book vi

. chap. i.

[589] Il. vi. 428.

[590] Il. ix. 533.

[591] Od. vi. 102.

[592] See infra, Studies on Religion, sect. ii.

[593] Il. v. 62.

[594] Od. xv. 80.

[595] Od. xi. 506.

[596] Il. iii. 232.

[597] Od. xi. 322.

[598] Il. i. 269.

[599] Od. xix. 399, 413.

[600] Od. iii. 267. xxi. 16.

[601] Il. xi. 698-702. Od. vi. 364. xiv. 327.

[602] Il. xxiii. 629-43.

[603] Od. xiv. 222.

[604] Od. i. 1-3.

[605] Il. xv. 80.

[606] Il. vi. 242, 315.

[607] Paus. i. 14. 2.

[608] Herod. i. 56.

[609] Il. xvi. 235.

[610] Il. x. 537-9.

[611] Hes. Fragm. xviii.

[612] Thuc. iv. 78.

SECT. VIII.

_On the three greater Homeric appellatives._

_a._ Danaans. _b._ Argives. _c._ Achæans.

We now come to the great Homeric appellatives, Danaan, Argive, and Achæan. As Thucydides has said (i. 3), Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι, καὶ Ἀργείους, καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. Why has the great historian arranged the three names in this order? It cannot be with reference to the comparative frequency of their use: for the first is employed the smallest number of times, and the third is by far the most frequent. For the present let us postpone seeking after the cause; and simply note it as probable, even if no more than probable, that there _is_ a cause.

_Modes of formation for Names of Peoples._

Let me, by way of preface to the examination of these names, consider the various ways in which, so far as we have the means of tracing them (which is but to a limited extent), the names attached by Homer to the inhabitants of particular countries are derived.

They appear to come either

1. From an eponymist directly, who is also an original founder, as Δαρδανοὶ, Τρῶες, from Dardanus, and Tros, in relation to Dardania and Troja respectively.

2. From the land they live in: and thus from an eponymist, if there has originally been one for the territory.

For example, we find Ἰθακήσιοι from an island Ἰθακὴ, which again was derived from Ἰθακός. In a case like this, when the appellation of the people comes not directly, but mediately from the name-giver, a territorial designation intervening, we can draw no inference as to the oneness of race between them and him. Thus in the case before us, Ἰθακήσιοι, though connected with Ἰθακὴ, has not as of necessity, any connection whatever with Ἰθακὸς personally.

3. From the land they live in, as described by its most prominent physical characteristic.

For example, the Thracians (Θρῇκες), must evidently be so called from the roughness of the country, as a cognate word to τρῆχυς, which is thus applied to Ithaca,

τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουρότροφος. Odyss. ix. 27.

Again, from Αἰγίαλος, the district afterwards called Achæa, we have, in later Greek[613], the name Αἰγιαλεῖς for the inhabitants. This does not occur in Homer, but we have what is equivalent to it in the name of Αἰγιάλεια, who was wife of Diomed, and daughter of Adrastus, the former king of Sicyon in Ægialus. This is an instance of the application of the principle, not to the inhabitants at large, but to an individual inhabitant.

4. The name of a population may be derived secondarily from that of another population. Thus while we must derive Ἕλληνες from Ἕλλας, this in its turn can only be drawn from the Ἕλλοι.

5. In the single case of the Athenians, we find the name of a population derived from that of a deity.

6. It is presumable, though not certain, that entire populations took their name from ruling individuals or races. It seems hardly possible to explain, for example, the name Καδμεῖοι, which nowhere connects itself with any of the foregoing sources of eponymism, otherwise than by reference to an individual Cadmus, whom Homer mentions in Od. v. 333.

The idea prevails extensively, at least by sufferance, that these three great names are in Homer mere synonyms, and have no reference to any actual and historical differences, either existing when Homer wrote, or known by him to have existed at a previous period.

This question it is proposed now to examine. I commence by making a broad admission. It is this.

Upon the face of the poems, and on almost all ordinary occasions, Homer seems at first sight to use, and he very frequently does use, as equivalent and interchangeable, those three principal designations which he applies to the Greeks in common.

_Homer’s use of them distinctive._

It is a very important question, however, whether Homer knew of and observed any distinctions between these names. For if he did, then these mere commonplace words, as they are taken to be, may involve in them the germ of much early history.

In this investigation, we have the advantage of dealing in great part, not with mere traditional assertion, but with facts. The use of

## particular names, at particular epochs, for particular tribes, affords

(if the text can be trusted for genuineness) a class of evidence analogous to that supplied by coins and inscriptions for history, or that afforded by geological phænomena with respect to the formation of the globe.

The poems of Homer, particularly the Iliad, abound in passages relating to prior occurrences. These passages are not in general of a high order of poetical beauty, as compared with the rest of the poem; they often cause the action to hang rather heavily; many of them make up the speeches of old men, whose natural leaning to loquacity it appears that the Poet has, with his usual skill, made to minister to the accomplishment of his own marked historic aims. But they are repositories stored, we may almost say packed, with the most curious and suggestive information.

Some of them may be without date: but the time is generally fixed within limits sufficiently close, either by genealogies, or by the period in the lives of the narrators, to which the tales belong. The war of the Elians and Pylians in the Eleventh Book took place in the boyhood of Nestor: probably from fifty to sixty years before the war of Troy. The birth of Eurystheus, related in the Nineteenth Book, was probably earlier still by ten or twenty years. The other legends fall into the interval between these events and the _Troica_. Now if we can trace a difference in the application by Homer of his appellatives, either as to the times or the places, he may hereby conclusively, though unconsciously, tell us a good deal about his view of the succession, and the local distribution, of ruling races in Greece.

Such a rule of difference is easy to be traced.

For example. In the Catalogue[614] and elsewhere, if in the course of the action he refers to the soldiers who proceeded from the country afterwards called Bœotia, he calls them Βοιωτοί. But where Agamemnon has, or rather makes, occasion to tell a story of the same people

## acting in prior history, he calls them, not Βοιωτοὶ, but once Καδμεῖοι,

and once by the equivalent name Καδμειῶνες[615]. The tale is an account of the mission of Tydeus from Thebes to Mycenæ, in company with Polynices, which had occurred under the Pelopid dynasty.

In this story it appears, that Tydeus and Polynices, first obtained a promise of the help they wanted; but that, after they had departed, there was a change of resolution. Hence messengers were sent to acquaint Tydeus, and apparently to recall the force. The expression is (Il. iv. 384),

ἔνθ’ αὖτ’ ἀγγελίην ἐπὶ Τύῃ στεῖλαν Ἀχαιοί.

An allusion to this occurrence is again put into the mouth of Minerva in Il. v. 800-7. The resemblance in the names used is so precise as to be almost _precisian_. Again, the Mycenians are named once, and named as Ἀχαιοί. Again, the Thebans are named twice, and once it is as Καδμεῖοι, once as Καδμείωνες.

_Proofs of the distinctive use._

These two instances fortify one another to such a degree by their concurrence, that, as I would submit, they would, even if they stood alone, amount to a demonstration that Homer had regard to the times and circumstances under which the several races prevailed, in those passages of his work which refer to particular incidents of prior history, personal and local. But there is no lack of other evidence.

First, we have other pieces of prior history, which affect the same portion of Greece. The first of these probably preceded the _Troica_ by only two, or, at the utmost, two and a half generations. It is the account of the birth of Eurystheus, given by Agamemnon himself in the Nineteenth Book. The scene of it is described as Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκόν. He calls it indeed by the name, which it still bore at the time when he spoke, and which was understood by the hearers, for it remained the same country as it had been in former times. But the same people, who in the time of Tydeus, living under the Pelopids, were Ἀχαιοὶ, in the time of Eurystheus, and therefore before the predominance of the Pelopids, are described as Ἀργεῖοι. In Il. xix. 122, Juno thus speaks of the birth of Eurystheus

ἤδη ἀνὴρ γέγον’ ἐσθλὸς, ὃς Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάξει.

And again, v. 124, the same term is used.

Again, it appears from the Sixth Iliad that Prœtus, who expelled Bellerophon about the same time, was king of the Ἀργεῖοι (Il. vi. 158);

ὅς ῥ’ ἐκ δήμου ἔλασσεν, ἐπεὶ πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν Ἀργείων.

According to extra-Homeric tradition, Prœtus was the brother of Eurystheus. According to Homer, his power extends over Ephyre, and over the Argives: and as Æolid dynasties were then ruling in the west, it is the country afterwards called the Argos of the Achæans, within some part of which he must have ruled. But in telling both the story of Prœtus, and the story of Eurystheus, with reference to the same side of Peloponnesus, and entirely out of connection with one another, the text of Homer, true to itself, calls the subjects of each at that period, only by the name Ἀργεῖοι, never Δαναοὶ or Ἀχαιοί.

Thus, one generation before the _Troica_ he calls people Achæans, and calls them by that name only, whom one or two generations earlier he describes, and repeatedly and uniformly describes, as having been Argives. There can hardly be stronger circumstantial evidence of the fact, that to each term he attached its own special meaning.

And yet it is not simply that Homer has made the Argive the more ancient, and the Achæan the more recent, name. On the contrary, he uses both the one and the other with marked respect to place as well as to time. For at the great Argive epoch he has Achæans: and at the great Achæan epoch, that of the poems, he has Argive associations, and a local Argive designation, still remaining.

In the Eleventh Book, Nestor detains Patroclus with a speech of great length. In the beginning of this harangue, he refers to the circumstances of the moment, and, having ended his preface, he travels back to his own early youth, indeed almost his childhood, to give the story of a war, or foray, between the Epeans and the Pylians. When he has ended this tale, he returns to the actual position of affairs before Troy.

In the narrative of this raid[616], he commonly terms the one side Epeans, and the other Pylians. But he once calls the Epeans, who were inhabitants of Elis, Elians. This is natural enough: for as the Elian name afterwards (and so soon as in the time of Homer) prevailed in that race and country, it might very well have been already beginning to come into use. But he also calls the Pylians Achæans; and he uses the name distinctively, for it is where he is speaking of them as the conquering party[617]. For this there is clearly no corresponding reason. It is equally clear that Homer does not call the Pylians Ἀχαιοὶ, simply in the sense of being Greeks, for then the name would not have been distinctive: the enemy too would have been included with them, which would turn the passage into nonsense. Homer, then, (there is no other alternative) means to say that the Pylians were, in some

## particular sense, of the Achæan race.

This is the more worthy of remark, when we look to the preamble and peroration of the speech. For in both of these, which refer to the whole body of the Greeks and to the Trojan epoch, he employs his usual names, and calls them both Danaans (Δαναῶν οὐ κήδεται, v. 665, also vid. 797), and Argives (Ἀργείων ἀέκητι, v. 667): finally Achæans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, 800).

Thus then he calls the Pylians Achæans at the time of the Argive predominance: for this local war could hardly have been more than ten or twenty years after the birth of Eurystheus, and must therefore have been before, or else during his reign; that is to say, at a time when his own subjects are called Ἀργεῖοι.

Again. Homer uses the word Ἀργεῖος in the feminine singular fifteen times. Twice it is with reference to Juno. Of course this application of the term is figurative. But though it be figurative, the figure is evidently founded on her close and intimate relation, not to the Greeks at large only, but to the Argive name; and to the persons, but more particularly to the place, that was so specially associated with it[618].

In all the other thirteen places, the epithet is joined with the name of Helen. Does it for her mean simply Greek, or something special and beyond this? Now if it meant simply Greek, it would be strange that she is never called, I will not say Δαναὴ, because the Danaan name has no singular use in Homer, but certainly Ἀχαιὴ or Ἀχαίïς. Especially as the word Ἀχαιὸς is used as an epithet, be it remembered, many times oftener, than is Ἀργεῖος: and it alone is used to describe the women of Greece generally.

Again, if the epithet Argive, as applied to Helen, meant simply Greek, it might be suitable enough in the mouth of a Trojan speaking among Trojans, but it would have been weak and unmeaning, and therefore most unlike Homer, in the mouth of a Greek or a friend of Greeks; or when, as in the Odyssey[619], Helen is no longer among strangers, but at home. Yet it is used in the following passages among others, (1) by Juno to Minerva, Il. ii. 161, (2) by Minerva to Ulysses, Il. ii. 177; and here in a near juxtaposition with the Achæan appellative, which goes far to prove of itself that Ἀργείη has a meaning more specific than merely Greek. The passage is,

Ἀργείην Ἑλένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ Ἀχαιῶν ἐν Τροίῃ ἀπόλοντο.

I doubt whether Homer ever places in such proximity the two epithets with the same meaning for each[620]. The tautology would be gross, if Achæan and Argeian each meant neither more nor less than Greek: but if Ἀργείη have the local sense, nothing awkward remains. (3) It is used by Agamemnon, Il. iii. 458, in addressing the Trojans; (4) Il. iv. 174, in addressing Menelaus; (5) Il. ix. 140, in addressing the Greek Council. It seems quite clear, from even this enumeration, that Ἀργείη, as applied to Helen, must mean something different from the mere fact that she belonged to the Greek nation at large.

Nor is it difficult to find a meaning. Homer indeed leaves us but narrow information as to the extraction of Helen. He calls her sometimes εὐπατέρεια[621], and many times Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα[622]. In the Third Iliad he shows her to be the sister of Castor and Pollux, and in the Eleventh Odyssey he shows them to be the children of Tyndareus and Leda[623]. Who Tyndareus was we do not know from him. But the common tradition, which makes him a sovereign in Eastern Peloponnesus, is thoroughly accordant with the slight notices in Homer. For, as we see from the cases of Eurystheus and Prœtus, it was in Eastern Peloponnesus that the Argive power and name prevailed; and Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus is, as we have also seen, characteristically with him the Argive Helen. Thus then it may now be lawful to say, we are supplied with a meaning for the name which makes it especially appropriate in the mouth of Agamemnon, the head of the Pelopids. For they were the race who, coming in at the head of the Achæans, had from the West overpowered and superseded the Argive power of the East, while they also held as heirs to it by marriage: and if a royal Argive house at the epoch of the war survived only in Helen and her sister Clytemnestra, she in part at least represented its title, and, as a lawful wife of Menelaus, added to his throne whatever authority the name and rights of her race were capable of conferring.

Having, I trust, seen enough to justify the belief that some at least of these names in the mind of Homer had a definite as well as a more general meaning, let us now, taking them in succession, proceed to examine what that meaning is.

_The Danaans of Homer._

Among the three great Homeric appellatives, let us direct our attention first to the one, which is presumably the oldest. The word Δαναοὶ, from the comparative paucity of the signs and indications connected with it, evidently answers to this description.

We will take first the Homeric, and then the later, evidence respecting it. Of the former, the greater number of particulars are negative. Indeed we have but two positive notes to dwell upon; both of these, however, are of great importance.

1. The Danaan name is with Homer a standing appellation of the Greeks. I think, however, it can be shown that it never means the Greek nation, but always the Greek armament or soldiery.

It is used in the Iliad one hundred and forty-seven times. The name Ἀργεῖοι is employed oftener, namely, one hundred and seventy-seven times in the plural, besides eleven times in the singular as a personal epithet: and Ἀχαιοὶ much more frequently still.

_His epithets for the three designations._

If we observe the shadings, attached to these words respectively by means of the epithets which Homer annexes to them, we shall find they establish perceptible distinctions.

The epithets of Δαναοὶ are exclusively military epithets:

1. ἥρωες. 2. θεράποντες Ἄρηος. 3. φιλοπτόλεμοι. 4. αἰχμηταί. 5. ἀσπισταί. 6. ἴφθιμοι. 7. ταχύπωλοι.

The epithets of Ἀργεῖοι are as follows:

1. ἰόμωροι, Il. iv. 242. xiv. 479. 2. ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι, Il. xiv. 479. 3. θωρηκτοί, Il. xxi. 429. 4. φιλοπτόλεμοι, Il. xix. 269. 5. ἐλεγχέες, Il. iv. 242.

Upon these we may observe, first, that they are few in number; secondly, that they are used with extreme rarity; being only applied in four passages altogether, whereas the word Δαναοὶ has epithets in twenty-two. Thirdly, this word only twice in the whole of the poems has a military epithet attached to it. For I must follow those, who do not translate ἰόμωροι as corresponding with ἐγχεσίμωροι: (1) because the Greeks were not archers, (2) because the derivation from ἴα, ‘the voice,’ giving the sense of braggart, harmonises exactly with the accompanying phrase ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι: as well as (3) for the presumptive, but in Homer by no means conclusive, reason, that ἴον in composition is long.

The epithets of Ἀχαιοὶ are numerous, highly varied, and of very frequent use. They are these:

1. ἀπειλητῆρες. 2. μάχης ἀκόρητοι. 3. ἀνάλκιδες. 4. δῖοι. 5. ἑλικῶπες. 6. εὐκνήμιδες. 7. ἥρωες. 8. καρηκομόωντες. 9. μεγάθυμοι. 10. μένεα πνείοντες. 11. χαλκοκνήμιδες. 12. χαλκοχίτωνες. 13. ὑπερκύδαντες. 14. ἀρηίφιλοι. 15. φιλοπτόλεμοι.

These epithets are used in nearly one hundred and thirty passages, and they may be classified as comprising,

(1) One or two words of sarcastic reproach, very rarely used.

(2) Words descriptive of courage and spirit: such are μεγάθυμοι, μένεα πνείοντες.

(3) Words indicating that disposition to brag, which is more or less traceable in the military conduct of the Greeks, as well as glaringly palpable among the Trojans.

(4) Words descriptive of personal beauty: ἑλικῶπες and καρηκομόωντες.

(5) The word δῖοι, which signifies generally the possession of some kind of excellence.

(6) Words relating to well made and well finished armour: εὐκνήμιδες, χαλκοκνήμιδες, χαλκοχίτωνες.

And of the epithets of the three appellatives respectively we may say,

(1) Those of Ἀχαιοὶ are highly diversified, extended, and elevated in meaning: and are not suitable for soldiers exclusively.

(2) Those of Ἀργεῖοι are so slight and rare that they may be passed over.

(3) Those of Δαναοὶ are most properly neither those of chiefs, nor of a nation at large, but of a soldiery.

In the Odyssey the Danaan name is used thirteen times: but it never signifies either the Greeks contemporary with the action of that poem, or the Greek nation in its prior history: it is employed always retrospectively, and always of the soldiery in the Trojan war.

It will be observed by readers of the poems, that Homer often brings two of the three great appellatives, or even all the three, into juxtaposition so near, as would be inconvenient upon the supposition that they are purely synonymous. For instance, in Il. i. 71, we have Ἀργεῖοι and Ἀχαιοὶ in the same line, and in Il. i. 90, 91, Δαναοὶ and Ἀχαιοὶ in two successive lines. It is, I think, obvious, that this inconvenience will be mitigated or removed, if it can be shown that each of these three names, though they were most commonly applied to mean the same body of persons, nevertheless had its own shade of meaning. And we shall presently have to examine cases, where a determination of this kind appears to be required by the sense[624].

All the rest of the Homeric evidence connected with the name Δαναοὶ is of a negative character.

It is never used in the singular number, either as an adjective, or as a substantive. Nor is it ever applied to women: a point not immaterial, in connection with the question, whether with Homer it does not mean the Greeks of the army exclusively. There is, again, nothing in his use of it which associates it with a particular class of the army, either the lower or the higher; but it appears to be essentially general, comprehensive, and, I may add, likewise invariable in its meaning.

Still less should we expect to find it, nor do we find it, connected with the inhabitants of any particular part of the country: it has not, like the Cadmean or Cephallenian name, a local habitation within Greece. Nor has it in itself any root, or any derivative, which would associate it with any territory, as Αἰγιαλεῖς refers us to Αἰγίαλος, or even as Ἄρκαδες is related to Ἀρκαδίη.

Its use in the Iliad is in exact harmony with that in the Odyssey: it is never associated with the history of the Greeks or any part of them: in short, there is no clear evidence of its existence or application beyond the limits of the camp.

Neither has it any thing related to the physical character of the country, or to any of the races known to have inhabited it, or to any employment or habit of life, or to any deity. It floats before us like Delos on the Ægean, without any visible or discoverable root. And the only question is, whether the slight positive evidence at our command is not so limited, and so hemmed in on all sides by negatives, as to determine the hypothesis that may be drawn from it to one particular form, by forbidding us to move, except in one particular direction.

It is quite plain that the Danaan name must have had some root, lying very deep in the history or legends of Greece: since it would not have been possible for Homer, as a poet of the people, handling a subject the most profoundly national, to describe the Greek army under any name, except one associated with some of the most splendid, or the most venerable, traditions of the country.

_Danaan name dynastic._

In one way alone could this name fulfil the required condition. If its root was not territorial, nor tribal, nor religious, it could only be personal. Was there, then, a Danaus known to the early history of Greece, who founded a dynasty in its centre of power, at a period anterior to the Hellenic history of the country, so as not to be in competition with the honours of that race? If so, then it is intelligible that the Greeks might be called Δαναοὶ by Homer. If that dynasty had passed away, we can well understand why Δαναοὶ should not be a name of contemporary Greeks as such: just as Καδμεῖοι was not an admissible designation for contemporary Bœotians. Further, if it had never been an historical appellative at all, but was the mere reflection cast by the figure of a great primitive personage, and incorporated, for the Poet’s purpose, in a designation made national by him, then we can see how natural it was, that he should limit the word altogether to an heroic and martial sense; just as Cambrian for Welshman, or Caledonian for Scotchman, or Gael for Highlander, or son of Albion for Englishman, would be an appellation naturally appropriated to romance, or war, or any strain impregnated with a strong vein of imagery or passion, but yet would not be suitable for the purposes of pure history.

In this inquiry concerning the Danaan name, we must, I think, carry along with us, as a cardinal element in the case, that which we know from other sources respecting the manner in which Homer was wont to veil all traces of the entry from elsewhere of races, persons, or influences into Greece. It must never be forgotten, that, throughout the whole of the poems, there is apparently not one single statement, made to us with the intention of conveying information respecting the colonization of Greece from abroad. It seems to be the Poet’s intention that we should assume all Greek manners, institutions, and races, to have sprung out of the very soil: and it is only accidentally that he imparts to us any information or suggestion on this subject, when he is in quest of some other purpose, and unawares lets fall a gleam of light upon some foreign settlement or immigration.

All this is conformable to the course of natural feeling. Shakespeare found it worth his while to sing of Lear, but not of Hengist and Horsa; of the English in France, not of the Normans in England. And though Danish invasions have not robbed our great Alfred of his fame, yet for a long time, in order to guard its brilliancy, it may have been that we coloured in our own favour the military history of the period. Arrivals from abroad, in the early periods of the life of a nation, are usually the conquests, in one form or another, of foreigners over natives: of what is strange to the soil over what is associated with it. It can hardly be, that such narratives should be popular. An abnormal instance to the contrary may be found in the fable, which deduced the Julian line in Rome from Æneas: but this was for poetry composed a thousand years after the date of its narrative; composed when the line of national continuity with those, whom Æneas was taken to have conquered, had been completely broken; and composed for the ears of a court, when the pulse of national life had become almost insensible. Even the process, by which Hellenes mastered Pelasgians, is nowhere professedly related by Homer; whose purpose it was to unite more closely the elements of the nation, and not to record that they had once been separate.

_Compared with the Cadmean._

Except in the one point, that the name Καδμεῖοι had had a clear and undeniable place in prior history, there is a marked analogy between the modes in which Homer treats the Cadmean and the Danaan stories. In each of the two cases, general tradition tells us of a foreigner, who enters Greece and founds a dynasty. This dynasty, after acting powerfully on the destinies of the country for some generations, in the course of time disappears, the name dying with it. All this, in the first of the two instances, we have seen to be sufficiently supported by inference and suggestion from Homer. Yet Homer never mentions Cadmus, except as it were by chance, in the act of giving the extraction of Leucothee[625]; nor states that he came from abroad; nor that he founded a dynasty at all. He gives us Cadmus, father of Leucothee, and Cadmeans, and lets us make of them what we can. So here he gives us Danaans, and not indeed a Danaus, but a Danae, who is presumably related to Danaus.

2. In Iliad xiv., Jupiter renders an account of his passion for various women, all of them persons in the very highest positions; and among these for Danae[626].

Δανάης καλλισφύρου Ἀκρισιώνης, ἣ τέκε Περσῆα, πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν.

_The line of Danae._

In this passage we have Danae exhibited as the head of a line of sovereigns through Perseus, who occupied the most ancient and most distinguished seat of power in Greece, that of the Eastern Peloponnesus. From her, indeed, the derivation of sovereignty is locally continuous down to the time of Homer. Perseus is the father of Sthenelus[627], and Sthenelus of Eurystheus. Next to him, we find Pelops in possession of the throne, with a new sceptre, betokening a new sovereignty. That is to say, he was no longer a merely local sovereign, whose highest honour it was to be first in that class, _primus inter pares_; but he had also acquired an extensive supremacy, reaching beyond his own borders, or those of the Achaic Argos, and embracing all Greece, with a multitude of islands[628].

Such is the line of Danae downwards: beginning with a son, whose paternal extraction we shall consider hereafter[629]. And her epoch, as we shall see, is six generations before the Trojan war. For tracing her upwards, we have no means from Homer, except such as are afforded by the word Ἀκρισιώνη. The use of a patronymic which describes Danae as the daughter (most probably) of Acrisius, in some degree makes it likely that Acrisius either was the brother of Danaus, or otherwise collaterally related, rather than directly descended from him. For, had Danae herself been descended from Danaus, it seems improbable that she would have drawn her patronymic from the less distinguished Acrisius, unless Danaus was a very remote ancestor. But this is very improbable: for seven generations before Troy form the utmost limit of Homer’s historical knowledge; and where all besides falls within that line, it is improbable that there should be a single exception reaching greatly beyond it. And again, from the course of migration, it is likely that we should find his oldest traditions in Asia, and not in Europe. On the other hand, that Homer should stop short in tracing the lineage onwards, just before he came to the foreign immigrant, is in exact conformity with what he has done in omitting to connect Œdipus and Epicaste[630] with Cadmus, or Pelops with Tantalus. In the former of these two cases, the omission all the more cogently suggests design, because Epicaste is the only woman introduced in the Νεκυΐα without mention of her husband, among all those, eight in number, of whose cases he gives us the detail. It is most probable, therefore, that Homer meant the genealogy to stand as follows: and at the least, it must not be thought that the text of Homer gives countenance either directly or indirectly to those later fables, which throw back the first Greek dynasties into a very remote antiquity.

1. Danaus = Acrisius | 2. Danae 3. Perseus 4. Sthenelus 5. Eurystheus (= Hercules) = Pelops 6. Atreus = Thyestes 7. Agamemnon = Ægisthus.

_Epoch of the dynasty._

According to these presumptions, Danaus is contemporary with Dardanus[631]: and also is just such a person as Homer’s poetic use of the name Δαναοὶ would lead us to expect; one who came from abroad, and is on that account kept in majestic shadow; one who founded a throne, but did not introduce a race: one who may have given his people the name of Δαναοὶ, as Cadmus gave that of Καδμεῖοι, for the time while his dynasty was in power, but whose name disappeared, together with its sway. We have, it will be remembered in Homer, no Homeric legends of the period of the Danaids, so that we do not know whether the name Δαναοὶ was then in any degree national or not.

According to the post-Homeric tradition, Danaus was an Egyptian[632], brother of Ægyptus. He migrated into Greece, and became king of Argos. Acrisius and Prœtus were reputed to be his great-grandsons.

In Homer, too, we have an Acrisius and a Prœtus: but Prœtus is contemporary with Bellerophon, two generations before the _Troica_, so that he is later by four generations than Acrisius, and later by at least four than Danaus.

The more recent tradition, contradicting Homer positively in this, as in so many instances, carries Prœtus back to the time of Acrisius, and then, paying some respect to the interval between Prœtus and Danaus, gives compensation by thrusting Danaus himself three generations further back.

Of the posterity of the Homeric Prœtus we hear nothing, and with him the Danaid line, prolonged in a junior branch, may have expired. Tradition places him on the throne of Tiryns. His holding a separate sovereignty in Argolis is not of itself in conflict with the Homeric account of the Perseids, who reigned at Mycenæ; because we find in Argos itself a separate sovereignty under Diomed at the epoch of the _Troica_. But the terms used are peculiar. Prœtus ruled over Ἀργεῖοι;

πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γάρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν[633].

The account of Eurystheus in the Nineteenth Book may, however, imply that he was king of all the Ἀργεῖοι: and at first sight there is some conflict here, because both Eurystheus and Prœtus may be said to date two generations before the _Troica_. The solution is probably as follows. The passion of Antea, wife of Prœtus, for Bellerophon, suggests that her husband was more advanced in life than Bellerophon, whom, as the grandfather of Glaucus, we may take as justly representing in time the second generation before the war. On the other hand, as Eurystheus was the contemporary of Hercules, and Hercules had a son, as well as grandsons in the war, we may assume Eurystheus to have been junior to the generation, as Prœtus was its senior; so that they need not have been contemporary princes.

The historic place assigned to Danaus, either as we might fix it from Homer, or as the later tradition would determine it, keeps him clear of the earliest Hellic traditions in southern Greece. None of these can well be carried back beyond Sisyphus; and Sisyphus stands at five generations before the war, while Danaus cannot be less than seven. Had Homer made Danaus synchronise with the earlier Hellic sovereignties, it would have been, in my view, a presumption against his Egyptian origin, or his existence altogether. For an Egyptian stranger was little likely to attain to power, where Hellenes were already in the field: the more energetic genius would subdue the less vigorous. The expulsion of the Hellenic Bellerophon, and the plot against his life, may really have been connected with the political jealousies of the Danaids towards the formidable new-comers of the Æolid stem: nor do I read the fable of Jupiter with Danae otherwise than as a veil, used to give dignity to the commencement of an Hellic sovereignty, which, in the person of Perseus, partly succeeded, partly supplanted, the Danaid throne.

Danaus has been mentioned by Hesiod, the first among the later authorities. This poet states, that he relieved Argos from drought: an operation which harmonises well with the tradition that brings him from a country dependent on the irrigation of the Nile, as the conditions of cultivation there could not but lead at an early date to care in the management of water. He likewise calls Perseus by the name of Δαναίδης, and also terms him the son of Danae[634].

The only point of connection between the Danaids and the Argive or Argeian name is, that Prœtus, the last of the Danaids, reigns over Argeians. But this is at a period when the Perseid house, which was evidently Hellenic, has already become the first in rank among the Greek thrones, and has given, as is probable, the Argeian name to the people of Eastern Peloponnesus. The whole evidence, therefore, throws the Danaan name, with all its incidents, back to a period anterior to that of Argeians and of Achæans.

