Chapter XV: Legend of Troy (3)

[804] Livy, xxxv. 43; xxxvii. 9. Polyb. v. 78-111 (passages which
prove that Ilium was fortified and defensible about B. C. 218).
Strabo, xiii. p. 594. Καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον δ᾽, ὃ νῦν ἐστι, κωμόπολίς τις
ἦν, ὅτε πρῶτον Ῥωμαῖοι τῆς Ἀσίας ἐπέβησαν καὶ ἐξέβαλον Ἀντίοχον
τὸν μέγαν ἐκ τῆς ἐντὸς τοῦ Ταύρου. Φησὶ γοῦν Δημήτριος ὁ Σκήψιος,
μειράκιον ἐπιδημήσας εἰς τὴν πόλιν κατ᾽ ἐκείνους τοὺς καιροὺς,
οὕτως ὠλιγωρημένην ἰδεῖν τὴν κατοικίαν, ὥστε μηδὲ κεραμωτὰς
ἔχειν τὰς στέγας. Ἡγησιάναξ δὲ, τοὺς Γαλάτας περαιωθέντας ἐκ τῆς
Εὐρώπης, ἀναβῆναι μὲν εἰς τὴν πόλιν δεομένους ἐρύματος, παραχρῆμα
δ᾽ ἐκλιπεῖν διὰ τὸ ἀτείχιστον· ὕστερον δ᾽ ἐπανόρθωσιν ἔσχε
πολλήν. Εἶτ᾽ ἐκάκωσαν αὐτὴν πάλιν οἱ μετὰ Φιμβρίου, etc.

This is a very clear and precise statement, attested by an
eye-witness. But it is thoroughly inconsistent with the statement
made by Strabo in the previous chapter, a dozen lines before, as
the text now stands; for he there informs us that Lysimachus,
after the death of Alexander, paid great attention to Ilium,
surrounded it with a wall of forty stadia in circumference,
erected a temple, and aggregated to Ilium the ancient cities
around, which were in a state of decay. We know from Livy that
the aggregation of Gergis and Rhœteium to Ilium was effected, not
by Lysimachus, but by the Romans (Livy, xxxviii. 37); so that the
_first_ statement of Strabo is not only inconsistent with his
second, but is contradicted by an independent authority.

I cannot but think that this contradiction arises from a
confusion of the text in Strabo’s _first_ passage, and that
in that passage Strabo really meant to speak only of the
improvements brought about by Lysimachus in _Alexandreia Trôas_;
that he never meant to ascribe to Lysimachus any improvements in
_Ilium_, but, on the contrary, to assign the remarkable attention
paid by Lysimachus to _Alexandreia Trôas_, as the reason why
he had neglected to fulfil the promises held out by Alexander
to _Ilium_. The series of facts runs thus:—1. Ilium is nothing
better than a κώμη; at the landing of Alexander; 2. Alexander
promises great additions, but never returns from Persia to
accomplish them; 3. Lysimachus is absorbed in Alexandreia Trôas,
into which he aggregates several of the adjoining old towns,
and which flourishes under his hands; 4. Hence Ilium remained a
κώμη when the Romans entered Asia, as it had been when Alexander
entered.

