Chapter III: The Heroic Age (1)

[Sidenote: [_ca._ 1400-1200 B.C.]]

In thinking of the mythical period with its citations of fables about gods and goddesses galore and heroes unnumbered, one is apt to become the victim of a mental mirage. One can hardly escape imagining the period in question thus veiled in mystery and peopled with half mythical and altogether mystical figures as really having been a time when men and women lived an idyllic life. As one contemplates the period he intuitively falls into a day-dream in which there dance before him light-robed artistic figures moving in arcadian bowers, tenanted by nymphs and satyrs and centaurs. But when one awakes to a practical view he recognises of course that all this is an illusion. Reason tells him that this was a mythical age, simply because the people were not sufficiently civilised to make permanent historical records. They were half barbarians, living as pastoral peoples everywhere live, striving for food against wild beasts, protecting their herds, cultivating the soil, fighting their enemies. And yet, in a sense, their life was idyllic. Heroic elements were not altogether lacking; the men were trained athletes, whose developed muscles were a joy to look upon, and no doubt the women, despite a certain coarseness, shared something of that figure. Then the people themselves believed in the gods and nymphs and satyrs and centaurs of which we dream, and so in a sense their world was peopled with them: in a sense they did dwell in Arcady. Still one cannot disguise the fact that it was an Arcady which no modern, placed under similar restrictions, would care to enter.

In that early day writing was an unknown art in Hellas, and so the people as they emerged from their time of semi-civilisation brought with them no specific tangible records of the life of that period, but only fables and traditions to take the place of sober historical records. To the people themselves these fables and traditions bore, for a long time at any rate, a stamp of veritable truth. Even the most extravagant of their narratives of gods and godlike heroes were believed as implicitly, no doubt, by the major part of the people even at a comparatively late historical period, as we to-day believe the stories of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Napoleon. As time went on these fables became even more intimately fixed in the minds of the people through becoming embalmed in the verses of the poet and the lines of the tragedian. Here and there, to be sure, there was a man who questioned the authenticity of these tales as recitals of fact, but we may well believe that the generality of people, even of the most cultured class, preferred throughout the entire period of antiquity to accept the myths at their face value. Not only so, but for many generations later, throughout the period sometimes spoken of as the “Age of Faith” of the western world, a somewhat similar estimate was put upon the Greek myths as recited by the classical authors. Even after the growth of scepticism and the development of the scientific spirit rendered the acceptance of the myths as recitals of fact impossible, for a long time it seemed little less than a sacrilege to think of severing them altogether from the realm of fact.

THE VALUE OF THE MYTHS

That, considered as historical narratives, they had been elaborated and their bald facts distorted by the creative imagination of a marvellous people, was clearly evident. No one, for example, in recent days would be expected to believe that the hero Achilles had been plunged into the river Styx by his mother and rendered thereby invulnerable except as to the heel by which he was held. But to doubt that the hero Achilles lived and accomplished such feats as were narrated in the _Iliad_ would seem almost a blow at the existence of the most fascinating people of antiquity. There came a time, however, in comparatively recent generations when scepticism no longer hesitated to invade the ranks of the most time-honoured and best-beloved traditions, and when a warfare of words began between a set of critics, who would wipe the whole mass of Greek myths from the pages of history, and the champions of those myths who were but little disposed to give them up. Thus scepticism found an obvious measure of support in the clear fact that the mythical narratives could not possibly be received as authentic in their entirety. Further support was given to the sceptical party a little later by the study of comparative mythology, which showed to the surprise of many scholars that the Greek myths were by no means so unique in their character as had been supposed. It was shown that in the main they are closely paralleled by myths of other nations, and a theory was developed and advocated with much plausibility that they had been developed out of a superstitious regard of the sun and moon and elements, that most of them were, in short, what came to be called solar myths, and that they had no association whatever with the deeds of human historic personages.

Looking at the subject in the broadest way it, perhaps, does not greatly matter which view, as to the status of myths, is the true one. After all, the main purport of history in all its phases has value, not for what it tells us of the deeds of individual men or the conflicts of individual nations, but for what it can reveal of the process of the evolution of civilisation. Weighed by this standard, the beautiful myths of the Greeks are of value chiefly as revealing to us the essential status of the Greek mind in the early historical period, and the stage of evolution of that mind.

The beautiful myths of Greece cannot and must not be given up, and fortunately they need not. The view which Grote and the host of his followers maintained, practically solves the problem for the historian. He may retain the legend and gain from it the fullest measure of imaginative satisfaction; he may draw from it inferences of the greatest value as to the mental status of the Greek people at the time when the legends were crystallised into their final form; he may even believe that, in the main, the legends have been built upon a substructure of historical fact, and he may leave to specialists the controversy as to the exact relations which this substructure bears to the finished whole, content to accept the decision of the greatest critical historians of Greece that this question is insoluble.

