The first column of this table exhibits the current years before and after the fall of Troy : in the second column of dates the complete intervals are expressed”.

Wherever chronology is possible, researches such as those of Mr. Clinton, which have conduced so much to the better understanding of the later times of Greece, deserve respectful attention. But the ablest chronologist can accomplish nothing, unless he is supplied with a certain basis of matters of fact, pure and distinguishable from fiction, and authenticated by witnesses, both knowing the truth and willing to declare it. Possessing this preliminary stock, he may reason from it to refute distinct falsehoods and to correct partial mistakes : but if all the original statements submitted to him contained truth (at least wherever there is truth), in a sort of chemical combination with fiction, which he has no means of decomposing, he is in the condition of one who tries to solve a problem without data: he is first obliged to construct his own data, and from them to extract his conclusions.

The statements of the epic poets, our only original witnesses in this case, correspond to the description here given. Whether the proportion of truth contained in them be smaller or greater, it is at all events unassignable, and the constant and intimate admixture of fiction is both indisputable in itself, and indeed essential to the purpose and profession of those from whom the tales proceed. Of such a character are all the deposing witnesses, even where their tales agree; and it is out of a heap of such tales, not agreeing, but discrepant in a thousand ways, and without a morsel of pure authenticated truth, that the critic is called upon to draw out a methodical series of historical events adorned with chronological dates.

If we could imagine a modern critical scholar transported into Greece at the time of the Persian war endued with his present habits of appreciating historical evidence, without sharing in the religious or patriotic feelings of the country and invited to prepare, out of the great body of Grecian epic which then existed, a History and Chronology of Greece anterior to 776 BC, assigning reasons as well for what he admitted as for what he rejected I feel persuaded that he would have judged the undertaking to be little better than a process of guess-work. But the modern critic finds that not only Pherekydes and Hellanikus, but also Herodotus and Thucydides have either attempted the task or sanctioned the belief that it was practicable, a matter not at all surprising, when we consider both their narrow experience of historical evidence and the powerful ascendency of religion and patriotism in predisposing them to antiquarian belief, and he therefore accepts the problem as they have bequeathed it, adding his own efforts to bring it to a satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, he not only follows them with some degree of reserve and uneasiness, but even admits important distinctions quite foreign to their habits of thought. Thucydides talks of the deeds of Hellen and his sons with as much confidence as we now speak of William the Conqueror; Mr. Clinton recognizes Hellen with his sons Dorus, Eolus and Nuthus, as fictitious persons. Herodotus recites the great heroic genealogies down from Kadmus and Danaus with a belief not less complete in the higher members of the series than in the lower: but Mr. Clinton admits a radical distinction in the evidence of events before and after the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 BC, the first date in Grecian chronology which can be fixed upon authentic evidence, the highest point to which Grecian chronology, reckoning upward, can be carried. Of this important epoch in Grecian development, the commencement of authentic chronological life, Herodotus and Thucydides had no knowledge or took no account : the later chronologists, from Timaeus downwards, noted it, and made it serve as the basis of their chronological comparisons, so far as it went : but neither Eratosthenes nor Apollodorus seems to have recognized (though Varro and Africanus did recognize) a marked difference in respect of certainty or authenticity between the period before and the period after.

ERATOSTHENES THE FIRST OLYMPIAD.

In further illustration of Mr. Clinton’s opinion that the first recorded Olympiad is the earliest date which can be fixed upon authentic evidence, we have the following just remarks in reference to the dissentient views of Eratosthenes, Phanias and Callimachus, about the date of the Trojan war : “The chronology of Eratosthenes (he says), founded on a careful comparison of circumstances, and approved by those to whom the same stores of information were open, is entitled to our respect. But we must remember that a conjectural date can never rise to the authority of evidence; that what is accepted as a substitute for testimony, is not an equivalent; witnesses only can prove a date, and in the want of these, the knowledge of it is plainly beyond our reach. If, in the absence of a better light, we seek for what is probable, we are not to forget the distinction between conjecture and proof; between what is probable and what is certain. The computation then of Eratosthenes for the war of Troy is open to inquiry; and if we find it adverse to the opinions of many preceding writers, who fixed a lower date, and adverse to the acknowledged length of generation in the most authentic dynasties, we are allowed to follow other guides, who give us a lower epoch”.

Here Mr. Clinton again plainly acknowledges the want of evidence and the irremediable uncertainty of Grecian chronology before the Olympiads. Now the reasonable conclusion from his argument is, not simply that "the computation of Eratosthenes was open to inquiry" (which few would be found to deny), but that both Eratosthenes and Phanias had delivered positive opinions upon a point on which no sufficient evidence was accessible, and therefore that neither the one nor the other was a guide to be followed. Mr. Clinton does indeed speak of authentic dynasties prior to the first recorded Olympiad, but if there be any such, reaching up from that period to a supposed point coeval with or anterior to the war of Troy I see no good reason for the marked distinction which he draws between chronology before and chronology after the Olympiad of Koroebus, or for the necessity which he feels of suspending his upward reckoning at the last-mentioned epoch, and beginning a different process, called “a downward reckoning”, from the higher epoch (supposed to be somehow ascertained without any upward reckoning) of the first patriarch from whom such authentic dynasty emanates. Herodotus and Thucydides might well, upon this supposition, ask of Mr. Clinton, why he called upon them to alter their method of proceeding at the year 776 BC, and why they might not be allowed to pursue their “upward chronological reckoning” without interruption from Leonidas up to Danaus, or from Peisistratus up to Hellen and Deucalion, without any alteration in the point of view. Authentic dynasties from the Olympiads, up to an epoch above the Trojan war, would enable us to obtain chronological proof of the latter date, instead of being reduced (as Mr. Clinton affirms that we are) to “conjecture” instead of proof.

The whole question, as to the value of the reckoning from the Olympiads up to Phoroneus, does in truth turn upon this one point : Are those genealogies which profess to cover the space between the two authentic and trustworthy or not? Mr. Clinton appears to feel that they are not so, when he admits the essential difference in the character of the evidence, and the necessity of altering the method of computation before and after the first recorded Olympiad : yet in his Preface he labors to prove that they possess historical worth and are in the main correctly set forth : moreover, that the fictitious persons, wherever any such are intermingled, may be detected and eliminated. The evidences upon which he relies, are 1. Inscriptions; 2. The early poets

CHRONOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF INSCRIPTIONS.

1. An inscription, being nothing but a piece of writing on marble, carries evidentiary value under the same conditions as a published writing on paper. If the inscriber reports a contemporary fact which he had the means of knowing, and if there be no reason to suspect misrepresentation, we believe this assertion : if, on the other hand, he records facts belonging to a long period before his own time, his authority counts for little, except in so far as we can verify and appreciate his means of knowledge.

In estimating therefore the probative force of any inscription, the first and most indispensable point is to assure ourselves of its date. Amongst all the public registers and inscriptions alluded to by Mr. Clinton, there is proved not one which can be positively referred to a date anterior to 776 BC. The quoit of Iphitus, the public registers at Sparta, Corinth, and Elis, the list of the priestesses of Juno at Argos are all of a date completely uncertified. O. Müller does indeed agree with Mr. Clinton (though in my opinion without any sufficient proof) in assigning the quoit of Iphitus to the age ascribed to that prince : and if we even grant thus much, we shall have an inscription as old (adopting Mr. Clinton’s determination of the age of Iphitus) as 828 BC. But when Mr. Clinton quotes O. Müller as admitting the registers of Sparta, Corinth, and Elis, it is right to add that the latter does not profess to guarantee the authenticity of these documents, or the age at which such registers began to be kept. It is not to be doubted that there were registers of the kings of Sparta carrying them up to Heracles, and of the kings of Elis from Oxylus to Iphitus : but the question is, at what time did these lists begin to be kept continuously? This is a point which we have no means of deciding, nor can we accept Mr. Clinton’s unsupported conjecture, when he tell us “Perhaps these were begun to be written as early as BC 1048, the probable time of the Dorian conquest”. Again he tells us “At Argos a register was preserved of the priestesses of Juno, which might be more ancient than the catalogues of the kings of Sparta or Corinth. That register, from which Hellanikus composed his work, contained the priestesses from the earliest times down to the age of Hellanikus himself ... But this catalogue might have been commenced as early as the Trojan war itself, and even at a still earlier date”. Again, respecting the inscriptions quoted by Herodotus from the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, in which Amphitryo and Laodamas are named, Mr. Clinton says “They were ancient in the time of Herodotus, which may perhaps carry them back 400 years before his time : and in that case they might approach within 300 years of Laodamas and within 400 years of the probable time of Kadmus himself”. “It is granted (he adds in a note) that these inscriptions were not genuine, that is, not of the date to which they were assigned by Herodotus himself. But that they were ancient cannot be doubted”, &c.

The time when Herodotus saw the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes can hardly have been earlier than 450 BC : reckoning upwards from hence to 776 BC, we have an interval of 326 years : the inscriptions which Herodotus saw may well therefore have been ancient, without being earlier than the first recorded Olympiad. Mr. Clinton does indeed tell us that ancient “may perhaps” be construed as 400 years earlier than Herodotus. But no careful reader can permit himself to convert such bare possibility into a ground of inference, and to make it available, in conjunction with other similar possibilities before enumerated, for the purpose of showing that there really existed inscriptions in Greece of a date anterior to 776 BC. Unless Mr. Clinton can make out this, he can derive no benefit from inscriptions, in his attempt to substantiate the reality of the mythical persons or of the mythical events.

The truth is that the Herakleid pedigree of the Spartan kings (as has been observed in a former chapter) is only one out of the numerous divine and heroic genealogies with which the Hellenic world abounded, a class of documents which become historical evidence only so high in the descending series as the names composing them are authenticated by contemporary, or nearly contemporary, enrolment. At what period this enrolment began, we have no information. Two remarks however may be made, in reference to any approximate guess as to the time when actual registration commenced : First, that the number of names in the pedigree, or the length of past time which it professes to embrace, affords no presumption of any superior antiquity in the time of registration : Secondly, that looking to the acknowledged paucity and rudeness of Grecian writing even down to the 60th Olympiad (540 BC), and to the absence of the habit of writing, as well as the low estimate of its value, which such a state of things argues, the presumption is, that written enrolment of family genealogies did not commence until a long time after 776 BC, and the obligation of proof falls upon him who maintains that it commenced earlier. And this second remark is farther borne out when we observe, that there is no registered list, except that of the Olympic victors, which goes up even so high as 776 BC. The next list which O. Müller and Mr. Clinton produce, is that of the Karneoniks or victors at the Karneian festival, which reaches only up to 676 BC.

If Mr. Clinton then makes little out of inscriptions to sustain his view of Grecian history and chronology anterior to the recorded Olympiads, let us examine the inferences which he draws from his other source of evidence the early poets. And here it will be found, First, that in order to maintain the credibility of these witnesses, he lays down positions respecting historical evidence both indefensible in themselves, and especially inapplicable to the early times of Greece: Secondly, that his reasoning is at the same time inconsistent inasmuch as it includes admissions, which if properly understood and followed out, exhibit these very witnesses, as habitually, indiscriminately, and unconsciously, mingling truth and fiction, and therefore little fit to be believed upon their solitary and unsupported testimony.

To take the second point first, he says “The authority even of the genealogies has been called in question by many able and learned persons, who reject Danaus, Kadmus, Hercules, Theseus, and many others, as fictitious persons. It is evident that any fact would come from the hands of the poets embellished with many fabulous additions: and fictitious genealogies were undoubtedly composed. Because, however, some genealogies were fictitious, we are not justified in concluding that all were fabulous ... In estimating then the historical value of the genealogies transmitted by the early poets, we may take a middle course; not rejecting them as wholly false, nor yet implicitly receiving all as true. The genealogies contain many real persons, but these are incorporated with many fictitious names. The fictions however will have a basis of truth : the genealogical expression may be false, but the connection which it describes is real. Even to those who reject the whole as fabulous, the exhibition of the early times which is presented in this volume may still be not unacceptable : because it is necessary to the right understanding of antiquity that the opinions of the Greeks concerning their own origin should be set before us, even if these are erroneous opinions, and that their story should be told as they have told it themselves. The names preserved by the ancient genealogies may be considered of three kinds; either they were the name of a race or clan converted into the name of an individual, or they were altogether fictitious, or lastly, they were real historical names”.

Enough has been said to show that the witnesses upon whom Mr. Clinton relies blend truth and fiction habitually, indiscriminately and unconsciously, even upon his own admission. Let us now consider the positions which he lays down respecting historical evidence. He says : “We may acknowledge as real persons all those whom there is no reason for rejecting. The presumption is in favor of the early tradition, if no argument can be brought to overthrow it. The persons may be considered real, when the description of them is consonant with the state of the country at that time, when no national prejudice or vanity could be concerned in inventing them, when the tradition is consistent and general, when rival or hostile tribes concur in the leading facts, when the acts ascribed to the person (divested of their poetical ornament) enter into the political system of the age, or form the basis of other transactions which fall within known historical times. Kadmus and Danaus appear to be real persons; for it is conformable to the state of mankind, and perfectly credible, that Phoenician and Egyptian adventurers, in the ages to which these persons are ascribed, should have found their way to the coasts of Greece : and the Greeks (as already observed) had no motive from any national vanity to feign these settlements. Hercules was a real person. His acts were recorded by those who were not friendly to the Dorians; by Achaeans and Aeolians and Ionians, who had no vanity to gratify in celebrating the hero of a hostile and rival people. His descendants in many branches remained in many states down to the historical times. His son Tlepolemus and his grandson and great-grandson Cleodaeus and Aristomachus are acknowledged (i.e. by O. Müller) to be real persons : and there is no reason that can be assigned for receiving these, which will not be equally valid for establishing the reality both of Hercules and Hyllus. Above all, Hercules is authenticated by the testimonies both of the Iliad and Odyssey”.

These positions appear to me inconsistent with sound views of the conditions of historical testimony. According to what is here laid down, we are bound to accept as real all the persons mentioned by Homer, Arktinus, Lesches, the Hesiodic poets, Eumelus, Asius, &c., unless we can adduce some positive ground in each particular case to prove the contrary. If this position be a true one, the greater part of the history of England, from Brute the Trojan down to Julius Caesar, ought at once to be admitted as valid and worthy of credence. What Mr. Clinton here calls the early tradition, is in point of fact the narrative of these early poets. The word tradition is an equivocal word, and begs the whole question; for while in its obvious and literal meaning it implies only something handed down, whether truth or fiction it is tacitly understood to imply a tale descriptive of some real matter of fact, taking its rise at the time when that fact happened, and originally accurate, but corrupted by subsequent oral transmission. Understanding therefore by Mr. Clinton's words early tradition, the tales of the old poets, we shall find his position totally inadmissible that we are bound to admit the persons or statements of Homer and Hesiod as real, unless where we can produce reasons to the contrary. To allow this, would be to put them upon a par with good contemporary witnesses; for no greater privilege can be claimed in favor even of Thucydides, than the title of his testimony to be believed unless where it can be contradicted on special grounds. The presumption in favor of an asserting witness is either strong, or weak, or positively nothing, according to the compound ratio of his means of knowledge, his moral and intellectual habits, and his motive to speak the truth. Thus, for instance, when Hesiod tells us that his father quitted the Eolic Kyme and came to Askra in Boeotia, we may fully believe him; but when he describes to us the battles between the Olympic gods and the Titans, or between Heracles and Kyknus, or when Homer depicts the efforts of Hector, aided by Apollo, for the defense of Troy, and the struggles of Achilles and Odysseus, with the assistance of Here and Poseidon, for the destruction of that city, events professedly long past and gone we cannot presume either of them to be in any way worthy of belief. It cannot be shown that they possessed any means of knowledge, while it is certain that they could have no motive to consider historical truth : their object was to satisfy an uncritical appetite for narrative, and to interest the emotions of their hearers. Mr. Clinton says, that “the persons may be considered real when the description of them is consistent with the state of the country at that time”. But he has forgotten, first, that we know nothing of the state of the country except what these very poets tell us; next, that fictitious persons may be just as consonant to the state of the country as real persons. While therefore, on the one hand, we have no independent evidence either to affirm or to deny that Achilles or Agamemnon are consistent with the state of Greece or Asia Minor at a certain supposed date 1183 BC, so, on the other hand, even assuming such consistency to be made out, this of itself would not prove them to be real persons.

PLAUSIBLE FICTION.

Mr. Clinton’s reasoning altogether overlooks the existence of plausible fiction, fictitious stories which harmonize perfectly well with the general course of facts, and which are distinguished from matters of fact not by any internal character, but by the circumstance that matter of fact has some competent and well-informed witness to authenticate it, either directly or through legitimate inference. Fiction may be, and often is, extravagant and incredible; but it may also be plausible and specious, and in that case there is nothing but the want of an attesting certificate to distinguish it from truth. Now all the tests, which Mr. Clinton proposes as guarantees of the reality of the Homeric persons, will be just as well satisfied by plausible fiction as by actual matter of fact; the plausibility of the fiction consists in its satisfying those and other similar conditions. In most cases, the tales of the poets did fall in with the existing current of feelings in their audience: “prejudice and vanity” are not the only feelings, but doubtless prejudice and vanity were often appealed to, and it was from such harmony of sentiment that they acquired their hold on men's belief. Without any doubt the Iliad appealed most powerfully to the reverence for ancestral gods and heroes among the Asiatic colonists who first heard it : the temptation of putting forth an interesting tale is quite a sufficient stimulus to the invention of the poet, and the plausibility of the tale a sufficient passport to the belief of the hearers. Mr. Clinton talks of “consistent and general tradition”. But that the tale of a poet, when once told with effect and beauty, acquired general belief is no proof that it was founded on fact : otherwise, what are we to say to the divine legends, and to the large portion of the Homeric narrative which Mr. Clinton himself sets aside as untrue under the designation of “poetical ornament”. When a mythical incident is recorded as “forming the basis” of some known historical fact or institution as for instance the successful stratagem by which Melanthus killed Xanthus in the battle on the boundary, as recounted in my last chapter, we may adopt one of two views : we may either treat the incident as real, and as having actually given occasion to what is described as its effect or we may treat the incident as a legend imagined in order to assign some plausible origin of the reality.

In cases where the legendary incident is referred to a time long anterior to any records as it commonly is the second mode of proceeding appears to me far more consonant to reason and probability than the first. It is to be recollected that all the persons and facts, here defended as matter of real history by Mr. Clinton, are referred to an age long preceding the first beginning of records.

I have already remarked that Mr. Clinton shrinks from his own rule in treating Kadmus and Danaus as real persons, since they are as much eponyms of tribes or races as Dorus and Hellen. And if he can admit Herakles to be a real man, I do not see upon what reason he can consistently disallow any one of the mythical personages, for there is not one whose exploits are more strikingly at variance with the standard of historical probability. Mr. Clinton reasons upon the supposition that “Hercules was a Dorian hero”: but he was Achaean and Kadmeian as well as Dorian, though the legends respecting him are different in all the three characters. Whether his son Tlepolemus and his grandson Kleodaeus belong to the category of historical men, I will not take upon me to say, though O. Müller (in my opinion without any warranty) appears to admit it; but Hyllus certainly is not a real man, if the canon of Mr. Clinton himself respecting the eponyms is to be trusted. “The descendants of Hercules (observes Mr. Clinton) remained in many states down to the historical times”. So did those of Zeus and Apollo, and of that god whom the historian Hekataeus recognized as his progenitor in the sixteenth generation : the titular kings of Ephesus, in the historical times, as well as Peisistratus, the despot of Athens, traced their origin up to Eolus and Hellen, yet Mr. Clinton does not hesitate to reject Eolus and Hellen as fictitious persons. I dispute the propriety of quoting the Iliad and Odyssey (as Mr. Clinton does) in evidence of the historic personality of Hercules. For even with regard to the ordinary men who figure in those poems, we have no means of discriminating the real from the fictitious; while the Homeric Heracles is unquestionably more than an ordinary man, he is the favorite son of Zeus, from his birth predestined to a life of labor and servitude, as preparation for a glorious immortality. Without doubt the poet himself believed in the reality of Hercules, but it was a reality clothed with superhuman attributes.

Mr. Clinton observes that “because some genealogies were fictitious, we are not justified in concluding that all were fabulous”. It is no way necessary that we should maintain so extensive a position : it is sufficient that all are fabulous so far as concerns from what gods and heroes, some fabulous throughout, and none ascertainably true, for the period anterior to the recorded Olympiads. How much, or what particular portions, may be true, no one can pronounce. The gods and heroes are, from our point of view, essentially fictitious; but from the Grecian point of view they were the most real (if the expression may be permitted, i.e. clung to with the strongest faith) of all the members of the series. They not only formed parts of the genealogy as originally conceived, but were in themselves the grand reason why it was conceived, as a golden chain to connect the living man with a divine ancestor. The genealogy therefore taken as a whole (and its value consists in its being taken as a whole) was from the beginning a fiction; but the names of the father and grandfather of the living man, in whose day it first came forth, were doubtless those of real men. Wherever therefore we can verify the date of a genealogy, as applied to some living person, we may reasonably presume the two lowest members of it to be also those of real persons : but this has no application to the time anterior to the Olympiads still less to the pretended times of the Trojan war, the Kalydonian boar-hunt, or the deluge of Deucalion. To reason (as Mr. Clinton does), “Because Aristomachus was a real man, therefore his father Cleodaeus, his grandfather Hyllus, and so farther upwards, &c., must have been real men”, is an inadmissible conclusion. The historian Hekataeus was a real man, and doubtless his father Hegesander also but it would be unsafe to march up his genealogical ladder fifteen steps to the presence of the ancestorial god of whom he boasted : the upper steps of the ladder will be found broken and unreal. Not to mention that the inference, from real son to real father, is inconsistent with the admissions in Mr. Clinton's own genealogical tables; for he there inserts the names of several mythical fathers as having begotten real historical sons.

The general authority of Mr. Clinton's book, and the sincere respect which I entertain for his elucidations of the later chronology, have imposed upon me the duty of assigning those grounds on which I dissent from his conclusions prior to the first recorded Olympiad. The reader who desires to see the numerous and contradictory guesses (they deserve no better name) of the Greeks themselves in the attempt to chronologise their mythical narratives, will find them in the copious notes annexed to the first half of his first volume. As I consider all such researches not merely as fruitless in regard to any trustworthy result, but as serving to divert attention from the genuine form and really illustrative character of Grecian legend, I have not thought it right to go over the same ground in the present work. Differing as I do, however, from Mr. Clinton's views on this subject, I concur with him in deprecating the application of etymology as a general scheme of explanation to the characters and events of Greek legend. Amongst the many causes which operated as suggestives and stimulants to Greek fancy in the creation of these interesting tales, doubtless Etymology has had its share; but it cannot be applied (as Hermann, above all others, has sought to apply it) for the purpose of imparting supposed sense and system to the general body of mythical narrative. I have already remarked on this topic in a former chapter.

