BELOCH’S VIEW OF THE CONVENTIONAL PRIMITIVE HISTORY[7]
[Sidenote: [_ca._ 1200-800 B.C.]]
The singers of the epic poems as well as their hearers were as yet wholly
unconscious of the gap separating mythology from history. To them the
Trojan War, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the wanderings of
Ulysses and Menelaus, were historical realities and they believed just
as firmly that Achilles, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and all the other heroes
once really lived, as the Swiss until recently believed in the reality of
their Tell and Winkelried. Indeed until the fourth century hardly any one
in Greece dared to question the truth of these things. Even so critical
a person as Thucydides is still wholly under the influence of epic
tradition, so much so that he gives a statistical report of the strength
of Agamemnon’s army and tries to answer the question as to how such
masses of people could have been supported during the ten years’ siege of
Troy.
But the world which the epic described belonged to an immeasurably
distant past. The people of that time were much stronger than those
“who live to-day”; the gods still used to descend upon the earth and
did not consider it beneath them to generate sons with mortal women. In
comparison with that great by-gone age, the present and that which oral
tradition told of the immediate past seemed wholly without interest; and
if the epic did occasionally seize upon historical recollections, the
events were put back into the heroic age and became inseparably mingled
with mythical occurrences. As to how the present had grown out of this
heroic past, the poets and their contemporaries had not yet begun to ask.
The time came, however, when this question was put. People wanted to
know why the Greece of historical times looked so different from Homer’s
Greece; why for example Homer knows of no Thessaly; why he has Achæans
instead of Dorians living in Argolis; why, according to him, descendants
of Pelops instead of those of Hercules sit upon the thrones of Argos and
Sparta. It is the first awakening of the historical sense which finds
expression in such questions. The answer, however, was already given with
the question. It was clear that the Grecian tribes must have changed
their abodes to a great extent after the Trojan War; Hellas must have
been shaken by a real migration of peoples. But this single fact was not
sufficient. People wanted to know the impelling cause of the migrations,
and the particular circumstances under which they took place. The
answer was not difficult for a people endowed with such a facility for
speculation.
The very lack of colour in such accounts would be a sufficient proof for
the fact that we are not dealing here with pure speculation, not with
real tradition. Thus hardly anything more is told of the immigration of
the Thessalians into the river basin of the Peneus beyond the bald fact,
and that was sufficient to explain why Homer’s “Pelasgian Argos” was
called Thessaly in historic times. Of course the incomers must have had
a leader, consequently Thessalus, the eponymic hero of the people, was
placed at their head, a point in the story which of itself is sufficient
to stamp the whole narrative as a late invention. The Thessalians also
must have come from somewhere; but since Homer already places the races
south of Thermopylæ in the homes they actually occupied in history,
and since they could not make a Grecian tribe immigrate from Thrace or
Illyria, there was nothing else to do but to place the original home of
the conquerors in Epirus. This was all the more plausible as the name
Thessaly is really closely connected with Thessaliotis, the region about
Pharsalia and Cierium on the borders of Epirus, and first spread from
here to other parts of the country.
Even more characteristic perhaps is the account of the migration of
the Bœotians. According to Homer, Cadmeans lived in Thebes, Minyæ in
Orchomenos. Hence it followed that the Bœotians must have immigrated
after the Trojan War, like the Thessalians. But a great many Thessalian
names of places and religious practices occur in Bœotia. Hence nothing
was more simple than to make the Bœotians immigrate from Thessaly, thus
at the same time explaining what had become of the original inhabitants
of Thessaly after the influx of Thessalians. To be sure this original
population, as represented by the serfs (_penestai_) of the Thessalian
nobles, presented a very different appearance; still these two views
could very well be combined: one needed only to suppose that one part of
the former population of the region had fallen into bondage, and that
the other had emigrated. Moreover, Homer already mentions Bœotians in
the region which they occupied in historic times. That made the further
supposition necessary that a part of the people had already settled in
Bœotia before the Trojan War; or else the opposite hypothesis was made,
that the Bœotians had been driven out of Bœotia after the Trojan War by
the Pelasgians and Thracians, and had returned thither after several
generations. We see plainly from this example how all such suppositions
were dependent on the epic poems.