This alteration in the text of Strabo might be effected by the
simple transposition of the words as they now stand, and by
omitting ὅτε καὶ, ἤδη ἐπεμελήθη, without introducing a single
new or conjectural word, so that the passage would read thus:
Μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἐκείνου (Alexander’s) τελευτὴν Λυσίμαχος μάλιστα τῆς
Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐπεμελήθη, συνῳκισμένης μὲν ἤδη ὑπ᾽ Ἀντιγόνου, καὶ
προσηγορευμένης Ἀντιγόνιας, μεταβαλούσης δὲ τοὔνομα· (ἔδοξε γὰρ
εὐσεβὲς εἶναι τοὺς Ἀλεξάνδρον διαδεξαμένους ἐκείνου πρότερον
κτίζειν ἐπωνύμους πόλεις, εἶθ᾽ ἑαυτῶν) καὶ νέων κατεσκεύασε καὶ
τεῖχος περιεβάλετο ὅσον 40 σταδίων· συνῴκισε δὲ εἰς αὐτὴν τὰς
κύκλῳ πόλεις ἀρχαίας, ἤδη κεκακωμένας. Καὶ δὴ καὶ συνέμεινε
... πόλεων. If this reading be adopted, the words beginning
that which stands in Tzschucke’s edition as sect. 27, and which
immediately follow the last word πόλεων, will read quite suitably
and coherently,—Καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον δ᾽, ὃ νῦν ἐστὶ, κωμόπολίς τις ἦν,
ὅτε πρῶτον Ῥωμαῖοι τῆς Ἀσίας ἐπέβησαν, etc., whereas with the
present reading of the passage they show a contradiction, and the
whole passage is entirely confused.

[805] Livy, xxxviii. 39; Strabo, xiii. p. 600. Κατέσκαπται δὲ καὶ
τὸ Σίγειον ὑπὸ τῶν Ἰλιέων διὰ τὴν ἀπείθειαν· ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνοις γὰρ ἦν
ὕστερον ἡ παραλία πᾶσα ἡ μέχρι Δαρδάνου, καὶ νῦν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνοις
ἔστι.

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 Skêpsis and Alexandreia Trôas—partly from the pronounced tendency of the age (in which Kratês at Pergamus 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. Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis, one of the most laborious of the Homeric critics, had composed thirty books of comment upon the Catalogue in the Iliad: Hestiæa, an authoress of Alexandreia Trôas, 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.[806] 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.

[806] Strabo, xiii. 599. Παρατίθησι δὲ ὁ Δημήτριος καὶ τὴν
Ἀλεξανδρίνην Ἑστίαιαν μάρτυρα, τὴν συγγράψασαν περὶ τῆς Ὁμήρου
Ἰλιάδος, πυνθανομένην, εἰ περὶ τὴν νῦν πόλιν ὁ πόλεμος συνέστη,
καὶ τὸ Τρωϊκὸν πεδίον ποῦ ἔστιν, ὃ μέταξυ τῆς πόλεως καὶ τῆς
θαλάσσης ὁ ποιητὴς φράζει· τὸ μὲν γὰρ πρὸ τῆς νῦν πόλεως
ὁρώμενον, πρόχωμα εἶναι τῶν ποταμῶν, ὕστερον γεγονός.

The words ποῦ ἔστιν are introduced conjecturally by Grosskurd,
the excellent German translator of Strabo, but they seem to me
necessary to make the sense complete.

Hesitæa is cited more than once in the Homeric Scholia (Schol.
Venet. ad Iliad, iii. 64; Enstath. ad Iliad, ii. 538).

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:[807] 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 Dêmêtrius 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 Dêmêtrius and Hestiæa 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 every one 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 Cæsar and Augustus,—all prove this continued recognition of identity.[808] 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: Aristidês, Dio Chrysostom, Pausanias, Appian, and Plutarch hold the same language.[809] But modern writers seem for the most part to have taken up the supposition from Strabo as implicitly as he took it from Dêmêtrius. They call Ilium by the disrespectful appellation of _New_ Ilium—while the traveller in the Trôad 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 Trôad.[810]

[807] Strabo, xiii. p. 599. Οὐδὲν δ᾽ ἴχνος σώζεται τῆς ἀρχαίας
πόλεως—εἰκότως· ἅτε γὰρ ἐκπεπορθημένων τῶν κύκλῳ πόλεων, οὐ
τελέως δὲ κατεσπασμένων, οἱ λίθοι πάντες εἰς τὴν ἐκείνων ἀνάληψιν
μετηνέχθησαν.

[808] Appian, Mithridat. c. 53; Strabo, xiii. p. 594; Plutarch,
Sertorius, c. 1; Velleius Paterc. ii. 23.