From the period of myth pure and simple when the gods and goddesses themselves roved the earth achieving miracles, taking various shapes, slaying pythons, titans, and other monsters, and exercising their amorous fancies among the men and women of earth--from this period we come to the semi-historical time of the activity of the demi-gods and the men who, superior to the ordinary clay, were called Heroes.

The term “Heroic Age” has passed into general use with the historian as applying to the period of Grecian history immediately preceding and including the Trojan wars. As there are very few reliable documents at hand relating to this period--there were none at all until recently--it is clear that this age is in reality only the latter part of that mythical period to which we have just referred. Recent historians tend to treat it much more sceptically than did the historians of an earlier epoch; some are even disposed practically to ignore it. But the term has passed far too generally into use to be altogether abandoned; and, indeed, it is not desirable that it should be quite given up, for, however vague the details of the history it connotes, it is after all the shadowy record of a real epoch of history. We shall, perhaps, do best, therefore, to view it through the eyes of a distinguished historian of an earlier generation, remembering only that what is here narrated is still only half history--that is to say, history only half emerged from the realm of legend.[a]

The real limits of this period cannot be exactly defined; but still, so far as its traditions admit of anything like a chronological connection, its duration may be estimated at six generations, or about two hundred years.[6] The history of the heroic age is the history of the most celebrated persons belonging to this class, who, in the language of poetry, are called heroes. The term “hero” is of doubtful origin, though it was clearly a title of honour; but in the poems of Homer, it is applied not only to the chiefs, but also to their followers. In later times its use was narrowed, and in some degree altered; it was restricted to persons, whether of the Heroic or of after ages, who were believed to be endowed with a superhuman, though not a divine, nature, and who were honoured with sacred rites, and were imagined to have the power of dispensing good or evil to their worshippers; and it was gradually combined with the notion of prodigious strength and gigantic stature. Here however we have only to do with the heroes as men. The history of their age is filled with their wars, expeditions, and adventures; and this is the great mine from which the materials of the Greek poetry were almost entirely drawn. But the richer a period is in poetical materials, the more difficult it usually is to extract from it any that are fit for the use of the historian; and this is especially true in the present instance. We must content ourselves with touching on some which appear most worthy of notice, either from their celebrity, or for the light they throw on the general character of the period, or their connection, real or supposed, with subsequent historical events.

THE EXPLOITS OF PERSEUS

We must pass very hastily over the exploits of Bellerophon and Perseus, and we mention them only for the sake of one remark. The scene of their principal adventures is laid out of Greece, in the East. The former, whose father Glaucus is the son of Sisyphus, having chanced to stain his hands with the blood of a kinsman, flies to Argos, where he excites the jealousy of Prœtus, and is sent by him to Lycia, the country where Prœtus himself had been hospitably entertained in his exile. It is in the adjacent regions of Asia that the Corinthian hero proves his valour by vanquishing ferocious tribes and terrible monsters. Perseus too has been sent over the sea by his grandfather Acrisius, and his achievements follow the same direction, but take a wider range; he is carried along the coasts of Syria to Egypt, where Herodotus heard of him from the priests, and into the unknown lands of the South. There can be no doubt that these fables owed many of their leading features to the Argive colonies which were planted at a later period in Rhodes, and on the southwest coast of Asia. But still it is not improbable that the connection implied by them between Argolis and the nearest parts of Asia may not be wholly without foundation. We proceed however to a much more celebrated name, on which we must dwell a little longer--that of Hercules.

THE LABOURS OF HERCULES

It has been a subject of long dispute, whether Hercules was a real or a purely fictitious personage; but it seems clear that the question, according to the sense in which it is understood, may admit of two contrary answers, both equally true. When we survey the whole mass of the actions ascribed to him, we find that they fall under two classes. The one carries us back into the infancy of society, when it is engaged in its first struggles with nature for existence and security: we see him cleaving rocks, turning the course of rivers, opening or stopping the subterraneous outlets of lakes, clearing the earth of noxious animals, and, in a word, by his single arm effecting works which properly belong to the united labours of a young community. The other class exhibits a state of things comparatively settled and mature, when the first victory has been gained, and the contest is now between one tribe and another, for possession or dominion; we see him maintaining the cause of the weak against the strong, of the innocent against the oppressor, punishing wrong, and robbery, and sacrilege, subduing tyrants, exterminating his enemies, and bestowing kingdoms on his friends. It would be futile to inquire, who the person was to whom deeds of the former kind were attributed; but it is an interesting question, whether the first conception of such a being was formed in the mind of the Greeks by their own unassisted imagination, or was suggested to them by a different people.

