Chapter II: Ethnology (11)

According to the view which has been here given, we must carefully distinguish between the sense of Ἀργεῖοι, as a national name in Homer, and that of Ἄργος, in this respect. The name Ἀργεῖοι was raised to the distinction of a national name apparently in consequence of the political ascendancy of a house that reigned over territories specially named Ἄργος, and over subjects named from the region Ἀργεῖοι. I say this without undertaking to determine whether there actually was a period in which the Greeks were as a nation called Ἀργεῖοι, a supposition which seems to me improbable: or whether it was a name which Homer applied to them poetically, like the name Δαναοὶ, because it had once been the proper designation of those who held the seat of Greek supremacy. In either view, however, the case of the name Ἄργος is different. That name had not its root in political power, actual or remembered: it kept its place, as being founded in a good physical description, so far as it went, of the general character of the principal habitable parts of the peninsula which the Hellic tribes, swarming downwards from their hills, successively and gradually occupied. Hence the substantive was, as we see, capable of spreading beyond the adjective in space, since, while we have an Iasian and a Pelasgian Ἄργος, we have no Iasian or Pelasgian Ἀργεῖοι. Thus they were detached one from the other. In Homer the epithet has a larger range of clear signification than the substantive. But apart from Homer the substantive appears from etymology to have been the older, and from history either to have reached points at which the adjective never arrived, or to have long survived its desuetude.

_The Achæans._

_Particulars of the use of the Achæan name._

The lights, which we have already obtained in considering the Danaan and Argive names, will assist the inquiry with respect to the Achæans. At the same time, the fullest view of that name and race cannot be attained, until we shall have succeeded in fixing what we are to understand by the Homeric ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

I now proceed, however, to show from the text of the poems,

1. That of the three great appellatives of the nation, the name Ἀχαιοὶ is the most familiar.

2. That the manner of its national use indicates the political predominance of an Achæan race, in the Homeric age, over other races, ranged by its side in the Troic enterprise, and composing along with it the nation, which owned Agamemnon for its head.

3. That, besides its national use, the name Ἀχαιοὶ has also an important local and particular use for a race which had spread through Greece, and which exercised sway among its population.

4. That the manner of its local and particular use points out to us, with considerable clearness, the epoch at which it acquired preponderance, namely that when Pelops and his family acquired ascendancy in Greece.

As respects the first of these propositions, the numerical test, although a rude one, yet appears to be conclusive. We find that Homer uses the name Ἀργεῖοι in the plural two hundred and five times, of which twenty-eight are in the Odyssey; besides fifteen passages in which the singular is used. And the name Δαναοὶ about one hundred and sixty times, of which thirteen are in the Odyssey. But we find the name Ἀχαιοὶ, employed from seven to eight hundred times: that is to say, five hundred and ninety-seven times in the Iliad, and one hundred and seventeen times in the Odyssey; all these in the plural number, besides thirty-two places of the poems in which it is used in the singular, or in its derivatives Ἀχαίïς or Ἀχαιïκός.

The particulars next to be stated will bear at once upon the first and upon the second proposition.

Homer very rarely attaches any epithet to the name Ἀργεῖοι, more frequently by much to Δαναοὶ, and still oftener to Ἀχαιοί. To the first only six times in all: to the second twenty-four: and to the third near one hundred and forty times. It is not likely that metrical convenience is the cause of this diversity. We have already seen that Ἀργεῖοι is susceptible of a substantive force, which will carry one at least of the other names by way of epithet, as if it indicated an employment, and not properly the name of a race. A like inference may be drawn from the greater susceptibility of carrying descriptive epithets, which we now find the Danaan and Achæan names evince. For example, the name of the Scotts, Douglasses, or Grahams, four centuries ago, would have afforded larger scope for characteristic epithets than such a name as Farmers or Colonists, when used to point out a particular people, or than such a name as Lowlanders, while it still retained its descriptive character, and had not yet become purely titular or proper. We must probably look, then, to political significance for the basis of the use made by Homer of the Achæan name.

When we examine the character of the epithets, this presumption is greatly corroborated. Homer uses with the word Ἀχαιοὶ, and with this word only, epithets indicating, firstly, high spirit, secondly, personal beauty, and thirdly, finished armour[693]. I take these to be of themselves sufficient signs, even were others wanting, to point to the Achæans as being properly the ruling class, or aristocracy, of the heroic age.

The Achæan name, again, attains with Homer to a greater variety of use and inflexion than the Danaan or Argeian names.

He has worked it into the female forms Ἀχαιΐδες, Ἀχαιïάδες, Ἀχαιαὶ, as on the other side he has done with the names Τρῶες into Τρωὲς, Τρωάδες, and Τρωαὶ, and Δάρδανοι into Δαρδανίδες: but he has not made any such use of the names Ἀργεῖοι and Δαναοί. The female use of the former appears indeed in the singular with the names of Juno and of Helen, but never as applicable to Greek women in general, or to a Greek woman simply as such.

He uses it in the singular to describe ‘a Greek’ Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ, Il. iii. 167, 226: which he never does for the two other names. In the same manner he uses Δάρδανος ἄνηρ, Il. ii. 701. This form seems to indicate the full and familiar establishment of a name; and the Dardanians had, we know, been Dardanians for seven generations before the _Troica_ (Il. xx. 215-40).

