Chapter II: Ethnology (9)

The first form of the religion of Greece was probably due to the Pelasgians; and moreover it would appear to be from them that it received, in the main, its ritual and hierarchical, as contradistinguished from its imaginative, development. They appear to have incorporated it in visible institutions, and to have given social order to the country; probably in that form in which men live sparsely, and not in the large aggregations of considerable cities. But social order in any form implies some means of defence against the lawless: and we must view the Pelasgians as having introduced the construction of works of this class, which were then of prime necessity to the existence of communities. Their standing pursuit was evidently that of agriculture: the only link of connection established by Homer between them and the beautiful in art, is the doubtful one of the epithets περικαλλέα and καλὰ[606] applied to the architecture of the palaces of Priam and Paris respectively.

In general, the Pelasgian race, though without the vivid temperament of the Hellic tribes, yet would appear to have been both brave and solid in character.

The stream of Pelasgic immigration, flowing chiefly northward, is met by the counter-stream of Hellic tribes, proceeding from the highland nation of the Helli, which had taken its seat in the mountains to the north of Thessaly.

They in their southward course overspread the same countries which the Pelasgi had already occupied; successive tribes of immigrants going forth from the parent stock at different times, as the pressure of population on the means of subsistence required it, and under different names, taken in all likelihood from their leaders.

In the nest of mountaineers, barbarism, or at least rudeness, continues: but as the young broods go forth, and make their way into more favourable conditions of physical and social life, their great capacities for development find scope, and they rapidly assume a new character.

By their greater energy and activity, they became everywhere the dominant race. Policy and war fell into their hands: they supplied the more vigorous, intellectual, and imaginative element in the wonderful composition of the Greek mind. Of the Pelasgian imagination it is difficult to speak in a definite manner: but it probably had not that masculine tone, and energetic movement, when alone, which marks the mind of Greece.

Far more expansive than their Pelasgian antecessors, the Hellic tribes availed themselves of the great advantages which the country offers for extended navigation, which was so essential as a means both of communication, and of attracting the elements of civilization from abroad. They were apt pupils under apt instructors, the Phœnician mariners. They developed the Pelasgic religion into their more enlarged and diversified mythology: they idealized the visible world together with human nature, and established those peculiar and pervasively poetical relations between the seen and the unseen spheres of existence, which are the basis of the Greek mythology. Their keen sense of the beautiful led them to adorn both the body and the mind of man with the attributes of deity, while their imaginative power continually prompted them both to clothe celestial objects in shapes borrowed from the visible world, and to equip the gods with sentiments and passions drawn from the sphere of every day experience.

They likewise brought with them the gymnastic element of the Greek system, the education of the body; and they made provision for this education, in conjunction with a powerful means of national union, in the Games which became so famous through so many ages.

The same qualities which found employment in fashioning the relations of earth to heaven, were likewise busy in uniting the past with the present, by the agency of history in the form of song.

Of this race were the Achæans, who by their power and extension through Greece, gave to it and to its people their first famous designation, that which they bore in the Homeric times. From the same source proceeded all the Hellenes, derivatively so called, and the Myrmidons. Under the great Achæan name, understood in its special sense, are probably included with the Pelopids, the Pylians, Cephallenians, Epeans, Myrmidons, Loerians. Nor can we be certain that it did not also include those Æolid families whose power and extension subsequently impressed large portions of Greece with the Æolian name.

While imperial cares and aims, and the refinements and enjoyments, together with the stir, movement, and solicitude of life, fell to the Hellic portion of the Greek societies, and took its form from them, the Pelasgian element, though depressed below the surface, continued to live and act with vigour; it predominated in the classes which form the solid _substratum_ of society, those on which rural industry, if not those on which mechanical pursuits depended, and from which the upper surface, when exhausted by the prolonged performance of its functions, may draw in every society successive stocks of new materials to renovate its vital forces.

While Homer himself seems to represent the unbounded wealth and fulness, and the manifold and versatile power, of the composite Greek mind, we appear to have, in the rural strains of Hesiod, if not in the unenlivened theogonic traditions ascribed to him, the just and natural exemplification of all that we might expect in a Pelasgic poet.

_States especially Hellic or Pelasgic._

In later, as well as in Homeric times, the Arcadians seem in the most marked manner to have exhibited the Pelasgic aspect of the Greek mind and life: and they show it much in the same relation to the Hellic races, as that of the Saxons to the Norman chivalry. Like the Saxons, it was not in bravery that they failed: they were ἐγχεσίμωροι and ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν: but in energy and passion, and likewise in governing and organizing powers, they were beneath the competing race, and therefore they gave way: while, from their enduring and solid qualities, they were well qualified in after generations to supply the greater waste caused by a more vivid temperament and keener action in the soil above them.

Among the Spartans we find developed, in a very peculiar degree, two of the imperial elements of the Greek character. The first is that political faculty of the Hellic races, by which, as Strabo says, they preserved their ἡγεμονία from the time of Lycurgus, down to the fifth century.

And the second is, the idea of the education of the body, as an essential and main part of human training: a sentiment which to us may seem narrow, but we must remember that the Greeks kept fully in their view what we have dropped from our theories, though it may be hoped, not wholly from our practice, namely, the influence of bodily exercise and discipline in forming mental qualities and habits.

It was to Attica, however, that was reserved the offices of exhibiting in the fullest degree the manysidedness of the Greek character: and the efficient cause, by which she was fitted to fulfil this function, probably may have been that constant infusion of new blood by the successive immigrations of the different Greek races, without the absolute displacement of any of them on a large scale, which, as we have seen, Thucydides remarks to have been her special characteristic. Hence she always exhibited both the ancient and the fresh; both, too, in the highest degree; urging, like Arcadia, the autochthonic origin of her population, which must refer to its Pelasgic element; contending with that state, and with Argos[607], for the honour of the traditions touching Pelasgus and the worship of Ceres; but richer at the same time than any other Greek State, in the varied aggregate of the qualities, which the composite or entire Greek mind appears to have owed to Hellic infusion. Hence the breadth of the transition which, according to Herodotus[608], she had made from the Pelasgic to the Hellenic character: and yet she had made it without any visible breach in the continuity of her social and political traditions.

