passage, I very much question whether we ought so to apply it. It is
quite against the general bearing of the passage, which would much
more naturally refer it to Minerva. The reason for it is that cows or
heifers were offered to her, and not rams or bulls. No doubt, in the
particular cases mentioned to us, (Il. vi. 94, x. 292, xi. 729, and Od.
iii. 382,) cows or heifers only are spoken of. But in Od. iii. 145 we
are told that ἑκατομβαὶ were to be offered to her, which we can hardly
limit so rigidly: and considering that the cases of cows mentioned by
Homer are all special, while this passage speaks of what was ordinary
and periodical, I think we should pause before admitting that the
application of the lines to Minerva is on this ground indefensible.
The word περιτελλομένων[192] is taken to mean not annual revolutions,
but the revolutions of periods of years. I question the grounds of this
interpretation: but, if it could be established, it would certainly
rather weaken the passage; for Homer nowhere else mentions periodical
celebrations of any kind divided by any number of years, and I doubt
whether such an idea does not involve greater familiarity with
numerical combinations than the Poet seems to have possessed.
Leaving these two lines subject to some doubt, but by no means fully
convicted, let us proceed to the third and last of the contested
portions of the passage.
(3)--Vss. 553-5.
τῷ δ’ οὔπω τις ὁμοῖος ἐπιχθόνιος γένετ’ ἄνηρ
κοσμήσαι ἵππους τε καὶ ἀνέρας ἀσπιδιώτας·
Νέστωρ οἶος ἔριζεν· ὁ γὰρ προγενέστερος ἦεν.
These lines were condemned by Zenodotus[193] upon the ground that we
have no other mention of these gifts of Menestheus, and no example of
his putting them in exercise. Mr. Payne Knight[194] also urges that
Menestheus, here so commended with respect to chariots as well as
infantry, does not even appear as a competitor in the chariot-race
at the funeral games of Patroclus, although, in order to enlarge the
competition, even the slow horses of Nestor are put in requisition.
The Scholiast answers, with regard to the first objection, and
Heyne[195] accepts the defence as sufficient, that other persons are
praised in the gross, of whom no details are given anywhere: as Machaon
is called ἀριστεύων in Il. xi. 506. But a mere general epithet is very
different from a set passage of three lines expressing extraordinary
preeminence in particular accomplishments.
Again, the word applied to Machaon is by no means one of abstract
panegyric, but is itself a description of the activity in the field by
which he was at the moment baffling the energies of Hector, and would,
says the Poet, have continued to baffle them, had not Paris wounded
him. Thus the word is not a vague epithet: the words παῦσεν ἀριστεύοντα
Μαχάονα simply mean, that the manful exertions of Machaon were arrested.
There is another objection to the passage in the rather inflated
character of its compliment to an undistinguished man. Even
Nestor[196], it says, did not beat him, but only (ἔριζεν) vied with
him: and this not as an abler, but only as an older, man.
On the other hand, some of the Scholiasts ingeniously suggest that
these verses are given to Menestheus by way of compensation; τοῦτο
χαρίζεται αὐτῷ, ἐπεὶ μὴ εὐδοκιμήσει ἐν ταῖς μάχαις[197]. But Homer
does not usually deal out compensation, among the Greeks, by abstract
praises, for the want of the honour earned by deeds: and all the other
martial eulogies on chiefs in the Catalogue are well borne out in the
poem.
On the whole, Mr. Payne Knight’s objection, and the judgment of the
Alexandrine Critics, seem to leave this part of the passage in a state
so questionable, that nothing ought to be rested on it. The best
point in its favour is, that the Athenian Legates before Gelon are
represented by Herodotus as confidently relying on it, when there would
have been an interest on his part in demurring to its authority, for
it was a question of military precedence that was at issue: τῶν καὶ
Ὅμηρος ὁ ἐποποιὸς ἄνδρα ἄριστον ἔφησε εἰς Ἴλιον ἀπικέσθαι, τάξαι τε καὶ
διακοσμῆσαι στράτον[198].
On the other hand, it may be observed with justice that the compliment
here paid to Menestheus is the very best of which the case admitted;
perhaps the only one that an interpolator would have been safe in
selecting. For he would have known that any panegyric relating to
strength or prowess in action would be conclusively belied by the rest
of the poem in its entire tenour.