The migration of the Eleans is a similar case. Elis is an old district
name, consequently no Eleans can ever have existed outside of Elis.
But Homer mentions the Epeans as being inhabitants of the country;
consequently it was stated that the Eleans did not enter the Peloponnesus
until after the Trojan War, and that they came from Ætolia, where Oxylus,
the mythical ancestor of the Elean royal house, was also worshipped as a
hero. According to an opposite version Ætolia was settled by emigrants
from Elis; and these two views were then combined, and the Eleans were
made first to move to Ætolia and then, after ten generations, to move
back again. As a matter of fact the Homeric Epeans are nothing else
than the inhabitants of Epea in Triphylia, whose name was extended to
include the inhabitants of the surrounding districts, like the name of
the neighbouring Pylians, since the knowledge of the Ionic rhapsodists
concerning the western part of the Peloponnesus is very scanty.
Further, since Homer knows of no Dorians in the Peloponnesus, it was
clear that the peoples inhabiting Argolis and Laconia in historic times
could have come in only after the Trojan War; it remained only to
discover from whence. This was not difficult; there was in the middle
part of Greece, between Œta and Parnassus, a small mountainous district
whose inhabitants were called Dorians, quite like the Grecian colonists
on the Carian coast. This is not at all remarkable, since in a widely
extended linguistic territory the same local names must necessarily recur
in different places, as may be seen from any topographical dictionary.
Such homonyms by no means prove an especially close relationship between
the inhabitants of such localities; in the formation of Greek racial
tradition, however, they have played an important part.
The home of the Dorians was in this way established. People now wanted
to know the reason which had led them to seek new abodes so far away. In
close connection with this was the question as to how the descendants of
Hercules had come to reign over Argos, Sparta, and Messene. The answer
was given by the tradition of the return of the Heraclidæ. Hercules, it
was related, had belonged to the royal family of Argos, but had been
robbed of his rights to the throne and had died in exile; his sons,
or grandsons as was stated later for chronological reasons, had made
good their rights with the aid of the Dorians and had also established
the claims which Hercules had to dominion over Laconia and Messenia.
The regained lands were divided under the three brothers Temenus,
Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, or between the twin sons of the latter,
Procles and Eurysthenes. This was a tradition which could be put to
admirable political use. Supported by this title, Argos could claim the
hegemony over the whole of Argolis; Sparta could justify the subjection
of the small cities of Laconia and Messenia. That was why this tradition,
once come into existence, was quickly circulated and officially
recognised.
But the mention of Messenia shows that we are here dealing with a
comparatively recent stage in the growth of tradition, since this region
could not be claimed as a heritage by the Heraclidæ until after the
Spartan conquest between the eighth and seventh centuries.
Also the eponymi of the Spartan royal dynasties of Agis and Eurypon have
no place in the tradition of the Doric migrations; a sure sign that they
were first connected with Hercules artificially. And Temenus, from whom
the Argive kings traced their descent, was, according to the Arcadian
myth,--no doubt taken from Argos,--the son of Pelasgus, of Phegeus, or of
the Argolian hero Phoroneus. It was also related that Temenus had been
brought up by Hera--the goddess of the Argolian land. He was thus an old
Argive hero who originally had nothing whatever to do with Hercules.
