Chapter VIII: Part 8

[377] xiii. 562.

Except, then, in his position as brother and copartner, Neptune is very feebly marked with the traditional character. Again, in no deity is the mere animal delight in sacrifice more strongly developed. By offerings, his menaced destruction of the Phæacian city seems to be averted. His pleasure in the sacrifice of bulls is specially recorded[378]: and his remarkable fondness for the Solyman mountains, and the Ethiopian quarter, is perhaps connected with the eminent liberality of that people at their altars.

[378] Il. xx. 405.

One traditive note, however, we find upon him, when we regard him as god of the sea: and it is this, that he is provided with a Secondary. It seems as though it was felt, that he did not wholly satisfy the demands of the mere element: and accordingly a god simply elemental has been provided in the person of Nereus, who is the centre of the submarine court, and who appears never to quit the depths. Nereus is the element impersonated: Neptune is its sovereign, has not his origin in it, but comes to it from without.

Neither is his command over the waters quite exclusive. He can of course raise a storm at sea. He can break off fragments, as the sea does, from rocks upon the coast[379]: and he threatens to overwhelm the Phæacian city by this means[380]. In conjunction with his power over the sea, he can let loose the winds, and darken the sky. On the other hand, not Jupiter only, but Juno and Minerva, can use the sea independently of him, as an instrument of their designs.

[379] Od. iv. 506.

[380] Od. xiii. 152.

Again, while not fully developed as the mere elemental sea-god, he has clinging to him certain traditions which it is very difficult to attach to any portion whatever of his general character. I do not find any key to his interest in Æneas, whom he rescues from Achilles: unless it may possibly be, that the gods, in the absence of any particular motive the other way, took a common interest in the descendants of their race, or of Jupiter as its head. Still less is it feasible to explain the legend of his service under Laomedon in company with Apollo, so as to place it in any clear relation to the other traditions respecting him. He has, again, a peculiar relation to the horse, for though a sea-god, he employs the animal to transport him to Troas; and it was he, who presented Xanthus and Balius to Peleus[381]. Again, he, in conjunction with Jupiter[382], conferred the gift of managing the horse on his descendant Antilochus.

[381] Il. xxiii. 277.

[382] Ibid. 307.

In the legend of the Eighth Odyssey, he does not share the unbecoming laughter of the other deities at the ridiculous predicament and disgrace of Mars, but earnestly labours for his release, and actually becomes his security for the damages due[383]. What was the cause of this peculiar interest? It is difficult to conceive the aim of the Poet in this place. Some have suggested the comic effect[384] which he has produced by putting the petition in the mouth of Neptune, whose mere opinion that Mars would pay was valueless, inasmuch as he was far too powerful to be called to account by Vulcan for any thing which he might have said. It seems to me more likely that, as being, in the possible absence of Jupiter as well as the goddesses, the senior and gravest of the deities, he becomes the official guardian of Olympian decorum; and that he acts here as the proper person to find an escape from a dilemma which, while ludicrous, is also embarrassing, and requires poetically a solution.

[383] Od. viii. 344-59.

[384] Nitzsch in loc.

Amphitrite, the wife of Neptune in the later mythology, is not so named in Homer, by whom she is but doubtfully personified. Yet there is, as it were, an anticipation of the union, in the passage where he tells us that she rears monster-fishes to do the will of Neptune. Or it may be meant here, that she is the wife of Nereus.

~_His relation to the Phœnicians._~

The connection of Neptune with the sea naturally raises the question, whether the introduction of his worship into Greece can have been owed to the Phœnicians. For an auxiliary mark, we have the fact that Ino, of Phœnician extraction, is a strictly maritime deity[385],

[385] Od. v. 335.

νῦν δ’ ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσι θεῶν ἐξέμμορε τιμῆς.

The very frequent intrigues of Neptune with women may be the mythical dress of the adventures of Phœnician sailors in this kind: such as that which is recounted[386] in the story of Eumæus. We may notice, too, that in the Iliad, he does not particularly love the Greeks, but simply hates the Trojans. He, with Jupiter, we are told, loved Antilochus[387]. Jupiter, no doubt, because he had a regard for him as a Greek: Neptune, plainly, because he was his descendant. And in this way perhaps we may best explain the connection between Neptune and some abode in the East, far away from his own domain. He is absent from the Assembly of the First Odyssey[388], among the Ethiopians: and he sees Ulysses, on his voyage homewards, from afar, namely off the Solyman mountains; with which we must suppose he had some permanent tie, as no special cause is stated for his having been there. It little accords with his character as a marine god: but it is in harmony with the view of him as belonging to the circle of the Phœnician traditions, that he should visit a nation, of which Homer, I believe, conceived as being but a little beyond Phœnicia.

[386] Od. xv. 420.

[387] Il. xxiii. 277.

[388] Od. i. 22.

But we have still to consider the fragments of information which concern Neptune, under the third of the heads above given.

~_And to the tradition of the Evil One._~

No ancient tradition appears to have been split and shivered into so many fragments in the time of Homer, as that which related to the Evil Principle. This was the natural prelude to its becoming, as it shortly afterwards did, indiscernible to the human eye[389]. Among these rivulets of tradition, some of the most curious connect themselves with the name of Neptune, who was, in his mythological character, prepared to be its recipient: for in that character he was near to Jupiter in strength, while his brotherly relation by no means implied any corresponding tie of affection.

[389] Vid. sup. Sect. ii. p. 44.

