voyage are traced to divine wrath, justly provoked by the sins of the
Greeks, who, in the fierce exultation of a victory purchased by so many
hardships, had neither respected nor even spared the altars of the gods
in Troy. Athene, who had been their most zealous ally during the siege,
was so incensed by their final recklessness, more especially by the
outrage of Ajax, son of Oileus, that she actively harassed and
embittered their return, in spite of every effort to appease her. The
chiefs began to quarrel among themselves; their formal assembly became a
scene of drunkenness; even Agamemnon and Menelaus lost their fraternal
harmony, and each man acted on his own separate resolution.
Nevertheless, according to the _Odyssey_, Nestor, Diomedes, Neoptolemus,
Idomeneus, and Philoctetes reached home speedily and safely; Agamemnon
also arrived in Peloponnesus, to perish by the hand of a treacherous
wife; but Menelaus was condemned to long wanderings and to the severest
privations in Egypt, Cyprus, and elsewhere before he could set foot in
his native land. The Locrian Ajax perished on the Gyræan rock. Though
exposed to a terrible storm, he had already reached this place of
safety, when he indulged in the rash boast of having escaped in defiance
of the gods. No sooner did Poseidon hear this language than he struck
with his trident the rock which Ajax was grasping and precipitated both
into the sea. Calchas, the soothsayer, together with Leonteus and
Polypoetes, proceeded by land from Troy to Colophon.
In respect, however, to these and other Grecian heroes, tales were told
different from those in the _Odyssey_, assigning to them a long
expatriation and a distant home. Nestor went to Italy, where he founded
Metapontum, Pisa, and Heracleia: Philoctetes also went to Italy, founded
Petilia and Crimisa, and sent settlers to Egesta in Sicily. Neoptolemus,
under the advice of Thetis, marched by land across Thrace, met with
Odysseus, who had come by sea, at Maroneia, and then pursued his journey
to Epirus, where he became king of the Molossians. Idomeneus came to
Italy, and founded Uria in the Salentine peninsula. Diomedes, after
wandering far and wide, went along the Italian coast into the innermost
Adriatic gulf, and finally settled in Daunia, founding the cities of
Argyrippa, Beneventum, Atria, and Diomedeia: by the favor of Athene he
became immortal, and was worshipped as a god in many different places.
The Locrian followers of Ajax founded the Epizephyrian Locri on the
southernmost corner of Italy, besides another settlement in Libya.
The previously exiled Teucros, besides founding the city of Salamis in
Cyprus, is said to have established some settlements in the Iberian
peninsula. Menestheus, the Athenian, did the like, and also founded both
Elæa in Mysia and Scylletium in Italy. The Arcadian chief Agapenor
founded Paphos in Cyprus. Epius, of Panopeus in Phocis, the constructor
of the Trojan horse with the aid of the goddess Athene, settled at
Lagaria, near Sybaris, on the coast of Italy; and the very tools which
he had employed in that remarkable fabric were shown down to a late date
in the temple of Athene at Metapontum.
Temples, altars, and towns were also pointed out in Asia Minor, in
Samos, and in Crete, the foundation of Agamemnon or of his followers.
The inhabitants of the Grecian town of Scione, in the Thracian peninsula
called Pallene or Pellene, accounted themselves the offspring of the
Pellenians from Achæa in Peloponnesus, who had served under Agamemnon
before Troy, and who on their return from the siege had been driven on
the spot by a storm and there settled. The Pamphylians, on the southern
coast of Asia Minor, deduced their origin from the wanderings of
Amphilochus and Calchas after the siege of Troy: the inhabitants of the
Amphilochian Argos on the Gulf of Ambracia revered the same Amphilochus
as their founder. The Orchomenians under Iamenus, on quitting the
conquered city, wandered or were driven to the eastern extremity of the
Euxine Sea; and the barbarous Achæans under Mount Caucasus were supposed
to have derived their first establishment from this source. Meriones,
with his Cretan followers, settled at Engyion in Sicily, along with the
preceding Cretans who had remained there after the invasion of Minos.
