Chapter IX: Part 9

The extraction of Mercury stands somewhat obscurely in Homer: his mother Maias is but once mentioned, and then without any clue. But, in the ancient hymn to Mercury, she is declared to be the daughter of Atlas: and if this be so, we shall be justified in considering him as the child of a Phœnician tradition[440]. This is also clear on Homeric grounds. Although Homer does not expressly connect him with Atlas, he makes Calypso, the daughter of that personage, address him as αἰδοῖός τε φίλος τε. These expressions are usually applied by him where there is some special relation of consanguinity, affinity, or guestship: as between Jupiter and his adopted child[441] and particular friend Thetis. It is therefore probable that Homer took Mercury’s mother Maias to be, as the after-tradition made her, the sister of Calypso, and the daughter of Atlas. All the other Homeric signs of him are in complete harmony with this hypothesis of a Phœnician origin for Mercury.

[440] See sup. Ethnology, sect. iv.

[441] Il. xxiv. 111.

We thus understand how he becomes the general agent for the gods: because the Phœnicians supplied the first and principal means of communication between the several nations in the heroic age: they were the men-of-business for the world[442].

[442] Od. ix. 124.

It thus becomes plain, again, how he can with propriety be called the giver of comforts or blessings; because the basis of commerce is this, that each person engaged in it parts with something which he does not want, and receives what he does want in return.

The apparent anomaly, which makes the god of increase also the god of thievery, is thus explained: because, from its nature, commerce is ever apt to degenerate partially into fraud; and because, in days of the strong hand, force as well as intelligence would often make it easy for the maritime merchants to change their vocation, for the occasion, into that of plunder[443].

[443] Od. viii. 161-4. and xv. 416.

His proper office in regard to the ἔργα of men seems not to be industry, nor skill in production or manufacture; but handiness and tidiness in the performance of services. He, says Ulysses, gives to the ἔργα, which may mean both the deeds and the industrial productions of men, their χάρις and κῦδος, their grace and credit or popularity[444].

[444] Od. xiv. 319.

~_Mercury the god of increase._~

This idea of increase forms the common or central element of the various attributes assigned to Mercury. It takes two principal forms, one that of increase in material goods, the other that of the propagation of the race. This latter, which was elsewhere grossly exhibited, is veiled by Homer with his almost unfailing sense of delicacy, and may not, indeed, have been fully developed in his time. It is perhaps however traceable in two passages of the poems: first, that of the Sixteenth Iliad, where we are told that he corrupted the virgin Polymele[445], though she belonged to the train of Diana. The other is in the episode of Venus and Mars, where Apollo selects him as the deity to whom to put the question, whether he would like to take the place of the adulterer, and he replies in the affirmative[446]. Each of these incidents seems to appertain to something distinctive in his character.

[445] Il. xvi. 179-86.

[446] Od. viii. 334-42.

That character, again, imports the extended intercourse with mankind, and the knowledge of the world, which causes him to be chosen, in the Twenty-Fourth Iliad, for the difficult office of conducting Priam to the abode of Ulysses. Moreover, the great balance of material benefit which commerce brings gives him, its patron, as a general rule, a genial and philanthropic aspect. In Homer we have nowhere any sign of his vengeance, anger, or severity. He neither punishes, hates, nor is incensed with any one. A passionless and prudent deity, he not only declines actual fighting with Latona, as she is a wife of Jupiter, but spontaneously gives her leave to boast among the gods that she has engaged and worsted him.

~_Mercury Hellenic and Phœnician._~

The Phœnician origin of Mercury will also account for his position in the poems, in relation to the Trojans and Greeks respectively. Not simply is he one of the five Hellenizing deities: for his talents would naturally with Homer tend to place him on that side. But he appears almost wholly unknown to the Trojans. The abundance of the flocks of Phorbas is indeed referred to his love (Il. xiv. 490): and he reveals himself to Priam by his name (Il. xxiv. 460): but it is remarkable, and contrary to the general rule of the poems, that Priam, notwithstanding his great obligations, takes no notice whatever of his deity, either upon his first revelation and departure, or when a second time he appears, and afterwards quits him anew (682-94).

On the other hand, we have abundant signs of his familiarity with the Greeks. He conveys the sceptre from Jupiter to Pelops: he carries the warning of the gods to Ægisthus: sacrifice is offered to him in Ithaca: and he is liberally treated with sacrifices by Autolycus in Parnesus, where he repays his worshipper by bestowing on him the arts of perjury and purloining[447].

[447] Od. xiv. 435, and xix. 394-8.

Now it is plain, from many places in the poems, that the Greeks had much intercourse with the Phœnicians. On the other hand, the Trojans, wealthy by internal products and home trade, seem to have known little or nothing of maritime commerce. Their intercourse with Thrace, the fertile Thrace that furnished a contingent of allies, required no more than that they should have the means of crossing the Straits of Gallipoli. We nowhere hear that they had a port or harbour. A Phœnician deity would therefore, of course, be on the Achæan side during the war.

Independently of such an origin, he might, in his usual capacity of agent, have been with perfect propriety sent to Calypso: but his mythical relationship to her as a nephew, and her evident connection with Phœnician traditions, give a peculiar propriety to his employment on this errand.