With Juno and Minerva, he took part in the dangerous rebellion recorded in the First Iliad. He refuses to join in a combination of Hellenizing gods against him, on the ground of its hopelessness: but afterwards, when all others acquiesce in the prohibition, he alone comes down to aid and excite the Greeks. The Juno of the Iliad is the active and astute intriguer against her husband: but it is Neptune, on whom in effect the burden and responsibility of action chiefly fall. Still, his principal points of contact with the traditions of resistance to the Supreme Will are mediate; and the connection is through his offspring.

In his favourite son, the Cyclops, we have the great atheist of the poems. It is Providence, and not idols only, that he rejects, when saying[390],

[390] Od. ix. 275.

οὐ γὰρ Κύκλωπες Διὸς αἰγιόχου ἀλέγουσιν,
οὐδὲ θεῶν μακάρων· ἐπειὴ πολὺ φέρτεροί εἰμεν.

The whole of this dangerous class, the kindred of the gods, seem to have sprung from Neptune[391]. The Læstrygones, indeed, are not expressly said to be his children. But they are called οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν: and the Giants are expressly declared to be divinely descended in a speech of Alcinous[392]:

[391] Od. x. 120.

[392] Od. vii. 205.

ἐπεί σφισιν ἐγγύθεν εἰμὲν,
ὥσπερ Κύκλωπές τε καὶ ἄγρια φῦλα Γιγάντων.

Neptune was the father of Nausithous and the royal house of Scheria, through Peribœa: but she was daughter of Eurymedon, and Eurymedon was king of the Giants, and was the king who led them, with himself, evidently by rebellion, into ruin[393];

[393] Od. vii. 60.

ἀλλ’ ὁ μὲν ὤλεσε λαὸν ἀτάσθαλον, ὤλετο δ’ αὐτός.

Thus we have Neptune placed in the relation of ancestor to the rebellious race, whom it is scarcely possible to consider as other than identical with the Titans condemned to Tartarus[394].

[394] Il. xiv. 274, 9.

But we have one yet more pointed passage for the establishment of this strange relationship. In the νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, Ulysses sees, among other Shades, Iphimedea, the wife of Aloeus, who bore to Neptune two children[395], Otus and Ephialtes; hugest of all creatures upon earth, and also most beautiful, after Orion. They, the sons of Neptune, while yet children, threatened war against Olympus, and planned the piling of the mountains: but Apollo slew them. Thus this, the most characteristic of all the traditions in Homer relating to the Evil One, hangs upon the person of Neptune, doubtless because his mythological place best fitted him for the point of junction. It must be observed, that Homer has, in bringing these young giants before us, used a somewhat artificial arrangement. He does not place them in the realm of Aides and Persephone, though he describes them to us, in connection with the figures in that gloomy scene, as the children of Iphimedea, who appears there in the first or feminine division. That he does not bring them before us in conjunction with Tityus and the other sufferers of that region, can only be because he did not intend them to be understood as belonging to it: and it is clear, therefore, that he means us to conceive of them as having their abode in Tartarus, among the Titans, doubtless by the side of Eurymedon and his followers.

[395] Od. xi. 505-20.

We may perceive with peculiar clearness, in the case of Neptune, the distinction between the elevated prerogatives of such a deity within his own province, and his comparative insignificance beyond it. When he traverses the sea, it exults to open a path for him, and the huge creatures from its depths sport along his wake. Such is its sympathy with him, that when he is exciting the Greeks to war, it too boils and foams upon the shore of the Hellespont. And not only is maritime nature thus at his feet, but he has the gift of vision almost without limit of space, and of knowledge of coming events, so long as they are maritime. He who knows nothing of the woes of his son Polyphemus till he is invoked from the sea-shore, yet can discern Ulysses on his raft from the far Solyman mountains, and even is aware that he will escape from his present danger (ὀϊζὺς ἥ μιν ἱκάνει) by reaching the shore of Scheria. This knowledge is shared by the minor goddess Leucothee: and doubtless on the same principle, namely, that it is marine knowledge. So he can predict to Tyro that there will be more than one child born to her: here, too, he speaks of what is personal to himself. When we take Neptune out of his province, we find none of these extraordinary gifts, no sign of a peculiar subjugation of nature or of man to him. He shares in the government of the world only as a vast force, which it will cost Jupiter trouble to subdue. Even within his own domain some stubborn phenomena of nature impose limits on his power: for we are told he would not be able, even were he willing, to save Ulysses from Charybdis[396].

[396] Od. xii. 107.

Thus it was that the sublime idea of one Governor of the universe, omnipotent over all its parts, was shivered into many fragments, and these high prerogatives, distributed and held in severalty, are the fragments of a conception too weighty and too comprehensive for the unassisted human mind to carry in its entireness.

~_His grandeur is material._~

Upon the whole, the intellectual spark in Neptune is feeble, and the conception is much materialized. Ideally he has the relation to Jupiter, which the statue of the Nile bears to one of Jupiter’s statues. Within these limits, his position is grand. The ceaseless motion, the unconquerable might, the wide extent, of the θάλασσα, compose for him a noble monarchy. At first sight, when we read of the lottery of the universe, we are startled at finding the earth left without an owner. It was not so in the Asiatic religions. But mark here the influence of external circumstances. The nations of Asia inhabited a vast continent; for them land was greater by far than sea. The Greeks knew of nothing but islands and peninsulas of limited extent, whereas the Sea for them was infinite; since, except round the Ægean, they knew little or nothing of its farther shores. Thus the sceptre of Neptune reaches over the whole of the Outer Geography; while Earth, as commonly understood, had long been left behind upon the course of the adventurous Ulysses.