The Elymians in Sicily also were composed of Trojans and Greeks
separately driven to the spot, who, forgetting their previous
differences, united in the joint settlements of Eryx and Egesta. We hear
of Podalerius both in Italy and on the coast of Caria; of Acamas, son of
Theseus, at Amphipolus in Thrace, at Soli in Cyprus, and at Synnada in
Phrygia; of Guneus, Prothous, and Eurypylus, in Crete as well as in
Libya. The obscure poem of Lycophron enumerates many of these dispersed
and expatriated heroes, whose conquest of Troy was indeed a "Cadmean"
victory (according to the proverbial phrase of the Greeks), wherein the
sufferings of the victor were little inferior to those of the
vanquished. It was particularly among the Italian Greeks, where they
were worshipped with very special solemnity, that their presence as
wanderers from Troy was reported and believed.
I pass over the numerous other tales which circulated among the
ancients, illustrating the ubiquity of the Grecian and Trojan heroes as
well as that of the Argonauts--one of the most striking features in the
Hellenic legendary world. Among them all, the most interesting,
individually, is Odysseus, whose romantic adventures in fabulous places
and among fabulous persons have been made familiarly known by Homer.
The goddesses Calypso and Circe; the semi-divine mariners of Phæacia,
whose ships are endowed with consciousness and obey without a steersman;
the one-eyed Cyclopes, the gigantic Læstrygones, and the wind-ruler
Æolus; the Sirens, who ensnare by their song, as the Lotophagi fascinate
by their food,--all these pictures formed integral and interesting
portions of the old epic. Homer leaves Odysseus reëstablished in his
house and family. But so marked a personage could never be permitted to
remain in the tameness of domestic life; the epic poem called the
_Telegonia_ ascribed to him a subsequent series of adventures.
Telegonus, his son by Circe, coming to Ithaca in search of his father,
ravaged the island and killed Odysseus without knowing who he was.
Bitter repentance overtook the son for his undesigned parricide: at his
prayer and by the intervention of his mother Circe, both Penelope and
Telemachus were made immortal: Telegonus married Penelope, and
Telemachus married Circe.
We see by this poem that Odysseus was represented as the mythical
ancestor of the Thesprotian kings, just as Neoptolemus was of the
Molossian.
It has already been mentioned that Antenor and Æneas stand distinguished
from the other Trojans by a dissatisfaction with Priam and a sympathy
with the Greeks, which was by Sophocles and others construed as
treacherous collusion,--a suspicion indirectly glanced at, though
emphatically repelled, by the Æneas of Vergil. In the old epic of
Arctinus, next in age to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, Æneas abandons Troy
and retires to Mount Ida, in terror at the miraculous death of Laocoon,
before the entry of the Greeks into the town and the last night battle:
yet Lesches, in another of the ancient epic poems, represented him as
having been carried away captive by Neoptolemus. In a remarkable passage
of the _Iliad_, Poseidon describes the family of Priam as having
incurred the hatred of Zeus, and predicts that Æneas and his descendants
shall reign over the Trojans: the race of Dardanus, beloved by Zeus more
than all his other sons, would thus be preserved, since Æneas belonged
to it. Accordingly, when Æneas is in imminent peril from the hands of
Achilles, Poseidon specially interferes to rescue him, and even the
implacable miso-Trojan goddess Here assents to the proceeding. These
passages have been construed by various able critics to refer to a
family of philo-Hellenic or semi-Hellenic Æneadæ, known even in the time
of the early singers of the _Iliad_ as masters of some territory in or
near the Troad, and professing to be descended from, as well as
worshipping, Æneas. In the town of Scepsis, situated in the mountainous
range of Ida, about thirty miles eastward of Ilium, there existed two
noble and priestly families who professed to be descended, the one from
Hector, the other from Æneas. The Scepsian critic Demetrius (in whose
time both these families were still to be found) informs us that
Scamandrius, son of Hector, and Ascanius, son of Æneas, were the
_archegets_ or heroic founders of his native city, which had been
originally situated on one of the highest ranges of Ida, and was
subsequently transferred by them to the less lofty spot on which it
stood in his time. In Arisbe and Gentinus there seem to have been
families professing the same descent, since the same _archegets_ were
acknowledged. In Ophrynium, Hector had his consecrated edifice, while in
Ilium both he and Æneas were worshipped as gods: and it was the
remarkable statement of the Lesbian Menecrates that Æneas, "having been
wronged by Paris and stripped of the sacred privileges which belonged to
him, avenged himself by betraying the city, and then became one of the
Greeks."