Another passage of the Odyssey seems, however, to place this relationship beyond doubt. Ulysses, in the Twelfth Book, recounts to Alcinous the transaction that occurred in the Olympian Assembly after his crew had slain the oxen of the Sun. On that occasion, the offended deity declared that, unless he got compensation, he would go down and shine in the realm of Aides; upon which Jupiter at once promised to destroy the ship of Ulysses. ‘This,’ adds Ulysses, ‘I heard from Calypso, and she told me that she had herself heard it from Mercury[448].’

[448] Od. xii. 389, 90.

Now this was no affair of Calypso’s; none, that is, on which the gods could make a communication to her in regard to Ulysses: but it was one in which, from her passion for the hero, she would take a natural interest, and on which she might well obtain information from a deity who was her relative. Nor does it appear on what other ground Mercury should be named, as the person who brought her this extra-official report.

Again, it is probably on account of his Phœnician connection, that the intervention of Mercury is employed in the Tenth Odyssey[449], to supply Ulysses with the instructions that were necessary, in order to enable him to cope with Circe.

[449] Od. x. 275-307.

For we are here in the midst of a cluster of traditions, which we have every reason to presume to be wholly Phœnician[450]. It is the cluster, which occupies the outer circle of the geography of the Odyssey: and it is severed from the Grecian world and experience, not only by a geographical line, but by an entire change in mythological relations. From the time when Ulysses enters that circle in the beginning of the Ninth Book, until his appearance near Scheria, on the outskirt of the known familiar sphere, his ancient friend Minerva nowhere attends him: and there are four whole books without even a mention of the goddess, who, except for this interval, stands prominently forth in almost every page of the Odyssey. The divine aid is given to him, during this period, through Circe and Calypso; while Mercury is appointed to command the latter, and to enable Ulysses to overcome the former. Both the company and the traditions, amidst which Mercury is found, thus invite us to presume that he is a deity of Phœnician importation into Greece.

[450] See ‘Achæis, or Ethnology,’ sect. iv.

~_Mercury recent in Greece._~

There is one other point connected with him, which, tending to mark that he had somewhat recently become known to the Greeks, agrees with other indications of his introduction from beyond sea. He figures, indeed, in legends as old as Hercules and Pelops[451]; and we do not receive any account of his infancy, as we do of the infancy of Dionysus and of Vulcan. But we may observe that, whenever he assumes human form, it is the form of one scarcely emerging from boyhood. In the last Iliad, he is a πρῶτον ὑπηνήτης, in the fairest flower of youth[452]. And in the Tenth Odyssey, where he makes his second and only other appearance to a mortal, the same line is repeated in order to describe his appearance, as if it were an established formula for himself, and not merely adapted to a particular occasion. Indeed it may reasonably be questioned, whether such adaptation exists at all. A very young person was not the most appropriate conductor for Priam, on such an errand as that which he had undertaken: nor the best instructor in the mode of coping with the formidable Circe. Therefore, without laying too much stress upon the point, the meaning of the youthful appearance seems to be, that he was young in the Greek Olympus.

[451] Il. ii. 104. Od. xi. 626.

[452] Il. xxiv. 348. Od. x. 279.

There is yet another sign by which I think we may identify Mercury as, in the estimation of Homer, a deity known to be of foreign introduction. The list given by Jupiter in the Fourteenth Iliad of his intrigues, includes no reference to Maias, the mother of Mercury, or to Diana the mother of Venus. Yet it is a large and elaborately constructed list, ending with Juno herself: and the question arises, on what principle was it constructed? I think the answer must be that, as it was addressed to Juno, the most Hellenic of all the Olympian deities, with whom he wished to be on good terms at the moment, so also it was intended, if not to give a full account of his Greek intrigues, yet at any rate that no tradition should appear in it, except such as Homer considered to be either native, or fully naturalized. It contains no reference, for example, to the mother of Sarpedon, the mother of Dardanus, the mother of Amphion and Zethus, the mother of Tantalus, (whom we have however only presumptions for reckoning as by Homeric tradition a son of Jupiter,) or even the mother of Æolus; whom it is possible that Homer may have regarded as Hellic, rather than properly Greek, though the father of illustrious Greek houses. If this be the rule, under which the Poet has framed the list, then the exclusion of Maias and her son remarkably coincides with the other evidence that tends to define his position as a deity of known and remembered foreign origin.

~_His Olympian office and that of Iris._~

It may be convenient to notice in this place the statement which is commonly made, that Iris is the messenger of the gods in the Iliad, but that Mercury, except only in the Twenty-fourth Book of that Poem, is confined in this capacity to the Odyssey: a statement, on which has been founded a standing popular argument against the unity of authorship in the two poems, and also against the genuineness of the Twenty-fourth Iliad itself.

The statement, however, appears to rest upon a pure misapprehension; for it assumes the identity of the character of Iris and Mercury respectively as messengers. Whereas there is really a difference, corresponding with the difference in dignity between the two deities: and Homer is in regard to them perfectly consistent with himself.