But if the Danai were thus before the Ἀργεῖοι and before the Ἀχαιοὶ, whom did they follow?

_Post-Homeric tradition._

The evidence of Æschylus in the Supplices supports the tradition which makes them immediately follow the Pelasgi[635], or which, more strictly, represents their name as the first of those borne by the Greek nation after it had ceased to be simply Pelasgic.

By Euripides was conveyed a kindred tradition, that Danaus, having come to Argos, colonized the city of Inachus; and that the Peloponnesians, previously called Pelasgiotes, were thereafter called Danai[636].

Πελασγιῶτας δ’ ὠνομασμένους, τὸ πρὶν Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ’ ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα.

These traditions, received through the tragedians, coincide with the evidence of the Homeric text. For this text, in the first place, clearly throws the Danaan line farther back than that of any of the Hellic tribes. Secondly, by negative evidence, no where employing the Danaan name in the pre-Troic legends, he leaves us to infer that it must have been the oldest, and the most remote from common use, of his three great appellations. Thirdly, Homer supplies us with no other name which there is the smallest ground for inserting between the Danaans and the ancient Pelasgi, of whom we have found traces, direct and indirect, in so many places of the poems.

Thus, then, although we can plead little but conjecture from Homer with respect to the person Danaus, we seem to be justified in concluding from his testimony, that the appellation was dynastic, that the dynasty was pre-Hellenic, and that it stands in chronological order next to the Pelasgic time.

The name Ἀργεῖοι is the next with which we have to deal: and this name, applicable to persons, is so evidently founded on the name Ἄργος, applicable to territory, that with this latter word we must of necessity begin the investigation; just as in order to arrive at the meaning of the term Hellenes, we were obliged to begin with Hellas.

_Applications of the name Argos._

And the word Ἄργος is so important, and as it were central, in the geography of Homer, that we had better first consider what are the various forms of expression which Homer uses when he wants to express in words the entire territory of the Greek nation:

1. We have already seen that he appears to use for this purpose the combined force of the names Hellas and Argos;

ἀνδρὸς, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος[637].

2. He employs other combinations for the like purpose. The first is that of Ἄργος, extended by the epithet πᾶν, and joined with the islands. These words taken together embrace the whole Empire of Agamemnon:

πολλῇσιν νήσοισι, καὶ Ἄργει παντὶ ἀνάσσειν[638].

3. And again, with the proper name Ἀχαïὶς,

Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον, καὶ Ἀχαïίδα καλλιγύναικα[639].

This is spoken by the Trojan herald of the possible adjustment of the quarrel, upon which, he says, we shall dwell quietly in Troy, and _they_ will return to Argos and Achæis. By “they” he means all the Greeks, therefore the country to which they return means all Greece.

4. It may be a question whether Ἄργος, in combination with μέσος, includes the whole of Greece, as in the speech of Diomed to Glaucus:

τῷ νῦν σοι μὲν ἐγὼ ξεῖνος φίλος Ἄργεï μέσσῳ εἰμὶ, σὺ δ’ ἐν Λυκίῃ[640].

5. It is also a question, what is the geographical force of Argos, even when standing alone. It is manifestly wide in certain passages. Thus Paris mentions the κτήματα,

ὅσσ’ ἀγόμην ἐξ Ἄργεος ἡμέτερον δῶ[641]:

and Polydamas, speaking of the possible destruction of the Greek army,

νωνύμνους ἀπολέσθαι ἀπ’ Ἄργεος ἐνθάδ’ Ἀχαιούς[642].

a line repeated elsewhere. On the other hand, the word in some places has undoubtedly a limited meaning only.

6. Again, we find the word Ἀχαίïς γαῖα, used apparently with the intention of signifying the whole Greek country; as in the first Iliad by Nestor;

ὦ πόποι, ἢ μέγα πένθος Ἀχαίïδα γαῖα ἱκάνει[643].

7. And we have the same word Ἀχαίïς without γαῖα, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

For instance, when Nestor and Ulysses were collecting the Greek forces, they were

λαὸν ἀγείροντες κατ’ Ἀχαίïδα πουλυβότειραν[644].

And Ulysses, addressing his mother in the Shades beneath, says,

οὐ γάρ πω σχέδον ἦλθον Ἀχαίïδος, οὐδέ πω ἀμῆς γῆς ἐπέβην[645].

To proceed first with what is most clear, I think it may be taken for certain that Ἀχαίïς, with or without the affix γαῖα or αἶα[646], means nothing less than the whole of Greece in the passages where Homer uses this appellative alone. One passage, indeed, taken alone, affords decisive proof for itself that even the islands are included. Telemachus[647] thus describes his mother as unrivalled in Greece:

οἵη νῦν οὐκ ἔστι γύνη κατ’ Ἀχαίïδα γαῖαν οὔτε Πύλου ἱερῆς, οὔτ’ Ἄργεος, οὔτε Μυκήνης, οὔτ’ αὐτῆς Ἰθάκης, οὔτ’ ἠπείροιο μελαίνης.

For here are clearly enumerated as among the parts of Ἀχαίïς, several Peloponnesian states, the island of Ithaca, and the continent, evidently meaning that to the North of the Corinthian gulf.

And yet it may remain true that, though commonly meaning Greece at large, Ἀχαίïς may still have a more special connection with the South, as the whole of this island is called Britain, whereas the name has been derived especially from its southern inhabitants.

But in the passages numbered (1) and (3) we find the whole of Greece designated by the use, not of one, but of two expressions: in the first case they are,

1. Ἕλλας. 2. μέσον Ἄργος.

In the second they are,

1. Ἄργος. 2. Ἀχαίïς.

And with these we may compare the expression, evidently meant to cover all the Greeks, in Il. ii. 530, under the names

1. Πανέλληνες. 2. Ἀχαιοί.

Now there are here three ways in which the words may be used so as to convey their joint sense, which I assume to be that of Greece _entire_: viz.

1. That each word should cover a part, the two parts together making up the whole, _i.e._ that the words should be used distributively.

2. That each should cover the whole, and that the words should be used cumulatively.

3. That one of the words should apply to a part of Greece only, and should be overlapped as it were by the other, that other meaning the whole.

Now as Ἀχαίïς uniformly means all Greece in eight passages where it stands alone, this will naturally govern its sense in the two passages, where it is joined copulatively with Ἄργος. We shall also hereafter see the local use of the Ἀχαιοὶ so diffused, that it would hardly be possible to suppose any other meaning. Thus, then, we have one point fixed, from which to operate upon others.

But what does the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον mean?

It is demonstrable that in Homer the word Ἄργος has several meanings.

1. It is a city, as in Il. iv. 51,

ἤτοι ἐμοὶ τρεῖς μὲν πολὺ φίλταται εἰσὶ πόληες Ἄργος τε, Σπάρτη τε, καὶ εὐρυάγυια Μυκήνη. τὰς διαπέρσαι κ.τ.λ.

2. It is a limited territory, probably such as was afterwards the State of Argolis. For when Telemachus is quitting Sparta, Theoclymenus joins him[648], φεύγων ἐξ Ἄργεος. And again, when Melampus quitted Pylos, he came to Argos:

ὁ δ’ ἄλλων ἵκετο δῆμον Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον[649].

The first proves that Sparta was not included in the geographical name Ἄργος: the second proves the same of Pylos: and this too is the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον.

The same phrase is used in Od. iii. 263, of Ægisthus, who endeavours to corrupt Clytemnestra,

μυχῷ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο.

Here Mycenæ is plainly meant by the μυχὸς, and the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον is Argolis, or something like it.

This district, including Mycenæ, was the head quarter of the Greek power. Now we find that the whole dominion of Priam was named Τροίη, while including many cities and much territory, and the name Τροίη was also sometimes applied to the capital, of which the proper name was Ilion. So Venezia at the present day means both a city and a territory, even though the city is outside the territory; the only distinction lying in the use or non-use of the article. Therefore it was sufficiently natural, that the Trojan herald should name the whole from the most excellent part, and so identify them: and on the other hand, it would not be otherwise than natural, were he to name the most excellent part, and likewise to name the whole, without verbally distinguishing them.

So that in Il. iii. 75, 258, the phrase Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον, according to what has preceded, may either mean,

1. The part of the Peloponnesus containing Argos and Mycenæ as its head quarter, (and then the line must be interpreted in the third of the modes above pointed out; as we might now say, ‘we visited Rome and Italy.’)

2. Or it may mean the whole of Greece, by transfer from its capital part, and then the line must be interpreted in the second mode, as might now be said, ‘to our Green Erin, our Ireland mother of the brave.’

The English ‘and’ would indeed mar the sense: but the Greek καὶ is much more elastic, and may be equivalent to the Italian _ossia_, or to the sign =.

I doubt if there be any passage in Homer where the word Argos stands alone, or with a characteristic epithet such as ἱππόβοτον, and where it requires any other sense than one of the three just given--the city--the north east of Peloponnesus--and (by metonymy) all Greece.

When Nestor (Il. ii. 348) denounces those Greeks who should think of returning home before the mind of Jupiter is known, and calls returning Ἄργοσδε ἰέναι, it seems indisputable that we must construe Ἄργος Greece.

When Paris says he brought the κτήματα from Argos, the most natural construction is, as the place was Sparta, and therefore not Argos in the narrow sense, from which he took them, that he means by Argos to signify Greece.

When Sisyphus dwells at Ephyre, μυχῷ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο, the word means the north eastern district Peloponnesus[650].

The word Ἄργος in the Catalogue (ii. 559) most probably means the city only.

As it is plain that in some passages it cannot mean the Peloponnesus, and as that meaning does not appear to be supported by superior probability in any place, such a meaning ought not to be admitted.

_Achaic and Iasian Argos._

It is another question how we ought to construe the phrases μέσον Ἄργος--Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, used four times--and Ἴασον Ἄργος.

The two latter are evidently analogous to Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος, which we have already found to mean Thessaly.

Of the four passages where we read the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, the two first[651] relate to the return of Agamemnon and the Greeks, and appear to admit therefore either of the limited sense of a portion of Peloponnesus as the most eminent part, or of the extended one of all Greece, better than of the intermediate one of Peloponnesus itself, with which neither Agamemnon, nor the whole body of the Greeks, had any separate and defined relation, as they had with the dominions of Agamemnon in the capacity of their supreme Chief, and perhaps with those of the Pelopid family jointly, so as to include Menelaus.

In the third case it is used of Juno, as she goes to hasten the birth of Eurystheus[652],

καρπαλίμως δ’ ἵκετ’ Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκὸν, ἔνθ’ ἄρα ᾔδη ἰφθίμην ἄλοχον Σθενέλου Περσηïάδαο.

This passage evidently admits the sense of the city, or a limited district, better than that of the Peloponnesus at large. Indeed, as the seat of the Perseid dominion is evidently intended, and as that dominion did not reach over all Peloponnesus, we may say that this could not be the meaning of the words.

But the fourth passage requires a larger signification for this phrase. It is the question of Telemachus, asking where Menelaus had been during all the time that Ægisthus was about his crime[653];

ποῦ Μενέλαος ἔην; ἢ οὐκ Ἄργεος ἦεν Ἀχαιïκοῦ, ἀλλὰ πῇ ἄλλῃ πλάζετ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους;

This seems clearly to include Sparta in Achaic Argos; and, this being so, no meaning is so suitable to it in this place as Eastern Peloponnesus. This construction is also eminently suitable to the relation between Eastern Peloponnesus and the Achæan power, which had its central seat there.

Undoubtedly Strabo treats Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος as meaning the whole of Peloponnesus (viii. 5. p. 365, ibid. 6. p. 369), but the argument from Homer’s text seems to be against him: and even he admits from Od. iii. 249, that the term applied also to Laconia in particular: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰδίως τὴν Λακωνικὴν οὕτω προσαγορευθῆναι[654].

As then it appears that the sense of Eastern Peloponnesus will suit the phrase Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκὸν in all the four passages where it is employed, while the more extended meaning of the whole Peloponnesus is required by none, and could only be even admissible in one (Od. iii. 249), we may conclude that Eastern Peloponnesus is the proper meaning of the phrase.

_Iasian Argos._

We now come to Ἴασον Ἄργος.

In Od. xviii. 245, Eurymachus the Suitor, in paying a compliment to the beauty of Penelope, says to her, you would have more suitors than you have,

εἰ παντές σε ἴδοιεν ἀν’ Ἴασον Ἄργος Ἀχαιοί.

Now it must first be admitted, that this does not refer to any country out of the Peloponnesus. For in the first place, that was the most distinguished part of the country, and the chief Achæan seat; so that the intention of this speech therefore most naturally bears upon it. But also we have nothing in Homer to connect any local use of the word Ἄργος with Middle Greece.

But if Eurymachus means nothing to the North of Peloponnesus, it is again most probable that he refers to that part of Peloponnesus with which Ithaca had most intercourse, where lay its relations of business, and of hospitality. Now this part was Western Peloponnesus, as we see from the journey of Ulysses to Ephyre (Od. i. 260); from the journey of Telemachus which, as it were, spontaneously takes that direction; from the course of public transactions implied in his speech (Od. iii. 82, cf. 72); from the χρεῖος, which Ulysses went to recover in Messene (Od. xxi. 15); from Nestor’s being the person to visit Ithaca in the matter of the great Trojan quarrel; and from the apprehension felt by the party of the Suitors, that Ulysses would forthwith repair to Elis, or to Pylos for aid. (Od. xxiv. 431.)

Just so the relations of Crete were with Eastern Peloponnesus; and therefore Helen at Troy recognises Idomeneus, because she has often seen him in Sparta. And this, I may observe in passing, is probably the reason why Ulysses, in the fictitious accounts which he gives of himself in Ithaca, is so fond of making himself a Cretan, namely that he may avoid any risk of detection, by placing his own proper whereabout at a distance beyond the ordinary range of intercourse.

Nor are we wholly without information from Homer on the subject of the original Iasus himself, from whom the name appears to be derived; and whose name we find still subsisting in Attica at the time of the _Troica_[655].

For a passage in the Eleventh Odyssey informs us that Amphion, son of Iasus[656], was a powerful prince in Minyeian Orchomenus: that his youngest daughter, the beautiful Chloris, was queen of Pylos: and that Neleus, marrying her, founded there the dynasty of the Neleids. Thus through Pylos we connect a powerful Iasid family with Western Peloponnesus, possibly five generations before the Trojan war, and at a time when we find from Homer that the Danaids or Perseus must have been reigning in Eastern Peloponnesus. This seems enough to justify putting the sense of Western Peloponnesus upon the phrase Ἴασον Ἄργος in the speech of Eurymachus.

We may justly inquire whether it is so certain, as seems to be taken for granted, that the Minyeian Orchomenus, where Amphion reigned, was the Orchomenus of Bœotia. For his daughter Chloris was sovereign of Pylos, and we must suppose that sovereignty to have been not acquired by herself, but inherited from her father. Now it is very improbable that Amphion could have been sovereign at the same time of Pylos and of the northern Orchomenos: between which intervened an Æolid family settled at the Isthmus, another race of Hellenic chiefs, the line of Portheus, in Ætolia, and perhaps also the dynasty of Cadmus in Bœotia. We have no instance in Homer of the possession by the same prince of territories not continuous. Now there was there a river Minyeius, between Pylos and Elis; in Arcadia as well as in Bœotia there was an Orchomenos at the period of Homer; it seems then probable, that the name of that town should be combined with the Minyeian name in Peloponnesus as well as in Bœotia. If it were so, the political connection with Pylos is natural, and the application of the Iasian name to Western Peloponnesus becomes still more easy of explication. But even though the Orchomenos here named be Bœotian, the case remains sufficiently clear. For it was once, or formerly (τότε) that Amphion reigned in Orchomenus; and the meaning may well be, that having in earlier life reigned there, he had afterwards accompanied the southward movement of the time, perhaps being expelled from his fat soil; and that he established, or re-established the connection between Western Peloponnesus and the Iasian name.

Lastly, the place μέσον Ἄργος seems to be equivalent to the English expression, ‘through the breadth of Argos,’ or _all over_ Argos; and though we may think that Ἄργος alone means one side of the Peloponnesus, μέσον Ἄργος may very well mean the whole. In the speech of Diomed[657] to Glaucus, it cannot mean less than this: on the other hand, from its being the counterpart of Lycia, it may perhaps not less probably signify the whole of settled Greece, and thus be the equivalent of πᾶν Ἄργος in Il. ii. 108. But the more convenient sense for Od. xv. 80 is plainly the Peloponnesus, because then it squares precisely with Hellas in the same passage, and the two together make up the whole of Greece. But without disturbing the signification of the word Hellas, as meaning Northern and Middle Greece, we might still give to μέσον Argos the force of ‘all Greece.’ The words of Menelaus would then stand as if an inhabitant of London said to his friend a foreigner, ‘I will take you through Scotland and all Britain.’ It is difficult, however, to decide absolutely between these two senses of μέσον Ἄργος. What we see plainly is, that the word Ἄργος had taken the deepest root, and a very wide range, in connection with Greek settlements, and with such settlements only.

And now with respect to the line so much criticised,

ἐγχείῃ δ’ ἐκέκαστο Πανέλληνας καὶ Ἀχαιούς[658].

The word Πανέλληνες may, we have seen, either mean the tribes of Greece beyond the Isthmus, or those of all Greece: in which latter and more likely sense it is coextensive with Ἀχαιοί. I here finally touch upon this verse along with those properly geographical, on account of the important combination which it involves.

_The Apian land._

We find in Il. i. 270, iii. 49, and in Od. vii. 25, xvi. 18, the expression ἀπίη γαίη, which some of the grammarians, and the common opinion mentioned by Strabo[659], have explained to mean the Peloponnesus, while modern scholars render it simply distant[660]. In the two passages of the Iliad, the former construction is certainly more suitable: and the combination with τηλόθεν in Il. i. 270, is tautological, flat, and un-Homeric, if ἀπίη mean merely distant. In Od. xvi. 18 either sense will serve the passage. In Od. vii. 25 (when we again have τηλόθεν) Ulysses states himself to have come ἐξ ἀπίης γαίης. As he had not come from Peloponnesus, it is assumed that this is not the meaning. I question the reasoning. Ulysses everywhere, when questioned, shows an immense fertility in fiction about himself: in every case, however, carefully reporting himself to be come from a distant spot. I see no reason therefore why we should not construe Ἀπίη γαῖα to mean the Peloponnesus; in conformity with the tradition which Æschylus[661] reports concerning Apis, and with the undoubted usage of the tragedians. As I interpret the Outer or Romance-geography of the Odyssey, the Peloponnesus would be understood by the Phæacians of Homer to be extremely remote from their country. The difference of quantity is no sufficient reason against this construction. Plainly Ἀπίη γαίη, if it be a proper name at all, means the whole Peloponnesus, and not a part of it, for Nestor in Il. i. 270 uses it so as to include the Western side, and Hector, Il. iii. 49, so as to include the Eastern.

_Geographical definitions._

I will now sum up the conclusions to which this inquiry has brought us, either by certain or by probable evidence, with respect to Homer’s geographical nomenclature for Greece at large, and for its principal members.

1. Ἀχαïὶς } Ἀχαïὶς γαῖα } invariably mean the whole of Greece. Ἀχαιῒς αἶα }

2. Ἄργος either alone, or with epithets other than those which concern geographical extension, means

(1) The city only, as in Il. iv. 52, and probably in Il. ii. 559.

(2) The immediate dominions of Agamemnon in the north and north-east of Peloponnesus, as in Od. iii. 263.

But it is possible, though by no means certain, that Ἄργος in this sense should be held to include the whole Pelopid dominions, which were looked upon as having a certain political unity, and thus to be the equivalent of Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκόν.

(3) By metonymy from this supreme and metropolitan quarter of Greece, it means the whole country.

3. The phrase πᾶν Ἄργος in Il. ii. 108 means the whole of Continental Greece.

4. The phrase μέσον Ἄργος means most probably the whole of Greece, or Greece at large; possibly the Peloponnesus only.

5. Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος is Thessaly, from Macedonia to Œta.

6. Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος means the Pelopid dominions of the Troic time, or in general words, Eastern Peloponnesus.

7. Ἴασον Ἄργος means Western Peloponnesus.

8. The word Ἕλλας means

(1) probably a portion of the dominions of Achilles, as in Il. ii. 683, ix. 395;

(2) certainly the country outside them to the southward of Phthia, down to the Isthmus of Corinth, and probably reaching northward through the rest of Thessaly: Il. ix. 447 and elsewhere;

(3) it is possible that Ἕλλας may mean all Greece in Od. i. 344, and xv. 80; but more likely that the sense is the same as in (2).

9. The phrase Ἀπίη γαίη most probably, though not certainly, means the entire Peloponnesus.

What then was this name Ἄργος, which Homer uses so much more frequently, and with so much more elasticity and diversity of sense, than any other territorial name whatever?

In the first place let us remark how rarely it is used for a city; in the strict sense of the word, we cannot be said to find it more than once. Its proper meaning is evidently a tract of country.

From this it is limited to the city to which the tract of country belonged: or it is extended to the country at large, of which the

## particular tract was the capital or governing part. Both these

significations are what are termed improper: the latter is also political, and has no relation to race, or to an eponymist, or to any physical features of soil or scenery, whether the word Ἄργος may have had such reference or not, when used in its original, proper, and usual application, to mean a district.

As previously with populations, let us now set out the various descriptions of source, to which the Homeric names of countries and places owe their origin.

They appear to be derived either

1. From an individual eponymist, as Ithaca from Ithacus, Od. xvii. 207; Dardania from Dardanus, Il. xx. 216; Ascanie from Ascanius, Il. ii. 863; while we see the intermediate stage of the process in the name Ἀπίη, joined with γαῖα, supposed to indicate the Peloponnesus, and to be derived from Apis.

2. From a race in occupation: as in the case of Ἀχαïὶς γαῖα and Ἀχαïὶς simply, from the Achæans; Ἕλλας from the Ἕλλοι; Κρήτη or Κρηταὶ (Od. xiv. 199) from the Κρῆτες.

3. From its physical features or circumstances directly, such as Αἰγίαλος from being a narrow strip along the shore of the Corinthian gulf, between the mountains and the sea: there is also a town Αἰγίαλος of the Paphlagonians, Il. ii. 855. Probably we may add Εὔβοια, Eubœa, from the adaptation of that fertile island to tillage, which afterwards made it the granary of Athens.

4. From some race occupying it: and in the cases where that race has been named from any feature of the country, then, not directly but derivatively, from the country itself.

For instance, Θρῄκη from Θρῇκες, Thracians, which word again must come from a common root with τρᾶχυς. The name Τρηχῖν has obviously a similar origin.

So again in the later Greek we find the old Αἰγίαλος named Αἰγιάλεια from the intermediate formation Αἰγιαλεῖς: and perhaps Ἄργολις from the Ἀργεῖοι, who inhabited it, and took their name from Ἄργος.

And so in Homer we have Φθίη; from that apparently comes Φθῖοι, and from this again, in the later Greek, Phthiotis.

Such then are the ordinary sources, as far as we know, of the territorial names of Homer.

The three aids which we have for judging of the meaning of the name Ἄργος are, the Homeric text, etymology, and the later tradition.

_Etymology of the word Argos._

None of these in any manner connect the name Ἄργος either with an eponymist, or with a race of inhabitants, either mediately or immediately, as its root. We can only therefore look for its origin in something related to the physical features of the country, or countries, to which it was applied.

The word ἄργος itself is frequently found in Homer otherwise than as a proper name. It is used as an adjective in the following combinations:

1. κύνες ἀργοὶ Il. i. 50.

2. βόες ἀργοὶ Il. xxiii. 30.

3. ἀργὴν χῆνα Od. xv. 161.

So also we have the compounds ἀργὴς (κέραυνος) ἀργικέραυνος, ἀργεστὴς (Νότος), ἀργενναὶ (ὀΐες, ὀθόναι), ἀργινόεις (Κάμειρος), ἀργιόδοντες (ὕες), ἀργιπόδες (κύνες), Ποδάργης (horse of Achilles).

And it is usual to give to the word ἀργὸς[662] in these several forms the several senses of

1. Swift, as in swift dogs, swift thunderbolt.

2. White, as in white goose, white (chalky) Cameirus.

3. Sleek, shining, as in sleek oxen, with glistening coats.

It is said truly, that what is swift in motion gives an appearance of shining: and what shines is in some degree akin to whiteness. But it is neither easy to say, in this view of the matter, which is the primary, and which the secondary, meaning of the word, nor what is its etymology. Nor does it show the slightest resemblance to the local name Ἄργος, which, from the variety of its applications, apart from any question of race or political connection, must have had some etymological signification.

Nor, as regards the βόες ἀργοὶ in particular, is it very easy to believe in the sleekness of the oxen in Homer’s time, (this seems to be rather an idea borrowed from the processes and experience of modern times,) or of the camp oxen of any time. Nor is the matter mended by two forced attempts, one to construe βόες ἀργοὶ as oxen having white fat within them, or again, as slow oxen. From these sources, then, we can at present obtain no light.

Now I submit that the just signification of the proper name Ἄργος is to be found by considering it as akin to the word ἔργον, which plainly appears in Homer to have agricultural labours for its primary object. And it seems pretty clear, that by the transposition of letters which so commonly occurs in popular speech, especially during the infant state of languages, the word ἄγρος, ‘a field,’ is no more than a form of Ἄργος.

K. O. Müller, as we have seen, considers that Ἄργος with the ancients means a plain[663]: I would add a plain, not as being a flat surface, but as being formed of cultivable ground, or else it means a settlement formed upon such ground.

In speaking of the word _plain_ as applied to Greece, we use it relatively, not as it would be employed in reference to Russia or Hungary, but as meaning the broader levels between the hills, and commonly towards the sea: such as those valleys of Scotland which are called _carses_, or those called _straths_.

Now in the first place I know no other meaning of the word Ἄργος which will suit its various uses in Homer as Pelasgic Argos, Achaic Argos, Iasian Argos. What is the one common physical feature of the several regions that accounts for the common factor in these three compound expressions, if it be not that of plain, that is to say, cultivable, and cultivated, or settled country?

Again, look at the relation of Ἄργος to Ἀργεῖοι. What except a physical and geographical meaning, still adhering to the word, and holding it somewhat short of the mature and familiar use of a proper name, can account for the fact that we have in the history and geography of Greece so many cases of an Argos, without Argives, that is local or provincial Argives, belonging to it? Achaic Argos indeed has Ἀργεῖοι belonging to it, but Pelasgic and Iasian Argos have none. Just so we might speak of the Highlands of Saxony, or of the Lowlands of Switzerland; but the inhabitants of the first are not known as Highlanders, nor those of the latter as Lowlanders[664].

I believe there are no phrases, which more nearly translate the words Ἄργος and Ἀργεῖοι, than Lowlands and Lowlanders respectively. For the word Lowlands means land not only lying low, but both lying low, and also being favourable for cultivation: and these ideas more truly represent the land fitted for the sort of settlement called Ἄργος, than the mere idea of level plains.

If this be the idea of the word Argos, we see the propriety of its application to the city of Argos and its district. For this city stood, as a city of the town and more open country, in a certain opposition to Mycenæ, which nestled among the hills; and which bore geographically much the same relation to Argos, as Dardania to Ilion. It afterwards fell also into the same political analogy.

In the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, Homer deals with a case where, as it is sometimes applied without an epithet, Ἄργος may justly be called a proper name, like the European _Pays-bas_; but there is no evidence of this in his ‘Pelasgic Argos,’ and ‘Iasian Argos,’ and it seems likely that he rather intends in those phrases to employ the term Argos as a word simply descriptive, and to speak of the Pelasgian Lowlands, and the Iasian Lowlands. The difference of sense is just that which we should indicate in English by the absence of the capital letter.

There is evidence that the name had not exhausted its elasticity even after Homer’s time. In later ages we find an Argos of Orestis in Macedonia; an Argos of Amphilochia in Western Greece; an Argos near Larissa in Thessaly[665], and other cases more remote. Nothing but a geographical force still adhering to the word will account for this extension.

The same is the inference to be drawn from the epithets and quasi-epithets, or descriptive phrases, applied to it by Homer. With the exception of one passage, where he gives it the political epithet[666] κλυτὸν, they are all physical; being ἱππόβοτον, πολυδίψιον, πολύπυρον, and οὖθαρ ἀρούρης. Of these four epithets, the first is in Homer peculiarly connected with the specific form and character of the country: accordingly, while it is the standing epithet of Argos, being used with it eleven times out of only fifteen in which the word has any epithet or quasi-epithet attached to it, it is never found with Achæis, or with Hellas. And the proof of its physically descriptive character lies in the passage where Telemachus gives to Menelaus an account of Ithaca;

ἐν δ’ Ἰθάκῃ οὔτ’ ἀρ’ δρόμοι εὔρεες, οὔτε τι λείμων· αἰγίβοτος, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος ἱπποβότοιο[667].

The ἱππόβοτος of Homer, again, does not point merely to fertility, but also to labour and its results; not merely to pasture, but also to grain, for the horses of Homer are fed on this as well as on herbage,

κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλεύρας[668].

Now, in referring the word Ἄργος to a common root and significancy with ἔργον, we are not bound to hold that it attains its initial vowel by junction with the particle ἀ used in its intensive sense. For we have the word, and also its derivatives, in this form, coming down to us from the old Greek. Among the four tribes of Attica which subsisted until the time of Cleisthenes[669], one was that of the Ἄργαδες or husbandmen: and in the Elian inscription supposed to date about the Fortieth Olympiad[670], or more than 600 years B. C., we have the very word ἔργον in the form ἄργον, with the digamma, in a passage which I copy,

ΑΙΤΕϜΕΠΟΣ ΑΙΤΕϜΑΡΓΟΝ

This inscription, says the Article in the _Museum Criticum_, is of older date than any other which has either been brought in copy from Greece, or is to be found on the marbles. The matter of it is a public treaty, between the Elians and some of their neighbours, concluded for an hundred years.

Another good example of the interchange of the vowels α and ε is in the word ἀρόω, which it is obvious to derive from ἔρα, the earth. In the Latin we see both forms preserved, the one in _aro_ to plough, the other in _sero_ to sow. And this latter suggests the derivation of the Greek σπείρω from a similar source.

If then the meaning of Ἄργος be an agricultural settlement, and its root the same with that of ἔργον, we need not now discuss at large whether that root be the old word ἔρα or terra, which however appears to be probable, and which accounts both for the especial reference of the word ἔργον in Homer to tillage, the oldest industry, and for the subsequent extension of its meaning to labour and its results in general.

