Chapter VI: Part 6

But in Homer’s time, though they were distinguished, they were not yet divided. On the Shield of Achilles, the work of Themis[275] is done in full Assembly: and this probably signifies the custom of the time. But in the Eleventh Iliad, Patroclus passes by the ships of Ulysses[276],

[275] Il. xviii. 497.

[276] Il. xi. 807.

ἵνα σφ’ ἀγορή τε θέμις τε
ἤην.

And, in the description of the Cyclopes, the line is yet more clearly drawn; for it is said[277],

[277] Od. ix. 112-15.

τοῖσιν δ’ οὔτ’ ἀγοραὶ βουληφόροι, οὔτε θέμιστες.

In that same place, too, the public solemnities of religion were performed: and though in the Greek camp it was doubtless placed at the centre of the line with a view to security, its position most aptly symbolized also its moral centrality, as the very heart of the national life. At the spot where the Assemblies were held were gathered into a focus the religious, as well as the patriotic sentiments of the country.

The fact is, that everywhere in Homer we find the signs of an intense corporate or public life, subsisting and working side by side with that of the individual. And of this corporate life the ἀγορὴ is the proper organ. If a man is to be described as great, he is always great in debate and on the field; if as insignificant and good for nothing, then he is of no account either in battle or in council. The two grand forms of common and public action are taken for the criteria of the individual.

When Homer wished to describe the Cyclopes as living in a state of barbarism, he says, not that they have no kings, or no towns, or no armies, or no country, but that they have no Assemblies, and no administration of justice, which, as we have seen, was the primary function of the Assemblies. And yet all, or nearly all the States had Kings. The lesson to be learned is, that in heroic Greece the King, venerable as was his title, was not the fountainhead of the common life, but only its exponent. The source lay in the community, and the community met in the Agorè. So deeply imbedded is this sentiment in the mind of the Poet, that it seems as if he could not conceive an assemblage of persons having any kind of common function, without their having, so to speak, a common soul too in respect of it.

~_The common Soul or Τὶς in Homer._~

Of this common soul the organ in Homer is the Τὶς or ‘Somebody;’ by no means one of the least remarkable, though he has been one of the least regarded, personages of the poems. The Τὶς of Homer is, I apprehend, what in England we now call public opinion. We constantly find occasions, when the Poet wants to tell us what was the prevailing sentiment among the Greeks of the army. He might have done this didactically, and described at length the importance of popular opinion, and its bearings in each case. He has adopted a method more poetical and less obtrusive. He proceeds dramatically, through the medium of a person, and of a formula:

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν, ἰδὼν ἐς πλήσιον ἄλλον.

It may, however, not seem worthy of remark, considering the amount of common interest among the Greeks, that he should find an organ for it in his Τίς. But when he brings the Greeks and Trojans together in the Pact, though it is only for the purpose of a momentary action, still he makes an integer _pro hâc vice_ of the two nations, and provides them with a common Τὶς (Il. iii. 319):

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν Ἀχαιῶν τε Τρώων τε.

We find another remarkable exemplification in the case of the Suitors in the Odyssey. Dissolute and selfish youths as they are, and competitors with one another for a prize which one only can enjoy, they are nevertheless for the moment banded together in a common interest. They too, therefore, have a collective sentiment, and a ready organ for it in a Τὶς of the Odyssey (Od. ii. 324), who speaks for the body of Suitors:

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκε νέων ὑπερηνορεόντων.

All these are, in my view, most striking proofs of the tenacious hold, which the principle of a public or corporate life for all aggregations of men had taken upon the mind of Homer, and upon Greece in the heroic age. Nor can I help forming the opinion, that in all probability we may discern in the Homeric Τὶς the primary ancestor of the famous Greek Chorus. It is the function of the Chorus to give utterance to the public sentiment, but in a sense apt, virtuous, and pious. Now this is what the Homeric Τὶς usually does; but of course he does on behalf of the community, what the Chorus does as belonging to the body of actors.

It is then surely a great error, after all we have seen, to conclude that, because the political ideas and practices of those times did not wear the costumes now in fashion, they were without their own real vitality, and powerful moral influence upon the minds and characters of men.

~_Imperfect organization of the Heroic Polities._~

But, on the other hand, in repelling these unsound and injurious notions, we must beware of assuming too much of external resemblance between the heroic age and the centuries either of modern Christendom or even of historic Greece and Rome. All the determinate forms of public right are the growth of long time, of dearbought experience, and of proved necessity. Right and force are supplements to one another; but the proportions, in which they are to be mingled, are subject to no fixed rule. If the existence of rights, both popular and regal, in the heroic age is certain, their indeterminateness is glaring and conspicuous. But the shape they bore, notwithstanding the looseness of its outline, was quite adequate to the needs of the time. We must not, in connection with the heroic age, think of public life as a profession, of a standing mass of public affairs, of legislation eternally in arrear, of a complex machinery of government. There were no regular regencies in Greece during the Trojan war. There was no Assembly in Ithaca during the long absence of Ulysses[278], before the one called by Telemachus, and reported in the Second Book of the Odyssey. We have seen, however, in what way this lack of machinery told upon the state of Greece by encouraging faction, and engendering revolution. The strain of the Trojan expedition was too great for a system so artless and inorganic. The state of Ithaca in the Odyssey is politically a state almost of anarchy; though the symptoms of that disease were milder by far then, than they could now be. The condition of the island shows us what its polity had been, rather than what it was. But for all ordinary occasions it had sufficed. For Assemblies met only when they had something to do; and rarely indeed would such junctures arrive. Infractions of social order and social rights, which now more commonly take place by fraud, were then due almost wholly to violence. And violence, from its nature, could hardly be the subject of appeal to the Assembly: as a general rule, it required to be repaid on the instant, and in the same coin. Judicial questions would not often be of such commanding interest, as to divide a people into two opinions; nor the parties to them wealthy enough to pay two talents to the successful judge. Great controversies, affecting allegiance and the succession, must of necessity in all ages be rare; and of a disputed succession in Greece the poems can hardly be said to offer us an instance. We find, however, in the last Book of the Odyssey, that, according to the ideas of that period, when a question as to the sovereignty did arise, the people needed no instructor as to the first measure they were to take. They repaired, as if by a common and instinctive impulse, to the Agorè; in which lay deposited their civil rights and their old traditions, like the gems of the wealth of Greece in the shrine of the Archer Apollo[279].