In the opening passage of the First Iliad, not less than in that of the Odyssey, Homer has, as it is generally observed by critics, intentionally given us a summary or ‘Argument’ of his poem. But I doubt whether sufficient notice has been taken of the very effective manner in which he has given force to his purpose, by taking care in that passage to use the most characteristic words. Achilles is there the son of Peleus, for his extraction, as on both sides divine, but especially as on the father’s side from Jupiter, is the groundwork of his high position in the poem. Agamemnon is likewise here introduced under the title which establishes the same origin for him, and more than any thing else enhances the dignity of his supremacy before men[694]. And the Greeks too, if I am correct, are not without significancy here introduced to us, as is right, under their highest and also their best established designation, that of Achæans. Nor is it until they have been five times called Achæans[695] that he introduces the Danaan name[696] at all. The Argive name, as if the weakest, when it is first employed, is placed in an awkward nearness to the title of Achæans, perhaps by way of explanation:

ὃς μέγα πάντων
Ἀργείων κρατέει, καὶ οἱ πείθονται Ἀχαιοί[697].

Again the paramount force of the Achæan name may justly be inferred from its being the only territorial name which had clearly grasped the whole of Greece at the epoch of the _Troica_[698].

Turning now entirely to what indicates more or less of peculiar character in the Achæans, I would observe, that the adjective δῖοι appears to be the highest of all the national epithets employed by Homer; and this he couples, as has been observed by Mure[699], (who recognises a peculiar force in the term,) with the Achæan designation alone among the three. He also applies it to the Pelasgi; for whom, as we have found, he means it to be a highly honourable epithet. Probably the Achæans are δῖοι because of preeminence, the Pelasgians because of antiquity. To no other nation or tribe whatever does he apply this epithet. His very chary use of it in the plural is a sign of its possessing in his eyes some peculiar virtue.

_Signs of its leaning to the aristocracy._

Of its feminine forms one has been selected to convey the most biting form of reproach to the army, in the speech of Thersites. Now it is remarkable that in that speech, of which an inflated presumption is the great mark, the Achæan name is used five times within nine lines, and neither of the other names is used at all. I do not doubt that the upstart and braggart uses this name only because it was the most distinguished or aristocratic name, as an ill-bred person always takes peculiar care to call himself a gentleman. And doubtless it is for the same reason that he takes the feminine of Ἀχαιὸς, instead of using Δανααὶ or Ἀργειαὶ for his interpretative epithet, when he wants to sting the soldiery as ‘Greekesses and not Greeks.’

Somewhat similar evidence is supplied by the Homeric phrase υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, which has nothing corresponding to it under the Danaan or Argive names. This is an Homeric formula, and the form υἷες seems to belong exclusively to the Achæan name. To the Greeks who always asked the stranger who were his parents, this phrase would carry a peculiar significance. What addressed them as the sons of honoured parents would be to them the sharpest touchstone of honour or disgrace. And what the patronymic was to the individual, this form of speech was to the nation, an incentive under the form of an embellishment. It is a principle that runs throughout Homer; it is every where μηδὲ γένος πατέρων αἰσχύνεμεν. The poet could not say sons of Danaans, for their forefathers were not Danaan: nor sons of Argeians, for this would recall the ploughshare and not the sword: though the army are addressed from time to time as ἥρωες Δαναοὶ, and ἥρωες Ἀχαιοὶ, they are never ἥρωες Ἀργεῖοι. But to be sons of the Achæans was the great glory of the race, even as to degenerate from being Achæan warriors into effeminacy would have been its deepest reproach: and the fact that he calls a mixed race sons of the Achæans is conversely a proof that the Achæan element was the highest and most famous element in the compound of their ancestry.

But, unless I am mistaken, we have many passages in Homer where the use of the simple term Ἀχαιοὶ is shown from the context to have a special and peculiar, sometimes perhaps even an exclusive reference to the chiefs and leaders of the army. I think it may be shown that the word has in fact three meanings:

1. That of a particular Greek race, which extended itself from point to point, acquiring power everywhere as it spread, by inherent superiority.

2. That of the aristocracy of the country, which it naturally became by virtue of such extension and assumption.

3. That of the whole nation, which takes the name from its prime part.

We have now to examine some passages in support of the second meaning: and I know not why, but certainly these passages appear in the Iliad to be most abundant near the opening of the poem.

Chryses solicits ‘all the Achæans and most the two Atridæ[700].’ All the Achæans assent, except Agamemnon. Now the priest could not solicit the army generally except in an assembly: and there is no mention of one, indeed the reply of Agamemnon[701] is hardly such as would have been given in one. It is likely, then, that those whom he addressed were Agamemnon’s habitual and ordinary associates; in other words, the chiefs.

When Calchas proceeds to invoke the vengeance of Apollo, which is to fall upon the army at large, it is no longer the Ἀχαιοὶ of whom he speaks, but his prayer is,

τισείαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν[702].

Although I do not concur with those, who find no element of real freedom in the condition of the Greek masses, whether at home or in the camp, yet it seems plain enough, from the nature of the case, that the questions relating to the division of booty, as being necessarily an executive affair, must have been decided by the chiefs. Now whenever questions of this class are handled, we generally find such an office ascribed to Ἀχαιοί. Agamemnon says[703], ‘Do not let me alone of the Argeians go without a prize;’ and in conformity with this we find Nestor stimulating the host at large with the expectation of booty[704]. But Achilles replies to Agamemnon, ‘that the _Achæans_ have it not in their power to compensate him there and then, for they have no common stock:’ but ‘when Troy is taken, then we the Achæans will repay you three and four fold[705].’ The same subject is again touched in i. 135, 162, 392. ii. 227: and both times with reference to the Ἀχαιοὶ as the distributors of the spoil. In Il. ii. 255 it is allotted by the ἥρωες Δαναοί.

In the same way we find a decided leaning to the use of the word Ἀχαιοὶ, when reference is made to other governing duties.