It would be curious to ascertain at what time, or by whom, the earliest continuous genealogies, connecting existing persons with the supposed antecedent age of legend, were formed and preserved. Neither Homer nor Hesiod mentioned any verifiable present persons or circumstances : had they done so, the age of one or other of them could have been determined upon good evidence, which we methodize the past, even though they do so on fictitious principles, being as yet unprovided with those records which alone could put them on a better course. The Homeric man was satisfied with feeling, imagining, and believing, particular incidents of a supposed past, without any attempt to graduate the line of connection between them and himself: to introduce fictitious hypotheses and media of connection is the business of a succeeding age, when the stimulus of rational curiosity is first felt, without any authentic materials to supply it. We have then the form of history operating upon the matter of legend the transition-state between legend and history; less interesting indeed than either separately, yet accessory as a step between the two.

Years before the Fall of Troy.		BC Eratosthenes	BC Chalimachus
570	Phoroneus	1753	1697
283	Danaus	1466	1410
283	Pelasgus	1466	1410
250	Deukalion	1433	1377
200	Erechteus	1383	1327
200	Dardanaus	1383	1327
150	Azan, Aphidas, Elatus	1333	1277
130	Kadmus	1313	1257
100	Pelops	1283	1227
78	Birth of Hercules	1261	1205
42	Argonauts	1225	1169
30	First Theban War	1213	1157
26	Death of Hercules	1209	1153
24	Death of Euristheus	1207	1151
20	Death of Hyllus	1203	1147
18	Accession of Agamemnon	1200	1144
16	Second Theban War	1198	1142
10	Trojan expedition	1192	1136
Years after the Fall of Troy
	Troy taken	1183	1127
8	Orestes reign at Argos	1176	1120
60	The Thesali occupy Thesaly	1124	1068
	The Boeoti return to Boeotia
	Eolic migration under Penthilus
80	Return of the Heracleids	1104	1048
109	Eletes reigns at Corinth	1075	1019
110	Migration of Theras	1074	1018
130	Lesbos occupied	1053	997
139	Death of Codrus	1045	989
140	Ionic migration	1044	988
151	Cyme founded	1033	977
169	Smyrna	1015	959
300	Olympiad of Iphitus	884	828
352	Olimpiad of Coroebus	776	776

THOUGH the particular persons and events, chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece, are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are, nevertheless, full of instruction as pictures of life and manners; and the very same circumstances, which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present: for among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign languages and habits, the imagination, even of highly gifted men, was naturally enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Solon or Herodotus; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality. Nor was the poetry of that age addressed to lettered and critical authors, watchful to detect plagiarism, sated with simple imagery, and requiring something of novelty or peculiarity in every fresh production. To captivate their emotions, it was sufficient to depict, with genius and fervor, the more obvious manifestations of human adventure or suffering, and to idealize that type of society, both private and public, with which the hearers around were familiar. Even in describing the gods, where a great degree of latitude and deviation might have been expected, we see that Homer introduces into Olympus the passions, the caprices, the love of power and patronage, the alternation of dignity and weakness, which animated the bosom of an ordinary Grecian chief; and this tendency, to reproduce in substance the social relations to which he had been accustomed, would operate still more powerfully when he had to describe simply human characters,—the chief and his people, the warrior and his comrades, the husband, wife, father, and son,—or the imperfect rudiments of judicial and administrative proceeding. That his narrative on all these points, even with fictitious characters and events, presents a close approximation to general reality, there can be no reason to doubt. The necessity under which he lay of drawing from a store, then happily unexhausted, of personal experience and observation, is one of the causes of that freshness and vivacity of description for which he stands unrivalled, and which constituted the imperishable charm of the Iliad and Odyssey from the beginning to the end of Grecian literature.

While, therefore, we renounce the idea of chronologizing or historicizing the events of Grecian legend, we may turn them to profit as valuable memorials of that state of society, feeling, and intelligence, which must be to us the starting-point of the history of the people. Of course, the legendary age, like all those which succeeded it, had its antecedent causes and determining conditions; but of these we know nothing, and we are compelled to assume it as a primary fact, for the purpose of following out its subsequent changes. To conceive absolute beginning or origin (as Niebuhr has justly remarked) is beyond the reach of our faculties: we can neither apprehend nor verify anything beyond progress, or development, or decay,—change from one set of circumstances to another, operated by some definite combination of physical or moral laws. In the case of the Greeks, the legendary age, as the earliest in any way known to us, must be taken as the initial state from which this series of changes commences. We must depict its prominent characteristics as well as we can, and show,—partly how it serves to prepare, partly how it forms a contrast to set off,— the subsequent ages of Solon, of Pericles, and of Demosthenes.

1. The political condition, which Grecian legend everywhere presents to us, is in its principal features strikingly different from that which had become universally prevalent among the Greeks in the time of the Peloponnesian war. Historical oligarchy, as well as democracy, agreed in requiring a certain established system of government, comprising the three elements of specialized functions, temporary functionaries, and ultimate responsibility (under some forms or other) to the mass of qualified citizens— either a Senate or an Ecclesia, or both. There were, of course, many and capital distinctions between one government and another, in respect to the qualification of the citizen, the attributes and efficiency of the general assembly, the admissibility to power, etc.; and men might often be dissatisfied with the way in which these questions were determined in their own city. But in the mind of every man, some determining rule or system—something like what in modern times is called a constitution—was indispensable to any government entitled to be called legitimate, or capable of creating in the mind of a Greek a feeling of moral obligation to obey it. The functionaries who exercised authority under it might be more or less competent or popular; but his personal feelings towards them were commonly lost in his attachment or aversion to the general system. If any energetic man could by audacity or craft break down the constitution, and render himself permanent ruler according to his own will and pleasure,—even though he might govern well, he could never inspire the people with any sentiment of duty towards him. His scepter was illegitimate from the beginning, and even the taking of his life, far from being interdicted by that moral feeling which condemned the shedding of blood in other cases, was considered meritorious. Nor could he be mentioned in the language except by a name (despot) which branded him as an object of mingled fear and dislike.

If we carry our eyes back from historical to legendary Greece, we find a picture the reverse of what has been here sketched. We discern a government in which there is little or no scheme or system,—still less any idea of responsibility to the governed,—but in which the mainspring of obedience on the part of the people consists in their personal feeling and reverence towards the chief. We remark, first and foremost, the king; next, a limited number of subordinate kings or chiefs; afterwards, the mass of armed freemen, husbandmen, artisans, freebooters, etc.; lowest of all, the free laborers for hire, and the bought slaves. The king is not distinguished by any broad or impassable boundary from the other chiefs, to each of whom the title basileus is applicable as well as to himself: his supremacy has been inherited from his ancestors, and passes by descent, as a general rule, to his eldest son, having been conferred upon the family as a privilege by the favor of Zeus. In war, he is the leader, foremost in personal prowess, and directing all military movements; in peace, he is the general protector of the injured and oppressed; he farther offers up those public prayers and sacrifices which are intended to obtain for the whole people the favor of the gods. An ample domain is assigned to him as an appurtenance of his lofty position, while the produce of his fields and his cattle is consecrated in part to an abundant, though rude hospitality. Moreover, he receives frequent presents, to avert his enmity, to conciliate his favor, or to buy off his exactions; and when plunder is taken from the enemy, a large previous share, comprising probably the most alluring female captive, is reserved for him, apart from the general distribution.

Such is the position of the king, in the heroic times of Greece,—the only person (if we except the heralds and priests, each both special and subordinate,) who is then presented to us as clothed with any individual authority,—the person by whom all the executive functions, then few in number, which the society requires, are either performed or directed. His personal ascendency—derived from divine countenance, bestowed both upon himself individually and upon his race, and probably from accredited divine descent—is the salient feature in the picture. The people hearken to his voice, embrace his propositions, and obey his orders: not merely resistance, but even criticism upon his acts, is generally exhibited in an odious point of view, and is, indeed, never heard of except from some one or more of the subordinate princes. To keep alive and justify such feelings in the public mind, however, the king must himself possess various accomplishments, bodily and mental, and that too in a superior degree. He must be brave in the field, wise in the council, and eloquent in the agora; he must be endued with bodily strength and activity above other men, and must be an adept, not only in the use of his arms, but also in those athletic exercises which the crowd delight to witness. Even the more homely varieties of manual acquirements are an addition to his character,—such as the craft of the carpenter or shipwright, the straight furrowing of the ploughman, or the indefatigable persistence of the mower without repose or refreshment throughout the longest day. The conditions of voluntary obedience, during the Grecian heroic times, are family descent with personal force and superiority mental as well as bodily, in the chief, coupled with the favor of the gods: an old chief, such as Peleus and Laertes, cannot retain his position. But, on the other hand, where these elements of force are present, a good deal of violence, caprice, and rapacity is tolerated: the ethical judgment is not exact in scrutinizing the conduct of individuals so preeminently endowed. As in the ease of the gods, the general epithets of good, just, etc., are applied to them as euphemisms arising from submission and fear, being not only not suggested, but often pointedly belied, by their particular acts. These words signify the man of birth, wealth, influence, and daring, whose arm is strong to destroy or to protect, whatever may be the turn of his moral sentiments; while the opposite epithet, bad, designates the poor, lowly, and weak; from whose dispositions, be they ever so virtuous, society has little either to hope or, to fear.

Aristotle, in his general theory of government, lays down the position, that the earliest sources of obedience and authority among mankind are personal, exhibiting themselves most perfectly in the type of paternal supremacy; and that therefore the kingly government, as most conformable to this stage of social sentiment, became probably the first established everywhere. And in fact it still continued in his time to be generally prevalent among the non-Hellenic nations, immediately around; though the Phoenician cities and Carthage, the most civilized of all non-Hellenic states, were republics. Nevertheless, so completely were the feelings about kingship reversed among his contemporary Greeks, that he finds it difficult to enter into the voluntary obedience paid by his ancestors to their early heroic chiefs. He cannot explain to his own satisfaction how any one man should have been so much superior to the companions around him as to maintain such immense personal ascendency: he suspects that in such small communities great merit was very rare, so that the chief had few competitors. Such remarks illustrate strongly the revolution which the Greek mind had undergone during the preceding centuries, in regard to the internal grounds of political submission But the connecting link, between the Homeric and the republican schemes of government, is to be found in two adjuncts of the Homeric royalty, which are now to be mentioned,—the boulê, or council of chiefs, and the agora, or general assembly of freemen.

These two meetings, more or less frequently convoked, and interwoven with the earliest habits of the primitive Grecian communities, are exhibited in the monuments of the legendary age as opportunities for advising the king, and media for promulgating his intentions to the people, rather than as restraints upon his authority. Unquestionably, they must have led in practice to the latter result as well as to the former; but this is not the light in which the Homeric poems describe them. The chiefs, kings, princes, or gerontes—for the same word in Greek designates both an old man and a man of conspicuous rank and position—compose the council, in which, according to the representations in the Iliad, the resolutions of Agamemnon on the one side, and of Hector on the other, appear uniformly to prevail. The harshness and even contempt with which Hector treats respectful opposition from his ancient companion Polydamas,—the desponding tone and conscious inferiority of the latter, and the unanimous assent which the former obtains, even when quite in the wrong—all this is clearly set forth in the poem: while in the Grecian camp we see Nestor tendering his advice in the most submissive and delicate manner to Agamemnon, to be adopted or rejected, as “the king of men” might determine. The council is a purely consultative body, assembled, not with any power of peremptorily arresting mischievous resolves of the king, but solely for his information and guidance. He himself is the presiding (boulephorus, or) member of council; the rest, collectively as well as individually, are his subordinates.

We proceed from the council to the agora: according to what seems the received custom, the king, after having talked over his intentions with the former, proceeds to announce them to the people. The heralds make the crowd sit down in order, and enforce silence: any one of the chiefs or councilors —but as it seems, no one else—is allowed to address them: the king first promulgates his intentions, which are then open to be commented upon by others. But in the Homeric agora, no division of affirmative or negative voices ever takes place, nor is any formal resolution ever adopted. The nullity of positive function strikes us even more in the agora than in the council. It is an assembly for talk, communication, and discussion, to a certain extent, by the chiefs, in presence of the people as listeners and sympathizers,— often for eloquence, and sometimes for quarrel,—but here its ostensible purposes end.

The agora in Ithaca, in the second book of the Odyssey, is convened by the youthful Telemachus, at the instigation of Athene, not for the purpose of submitting any proposition, but in order to give formal and public notice to the suitors to desist from their iniquitous intrusion and pillage of his substance, and to absolve himself farther, before godsend men, from all obligations towards them, if they refuse to comply. For the slaughter of the suitors, in all the security of the festive hall and banquet (which forms the catastrophe of the Odyssey), was a proceeding involving much that was shocking to Grecian feeling, and therefore required to be preceded by such ample formalities, as would leave both the delinquents themselves without the shadow of excuse, and their surviving relatives without any claim to the customary satisfaction. For this special purpose, Telemachus directs the heralds to summon an agora: but what seems most of all surprising is, that none had ever been summoned or held since the departure of Odysseus himself,—an interval of twenty years. “No agora or session has taken place amongst us (says the gray-headed Aegyptius, who opens the proceedings) since Odysseus went on shipboard; and now, who is he that has called us together? what man, young or old, has felt such a strong necessity? Has he received intelligence from our absent warriors, or has he other public news to communicate? He is our good friend for doing this : whatever his projects may be, I pray Zeus to grant him success”. Telemachus, answering the appeal forthwith, proceeds to tell the assembled Ithacans that he has no public news to communicate, but that he has convoked them upon his own private necessities. Next, he sets forth, pathetically, the wickedness of the suitors, calls upon them personally to desist, and upon the people to restrain them, and concludes by solemnly warning them, that, being henceforward free from all obligation towards them, he will invoke the avenging aid of Zeus, so “that they may be slain in the interior of his own house, without bringing upon him any subsequent penalty”.

We are not of course to construe the Homeric description as anything more than an idéal, approximating to actual reality. But, allowing all that can be required for such a limitation, it exhibits the agora more as a special medium of publicity and intercommunication, from the king to the body of the people, than as including any idea of responsibility on the part of the former or restraining force on the part of the latter, however such consequences may indirectly grow out of it. The primitive Grecian government is essentially monarchical, reposing on personal feeling and divine right: the memorable dictum in the Iliad is borne out by all that we hear of the actual practice: “The ruler of many is not a good thing : let us have one ruler only,— one king,—him to whom Zeus has given the scepter and the tutelary sanctions”.

The second book of the Iliad, full as it is of beauty and vivacity, not only confirms our idea of the passive, recipient, and listening character of the agora, but even presents a repulsive picture of the degradation of the mass of the people before the chiefs. Agamemnon convokes the agora for the purpose of immediately arming the Grecian host, under a full impression that the gods have at last determined forthwith to crown his arms with complete victory. Such impression has been created by a special visit of Oneirus (the Dream-god), sent by Zeus during his sleep,—being, indeed, an intentional fraud on the part of Zeus, though Agamemnon does not suspect its deceitful character. At this precise moment, when he may be conceived to be more than usually anxious to get his army into the field and snatch the prize, an unaccountable fancy seizes him, that, instead of inviting the troops to do what he really wishes, and encouraging their spirits for this one last effort, he will adopt a course directly contrary: he will try their courage by professing to believe that the siege had become desperate, and that there was no choice except to go on shipboard and flee. Announcing to Nestor and Odysseus, in preliminary council, his intention to hold this strange language, he at the same time tells them that he relies upon them to oppose it and counterwork its effect upon the multitude. The agora is presently assembled, and the king of men pours forth a speech full of dismay and despair, concluding by a distinct exhortation to all present to go aboard and return home at once. Immediately the whole army, chiefs as well as people, break up and proceed to execute his orders: every one rushes off to get his ship afloat, except Odysseus, who looks on in mournful silence and astonishment. The army would have been quickly on its voyage home, had not the goddesses Here and Athene stimulated Odysseus to an instantaneous interference. He hastens among the dispersing crowd and diverts them from their purpose of retreat: to the chiefs he addresses flattering words, trying to shame them by gentle expostulation: but the people he visits with harsh reprimand and blows from his scepter, thus driving them back to their seats in the agora.

Amidst the dissatisfied crowd thus unwillingly brought back, the voice of Thersites is heard the longest and the loudest,—a man ugly, deformed, and unwarlike, but fluent in speech, and especially severe and unsparing in his censure of the chiefs, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus. Upon this occasion, he addresses to the people a speech denouncing Agamemnon for selfish and greedy exaction generally, but particularly for his recent ill-treatment of Achilles,—and he endeavors, moreover, to induce them to persist in their scheme of departure. In reply, Odysseus not only rebukes Thersites sharply for his impudence in abusing the commander-in-chief, but threatens that, if ever such behavior is repeated, he will strip him naked, and thrash him out of the assembly with disgraceful blows; as an earnest of which, he administers to him at once a smart stroke with the studded scepter, imprinting its painful mark in a bloody weal across his back. Thersites, terrified and subdued, sits down weeping; while the surrounding crowd deride him, and express the warmest approbation of Odysseus for having thus by force put the reviler to silence.

Both Odysseus and Nestor then address the agora, sympathizing with Agamemnon for the shame which the retreat of the Greeks is about to inflict upon him, and urging emphatically upon every one present the obligation of persevering until the siege shall he successfully consummated. Neither of them animadverts at all upon Agamemnon, either for his conduct towards Achilles, or for his childish freak of trying the temper of the army.

There cannot be a clearer indication than this description—so graphic in the original poem—of the true character of the Homeric agora. The multitude who compose it are listening and acquiescent, not often hesitating, and never refractory to the chief: The fate which awaits a presumptuous critic, even where his virulent reproaches are substantially well-founded, is plainly set forth in the treatment of Thersites; while the unpopularity of such a character is attested even more by the excessive pains which Homer takes to heap upon him repulsive personal deformities, than by the chastisement of Odysseus;—he is lame, bald, crook-backed, of misshapen head, and squinting vision.

But we cease to wonder at the submissive character of the agora, when we read the proceedings of Odysseus towards the people themselves;—his fine words and flattery addressed to the chiefs, and his contemptuous reproof and manual violence towards the common men, at a moment when both were doing exactly the same thing,—fulfilling the express bidding of Agamemnon, upon whom Odysseus does not offer a single comment. This scene, which excited a sentiment of strong displeasure among the democrats of histories: Athens, affords a proof that the feeling of personal dignity, of which philosophic observers in Greece—Herodotus, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristotle—boasted, as distinguishing the free Greek citizen from the slavish Asiatic, was yet undeveloped in the time of Homer. The ancient epic is commonly so filled with the personal adventures of the chiefs, and the people are so constantly depicted as simple appendages attached to them, that we rarely obtain a glimpse of the treatment of the one apart from the other, such as this memorable Homeric agora affords.

There remains one other point of view in which we are to regard the agora of primitive Greece,—as the scene in which justice was administered. The king is spoken of as constituted by Zeus the great judge of society: he has received from Zeus the scepter, and along with it the powers of command and sanction: the people obey these commands and enforce these sanctions, under him, enriching him at the same time with lucrative presents and payments. Sometimes the king separately, sometimes the kings or chiefs or gerontes in the plural number, are named as deciding disputes and awarding satisfaction to complainants; always, however, in public, in the midst of the assembled agora.

In one of the compartments of the shield of Achilles, the details of a judicial scene are described. While the agora is full of an eager and excited crowd, two men are disputing about the fine of satisfaction for the death of a murdered man,—one averring, the other denying, that the fine had already been paid, and both demanding an inquest. The gerontes are ranged on stone seats, in the holy circle, with two talents of gold lying before them, to be awarded to such of the litigants as shall make out his case to their satisfaction. The heralds with their scepters, repressing the warm sympathies of the crowd in favor of one or other of the parties, secure an alternate bearing to both. This interesting picture completely harmonizes with the brief allusion of Hesiod to the judicial trial—doubtless a real trial—between himself and his brother Perses. The two brothers disputed about their paternal inheritance, and the cause was carried to be tried by the chiefs in agora; but Perses bribed them, and obtained an unjust verdict for the whole. So at least Hesiod affirms, in the bitterness of his heart; earnestly exhorting his brother not to waste a precious time, required for necessary labors, in the unprofitable occupation of witnessing and abetting litigants in the agora,—for which (he adds) no man has proper leisure, unless his subsistence for the year beforehand be safely treasured up in his garners. He repeats, more than once, his complaints of the crooked and corrupt judgments of which the kings were habitually guilty; dwelling upon abuse of justice as the crying evil of his day, and predicting as well as invoking the vengeance of Zeus to repress it. And Homer ascribes the tremendous violence of the autumnal storms to the wrath of Zeus against those judges who disgrace the agora “with their wicked verdicts”.

Though it is certain that, in every state of society, the feelings of men when assembled in multitude will command a certain measure of attention, yet we thus find the agora, in judicial matters still more than in political, serving merely the purpose of publicity. It is the king who is the grand personal mover of Grecian heroic society. He is on earth, the equivalent of Zeus in the agora of the gods: the supreme god of Olympus is in the habit of carrying on his government with frequent publicity, of hearing some dissentient opinions, and of allowing himself occasionally to be wheedled by Aphrodite, or worried into compliance by Here: but his determination is at last conclusive, subject only to the overruling interference of the Mora, or Fates. Both the society of gods, and the various societies of men, are, according to the conceptions of Grecian legend, carried on by the personal rule of a legitimate sovereign, who does not derive his title from the special appointment of his subjects, though he governs with their full consent. In fact, Grecian legend presents to us hardly anything else, except these great individual personalities. The race, or nation, is as it were absorbed into the prince: eponymous persons, especially, are not merely princes, but fathers and representative unities, each the equivalent of that greater or less aggregate to which he gives name.

But though, in the primitive Grecian government, the king is the legitimate as well as the real sovereign, he is always conceived as acting through the council and agora. Both the one and the other are established and essential media through which his ascendency is brought to bear upon the society: the absence of such assemblies is the test and mark of savage men, as in the case of the Cyclopes. Accordingly, he must possess qualities fit to act with effect upon these two assemblies: wise reason for the council, unctuous eloquence for the agora. Such is the idéal of the heroic government: a king, not merely full of valor and resource as a soldier, but also sufficiently superior to those around him to insure both the deliberate concurrence of the chiefs, and the hearty adhesion of the masses. That this picture is not, in all individual cases, realized, is unquestionable; but the endowments so often predicated of good kings show it to have been the type present to the mind of the describer. Xenophon, in his Cyropaedia, depicts Cyrus as an improved edition of the Homeric Agamemnon,—“a good king and a powerful soldier”, thus idealizing the perfection of personal government.

It is important to point out these fundamental conceptions of government, discernible even before the dawn of Grecian history, and identified with the social life of the people. It shows us that the Greeks, in their subsequent revolutions, and in the political experiments which their countless autonomous communities presented, worked upon preéxisting materials,—developing and exalting elements which had been at first subordinate, and suppressing, or remodeling on a totally new principle, that which had been originally predominant. When we approach historical Greece, we find that (with the exception of Sparta) the primitive hereditary, unresponsible monarch, uniting in himself all the functions of government, has ceased to reign,— while the feeling of legitimacy, which originally induced his people to obey him willingly, has been exchanged for one of aversion towards the character and title generally. The multifarious functions which he once exercised, have been parceled out among temporary nominees. On the other hand, the council, or senate, and the agora, originally simple media through which the king acted, are elevated into standing and independent sources of authority, controlling and holding in responsibility the various special officers to whom executive duties of one kind or another are confided. The general principle here indicated is common both to the oligarchies and the democracies which grew up in historical Greece: much as these two governments differed from each other, and many as were the varieties even between one oligarchy or democracy and another, they all stood in equal contrast with the principle of the heroic government. Even in Sparta, where the hereditary kingship lasted, it was preserved with luster and influence exceedingly diminished, and such timely diminution of its power seems to have been one of the essential conditions of its preservation. Though the Spartan kings had the hereditary command of the military forces, yet, even in all foreign expeditions, they habitually acted in obedience to orders from home; while in affairs of the interior, the superior power of the ephors sensibly overshadowed them. So that, unless possessed of more than ordinary force of character, they seem to have exercised their chief influence as presiding members of the senate.