The inscriptions attest Panathenaic games celebrated at Ilium
in honor of Athênê by the Ilieans conjointly with various other
neighboring cities (see Corp. Inscr. Boeckh. No. 3601-3602, with
Boeckh’s observations). The valuable inscription No. 3595 attests
the liberality of Antiochus Soter towards the Iliean Athênê as
early as 278 B. C.

[809] Arrian, i. 11; Appian _ut sup._; also Aristidês, Or. 43,
Rhodiaca, p. 820 (Dindorf p. 369). The curious Oratio xi. of Dio
Chrysostom, in which he writes his new version of the Trojan war,
is addressed to the inhabitants of Ilium.

[810] The controversy, now half a century old, respecting Troy
and the Trojan war—between Bryant and his various opponents,
Morritt, Gilbert Wakefield, the British Critic, etc., seems
now nearly forgotten, and I cannot think that the pamphlets on
either side would be considered as displaying much ability, if
published at the present day. The discussion was first raised by
the publication of Le Chevalier’s account of the plain of Troy,
in which the author professed to have discovered the true site of
Old Ilium (the supposed Homeric Troy), about twelve miles from
the sea near Bounarbashi. Upon this account Bryant published some
animadversions, followed up by a second treatise, in which he
denied the historical reality of the Trojan war, and advanced the
hypothesis that the tale was of Egyptian origin (Dissertation on
the War of Troy, and the Expedition of the Grecians as described
by Homer, showing that no such Expedition was ever undertaken,
and that no such city of Phrygia existed, by Jacob Bryant;
seemingly 1797, though there is no date in the title-page:
Morritt’s reply was published in 1798). A reply from Mr. Bryant
and a rejoinder from Mr. Morritt, as well as a pamphlet from G.
Wakefield, appeared in 1799 and 1800, besides an Expostulation by
the former addressed to the British Critic.

Bryant, having dwelt both on the incredibilities and the
inconsistencies of the Trojan war, as it is recounted in
Grecian legend generally, nevertheless admitted that Homer had
a groundwork for his story, and maintained that that groundwork
was Egyptian. Homer (he thinks) was an Ithacan, descended
from a family originally emigrant from Egypt: the war of Troy
was originally an Egyptian war, which explains how Memnôn the
Ethiopian came to take part in it: “upon this history, which
was originally Egyptian, Homer founded the scheme of his two
principal poems, adapting things to Greece and Phrygia by an
ingenious transposition:” he derived information from priests
of Memphis or Thêbes (Bryant, pp. 102, 108, 126). The Ἥρως
Αἰγύπτιος, mentioned in the second book of the Odyssey (15), is
the Egyptian hero, who affords, in his view, an evidence that the
population of that island was in part derived from Egypt. No one
since Mr. Bryant, I apprehend, has ever construed the passage in
the same sense.

Bryant’s Egyptian hypothesis is of no value; but the negative
portion of his argument, summing up the particulars of the Trojan
legend, and contending against its historical credibility, is
not so easily put aside. Few persons will share in the zealous
conviction by which Morritt tries to make it appear that the
1100 ships, the ten years of war, the large confederacy of
princes from all parts of Greece, etc., have nothing but what
is consonant with historical probability; difficulties being
occasionally eliminated by the plea of our ignorance of the time
and of the subject (Morritt, p. 7-21). Gilbert Wakefield, who
maintains the historical reality of the siege with the utmost
intensity, and even compares Bryant to Tom Paine (W. p. 17), is
still more displeased with those who propound doubts, and tells
us that “grave disputation in the midst of such darkness and
uncertainty is a conflict with chimæras” (W. p. 14).

The most plausible line of argument taken by Morritt and
Wakefield is, where they enforce the positions taken by Strabo
and so many other authors, ancient as well as modern, that a
superstructure of fiction is to be distinguished from a basis
of truth, and that the latter is to be maintained while the
former is rejected (Morritt, p. 5; Wake. p. 7-8). To this Bryant
replies, that “if we leave out every absurdity, we can make
anything plausible; that a fable may be made consistent, and we
have many romances that are very regular in the assortment of
characters and circumstances: this may be seen in plays, memoirs,
and novels. But this regularity and correspondence alone will not
ascertain the truth” (Expostulation, pp. 8, 12, 13). “That there
are a great many other fables besides that of Troy, regular and
consistent among themselves, believed and chronologized by the
Greeks, and even looked up to by them in a religious view (p.
13), which yet no one now thinks of admitting as history.”