One tale thus among many respecting Æneas, and that, too, the most
ancient of all, preserved among natives of the Troad, who worshipped him
as their heroic ancestor, was that after the capture of Troy he
continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans, on friendly
terms with the Greeks. But there were other tales respecting him, alike
numerous and irreconcilable: the hand of destiny marked him as a
wanderer (_fato profugus_) and his ubiquity is not exceeded even by that
of Odysseus. We hear of him at Ænus in Thrace, in Pallene, at Æneia in
the Thermaic Gulf, in Delos, at Orchomenus and Mantineia in Arcadia, in
the islands of Cythera and Zacynthus, in Leucas and Ambracia, at
Buthrotum in Epirus, on the Salentine peninsula and various other places
in the southern region of Italy; at Drepana and Segesta in Sicily, at
Carthage, at Cape Palinurus, Cumæ, Misenum, Caieta, and finally in
Latium, where he lays the first humble foundation of the mighty Rome
and her empire. And the reason why his wanderings were not continued
still further was, that the oracles and the pronounced will of the gods
directed him to settle in Latium. In each of these numerous places his
visit was commemorated and certified by local monuments or special
legends, particularly by temples and permanent ceremonies in honor of
his mother Aphrodite, whose worship accompanied him everywhere: there
were also many temples and many different tombs of Æneas himself. The
vast ascendancy acquired by Rome, the ardor with which all the literary
Romans espoused the idea of a Trojan origin, and the fact that the
Julian family recognized Æneas as their gentile primary ancestor,--all
contributed to give to the Roman version of this legend the
preponderance over every other. The various other places in which
monuments of Æneas were found came thus to be represented as places
where he had halted for a time on his way from Troy to Latium. But
though the legendary pretensions of these places were thus eclipsed in
the eyes of those who constituted the literary public, the local belief
was not extinguished; they claimed the hero as their permanent property,
and his tomb was to them a proof that he had lived and died among them.
Antenor, who shares with Æneas the favorable sympathy of the Greeks, is
said by Pindar to have gone from Troy along with Menelaus and Helen into
the region of Cyrene in Libya. But according to the more current
narrative, he placed himself at the head of a body of Eneti or Veneti
from Paphlagonia, who had come as allies of Troy, and went by sea into
the inner part of the Adriatic Gulf, where he conquered the neighboring
barbarians and founded the town of Patavium (the modern Padua); the
Veneti in this region were said to owe their origin to his immigration.
We learn further from Strabo that Opsicellas, one of the companions of
Antenor, had continued his wanderings even into Iberia, and that he had
there established a settlement bearing his name. Thus endeth the Trojan
war, together with its sequel, the dispersion of the heroes, victors as
well as vanquished.
ACCESSION OF SOLOMON
BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM
B.C. 1017
HENRY HART MILMAN
After many weary years of travail and fighting in the wilderness
and the land of Canaan, the Jews had at last founded their kingdom,
with Jerusalem as the capital. Saul was proclaimed the first king;
afterward followed David, the "Lion of the tribe of Judah." During
the many wars in which the Israelites had been engaged, the Ark of
the Covenant was the one thing in which their faith was bound. No
undertaking could fail while they retained possession of it.
In their wanderings the tabernacle enclosing the precious ark was
first erected before the dwellings for the people. It had been
captured by the Philistines, then restored to the Hebrews, and
became of greater veneration than before. It will be remembered
that, among other things, it contained the rod of Aaron which
budded and was the cause of his selection as high-priest. It also
contained the tables of stone which bore the Ten Commandments.
David desired to build a fitting shrine, a temple, in which to
place the Ark of the Covenant; it should be a place wherein the
people could worship; a centre of religion in which the ark should
have paid it the distinction due it as the seat of tremendous
majesty.