Though Thessaly was the country in which, to all appearance, the Hellic tribes, coming down from the poverty and rudeness of their highland life, first began to develope their amazing powers, and to acquire civilization, yet it was rather, so to speak, their caravansera or halting house, than their abode.

The Helli, thus travelling through Hellas, give it a name, and receive from it one in return; so that when they pass on to the southward, they are no longer Helli but Hellenes, and have only a secondary and derivative relation to their original home and stock. It is intelligible, that they should not wish to claim too close a kindred with the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι of Homer[609], although most ready to own the relationship in solemn appeals to the ancient seat of Jupiter. Even in Homer’s time, they had advanced very far ahead of the habits thus ascribed to them: for when the Greek chiefs return from the Doloneia, they first wash in the sea, then pass into the bath, and thirdly are anointed, before they begin their well-earned meal[610].

The rapidity of their growth in numbers, and of their propagation southwards, might be due to their having settled on a fertile plain; while necessities, arising from the vicissitudes of climate, would be the probable and less copious cause of migration from the hills. But in any case, whether from the rapidity of their passage through Thessaly, or from their having actually occupied no more than a small portion of it, they left it in the Homeric, and apparently also in the Hesiodic period, still partly impressed, as they must have found it, with the Pelasgic name[611]. The prolonged existence of this appellation indicates in part perhaps the predominance of the Pelasgic element in this country, in part the fugacious character of the Hellic settlement, of which only the Achæan portion lived through the historic times in such a degree of force as to maintain its visible identity: this, too, according to post-Homeric tradition, was peopled by the Myrmidons from the south, and not directly from the region of the Helli.

Thessaly, then, was the nursery or cradle of the Hellic or Hellenic races, but it was no more. Consequently with the lapse of time, as it wanted the true mixture of ingredients, Thessaly became less and less Greek in its essential habits and sympathies: while from its preserving a federal constitution, under a federal head, the τάγος, we may also refer to its more Pelasgian character the apparent fact, that it was not so liable to political change, or νεωτέρισις, as were the less Pelasgian parts of Greece. When, after centuries of vicissitude, the outward notes of its original blood were almost gone, Pelasgian feeling still survived: for Thucydides relates that, when Brasidas entered Thessaly at the head of the Lacedæmonian army, he found the mass of the people attached by affection to the Athenian cause, and had to rely on aristocratic influence to furnish him with guides[612].

FOOTNOTES:

[516] See Studies on the Theo-mythology of Homer.

[517] Fasti, i. 39.

[518] De Nat. Deor. ii. 27.

[519] Liv. Hist. Rom. iv. 25, 29.

[520] Exc. iv. ad Æn. vii. See Browne’s History of Roman Literature, chap. viii. p. 129, and chap. iii. p. 41. Also Dunlop’s Hist. Rom. Literature, vol. iii. p. 56.

[521] See ‘The Trojans.’

[522] Polyb. vi. 56, sect. 6-12.

[523] Dionysius, b. ii. 18-21.

[524] Id., b. viii. 38. See also Cic. Div. i. 2.

[525] Smith’s Dict., Art. ‘Fasti.’

[526] Acts xvii. 22.

[527] Outram de Sacrif. b. i. ch. iv. sect. 3.

[528] Exodus xi. 12-16, and Levit. viii. 1-13. 1 Sam. xvi. 2, &c. See Calmet’s Dict. Taylor’s Edition, 1838. Art. Priest.

[529] Heb. v. 4.

[530] Browne’s Roman Classical Literature, ch. i. p. 13.

[531] Hor. de Art. Poet. v. 53.

[532] Hare and Thirlwall’s Niebuhr, vol. i. p. 65.

[533] Horæ Pelasg. ch. iv.

[534] Sechster Theil. Leipzig, 1838.

[535] Applied principally to the shoulder of animals by the Latins.

[536] The link of ideal connection is to be found in the sacrificial office of the primitive _rex_.

[537] Scott and Liddell _in voc._

[538] Compare the Homeric derivation of Ὀδύσσευς from ὀδύσσομαι, Od. xix. 407.

[539] Döderlein.

[540] Ennius.

[541] Perhaps connected with the Greek κεύθειν.

[542] Cæsar, b. iii. c. 96.

[543] Il. xx. 123.

[544] As in Æn. xii. 952.

[545] Buttmann’s Lexil. in voc. κελαινός.

[546] Compare sup. p. 237.

[547] Od. iii. 601-8. The names of Ctesippus and Elatus among the Suitors are related to horses: but all the islands were not so rough as Ithaca, and some of the nobles may, like Ulysses, have had pastures on the continent. (Od. xiv. 100.)

[548] Sup. p. 256.

[549] Inf. sect. ix.

[550] Od. ii. 347. vii. 8. iv. 124.

[551] See Mure’s Hist. Lit. Greece, vol. ii. p. 86.

[552] Il. ii. 840-3.

[553] Il. xi. 303.

[554] See inf. sect. viii.

[555] Il. v. 705-7.

[556] Il. xvi. vv. 369, 393, 419, 422.

[557] Il. vi. 20-37.

[558] Il. xvi. 694.

[559] Il. v. 677, 8.

[560] Il. xx. 455-87.

[561] Inf. sect. x.

[562] See ‘Studies on Policy.’

[563] See Studies on ‘The Trojans.’

[564] Il. xiii. 685.

[565] Il. ii. 577.

[566] Herod. i. 56.

[567] See Studies on Religion, sect. 2.