Morritt, having urged the universal belief of antiquity as
evidence that the Trojan war was historically real, is met
by Bryant, who reminds him that the same persons believed in
centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, augury, aruspicy; Homer maintaining
that horses could speak, etc. To which Morritt replies, “What has
religious belief to do with historical facts? Is not the evidence
on which our faith rests in matters of religion totally different
in all its parts from that on which we ground our belief in
history?” (Addit. Remarks, p. 47).

The separation between the grounds of religious and historical
belief is by no means so complete as Mr. Morritt supposes, even
in regard to modern times; and when we apply his position to the
ancient Greeks, it will be found completely the reverse of the
truth. The contemporaries of Herodotus and Thucydidês conceived
their early history in the most intimate conjunction with their
religion.

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.[811] It may be true that Dêmêtrius 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 Xerxês, 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 Thalês, 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.[812] The inspired poet might describe, and his hearers would listen with delight to the tale, how Hectôr, 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 Hectôr 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.[813] 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 Thucydidês;[814] in the Peloponnesian war[815]—but which are not more applicable to the epic narrative than they would be to the exploits of Amadis or Orlando.

[811] For example, adopting his own line of argument (not to
mention those battles in which the pursuit and the flight reaches
from the city to the ships and back again), it might have been
urged to him, that by supposing the Homeric Troy to be four miles
farther off from the sea, he aggravated the difficulty of rolling
the Trojan horse into the town: it was already sufficiently hard
to propel this vast wooden animal full of heroes from the Greek
Naustathmon to the town of Ilium.

The Trojan horse, with its accompaniments Sinon and Laocoôn, is
one of the capital and indispensable events in the epic: Homer,
Arktinus, Leschês, Virgil, and Quintus Smyrnæus, all dwell upon
it emphatically as the proximate cause of the capture.

The difficulties and inconsistencies of the movements ascribed to
Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, when applied to real topography,
are well set forth in Spohn, _De Agro Trojano_, Leipsic, 1814;
and Mr. Maclaren has shown (Dissertation on the Topography of the
Trojan War, Edinburgh, 1822) that these difficulties are nowise
obviated by removing Ilium a few miles further from the sea.

[812] Major Rennell argues differently from the visit of
Alexander, employing it to confute the hypothesis of Chevalier,
who had placed the Homeric Troy at Bounarbashi, the site supposed
to have been indicated by Dêmêtrius and Strabo:—

“Alexander is said to have been a passionate admirer of the
Iliad, and he had an opportunity of deciding on the spot how far
the topography was consistent with the narrative. Had he been
shown the site of Bounarbashi for that of Troy, he would probably
have questioned the fidelity either of the historical part of the
poem or his guides. It is not within credibility, that a person
of so correct a judgment as Alexander could have admired a poem,
which contained a long history of military details, and other
transactions that could not physically have had an existence.
What pleasure could he receive, in contemplating as subjects
of history, events which could not have happened? Yet he did
admire the poem, and _therefore must have found the topography
consistent_: that is, Bounarbashi, surely, was not shown to him
for Troy.” (Rennell, Observations on the Plain of Troy, p. 128).

Major Rennell here supposes in Alexander a spirit of
topographical criticism quite foreign to his real character. We
have no reason to believe that the site of Bounarbashi was shown
to Alexander as the Homeric Troy, or that any site was shown
to him _except Ilium_, or what Strabo calls New Ilium. Still
less reason have we to believe that any scepticism crossed his
mind, or that his deep-seated faith required to be confirmed by
measurement of distances.