There is yet another point of view in which it behoves us to take notice of the council and the agora as integral portions of the legendary government of the Grecian communities. We are thus enabled to trace the employment of public speaking, as the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience, to the social infancy of the nation. The power of speech in the direction of public affairs becomes more and more obvious, developed, and irresistible, as we advance towards the culminating period of Grecian history, the century preceding the battle of Chaeronea. That its development was greatest among the most enlightened sections of the Grecian name, and smallest among the more obtuse and stationary, is matter of notorious fact; nor is it less true, that the prevalence of this habit was one of the chief causes of the intellectual eminence of the nation generally. At a time when all the countries around were plunged comparatively in mental torpor, there was no motive sufficiently present and powerful to multiply so wonderfully the productive minds of Greece, except such as arose from the rewards of public speaking. The susceptibility of the multitude to this sort of guidance, their habit of requiring and enjoying the stimulus which it supplied, and the open discussion, combining regular forms with free opposition, of practical matters, political as well as judicial,—are the creative causes which formed such conspicuous adepts in the art of persuasion. Nor was it only professed orators who were thus produced; didactic aptitude was formed in the background, and the speculative tendencies were supplied with interesting phenomena for observation and combination, at a time when the truths of physical science were almost inaccessible. If the primary effect was to quicken the powers of expression, the secondary, but not less certain result, was to develop the habits of scientific thought. Not only the oratory of Demosthenes and Pericles, and the colloquial magic of Socrates, but also the philosophical speculations of Plato, and the systematic politics, rhetoric, and logic of Aristotle, are traceable to the same general tendencies in the minds of the Grecian people: and we find the germ of these expansive forces in the senate and agora of their legendary government. The poets, first epic and then lyric, were the precursors of the orators, in their power of moving the feelings of an assembled crowd; whilst the Homeric poems—the general training-book of educated Greeks—constituted a treasury of direct and animated expression, full of concrete forms, and rare in the use of abstractions, and thence better suited to the workings of oratory. The subsequent critics had no difficulty in selecting from the Iliad and Odyssey, samples of eloquence in all its phases and varieties.

On the whole, then, the society depicted in the old Greek poems is loose and unsettled, presenting very little of legal restraint, and still less of legal protection,—but concentrating such political power as does exist in the hands of a legitimate hereditary king, whose ascendency over the other chiefs is more or less complete according to his personal force and character. Whether that ascendency be greater or less, however, the mass of the people is in either ease politically passive and of little account. Though the Grecian freeman of the heroic age is above the degraded level of the Gallic plebs, as described by Caesar, he is far from rivaling the fierce independence and sense of dignity, combined with individual force, which characterize the Germanic tribes before their establishment in the Roman empire. Still less does his condition, or the society in which he moves, correspond to those pleasing dreams of spontaneous rectitude and innocence, in which Tacitus and Seneca indulge with regard to primitive man.

2. The state of moral and social feeling, prevalent in legendary Greece, exhibits a scene in harmony with the rudimentary political fabrics just described. Throughout the long stream of legendary narrative on which the Greeks looked back as their past history, the larger social motives hardly ever come into play: either individual valor and cruelty, or the personal attachments and quarrels of relatives and war-companions, or the feuds of private enemies, are ever before us. There is no sense of obligation then existing, between man and man as such,—and very little between each man and the entire community of which he is a member; such sentiments are neither operative in the real world, nor present to the imaginations of the poets. Personal feelings, either towards the gods, the king, or some near and known individual, fill the whole of a man's bosom: out of them arise all the motives to beneficence, and all the internal restraints upon violence, antipathy, or rapacity: and special communion, as well as special solemnities, are essential to their existence. The ceremony of an oath, so imposing, so paramount, and so indispensable in those days, illustrates strikingly this principle. And even in the case of the stranger suppliant,—in which an apparently spontaneous sympathy manifests itself;—the succor and kindness shown to him arise mainly from his having gone through the consecrated formalities of supplication, such as that of sitting down in the ashes by the sacred hearth, thus obtaining a sort of privilege of sanctuary. That ceremony exalts him into something more than a mere suffering man,—it places him in express fellowship with the master of the house, under the tutelary sanctions of Zeus Hiketesios. There is great difference between one form of supplication and another; the suppliant, however, in any form, becomes more or less the object of a particular sympathy.

The sense of obligation towards the gods manifests itself separately in habitual acts of worship, sacrifice, and libations, or by votive presents, such as that of the hair of Achilles, which he has pledged to the river-god Spercheius, and such as the constant dedicated offerings which men who stand in urgent need of the divine aid first promise and afterwards fulfill. But the feeling towards the gods also appears, and that not less frequently, as mingling itself with and enforcing obligations towards some particular human person. The tie which binds a man to his father, his kinsman, his guest, or any special promise towards whom he has taken the engagement of an oath, is conceived in conjunction with the idea of Zeus, as witness and guarantee; and the intimacy of the association is attested by some surname or special appellation of the god. Such personal feelings composed all the moral influences of which a Greek of that day was susceptible,—a state of mind which we can best appreciate by contrasting it with that of the subsequent citizen of historical Athens. In the view of the latter, the great impersonal authority, called “The Laws”, stood out separately, both as guide and sanction, distinct from religious duty or private sympathies: but of this discriminated conception of positive law and positive morality, the germ only can be detected in the Homeric poems. The appropriate Greek word for human laws never occurs. Amidst a very wavering phraseology, we can detect a gradual transition from the primitive idea of a personal goddess Themis, attached to Zeus, first to his sentences or orders called Themistes, and next by a still farther remove to various established customs, which those sentences were believed to sanctify, —the authority of religion and that of custom coalescing into one indivisible obligation.

The family relations, as we might expect, are set forth in our pictures of the legendary world as the grand sources of lasting union and devoted attachment. The paternal authority is highly reverenced: the son who lives to years of maturity, repays by affection to his parents the charge of his maintenance in infancy, which the language notes by a special word; whilst on the other hand, the Erinnys, whose avenging hand is put in motion by the curse of a father or mother, is an object of deep dread.

In regard to marriage, we find the wife occupying a station of great dignity and influence, though it was the practice for the husband to purchase her by valuable presents to her parents, a practice extensively prevalent among early communities, and treated by Aristotle as an evidence of barbarism. She even seems to live less secluded and to enjoy a wider sphere of action than was allotted to her in historical Greece. Concubines are frequent with the chiefs, and occasionally the jealousy of the wife breaks out in reckless excess against her husband, as may be seen in the tragic history of Phoenix. The continence of Laertes, from fear of displeasing his wife Antikleia, is especially noticed. A large portion of the romantic interest which Grecian legend inspires is derived from the women: Penelope, Andromache, Helen, Clytemnestra, Eriphyle, Iokasta, Hekabe, etc., all stand in the foreground of the picture, either from their virtues their beauty, their crimes, or their sufferings.

Not only brothers, but also cousins, and the more distant blood-relations and clansmen, appear connected together by a strong feeling of attachment, sharing among them universally the obligation of mutual self-defense and revenge, in the event of injury to any individual of the race. The legitimate brothers divide between them by lot the paternal inheritance,—a bastard brother receiving only a small share; he is, however, commonly very well treated, though the murder of Phokus, by Telamon and Peleus, constitutes a flagrant exception. The furtive pregnancy of young women, often by a god, is one of the most frequently recurring incidents in the legendary narratives; and the severity with which such a fact, when discovered, is visited by the father, is generally extreme. As an extension of the family connection, we read of larger unions, called the phratry and the tribe, which are respectfully, but not frequently, mentioned.

The generous readiness with which hospitality is afforded to the stranger who asks for it, the facility with which he is allowed to contract the peculiar connection of guest with his host, and the permanence with which that connection, when created by partaking of the same food and exchanging presents, is maintained even through a long period of separation, and even transmitted from father to son—these are among the most captivating features of the heroic society. The Homeric chief welcomes the stranger who comes to ask shelter in his house, first gives him refreshment, and then inquires his name and the purpose of his voyage. Though not inclined to invite strangers to his house, he cannot repel them when they spontaneously enter it craving a lodging. The suppliant is also commonly a stranger, but a stranger under peculiar circumstances; who proclaims his own calamitous and abject condition, and seeks to place himself in a relation to the chief whom be solicits, something like that in which men stand to the gods. Onerous as such special tie may become to him, the chief cannot decline it, if solicited in the proper form: the ceremony of supplication has a binding effect, and the Erinnys punish the hardhearted person who disallows it. A conquered enemy may sometimes throw himself at the feet of his conqueror, and solicit mercy, but he cannot by doing so acquire the character and claims of a suppliant properly so called: the conqueror has free discretion either to kill him, or to spare him and accept a ransom.

There are in the legendary narratives abundant examples of individuals who transgress in particular acts even the holiest of these personal ties, but the savage Cyclops is the only person described as professedly indifferent to them, and careless of that sanction of the gods which in Grecian belief accompanied them all. In fact, the tragic horror which pervades the lineage of Athamas or Kadmus, and which attaches to many of the acts of Heracles, of Peleus and Telamon, of Jason and Medea, of Atreus and Thyestes, etc., is founded upon a deep feeling and sympathy with those special obligations, which conspicuous individuals, under the temporary stimulus of the maddening Ate, are driven to violate. In such conflict of sentiments, between the obligation generally reverenced and the exceptional deviation in an individual otherwise admired, consists the pathos of the story.

These feelings—of mutual devotion between kinsmen and companions in arms—of generous hospitality to the stranger, and of helping protection to the suppliant,—constitute the bright spots in a dark age. We find them very generally prevalent amongst communities essentially rude and barbarous,—amongst the ancient Germans as described by Tacitus, the Druses in Lebanon, the Arabian tribes in the desert, and even the North American Indians.

They are the instinctive manifestations of human sociality, standing at first alone, and for that reason appearing to possess a greater tutelary force than really belongs to them -beneficent, indeed, in a high degree, with reference to their own appropriate period, but serving as a very imperfect compensation for the impotence of the magistrate, and for the absence of any all-pervading sympathy or sense of obligation between man and man. We best appreciate their importance when we compare the Homeric society with that of barbarians like the Thracians, who tattooed their bodies, as the mark of a generous lineage,—sold their children for export as slaves,—considered robbery, not merely as one admissible occupation among others, but as the only honorable mode of life; agriculture being held contemptible,—and above all, delighted in the shedding of blood as a luxury. Such were the Thracians in the days of Herodotus and Thucydides: and the Homeric society forms a mean term between that which these two historians yet saw in Thrace, and that which they witnessed among their own civilized countrymen.

When, however, among the Homeric men we pass beyond the influence of the private ties above enumerated, we find scarcely any other moralizing forces in operation. The acts and adventures commemorated imply a community wherein neither the protection nor the restraints of law are practically felt, and where in ferocity, rapine, and the aggressive propensities generally, seem restrained by no internal counterbalancing scruples. Homicide, especially, is of frequent occurrence, sometimes by open violence, sometimes by fraud: expatriation for homicide is among the most constantly recurring acts of the Homeric poems: and savage brutalities are often ascribed, even to admired heroes, with apparent indifference. Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on the tomb of Patroklus, while his son Neoptolemus not only slaughters the aged Priam, but also seizes by the leg the child Astyanax (son of the slain Hector) and hurls him from one of the lofty towers of Troy. Moreover, the celebrity of Autolykus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, in the career of wholesale robbery and perjury, and the wealth which it enabled him to acquire, are described with the same unaffected admiration as the wisdom of Nestor or the strength of Ajax. Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus, pillage in person, wherever they can find an opportunity, employing both force and stratagem to surmount resistance. The vocation of a pirate is recognized and honorable, so that a host, when he asks his guest what is the purpose of his voyage, enumerates enrichment by indiscriminate maritime plunder as among those projects which may naturally enter into his contemplation. Abduction of cattle, and expeditions for unprovoked ravage as well as for retaliation, between neighboring tribes, appear ordinary phenomena; and the established inviolability of heralds seems the only evidence of any settled feeling of obligation between one community and another. While the house and property of Odysseus, during his long absence, enjoys no public protection, those unprincipled chiefs, who consume his substance, find sympathy rather than disapprobation among the people of Ithaca. As a general rule, he who cannot protect himself finds no protection from society: his own kinsmen and immediate companions are the only parties to whom he can look with confidence for support. And in this respect, the representation given by Hesiod makes the picture even worse. In his emphatic denunciation of the fifth age, that poet deplores not only the absence of all social justice and sense of obligation among his contemporaries, but also the relaxation of the ties of family and hospitality. There are marks of querulous exaggeration in the poem of the Works and Days; yet the author professes to describe the real state of things around him, and the features of his picture, soften them as we may, will still appear dark and calamitous. It is, however, to he remarked, that he contemplates a state of peace,—thus forming a contrast with the Homeric poems. His copious catalogue of social evils scarcely mentions liability to plunder by a foreign enemy, nor does he compute the chances of predatory aggression as a source of profit.

There are two special veins of estimable sentiment, on which it may be interesting to contrast heroic and historical Greece, and which exhibit the latter as an improvement on the former, not less in the affections than in the intellect.

The law of Athens was peculiarly watchful and provident with respect both to the persons and the property of orphan minors; but the description given in the Iliad of the utter and hopeless destitution of the orphan boy, despoiled of his paternal inheritance, and abandoned by all the friends of his father, whom he urgently supplicates, and who all harshly cast him off, is one of the most pathetic morsels in the whole poem. In reference again to the treatment of the dead body of an enemy we find all the Greek chiefs who come near (not to mention the conduct of Achilles himself) piercing with their spears the corpse of the slain Hector, while some of them even pass disgusting taunts upon it. We may add, from the lost epics, the mutilation of the dead bodies of Paris and Deiphobus by the hand of Menelaus. But at the time of the Persian invasion, it was regarded as unworthy of a right-minded Greek to maltreat in any way the dead body of an enemy, even where such a deed might seem to be justified on the plea of retaliation. After the battle of Plataea, a proposition was made to the Spartan king Pausanias, to retaliate upon the dead body of Mardonius the indignities which Xerxes had heaped upon that of Leonidas at Thermopylae. He indignantly spurned the suggestion, not without a severe rebuke, or rather a half-suppressed menace, towards the proposer: and the feeling of Herodotus himself goes heartily along with him.

The different manner of dealing with homicide presents a third test, perhaps more striking yet, of the change in Grecian feelings and manners during the three centuries preceding the Persian invasion. That which the murderer in the Homeric times had to dread, was, not public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends of the deceased, who were stimulated by the keenest impulses of honor and obligation to avenge the deed, and were considered by the public as specially privileged to do so. To escape from this danger, he is obliged to flee the country, unless he can prevail upon the incensed kinsmen to accept of a valuable payment (we must not speak of coined money, in the days of Homer) as satisfaction for their slain comrade. They may, if they please, decline the offer, and persist in their right of revenge; but if they accept, they are bound to leave the offender unmolested, and he accordingly remains at home without farther consequences. The chiefs in agora do not seem to interfere, except to insure payment of the stipulated sum.

Here we recognize once more the characteristic attribute of the Grecian heroic age,—the omnipotence of private force, tempered and guided by family sympathies, and the practical nullity of that collective sovereign afterwards called The City, who in historical Greece becomes the central and paramount source of obligation, but who appears yet only in the background, as a germ of premise for the future. And the manner in which, in the case of homicide, that germ was developed into a powerful reality, presents an interesting field of comparison with other nations.

For the practice, here designated, of leaving the party guilty of homicide to compromise by valuable payment with the relatives of the deceased, and also of allowing to the latter a free choice whether they would accept such compromise or enforce their right of personal revenge,—has been remarked in many rude communities, but is particularly memorable among the early German tribes. Among the many separate Teutonic establishments which rose upon the ruins of the Western Empire of Rome, the right as well as duty of private revenge, for personal injury or insult offered to any member of a family,—and the endeavor to avert its effects by means of a pecuniary composition levied upon the offender, chiefly as satisfaction to the party injured, but partly also as perquisite to the king,—was adopted as the basis of their legislation. This fundamental idea was worked out in elaborate detail as to the valuation of the injury inflicted, where in one main circumstance was the rank, condition, and power of the sufferer. The object of the legislator was to preserve the society from standing feuds, but at the same time to accord such full satisfaction as would induce the injured person to waive his acknowledged right of personal revenge,—the full luxury of which, as it presented itself to the mind of an Homeric Greek, may be read in more than one passage of the Iliad. The German codes begin by trying to bring about the acceptance of a fixed pecuniary composition as a constant voluntary custom, and proceed ultimately to enforce it as a peremptory necessity: the idea of society is at first altogether subordinate, and its influence passes only by slow degrees from amicable arbitration into imperative control.

The Homeric society, in regard to this capital point in human progression, is on a level with that of the German tribes as described by Tacitus. But the subsequent course of Grecian legislation takes a direction completely different from that of the German codes: the primitive and acknowledged right of private revenge (unless where bought off by pecuniary payment), instead of being developed into practical working, is superseded by more comprehensive views of a public wrong requiring public intervention, or by religious fears respecting the posthumous wrath of the murdered person. In historical Athens, this right of private revenge was discountenanced and put out of sight, even so early as the Draconian legislation, and at last restricted to a few extreme and special cases; while the murderer came to be considered, first as having sinned against the gods, next as having deeply injured the society, and thus at once as requiring absolution and deserving punishment. On the first of these two grounds, he is interdicted from the agora and from all holy places, as well as from public functions, even while yet untried and simply a suspected person; for if this were not done, the wrath of the gods would manifest itself in bad crops and other national calamities. On the second ground, he is tried before the council of Areiopagus, and if found guilty, is condemned to death, or perhaps to disfranchisement and banishment. The idea of a propitiatory payment to the relatives of the deceased has ceased altogether to be admitted: it is the protection of society which dictates, and the force of society which inflicts, a measure of punishment calculated to deter for the future.

3. The society of legendary Greece includes, besides the chiefs, the general mass of freemen, among whom stand out by special names certain professional men, such as the carpenter, the smith, the leather-dresser, the leech, the prophet, the bard, and the fisherman. We have no means of appreciating their condition. Though lots of arable land were assigned in special property to individuals, with boundaries both carefully marked and jealously watched, yet the larger proportion of surface was devoted to pasture. Cattle formed both the chief item in the substance of a wealthy man, the chief means of making payments, and the common ground of quarrels,—bread and meat, in large quantities, being the constant food of every one. The estates of the owners were tilled, and their cattle tended, mostly by bought slaves, but to a certain degree also by poor freemen called Thetes, working for hire and for stated periods. The principal slaves, who were entrusted with the care of large herds of oxen, swine, or goats, were of necessity men worthy of confidence, their duties placing them away from their master’s immediate eye. They had other slaves subordinate to them, and appear to have been well-treated: the deep and unshaken attachment of Eumaeus the swineherd and Philoetius the neat herd to the family and affairs of the absent Odysseus, is among the most interesting points in the ancient epic. Slavery was a calamity, which in that period of insecurity might befall any one: the chief who conducted a freebooting expedition, if he succeeded, brought back with him a numerous troop of slaves, as many as he could seize,— if he failed, became very likely a slave himself: so that the slave was often by birth of equal dignity with his master: Eumaeus was himself the son of a chief, conveyed away when a child by his nurse, and sold by Phoenician kidnappers to Laertes. A slave of this character, if he conducted himself well, might often expect to be enfranchised by his master and placed in an independent holding.

On the whole, the slavery of legendary Greece does not present itself as existing under a peculiarly harsh form, especially if we consider that all the classes of society were then very much upon a level in point of taste, sentiment, and instruction. In the absence of legal security or an effective social sanction, it is probable that the condition of a slave under an average master, may have been as good as that of the free Thete. The class of slaves whose lot appears to have been the most pitiable were the females,—more numerous than the males, and performing the principal work in the interior of the house. Not only do they seem to have been more harshly treated than the males, but they were charged with the hardest and most exhausting labor which the establishment of a Greek chief required: they brought in water from the spring, and turned by hand the house-mills, which ground the large quantity of flour consumed in his family. This oppressive task was performed generally by female slaves, in historical as well as legendary Greece. Spinning and weaving was the constant occupation of women, whether free or slave, of every rank and station: all the garments worn both by men and women were fashioned at home, and Helen as well as Penelope is expert and assiduous at the occupation. The daughters of Keleos at Eleusis go to the well with their basins for water, and Nausikaa, daughter of Alkinous, joins her female slaves in the business of washing her garments in the river. If we are obliged to point out the fierceness and insecurity of an early society, we may at the same time note with pleasure its characteristic simplicity of manners: Rebecca, Rachel, and the daughters of Jethro, in the early Mosaic narrative, as well as the wife of the native Macedonian chief (with whom the Temenid Perdiccas, ancestor of Philip and Alexander, first took service on retiring from Argos), baking her own cakes on the hearth, exhibit a parallel in this respect to the Homeric pictures.

We obtain no particulars respecting either the common freemen generally, or the particular class of them called Thetes. These latter, engaged for special jobs, or at the harvest and other busy seasons of field labor, seem to have given their labor in exchange for board and clothing: they are mentioned in the same line with the slaves, and were (as has been just observed) probably on the whole little better off. The condition of a poor freeman in those days, without a lot of land of his own, going about from one temporary job to another, and having no powerful family and no social authority to look up to for protection, must have been sufficiently miserable. When Eumaeus indulged his expectation of being manumitted by his masters, he thought at the same time that they would give him a wife, a house, and a lot of land near to themselves; without which collateral advantages, simple manumission might perhaps have been no improvement in his condition. To be Thete in the service of a very poor farmer is selected by Achilles as the maximum of human hardship: such a person could not give to his Thete the same ample food, and good shoes and clothing, as the wealthy chief Eurymachus, while he would exact more severe labor. It was probably among such smaller occupants, who could not advance the price necessary to purchase slaves, and were glad to save the cost of keep when they did not need service, that the Thetes found employment: though we may conclude that the brave and strong amongst these poor freemen found it preferable to accompany some freebooting chief and to live by the plunder acquired. The exact Hesiod advises his farmer, whose work is chiefly performed by slaves, to employ and maintain the Thete during summertime, but to dismiss him as soon as the harvest is completely got in, and then to take into his house for the winter a woman “without any child”; who would of course be more useful than the Thete for the indoor occupations of that season.