It is sufficient to throw a single glance at the fabulous adventures called the “labours” of Hercules, to be convinced that a part of them at least belongs to the Phœnicians, and their wandering god, in whose honour they built temples in all their principal settlements along the coast of the Mediterranean. To him must be attributed all the journeys of Hercules round the shores of western Europe, which did not become known to the Greeks for many centuries after they had been explored by the Phœnician navigators. The number to which those labours are confined by the legend, is evidently an astronomical period, and thus itself points to the course of the sun which the Phœnician god represented. The event which closes the career of the Greek hero, who rises to immortality from the flames of the pile on which he lays himself, is a prominent feature in the same Eastern mythology, and may therefore be safely considered as borrowed from it. All these tales may indeed be regarded as additions made at a late period to the Greek legend, after it had sprung up independently at home. But it is at least a remarkable coincidence, that the birth of Hercules is assigned to the city of Cadmus; and the great works ascribed to him, so far as they were really accomplished by human labour, may seem to correspond better with the art and industry of the Phœnicians, than with the skill and power of a less civilised race. But in whatever way the origin of the name and idea of Hercules may be explained, he appears, without any ambiguity, as a Greek hero; and here it may reasonably be asked, whether all or any part of the adventures they describe, really happened to a single person, who either properly bore the name of Hercules, or received it as a title of honour.

We must briefly mention the manner in which these adventures are linked together in the common story. Amphitryon, the reputed father of Hercules, was the son of Alcæus, who is named first among the children born to Perseus at Mycenæ. The hero’s mother, Alcmene, was the daughter of Electryon, another son of Perseus, who had succeeded to the kingdom. In his reign, the Taphians, a piratical people who inhabited the islands called Echinades, near the mouth of the Achelous, landed in Argolis, and carried off the king’s herds. While Electryon was preparing to avenge himself by invading their land, after he had committed his kingdom and his daughter to the charge of Amphitryon, a chance like that which caused the death of Acrisius stained the hands of the nephew with his uncle’s blood. Sthenelus, a third son of Perseus, laid hold of this pretext to force Amphitryon and Alcmene to quit the country, and they took refuge in Thebes: thus it happened that Hercules, though an Argive by descent, and, by his mortal parentage, legitimate heir to the throne of Mycenæ, was, as to his birthplace, a Theban. Hence Bœotia is the scene of his youthful exploits: bred up among the herdsmen of Cithæron, like Cyrus and Romulus, he delivers Thespiæ from the lion which made havoc among its cattle. He then frees Thebes from the yoke of its more powerful neighbour, Orchomenos: and here we find something which has more the look of a historical tradition, though it is no less poetical in its form. The king of Orchomenos had been killed, in the sanctuary of Poseidon at Onchestus, by a Theban. His successor, Erginus, imposes a tribute on Thebes; but Hercules mutilates his heralds when they come to exact it, and then marching against Orchomenos, slays Erginus, and forces the Minyans to pay twice the tribute which they had hitherto received. According to a Theban legend, it was on this occasion that he stopped the subterraneous outlet of the Cephisus, and thus formed the lake which covered the greater part of the plain of Orchomenos. In the meanwhile Sthenelus had been succeeded by his son Eurystheus, the destined enemy of Hercules and his race, at whose command the hero undertakes his labours. This voluntary subjection of the rightful prince to the weak and timid usurper is represented as an expiation, ordained by the Delphic oracle, for a fit of frenzy, in which Hercules had destroyed his wife and children.

This, as a poetical or religious fiction, is very happily conceived; but when we are seeking for a historical thread to connect the Bœotian legends of Hercules with those of the Peloponnesus, it must be set entirely aside; and yet it is not only the oldest form of the story, but no other has hitherto been found or devised to fill its place with a greater appearance of probability. The supposed right of Hercules to the throne of Mycenæ was, as we shall see, the ground on which the Dorians, some generations later, claimed the dominion of Peloponnesus. Yet, in any other than a poetical view, his enmity to Eurystheus is utterly inconsistent with the exploits ascribed to him in the peninsula. It is also remarkable, that while the adventures which he undertakes at the bidding of his rival are prodigious and supernatural, belonging to the first of the two classes above distinguished, he is described as during the same period engaged in expeditions which are only accidentally connected with these marvellous labours, and which, if they stood alone, might be taken for traditional facts. In these he appears in the light of an independent prince, and a powerful conqueror. He leads an army against Augeas, king of Elis, and having slain him, bestows his kingdom on one of his sons, who had condemned his father’s injustice. So he invades Pylus to avenge an insult which he had received from Neleus, and puts him to death, with all his children, except Nestor, who was absent, or had escaped to Gerenia. Again he carries his conquering arms into Laconia, where he exterminates the family of the king Hippocoön, and places Tyndareus on the throne. Here, if anywhere in the legend of Hercules, we might seem to be reading an account of real events. Yet who can believe, that while he was overthrowing these hostile dynasties, and giving away sceptres, he suffered himself to be excluded from his own kingdom?