[813] Strabo, xiii. p. 599. Οὐδ᾽ ἡ τοῦ Ἕκτορος δὲ περιδρομὴ ἡ
περὶ τὴν πόλιν ἔχει τι εὔλογον· οὐ γάρ ἐστι περίδρομος ἡ νῦν, διὰ
τὴν συνεχῆ ῥάχιν· ἡ δὲ παλαιὰ ἔχει περιδρομήν.

[814] Mannert (Geographie der Griechen und Römer, th. 6. heft 3.
b. 8. cap. 8) is confused in his account of Old and New Ilium: he
represents that Alexander raised up a new spot to the dignity of
having been the Homeric Ilium, which is not the fact: Alexander
adhered to the received local belief. Indeed, as far as our
evidence goes, no one but Dêmêtrius, Hestiæa, and Strabo appears
ever to have departed from it.

[815] There can hardly be a more singular example of this same
confusion, than to find elaborate military criticisms from the
Emperor Napoleon, upon the description of the taking of Troy in
the second book of the Æneid. He shows that gross faults are
committed in it, when looked at from the point of view of a
general (see an interesting article by Mr. G. C. Lewis, in the
Classical Museum, vol. i. p. 205, “Napoleon on the Capture of
Troy”).

Having cited this criticism from the highest authority on the
art of war, we may find a suitable parallel in the works of
distinguished publicists. The attack of Odysseus on the Ciconians
(described in Homer, Odyss. ix. 39-61) is cited both by Grotius
(De Jure Bell. et Pac. iii. 3, 10) and by Vattel (Droit des Gens,
iii. 202) as a case in point in international law. Odysseus is
considered to have sinned against the rules of international law
by attacking them as allies of the Trojans, without a formal
declaration of war.

There is every reason for presuming that the Ilium visited by Xerxês 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 Trôas, or the Trôad (more properly Trôïas), is known both to Herodotus and to Thucydidês: it seems to include the territory westward of an imaginary line drawn from the north-east corner of the Adramyttian gulf to the Propontis at Parium, since both Antandrus, Kolônæ, and the district immediately round Ilium, are regarded as belonging to the Trôad.[816] Herodotus further notices the Teukrians of Gergis[817] (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.[818] To that Teukrian population he thinks that the Homeric Trojans belonged:[819] 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 B. C., who connected it by an alleged immigration of Teukrians from Krête into the region round about Ida. Others again denied this, asserting that the primitive ancestor, Teukrus, had come into the country from Attica,[820] or that he was of indigenous origin, born from Skamander and the nymph Idæa—all various manifestations of that eager thirst after an eponymous hero which never deserted the Greeks. Gergithians occur in more than one spot in Æolis, even so far southward as the neighborhood of Kymê:[821] 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 Kebrên. As Herodotus calls the old epical Trojans by the name Teukrians, so the Attic Tragedians call them Phrygians; though the Homeric hymn to Aphroditê represents Phrygians and Trojans as completely distinct, specially noting the diversity of language;[822] 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.[823] 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.[824] 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 Krête with the territories of Phrygia and Æolis, were certain, according to the established tendency of the Grecian mind, to beget stories of a common genealogy.

[816] Compare Herodot. v. 24-122; Thucyd. i. 131. The Ἰλιὰς γῆ is
a part of the Trôad.

[817] Herodot. vii. 43.

[818] Herodot. v. 122. εἷλε μὲν Αἰολέας πάντας, ὅσοι τὴν Ἰλιάδα
γῆν νέμονται, εἷλε δὲ Γέργιθας, τοὺς ἀπολειφθέντας τῶν ἀρχαίων
Τεύκρων.

For the migration of the Teukrians and Mysians into Europe, see
Herodot. vii. 20; the Pæonians, on the Strymôn, called themselves
their descendants.

[819] Herodot. ii. 118; v. 13.

[820] Strabo, xiii. p. 604; Apollodôr. iii. 12, 4.

Kephalôn of Gergis called Teukrus a Krêtan (Stephan. Byz. v.
Ἀρίσβη).