[278] Tittmann Griech. Staatsv. b. ii. p. 56.

[279] Il. ix. 404.

II. ILIOS.

THE TROJANS COMPARED AND CONTRASTED WITH THE GREEKS.

We have perhaps been accustomed to contemplate the Trojans too exclusively, either as enemies of the Greeks, or else as constituting, together with them, one homogeneous chapter of antiquity, which we might be content to examine as a whole, without taking notice of specific differences. Let us now endeavour to inquire what were the relations, other than those of mere antagonism in the war, between the two nations; what points they embraced, and what affinities or discords they disclose. The direct signs of kindred between Troy and Greece have already been considered; but the examination into points of contrast and resemblance as respects religion, polity, and character, will assist us in judging how far a key to those affinities and discords is to be found in the different interfusion and proportion, in the two cases, of ethnical elements which they possessed in common.

We have seen in another place[280] that the Greeks, or Achæans, and the Trojans, were akin by the Hellic element, which appears to establish a connection chiefly as regarded the royal house, and other ruling houses, of Troy. On the other hand it has seemed clear, from many sources, that the main affinity between the bulk of the two nations was Pelasgian. As respects the ethnological question, the supposition most consonant to the evidence as a whole appears to me to be, that in Troas we find Hellic families, possessed of dominion over a Pelasgian people: in Greece we find Hellic tribes, placed in dominant juxtaposition with Pelasgic tribes, of prior occupancy; constituting, as is probable, whole classes of the community, and mingling with and powerfully modifying the aggregate composition so as to produce a mixed result; while in Troy, though the ruling houses are probably a different order, and there may be found here and there the tokens of this influence, yet the general face of society, and the substance of manners and institutions, are Pelasgian. It will be recollected, that even in Greece we trace two forms of Hellic diffusion. Sometimes the descendants of the Helli appear as single families, like the Æolids; sometimes as races, like the Achæans. The state of facts here supposed as to Troy is in accordance with the former class of indications within Greece itself.

[280] Achæis, or Ethnology, sect. ix. p. 496.

Upon the footing supplied by these assumptions, I shall treat the comparison of the two countries as to religion, policy, social usages, and moral ideas and practice.

We have already been obliged, in considering the respective shares of the Hellenic and Pelasgian factors in the compound Greek character, to anticipate in some degree the conclusions with regard to the religion of the Trojans in its general character, which I will now proceed more fully to explain and illustrate.

We have found three conspicuous deities, of worship apparently supreme and universal: Jupiter, Minerva, and Apollo. After these comes Neptune, of a more doubtful position when we pass out of the Hellenic and Phœnician circles; and Latona with Diana, who, doubtless from the vantage ground of early tradition, take rank alike with an Hellenic and a Pelasgian people. We have also supposed Ceres to be of immemorial standing as a deity of the Pelasgians; and Venus to have made great way among them.

~_Greek names of deities found also in Troas._~

Passing on from the consideration of Pelasgian religion at large, it will now be requisite to show, with particular reference to Troy, how far we find the names of the Greek divinities recognised there; nor must we omit to consider, in what degree identity of name implies identity of person and function.

1. Jupiter had a τέμενος, or portion of consecrated land, on Mount Gargarus; and there Onetor was his priest[281]. He is, with the Trojans as with the Greeks, the first and greatest of the gods[282]. He himself attests their abundant liberality in sacrifices offered to himself[283]. The Greek Jupiter is Olympian; the Trojan Jupiter is Jupiter of Ida. Except as to abode, there is no difference to be discerned between the features of the two.

[281] Il. viii. 47, 8.

[282] Il. iii. 298.

[283] Il. iv. 48.

2. We have no direct indication, in the Iliad, of the worship of Neptune by the Trojans. But the legend of his employment under Laomedon must be taken to imply that his divinity was acknowledged in that country: confirmed as it is by his sharing with Jupiter and Apollo the destruction of the Greek rampart after the conclusion of the war[284].

[284] Il. xxi. 442 seqq. vii. 459. xii. 17.

3. In the case of Juno, I have elsewhere noticed[285] the three passages, which alone appear to establish a faint connection between her and the Trojans.

[285] Olympus, sect. iii. p. 197.

4. Minerva had a temple on Pergamus; and was served there by a priestess, Theano; who, as the wife of Antenor, was of the very next rank to Priam and his house. The goddess is addressed, on the occasion of the procession of the Sixth Book, in a strain which seems to acknowledge her possession of supreme power[286]: the defender of cities, excellent among goddesses, she is entreated to have pity on Troy, to break the lance of Diomed, and to grant that he himself may fall.

[286] Il. vi. 298-300. 305-10.