Just as little was known about the Doric migration on the island of
Cos at the time when the genealogy of its ruling dynasty was written,
since the latter is not traced back to Temenus, but directly to Hercules
through his son Thessalus. And anyway Hercules, as we have seen, is not
a “Doric” divinity at all, but a Bœotian, whose cult was extended to the
neighbouring countries of Bœotia, only after the colonisation of Asia
Minor. The tradition concerning the return of the Heraclidæ is thus seen
to have come into existence long after the immigration of the Dorians
into the Peloponnesus, with which it is inseparably connected. This
tradition is first mentioned by Tyrtæus towards the end of the seventh
century and in the epic poem _Ægimios_, ascribed to Hesiod, which may
have been written at the same time, or a little later. That was the
period when the Homeric poems became popular in European Greece; both
Tyrtæus and Hesiod are wholly under their influence. Moreover it is clear
that an immigration of Dorians from middle Greece into the Peloponnesus
could be talked of only after the Doric name had been carried from the
colonies of Asia Minor to the west coast of the Ægean Sea, which did
not happen until post-Homeric times. In the same way the legend of the
Thessalian migration could have grown up only after the inhabitants of
the Peneus river basin had become conscious of their racial unity and had
begun to designate themselves by the common name of Thessalians. This
must have taken place early in the eighth or seventh centuries, since, as
has already been stated, Homer is not as yet acquainted with this name,
whereas the latest part of the _Iliad_, the catalogue of ships, mentions
the eponymic hero of the people. Finally, the dependence of all these
legendary migrations upon the epic poems is shown by the fact that they
are connected only with regions which in Homer had a different population
than in historic times. The Arcadians and Athenians, on the other hand,
who already in Homer are found in the same districts they occupied in
later times, considered themselves autochthonous. Thus we see that Homer
had not only given the Greeks their gods, as Herodotus says, but their
ancient history also. We, however, do not need to be told that traditions
which did not grow up until the eighth or seventh century are entirely
worthless as helping to an understanding of conditions in Greece at a
time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor.
After all this the question as to the internal evidence of the truth
of these traditions is really superfluous. Even a well-invented myth
is yet by no means history. Here, however, we are asked to believe the
most improbable things. The Doris on the Œta is a wild mountain valley,
measuring scarcely two hundred square kilometers in area, which could not
have contained more than a few thousand inhabitants, since farming and
grazing formed their sole means of support. In Homer’s time the eastern
Locrians were still so lightly armed that they were wholly unfitted for
fighting with the hoplites at close range; the Dorians who lived farther
inland than these Locrians cannot have been much further advanced several
centuries earlier. And a few hundreds or even thousands of such poorly
armed soldiers are to have conquered the old highly civilised districts
of the Peloponnesus with their numerous strongholds, and the superior
armour of their inhabitants? The very idea is an absurdity. No more can
we understand why the Dorians should have migrated precisely to Argolis,
and Laconia, and even to Messenia--places situated so far from their
home. The legend does indeed give a satisfactory answer to this question,
but anyone who cannot recognise Hercules, with his sons and grandsons,
as historical characters, is obliged to find some other motive for the
migration of the Dorians.
In other respects, also, there is absolutely no proof to support the
supposition of a migration of peoples upon the Grecian peninsula. The
“Mycenæan” civilisation was not, as has been supposed, suddenly destroyed
by an incursion of uncivilised tribes, but was gradually merged into the
civilisation of the classic period. Even Attica, in connection with which
there is no tradition of a migration, had its period of Mycenæan culture.
The so-called “Doric” institutions are limited to Crete and Laconia,
and in the latter country they are not older than the Spartan conquest
in the eighth century; hence they have nothing whatever to do with the
Doric migration. In the same way the serfdom of the Thessalian peasants
may very well have been the result of an economic development, like the
colonia during the Roman empire or serfdom in Germany after the end of
the Middle Ages. Also the differentiation of the Grecian dialects came
about, as we saw, after the colonisation of Asia Minor, and hence should
not be traced back to the migrations which took place within the Grecian
peninsula at some time preceding this period. And, in any case, after the
Dorians settled in the Peloponnesus they must have adopted the dialect of
the original inhabitants of the country, who were so far superior to them
in numbers and civilisation; just as no one doubts that the Thessalians
did the same after their immigration into the Peneus river basin. A
“religion of the Doric race,” however, exists only in the imagination of
modern scholars; Hercules himself, the ancestral god of the Dorians, is
of Bœotian origin. Finally, it is extremely doubtful if the Argives and
Laconians were any more closely related to each other than to the other
Grecian tribes--the so-called Doric Phyleans, at least, have until now
been traced only in Argolis and in the Argolian colonies. But even if a
closer relationship did exist between the two neighbouring tribes, it
would by no means necessarily follow that the Argo-Laconian people first
immigrated into the Peloponnesus at a time when the eastern part of the
peninsula had already reached a comparatively high grade of civilisation.