_Aidoneus._

~_The Aidoneus of Homer._~

There is a marked contrast between the mere rank of Aides or Aidoneus, and his want of substance and of activity, in the poems. He is one of the three Kronid Brothers, of whom Neptune asserts--and we are nowhere told that it is an unwarrantable boast--that they are of equal dignity and honour. He bears the lofty title of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος: and he is the husband of Persephone the Awful. It is plain that he belonged of right to the order of Olympian deities, because Dione states that he repaired to the divine abode, to have the wounds healed there by Paieon, which he had received from Hercules: but it is very doubtful whether we ought to understand him to have attended even the great Chapter, or Assembly, of the Twentieth Iliad. His ordinary residence is exclusively in the nether world. At the same time there is, in his position, and in that of Persephone, a remarkable independence. This the very title of subterranean Jupiter is enough to indicate. Neptune is never called the Jupiter of the sea. And it is quite plain that the power of Jupiter over the dead was limited. We cannot say it was null: for Castor and Pollux after death are still τιμὴν πρὸς Ζῆνος ἔχοντες, and they live accordingly on alternate days. But it was Minerva who interfered to carry Hercules safely through the Shades, and bring him back; and it appears that but for her Jupiter would not have been able to give effect to his design[397].

[397] Od. xi. 302, 626. Il. viii. 366-9.

But the share of action ascribed to this divinity in any part of the poems is a very small one. In the Twentieth Iliad, the tramp of the Immortals, when engaged in fight, and the quaking of the earth under the might of Neptune, cause him to tremble. And his having received wounds from Hercules, though he shared this indignity with Juno, detracts from his mythological greatness.

Love of symmetry has sometimes led writers on the Greek mythology to find matrimonial arrangements for Jupiter’s brothers similar to his own, by giving to Neptune Amphitrite, and to Aidoneus Persephone, for their respective wives. The former of these two unions has no foundation in Homer; and the latter bears little analogy to that of Jupiter and Juno. For Proserpine is the real Queen of the Shades below: all the higher traditions and active duties of the place centre around her, while he appears there as a sort of King-Consort. There is no sign whatever of his exercising any influence over her, far less of her acting in the capacity of his organ. And while she has a cult or worship on earth, he apparently has none.

Under these circumstances, we do not expect to find her exhibiting any tokens of derivation from, or ideal dependance on him. They would appear to be respectively derived from traditions of independent origin.

Homer has not attached marks to Aidoneus which would enable us to trace him to any particular source beyond the limits of the Olympian system. It would be natural to seek his prototype among the darkest and earthiest of the elemental powers. But he appears before us in the poems rather as an independent and Hellenic creation, metaphysical in kind, and representing little beyond (1), a place in the trine number of the Kronid Brothers, which appears to be the Hellenic form of a great primitive tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead; and (2), the consciousness that there was a city and a government of the dead, and that a ruler must be provided for them, while the idea of the Supreme Deity had not retained enough of force and comprehensiveness to seem sufficient for the purpose.

As the representative of inexorable death, Aidoneus was the opposite of the bright and life-giving Apollo: and was naturally the most hateful to mortals of all the Olympian deities[398]. But the place in which the idea of punishment centres is the domain of Κρόνος rather than that of Aides: and he is the ruler over a state of the dead which is generally neither bliss nor acute suffering, but which is deeply overspread with chillness and gloom.

[398] Il. ix. 159.

I shall refer hereafter[399] to the peculiar relation which appears to subsist between Aidoneus, together with Persephone, and the mysterious Ἐρινύες.

[399] Inf. sect. iv.

_Demeter, or Ceres._

~_The Ceres or Demeter of Homer._~

The goddess Demeter, the Ceres of the Latins, though afterwards of considerable dignity and importance, is but a feeble luminary in the Homeric heavens. That there are in the Iliad[400] only two distinct notices of her personality, might of itself be compatible with a contrary supposition: for in the _Troica_ he introduces his divine personages on account of their relation to the subject, rather than for their general importance; and corn, which feeds man, has little affinity with war, which destroys him. But her weight is, if possible, even smaller in the Odyssey, where she is noticed but once[401], and that incidentally.

[400] Il. ii. 696. xiv. 326.

[401] Od. v. 125.

The use of the phrase Δημήτερος ἀκτὴ for corn, like the φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο for Vulcan, and Ἄρης for the spear, or for the battle, tends to indicate imperfect personality; to show that the deity was indistinctly realized; that the personal name was either recent or at least unfamiliar; and that it was used, not so much to designate a being, as to give life to an idea.

Homer has not asserted any connection between Demeter and Persephone: and the idea of it in later times may have arisen simply from the observation that in the poems Demeter stands as a mother without a child, and Persephone as a daughter without a mother.

Possibly, however, the connection may have been suggested by the name; which seems manifestly to be equivalent to Γῆ μήτηρ or Mother-Earth. And though the original reference was to the production of food by which man lives, the word might be susceptible of another sense, connecting it with the nether world, which had a material relation to Earth, and which, even in Homer, Tityus the son of Γαῖα, and in the later tradition the earth-born race generally, were reputed to inhabit.

The name in its proper sense indicates first the idea, and then the goddess of agriculture: and points to a Pelasgian, and perhaps farther back an Egyptian, rather than an Hellenic or a Phœnician connection. In Egypt, according to the reports collected by Diodorus[402], Isis was held nearly to correspond with her.