Mercury is sometimes a messenger in the proper sense, and sometimes an agent, or an agent and messenger combined. It is not true that, so far as the Iliad is concerned, he only appears in the last Book in one of these capacities. For in the Second Book[453] we find, that he carried the Pelopid sceptre from Jupiter to Pelops: which may mean either simply, that he was the bearer of it, or that by a commission he assisted Pelops in acquiring, or rather in founding, the Achæan throne in the Peloponnesus. In the Twenty-fourth Iliad, Mercury is not really a messenger at all[454]; but he is an agent, intrusted by Jupiter on the ground of special fitness with the despatch of a delicate and important business, the bringing Priam in safety to the presence of Achilles, and afterwards the withdrawing him securely from a position of the utmost danger. This is an office like that undertaken by Minerva in the Fourth Book, when, as she was commissioned to bring about a breach of the Pact by the Trojans, she repaired to Pandarus for the purpose. But the function of Iris is simply to carry messages, and chiefly from one deity to another; she is not only ἄγγελος, but μετάγγελος[455]; she is not intrusted in any case with the conduct of transactions among men, or responsible for their issue, although in the Fifteenth Book she spontaneously advises the god Neptune in the sense of the message she has brought. It is not for Jupiter only that she acts: she also conveys a message, and a clandestine one, for Juno[456]. Nay, on one occasion, without any divine charge, hearing the prayer of Achilles to two of the Winds, she spontaneously carries it to the palace, where they were all feasting together[457].

[453] Il. ii. 104.

[454] Il. xxiv. 334.

[455] Il. xxiii. 199.

[456] Il. xviii. 165-8.

[457] Il. xxiii. 199.

Only in the Odyssey do we find Mercury unquestionably and simply discharging the duty of a messenger; and this on two occasions: the first, when he brought to Ægisthus the warning that his crimes, if committed, would be followed by retribution from the hand of Orestes; the second, when he communicated to Calypso the command to release Ulysses.

But there is in reality no discrepancy whatever between the two poems: inasmuch as Mercury and Iris, though both messengers, act in different characters. Iris is in one case the spontaneous messenger, who carries a hero’s wish to subordinate deities; but she uniformly has this mark, that she never rises higher than to be the personal messenger of Jupiter. On the other hand, Mercury in the Odyssey is the official messenger, not of Jupiter individually, but in both cases of the Assembly of the gods: and the care, with which the distinction seems to be drawn, is very remarkable. It is true, the message to Calypso is called Ζηνὸς ἀγγελίη: but it became the message of Jupiter, because it was a proposal made by Minerva in the Olympian Assembly, and made on the part of all in the plural number, which was then duly adopted by Jupiter as the executive head of the body[458]:

[458] Od. i. 84.

Ἑρμείαν μὲν ἔπειτα, διάκτορον Ἀργειφόντην,
νῆσον ἐς Ὠγυγίην ὀτρύνομεν.

The message in the case of Ægisthus is equally well defined[459]:

[459] Od. i. 38.

πρό οἱ εἴπομεν ἡμεῖς
Ἑρμείαν πέμψαντες.

It would have been out of keeping, therefore, with the character and rank of the Homeric Iris, to give her the charge of the messages carried by Mercury. The only case at all analogous in the Iliad is that of the decision in the Fourth Book: and there not Iris, but Minerva is employed. It is not, however, true that we have in the Odyssey no recognition of the character of Iris as a messenger. We find one, and that the plainest of all, in the etymology of the name of Ἶρος the beggar. His proper name was Arnæus[460]; and he was called Irus, because he was a messenger:

[460] Od. xviii. 6.

Ἶρον δὲ νέοι κίκλησκον ἅπαντες,
οὕνεκ’ ἀπαγγέλλεσκε κιὼν, ὅτε πού τις ἀνώγοι.

There is yet another illustration of the view which has here been given. In the Assembly of the Twenty-fourth Iliad, Jupiter, in order to give effect to the general desire of the gods, has occasion to wish for the presence of Thetis: and it has at first sight an odd appearance that he does not, as in other cases where he is acting singly, call Iris and bid her go: but he says, with a mode of expression not found elsewhere,

ἀλλ’ εἴ τις καλέσειε θεῶν Θέτιν....

And Iris, hearing him, sets forth without being personally designated. The peculiar language seems as if it had been employed for the especial purpose of keeping Iris within her own province, and of preventing the possibility of the confusion between her office and that of deities superior in rank, which might have arisen if she had regularly received an errand in the midst of the Olympian Court.

Thus, then, it would appear, that the apparent discrepancy between the various parts of the poems, when closely examined, really yields to us fresh evidence of their harmony. Nor let it be thought unworthy of Homer thus minutely to preserve the precedence and relative dignity of his deities. With our views of the Olympian scheme, it may require an effort to assume his standing-ground: but when he was dealing with the actual religion of his country, it was just as natural and needful for him to maintain the ranks and distinctions of the gods, as of men in their various classes. Mythology might, indeed, afford ample scope to his fancy for free embellishment and enlargement of the established traditions; but these processes must always be in the sense of harmonious development, not of discord.

Another question may indeed be asked: whence came this idea of twofold messengership, higher and lower? and would it not have been more natural if the whole of this function had been intrusted to one deity? This question is, I believe, just, and requires that a special account should be given of an arrangement apparently anomalous. Such an account I have endeavoured to supply in treating of Iris, by shewing that she owes her place to a primeval tradition, while Mercury owes his to an ideal conformity with the laws of the Olympian system.