[568] Hist. of Greece, vol. i. p. 137.

[569] Od. viii. 179.

[570] Hor. Od. i. 10. 1.

[571] Plutus 1162.

[572] Pyth. ii. 18. Nem. x. 98. Isthm. i 85.

[573] Od. viii. 493. xi. 592.

[574] Il. xxiii. 827.

[575] Il. xi. 699-702.

[576] Vid. inf. sect. viii.

[577] xxiii. 629.

[578] Il. ii. 642.

[579] Il. ix. 529-99.

[580] Il. iv. 399.

[581] Sup. pp. 167, 242, and see ‘The Outer Geography of the Odyssey.’

[582] Grote’s Hist. ii. 322.

[583] Paus. viii. 2. 1.

[584] Grote’s Hist. Greece, i. 160.

[585] Il. ii. 773.

[586] Il. ii. 597, 8.

[587] On Pelasgian music see Müller’s Dorians, i. p. 367 (transl.)

[588] Fergusson’s Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, book vi. chap. i.

[589] Il. vi. 428.

[590] Il. ix. 533.

[591] Od. vi. 102.

[592] See infra, Studies on Religion, sect. ii.

[593] Il. v. 62.

[594] Od. xv. 80.

[595] Od. xi. 506.

[596] Il. iii. 232.

[597] Od. xi. 322.

[598] Il. i. 269.

[599] Od. xix. 399, 413.

[600] Od. iii. 267. xxi. 16.

[601] Il. xi. 698-702. Od. vi. 364. xiv. 327.

[602] Il. xxiii. 629-43.

[603] Od. xiv. 222.

[604] Od. i. 1-3.

[605] Il. xv. 80.

[606] Il. vi. 242, 315.

[607] Paus. i. 14. 2.

[608] Herod. i. 56.

[609] Il. xvi. 235.

[610] Il. x. 537-9.

[611] Hes. Fragm. xviii.

[612] Thuc. iv. 78.

SECT. VIII.

_On the three greater Homeric appellatives._

_a._ Danaans. _b._ Argives. _c._ Achæans.

We now come to the great Homeric appellatives, Danaan, Argive, and Achæan. As Thucydides has said (i. 3), Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι, καὶ Ἀργείους, καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. Why has the great historian arranged the three names in this order? It cannot be with reference to the comparative frequency of their use: for the first is employed the smallest number of times, and the third is by far the most frequent. For the present let us postpone seeking after the cause; and simply note it as probable, even if no more than probable, that there _is_ a cause.

_Modes of formation for Names of Peoples._

Let me, by way of preface to the examination of these names, consider the various ways in which, so far as we have the means of tracing them (which is but to a limited extent), the names attached by Homer to the inhabitants of particular countries are derived.

They appear to come either

1. From an eponymist directly, who is also an original founder, as Δαρδανοὶ, Τρῶες, from Dardanus, and Tros, in relation to Dardania and Troja respectively.

2. From the land they live in: and thus from an eponymist, if there has originally been one for the territory.

For example, we find Ἰθακήσιοι from an island Ἰθακὴ, which again was derived from Ἰθακός. In a case like this, when the appellation of the people comes not directly, but mediately from the name-giver, a territorial designation intervening, we can draw no inference as to the oneness of race between them and him. Thus in the case before us, Ἰθακήσιοι, though connected with Ἰθακὴ, has not as of necessity, any connection whatever with Ἰθακὸς personally.

3. From the land they live in, as described by its most prominent physical characteristic.

For example, the Thracians (Θρῇκες), must evidently be so called from the roughness of the country, as a cognate word to τρῆχυς, which is thus applied to Ithaca,

τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουρότροφος. Odyss. ix. 27.

Again, from Αἰγίαλος, the district afterwards called Achæa, we have, in later Greek[613], the name Αἰγιαλεῖς for the inhabitants. This does not occur in Homer, but we have what is equivalent to it in the name of Αἰγιάλεια, who was wife of Diomed, and daughter of Adrastus, the former king of Sicyon in Ægialus. This is an instance of the application of the principle, not to the inhabitants at large, but to an individual inhabitant.

4. The name of a population may be derived secondarily from that of another population. Thus while we must derive Ἕλληνες from Ἕλλας, this in its turn can only be drawn from the Ἕλλοι.

5. In the single case of the Athenians, we find the name of a population derived from that of a deity.

6. It is presumable, though not certain, that entire populations took their name from ruling individuals or races. It seems hardly possible to explain, for example, the name Καδμεῖοι, which nowhere connects itself with any of the foregoing sources of eponymism, otherwise than by reference to an individual Cadmus, whom Homer mentions in Od. v. 333.

The idea prevails extensively, at least by sufferance, that these three great names are in Homer mere synonyms, and have no reference to any actual and historical differences, either existing when Homer wrote, or known by him to have existed at a previous period.

This question it is proposed now to examine. I commence by making a broad admission. It is this.

Upon the face of the poems, and on almost all ordinary occasions, Homer seems at first sight to use, and he very frequently does use, as equivalent and interchangeable, those three principal designations which he applies to the Greeks in common.

_Homer’s use of them distinctive._

It is a very important question, however, whether Homer knew of and observed any distinctions between these names. For if he did, then these mere commonplace words, as they are taken to be, may involve in them the germ of much early history.

In this investigation, we have the advantage of dealing in great part, not with mere traditional assertion, but with facts. The use of particular names, at particular epochs, for particular tribes, affords (if the text can be trusted for genuineness) a class of evidence analogous to that supplied by coins and inscriptions for history, or that afforded by geological phænomena with respect to the formation of the globe.

The poems of Homer, particularly the Iliad, abound in passages relating to prior occurrences. These passages are not in general of a high order of poetical beauty, as compared with the rest of the poem; they often cause the action to hang rather heavily; many of them make up the speeches of old men, whose natural leaning to loquacity it appears that the Poet has, with his usual skill, made to minister to the accomplishment of his own marked historic aims. But they are repositories stored, we may almost say packed, with the most curious and suggestive information.