It was the fate of Hercules to be incessantly forced into dangerous and arduous enterprises; and hence every part of Greece is in its turn the scene of his achievements. Thus we have already seen him, in Thessaly, the ally of the Dorians, laying the foundation of a perpetual union between the people and his own descendants, as if he had either abandoned all hope of recovering the crown of Mycenæ, or had foreseen that his posterity would require the aid of the Dorians for that purpose. In Ætolia too he appears as a friend and a protector of the royal house, and fights its battles against the Thesprotians of Epirus. These perpetual wanderings, these successive alliances with so many different races, excite no surprise, so long as we view them in a poetical light, as issuing out of one source, the implacable hate with which Juno persecutes the son of Jove. They may also be understood as real events, if they are supposed to have been perfectly independent of each other, and connected only by being referred to one fabulous name. But when the poetical motive is rejected, it seems impossible to frame any rational scheme according to which they may be regarded as incidents in the life of one man, unless we imagine Hercules, in the purest spirit of knight-errantry, sallying forth in quest of adventures, without any definite object, or any impulse but that of disinterested benevolence. It will be safer, after rejecting those features in the legend which manifestly belong to Eastern religions, to distinguish the Theban Hercules from the Dorian, and the Peloponnesian hero. In the story of each some historical fragments have most probably been preserved, and perhaps least disfigured in the Theban and Dorian legends. In those of Peloponnesus it is difficult to say to what extent their original form may not have been distorted from political motives. If we might place any reliance on them, we should be inclined to conjecture that they contain traces of the struggles by which the kingdom of Mycenæ attained to that influence over the rest of the peninsula, which is attributed to it by Homer, and which we shall have occasion to notice when we come to speak of the Trojan war.

THE FEATS OF THESEUS

The name of Hercules immediately suggests that of Theseus, according to the mythical chronology his younger contemporary, and only second to him in renown. It was not without reason that Theseus was said to have given rise to the proverb, _another Hercules_; for not only is there a strong resemblance between them in many particular features, but it also seems clear that Theseus was to Attica what Hercules was to the rest of Greece, and that his career likewise represents the events of a period which cannot have been exactly measured by any human life, and probably includes many centuries. His legend is chiefly interesting to us, so far as it may be regarded as a poetical outline of the early history of Attica [where it will be recounted in detail].

The legend of his Cretan expedition most probably preserves some genuine historical recollections. But the only fact which appears to be plainly indicated by it, is a temporary connection between Crete and Attica. Whether this intercourse was grounded solely on religion, or was the result of a partial dominion exercised by Crete over Athens, it would be useless to inquire; and still less can we pretend to determine the nature of the Athenian tribute, or that of the Cretan worship to which it related. That part of the legend which belongs to Naxos and Delos was probably introduced after these islands were occupied by the Ionians. A part is assigned in these traditions to Minos, who is represented by the general voice of antiquity as having raised Crete to a higher degree of prosperity and power than it ever reached at any subsequent period [and whom we shall also discuss later in connection with Cretan history].

THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES

Our plan obliges us to pass over a great number of wars, expeditions, and achievements of these ages, which were highly celebrated in heroic song, not because we deem them to contain less of historical reality than others which we mention, but because they appear not to have been attended with any important or lasting consequences. We might otherwise have been induced to notice the quarrel which divided the royal house of Thebes, and led to a series of wars between Thebes and Argos, which terminated in the destruction of the former city, and the temporary expulsion of the Cadmeans, its ancient inhabitants. Hercules and Theseus undertook their adventures either alone, or with the aid of a single comrade; but in these Theban wars we find a union of seven chiefs; and such confederacies appear to have become frequent in the latter part of the heroic age. So a numerous band of heroes was combined in the enterprise, which, whatever may have been its real nature, became renowned as the chase of the Calydonian boar. Plassman[f] suspects that this was in reality a military expedition against some of the savage Ætolian tribes, and that the name of one of them (the Aperantii) suggested the legend. We proceed to speak of two expeditions much more celebrated, conducted like these by a league of independent chieftains, but directed, not to any part of Greece, but against distant lands; we mean the voyage of the Argonauts, and the siege of Troy, which will conclude our review of the mythical period of Grecian history.

THE ARGONAUTS

The Argonautic expedition, when viewed in the light in which it has usually been considered, is an event which a critical historian, if he feels himself compelled to believe it, may think it his duty to notice, but which he is glad to pass rapidly over as a perplexing and unprofitable riddle. For even when the ancient legend has been pared down into a historical form, and its marvellous and poetical features have been all effaced, so that nothing is left but what may appear to belong to its pith and substance, it becomes indeed dry and meagre enough, but not much more intelligible than before. It relates an adventure, incomprehensible in its design, astonishing in its execution, connected with no conceivable cause, and with no sensible effect. The narrative, reduced to the shape in which it has often been thought worthy of a place in history, runs as follows:

In the generation before the Trojan war, Jason, a young Thessalian prince, had incurred the jealousy of his kinsman Pelias, who reigned at Iolcus. The crafty king encouraged the adventurous youth to embark in a maritime expedition full of difficulty and danger. It was to be directed to a point far beyond the most remote which Greek navigation had hitherto reached in the same quarter; to the eastern corner of the sea, so celebrated in ancient times for the ferocity of the barbarians inhabiting its coasts, that it was commonly supposed to have derived from them the name of “Axenus,” the inhospitable, before it acquired the opposite name of the “Euxine,” from the civilisation which was at length introduced by Greek settlers. Here, in the land of the Colchians, lay the goal, because this contained the prize, from which the voyage has been frequently called the adventure of the golden fleece. Jason having built a vessel of uncommon size,--in more precise terms, the first 50-oared galley his countrymen had ever launched,--and having manned it with a band of heroes, who assembled from various parts of Greece to share the glory of the enterprise, sailed to Colchis, where he not only succeeded in the principal object of his expedition, whatever this may have been, but carried off Medea, the daughter of the Colchian king, Æetes.