_The etymology tested by kindred words._

Now, having this view of the words Ἄργος and ἔργον, we shall find, in the fundamental idea of labour itself, a meaning which will furnish a basis for the Homeric adjective, and for all its compounds in all their varied applications. That idea is always in relation with what is earnest, and (so to speak) strengthful; sometimes this takes the form of keenness, and then comes in the idea of swiftness in conjunction with labour: sometimes, again, it takes the form of patience, and then labour suggests slowness. The labour of a dog is swift, that of an ox is patient: hence the κύνες ἄργοι are laborious dogs, therefore swift; and hence too the βόες ἄργοι are laborious oxen, therefore slow; the office of the one being to cover space, and of the other to overcome resistance. We may bring the two senses near without any loss in either case, by calling the oxen sturdy or sedulous, and the dogs strenuous or keen.

The third sense of whiteness legitimately attaches to the effect of rapid motion upon the eye.

The sense of sleekness does not appear to be required in Homer: but it may be a derivative from that of whiteness.

By one or more of the three first senses, or by the original sense of labour in its (so to speak) integral idea, all the Homeric words may be justly rendered. Some of them will bear either the sense of swift, or that of white: for instance, ἀργὴς with κεραυνός. In Aristotle[671], de Mundo, c. 4, we have τῶν κεραυνῶν ... οἱ ταχέως διάττοντες, ἀργῆτες λέγονται. And again, ἀργεστὴς with Νότος. This may mean the fleet Notus: it may also mean white, as carrying the light white cloud from over the sea, in the sense taken by Horace, who appears to have been an accurate and careful observer of Homeric epithets; and who says,

Albus ut obscuro deterget nubila cœlo Sæpe Notus[672].

This sense of the word Argos will suit other uses of it which have not been yet named.

For instance, it will suit the ship Argo, which we may consider as swift, or, and perhaps preferably, as stout, strong, doing battle with the waves: as we now say, a good ship, or a gallant ship. Again, it suits the noble dog Argus of the Odyssey, whose character would be but inadequately represented by either patient, swift, or white. Considering this word as the adjective of the word which describes what has been well called by a writer of the present day, “noble, fruitful labour,” we at once see him before us, swift as he had been, and patient as he was, but also brave, faithful, trustful, and trustworthy. Argus the spy, named in the Ἀργειφόντης of Homer, represents one side of the early meaning of the word[673]. The adjective ἀργαλέος, exaggerating as well as isolating that element of difficulty which the root comprises, represents another: and the later word ἀργοῦντες[674], the idle, catching the idea of slowness at the point where it passes into inertness, similarly represents yet another.

Such being the case in regard to the name Ἄργος, we shall now have an easy task in dealing with Ἀργεῖοι.

Homer employs this word in four places (to speak in round numbers) for three in which he uses Δαναοί.

He employs it as an epithet, sometimes with the name of Juno, and frequently with the name of Helen.

_The Danaan Argives of Od. viii. 578._

In the Odyssey[675] we have this singular and rare juxtaposition of the words:

Ἀργείων Δαναῶν ἠδ’ Ἰλίου οἶτον ἀκούων.

Nitzsch[676] observes, that we might almost suppose the word Ἀργείων to be an epithet, and this observation is quoted by G. Crusius. Eustathius, the Scholiast, Barnes, Payne Knight, do not notice it. It seems to me more agreeable to Homeric laws to treat Ἀργείων as the substantive, and Δαναῶν as the adjective. For as Homer knows of an Achaic, an Iasian, a Pelasgic Argos, so he may consistently speak of Danaan Argives, with the latent idea that there might be, and were, other Lowlanders out of Greece. But there were not, so far as we know, any other Danaans than a single Greek dynasty.

Homer also in other places uses Δαναοὶ[677] as an adjective, with the substantives ἥρωες and αἰχμηταί. He has no corresponding use of Ἀργεῖοι: thus the old idea of a _colonus_ or farming settler seems still to colour the word, and lingers in it, even after it has grown to be in common use a proper name.

In the application of the word Ἀργείη as an epithet to Juno and Helen, he appears not to mean simply Greek but Argive Juno, Argive Helen, so that the word here is not properly the singular of Ἀργεῖοι the national name, but simply the adjective formed from Ἄργος, in the sense of that part of Peloponnesus which formed the Pelopid dominions. To these Helen belonged: and for that family, as previously for the Perseid race, Juno felt her chief anxiety, evidently because they were the political heads of Greece.

Thus the use of Argeian as an adjective seems to be quite clearly limited to a local sense of the word: and this being the case, it seems remarkable that the attention of the commentators before Nitzsch should not have been directed to the line in the Eighth Odyssey, and that Nitzsch, with ἥρωες Δαναοὶ and αἰχμηταὶ Δαναοὶ to guide him, should suggest the sense of Argive Danaans, instead of Danaan Argives.

The local use, however, of the Argeian name must not be dismissed without a more full investigation. Let us first dispose of its use for Juno and Helen.

The proof that Helen is meant to be described as not merely Greek, but as connected with Achaic Argos or Eastern Peloponnesus, has already been sufficiently[678] set forth.

As respects Juno, we shall find that her affections always centre in the house that was paramount in the chief seat of Hellenic power, the Eastern Peloponnesus. Her tenacious attachments are constantly directed to the nation, and they survive dynastic changes. Hence her keen and venturesome feeling for Eurystheus; her never dying, never sleeping hatred to his rival Hercules; her esteem for Agamemnon equally with Achilles[679], though they were so unequal in fame and valour: perhaps suggesting that Achilles was regarded by her either because he was necessary for the purposes of Agamemnon, or because he was closely allied to the chief Achæan stock[680]. Hence it is that, when he has assumed his arms[681], she thunders in his honour: and hence her especial love for the three cities, which were the symbols of Greek power, Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ[682]. So intense is her attachment, that she could wish to be the actual mother of the Greeks, even as she would readily devour the Trojans upon occasion[683]. Hence, once more, even in the Odyssey, where she is almost a mute, it is mentioned, that Agamemnon[684] came safe across the sea, for Juno protected him. This is quite enough to fix the sense of Ἀργείη, when it is applied to Juno, as a local sense.

In fact, Homer’s use of this word with a restrained and local sense is not only clear, but most carefully defined, both as to time and as to place.

While in the army before Troy he freely interchanges Danaan, Argive, and Achæan, as they are near enough to identity for his purpose, he never applies Danaan at all to the Greeks at home, and employs the other two names with the most accurate discrimination.

_Transition from Argeians to Achæans._

The Argeian name is confined in place to the Eastern Peloponnesus, and in time to the Perseid epoch. Upon the transfer of the sovereignty to the Pelopid house, the Argeian name ceases to be applied to their immediate subjects. Let us now examine passages which may illustrate the case.

1. Two or nearly three generations before the _Troica_, in the time when Bellerophon was young, Prœtus ruled over the Ἀργεῖοι,

πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γὰρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν[685].

Now Prœtus was certainly not lord of Greece. There was no lord paramount of Greece before the Pelopids: and near the time of Prœtus we have Eurystheus, Œneus and his line, Cadmus and his line, Neleus and his line, Minos and his line, as well as probably other thrones, each in its own place. But Prœtus falls within the period of the Perseids, and within the local circumscription of the Eastern Peloponnesus where they reigned.

2. But neither is Eurystheus spoken of by Homer as sovereign of Greece; though he is king of the Argives[686],

ὃς Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάξει.

For when Juno fraudulently asks and obtains from Jupiter the promise that the person to be born that day shall enjoy a certain sovereignty, it is not over the Argives, but over the περικτίονες:

ἦ μὲν τὸν πάντεσσι περικτιόνεσσιν ἀνάξειν ὅς κεν ἐπ’ ἤματι τῷδε πέσῃ μετὰ ποσσὶ γυναικός.

Thus the promise is the babe shall reign over περικτίονες, a word clearly inapplicable to the whole of that straggling territory, which was occupied irregularly by the Greeks. But when the fulfilment is claimed, it is that he shall reign over Ἀργεῖοι. Therefore the two names are coextensive, and accordingly Ἀργεῖοι does not mean all Greeks; for example, it does not include the line of Cadmus then ruling in Bœotia.

3. But we come down to the time of Tydeus, who was lord of Argos during the epoch of the Pelopid sovereigns. And now we find that his subjects cease to be called Ἀργεῖοι (see Il. v. 803. iv. 384) in the legends, where Homer observes a peculiar nicety in the application of these important words.

_Local sense of the former name retained._

4. Still the Argeian name continues to preserve its local application to the inhabitants of Argos and its district, or of Achaic Argos.

At the games on the death of Patroclus, Idomeneus thinks he discerns Diomed coming in as the winner, and he describes him thus:

δοκέει δέ μοι ἔμμεναι ἀνὴρ Αἴτωλος γενέην, μετὰ δ’ Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάσσει[687].

It is plain that here Idomeneus means among Argives, and not among Greeks.

1. Because not Diomed was lord among the Greeks, but Agamemnon.

2. Because Diomed was lord over a part of the Argives.

3. Because the word is used in evident contradistinction to, and correspondence with, the foregoing word Αἴτωλος, which is undoubtedly local.

Again, when we are told that Orestes made a funeral feast for the Ἀργεῖοι[688], we may probably presume that we have here again the local sense.

Thus we see plainly enough the history of the rise of the Argive name. Belonging to the subjects of the ruling part of Greece, it grows so as to be applicable to all Greeks, in cases where no confusion can arise from its being thus employed. Thus the Roman name became applicable to Campanians or Calabrians as subjects of Rome, in contradistinction to Germans, Dacians, or Parthians; but if the subject in hand were domestic and Italian, the domestic distinction would naturally revive. Even so Homer’s Greeks are all Argeians in the _Troica_: but at home they have their local meaning, like Cadmeans, Ætolians, Pylians, Elians, Epeans, Arcadians, Locrians, and also, as we shall find, Achæans.

It is at the very period of the local prevalence of the Argive name, that we find also from Homer unequivocal appearances of a Cretan empire, circumscribing it by sea, and possibly more or less by land, though perhaps the Minoan power and dynasty may not at once have acquired its Grecian character. If then, with respect to the word Ἀργεῖοι, we see that it was originally of limited and local application; we have no reason whatever to suppose that the Danaan name could ever have been of wider scope. Two questions then arise.

First, why does Homer use the Danaan and Argive names as national, when they were only local?

Secondly, the priority of the Danaan name being clear, as we see that the Danaan dynasty preceded that one whose subjects were called Argives, why did the Argive name supplant or succeed the Danaan?

The first question will be resumed hereafter, but I will now touch upon the second.

The name Danaan, in all likelihood, was that of a dynasty originating beyond seas; and if so, it could not well, until softened by the mellow haze of distance, be more popular with the Greeks, when they had awakened under Hellic influence to a full consciousness of national life, than it would have been with the English in the last century to be called Hanoverians or Brunswickers.

The Danaid line ceased, when Perseus came to the throne, as he was descended on the father’s side from another source.

Nothing could be more natural, than that with this change of dynasty an old and merely dynastic name should disappear. But why should it be succeeded by the name Ἀργεῖοι?

_Relation of Argeian and Pelasgian names._

I hope it will not be thought too bold, if, founding myself on the probable, perhaps I might say, plain resemblance of meaning between Πελασγοὶ and Ἀργεῖοι, I conjecture that on the disappearance from use of the name Δαναοὶ, instead of falling back upon the old agricultural name Πελασγοὶ, which had by a Danaan conquest become that of a subordinate, if not servile class, the people may have come to bear the name Ἀργεῖοι; borrowed, like the other, from the region they inhabited, and from their habits of life in it, and of equal force, but without the taint which attached to the designation of a depressed race.

In this view, the name Ἀργεῖοι may be defined to be the Hellic equivalent of the old Pelasgic appellation of the people of the country: and it naturally takes root upon the passing away of the Danaan power, within the dominions of those to whom that power had been transferred.

I shall hereafter have occasion to consider further, what was the first historic use of the Argeian name.

There are signs in the later Greek of the affinity, which I have here supposed, between the Pelasgian and Argeian names, and of the assumption of the functions of the former by the latter. I do not enter on the question of etymological identity, but I refer to similarity of application alone.

_Illustrations of the Etymology._

In Suidas we find the proverb Ἀργείους ὁρᾷς, with this explanation; παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν ἀτενῶς καὶ καταπληκτικῶς ὁρώντων. Now we know nothing of the Argives, that is, the inhabitants of Argolis, which would warrant the supposition that they were of particularly savage and wild appearance. But if Ἀργεῖοι, as has been shown, originally meant settlers in an agricultural district, and if in process of time the population gathered into towns, in lieu of their old manner of living κωμηδὸν, then, in consequence of the change, Ἀργεῖοι would come to mean rustics, as opposed to townspeople, and from this the transition would be slight and easy to the sense of a wild and savage aspect, as in the proverb.

Let us compare with it the Latin word _agrestis_. This I take to be precisely similar, indeed identical, etymologically, with Ἀργεῖος. The point of divergence is when Ἄργος by transposition becomes ἀγρὸς, whence are _ager_ and _agrestis_. Materially this Latin word is in still closer correspondence with ἀργηστὴς, a Greek derivative of ἄργος. Ideally, it passes through the very same process as has been shown in the case of Ἀργεῖος, and here it is strongly supported by the common Homeric word ἄγριος, rude or savage, which comes from ἄγρος, made ready by transposition to yield such a derivative.

This name we find not only as an adjective, but likewise as a proper name. It is applied to a brother of Œneus and Melas, a son of Portheus[689]: and in these names we appear to see described the first rude Hellic invaders of Ætolia, at an epoch three generations before the _Troica_. The _agrestis_, or agricultural settler, next comes to mean the class of country folk, as opposed to the inhabitants of towns or _urbani_; and then, while _urbanus_, with its Greek correlative ἀστεῖος, passes on to acquire the meaning of cultivated and polished, _agrestis_, on the other hand, following a parallel movement with Ἀργεῖος, and in the opposite direction, comes to mean uneducated, coarse, wild, barbarous. Thus Ovid says of the river Achelous, when he had been mutilated by the loss of his horn in the combat with Hercules,

Vultus Achelous agrestes Et lacerum cornu mediis caput abdidit undis[690].

Thus Cicero, in the Tusculans, after a description of the battles of the Spartan youths, carried on not only with fists and feet, but with nails and teeth, asks, _Quæ barbaria India (~al.~ barbaries Indica) vastior atque agrestior?_

We also find in Suidas the phrase Ἀργεῖοι φῶρες, and this explanation: Ἐπὶ τῶν προδήλως πονηρῶν· οἱ γὰρ Ἀργεῖοι ἐπὶ κλοπῇ κωμῳδοῦνται. Ἀριστοφάνης Ἀναγύρῳ.

No part of this play remains, so that we are left to general reasoning: but it seems a most natural explanation of this proverb or phrase, that the word Ἀργεῖος, meaning wild and savage, should be applied to banditti: theft in the early stages of society, always frequenting solitary places, as in the later ones, it rather draws to the most crowded haunts of men.

Again, Æschines, in the Περὶ Παραπρεσβείας, brings the grossest personal charges against Demosthenes, for offences, which he says had brought upon him various nicknames. Among these, he thus accuses him: Ἐκ παιδῶν δὲ ἀπαλλαττόμενος, καὶ δεκαταλάντους δίκας ἑκαστῷ τῶν ἐπιτρόπων λαγχάνων, Ἄργας ἐκλήθη. This passage is noticed by both Suidas and Hesychius under Ἀργὰς, and it is explained ὄνομα ὀφέως. A serpent, either generally or of some particular kind, had, it seems, the name of Ἀργὰς, which we can easily derive from ἄργος, taken in the same sense as that in which it became the name of Argus the spy. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field[691].’ But this does not seem to satisfy the intention of the highly vituperative passage in Æschines. This imputation of extreme cleverness or craft would not have been perhaps a very effective one in Greece. I think he more probably means to call Demosthenes a swindler or plunderer, _homo trium literarum_, from whom his guardians were trying to recover, and who was likely to be exposed, not like the serpent, to get off: and in this sense the word Ἀργὰς at once attaches itself to the reported passage in Aristophanes, and through that to the old meaning of _agrestis_ or Ἀργεῖος. Nor is Ἀργεῖος, a thief, more remote in sense from Ἀργεῖος, a rural settler, than is _paganus_, an idolater, from _paganus_, a villager.

I will take yet one more illustration, Hesychius under Ἀργεῖοι gives this explanation; ἐκ τῶν Εἱλώτων οἱ πιστευόμενοι οὕτως ἐλέγοντο, ἢ λαμπροί. Now the sense of λαμπροὶ might easily be derived from the primitive sense, in the same way as that of whiteness. But it is quite distinct from the explanation respecting that select and trusted class of Helots, who were called Ἀργεῖοι. This usage both serves to explain history, and is explained by it. Ἀργεῖοι was the name of the Greek citizen in Eastern Peloponnesus under the Perseids; it appears in part to have retained its local force throughout the period of the Pelopids; for though in the legend of Tydeus the inhabitants of Argolis we at least find the name Ἀχαιοὶ among them, yet in the Twenty-third Iliad, and in the Third Odyssey, they are called Ἀργεῖοι. In the local usage, then, the Helot meaning a serf, the emancipated Helot would be a citizen, an Ἀργεῖος. But neither serfship nor citizenship were in those days rigidly defined, and the one ran into the other. What could under such circumstances be more natural, than that any Helot who was separated from his brethren, by being taken into the confidence of his master, and living on easy terms with him, should acquire the name of Ἀργεῖος, and, that the class who had thus obtained it in a somewhat peculiar sense, that is to say, the sense of a free rural settler, or (so to speak) freeholder, should continue to bear it as descriptive of their own position, even when it had ceased to be generally applicable to the free Greeks of that particular district? which of course it could no longer be when the family and dynastic tie between Argolis and Lacedæmon came to be dissolved.

And if I am right in supposing that even in Homer[692] the name Ἀργεῖοι evidently leans towards the masses, and that of Ἀχαιοὶ towards the select few or chiefs, such a distinction is in marked harmony with the whole of this inquiry respecting the force of the former phrase.

_Different extent of Ἀργεῖοι and Ἄργος._

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

_The Achæans._

_Particulars of the use of the Achæan name._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Signs of its leaning to the aristocracy._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

τισείαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν[702].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Its application within Ithaca._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Local uses of the Achæan name._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

οἵτινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

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

οὗτοι ἀρ’ ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

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

_The name Παναχαιοι._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

τῷ κέν οἱ τυμβὸν μὲν ἐποίησαν Παναχαιοί,

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

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

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

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

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

_The Æolid and Æolian names._

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

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

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

_The Heraclids in Homer._

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

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

_Descent of the Æolids._

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

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

γίγνωσκε θεοῦ γόνον ἠῢν ἐόντα[747].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These genealogies are in perfect keeping with what Homer tells us of the Neleid line. Tyro, he says, fell in love with Enipeus. In the likeness of that river, Neptune had access to her, and she bore to him two sons, Pelias and Neleus. Neleus is the father of Nestor: and Nestor stands one generation senior to Eumelus; for he was in his third tri-decadal period[752], if the expression may be allowed, during the

## action of the Iliad. Thus we have (as before), 3. Tyro; 4. Neleus; 5.

Nestor; 6. Nestor. The maternal genealogy of Eumelus brings us exactly to the same point: for Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, was married to his father Admetus[753].

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

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

_Earliest Hellenic thrones in Greece._

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

1. The house of Perseus.

2. That of Sisyphus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Use of the Danaan and Argeian names poetical._

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

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

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

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

This may be considered as the _rationale_ of the common and palpably manufactured tradition respecting Hellen and his family, of which we have the earliest form in Hesiod.

_Summary of the Evidence._

Our conclusions respecting the names by which Homer describes the inhabitants of Greece may now be summed up as follows:

1. We set out from the point at which Greece is, probably for the first time, settled by a race given to tillage and pacific habits, under the general name of Pelasgians, with subdivision under minor names of

## particular tribes, or partially and locally intermixed with fragments

of other races.

2. A dynasty of foreign origin, in a portion of Greece which then became, and ever after continued to be most famous, leads the march of events; and, apparently without displacing the Pelasgians themselves, yet seems to have displaced, in a certain quarter, the Pelasgic by the Danaan name; at any rate, it attains to such celebrity, that its history, in the eye of Homer, fills the whole breadth of its own epoch, and its name stands in after time, poetically at least, for a national title.

3. An Hellenic dynasty of Perseids, belonging to the Greek Peninsula, follows this dynasty; and, effacing the trace of foreign rule, governs its subjects under the Argeian or Argive name; which, without reviving the title of the Pelasgi, a word now becoming or become subordinate, yet like that title is founded on the physical character of the regions in which the population was settled, and upon the employments suited thereto.

4. Next appears upon the scene the Achæan name, which bears no mark of relationship to the soil, or to any particular employment, or to any

## particular eponymist, but appears to be the designation of a race, not

indeed foreign, yet new to the Peloponnesus.

5. A warlike and highly gifted race gradually pervade different parts of Greece under this name: the Pelopids, its ruling family, possessing themselves of the throne of the Perseids, attain, perhaps through the extended sympathy of Achæan blood, to a national supremacy. The Achæans are, in fact, become the Greeks of the Troic age. They include Æolids and Æacids, Argives, Bœotians, Ætolians, Epeans, Abantes, Dorians, Arcadians, Ionians, and all the other local tribes, as well as the mass of old Pelasgians, who constitute the working population (so to speak) of the country; some of them by virtue of blood, and the rest by that political union, in which the Achæans had an undisputed ascendancy.

6. All the characteristics of this race, social and religious, and its close geographical proximity to, if not indeed its identity with, the first-named or Myrmidon Hellenes of Homer, appear to derive it from the North, to dissociate it from the Pelasgic, and to unite it with the Hellic stock.

7. Time passes on; we lose the guiding hand of Homer; but universal tradition assures us that the Dorians, emerging, like those who had preceded them, from the cradle of the nation, lead another and the last great Hellenic migration southward; the Pelopids are driven from the throne of that which may be termed the metropolitan region of Greece; they migrate to an inferior seat, with their followers, and become the obscure heads of a secondary State: and the name of Hellenes, belonging to all the great Greek tribes in common, whether of Achæan, Æolid, or Dorian blood or connection, becomes the grand historical designation of the nation at large.

8. After perhaps eight hundred years of fame and freedom for Hellas, the iron hand of Roman power descends upon her at a time when the old Achæan name has revived by means of a democratic confederacy, and has once more overspread[758] the Peloponnesus. From this time, Hellas takes her place in history only as a minor portion of the Roman empire, even while, by an inward process, she is asserting her intellectual supremacy[759], and moulding the literature and philosophy of her conquerors. But to them politically she is no more than an appendage of the _Magna Græcia_, whose glory it is to be a part of imperial Italy, and whose name the land of Homer’s song must now assume in virtue of a double relationship; the first, that of their common social base, the old Pelasgi, of whom the Greeks (Γραïκοὶ) were probably a part; and the second, that of a more recent colonization. Thus the Graic or Greek name, having existed, but never having emerged to what may be called visibility in Hellas, travels round to it again by the route of Italy, and finally becomes predominant in this its earliest seat.

Of this intermixture and succession of names dependent on the fusion of races, and on political supremacy, we have sufficient example in our own island. It has been inhabited by Britons, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. All came more or less as conquerors, one following upon the other. But two names only have left their mark, Britons and Angles: all the others, including the last or Norman conquerors, are submerged. So it has been with the succession of Pelasgians, Achæans, Hellenes, Greeks. Each of these names historically superseded the one before it. Apart from them, by the high privilege of Poetry, stand their names in another combination: the Iliad and Odyssey shew us Danaans, Argeians, and Achæans, as in the main synonymous before Troy: yet each with its own leaning, which makes Δαναοὶ most properly and by preference ‘the soldiery,’ Ἀργεῖοι, ‘the masses,’ and Ἀχαιοὶ, ‘the chiefs.’

It still remains to observe the immediately subsequent literary history of these three great appellatives, which the _fiat_ of Homer made so famous.

Hesiod and the minor Greek poets afford us the only satisfactory illustration of actual usage, because the tragedians may probably have sought, in treating heroic subjects, to employ the nomenclature of the heroic age. The other poets spoke, of course, according to their own respective ages.

In Hesiod we do not find Δαναοὶ at all: Ἀργεῖος only in the singular for Juno: Ἀχαιοὶ is once used for the Greeks collectively, in a retrospective passage referring to the assembly at Aulis[760]. He uses Πανέλληνες[761] in the same poem with the same sense. An important passage of Strabo[762] testifies, that both Hesiod and Archilochus were acquainted with the use of the names Ἕλληνες and Πανέλληνες for the Greeks at large; and refers to works of theirs, now lost, by way of example as to the latter term. Both Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες are freely used in Simonides, who also has Ἀργεῖοι for the Argives only. And generally these old writers, coming next after Hesiod, knew nothing of the use of Ἀργεῖοι, or even of Ἀχαιοὶ, for the whole nation, while the word Δαναοὶ is not found in them at all.

This is strongly confirmatory, as it appears to me, of the propositions I have endeavoured to establish.

Among the tragedians the name Ἀχαιὸς, with its derivatives, used to some extent by Æschylus, progressively declines: the Danaan name holds its ground rather better, and Ἀργεῖος better still; though all are eclipsed by the great historical name of Hellenes, which probably had enjoyed an undisputed prevalence from the time of the Dorian conquest. Thus, for poetical use, dealing with the events and characters of the heroic age, they properly fall back upon the names which Homer employed.

_Its value as primitive history._

From these successions of name, whether the particular appellation be founded upon lineage or upon physical incidents, it is not unreasonable to hold that we may draw the outlines of a primitive history, at least with more confidence and satisfaction than by efforts to compound and piece together the miscellaneous and promiscuous traditions of many ages and places, set wide apart from one another; in respect to which, even where we have not to lament the gnawing power of Time, we, at least, know that the faculties both of exaggeration and of invention, stimulated by vanity, rivalry, and self-interest in many other forms, have been at work. It is better to deal with slighter relics, of which we know the _bona fides_, than with an abundance of such as have been falsified. Besides, when we have effectually exhausted the power of the first, we may much more profitably use the subsidiary lights which the second will afford us. And the tendency of an attempt to invest the Homeric text with an unequivocal supremacy, is to substitute for complete and symmetrical systems, in which the hewn stone and the trash are not distinguishable one from another, very slight and partial indeed, but yet authoritative fragments and outlines, all the intervals of which are filled up by avowed conjecture. This conjecture is without a pretence to authority properly so called, but it is, at any rate, both kept visibly apart from what is authoritative, and likewise founded upon the suggestions which even fragmentary testimony, when genuine and near the source, is well qualified to make.

And the succession of names is in effect of itself almost a political history. For the names of nations are not arbitrarily changed, though such things have been done to particular cities within the dominion of

## particular states. The names of races, especially of races disposed,

like the Greeks, to knit themselves closely with the past, are cherished as a material portion of their patrimony. When they alter, it is for some great and commanding political reason. Such as, for example, if some tribe or family, previously not advanced beyond its fellows, in some great national exigency becomes invested with the responsibility of acting for the whole body, and thus grows to be as well its representative and organ in all external relations, as also the representative of its inward life: or when some conquering dynasty and host have by the strong hand entered in upon prior occupants of the soil, and, reducing them to dependence or to servitude more or less qualified, or narrowing the circle of their possessions, have taken into their own custody, together with the best lands of the country, the whole range of public affairs, and have imposed laws upon the vanquished, and imparted to them manners. In this case, the different elements are welded into a political unity, by a power proceeding from that race which among them has possessed the greater physical and martial force. But unless there be more than the merely convulsive effort of conquest, unless deep roots be struck into the soil, and sharper furrows drawn upon it than the spear alone can carve, or than the wave of a mere deluge traces, unless, in a word, there be a predominant organizing faculty, the effect will not be permanent; and the crude mass of mere strength will sink down amid the surrounding milder, but more enduring and more prevailing impulses. In some instances it has been so: the body, which has been stronger in the hand, has proved weaker in the intellectual and moral, that is to say, the enduring, elements of power. The undying yet daily influences and sympathies of peace wear down the convulsive vibrations, which the shock of war and conquest have communicated to the social fabric. Victory must end in possession, like toil in sleep. Possession implies the dispersion of the conquerors, and, in such cases as these, their free intermixture with the vanquished. Ties of neighbourhood, of commerce, of marriage, ties belonging to all the transactions of life, are gradually multiplied between the new comers and the old; and by a gentle process, experience and opinion gradually decide, not imperiously in the spirit of party, but insensibly for the benefit of all, what laws, what manners, what language[763], what religion shall predominate. The fate of the name follows that of the institutions and habits with which it was connected; and the old designation prevails ultimately over the new, or the new over the old, in proportion as the older inhabitants have contributed a larger or a smaller share towards the common national life resulting from the combination; in proportion as the newly arrived receive more of impression than they impart, or impart more than they receive.

FOOTNOTES:

[613] Strabo, pp. 372, 383.

[614] Il. ii. 494. xiii. 685. vid. sup. p. 243.

[615] Il. iv. 385. 191.

[616] Il. xi. 670-761.

[617] v. 759.

[618] Inf. p. 392.

[619] Od. iv. 184, 296.

[620] See inf. sect. ix.

[621] Il. vi. 292. Od. xxii. 227.

[622] Il. iii. 199 et alibi.

[623] Il. iii. 236. Od. xi. 298.

[624] Inf. pp. 410, 11.

[625] Od. v. 333.

[626] Il. xiv. 319.

[627] Il. xix. 116.

[628] Il. ii. 108.

[629] Inf. sect. x.

[630] Od. xi. 271.

[631] See inf. sect. ix.

[632] Fragm. of the Danais, Düntzer, Fragm. der Epischen Poesie, p. 3. It has been argued by E. Curtius (_Ionier vor der Ionischen Wanderung_, pp. 11-13), that there were settlers on the Egyptian sea-board, belonging to the Ionian race, and to the same stock with the Hellenes. From among such settlers, whether Ionian or not, it seems likely that the immigrants from Egypt to Greece might have proceeded.

[633] Il. vi. 158.

[634] Hes. Fragm. lviii. and Scut. Herc. 216. 229.

[635] Sup. sect. iii.

[636] Eurip. Ar. Fr. ii. 7.

[637] Od. i. 344.

[638] Il. ii. 108.

[639] Il. iii. 75, 258.

[640] Il. vi. 224.

[641] Il. vii. 363.

[642] Il. xii. 70.

[643] Il. i. 254, and vii. 124.

[644] Il. xi. 770.

[645] Od. xi. 166 and 481. See also Od. xxiii. 68.

[646] Od. xiii. 249.

[647] Od. xxi. 107.

[648] Od. xv. 223.