For instance, in the adjuration of Achilles by the staff or sceptre. ‘It has been stripped of leaf and bark, and now the υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, who are intrusted by Jupiter with sovereign functions, bear it in hand[706].’ It is hardly possible here to construe the phrase without limiting it to the chiefs.

I have referred to the passage where Homer introduces the word Ἀργεῖοι for the first time, under the shadow, as it were, of Ἀχαιοί. Now, if we examine that passage, we shall perceive that unless there be some shade whatever of difference in the meaning, the words are tautological, an imputation which Homer never merits. But if we admit in the Achæan name a certain bias towards the nobles of the army, then the sense and expressions are alike appropriate. ‘I fear the resentment of him, who mightily lords it over (all) the Greeks, and to whom even the Achæans (or chiefs) submit themselves[707].’

Again the phrase Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ[708], twice used by Homer, and both times in the mouth of Priam from the Trojan wall, both times also refers to noble and chieftainlike figures, which his eye, keen for beauty, discerns among the crowd. The second case is particularly worthy of notice:

τίς τ’ ἄρ’ ὅδ’ ἄλλος Ἀχαιὸς ἀνὴρ ἤυς τε μέγας τε,
ἔξοχος Ἀργείων κεφάλην ἠδ’ εὔρεας ὤμους;

Of which the effect seems to be expressed in these words:

Who is th’ Achæan Chieftain
So beautiful and tall?
His shoulders broad surmount the crowd,
His head outtops them all.

Here again, if Achæan and Argeian be synonymous, the use of the latter word is in the highest degree insipid, but if the reference be to the chief, excelling in height the mass of the soldiery, a perfect propriety is maintained.

I need not extend these illustrations to other passages, such as Il. ii. 80, 346. ix. 670. And, on the other hand, it is easy to point to passages where the force of the Achæan and Argeian names is obviously identical, such as Il. ix. 521: or again where Achæan and Danaan must agree, as in Il. ix. 641, 2. The most frequent use of the Achæan name is, I believe, for the nation, and not the race or class: yet a number of passages remain to show the native bias and primitive meaning of the word.

I will however point out two more places, one in each poem, where that shading of the sense, for which I contend, will either greatly facilitate the rendering of the text, or even may be called requisite in order to attain a tolerable construction.

1. It deserves particular notice, that Homer sometimes places the words in very close proximity, as in the following passage;

νηῶν ἐπ’ ἀρίστερα δηιόωντο
λαοὶ ὑπ’ Ἀργείων· τάχα δ’ ἂν καὶ κῦδος Ἀχαιῶν
ἔπλετο· τοῖος γὰρ Γαιήοχος Ἐννοσίγαιος
ὤτρυν’ Ἀργείους·

This is in Il. xiii. 676-8, and Δαναῶν follows in 680. The nearness of the words, and the place of Ἀχαιοὶ, between the twice used Ἀργεῖοι, is highly insipid and un-Homeric, if they are pure equivalents. But now it seems by no means impossible, that the Poet may in this passage have in view a distinction between the leaders and the mass. He may have meant to say, ‘Hector had not yet learned that his men were suffering havock on the left from the Greek troops. But so it was; and the chiefs might now perhaps have won fame, such was the might with which Neptune urged on their forces,’ but that, &c.

2. It is difficult, except upon the supposition of a different shade of meaning in these appellatives, to construe at all such a passage as

ἐξερέεινεν ἕκαστα,
Ἴλιον, Ἀργείων τε νέας, καὶ νόστον Ἀχαιῶν[709].

Here the juxtaposition of the words, if they are synonymous, becomes absolutely intolerable. But the sense runs easily and naturally, if we render it ‘he inquired (of me) all about (the fall of) Troy, and the fleet (or armament) of the Greeks, and the adventures of the chiefs while on their way home.’

The Odyssey, however, appears to offer a larger contribution towards our means of comprehending the Homeric use of Ἀχαιοὶ, than can be supplied by the mere citation of particular passages.

_Its application within Ithaca._

There is considerable evidence of a division of races in Ithaca: and also of the application of the Achæan name to the aristocracy of the country.

The length of time during which Ulysses had been absent, will account for much disorganization in his dominions: and their lying chiefly in separate insular possessions would tend to aggravate the evil. Still not only Nestor, Idomeneus[710], Philoctetes, Neoptolemus, but also Menelaus, who was absent almost as long as Ulysses himself, appear to have resumed their respective thrones without difficulty; so that we are led to suppose there must have been much peculiarity in the case of Ithaca. Part of this we may find in the fact, that the family of Ulysses may but recently have attained to power, and that the consolidation of races was imperfect. Besides his force of character, he had accumulated[711] great wealth, following in the footsteps of his father Laertes, who was both a conqueror and an economist[712]. His power, thus depending on what was personal to himself, could not but be shaken to its very base by his departure, and by his long detention in foreign parts.

So far as we can learn from the text of Homer, the family of Ulysses had come, like the other Hellic families, from the north: and it had only reigned in Ithaca at most for two generations. His extraction is not stated further back than his paternal grandfather Arceisius[713]. But his connections all appear to be in the north. His maternal grandfather, Autolycus[714], lived by Parnesus, or Parnassus, in Phocis, near to Delphi. And his wife’s father, Icarius, had a daughter Iphthime, who was married to Eumelus[715], heir-apparent of Pheræ in the south of Thessaly: a circumstance which affords a presumption of proximity in their dominions. Thus it is probable that Laertes may have married in Thessaly; and, as we have no mention of the sovereignty of Arceisius, it is highly probable that Laertes was the first, either to acquire the Ithacan throne, or at least to hold it for any length of time.

The fountain near the city, which supplied it with water, and which probably marks its foundation, was constructed, as we are told, by Ithacus, Neritus, and Polyctor[716].