[402] Diod. i. 13.

With this supposition agree the only notices contained in the poems that tend to attach the goddess Demeter to a particular locality. Her connection with Iasion was probably in Crete or Cyprus, or at any rate (from the name) in some country occupied, and ruled too, by Pelasgians. Her τέμενος[403] or dedicated lands in Thessaly, the Pelasgic Argos, suggest a similar presumption. In Middle Greece and Peloponnesus we never hear of her. The very solemn and ancient observance of her worship in Attica, which was so eminently a Pelasgian state in the time of Homer, entirely accords with the indications of the Homeric text.

[403] Il. ii. 696.

The slight notice she obtains from Homer, compared with the dignity to which other tokens would tend to show that she was entitled, may have been owing to the incomplete amalgamation in his time of Hellenic and Pelasgian institutions.

Upon this goddess, as upon so many others, sensual passion had laid hold. This is decidedly confirmatory of her Pelasgian or eastern, as opposed to properly Hellic associations. We see Venus coming from the east and worshipped in Pelasgian countries: of the three persons whom Aurora appropriates, Orion is pretty evidently the subject of a naturalized eastern tradition, and Tithonus is Asiatic: Calypso and Circe belong to the east by Phœnicia: it is in Troas and Asia that no less than three Nymphs appear as the bearers of children, fighting on the Trojan side, to human fathers[404]. Whereas among the more Hellenic deities, we have Minerva and Proserpine wholly exempt; and Juno using sensual passion it is true, but only for a political end. This assemblage of facts further confirms the supposition, that Ceres ought to be set down as a Pelasgian deity. Orion and Ino, shining in the heavens, seem to belong to the more astronomical form of eastern religion: Ceres to that which was probably transmitted through fertile and well-cultivated Egypt.

[404] Il. vi. 21, xiv. 444, and xx. 384.

~_Her place in Olympus._~

The title of Demeter to rank with the Olympian deities of Homer is not so absolutely clear, as that of many among them: but it may on the whole be sufficiently inferred from the arrangement of the passage in the Fourteenth Odyssey, where Jupiter recites a list of the various partners to whom he owed his offspring. The three first are women, who bore sons never deified, Pirithous, Perseus, and Minos: the two next are women, of whom one gave birth to Dionysus a god, the other to the substantially deified Hercules. The sixth and seventh are Demeter, or Ceres, and Latona; the children of neither are mentioned. Besides that Demeter is called καλλιπλόκαμος ἄνασσα, the two seem to be coupled together as goddesses. The structure of the passage is not chronological, but depends upon dignity advancing regularly towards a climax; so purposely indeed, that Dionysus, always an immortal, is mentioned after Hercules, a mortal born, though Semele had been named before Alcmene. All this appears to require the adoption of the conclusion, that Demeter was reckoned as an Olympian goddess in the Homeric system.

There is, however, another and more comprehensive solution of the question which arises out of the faint notices of Δημήτηρ in Homer. We ought, perhaps, to consider her as the Pelasgian, and Juno as the Hellenic, reproduction of those eastern traditions, which gave mythological impersonation to the female principle. They naturally centred upon the Earth as the recipient of productive influences, and as the great nurse and feeder of man, the τραφερὴ, the πολύφορβος, the πουλυβότειρα, the ζείδωρος. The Pelasgic Demeter may be a very fair and close copy, in all probability, from these traditions as they existed in Egypt. But when the same materials were presented to the Hellenic mind, they could not satisfy its active and idealizing fancy. For the Hellene, man was greater than nature: so that the great office of Jupiter as king of air was subordinated to his yet more august function as the supreme superintendent and controller of human affairs. As the political idea thus predominated in the chief of the Hellenic Immortals, it was requisite that a similar predominance of the intellectual and organizing element should be obtained in his divine Mate. Traditions, however, that had their root in earth, were of necessity wholly intractable for such a purpose, although the lighter and more spirit-like fabric of air was less unsuited to it. Earth was heavy, inactive; and was the prime representative of matter as opposed to mind. Hence the personality of the tradition was severed by the Greeks from its material groundwork; and Earth, the Nature-power, remained beneath, while the figure of Juno, relieved from this incumbrance, and invested with majestic and vigorous attributes, soared aloft and took the place of eldest sister and first wife of Jupiter. Hence doubtless it is that the Γαῖα of Homer is so inanimate and weakling: because she was but the exhausted residue of a tradition, from which the higher life had escaped. But the Ἥρη and the Γαῖα, according to this hypothesis, made up between them a full representation of the traditions from the East, relating to the chief female form of deity. This being so, no legitimate place was left in the mythology of Homer for Ceres; as she had nothing to represent but the same tradition in a form far less adapted to the Hellenic mind, a form indeed which it had probably repudiated. Hence while the Olympian system was young, and Juno not wholly severed from her Oriental origin, the Γῆ μήτηρ could not but remain a mere outlier. But as the poetry of the system was developed, and its philosophy submerged and forgotten, this difficulty diminished, and the later mythology found an ample space for Ceres as a great elemental power.

I may, then, observe, in conclusion, that the whole of this hypothesis is eminently agreeable to the Homeric representation of Ceres in its four main branches, (1) as Pelasgian, (2) as subject to lustful passion, (3) as a secondary wife of Jupiter, and (4) as immediately associated with productive Earth.

_Persephone._

~_The Persephone of Homer._~

Although the Persephone of Homer is rarely brought before us, and our information respecting her is therefore slight, there seems to be sufficient ground for asserting that she is not the mere female reflection of Hades or Aidoneus.