[649] Od. xv. 238.

[650] See also Il. xiii. 378. Od. xv. 224, 239.

[651] Il. ix. 141, 283.

[652] Il. xix. 115.

[653] Od. iii. 249.

[654] It is curious that Strabo should say in viii. 6, that Homer often marks Ἄργος by the epithet ἵππιον, as well as ἱππόβοτον, when the former word does not occur at all in the Homeric Poems.

[655] Il. xv. 332.

[656] Od. xi. 281. E. Curtius (‘Ionier,’ p. 22 et seqq.) connects Iasus, Amphion, Iaolkos, Jason, with the Ionian race.

[657] Il. vi. 224.

[658] Il. ii. 530.

[659] Strabo viii. p. 371.

[660] Heyne on Il. i. 270. Buttmann Lexil. in voc. Crusius ad locc.

[661] Suppl. 277.

[662] See Scott and Liddell, in voc. Damm Lex. Hom. in voc. Crusius Il. xxiii. 30. Nitzsch on Od. ii. 11, and Hermann quoted by him.

[663] Orchomenus und die Minyer, p. 119. See also E. Curtius ‘Ionier,’ p. 17.

[664] Strabo found in his own time, and has reported it as the custom of the ‘moderns,’ that the Argive plain passed by the name of Ἄργος, and not the city only.

[665] Cramer’s Greece, i. 197. 385. ii. 10. Strabo ix. p. 440.

[666] Il. xxiv. 437.

[667] Od. iv. 606.

[668] Il. v. 196. viii. 560.

[669] Grote’s Hist.

[670] See _Museum Criticum_, vol. i. p. 536, and Marsh’s Horæ Pelasgicæ, p. 70.

[671] Steph. Lex.

[672] Carm. I. vii. 15.

[673] See Nitzsch on Od. i. 38 for his etymology of Argeiphontes; but not for his etymology of Argus, which he simply refers to Argos.

[674] Soph. Fr. 288.

[675] Od. viii. 578.

[676] In loc.

[677] Il. ii. 110, 256. xv. 733. xii. 419.

[678] Sup. p. 353, 4.

[679] Il. i. 196.

[680] Inf. p. 417.

[681] Od. xi. 45.

[682] Il. iv. 52.

[683] Od. iv. 35.

[684] Od. iv. 515.

[685] Il. vi. 158.

[686] Il. xix. 122.

[687] Il. xxiii. 470.

[688] Od. iii. 309.

[689] Il. xiv. 115.

[690] Ov. Met. ix. 96.

[691] Gen. iii. 1.

[692] See inf. p. 410.

[693] Sup. p. 357.

[694] See inf. sect. ix.

[695] Il. i. 2, 12, 15, 17, 22.

[696] Il. i. 42.

[697] Il. i. 81.

[698] See sup. p. 380.

[699] Hist. Gr. Lit. xv. 5. vol. ii. p. 77.

[700] Il. i. 15, 22.

[701] i. 26-32.

[702] i. 42.

[703] i. 118.

[704] ii. 354.

[705] Il. i. 123, 127.

[706] i. 237.

[707] i. 78.

[708] iii. 167, 226.

[709] Od. x. 14.

[710] Od. iii. 188, 9.

[711] Od. xiv. 96.

[712] Od. xxiv. 377, and 205-7.

[713] Od. xvi. 118.

[714] Od. xix. 394.

[715] Od. iv. 798.

[716] Od. xvii. 205-7.

[717] Od. ix. 22.

[718] Od. xviii. 299.

[719] Od. xxii. 243.

[720] Od. xxi. 210. xxiv. 354. 377. 428.

[721] Od. i. 394. 401. ii. 87. 90. 106. 112. 115. xviii. 301, et alibi.

[722] Od. ii. 51. xvi. 122.

[723] Od. ii. 386. xv. 545.

[724] Od. xvi. 114.

[725] Od. xxiv. 463.

[726] Od. ii. 7.

[727] Od. viii. 11.

[728] Il. ii. 624.

[729] Od. xix. 175-7.

[730] Il. iii. 232.

[731] Il. xi. 671, 94, 732, 7. xi. 687, 724, 37, 53, 59.

[732] Il. ii. 562.

[733] Pausanias ii. 321.

[734] Il. ix. 300.

[735] Il. i. 85-91.

[736] B. viii. c. 1. p. 333.

[737] Hom. Il. vol. vii. p. 711.

[738] See inf. sect. ix.

[739] Sup. p. 352.

[740] Polyb. b. ii. c. 38.

[741] Müller, Dorians, ii. 11. 6.

[742] Il. ii. 653. 665. 678. v. 628.

[743] Müller ii. 11. 10.

[744] Sup. p. 88.

[745] Inf. sect. x.

[746] Il. vi. 154, 5.

[747] Ibid. 191.

[748] Od. xi. 235-7.

[749] Inf. sect. ix.

[750] Fragm. xxviii.

[751] Il. vi. 154, 197, 206.

[752] Il. i. 250.

[753] Il. ii. 714.

[754] Sup. p. 364.

[755] Thuc. iv. 78.

[756] On Od. iii. 4.

[757] Il. ii. 101-8.

[758] Polyb. ii. c. 38.

[759] Hor. Ep. II. i. 156. _Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit._

[760] Ἔργα, ii. 269.

[761] Ibid. ii. 146.

[762] Strabo, viii. 6. p. 370.

[763] The mode of this process, with reference to language, is beautifully exhibited for the case of Spain, in Ticknor’s Spanish Literature, Appendix A. (vol. iii.)

SECT. IX.

_On the Homeric title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν._

_Difference between Epithets and Titles._

Both in modern society, and in the forms of modern language, the distinction is a familiar one, which separates between descriptive affixes or epithets, and titles properly so called.

A descriptive affix, be it substantive, like Δαναοὶ αἰχμηταὶ, or adjective, like Δαναοὶ φιλοπτόλεμοι, describes a quality, and challenges from the reader, like any other phrase conveying an idea, assent to the justice of its description. These descriptive affixes have a tendency, from repeated use, to grow into _formulæ_, and then at length they approximate to the nature of titles.

But a title is quite a different thing from a descriptive affix. A title is the current coin of language, which is intended to pass from mouth to mouth without examination. It is like a pronoun, having for its office simply to indicate, or to stand for, a particular person. It is the index of a rank or office, a thing determinate in its nature, like an unit of number: and it has no relation, when once fixed as a title, to personal character, though in its origin it may have been founded on the real or presumed existence of personal qualities. Like a descriptive affix, a title may be either adjective, as ‘most noble,’ or substantive, as ‘marquis.’

Titles evidently presume a certain progress in the organization of political society; while descriptive epithets must be used, in order to meet the purposes of human speech, even in its first stages.

This degree of progress must have been attained in the time of Homer; for the use of titles in the poems, as well as of descriptive epithets, can be clearly made out.

Among the descriptive epithets of Homer we find, of substantives, ἡγεμόνες, ἀριστῆες, and also βασιλεῖς, ἀοιδοί. Of adjectives, applied to classes, σκηπτοῦχοι (βασιλῆες), ὑπερμενέες (βασιλῆες), θεῖοι (ἀοιδοί): and applied to persons, ἐχεφρὼν Πηνελόπεια, Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος, πολύμητις Ὀδύσσευς: and many more.

In modern phraseology, duke, earl, baron, knight, esquire, are titles: nobles, clergy, freeholders, burgesses, are descriptive phrases. Of a descriptive epithet or affix which has grown to be a title, we may find instances among those just cited; knight (_knecht_) meant originally a servant, then a person performing particular service to the king; and esquire (_scudiero_, _écuyer_) meant a person who bore the arms of a knight, particularly his shield. In process of time these became titles. Again, words may hang doubtfully upon the confine between title and epithet; as the much criticised expressions of the English Common Prayer Book, ‘(our) most religious and gracious (king).’

We find in Homer that the word βασιλεὺς, a king, had already begun to pass from the function of a mere descriptive word towards that of a title; for, though rarely, he attaches it to the names of individuals, besides freely using it without them; and it is an usual note of titles properly so called, that they can, even if substantives, either be combined with the name of the person, or, in addressing them, substituted for it. In the Iliad we find Ἀλεξάνδρῳ βασιλῆι, and in the Odyssey Ἔχετον βασιλῆα. Again, we find βασίλεια used in the Odyssey in the vocative[764], which in like manner marks it as a title.

The word ἄναξ, again, in Homer, which must on no account be confounded with βασιλεὺς[765], is commonly a descriptive epithet, nearly equivalent to our word _lord_, and, like it, having an extraordinary elasticity of sense; for as a person may now be lord, so he might then be ἄναξ, of a kingdom, a people, a field, a mine, a slave, a horse, or a dog. Instances are countless. Sometimes the meaning is lord, or master, relatively to a particular object, as of the horses of Nestor,

οἱ δὲ ἄνακτος ὑποδδείσαντες ὁμοκλὴν....[766]

Sometimes it means in the abstract a class of persons,

οἷοί τε ἀνάκτων παῖδες ἔασιν.[767]

where the ἀνάκτων παῖδες nearly corresponds with our ‘children of the higher orders,’ i.e. the masters of slaves.

On the other hand, in reference to the immortals, ἄναξ is sometimes a title: as in Il. xvi. 233,

Ζεῦ ἄνα, Δωδώναιε, Πελασγικέ.

_Examples of titles._

There are, however, in Homer various words which are undoubtedly and uniformly titular. Such are in particular the adjectives Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, which are very nearly equivalent in power to the phrase ‘Royal Highness’ of the present day. They commonly accompany the name of the individual, or of the class, to which they belong: and they are confined, with one single exception, in the Iliad, to persons of the highest known rank, that of βασιλεὺς or king. The exception is Phœnix, who is in one place addressed by Achilles as γέραιε Διοτρεφές. But Achilles says this χαριζόμενος, when petting and coaxing the old man, and therefore the instance does not destroy the force of the general rule.

In one place we have ὁ Διογενὴς[768] used for Achilles in the third person without his name: which still more strikingly marks the word as a title. Also Διοτρεφὴς is not unfrequently used in the vocative, without, as well as with, the name of the person to whom it is addressed. It may possibly be worth notice, that these words, Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, are never applied to Agamemnon, as if they had, again like the phrase ‘Royal Highness,’ a limit upwards as well as downwards, and were not applicable to the supreme head of the nation. There is indeed one passage where Agamemnon is addressed as Διοτρεφὴς, but it is in the universally suspected[769] νεκυΐα of the Twenty-fourth Odyssey. Plainly this fact cannot be referred to metrical considerations, even as to Διοτρεφὴς, because either in the genitive, or in the vocative, it would easily have been made available: especially in the latter inflexion, for Agamemnon is addressed vocatively some five and twenty times in the poems. I admit that Ulysses may allude to him in the line,

θυμὸς δὲ μέγας ἐστὶ Διοτρεφέος βασιλῆος[770].

But the phrase here is more abstract than personal: it is perhaps as we should say, ‘our royal master.’

The word βασιλεὺς may have borne originally a merely descriptive character. But it has only partial traces of that character still adhering to it, as it is used in the Iliad. The chief note of such a sense, that I can find, is, that it is used in the comparative and superlative to distinguish the Pelopid house from the other kings. Agamemnon is βασιλεύτατος, Il. ix. 69, and Menelaus is evidently intended in the βασιλεύτερος of Il. x. 239; where Diomed is bidden to choose the best man, irrespectively of rank, and not to tie himself to the βασιλεύτερος.

As the Odyssey represents a period of political disorganization, brought about by the long absence of the chiefs, it is not surprising that we find the word βασιλεὺς, and its proper epithet Διοτρεφὴς, used in this poem with greater laxity. The βασιλῆες and the Διοτρεφεῖς[771], are here not the kings but the aristocracy of Scheria, and of the dominions of Ulysses: and it is a compliment paid to Telemachus by Theoclymenus, when he says[772],

ὑμετέρου δ’ οὐκ ἔστι γένος βασιλεύτερον ἄλλο ἐν δημῷ Ἰθάκης.

Yet even here the special and official sense of βασιλεὺς remains: no one is ever called individually a βασιλεὺς unless he is on the throne, though Antinous is said to resemble one of the king-class,

βασιλῆι γὰρ ἀνδρὶ ἔοικας[773].

And the same Antinous sarcastically expresses his hope, that Jupiter will not make Telemachus βασιλεὺς in Ithaca, notwithstanding his right of succession by birth[774]. If βασιλεὺς only indicated a certain station, Telemachus without doubt was βασιλεὺς already.

The sense proper to it in Homer is that in which, for some thousands of years, it appears to have maintained a world-wide celebrity.

_Common interpretations of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν._

And now as respects the constructions which have been put upon the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. It is not noticed by Heyne or by Crusius. Of the translators I have already spoken. As regards the Lexicographers, Scott and Liddell say ‘Agamemnon _as general-in-chief_ is specially ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, while Orsilochos is called ἄναξ ἄνδρεσσιν in Il. v. 546;’ but the phrase is πολέεσσ’ ἄνδρεσσιν ἄνακτα, which I take to be simply equivalent to ἀνάσσοντα, and to have no relation to a phrase or _formula_.

Damm[775] says it indicates supreme dignity united with military command.

Again; Mure[776] remarks, that in common with ποιμὴν λαῶν and κρείων, ‘it denotes the office of any king or chieftain, but more particularly that of a supreme ruler or commander.’

That these explanations are entirely beside the mark, I am convinced after a somewhat minute consideration.

In answer to Damm, I would observe that the phrase was applied to Æneas, who was a commander, but not a sovereign: it was applied to Anchises, who was a sovereign, but not a commander; it was applied to Eumelus, who was neither a sovereign, nor a warrior of any note, and who commanded no more than eleven ships.

It does not then depend upon the highest degree either of military or of civil elevation.

Nor does it in all cases attach to divine descent, even though that descent be from Jupiter; nor even if it be immediate or next to immediate: as among the living, Sarpedon the son of Jupiter has it not, neither has Polypœtes his grandson (Il. ii. 740). So, among the dead, it is not given either to Hercules or to Rhadamanthus[777], sons of Jupiter. If, as is probable, reputed extraction from Jupiter in all cases attached to it, it was a remote and not a near extraction, and thus the title was the ornament of an antique lineage; certainly divine descent was not the immediate qualification for the particular dignity.

I do not dispute, that an idea of divine descent attaches generally and immediately to sovereigns as such, at least in the Iliad. But this is represented by the words Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, as they bear witness by their etymology, and not by ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Indeed we seem to find the word Διοτρεφὴς used for heaven-born, without reference to political power, in that line of the Odyssey (v. 378), where Neptune applies it to the Phæacians:

εἰσόκεν ἀνθρώποισι Διοτρεφέεσσι μιγείης.

But of those Homeric titles which are specifically Greek, by far the most remarkable is the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

_Particulars of its use._

It is used by the Poet fifty-two times: fifty times in the Iliad, twice only in the Odyssey.

It is applied forty-six times to Agamemnon, and six times to five other persons, once for each in four cases, and twice in one. The persons are,

Eumelus, a living Greek.

Augeias, } } dead Greeks. Euphetes, }

Anchises, } } living Trojans. Æneas, }

It appears and perishes with Homer, not being found in the writings of any other Greek author.

It is never used in any of the cases, except the nominative: never separated from the proper name of the person to whom it is applied, except once (Il. i. 7), and then only by the particle τε: it always precedes the name except in that single passage: it always ends with the first half of the fifth foot of the verse, except in that same passage: and again, the word ἄναξ is never separated from the word ἀνδρῶν, except once in the Odyssey by the word δέ.

It is applied to no person whose name does not begin with a vowel, and to no person whose name is not of the metrical value necessary to enable it to form the last foot and a half of the hexameter: as, Agamemnon, of two short syllables and two long ones; Euphetes, three long ones; Eumelus, two long and one short. Circumstances, these last, which, if they stood alone, would raise a presumption that the use of it was determined by metrical considerations only.

That metrical considerations had some degree of influence on the use of phrases in Homer, we may sufficiently judge, by observing that while Homer uses the name of Achæans four times for that of Argeians once, he uses the forms Ἀχαίοισι and Ἀχαίοισιν but twelve times, whereas he uses Ἀργείοισι and Ἀργείοισιν more than sixty times.

But we may observe that no metrical considerations could have prevented Homer from applying the phrase to Diomedes, Polypœtes, or others, whose names differ from that of Agamemnon only in having a consonant at the beginning of them: and yet he has not done this: the names of all his six ἄνακτες ἀνδρῶν begin with a vowel. Thus as he restrains himself beyond what metre requires, he may have had some reason other than metre to govern his use of the title.

The question is, whether there are, evidently or probably, other conditions of substance, which, besides these of sound, meet in the persons designated by the title, and which enable us to trace and fix its purport?

With reference to Mure’s explanation I observe, that it does not appear to take account of the difference between descriptive words in general, and titles, as applicable to Homer; but rather to assume that the Homeric phrases are simply of the former class.

It is plain that the word κρείων is a term of that class only: which, _pro tanto_, is indicated by its relationship to the established and ordinary epithet of comparison κρείσσων. It clearly describes the class of those, who bore single-handed rule, in the address to Jupiter, ὕπατε κρειόντων[778]; and it answers to the epithet princely in Il. xxiv. 538.

ὅττι οἱ οὔτι Παίδων ἐν μεγάροισι γονὴ γένετο κρειόντων.

‘For he had not as yet a princely offspring in his home.’

Lower than Βασιλεὺς, which corresponds to the rank implied by our term ‘majesty,’ and less wide in sense than ἄναξ, which corresponds very nearly with ‘lord,’ it is generally the equivalent as to rank of prince or princely, according to the English sense of the terms; but it is in Homer always a descriptive word only, and never a title. Accordingly it is found in the later Greek writers, when both ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and even ποιμὴν λαῶν have disappeared.

_The ποιμὴν λαῶν of Homer._

The phrase ποιμὴν λαῶν is more largely used than κρείων, and with more appearance of approximation to that substantive character, and susceptibility of individual application, which belongs to a title. Thus in

Οἱ δ’ ἐπανέστησαν, πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν, σκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες[779],

the βασιλῆες are the members of the Greek βουλὴ, and ποιμὴν λαῶν means Agamemnon. Like κρείων, it was applicable to those who held secondary sovereignties, the feudatories, so to speak, of the principal chiefs: as for instance, we find among the secondary commanders of the Pylian division,

Αἵμονά τε κρείοντα, Βίαντά τε, ποιμένα λαῶν[780].

It reaches down to persons, of whom we know and can infer nothing, but that they may probably have held small fiefs (so to call them) with derivative sovereignty of some kind, such as were, among the Trojans[781], Bienor, Hypeiron, Apisaon, Hypsenor: and it is also applied to the sons of the greater chiefs, for example, Thrasymedes and Agenor[782], as well as to the chiefs themselves, including Agamemnon. It is likewise given to Ægisthus, when he was, _de facto_, in possession of the throne of Agamemnon[783]. It is therefore applicable to the idea of political rule in the very widest sense, differing however from ἄναξ in so far that, while it is assigned to personages of smaller note politically, it is confined to the expression of that kind of superiority, and has nothing whatever to do with property.

I find it, on the whole, impossible to detect in this phrase any thing of a definite character, except that it expresses political rule at large, and expresses it under the form of a figure adapted to the early and patriarchal state of society. I hesitate then to call it with confidence a title, because the class to which it applies is somewhat indeterminate, and therefore it is wanting in specific meaning: yet it may partake somewhat of that character. We must, however, distinguish broadly between the element of subordination to Agamemnon, such as we see it in Nestor and Diomed, and that of the class to which the lower ποιμένες λαῶν belonged. These were as widely separated as the great feudatories of mediæval France, from the petty lords who so much abounded in this island.

In its form, the phrase bears an external, rather than a real resemblance to ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. For ποίμην figuratively used expresses no more than the office of a ruler in his political relation to his subjects; while ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is much more peculiar in character, since ἄναξ exhibits the idea of master as well as ruler, and he is not merely ἄναξ of a people, but ἄναξ of individual men, in respect to something appertaining to man as such, of which he is the possessor or usufructuary. The ποιμὴν λαῶν expresses a relation, which implies that political society is already formed, for λαὸς means a body united in that form.

Again, we are scarcely entitled to presume that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν denotes the office of ‘any king or chieftain,’ when, though it is used in some fifty passages, it is only applied to six persons: nor is it less hazardous to say that it means especially the office of a supreme ruler or commander, when out of these six persons only one at all answers to that description, and when at least three are persons of insignificant power, as well as individually obscure.

Once more, it is the manner of Homer, where he applies an epithet or phrase characteristically to one of his greater personages, to give them the exclusive use of it, such as the ποδωκὴς δῖος for Achilles, κορυθαίολος for Hector, πολύμητις and πολυτλὰς δῖος for Ulysses. For example, κορυθαίολος is used thirty-eight times for Hector, never for any other hero: though it is used once for Mars, in Il. xx. 38. It would be strange if he departed from this usage in the case before us. But if ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν be a mere phrase of description, as Mure supposes, he does depart from it in the strangest manner; for while he applies it forty-six times to Agamemnon, he likewise gives it to the very insignificant Eumelus. If it be a phrase simply serving the purpose, as an epithet would, of denoting the great political position of Agamemnon, how can its force be more utterly shattered than by bestowing it not only upon Eumelus, who does nothing except drive a chariot, but upon Euphetes, who is mentioned but once in the poems of Homer, without any epithet or circumstance whatever except this to distinguish him, and who is named nowhere else at all? If it describes a ruler as supreme among rulers, why is it thus debasingly, as well as loosely, applied? But if it describes a ruler generally, then why is it employed so restrictedly? The actual mode and conditions of its use require us to examine whether it does not in fact cover some specific idea, derived from a form of society which, even in the days of Homer, had become, or, at the least, was becoming obsolete; perhaps already in some part a monument of the past, and cutting across, rather than fitting into, the arrangements and usages of his time.

_Ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν has a specific meaning._

The peculiar formula ‘lord of men’ appears well adapted to mark the period of transition from the patriarchal to the political construction of society; in the family, sovereignty and the possession of property are united, and the βασιλεὺς naturally follows after and grows out of the ἄναξ. Authority is here clothed in a form more extended than that of a mere family connection, yet the idea of it remains indeterminate: there is no distinct formation of _class_; superiors are not yet viewed under the formal political notion of kings, nor (as in λαὸς) have _men_ yet come to conceive of themselves as subjects. There are human beings with a superior: but there is no society with a head. In that state of things, power, if less secure and rooted, was more absolute: witness the projected sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac.

To sum up, however, what we have said upon the other phrases, it appears that we have in Homer four words commonly used to express the ruling office, from the highest form of that office downwards: they are,

1. βασιλεὺς, the most limited: confined in the Iliad to those who both were practically supreme, and ruled over considerable territory, or else were of primary importance from personal prowess or other qualities.

2. κρείων, the next; embracing the very highest, but descending to secondary princes, though commonly confined to the more considerable.

3. ποιμὴν λαῶν, which, also capable of application to the highest, yet, as expressing political dominion in the widest form, embraces the subordinate, derivative, and petty principalities even of persons who do not appear to have been in any sense independent sovereigns.

4. More varied in its application than any of these, perhaps older, and related to the time when the only known form of sovereignty implied indeterminate, and so far absolute powers of disposal, the word ἄναξ involves the double idea of political authority and of ownership; it accompanies them both, like our word _lord_, when they separate, and it adheres to each of them in all its forms.

I admit that the construction which it is now proposed to put upon ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν has not, so far as I am aware, been heretofore propounded; and that this is, _pro tanto_, a presumption against it. But in lieu of _pro tanto_, I would in this case crave to write _pro tantillo_; for it seems to be the fact, that, as only of late has Ethnology been systematically studied, so only of late have the text and diction of Homer been subjected to minute investigation; and it is reasonable to expect, that the further application of critical attention to it may yet disclose to our view much, which has heretofore been unsuspected. It is the more allowable to proceed upon this view in the case of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, because so few readers of Homer appear even to have observed that it is ever applied to any person besides Agamemnon, and therefore the common opinion rests upon an inaccurate impression as to the elementary facts. My purpose, accordingly, may more justly be described as an attempt to open a new question, than as an attack upon a critical verdict regularly delivered.

Let us now proceed to examine what the facts really are respecting the use of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in Homer.

_Persons to whom it is applied._

It is applied to Agamemnon in the following passages:

Il. i. 7, 172, 442, 506. ii. 402, 434, 441, 612. iii. 81, 267, 455. iv. 148, 255, 336. v. 38. vi. 33. vii. 162, 314. viii. 278. ix. 96, 114, 163, 672, 677, 697. x. 64, 86, 103, 119, 233. xi. 99, 254. xiv. 64, 103, 134. xviii. 111. xix. 51, 76, 146, 172, 184, 199. xxiii. 161, 895.

Od. viii. 77. xi. 396.

It is also applied to

Anchises, Il. v. 268. Æneas, Il. v. 311. Augeias, Il. xi. 701, 739. Euphetes, Il. xv. 532. Eumelus, Il. xxiii. 288.

Now although, as we have seen, the term is in fact employed only with names nearly akin to one another in point of metrical value, yet the Poet has given us the most distinct evidence that the employment of it was not a mere metrical expedient to assist him in the use of names otherwise unmanageable. This we learn in the two following forms:

1. The name Eumelus is one of those to which he applies the phrase: but the metrical conjunction of it with this name is by no means

## particularly convenient, for out of five places in which Homer mentions

Eumelus in the nominative case, he only once gives him his title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Again, it is evident that he has no preference for the end of the verse as a place for the name of Eumelus; for he places it elsewhere, at the beginning, and in τὴν Εὔμηλος ὄπυιε (Il. ii. 714. Od. iv. 798), on the only two occasions when he uses the nominative without a title annexed. He only puts it at the end of the verse in order to couple it with ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and with κρείων (Il. xxiii. 288, 354). So far then from being a metrical convenience, this phrase rather forces him out of his way in order to introduce it. So it is with Æneas. Homer uses his name very many times, but never once places it at the end of a verse, except in the single case in which he attaches it to the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Again, then, the phrase compels him to adopt a position which he is uniformly careful to avoid elsewhere for Æneas, and this in little short of forty instances.

_Persons to whom it might have been applied._

2. Besides the names to which Homer applies the phrase, he employs a great number of names, of persons having high or the very highest rank, which possess exactly the same metrical value as one or another of the six names above quoted; but yet to none of these does he at any time give the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Of such names I have observed the following: and I exclude from the list the merely local characters of the Odyssey, and all persons in inferior station.

(1) Of the same metrical value with Eumelus:

Patroclus. Pheidippus. Euneus. Eudorus. Euphemus. Ægisthus. Admetus. Amphius. Euphorbus.

And of the dead,

Isandros. Adrestus.

(2) Of the same metrical value with Augeias, Euphetes, Æneas, Anchises:

Antenor. Sarpedon. Pyræchmes. Hercules (Heracles). Eurystheus.

(3) Of the same metrical value with Agamemnon:

Diomedes. Polypœtes. Megapenthes. Thrasymedes. Eteoneus. Agapenor. Euphenor. Prothoenor. Hyperenor.

(4) Of the same metrical value with Agamemnon, except having the last syllable short:

Menelaus. Echepolus. Melanippus. Polydorus.

And of the dead,

Rhadamanthus. Meleagros.

Here are thirty-five names as susceptible of conjunction with the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν as the six to which he attaches it. How comes it to be attached, significant as it is _primâ facie_, to the six, and never to the thirty-five? Did it come and go by accident, or had Homer a meaning in it?

Moreover, I would by no means be understood to admit, that metrical obstacles would have sufficed to prevent Homer from applying almost any title to almost any name: such were the resources of his genius and his ear, and such the freedom that the youthful elasticity of the language secured to him.

It must be remembered too that he has given us an instance (in Il. i. 7) of a second site, so to speak, for ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in the Greek hexameter, which would have enabled him at once to combine it with all such proper names as come within the compass of a dactyl and trochee, or a spondee and trochee. Such as Πουλυδάμας γὰρ ... Καὶ Πρίαμος μὲν ... Καὶ γὰρ Τευκρὸς ... Θησεὺς αὐτὸς ... Δάρδανος αὐτὸς .... And even without altering its usual position in the verse, by a break of it, or a _cæsura_, which is not unfrequent with him, he might have given us (for example) ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν γὰρ Ἐρεχθεύς. Or he might by _tmesis_, more liberally used, have further widened the field for its employment.

Or again, he would have been free, by the rules of his own usage, to have said in the vocative, ἀνδρῶν ἄνα.

_Homer’s reverence for this title._

His abstinence from inflexion absolutely, and from _tmesis_ almost entirely, in the use of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, I think deserves remark. We might be struck, even in another author, by finding a word fifty-six times in the nominative singular, and never in any other form: but in Homer these slight circumstances have a value and significance, which in ordinary cases it would be more dangerous to assign to them. It seems to me possible, that this restraint in the use of the name, which always assigns to it the most commanding place in the sentence, was not unconnected with a sense of reverence towards it. I think that if we were to examine the correspondence, for example, between British Ministers and their Sovereign, we might find that the phrase ‘Your Majesty’ was placed, under a sort of natural and unconscious bias, by the writers, in the nominative case, in a proportional number of instances far exceeding that which the pronoun ‘you’ would supply in an ordinary letter.

It is difficult to define this delicate and subtle sentiment: but it may perhaps be illustrated by the feeling on which is founded the prevailing usage of addressing among ourselves the very highest ranks, and in some languages all persons of consideration, in the third rather than the second person. And again, it is the same description of sentiment, which, when carried into the sphere of religion, has led Dante invariably to forbear, when he introduces the name ‘Cristo’ at the close of a verse, from placing any other word in rhyme with it, so that he makes it its own echo (so to speak), and repeats it thrice, in no less than four passages, to meet the full demand of his metre[784].

Or again, as Homer appears to have possessed a fineness of ear which is not only wonderful, but by us in some part inappreciable, it may be that he attached an importance, which we cannot measure, to preserving a perfect uniformity in this dignified and sonorous title, as a means of producing popular impression, not less than of satisfying his own taste.

Other instances might be given from Homer, bearing upon the case.

Ἐνοσίχθων is used forty times, and only once out of the nominative, though metrical reasons could not hamper the poet with respect to any of the cases of this noun. Διογενὴς is used in the nominative and vocative only. Κύδιστος is used sixteen times, and in the vocative alone. The feminine form however is found in the nominative, but only in two passages (one of them with a rival reading) applied to Minerva. Εὐρυκρείων is found twelve times, and only in the nominative.

Perhaps again the rarity and slightness of his use of _tmesis_ may be accounted for, not by euphony alone, but by the circumstance that these two words had grown by titular use almost into one.