In a state of society such as that which we have been describing, Grecian commerce was necessarily trifling and restricted. The Homeric poems mark either total ignorance or great vagueness of apprehension respecting all that lies beyond the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor, and the islands between or adjoining them. Libya and Egypt are supposed so distant as to be known only by name and hearsay: indeed, when the city of Cyrene was founded, a century and a half after the first Olympiad, it was difficult to find anywhere a Greek navigator who had ever visited the coast of Libya, or was fit to serve as guide to the colonists. The mention of the Sikels in the Odyssey, leads us to conclude that Corcyra, Italy, and Sicily were not wholly unknown to the poet: among seafaring Greeks, the knowledge of the latter implied the knowledge of the two former, since the habitual track, even of a well-equipped Athenian trireme during the Peloponnesian war, from Peloponnesus to Sicily, was by Corcyra and the Gulf of Tarentum. The Phokians, long afterwards, were the first Greeks who explored either the Adriatic or Tyrrhenian sea. Of the Euxine sea no knowledge is manifested in Homer, who, as a general rule, presents to us the names of distant regions only in connection with romantic or monstrous accompaniments. The Cretans, and still more the Taphians (who are supposed to have occupied the western islands off the coast of Acarnania), are mentioned as skillful mariners, and the Taphian Mentes professes to be conveying iron to Temesa to be there exchanged for copper but both Taphians and Cretans are more corsairs than traders. The strong sense of the dangers of the sea, expressed by the poet Hesiod, and the imperfect structure of the early Grecian ship, attested by Thucydides (who points out the more recent date of that improved ship-building which prevailed in his time, concur to demonstrate the then narrow range of nautical enterprise.

Such was the state of the Greeks, as traders, at a time when Babylon combined a crowded and industrious population with extensive commerce, and when the Phoenician merchantships visited in one direction the Southern coast of Arabia, perhaps even the island of Ceylon,—in another direction, the British islands.

The Phoenician, the kinsman of the ancient Jew, exhibits the type of character belonging to the latter, with greater enterprise and ingenuity, and less of religious exclusiveness, yet still different from, and even antipathetic to, the character of the Greeks. In the Homeric poems, he appears somewhat like the Jew of the Middle Ages, a crafty trader, turning to profit the violence and rapacity of others,—bringing them ornaments, decorations, the finest and brightest products of the loom, gold, silver, electrum, ivory, tin, etc., in exchange for which he received landed produce, skins, wool, and slaves, the only commodities which even a wealthy Greek chief of those early times had to offer,—prepared at the same time for dishonest gain, in any manner which chance might throw in his way. He is, however, really a trader, not undertaking expeditions with the deliberate purpose of surprise and plunder, and standing distinguished in this respect from the Tyrrhenian, Cretan, or Taphian pirate. Tin, ivory, and electrum, all of which are acknowledged in the Homeric poems, were the fruit of Phoenician trade with the West as well as with the East.

Thucydides tells us that the Phoenicians and Carians, in very early periods, occupied many of the islands of the Aegean, and we know, from the striking remnant of their mining works which Herodotus himself saw in Thasus, off the coast of Thrace, that they had once extracted gold from the mountains of that island,—at a period indeed very far back, since their occupation must have been abandoned prior to the settlement of the poet Archilochus. Yet few of the islands in the Aegean were rich in such valuable products, nor was it in the usual course of Phoenician proceeding to occupy islands, except where there was an adjoining mainland with which trade could be carried on. The traffic of these active mariners required no permanent settlement, but as occasional visitors they were convenient, in enabling a Greek chief to turn his captives to account,—to get rid of slaves or friendless Thetes who were troublesome,—and to supply himself with the metals, precious as well as useful. The halls of Alkinous and Menelaus glitter with gold, copper, and electrum; while large stocks of yet unemployed metal—gold, copper, and iron—are stored up in the treasure-chamber of Odysseus and other chiefs. Coined money is unknown to the Homeric age,—the trade carried on being one of barter. In reference also to the metals, it deserves to be remarked that the Homeric description universally suppose copper, and not iron, to be employed for arms, both offensive and defensive. By what process the copper was tempered and hardened, so as to serve the purposes of the warrior, we do not know; but the use of iron for these objects belongs to a later age, though the Works and Days of Hesiod suppose this change to have been already introduced.

The mode of fighting among the Homeric heroes is not less different from the historical times, than the material of which their arms were composed. The Hoplites, or heavy-armed infantry of historical Greece, maintained a close order and well-dressed line, charging the enemy with their spears portended at even distance, and coming thus to close conflict without breaking their rank: there were special troops, bowmen, slingers, etc. armed with missiles, but the hoplite had no weapon to employ in this manner. The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey, on the contrary, habitually employ the spear as a missile, which they launch with tremendous force: each of them is mounted in his war-chariot, drawn by two horses, and calculated to contain the warrior and his charioteer; in which latter capacity a friend or comrade will sometimes consent to serve. Advancing in his chariot at full speed, in front of his own soldiers, he hurls his spear against the enemy: sometimes, indeed, he will fight on foot, and hand to hand, but the chariot is usually near to receive him if he chooses, or to insure his retreat. The mass of the Greeks and Trojans, coming forward to the charge, without any regular step or evenly-maintained line, make their attack in the same way by hurling their spears. Each chief wears habitually a long sword and a short dagger, besides his two spears to be launched forward,—the spear being also used, if occasion serves, as a weapon for thrust. Every man is protected by shield, helmet, breastplate, and greaves: but the armor of the chiefs is greatly superior to that of the common men, while they themselves are both stronger and more expert in the use of their weapons. There are a few bowmen, as rare exceptions, but the general equipment and proceeding is as here described.

Such loose array, immortalized as it is in the Iliad, is familiar to everyone; and the contrast which it presents, with those inflexible ranks, and that irresistible simultaneous charge which bore down the Persian throng at Plataea and Cunaxa, is such as to illustrate forcibly the general difference between heroic and historical Greece. While in the former, a few splendid figures stand forward, in prominent relief, the remainder being a mere unorganized and ineffective mass, in the latter, these units have been combined into a system, in which every man, officer and soldier, has his assigned place and duty, and the victory, when gained, is the joint work of all. Preeminent individual prowess is indeed materially abridged, if not wholly excluded, no man can do more than maintain his station in the line; but on the other hand, the grand purposes, aggressive or defensive, for which alone arms are taken up, become more assured and easy, and long-sighted combinations of the general are rendered for the first time practicable, when he has a disciplined body of men to obey him. In tracing the picture of civil society, we have to remark a similar transition—we pass from Heracles, Theseus, Jason, Achilles, to Solon, Pythagoras, and Pericles—from “the shepherd of his people”, (to use the phrase in which Homer depicts the good side of the heroic king) to the legislator who introduces, and the statesman who maintains, a preconcerted system by which willing citizens consent to bind themselves. If commanding individual talent is not always to be found, the whole community is so trained as to be able to maintain its course under inferior leaders; the rights as well as the duties of each citizen being predetermined in the social order, according to principles more or less wisely laid down. The contrast is similar, and the transition equally remarkable, in the civil as in the military picture. In fact, the military organization of the Grecian republics is an element of the greatest importance in respect to the conspicuous part which they have played in human affairs,—their superiority over other contemporary nations in this respect being hardly less striking than it is in many others, as we shall have occasion to see in a subsequent stage of this history.

Even at the most advanced point of their tactics, the Greeks could effect little against a walled city, whilst the heroic weapons and array were still less available for such an undertaking as a siege. Fortifications are a feature of the age deserving considerable notice. There was a time, we are told, in which the primitive Greek towns or villages derived a precarious security, not from their walls, but merely from sites lofty and difficult of access. They were not built immediately upon the shore, or close upon any convenient landing-place, but at some distance inland, on a rock or elevation which could not be approached without notice or scaled without difficulty. It was thought sufficient at that time to guard against piratical or marauding surprise: but as the state of society became assured,—as the chance of sudden assault comparatively diminished and industry increased,—these uninviting abodes were exchanged for more convenient sites on the plain or declivity beneath; or a portion of the latter was enclosed within larger boundaries and joined on to the original foundation, which thus became the Acropolis of the new town. Thebes, Athens, Argos, etc., belonged to the latter class of cities; but there were in many parts of Greece deserted sites on hilltops, still retaining, even in historical times, the traces of former habitation, and some of them still bearing the name of the old towns. Among the mountainous parts of Crete, in Aegina and Rhodes, in portions of Mount Ida and Parnassus, similar remnants might be perceived.

Probably, in such primitive hill villages, a continuous circle of wall would hardly be required as an additional means of defense, and would often be rendered very difficult by the rugged nature of the ground. But Thucydides represents the earliest Greeks—those whom he conceives anterior to the Trojan war—as living thus universally in unfortified villages, chiefly on account of their poverty, rudeness, and thorough carelessness for the morrow. Oppressed, and held apart from each other by perpetual fear, they had not yet contracted the sentiment of fixed abodes: they were unwilling even to plant fruit-trees because of the uncertainty of gathering the produce,—and were always ready to dislodge, because there was nothing to gain by staying, and a bare subsistence might be had anywhere. He compares them to the mountaineers of Aetolia and of the Ozolian Lokris in his own time, who dwelt in their unfortified hill villages with little or no intercommunication, always armed and fighting, and subsisting on the produce of their cattle and their woods,—clothed in undressed hides, and eating raw meat.

The picture given by Thucydides, of these very early and unrecorded times, can only be taken as conjectural,—the conjectures, indeed, of a statesman and a philosopher,—generalized too, in part, from the many particular instances of contention and expulsion of chiefs which he found in the old legendary poems. The Homeric poems, however, present to us a different picture. They recognize walled towns, fixed abodes, strong local attachments, hereditary individual property in land, vineyards planted and carefully cultivated, established temples of the gods, and splendid palaces of the chiefs. The description of Thucydides belongs to a lower form of society, and bears more analogy to that which the poet himself conceives as antiquated and barbarous,—to the savage Cyclopes, who dwell on the tops of mountains, in hollow caves, without the plough, without vine or fruit culture, without arts or instruments,—or to the primitive settlement of Dardanus son of Zeus, on the higher ground of Ida, while it was reserved for his descendants and successors to found the holy Ilium on the plain. Ilium or Troy represents the perfection of Homeric society. It is a consecrated spot, containing temples of the gods as well as the palace of Priam, and surrounded by walls which are the fabric of the gods; while the antecedent form of ruder society, which the poet briefly glances at, is the parallel of that which the theory of Thucydides ascribes to his own early semi-barbarous ancestors.

Walled towns serve thus as one of the evidences, that a large part of the population of Greece had, even in the Homeric times, reached a level higher than that of the Aetolians and Lokrians of the days of Thucydides. The remains of Mycenae and Tiryns demonstrate the massy and Cyclopean style of architecture employed in those early days: but we may remark that, while modern observers seem inclined to treat the remains of the former is very imposing, and significant of a great princely family, Thucydides, on the contrary, speaks of it as a small place, and labors to elude the inference, which might be deduced from its insignificant size, in disproof of the grandeur of Agamemnon. Such fortifications supplied a means of defense incomparably superior to those of attack. Indeed, even in historical Greece, and after the invention of battering engines, no city could be taken except by surprise or blockade, or by ruining the country around, and thus depriving the inhabitants of their means of subsistence. And in the two great sieges of the legendary time, Troy and Thebes, the former is captured by the stratagem of the wooden horse, while the latter is evacuated by its citizens, under the warning of the gods, after their defeat in the field.

This decided superiority of the means of defense over those of attack, in rude ages, has been one of the grand promotive causes both of the growth of civic life and of the general march of human improvement. It has enabled the progressive portions of mankind not only to maintain their acquisitions against the predatory instincts of the ruder and poorer, and to surmount the difficulties of incipient organization,—but ultimately, when their organization has been matured, both to acquire predominance, and to uphold it until their own disciplined habits have in part passed to their enemies. The important truth here stated is illustrated not less by the history of ancient Greece, than by that of modern Europe during the Middle Ages. The Homeric chief, combining superior rank with superior force, and ready to rob at every convenient opportunity, greatly resembles the feudal baron of the Middle Ages, but circumstances absorb him more easily into a city life, and convert the independent potentate into the member of a governing aristocracy. Traffic by sea continued to be beset with danger from pirates, long after it had become tolerably assured by land: the “wet ways” have always been the last resort of lawlessness and violence, and the Aegean, in particular, has in all times suffered more than other waters under this calamity.

Aggressions of the sort here described were of course most numerous in those earliest times when the Aegean was not yet an Hellenic sea, and when many of the Cyclades were occupied, not by Greeks, but by Carians,—perhaps by Phoenicians the number of Carian sepulchers discovered in the sacred island of Delos seems to attest such occupation as an historical fact. According to the legendary account, espoused both by Herodotus and by Thucydides, it was the Cretan Minos who subdued these islands and established his sons as rulers in them; either expelling the Carians, or reducing them to servitude and tribute. Thucydides presumes that he must of course have put down piracy, in order to enable his tribute to be remitted in safety, like the Athenians during the time of their hegemony. Upon the legendary thalassocracy of Minos, I have already remarked in another place: it is sufficient here to repeat, that, in the Homeric poems (long subsequent to Minos in the current chronology), we find piracy both frequent and held in honorable estimation, as Thucydides himself emphatically tells us,—remarking, moreover, that the vessels of those early days were only half-decked, built and equipped after the piratical fashion, in a manner upon which the nautical men of his time looked back with disdain. Improved and enlarged shipbuilding, and the trireme, or ship with three banks of oars, common for warlike purposes during the Persian invasion, began only with the growing skill, activity, and importance of the Corinthians, three quarters of a century after the first Olympiad. Corinth, even in the Homeric poems, is distinguished by the epithet of wealthy, which it acquired principally from its remarkable situation on the Isthmus, and from its two harbors of Lechaeum and Kenchreae, the one on the Corinthian, the other on the Saronic gulf. It thus supplied a convenient connection between Epirus and Italy on the one side, and the Aegean sea on the other, without imposing upon the unskillful and timid navigator of those days the necessity of circumnavigating Peloponnesus.

The extension of Grecian traffic and shipping is manifested by a comparison of the Homeric with the Hesiodic poems; in respect to knowledge of places and countries,—the latter being probably referable to dates between BC 740 and BC 640. In Homer, acquaintance is shown (the accuracy of such acquaintance, however, being exaggerated by Strabo and other friendly critics) with continental Greece and its neighboring islands, with Crete and the principal islands of the Aegean, and with Thrace, the Troad, the Hellespont, and Asia Minor between Paphlagonia northward and Lycia southward. The Sikels are mentioned in the Odyssey, and Sikania in the last book of that poem, but nothing is said to evince a knowledge of Italy or the realities of the western world. Libya, Egypt, and Phoenike, are known by name and by vague hearsay, but the Nile is only mentioned as “the river Egypt” : while the Euxine sea is not mentioned at all. In the Hesiodic poems, on the other hand, the Nile, the Ister, the Phasis, and the Eridanus, are all specified by name; Mount Etna, and the island of Ortygia near to Syracuse, the Tyrrhenians and Ligurians in the west, and the Scythians in the north, were also noticed. Indeed, within forty years after the first Olympiad, the cities of Corcyra and Syracuse were founded from Corinth,—the first of a numerous and powerful series of colonies, destined to impart a new character both to the south of Italy and to Sicily.

In reference to the astronomy and physics of the Homeric Greek, it has already been remarked that be connected together the sensible phenomena which form the subject matter of these sciences by threads of religious and personifying fancy, to which the real analogies among them were made subordinate; and that these analogies did not begin to be studied by themselves, apart from the religious element by which they had been at first overlaid, until the age of Thales,—coinciding as that period did with the increased opportunities for visiting Egypt and the interior of Asia. The Greeks obtained access in both of these countries to an enlarged stock of astronomical observations, to the use of the gnomon, or sundial, and to a more exact determination of the length of the solar year, than that which served as the basis of their various lunar periods. It is pretended that Thales was the first who predicted an eclipse of the sun,—not, indeed. accurately, but with large limits of error as to the time of its occurrence,—and that he also possessed so profound an acquaintance with meteorological phenomena and probabilities, as to be able to foretell an abundant crop of olives for the coming year, and to realize a large sum of money by an olive speculation.

From Thales downward we trace a succession of astronomical and physical theories, more or less successful, into which I do not intend here to enter: it is sufficient at present to contrast the father of the Ionic philosophy with the times preceding him, and to mark the first commencement of scientific prediction among the Greeks, however imperfect at the outset, as distinguished from the inspired dicta of prophets or oracles, and from those special signs of the purposes of the gods, which formed the habitual reliance of the Homeric man We shall see these two modes of anticipating the future,—one based upon the philosophical, the other upon the religious appreciation of nature,—running simultaneously on throughout Grecian history, and sharing between them in unequal portions the empire of the Greek mind; the former acquiring both greater predominance and wider application among the intellectual men, and partially restricting, but never abolishing, the spontaneous employment of the latter among the vulgar.

Neither coined money, nor the art of writing, nor painting, nor sculpture, nor imaginative architecture, belong to the Homeric and Hesiodic times. Such rudiments of arts, destined ultimately to acquire so great a development in Greece, as may have existed in these early days, served only as a sort of nucleus to the fancy of the poet, to shape out for himself the fabulous creations ascribed to Hephaetus or Daelalus. No statues of the gods, not even of wood, are mentioned in the Homeric poems. All the many varieties, in Grecian music, poetry, and dancing,—the former chiefly borrowed from Lydia and Phrygia,—date from a period considerably later than the first Olympiad: Terpander, the earliest musician whose date is assigned, and the inventor of the harp with seven strings instead of that with four strings, does not come until the 26th Olympiad, or 676 BC; the poet Archilochus is nearly of the same date. The iambic and elegiac metres—the first deviations from the primitive epic strain and subject—do not reach up to the year 700 BC.

It is this epic poetry which forms at once both the undoubted prerogative and the solitary jewel of the earliest era of Greece. Of the many epic poems which existed in Greece during the eight century before the Christian era, none have been preserved except the Iliad and Odyssey: the Athiopis of Arktinus, the Ilias Minor of Lesches, the Cyprian Verses, the Capture of Oechalia, the Returns of the Heroes from Troy, the Maas and the Epigoni,—several of them passing in antiquity under the name of Homer,—have all been lost. But the two which remain are quite sufficient to demonstrate in the primitive Greeks, a mental organization unparalleled in any other people, and powers of invention and expression which prepared, as well as foreboded, the future eminence of the nation in all the various departments to which thought and language can be applied. Great as the power of thought afterwards became among the Greeks, their power of expression was still greater: in the former, other nations have built upon their foundations and surpassed them,— in the latter, they still remained unrivalled. It is not too much to say that this flexible, emphatic, and transparent character of the language as an instrument of communication,—its perfect aptitude for narrative and discussion, as well as for stirring all the veins of human emotion without ever forfeiting that character of simplicity which adapts it to all men and all times,—may be traced mainly to the existence and the widespread influence of the Iliad and Odyssey. To us, these compositions are interesting as beautiful poems, depicting life and manners, and unfolding certain types of character with the utmost vivacity and artlessness to their original hearer; they possessed all these sources of attraction, together with others more powerful still, to which we are now strangers. Upon him, they bore with the full weight and solemnity of history and religion combined, while the charm of the poetry was only secondary and instrumental. The poet was then the teacher and preacher of the community, not simply the amuser of their leisure hours : they looked to him for revelations of the unknown past and for expositions of the attributes and dispensations of the gods, just as they consulted the prophet for his privileged insight into the future. The ancient epic comprised many different poets and poetical compositions, which fulfilled this purpose with more or less completeness: but it is the exclusive prerogative of the Iliad and Odyssey, that, after the minds of men had ceased to be in full harmony with their original design, they yet retained their empire by the mere force of secondary excellences: while the remaining epics—though serving as food for the curious, and as storehouses for logographers, tragedians, and artists—never seem to have acquired very wide popularity even among intellectual Greeks.

XX.

GRECIAN EPIC. HOMERIC POEMS.

AT the head of the once abundant epics’ compositions of Greece, most of them unfortunately lost, stand the Iliad and Odyssey, with the immortal name of Homer attached to each of them, embracing separate portions of the comprehensive legend of Troy. They form the type of what may be called the heroic epic of the Greeks, as distinguished from the genealogical, in which latter species some of the Hesiodic poems—the Catalogue of Women, the Eoiai, and the Naupaktia—stood conspicuous. Poems of the Homeric character (if so it may be called, though the expression is very indefinite), being confined to one of the great events, or great personages of Grecian legendary antiquity, and comprising a limited number of characters, all contemporaneous, made some approach, more or less successful, to a certain poetical unity; while the Hesiodic poems, tamer in their spirit, and unconfined both as to time and as to persons, strung together distinct events without any obvious view to concentration of interest, without legitimate beginning or end. Between these two extremes there were many gradations: biographical poems, such as the Herakleia, or Theseis, recounting all the principal exploits performed by one single hero, present a character intermediate between the two, but bordering more closely on the Hesiodic. Even the hymns to the gods, which pass under the name of Homer, are epical fragments, narrating particular exploits or adventures of the god commemorated.

Both the didactic and the mystico-religious poetry of Greece began in Hexameter verse—the characteristic and consecrated measure of the epic but they belong to a different species, and burst out from a different vein in the Grecian mind. It seems to have been the more common belief among the historical Greeks, that such mystic effusions were more ancient than their narrative poems, and that Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus, Olen, Pamphus, and even Hesiod, etc., etc., the reputed composers of the former, were of earlier date than Homer. But there is no evidence to sustain this opinion, and the presumptions are all against it. Those compositions, which in the sixth century before the Christian era passed under the name of Orpheus and Musaeus, seem to have been unquestionably post-Homeric, nor can we even admit the modified conclusion of Hermann, Ulrici, and others, that the mystic poetry as a genus (putting aside the particular compositions falsely ascribed to Orpheus and others) preceded in order of time the narrative.

Beside the Iliad and Odyssey, we make out the titles of about thirty lost epic poems, sometimes with a brief hint of their contents.

Concerning the legend of Troy there were five : the Cyprian Verses, the Ethiopis, and the Capture of Troy, both ascribed to Arktinus; the lesser Iliad, ascribed to Lesches; the Returns (of the Heroes from Troy), to which the name of Hagias of Troezen is attached; and the Telegonia, by Eugammon, a continuation of the Odyssey. Two poems,—the Thebais and the Epigoni (perhaps two parts of one and the same poem) were devoted to the legend of Thebes,—the two sieges of that city by the Argeians. Another poem, called Edipodia, had for its subject the tragical destiny of Oedipus and his family; and perhaps that which is cited as Europia, or verses on Europa, may have comprehended the tale of her brother Cadmus, the mythical founder of Thebes.

The exploits of Heracles were celebrated in two compositions, each called Herakleia, by Kinaethon and Pisander,—probably also in many others, of which the memory has not been preserved. The capture of Echalia, by Heracles, formed the subject of a separate epic. Two other poems, the Aegimius and the Minyas, are supposed to have been founded on other achievements of this hero,—the effective aid which he lent to the Dorian king Aegimius against the Lapithae, his descent to the underworld for the purpose of rescuing the imprisoned Theseus, and his conquest of the city of the Minyae, the powerful Orchomenus.