The first must have been the Eponymist of the island: the second of its principal mountain[717].

Peisander, called ἄναξ and Πολυκτορίδης[718], is one of four principal Suitors, whose gifts to Penelope are specifically mentioned in the Eighteenth Odyssey. Thus he would appear to have been most probably nephew to the Eponymist of the island. Sometimes indeed the patronymic is derived from a grandfather, or even, as in the case of Priam (Δαρδανίδης, Il. xxiv. 629, 631), from a remote ancestor; but then he must apparently be a founder, or one of the highest fame. But Peisander at the least may have been the son of Polyctor; and he was probably the representative of the family, which had been displaced from the Sovereignty by the house of Laertes. He afterwards appears among the leaders in the struggle of the Suitors with Ulysses[719].

The names applied to the subjects of Ulysses in the Odyssey are three: Κεφαλλῆνες, Ἰθακήσιοι, and Ἀχαιοί. In accordance with its use in the Iliad, the first of these, which is but four times[720] used, appears to be a name of the whole people of the state; and, judging from what we have seen of the force of the word, it implies that the Hellenic element was dominant. The difference in the use of the other two is very marked.

In the first place, the Suitors are commonly called Ἀχαιοὶ[721], never Ἰθακήσιοι, nor ever Δαναοὶ or Ἀργεῖοι. Either, being the aristocracy, they were an Achæan race; or else, without all being of Achæan race, they were called Achæan, because they were the aristocracy. Of that class they are stated to have constituted the whole[722].

The more probable of these two suppositions is, that they were by no means exclusively of Achæan blood, but took the name from their birth and station. It is most natural to suppose that the displaced family of Peisander, and probably others, were not Achæan, but belonged to an older stock. This stock may have been Hellenic; for, as we know, there were Hellenic, and in particular Æolid, families in Greece long before we hear of the Achæans there.

The house of Ulysses still indeed had friends in the island, like Mentor, like Noemon, son of Phronius, (or the class represented by these names, if they be typical only,) or like Peiræus, who took charge of Theoclymenus at the request of Telemachus[723]. But the bulk of the people were neutral, or else unfriendly. The best that Telemachus can say is, that the _whole_ people is not hostile[724]. And in the last Book, whilst more than one half the Assembly take up arms against Ulysses the rest simply[725] remain neutral: so that he has no one to rely upon but his father, his son, and a mere handful of dependents.

While the Achæan name is thus exclusively applied to the Suitors, and apparently to them because they formed the aristocracy, the people, when assembled, are invariably addressed as Ἰθακήσιοι. It is said indeed, that the Achæans[726] were summoned by the heralds to the Assembly of the Second Book: but it seems to have been customary to send a special summons only to principal persons, as we find in Scheria[727]; though all classes were expected to attend, and did attend.

I do not, however, venture to treat it as certain, that the word Ἀχαιοὶ is not applied to the population of Ithaca generally. When Euripides addresses the Assembly, and incites the people to revenge the death of the Suitors, we are told that οἶκτος δ’ ἕλε πάντας Ἀχαιούς. This may mean the aristocratic party in the Assembly, as we know that there were two sections very differently minded. At any rate, if the whole people be meant, it is by the rarest possible exception. The name is applied, as we should expect, to the soldiers who sailed with Ulysses to Troy: but within Ithaca it seems clear that the name properly denotes the nobles. And upon the whole it seems most probable, that these Ἀχαιοὶ, in the Twenty-third Book, are the party of the Suitors, with reference rather to their position in society than their extraction: while the minority, who do not join in the movement against Ulysses, are probably the old population of the island, who have no cause of quarrel to make them take up arms against him, and yet no such tie with him, either of race or of ancient subordination, as to induce them to move in his favour.

Ithaca was ill fitted for tillage, or for feeding anything but sheep and goats. And Ithacus, its eponymist, being a very modern personage, it seems highly probable that, whether Achæan or not, he and his race were Hellenic, and gave to the population that peculiar name of Cephallenes, under which Laertes describes them as his subjects. But there were probably anterior inhabitants of the old Pelasgian stock, submerged beneath two Hellenic immigrations, caring little which of their lords was uppermost, and forming the supine minority of the final Assembly.

The use of the Achæan name in Ithaca, in broad separation from the Ithacesian, must then prove either its connection with a race, or its bias towards a class, and may prove both. But quitting the latter as sufficiently demonstrated, I now proceed to trace the local use of the Achæan name.

And, first of all, we find it locally used in the North; in that Thessaly, where the name of Hellas came into being, and from whence it extended itself to the Southward; therefore in the closest connection with the Hellic stem.

We are told in the Catalogue, with respect to the division under Achilles, after the names of the districts and places from which they came,

Μυρμίδονες δὲ καλεῦντο, καὶ Ἕλληνες, καὶ Ἀχαιοί[728].

Now we find throughout the Iliad, that the local or divisional name of this body is unchanging: the troops of Achilles are uniformly denominated Myrmidons. Therefore Homer does not mean that one part were Myrmidons, another Hellenes, another Achæans, but that the three names attached to the whole body, of course in different respects. They were then Myrmidons, whatever the source of that name may have been, by common designation. They were Hellenes, because inhabitants of Hellas, of the territory from whence the influence and range of that name had already begun to radiate, more properly and eminently therefore Hellenes, than others who had not so positively acquired the name, though they may have been included in the Πανέλληνες. And manifestly they could only be called Ἀχαιοὶ, because known to be under leaders of the pure Achæan stock, who were entitled to carry the name in their own right, instead of bearing it only in a derivative sense, and because it had spread all over Greece. Of this peculiar and eminent Achæanism in the Peleid stock, we have, I think, two other signs from the poems: one in the possible meaning of the love of Juno, which we have seen extended to Achilles in an equal degree with Agamemnon; the other in the marriage of Hermione to Neoptolemus, which was founded upon a promise given by Menelaus her father while before Troy. Doubtless the eminent services of Neoptolemus might be the sole ground of this promise: but it may also have had to do with kin, as some special relation, of neighbourhood or otherwise, appears commonly to accompany these matrimonial connections. In conformity with this passage, the name Ἀχαίιδες is applied by Achilles in the Ninth Book to the women of Hellas and Phthia.