The fact that the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν should have disappeared with Homer himself, while his heroes were incessantly sung by later poets, of itself raises a presumption that it belonged to a state of things which, when after a wide interval the race of his successors began, had wholly ceased to exist.

That stage of society, in the closing stages of which Homer lived, and which we know through him alone of classical authors, was the patriarchal stage in its last phasis. By the patriarchal stage of society, I mean the stage in which rights on the one hand, and powers and duties on the other, were still indeterminate, and were gradually passing from the state of _nebula_ into that of body. Now, if the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν belonged to it, without doubt it must at the outset have exhibited its unvarying characteristic, the union of sovereign political power not only with hereditary descent, but with a reference to some original stock as an object of deep veneration, if not to a relationship of blood more or less remote between the royal family and their subjects, or to the dominant race among them.

_Its relation to Patriarchal Chieftaincy._

The chieftaincies of the Celtic tribes in our own island, such as they existed until within only one century back, afford us a partial analogy. The primary idea is that of the headship of an extended family, sometimes approximating to the character of a nation; sometimes more limited, so that many of such families or tribes may be regarded as belonging to the same nation. One marked characteristic of these chieftaincies is that the preeminence and power, which they attached to birth, is separable from, though capable of union with, sovereignty strictly so called, that is, an absolute political supremacy, and subsists in its main particulars even after the division; neither does it become ambiguous or indefinite, where the field for its exercise is a narrow one. The splendour of the name increases with the range of dominion, but its integrity subsists even in the most contracted sphere, so long as the organization on which it is dependent remains.

It is at least conceivable, that the Greek and the Celtic chieftaincies thus far agree. They differ in this, that the Hellenes, whenever we hear of them, appear more or less clearly as the subjugators of some race in prior occupancy of the soil, and as the masters of slaves: so that, while the relation of the Highland Chief to his clan was elevated and softened by union in blood, a Greek chieftaincy rather affected the relation between the head of the tribe and, not the whole, but only a privileged part, of the community.

The fundamental idea of this chieftainship would lie in the possession of the powers of government, patriarchally organized, by lineal descent, and traced up to the point which was the recognised fountain-head of the traditions of the race.

Where the idea of succession by primogeniture was well defined, there probably would be but one line in existence at a time that could hold the title for any one race. But there might be cases where the rule of primogeniture was unknown, or not consistently applied, or where the fact of elder descent was contested, or where common descent from some one acknowledged race and period might confer the title on a variety of families, situated at remote points from one another, in each of which it might afterwards be confined to the lineal heir. In such cases there would be a plurality of lines, all running up into the stem of a common ancestor, and all bearing in their own separate successions the title of chieftainships.

Again, among these chieftains one might be politically supreme over the rest within a given country. Such were the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, in Scotland, who claimed to be kings as well as chieftains: and such in Ireland were the Kevanaghs, O’Ruarcs, and O’Briens.

If therefore I am right in interpreting the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν to mean properly (together with something more) _Chieftain_, in a sense including the main elements of Celtic chieftaincy, or _Patriarch_, (but the latter phrase is less applicable from its conventional connection with advanced age), then it need excite no surprise if we find an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν on each side, and not in the supreme command. At the same time, though there are vast differences in power between one Homeric ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν and another, they are all, so far as we see, strictly in the position of princes ordinarily independent within their dominions, though owning, it might be, the prerogatives of a qualified political supremacy lodged in other hands.

_Case of Agamemnon._

_Mode of its use for Agamemnon._

It is very worthy of remark, that Homer scarcely ever describes Agamemnon by personal epithets. In a few passages (I see seven noticed) he uses the word δῖος in connection with the name: but this is one of the least specific among the Homeric epithets for individuals, and is employed not only for Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, and others, but for a crowd of inferior personages, so that, as a word of the most general purport, it has little or no defining or individualizing power. It means preeminence in some particular kind, among a class, and it is applicable to any class; to Agamemnon greatest among sovereigns, and to Eumæus worthiest among swineherds. A few times Homer calls him ἥρως, a word which he also applies to the entire Greek army (Il. ii. 110). In all other places, (I omit, of course, the invectives of Achilles,) he is characterised only by words taken from his position or descent. The principal of these are Ἀτρείδης, which he enjoys in common with Menelaus: κρείων, applied to him and to various other chiefs: ποιμὴν λαῶν, yet more largely and loosely used: εὐρυκρείων, which is exclusively his own among men, and which is the epithet used by Homer as properly descriptive of his wide-reaching sway. It is also applied to Neptune among the immortals, because vastness was with Homer a principal feature of the θάλασσα, his domain. Lastly, Agamemnon is ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, which, as I hold, describes his position by birth as the head or chieftain of the Achæans properly so called.

There are two remarkable passages, which are evidently intended to supply the key-note, as it were, for our conception of the material power of Agamemnon: the first, Il. ii. 108, respecting the sceptre: the second, in the Catalogue, Il. ii. 576-80: in both of these he is called κρείων, in neither ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. This fact entirely accords with the supposition that neither a determinate form of political power, nor military command, is the vital idea of the phrase.

On the other hand, although the Poet does not seem to connect this phrase with imperial power, yet that he intended to use it as one highly characteristic, we may at once deem probable from his having employed it in that remarkable passage[785] with which the poem begins, and which so succinctly, yet so broadly opens the subject of it. For here he has taken the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν out of its usual, and elsewhere its only place in the verse, and has subjoined it, contrary in this likewise to his uniform practice elsewhere, to the name of the person described by it. The line is

Ἀτρείδης τε, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Evidently this is done for greater emphasis: as ‘great Alexander’ is less emphatic than ‘Alexander the Great,’ and ‘king Darius’ than ‘Darius the king.’ It may be admitted that the epithet δῖος, used in this place for Achilles, is not one of the most characteristic: but Achilles had already been described (in v. i.) by that distinguished patronymic which formed his chief glory[786], as it connected him, through his father and his grandfather, with Jupiter.

All these presumptions drawn from the case of Agamemnon converge upon a point: they tend to show, that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν means preeminence indeed, but yet a particular kind of preeminence; and one distinct from, and more specific than, the general idea of sovereignty.

_Extraction and station of Agamemnon._

The so-called genealogy of Agamemnon differs from every other one given by Homer in this, that it does not describe the descent in a right line. For as Thyestes, one of his three predecessors on the Pelopid throne was the father of Ægisthus, who was the contemporary, but yet not the brother of Agamemnon, he must without doubt have been brother to Atreus, Agamemnon’s father. It is in fact not a genealogy simply, but rather a succession in dignities. The dignity of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν may have combined with that of the political supremacy to lead Homer into this unusual course. If, as I suppose, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν required the double derivation both of lineage and of sovereignty, this was the way, and the only way, in which Homer could attain his end. And his having pursued this method seems to imply that such _was_ his end.

I cannot therefore under the conditions of the definition given above, explain the application of the phrase to Agamemnon by mere reference to his political supremacy. It will be necessary to prove, either by direct or by presumptive evidence, his lineal connection with the primitive Grecian or Hellenic stock, the trunk of the tree from which other Achæan families were branches and offshoots only.

I propose to do this by showing,

First, that no appreciable value is to be attached to the notions which represent him as the grandson of an Asiatic immigrant; while even if this descent could be made good, we should not on that account be justified in at once proceeding to deny that the Pelopids were of pure Hellenic blood.

Secondly, that he was not merely at the moment the political head of Greece, but that he was also the hereditary chief of the Achæans, then the ruling tribe of the country.

Thirdly, that this Achæan tribe was in all likelihood derived from Thessaly, where it was especially rooted and distinguished: as Thessaly was itself fed from the Helli of the mountains, and constituted the secondary and immediate source from whence the Hellenic races successively issued, and spread themselves over the peninsula.

I do not pretend to carry the proof of a patriarchal position or lineal chieftaincy in the case of Agamemnon further. We do not know what was the strictly original royal stock of the Hellenic tribes. The current tradition of Hellen and his sons would be very convenient, but it is too obviously accommodated to after-times, and too flatly at variance with the earliest, that is to say with the Homeric accounts, to be in the slightest degree trustworthy as an historic basis. We may take the Hesiodic tradition as affording evidence of the belief that there was a primitive royal stock, and that the ruling families had been derived from it, since within these limits it does not contradict Homer; but we can justly build upon it nothing further. Undoubtedly the very employment of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, if the proposed construction of it can be made good, will greatly fortify this belief. But this can only be made good in a presumptive manner: as by showing that the phrase was only given in ruling families: and only in the representative lines of ruling families: and only in families which ruled over tribes of the dominant race; and which had so ruled from time immemorial--that is to say, they must be families of which it cannot be shown that at any time they had acquired their position in their own tribe. If a first ancestor, apparently the channel of the title, is indicated, he must be one from whom history begins: there must be nothing before him, nothing to show that he or his line had ever been less than what he came to be. Lastly, the tribes, over which the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν rules, must be in visible or presumable connection locally with the original seat or cradle of the nation; and it will be a further confirmation of the argument if, as we ascend the lineal lines, we find in them a tendency to converge towards an unity of origin, which we shall find poetically expressed as the divine parentage of Jupiter, and thus covered with the golden clouds of a remote antiquity, that not even the sun can pierce[787]. Perhaps we may even find reason to suppose it likely that descent from Jupiter was an essential qualification for the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

_Arguments against his Hellenic descent._

First, then, let us deal with the negative or adverse presumptions, which would go to prove that Agamemnon was not Hellenic at all.

It may be urged,

1. That we see, even from Homer, that Pelops was a recent hero, only two generations before the _Troica_, so that Agamemnon has no antiquity to boast of.

2. That, according to extraneous tradition, there is no connection between Agamemnon and the Hellic stock: as Pelops is reputed to be the son of Tantalus, and Tantalus the king of Phrygia.

To the first I answer, that the list of names in Il. ii. 101-8, is not simply a genealogy, for it includes Thyestes, who is not in the right line; but it is a succession of kings on a common throne, and can only therefore begin with Pelops, as the first who sat upon that throne.

But, further, even if it were a genealogy, yet Homer seems usually to begin his genealogies not with the first known ancestor of a person, but with the first ancestor of his who settled in the place where he exercises power. Thus Nestor, though we acquire indirectly a knowledge of his earlier descent through the Νεκυΐα, has no genealogy beyond Neleus his father, because he was the ancestor that migrated into Peloponnesus, or, at least, that first acquired the Pylian throne, by marriage into a prior, and perhaps a Pelasgian house[788]. Ulysses has none beyond Arceisius; and it is plain, from the records of the earlier dynasty in Ithaca, that there could have been no king of that house before him. Dardanus and Minos, heads of genealogies, were also the founders of sovereignties. Again, Portheus is given us as the head of the Œneid line in Ætolia: and we have found it probable that he was the first of his race[789] who migrated into that country. The same considerations, in all likelihood, hold good with regard to Pelops.

Now with respect to the second objection.

We are to remember that Homer has nowhere asserted the connection between Pelops and Tantalus, or between Tantalus and Phrygia.

But not even the latter connection, and far less the former, would disprove the title of Agamemnon to represent lineally the character of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. For, as we have seen, that title subsisted in the line of Dardanus, and the causes which planted it there might also have planted it in Phrygia; which is not irrationally supposed to have been the line of march for the Hellic race in its original movement westwards[790]. Moreover, Phrygia is not a name confined to Asia.

_Connection of Tantalus with the Greeks._

There are, however, many indirect Homeric indications, as well as much extra-Homeric tradition, which tend to connect Pelops both with Tantalus and with Greece.

First, even if Tantalus were known to Homer as the father of Pelops, he could not have been named in the tradition of Il. ii. 101-8, unless he had occupied, like Pelops, the throne to which Agamemnon succeeded.

From the appearance of Tantalus in the Νεκυΐα, it is probable that Homer regarded him as Greek, either by birth or by what we may call naturalization. This he might be in the Poet’s view, if the traditions concerning him, without assigning to him Greek birth or even residence, made him the father of one who became a great Greek sovereign. If, for instance, we take the name of Æolus; it is the source of some of the most famous Greek houses, yet Homer never mentions it, except in the patronymic, and gives us no means of absolutely attaching it to any part of Greece. Æolus may have been known only as the father of Greeks. So Minos was not of Greek birth; but was naturalized, and therefore appears in the Νεκυΐα as the judge of the nether world. All the other personages, without exception, who are introduced there, are apparently Greek: Sisyphus, Hercules, Tityus, Theseus, Pirithous, from clear marks of residence: even Orion, since he is made the hero of a

## scene in Delos[791], appears, whatever his origin, to have been already

Hellenized by tradition. Nor is it easy to avoid the same assumption with respect to Tantalus.

Again, we may be quite sure, that Tantalus was a person of the highest rank and position. None others seem to have been distinguished by an express notice of their fate after death. Orion was the object of the passion of Aurora (Od. v. 121). Tityus was an offender so lofty, that he became the occasion of a voyage of Rhadamanthus himself to deal with his crime[792]. Sisyphus was, as we have found reason to believe[793], of the most exalted stock.

The punishment of Tantalus in the nether world is probably, as in other cases, the reflection of a previous catastrophe, certainly of a previous character, upon earth. The nature of his punishment is a perpetual temptation, of irresistible force, presented to the appetites of hunger and thirst, while the gratification of it is wholly and perpetually denied. This shews that his offence on earth must have been some form of πλεονεξία, of greediness, presumption, or ambition. It is therefore not unlikely that by restless attempts at acquisition, he may have convulsed his dominions, and caused his son to migrate.

Now this supposed vein of character in Tantalus would thoroughly accord with that of the Pelopid line. He is punished for covetousness or acquisitiveness. His son gains a kingdom through Mercury, who is the god of increase by fair means or foul. His grandson Thyestes gathers wealth (πολύαρς, Il. ii. 106): his great-grandson Agamemnon is deeply marked by the avarice everywhere glanced at in the Iliad: and finally we have the reckless and guilty cravings of the ambition of Ægisthus.

We are by no means without reasons from the poems for placing Tantalus, as the later tradition places him, among the heroes of the stock of Jupiter. One ground is afforded us by the text of the Eleventh Odyssey for supposing that he was, I do not say a son, but at least a descendant of Jupiter. It is this; that apparently all the heroes, to whom we are thus introduced, were at least of divine extraction. They are, besides Tantalus, as follows:--

1. Minos, who was a son of Jupiter. (Od. xi. 568.)

2. Orion: he was of divine extraction according to the later tradition. In Homer he has no parentage, but he had at least attained to divine honours, inasmuch as he was translated into a star. (Od. v. 274 et alibi.)

3. Tityus, son of Γαῖα. (Od. xi. 596, and vii. 324.)

4. Sisyphus, son of Æolus; therefore descended from Jupiter.

5. Hercules, son of Jupiter (ibid. 620.)

But I rely specially upon the passages towards the end, where these are all called ἄνδρες ἥρωες, and where Ulysses says he might have seen others, namely, Θήσεα Πειρίθοόν τε, θεῶν ἐρικύδεα τέκνα, illustrious children of the gods: as if to be a child of the gods were a condition of appearing in this august, though mournful, company.

Hereas, a Megarian author of uncertain age, is quoted by Plutarch[794] as having declared that the last cited verse was among the interpolations of Pisistratus. But Hereas was as likely to be wrong in this statement, through Megarian antipathy, as Pisistratus to have interpolated the verse in favour of Athenian vanity. The internal evidence is, I think, in its favour. For the phrase θεῶν ἐρικύδεα τέκνα is, according to the view here given, really characteristic. It is, at the same time, characteristic through the medium of an idea which, though it can be deduced fairly from the text, is not obvious upon its surface; namely the idea that all the heroes of the Νεκυΐα were divine. The verse is therefore supported by something in the nature of a spontaneous or undesigned coincidence.

The post-Homeric tradition makes Niobe the daughter of Tantalus; and, if this be so, then we may derive from her very high position a further support to the presumption that Tantalus was of the race of Jupiter, as also to the hypothesis of his personal connection with Greece. For that the tradition of Niobe is Greek we see, from its being cited by Achilles; and that she was a sovereign is clearly implied by the combined effect of various circumstances. The first is her being compared by Achilles with Priam. The second, that the vaunt of an inferior person would hardly have been noticed by the direct intervention of the gods. The third is the singular extent and dignity of that intervention: Apollo slays the sons, Diana the daughters; Jupiter converts the people to stone; the Immortals at large bury the dead. The fourth is the use of the term λαοὺς, which means plainly the subjects of the kingdom where Niobe was queen.

We cannot now carry farther the presumptions that Tantalus was the descendant of Jupiter, and Agamemnon of Tantalus: but if, in considering the cases of the other members of his class, we shall sufficiently shew that they were all descended in common repute from Jupiter, we shall then perhaps be warranted in relying more decidedly upon the connection, which is suggested by the text in the case of Agamemnon through his presumed ancestor Tantalus.

It is difficult to find more than slight traces of the seat of the power of Tantalus from Homer.

He mentions a mountain called Sipylus[795], near the Achelous, and thus near the principal passage from Northern and Middle into Southern Greece. Here it is that he places the mourning Niobe. But Pausanias places the tomb of Pelops on the summit of Mount Sipylus, meaning, apparently, the hill of that name in Lydia[796]. Again, the Phryges, over whom the later tradition reports him to have reigned, are also made known to us as a Thracian people[797]: a designation quite capable of embracing any of the hill tribes in the neighbourhood of Thessaly. We have another sign of the extension of this name in the Phrygians of Attica, mentioned by Thucydides (ii. 22): and the Phrygian alphabet is closely akin to that of Greece.

Strabo, however, observes, that the state of these traditions is so greatly confused, so as to make them scarcely tractable for the purposes of history[798].

_Place of Pelops in Greek history._

The connection of Pelops with Southern Greece is well supported by the ancient name of Peloponnesus. No notice of this name is found in Homer; but we need not be surprised, if Pelops was the first of his race in that part of the country, at finding him sparely recognised by the Poet: it is the uniform manner of the poet with strangers or _novi homines_.

The Homeric notices of Pelops are not more liberal than of Tantalus. 1. We find him called πλήξιππος[799] in such a way as shows that something connected with the driving of a chariot must have been attached either to the known habits, or to some great crisis of his life, or to both. In either mode, it agrees with the common tradition, according to which, by success in the chariot race, he won the hand of Hippodameia, daughter of king Œnomaus, and therewith the throne of Pisa. We have another fact from Homer which tends to support this tradition, namely, that in the earliest youth of Nestor there were, as we have seen, public games, which included chariot-races, in Elis.

2. The common tradition is also further supported by the passage in the Second Iliad, which gives us the line of Pelopid sovereigns. For we are there told that Vulcan wrought the Pelopid sceptre for Jupiter: that Jupiter gave it to Mercury, and Mercury to Pelops the horse-driver, who handed it on to Atreus and the rest. From this statement two things clearly appear. First, that the throne of Pelops was gained either by craft, or at least by enterprise, of his own. Secondly, that it was a new power which he erected, and that he was not merely the transferee of the power of the Perseid line.

Nor is it difficult to discern wherein the novelty consisted. This sceptre carried the right of paramount lordship over all Greece--

πολλῇσιν νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν[800]--

whereas the Perseids had been local sovereigns, though probably the first in rank and power among their contemporaries of Continental Greece.

Now this sovereignty, thus extended, was plainly an Achæan sovereignty. For we have seen that, contemporaneously with its erection, Homer drops the marked and exclusive use of the word Ἀργεῖοι for the inhabitants of that quarter, and calls them by preference Ἀχαιοὶ, the older name falling into the shade. Thus, then, the Achæans rose with the house of Pelops: and this being the case, we can the better understand why it was that that house rose to so great an elevation. It was because the Achæan race had now acquired extension in the North and in the South of Greece, in Eastern and Western Peloponnesus, and because it usually predominated wheresoever it went. Thus the house of Pelops had an opportunity of gaining influence and power, which had not been enjoyed by the preceding dynasties, though they ruled from the same sovereign seat. They were families only: the Pelopids were chiefs of a race.

What we have thus seen from Homer, with respect to the high position attained by Pelops, is confirmed by the later tradition.

Pausanias notices the local traces of Tantalus, as well as of Pelops, in Elis. A harbour there bore the name of Tantalus[801]: and Pelops was worshipped in a sanctuary hard by the temple of Jupiter Olympius. It was on the right hand, in front of that temple, a very marked situation in all likelihood: and Pausanias says, that the Elians reverenced Pelops among heroes, like Jupiter among gods. It was probably on this account, and as a memorial of the worship from high places, that the θρόνος, or seat of Pelops, was, as he says, not only in Sipylus, but on the summit of the mountain.

Another tradition makes Pelops the original king of Pisa, the rival town to Elis, which at length succumbed to it. And a further tradition reports, that he became the son-in-law of Œnomaus, king of Pisa, by conquering him in the chariot-race: and together with this, that he restored the Olympian Games. Another tradition reports him to have come from Olenos in Achaia: and as the Dorians, with the Heraclids, came into Peloponnesus by that route, probably as the easiest, so, and for the same reason, may Pelops probably have done. Lastly, while Homer places Achæans in Ægina and in Mases, (of which the site is unknown,) Pausanias (b. ii. c. 34) states that nine islands (νησίδες) off the coast of Methana, which lies directly opposite Ægina, were in his time called the Islands of Pelops.

Before quitting the subject of Pelops, I would observe, that his worship in Olympia with such peculiar honours is connected with a tradition, that he raised the Olympian Games to a distinction which they had never before attained. Now if we view him as the principal chief who brought the Achæans into Peloponnesus, this tradition tends to support the view which has been taken in a former section of the relation between the Hellic race and the institution of public Games. Nor is there any thing more intrinsically probable, than that a chief from the great breeding region of Thessaly should have either founded the chariot or horse-races of Olympia, or should have raised them to an unprecedented celebrity, and secured for them the truly national position that they for so long a time maintained.

We have seen thus far,

1. That the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is employed by Homer as the chief distinction of Agamemnon.

2. That most probably Agamemnon was descended from Tantalus, as well as from Pelops, that the line was a line of sovereigns all along, and Tantalus in all likelihood a reputed descendant of Jupiter himself.

3. That the Achæans emerge in company with the Pelopids, from the cavern of pre-historic night, and that the Pelopids are therefore to be taken as in all likelihood the chief and senior house of the Achæan tribe.

But we have still to ask, whence came the Achæans themselves? and how are we to prove their connection with the Hellenic name and stock?

And first, as to Homeric evidence.

_Achæans from Thessaly._

We have already seen, in considering Homer’s account of the contingent of Achilles, and also from Il. ix. 395, that the Achæan race appears to have been the dominant one in the proper and original Hellas of Thessaly: which appears to place it beyond doubt, that the Achæans were they who first carried with them extensively into Greece the Hellenic name, a name always following in the wake of the Achæan one, and in Homer extending to all Greece, unless we except that part which was the sovereign seat of Achæan power.

The first form of the name is with the Helli of Northern Thessaly: the second is developed into the Hellas proper of Southern Thessaly; we find the third in the more large and less determinate use of the word for Greece to the northward of the Isthmus. The name gains this extension apparently just during the period while the Achæans are moving southward, as the house of Ulysses to Ithaca, the house of Neleus, perhaps with an Achæan train, to Pylos, the Pelopids to Mycenæ and Sparta, Tydeus from Ætolia to Argos.

And again, we must observe this distinction. We see the Achæans come into the Peloponnesus, and we can, from the text of Homer, point out the time when they were not there. But we do not see them come into Thessaly from among the Helli of the mountains. We simply find their name prominent there; from which we must conclude, that Homer meant to point them out as the first representatives on an adequate scale of Hellas in that country.

All this is strongly confirmed by the later tradition as to the connection of Pelops with the Achæans of Thessaly, and by the clear historical proofs in our possession of the profound root which the Achæan name had taken there.

Strabo, in a passage where he chooses a particular tradition from among many, as peculiarly worthy of record, says[802],

Ἀχαιοὺς γὰρ τοὺς Φθιώτας φασὶ συγκατελθόντας Πέλοπι εἰς τὴν Πελοπόννησον, οἰκῆσαι τὴν Λακωνικὴν· τοσοῦτον δ’ ἀρετῇ διενεγκεῖν, ὥστε τὴν Πελοπόννησον, ἐκ πολλῶν ἤδη χρόνων Ἄργος λεγομένην, τότε Ἀχαϊκὸν Ἄργος λεχθῆναι.

Thus he at once asserts the connection of Pelops with the Achæans, and of the Achæans with Thessaly. He proceeds to say, that Laconia was considered to have a peculiar title to the name of Achaic Argos[803]; that some construed Od. iii. 251 as supporting it, and that the Achæans, driven by the Dorians out of Laconia, in their turn displaced an Ionian race from Achaia, and took possession of the district.

Herodotus[804], in treating of the Peloponnesus, describes the Arcadians and Cynurians as αὐτόχθονες, who had never changed their habitation; four other races, including the Dorians, as ἐπήλυδες, and the Achæans as having migrated about the Peloponnesus, but never left it. He does not explicitly place the Achæans in either class; and this tradition does not throw much light on the origin of the Achæans, which would seem not to have been within his knowledge, but only deals with matter subsequent to their entry into Peloponnesus.

Pausanias[805], again, would seem rather to draw the Thessalian Achæans from Peloponnesus than _vice versa_. He tells us that, after the death of Xuthus, Achæus went with an army from Ægialus, and established himself in Thessaly. But with Homer before us, we may boldly say, that there was no such person as either the Xuthus or the Achæus of the later tradition, and that there were, on the other hand, Achæans in Thessaly long before the time assigned to this Achæus, namely, the epoch when the race took refuge in Ægialus. This tradition, then, is late and worthless, and, even if it directly contradicted that of Strabo, which it does not, could not be put in competition with it.

The tradition which made Phthiotis in Southern Thessaly the cradle of the Achæan race, where it first grew into conscious life, seems to have been an undying one.

_Duration of the name in Thessaly._

Here again history comes in to our aid. Throughout the historic times of Greece, and down to the era of Polybius, there were Achæans of Phthiotis. When, 205 years before Christ, Quintius, the Roman general, examined into the origin of the Greek cities, and made a classification of them[806], the Achæans of Phthiotis were declared to be Thessalians: and he appears to use the name for all Phthians, since he calls Phaxidas[807] an Achæan, seemingly for no other reason than that he was an inhabitant of Melitea, a city of Phthiotis.

I take it then to be sufficiently proved, that Agamemnon and his house were the proper heads of the Achæan race, which rose with them. The proof is doubled by the fact that they fell with it: for in the post-Homeric literature, all of which follows the Dorian conquest, the Achæan name has ceased to be a living name for the nation of the Greeks.

And as the Pelopids were the leaders of the Achæans, so I now assume it to be sufficiently shown from Homer, that the Achæans were in his time at the head of all the Hellenic families and tribes; of the Dorians, the Æolids, the Cephallenes, and whatever others came from the same stock, and were in fact, for their age, the proper type of Hellenism itself.

That most remarkable supremacy of Agamemnon over the Greek nation, which is so strongly marked on the page of Homer, and to the force of which Thucydides ascribes the wonderful movement of the Trojan war, left behind it a tradition which it was thought worth while by the ruling race of Dorians to appropriate, even after the shipwreck of the old political system.

Orestes came to the throne of Agamemnon, and Tisamenus to that of Orestes. He was cast out by the Heraclids with the Dorians, and they made Sparta the chief seat of their power. Thus established in the primacy of Greece, they held it, under the name of Ἡγεμονία, contested sometimes, but only after the lapse of several ages, by Athens: never absolutely taken away, until it passed, as Polybius says, unexpectedly, into the hands of the Thebans, in the fourth century before the Christian era.

Tisamenus and his Achæans went into Ægialus, and gave it their own name. But the imperial Spartans found it for their interest to put in their claim to the old Agamemnonian title. So, as Pausanias[808] informs us, even down to his day, the Tomb of Tisamenus was shown in Sparta, and hard by it the Lycurgian feast of Pheiditia was kept; with a tradition that their fathers, admonished by an oracle, had fetched the remains of the last Pelopid sovereign from Helice in Achæa. On the other hand, the Achæans, who in the time of Polybius[809] had not yet ceased to keep the image of their legendary ancestor Achæus, and whose claim to that image was recognised by the Roman general, likewise cherished a tradition that the family of Tisamenus had been continued, and had reigned among them down to the time of Ogygus[810], when their League was formed upon the basis of democratic institutions.

_Dorians appropriate the Pelopid succession._

Now it is no more than we might expect, that the Achæans should, in their depressed fortunes, fondly cherish the recollections of their glory, by preserving and honouring the memory of the last of that race, who, through being their sovereigns, were also the heads of the Greek nation. But why did the Dorians exhibit an anxiety of a kind in their position so remarkable? Such a feeling could hardly have existed, had there not been a special character attaching to the Pelopid race, as possessed not only of an actual supremacy, but of some peculiar title by descent, to which it was worth the while of the Dorian sovereigns to lay claim, as a kind of heirs by adoption. We do not find that when the Pelopids came in with their Achæans, they had shown any corresponding solicitude to connect themselves with the memory of Danaids or of Perseids: on the contrary, Homer expressly disconnects the dynasties, by assigning to the Pelopids a new sceptre, fresh by the hands of Mercury from Jupiter. It seems to follow, that in all likelihood the Pelopids had something which neither Danaids nor Perseids possessed before them, and which the Dorians too did not hold at all, or did not hold by so clear a title: the honour, namely, not of Hellenic blood alone, but of being ruled by a family which represented an original and primitive sovereignty over the Hellenic nation, through its foremost, or Achæan tribe.

This is the more remarkable, because the Dorian sovereigns of Sparta claimed Hercules, and through him Jupiter, for their progenitor. But the patriarchal chieftaincy, though not more directly connected with a divine stock, had superadded to it that accumulation of dignity, which depends upon the unbroken transmission of power from the most remote historic origin: and Hercules was modern in comparison with those to whom some of the Hellenic families were able (as we have seen) to trace their ancestry.

Were we to give credit to the common tradition respecting Hellen and his sons, I admit that it would raise a new difficulty in the way of the construction, which I propose to attach to the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Instead of seeing Agamemnon invested with it because he is head of the Achæans, and highly favoured by a special, nay by an almost exclusive appropriation of it, because they are the foremost Hellenic tribe, we should have to own in them the youngest of all the branches from that stem, with Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians too, taking precedence of them: and we should have to look, and look in vain, for any trace or presumption whatever of his descent from that Achæus, whom the tradition feigns to have existed.

But with the acknowledgment of Homer’s historical authority, the credit of that tradition falls; as indeed it is etymologically self-convicted by the formation of its cardinal name Hellen.