It is only for those deities from whom other deities are drawn by descent, that we find in Homer a regular conjugal connection provided. Thus Neptune, as we have seen, cannot be said to have a wife in Homer. Amphitrite appears in the poems with a faint and indeed altogether doubtful personality, though she afterwards grew into his spouse. Now Neptune was a deity much more in view than Aides: and it is not likely that we should have found Persephone more fully developed than Amphitrite, had she not represented some older and more independent tradition.

Again, in cases where the female deity is the mere reflection of the male, we do not find her invested with a share in his dominion, although, as in the case of Juno, she may occasionally and derivatively exercise some of the prerogatives, which in him have a higher and more unquestionable activity. Thus Tartarus is the region of Κρόνος, not of Ῥέα; air is the realm of Jupiter, not of Jupiter and Juno. But Persephone appears by the side of Hades as a substantive person; she is invoked with him by Althea to slay Meleager, in the Legend of the Ninth Iliad[405]: and the region in which she dwells is not less hers than his[406],

[405] Il. ix. 569.

[406] Od. x. 491.

εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους καὶ ἐπαινῆς Περσεφονείης.

Indeed her personality is the better developed of the two: for no personal act is ascribed in the poems to Aides, except the indeterminate one of trembling, at the battle of the gods, lest the crust of earth should be broken through: and the name given him in the Iliad of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος, subterranean Jupiter, may possibly suggest that he was sometimes viewed as hardly more than a form or function of the highest god: whereas, in the under-world of the Eleventh Odyssey, all the active functions of sovereignty are placed in her hands. It is she who gathers the women-shades for Ulysses: and it is she who disperses them when they have been passed in review. It is by her that Ulysses apprehends the head of Gorgo may be sent forth to drive him off, should he linger too long; it is by her that he apprehends he may have been deluded with an εἴδωλον or shade, instead of a substance; most of all, it is she who endows Tiresias, alone among the dead, with the character of the Seer[407]. In fine, the whole of the active duties of the nether kingdom appear to be in her hands.

[407] Od. xi. 226, 385, 639, 213, and x. 494.

That she was generally worshipped by the Hellenic tribes we must infer from the cases mentioned in the Ninth Iliad, the one in Ætolia, the other farther North[408]; as well as from her office in regard to the thoroughly national region of the Shades.

[408] Il. x. 457, 569.

~_Her marked and substantive character._~

She has her own strongly marked set of epithets. Of these, one is ἁγνὴ, the severely pure; for with Homer ἁγνὸς is exclusively applicable to divine womanhood, and is given only to Diana and Persephone: then she is ἀγαυὴ, the dread: and lastly, she is ἐπαινὴ, an epithet appropriated to her exclusively, which appears to be Homer’s favourite method for sharply marking out individuality of character. Buttmann has also well observed, that she has this epithet only when mentioned along with Hades, that is, when shown very strictly in her official character; and that ἀγαυὴ is used when she appears alone. Upon this he observes; ‘this way of joining the name of Proserpine with that of Pluto was an old epic formula, handed down even to Homer and our oldest Greek poets from still earlier times, and which they used unchanged[409].’ He would read ἐπ’ αἰνὴ, instead of ἐπαινὴ, but this neither affects the sense (awful, terrible) nor the force of the exclusive appropriation.

[409] Buttmann’s Lexil. p. 62. _in voc._ αἶνος.

There is another sign confirmatory of the belief that the origin of this mythical person must be sought, not in the necessity of finding a queen for Aidoneus, but in an anterior and distinct tradition. Namely, this; that, though she is a daughter of Jupiter[410], she is not provided with a mother. Thus she seems as if she were older than the Olympian œconomy. Venus, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, are all equipped with a full parentage. The later tradition, which made Persephone the daughter of Ceres, has no other support from Homer than this, that we are left to suppose that Ceres had some offspring by Jupiter, while none is named[411].

[410] Od. xi. 217.

[411] Il. xiv. 326.

The chain of presumptions appears to me to become complete, when we take into view two other pieces of evidence supplied by the poems. In the far East[412], beyond the couch of the morning Sun, some distance up the stream of the great river Ocean, but to the south of the point where it is entered, and at a spot where the shore narrows very much--immediately, in short, before the point of descent--are the groves of Persephone. According to the general rules of interpretation applicable to Homer, this appears to convey to us that the seat of her worship was in the far Southern East, and that her office, as there understood, was that of the goddess or queen of Death. And if she is indeed the reflection, in the mirror of the lower world, of any other known deity, then, both from this great office, and from the peculiar epithet ἁγνὴ, it is most likely to be of Diana, with whom, in the later mythology, she was identified; and, again, through Diana, of Apollo, from whom the light of Diana herself was derived. Or, in other words, she may be for the lower world that reflection of Apollo, which the Homeric Diana was for this earth: and it is worth observation, that the gift of second sight, which she allows to Tiresias, and which therefore is at her disposal beneath ground[413], is the peculiar and exclusive property of Apollo.

[412] Od. x. 506 _seqq._ xi. 1 _seqq._ xii. _1 seqq._

[413] Od. x. 492-5.