[821] Clearchus ap. Athæne. vi. p. 256; Strabo, xiii. p. 589-616.

[822] Homer, Hymn. in Vener. 116.

[823] Iliad, ii. 863. Asius, the brother of Hecabê, lives in
Phrygia on the banks of the Sangarius (Iliad, xvi. 717).

[824] See Hellanik. Fragm. 129, 130. ed. Didot; and Kephalôn
Gergithius ap. Steph. Byz. v. Ἀρισβή.

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 B. C. 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 Æolized, or was occupied by Æolic Greeks—likewise the inland towns of Skêpsis[825] and Krebên. 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 Ægean 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 Æolic. A century earlier, the Teukrian population would have embraced a wider range—perhaps Skêpsis and Krebên, the latter of which places was colonized by Greeks from Kymê:[826] 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, Kebrên and Skêpsis, all in lofty and strong positions, were distinguished each by a solemn worship and temple of Athênê, and by the recognition of that goddess as their special patroness.[827]

[825] Skêpsis received some colonists from the Ionic Miletus
(Anaximenês apud Strabo, xiv. p. 635); but the coins of the place
prove that its dialect was Æolic. See Klausen, Æneas und die
Penaten, tom. i. note 180.

Arisbê also, near Abydus, seems to have been settled from
Mitylênê (Eustath. ad Iliad. xii. 97).

The extraordinary fertility and rich black mould of the plain
around Ilium is noticed by modern travellers (see Franklin,
Remarks and Observations on the Plain of Troy, London, 1800, p.
44): it is also easily worked: “a couple of buffaloes or oxen
were sufficient to draw the plough, whereas near Constantinople
it takes twelve or fourteen.”

[826] Ephôrus ap. Harpocrat. v. Κεβρῆνα.

[827] Xenoph. Hellen. i. 1, 10; iii. 1, 10-15.

One of the great motives of Dio in setting aside the Homeric
narrative of the Trojan war, is to vindicate Athênê from the
charge of having unjustly destroyed her own city of Ilium (Orat.
xi. p. 310: μάλιστα διὰ τὴν Ἀθηνᾶν ὅπως μὴ δοκῇ ἀδίκως διαφθεῖραι
τὴν ἑαυτῆς πόλιν).

The author of the Iliad conceived the whole of this region as occupied by people not Greek,—Trojans, Dardanians, Lykians, Lelegians, Pelasgians, and Kilikians. He recognizes a temple and worship of Athênê 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 Æolis, is, the solemn and diffused worship of the Sminthian Apollo. Chrysê, 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.[828]

[828] Strabo, x. p. 473; xiii. p. 604-605. Polemon. Fragm. 31. p.
63, ed. Preller.

Polemon was a native of Ilium, and had written a periegesis of
the place (about 200 B. C., therefore earlier than Dêmêtrius of
Skêpsis): he may have witnessed the improvement in its position
effected by the Romans. He noticed the identical stone upon which
Palamêdês had taught the Greeks to play at dice.

The Sminthian Apollo appears inscribed on the coins of
Alexandreia Trôas; and the temple of the god was memorable even
down to the time of the emperor Julian (Ammian. Marcellin. xxii.
8). Compare Menander (the Rhetor) περὶ Ἐπιδεικτικῶν, iv. 14; apud
Walz. Collect. Rhetor. t. ix. p. 304; also περὶ Σμινθιακῶν, iv.
17.

Σμίνθος, both in the Krêtan and the Æolic dialect, meant a
_field-mouse_: the region seems to have been greatly plagued by
these little animals.

Polemon could not have accepted the theory of Dêmêtrius, that
Ilium was not the genuine Troy: his Periegesis, describing the
localities and relics of Ilium, implied the legitimacy of the
place as a matter of course.