The Achæan prominence in Homer rests on grounds sufficiently clear: over the Ionians, who appear to be not even an Hellenic race; over the Dorians, latent in the Pylian town of Dorion, or among the sister races of Crete, where they are as yet wholly undistinguished: over the Æolids, (for there are no Æolians,) because these are single shoots only, while the Achæans are a branch, a principal section of the Hellenic race; and also, as I think may be shown[811], because of all Hellenes they appear really to have had the most normal connection with the true fountain-head of their race.

Nowhere among the Dorians, and (of course, if the Ionians are Pelasgian,) nowhere among the Ionians, have we any trace of the name ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, or of the thing indicated by it. May not this be the reason that the Dorian kings of Sparta sought (so to speak) to serve themselves heirs to the house of Agamemnon?

I may observe in passing, as to the Ionians, that it has recently been held that they are not only Hellenic, but the oldest Hellenes: that they parted from the rest of the race in Asia, came into Greece by the islands, and were its great sea-faring race. This theory, ably as it has been supported, is but doubtfully agreeable to the positive or negative evidence of Homer: still it is not less fatal to the current tradition of Hellen and his family, than that which views the Ionians as more nearly connected with the Pelasgians[812].

Only among Achæans, Æolids, and Dardanians, do we find the patriarchal title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. The Dardan house fell with the Trojan war. The throne of Augeias had given way even before that great crisis. It is probable that the line of Euphetes was then no longer in existence; else we must have heard of it in the Catalogue, or during the action. The realm of Eumelus was remote and small, and if it had been wrecked in the convulsions of the period, it would leave nothing upon which the Dorians could lay hold as a point of junction with the past. But they had come into the very dominions of the family of Pelops, though with a transfer of the metropolis from Mycenæ to Sparta. Here was the true Greek Patriarchate, of which for purposes of policy they might well desire to become the ostensible representatives.

_Spurious Tradition of the Hellenidæ._

The legend of the Hellenidæ might probably be meant to cooperate towards the same end. Its determinate form I have ventured to discard: but its spirit and intention have their importance in connection with the subject of the extraction of the Greeks. It affords early witness to the general belief in the derivation of the Greek races from Thessaly: and though it does not suffice of itself to prove that a Dorus or an Ion came from thence, yet it is of great importance as a testimony to their general connection with Thessaly, and it powerfully corroborates evidence such as Homer affords to that effect in the case of the Achæans. Nor are we entirely without Homeric evidence of a connection between the Dorians and the Achæans, and thus between the Dorians and Thessaly. For the Dorians are found in Crete together with the Achæans (Od. xix.), and in the dominions of Nestor peopled by Achæans we find the town called Δώριον, Il. ii. 594. As, however, the great Dorian mass came into Peloponnesus not under a family of Dorian rulers, but under Heraclids, their connection with the old Hellas was not maintained by any regal tradition, and hence perhaps the need of the legend of Hellen to revive the memory of it.

Let us now endeavour to gather together the threads of the argument.

It is plain that Agamemnon was not called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν on account of his great monarchy; because other great monarchs want the title, and, again, other insignificant lords hold it.

Nor did he possess it on the ground of autochthonism: for the Achæans were immigrants into the Peloponnesus, and not autochthons, and they had been preceded by other races.

Neither was it borne by him on the ground of a divine descent more direct or more illustrious than that of others: for his divine descent would in that case at least have been specifically stated, instead of being left to remote and hazardous inference. Nor is the title borne by Achilles, who was the great grandson of Jupiter, or by Hercules or Minos, who were his sons.

If sovereignty and antiquity be connected with the title, they are not of themselves sufficient to confer it: and if divine descent be a condition of it, this must be joined with other conditions.

These negatives, established in the case of Agamemnon, leave room, I believe, for but one supposition; namely, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν must indicate chieftaincy, or in other words, the lineal headship, passing by seniority, of one among the ruling or royal houses, who represent the stem of a particular race, in his case the Achæan branch of the Hellenic family; and who govern, and have continuously governed, those of their own name or branch. Of these royal houses there might be many, allied together by common derivation, at the same or different epochs, from a common stem.

_Summary of the Evidence._

In sum, the Homeric picture appears to be as follows.

First we have the remote and wintry Dodona of Thessaly, the most ancient and most awful seat of the religious worship of the Greeks; in connection with which Achilles invokes Jupiter for the success and safe return of Patroclus.

Around Dodona dwell the Selli or Helli. The special veneration paid to the place points it out as the oldest site of the national worship; and the possession of this oldest site again points out the tribe as the mother-tribe of that wonderful Greek race, whose fame is graven ineffaceably upon the rock with a pen of iron.

From among the Helli of the mountains, who nowhere appear among the contingents of the Greek army, must have proceeded the migratory bands who gave to the Thessalian plain the name of Hellas. Their descendants fix themselves as settlers there. Beguiled into civilization, they become Hellenes; they spread, by their inborn elastic energies, towards the south, and carry with them, only a little in their rear, the very title of their Hellenic origin, as well as their own peculiar name.

The ruling families of their septs or clans give each to its actual head, if not to its heir, the dignity of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and this title they carry forth with them to the southern provinces in which they plant themselves.

One of these ruling families, the head of the great sept of the Achæans, carries the right to this title in the case of Agamemnon: and inasmuch as it betokens what is both oldest and highest in descent and in civil authority in the whole group of the Hellenic tribes, it forms an appropriate and characteristic designation for their chief ruler and leader.

Having thus considered the case of Agamemnon, the great Achæan chieftain, in this view, we may proceed to the other cases of Anchises and Æneas, of Augeias, Euphetes, and Eumelus.

In none of these cases, however, have we the same right to assume _in limine_ the character of chieftainship by known lineage from an Hellenic family, as in the case of the Achæans. The cases of Anchises and Æneas may indeed be treated on grounds of their own. In the other instances, we must inquire what ground Homer furnishes for especially connecting these persons with the headship of ruling families, and with Hellas or Thessaly.

This I shall do, subject to the general rule, that if in any particular case there can be found a special mark of connection with Thessaly or Hellas in or about a particular spot, it is thereupon to be inferred that in that particular place the connection was known and commemorated. If, for example, we find at a given point an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, reason binds us to presume that, as the local name might show the derivation from the first seat of the race, so by this title the lineal descent from a ruling family there was meant to be commemorated and marked.

_The Cases of Anchises and Æneas._

But first for Anchises and Æneas.

Homer is the historian as well as the poet of Greece: but he is neither the poet nor the historian of Troy, further than as it was necessary for him to describe generally to the Greeks the race with whom they had been engaged in a death-struggle.

The strong resemblance between the two nations, and especially their partaking, to a certain extent, of a common lineage, seems to have constituted a difficulty in his way. Already in his time the sentiment of Greek nationality was strong. Whether he chiefly found or made it so, is nothing to the present purpose. This sentiment of nationality required to be circumscribed by a clear line, marking the extent of the Greek political organisation; and if it was unfavourable to the acknowledgment of relationship to any race beyond that line, especially was it so in the case of a race that the Greeks had conquered. Probably therefore the purpose of Homer required that he should instinctively as it were keep in special obscurity the notes of kindred between the two countries.

In the case of the Greeks, Homer has intelligibly pointed out the origin of the race among the hills of Northern Thessaly round the ancient Dodona, and near Olympus, its poetical counterpart, and the residence of Jupiter with his gorgeous train. Yet more clearly has he in the case of the Trojans enabled us to trace them to their fountain-head, again in the mountains, and beside the roots, of Ida, where they worshipped the Idæan Jove[813]. We have here the race without predecessors, residing in the very spot where they were planted by their divine progenitor, and coming down by a clear line of seven generations to the cousins Hector and Æneas.

But although the conditions of chieftaincy are thus obviously fulfilled in the race of Dardanus, yet difficulty presents itself in a new form. Why is the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν applied to Anchises and to his son Æneas, but never to Priam, or to his son Hector, or to any of his family?

The answer to this question opens a curious chapter of Homeric history and speculation. In going through it I shall endeavour carefully to separate between positive statement, and interpretation or conjecture.

These facts then are on the face of the poem.

1. Anchises nowhere personally appears in it. And yet there was at Troy an assembly of δημογέροντες (Il. iii. 146-8). Of the persons there mentioned, Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon were brothers of Priam; others, for example, Panthus and Antenor, were in the exercise of at the very least a subaltern sovereignty. They were present at Troy, while their sons fought in the Trojan ranks. The reason, therefore, of the absence of Anchises is not to be sought in his being represented by Æneas. Nor in the immunity of his dominions, through their being placed among the mountains, from war: for Æneas himself, before he came to Troy, had only been rescued by divine interposition from the hands of Achilles[814]. Why then does Anchises never appear? Either surely because of the high rank of his sovereignty, or because of some unexplained rivalry between the families.

_Evidence as to Æneas._

2. It does not appear that Æneas took any part in the councils of the Trojans. But still he is always represented as a personage of the greatest importance. It is said of him, as of Hector, θεὸς δ’ ὡς τίετο δήμῳ[815]. Yet his character would seem to be wholly unmarked by any great or striking quality, such as we find in Sarpedon and in Polydamas. Something peculiar then in his birth and position must have been the cause of the importance attached to him, as it is not to be found in his personal qualities.

3. Accordingly, there are clear indications of a jealousy between Æneas himself and the Trojan royal family. In the great battle of B. x. 118, Deiphobus, wanting aid, goes to seek Æneas (459-61).

τὸν δ’ ὕστατον εὗρεν ὁμίλου ἐστάοτ’· αἰεὶ γὰρ Πριάμῳ ἐπεμήνιε δίῳ οὕνεκ’ ἀρ’, ἔσθλον ἔοντα μετ’ ἀνδράσιν, οὔτι τίεσκεν.

Now this aversion is wholly foreign to the character of Priam, which was genial and kindly: nor can it be accounted for by any thing in the very neutral character of Æneas. There is an opinion of some critics, that he and Anchises had given offence by advising the restoration of Helen. This, however, seems (B. iii. 159) to have been the general wish of the δημογέροντες, to whom it is expressly ascribed; and it is Antenor, who proposes it in the Assembly; why then should it not, if it existed, be mentioned by Homer in the case of Æneas and Anchises? Yet there is not the faintest reference to it. It would still, however, appear insufficient to account for the feeling imputed to Priam. Coupling it with the high position of Æneas, and the absence of Anchises, I cannot but think there is most probably a reference here to the headship of the family, which is designated by the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Nothing could be more natural than this jealousy between the recent and wealthy city of the plain on the one hand, and the ancient but comparatively poor city of the hills on the other, if the ruling family of Dardania claimed by seniority the chieftaincy of the race.

4. Another remarkable indication of the peculiar position of Æneas is afforded by the taunt of Achilles (Il. xx. 179-83),

ἦ σέ γε θυμὸς ἐμοὶ μαχέσασθαι ἀνώγει ἐλπόμενον Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξειν ἱπποδάμοισιν τιμῆς τῆς Πριάμου;

‘But you will not get it,’ he proceeds, ‘for Priam has children of his own, and is no fool.’

To this taunt Æneas makes no reply, except by stating his genealogy, for which Achilles had not asked. Is not this very like justifying his expectation of the throne? or what other connecting link can be pointed out between the taunt of Achilles, and the genealogy given in answer to the challenge it conveyed?

5. While Ilion, the city of Priam, was later by several generations, probably having been founded in the reign of Ilus, Anchises reigned in Dardania, the original seat (Il. xx. 216) of the race. The fact of his sovereignty there seems to be indicated by our finding Æneas in command of the Dardanians, with two sons of Antenor, who probably served as his lieutenants (ii. 819-23): by the connection which that passage establishes between Anchises and the hill country, inhabited (Il. xx. 216) by the Dardanians; by the division of the royal line at the point where the Ilian name first appears (Il. xx. 231); and by a number of places showing the high position in the army which Æneas held, as head of the Dardanian force.

6. The rank of Æneas was without any rival or parallel in the Trojan army, except Hector. Though strictly speaking Dardanian, he is addressed as

Αἰνεία, Τρώων βουλήφορε·

His name is often combined with that of Hector, and when so combined frequently precedes it. Thus we have (vi. 75),

εἰ μὴ ἄρ’ Αἰνείᾳ τε καὶ Ἕκτορι εἶπε κ.τ.λ.

To this are subjoined, by Helenus, words which assign to Æneas a parity of command with Hector:

Αἰνεία τε καὶ Ἕκτορ, ἐπεὶ πόνος ὔμμι μάλιστα Τρώων καὶ Λυκίων ἐγκέκλιται[816].

If it be thought that metrical considerations had to do with putting Æneas in these places as well as in xx. 240, before Hector, so they might have to do with placing Ilus before Assaracus in the genealogy.

It is asserted of him by Mars in the person of Acamas, Il. v. 467,

κεῖται ἀνὴρ ὅντ’ ἶσον ἐτίομεν Ἕκτορι δίῳ, Αἰνείας, υἱὸς μεγαλήτορος Ἀγχίσαο.

Lastly, we have the prophecy of Neptune that the sceptre of Dardanus should continue in the line of Anchises (Il. xx. 302-8).

And, as regards the application to Æneas of the title which properly belonged to Anchises, this seems to connect itself with the practice of the heroic age as to a devolution of sovereignty, either partial or total, by aged men upon their heirs. We seem to find another example of this in the case of Eumelus; and the instances of Achilles, and especially of Ulysses, are also in point.

7. As the character of Æneas does not account for the jealousy felt towards him, so neither does his conduct. He nowhere thwarts Hector by opposition, or tries him by advice that he is not inclined to take. Of this course of proceeding we have an instance; but it is in Polydamas. If, then, neither the character nor the conduct of Æneas supply the explanation, we must look for it in some claims that he was entitled to make in virtue of lineage, and that consequently attracted jealousy towards him.

8. Although it has been assumed that Priam was the head of the Trojan race and federation, this is not stated by Homer. In Il. xxiv. 544 it is only said that he excelled the other princes of that region, (1) in his wealth, and (2) in the number, or possibly it may mean the excellence of his sons. On the contrary, it is doubtful, by the mere words of the poem, whether Priam represented the senior or the junior line, and when we compare and draw inferences from the text, we may arrive at the conclusion that it was the junior line, quite as easily as at an opposite one; especially if we shall find, that the rights of seniority itself were less determinate in Troas, than in Greece.

In the genealogy of the Twentieth Book, we find no assistance towards elucidating this question, except in the precedence given to names. The three sons of Tros stand in the following order:

1. Ilus. 2. Assaracus. 3. Ganymedes.

Then (1) the fate of Ganymedes is described;

(2) the line of Ilus is traced down to Priam;

(3) that of Assaracus is traced to Anchises.

Here the line of Priam has precedence: but on the other hand, lastly, Æneas proceeds to state his own birth from Anchises, before that of Hector from Priam,

αὐτὰρ ἔμ’ Ἀγχίσης, Πρίαμος δ’ ἔτεχ’ Ἕκτορα δῖον[817].

9. In the Fifth Iliad we learn, that Jupiter presented some horses of a particular breed to Tros, as a compensation for the loss of his son Ganymedes. Anchises brought his mares to them in the time of Laomedon without leave, and thus got possession of the breed. And it is in this place that Homer calls him ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν[818]. It may also be observed that this was the act of a young man; for Laomedon, on whom he played this trick, was one generation higher in the family tree. It is here shown undoubtedly that the horses of Tros, the common ancestor, descended to the line of Priam; which was the more wealthy and powerful, and occupied the plain country, where the horses fed in great numbers (xx. 221); but again, does it not seem as if this very proceeding of Anchises may have had reference to a rivalry between the two houses, and a claim on his part to the headship of the family? especially from the use in this very narrative of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν for Anchises (v. 268), and shortly after for his heir Æneas (v. 311).

_Summary of the Evidence._

To sum up the evidence. We find the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν applied to two persons only among the Trojans. Those two are a father advanced in years, and his heir apparent. The father is plainly enough the sovereign of Dardania, as well as descended from Dardanus; and Dardania, though secondary in power, was the original seat of the race. We cannot say positively whether Anchises represented the elder or the younger branch of the family: for precedence of name is sometimes given to one, and sometimes to the other line. But as Troy was powerful, and Dardania poor, we can understand the precedence of the Trojan line, even although it be supposed junior: whereas it seems difficult to account for the fact that the precedence is sometimes given to Æneas, or for the jealousy felt both towards him, and by him, except on the supposition that his family in its humbler circumstances either were the rightful representatives of Dardanus, whose sceptre, after the fall of Troy, Æneas and his sons were undoubtedly to transmit[819]; or at least were in a condition, whether by primogeniture in Assaracus, or whether by holding the original seat of the race, to make fair and plausible pretensions to the distinction.

It is important to bear in mind, that we have not the same clear assertion of the right of the elder branch to succeed to power in Asia, which the cases of Agamemnon, Protesilaus, Thrasymedes, and perhaps others, supply in Greece. On the contrary, we shall find Sarpedon first leader of the Lycians, though of a junior branch to Glaucus, and likewise representing only the female line. We shall also find great reason to question whether Hector, even if he was the heir expectant of the succession, was not, nevertheless, junior to Paris. This want of definiteness in the rule of succession is exactly what would bring it into dispute, and perhaps into prolonged dispute. And if the right of seniority was not fully acknowledged in Asia, this would at once explain, why Homer did not observe an uniform order in the genealogy: perhaps it might also explain his not being historically aware what that order was.

If this be so, the apparent anomaly of the application, on the Trojan side, to secondary persons only of the title so constantly given to the highest Greek, disappears, and becomes the consistent application of a rule. And Anchises with Æneas may then offer the most perfect model of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, as uniting with continued sovereignty not only known lineal descent from the first ancestor, and from Jupiter, but also the continued possession of the original seat.

It may however be asked, why, even if we allow that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is among the Greeks a title of patriarchal chieftaincy, should we therefore assume that it had the same defined meaning among a people of different blood and institutions?

Let me briefly answer this question.

It is to the Helli that we have looked back as the most probable source of those ideas and institutions of clanship, which gave rise to the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. But the Helli were a mountain people, (for they were around the wintry Dodona,) and so were the Dardanians: and the institutions of highlanders in different parts, even at wide intervals of space and time, often present strong mutual resemblances. The limited means and pursuits of man in such a physical position check development, and tend to maintain uniformity.

The Dardan highlanders worshipped Jupiter on Ida, as the Helli worshipped him at Dodona. That it was the same Jupiter, we may infer with the greatest confidence, from the fact that Homer makes one formula of invocation common to his Trojans and his Greeks[820].

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν Ἀχαιῶν τε Τρώων τε· Ζεῦ πάτερ, Ἴδηθεν μεδέων, κύδιστε, μέγιστε, κ.τ.λ.

The bulk of the religion was nearly the same on both sides, as far as the principal deities were concerned.

_Signs of kin between Trojans and Greeks._

As the first among the proofs of affinity in blood, I should be inclined to cite that very visit of Paris to Menelaus, which gave occasion to the war. We have no other instance recorded in Homer of a foreign prince, received as such in domestic hospitality by a Greek chieftain. Nor can we, inversely, find that Greek chieftains were similarly entertained by foreigners. We have indeed an account of gifts received by Menelaus in Egypt[821]; and we have the kindly reception by the Egyptian king and his people of the Pseudo-Ulysses as a suppliant[822]; and the similar entertainment of Ulysses, again as a suppliant, in Scheria. But these cases fall greatly short of the case of Paris. Again, Homer calls the Egyptians ἀλλόθροοι ἄνθρωποι[823]: and that phrase is an usual one with him, evidently representing a familiar idea. But he never calls the Trojans ἀλλόθροοι, nor speaks of them as having different manners or religion from the Greeks. The strongest word applied to them is ἀλλοδάπος[824]. But this word seems to mean simply ‘from another place,’ and does not convey the proper and full idea of a foreigner. For not only the Lycian Sarpedon is an ἀλλοδάπος to the Trojans, but Greek pirates are usually said to attack ἀλλοδάποι, whereas they evidently were wont to plunder those of their own nation, even down to the time of Thucydides: and above all Eumæus, disgusted and worn out with the profligate misdeeds of the Suitors, thinks of moving off ἄνδρας ἐς ἀλλοδάπους, together with his oxen (ἰόντ’ αὐτῇσι βόεσσιν), by which he could not have meant more than a short passage to the Greek continent[825]. On the whole, I think that all this permits the supposition that the Trojans were admitted to be a kindred, though they were not a Greek people.

But further, the poems are full of testimony to the affinities between the Trojans and the Greeks. It is true they also bear witness to considerable differences: but both nations had been settled in the plain country for several generations before the Trojan War; and, with the growth of agriculture and trade, arts and wealth, they might well have diverged from the close parallelism of a ruder age.

At this point, however, we must call to mind some matters, which have been more largely discussed already.

Among these resemblances of a general character it may be observed, that there evidently are Pelasgi on both sides of the great quarrel. The Πελασγοὶ of the Trojans are among the ἐπίκουροι (Il. ii. 840): the Πελασγοὶ of the Greeks appear as one of the Cretan races, distinct from the Dorians and Achæans, and probably as the first founders of those lowland settlements in Thessaly (ii. 681), over which the Hellenic and Achæan names seem principally to have prevailed. Thus the Pelasgian name forms a decided bond of union between the two races: though, from the Poet’s mentioning it on the Trojan, and suppressing it on the Greek side, we at once infer that the Pelasgian element was stronger and more palpable among the Trojans.

_Signs connected with the Helli._

Next, it may be recollected that, according both to antecedent probability and to tradition, those Helli who colonized the tract about Dodona must have come from, that is, come by way of, Dardania. There is thus every likelihood of a similarity, either of race or of manners, between those who passed onwards, and those who dropped off the movement, and remained behind.

Nor are there wanting some indications, small in amount, but trustworthy in their nature, of primitive identity between the Dardans, or some portion of them, and the Helli.

The Trojan Catalogue divides itself into two principal parts. The latter of these (840-877) recites the names of the allied nations. The former (816-39) mentions no names of races but the Trojan and Dardanian; which were really one, and were even in name sometimes treated as identical: for Æneas is addressed, though commander of the Dardans[826], as

Αἰνεία, Τρώων βουλήφορε.

This division of the Catalogue is clearly indicated by the verse which introduces it,

ἔνθα τότε Τρῶές τε διέκριθεν ἠδ’ ἐπίκουροι·

where the word Τρῶες evidently includes the Dardanians.

And that every thing is Trojan, or Dardan, which lies within the division, vv. 816-839, may further be inferred from Dolon’s description of the bivouac of the ἐπίκουροι in Il. x. 428-31. He enumerates nine nations, some of whom appear among the eleven described in Il. ii. 840-77, but not one among those portions of the force which are described 816-839. I therefore gather, that every thing in this part of the Catalogue is strictly Trojan or Dardan. But here we have

Ἄσιος Ὑρτακίδης, ὃν Ἀρίσβηθεν φέρον ἵπποι αἴθωνες μεγάλοι, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελλήεντος.

The mention of this river is repeated in Il. xii. 96, 7.

Now the name of a river Selleeis at once suggests a connection with the tribe of Selli or Helli: and further on we shall find, that Ephyre is a sign of the Helli, as Larissa is of the Pelasgi, and that one at least of the Ephyres of Greece, probably one situated in Thessaly, was by a river Selleeis. In later times Sicyon[827], and in Homer Elis, if not Thessaly, show each their Ephyre with a river Selleeis.

It has been already noticed, that in the Games of the Twenty-third Iliad, Homer tells us that the σόλος, or ball of iron given by Achilles as a prize, had previously been hurled by the strong arm of king Eetion. And as all the traces of gymnastic exercises in Homer lead us to refer them to Hellic families, we may perhaps be justified in taking this as an indication that Eetion, the father of Andromache, belonged to this stock.

_The Hellespont of Homer._

Another trace of the name of the Helli is found in the grammatical structure of the ancient Homeric word Hellespont. Its composition declares it to be the sea of Helle. Helle would be the descriptive name of a woman of the tribe of Helli. Nor could any thing be more natural, than that the Strait and neighbouring water should take its appellation from the tribe of Helli, or even from a person of that tribe, when we have every reason to believe they made the passage in the course of their migration westward.

In later times, the name Hellespont has been restricted to the narrow strait between the Sea of Marmora and the Archipelago. In Homer it bore this sense, at least occasionally or inclusively, because he calls it ἀγάῤῥοος[828]. At other times he calls it πλατὺς, and the commentators have been much puzzled to show how a narrow strait could be a broad one, while the interpretation _salt_ has also been suggested for the epithet. It is just possible, that this adjective might apply to what was afterwards known as the Hellespont, and might describe it as broad, in comparison with the bay in which lay the Greek ships: but it is much more natural to construe it more freely, and to understand by it the broad Hellespont, in opposition to the narrow Hellespont; that is, the open sea, in opposition to the ἀγάῤῥοος, which signifies the Strait. The expression πλατὺς Ἑλλήσποντος is used but thrice; once[829] for the water near the part of the camp occupied by Achilles, which we know was by the open sea[830], and twice[831] with reference to the sepulchral mounds which were to be erected there, and for which the most conspicuous spot would of course be chosen. What πλατὺς suggests, another epithet, ἀπείρων[832], surely requires: for it is incredible that this word should be applied to the mere Strait. And in truth, independently of epithets, it is demonstrable that the word in Homer sometimes means, not the strait, but the Archipelago. For Achilles, announcing his intention to sail home, says he will be seen passing Ἑλλήσποντον ἐπ’ ἰχθυόεντα[833], _over_ the Hellespont, which, having his vessels already at the mouth of it, he clearly could not do if it meant the strait only. And, in truth, the etymology of the word speaks for itself: the Greeks never would have given the name πόντος at all to a narrow strip of water. The connection, which was thus established between this quarter and Greece through the medium of the name Helle, was recognised by the later Greeks: but they naturally altered its form, by keeping to their own country the honours of the fountain-head, while they made the eastward traces of the name to be secondary and derivative. In Apollonius, Phryxus and Helle are the children of Athamas, and grandchildren of Æolus: and they are carried from Thessaly on the back of a ram to the Troic sea, where she is dropped, and gives her name to it. This tradition is summed up in the argument to the Argonautica, and exhibits the belief of the Greeks in the early relationship of the countries.

All this marks the Helli not only as a people who had crossed the straits, but as one which had left its name associated with the northern coast of the Ægean, and moreover upon the country in the neighbourhood of the straits, up to the river Selleeis; a stream which we see must have been at a considerable distance beyond Troy, because all the rivers that descended from Mount Ida were employed in clearing away the Greek earthworks, and this one is not among them[834].

_The gift of Echepolus._

We find an insulated yet remarkable note of kin between the Dardan house and the Greeks in the case of Echepolus. He was a son of Anchises, and he resided in Sicyon. He was possessed of great wealth, and apparently he had also the fine breed of horses which was in his family: for he presented Agamemnon with the mare Αἴθη[835], as a consideration for not being required to follow him against Troy.

Now there was evidently at this time no commercial class formed in Greece. Echepolus must therefore have had a territorial fortune. To find a wealthy member of the Dardan house domesticated in Greece, and peacefully remaining there during the expedition, must excite some surprise. It seems to supply a new and strong presumption of the Hellic origin of the royal families of Troas. The name too, and the gift of a horse, are in remarkable conformity with the horse-rearing and horse-breaking pursuits of the highest Trojans.

We have already seen stray signs of the Pelasgic affinities between the two contending parties: but it would now appear, that there were affinities in the Hellic line also: and if so, then this institution of chieftaincy, standing above merely political supremacy, and indicated by the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, may probably have subsisted among Trojans as well as Greeks.

The less warlike character of the Trojans, their more oriental manners, and their less multiform and imaginative religion, all point to considerable differences in the composition of the people. The Pelasgic ingredient was probably stronger in Troy: it appears to have had more influence over religion, manners, and institutions. But the circumstances mentioned above are tokens of an infusion of Hellic blood in the populations that inhabited Troas. Now this was nowhere so likely to be found as in the royal family; for we see the governing faculty everywhere accompanying the Hellic tribes through Greece, and asserting itself both by the acquisition of political power, and by the energetic use of it. Everywhere it rises, by a natural buoyancy, to the summit of society; and gives their first vent, in miniature, to those energies, which were afterwards to defy, or even to subdue the world.

At the same time, though it is in connection with the Hellic families alone that we find the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν among the Greeks, we need not proceed so far as to deny the possibility that it might also have been a Pelasgic institution, and that its non-appearance, in connection with their name, might be sufficiently accounted for simply by their loss of political power. We have no reason to suppose the Pelasgi and Helli to have been families of mankind whose characters were in radical and absolute opposition to one another: the completeness of their fusion after a short period seems to prove, that, though with a different distribution of capacities and tendencies, they must have had many and important points of contact.

IV. _Case of Augeias._

Let us take next the case of Augeias.

He appears in three passages of the Iliad.

1. The Epeans, who inhabited Elis, with Bouprasium and other towns enumerated in the Catalogue, and lying in the north-western corner of the Peloponnesus, sent to the Trojan war forty ships, in four divisions, under four separate leaders, and without any head over the whole contingent. The fourth named of these is Polyxeinus, son of Agasthenes, himself a lord (ἄναξ), and the son of Augeias.

2. In the Eleventh Book, Nestor gives the curious history of the war of his boyhood or earliest youth, between the Elians (v. 671), called also Epeans (688), and the Pylians.

Neleus had sent to Elis a chariot with four horses to contend in the games, of which a tripod was the prize. The horses were detained by Augeias (v. 701).

τοὺς δ’ αὖθι ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Αὐγείας κάσχεθε.

Nestor and the Pylians invaded Elis in return, and brought off an immense booty. The Elians then took arms and besieged Thryoessa (in the Catalogue Thryon), the border city of Pylos, at the ford of the Alpheus. Minerva brought the tidings to Pylos. The Pylian forces spent one night on the boundary river Minyeius, and marched to the Alpheus, beside which they spent a second night.

3. In the morning the battle was fought: the Epeans were defeated, and driven all the way to Bouprasium and the Olenian rock, upon the sea shore, in the western part of what was afterwards Achæa. There Pallas turned them back. The Pylians, who returned home, are called Achæans[836].

Nestor in the first fight had slain a warrior named Μούλιος. He was the son-in-law of Augeias, married to his eldest daughter Agamede, who was profoundly skilled in drugs (v. 741);

ἣ τόσα φάρμακα ᾔδη, ὅσα τρέφει εὐρεῖα χθών.