5. Apollo would appear to be the favourite among the great deities of the country. He, like Minerva, has a temple in the citadel[287]. Chryses is his priest at Chryse, and there too he has a temple. He is the special protector of Cilla and of Tenedos[288]. With Minerva, he is indicated as the recipient of supreme honour[289]. The Lycian name, so prevalent in Troas, establishes a special connection with him. In the Iliad, he seems to be the ordinary and immediate Providence to the Trojan chiefs, as Minerva is to the Greek ones. At the same time, he carries no sign of exclusive nationalism; he bears no hatred to the Greeks; but, after the restitution and propitiation, he at once accepts the prayer, and stays the pestilence[290].

[287] Il. v. 446.

[288] Il i. 37-9.

[289] Il. vii. 540. xiii. 827.

[290] Il. i. 457.

6. Latona must have been known among the Trojans; because Homer has represented her as contending on the Trojan side in the war of the gods, and as engaged in tending the wounded Æneas within the temple of Apollo on Pergamus.

7. The same reasons apply also to Diana: and we moreover find, that she instructed the Trojan Scamandrius in the huntsman’s art[291].

[291] Il. v. 49.

8. Venus is eminently Trojan. Her relation to this people is marked by her favour towards Paris: her passion for Anchises: her sending a personal ornament as a marriage gift to Andromache; her ministerial charge over the body of Hector (Il. xxiii. 184-7); her being chosen as the model to which Trojan beauties are compared, while Diana is the favourite standard for the Greek woman. It is also marked by her zealous, though feeble, partizanship in favour of Troy among the Immortals: and by the biting taunts of Pallas, of Helen, and of Diomed[292].

[292] Il. v. 421-5. 348-51. iii. 405-9.

9. Vulcan is not only known, but has a _cult_ in Troy: for Dares is his priest, and is a person of great wealth and consideration; one of whose sons he delivers from death in battle, to comfort the old man in his decline[293].

[293] Il. v. 9. and 20-4.

10. Mars. Of this deity it would seem, that he has been given by Homer to the Pelasgians, mainly because of his so strongly marked Thracian character, and his want of recognition among the Hellenes, who had a higher deity of war in Minerva. I have touched elsewhere upon his equivocal position as between the two parties to the war. It corresponds with that of the Thracians, who appear to form a point of intersection, so to speak, for the Hellic and Pelasgian races. Those of the plain of Adrianople are, like the Pelasgi, horse-breeders, dwelling in a fertile country: the ruder portion are among the mountains to the north and west.

11. Mercury. One sign only of the ordinary agency of this deity in Troas is exhibited; he gives abundant increase to the flocks of Phorbas[294].

[294] Il. xiv. 490.

12. Earth (Γαῖα) would appear to have been recognised as an object of distinct worship in Troas: for when Menelaus proposes the Pact, he invites the Trojans to sacrifice a black lamb to her, and a white one to the Sun; while the Greeks will on their part offer up a lamb to Jupiter. The proposal is at once accepted; and the heralds are sent by Hector to the city for the lambs[295], which seems to be conclusive as to the acknowledgment of these two deities in Troy.

[295] Il. iii. 103. 116.

13. The Sun. Besides that the passage last quoted for Earth is also conclusive for the Sun, we have another token of his relation to Troy, in the unwillingness with which he closes the day, when with his setting is to end the glory of Hector and of his country[296].

[296] Il. xviii. 239.

We have thus gone through the list of the greater Greek deities, and have found them all acknowledged in Troas, with the following exceptions: 1. of Ceres, whom we may however suspect, from her Pelasgian character, to have been worshipped there under some name or form; 2. of Aidoneus; and 3. of Persephone. These exceptions will be further noticed.

Again, among the thirteen who have been identified as objects of Trojan worship, we find one, namely, Γαῖα, of whom we can hardly say that she was worshipped in Greece; though she was invoked, as by Agamemnon in the Nineteenth Book, and by Althea in the Ninth, to add a more solemn sanction to oaths.

14. Together with her, we may take notice of a fourteenth deity, apparently of great consideration in Troy, namely, the River Scamander. He bears a marked sign of ancient worship, in having a divine appellation, Xanthus, as well as his terrestrial one, Scamander. He had an ἀρήτηρ, by name Dolopion. To him, according to the speech of Achilles, the Trojans sacrificed live horses. He enters into the division of parties among the gods about the war, and fights vigorously against Achilles, until he is at length put down by Hephæstus, or Vulcan. As a purely local deity, however, he has of course no place in the Greek mythology.

15. Though we have no direct mention of the translation of Tithonus by Ἠὼς, or Aurora, yet, as Homer gives Tithonus a place both in the genealogy of the Dardanidæ, and likewise by the side of Aurora, we may consider that, by thus recognising the translation, he also points out Aurora as an acknowledged member of the supernatural order in Troas.

Several among these names call for more particular notice: especially those of Vulcan, Earth, and Scamander.

~_Worship of Vulcan in Troas._~

The case of Vulcan, and his place in Troy, may serve to remind us of a proposition somewhat general in its application; this namely, that, in classifying the Trojan divinities, Homer need not have intended to imply that the same name must in all cases carry exactly the same attributes. We must here bear in mind, that probably all, certainly almost all, of the properly Olympian gods, were Greek copies modified from Oriental or from traditive originals. But as these conceptions were propagated in different quarters, each country would probably add or take away, or otherwise alter, in conformity with its own ruling tendencies. Hence when we find a Vulcan in Greece, and a Vulcan in Troas, it by no means follows, that each of them presented the same features and attributes. If Homer believed them to be derived from a common original in Egypt or elsewhere, that would be a good and valid reason for his describing them by the same name, though the Trojan Vulcan might not present all the Hellenic traits, nor _vice versâ_. In some cases, such as those of Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, there is such a correspondence of attributes entering into the portraiture of the respective deities in the two countries, that their identity, at least so far as the evidence goes, seems quite unimpaired and unequivocal. But we have no means of showing from the poems, that the Trojan Hephæstus corresponded with the Greek one. Indeed when we find no mention of his being actually worshipped in Greece, and at the same time learn that he had a priest in Troas, the presumption arises, that different conceptions of him prevailed in the two countries. Again, there is nowhere assigned to him as a Greek deity any such exercise of power, as that by which he saves Idæus, a son of his priest Dares, from imminent death on the field of battle.