Though this is an artificial statement, framed to reconcile the main incidents of a wonderful story with nature and probability, it still contains many points which can scarcely be explained or believed. It carries us back to a period when navigation was in its infancy among the Greeks; yet their first essay at maritime discovery is supposed at once to have reached the extreme limit, which was long after attained by the adventurers who gradually explored the same formidable sea, and gained a footing on its coasts. The success of the undertaking however is not so surprising as the project itself; for this implies a previous knowledge of the country to be explored, which it is very difficult to account for. But the end proposed is still more mysterious; and indeed can only be explained with the aid of a conjecture. Such an explanation was attempted by some of the later writers among the ancients, who perceived that the whole story turned on the Golden Fleece, the supposed motive of the voyage, and that this feature had not a sufficiently historical appearance. But the mountain torrents of Colchis were said to sweep down particles of gold, which the natives used to detain by fleeces dipped in the streams.

This report suggested a mode of translating the fable into historical language. It was conjectured that the Argonauts had been attracted by the metallic treasures of the country, and that the Golden Fleece was a poetical description of the process which they had observed, or perhaps had practised: an interpretation certainly more ingenious, or at least less absurd, than those by which Diodorus transforms the fire-breathing bulls which Jason was said to have yoked at the bidding of Æetes, into a band of Taurians, who guarded the fleece, and the sleepless dragon which watched over it, into their commander Draco; but yet not more satisfactory; for it explains a casual, immaterial circumstance, while it leaves the essential point in the legend wholly untouched. The epithet “golden,” to which it relates, is merely poetical and ornamental, and signified nothing more as to the nature of the fleece than the epithets white or purple, which were also applied to it by early poets. According to the original and genuine tradition, the fleece was a sacred relic, and its importance arose entirely out of its connection with the tragical story of Phrixus, the main feature of which is the human sacrifice which the gods had required from the house of Athamas. His son Phrixus either offered himself, or was selected through the artifices of his stepmother Ino, as the victim; but at the critical moment, as he stood before the altar, the marvellous ram was sent for his deliverance, and transported him over the sea, according to the received account, to Colchis, where Phrixus, on his arrival, sacrificed the ram to Jupiter, as the god who had favoured his escape; the fleece was nailed to an oak in the grove of Mars, where it was kept by Æetes as a sacred treasure, or palladium.

But the tradition must have had a historical foundation in some real voyages and adventures, without which it could scarcely have arisen at all, and could never have become so generally current as to be little inferior in celebrity to the tale of Troy itself. If however the fleece had no existence but in popular belief, the land where it was to be sought was a circumstance of no moment. In the earlier form of the legend, it might not have been named at all, but only have been described as the distant, the unknown, land; and after it had been named, it might have been made to vary with the gradual enlargement of geographical information. But in this case the voyage of the Argonauts can no longer be considered as an isolated adventure, for which no adequate motive is left; but must be regarded, like the expedition of the Tyrian Hercules, as representing a succession of enterprises, which may have been the employment of several generations. And this is perfectly consistent with the manner in which the adventurers are most properly described. They are Minyans; a branch of the Greek nation, whose attention was very early drawn by their situation, not perhaps without some influence from the example and intercourse of the Phœnicians, to maritime pursuits. The form which the legend assumed was probably determined by the course of their earliest naval expeditions. They were naturally attracted towards the northeast, first by the islands that lay before the entrance of the Hellespont, and then by the shores of the Propontis and its two straits. Their successive colonies, or spots signalised either by hostilities or peaceful transactions with the natives, would become the landing-places of the Argonauts. That such a colony existed at Lemnos, seems unquestionable; though it does not follow that Euneus, the son of Jason, who is described in the Iliad as reigning there during the siege of Troy, was a historical personage.