Some of them may be without date: but the time is generally fixed within limits sufficiently close, either by genealogies, or by the period in the lives of the narrators, to which the tales belong. The war of the Elians and Pylians in the Eleventh Book took place in the boyhood of Nestor: probably from fifty to sixty years before the war of Troy. The birth of Eurystheus, related in the Nineteenth Book, was probably earlier still by ten or twenty years. The other legends fall into the interval between these events and the _Troica_. Now if we can trace a difference in the application by Homer of his appellatives, either as to the times or the places, he may hereby conclusively, though unconsciously, tell us a good deal about his view of the succession, and the local distribution, of ruling races in Greece.

Such a rule of difference is easy to be traced.

For example. In the Catalogue[614] and elsewhere, if in the course of the action he refers to the soldiers who proceeded from the country afterwards called Bœotia, he calls them Βοιωτοί. But where Agamemnon has, or rather makes, occasion to tell a story of the same people acting in prior history, he calls them, not Βοιωτοὶ, but once Καδμεῖοι, and once by the equivalent name Καδμειῶνες[615]. The tale is an account of the mission of Tydeus from Thebes to Mycenæ, in company with Polynices, which had occurred under the Pelopid dynasty.

In this story it appears, that Tydeus and Polynices, first obtained a promise of the help they wanted; but that, after they had departed, there was a change of resolution. Hence messengers were sent to acquaint Tydeus, and apparently to recall the force. The expression is (Il. iv. 384),

ἔνθ’ αὖτ’ ἀγγελίην ἐπὶ Τύῃ στεῖλαν Ἀχαιοί.

An allusion to this occurrence is again put into the mouth of Minerva in Il. v. 800-7. The resemblance in the names used is so precise as to be almost _precisian_. Again, the Mycenians are named once, and named as Ἀχαιοί. Again, the Thebans are named twice, and once it is as Καδμεῖοι, once as Καδμείωνες.

_Proofs of the distinctive use._

These two instances fortify one another to such a degree by their concurrence, that, as I would submit, they would, even if they stood alone, amount to a demonstration that Homer had regard to the times and circumstances under which the several races prevailed, in those passages of his work which refer to particular incidents of prior history, personal and local. But there is no lack of other evidence.

First, we have other pieces of prior history, which affect the same portion of Greece. The first of these probably preceded the _Troica_ by only two, or, at the utmost, two and a half generations. It is the account of the birth of Eurystheus, given by Agamemnon himself in the Nineteenth Book. The scene of it is described as Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκόν. He calls it indeed by the name, which it still bore at the time when he spoke, and which was understood by the hearers, for it remained the same country as it had been in former times. But the same people, who in the time of Tydeus, living under the Pelopids, were Ἀχαιοὶ, in the time of Eurystheus, and therefore before the predominance of the Pelopids, are described as Ἀργεῖοι. In Il. xix. 122, Juno thus speaks of the birth of Eurystheus

ἤδη ἀνὴρ γέγον’ ἐσθλὸς, ὃς Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάξει.

And again, v. 124, the same term is used.

Again, it appears from the Sixth Iliad that Prœtus, who expelled Bellerophon about the same time, was king of the Ἀργεῖοι (Il. vi. 158);

ὅς ῥ’ ἐκ δήμου ἔλασσεν, ἐπεὶ πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν
Ἀργείων.

According to extra-Homeric tradition, Prœtus was the brother of Eurystheus. According to Homer, his power extends over Ephyre, and over the Argives: and as Æolid dynasties were then ruling in the west, it is the country afterwards called the Argos of the Achæans, within some part of which he must have ruled. But in telling both the story of Prœtus, and the story of Eurystheus, with reference to the same side of Peloponnesus, and entirely out of connection with one another, the text of Homer, true to itself, calls the subjects of each at that period, only by the name Ἀργεῖοι, never Δαναοὶ or Ἀχαιοί.

Thus, one generation before the _Troica_ he calls people Achæans, and calls them by that name only, whom one or two generations earlier he describes, and repeatedly and uniformly describes, as having been Argives. There can hardly be stronger circumstantial evidence of the fact, that to each term he attached its own special meaning.

And yet it is not simply that Homer has made the Argive the more ancient, and the Achæan the more recent, name. On the contrary, he uses both the one and the other with marked respect to place as well as to time. For at the great Argive epoch he has Achæans: and at the great Achæan epoch, that of the poems, he has Argive associations, and a local Argive designation, still remaining.

In the Eleventh Book, Nestor detains Patroclus with a speech of great length. In the beginning of this harangue, he refers to the circumstances of the moment, and, having ended his preface, he travels back to his own early youth, indeed almost his childhood, to give the story of a war, or foray, between the Epeans and the Pylians. When he has ended this tale, he returns to the actual position of affairs before Troy.

In the narrative of this raid[616], he commonly terms the one side Epeans, and the other Pylians. But he once calls the Epeans, who were inhabitants of Elis, Elians. This is natural enough: for as the Elian name afterwards (and so soon as in the time of Homer) prevailed in that race and country, it might very well have been already beginning to come into use. But he also calls the Pylians Achæans; and he uses the name distinctively, for it is where he is speaking of them as the conquering party[617]. For this there is clearly no corresponding reason. It is equally clear that Homer does not call the Pylians Ἀχαιοὶ, simply in the sense of being Greeks, for then the name would not have been distinctive: the enemy too would have been included with them, which would turn the passage into nonsense. Homer, then, (there is no other alternative) means to say that the Pylians were, in some particular sense, of the Achæan race.