And in truth there is no single deity, on whom the stamp of that system has been more legibly impressed. It might be said of the Homeric Mercury, that he exceeds in humanism (to coin a word for the purpose) the other Olympian gods, as much as they excel the divinities of any other system. His type is wholly and purely inventive, without a trace of what is traditional. He represents, so to speak, the utilitarian side of the human mind, which was of small account in the age of Homer, but has since been more esteemed. In the limitation of his faculties and powers, in the low standard of his moral habits, in the abundant activity of his appetites, in his indifference, his ease, his good nature, in the full-blown exhibition of what Christian Theology would call conformity to the world, he is, as strictly as the nature of the case admits, a product of the invention of man. He is the god of intercourse on earth; and thus he holds in heaven by mythological title, what came to Iris by primitive tradition. The proof must, I think, be sufficiently evident, from what has been and will be adduced piecemeal and by way of contrast, in the accounts of other and, for that period at least, more important divinities.

_Venus._

~_The Venus of Homer._~

There is no deity, except perhaps Dionysus, of whom the position and estimation in Homer are so vividly contrasted with those, to which he or she attained in later paganism, as Venus. The Venus of Virgil, the Venus of Lucretius, are separated by an immeasurable interval from the Aphrodite of Homer. And the manner in which she is treated throughout the Iliad and Odyssey is not only curious, as indicating the nature and origin of her divinity, but is of very high interest as illustrative of the great Poet’s tone of mind and feeling.

There is no act of worship or reverence, no sign of awe or deference, shown to her in any part of either of the poems. Yet her rank is indisputably elevated. It is beyond doubt that she belongs to the Olympian family. She appears in Olympus, not as specially sent for, but as entitled ordinarily to be there: she takes a side in the war: she makes the birth of Æneas more glorious on the mother’s side than that of Achilles, who was sprung from Thetis, the daughter of Nereus, and a deity of inferior dignity to hers. Not only is Jupiter her father, but her mother Dione is an Olympian goddess. Yet her Olympian rank is ill sustained by powers and prerogatives: and she probably owed it to the poetical necessity, which obliged Homer to have an array of divinities on each side in the war, with some semblance of equality at least between the rival divisions.

The indications of the poem may lead us to believe that her name and worship were of recent origin. That a worship of her had begun is obvious: for in Paphos, a town of Cyprus, and the only one named by Homer, she had both an altar, and a τέμενος, or dedicated estate; and she bears the name of Cypris[461]. But we have only the very slightest mention of her, or of any thing connected with her, in Greece proper. We have seen much reason to assume that Cyprus was essentially Pelasgian, and ethnically more akin to Troy than to Greece. In Troy we find various signs of her influence. She sent to Andromache the marriage gift of her κρήδεμνον[462]. She made to Paris the fatal present of his lust[463]. She fell in love with Anchises, and became the mother of Æneas[464]. She led Helen away from the roof of Menelaus[465], and was an object of dread to her when in Troy[466]. Minerva, in taunting her bitterly about her wound, supposes she may have got it by a scratch from a golden buckle, in undressing some Greek woman that she had persuaded to elope with one of the Trojans whom she so signally loves[467]. Again, it appears from a speech of Helen, that she was worshipped in Phrygia and Mæonia[468]. The only token of her influence in Greece is, that she is twice in the Odyssey called Κυθέρεια. Thus we see her not strictly within Greece, but rather advanced some steps on her way to it. And it is easy to suppose that, in the race of corruption, her worship would run among the fastest.

[461] Il. v. 422 _et alibi_.

[462] Il. xxii. 470.

[463] Il. xxiv. 30.

[464] Il. ii. 820.

[465] Il. iii. 400.

[466] Il. iii. 418; also 395, where ὀρίνω, as most commonly in Homer, means to excite with fear.

[467] Il. v. 422-5.

[468] Il. iii. 402.

~_Venus as yet scarcely Greek._~

The negative evidence, then, thus far tends to the belief that Venus was not yet established among the regular deities of the Poet’s countrymen: and it is supported by positive testimony. For some of the functions, that must in the post-Homeric view of her office have belonged to her, Homer studiously makes other provision. Of this there is a most remarkable case in the Odyssey. He designs that the Suitors, before they are put to death, shall be made to yield of their substance to the house of Ulysses, in the form of gifts to Penelope. For this purpose he arrays her in all her charms, and brings her forth in appearance like Diana, or golden Venus[469]. It is not a common practice with Homer to compare a beautiful Greek woman to Venus; especially when it is one so matronlike as Penelope. On the other hand, the comparison of Cassandra to Venus[470] is entirely in keeping with the Asiatic character of the deity. But the intention of the allusion here is manifest: for when the Suitors see her, it is passion which prompts them to vie with one another in courting her favour through the medium of costly gifts. How, then, came the sad Penelope thus to deck herself? It was not her own thought: it was the suggestion of a deity, and if Venus had been recognised by Homer as an established object of worship in Greece, Venus would most properly have made the suggestion: for she, says Achilles, is supreme in beauty, as Minerva is in industry and skill[471]. But it is Minerva who instils this suggestion into the mind of Penelope; though in a form which conveys no taint to her mind[472]. She goes, however, beyond this: for she sends Penelope to sleep, and then, to enhance her beauty, applies to her face a wash, of the kind that Venus herself uses when she goes among the Graces. Yet this is not procured from Venus, as Juno in the Iliad procures the _cestus_ from her on Mount Olympus; nor is her agency or aid in any manner employed. Thus she is not allowed, as it were, to have to do in any manner with Penelope; a clear indication, I think, that though known, she was not yet worshipped in Greece proper.