Other epic poems : the Phoronis, the Danais, the Alkmaeonis, the Atthis, the Amazonia, we know only by name, and can just guess obscurely at their contents so far as the name indicates. The Titanomachia, the Gigantomachia, and the Corinthiaca, three compositions all ascribed to Eumelus, afford by means of their titles an idea somewhat clearer of the matter which they comprised. The Theogony ascribed to Hesiod still exists, though partially corrupt and mutilated: but there seem to have been other poems, now lost, of the like import and title.

Of the poems composed in the Hesiodic style, diffusive and full of genealogical detail, the principal were, the Catalogue of Women and the Great Eoiai; the latter of which, indeed, seems to have been a continuation of the former. A large number of the celebrated women of heroic Greece were commemorated in these poems, one after the other, without any other than an arbitrary bond of connection. The Marriage of Keyx,—the Melampodia—and a string of fables called Astronomia, are farther ascribed to Hesiod: and the poem above mentioned, called Aegimius, is also sometimes connected with his name, sometimes with that of Kerkops. The Naupaktian Verses (so called, probably, from the birthplace of their author), and the genealogies of Kinaethon and Asius, were compositions of the same rambling character, as far as we can judge from the scanty fragments remaining. The Orchomenian epic poet Chersias, of whom two lines only are preserved to us by Pausanias, may reasonably be referred to the same category.

The oldest of the epic poets, to whom any date, carrying with it the semblance of authority, is assigned, is Arktinus of Miletus, who is placed by Eusebius in the first Olympiad, and by Suidas in the ninth. Eugammon, the author of the Telegonia, and the latest of the catalogue, is placed in the fifty-third Olympiad, BC 566. Between these two we find Asius and Lesches, about the thirtieth Olympiad,—a time when the vein of the ancient epic was drying up, and when other forms of poetry—elegiac, iambic, lyric, and choric—had either already arisen, or were on the point of arising, to compete with it .

It has already been stated in a former chapter, that in the early commencements of prose-writing, Hekataeus, Pherekydes, and ether logographers, made it their business to extract from the ancient fables something like a continuous narrative, chronologically arranged. It was upon a principle somewhat analogous that the Alexandrine literati, about the second century before the Christian era, arranged the multitude of old epic poets into a series founded on the supposed order of time in the events narrated,— beginning with the intermarriage of Uranus and Gaea, and the Theogony,—and concluding with the death of Odysseus by the hands of his son Telegonus. This collection passed by the name of the Epic Cycle, and the poets, whose compositions were embodied in it, were termed Cyclic poets. Doubtless, the epical treasures of the Alexandrine library were larger than had ever before been brought together and submitted to men both of learning and leisure : so that multiplication of such compositions in the same museum rendered it advisable to establish some fixed order of perusal, and to copy them in one corrected and uniform edition. It pleased the critics to determine precedence, neither by antiquity nor by excellence of the compositions themselves, but by the supposed sequence of narrative so that the whole taken together constituted a readable aggregate of epical antiquity.

Much obscurity exists, and many different opinions have been expressed, respecting this Epic Cycle. I view it, not as an exclusive canon, but simply as an all-comprehensive classification, with a new edition founded thereupon. It would include all the epic poems in the library older than the Telegonia, and apt for continuous narrative; it would exclude only two classes; first, the recent epic poets, such as Panyasis and Antimachus; next, the genealogical and desultory poems, such as the Catalogue of Women, the Eoiai, and others, which could not be made to fit in to any chronological sequence of events. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey were comprised in the Cycle, so that the denomination of cyclic poet did not originally or designedly carry with it any association of contempt. But as the great and capital poems were chiefly spoken of by themselves, or by the title of their own separate authors, so the general name of poets of the Cycle came gradually to be applied only to the worst, and thus to imply vulgarity or common-place; the more so, as many of the inferior compositions included in the collection seem to have been anonymous, and their authors in consequence describable only under some such common designation as that of the cyclic poets. It is in this manner that we are to explain the disparaging sentiment connected by Horace and others with the idea of a cyclic writer, though no such sentiment was implied in the original meaning of the Epic Cycle.

The poems of the Cycle were thus mentioned in contrast and antithesis with Homer, though originally the Iliad and Odyssey had both been included among them: and this alteration of the meaning of the word has given birth to a mistake as to the primary purpose of the classification, as if it had been designed especially to part off the inferior epic productions from Homer. But while some critics are disposed to distinguish the cyclic poets too pointedly from Homer, I conceive that Welcker goes too much into the other extreme, and identifies the Cycle too closely with that poet. He construes it as a classification deliberately framed to comprise all the various productions of the Homeric epic, with its unity of action and comparative paucity, both of persons and adventures, —as opposed to the Hesiodic epic, crowded with separate persons and pedigrees, and destitute of central action as well as of closing catastrophe. This opinion does, indeed, coincide to a great degree with the fact, inasmuch as few of the Hesiodic epics appear to have been included in the Cycle : to say that none were included, would be too much, for we cannot venture to set aside either the Theogony or the Aegimius; but we may account for their absence perfectly well without supposing any design to exclude them, for it is obvious that their rambling character (like that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid) forbade the possibility of interweaving them in any continuous series. Continuity in the series of narrated events, coupled with a certain degree of antiquity in the poems, being the principle on which the arrangement called the Epic Cycle was based, the Hesiodic poems generally were excluded, not from any preconceived intention, but because they could not be brought into harmony with such orderly reading.

What were the particular poems which it comprised, we cannot now determine with exactness. Welcker arranges them as follows : Titanomachia, Donais, Amazonia (or Atthis), Edipodia, Thebais (or Expedition of Amphiaraus), Epigoni (or Alcmeonis), Minyas (or Phokais), Capture of Oechalia, Cyprian Verses, Iliad, Athiopis, Lesser Iliad, Iliupersis or the Taking of Troy, Returns of the Heroes, Odyssey, and Telegonia. Wuellner, Lange, and Mr. Fynes Clinton enlarge the list of cyclic poems still farther. But all such reconstructions of the Cycle are conjectural and destitute of authority : the only poems which we can affirm on positive grounds to have been comprehended in it, are, first, the series respecting the heroes of Troy, from the Cypria to the Telegonia, of which Proclus has preserved the arguments, and which includes the Iliad and Odyssey,—next, the old Thebais, which is expressly termed cyclic, in order to distinguish it from the poem of the same name composed by Antimachus. In regard to other particular compositions, we have no evidence to guide us, either for admission or exclusion, except our general views as to the scheme upon which the Cycle was framed. If my idea of that scheme be correct, the Alexandrine critics arranged therein all their old epical treasures, down to the Telegonia,—the good as well as the bad; gold, silver, and iron,—provided only they could be pieced in with the narrative series. But I cannot venture to include, as Mr. Clinton does, the Europia, the Phoronis, and other poems of which we know only the names, because it is uncertain whether their contents were such as to fulfill their primary condition : nor can I concur with him in thinking that, where there were two or more poems of the same title and subject, one of them must necessarily have been adopted into the Cycle to the exclusion of the others. There may have been two Theogonies, or two Herakleias, both comprehended in the Cycle; the purpose being (as I before remarked), not to sift the better from the worse, but to determine some fixed order, convenient for reading and reference, amidst a multiplicity of scattered compositions, as the basis of a new, entire, and corrected edition.

Whatever may have been the principle on which the cyclic poems were originally strung together, they are all now lost, except those two unrivalled diamonds, whose brightness, dimming all the rest, has alone sufficed to confer imperishable glory even upon the earliest phase of Grecian life. It has been the natural privilege of the Iliad and Odyssey, from the rise of Grecian philology down to the present day, to provoke an intense curiosity, which, even in the historical and literary days of Greece, there were no assured facts to satisfy. These compositions are the monuments of an age essentially religious and poetical, but essentially also unphilosophical, unreflecting, and unrecording : the nature of the case forbids our having any authentic transmitted knowledge respecting such a period; and the lesson must be learned, hard and painful though it be, that no imaginable reach of critical acumen will of itself enable us to discriminate fancy from reality, in the absence of a tolerable stock of evidence. After the numberless comments and acrimonious controversies I to which the Homeric poems have given rise, it can hardly be said that any of the points originally doubtful have obtained a solution such as to command universal acquiescence. To glance at all these controversies, however briefly, would far transcend the limits of the present work; but the most abridged Grecian history would be incomplete without some inquiry respecting the Poet (so the Greek critics in their veneration denominated Homer), and the productions which pass now, or have heretofore passed, under his name.

Who or what was Homer? What date is to be assigned to him? What were his compositions?

A person, putting these questions to Greeks of different towns and ages, would have obtained answers widely discrepant and contradictory. Since the invaluable labors of Aristarchus and the other Alexandrine critics on the text of the Iliad and Odyssey, it has, indeed, been customary to regard those two (putting aside the Hymns, and a few other minor poems) as being the only genuine Homeric compositions : and the literary men called Chorizontes, or the Separators, at the head of whom were Xenon and Hellanikus, endeavored still farther to reduce the number by disconnecting the Iliad and Odyssey, and pointing out that both could not be the work of the same author. Throughout the whole course of Grecian antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Hymns, have been received as Homeric : but if we go back to the time of Herodotus, or still earlier, we find that several other epics also were ascribed to Homer, —and there were not wanting critics, earlier than the Alexandrine age, who regarded the whole Epic Cycle, together with the satirical poem called Margites, the Batrachomyomachia, and other smaller pieces, as Homeric works. The cyclic Thebais and the Epigoni (whether they be two separate poems, or the latter a second part of the former) were in early days currently ascribed to Homer : the same was the case with the Cyprian Verses : some even attributed to him several other poems, the Capture of Oechalia, the Lesser Iliad, the Phokais, and the Amazonia. The title of the poem called Thebais to be styled Homeric, depends upon evidence more ancient than any which can be produced to authenticate the Iliad and Odyssey : for Kallinus, the ancient elegiac poet (BC. 640), mentioned Homer as the author of it,—and his opinion was shared by many other competent judges. From the remarkable description given by Herodotus, of the expulsion of the rhapsodes from Sicyon, by the despot Kleisthenes, in the time of Solon (about BC 580), we may form a probable judgment that the Thebais and the Epigoni were then rhapsodized at Sicyon as Homeric productions. And it is clear from the language of Herodotus, that in his time the general opinion ascribed to Homer both the Cyprian Verses and the Epigoni, though he himself dissents. In spite of such dissent, however, that historian must have conceived the names of Homer and Hesiod to be nearly coextensive with the whole of the ancient epic; otherwise, he would hardly have delivered his memorable judgment, that they two were the framers of Grecian theogony.

The many different cities which laid claim to the birth of Homer (seven is rather below the truth, and Smyrna and Chios are the most prominent among them), is well known, and most of them had legends to tell respecting his romantic parentage, his alleged blindness, and his life of an itinerant bard, acquainted with poverty and sorrow. The discrepancies of statement respecting the date of his reputed existence are no less worthy of remark; for out of the eight different epochs assigned to him, the oldest differs from the most recent by a period of four hundred and sixty years.

Thus conflicting would have been the answers returned in different portions of the Grecian world to any questions respecting the person of Homer. But there were a poetical gens (fraternity or guild) in the Ionic island of Chios, who, if the question had been put to them, would have answered in another manner. To them, Homer was not a mere antecedent man, of kindred nature with themselves, but a divine or semi-divine eponymous and progenitor, whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices, and in whose ascendant name and glory the individuality of every member of the gens was merged. The compositions of each separate Homerid, or the combined efforts of many of them in conjunction, were the works of Homer: the name of the individual bard perishes and his authorship is forgotten, but the common gentile father lives and grows in renown, from generation to generation, by the genius of his self-renewing sons.

Such was the conception entertained of Homer by the poetical gens called Homerids; and in the general obscurity of the whole case, I lean towards it as the most plausible conception. Homer is not only the reputed author of the various compositions emanating from the gentile members, but also the recipient of the many different legends and of the divine genealogy, which it pleases their imagination to confer upon him. Such manufacture of fictitious personality, and such perfect incorporation of the entities of religion and fancy with the real world, is a process familiar, and even habitual, in the retrospective vision of the Greeks.

It is to be remarked, that the poetical gens here brought to view, the Homerids, are of indisputable authenticity. Their existence and their considerations were maintained down to the historical times in the island of Chios. If the Homerids were still conspicuous, even in the days of Akusilaus, Pindar, Hellanikus, and Plato, when their productive invention had ceased, and when they had become only guardians and distributors, in common with others, of the treasures bequeathed by their predecessors,—far more exalted must their position have been three centuries before, while they were still the inspired creators of epic novelty, and when the absence of writing assured to them the undisputed monopoly of their own compositions.

Homer, then, is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father (the ideas of worship and ancestry coalescing, as they constantly did in the Grecian mind) of the gentile Homerids, and he is the author of the Thebais, the Epigoni, the Cyprian Verses, the Proems, or Hymns, and other poems, in the same sense in which he is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey,—assuming that these various compositions emanate, as perhaps they may, from different individuals numbered among the Homerids. But this disallowance of the historical personality of Homer is quite distinct from the question, with which it has been often confounded, whether the Iliad and Odyssey are originally entire poems, and whether by one author or otherwise. To us, the name of Homer means these two poems, and little else : we desire to know as much as can be learned respecting their date, their original composition, their preservation, and their mode of communication to the public. All these questions are more or less complicated one with the other.

Concerning the date of the poems, we have no other information except the various affirmations respecting the age of Homer, which differ among themselves (as I have before observed) by an interval of four hundred and sixty years, and which for the most part determine the date of Homer by reference to some other event, itself fabulous and unauthenticated,— such as the Trojan war, the Return of the Herakleids, or the Ionic migration. Krates placed homer earlier than the Return of the Herakleids, and less than eighty years after the Trojan war: Eratosthenes put him one hundred years after the Trojan war : Aristotle, Aristarchus, and Castor made his birth contemporary with the Ionic migration, while Apollodorus brings him down to one hundred years after that event, or two hundred and forty years after the taking of Troy. Thucydides assigns to him a date much subsequent to the Trojan war. On the other hand, Theopompus and Euphorion refer his age to the far more recent period of the Lydian king, Gyges, (Ol. 18-23, BC 708-688,) and put him five hundred years after the Trojan epoch. What were the grounds of these various conjectures, we do not know; though in the statements of Krates and Eratosthenes, we may pretty well divine. But the oldest dictum preserved to us respecting the date of Homer,—meaning thereby the date of the Iliad and Odyssey,— appears to me at the same time the most credible, and the most consistent with the general history of the ancient epic. Herodotus places Homer four hundred years before himself; taking his departure, not from any fabulous event, but from a point of real and authentic time. Four centuries anterior to Herodotus would be a period commencing with 880 BC so that the composition of the Homeric poems would thus fall in a space between 850 and 800 BC. We may gather from the language of Herodotus that this was his own judgment, opposed to a current opinion, which assigned the poet to an earlier epoch.

To place the Iliad and Odyssey at some periods between 850 BC and 776 BC., appears to me more probable than any other date, anterior or posterior, more probable than the latter, because we are justified in believing these two poems to be older than Arktinus, who comes shortly after the first Olympiad; more probable than the former, because, the farther we push the poems back, the more do we enhance the wonder of their preservation, already sufficiently great, down from such an age and society to the historical times.

The mode in which these poems, and indeed all poems, epic as well as lyric, down to the age (probably) of Peisistratus, were circulated and brought to bear upon the public, deserves particular attention. They were not read by individuals alone and apart, but sung or recited at festivals or to assembled companies. This seems to be one of the few undisputed facts with regard to the great poet : for even those who maintain that the Iliad and Odyssey were preserved by means of writing, seldom contend that they were read.

In appreciating the effect of the poems, we must always take account of this great difference between early Greece and our own times; between the congregation mustered at a solemn festival, stimulated by community of sympathy, listening to a measured and musical recital from the lips of trained bards or rhapsodes, whose matter was supposed to have been inspired by the Muse, and the solitary reader, with a manuscript before him; such manuscript being, down to a very late period in Greek literature, indifferently written, without division into parts, and without marks of punctuation. As in the case of dramatic performances, in all ages, so in that of the early Grecian epic, a very large proportion of its impressive effect was derived from the talent of the reciter and the force of the general accompaniments, and would have disappeared altogether in solitary reading.

Originally, the bard sung his own epical narrative, commencing with a proemium or hymn to one of the gods : his profession was separate and special, like that of the carpenter, the leech, or the prophet: his manner and enunciation must have required particular training no less than his imaginative faculty. His character presents itself in the Odyssey as one highly esteemed; and in the Iliad, even Achilles does not disdain to touch the lyre with his own hands, and to sing heroic deeds?

Not only did the Iliad and Odyssey, and the poems embodied in the Epic Cycle, produce all their impression and gain all their renown by this process of oral delivery, but even the lyric and choric poets who succeeded them were known and felt in the same way by the general public, even after the full establishment of habits of reading among lettered men. While in the ease of the epic, the recitation or singing had been extremely simple, and the measure comparatively little diversified, with no other accompaniment than that of the four-stringed harp,—all the variations superinduced upon the original hexameter, beginning with the pentameter and iambus, and proceeding step by step to the complicated strophes of Pindar and the tragic writers, still left the general effect of the poetry greatly dependent upon voice and accompaniments, and pointedly distinguished from mere solitary reading of the words. And in the dramatic poetry, the last in order of time, the declamation and gesture of the speaking actor alternated with the song and dance of the chorus, and with the instruments of musicians, the whole being set off by imposing visible decorations. Now both dramatic effect and song are familiar in modern times, so that every man knows the difference between reading the words and bearing them under the appropriate circumstances : but poetry, as such, is, and has now long been, so exclusively enjoyed by reading, that it requires an especial memento to bring us back to the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were addressed only to the ear and feelings of a promiscuous and sympathizing multitude.

Readers there were none, at least until the century preceding Solon and Peisistratus : from that time forward, they gradually increased both in number and influence; though doubtless small, even in the most literary period of Greece, as compared with modern European society. So far as the production of beautiful epic poetry was concerned, however, the select body of instructed readers, furnished a less potent stimulus than the unlettered and listening crowd of the earlier periods. The poems of Choerilus and Antimachus, towards the close of the Peloponnesian war, though admired by erudite men, never acquired popularity; and the emperor Hadrian failed in his attempt to bring the latter poet into fashion at the expense of Homer.

It will be seen by what has been here stated, that that class of men, who formed the medium of communication between the verse and the ear, were of the highest importance in the ancient world, and especially in the earlier periods of its career,— the bards and rhapsodes for the epic, the singers for the lyric, the actors and singers jointly with the dancers for the chorus and drama. The lyric and dramatic poets taught with their own lips the delivery of their compositions, and so prominently did this business of teaching present itself to the view of the public, that the name Didaskalia, by which the dramatic exhibition was commonly designated, derived from thence its origin.

Among the number of rhapsodes who frequented the festivals at a time when Grecian cities were multiplied and easy of access, for the recitation of the ancient epic, there must have been of course great differences of excellence; but that the more considerable individuals of the class were elaborately trained and highly accomplished in the exercise of their profession, we may assume as certain. But it happens that Socrates, with his two pupils Plato and Xenophon, speak contemptuously of their merits; and many persons have been disposed, somewhat too readily, to admit this sentence of condemnation as conclusive, without taking account of the point of view from which it was delivered. These philosophers considered Homer and other poets with a view to instruction, ethical doctrine, and virtuous practice: they analyzed the characters whom the poet described, sifted the value of the lessons conveyed, and often struggled to discover a hidden meaning, where they disapproved that which was apparent. When they found a man like the rhapsode, who professed to impress the Homeric narrative upon an audience, and yet either never meddled at all, or meddled unsuccessfully, with the business of exposition, they treated him with contempt; indeed, Socrates depreciates the poets themselves, much upon the same principle, as dealing with matters of which they could render no rational account. It was also the habit of Plato and Xenophon to disparage generally professional exertion of talent for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, contrasting it often in an indelicate manner with the gratuitous teaching and ostentatious poverty of their master. But we are not warranted in judging the rhapsodes by such a standard. Though they were not philosophers or moralists, it was their province—and it had been so, long before the philosophical point of view was opened—to bring their poet home to the bosoms and emotions of an assembled crowd, and to penetrate themselves with his meaning so far as was suitable for that purpose, adapting to it the appropriate graces of action and intonation. In this their genuine task they were valuable members of the Grecian community, and seem to have possessed all the qualities necessary for success.

These rhapsodes, the successors of the primitive aoedi, or bards, seem to have been distinguished from them by the discontinuance of all musical accompaniment. Originally, the bard sung, enlivening the song with occasional touches of the simple four-stringed harp: his successor, the rhapsode, recited, holding in his hand nothing but a branch of laurel and depending for affect upon voice and manner,—a species of musical and rhythmical declamation, which gradually increased in vehement emphasis and gesticulation until it approached to that of the dramatic actor. At what time this change took place, or whether the two different modes of enunciating the ancient epic may for a certain period have gone on simultaneously, we have no means of determining. Hesiod receives from the Muse a branch of laurel, as a token of his ordination into their service, which marks him for a rhapsode; while the ancient bard with his harp is still recognized in the Homeric Hymn to the Delian Apollo, as efficient and popular at the Panionic festivals in the island of Delos. Perhaps the improvements made in the harp, to which three strings, in addition to the original four, were attached by Terpander (BC 660), and the growing complication of instrumental music generally, may have contributed to discredit the primitive accompaniment, and thus to promote the practice of recital : the story, that Terpander himself composed music, not only for hexameter poems of his own, but also for those of Homer, seems to indicate that the music which preceded him was ceasing to find favor. By whatever steps the change from the bard to the rhapsode took place, certain it is that before the time of Solon, the latter was the recognized and exclusive organ of the old Epic; sometimes in short fragments before private companies, by single rhapsodes, sometimes several rhapsodes in continuous succession at a public festival.

Respecting the mode in which the Homeric poems were preserved, during the two centuries (or as some think, longer interval) between their original composition and the period shortly preceding Solon, and respecting their original composition and subsequent changes, there are wide differences of opinion among able critics. Were they preserved with or without being written? Was the Iliad originally composed as one poem, and the Odyssey in like manner, or is each of them an aggregation of parts originally self-existent and unconnected? Was the authorship of each poem single-headed or many-headed?

Either tacitly or explicitly, these questions have been generally coupled together and discussed with reference to each other, by inquiries into the Homeric poems; though Mr. Payne Knight's Prolegomena have the merit of keeping them distinct. Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf, turning to account the Venetian Scholia which had then been recently published, first opened philosophical discussion as to the history of the Homeric text. A considerable part of that dissertation (though by no means the whole) is employed in vindicating the position, previously announced by Bentley, among others, that the separate constituent portions of the Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into any compact body and unchangeable order until the days of Peisistratus, in the sixth century before Christ. As a step towards that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no written copies of either poem could be shown to have existed during the earlier times to which their composition is referred, and that without writing, neither the perfect symmetry of so complicated a work could have been originally conceived by any poet, nor, if realized by him, transmitted with assurance to posterity. The absence of easy and convenient writing, such as must be indispensably supposed for long manuscripts, among the early Greeks, was thus one of the points in Wolf's case against the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By Nitzsch and other leading opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the other seems to have been accepted as he originally put it; and it has been considered incumbent, on those who defended the ancient aggregate character of the Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that they were written poems from the beginning.