These general considerations, which tend to show that the identity of name in a Trojan and a Greek deity may be compatible with much of dissimilarity in the popular development of the functions, will relieve us from difficulties, which we should otherwise have had to meet, in accounting for the place of some of the Olympian divinities in Trojan worship. We have found reason to suppose, that Vulcan may have come into Greece through Phœnicia. But the Trojans appear to have had very little connection with Phœnicia. The precious κειμήλιον of Priam, the cup that he carried to Achilles, was not Phœnician but Thracian[297]. The only token of intercourse mentioned is, that Paris brought textile fabrics from Sidon[298]. Again, Vulcan was especially worshipped in Lemnos, and had his terrestrial abode there. But this goes more naturally to account for the works of metal in Thrace, than for the position of Vulcan in Troas; higher as it was, apparently, than in Greece. Again, it is worth notice, that the Vulcan of the Romans was, like their Mars, one of the old gods of Etruria, a country stamped with many Pelasgian characteristics. It may be, that we ought to look back to Egypt for the origin of all these Vulcans. In the time of Herodotus[299], the Egyptian priests claimed him as their own: and Phtah, the principal deity of Memphis, was held by the later Greeks to correspond with their Ἥφαιστος. Even the two names carry tokens of relationship. From that fountain-head might be propagated diverging copies of the deity: and, as far as we can judge, the Vulcan worshipped in Troy was much more like the common ancestor, than the highly idealized artificer of Olympus, upon whom the Poet has worked out all his will[300].

[297] Il. xxiv. 234-5.

[298] Il. vi. 289-92.

[299] Herod. ii. 50.

[300] Döllinger Heid. u. Jud. VI. iii. p. 411.

~_Worship of Juno and Gaia in Troas._~

There is another of its points of contact with the Olympian system, in which this list of Trojan deities is remarkable. While investigating the Greek mythology, we have found reason to suppose that Juno, Ceres, and Gaia are but three different forms of the same original tradition of a divine _feminine_: of whom Ceres is the Pelasgian copy, Juno the vivid and powerful Hellenic development, and Gaia the original skeleton, retaining nothing of the old character, but having acquired the function of gaol-keeper for perjurors when sent to the other world[301]. In the retention however of all three within the circle of religion, we see both the receptiveness and the universalism of the Greek mythology. Now, in Troy, where there was less of imaginative power, the case stands very differently. Of Ceres, who represents the Pelasgian impression of the old earth-worshipping tradition, we hear nothing in Troas. Probably she was not there, because Gaia, her original, was still a real divinity for the Trojans. But how are we to explain the fact that Gaia and Juno are both there? I venture to suggest, that it is because these are different names, the foreign and the domestic one, for the same thing. When Hector swears to Dolon, it is by Jupiter, ‘the loud-thundering husband of Here:’ which almost appears as if Juno held, in the Trojan oath, a place more or less resembling the place occupied in the Greek oaths (where Juno does not appear at all) by Gaia.

[301] Rhea (ἔρα) shows us the fourth and cosmogonic side of the same conception.

Again, it is obvious that, if this relation exists between Gaia and Juno, it explains the fact that we do not find both, so to speak, thriving together. In Troas Gaia is worshipped, but Juno scarcely appears. In Greece Juno is highly exalted, but Gaia has lost all body, and has dwindled to a spectral phantasm. It is the want of imagination in the Trojan mythology, which makes it a more faithful keeper of traditions, stereotyped in the forms in which they were had from their inventors.

~_Worship of Mercury in Troas._~

Next, as to Mercury. I have already adverted to the fact that Priam[302], notwithstanding his obligations to Mercury in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, takes no notice of his divinity. I think that a close examination of the narrative tends to show, that the Greek Mercury was not worshipped in Troy; and leaves us to conclude that Homer uses a merely poetical mode of speech in saying that this god gave increase to the flocks of Phorbas[303]: even as when he makes Priam call Iris an _Olympian_ messenger[304].

[302] Olympus, sect. iii. p. 234.

[303] Il. xiv. 490.

[304] Il. xxiv. 194.

He appears before Priam and his companion Idæus, when they are on their way to the Greek camp, in the semblance of a young and noble Myrmidon. There were, we know[305], certain visible signs, by which deities could in general be recognised or, at least, guessed as such. Both Idæus, however, and Priam himself, saw nothing of this character in Mercury, and simply took him for a Greek enemy[306]. Mercury, after some genial conversation, conducts his chariot to the quarters of Achilles, and then, before quitting him, announces himself. Not, however, like Apollo to Hector (Il. xv. 256), and Minerva to Ulysses (Od. xiii. 299), simply by giving his name: but he also declares himself to be an Immortal, θεὸς ἄμβροτος (460). This unusual circumstance raises a presumption, that he was not already known as a divinity to Priam; and the presumption seems to become irrefragable, when we find that Priam, though given to the observances of religion, uses no act or expression of reverence or even recognition to his benefactor, either on his first declaration and departure (460, 7), or upon his second nocturnal appearance (682), followed by a second and final flight to Olympus (694).

[305] Olympus, sect. v.

[306] Il. xxiv. 347, 355, 358-60.

The case of Scamander will require particular notice: because it is immediately connected with the question, whether the Trojans partook of that tendency to a large imaginative development of religion, which so eminently distinguishes the Grecian supernaturalism.