Let us now lastly consider, what light the etymology of her remarkable name may afford us. Its meaning appears to be, either destruction by slaughter; from two roots, one that represented in ἔπερσα, from the verb πέρθω, and the other φόνη; or else, that of the destruction or slaughter of Persians. In the former view, the evidence leaves us where we were, or brings us a point nearer to Diana, whose function was not that of all death whatever, but of such death as might be called slaughter, because not due to disease, but brought about at the moment by a sudden process, though often the mildest of all ways of dying[414]. But the other etymology may be worth some further attention.

[414] Od. xv. 409.

~_Her connection with the East_.~

Besides that cluster of traditions, relating to remote places, which the Greeks derived from the Phœnician navigators, and which cannot but have included some eastward wanderings in the Black Sea, as well as westward experience in the Mediterranean, they must in all likelihood have had oriental traditions properly their own, brought by their Hellic forefathers with them from their cradle. We have already seen that that cradle was probably Persia; and we have found traces of the connection in the name of the great pre-Achæan hero, Perseus, and in the continuing use of that name in the high Achæan family of Nestor, as well as at much later historic dates. Another link, connecting the Homeric traditions with this name, and both with the East, is found in the name of Perse, who was the mother of Circe, an Eastern goddess; and who was the daughter of Ocean, and the wife of the Sun[415].

[415] Od. x. 135-9.

We must take these circumstances into view along with the force of the name Persephone, and with the evidence we have already had of the antiquity of the traditions relating to her. To this we have to add the absence of any Homeric evidence connecting her with any other local source. There is no sign of any institution, that belonged to her worship, except in those groves planted in the far East; and no sign of any other particular locality marked as her peculiar abode, which we have found to be a mark of such invented deities generally as had a well developed personality. There is no note of her whatever in Troas; and nothing to connect her with Egypt, or with the Pelasgians in any quarter. It is not likely that she came in with the Phœnicians, as she would then have had signs of a recent origin, and would not have attained to so august and mysterious a position as she actually holds. The two distinct notices of her worship are both in the Homeric Hellas; not in Southern Greece, nor in the islands.

It seems, therefore, on every ground reasonable to suppose, that the tradition of Proserpine was an original Hellic tradition brought into the country from the East, probably by the Hellic tribes, and from among their Persian forefathers; and that the name of the deity, as we find it in Homer, affords a new indication of the extraction of the race.

Accordingly, the unusually substantive aspect of her position in the nether world, which makes her relation to Aidoneus so different from that of the other mythological wives, or feminines, to their respective husbands, is such, that it seems most reasonable, instead of deriving her from him, as Juno was derived from Jupiter, or Tethys from Ocean, to consider them as representing the union of two independent impersonations, associated together primarily by their common subject matter. For there does not seem to be any thing improbable in the hypothesis, that Persephone may, in the belief of some country and age, have served alone for the ruler of the region of the dead. Just as so many subordinate ministers of Doom, the Fates, the Erinues, and the Harpies, assumed the female form in the process of impersonation, so it may have been with their sovereign. And if we are to look farther for the metaphysical groundwork of such a tradition, we may perhaps find it as follows. There is a relation of analogy between each function and its converse: and as in the pure mythology, all that gave life was feminine, so conversely, all that represented the destroying agency might assume a similar form.

~_Her relation to Olympus_.~

In her case, as in that of one or two others, it is difficult to discover whether Homer meant a particular deity to be included, or not, among the Olympian gods of the ordinary or smaller assembly. There is no indication in the poems, which directly connects Persephone with Olympus; and that celestial palace may seem to belong to the government of the living world, and to be almost incapable of relations with that of the departed. Nor is she connected specially with the Olympian system, like Aidoneus, by the position which birth confers. The ἄλσος, and the worship paid her there, can hardly belong to the departed spirits on their way to their abode, and more probably indicate an ancient tradition deriving her worship from the far East. On the other hand, her dignity and majesty in the poems are unquestionable, and indeed superior to those of any Olympian deity, after some five or six. I do not find materials for a confident judgment on the Homeric view of her place in his theo-mythology, with reference to this particular point of connection with Olympus.

Founding conjecture upon the facts before us, I venture, however, on a further extension of these hypotheses with respect to Persephone. We perceive in Persephone and Diana that kind of likeness which may be due to their common origin; if, as we suppose, both were images of Apollo. But it is not likely that two such images should have been formed by the same race for itself. Can we then, probably refer Diana and Persephone to different sources ethnically?

It is plain that Diana was worshipped in Troy and Greece. Persephone, so far as we know, in Greece only. This would agree with the supposition that Diana was originally Pelasgian, Persephone only Hellic.

Again, Diana was an earthly, Persephone a subterraneous reflection of Apollo. Now the Hellic tribes were lively believers in a future state: as we see from the communion of Achilles with the soul of Patroclus, and from many places in the Odyssey. But we have nowhere in Homer the slightest allusion among the Trojans to the belief in a future state, beyond the mere formula of entering the region of Aïdes. Neither the succinct account of the funeral rites of Hector, nor any one of the three addresses over his remains, contain the slightest allusion to his separate existence as a spirit. There is, indeed, mention of wine used to extinguish the flame of the funeral pile, but none of invocation along with it, as there is in the case of Patroclus[416]. And as we have no less than an hundred lines spoken over or otherwise bestowed upon the dead Hector, the omission is singular. It becomes still more significant, when we recollect that the Greeks, and their goddess Juno, invoke the deities of the under-world, and the powers connected with a future state, in their solemn oaths and imprecations[417]; but when Hector swears to Dolon, (our only example of a Trojan oath,) he adjures Jupiter alone[418]. Now it may be that the religion of Troy did not include so distinct a reference to a future state, as that of Greece, and that the Trojans knew nothing of Persephone, or of any deity holding her place. This hypothesis would at once accord with the features of the Homeric portrait, and with the striking absence among the Trojans of all pointed reference to a future life, or to the disembodied spirit. Nor need we consider it to be at all shaken by slight and formal allusions, or by the words in which Homer on his own part dismisses to Hades the spirit of the slain Hector[419]. The hypothesis which the circumstances appear to suggest is, not that the Trojans disbelieved a future existence, but that they neither felt keenly respecting it, nor gave a mythological development to the doctrine.