[469] Od. xvii. 37. xix. 54.

[470] Il. xxiv. 699. I think the case of Hermione (Od. iv. 14.) is an exception.

[471] Il. ix. 389.

[472] Od. xviii. 158-68.

She appears, indeed, in the legend of the daughters of Pandareus[473]: but the scene of this legend is not stated by Homer to be in Greece, and by general tradition it is placed in Crete or in Asia Minor.

[473] Od. xix. 67, 73.

Again, the predicaments in which she is exhibited in the poems are of a kind hardly reconcilable with the supposition, that she was an acknowledged Greek deity at the time. In the lay of Demodocus, the Poet seems to intend to make the guilty pair ridiculous, from his sending them off, when released, so rapidly and in silence. It is true that he exhibits to us in the Iliad the sensual passion of Jupiter: but he has wreathed the passage where it is described in imagery, both of wonderful beauty, and rather more elaborate than is his wont[474]. But whatever may be thought of the Eighth Odyssey, the Fifth and Twenty-first Iliad seem, so far as Venus is concerned, only to permit one construction. In the former, she is, after being wounded, both menaced and ridiculed by Diomed[475]. In the latter, for no other offence than leading the battered Mars off the field, she is followed by Minerva, and struck to the ground by a blow upon the breast. As in the case of Mars, so and more decidedly in the case of Venus, it appears as if the ignominious treatment in the Theomachy was difficult, and the wounding and treatment by Diomed quite impossible, to reconcile with the idea that it could have been devised by a Poet, and recited to audiences, for whom the personages so handled formed a part of the established objects of religious veneration. Even Helen is permitted to taunt her bitterly: to recommend her becoming the wife, or even the slave, of Paris, and her ceasing to make pretensions to play the part of a deity:

[474] Il. xiv. 346-51.

[475] Il. v. 335, 348.

ἧσο παρ’ αὐτὸν ἰοῦσα, θεῶν δ’ ἀπόεικε κελεύθου[476].

[476] Il. iii. 406.

~_Her advance from the East._~

In entire harmony with these suppositions is, first, the side taken by her in the war; and secondly, the geographical indications of her worship. It appears to have moved from the East along that double line, by which we have found it probable that the Pelasgians flowed into Europe: one the way of the islands at the base of the Ægean, the other by the Hellespont. We know, from other sources, that the East engendered at a very early date creations of this kind. Under the names of Astarte, Mylitta, Mitra, and the like, we seem to encounter so many separate forms or versions of the Greek Venus. We may indeed observe that Astarte was commonly associated with the Moon, and it would be a matter of interest to know the original relation between the popular or promiscuous Venus (πάνδημος), and the celestial one. In Homer we find them completely severed: we perceive Artemis with many traces of the older, and Aphrodite fully representing the more recent and carnal conception. There still remains one sign of correspondence; it is the standing epithet of χρυσέη for Aphrodite, compared with the cluster of golden epithets[477] applied to Diana. We may not unreasonably, I think, take Artemis as the probable prototype; and Aphrodite as the sensual image, into which the old and pure conception had already degenerated, before the time when the two fell, as poetic material, each for its own purpose, into the moulding hand of Homer. While such a source is every way probable, our reference to it is the more natural, because it is not very easy to attribute to the Greeks of the heroic age the original conception of such a divinity as Venus. For though they were of social and therefore somewhat jovial habits, and though they were a race of ready hand, given to crimes of violence, yet they were not, on the whole, by any means a sensual race, in relation to the standard which seems to have governed the Asiatic nations, whether we estimate these latter the Trojans, the Assyrians, or the Jews.

[477] Sup. sect. ii. p. 146.

The marriage with Vulcan, and the relation to a mother Dione, invented apparently for the purpose of maternity, are marks of recency. If I have rightly referred Vulcan to the Phœnician order, this marriage may be an indication that Venus likewise had a place in it: and again, considering her station in Troas, it seems not impossible that the worship of Vulcan may have been introduced there the more readily, because of his being reputed to be her husband.

Like Maias the mother of Mercury, Dione, the mother of Venus, is excluded from the list of Jupiter’s amorous or matrimonial connections in the Fourteenth Iliad (312-28). This leads to the conclusion, either that the tradition respecting her was known only as a foreign one, or else that it was recent, slight, and as yet unauthenticated in popular belief. In either view it coincides with the other indications as to Venus.

~_Her rank and personal character._~

The primary function of Venus, apart from Asia, appears to lie among the Olympian deities. That she was, as a member of that family, in actual exercise of her prerogatives, we see plainly from the application made by Juno to her in order to obtain the grace and attractiveness, by which she hoped to act upon the mind of Jupiter. As a mythological conception, she exhibits to us on the page of Homer the union of the most finished material beauty with strong sensuality, and the entire absence of all traces of the ethical element. She represents two things, form and passion; the former refined, the latter not so. In her character, as conceived by Homer, we see how that which is divine, when it has ceased to be divine, becomes, not human, but something much worse and baser: as he that falls from a height cannot stop half-way down the precipice at his will, but must reach the ground. Even feminine tenderness does not cling to the character of Venus. She is effeminate, indeed, for when wounded she lets her son Æneas fall: but gentle she is not, for in the scene of the Third Iliad with Helen her conduct is harsh even to brutality, and she drives the reluctant princess into sensuality only by the cruel threat of violence and death[478].