We will therefore consider carefully the facts relating to this deity, and such other kindred facts as Homer suggests.

He speaks of Dolopion as follows[307];

[307] Il. v. 77.

ὑπερθύμου Δολοπίονος, ὅς ῥα Σκαμάνδρου
ἀρητὴρ ἐτέτυκτο, θεὸς δ’ ὣς τίετο δήμῳ.

This is entirely in keeping, as to particulars, with the Pelasgian and Trojan institutions. The ἀρητὴρ of Homer is apparently always the priest. Dolopion was a man in very high station and honour, like the priests of Rome, and of early Ætolia[308]; but not like those of later Greece. And he had been ‘made’ or ‘appointed’ priest; as Theano was chosen to be priestess by the people. The priesthood of the Homeric age never appears as a caste in these latitudes. The only approximation to caste is in the gift of the μάντις, which, as we find from the Odyssey, was hereditary in the family of Melampus[309]. Thus far, then, the evidence respecting Scamander certainly would appear to belong to the category of Homer’s historical statements.

[308] Il. ix. 575.

[309] Od. xv. 223 and seqq.

Beyond this, everything assumes a figurative stamp. Scamander fights as a deity with Achilles, and his waters are so powerful that they can only be subdued by the immediate action of the god of fire. The hero, too, is aided by the powerful blasts of Zephyr and of Notus, whom Juno rouses up to scorch the Trojans[310]. As we can hardly doubt, that the plague in the First Book represents some form of marsh-fever, so here it appears likely that the Poet takes very skilful advantage of a flood, caused by summer rains, which had annoyed the Greeks, and which had been followed by the subsidence of the waters upon the return of hot weather.

[310] Il. xxi. 331 and seqq.

Scamander is very great in the Iliad, but with a purely local greatness. As a person, he speaks both to men and to gods. He addresses Simois as his beloved brother; but it is entirely on the affair of the deluge and the heat. Though he takes part in the war, the distinction is not awarded to him of being a member of the smaller and select Olympian community: he merely stands included by presumption in the general category of Rivers[311].

[311] Il. xx. 7.

~_Worship of Scamander._~

We have a description from the mouth of Achilles of certain sacrifices, as belonging to the worship of Scamander[312]:

[312] Il. xxi. 130-2.

οὐδ’ ὑμῖν ποταμός περ ἐΰῤῥοος ἀργυροδίνης
ἀρκέσει, ᾧ δὴ δηθὰ πολέας ἱερεύετε ταύρους,
ζωοὺς δ’ ἐν δίνῃσι καθίετε μώνυχας ἵππους.

This offering of live horses is peculiar, and unlike anything else represented to us in the Homeric poems. Not only the youths, but even the dogs, whom Achilles offers to the Shade of Patroclus, are slain before they are cast into the fire. The same thing is not mentioned with respect to the four horses, who are also among the victims; but it is probably, even from the physical necessities of the case, to be presumed.

It may, perhaps, be argued, that this speech of Achilles partakes of the nature of a sarcasm. The fine Trojan horses were reared and pastured on the river banks; taunts often pass between the warriors of the two sides: the δὴ δηθὰ may have had the force of _forsooth_. Some doubt may attach to the evidence, which the passage gives, on this ground; and also from the singularity of the practice that is imputed. It is, on the whole, however, safest to assume that it is trustworthy.

The case will then stand thus; that we have apparently one single case in Troy of a pure local impersonation of a power belonging to external nature. Now this might happen under peculiar circumstances, and yet a very broad distinction might subsist between the religion of the two nations as to imaginative development.

Scamander was indeed a great power for the Trojans; it was the great river of the country, the μέγας ποταμὸς βαθυδίνης. The child of the great Hector was named by him Scamandrius, while Simoeisius[313] was the son of a very insignificant person. Another Scamandrius was a distinguished huntsman, taught by Diana, in a country where the accomplishment was rare[314]. His floods, however useful in time of war, would in time of peace do fearful damage. It is possibly the true explanation of the last among the lines quoted from the speech of Achilles, that he carried away, in sudden _spates_, many of the horses that were pastured on his banks. The Trojans, then, may have had strong motives for deifying Scamander, and particularly for providing him with a priest, who might beseech him to keep down his waters. And it will be remembered, from the case of Gaia, that the Trojan religion was, without doubt, favourable to the idea of purely elemental deities: what lacked was the vivid force of fancy, that revelled in profuse multiplication.

[313] Il. iv. 474, 488.

[314] Il. v. 49.

~_Different view of Rivers in Troas._~

For we cannot fail to perceive, that the idea of a river-god did not enter into the Trojan as it did into the Greek life. Ulysses, when in difficulty, at once invokes the aid of the Scherian river[315], at whose mouth he lands. Now the Trojans are driven in masses into the Scamander by the terrible pursuit of Achilles, and they hide and sculk, or come forth and fight, about its banks and waters. Yet no one of them invokes the River, although that River was a deity contending on their side. So entirely was he without place in their consciousness as a power able to help, even though he may have been publicly worshipped in deprecation of a calamity, which he was known to be able to inflict.

[315] Od. v. 445.

With this remarkable silence we may compare, besides the prayer and thanksgiving of Ulysses, the invocation of Achilles to Spercheius[316]. On his leaving home, his father Peleus had dedicated his hair as an offering to be made to the River on his return, and to be accompanied by a hecatomb. This would have been a thank-offering; and as such, in accordance with the prayer of Ulysses, it implies the power of the River deity to confer benefits. Nor is that power rendered doubtful by the fact, that in the particular case the prayer is not fulfilled, and that the hair is therefore devoted to the remains of Patroclus. We may remark, again, the sacrifice offered, apparently almost as matter of course, by the Pylian army to Alpheus, on their merely reaching his banks[317]. And, as a whole, the multitudinous impersonations of natural objects in the Greek mythology are, both with Homer and in the later writers, of a benign and genial character. This bright and sunny aspect is in contrast with the formidable character of Scamander, and of the worship offered to him.