To me it appears that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to Peisistratus and his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are nowise admissible. But much would undoubtedly be gained towards that view of the question, if it could be shown that, in order to controvert it, we were driven to the necessity of admitting long written poems in the ninth century before the Christian era. Few things, in my opinion, can be more improbable : and Mr. Payne Knight, opposed as he is to the Wolfian hypothesis, admits this no less than Wolf himself. The traces of writing in Greece, even in the seventh century before the Christian era, are exceedingly trifling. We have no remaining inscription earlier than the 40th Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskillfully executed: nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtxus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground, which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon with regard to the rhapsodes at the Panathenma; but for what length of time, previously, manuscripts had existed, we are unable to say.

Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing habits of society with regard to poetry, for they admit generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard, but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts, to insure the preservation of the poems, the unassisted memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we only escape a smaller difficulty by running into a greater; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with extraordinary memory, is far less astonishing than that of long manuscripts in an age essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when even suitable instruments and materials for the process arc not obvious. Moreover, there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under no necessity for refreshing his memory by consulting a manuscript. For if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a disqualification for the profession, which we know that it was not; as well from the example of Demodokus in the Odyssey, as from that of the blind bard of Chios, in the hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer himself: The author of that Hymn, be he who he may, could never have described a blind man as attaining the utmost perfection in his art, if he had been conscious that the memory of the bard was only maintained by constant reference to the manuscript in his chest.

Nor will it be found, after all, that the effort of memory required, either from bards or rhapsodes, even for the longest of these old Epic poems, though doubtless great, was at all superhuman. Taking the case with reference to the entire Iliad and Odyssey, we know that there were educated gentlemen at Athens who could repeat both poems by heart: but in the professional recitations, we are not to imagine that the same person did go through the whole : the recitation was essentially a joint undertaking, and the rhapsodes who visited a festival would naturally understand among themselves which part of the poem should devolve upon each particular individual. Under such circumstances, and with such means of preparation beforehand, the quantity of verse which a rhapsode could deliver would be measured, not so much by the exhaustion of his memory, as by the physical sufficiency of his voice, having reference to the sonorous, emphatic, and rhythmical pronunciation required from him.

But what guarantee have we for the exact transmission of the text for a space of two centuries by simply oral means? It may be replied, that oral transmission would hand down the text as exactly as in point of fact it was handed down. The great lines of each poem, the order of parts, the vein of Homeric feeling, and the general style of locution, and, for the most part, the true words, would be maintained : for the professional training of the rhapsode, over and above the precision of his actual memory, would tend to Homerize his mind (if the expression may be permitted), and to restrain him within this magic circle. On the other hand, in respect to the details of the text, we should expect that there would be wide differences and numerous inaccuracies : and so there really were, as the records contained in the Scholia, together with the passages cited in ancient authors, but not found in our Homeric text, abundantly testify.

Moreover, the state of the Iliad and Odyssey, in respect to the letter called the Digamma, affords a proof that they were recited for a considerable period before they were committed to writing, insomuch that the oral pronunciation underwent during the interval a sensible change. At the time when these poems were composed, the Digamma was an effective consonant, and figured as such in the structure of the verse: at the time when they were committed to writing, it had ceased to be pronounced, and therefore never found a place in any of the manuscripts, insomuch that the Alexandrine critics, though they knew of its existence in the much later poems of Alkaeus and Sappho, never recognized it in Homer. The hiatus, and the various perplexities of metre occasioned by the loss of the Digamma, were corrected by different grammatical stratagems. But the whole history of this lost letter is very curious, and is rendered intelligible only by the supposition that the Iliad and Odyssey belonged for a wide space of time to the memory, the voice, and the ear, exclusively.

At what period these poems, or, indeed, any other Greek poems, first began to be written, must be matter of conjecture, though there is ground for assurance that it was before the time of Solon. If, in the absence of evidence, we may venture upon naming any more determinate period, the question at once suggests itself, what were the purposes which, in that stage of society, a manuscript at its first commencement must have been intended to answer? For whom was a written Iliad necessary? Not for the rhapsodes; for with them it was not only planted in the memory, but also interwoven with the feelings, and conceived in conjunction with all those flexions and intonations of voice, pauses, and other oral artifices, which were required for emphatic delivery, and which the naked manuscript could never reproduce. Not for the general public, they were accustomed to receive it with its rhapsodic delivery, and with its accompaniments of a solemn and crowded festival. The only persons for whom the written Iliad would be suitable, would be a select few; studious and curious men, a class of readers, capable of analyzing the complicated emotions which they had experienced as hearers in the crowd, and who would, on perusing the written words, realize in their imaginations a sensible portion of the impression communicated by the reciter.

Incredible as the statement may seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and there was in early Greece, a time when no such reading class existed. If we could discover at what time such a class first began to be formed, we should be able to make a guess at the time when the old Epic poems were first committed to writing. Now the period which may with the greatest probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the formation even of the narrowest reading class in Greece, is the middle of the seventh century before the Christian era (B. 660 to BC 630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, etc. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music, the elegiac and iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable, yet the nearest approaching to the sense). It argued a new way of looking at the old epical treasures of the people, as well as a thirst for new poetical effect; and the men who stood forward in it may well be considered as desirous to study, and competent to criticize, from their own individual point of view, the written words of the Homeric rhapsodes, just as we are told that Kallinus both noticed and eulogized the Thebais as the production of Homer. There seems, therefore, ground for conjecturing, that (for the use of this newly-formed and important, but very narrow class) manuscripts of the Homeric poems and other old epics, the Thebais and the Cypria as well as the Iliad and the Odyssey, began to be compiled towards the middle of the seventh century BC, and the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, which took place about the same period, would furnish increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon. A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with it; so that before the time of Solon, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manuscripts, though still comparatively few, might have attained a certain recognized authority, and formed a tribunal of reference, against the carelessness of individual rhapsodes.

We may, I think, consider the Iliad and Odyssey to have been preserved without the aid of writing, for a period near upon two centuries. But is it true, as Wolf imagined, and as other able critics have imagined, also, that the separate portions of which these two poems are composed were originally distinct epical ballads, each constituting a separate whole and intended for separate recitation? Is it true, that they had not only no common author, but originally, neither common purpose nor fixed order, and that their first permanent arrangement and integration was delayed for three centuries, and accomplished at last only by the taste of Peisistratus conjoined with various lettered friends?

This hypothesis, to which the genius of Wolf first gave celebrity, but which has been since enforced more in detail by others, especially by William Muller and Laehmann, appears to me not only unsupported by any sufficient testimony, but also opposed to other testimony as well as to a strong force of internal probability. The authorities quoted by Wolf are Josephus, Cicero, and Pausanias : Josephus mentions nothing about Peisistratus, but merely states (what we may accept as the probable fact) that the Homeric poems were originally unwritten, and preserved only in songs or recitations, from which they were at a subsequent period put into writing : hence many of the discrepancies in the text. On the other hand, Cicero and Pausanias go farther, and affirm that Peisistratus both collected, and arranged in the existing order, the rhapsodies of the Iliad and Odyssey, (implied as poems originally entire, and subsequently broken into pieces,) which he found partly confused and partly isolated from each other, each part being then remembered only in its own portion of the Grecian world. Respecting Hipparchus the son of Peisistratus, too, we are told in the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue which bears his name, that he was the first to introduce into Attica, the poetry of Homer, and that he prescribed to the rhapsodes to recite the parts of the Panathenaic festival in regular sequence.

Wolf and William Muller occasionally speak as if they admitted something like an Iliad and Odyssey as established aggregates prior to Peisistratus; but for the most part they represent him or his associates as having been the first to put together Homeric poems which were before distinct and self-existent compositions. And Lachmann, the recent expositor of the same theory, ascribes to Peisistratus still more unequivocally this original integration of parts in reference to the Iliad, —distributing the first twenty-two books of the poem into sixteen separate songs, and treating it as ridiculous to imagine that the fusion of these songs, into an order such as we now read, belongs to any date earlier than Peisistratus.

Upon this theory we may remark, first, that it stands opposed to the testimony existing respecting the regulations of Solon; who, before the time of Peisistratus, had enforced a fixed order of recitation on the rhapsodes of the Iliad at the Panathenaic festival; not only directing that they should go through the rhapsodies seriatim, and without omission or corruption, but also establishing a prompter or censorial authority to insure obedience, which implies the existence (at the same time that it proclaims the occasional infringement) of an orderly aggregate, as well as or manuscripts professedly complete. Next, the theory ascribes to Peisistratus a character not only materially different from what is indicated by Cicero and Pausanias, who represent him, not as having put together atoms originally distinct, but as the renovator of an ancient order subsequently lost, but also in itself unintelligible, and inconsistent with Grecian habit and feeling. That Peisistratus should take pains to repress the license, or make up for the unfaithful memory, of individual rhapsodes, and to ennoble the Panathenaic festival by the most correct recital of a great and venerable poem, according to the standard received among the best judges in Greece, this is a task both suitable to his position, and requiring nothing more than an improved recension, together with exact adherence to it on the part of the rhapsodes.

But what motive had he to string together several poems, previously known only as separate, into one new whole? What feeling could he gratify by introducing the extensive changes and transpositions surmised by Lachmann, for the purpose of binding together sixteen songs, which the rhapsodes are assumed to have been accustomed to recite, and the people to hear, each by itself apart?

Peisistratus was not a poet, seeking to interest the public mind by new creations and combinations, but a ruler, desirous to impart solemnity to a great religious festival in his native city. Now such a purpose would be answered by selecting, amidst the divergences of rhapsodes in different parts of Greece, that order of text which intelligent men could approve as a return to the pure and pristine Iliad; but it would be defeated if he attempted large innovations of his own, and brought out for the first time a new Iliad by blending together, altering, and transposing, many old and well-known songs. A novelty so bold would have been more likely to offend than to please both the critics and the multitude. And if it were even enforced, by authority, at Athens, no probable reason can be given why all the other towns, and all the rhapsodes throughout Greece, should abnegate their previous habits in favor of it, since Athens at that time enjoyed no political ascendency such as she acquired during the following century. On the whole, it will appear that the character and position of Peisistratus himself go far to negative the function which Wolf and Lachmann put upon him. His interference presupposes a certain foreknown and ancient aggregate, the main lineaments of which were familiar to the Grecian public, although many of the rhapsodes in their practice may have deviated from it both by omission and interpolation. In correcting the Athenian recitations conformably with such understood general type, he might hope both to procure respect for Athens, and to constitute a fashion for the rest of Greece. But this step of "collecting the torn body of sacred Homer," is something generically different from the composition of a new Iliad out of preexisting songs, the former is as easy, suitable, and promising, as the latter is violent and gratuitous.

To sustain the inference, that Peisistratus was the first architect of the Iliad and Odyssey, it ought at least to be shown that no other long and continuous poems existed during the earlier centuries. But the contrary of this is known to be the fact. The Aethiopis of Arktinus, which contained nine thousand one hundred verses, dates from a period more than two centuries earlier than Peisistratus : several other of the lost cyclic epics, some among them of considerable length, appear during the century succeeding Arktinus; and it is important to notice that three or four at least of these poems passed currently under the name of Homer. There is no greater intrinsic difficulty in supposing long epics to have begun with the Iliad and Odyssey than with the Ethiopis : the ascendency of the name of Homer and the subordinate position of Arktinus, in the history of early Grecian poetry, tend to prove the former in preference to the latter.

Moreover, we find particular portions of the Iliad, which expressly pronounce themselves, by their own internal evidence, as belonging to a large whole, and not as separate integers. We can hardly conceive the Catalogue in the second book, except as a fractional composition, and with reference to a series of approaching exploits; for, taken apart by itself, such a barren enumeration of names could have stimulated neither the fancy of the poet, nor the attention of the listeners. But the Homeric Catalogue had acquired a sort of canonical authority even in the time of Solon, insomuch that he interpolated a line into it, or was accused of doing so, for the purpose of gaining a disputed point against the Megarians, who, on their side, set forth another version. No such established reverence could have been felt for this document, unless there had existed for a long time prior to Peisistratus, the habit of regarding and listening to the Iliad as a continuous poem. And when the philosopher Xenophanes, contemporary with Peisistratus, noticed Homer as the universal teacher, and denounced him as an unworthy describer of the gods, he must have connected this great mental sway, not with a number of unconnected rhapsodies, but with an aggregate Iliad and Odyssey; probably with other poems, also, ascribed to the same author, such as the Cypria, Epigoni, and Thebais.

We find, it is true, references in various authors to portions of the Iliad, each by its own separate name, such as the Teichomachy, the Aristeia (preeminent exploits) of Diomedes, or Agamemnon, the Doloneia, or Night-expedition (of Dolon as well as of Odysseus and Diomedes), etc., and hence, it has been concluded, that these portions originally existed as separate poems, before they were cemented together into an Iliad. But such references prove nothing to the point; for until the Iliad was divided by Aristarchus and his colleagues into a given number of books, or rhapsodies, designated by the series of letters in the alphabet, there was no method of calling attention to any particular portion of the poem except by special indication of its subject-matter. Authors subsequent to Peisistratus, such as Herodotus and Plato, who unquestionably conceived the Iliad as a whole, cite the separate fractions of it by designations of this sort.

The foregoing remarks on the Wolfian hypothesis respecting the text of the Iliad, tend to separate two points which are by no means necessarily connected, though that hypothesis, as set forth by Wolf himself, by W. Muller, and by Lachmann, presents the two in conjunction. First, was the Iliad originally projected and composed by one author, and as one poem, or were the different parts composed separately and by unconnected authors, and subsequently strung together into an aggregate? Secondly, assuming that the internal evidence of the poem negative the former supposition, and drive us upon the latter, was the construction of the whole poem deferred, and did the parts exist only in their separate state, until a period so late as the reign of Peisistratus? It is obvious that these two questions are essentially separate, and that a man may believe the Iliad to have been put together out of preexisting songs, without recognizing the age of Peisistratus as the period of its first compilation. Now, whatever may be the steps through which the poem passed to its ultimate integrity, there is sufficient reason for believing that they had been accomplished long before that period : the friends of Peisistratus found an Iliad already existing and already ancient in their time, even granting that the poem had not been originally born in a state of unity. Moreover, the Alexandrine critics, whose remarks are preserved in the Scholia, do not even notice the Peisistratic recension among the many manuscript, which they had before them: and Mr. Payne Knight justly infers from their silence that either they did not possess it, or it was in their eyes of no great authority; which could never have been the case if it had been the prime originator of Homeric unity.

The line of argument, by which the advocates of Wolf's hypothesis negative the primitive unity of the poem, consists in exposing gaps, incongruities, contradictions, etc., between the separate parts. Now, if in spite of all these incoherencies, standing mementos of an antecedent state of separation, the component poems were made to coalesce so intimately as to appear as if they had been one from the beginning, we can better understand the complete success of the proceeding and the universal prevalence of the illusion, by supposing such coalescence to have taken place at a very early period, during the productive days of epical genius, and before the growth of reading and criticism. The longer the aggregation of the separate poems was deferred, the harder it would be to obliterate in men's minds the previous state of separation, and to make them accept the new aggregate as an original unity. The bards or rhapsodes might have found comparatively little difficulty in thus piecing together distinct songs, during the ninth or eighth century before Christ; but if we suppose the process to be deferred until the latter half of the sixth century, if we imagine that Solon, with all his contemporaries and predecessors, knew nothing about any aggregate Iliad, but was accustomed to read and hear only those sixteen distinct epical pieces into which Lachmann would dissect the Iliad, each of the sixteen bearing a separate name of its own, no compilation then for the first time made by the friends of Peisistratus could have effaced the established habit, and planted itself in the general convictions of Greece as the primitive Homeric production. Had the sixteen pieces remained disunited and individualized down to the time of Peisistratus, they would in all probability have continued so ever afterwards; nor could the extensive changes and transpositions which (according to Lachmann’s theory) were required to melt them down into our present Iliad, have obtained at that late period universal acceptance. Assuming it to be true that such changes and transpositions did really take place, they must at least be referred to a period greatly earlier than Peisistratus or Solon.

The whole tenor of the poems themselves confirms what is here remarked. There is nothing either in the Iliad or Odyssey which savors of modernism, applying that term to the age of Peisistratus; nothing which brings to our view the alterations, brought about by two centuries, in the Greek language, the coined money, the habits of writing and reading, the despotisms and republican governments, the close military array, the improved construction of ships, the Amphiktyonic convocations, the mutual frequentation of religious festivals, the Oriental and Egyptian veins of religion, etc., familiar to the latter epoch. These alterations Onomakritus and the other literary friends of Peisistratus, could hardly have failed to notice even without design, had they then for the first time undertaken the task of piecing together many self-existent epics into one large aggregate. Everything in the two great Homeric poems, both in substance and in language, belongs to an age two or three centuries earlier than Peisistratus. Indeed, even the interpolations (or those passages which on the best grounds are pronounced to be such) betray no trace of the sixth century before Christ, and may well have been heard by Archilochus and Kallinus, in some cases even by Arktinus and Hesiod, as genuine Homeric matter. As far as the evidences on the case, as well internal as external, enable us to judge, we seem warranted in believing that the Iliad and Odyssey were recited substantially as they now stand, (always allowing for partial divergences of text, and interpolations,) in 776 BC, our first trustworthy mark of Grecian time. And this ancient date, let it be added, as it is the best-authenticated fact, so it is also the most important attribute of the Homeric poems, considered in reference to Grecian history. For they thus afford us an insight into the ante-historical character of the Greeks, enabling us to trace the subsequent forward march of the nation, and to seize instructive contrasts between their former and their later condition.

Rejecting, therefore, the idea of compilation by Peisistratus, and referring the present state of the Iliad and Odyssey to a period more than two centuries earlier, the question still remains, by what process, or through whose agency, they reached that state? Is each poem the work of one author, or of several? If the latter, do all the parts belong to the same age? What ground is there for believing, that any or all of these parts existed before, as separate poems, and have been accommodated to the place in which they now appear, by more or less systematic alteration?

The acute and valuable Prolegomena of Wolf, half a century ago, powerfully turned the attention of scholars to the necessity of considering the Iliad and Odyssey with reference to the age and society in which they arose, and to the material differences in this respect between Homer and more recent epic poets. Since that time, an elaborate study has been bestowed upon the early manifestations of poetry (Sagen-poesie) among other nations; and the German critics especially, among whom this description of literature has been most cultivated, have selected it as the only appropriate analogy for the Homeric poems. Such poetry, consisting for the most part of short, artless effusions, with little of deliberate or far-sighted combination, has been assumed by many critics as a fit standard to apply for measuring the capacities of the Homeric age; an age exclusively of speakers, singers, and hearers, not of readers or writers. In place of the unbounded admiration which was felt for Homer, not merely as a poet of detail, but as constructor of a long epic, at the time when Wolf wrote his Prolegomena, the tone of criticism passed to the opposite extreme, and attention was fixed entirely upon the defects in the arrangement of the Iliad and Odyssey. Whatever was to be found in them of symmetry or pervading system, was pronounced to be decidedly post-Homeric. Under such preconceived anticipations, Homer seems to have been generally studied in Germany, during the generation succeeding Wolf; the negative portion of whose theory was usually admitted, though as to the positive substitute, what explanation was to be given of the history and present constitution of the Homeric poems, there was by no means the like agreement. Dining the last ten years, however, a contrary tendency has manifested itself; the Wolfian theory has been reexamined and shaken by Nitzsch, who, as well as 0. Muller, Welcker, and other scholars, have revived the idea of original Homeric unity, under certain modifications. The change in Goethe's opinion, coincident with this new direction, is recorded in one of his latest works. On the other hand, the original opinion of Wolf has also been reproduced within the last five years, and fortified with several new observations on the text of the Iliad, by Lachmann.

The point is thus still under controversy among able scholars, and is probably destined to remain so. For, in truth, our means of knowledge are so limited, that no man can produce arguments sufficiently cogent to contend against opposing preconceptions; and it creates a painful sentiment of diffidence when we read the expressions of equal and absolute persuasion with which the two opposite conclusions have both been advanced. We have nothing to teach us the history of these poems except the poems themselves. Not only do we possess no collateral information respecting them or their authors, but we have no one to describe to us the people or the age in which they originated; our knowledge respecting contemporary Homeric society, is collected exclusively from the Homeric compositions themselves. We are ignorant whether any other, or what other, poems preceded them, or divided with them the public favor; nor have we anything better than conjecture to determine either the circumstances under which they were brought before the hearers, or the conditions which a bard of that day was required to satisfy. On all these points, moreover, the age of Thucydides and Plato seems to have been no better informed than we are, except in so far as they could profit by the analogies of the cyclic and other epic poems, which would doubtless in many cases have afforded valuable aid.

Nevertheless, no classical scholar can be easy without some opinion respecting the authorship of these immortal poems. And the more defective the evidence we possess, the more essential is it that all that evidence should be marshaled in the clearest order, and its bearing upon the points in controversy distinctly understood beforehand. Both these conditions seem to have been often neglected, throughout the long-continued Homeric discussion.

To illustrate the first point : Since two poems are comprehended in the problem to be solved, the natural process would be, first, to study the easier of the two, and then to apply the conclusions thence deduced as a means of explaining the other. Now, the Odyssey, looking at its aggregate character, is incomparably more easy to comprehend than the Iliad. Yet most Homeric critics apply the microscope at once, and in the first instance, to the Iliad.

To illustrate the second point : What evidence is sufficient to negative the supposition that the Iliad or the Odyssey is a poem originally and intentionally one? Not simply particular gaps and contradictions, though they be even gross and numerous; but the preponderance of these proofs of mere unprepared coalescence over the other proofs of designed adaptation scattered throughout the whole poem. For the poet (or the cooperating poets, if more than one) may have intended to compose an harmonious whole, but may have realized their intention incompletely, and left partial faults; or, perhaps, the contradictory lines may have crept in through a corrupt text. A survey of the whole poem is necessary to determine the question; and this necessity, too, has not always been attended to.

If it had happened that the Odyssey had been preserved to us alone, without the Iliad, I think the dispute respecting Homeric unity would never have been raised. For the former is, in my judgment, pervaded almost from beginning to end by marks of designed adaptation; and the special faults which Wolf, W. Muller, and B. Thiersch, have singled out for the purpose of disproving such unity of intention, are so few, and of so little importance, that they would have been universally regarded as mere instances of haste or unskillfulness on the part of the poet, had they not been seconded by the far more powerful battery opened against the Iliad. These critics, having laid down their general presumptions against the antiquity of the long epopee, illustrate their principles by exposing the many flaws and fissures in the Iliad, and then think it sufficient if they can show a few similar defects in the Odyssey,— as if the breaking up of Homeric unity in the former naturally entailed a similar necessity with regard to the latter; and their method of proceeding, contrary to the rule above laid down, puts the more difficult problem in the foreground, as a means of solution for the easier. We can hardly wonder, however, that they have applied their observations in the first instance to the Iliad, because it is in every man's esteem the more marked, striking, and impressive poem of the two,—and the character of Homer is more intimately identified with it than with the Odyssey. This may serve as an explanation of the course pursued; but be the case as it may in respect to comparative poetical merit, it is not the less true, that, as an aggregate, the Odyssey is more simple and easily understood, and, therefore, ought to come first in the order of analysis.