[478] Il. iii. 414-7.

In Venus we see the power of an Immortal reduced to its minimum. Even the faculty of self-transformation seems to have been in her case but imperfectly exercised[479]. She does not pretend to give strength or courage to her son Æneas, but is represented simply as carrying him off in her arms. It is here worthy of remark, that she has not even the ability, like the greater deities, to envelop him in cloud: she has no command over nature, only over the corrupt and rebellious impulses of man: she has power to carry Æneas away, but he is folded in her mantle[480]. In fact, her privileges in general appear to be like those of the inferior orders of deity, held and used for her own enjoyment; but they do not carry the power of acting upon man or nature, except in a particular and prescribed function. Her capacity of locomotion is limited in a peculiar degree. Mars, though no great deity, went, when wounded, up to heaven on the clouds. But Venus required to borrow the disengaged chariot of Mars for the purpose, when in the same predicament[481].

[479] Il. iii. 396.

[480] Il. v. 311-18.

[481] Il. v. 355-64. 363.

It is no wonder that the ancient, probably the earliest Greek, account of her origin which is given by Hesiod[482], should mark her as of entirely animal extraction.

[482] Theog. 188-98.

Another peculiarity in the case of Venus is, that she already takes her name, and not only receives mere epithets, from two particular spots where she is worshipped. Cyprus makes her Κύπρις in the Iliad, and from Cythera she is also Cytherea in the Odyssey. She thus stands distinct from Juno: to whom the Argeian name is simply an appendage, though one of a most characteristic force, and one involving important inferences as to her origin. Nor is she less distinct from Minerva, whose name is not derivative in form when she is called Ἀθήνη, and whom we must consider as the eponymist of Athens, and not its namesake. No indication could be of greater force, than this marked localism, in stamping the ideas about Venus as purely human in their origin.

~_Venus unable to confer beauty._~

It would be an error to consider the Venus of Homer as even the goddess of beauty. She was endowed with it personally, and she possessed the _cestus_ of fascination and desire: but she had no capacity to make mortals beautiful, such as Minerva exercised upon Penelope and Ulysses, and Juno upon the virgin daughters of Pandareus. She is there passed by in such a manner as to make it plain that she did not possess any power of imparting this gift. Her δῶρα, in Il. iii. 65, do not appear to include it; or Paris would not say, ‘no one would spontaneously seek them.’ For beauty of person was among the recognised and highly valued gifts of heaven[483].

[483] Od. viii. 167-77.

We are told, in the Twentieth Odyssey, that Venus fed the orphan girls of Pandareus with cheese, honey, and wine; and, continues the passage, Juno gave them extraordinary beauty and prudence, Diana lofty stature, Minerva industrial skill. Afterwards, they being thus equipped, Venus went up to Olympus to pray Jupiter that he would make arrangements for their marriage[484]. Thus her operations in a work of good are wholly ministerial and inferior: and not only does she not confer beauty herself, but she sees it conferred by Juno. This again shows that the Venus of Homer, except for evil, has no power to work upon the body or mind of man.

[484] Od. xx. 66-75.

But we must not omit to mark that sign of the real chastity of Homer’s mind which he has given us by his method of handling the character of Venus; a deity whom the nature of his subject in the Iliad would have led almost any other heathen, and many Christian, poets to magnify.

In not a single instance does Homer exhibit this divinity to us in an amiable or engaging light, or invest her with the attractions of power, glory, and success.

When Minerva advises Diomed in the Fifth Iliad[485], she says, Do _not_ attack any of the immortals; but if you happen to see Venus, her you may wound. We seem to have a clear indication, that Homer introduced this passage simply in order to throw contempt on Venus; because afterwards, when Mars is in the field, and Diomed pleads the inhibition he had received as a reason for his inaction, Minerva at once removes it, and bids the warrior assail that god without scruple[486].

[485] Il. v. 131. cf. 330.

[486] Il. v. 818, 27.

Again, when Diomed wounds Mars, it is because Minerva invisibly directs and impels his lance[487]: but he wounds Venus without any aid. In the Theomachy, she appears upon the list of deities enumerated as taking the Greek and Trojan side respectively; but when the Poet comes to match the others for fight, she disappears from his mind; as though it would have been an insult to any other member of the Olympian family to be pitted against her effeminacy. Accordingly, no antagonist is named for her.

[487] Il. v. 856.

She is sometimes made contemptible, as in the foregoing instances. She is at other times silly and childish, as under the bitter taunt of Minerva and the admonition of Jupiter[488], and again, when she falls into the trap cunningly laid by Juno[489]. Odious in the interview with Helen in the Third Book, she is never better than neutral, and never once so handled by the Poet as to attract our sympathies.

[488] Il. v. 421-30.

[489] Il. xiv. 190-224.

~_Never made attractive in Homer._~

Again, there is not, throughout the Odyssey or Iliad, a single description of the beauty of Venus, such as Homer has given us of the dress of Juno, or the arms of Minerva. It is never, either directly or indirectly, set off for the purpose of creating interest and favour. One exception may perhaps be alleged: but, if it is such, at least it affords the most marked illustration of the rule. Once he does praise the exceeding beauteous neck, the lovely breast, the sparkling eyes of Venus; but it is when he has clothed her in the withered form of the aged spinstress that had attended upon Helen from Sparta, and through whose uninviting exterior such glimpses of the latent shape of Venus are caught by Helen as to enable her, but no one else, to recognise the deity.