[316] Il. xxiii. 144.

[317] Il. xi. 728.

There is, perhaps, enough of resemblance between the Scamander of the Trojan mythology, and the Spercheus or Alpheus of the Greek, to suggest the question, whether the deification of this river may possibly have been due to the Hellic influences, which resided in the royal houses of the country. There are not wanting signs, that the family of Priam was closely connected with the river and its banks. The name given to Hector’s child is one such token; and we know that the mares of Erichthonius were fed upon the marshes near Scamander[318]. It is also worth observation that the Priest of Scamander was called Dolopion, while Dolops was the name of a son of Lampus, a Trojan of the highest rank, brother to Priam, and one of the δημογέροντες of Troy[319].

[318] Il. xx. 221.

[319] Il. iii. 147-9. xv. 525-7.

But though there may be a special relation between the worship of Scamander, and the influence of the royal family, I think the explanation is chiefly to be sought in the specific differences which separate it from River-worship, as generally conceived in the Olympian system.

There is another aspect of River-worship in Greece, with which it seems to have more affinity. There is the terrible adjuration of Styx, which implies its vindictive agency[320]. This river is represented on earth by a branch from itself, called Titaresius, near the Perrhæbian Dodona[321]. The Rivers are expressly invoked, in this character, by Agamemnon in the adjuration of the Pact: and are associated with the deities that punish perjury after death. Moreover, it is curious that, when Agamemnon makes an adjuration before Greeks alone, he omits the appeal to the Rivers, whom he had named when he was acting for the two peoples jointly[322]. This seems to show that the invocation of Rivers, or of some class of Rivers, in a retributive capacity, was familiar, and may have been peculiar, to the Trojans.

[320] Il. xiv. 271. xv. 37.

[321] Il. 2. 751-5.

[322] Compare Il. iii. 276. xix. 258.

~_True aspect of Trojan River-worship._~

In effect, then, the grand distinction seems to be this. The worship of Scamander in Troas belonged to the elemental system and earth-worship, which the Greeks, for the purposes of their Olympus, had refined away into a poetical vivifying Power, replete with more bland influences: retaining it, more or less, for the purpose of adjuration, in the darker and sterner sense. Accordingly, while Scamander, who is also called Xanthus, has, as a god, a mark of antiquity in the double name[323], he shows none of the Greek anthropophuistic ingredients. Even for speech and action, he does not take the human form; but he is, simply and strictly, the element alive.

[323] Il. xx. 74.

The species of deification, implied in earth-worship, scarcely lifted the objects of it in any degree out of the sphere of purely material conceptions. Thus, while Scamander, from his superior power, is no more than Nature put in action, all the other Rivers of Troas exhibit to us Nature purely passive, a blind instrument in the hand of deity. The total silence and inaction of Simois[324], after the appeal of Scamander, makes his impersonality more conspicuous, than if he had not been addressed. Again, when the Greeks have quitted the country, Apollo takes up the streams of the eight rivers that descend from Ida, including great Scamander, like so many firemen’s hose, and turns them upon the rampart to destroy it. We have no example in Homer of this mechanical mode of handling Greek rivers.

[324] Il. xxi. 308.

The distinction of treatment seems to be due to a difference in the mythology of the two countries as its probable source. And I find an analogous method of proceeding with reference to the Winds. In the Iliad they are deities, addressed in prayer, and capable of receiving offerings. In the Odyssey they are mere senseless instruments of nature, under the control of Æolus. But then in the Iliad Homer deals with them for a Greek purpose (for I do not except the impersonation of Boreas, Il. xx. 203, where the Dardanid family is concerned): it is Achilles who prays to them: it is the Greek war-horse that they beget. In the Odyssey he introduces them amidst a system of foreign, that is to say, of Phœnician traditions.

Turning now to other objects, let us next see whether further inquiry will confirm the suggestions, which I have founded on the cases of Gaia and of Scamander.

At the head of Scamander are two fountains, and hard by them are the cisterns, which the women of the city frequent for washing clothes. Thus the spot is one of great notoriety; yet there is not a word of any deity connected with these fountains. This is in remarkable contrast with what we meet in Homer’s Greek topography. Ulysses[325], immediately on being aware that he has been disembarked in Ithaca, prays to the Nymphs of the grotto, which was dedicated to them. There they had their bowls and vases, and their distaffs of stone, with which they spun yarn of sea-purple[326]. And the harbour, in which he was landed, was the harbour of Phorcys, the old man of the sea[327]. So again at the fountain, where the people of the town drew water, there was an altar of the Nymphs that presided over it, upon which all the passers-by habitually made offerings[328]. Nor could this be wonderful, as all groves, all fountains, all meadows, and probably all mountains, had their proper indwelling Nymphs according to the Greek mythology; while the Rivers were impersonated as deities, and the sea too teemed at every point with preternatural life.

[325] Od. xiii. 356.

[326] Od. xiii. 103.

[327] Ibid. 96.

[328] Od. xvii. 208-11.

~_Trojan impersonations from Nature rare._~

Homer has named many, besides Scamander, of the rivers of Mount Ida; but to none, not even to Simois, nor again to Ida or Gargarus themselves, does he assign any of these local inhabitants.