Now, looking at the Odyssey by itself, the proofs of an unity of design seem unequivocal and everywhere to be found. A premeditated structure, and a concentration of interest upon one prime hero, under well-defined circumstances, may be traced from the first book to the twenty-third. Odysseus is always either directly or indirectly kept before the reader, as a warrior returning from the fullness of glory at Troy, exposed to manifold and protracted calamities during his return home, on which his whole soul is so bent that he refuses even the immortality offered by Calypso; a victim, moreover, even after his return, to mingled injury and insult from the suitors, who have long been plundering his property, and dishonoring his house; but at length obtaining, by valor and cunning united, a signal revenge, which restores him to all that he had lost. All the persons and all the events in the poem are subsidiary to this main plot : and the divine agency, necessary to satisfy the feeling of the Homeric man, is put forth by Poseidon and Athene, in both cases from dispositions directly bearing upon Odysseus. To appreciate the unity of the Odyssey, we have only to read the objections taken against that of the Iliad, especially in regard to the long withdrawal of Achilles, not only from the scene, but from the memory, together with the independent prominence of Ajax, Diomedes, and other heroes. How far we are entitled from hence to infer the want of premeditated unity in the Iliad, will be presently considered; but it is certain that the constitution of the Odyssey, in this respect, everywhere demonstrates the presence of such unity. Whatever may be the interest attached to Penelope, Telemachus, or Eumaeus, we never disconnect them from their association with Odysseus. The present is not the place for collecting the many marks of artistical structure dispersed throughout this poem; but it may be worthwhile to remark, that the final catastrophe realized in the twenty-second book, the slaughter of the suitors in the very house which they were profaning; is distinctly and prominently marked out in the first and second books, promised by Teiresias in the eleventh, by Athene in the thirteenth, and by Helen in the fifteenth, and gradually. matured by a series of suitable preliminaries, throughout the eight books preceding its occurrence. Indeed, what is principally evident, and what has been often noticed, in the Odyssey, is the equable flow both of the narrative and the events; the absence of that rise and fall of interest which is sufficiently conspicuous in the Iliad.

To set against these evidences of unity, there ought, at least, to be some strong cases produced of occasional incoherence or contradiction. But it is remarkable how little of such counter-evidence is to be found, although the arguments of Wolf, W. Muller, and B. Thiersch stand so much in need of it. They have discovered only one instance of undeniable inconsistency in the parts, the number of days occupied by the absence of Telemachus at Pylus and Sparta. That young prince, though represented as in great haste to depart, and refusing pressing invitations to prolong his stay, must, nevertheless, be supposed to have continued for thirty days the guest of Menelaus, in order to bring his proceedings into chronological harmony with those of Odysseus, and to explain the first meeting of father and son in the swine-fold of Eumaeus. Here is undoubtedly an inaccuracy, (so Nitzsch treats it, and I think justly) on the part of the poet, who did not anticipate, and did not experience in ancient times, so strict a scrutiny; an inaccuracy certainly not at all wonderful; the matter of real wonder is, that it stands almost alone, and that there are no others in the poem.

Now, this is one of the main points on which W. Muller and B. Thiersch rest their theory, explaining the chronological confusion by supposing that the journey of Telemachus to Pylus and Sparta, constituted the subject of an epic originally separate (comprising the first four books and a portion of the fifteenth), and incorporated at second-hand with the remaining poem. And they conceive this view to be farther confirmed by the double assembly of the gods, (at the beginning of the first book as well as of the fifth,) which they treat as an awkward repetition, such as could not have formed part of the primary scheme of any epic poet. But here they only escape a small difficulty by running into another and a greater. For it is impossible to comprehend how the first four books and part of the fifteenth can ever have constituted a distinct epic; since the adventures of Telemachus have no satisfactory termination, except at the point of confluence with those of his father, when the unexpected meeting and recognition takes place under the roof of Eumaeus, nor can any epic poem ever have described that meeting and recognition without giving some account how Odysseus came thither. Moreover, the first two books of the Odyssey distinctly lay the ground, and carry expectation forward, to the final catastrophe of the poem, treating Telemachus as a subordinate person, and his expedition as merely provisional towards an ulterior result. Nor can I agree with W. Muller, that the real Odyssey might well be supposed to begin with the fifth book. On the contrary, the exhibition of the suitors and the Ithakesian agora, presented to us in the second book, is absolutely essential to the full comprehension of the books subsequent to the thirteenth. The suitors are far too important personages in the poem to allow of their being first introduced in so informal a manner as we read in the sixteenth book: indeed, the passing allusions of Athene, (xiii. 310, 375) and Eumaeus (xiv. 41, 81) to the suitors, presuppose cognizance of them on the part of the hearer.

Lastly, the twofold discussion of the gods, at the beginning of the first and fifth books, and the double interference of Athene, far from being a needless repetition, may be shown to suit perfectly both the genuine epical conditions and the unity of the poem. For although the final consummation, and the organization of measures against the suitors, was to be accomplished by Odysseus and Telemachus jointly, yet the march and adventures of the two, until the moment of their meeting in the dwelling of Eumaeus, were essentially distinct. But, according to the religious ideas of the old epic, the presiding direction of Athena was necessary for the safety and success of both of them. Her first interference arouses and inspires the son, her second produces the liberation of the father, constituting a point of union and common origination for two lines of adventures, in both of which she takes earnest interest, but which ate necessarily for a time kept apart in order to coincide at the proper moment.

It will thus appear that the twice-repeated agora of the gods in the Odyssey, bringing home, as it does to one and the same divine agent, that double start which is essential to the scheme of the poem, consists better with the supposition of premeditated unity than with that of distinct self-existent parts. And, assuredly, the manner in which Telemachus and Odysseus, both by different roads, are brought into meeting and conjunction at the dwelling of Eumaeus, is something not only contrived, but very skillfully contrived. It is needless to advert to the highly interesting character of Eumaeus, rendered available as a rallying-point, though in different ways, both to the father and the son, over and above the sympathy which he himself inspires.

If the Odyssey be not an original unity, of what self-existent parts can we imagine it to have consisted? To this question it is difficult to imagine a satisfactory reply : for the supposition that Telemachus and his adventures may once have formed the subject of a separate epos, apart from Odysseus, appears inconsistent with the whole character of that youth as it stands in the poem, and with the events in which he is made to take part. We could better imagine the distribution of the adventures of Odysseus himself into two parts, one containing his wanderings and return, the other handling his ill-treatment by the suitors, and his final triumph. But though either of these two subjects might have been adequate to furnish out a separate poem, it is nevertheless certain that, as they are presented in the Odyssey, the former cannot be divorced from the latter. The simple return of Odysseus, as it now stands in the poem, could satisfy no one as a final close, so long as the suitors remain in possession of his house, and forbid his reunion with his wife. Any poem which treated his wanderings and return separately, must have represented his reunion with Penelope and restoration to his house, as following naturally upon his arrival in Ithaca, thus taking little or no notice of the suitors. But this would be a capital mutilation of the actual epical narrative, which considers the suitors at home as an essential portion of the destiny of the much-suffering hero, not less than his shipwrecks and trials at sea. His return (separately taken) is foredoomed, according to the curse of Polyphemus, executed by Poseidon, to be long deferred, miserable, solitary, and ending with destruction in his house to greet him; and the ground is thus laid, in the very recital of his wanderings, for a new series of events which are to happen to him after his arrival in Ithaca. There is no tenable halting-place between the departure of Odysseus from Troy, and the final restoration to his house and his wife. The distance between these two events may, indeed, be widened, by accumulating new distresses and impediments, but any separate portion of it cannot be otherwise treated than as a fraction of the whole. The beginning and the end are here the data in respect to epical genesis, though the intermediate events admit of being conceived as variables, more or less numerous : so that the conception of the whole may be said without impropriety both to precede and to govern that of the constituent parts.

The general result of a study of the Odyssey may be set down as follows : 1. The poem, as it now stands, exhibits unequivocally adaptation of parts and continuity of structure, whether by one or by several consentient hands : it may, perhaps, be a secondary formation, out of a preexisting Odyssey of smaller dimensions; but, if so, the parts of the smaller whole must have been so far recast as to make them suitable members of the larger, and are noway recognizable by us. 2. The subject-matter of the poem not only does not favor, but goes far to exclude, the possibility of the Wolfian hypothesis. Its events cannot be so arranged as to have composed several antecedent substantive epics, afterwards put together into the present aggregate. Its authors cannot have been mere compilers of preexisting materials, such as Peisistratus and his friends : they must have been poets, competent to work such matter as they found, into a new and enlarged design of their own. Nor can the age in which this long poem, of so many thousand lines, was turned out as a continuous aggregate, be separated from the ancient, productive, inspired age of Grecian epic.

Arriving at such conclusions from the internal evidence of the Odyssey, we can apply them by analogy to the Iliad. We learn something respecting the character and capacities of that early age which has left no other mementos except these two poems. Long continuous epics (it is observed by those who support the views of Wolf), with an artistical structure, are inconsistent with the capacities of a rude and non-writing age. Such epics (we may reply) are not inconsistent with the early age of the Greeks, and the Odyssey is a proof of it; for in that poem the integration of the whole, and the composition of the parts, must have been simultaneous. The analogy of the Odyssey enables us to rebut that preconception under which many ingenious critics sit down to the study of the Iliad, and which induces them to explain all the incoherencies of the latter by breaking it up into smaller unities, as if short epics were the only manifestation of poetical power which the age admitted. There ought to be no reluctance in admitting a presiding scheme and premeditated unity of parts, in so far as the parts themselves point to such a conclusion.

That the Iliad is not so essentially one piece as the Odyssey, every man agrees. It includes a much greater multiplicity of events, and what is yet more important, a greater multiplicity of prominent personages: the very indefinite title which it bears, as contrasted with the specialty of the name, Odyssey, marks the difference at once. The parts stand out more conspicuously from the whole, and admit more readily of being felt and appreciated in detached recitation. We may also add, that it is of more unequal execution than the Odyssey, often rising to a far higher pitch of grandeur, but also, occasionally, tamer : the story does not move on continuously; incidents occur without plausible motive, nor can we shut our eyes to evidences of incoherence and contradiction.

To a certain extent, the Iliad is open to all these remarks, though Wolf and William Muller, and above all Lachmann, exaggerate the case in degree. And from hence has been deduced the hypothesis which treats the parts in their original state as separate integers, independent of, and unconnected with, each other, and forced into unity only by the afterthought of a subsequent age; or sometimes, not even themselves as integers, but as aggregates grouped together out of fragments still smaller, short epics formed by the coalescence of still shorter songs. Now there is some plausibility in these reasonings, so long as the discrepancies are looked upon as the whole of the case. But in point of fact they are not the whole of the case : for it is not less true, that there are large portions of the Iliad which present positive and undeniable evidences of coherence as antecedent and consequent, though we are occasionally perplexed by inconsistencies of detail. To deal with these latter, is a portion of the duties of the critic. But he is not to treat the Iliad as if inconsistency prevailed everywhere throughout its parts; for coherence of parts—symmetrical antecedence and consequence—is discernible throughout the larger half of the poem.

Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else. If (as Lachmann thinks) the Iliad originally consisted of sixteen song or little substantive epics, (Lachmann’s sixteen songs cover the space only as far as the 22d book, or the death of Hector, and two more songs would have to be admitted for the 23d and 24th books),—not only composed by different authors, but by each without any view to conjunction with the rest, — we have then no right to expect any intrinsic continuity between them; and all that continuity which we now find must be of extraneous origin. Where are we to look for the origin? Lachmann follows Wolf, in ascribing the whole constructive process to Peisistratus and his associates, at a period when the creative epical faculty is admitted to have died out. But upon this supposition, Peisistratus (or his associates) must have done much more than omit, transpose, and interpolate, here and there; he must have gone far to rewrite the whole poem. A great poet might have recast preexisting separate songs into one comprehensive whole, but no mere arrangers or compilers would be competent to do so : and we are thus left without any means of accounting for that degree of continuity and consistence which runs through so large a portion of the Iliad, though not through the whole. The idea that the poem, as we read it, grew out of atoms not originally designed for the places which they now occupy, involves us in new and inextricable difficulties, when we seek to elucidate either the mode of coalescence or the degree of existing unity.

Admitting then premeditated adaptation of parts to a certain extent as essential to the Iliad, we may yet inquire, whether it was produced all at once, or gradually enlarged, whether by one author, or by several; and, if the parts be of different age, which is the primitive kernel, and which are the additions.

Welcker, Lange, and Nitzsch treat the Homeric poems as representing a second step in advance, in the progress of popular poetry. First, comes the age of short narrative songs; next, when these have become numerous, there arise constructive minds, who recast and blend together many of them into a larger aggregate, conceived upon some scheme of their own. The age of the epos is followed by that of the epopee, short, spontaneous effusions preparing the way, and furnishing materials, for the architectonic genius of the poet. It is farther presumed by the above-mentioned authors, that the pre-Homeric epic included a great abundance of such smaller songs, a fact which admits of no proof, but which seems countenanced by some passages in Homer, and is in itself no way improbable. But the transition from such songs, assuming them to be ever so numerous, to a combined and continuous poem, forms an epoch in the intellectual history of the nation, implying mental qualities of a higher order than those upon which the songs themselves depend. Nor is it to be imagined that the materials pass unaltered from their first state of isolation into their second state of combination. They must of necessity be recast, and undergo an adapting process, in which the genius of the organizing poet consists; nor can we hope, by simply knowing them as they exist in the second stage, ever to divine how they stood in the first. Such, in my judgment, is the right conception of the Homeric epoch, an organizing poetical mind, still preserving that freshness of observation and vivacity of details which constitutes the charm of the ballad.

Nothing is gained by studying the Iliad as a congeries of fragments once independent of each other : no portion of the poem can be shown to have ever been so, and the supposition introduces difficulties greater than those which it removes. But it is not necessary to affirm that the whole poem as we now read it, belonged to the original and preconceived plan. In this respect, the Iliad produces, upon my mind, an impression totally different from the Odyssey. In the latter poem, the characters and incidents are fewer, and the whole plot appears of one projection, from the beginning down to the death of the suitors : none of the parts look as if they had been composed separately, and inserted by way of addition into a preexisting smaller poem. But the Iliad, on the contrary, presents the appearance of a house built upon a plan comparatively narrow, and subsequently enlarged by successive additions. The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the eleventh to the twenty-second, inclusive, seem to form the primary organization of the poem, then properly an Achilleis : the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books are, perhaps, additions at the tail of this primitive poem, which still leave it nothing more than an enlarged Achilleis. But the books from the second to the seventh, inclusive, together with the tenth, are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem from an Achilleis into an Iliad. The primitive frontispiece, inscribed with the anger of Achilles, and its direct consequences, yet remains, after it has ceased to be coextensive with the poem. The parts added, however, are not necessarily inferior in merit to the original poem : so far is this from being the case, that amongst them are comprehended some of the noblest efforts of the Grecian epic. Nor are they more recent in date than the original ; strictly speaking, they must be a little more recent, but they belong to the same generation and state of society as the primitive Achilles. These qualifications are necessary to keep apart different questions, which, in discussions of Homeric criticism, are but too often confounded.

If we take those portions of the poem which I imagine to have constituted the original Achilleis, it will be found that the sequence of events contained in them is more rapid, more unbroken, and more intimately knit together in the way of cause and effect, than in the other books. Heyne and Lachmann, indeed, with other objecting critics, complains of the action in them as being too much crowded and hurried, since one day lasts from the beginning of the eleventh book to the middle of the eighteenth, without any sensible halt in the march throughout so large a portion of the journey. Lachmann, likewise, admits that those separate songs, into which he imagines that the whole Iliad may be dissected, cannot be severed with the same sharpness, in the books subsequent to the eleventh, as in those before it. There is only one real halting-place from the eleventh book to the twenty-second—the death of Patroclus; and this can never be conceived as the end of a separate poem, though it is a capital step in the development of the Achilleis, and brings about that entire revolution in the temper of Achilles which was essential for the purpose of the poet. It would be a mistake to imagine that there ever could have existed a separate poem called Patrocleia, though a part of the Iliad was designated by that name. For Patroclus has no substantive position : he is the attached friend and second of Achilles, but nothing else, standing to the latter in a relation of dependence resembling that of Telemachus to Odysseus. And the way in which Patroclus is dealt with in the Iliad, is, (in my judgment,) the most dexterous and artistical contrivance in the poem, that which approaches nearest to the neat tissue of the odyssey.

The great and capital misfortune which prostrates the strength of the Greeks, and renders them incapable of defending themselves without Achilles, is the disablement, by wounds, of Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus; so that the defense of the wall and of the ships is left only to heroes of the second magnitude (Ajax alone excepted), such as Idomeneus, Leonteus, Polypoetes, Meriones, Menelaus, etc. Now, it is remarkable that all these three first-rate chiefs are in full force at the beginning of the eleventh book : all three are wounded in the battle which that book describes, and at the commencement of which Agamemnon is full of spirits and courage.

Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which Homer concentrates our attention in the first book upon Achilles as the hero, his quarrel with Agamemnon, and the calamities to the Greeks which are held out as about to ensue from it, through the intercession of Thetis with Zeus. But the incidents dwelt upon from the beginning of the second book down to the combat between Hector and Ajax in the seventh, animated and interesting as they are, do nothing to realize this promise. They are a splendid picture of the Trojan war generally, and eminently suitable to that larger title under which the poem has been immortalized,—but the consequences of the anger of Achilles do not appear until the eighth book. The tenth book, or Doloneia, is also a portion of the Iliad, but not of the Achilleis : while the ninth book appears to me a subsequent addition, nowise harmonizing with that main stream of the Achilleis which flows from the eleventh book to the twenty-second. The eighth book ought to be read in immediate connection with the eleventh, in order to see the structure of what seems the primitive Achilleis; for there are several passages in the eleventh and the following books, which prove that the poet who composed them could not have had present to his mind the main event of the ninth book, the outpouring of profound humiliation by the Greeks, and from Agamemnon, especially, before Achilles, coupled with formal offers to restore Briseis, and pay the amplest compensation for past wrong. The words of Achilles (not less than those of Patroclus and Nestor) in the eleventh and in the following books, plainly imply that the humiliation of the Greeks before him, for which he thirsts, is as yet future and contingent; that no plenary apology has yet been tendered, nor any offer made of restoring Briseis; while both Nestor and Patroclus, with all their wish to induce him to take arms, never take notice of the offered atonement and restitution, but view him as one whose ground for quarrel stands still the same as it did at the beginning. Moreover, if we look at the first book,— the opening of the Achilles, — we shall see that this prostration of Agamemnon and the chief Grecian heroes before Achilles, would really be the termination of the whole poem; for Achilles asks nothing more from Thetis, nor Thetis anything more from Zeus, than that Agamemnon and the Greeks may be brought to know the wrong they have done to their capital warrior, and humbled in the dust in expiation of it. We may add, that the abject terror in which Agamemnon appears in the ninth book, when he sends the supplicatory message to Achilles, as it is not adequately accounted for by the degree of calamity which the Greeks have experienced in the preceding (eighth) book, so it is inconsistent with the gallantry and high spirit with which lie shines at the beginning of the eleventh. The situation of the Greeks only becomes desperate when the three great chiefs, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, are disabled by wounds; this is the irreparable calamity which works upon Patroclus, and through him upon Achilles. The ninth book, as it now stands, seems to me an addition, by a different hand, to the original Achilles, framed so as both to forestall and to spoil the nineteenth book, which is the real reconciliation of the two inimical heroes. I will venture to add, that it carries the pride and egotism of Achilles beyond even the largest exigencies of insulted honor, and is shocking to that sentiment of Nemesis which was so deeply seated in the Grecian mind. We forgive any excess of fury against the Trojans and Hector, after the death of Patroclus; but that he should remain unmoved by restitution, by abject supplications, and by the richest atoning presents, tendered from the Greeks, indicates an implacability such as neither the first book, nor the books between the eleventh and seventeenth, convey.

It is with the Grecian agora, in the beginning of the second book, that the Iliad (as distinguished from the Achilleis) commences,—continued through the Catalogue, the muster of the two armies, the single combat between Menelaus and Paris, the renewed promiscuous battle caused by the arrow of Pandarus, the (Epipolesis, or) personal circuit of Agamemnon round the army, the Aristeia, or brilliant exploits of Diomedes, the visit of Hector to Troy for the purposes of sacrifice, his interview with Andromache, and his combat with Ajax,—down to the seventh book. All these are beautiful poetry, presenting to us the general Trojan war, and its conspicuous individuals under different points of view, but leaving no room in the reader's mind for the thought of Achilles. Now, the difficulty for an enlarging poet, was, to pass from the Achilleis in the first book, to the Iliad in the second, and it will accordingly be found that here is an awkwardness in the structure of the poem, which counsel on the poet's behalf (ancient or modern) do not satisfactorily explain.

In the first book, Zeus has promised Thetis, that he will punish the Greeks for the wrong done to Achilles : in the beginning of the second book, he deliberates how he shall fulfill the promise, and sends down for that purpose “mischievous Oneirus” (the Dream-god) to visit Agamemnon in his sleep, to assure him that the gods have now with one accord consented to put Troy into his hands, and to exhort him forthwith to the assembling of his army for the attack. The ancient commentators were here perplexed by the circumstance that Zeus puts a falsehood into the mouth of Oneirus. But there seems no more difficulty in explaining this, than in the narrative of the book of 1 Kings (chap. XXII. 20), where Jehovah is mentioned to have put a lying spirit into the mouth of Ahab’s prophets,—the real awkwardness is that Oneirus and his falsehood produce no effect. For in the first place, Agamemnon takes a step very different from that which his dream recommends,—and in the next place, when the Grecian army is at length armed and goes forth to battle, it does not experience defeat, (which would be the case if the exhortation of Oneirus really proved mischievous,) but carries on a successful day's battle, chiefly through the heroism of Diomedes. Instead of arming the Greeks forthwith, Agamemnon convokes first a council of chiefs, and next an agora of the host. And though himself in a temper of mind highly elate with the deceitful assurances of Oneirus, he deliberately assumes the language of despair in addressing the troops, having previously prepared Nestor and Odysseus for his doing so, merely in order to try the courage of the men, and with formal instructions, given to these two other chiefs, that they are to speak in opposition to him. Now this intervention of Zeus and Oneirus, eminently unsatisfactory when coupled with the incidents which now follow it, and making Zeus appear, but only appear, to realize his promise of honoring Achilles as well as of hurting the Greeks, forms exactly the point of junction between the Achilleis and the Iliad.

The freak which Agamemnon plays off upon the temper of his army, though in itself childish, serves a sufficient purpose, not only because it provides a special matter of interest to be submitted to the Greeks, but also because it calls forth the splendid description, so teeming with vivacious detail, of the sudden breaking up of the assembly after Agamemnon's harangue, and of the decisive interference of Odysseus to bring the men back, as well as to put down Thersites. This picture of the Greeks in agora, bringing out the two chief speaking and counselling heroes, was so important a part of the general Trojan war, that the poet has permitted himself to introduce it by assuming an inexplicable folly on the part of Agamemnon; just as he has ushered in another fine scene in the third book, — the Teichoskopy, or conversation, between Priam and Helen on the walls of Troy,—by admitting the supposition that the old king, in the tenth year of the war, did not know the persons of Agamemnon and the other Grecian chiefs. This may serve as an explanation of the delusion practiced by Agamemnon towards his assembled host; but it does not at all explain the tame and empty intervention of Oneirus.