_Local uses of the Achæan name._

It is wonderfully illustrative of the perspicacity and accuracy of Homer, to find that in this very spot, which he has so especially marked with the Achæan name, it continued to subsist as a local appellation, and to subsist here almost exclusively, all through the historic ages of Greece. On this subject we shall have further occasion to touch.

2. Of the five races who inhabited Crete at the time of the _Troica_, one was Achæan[729]:

ἐν μὲν Ἀχαιοὶ
ἐν δ’ Ἐτεοκρῆτες μεγαλήτορες, ἐν δὲ Κύδωνες,
Δωριέες τε τριχάïκες, δῖοί τε Πελασγοί.

The presence of an Achæan tribe in Crete may have been due to its constant intercourse with Eastern Peloponnesus[730], where the Achæans had for some time been dominant: or to those relations with Thessaly, to which the name of Deucalion in Homer bears probable witness. In any case, the passage clearly establishes the local virtue of the name. It also exhibits to us Achæans as distinct from Dorians, and shows us that there were a variety of branches, known to Homer, of the Hellenic tree. And the enumeration of the Achæan and Pelasgian races with others in this place, compared with the uniform description in the Iliad of the whole force of Idomeneus as Cretan, shows us how careful Homer was to avoid such confusion as the juxtaposition of Achæans and Pelasgians would have caused with reference to the main ethnical division in the Iliad.

3. In the Pylian raid of the Eleventh Book, Nestor carefully distinguishes between the parties, as Epeans, also called Elians, on the one side, and Pylians, also called Achæans, on the other[731]. This raid took place in his early youth, perhaps forty or fifty years before the _Troica_, and within the Achæan epoch. And as he withholds the Achæan name from the other party, they plainly were not Achæan in the limited sense. And yet they were Hellenic: for, among other Hellenic signs, Augeas, the king of the Epeans, was an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Thus again we have Achæan fixed as a subdivision, though probably the principal subdivision, of the Hellenic race.

4. A fourth case, in which the Achæan name appears clearly to have a limited signification, is in a second passage of the Greek Catalogue, where a part of the forces of Diomed are described as those,

οἵ τ’ ἔχον Αἰγίνην, Μάσητά τε, κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν[732].

Although Mases has been taken to be a town, yet its junction here with Ægina perhaps rather points to it as an island. It appears to be admitted that its site is unknown. And an extra-Homeric tradition[733] reports, that the small islands off the Trœzenian coast were called after Pelops. It is impossible not to observe the correspondence between this tradition, and the indirect traditions afforded us by Homer’s language in this verse. For in the Catalogue he seems carefully to avoid repeating the general Greek appellatives in connection with the inhabitants of particular places, and to give them local and special names only. It follows irresistibly, that therefore he must be understood here to speak of the distinct race and local name of Achæans: to which race and name would naturally belong any settlers brought by Pelops into Southern Greece.

And, as Homer does not discontinue altogether the application of the Argeian name to the inhabitants of Argolis, he probably in this place means to distinguish Achæans not only from other Greek races, but even from other subjects of Tydeus and of Diomed, who would most properly be called Argeians.

It thus appears, that twice in the Catalogue Homer has occasion to use the Achæan name locally, and in its original or, so to speak, gentile sense. And accordingly he has been careful not to risk confusion by employing it in its wider signification either at the commencement of the Catalogue or at the close. In both cases he uses the word Δαναοί; the only one of his great appellatives which nowhere takes a local or otherwise varied meaning. When he begins he invites the Muse to tell him, v. 487,

οἵτινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

So also at the close, v. 760, he sums up in these words,

οὗτοι ἀρ’ ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

5. As Nestor applies the Achæan name to the inhabitants of Pylos, so from the time of the Pelopid sway it becomes applicable to those of Eastern Peloponnesus generally, in a sense wider than that of Il. ii. 562, but yet narrower than the national one. In Il. iv. 384, and Il. v. 803, those, from among whom Tydeus set out for Thebes, are called Ἀχαιοί. So also in the colloquy with Glaucus, Diomed calls the comrades of his father on that occasion by the same name (Il. vi. 223). He repeats the name in his prayer to Minerva, Il. x. 286, 7; and here he is careful to distinguish them from the Thebans of that epoch, who are Καδμεῖοι (288).

_The name Παναχαιοι._

6. In further prosecution of the same subject, we have yet to consider the force of the kindred Homeric word Παναχαιοί.

This is undoubtedly a term that challenges particular notice. No writer is so little wont as Homer to vary his expressions without a reason for it. But since the word Ἀχαιοὶ is used many hundred times as the simple equipollent of Greek, it cannot require the prefix παν to enable it to convey this sense effectually. Therefore to suppose that Παναχαιοὶ means Greeks and nothing more, would render the prefix unmeaning, and I conclude that such cannot be an adequate explanation of its purpose. But if we construe the word as having a specific reference not only to the aggregate, but to the parts of which it is made up, then the prefix παν becomes abundantly charged with meaning. The word Παναχαιοὶ will in this view mean what we should call ‘all classes of the Greeks,’ ‘the Greeks from the highest to the lowest.’