There are, however, three curious cases of Nymphs assigned by him to Troas. The νύμφη νηῒς, called Abarbaree, bears two sons to Bucolion[329], a spurious child of Laomedon; and another nymph of the same class bears Satnius to Enops[330]. A third similar case is recorded in the Twentieth Book[331]. These would appear to be simple cases of spurious births, and to have no proper connection with mythology. For the mother of Satnius is called ἀμύμων; a name never applied by Homer to the Immortals. If, however, the Nymphs be deities, they mark another difference between Greece and Troy: for Homer never attributes lusts to the Nymphs of the Greek Olympus.

[329] Il. vi. 21.

[330] Il. xiv. 444.

[331] Il. xx. 384.

Amidst the whole detail of the Iliad, in one instance only have we Trojan Nymphs conceived after the Greek fashion: it is when those of the mountains, according to the speech of Andromache, planted elms round about the fresh-made tomb of her father Eetion.

As a general rule, no Trojan refers in speech either to any legend, or to any intermediate order, of supernatural beings. Destiny, named by Hecuba, is, as we have seen, a metaphysical idea, rather than a person[332].

[332] Il. xxii. 435. xxiv. 209.

The very name of Olympus itself is a symbol of nationality; and around it are grouped the forms, which either the popular belief, or the imagination of the Poet, incorporated into the company of objects for worship. They form a body wonderfully brilliant and diversified. They pervade the Greek mind in such a way, as to appear alike in its didactic, and its most deeply pathetic moods. The speech of Phœnix gives us the Parable of Ἄτη and the Λιταί: then the episode of Meleager, which is founded on the wrath of Diana: but into this legend itself, inserted into the speech, is again interpolated the separate legend of Apollo and Alcyone[333]. The speech of Agamemnon, in the Nineteenth Book, affords us another example[334]. The case is the same in the most pathetic strains. Achilles, in the interview with Priam, exhorts him to take food by the example of Niobe, and appends her tale[335]: Penelope, praying to Diana in the extremity of her grief, recites the tale of the daughters of Pandareus[336]. Even the Suitor Antinous points his address to Ulysses with the semi-divine legend of the Centaurs and Lapithæ[337]. Everywhere, and from all the receptacles of thought, mythology overflows. But in Troy the case is quite different. There the human mind never seems to resort to it, either for food or in sport. We find deities, priests, prophets, ceremonial, all apparently in abundance: in all of these, except the first, the Greeks are much poorer; but each of them, in and for himself, is in contact with an entire supernatural world, the creation of luxuriant and energetic fancy, which ranges alike over the spheres of sense and of metaphysics. Andromache, virtuous and sincere as Penelope, has no such mental wealth; her thoughts, and those of Hecuba and Priam, both ordinarily and also on the death of Hector, are limited to topics the most obvious and primitive, with which society, however undeveloped, is familiar. From this limitation, and from the nature of those legends respecting deities, of which the scene is laid in Troas, it seems reasonable to believe that the mythological dress is of purely Hellenic origin.

[333] Il. ix. 559.

[334] Il. xix. 90-133.

[335] Il. xxiv. 602-17.

[336] Od. xx. 66.

[337] Od. xxi. 295-304.

The dedication to Jupiter of the lofty and beautiful chestnut-tree[338] near Troy, is in correspondence with the oak of Dodona, and indicates quite a different train of thought from those which conceived the Greek Olympus. It is probably both a fragment of nature-worship in its Oriental form, and likewise a portion of the external and ritual development, in which the religion of Troy was evidently prolific enough. And in this case the negative evidence of Homer is especially strong; because the great number of the particular spots on the plain of Troy, which he has had occasion to commemorate, constitute a much more minute topography there, than he has given us on any other scene, not even excepting Ithaca: so that he could hardly have avoided showing us, had it been the fact, that the religion of Troy entered largely into what Mr. Grote has so well called ‘the religious and personal interpretation of nature.’

[338] Il. v. 697, and vii. 60.

Next as to those divine persons of the second order, who are so abundantly presented to us by Homer in relations with the Greeks. Iris visits the Trojans thrice. First, she repairs to their Assembly in the form of Polites. Secondly, she appears to Helen, as her sister-in-law Laodice. She delivers her message to Priam in the Twenty-fourth Book without disguise; perhaps because it was necessary[339] that he should have the assistance of a deity seen and heard, in order to embolden him for a seemingly desperate enterprise. But there is nothing in his account of the interview, which requires us to suppose that the person Iris was known to Priam. The expression he uses is[340]

[339] Il. xxiv. 220.

[340] Il. xxiv. 223, 194.

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἄκουσα θεοῦ καὶ ἐσέδρακον ἄντην.

And again, he calls her an Olympian messenger[341] from Jupiter. Another passage carries the argument a point further, by showing us that the appearance of this benignant deity was alarming, doubtless because it was strange, to him. When she arrives, she addresses him very softly τυτθὸν φθεγξαμένη (170): but he is seized with dread;

[341] Sup. p. 155.

τὸν δὲ τρόμος ἔλλαβε γυῖα·

an emotion, which I do not remember to have found recorded on any apparition of a divinity to a Greek hero.

~_Poverty of Trojan Mythology._~

Thus far then it would appear probable, that in the Trojan mythology the list of major deities was more contracted than in Greece, and that the minor deities were almost unknown. But perhaps the most marked difference between the two systems is in the copious development on the Greek side of the doctrine of a future state, compared with the jejune and shadowy character of that belief among the Trojans.

~_Jejune doctrine of a Future State._~

In the narrative of the sack of Hypoplacian Thebes, and again in her first lament over Hector, Andromache does indeed speak of her husband, father, and brothers, respectively, as having entered the dwellings of Aides[342]. But these references are slight, and it may almost be said perfunctory. Not another word is said either in the Twenty-second Book, or in the whole of the Twenty-fourth, about the shade of Hector.