There is indeed no question but that the Peloponnesus got its Hellenic
population from the north, that is directly from middle Greece; and
it is very probable that, even after the Peloponnesus was already in
the possession of the Greeks, tribal displacements still took place in
Greece. But they occurred in so remote a period that they have left no
distinguishable trace, even in tradition. If the Greeks of Asia Minor
remembered only the bare fact of their immigration, how could a tradition
have been maintained of tribal wanderings which took place long before
this colonisation? It is an idle task to try to discover the direction of
these migrations or the more particular circumstances under which they
took place.
Hence it is a picture of the imagination which, since Herodotus,[e] has
been accepted as primitive Grecian history. But the problem which gave
rise to the traditions of mythical migrations still remains for us to
solve--the question as to why the epics present us with a different
picture of the distribution of Grecian tribes, from that found in
historic times. The answer to-day will naturally be different from the
one given two thousand years ago.
The epic poem designates Agamemnon’s followers, and indeed all the
Greeks before Troy, as Argives, Achæans, or Danaans--terms which are
used wholly synonymously even in the oldest parts of the _Iliad_. Now
we know that not only in Homeric times, but already centuries earlier,
before the colonisation of Crete and Asia Minor, Argolis was inhabited
by the same people that we find there in historic times. It would not of
itself be impossible to suppose that this people, who afterwards had no
common tribal name, should have called themselves Achæans or Danaans,
in prehistoric times, although it would be difficult to understand how
this tribal name could have been lost. But as a matter of fact a tribe
called Danaan never did exist. Danaus is an old Argive hero who is said
to have transformed the waterless Argos into a well-watered country;
his daughters, the Danaides, are water nymphs; Danæ also, the mother
of the solar hero Perseus, and herself a goddess, cannot be separated
from Danaus. The Danaans, accordingly, are the “people of Danaus”; they
belong like him to tradition, and have been transposed from heaven to
earth like the Cadmeans and Minyæ to whom we shall return later on. The
name Achæan, however, was applied in historic times to the inhabitants
of the northern coast of the Peloponnesus and of the south of Thessaly,
and it is hardly probable that it should have been more widely spread
in historic times. Agamemnon seems rather, according to the oldest
tradition, to have been a Thessalian prince, like Achilles, who continued
to be regarded as such. At the time, however, when the epic was being
formed in Ionia, the Peloponnesian Argos outshone all other parts of
the Grecian peninsula, and the poets in consequence were obliged to
transpose the governmental seat of the powerful ruler from Thessaly to
the Peloponnesus. His Achæans of course migrated with him.
Since, now, in Homer the name Achæan includes all the Grecian tribes
under Agamemnon’s command, it could no longer be used to designate the
inhabitants of one single region. Consequently in the epic the name
Achaia is not used for the northern coast of the Peloponnesus, but this
region is simply called “coast-land,” or Ægialea. This then gave rise to
the tradition--if we still call such combinations tradition--that the
Achæans who were driven out of Laconia by the Dorians had settled in
Ægialea and given their name to the country. Ionians were said to have
lived there previously, a theory which was supported by the existence of
a sanctuary of the Heliconian Poseidon on the promontory of Mycale.
Furthermore Homer mentions various peoples upon the Grecian peninsula
and the surrounding islands, which in historic times no longer existed
there; for example, the Abantes, who appear in the catalogue of ships
as inhabitants of Eubœa, whereas in the rest of the _Iliad_ they are
not localised. It is possible that there has here been a preservation
of the old tribal name of the Eubœans, which later must have been lost;
but it is also just as possible, and more probable, that the Abantes
had originally nothing whatever to do with Eubœa, but that they were
the inhabitants of Abæ in Phocis, whose name then, for the sake of
some theory, was transferred to the neighbouring island. The Caucones
according to the _Telemachus_ must have dwelt in the western part of
the Peloponnesus, not far from Pylus, whereas the _Iliad_ calls them
allies of the Trojans; and in reality even in historic times Caucones
are said to have been found on the Paphlagonian coast. The name was thus
evidently transferred from Asia Minor to the Peloponnesus, for which the
river Caucon near Dyme in Achaia may have given a reason. A comparatively
late part of the _Iliad_ tells of a war between the Curetes and the
inhabitants of Calydon in Ætolia. In Hesiod, on the other hand, the
Curetes are divine beings, related to the nymphs and satyrs. They appear
also as beneficent dæmons in the Cretan folk-lore; they are said to have
taught mankind all sorts of useful arts and also to have brought up the
infant Zeus. They belong thus to mythology, not to history. They were
probably located in Ætolia only because there was a mountain there called
Curion; and as a matter of course it was said that they had immigrated
from Crete. Since on the Ætolian coast at the foot of the Curion there
was a city called Chalcis, they were further transferred to the Eubœan
Chalcis.