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 Æolic 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 religious 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 Kyzikus 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 Kymê, sprang the original Sibylline prophecies, and the legendary Sibyll who plays so important a part in the tale of Æneas: the mythe of the Sibyll, whose prophecies are supposed to be heard in the hollow blast bursting out from obscure caverns and apertures in the rocks,[829] was indigenous among the Gergithian Teukrians, and passed from the Kymæans in Æolis, along with the other circumstances of the tale of Æneas, to their brethren the inhabitants of Cumæ in Italy. The date of the Gergithian Sibyll, or rather of the circulation of her supposed prophecies, is placed during the reign of Crœsus, 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.[830]

[829] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 42:—

Excisum Euboicæ latus ingens rupis in antrum,
Quo lati ducunt aditus centum, ostia centum;
Unde ruunt totidem voces, responsa Sibyllæ.

[830] Pausanias, x. 12, 8; Lactantius, i. 6, 12; Steph. Byz. v.
Μέρμησσος; Schol. Plat. Phædr. p. 315, Bekker.

The date of this Gergithian Sibyll, or of the prophecies passing
under her name, is stated by Hêrakleidês of Pontus, and there
seems no reason for calling it in question.

Klausen (Æneas und die Penaten, book ii. p. 205) has worked out
copiously the circulation and legendary import of the Sibylline
prophecies.

At what time Ilium and Dardanus became Æolized we have no information. We find the Mitylenæans in possession of Sigeium in the time of the poet Alkæus, about 600 B. C.; and the Athenians during the reign of Peisistratus, having wrested it from them and trying to maintain their possession, vindicate the proceeding by saying that they had as much right to it as the Mitylenæans, “for the latter had no more claim to it than any of the other Greeks who had aided Menelaus in avenging the abduction of Helen.”[831] This is a very remarkable incident, as attesting the celebrity of the legend of Troy, and the value of a mythical title in international disputes—yet seemingly implying that the establishment of the Mitylenæans on that spot must have been sufficiently recent. The country near the junction of the Hellespont and the Propontis is represented as originally held[832] by Bebrykian Thracians, while Abydus was first occupied by Milesian colonists in the reign and by the permission of the Lydian king Gygês[833]—to whom the whole Trôad and the neighboring territory belonged, and upon whom therefore the Teukrians of Ida must have been dependent. This must have been about 700 B. C., a period considerably earlier than the Mitylenæan occupation of Sigeium. Lampsacus and Pæsus, on the neighboring shores of the Propontis, were also Milesian colonies, though we do not know their date: Parium was jointly settled from Miletus, Erythræ and Parus.

[831] Herodot. v. 94. Σίγειον ... τὸ εἷλε Πεισίστρατος αἰχμῇ
παρὰ Μιτυληναίων ... Ἀθηναῖοι, ἀποδεικνύντες λόγῳ οὐδὲν μᾶλλον
Αἰολεῦσι μετεὸν τῆς Ἰλιάδος χώρης, ἢ οὐ καὶ σφι καὶ τοῖσι
ἄλλοισι, ὅσοι Ἑλλήνων συνεξεπρήξαντο Μενέλεῳ τὰς Ἑλένης ἁρπαγάς.
In Æschylus (Eumenid. 402) the goddess Athênê claims the land
about the Skamander, as having been presented to the sons of
Thêseus by the general vote of the Grecian chiefs:—

Ἀπὸ Σκαμάνδρου γῆν καταφθατουμένη,
Ἣν δὴ τ᾽ Ἀχαιῶν ἄκτορές τε καὶ πρόμοι
Τῶν αἰχμαλώτων χρημάτων λάχος μέγα,
Ἔνειμαν αὐτόπρεμνον εἰς τὸ πᾶν ἐμοὶ,
Ἐξαιρετὸν δώρημα Θησέως τόκοις.

In the days of Peisistratus, it seems Athens was not bold enough
or powerful enough to advance this vast pretension.

[832] Charôn of Lampsacus ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 2;
Bernhardy ad Dionys. Periêgêt. 805. p. 747.

[833] Such at least is the statement of Strabo (xii. p. 590);
though such an extent of Lydian role at that time seems not easy
to reconcile with the proceedings of the subsequent Lydian kings.