[342] Il. vi. 422. xxii. 482.

When Pope closed his Iliad with the line

And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade,

it probably did not occur to him, that he was not merely altering the poetry of Homer, but falsifying also his picture of the Trojan religion; which had indeed its funeral rites, but so described as to leave us no means of concluding, that they were in any degree directed to procuring the comfort and tranquillity of the dead. The silence observed about the spirit of Hector is remarkable from the contrast with the case of Patroclus. Both are mourned for passionately, by those who love them best: but the shade of Patroclus is the great figure in the mourning of Achilles, while Hector’s existence after death is but once owned, faintly and in the abstract. Nor, as we see from the Odyssey, was this homage to the shade of Patroclus a thing occasional or accidental. We there meet the souls of all the great departed of the War, in the under-world. That region, opened to Ulysses, had formerly been opened to Hercules. Even the dissolute Suitors cannot be dismissed from life, without our being called to accompany their spirits past the Leucadian rock to the place of their destination. The warriors slain in battle with the Cicones are thrice invoked by the survivors[343]. Nay Elpenor himself, most insignificant of men, is duly brought before us in his last home[344].

[343] Od. ix. 65.

[344] Od. xi. 51.

We are, however, enabled to open another chapter of evidence, that bears upon this interesting subject. It is obtained through the medium of the oaths of the two nations respectively.

Displacing the elemental powers from their ordinary religion, the Greeks made them gaolers, as it were, of the under-world, and gave them this for their proper business. Hence they are paraded freely in the Greek oaths[345]. Agamemnon before the Pact invokes, with Jupiter, the Sun, the Rivers, the Earth, the infernal gods. In the Nineteenth book, the same; omitting however the Rivers, and naming, instead of simply describing, the Erinües[346]. In the Fourteenth Iliad, Juno apparently swears by Styx, Earth, Sea, and the infernal gods[347]. In the Fifteenth, by Earth, Heaven, Styx, the head of Jupiter, and their marriage bed[348]. Calypso swears, for the satisfaction of Ulysses, and according to his fashion as the _imponens_, by Earth, Heaven, and Styx[349]. Thus the Greeks made an effective use of these earthy and material divinities, in connection with their large development of the Future State, by installing them as the official punishers of perjury. Now the Trojans appear, from what we have seen, to have worshipped this class of deities; but as super-terranean, not as sub-terranean gods. Had they not been _thus_ worshipped at the least, Agamemnon could not have included them in the Invocation of the Pact, where he had to act and speak for both nations[350]. And while we see they sacrificed lambs to Earth and Sun, still we have a curious proof that these deities were not worshipped in Troy as avengers of perjury. For when in the Tenth Book Hector swears to Dolon, he invokes no divinity, except Jupiter the loud-thundering husband of Juno. There may, as we have seen here, be a faint reference to the earthy character of the Trojan Juno; but there is no well-developed system, which uses a particular order of powers for the punishment of perjurors in a future state. We can hardly doubt that this was primarily because the doctrine of the Future State was wanting in deep and practical roots, so far as we can see, among the Trojans. A materializing religion seems essentially hostile to the full development of such a doctrine. And it is not a little curious to find that in this same country, where the oath was less solemn than in Greece, and the life after death less a subject of practical and energetic belief, perjury and breach of faith should have been, as we shall find they were, so much more lightly regarded.

[345] Il. iii. 276.

[346] Il. xix. 258.

[347] Il. xiv. 271-4, 278, 9.

[348] Il. xv. 36-40.

[349] Od. v. 184.

[350] Il. iii 264-75.

For the sake of realizing to ourselves the contrast between the religious system of Troy, as we thus at least by glimpses seem to perceive it, and the wonderful imaginative richness of the preternatural system of the Greeks as exhibited in Homer, it may be well to point briefly to a few cases, which are the more illustrative, because they are the accessories, and not the main pillars of the system. Take, then, the personifications of all the forms of Terror in the train of Mars: the transport, by Sleep and Death, of the body of Sarpedon to his home; the tears of blood wept by Jupiter; the agitation of the sea in sympathy with Neptune’s warlike parade; the dread of Aidoneus lest the crust of earth should give way under the tramp of the gods in battle; the mourning garb of Thetis for the friend of her son’s youth; the long train of Nymphs, rising from the depths of the sea to accompany her, when she mounts to visit the sorrowing Achilles; the redundant imagery of the nether world; the inimitable tact with which he preserves the identity of his great chieftains when visited below, but presents each under a deep tint of sadness. All this makes us feel not only that war, policy, and poetry, are indissolubly blended in the great mind of Homer, and of his race, but that the harmonious association of all these with the Olympian religion was the work of a vivifying imagination, which was a peculiar and splendid part of their inheritance.

~_Worship from the hills._~

There is a more marked trace in the Trojan worship, than is to be found among the Greeks, of the practice of the Persian; who paid homage to the Deity,

To loftiest heights ascending, from their tops,
With myrtle-wreathed tiara on his brow[351].

[351] Wordsworth’s Excursion, b. iv.

For Hector offered to Jupiter sometimes (which may be referred to a different cause) on the highest ground of the city, sometimes on the tops of Ida[352]:

[352] Il. xxii. 171.

Ἴδης ἐν κορυφῇσι πολυπτύχου, ἀλλότε δ’ αὖτε
ἐν πόλει ἀκροτάτῃ.

At all events we may say, that the only sign remaining in Greece of this principle of worship, was one common to it with Troy, and seen in the epithet ὑψίζυγος applied to Jupiter, as well as in the association between the seats of the gods, and the highest mountains.

On the other hand, the religion of the Trojans appears to have abounded more in positive observance and hierarchical development, than that of the Greeks.