There are also other cases in pre-Homeric times of mythical people having
been transposed from heaven to earth--thus the Danaans of whom we have
already spoken; furthermore, the Lapithæ, who are said to have lived in
the northern part of Thessaly at the foot of Olympus and Ossa. Their
close association with the centaurs leaves no doubt that they, like the
latter, belong to the realm of mythology. Closely related to them are
the Phlegyæ. The _Iliad_ gives us a picture of Ares, as he advances
to battle in their ranks, but leaves their dwelling-place indefinite;
later authorities placed it in Thessaly or in the valley of the Bœotian
Cephisus. Coronis, the mother of Æsculapius, belonged to this tribe;
also Ixion, who laid violent hands on Hera. Finally, the Phlegyæ are
said to have burned the Delphic temple and in punishment therefor were
destroyed by Apollo by lightning and an earthquake. The Minyæ also belong
to this circle. They compose the crew of the ship _Argo_, which goes into
the distant sun-land of the east to bring back from thence the Golden
Fleece; the daughter of their tribal hero, Minyas, is Persephone, and
no further proof is necessary to show that he himself is a god and his
people mythical. Afterwards when the starting-point of the Argonauts was
localised in the Pagasæan Gulf, the Minyæ also became a Thessalian race;
from there, like their relatives the Phlegyæ, they were brought over to
Bœotia, where Orchomenos in Homer is called “Minyean.” And since the
_Iliad_ furthermore mentions a river Minyos in the later Triphylia, the
Minyæ were placed there also.
The Pelasgians play a much more important part in the conventional
primitive history of Greece than the last-mentioned peoples. Throughout
antiquity their name is connected with the western part of the great
Thessalian plain, the “Pelasgic Argos” of Homer, the Pelasgiotis of
historic times. The _Iliad_ speaks of the Pelasgians, famed for their
spears, who lived far from Troy in broad-furrowed Larissa, and probably
intends thereby the Thessalian capital. Thessalian Achilles prays to the
Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona before the departure of his friend Patroclus.
But the _Iliad_ as yet knows nothing of Pelasgian inhabitants of Dodona;
on the contrary the catalogue of ships reckons this sacred city as
belonging to the territory of the Ænianes and Perrhæbi, and it is Hesiod
who first makes the temple to have been founded by Pelasgians. Elsewhere
Pelasgians are mentioned by Homer only in Crete.
Otherwise the later accounts. Wherever within the circle of the Ægean Sea
the name of Larissa occurs, there Pelasgians are said to have lived--in
the Peloponnesian Argos, in Æolis of Asia Minor, on the island of Lesbos,
on the Cayster near Ephesus. It is possibly for this reason that the
_Odyssey_ places Pelasgians in Crete, since there, also, there was a
Larissæan field near Hierapytna, and Gortyn is said to have been called
Larissa in ancient times. From Argos the Pelasgians also became woven
into the myths of the neighbouring Arcadia, the ancestral hero of which,
Lycaon, is called by Hesiod a son of Pelasgus.
Pelasgians were said to have lived once in Attica also. The wall
which defended the approach to the citadel of Athens bore the name
Pelargicon, and as no one knew what that meant, it was said that it had
been corrupted out of Pelasgicon and that the citadel had been built by
Pelasgians. These Pelasgians were then said to have been driven out by
the Athenians and to have migrated to Lemnos. Why they went precisely
to this place we do not know, nor why these Lemnian Pelasgians were
called Tyrrhenians. Homer places the Sinties, that is a Thracian tribe,
in Lemnos. Remnants of the original inhabitants of the island, who were
driven out by the Athenians in about the year 500 B.C., were, a hundred
years later, still living on the peninsula of Athos and on the Propontis
near Placia and Scylace; they had preserved their old language, which was
different from the Greek.