K. O. Müller (Orchomenus, p. 355) infers from the Catalogue, that Augeias was lord only of a fourth part of Elis. But this assumption seems quite gratuitous in connection with the passage in the Catalogue, and utterly in contradiction to the tenour of the history of the Pylian raid in B. xi. On the contrary, I infer with considerable confidence, from the acephalous state of the Elian division of the army, in which it differs from the other divisions, that there had been a revolution in that state since the time of Augeias; and if so, then indirectly the Catalogue confirms the Elian monarchy described in the Eleventh Book.

Thus then we find this ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, Augeias, lord of Elis two generations before the Trojan war. He is neighbour to Achæans, whom we have already traced in Hellas: and he appears to have belonged to the same national origin with them, because they sent their chariots to run races at his games. Again, the fact of his holding these games at all, and at a place which subsequently contended for and obtained the superintendence of the great national assemblages celebrated at Olympia, testifies to his known connection with the cradle of the race whose custom it was to celebrate them; because these festivities had a religious and national character, and as such could not but have depended very greatly upon traditionary title. This race we have previously found to be the Hellenic race.

_Notes of connection between Elis and the North._

We may however find other indications of the descent of Augeias from a ruling Hellenic family, in local and personal notices which connect Elis, his own territory, with the north, and with Thessaly in

## particular.

For example: it was at the Alpheus in Elis that Thamyris suffered his calamity: and he was coming at the time from Œchalia[837], in the valley of the Upper Peneus, a part of the Homeric Thessaly or Hellas proper. (Il. ii. 730.)

The name Θρῂξ, too, which is applied to him, never seems to have spread farther southwards than the hills about Thessaly.

Further, he was coming from Eurytus of Œchalia, who is again named as the lord, apparently, of that city, in ii. 730. But the name Eurytus was one current among the descendants of Actor[838], for a descendant of Actor who bore it is named in the Catalogue a little below: and this latter Eurytus was an Epean chief: and the descendants of Actor are found in the Epean or Elian army of the Eleventh Book. (xi. 709, 739.)

Again, they are found in Thessaly or Phthiotis, for when Mercury had deflowered Polymele, the daughter of Phylas a Thessalian, Echecles, a descendant of Actor, married her; and yet again, they are found near Aspledon[839] and the Minyeian Orchomenos, between Bœotia and Phocis[840].

Again, the Pylian army halted, at a day’s march from the Alpheus, on the Minyeius, a river evidently named from the Minyæ of Peloponnesus. But there was a Minya also in Thessaly[841], of which the site was not precisely known in historic times: and the northern Orchomenos was called Minyeius[842].

There is no part of Middle or of Southern Greece which so abounds in the local and personal notes of connection with Thessaly and the North as Elis and its neighbourhood. Some indications of it have already been given, and many more might be added. As for example, there was an Enipeus[843], a river of Elis, so there was of Pieria and of Phthiotis. Doris, beneath Œta, is reflected or prefigured in the Homeric Dorium of the Pylian territories: the Thessalian Larissa in a Larissa, and a river Larissus, of Elis. The Thessalian name Œchalia is repeated in the district, over which Nestor ruled at the epoch of the _Troica_; and there is an Arcadian Orchomenos as well as a northern one. Cyparissus in Elis corresponds, again, with a Cyparissus in Phocis. Some other more doubtful indications may close the list. The Parrhasie of Arcadia may be from the same root with the Πύρασος[844] of the dominions of Protesilaus. Perhaps the Thessalian Helos and Pteleos may be akin to Alos in the country of Peleus[845]. The resemblance of names is not confined to the extremities of the line, but is scattered along the path of migration from north to south. It extends also to Laconia.

Nestor in his youth is summoned all the way from Pylos (τηλόθεν), to fight with Pirithous and others in Thessaly; (from whence Polypœtes, the son of Pirithous, led a division of the Greek army,) against the Φῆρες.

Thus far we find some presumptions as to the descent of Augeias, as to his connection with the Hellic institution of the games, and as to the relation between Elis, over which he reigned, and the line northwards into Thessaly; all tending, together with the evidently Hellic character of the Epeans, to shew that he was the representative of one of their ruling tribes.

But he also bears a distinct local mark, the nature of which I shall now endeavour to investigate.

The chieftainship of Agamemnon has been traced and identified by means of his Achæan connection, without any assistance from local or territorial names connected with the abode of his family.

In such a case as his, we could not look for aid of that description: for his house had only been possessed for two generations of their dominions: we have no precise knowledge before that time of the place of their sojourn: and when they rose to power, it was in a territory, and in cities, which appear to have been already of historic fame. It was not therefore likely that their abodes should bear names such as, if they had come in the characters of founders and not of inheritors, they would probably have affixed to them.

In the case of the Dardan house, we have found, among other indications of their Hellic affinities, the two evidently Hellic names of the Hellespont and the River Selleeis.

_The name of Ephyre._

There is another local name in Homer of paramount importance as a key to the question respecting the ruling Hellic tribes, the name of Ephyre (Ἐφύρη).

Let us endeavour to collect the scattered lights which either the etymology, or the use and associations of the term in Homer, may supply.

_Its cognate names._

And, first, we may notice in Homer a large cluster of names which are found running over Greece, and which are evidently in etymological association with one another: I will bring these together, before endeavouring to estimate their relation to the name Ephyre.

1. Φᾶρις, Il. ii. 582. In Lacedæmon.

2. Φεραὶ, Il. ii. 711. In Thessaly.

3. Φήρη, Il. v. 543. Between Pylus and Sparta.

4. Φήραι, Il. ix. 151, 293. Od. iii. 488. The same.

5. Φεαὶ, Od. xv. 296[846]. Otherwise read Φεραὶ, and, according to the Scholiast, the same with Φῆραι. The site is on the sea, between Pylus and Sparta.

6. Φεῖα, Il. vii. 135. On the Iardanus: and probably also on the Arcadian frontier towards Pylus: but, in the opinion of the Scholiast[847], the same with Φεαί.

Besides these names of places, we have also,

1. Φηρητιάδης, Il. ii. 763. xxiii. 376, the name of Eumelus; who was the son of Admetus, the lord of Φεραὶ in Il. ii. 711.

2. Φέρης, one of the sons of Cretheus, a Thessalian king, Od. xi. 259.

3. The Φῆρες, termed ὀρέσκῳοι in Il. i. 268, and λαχνηέντες in Il. ii. 743; the shaggy mountaineers, on whom Pirithous made war, when he was attended by Nestor.

With respect to the six local names, and the two first of the three personal names, there can be little doubt of their identity in root. It is directly probable from the text, that Φήρη and Φηραὶ were the same place. The name of Eumelus, who lives at Φεραὶ, and who is the grandson of Φέρης, yet is called Φηρητιάδης, clearly establishes the etymological relationship. Thus there is, again, no difficulty whatever in recognising between Φεραὶ and Φεαὶ, or again between Φεαὶ and Φείαι; and it is in the manner of Homer to give the name of the same country both in the singular and in the plural, as Μυκήνη, Il. iv. 52, and Μυκηναὶ, Il. ii. 569. Φᾶρις, the only remaining name, gives us the Doric or Æolic α for η, and an altered form of declension. This however is not at all incompatible with the manner of Homer, who not only uses Πηνελόπη and Πηνελόπεια, Ἀστυόχη and Ἀστυόχεια, Πηρείη (according to one reading), Il. ii. 766, and Πιερίη, Od. v. 50, but Ἑρμῆς and Ἑρμείας, Πατροκλέης and Πατρόκλος; and for towns, the Θρύον of Il. ii. 591 appears again as Θρυόεσσα in Il. xi. 711.

In general it is to be remembered that the instrument of language, at the time when Homer lived was as yet in a highly elastic state: it was in the state as it were of gristle; it had not yet hardened into bone, nor assumed the strict conventional forms which a formed literature requires. And for the same reasons that it has presented variations as between one time and another, it could not but do the like as between one place and another.

The very same causes which made change a law of language would give to that course of change in one place a greater, and in another a less velocity, older forms succumbing at a given time in one place, and yet surviving in another. Such a state of facts around him would give great liberty to a poet, independently of the exigencies of his verse; which appear indeed to have caused to such a man, and with such a language, little difficulty.

But we hardly require the benefit of these general considerations to cover the case of a varying declension for the name of a town. The true explanation probably is the very simple one, that in one declension it has been used substantively, and in the other adjectively. And this will be the more plain if we consider that the name of the town would usually be the representative of an idea, either in conjunction with a person, or directly. Thus θρύον is _a rush_, and θρυοεὶς _rushy_. The town Θρύον in the Catalogue is at the ford of the Alpheus, and in Il. xi. 711 it is τις Θρυόεσσα πόλις, αἰπεῖα κολώνη, which exhibits to us the adjective use in an actual example. So again by analogy we might have Φῆρις from Φήρα or Φήρη, as πάτρις from πάτρα, ἀναλκὶς from ἄλκη.

We have a curious extra-Homeric remnant of geographical evidence with respect to this Pharis. Pausanias[848] relates to us, that the place where it was reported to have stood was in his time called Alesiæ, and that near it there was a river bearing the peculiar name of Phellias; which it seems most natural to regard as a corrupted form of the Homeric name Σελληείς. This connection of Pharis with Selleeis becomes in its turn an argument for relationship between Pharis and Ephyre, with which Selleeis is associated in the places where Homer mentions it as the name of a Greek river.

Nor are we without other traces, in this region, of that name which so often attends upon Ephyre: for Laconia had for its key on the north the town of Sellasia[849]. The Προέληνοι of Arcadia should also here be borne in mind.

Thus then we appear to find the name of Ephyre according to one or other of its forms in Laconia, in Pylus, and in that part of Thessaly which was ruled by Admetus. The ruling race in the two former was Achæan, and therefore Hellic. Admetus was himself an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and his Hellic origin will be shown presently. So far, therefore, we have a presumption established that the name of Ephyre signifies some peculiar connection with the Helli.

Etymologically it is obvious to connect these words with ἔρα as their root, and to suppose that they retain the prefix, which it had lost in the common Greek usage even before the days of Homer, as he employs ἔραζε without the digamma: and which prefix we find reproduced in the Latin _terra_.

_The Φῆρες._

Let us now pass on to the Φῆρες.

The Φῆρες of Homer are, like the Ἕλλοι, a mountain people, Il. i. 268, rude in manners (ii. 743), and aggressive upon the inhabitants of the plains; for the war in which Nestor engaged was evidently retributive, as the expression used is ἐτίσατο[850], Pirithous ‘_paid them off_;’ and he was sovereign of a part of the plain country, called Pelasgic Argos. Nor does any adverse presumption arise from our finding a Hellic tribe (if such they were) of the mountains, making war on tribes of similar origin in the plain: any more than we are surprised at war between the Pylians and the Epeans, both apparently Hellic, though probably not both Achæan.

It may be well to remember, that the Dardans of Homer are often included in Trojans; as well as often separately designated: and that the Cephallenians are also apparently included among his Ἀχαιοί. Neither of these pairs of names are territorial: while in each pair one probably indicates a subdivision of the other.

The Φῆρες thus resembling the Ἕλλοι, we are led by their designation to another link between the name of Φῆραι with its cognates and the Hellic race. It seems thus far as if Φηραὶ were the appropriate name of a settlement formed by Φῆρες.

Having proceeded thus far, we may now observe the relation of the word Φὴρ,

1. To the Greek ἔρα, which evidently, from its passing into the Latin _terra_, had at one time a Greek prefix. With this we may probably associate the Greek ἔαρ, and the Latin _ver_.

2. To the Greek θὴρ, a wild beast.

3. To the Latin _fera_, with the same meaning.

4. To the Latin _terra_, meaning the earth.

5. To the Italian _terra_, the old classical name, in that beautiful tongue, not for a district, but for an inclosed, walled, or fortified place. This word seems in Italian to be rarely, if at all, used for a district, but so generally for a town, that it is difficult to suppose the signification was derived in the same manner as Argos in Greek, from the tract of country in which it was situated. In Italian _terra_ seems often to mean _tellus_, often _humus_, very rarely _ager_, constantly _oppidum_ or _castrum_. Thus in Dante (Inferno, C., v. 97), ‘_Siede_ la terra, dove nata fui.’

This being so, it is natural to suppose that, while the correlative of the Greek ἔρα became in Latin _terra_, so as directly to signify _tellus_ or _humus_, that of the Greek Φηρὰ became in Italian _terra_, so as to signify a walled place; or, in other words, that the original word, whatever it was, of the common mother language, which became Φηρὰ in Greek, in Italy became _terra_ for this latter purpose. The exchange of θ for _t_ we see in ἐσθὴς becoming _vestis_: and of _t_ for _f_ (= φ) in τρυγάω compared with _fruges_.

This sense of _terra_ seems to have dropped altogether out of the Latin, and especially Pelasgian, branch of the old Italian tongue.

The relation between Φὴρ and θὴρ, the one applicable to men, and the other to wild beasts, appears evidently to throw us back upon that which the mountain tribes of men had in common with animals, namely, a wild and savage life, and the free possession of the earth. Thus the two stand in a common and near relation to the word ἔρα, the earth, and they seem to have ἐρ or ἠρ for their common root.

Before passing on to Ἐφύρη, I would remark that in this instance again we seem to derive light from Homer’s unequalled point and precision in the use of epithets. His Φῆρες appear to be in fact the rude and uncombed mountaineers, who also have the name of Ἕλλοι in the same or other tribes. These Φῆρες are λαχνηέντες, shaggy. They come down to the plains, and acquire settled and civilised habits: from Φῆρες they are become Ἀχαιοὶ, but their long hair has not left them, and from λαχνηέντες they are now καρηκομόωντες.

Now we find the word Ἐφύρη used many times in Homer: and once we have the name Ἔφυροι, applied to a people apparently Thessalian, on whom Mars[851], with his son Φόβος, makes war from out of Thrace.

_Etymology of Ἐφύρη._

Can we then presume an etymological connection between the word Ἐφύρη, and that group of words which we have been discussing, and which we have found to show marks of connection with the Helli?

For if so, then we shall be supported by various other reasons, which, as we shall find, connect the word Ephyre with the Hellic races in a very remarkable manner.

What we have here to consider is,

1. The prefix ε.

2. The change of ε or η for υ.

Dr. Donaldson[852] has given a list of Greek words which have, as prefixes unconnected with the root, sometimes the letter α, sometimes ε, sometimes ο.

Such in the second class are

ἐ-ρέφω, whence roof. ἐ-λεύθερος, whence liber. ἐ-ρυθρὸς, whence ruber, rufus. ἐ-ρετμὸς, whence remus.

This point being disposed of, how are we to account for finding φυρη, instead of φερη or φηρη?

Can it be because, in cases of Greek syllabic augment, there is a tendency to avoid reduplication, as in ἀτιτάλλω for ἀτατάλλω? In but a small proportion of the cases given in Dr. Donaldson’s table is the vowel prefix the same with the vowel following.

Can it be from that tendency of what we call comprehensively the digamma to lapse into the υ, which Heyne has observed[853]?

Or, shall we found it on the principles laid down by Bopp[854], in his Comparative Grammar, that the α has a tendency to weaken itself into υ, and that liquids having a preference for that latter vowel, influence the generation of it? the conditions of interchange between α and υ resting, as he says, upon the laws of gravity or vocal equilibrium.

It must be observed that the original vowel of the root may, in this case, have been the α which we find in φᾶρις.

It is not only α that we may find supplanted by υ. The ε suffers the same fate in the Italian _Siculus_, which appears as the representative of the Greek Σίκελος. Again we have, in the Latin, the kindred words _furo_ and _fera_. Perhaps I am wrong in dealing thus scrupulously with the variation from ε to υ, as if capable of affecting vitally the question of identity in the root. For in examining another root (that of κεφάλη), we have seen that its derivatives appear to include the whole, or nearly the whole range of the vowels of the alphabet.

_Its probable signification._

Upon the whole it appears not unsafe, without pretending to any authoritative solution of a question fitted for philological scholars, among whom I cannot pretend to rank, to suppose that Ἐφύρη and Φηραὶ may be drawn etymologically from the same root. If so, that root will be probably the same with that of ἔρα, and of φῆρ of which we have ascertained that it is related to the Hellic races: and upon these suppositions we may already be prepared, I do not say to conclude, but to suspect that Ἐφύρη and Φεραὶ may properly denote, and may be the original and proper Hellic name for the _terre_ (Ital.), or walled places, founded by the Hellic races; as Ἄργος signifies the open districts in which the Pelasgians were given to settling κωμηδὸν, for agricultural purposes.

I do not mean by this that the Pelasgian settlements contained no aggregations of houses, or that the Hellic were not connected with the cultivation of the soil. On the contrary, as the Pelasgians apparently built their Larissas for defence, so we seem to have indications connecting the name Ephyre with a fertile soil. When Homer represents the Ἔφυροι as objects of invasion by Mars from Thrace, he probably means by the name the inhabitants of a settled country in the plains, on whom predatory incursions were made by the Thracian highlanders. So that if we shall succeed in shewing a special connection between the local name Ephyre and the Hellic tribes, we may, by the reflected light of that conclusion, even venture to understand the word Ephyri as meaning Helli, who had come down into the low country, made settlements, and acquired something at least of the habits of civilized life.

Nor are we without further Homeric evidence to the effect that, wherever an Ephyre is found, there is usually an abundance of rich pasture and cultivable land, so that the name is well adapted to mark those spots which a conquering race would be apt to choose for its abodes.

For example, Elis has its Ephyre: and from the fact that Elis was the scene of the national chariot-races, we might at once conclude that it was famous for its horses, and if so, that it abounded in good soil and pasture, and in open country. Wherever in Homer we find the horse conspicuous, we find also good lands and opulence, whether it be in Troas, in the Thrace called ἐριβώλαξ[855], in Thessaly, or in Elis. For Homer gives us, as to the last, direct evidence of the fact, by his epithets εὐρύχορος, open, and ἱππόβοτος, horse-pasturing[856]. Elis, in fact, was most probably for Peloponnesus what Bœotia was for Middle Greece: the first halting place, from its fertile soil, of those who entered the region; the scene, accordingly, of rapid successions, and therefore frequent revolutions, but also the place bearing the strongest marks, through nomenclature, of the country from which the new-comers had proceeded.

Again, the Ephyre of the Odyssey is expressly called (Od. ii. 328), πίειραν ἄρουραν. And when Hercules took Astyoche from Ephyre (Il. ii. 659), after despoiling that with many other cities, we may clearly infer, that they were rich, and not poor places which he plundered, therefore that this Ephyre also was rich, and if so, rich in its soil, the only wealth, for regions, then known to Greece. Again, the Ephyre of Sisyphus (Il. vi. 152) became Corinth, and Corinth was even in Homer’s time called ἄφνειος. This epithet is referred by some to its favourable position for commerce. But such an explanation is wholly unsuited to the age of Homer. For the commercial prominence of Corinth belongs to a later period; and we have nothing to support the idea, that commercial opulence existed in Greece at this period at all. The natural explanation seems to be, the fertility of the soil of the plain between the rock of Corinth and Sicyon. This seems to have become, in after-time, the subject of a proverb. Hence the χρησμόλογος in the Aves of Aristophanes says (Av. 968),

ἀλλ’ ὅταν οἰκήσωσι λύκοι πολιαί τε κορώναι ἐν ταυτῷ τὸ μεταξὺ Κορίνθου καὶ Σικυῶνος.

In the same sense as where Shakespeare says,

When Birnam wood shall move to Dunsinane.

The Scholiast gives two explanations, of which the best is εὔφορος γὰρ αὕτη ἡ χώρα.

Again, it is certainly confirmatory of the supposition that Ἐφύρη was the name of the primitive Hellic, as Ἄργος was of the Pelasgic settlement, when we find that the first, though clearly meaning a settled place, has etymologically no reference to agricultural labour, while the second is entirely based upon that idea; since these significations of the word chosen to denote settlement, in the two cases agree, in their reciprocal difference, with the different specific character of the Hellic and Pelasgic tribes, the former emerging from the mountains, predatory and poor, ardent, bold, and enterprising; the latter peaceful in their habits, and looking to nothing beyond the cultivation of the soil.

So much for the root of Ephyre and Pheræ, and for the relation between the two.

_Places bearing the name in Homer._

Now the Homeric testimony to the prevalence of these names is exactly such as most effectually establishes the connection between them on the one hand, and Thessaly with the Hellic races on the other.

First as to Ephyre.

1. Five generations before the Trojan war, Sisyphus, a son or descendant of Æolus, was settled, apparently as a subordinate prince or lord, in an Ephyre, which was near the territory of Prœtus, and was situated μύχῳ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο. Bellerophon, the grandson of Sisyphus, was driven out by Prœtus, king of the Argives; and was a ξεῖνος of Œneus, the ancestor of Diomed. These circumstances, combined with the tradition that attached the name of Ephyre to the site of Corinth, leave no doubt that Homer means to place Sisyphus in what was afterwards Corinth[857]. There was no other known Ephyre in a nook of Ἄργος, or what may be termed within reach of Prœtus and Œneus: whereas this Ephyre lay upon the pass that communicated with the North from that part of the Peloponnesus.

But the line of Sisyphus had been displaced in the person of Bellerophon, two generations before the Trojan war. Together with this line the old name of Ephyre had disappeared: we hear of it in the Iliad only as Corinth, and as part of the Mycenian dominions. Now tradition connects the Æolid title particularly with Thessaly, the Æolids always having been recognised as one of the great primitive Greek races. And Homer gives us Æolids in Thessaly, as well as in Peloponnesus. In the time of Sisyphus then we see this Æolid name, which is Eteo-Hellenic, conjoined with the local name Ephyre: at the epoch of the Trojan war, both have disappeared from the spot.

The traditional name Ephyre remained, indeed, in many parts of Greece down to later times. Strabo (p. 338) reckons one in Elis, one in Thesprotia, and one in Thessaly, besides Corinth: and also five κωμαὶ of the name. But even in Homer’s time, either these settlements had decayed, or else, which is more likely, the particular form Ἐφύρη had never acquired the precise force of a proper name, but remained rather in the category of a descriptive word: for otherwise it could hardly have happened, but that one or other of the Ephyres must have been named in the Catalogue of Homer. If a descriptive word, it was in all likelihood simply descriptive of primitive settlement for the Hellic race. Probably these Ἐφύραι were rude and small; and were, properly speaking, collections of a few buildings, rather than cities regularly formed.

2. That passage of the Thirteenth Iliad has already been mentioned, which places this name in the North. The Poet says, speaking of Mars and his son Φόβος,

τὼ μὲν ἄρ’ ἐκ Θρῄκης Ἐφύρους μέτα θωρήσσεσθον, ἠὲ μετὰ Φλέγυας μεγαλήτορας[858].

Two circumstances warrant our placing these Ἔφυροι in Thessaly: the first, that the name of Thrace does not extend farther southward: and the second, that here is the only known seat of the Phlegyæ.

3. It may be convenient next to take the Ephyre, which is mentioned twice in the Odyssey.

In the first of these passages Pallas, in the character of Mentes, Lord of the Taphians, remembers Ulysses in the days when he undertook other journeys before his Trojan one: remembers him,

ἐξ Ἐφύρης ἀνίοντα παρ’ Ἴλου Μερμερίδαο. ᾤχετο γὰρ καὶ κεῖσε θοῆς ἐπὶ νηὸς Ὀδυσσεὺς φάρμακον ἀνδροφόνον διζήμενος[859].

And again, when the Suitors apprehend that Telemachus meditates mischief, they ask whether he will bring allies from Pylus, or even from Sparta (which was more remote).

ἤ τινας ἐκ Πύλου ἄξει ἀμύντορας ἠμαθόεντος ἢ ὅγε καὶ Σπάρτηθεν, ἐπεί νύ περ ἵεται αἰνῶς· ἠὲ καὶ εἰς Ἐφύρην ἐθέλει, πίειραν ἄρουραν· ἐλθεῖν, ὄφρ’ ἔνθεν θυμοφθόρα φάρμακ’ ἐνείκῃ[860].

For several reasons it appears probable that the Ephyre here meant was in Elis, and was therefore the Ephyre of Augeias.

1. Geographically it would appear likely to be in the Peloponnesus. Telemachus was little likely to make any more extended voyage. The intercourse of his family was generally with the Iasian Argos, or Western Peloponnesus. Hence it is said of Penelope[861], ‘Could all the Achæans of Iasian Argos see thee.’ And hence, in the Twenty-fourth Odyssey[862], the enemies of Ulysses anticipate that, unless prevented by them, he will resort either to Pylus or to Elis, where are the Epeans, for assistance. Hence, again, it is that, in the Second Odyssey, we find Ephyre joined with Pylus and Sparta (which last is mentioned as an extreme point, ἢ ὅγε καὶ Σπάρτηθεν,) as the quarters to which he might repair for aid. The names of Elis and the Epeans do not appear: and this of itself amounts nearly to a demonstration that Ephyre not only lay in, but actually stands in lieu of, Elis in this place.

We may however note one or two secondary points.

2. Corinth had now lost the name of Ephyre, that is to say, a new name had overshadowed the old one. But this Ephyre, if not Corinth, could only be the Elian Ephyre.

3. Post-Homeric tradition places an Ephyre in Elis.

We have already seen that Augeias was lord of Elis, that he ruled over an Hellenic race, that he is an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν: was this Ephyre the seat of his empire?

Even from the bare fact of being in Elis, it stands in significant connection with Augeias: but more especially, it seems impossible not to connect the peculiar knowledge of drugs, preserved at the Ephyre to which Ulysses repaired, with the former fame of Agamede, the daughter of Augeias (Il. xi. 740), from whom it had, in all probability, been handed down to the next following generation.

It may be asked, what place had Ilus, the son of Mermerus[863], in an Ephyre, where Augeias had been king or lord? We can give at least this negative answer: the Catalogue shews that Elis, in the time of the Trojan war, was no longer patriarchally ruled; for the Epeans had four coordinate leaders; of whom the grandson of Augeias was but one. Therefore an Ilus may have been in the time of Ulysses possessed of the place, which belonged to Augeias in Nestor’s boyhood: and we may observe, that no Epean or Elian chief, contemporary with the _Troica_, appears in Homer under the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Upon combining all these circumstances, we appear to have the strongest warrant for believing that Augeias was lord of Ephyre; that he was the head of one of the ruling families which derived themselves by a known and recorded lineage from Hellas and a Hellic tribe; and consequently that the archaic title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν was applied to him, not casually, but with a definite meaning, and in conformity to an established rule.

_Summary of the evidence for Augeias._

The following brief synopsis will, after what has been said, serve to indicate the chief presumptive grounds of the title of Augeias to ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

1. Augeias is connected with the φάρμακα, Il. xi. 739-41.

2. The φάρμακα with Ephyre, Od. i. 259.

3. Ephyre with Sisyphus, Il. vi. 152, 3.

4. Sisyphus is the son of Æolus, Il. vi. 154.

5. Æolus is Eteo-Hellenic, as the common ancestor of several of the great Greek houses, and the lineal ancestor of at least one ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν[864].

6. Æolus is also of divine descent, for his descendant Bellerophon is θεοῦ γόνος, Il. vi. 191.

7. That is to say, he is a son of Jupiter; for θεὸς commonly means Jupiter, when there is no particular reference to any other deity in the context, and when a personal act or attribute is described.

The extra-Homeric tradition entirely supports this belief, for it makes Augeias the son of Salmoneus, and Salmoneus the son of Æolus.

And now, after we have considered so fully the term Ἐφύρη and its kindred words, we shall do well to notice that at least the dominions of Agamemnon are not void of some relation to this family of names; inasmuch as Φᾶρις, in the Catalogue, is one of the towns that provide his forces, and Φῆραι, in the Ninth Iliad, is one of the towns of which he promises to make Achilles lord. Of Phellias and Sellasia we have already treated.

V. _Case of Euphetes._

I proceed to the case of Euphetes.

He is mentioned only once in the Homeric Poems. It is when, in the Fifteenth Iliad, Dolops strikes at Meges, son of Phyleus, who is saved by his stout breastplate: by that breastplate,

τόν ποτε Φύλευς ἤγαγεν ἐξ Ἐφύρης, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελλήεντος. ξεῖνος γάρ οἱ ἔδωκεν ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Εὐφήτης[865].

This case, as it stands, is very simple. Euphetes is manifestly the king of Ephyre: the name of the place supplies the connection with the cradle of the Hellenes; the link is doubled by the name of the river Σελληείς, and his rank presumably stamps him as of a ruling race in the country; for he is a ξεῖνος to a sovereign, and the xenial relation appears to have been always one between persons equal, or nearly so.

The passage, however, affords us no aid towards determining where this Ephyre lay; for it does not tell us where to look for the residence of Phyleus.

Was it the Ephyre of Elis, or was it another Ephyre, mentioned in a passage that we have not yet examined? To this passage let us now turn.

In the Greek Catalogue, Tlepolemus, the son of Hercules, commands nine ships from Rhodes, whither he had migrated, on account of having slain his grand uncle Licymnius. His birth is described as follows,--

ὃν τέκεν Ἀστυόχεια βίῃ Ἡρακληείῃ· τὴν ἄγετ’ ἐξ Ἐφύρης, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελληέντος, πέρσας ἄστεα πολλὰ Διοτρεφέων αἰζηῶν[866].

Hercules then led off Astyocheia from Ephyre beside Selleeis, after having devastated many cities. The opinion may perhaps be sustained from this passage, that the Ephyre mentioned in it is not the Ephyre of Elis, for the following reasons.

1. Tlepolemus[867] emigrates to Rhodes in consequence of homicide. He is more likely to have done this from Thessaly than Elis, for we see no signs of communication between western Peloponnesus and the islands of Asia Minor near the base of the Ægean.

2. If Astyocheia, the mother of Tlepolemus, was also the Astyoche who bore to Mars Ascalaphus and Ialmenus (Il. ii. 513), then he was more likely to be Thessalian than Elian; for Mars, dwelling in Thrace, bordered upon Thessaly, but is not heard of in Southern Greece; and these princes ruled over the Minyeian Orchomenus, which is far from the Peloponnesus, but near Southern Thessaly.

3. Again, Nestor, in the Eleventh Book[868], where he sets forth the depression into which the Pylians had fallen, through the depredations of their neighbours the Elians, states that they had been unable to defend themselves against those ravages, because Hercules had devastated their country and slain their princes. Now he would hardly have said this, if the Elian Ephyre and its neighbourhood had likewise been devastated by Hercules, since his account would then have failed to explain the relative inferiority of the Pylians. But if it was not the Elian Ephyre, and since the situation of the Isthmus and its state make the passage inapplicable to the Corinthian Ephyre, then, still looking for some country known in connection with the exploits of Hercules, we must naturally take it to be the Ephyre of Thessaly, where the name Selleeis, as that of a neighbouring stream, would most naturally of all be looked for.