If however it should be asked, in what light the hero and heroine of the legend are to be viewed on this hypothesis, it must be answered that both are most probably purely ideal personages, connected with the religion of the people to whose poetry they belong. Jason was perhaps no other than the Samothracian god or hero Jasion, whose name was sometimes written in the same manner, the favourite of Demeter, as his namesake was of Hera, and the protector of mariners as the Thessalian hero was the chief of the Argonauts. Medea seems to have been originally another form of Hera herself, and to have descended, by a common transition, from the rank of a goddess into that of a heroine, when an epithet had been mistaken for a distinct name. We have already seen that the Corinthian tradition claimed her as belonging properly to Corinth, one of the principal seats of the Minyan race. The tragical scenes which rendered her stay there so celebrated were commemorated by religious rites, which continued to be observed until the city was destroyed by the Romans. According to the local legend, she had not murdered her children; they had been killed by the Corinthians; and the public guilt was expiated by annual sacrifices offered to Hera, in whose temple fourteen boys, chosen every twelve-month from noble families, were appointed to spend a year in all the ceremonies of solemn mourning. But we cannot here pursue this part of the subject any further. The historical side of the legend seems to exhibit an opening intercourse between the opposite shores of the Ægean. If however it was begun by the northern Greeks, it was probably not long confined to them, but was early shared by those of the Peloponnesus. It would be inconsistent with the piratical habits of the early navigators, to suppose that this intercourse was always of a friendly nature; and it may therefore not have been without a real ground, that the Argonautic expedition was sometimes represented as the occasion of the first conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. We therefore pass by a natural transition out of the mythical circle we have just been tracing, into that of the Trojan war, and the light in which we have viewed the one may serve to guide us in forming a judgment on the historical import of the other.

We have already seen in what manner Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus, had usurped the inheritance which belonged of right to Hercules, as the legitimate representative of Perseus. Sthenelus had reserved Mycenæ and Tiryns for himself; but he had bestowed the neighbouring town of Midea on Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops, and uncles of Eurystheus. On the death of Hercules, Eurystheus pursued his orphan children from one place of refuge to another, until they found an asylum in Attica. Theseus refused to surrender them, and Eurystheus then invaded Attica in person; but his army was routed, and he himself slain by Hyllus, the eldest son of Hercules, in his flight through the isthmus. Atreus succeeded to the throne of his nephew, whose children had been all cut off in this disastrous expedition; and thus, when his sceptre descended to his son Agamemnon, it conveyed the sovereignty of an ample realm. While the house of Pelops was here enriched with the spoils of Hercules, it enjoyed the fruits of his triumphant valour in another quarter. He had bestowed Laconia on Tyndareus, the father of Helen; and when Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, had been preferred to all the other suitors of this beautiful princess, Tyndareus resigned his dominions to his son-in-law. In the meanwhile a flourishing state had risen up on the eastern side of the Hellespont. Its capital, Troy, had been taken by Hercules, with the assistance of Telamon, son of Æacus, but had been restored to Priam, the son of its conquered king, Laomedon, who reigned there in peace and prosperity over a number of little tribes, until his son Paris, attracted to Laconia by the fame of Helen’s beauty, abused the hospitality of Menelaus by carrying off his queen in his absence. All the chiefs of Greece combined their forces, under the command of Agamemnon, to avenge this outrage, and sailed with a great armament to Troy.[c] Their enterprise, famous for all time as the Trojan War, stands quite by itself in interest and importance among the traditions of the Heroic Age, and demands exceptional treatment here.

THE TROJAN WAR

Historic criticism is almost a pendulum in its motion. Nowhere has this been more vividly seen than in the attitude of prominent historians toward the Trojan War and the poetical chronicle of it known as Homer’s _Iliad_. Scholarly belief has passed through all imaginable grades of opinion ranging between a flat denial that there was ever such a place as Troy, such a war as the Trojan, or such a man as Homer, to an acceptance of them all with an unquestioning credulity matching that of the early Greeks.

It was textual criticism, the deadly work of the critical scalpel in the verbal form of the poems that first destroyed the good standing of the Homeric legend. It is the revivifying work of the pickaxe and shovel in the actual ground as wielded by the excavator and archæologist that have brought back the repute of Homer. A few years ago and a Gladstone arguing for the reality of a Homer and of an Homeric epic was dismissed by the professor as an old-fashioned ignoramus. To-day almost the same terms are applied to those who cling to the fashion of yesterday and claim that the Trojan War and Homer himself are myths. In the new swing of the pendulum, however, the cautious will still avoid extremes.

What has already been said about the status of Greek myth applies in the main to the Homeric poems. They are legends doubtless with some measure of historical foundation, but they cannot be accepted by the critical student of to-day as historical narratives in the narrow sense. But the Homeric poems have an interest of quite another kind which gives them a place apart among the legends of antiquity. This interest centres about the personality of the author of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. From the earliest historic periods of Grecian life the authorship of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ was unquestionably ascribed to a poet named Homer. If doubts ever arose in the mind of any sceptical or critical person as to the reality of Homer, such doubts were quite submerged by the popular verdict. It was not generally claimed that Homer himself had written the works ascribed to him,--it was long held, indeed, that he must have lived at a period prior to the introduction of writing into Greece,--but that the person whom tradition loved to speak of as the blind bard had invented and recited his narratives _in toto_, and that these, memorised by others, had been brought down through succeeding generations until they were finally given permanence in writing, were accepted as the most unequivocal of historical facts.