In consequence of this and similar traditions, the theory was brought
forward in the sixth century that the Hellenes had been preceded in
Greece by a Pelasgic race. Since, however, some of the Grecian tribes, as
the Arcadians and Athenians, considered themselves to be autochthonous,
there was nothing for it but to call the Pelasgians the ancestors of
the later Hellenes, and so the whole change was reduced to one of
name only. This to be sure was in contradiction of the statements of
Homer, who names the Pelasgians among the allies of Troy, and hence
evidently considered them to be racially antagonistic to the Greeks.
The genealogists and historians of antiquity never got around this
contradiction, which was indeed inexplicable with the means at their
command.
Moreover, even if a Pelasgian people ever had existed in the wide
extent attributed to them by tradition, the Greeks of antiquity would
no more have conceived of them as being a single nation, than they
themselves became conscious of their national unity before the eighth
century; they would have designated the several Pelasgian tribes by
different names. This alone shows that we are not dealing here with
real historical tradition, quite apart from the fact that there is no
historical tradition from the time preceding the colonisation of Asia
Minor. Here also it is a question of mere theorising, and the theories
already presuppose the existence of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, even to
their later songs, so that they cannot be older than the seventh or sixth
century. Historically the Pelasgians can be traced only in Thessaly.
Pelasgiotis is thus equivalent to Pelasgia, just as Thessaliotis is
equivalent to Thessalia and Elimiotis to Elimea. The Pelasgiots, however,
of historic times were of Grecian origin and we have not the slightest
reason to suppose that the same was not true of prehistoric times.
Indeed the Thessalian plain in all probability is the place in which the
Hellenes first made permanent settlements.
A similar position to that of the Pelasgians is occupied by the Leleges
in tradition. Homer speaks of them as inhabiting Pedasus in southern Troy
and even Alcæus calls Antandrus, situated in this region, a Lelegean
town. Later comers regarded the Leleges as the original inhabitants of
Caria, where there was also a Pedasus; even in the Hellenistic period
they were said to have formed a clan of serfs in this region, like the
Heliots in Sparta. Old fortresses and tombstones, concerning the origin
of which nothing was known, were ascribed to the Leleges, just as we
speak of “Pelasgian” walls. It was also supposed that the whole Ionian
coast and the islands near it were once inhabited by these people. It
was natural to suppose a similar relationship for European Greece and
here also to let a Lelegean population precede the Hellenic. Supports for
this theory were found in a number of local names, such as Physcus and
Larymna in Locris, Abæ in Phocis, Pedasus in Messenia, which occur in an
identical or similar form in Caria. One of the two citadels of Megara was
called Caria; and Zeus Carios was worshipped in various parts of Greece.
Accordingly, Leleges or Carians were said to have lived in all these
places. The supposition that the southern part of the Hellenic peninsula
was occupied by a Carian population in a pre-Grecian period has, as we
have seen, a great deal in its favour; only we should avoid trying to
discover historical tradition in late suppositions, since Homer still
knows nothing of all these myths and Hesiod is the first to make Locrus
rule over the Leleges.
Nor does Homer know anything of Thracians outside of their historic
abodes to the north of the Ægean Sea. Later tradition places them in
Phocian Daulis and in Bœotia on the Helicon. The most direct cause for
this was probably furnished by the race of Thracidæ, which attained a
prominent position in Delphi and which had probably spread into other
Phocian cities as well; another reason was the name of the Daulian king,
Tereus, which had a Thracian sound, and lastly, the cult of the Muses
which had a home on the Helicon, as also on Olympus in Thracian Pieria.
Mysteries were connected with this cult even at a comparatively early
period, as is shown by the legends of Orpheus and Musæus. Hence Eumolpus,
the mythical founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, was held to be a
Thracian; his very name shows that he is connected with the worship of
the Muses, even if he were not expressly said to be the son of Musæus.
The historic value of this tradition is thus sufficiently demonstrated.
There were also traditions of immigrations from the Orient into Greece.