It is used, in all, eleven times. Of these eleven passages, seven times it appears in the expression ἀριστῆες Παναχαιῶν. Here the preceding word ἀριστῆες at once directs the mind to this notice of the different classes, and receives much force from the distinctive particle παν: as we may judge from the fact that Homer never but once (ἀριστῆες Δαναῶν, Il. xvii. 225) appends the appellative in its simple form to ἀριστῆες. The prefix παν seems to strip the idea of conventionality, and to make it real: the chiefs are the pick and flower of the whole Greek array.

Only in one other passage of the Iliad do we find Παναχαιοί; it is in the peroration of the speech of Ulysses to Achilles[734]:

εἰ δέ τοι Ἀτρείδης μὲν ἀπήχθετο κηρόθι μᾶλλον,
αὐτὸς καὶ τοῦ δῶρα, σὺ δ’ ἄλλους περ Παναχαιοὺς
τειρομένους ἐλέαιρε κατὰ στρατόν.

‘Still, if you detest (the king) Atrides from your heart ever so much, him and his gifts, yet pity the Greeks throughout the army, now suffering from the highest to the lowest.’ The force of the Παναχαιοὶ κατὰ στρατὸν is here very marked.

Lastly, in the Odyssey we find the line thrice repeated,

τῷ κέν οἱ τυμβὸν μὲν ἐποίησαν Παναχαιοί,

and always in the same connection with the death of some select and beloved hero of the army. Its obvious sense is, ‘all classes of the Greeks would have joined to do him honour, by lending a hand to raise his funeral mound.’

In every one of these cases therefore the word Παναχαιοὶ seems to express the combination of all classes, and thus to point distinctly to the word Ἀχαιοὶ as capable of signifying something less than all classes, namely, one, that is, the ruling class.

The construction thus put upon Παναχαιοὶ is in conformity with Homer’s usual mode of employing such words as the adjective πᾶς and the preposition σὺν in composition. We have previously seen the intensive force of πᾶς in πᾶν Ἄργος and Πανέλληνες. And πᾶς itself receives additional power from σύν. As in Il. i., where Achilles, having just before reminded Calchas of his office as Seer to the Δαναοὶ, proceeds to assure him that no one of the Greeks shall hurt him for doing his duty, it is now no one, not of the Δαναοὶ merely, but of the σύμπαντες Δαναοί; no, not even if he name Agamemnon himself as the guilty person[735].

It is hardly necessary to point out how accurately all this coincides with the general results to which we have been already led. According to these, the bulk of the Greeks were a Pelasgian population, under the sway of ruling tribes and families, belonging to another race; among which the most powerful were those belonging to the Achæan stock; and whose Argeian name was etymologically, and perhaps practically, a sort of substitute for the older Pelasgian one.

Nor is there difficulty in conceiving how, if the Achæans became the dominant race in the most important parts of Greece, they might, without constituting a numerical majority, give their name to the mass of the people, and to the country itself, as Britain and Britons became England and English from the Angles, or as Lombardy took its name from the Lombards, and, unhappily, European Turkey, once the civil head of Christendom, from the Turks.

_The Æolid and Æolian names._

It has been customary to speak of the question whether Homer was an Æolian Greek: to give the Æolian name to the forms of the Greek language prevailing in his time: and to describe the Achæans as a branch of the Æolians. With certain exceptions, says Strabo[736], the Æolian name still prevails outside the Isthmus; and it also covered the Peloponnesus, till a mixture took place. The Ionians from Attica had occupied Ægialus; and when the Heraclids, with the Dorians, became masters of many Peloponnesian cities, the Ionians were expelled in their turn ὑπὸ Ἀχαιῶν, Αἰολικοῦ ἔθνους, after which two ἔθνη only remained in Peloponnesus, the Æolian and the Dorian.

Again, as respects the _digamma_, Heyne[737] most justly observes that it may much more justly be called Pelasgic than Æolic; since the Æolians, as far as we know, only retained it, after having found it in use with the Pelasgi. But in general, to those who ground their judgments on the Homeric text, the whole view of the relation of Achæans and Æolians, as it is commonly given, will appear a false one. In the first place the Æolians as a nation or tribe are wholly post-Homeric: unless we are bold enough to find some modification of their name in the Αἴτωλοι. The Æolid families, indeed, of Homer have evidently a great position, which we shall further discuss[738]: but they simply fall for the time under the general name of Achæans, as much as any other families, and more than families like the Æacidæ, who were in close political relations with a race bearing a designation of its own, namely, the Myrmidons. This nowhere appears to have been the case with the Æolians. On the contrary, the Neleids, though they were of illegitimate birth, may perhaps be considered as belonging to the Æolidæ; but their subjects actually bore the name of Achæans, besides their territorial name of Pylians[739]. With respect to the epoch of the _Troica_, instead of calling the Achæans an Æolic race, it would be more reasonable to call the Æolids (as there was nothing more extensive than a patronymic connected with that name) Achæan houses. I do not however mean that they were properly such: for the Æolid name appears in Southern Greece before the Achæan, and was probably an older branch from the same trunk.

The subsequent prevalence of the Æolian as compared with the Achæan name, (the Hellenic, however, overlying and soon absorbing both,) appears to point to one of two suppositions. Either there was an original Æolian tribe, which has escaped notice altogether in Homer, as the Dorians have all but escaped it: or else, and more probably, it may have happened that part at least of these Æolian houses held their ground in Greece, while the Achæan name, which had been elevated by the political predominance of the Pelopid sovereigns, collapsed upon the loss of that predominance. It was to be expected that the name should share in the downfall of the race, when the Heraclid and Dorian invasion expelled the bearers of it from the seat of their power, and reduced them first to be fugitives, and then to settle in a mere strip of the Peloponnesus; a single region of narrow scope, and, as is remarked by Polybius[740] after many centuries, of small weight and influence, which from them was called Achæa. The fact that the Dorian name is all but unknown to Homer, while the Achæan one is at its zenith, not only heroically, as in the Iliad, but in the every day familiar use of Ithaca throughout the Odyssey, is to me one of several strong presumptions, not countervailed by any evidence of equal strength, that Homer could not have lived to see that great revolution, which so completely effaced the ethnical landmarks, and altered the condition, of Southern Greece.