But David had been a man of war; this temple was a place of peace.
Blood must not stain its walls; no shedder of gore could be its
architect. Yet David collected stone, timber, and precious metals
for its erection; and, not being allowed to erect the temple
himself, was permitted to depute that office to his son and
successor, "Solomon the Wise."
At this time all the enemies of Israel had been conquered, the
country was at peace; the domain of the Hebrews was greater than at
any other time, before or afterward. It was the fitting time for
the erection of a great shrine to enclose the sacred ark. Nobly was
this done, and no human work of ancient or modern times has so
impressed mankind as the building of Solomon's Temple.
Solomon succeeded to the Hebrew kingdom at the age of twenty. He was
environed by designing, bold, and dangerous enemies. The pretensions of
Adonijah still commanded a powerful party: Abiathar swayed the
priesthood; Joab the army. The singular connection in public opinion
between the title to the crown and the possession of the deceased
monarch's harem is well understood.[25] Adonijah, in making request for
Abishag, a youthful concubine taken by David in his old age, was
considered as insidiously renewing his claims to the sovereignty.
Solomon saw at once the wisdom of his father's dying admonition: he
seized the opportunity of crushing all future opposition and all danger
of a civil war. He caused Adonijah to be put to death; suspended
Abiathar from his office, and banished him from Jerusalem: and though
Joab fled to the altar, he commanded him to be slain for the two murders
of which he had been guilty, those of Abner and Amasa. Shimei, another
dangerous man, was commanded to reside in Jerusalem, on pain of death if
he should quit the city. Three years afterward he was detected in a
suspicious journey to Gath, on the Philistine border; and having
violated the compact, he suffered the penalty.
[Footnote 25: I Kings, i.]
Thus secured by the policy of his father from internal enemies, by the
terror of his victories from foreign invasion, Solomon commenced his
peaceful reign, during which Judah and Israel dwelt safely, _Every man
under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba_. This
peace was broken only by a revolt of the Edomites. Hadad, of the royal
race, after the exterminating war waged by David and by Joab, had fled
to Egypt, where he married the sister of the king's wife. No sooner had
he heard of the death of David and of Joab than he returned, and seems
to have kept up a kind of predatory warfare during the reign of Solomon.
Another adventurer, Rezon, a subject of Hadadezer, king of Zobah, seized
on Damascus, and maintained a great part of Syria in hostility to
Solomon.
Solomon's conquest of Hamath Zobah in a later part of his reign, after
which he built Tadmor in the wilderness and raised a line of fortresses
along his frontier to the Euphrates, is probably connected with these
hostilities.[26] The justice of Solomon was proverbial. Among his first
acts after his accession, it is related that when he had offered a
costly sacrifice at Gibeon, the place where the Tabernacle remained, God
had appeared to him in a dream, and offered him whatever gift he chose:
the wise king requested an understanding heart to judge the people. God
not merely assented to his prayer, but added the gift of honor and
riches. His judicial wisdom was displayed in the memorable history of
the two women who contested the right to a child. Solomon, in the wild
spirit of Oriental justice, commanded the infant to be divided before
their faces: the heart of the real mother was struck with terror and
abhorrence, while the false one consented to the horrible partition, and
by this appeal to nature the cause was instantaneously decided.
[Footnote 26: I Kings, xi., 23; I Chron., viii., 3.]
The internal government of his extensive dominions next demanded the
attention of Solomon. Besides the local and municipal governors, he
divided the kingdom into twelve districts: over each of these he
appointed a purveyor for the collection of the royal tribute, which was
received in kind; and thus the growing capital and the immense
establishments of Solomon were abundantly furnished with provisions.
Each purveyor supplied the court for a month. The daily consumption of
his household was three hundred bushels of finer flour, six hundred of a
coarser sort; ten fatted, twenty other oxen; one hundred sheep; besides
poultry, and various kinds of venison. Provender was furnished for forty
thousand horses, and a great number of dromedaries. Yet the population
of the country did not, at first at least, feel these burdens: _Judah
and Israel were many, as the sand which is by the sea in multitude,
eating and drinking, and making merry_.