[416] Il. xxiii. 218-21.

[417] Il. iii. 278. ix. 454. 569. xiv. 271-4. xv. 36-40. xix. 258-60.

[418] Il. x. 329.

[419] Il. xvi. 856, 7, and xxii. 362, 3.

_Mars._

~_The Mars of Homer._~

Even in Homer, Mars is externally the most imposing figure among the masculine deities of pure invention. The greatest of war-bards could not but find him a fine subject for poetical amplification. But in the Roman period he had far outgrown the limits of his Homeric position. With the lapse of time, the forces and passions, which gave to this impersonation its hold upon human nature, were sure to prevail in a considerable degree over the finer elements from which Apollo was moulded. It requires an effort of mind to liberate ourselves from the associations of the later mythology, and contract our vision for the purpose of estimating the Mars of Homer as he really is.

Notwithstanding his stature, beauty, hand and voice, which constitute, taken together, a proud appearance, it seems as if Mars had stood lower in the mind of Homer than any Olympian deity who takes part in the Trojan war, except Venus only.

The Odyssey never once brings Mars before us, even by way of allusion, except in the licentious lay of Demodocus; and the spirit of that lay certainly seems to aim at making him ridiculous, especially in the manner of his release and withdrawal. In the Iliad his part is, of course, more considerable; but on no occasion whatever does Homer apparently seek to set him off, or give him a commanding attitude in comparison with other deities.

We have nowhere any account of any act of reverence or worship done to him, either in or out of Greece. For instance, he is never, even in the contingencies of war, the object of prayer. He never shows command over the powers of nature, or the mind of man; which he nowhere attempts to influence by suggestion. It is said, indeed, that he entered into Hector, as that warrior was putting on the armour of Achilles;

δῦ δέ μιν Ἄρης
δεινὸς Ἐνυάλιος[420].

[420] Il. xvii. 210.

But no words could more conclusively fix his place in the Homeric system as the mere impersonation of a Passion. For with Homer no greater deity, indeed, no other of the Olympian gods, is ever said to enter into the mind of a mortal man. In the Fifth Book he stirs up the warlike passion of Menelaus; having, like Venus, a limited hold upon a particular propensity. His climax of honour in this department is his giving θάρσος to the Pseudo-Ulysses; but this he does only in conjunction with Minerva[421].

[421] Od. xiv. 216.

~_His limited worship and attributes._~

His possession of the attributes of deity appears to have been most limited. The use of the word Ἄρης not only for the passion of war, but even for its weapons, shows us that the impersonation was in this case as yet very partially disengaged from the metaphysical ideas, or the material objects, in which it took its rise.

His function as god of war was confined to the merely material side of war, and had nothing to do with that aspect, in which war enlists and exhausts all the higher faculties of the human mind; so much so, indeed, that to be a great general is almost necessary in order to enter the first rank of greatness at all. Even of war in the lower sense he had not, as a god, exclusive possession, but he administered his office in partnership with a superior, Minerva. Besides being every thing else that she was, she presided, along with him, over war. On the shield of Achilles, he and Minerva lead the opposing hosts[422]. Over the body of Patroclus the struggle was one of which, says the Poet, neither Mars nor Minerva could think lightly[423]. Achilles, when pursuing the Trojans, calls for assistance; for, says he, neither Mars nor Minerva could undertake to dispose of such a multitude[424]. Mars and Minerva, says Jupiter, will take charge of the concerns of war[425].

[422] Il. xviii. 516.

[423] xvii. 398.

[424] xx. 359.

[425] Il. v. 430.

But that in this partnership he was an inferior, and not an equal, is clear from the manner in which he is habitually handled by Minerva. She wounds him through the spear of Diomed, when, unless saved by flight, he himself apprehends he might have perished[426]. In the Theomachy, she twice over strikes him powerless to the ground. In the Olympian meeting of the Fifteenth Book, when his intended visit to the battlefield menaces the gods with trouble from the displeasure of Jupiter, Minerva strips his armour off his back, scolds him sharply, and replaces him in his seat[427]. And she is pointed out by Jupiter as the person, whose habitual duty it was to keep him in order by the severest means[428];

[426] Il. v. 885-7.

[427] Il. xv. 110-42.

[428] Il. v. 766.

ἥ ἑ μάλιστ’ εἴωθε κακῇς ὀδύνῃσι πελάζειν.

In the Fifth Iliad, he stirs up the Trojans, and envelopes the fight in darkness: but here he is acting under ἐφετμαὶ, or injunctions from Apollo[429], who thus appears, like Minerva, in the light of a superior to him, even in his own department.

[429] Il. v. 508.

We learn, again, that he was overcome and imprisoned by the youths Otus and Ephialtes, whom Apollo subdued: he was in bondage for thirteen months, and would have perished, had not Mercury released him[430].

[430] Il. v. 385.