This is the more worthy of remark, when we look to the preamble and peroration of the speech. For in both of these, which refer to the whole body of the Greeks and to the Trojan epoch, he employs his usual names, and calls them both Danaans (Δαναῶν οὐ κήδεται, v. 665, also vid. 797), and Argives (Ἀργείων ἀέκητι, v. 667): finally Achæans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, 800).

Thus then he calls the Pylians Achæans at the time of the Argive predominance: for this local war could hardly have been more than ten or twenty years after the birth of Eurystheus, and must therefore have been before, or else during his reign; that is to say, at a time when his own subjects are called Ἀργεῖοι.

Again. Homer uses the word Ἀργεῖος in the feminine singular fifteen times. Twice it is with reference to Juno. Of course this application of the term is figurative. But though it be figurative, the figure is evidently founded on her close and intimate relation, not to the Greeks at large only, but to the Argive name; and to the persons, but more particularly to the place, that was so specially associated with it[618].

In all the other thirteen places, the epithet is joined with the name of Helen. Does it for her mean simply Greek, or something special and beyond this? Now if it meant simply Greek, it would be strange that she is never called, I will not say Δαναὴ, because the Danaan name has no singular use in Homer, but certainly Ἀχαιὴ or Ἀχαίïς. Especially as the word Ἀχαιὸς is used as an epithet, be it remembered, many times oftener, than is Ἀργεῖος: and it alone is used to describe the women of Greece generally.

Again, if the epithet Argive, as applied to Helen, meant simply Greek, it might be suitable enough in the mouth of a Trojan speaking among Trojans, but it would have been weak and unmeaning, and therefore most unlike Homer, in the mouth of a Greek or a friend of Greeks; or when, as in the Odyssey[619], Helen is no longer among strangers, but at home. Yet it is used in the following passages among others, (1) by Juno to Minerva, Il. ii. 161, (2) by Minerva to Ulysses, Il. ii. 177; and here in a near juxtaposition with the Achæan appellative, which goes far to prove of itself that Ἀργείη has a meaning more specific than merely Greek. The passage is,

Ἀργείην Ἑλένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ Ἀχαιῶν
ἐν Τροίῃ ἀπόλοντο.

I doubt whether Homer ever places in such proximity the two epithets with the same meaning for each[620]. The tautology would be gross, if Achæan and Argeian each meant neither more nor less than Greek: but if Ἀργείη have the local sense, nothing awkward remains. (3) It is used by Agamemnon, Il. iii. 458, in addressing the Trojans; (4) Il. iv. 174, in addressing Menelaus; (5) Il. ix. 140, in addressing the Greek Council. It seems quite clear, from even this enumeration, that Ἀργείη, as applied to Helen, must mean something different from the mere fact that she belonged to the Greek nation at large.

Nor is it difficult to find a meaning. Homer indeed leaves us but narrow information as to the extraction of Helen. He calls her sometimes εὐπατέρεια[621], and many times Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα[622]. In the Third Iliad he shows her to be the sister of Castor and Pollux, and in the Eleventh Odyssey he shows them to be the children of Tyndareus and Leda[623]. Who Tyndareus was we do not know from him. But the common tradition, which makes him a sovereign in Eastern Peloponnesus, is thoroughly accordant with the slight notices in Homer. For, as we see from the cases of Eurystheus and Prœtus, it was in Eastern Peloponnesus that the Argive power and name prevailed; and Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus is, as we have also seen, characteristically with him the Argive Helen. Thus then it may now be lawful to say, we are supplied with a meaning for the name which makes it especially appropriate in the mouth of Agamemnon, the head of the Pelopids. For they were the race who, coming in at the head of the Achæans, had from the West overpowered and superseded the Argive power of the East, while they also held as heirs to it by marriage: and if a royal Argive house at the epoch of the war survived only in Helen and her sister Clytemnestra, she in part at least represented its title, and, as a lawful wife of Menelaus, added to his throne whatever authority the name and rights of her race were capable of conferring.

Having, I trust, seen enough to justify the belief that some at least of these names in the mind of Homer had a definite as well as a more general meaning, let us now, taking them in succession, proceed to examine what that meaning is.

_The Danaans of Homer._

Among the three great Homeric appellatives, let us direct our attention first to the one, which is presumably the oldest. The word Δαναοὶ, from the comparative paucity of the signs and indications connected with it, evidently answers to this description.

We will take first the Homeric, and then the later, evidence respecting it. Of the former, the greater number of particulars are negative. Indeed we have but two positive notes to dwell upon; both of these, however, are of great importance.

1. The Danaan name is with Homer a standing appellation of the Greeks. I think, however, it can be shown that it never means the Greek nation, but always the Greek armament or soldiery.

It is used in the Iliad one hundred and forty-seven times. The name Ἀργεῖοι is employed oftener, namely, one hundred and seventy-seven times in the plural, besides eleven times in the singular as a personal epithet: and Ἀχαιοὶ much more frequently still.

_His epithets for the three designations._

If we observe the shadings, attached to these words respectively by means of the epithets which Homer annexes to them, we shall find they establish perceptible distinctions.

The epithets of Δαναοὶ are exclusively military epithets:

1. ἥρωες.
2. θεράποντες Ἄρηος.
3. φιλοπτόλεμοι.
4. αἰχμηταί.
5. ἀσπισταί.
6. ἴφθιμοι.
7. ταχύπωλοι.

The epithets of Ἀργεῖοι are as follows:

1. ἰόμωροι, Il. iv. 242. xiv. 479.
2. ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι, Il. xiv. 479.
3. θωρηκτοί, Il. xxi. 429.
4. φιλοπτόλεμοι, Il. xix. 269.
5. ἐλεγχέες, Il. iv. 242.