If the initial incident of the second book, whereby we pass out of the Achilleis into the Iliad, is awkward, so also the final incident of the seventh book, immediately before we come back into the Achilleis, is not less unsatisfactory, I mean, the construction of the wall and ditch round the Greek camp. As the poem now stands, no plausible reason is assigned why this should be done. Nestor proposes it without any constraining necessity : for the Greeks are in a career of victory, and the Trojans are making offers of compromise which imply conscious weakness, —while Diomedes is so confident of the approaching ruin of Troy that he dissuades his comrades from receiving even Helen herself, if the surrender should be tendered. "Many Greeks have been slain," it is true, as Nestor observes; but an equal or greater number of Trojans have been slain, and all the Grecian heroes are yet in full force : the absence of Achilles is not even adverted to.

Now this account of the building of the fortification seems to be an after-thought, arising out of the enlargement of the poem beyond its original scheme. The original Achilleis, passing at once from the first to the eighth, and from thence to the eleventh book, might well assume the fortification, and talk of it as a thing existing, without adducing any special reason why it was erected. The hearer would naturally comprehend and follow the existence of a ditch and wall round the ships, as a matter of course, provided there was nothing in the previous narrative to make him believe that the Greeks had originally been without these bulwarks. And since the Achilleis, immediately after the promise of Zeus to Thetis, at the close of the first book, went on to describe the fulfillment of that promise and the ensuing disasters of the Greeks, there was nothing to surprise anyone in hearing that their camp was fortified. But the case was altered when the first and the eighth books were parted asunder, in order to make room for descriptions of temporary success and glory on the part of the besieging army. The brilliant scenes sketched in the books, from the second to the seventh, mention no fortification, and even imply its nonexistence; yet, since notice of it occurs amidst the first description of Grecian disasters in the eighth book, the hearer, who had the earlier books present to his memory, might be surprised to find a fortification mentioned immediately afterwards, unless the construction of it were specially announced to have intervened. But it will at once appear, that there was some difficulty in finding a good reason why the Greeks should begin to fortify at this juncture, and that the poet who discovered the gap might not be enabled to fill it up with success. As the Greeks have got on, up to this moment, without the wall, and as we have heard nothing but tales of their success, why should they now think farther laborious precautions for security necessary? We will not ask, why the Trojans should stand quietly by and permit a wall to be built, since the truce was concluded expressly for burying the dead.

The tenth book, or Doloneia, was considered by some of the ancient scholiasts, and has been confidently set forth by the modern Wolfian critics, as originally a separate poem, inserted by Peisistratus into the Iliad. How it can ever have been a separate poem, I do not understand. It is framed with great specialty for the antecedent circumstances under which it occurs, and would suit for no other place; though capable of being separately recited, inasmuch as it has a definite beginning and end, like the story of Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid. But while distinctly presupposing and resting upon the incidents in the eighth book, and in line 88 of the ninth, (probably, the appointment of sentinels on the part of the Greeks, as well of the Trojans, formed the close of the battle described in the eighth book,) it has not the slightest bearing upon the events of the eleventh or the following books : it goes to make up the general picture of the Trojan war, but lies quite apart from the Achilleis. And this is one mark of a portion subsequently inserted, that, though fitted on to the parts which precede, it has no influence on those which follow.

If the proceedings of the combatants on the plain of Troy, between the first and the eighth book, have no reference either to Achilles, or to an Achilleis, we find Zeus in Olympus still more completely putting that hero out of the question, at the beginning of the fourth book. He is in this last mentioned passage the Zeus of the Iliad, not of the Achilleis. Forgetful of his promise to Thetis, in the first book, he discusses nothing but the question of continuance or termination of the war, and manifests anxiety only for the salvation of Troy, in opposition to the Trojan goddesses, who prevent him from giving effect to the victory of Menelaus over Paris, and the stipulated restitution of Helen, in which case, of course, the wrong offered to Achilles would remain unexpiated. An attentive comparison will render it evident that the poet who composed the discussion among the gods, at the beginning of the fourth book, has not been careful to put himself in harmony either with the Zeus of the first book, or with the Zeus of the eighth.

So soon as we enter upon the eleventh book, the march of the poem becomes quite different. We are then in a series of events, each paving the way for that which follows, and all conducing to the result promised in the first book, the reappearance of Achilles, as the only means of saving the Greeks from ruin, preceded by ample atonement, and followed by the maximum both of glory and revenge. The intermediate career of Patroclus introduces new elements, which, however, are admirably woven into the scheme of the poem, as disclosed in the first book. I shall not deny that there are perplexities in the detail of events, as described in the battles at the Grecian wall, and before the ships, from the eleventh to the sixteenth books, but they appear only cases of partial confusion, such as may be reasonably ascribed to imperfections of text : the main sequence remains coherent and intelligible. We find no considerable events which could be left out without breaking the thread, nor any incongruity between one considerable event and another. There is nothing between the eleventh and twenty-second books, which is at all comparable to the incongruity between the Zeus of the fourth book and the Zeus of the first and eighth. It may, perhaps, be true, that the shield of Achilles is a super-added amplification of that which was originally announced in general terms, because the poet, from the eleventh to the twenty-second books, has observed such good economy of his materials, that he is hardly likely to have introduced one particular description of such disproportionate length, and having so little connection with the series of events. But I see no reason for believing that it is an addition materially later than the rest of the poem.

It must be confessed, that the supposition here advanced, in reference to the structure of the Iliad, is not altogether free from difficulties, because the parts constituting the original Achilleis have been more or less altered or interpolated, to suit the additions made to it, particularly in the eighth book. But it presents fewer difficulties than any other supposition, and it is the only means, so far as I know, of explaining the difference between one part of the Iliad and another; both the continuity of structure, and the conformity to the opening promise, which are manifest when we read the books in the order I, VIII, XI, to XXII, as contrasted with the absence of these two qualities in books II to VII, IX and X. An entire organization, preconceived from the beginning, would not be likely to produce any such disparity, nor is any such visible in the Odyssey; still less would the result be explained by supposing integers originally separate, and brought together without any designed organization. And it is between these three suppositions that our choice has to be made. A scheme, and a large scheme too, must unquestionably be admitted as the basis of any sufficient hypothesis. But the Achilleis would have been a long poem, half the length of the present Iliad, and probably not less compact in its structure than the Odyssey. Moreover, being parted off only by an imaginary Line from the boundless range of the Trojan war, it would admit of enlargement more easily, and with greater relish to hearers, than the adventures of one single hero; while the expansion would naturally take place by adding new Grecian victory, since the original poem arrived at the exaltation of Achilles only through a painful series of Grecian disasters. That the poem under these circumstances should have received additions, is no very violent hypothesis : in fact, when we recollect that the integrity both of the Achilleis and of the Odyssey was neither guarded by printing nor writing, we shall perhaps think it less wonderful that the former was enlarged, than that the latter was not. Any relaxation of the laws of epical unity is a small price to pay for that splendid poetry, of which we find so much between the first and the eighth books of our Iliad.

The question respecting unity of authorship is different, and more difficult to determine, than that respecting consistency of parts, and sequence in the narrative. A poem conceived on a comparatively narrow scale may be enlarged afterwards by its original author, with greater or less coherence and success : the Faust of Goethe affords an example even in our own generation. On the other hand, a systematic poem may well have been conceived and executed by prearranged concert between several poets; among whom probably one will be the governing mind, though the rest may be effective, and perhaps equally effective, in respect to execution of the parts. And the age of the early Grecian epic was favorable to such fraternization of poets, of which the Gens called Homerids probably exhibited many specimens. In the recital or singing of a long unwritten poem, many bards must have conspired together, and in the earliest times the composer and the singer were one and the same person. Now the individuals comprised in the Homerid Gens, though doubtless very different among themselves in respect of mental capacity, were yet homogeneous in respect of training, means of observation and instruction, social experience, religious feelings and theories, etc., to a degree much greater than individuals in modern times. Fallible as our inferences are on this point, where we have only internal evidence to guide us, without any contemporary points of comparison, or any species of collateral information respecting the age, the society, the poets, the hearers, or the language, we must nevertheless, in the present case, take coherence of structure, together with consistency in the tone of thought, feeling, language, customs, etc., as presumptions of one author; and the contrary as presumptions of severalty; allowing, as well as we can, for that inequality of excellence which the same author may at different times present.

Now, the case made out against single-headed authorship of the Odyssey, appears to me very weak; and those who dispute it, are guided more by their a priori rejection of ancient epical unity, than by any positive evidence which the poem itself affords. It is otherwise with regard to the Iliad. Whatever presumptions a disjointed structure, several apparent inconsistencies of parts, and large excrescence of actual matter beyond the opening promise, can sanction, may reasonably be indulged against the supposition that this poem all proceeds from a single author. There is a difference of opinion on the subject among the best critics, which is, probably, not destined to be adjusted, since so much depends partly upon critical feeling, partly upon the general reasonings, in respect to ancient epical unity, with which a man sits down to the study. For the champions of unity, such as Mr. Payne Knight, are very ready to strike out numerous and often considerable passages as interpolations, thus meeting the objections raised against unity of authorship, on the ground of special inconsistencies. Hermann and Boeckh, though not going the length of Lachmann in maintaining the original theory of Wolf, agree with the latter in recognizing diversity of authors in the poem, to an extent overpassing the limit of what can fairly be called interpolation. Payne Knight and Nitzsch are equally persuaded of the contrary. Here, then, is a decided contradiction among critics, all of whom have minutely studied the poems since the Wolfian question was raised. And it is such critics alone who can be said to constitute authority; for the cursory reader, who dwells upon the parts simply long enough to relish their poetical beauty, is struck only by that general sameness of coloring which Wolf himself admits to pervade the poem.

Having already intimated that, in my judgment, no theory of the structure of the poem is admissible which does not admit an original and preconcerted Achilleis,— a stream which begins at the first book and ends with the death of Hector, in the twenty-second, although the higher parts of it now remain only in the condition of two detached lakes, the first book and the eighth, —I reason upon the same basis with respect to the authorship.

Assuming continuity of structure as a presumptive proof, the whole of this Achilleis must be treated as composed by one author. Wolf, indeed, affirmed, that he never read the poem continuously through without being painfully impressed with the inferiority and altered style of the last six books,— and Lachmann carries this feeling farther back, so as to commence with the seventeenth book. If I could enter fully into this sentiment, I should then be compelled, not to deny the existence of a preconceived scheme, but to imagine that the books from the eighteenth to the twenty-second, though forming part of that scheme, or Achilleis, had yet been executed by another and an inferior poet. But it is to be remarked, first, that inferiority of poetical merit, to a certain extent, is quite reconcilable with unity of authorship; and, secondly, that the very circumstances upon which Wolf's unfavorable judgment is built, seem to arise out of increased difficulty in the poet's task, when he came to the crowning cantos of his designed Achilleis. For that which chiefly distinguishes these books, is the direct, incessant, and manual intervention of the gods and goddesses, formerly permitted by Zeus, and the repetition of vast and fantastic conceptions to which such superhuman agency gives occasion; not omitting the battle of Achilles against Skamander and Simois, and the burning up of these rivers by Hephaestus. Now, looking at this vein of ideas with the eyes of a modern reader, or even with those of a Grecian critic of the literary ages, it is certain that the effect is unpleasing : the gods, sublime elements of poetry when kept in due proportion, are here somewhat vulgarized. But though the poet here has not succeeded, and probably success was impossible, in the task which he has prescribed to himself,— yet the mere fact of his undertaking it, and the manifest distinction between his employment of divine agency in these latter cantos as compared with the preceding, seems explicable only on the supposition that they are the latter cantos, and come in designed sequence, as the continuance of a previous plan. The poet wishes to surround the coming forth of Achilles with the maximum of glorious and terrific circumstance; no Trojan enemy can for a moment hold out against him : the gods must descend to the plain of Troy and fight in person, while Zeus, who at the beginning of the eighth book, had forbidden them to take part, expressly encourages them to do so at the beginning of the twentieth. If, then, the nineteenth book (which contains the reconciliation between Achilles and Agamemnon, a subject naturally somewhat tame) and the three following books (where we have before us only the gods, Achilles, and the Trojans, without hope or courage) are inferior in execution and interest to the seven preceding books (which describe the long-disputed and often doubtful death-struggle between the Greeks and Trojans without Achilles), as Wolf and other critics affirm,—we may explain the difference without supposing a new poet as composer; for the conditions of the poem bad become essentially more difficult, and the subject more unpromising. The necessity of keeping Achilles above the level, even of heroic prowess, restricted the poet's means of acting upon the sympathy of his hearers.

The last two books of the Iliad may have formed part of the original Achilleis. But the probability rather is, that they are additions; for the death of Hector satisfies the exigencies of a coherent scheme, and we are not entitled to extend the oldest poem beyond the limit which such necessity prescribes. It has been argued on one side by Nitzsch and 0. Muller, that the mind could not leave off with satisfaction at the moment in which Achilles sates his revenge, and while the bodies of Patroclus and Hector are lying unburied, also, that the more merciful temper which he exhibits in the twenty-fourth book, must always have been an indispensable sequel, in order to create proper sympathy with his triumph. Other critics, on the contrary, have taken special grounds of exception against the last book, and have endeavored to set it aside as different from the other books, both in tone and language. To a certain extent, the peculiarities of the last book appear to me undeniable, though it is plainly a designed continuance, and not a substantive poem. Some weight also is due to the remark about the twenty-third book, that Odysseus and Diomedes, who have been wounded and disabled during the fight, now reappear in perfect force, and contend in the games : here is no case of miraculous healing, and the inconsistency is more likely to have been admitted by a separate enlarging poet, than by the schemer of the Achilles.

The splendid books from the second to v. 322 of the seventh, are equal, in most parts, to any portion of the Achilleis, and are pointedly distinguished from the latter by the broad view which they exhibit of the general Trojan war, with all its principal personages, localities, and causes,—yet without advancing the result promised in the first book, or, indeed, any final purpose whatever. Even the desperate wound inflicted by Tlepolemus on Sarpedon, is forgotten, when the latter hero is called forth in the subsequent Achilleis. The arguments of Lachmann, who dissects these six books into three or four separate songs, carry no conviction to my mind; and I see no reason why we should not consider all of them to be by the same author, bound together by the common purpose of giving a great collective picture which may properly be termed an Iliad. The tenth book, or Doloneia, though adapted specially to the place in which it stands, agrees with the books between the first and eighth in belonging only to the general picture of the war, without helping forward the march of the Achilles; yet it seems conceived in a lower vein, in so far as we can trust our modern ethical sentiment. One is unwilling to believe that the author of the fifth book, or Aristeia of Diomedes, would condescend to employ the hero whom he there so brightly glorifies, the victor even over Ares himself, in slaughtering newly-arrived Thracian sleepers, without any large purpose or necessity. The ninth book, of which I have already spoken at length, belongs to a different vein of conception, and seems to me more likely to have emanated from a separate composer.

While intimating these views respecting the authorship of the Iliad, as being in my judgment the most probable, I must repeat that, though the study of the poem carries to my mind a sufficient conviction respecting its structure, the question between unity and plurality of authors is essentially less determinable. The poem consists of a part original, and other parts superadded; yet it is certainly not impossible that the author of the former may himself have composed the latter; and such would be my belief, if I regarded plurality of composers as an inadmissible idea. On this supposition, we must conclude that the poet, while anxious for the addition of new, and for the most part, highly interesting matter, has not thought fit to recast the parts and events in such manner as to impart to the whole a pervading thread of consensus and organization, such as we see in the Odyssey.

That the Odyssey is of later date than the Iliad, and by a different author, seems to be now the opinion of most critics, especially of Payne Knightl and Nitzsch; though 0. Muller leans to a contrary conclusion, at the same time adding that he thinks the arguments either way not very decisive. There are considerable differences of statement in the two poems in regard to some of the gods : Iris is messenger of the gods in the Iliad, and Hermes in the Odyssey : Eolus, the dispenser of the winds is the Odyssey, is not noticed in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, but, on the contrary, Iris invites the winds, as independent gods, to come and kindle the funeral pile of Patroclus; and, unless we are to expunge the song of Demodokus in the eighth book of the Odyssey, as spurious, Aphrodite there appears as the wife of Hephaestus,— a relationship not known to the Iliad. There are also some other points of difference enumerated by Mr. Knight and others, which tend to justify the presumption that the author of the Odyssey is not identical either with the author of the Achilleis or his enlargers, which G. Hermann considers to be a point unquestionable. Indeed, the difficulty of supposing a long coherent poem to have been conceived, composed, and retained, without any aid of writing, appears to many critics even now, insurmountable, though the evidences on the other side, are, in my view, sufficient to outweigh any negative presumption thus suggested. But it is improbable that the same person should have powers of memorial combination sufficient for composing two such poems, nor is there any proof to force upon us such a supposition.

Presuming a difference of authorship between the two poems, I feel less convinced about the supposed juniority of the Odyssey. The discrepancies in manners and language in the one and the other, are so little important, that two different persons, in the same age and society, might well be imagined to exhibit as great or even greater. It is to be recollected that the subjects of the two are heterogeneous, so as to conduct the poet, even were he the same man, into totally different veins of imagination and illustration. The pictures of the Odyssey seem to delineate the same heroic life as the Iliad, though looked at from a distinct point of view : and the circumstances surrounding the residence of Odysseus, in Ithaca, are just such as we may suppose him to have left in order to attack Troy. If the scenes presented to us are for the most part pacific, as contrasted with the incessant fighting of the Iliad, this is not to be ascribed to any greater sociality or civilization in the real hearers of the Odyssey, but to the circumstances of the hero whom the poet undertakes to adorn : nor can we doubt that the poems of Arktinus and Lesches, of a later date than the Odyssey, would have given us as much combat and bloodshed as the Iliad. I am not struck by those proofs of improved civilization which some critics affirm the Odyssey to present : Mr. Knight, who is of this opinion, nevertheless admits that the mutilation of Melanthius, and the hanging up of the female slaves by Odysseus, in that poem, indicate greater barbarity than any incidents in the fights before Troy. The more skillful and compact structure of the Odyssey, has been often considered as a proof of its juniority in age: and in the case of two poems by the same author, we might plausibly contend that practice would bring with it improvement in the combining faculty. But in reference to the poems before us, we must recollect, first, that in all probability the Iliad (with which the comparison is taken) is not a primitive but an enlarged poem, and that the primitive Achilleis might well have been quite as coherent as the Odyssey; secondly, that between different authors, superiority in structure is not a proof of subsequent composition, inasmuch as, on that hypothesis, we should be compelled to admit that the later poem of Arktinus would be an improvement upon the Odyssey; thirdly, that, even if it were so, we could only infer that the author of the 0dyssey had heard the Achilleis or the Iliad; we could not infer that he lived one or two generations afterwards.

On the whole, the balance of probabilities seems in favor of distinct authorship for the two poems, but the same age, and that age a very early one, anterior to the first Olympiad. And they may thus be used as evidences, and contemporary evidences, for the phenomena of primitive Greek civilization; while they also show that the power of constructing long premeditated epics, without the aid of writing, is to be taken as a characteristic of the earliest known Greek mind. This was the point controverted by Wolf, which a full review of the case (in my judgment) decides against him: it is, moreover, a valuable result for the historian of the Greeks, inasmuch as it marks out to him the ground from which he is to start in appreciating their ulterior progress.

Whatever there may be of truth in the different conjectures of critics respecting the authorship and structure of these unrivalled poems, we are not to imagine that it is the perfection of their epical symmetry which has given them their indissoluble hold upon the human mind, as well modern as ancient. There is some tendency in critics, from Aristotle downwards, to invert the order of attributes in respect to the Homeric poems, so as to dwell most on recondite excellences which escape the unaided reader, and which are even to a great degree disputable. But it is given to few minds (as Goethe has remarked), to appreciate fully the mechanism of a long poem; and many feel the beauty of the separate parts, who have no sentiment for the aggregate perfection of the whole.

Nor were the Homeric poems originally addressed to minds of the rarer stamp. They are intended for those feelings which the critic has in common with the unlettered mass, not for that enlarged range of vision and peculiar standard which he has acquired to himself. They are of all poems the most absolutely and unreservedly popular : had they been otherwise, they could not have lived so long in the mouth of the rhapsode, and the ear and memory of the people : and it was then that their influence was first acquired, never afterwards to be shaken. Their beauties belong to the parts taken separately, which revealed themselves spontaneously to the listening crowd at the festival,—far more than to the whole poem taken together, which could hardly be appreciated unless the parts were dwelt upon and suffered to expand in the mind. The most unlettered hearer of those times could readily seize, while the most instructed reader can still recognize, the characteristic excellence of Homeric narrative, its straightforward, unconscious, unstudied simplicity, its concrete forms of speech and happy alternation of action with dialogue, its vivid pictures of living agents, always clearly and sharply individualized, whether in the commanding proportions of Achilles and Odysseus, in the graceful presence of Helen and Penelope, or in the more humble contrast of Euzmaeus and Melanthius; and always, moreover, animated by the frankness with which his heroes give utterance to all their transient emotions and even all their infirmities, its constant reference to those coarser veins of feeling and palpable motives which belong to all men in common, its fullness of graphic details, freshly drawn from the visible and audible world, and though often homely, never tame, nor trenching upon that limit of satiety to which the Greek mind was so keenly alive, lastly, its perpetual junction of gods and men in the same picture, and familiar appeal to ever-present divine agency, in harmony with the interpretation of nature at that time universal.

It is undoubtedly easier to feel than to describe the impressive influence of Homeric narrative : but the time and circumstances under which that influence was first, and most powerfully felt, preclude the possibility of explaining it by comprehensive and elaborate comparisons, such as are implied in Aristotle's remarks upon the structure of the poems. The critic who seeks the explanation in the right place will not depart widely from the point of view of those rude auditors to whom the poems were originally addressed, or from the susceptibilities and capacities common to the human bosom in every stage of progressive culture. And though the refinements and delicacies of the poems, as well as their general structure, are a subject of highly interesting criticism,—yet it is not to these that Homer owes his widespread and imperishable popularity. Still less is it true, as the well-known observations of Horace would lead us to believe, that Homer is a teacher of ethical wisdom akin and superior to Chrysippus or Crantor. No didactic purpose is to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey; a philosopher may doubtless extract, from the incidents and strongly marked characters which it contains, much illustrative matter for his exhortations, —but the ethical doctrine which he applies must emanate from his own reflection. The homeric hero manifests virtues or infirmities, fierceness or compassion, with the same straightforward and simple-minded vivacity, unconscious of any ideal standard by which his conduct is to be tried nor can we trace in the poet any ulterior function beyond that of the inspired organ of the Muse; and the nameless, but eloquent, herald of lost adventures out of the darkness of the past.

HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE

LEGENDARY GREECE

FROM THE GODS AND HEROES TO THE FOUNDATION OF THE OLIMPIC GAMES (776 BC)

I

LEGENDS RELATING TO HEROES AND MEN

II