He is able to assume the human figure, and, as we have seen, to bring darkness over contending hosts: but, when in Olympus, he remains ignorant[431] of the death of his son Ascalaphus, until he receives the information from Juno; as it was only from his Nymphs that the Sun learned the slaughter of his oxen. Nay, Minerva even puts on a particular helmet, in order that it may secure her from being recognised by Mars when within his view[432].

[431] Il. xiii. 521. xv. 110 _et seqq._

[432] Il. v. 845.

Mars in the Olympian court bears some resemblance to Ajax among the Grecian heroes. But the intellectual element, which appears to be simply blunt in Ajax, in Mars seems to be wholly wanting: so that he represents an animal principle in its crudest form: and is not so much an Ajax, as a Caliban.

We are not told that he is greedy of sacrifices, for no _cultus_ is assigned to him: but he is represented as greedy of blood, and as capable of being satiated with it[433].

[433] Il. v. 289.

Except with Venus for his mere person, he has no favour with any other Olympian deities[434]. Juno describes him as lawless and as a fool: and Jupiter tells him that, were he the son of any other deity but himself, he would long ago have been ejected from his place in heaven[435].

[434] Od. viii. 310.

[435] v. 831, 97.

On one occasion, his name is associated with those of Agamemnon and Neptune: but the due relation between them is still preserved. Agamemnon is compared with Jupiter as to his face and head; with Neptune as to his chest; and with Mars as to his waist. The eyes of Hector on the field of battle were like the Gorgon, and like Mars[436].

[436] Il. ii. 478, and viii. 349.

From the repeated allusions to contingencies in which he would have perished, there seems to be something more or less equivocal even about his title to immortality. If more, he is also much less, than man. He is perhaps the least human of the Olympian family; and is a compound between deity and brute.

The exhibitions of Mars, as wounded by Diomed for the Iliad, and in the lay of Demodocus for the Odyssey, seem to imply that this deity could not, in the time of Homer, have become an object of general or established religious worship in Greece.

~_Mars as yet scarcely Greek._~

He is a local deity, and his abode is in Thrace. From thence he issues forth with his mythical son Terror to make war upon the Ephyri: a race whose name has a strong Greek savour, and whose hostile relation to Mars thus exhibited, tends, with other evidence, to place him in the category of foreign deities, not yet naturalized in the country, though made available by Homer for his Olympian Court. After the detection in the palace of Vulcan, it is to Thrace that he again repairs.

We are not to consider this paramount Thracian relation as absolutely separating him from Greece: Thracians, like Pelasgi, had links with both parties in the war, though the stronger ones are apparently those which connect them with Troy.

He has among the deities the nickname of ἀλλοπρόσαλλος, or turncoat, because of his vacillation between the two parties. This singular epithet, applied to the Thracian god, conveys the idea that Homer, knowing of the sympathies of the name with both sides, was puzzled as to placing him decisively on either. Now the Thracians of Homer were ἀκρόκομοι[437], while the Achæans were καρηκομόωντες. And it is worth notice that the Germans of Tacitus, among whom we find marked signs of resemblance to the Hellenic tribes, wore in general flowing hair, but the Suevi, one particular tribe of them, on the contrary, gathered it into a knot[438].

[437] Il. iv. 533.

[438] Tac. Germ. c. 38. Il. xx. 413.

Mars, however, incurs the particular wrath of Juno by abandoning the party of the Greeks, and siding with the Trojans. But in the Fifteenth Book, where Juno acquaints him of the death of his son, who had fought in the Greek ranks, she evidently does it in the expectation that grief and resentment will once more make him a foe to the Trojans. And her calculation is well founded: for he is setting out with that intention, when Minerva follows, and roughly brings him back.

He only appears once in a pre-Troic legend. This appearance, too, is beyond the borders of Greece. In Lycia he, or, it may be, simply warlike passion which he represents, slays Isander, the son of Bellerophon and uncle of Glaucus, in battle with the Solymi. Still he is the father by Astyoche, of Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Minyeian Orchomenus, or else farther towards the north of Greece.

The Homeric indications, on the whole, as well as the general conceptions of the character, represent Mars as neither a deity indigenous to the country, nor one belonging to the Hellenic traditions: while the Poet perhaps intends us to understand that he had points of contact or affinity with Greece, which are represented in his wavering attitude between the two parties to the war. It is probable that the Poet himself may have been a principal agent in the introduction of Mars to Hellenic worship. The machinery of the Iliad required him to find an array of gods, who should be champions on each side respectively. It also required that these gods should be united round a centre, which he provided for them in Olympus and in its Court, under the presidency of Jupiter. Both Mars and Venus may thus have made good a title, which before was doubtful and imperfect, through the place to which they were promoted in the Iliad, combined with the place which the Iliad itself won for itself in the national understanding and affections.

_Mercury._

~_The Mercury of Homer._~

The Homeric signs respecting Mercury are sufficient to fix his character and origin. The small part, which this deity plays in the poems, is indeed in remarkable contrast with the extended popularity to which at a later period he attained: but his character in Homer is one which accounts in a natural manner for the subsequent increase in his importance.

He is the son of Maias, Od. xiv. 435; and of Jupiter, Od. viii. 335.

He is the man of business for the Olympian deities, διάκτορος. Od. viii. 335. v. 28[439].

[439] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. p. 74.

He is the giver of increase, δῶτορ ἐάων. Od. viii. 335. Il. xiv. 490.

He is the most sociable of deities, Il. xxiv. 334. σοὶ γάρ τε μάλιστά γε φίλτατόν ἐστιν ἀνδρὶ ἑταίρισσαι.