Upon these we may observe, first, that they are few in number; secondly, that they are used with extreme rarity; being only applied in four passages altogether, whereas the word Δαναοὶ has epithets in twenty-two. Thirdly, this word only twice in the whole of the poems has a military epithet attached to it. For I must follow those, who do not translate ἰόμωροι as corresponding with ἐγχεσίμωροι: (1) because the Greeks were not archers, (2) because the derivation from ἴα, ‘the voice,’ giving the sense of braggart, harmonises exactly with the accompanying phrase ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι: as well as (3) for the presumptive, but in Homer by no means conclusive, reason, that ἴον in composition is long.

The epithets of Ἀχαιοὶ are numerous, highly varied, and of very frequent use. They are these:

1. ἀπειλητῆρες.
2. μάχης ἀκόρητοι.
3. ἀνάλκιδες.
4. δῖοι.
5. ἑλικῶπες.
6. εὐκνήμιδες.
7. ἥρωες.
8. καρηκομόωντες.
9. μεγάθυμοι.
10. μένεα πνείοντες.
11. χαλκοκνήμιδες.
12. χαλκοχίτωνες.
13. ὑπερκύδαντες.
14. ἀρηίφιλοι.
15. φιλοπτόλεμοι.

These epithets are used in nearly one hundred and thirty passages, and they may be classified as comprising,

(1) One or two words of sarcastic reproach, very rarely used.

(2) Words descriptive of courage and spirit: such are μεγάθυμοι,
μένεα πνείοντες.

(3) Words indicating that disposition to brag, which is more or less
traceable in the military conduct of the Greeks, as well as glaringly
palpable among the Trojans.

(4) Words descriptive of personal beauty: ἑλικῶπες and καρηκομόωντες.

(5) The word δῖοι, which signifies generally the possession of some
kind of excellence.

(6) Words relating to well made and well finished armour: εὐκνήμιδες,
χαλκοκνήμιδες, χαλκοχίτωνες.

And of the epithets of the three appellatives respectively we may say,

(1) Those of Ἀχαιοὶ are highly diversified, extended, and elevated in
meaning: and are not suitable for soldiers exclusively.

(2) Those of Ἀργεῖοι are so slight and rare that they may be passed
over.

(3) Those of Δαναοὶ are most properly neither those of chiefs, nor of
a nation at large, but of a soldiery.

In the Odyssey the Danaan name is used thirteen times: but it never signifies either the Greeks contemporary with the action of that poem, or the Greek nation in its prior history: it is employed always retrospectively, and always of the soldiery in the Trojan war.

It will be observed by readers of the poems, that Homer often brings two of the three great appellatives, or even all the three, into juxtaposition so near, as would be inconvenient upon the supposition that they are purely synonymous. For instance, in Il. i. 71, we have Ἀργεῖοι and Ἀχαιοὶ in the same line, and in Il. i. 90, 91, Δαναοὶ and Ἀχαιοὶ in two successive lines. It is, I think, obvious, that this inconvenience will be mitigated or removed, if it can be shown that each of these three names, though they were most commonly applied to mean the same body of persons, nevertheless had its own shade of meaning. And we shall presently have to examine cases, where a determination of this kind appears to be required by the sense[624].

All the rest of the Homeric evidence connected with the name Δαναοὶ is of a negative character.

It is never used in the singular number, either as an adjective, or as a substantive. Nor is it ever applied to women: a point not immaterial, in connection with the question, whether with Homer it does not mean the Greeks of the army exclusively. There is, again, nothing in his use of it which associates it with a particular class of the army, either the lower or the higher; but it appears to be essentially general, comprehensive, and, I may add, likewise invariable in its meaning.

Still less should we expect to find it, nor do we find it, connected with the inhabitants of any particular part of the country: it has not, like the Cadmean or Cephallenian name, a local habitation within Greece. Nor has it in itself any root, or any derivative, which would associate it with any territory, as Αἰγιαλεῖς refers us to Αἰγίαλος, or even as Ἄρκαδες is related to Ἀρκαδίη.

Its use in the Iliad is in exact harmony with that in the Odyssey: it is never associated with the history of the Greeks or any part of them: in short, there is no clear evidence of its existence or application beyond the limits of the camp.

Neither has it any thing related to the physical character of the country, or to any of the races known to have inhabited it, or to any employment or habit of life, or to any deity. It floats before us like Delos on the Ægean, without any visible or discoverable root. And the only question is, whether the slight positive evidence at our command is not so limited, and so hemmed in on all sides by negatives, as to determine the hypothesis that may be drawn from it to one particular form, by forbidding us to move, except in one particular direction.

It is quite plain that the Danaan name must have had some root, lying very deep in the history or legends of Greece: since it would not have been possible for Homer, as a poet of the people, handling a subject the most profoundly national, to describe the Greek army under any name, except one associated with some of the most splendid, or the most venerable, traditions of the country.

_Danaan name dynastic._

In one way alone could this name fulfil the required condition. If its root was not territorial, nor tribal, nor religious, it could only be personal. Was there, then, a Danaus known to the early history of Greece, who founded a dynasty in its centre of power, at a period anterior to the Hellenic history of the country, so as not to be in competition with the honours of that race? If so, then it is intelligible that the Greeks might be called Δαναοὶ by Homer. If that dynasty had passed away, we can well understand why Δαναοὶ should not be a name of contemporary Greeks as such: just as Καδμεῖοι was not an admissible designation for contemporary Bœotians. Further, if it had never been an historical appellative at all, but was the mere reflection cast by the figure of a great primitive personage, and incorporated, for the Poet’s purpose, in a designation made national by him, then we can see how natural it was, that he should limit the word altogether to an heroic and martial sense; just as Cambrian for Welshman, or Caledonian for Scotchman, or Gael for Highlander, or son of Albion for Englishman, would be an appellation naturally appropriated to romance, or war, or any strain impregnated with a strong vein of imagery or passion, but yet would not be suitable for the purposes of pure history.