But in the latter half of the 18th century, these supposed historical facts began to be called in question, Wolf[k] leading the van and holding all scholarship in terror of his name for nearly a century. Critical students of Homer were struck with numerous anomalies in his writings that seemed to them inconsistent with the idea that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ had been composed at one time and by one person. To cite but a single illustration, it was noted that the various parts of these poems were not all written in the same dialect, and it seemed highly improbable that any one person should have employed different dialects in a single composition. Such a suggestion as this naturally led to bitter controversies--controversies which have by no means altogether subsided after the lapse of a century.[a] Later scholarship denies the “stratification of language” in the poems.[b] But the controversy did not confine itself to the mere question whether such a person as Homer had lived and written, it came presently to involve also the subject of the Homeric poems, in particular, of the _Iliad_.

Certain details aside, the Trojan War had been looked upon as an historical event, quite as fully credited by the modern historian as it had been by Alexander when he stopped to offer sacrifices at the site of Troy. But now the iconoclastic movement being under way there was a school of students who openly maintained that the whole recital, by whomsoever written, was nothing but a fable which the historian must utterly discard. It was even questioned whether such a place as Troy had ever existed. Such a scepticism as this seemed, naturally enough, a clear sacrilege to a large body of scholars, but for several generations no successful efforts were made to meet it with any weapons more tangible than words. Then came a champion of the historical verity of the Homeric narrative who set to work to prove his case in the most practical way. Curiously enough the man who thus championed the cause of the closet scholars and poets and visionaries was himself a practical man of affairs, no less experienced and no less successful in dealing with the affairs of an everyday business than had been the man from whom the iconoclastic movement had gained its chief support. This man was also a German, Heinrich Schliemann.[l]

Having amassed a fortune, the income from which was more than sufficient for all his needs, he retired from active business and devoted the remainder of his life to a self-imposed task, which had been an ambition with him all his life, the search, namely, for the site of Ancient Troy. How well he succeeded all the world knows. But in opposition to the opinions of many scholars he selected the hill of Hissarlik as the site of ancient Ilium, and his excavations there soon demonstrated that at least it had been the site not of one alone but of at least seven different cities in antiquity--one being built above the ruins of another at long intervals of time. One of these cities, the sixth from the top,--or to put it otherwise, the most ancient but one,--was, he became firmly convinced, Ilium itself.

The story of his achievements cannot be told here in detail, and it is necessary to point the warning that Dr. Schliemann’s excavations--wonderful as are their results--do not, perhaps, when critically viewed, demonstrate quite so much as might at first sight appear. There is, indeed, a high degree of probability that the city which he excavated was really the one intended in the Homeric descriptions, but it must be clear to any one who scrutinises the matter somewhat closely, that this fact goes but a little way towards substantiating the Homeric narrative as a whole. The city of Ilium may have existed without giving rise to any such series of events as that narrated in the _Iliad_. Dr. Schliemann himself was led to realise this fact, and to modify somewhat in later years the exact tenor of some of his more enthusiastic earlier views, yet the fact remains that the excavations at Hissarlik must be reckoned with by whoever in future discusses the status of the Homeric story.

This is not the place to enter into a statement of the multitudinous phases scepticism has taken in dealing with the Trojan legend. The story, whether pure fancy, as some have thought it, or a dramatised and romantic version of actual history, is indispensable to any chronicle of Greece or of Grecian influence.[a] Taking Homer as a basis, it may be outlined as follows:

_The Town of Troy_

The origin of Dardanus, founder of the Trojan state, has been very variously related; but the testimony of Homer to the utter uncertainty of his birth and native country, delivered in the terms that he was the son of Jupiter, may seem best entitled to belief. Thus however it appears that the Greeks not unwillingly acknowledged consanguinity with the Trojans; for many, indeed most, of the Grecian heroes also claimed their descent from Jupiter. It is moreover remarkable that, among the many genealogies which Homer has transmitted, none is traced so far into antiquity as that of the royal family of Troy. Dardanus was ancestor in the sixth degree to Hector, and may thus have lived from a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before that hero. On one of the many ridges projecting from the foot of the lofty mountain of Ida in the northwestern part of Asia Minor, he founded a town, or perhaps rather a castle, which from his own name was called Dardania.

The situation commanded the narrow but highly fruitful plain, watered by the streams of Simois and Scamander, and stretching from the roots of Ida to the Hellespont northward, and the Ægean Sea westward. His son Erichthonius, who succeeded him in the sovereignty of this territory, had the reputation of being the richest man of his age. Much of his wealth seems to have been derived from a large stock of brood mares, to the number, according to the poet, of three thousand, which the fertility of his soil enabled him to maintain, and which by his care and judgment in the choice of stallions produced a breed of horses superior to any of the surrounding countries. Tros, son of Erichthonius, probably extended, or in some other way improved, the territory of Dardania; since the appellation by which it was known to posterity was derived from his name. With the riches the population of the state of course increased. Ilus, son of Tros, therefore, venturing to move his residence from the mountain, founded, on a rising ground beneath, that celebrated city called from his name Ilion [or Ilium], but more familiarly known in modern languages by the name of Troy, derived from his father.