The foreign treaties of Solomon were as wisely directed to secure the
profound peace of his dominions. He entered into a matrimonial alliance
with the royal family of Egypt, whose daughter he received with great
magnificence; and he renewed the important alliance with the king of
Tyre.[27] The friendship of this monarch was of the highest value in
contributing to the great royal and national work, the building of the
Temple. The cedar timber could only be obtained from the forests of
Lebanon: the Sidonian artisans, celebrated in the Homeric poems, were
the most skilful workmen in every kind of manufacture, particularly in
the precious metals.
[Footnote 27: After inserting the correspondence between King Solomon
and King Hiram of Tyre, according to I Kings, v., Josephus asserts that
copies of these letters were not only preserved by his countrymen, but
also in the archives of Tyre. I presume that Josephus adverts to the
statement of Tyrian historians, not to an actual inspection of the
archives, which he seems to assert as existing and accessible.]
Solomon entered into a regular treaty, by which he bound himself to
supply the Tyrians with large quantities of corn; receiving in return
their timber, which was floated down to Joppa, and a large body of
artificers. The timber was cut by his own subjects, of whom he raised a
body of thirty thousand; ten thousand employed at a time, and relieving
each other every month; so that to one month of labor they had two of
rest. He raised two other corps, one of seventy thousand porters of
burdens, the other of eighty thousand hewers of stone, who were employed
in the quarries among the mountains. All these labors were thrown, not
on the Israelites, but on the strangers who, chiefly of Canaanitish
descent, had been permitted to inhabit the country.
These preparations, in addition to those of King David, being completed,
the work began. The eminence of Moriah, the Mount of Vision, _i.e._, the
height seen afar from the adjacent country, which tradition pointed out
as the spot where Abraham had offered his son (where recently the plague
had been stayed, by the altar built in the threshing-floor of Ornan or
Araunah, the Jebusite), rose on the east side of the city. Its rugged
top was levelled with immense labor; its sides, which to the east and
south were precipitous, were faced with a wall of stone, built up
perpendicular from the bottom of the valley, so as to appear to those
who looked down of most terrific height; a work of prodigious skill and
labor, as the immense stones were strongly mortised together and wedged
into the rock. Around the whole area or esplanade, an irregular
quadrangle, was a solid wall of considerable height and strength: within
this was an open court, into which the Gentiles were either from the
first, or subsequently, admitted. A second wall encompassed another
quadrangle, called the court of the Israelites. Along this wall, on the
inside, ran a portico or cloister, over which were chambers for
different sacred purposes. Within this again another, probably a lower,
wall separated the court of the priests from that of the Israelites. To
each court the ascent was by steps, so that the platform of the inner
court was on a higher level than that of the outer.
The Temple itself was rather a monument of the wealth than the
architectural skill and science of the people. It was a wonder of the
world from the splendor of its materials, more than the grace, boldness,
or majesty of its height and dimensions. It had neither the colossal
magnitude of the Egyptian, the simple dignity and perfect proportional
harmony of the Grecian, nor perhaps the fantastic grace and lightness of
later Oriental architecture. Some writers, calling to their assistance
the visionary temple of Ezekiel, have erected a most superb edifice; to
which there is this fatal objection, that if the dimensions of the
prophet are taken as they stand in the text, the area of the Temple and
its courts would not only have covered the whole of Mount Moriah, but
almost all Jerusalem. In fact our accounts of the Temple of Solomon are
altogether unsatisfactory. The details, as they now stand in the books
of Kings and Chronicles, the only safe authorities, are unscientific,
and, what is worse, contradictory.
Josephus has evidently blended together the three temples, and
attributed to the earlier all the subsequent additions and alterations.
The Temple, on the whole, was an enlargement of the tabernacle, built of
more costly and durable materials. Like its model, it retained the
ground-plan and disposition of the Egyptian, or rather of almost all the
sacred edifices of antiquity: even its measurements are singularly in
unison with some of the most ancient temples in Upper Egypt. It
consisted of a propylæon, a temple, and a sanctuary; called respectively
the Porch, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies. Yet in some respects,
if the measurements are correct, the Temple must rather have resembled
the form of a simple Gothic church.