In this inquiry concerning the Danaan name, we must, I think, carry along with us, as a cardinal element in the case, that which we know from other sources respecting the manner in which Homer was wont to veil all traces of the entry from elsewhere of races, persons, or influences into Greece. It must never be forgotten, that, throughout the whole of the poems, there is apparently not one single statement, made to us with the intention of conveying information respecting the colonization of Greece from abroad. It seems to be the Poet’s intention that we should assume all Greek manners, institutions, and races, to have sprung out of the very soil: and it is only accidentally that he imparts to us any information or suggestion on this subject, when he is in quest of some other purpose, and unawares lets fall a gleam of light upon some foreign settlement or immigration.

All this is conformable to the course of natural feeling. Shakespeare found it worth his while to sing of Lear, but not of Hengist and Horsa; of the English in France, not of the Normans in England. And though Danish invasions have not robbed our great Alfred of his fame, yet for a long time, in order to guard its brilliancy, it may have been that we coloured in our own favour the military history of the period. Arrivals from abroad, in the early periods of the life of a nation, are usually the conquests, in one form or another, of foreigners over natives: of what is strange to the soil over what is associated with it. It can hardly be, that such narratives should be popular. An abnormal instance to the contrary may be found in the fable, which deduced the Julian line in Rome from Æneas: but this was for poetry composed a thousand years after the date of its narrative; composed when the line of national continuity with those, whom Æneas was taken to have conquered, had been completely broken; and composed for the ears of a court, when the pulse of national life had become almost insensible. Even the process, by which Hellenes mastered Pelasgians, is nowhere professedly related by Homer; whose purpose it was to unite more closely the elements of the nation, and not to record that they had once been separate.

_Compared with the Cadmean._

Except in the one point, that the name Καδμεῖοι had had a clear and undeniable place in prior history, there is a marked analogy between the modes in which Homer treats the Cadmean and the Danaan stories. In each of the two cases, general tradition tells us of a foreigner, who enters Greece and founds a dynasty. This dynasty, after acting powerfully on the destinies of the country for some generations, in the course of time disappears, the name dying with it. All this, in the first of the two instances, we have seen to be sufficiently supported by inference and suggestion from Homer. Yet Homer never mentions Cadmus, except as it were by chance, in the act of giving the extraction of Leucothee[625]; nor states that he came from abroad; nor that he founded a dynasty at all. He gives us Cadmus, father of Leucothee, and Cadmeans, and lets us make of them what we can. So here he gives us Danaans, and not indeed a Danaus, but a Danae, who is presumably related to Danaus.

2. In Iliad xiv., Jupiter renders an account of his passion for various women, all of them persons in the very highest positions; and among these for Danae[626].

Δανάης καλλισφύρου Ἀκρισιώνης,
ἣ τέκε Περσῆα, πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν.

_The line of Danae._

In this passage we have Danae exhibited as the head of a line of sovereigns through Perseus, who occupied the most ancient and most distinguished seat of power in Greece, that of the Eastern Peloponnesus. From her, indeed, the derivation of sovereignty is locally continuous down to the time of Homer. Perseus is the father of Sthenelus[627], and Sthenelus of Eurystheus. Next to him, we find Pelops in possession of the throne, with a new sceptre, betokening a new sovereignty. That is to say, he was no longer a merely local sovereign, whose highest honour it was to be first in that class, _primus inter pares_; but he had also acquired an extensive supremacy, reaching beyond his own borders, or those of the Achaic Argos, and embracing all Greece, with a multitude of islands[628].

Such is the line of Danae downwards: beginning with a son, whose paternal extraction we shall consider hereafter[629]. And her epoch, as we shall see, is six generations before the Trojan war. For tracing her upwards, we have no means from Homer, except such as are afforded by the word Ἀκρισιώνη. The use of a patronymic which describes Danae as the daughter (most probably) of Acrisius, in some degree makes it likely that Acrisius either was the brother of Danaus, or otherwise collaterally related, rather than directly descended from him. For, had Danae herself been descended from Danaus, it seems improbable that she would have drawn her patronymic from the less distinguished Acrisius, unless Danaus was a very remote ancestor. But this is very improbable: for seven generations before Troy form the utmost limit of Homer’s historical knowledge; and where all besides falls within that line, it is improbable that there should be a single exception reaching greatly beyond it. And again, from the course of migration, it is likely that we should find his oldest traditions in Asia, and not in Europe. On the other hand, that Homer should stop short in tracing the lineage onwards, just before he came to the foreign immigrant, is in exact conformity with what he has done in omitting to connect Œdipus and Epicaste[630] with Cadmus, or Pelops with Tantalus. In the former of these two cases, the omission all the more cogently suggests design, because Epicaste is the only woman introduced in the Νεκυΐα without mention of her husband, among all those, eight in number, of whose cases he gives us the detail. It is most probable, therefore, that Homer meant the genealogy to stand as follows: and at the least, it must not be thought that the text of Homer gives countenance either directly or indirectly to those later fables, which throw back the first Greek dynasties into a very remote antiquity.

1. Danaus = Acrisius
|
2. Danae
3. Perseus
4. Sthenelus
5. Eurystheus (= Hercules) = Pelops
6. Atreus = Thyestes
7. Agamemnon = Ægisthus.

_Epoch of the dynasty._

According to these presumptions, Danaus is contemporary with Dardanus[631]: and also is just such a person as Homer’s poetic use of the name Δαναοὶ would lead us to expect; one who came from abroad, and is on that account kept in majestic shadow; one who founded a throne, but did not introduce a race: one who may have given his people the name of Δαναοὶ, as Cadmus gave that of Καδμεῖοι, for the time while his dynasty was in power, but whose name disappeared, together with its sway. We have, it will be remembered in Homer, no Homeric legends of the period of the Danaids, so that we do not know whether the name Δαναοὶ was then in any degree national or not.

According to the post-Homeric tradition, Danaus was an Egyptian[632], brother of Ægyptus. He migrated into Greece, and became king of Argos. Acrisius and Prœtus were reputed to be his great-grandsons.