Twice before that war which Homer has made so famous Troy is said to have been taken and plundered: and for its second capture by Hercules, in the reign of Laomedon, son of Ilus, we have Homer’s authority. The government however revived, and still advanced in power and splendour. Laomedon after his misfortune fortified the city in a manner so superior to what was common in his age that the walls of Troy were said to be a work of the gods. Under his son Priam, the Trojan state was very flourishing and of considerable extent; containing, under the name of Phrygia, the country afterwards called Troas, together with both shores of the Hellespont and the large and fertile island of Lesbos.

A frequent communication, sometimes friendly, but oftener hostile, was maintained between the eastern and western coasts of the Ægean Sea; each being an object of piracy more than of commerce to the inhabitants of the opposite country. Cattle and slaves constituting the principal riches of the times, men, women, and children, together with swine, sheep, goats, oxen, and horses, were principal objects of plunder. But scarcely was any crime more common than rapes; and it seems to have been a kind of fashion, in consequence of which the leaders of piratical expeditions gratified their vanity in the highest degree when they could carry off a lady of superior rank. How usual these outrages were among the Greeks, may be gathered from the condition said to have been exacted by Tyndareus, king of Sparta, father of the celebrated Helen, from the chieftains who came to ask his daughter in marriage; he required of all, as a preliminary, to bind themselves by solemn oaths that, should she be stolen, they would assist with their utmost power to recover her. This tradition, with many other stories of Grecian rapes, on whatsoever founded, indicates with certainty the opinion of the later Greeks, among whom they were popular, concerning the manners of their ancestors. But it does not follow that the Greeks were more vicious than other people equally unhabituated to constant, vigorous, and well-regulated exertions of law and government. Equal licentiousness but a few centuries ago prevailed throughout western Europe. Hence those gloomy habitations of the ancient nobility, which excite the wonder of the traveller, particularly in the southern parts, where, in the midst of the finest countries, he often finds them in situations so very inconvenient and uncomfortable, except for what was then the one great object, security, that now the houseless peasant will scarcely go to them for shelter. From the licentiousness were derived the manners, and even the virtues, of the times; and hence knight-errantry with its whimsical consequences.

_Paris and Helen_

The expedition of Paris, son of Priam king of Troy, into Greece, appears to have been a marauding adventure, such as was then usual. It is said indeed that he was received very hospitably, and entertained very kindly, by Menelaus king of Sparta. But this also was consonant to the spirit of the times; for hospitality has always been the virtue of barbarous ages: it is at this day no less characteristical of the wild Arabs than their spirit of robbery; and in the Scottish highlands we know robbery and hospitality flourished together till very lately. Hospitality indeed will be generally found in different ages and countries very nearly in proportion to the need of it; that is, in proportion to the deficiency of jurisprudence, and the weakness of government. Paris concluded his visit at Sparta with carrying off Helen, wife of Menelaus, together with a considerable treasure: and whether this was effected by fraud, or as some have supposed, by open violence, it is probable enough that as Herodotus relates, it was first concerted, and afterward supported, in revenge for some similar injury done by the Greeks to the Trojans.

An outrage however so grossly injurious to one of the greatest princes of Greece, especially if attended with a breach of the rights of hospitality, might not unreasonably be urged as a cause requiring the united revenge of all the Grecian chieftains. But there were other motives to engage them in the quarrel. The hope of returning laden with the spoil of the richer provinces of Asia was a strong incentive to leaders poor at home, and bred to rapine. The authority and influence of Agamemnon, king of Argos, brother of Menelaus, were also weighty. The spirit of the age, his own temper, the extent of his power, the natural desire of exerting it on a splendid occasion, would all incite this prince eagerly to adopt his brother’s quarrel. He is besides represented by character qualified to create and command a powerful league; ambitious, active, brave, generous, humane; vain indeed and haughty, sometimes to his own injury; yet commonly repressing those hurtful qualities, and watchful to cultivate popularity. Under this leader all the Grecian chieftains from the end of Peloponnesus to the end of Thessaly, together with Idomeneus from Crete, and other commanders from some of the smaller islands, assembled at Aulis, a seaport of Bœotia. The Acarnanians alone, separated from the rest of Greece by lofty mountains and a sea at that time little navigated, had no share in the expedition.

_The Siege of Troy_

A story acquired celebrity in aftertimes, that, the fleet being long detained at Aulis by contrary winds, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia as a propitiatory offering to obtain from the gods a safe and speedy passage to the Trojan coast. To the credit of his character however it is added that he submitted to this abominable cruelty with extreme reluctance, compelled by the clamours of the army, who were persuaded that the gods required the victim; nor were there wanting those who asserted that by a humane fraud the princess was at last saved, under favour of a report that a fawn was miraculously sent by the goddess Diana to be sacrificed in her stead. Indeed the story, though of such fame, and so warranted by early authorities, that some notice of it seemed requisite, wants, it must be confessed, wholly the best authentication for matters of that very early age; for neither Homer, though he enumerates Agamemnon’s daughters, nor Hesiod, who not only mentions the assembling of the Grecian forces under his command at Aulis, but specifies their detentions by bad weather, has left one word about so remarkable an event as this sacrifice.