_The Heraclids in Homer._

There is certainly a striking analogy between the relation of the Æolid houses named in Homer to the afterwards prevalent and powerful Æolian race, and that of the Heraclid families, also named by him, to the Dorian race, which in like manner grew from obscurity in the Homeric period to such great after-celebrity. Hercules himself appears before us in the ancient legend as the great Dorian hero, ‘everywhere paving the road for his people and their worship, and protecting them from other races[741].’ The only Heraclids mentioned nominally by Homer are Tlepolemus, Pheidippus, Antiphus; and there are others without names specified[742]; none of these, or of the Greeks of the expedition, are called Dorians, while, again, none of the Heraclids of Homer are called by the Achæan or Æolid names. They may have been Dorian houses, like the Æolid houses; and the name may have become tribal afterwards, when they rose to power. The tradition of the reception of certain Heraclids in Attica appears to have been recognised by the Lacedæmonians in the historic ages[743], and in the supposition of a friendship thus established, we may perhaps find the true explanation of the Decelean privilege mentioned by Herodotus[744].

In arranging chronologically the Danaan, Argeian, and Achæan names of Homer, we give the first place to Danaan, and the next to Argeian, so as to bring the Danaans nearest to the Pelasgi. But the real meaning of this is simply that the three names were suggested to Homer by three periods of Greek history, which stand in the order given to the names. If, however, instead of tracing the purpose of the Poet, we are to look for ethnical history, then we must state that the Danaan name does not denote a change of race, but it is a mere foreign affix to the closing portion of the Pelasgian period. Nor does the Argeian name, if we suppose it to have been a sort of translation or reconstruction of the Pelasgian, directly indicate the Hellenic infusion; but the mere fact of its substitution for a preceding appellation appears to presuppose a cause. Homer, indeed, gives us no Greek stories of the Danaid period, so that we do not certainly know that he might not have described the Greeks of that period also as Argeian. All we can say positively is, that his use of the Argeian name _de facto_ begins with the epoch of the first Hellenic throne in Greece, that of the Perseids. I hope to show that the Achæan name and that of Perseus belong in truth to the same stock and origin[745]: but it is with the Pelopids only that the Achæan name appears, and it denotes the second stage of the Hellenic preponderance, as the Argeian name marks the first, and the Dorian the third. The first, or Argeian, stage belongs partly, as I believe, to the house of Perseus, but partly, as is clear from the Homeric text, to the houses descended from Æolus.

_Descent of the Æolids._

Æolus himself is nowhere mentioned in Homer. The oldest Αἰολίδαι given to us as such are Sisyphus and Cretheus. The patronymic does not of itself enable us to determine whether these were sons of Æolus, or were more remotely descended from him. But indirectly we may perhaps be enabled to fix his date, as follows:

1. Bellerophon the grandson of Sisyphus[746], is called by the contemporary Lycian king, the offspring of the deity, that is, of Jupiter:

γίγνωσκε θεοῦ γόνον ἠῢν ἐόντα[747].

The meaning of this can only be that the person, whom Homer has indicated as the founder of the race, namely Æolus, was a reputed son of Jupiter.

2. In the Νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey we are introduced to Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, and the wife of Cretheus[748]. She is decorated with the epithet εὐπατέρεια, never given elsewhere by Homer except to Helen, and apparently an equivalent with him for Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα.

It is by no means unlikely, I would venture to suggest, that a similar force may lie in the epithet Salmoneus, who is here called ἀμύμων. That epithet is indeed sometimes applied on the ground of personal character. But Homer also gives it to the villain Ægisthus, which appears quite inexplicable except on the ground of the divine descent of the Pelopids[749]. The later tradition has loaded Salmoneus with the crime of audacious profanity: and it has also, beginning with Hesiod[750], made him a son of Æolus. The word ἀμύμων, combined with the εὐπατέρεια of Tyro, leaves little room for doubt that perhaps both, and certainly the latter of these representations are agreeable to the sense of Homer. If so, then Tyro was a granddaughter of Æolus; and we can at once fix his date from Homer, as follows:

1. Æolus.
2. Salmoneus, Od. xi. 235-7.
3. Tyro = Cretheus, ibid.
4. Pheres, Od. xi. 259.
5. Admetus, Il. ii. 711-15, 763.
6. Eumelus, ibid. and Od. iv. 798.

From which last cited passage I set down Eumelus as the contemporary of his brother-in-law Ulysses, and half a generation senior to the standard age of the war.

We have also the collateral line of Sisyphus from Æolus as follows: 1. Sisyphus; 2. Glaucus (1); 3. Bellerophon; 4. Hippolochus; 5. Glaucus (2), contemporary with the war[751]. According to this table Sisyphus might be either the son or the grandson of Æolus.

And again, Cretheus, who like Sisyphus is Αἰολίδης, may have been either the uncle or the cousin of his wife Tyro. The Fragment of Hesiod would make both him and Sisyphus sons of Æolus, and therefore uncles to Tyro.