It is true that the geographers give us no record of a river Selleeis near the Thessalian Ephyre. But the fugitive character of the name Ephyre is manifest from the fact that, though there were several Ephyres in Homer’s time, none of them was of sufficient importance to furnish a military contingent worth naming. If by Ephyre was meant the first site of a new colony, that name might naturally disappear, not only with a removal to a more secure or convenient spot, but even perhaps on the growth of a mere group of inclosed buildings into a walled town. It is therefore no wonder if the site of many of these towns has been forgotten, or if the neighbouring streams in consequence cannot be identified.

_The site of his Ephyre._

There is a tradition, external to Homer, but not at variance with him, that the Astyocheia whom Hercules carried off was the daughter of Phylas; and if so, Phylas was of course lord of the Ephyre, from which she was carried off. If we assume the veracity of this tradition, we can determine the seat of the Ephyre of Astyocheia to have been in Thessaly. For the five commanders under Achilles were of course all drawn from that country. But among them is Eudorus, the son of Polymele and grandson of Phylas[869].

It may here be asked, by the way, why is not this Eudorus an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? even his name is of the form to which the phrase is so well suited. The answer is that, though he was the son of Polymele, and the grandson of Phylas on the female side, his reputed father was Mercury, and he was therefore not descended in the male line from, and could not be called, the chieftain of a tribe.

If then Phylas was lord of the Thessalian Ephyre, and Euphetes was also lord of the Thessalian Ephyre, in what relation to one another are we to presume them to have stood as to time? There is here no appearance of discrepancy. Phyleus, as the father of Meges, was the ξεῖνος of Euphetes one generation before the Trojan war. Tlepolemus, contemporary of Meges, was by our supposition the grandson of Phylas. Phylas, lord of Ephyre, was therefore probably one generation earlier than Euphetes, and may have been his father.

Nor is it an objection to this reasoning, that Meges, son of Phyleus, was lord of Dulichium, and that we cannot suppose Phyleus to have been the ξεῖνος of one dwelling so far off as the Thessalian Ephyre. For first, Nestor the Pylian had fought in Thessaly. And next, Meges had been a fugitive from his father’s dwelling on account of a feud with him: which makes it even probable that he would remove to a distance, as we see that Tlepolemus went on a similar account from Thessaly, or at least from some part of Greece, to Rhodes.

If then Euphetes, who was an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, governed an Ephyre, and

## particularly if it was in Thessaly, the special seat of the Helli, we

can have little difficulty in concluding that he bore the title as a patriarchal one, in right of his descent.

On the other hand, the Ephyre of Tlepolemus is certainly in the general opinion presumed to be the Ephyre of Elis. If this opinion be correct, it is still more easy to connect him with the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Augeias lives two generations before the Trojan war, rules in Ephyre, and is ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Euphetes is contemporary with the father of Meges, who fights in the war; and he is therefore one generation after Augeias, while he rules in the same place, and bears the same title. If then the Ephyre of Euphetes was Elian, it seems impossible to escape the presumption that Euphetes was the son of Augeias.

This view as to the Ephyre of Euphetes on the whole will more completely satisfy the Homeric text. For we find Meges in the Thirteenth Book fighting at the head of Epean troops[870]. But the troops he led to Troy were from Dulichium and the Echinades[871]. So we can only conclude one of two things. Either Meges commanded the Epeans of Elis in virtue of the connection of his family with that country; or he commanded Epeans, whom his father Phyleus had taken with him from Elis across the Corinthian gulf. Either way a relation between Elis and the family of Meges is made good, which tends to place Euphetes, as the friend of that family, in the Ephyre of Elis.

There is yet another supposition open. Homer has told us that Phyleus was Διὶ φίλος,--a distinction he very rarely confers,--and that he migrated, as he implies rather than asserts, from Elis, on account of a quarrel with his father:

ὃς πότε Δουλίχιόν δ’ ἀπενάσσατο πατρὶ χολωθείς.

He does not mention the cause; but this abrupt allusion to the father of Phyleus implies that he was a person of note. Strabo[872] may therefore only be filling up a void in Homer, when he tells us, of course from some tradition, that Augeias was the father of Phyleus.

If this were so, we have to ask, why is not Phyleus an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? and who, upon this supposition, could Euphetes be?

As we must infer from the Catalogue that the Elian kingdom of Augeias was broken up at the epoch of the _Troica_, and as in consequence we do not find Polyxeinus, his grandson, called by the title in question, so neither need we expect it of Phyleus.

If Phyleus was the son of Augeias, Euphetes cannot have been sovereign of the Elian Ephyre, for they would in this case not have been ξεῖνοι, but brothers.

But he might still have been sovereign either of the Ephyre mentioned by Homer, μυχῷ Ἄργεος, which appears as Corinth in the Catalogue: or possibly of the Thesprotian Ephyre with which we become acquainted in Strabo.

If Euphetes represented, with the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, one of the old Hellic chieftaincies at either of those places, nothing could be more natural than that the tie of hostship should subsist between him and Phyleus, the son of another Hellic chieftain of the same class.

In any case, though the Homeric evidence is palpably incomplete, yet by connecting the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν with the highly characteristic local title of Ephyre, and the name of the river Selleeis, it unequivocally supports the interpretation of that title as one indicating an original and purely Hellic chieftaincy.

VI. _Case of Eumelus._

It now only remains to consider the case of Eumelus, the last of the six persons to whom Homer gives the peculiar title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

He is introduced to us in the Catalogue as the φίλος παῖς[873] (φίλος meaning probably either the eldest or only son) of Admetus, who is never mentioned except in the oblique cases, and to whom therefore, consistently with his usage, Homer never applies the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. He is in command of his father’s forces; and, as Pheræ is the city first named in this list, we may infer that this was his principal city.

In the first place I would remark, that we have for this Pheræ a sign of wealth, which has been already noticed, the excellence, namely, of its breed of horses. There is also abundant evidence of the wealth and importance of Pheræ in the historic times[874]. This mark then accords with the hypothesis, that it was probably one of the primitive lowland settlements made by the Hellic race in Thessaly. In fact, Pheræ stands relatively to Admetus, as Ephyre does relatively to Augeias, Euphetes, and the older Æolid, Sisyphus.

Through the medium of the name Pheræ we connect this family with Ἐφύρη, as its cognate name, and as the name which we have found, in the cases of Euphetes and Augeias, to be eminently characteristic of settlements under an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Next it appears, that the father or ancestor of Admetus took his name from the place which he inhabited, and was called Pheres, for says the poet,

Ἵπποι μὲν μέγ’ ἄρισται ἔσαν Φηρητιάδαο, τὰς Εὔμηλος ἔλαυνε[875].

The union between the names of the place and the person affords another sign of primitive settlement. Pheres was probably the founder of the town Φηραί.

Next, a passage in the Odyssey gives us an account of this Pheres[876]. He was the son of Cretheus, by Tyro:

τοὺς δ’ ἑτέρους Κρηθῆϊ τέκεν βασίλεια γυναικῶν, Αἴσονά τ’ ἠδὲ Φέρητ’ Ἀμυθάονα τ’ ἱππιοχάρμην.

Now Cretheus was a son or descendant of Æolus:

Φῆ δὲ Κρηθῆος γυνὴ ἔμμεναι Αἰολίδαο[877].

And we have already seen the Æolids of Homer directly connected with the characteristic name of Ephyre in the person of Sisyphus (Il. vi. 152, 211). Outside the Homeric text, all tradition ascribes to the Æolians, not less than the Achæans, an Eteo-Hellenic origin. Again, we may observe, that among the Greek genealogies of Homer, the longest are those of the Æolids. From Æolus to Glaucus II, in the Sixth Iliad, are six generations: and here in like manner from Cretheus to Eumelus are four, which number will be increased to five or to six, according as we take Cretheus to be the son or the grandson of Æolus, or estimate the age of Eumelus. According to the Homeric force of the patronymic, he may be either. Eumelus, however, himself was, as we have seen, presumably not young at the time of the _Troica_; since he was wedded to Iphthime, the sister of Penelope, who must be taken to stand, with her husband Ulysses (Il. xxiii. 791), as above the average age of the army.

To sum up; it thus far appears,

1. That Eumelus was heir to Admetus, a reigning prince of Thessaly or Hellas.

2. That the capital of this prince bore testimony by its name to its primitive or Eteo-Hellenic character.

3. That Eumelus was a descendant in the male line from Æolus, of whose lineage several, according to Homer, seem to have possessed the character and borne the title of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

4. In virtue of his descent from Æolus, he is sprung from Jupiter.

To estimate fully the force of the evidence, it may be well to observe, that a great many Thessalian princes and leaders are noticed in the Catalogue besides Eumelus; to the last alone, however, the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is applied. But no one of the others bears any mark, personal or local, of the peculiar descent and social position to which this title appears to belong: although among them are found Podaleirius and Machaon, the sons of Asclepius; Polypœtes, the son of Pirithous, and grandson of Jupiter; Eurypylus, the distinguished warrior; Protesilaus and Philoctetes, each the subject of distinct historical notices.

Again, I would, from the case of Eumelus, illustrate the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in another point of view.

He was descended by his mother Alcestis from Neptune. She was the daughter of Pelias, the son whom Tyro bore to the fabled ruler of the seas. This descent on the mother’s side is mentioned in the Catalogue, where a total silence is observed as to his paternal lineage from Æolus and Cretheus.

Εὔμηλος, τὸν ὑπ’ Ἀδμήτῳ τέκε δῖα γυναικῶν, Ἄλκηστις, Πελίαο θυγατρῶν εἶδος ἀρίστη.

But it is plain that his descent from Jupiter by the father’s side was more worthy of notice than his descent from Neptune through the bastard Pelias. Yet Homer has nowhere taken notice of the descent from Jupiter, in the case of Eumelus, unless it is implied in the meaning of the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, though we know the descent as a fact: surely a strong proof that it is part of the meaning of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and is a thing not only inseparable from it, but conveyed by it.

_The ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν descended from Jupiter._

With regard to the divine descent of the Homeric chieftains bearing this title, our direct evidence from the Poet stands as follows:

1. That the Dardan line springs originally from Jupiter.

2. That Tyro, being called εὐπατέρεια in common with Helen only, is evidently meant to be described as sprung from that deity.

3. That Bellerophon, also an Æolid, is also θεοῦ γόνος, therefore himself a descendant of Jupiter.

4. And if so, then Eumelus, who was Æolid too, falls within the same description.

5. Augeias in like manner attains to the same honour by the Homeric presumptions which make him an Æolid, as well as by all extra-Homeric tradition.

6. With regard to Euphetes and Agamemnon, we have no direct evidence. But we have seen strong reason to suppose, that Euphetes was himself an Æolid: and no inconsiderable presumption that Tantalus was according to Homer what the later tradition makes him, a son of Jupiter, and that Agamemnon was descended from Tantalus.

Perhaps also, without venturing to attach any conclusive weight to such a sign, we may interpret the annexation of Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς to Hellic kingship, as a sign that the earliest Hellic kingship, being also that which conveyed the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, was always associated with divine descent.

Among those who bear the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, we find no case of a descent from Jupiter reputed to be recent. The two lines in which the title is most clearly transmitted, those of Æolus and of Dardanus, are among the oldest genealogies in Homer. That of Agamemnon, apparently the shortest, interposes at the least four generations between Jupiter and him.

The line of Dardanus is apparently by one generation longer than any of the others belonging to an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. But nothing can be more natural: for any settlement, made by the Helli on the Hellespont during their eastward movement, would naturally precede by some time their descent from Olympus and the Thracian hills into Thessaly; so that the earlier date of the primary ancestor is a witness for, rather than against the relationship.

It cannot, however, be too carefully borne in mind, that the divine descent of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν from Jupiter is widely different from that of the more recent heroes, like Sarpedon or Hercules. We may suppose that in such cases as these the divine parent either screens the result of unlawful love, or perhaps indicates the sudden rise into eminence of a family previously obscure: with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν the case is quite distinct. The poetical meaning here is, that backward there lay nothing of family history beyond the ancestor from whom he claimed descent, whether it were Dardanus, or Æolus, or Tantalus: as if aiming at the effect legitimately produced by those words in the Gospel of St. Luke, with which the upward line of the genealogy given by him closes; ‘which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God[878].’ And the historic basis of the allegory may probably be this, that the person indicated was one of some ruling house, who, with his followers or kindred, separated from the migratory race of Helli as it swept westward along the hills, and founded a stable settlement, and a society more or less organized in orders and employments, in which his name became the symbol at once of sovereign rank, of the national point of origin, and of affinity in blood with a ruling race.

_Four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν._

To conclude then: the notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in Homer, probable or demonstrative, are these:

1. He must be born of Jupiter _ab antiquo_.

2. He must hold a sovereignty, either paramount or secondary, and either in whole, or, like Æneas, by devolution in part, over some given place or tribe.

3. His family must have held this sovereignty continuously from the time of the primary ancestor.

4. He must be the head of a ruling tribe or house of the original Hellenic stock: and must be connected with marks of the presence of Hellenic settlement. These marks may, as in the case of Agamemnon, be supplied by a race or tribe: or they may be territorial, such as those afforded by the name of the river Selleeis, and more especially by the name Ephyre, and the family of cognate words.

Now each of the six persons, to whom alone Homer gives the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, partakes, by evidence either demonstrative or probable, of every one of these notes.

_Negative proofs._

Among negative evidences that the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν conveys a peculiar sense, we may place the following:

1. The position of Priam in Troas, where he was the greatest man of North-western Asia, Il. xxiv. 543-6, and of Hector, or else Paris, as his heir, were such as called for the highest epithets of dignity. He had even a regular court of γέροντες, of whom it seems plain, that some at least, such as Antenor, were invested with some kind of sovereignty. Yet none of the Ilian family are called by the name of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

2. Alcinous in the Odyssey affords another example of a lord over lords, who does not belong to the historical Greek stem, and who therefore is not called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. The example may appear weak, because of the divine descent of the Phæacians. But if this phrase had, like κρείων, been one of merely general ornament, why should it not have been applied to him as κρείων is, or to his brother Rhexenor, or his father Nausithous? If the divine descent of the Phæacians from Neptune renders the phrase inapplicable to them, this is of itself a proof of its very specific nature.

3. Again; it may be asked why Glaucus was not an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, as he was descended from an Æolid sovereign. The answer is, he was no longer the chieftain of any Hellenic clan. His grandfather Bellerophon had migrated simply as an individual fugitive into a South-Asian country, of which the people had no immediate ties of race with him; and, while apart from his original tribe, he could not inherit a title as its head.

4. Sarpedon was under the same disqualification as Glaucus his brother king. Besides this, he was not descended in the male line from Æolus, but only through his mother Hippodamia.

5. Again, among the Greeks. Why, it may be asked, was not Peleus, or why was not Achilles an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? Here was a throne above thrones: for Patroclus was not only an ἄναξ, but was called Διογενὴς, which implies sovereignty; therefore Menœtius his father was the same: but Menœtius was in attendance at the court of Peleus. Phœnix again was tutor to that chief, though he ruled over the Dolopians by the gift of Peleus, as he tells us,

καί μ’ ἀφνειὸν ἔθηκε, πολὺν δέ μοι ὤπασε λαὸν, ναῖον δ’ ἐσχατίην Φθίης, Δολόπεσσιν ἀνάσσων[879].

Besides that he occupied a great position, and was of the highest descent, I think it is clear from the Catalogue that the Myrmidons, over whom Peleus reigned, were Achæans, and therefore a strictly Hellic race.

And again, the character of Achilles makes it quite clear that his family were from the Hellic stock. For it is in him that Homer has chosen to exhibit the prime and foremost pattern of the whole Greek nation: and he could surely never have chosen for such a purpose any family of foreign, or of doubtful blood.

It is not however in every Hellic race or family, but only among the known representatives by descent of the principal or senior branches, that we are justified in expecting to find the patriarchal title. And still less do we know whether the Myrmidons, even though Hellic and Achæan, were a principal tribe of that stock.

The evidence as to the descent of Achilles may throw further light upon this part of the subject.

In those cases where a long line of ancestry purported to begin with Jupiter, as, for instance, the Trojan genealogy, it is doubtless natural to treat this as a sort of necessary introduction to a period, beyond which the memory of man, unaided as it was, did not run.

But when we find the paternity of a person contemporary with the Trojan war, or of some near ancestor of his, referred to Jupiter, the most proper interpretation of this legendary statement seems to be, that they were, so to speak, _novi homines_, who having come suddenly into the blaze of celebrity, and living among a nation accustomed to ask of every passing stranger who were his parents, yet having no parents to quote, or none worth quoting, gilded their origin by claiming some great deity for their father. I do not speak now of the distinct and yet cognate case, where a similar pretext was used to shield illegitimacy: as for example, not to travel from the line before us, in the instance of the son of Polydora[880], sister to Achilles himself. But the same principle applies to both: divine progenitorship was used to keep from view something that it was desirable to hide, whether this were the shame of a noble maiden, or the undistinguished ancestry of a great house or hero. Such a hero perhaps, according to this rule, was Hercules: such a house more clearly was that of the Æacids; for Æacus, grandfather of Achilles, was son of Jupiter[881]. He did not therefore represent a patriarchal family, and could not bear the title.

According to extra-Homeric tradition, the Myrmidons fled from Ægina to Thessaly under Peleus[882].

6. Further examples may be taken from the Pelopid family. The Menelaus of the Iliad belongs to the highest order: he is more kingly than the other kings[883]. In the Odyssey he desires to transplant Ulysses to a portion of his dominions (Od. iv. 174). And Ægisthus actually occupies for years, during the exile of Orestes, the Pelopid throne: the name of either Menelaus or Ægisthus is of the metrical value most convenient for union with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν: but neither the one nor the other was the representative of the great Achæan house of Pelops, and accordingly neither the one nor the other receives the title.

7. Diomed is a Greek of the very highest descent: of him alone, among the kings before Troy, we may confidently say, that he was himself a hero, had a hero for his father, a hero for his uncle, and a hero for his grandfather. Œneus, Tydeus, Meleager, are three names not easily to be matched in early Greek story. They were likewise near the stock, as we may probably infer from the name of the founder of the race, Portheus, the Destroyer. He was father of Œneus and also of Ἄγριος the Rude, and Μέλας the Swarthy, all names indicating that the first stage of arrival within the precinct of civilization had not yet been passed. He commanded, too, one of the largest contingents: yet neither he nor his uncle Meleager, the Achilles of his day, is ever called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

The reason doubtless is that, in the case of the Œneid family, there is no connection with a leading Greek ancestry. They are neither Æolid nor Pelopid; and they stand in no relation to the characteristic names of Ephyre and the Selleeis.

8. Let me notice, lastly, the case of Nestor. He had been a warrior of the first class. His rich dominions supplied a contingent of ninety ships to the war; larger even than that of Diomed, or of any chief whatever, except Agamemnon, who had one hundred. His father, Neleus, was of great fame. He had actually more influence in council than any other chief, and always took the lead there. He was descended from Neptune, who indeed was but his grandfather: while his grandmother, Tyro, was probably, as we have found, a granddaughter of Æolus.

But he could not be ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, because not in lineal male descent from the primary ancestor Æolus: nor was he the tribal head of the Hellenic race among which he ruled, which was an Achæan one (Il. xi. 759), since the Achæans owned the Pelopids for their chiefs. Also his father Neleus, apparently the younger twin, had migrated from the North, leaving Pelias the elder, as is probable, in possession. Thus Nestor presents none of the four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Yet this title attached to an insignificant relative, Eumelus, his first cousin once removed, doubtless because he possessed them.

_Persons with the notes yet without the title._

It is certainly true that there are a few cases where Homer has _not_ applied the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν to particular persons, to whom he might have given it consistently with the suppositions, as to its meaning, of which I have attempted to show the truth. They are, in one word, the ancestors of the persons to whom he has actually given the title. But all of these, such as Pelops and his line, Dardanus with his line as far as Tros, and the earlier descendants of Æolus, are persons mentioned in the poems for the most part but once, and rarely more than twice or thrice. Now, as Homer mentions frequently without the prefix, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, those to whom on other occasions he gives it, we are not entitled to require its application to all persons capable of bearing it, whom he mentions but once.

And again, if I am right in holding that this was strictly a title attaching to lineage, then it was wholly needless, when he had designated a particular person, as an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, to grace his predecessors also with the title, because, as a matter of course, inasmuch as they were his predecessors, it attached to them. No historic aim then was involved, and no purpose would have been gained if Admetus, for example, had been mentioned with this title as well as his son Eumelus.

But, I confess, it appears to me to afford no small confirmation to the arguments and the conclusions of these pages, when we remember that not only do the four rules for the sense of the phrase suit, as far as we can tell, all the six persons to whom it is applied, but that there is absolutely no other living person named in the poems, whom they would not effectually exclude, with the insignificant exceptions, first of Admetus, who has just been mentioned, and next of Orestes. In the Iliad, Orestes is only named in one single passage (twice repeated), of the Ninth Book[884]. In the Odyssey he is named several times, but the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is less suitable to the political state of Greece as it appears in this poem, and also to the subject. It never appears, except retrospectively.

A few words may perhaps be due to the case of Polyxeinus, grandson of Augeias, who, it is just possible, though unlikely, may have retained the position of his grandfather. It is just possible, because we are not assured of the contrary; but most unlikely, because Augeias appears as lord of the Epeans, Polyxeinus only as commanding a division of them. Again, Polyxeinus is only once mentioned. It is also evident that the loss of his grandfather’s throne, by a revolution in Elis, might naturally put an end to the application of the title in his particular case, by a process exactly the same with that to which its general and final extinction, now so speedily to arrive, was due.

It might indeed be of some interest to inquire why it is that, when Homer makes no practical or effective use of the phrase for any one except Agamemnon, he has notwithstanding been careful to register, as it were, a title to it on behalf of five other persons? Nor can I doubt that the just answer would be, that he did this because, with his historic aims, he may have deemed it a matter of national interest to record a title of such peculiar and primitive significance.

_Its disappearance with Homer._

But of all the negative arguments that tend to show ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν not to have been a merely vague title, there is none on which I dwell with more confidence than its total disappearance with the Homeric age. For it was not so with the other less peculiar forms, βασιλεὺς, ἄναξ, and κρείων. Although they were supplanted in actual use by the term τυραννὸς, which became for the Greeks the type of supreme power in the hands of a single person, yet the idea of them was traditionally retained. Accordingly, even the name βασιλεὺς was applied by Greek writers to contemporary kings out of Greece, and to the old bygone Greek monarchies: and Thucydides has given it to them as a class, where he describes the πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι[885]. But the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, the most specific of them all, disappears even from retrospective use: and the inference is, that its proper meaning had ceased to be represented in the institutions either of Greece or of the known world beyond the Greek borders; that it had passed away with the archaic system, of which it was the peculiar token.

Even independently of direct testimony, we might be assured that the patriarchal and highland constitution of society could not very long survive the multiplication of settlements in the plains. For the wealth, which these settlements created through the increased efficiency of labour, the greater bounty of the earth, and the augmented means of communication and exchange, could not but bring with it at once new temptations, and new sources of disturbance; whereas the art of controlling these evils was but painfully and slowly, and most incompletely learned. Among highland tribes, there might be war and pillage with a view to immediate wants: but stored wealth could not be stolen, where, except in its simplest forms, it did not exist: and men do not overturn hereditary power, or drag society into revolutions, without an object.

But the Catalogue, as well as other parts of the Homeric poems, show us how the causes thus indicated had already worked. Of the Greek States comprised in that invaluable enumeration, some were, as is plainly asserted or implied, monarchically governed: for example, the Mycenians, the Spartans, the Pylians, the Myrmidons, the Arcadians, the Eubœans[886], and the Ætolians. We may reasonably infer the same with regard to the followers of those great chiefs, who are treated as Βασιλεῖς in the body of the poems: the Salaminians and Locrians, each under their Ajax, the Cephallenians under Ulysses, the Cretans, or else a portion of them, under Idomeneus, the Argives under Diomed. In each of these cases, either there is but a single leader, or, as in the two last, the text makes it obvious that the chief first named is supreme in rank. We may probably infer that monarchy prevailed in all the instances, including the Athenians, when only a single general appears. The expression δῆμος, applied to Athens, is perfectly compatible with kingship in Homer. But there remain six cases, where there are a plurality of leaders, apparently on an equal footing. These are the cases of

1. The Bœotians.

2. The people of Aspledon and the Minyeian Orchomenus; who are in fact a second Bœotian contingent.

3. The Phocians.

4. The Elians or Epeans: who differ from the others in being formally distributed into four divisions, under four leaders, and who are therefore strictly acephalous.

5. The Nisurians, &c.

6. The people of Tricce, Ithome, and Œchalia, under the sons of Asclepius.

It is observable with respect to the four first of these, that they were all in the comparatively open, and rich country; liable, therefore, to the influences which, as Thucydides observes[887], made Bœotia, Thessaly, and most of Peloponnesus peculiarly liable to revolutions; and whence doubtless it is, that Homer has been led to tell us that Amphion and Zethus built walls for Thebes, because they could not hold it without them.

With respect to the Nisurians, in stating that they were under Pheidippus and Antiphus, Homer adds that these were (Il. ii. 679)

Θεσσαλοῦ υἷε δύω Ἡρακλείδαο ἄνακτος.

On which we may observe

1. That the power divided between them had apparently been monarchical in the preceding generation.

2. That the name of their father points to his having been born in Thessaly[888], which from its richness was peculiarly open to revolutions.

3. That he was the son of Hercules, with whose name disturbance and convulsion are so much associated.

In the case of the sons of Asclepius, there is the same presumption that they divided a power which had been monarchical: and although the epithet κλωμακόεσσα given to Ithome, the site of which is unknown[889], may suggest rough and broken ground, yet the territory is within the limits of Thessaly[890], and on the river Peneus. Tricce was known in the historic times; and it is mentioned in Homer with the epithet ἱππόβοτος, indicating fertility.

_Signs of political disorganisation._

Here, then, and particularly in the Bœotian and Elian cases, we have considerable signs of the weakening and gradual breaking up of the old highland institutions: I distinguish between those two and the rest, because where the division is only between two brothers, it may have implied little deviation from the monarchical form. Still that little might be the first stage of a deviation which was soon to grow indefinitely large.

There are other signs to the same effect, both in the Iliad, and to a greater extent in the Odyssey.

For example: the dynasty of the Œneids had disappeared among the Ætolians[891]: the dynasty of the Æolids, and the name Ephyre, from Corinth[892]: Polyxeinus, the grandson of Augeias, an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, is not described as an ἄναξ, or lord, at all: Hercules had laid waste the cities about Ephyre, and the cities about Pylos[893]: Tlepolemus, at war with his Heraclid relations, had been driven to emigrate to Rhodes: and all this since the family of the Perseids had disappeared before the Pelopids.

The changes observable in the Odyssey are such as connect themselves with a species of deluge, which had apparently overspread the face of the political society of Greece. They would merit a full examination, in connection with a view of the relation of that poem to the Iliad. Here it need only be observed, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears nowhere in the action of the Odyssey: the phrase is used but twice, and then only with reference to the dead Agamemnon: and that the partial disappearance of the word from the later work of Homer evidently accompanies a great approach towards disorganisation of the old order of things and ideas in the political state of Greece.

_Summary of the whole._

I may now collect the results, as far as they are related to the present subject, of our whole ethnological inquiry.

1. From the Homeric text, the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears not to have belonged to political preeminence or power, or to personal heroism, or to the distinction of wealth, or to divine descent as such; but to the archaic form of sovereignty which united it continuously with the headship in blood of a ruling family or clan, inhabiting the country which was the reputed cradle of the nation, or able to trace lineally its derivation from that country. A tradition of original descent from Jupiter attached in all cases essentially to the possession of the title.

2. In each of the six instances where Homer employs it, he appears to do so in strict conformity with the rules thus indicated.

3. The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was either a synonym, or a part.

4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to the family was still palpable and near.

5. The resemblances of the Helli and the Dardans afford, together with the probabilities of the case, strong evidence of their having some common affinity to the same branch of the great stem, from which a large part of Europe was peopled with its ruling race.

6. Finally, we may with reasonable grounds conjecture, that the patriarchal system denoted by the patriarchal chieftaincies, which had been shaken before the Trojan war, was further and violently disturbed by it, and by its direct and indirect political consequences; and that this system had vanished before the line of the post-Homeric Greek poets, to be reckoned from Hesiod, had begun. Thus, the basis of the title being removed, the title itself naturally disappeared from literature as well as history; and if we find, that in later times the key to its meaning had been lost, it is but a new mark of the abruptness and width of the breach that lies between Homer and his successors, of the paucity of continuous traditions, and of the limited means possessed by the Greeks of the historic ages for research into the earlier periods of their national existence.

FOOTNOTES:

[764] Od. iv. 697.

[765] This caution is not needless, as the error is a common one. Damm, indeed, most strangely says, ἄναξ _ex multo augustius nomen quam_ βασιλεὺς (in voc. ἄναξ). The English translators, Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and others, render ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, king of men. Voss, with his usual precision, though probably without a very specific meaning, translates it, ‘_der herrscher des volks_.’

[766] Il. xxiii. 417.

[767] Od. xiii. 223.

[768] Il. xx. 17.

[769] V. 121.

[770] Il. ii. 196.

[771] Od. i. 394.

[772] Od. xv. 533.

[773] Od. xvii. 416.

[774] Od. i. 386; cf. 401.

[775] In voc. ἄναξ.

[776] Lit. Greece, vol. ii. p. 78.

[777] Il. xiv. 322.

[778] Il. viii. 31. Od. i. 45.

[779] Il. ii. 85.

[780] Il. iv. 296.

[781] Il. ix. 92. v. 144. xi. 578. xiii. 411.

[782] Il. ix. 81. xiii. 600.

[783] Od. iv. 528.

[784] Paradiso, xii. 71. xiv. 104. xix. 104. xxix. 11.

[785] Il. i. 1-7.

[786] See Il. xx. 106.

[787] Il. xiv. 343.

[788] Od. xi. 281.

[789] Sup. p. 398.

[790] See E. Curtius, Ionier vor der Ionischen Wanderung, p. 9.

[791] Od. v. 121. also see Il. xviii. 436.

[792] Od. vii. 323.

[793] Sup. sect. viii. pp. 427, 8.

[794] Thes. 20.

[795] Il. xxiv. 615.

[796] Pausan. ii. 23. 4.

[797] Strabo, xii. p. 579. xiv. p. 680.

[798] Strabo xii. 572, 3.

[799] Il. ii. 104.

[800] Il. ii. 108.

[801] Paus. v. xiii. 1-4.

[802]