How different is this from the case of Virgil, who has introduced a most beautiful and winning description of her in the Second Æneid[490], just when he brings her into action that she may acquit both Helen and Paris of all responsibility for the fall of Troy. It would have been not only natural for Homer, but, unless he was restrained by some strong reason, we may almost say it would have been inevitable, that he should have done for Venus what has been done in our own day, with very high classical effect, by Tennyson in his Œnone:

[490] Æn. ii. 589-93.

Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new bathed in Paphian wells,
With rosy slender fingers backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form
Between the shadows of the vine-branches
Floated the glowing sun-light as she moved.

Upon the whole, I should confidently cite the treatment of Venus in the poems as being among the most satisfactory indications of the state of heroic Greece, and one of the most honourable tokens of the disposition of her Poet.

_Vulcan._

~_The Vulcan of Homer._~

Besides Juno and Bacchus, Hephæstus or Vulcan is the only Homeric deity who bears upon him this unequivocal, or at least significant, mark of novelty, that we are supplied with a distinct tradition of his childhood[491]. In his youth he was rickety and lame. His mother Juno wished to conceal him, and she let him fall into the sea. Here Thetis and Eurynome received him, and reared him in a submarine cave, not, however, under the Mediterranean, but the Ocean; and in that cave for nine years the boy-smith employed himself in making ornaments for women.

[491] Od. viii. 311: and Il. xviii. 395.

He is thus associated by his traditions with the two opposing elements of water and fire; with water by the history of his childhood, and with fire as the grand instrument and condition of his art. The latter was by much the stronger association, for it was continually fed by the history and progress of the art itself; so that he became the impersonation of that element itself, and in the phrase φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο it is his name which gives the distinctive force; for φλὸξ in Homer seems to mean the flame or light of fire[492], and is not used to signify fire proper, except with some other word in conjunction to it or near it. But the explanation of the seeming contrariety is probably to be found in the hypothesis, that his worship was of Phœnician introduction; as the Phœnicians seem to have made the Greeks acquainted with the use of fire in working metals. If they made the deity known to the Greeks, this will account for his association with the idea of fire: and as accounts and traditions, which they had supplied, were evidently the source of all the more remote maritime delineations of Homer, (since they alone frequented Ocean and the distant seas,) this is the natural and easy explanation for the tradition of his childish arts in the oceanic cave. That he is thus, like the Phœnicians, for Homer, the meeting point of fire and water, appears clearly to stamp him as Phœnician or oriental in his origin, relatively to Greece.

[492] Thus, in Il. xviii. 206, it means that blaze without heat, as from shining armour, with which Minerva invested Achilles when he went forth unarmed. The name Ἥφαιστος also stands alone for fire in Il. ii. 426.

Accordingly, true to the association between Phœnician and Hellenic elements, he is one of the five Hellenizing deities in the Trojan war; in which, as the element of fire, he opposes and subdues the river Xanthus. He was not, however, unknown to the Trojans; for Dares, his priest, had two sons in their army. His introduction to Troas may have been due to his conjugal connection with Venus; or it may have been due to the neighbourhood of Lemnos, the island on which, when hurled from Olympus by Jupiter, he fell, and which thenceforward formed his favourite earthly habitation. With Lemnos and other isles Troy was in communication, at least from the time of Laomedon, for that prince threatened to seize Apollo and to sell him, νήσων ἔπι τηλεδαπάων[493]. A regular commerce was established between Lemnos and the camp during the Trojan war[494].

[493] Il. xxi. 453.

[494] Il. vii. 467.

Among the deities of Vulcan’s generation we find but one married couple, and they are a strangely assorted pair, Vulcan himself and Venus. Neither character nor occupation will account for this singular union: on the contrary, there is no case in which the extremes of repugnance must so decidedly be supposed. It is questionable whether the hypothesis, that Venus represents the beauty which gives perfection to works of art, is in entire keeping with the tone of the Homeric system. Indeed Venus with Homer represents absolutely nothing, except sensual passion in a fine exterior form which can hardly be severed from it. One explanation, and one only, may suggest itself as more natural. It is this: that the worship of Vulcan and that of Venus came in, not distinctly connected with those of any other deity, at about the same time, and from the same quarter. We have already seen upon Venus those marks of comparative modernism, and of an eastern extraction, which we now find in Vulcan; and here probably is to be found, either wholly or in part, the actuating suggestion of their ill-starred wedlock.

Though we find the works of Vulcan scattered promiscuously abroad, there is no notice of his worship, or of any site or endowment belonging to him in the Greece of Homer. He was available to the Poet for embellishment, but he probably had not become for the Greek nation a regular object of adoration.

I think we may trace the tokens of his eastern origin in the legend of his infancy. It was into the sea that he was thrown: but, as we have seen, the cave in which he was reared was a cave of Ocean[495].

[495] Il. xviii. 402.