These genealogies are in perfect keeping with what Homer tells us of the Neleid line. Tyro, he says, fell in love with Enipeus. In the likeness of that river, Neptune had access to her, and she bore to him two sons, Pelias and Neleus. Neleus is the father of Nestor: and Nestor stands one generation senior to Eumelus; for he was in his third tri-decadal period[752], if the expression may be allowed, during the action of the Iliad. Thus we have (as before), 3. Tyro; 4. Neleus; 5. Nestor; 6. Nestor. The maternal genealogy of Eumelus brings us exactly to the same point: for Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, was married to his father Admetus[753].

Thus the Æolid genealogies are laid down by Homer with great clearness, except as to the first interval, and with a singular self-consistency. Perseus[754], as we have seen, belongs to the fifth generation before the war. This is nearly the same with Sisyphus, and with Cretheus: and we are thus enabled to determine with tolerable certainty the epoch of the first Hellenic infusion into Greece. It precedes the arrival of Portheus in Ætolia by one generation, and that of Pelops by two.

Of Sisyphus we know from Homer, that he lived at an Ephyre on or near the Isthmus of Corinth. It is not so clear whether Cretheus ever came into the Peloponnesus. There is an Enipeus of Elis: but there is also one[755] of Thessaly, which was doubtless its original. The name, however, of the Thessalian stream appears to have been written Eniseus. Nitzsch[756] determines, on insufficient grounds as far as I can judge, that the passage of Od. xi. cannot mean the Enipeus of Pisatis. I can find no conclusive evidence either way: but Sisyphus was certainly in Southern Greece at or before this time, so that we need not wonder if Cretheus, another Æolid, was there also. His reputed son Neleus founded, without doubt, the kingdom of Pylos. Post-Homeric tradition places even Salmoneus, the father of Tyro, in Elis.

_Earliest Hellenic thrones in Greece._

We have now before us an outline of the first entrance of Hellic elements into Greece, south of Thessaly. It seems to have been effected by five families;

1. The house of Perseus.

2. That of Sisyphus.

3. The illegitimate line of Cretheus, or the Neleids.

4. Probably the legitimate line of Salmoneus, represented in Augeas.

5. Next to these will come Portheus, the head of the Œneidæ in Ætolia: and only then follows the great house of the Pelopids, not alone, but in conjunction with a race, to whose history we now must turn.

Of the Danaid and Perseid princes we have no reason to suppose, that they enjoyed the extended power which was wielded by Agamemnon. Not only would they appear to have been circumscribed, latterly at least, by the Minoan empire founded in Crete, but Homer gives us no intimation that their dominion at any time included the possession of a supremacy over a number of subordinate princes beyond their own immediate borders, or reached beyond the territory which may be generally described as the Eastern Peloponnesus.

A direct inference bearing on this subject may be obtained from the passage concerning the sceptre of Agamemnon[757]: for the Pelopids do not succeed to that of Eurystheus and the Perseids, but they hold from Jupiter: which seems to imply that they acquired much more, than had been under the sway of their predecessors. Probably therefore we shall do well to conclude that Eurystheus, for example, had a limited realm, and that by land only: Agamemnon, a certain supremacy by land and sea, within the range of which the old Minoan empire had now fallen. Still the kingdom of Eurystheus was probably in its own day the greatest, and was also probably the oldest, of all properly Hellenic kingdoms.

If, then, neither of the prior dynasties of Danaus and Perseus reigned over all Greece, it is unlikely that either of them could give a name to the whole nation: though they might give a name to the part of the country which, having in their time been particularly famous and powerful, became under the Pelopids a metropolis, supreme throughout the rest of the country; and whose people then not only took the name of Ἀχαιοὶ for itself, but extended it over the whole of Greece.

_Use of the Danaan and Argeian names poetical._

It is thus more than probable that the scope of the name Danai, (if we are to assume that it was then a name in actual use,) under the Danaids, and of the name Ἀργεῖοι under the Perseids, was local, and confined in the main to Eastern Peloponnesus, where those princes ruled; with the addition of any other parts of the country, over which they might for the time have extended their power. And if so, then we have to suppose that Homer, having received the traditions of the Danaan and Argeian princes as having been at the head in their own time of Greek history or legend, gave to the nation by way of a poetical name, but of a poetical name only, the appellation which their subjects respectively had borne, and which had never before been, and never became by any other title than his poetical authority, applicable to all the Greeks.

The Achæan name, on the other hand, differs from these, first, in denoting the extension of a particular race, though not over the whole country, yet through very many of its parts, and secondly, in the fact that the ruling house of those who bore the name enjoyed a real political supremacy over both the continent and the islands. So that it became the most legitimate exponent of Greek nationality, until it had lost both its extension and its power; the one by compression of its principal tribes into a narrow space: the other by the transfer of its political prerogatives to the great Dorian family of the Spartan kings, after the conquest of the Heraclidæ.

When the Achæans had ceased to predominate, there could be no reason why their name should remain stamped upon their brethren, who boasted of the same descent, and who had attained to greater force.

As in the Homeric times, while the Achæans were the leaders of Greece, they might claim to represent the whole Hellenic stock, so, when the Dorians had dethroned them and occupied the seat of power, when the Æolian name was widely diffused, and, again, when Athens with its mixed race became great, and claimed, along with its vaunts of antiquity and continuity, to pass over, as Herodotus says, to the Hellenic class, but without an Achæan descent, then the Achæan name could no longer adequately represent the title to nationality, and the various races naturally fell back on the designation which gave no exclusive right or preeminence to any of them, and which they were all entitled to enjoy in common. They apparently however chose to be connected with the rich plains of Thessaly, where they first learned civilization, and organized their collective or national life, rather than with the rude and coarse manners of their more remote ancestors in the hills. They were therefore not Helli, but Hellenes.