These were based in part upon solar myths, which have given rise to
similar legends among the most widely separated peoples; they also
reflect the consciousness that the rudiments of a higher civilisation
were brought to the Greeks from the East. In the form in which we have
them, these myths are without exception late formations, which presuppose
close relations between Greece and the old civilisations of Asia and
Egypt. In Homer, accordingly, there is no trace of them.
Thus Pelops is said to have come from Lydia or Phrygia to the peninsula
which has since borne his name. One might be tempted to regard him as
the eponymic hero of the Peloponnesus; but Pelopia was also the name of
a daughter of Pelias or of Niobe, and of the mother of Cycnus, a son
of Ares. Pelops’ mother also is Euryanassa, a daughter of Dione; his
paternal grandfather is Xanthus (the “shining one”); two of his sons
are called Chrysippus and Alcathous. These names leave no doubt as to
the fact that Pelops was originally a solar hero; hence also the story
of his contest with Œnomaus for the possession of Hippodamia. The name
Peloponnesus, which is also unknown to Homer, means accordingly “Island
of the sun-god”; Helios, as is well known, had a celebrated temple at
the most extreme southern point of the peninsula, on the promontory
of Tænarum. Thus Pelops, originally, was not materially different
from Hercules, who for the most part has crowded him out of cult and
tradition; just as the genealogy of the Peloponnesian dynasties was
traced back to Pelops in ancient times and to Hercules at a later period.
Nevertheless Pelops has at least kept the first place in Olympia.
The tradition of the immigration of Danaus from Egypt is closely
connected with the legend of the wanderings of Io, which could not
have taken on its present form until after Egypt was opened up to the
Hellenes, that is not before the end of the seventh century. The legend
concerning the Egyptian origin of the old Attic national hero Cecrops
grew up much later in the fourth or third century, and never attained
general recognition.
We have already seen how Phœnix and his brother Cadmus became Phœnicians.
Accordingly Phœnix’s daughter, or according to a later myth his sister,
Europa, was carried off by Zeus from Phœnicia to Crete, where she gave
birth to Minos. This alone makes it clear that Minos had nothing whatever
to do with the Phœnicians, but is a good Grecian god, as are also Phœnix,
Cadmus, Europa, his wife Pasiphaë (the “all enlightening”), his daughter
Phædra (the “beaming”), and Ariadne the wife of Dionysus. Minos, also,
afterwards fell to the rank of a hero; already in Homer he appears as the
king of Knossos, and later the Cretans trace their laws back to him. The
name Minoa occurs frequently in the islands and on the coast of the Ægean
Sea; also in Crete itself, and in Amorgos, Siphnos, and on the coast of
Megaris. Hence the conclusion was drawn that Minos had ruled in all these
places and must therefore have been a great sea-king, whose dominion
extended over the whole of the Cyclades and in fact over the whole
Ægean Sea. But in Sicily there was also a Minoa, a daughter city of the
Megarian colony of Selinus, and doubtless named after the small island of
Minoa near the Nisæan Megara. Thus the tradition arose that Minos had
proceeded to Sicily and there found his death. Since Selinus was founded
in the year 650 B.C., this myth cannot have come into existence before
the sixth century.
At the beginning of the fifth century all these traditions were
combined, and connected; on the one hand, with the myths which formed
the substance of the epic poems; on the other, with the oldest historic
recollections. The genealogies of the heroes as given in part by Homer
and more completely by Hesiod served as a chronological basis. At the
beginning were placed the Pelasgians, then the immigrations from the
east, of Danaus, Pelops, Cadmus, and others. Then followed the expedition
of the Argonauts, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the Trojan War,
and whatever else of similar nature was related in the epics. Next came
the age of the great migrations; first the incursion of the Thessalians
into the plains of the Peneus, and the Bœotian migration caused thereby,
then the march of the Dorians and their allies, the Eleans, into the
Peloponnesus, which was followed by the colonisation of the islands and
of the western coast of Asia Minor.
Thus was gained the misleading appearance of a pragmatic history of
Grecian antiquity; and although even in ancient times occasional critical
doubts were not wanting, this system as a whole was accepted by the
Greeks as historical truth.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Reproduced by permission from his _Griechische Geschichte_. The
subject here treated is one on which the authorities are by no means
agreed. Other views are presented in a subsequent chapter.]
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