In Homer, too, we have an Acrisius and a Prœtus: but Prœtus is contemporary with Bellerophon, two generations before the _Troica_, so that he is later by four generations than Acrisius, and later by at least four than Danaus.

The more recent tradition, contradicting Homer positively in this, as in so many instances, carries Prœtus back to the time of Acrisius, and then, paying some respect to the interval between Prœtus and Danaus, gives compensation by thrusting Danaus himself three generations further back.

Of the posterity of the Homeric Prœtus we hear nothing, and with him the Danaid line, prolonged in a junior branch, may have expired. Tradition places him on the throne of Tiryns. His holding a separate sovereignty in Argolis is not of itself in conflict with the Homeric account of the Perseids, who reigned at Mycenæ; because we find in Argos itself a separate sovereignty under Diomed at the epoch of the _Troica_. But the terms used are peculiar. Prœtus ruled over Ἀργεῖοι;

πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν
Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γάρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν[633].

The account of Eurystheus in the Nineteenth Book may, however, imply that he was king of all the Ἀργεῖοι: and at first sight there is some conflict here, because both Eurystheus and Prœtus may be said to date two generations before the _Troica_. The solution is probably as follows. The passion of Antea, wife of Prœtus, for Bellerophon, suggests that her husband was more advanced in life than Bellerophon, whom, as the grandfather of Glaucus, we may take as justly representing in time the second generation before the war. On the other hand, as Eurystheus was the contemporary of Hercules, and Hercules had a son, as well as grandsons in the war, we may assume Eurystheus to have been junior to the generation, as Prœtus was its senior; so that they need not have been contemporary princes.

The historic place assigned to Danaus, either as we might fix it from Homer, or as the later tradition would determine it, keeps him clear of the earliest Hellic traditions in southern Greece. None of these can well be carried back beyond Sisyphus; and Sisyphus stands at five generations before the war, while Danaus cannot be less than seven. Had Homer made Danaus synchronise with the earlier Hellic sovereignties, it would have been, in my view, a presumption against his Egyptian origin, or his existence altogether. For an Egyptian stranger was little likely to attain to power, where Hellenes were already in the field: the more energetic genius would subdue the less vigorous. The expulsion of the Hellenic Bellerophon, and the plot against his life, may really have been connected with the political jealousies of the Danaids towards the formidable new-comers of the Æolid stem: nor do I read the fable of Jupiter with Danae otherwise than as a veil, used to give dignity to the commencement of an Hellic sovereignty, which, in the person of Perseus, partly succeeded, partly supplanted, the Danaid throne.

Danaus has been mentioned by Hesiod, the first among the later authorities. This poet states, that he relieved Argos from drought: an operation which harmonises well with the tradition that brings him from a country dependent on the irrigation of the Nile, as the conditions of cultivation there could not but lead at an early date to care in the management of water. He likewise calls Perseus by the name of Δαναίδης, and also terms him the son of Danae[634].

The only point of connection between the Danaids and the Argive or Argeian name is, that Prœtus, the last of the Danaids, reigns over Argeians. But this is at a period when the Perseid house, which was evidently Hellenic, has already become the first in rank among the Greek thrones, and has given, as is probable, the Argeian name to the people of Eastern Peloponnesus. The whole evidence, therefore, throws the Danaan name, with all its incidents, back to a period anterior to that of Argeians and of Achæans.

But if the Danai were thus before the Ἀργεῖοι and before the Ἀχαιοὶ, whom did they follow?

_Post-Homeric tradition._

The evidence of Æschylus in the Supplices supports the tradition which makes them immediately follow the Pelasgi[635], or which, more strictly, represents their name as the first of those borne by the Greek nation after it had ceased to be simply Pelasgic.

By Euripides was conveyed a kindred tradition, that Danaus, having come to Argos, colonized the city of Inachus; and that the Peloponnesians, previously called Pelasgiotes, were thereafter called Danai[636].

Πελασγιῶτας δ’ ὠνομασμένους, τὸ πρὶν
Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ’ ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα.

These traditions, received through the tragedians, coincide with the evidence of the Homeric text. For this text, in the first place, clearly throws the Danaan line farther back than that of any of the Hellic tribes. Secondly, by negative evidence, no where employing the Danaan name in the pre-Troic legends, he leaves us to infer that it must have been the oldest, and the most remote from common use, of his three great appellations. Thirdly, Homer supplies us with no other name which there is the smallest ground for inserting between the Danaans and the ancient Pelasgi, of whom we have found traces, direct and indirect, in so many places of the poems.

Thus, then, although we can plead little but conjecture from Homer with respect to the person Danaus, we seem to be justified in concluding from his testimony, that the appellation was dynastic, that the dynasty was pre-Hellenic, and that it stands in chronological order next to the Pelasgic time.

The name Ἀργεῖοι is the next with which we have to deal: and this name, applicable to persons, is so evidently founded on the name Ἄργος, applicable to territory, that with this latter word we must of necessity begin the investigation; just as in order to arrive at the meaning of the term Hellenes, we were obliged to begin with Hellas.

_Applications of the name Argos._

And the word Ἄργος is so important, and as it were central, in the geography of Homer, that we had better first consider what are the various forms of expression which Homer uses when he wants to express in words the entire territory of the Greek nation:

1. We have already seen that he appears to use for this purpose the combined force of the names Hellas and Argos;

ἀνδρὸς, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος[637].

2. He employs other combinations for the like purpose. The first is that of Ἄργος, extended by the epithet πᾶν, and joined with the islands. These words taken together embrace the whole Empire of Agamemnon:

πολλῇσιν νήσοισι, καὶ Ἄργει παντὶ ἀνάσσειν[638].

3. And again, with the proper name Ἀχαïὶς,

Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον, καὶ Ἀχαïίδα καλλιγύναικα[639].