περὶ δὲ ῥόος Ὠκεανοῖο
ἀφρῷ μορμύρων ῥέεν ἄσπετος·

Also, by a rather singular arrangement, there are two deities, not one only, employed in taking him up and watching over his childhood. Nor are the two naturally associated together: for Thetis is a daughter of Nereus, and belongs to the Thalassian family; Eurynome is a child of Ocean. The connection with Thetis and the sea is appropriate enough in the case of any child of Juno, for the wife of Peleus, as his nurse, seems to give him an Hellenic character: but it seems hard to explain the appointment of a colleague belonging to the race of Ocean, and for the situation of the cave in its bed, except as having been due to the eastern origin of the divinity, of which the mark had not yet been effaced.

~_His marriage with Venus._~

The marriage of Venus and Vulcan, metaphysically interpreted, represents the union of strength and skill in the production of works of art: but though this may have been a Greek application of eastern traditions originally independent, there is no distinct trace of it in Homer; while it may seem strange that, if the Poet had had such an idea before his mind, his only picture of their conjugal relation should have been the one given in the Eighth Odyssey. Still, he may have had that idea.

Vulcan’s other wife, Charis, represents an exactly similar conception; and here there is a more obvious probability that the combination was Greek, and was one intended, or even devised, by Homer.

It is common to treat the handling of this subject in the Iliad as in contradiction with that of the Odyssey; and to use the assumption of discrepancy either in support of the doctrine of the Chorizontes, or in proof that the Olympian lay of Demodocus is spurious.

Without entering into that controversy, I venture to urge that the proof is insufficient. Why should the Vulcan of Homer be limited to a single spouse? Jupiter has three, probably four; namely, Juno, Latona, Dione, and Ceres. No other Olympian deity, until we come down to Vulcan, has any. The question then arises, Why should the poets, or even the religion of the day, be limited in this case to monogamy, which has no place elsewhere in the Olympian family? Why should the reasons, which induced the framers of the religion to give him a wife at all, forbid them absolutely from giving him more than one? Nay more; why, if the original object of the Greek mind in this marriage was to symbolize the union of manual skill and beauty, and if the materials of the received mythology were in a state of growth and progress, might it not happen that in the youth of Homer Charis was, all things considered, suited to afford the most appropriate means of representing the idea, and yet that in his later age he might amend his own plan, and make Venus the wife of Vulcan, without at all troubling himself to consider what was to become of the slightly sketched image that he had previously presented in the Iliad? I say this, because the assumed contradiction of these legends appears to me to proceed upon another assumption of a false principle; namely, that, though the mythology was continually changing with the progress of the country, yet each poet was bound, even in its secondary and in its most poetical parts, to a rigid uniformity of statement. No one, I think, who considers how the current of the really theistic and religious ideas runs upon a very few of the greater gods, can fail to see that with Homer the religious meaning of his Vulcan, and of the other gods of the second order, was very slight. A sufficient proof of this may be found in the fact, that of no one of them, excepting Mercury alone, does he mention the actual worship in his own country.

Moreover, two things may deserve remark with reference to the variation which makes Charis the wife of Vulcan in the Iliad, and Venus in the Odyssey.

First, from the plan of the Iliad, which placed Venus and Vulcan in the sharpest opposition, the conjugal relation between them would have been, for that poem, inadmissible. The Poet could not have introduced Venus, where he has introduced Charis: and he must thus have given up a strikingly poetical picture, and one most descriptive of the works of high art in metal.

Secondly, it may not be certain, but it is by no means improbable, that the worship of Venus may have attained to much wider vogue in Greece when Homer composed the Odyssey, than at the period when he gave birth to the Iliad. We have seen already the signs that it was a recent worship. We have seen it in Cyprus and then more advanced in Cythera, not in continental Greece. Now it was in the Iliad that Venus had the name of Cypris; in the Odyssey this is exchanged for Cytherea: that is to say, she was known sometime before as a goddess worshipped in Cyprus and not properly Greek; but she was now, such is the probable construction, known also as a goddess worshipped in Cythera, and therefore become Greek. On this account, as well as because the opposition between them had disappeared, she might with poetical propriety be made to bear a character in the Odyssey, which could not attach to her during the continuance of the great Trojan quarrel.

~_Vulcan in and out of his art._~

Beyond his own function as god of fire, and of metallic art in connection with it, Vulcan is nobody. But within it he is supreme, and no deity can rival him in his own kind. His animated works of metal are among the boldest figures of poetry. Even his lameness is propped by bronze damsels of his own manufacture. And the lock, which he puts for Juno on her chamber-door, is one that not even any other deity can open[496]. But this is not so much an exemplification of the power and elevation of mythological godhead, as of the skill and exclusive capacity of a professional person in his own art.

[496] Il. xiv. 168.

Finally, the Vulcan of Homer conforms in all respects to the inventive, as opposed to the traditional type of deity.

_Ἠέλιος, or the Sun._

~_The Ἠέλιος of Homer._~

In the case of Ἠέλιος, or the Sun, as in various others, we appear to see the curious process by which the Greek mythology was constructed, not only in its finished result, but even during the several stages of its progress. It lies before us like the honeycomb in the glass beehive; and it tends strongly to the conclusion that the Poet is himself the queen bee. The Philosopher did not then exist. The Priest, we know, was not a religious teacher. The Seer or Prophet interpreted the Divine will only for the particular case, and did not rise to generalization. Who was it, then, that gathered up the thoughts and arrested the feelings of the general mind, and that, reducing the crude material to form and beauty, made it a mythology? The answer can only be, that for the heroic age it was the Bard.