But while we cannot confidently rely upon these three lines, there
appears to be no reason why we should not use the evidence supplied
by the rest of the passage as most probably good historic matter. It
undoubtedly represents a strong course of old local tradition[199]:
for there was in Athens a most ancient temple dedicated to Minerva and
Erechtheus in conjunction.
_Review of the Homeric evidence._
The Homeric evidence then up to this point stands as follows with
reference to Athens and the Athenian contingent, or the principal and
picked men of it, whichever be the best term for the passage. They were
1. Ionians, Il. xiii. 685.
2. ἑλκεχίτωνες, ibid.
3. Autochthonous, Il. ii. 547.
4. Undistinguished in the war.
5. Under the special patronage of Pallas or Minerva, Il. ii. 546, and
Od. xi. 323, where the epithet ἱεράων, given to Athens, indicates a
special relation to a deity.
The epithet ἑλκεχίτωνες suggests unwarlike habits, and, though
more faintly, it also betokens textile industry. It stands in
marked contrast with the ἀμιτροχίτωνες[200] of the valiant Lycians,
whose short and spare tunic required no cincture to confine it. It
corroborates the negative evidence afforded by the Iliad of some want
of martial genius in the primitive Athens. It coincides with the
tutelage of Pallas, for the Minerva of Homer has no more indisputable
function than as the goddess of skilled industry[201]. All this tends
to betoken that the inhabitants of the Homeric Attica were Pelasgian.
Again, the autochthonic origin, ascribed to the Athenians in the person
of Erechtheus, amounts to an assertion that they were the first known
inhabitants of the country: in other words, that they were Pelasgian.
The negative evidence is also important. There is nothing in Homer that
tends to associate Athens with the Hellenic stem. The want of military
distinction deserves a fuller notice.
It can hardly be without meaning, that of all the chiefs, considerable
in the Iliad by their positions and commands, there are but two who are
never named as in actual fight, or with any other mark of distinction,
and these two are the heads of the two (as we suppose) emphatically
Pelasgian contingents, from Athens and Arcadia respectively. Agapenor,
who (being however of Ætolian extraction) leads the Arcadians, is named
nowhere but in the Catalogue: Menestheus is repeatedly named, but never
with reference to fighting. In the only part of the action of the poem
where he is put forward, he shudders[202], and shows an anxiety for his
personal safety, much more like a Trojan leader than a Greek one. Yet
they were sole commanders, the first of no less than sixty ships, the
second of fifty. There are no similar cases. The nearest to them are
those (1) of Prothous[203], who commands 40 ships of the Magnesians,
and Gourieus[204], who leads 22 of the Enienes and Perrhæbi: both of
these are remote, Thessalian, and very probably Pelasgian tribes: (2)
of Podarkes, who commands 40 ships, but only as deputy for his deceased
brother Protesilaus, who is said to have been not only the elder, but
the more valiant[205].
Agapenor, indeed, was evidently dependent in a peculiar sense on
Agamemnon, in whose ships he sailed: but this could not affect his
position as to personal prowess. The case of Menestheus is the more
remarkable from this circumstance, that he is the only independent
and single commander in charge of so many as fifty ships, who is not
invested with the supreme rank of Βασιλεὺς or King. His father Peteos
is however called Διοτρεφὴς Βασιλεὺς (Il. iv. 338), which marks him as
having probably been a person of greater importance.
And what is true of the commanders is true also of the troops.
Athens, and with her Arcadia, may justly be regarded as the only two
undistinguished in Homer among those states of Greece which afterwards
attained to distinction. For among the States which acquired fame in
the historic ages, Argolis, Achaia, and Laconia hold through their
chiefs very high places in the poem: Elis and Bœotia are conspicuous
in the anterior traditions which it enshrines. Only Attica and Arcadia
fail in exhibiting to us signs of early pre-eminence in the arts of
war: which in a marked manner confirms the suppositions we have already
obtained, as to the Pelasgian character of their inhabitants.
A sign, though a more uncertain one, that points in the same
direction, is afforded by the choice of Athens, on the part of
Orestes[206], as his place of habitation during the tyranny of
Ægisthus in Mycenæ. The displaced, if they do not fly to the strong
for protection, go among those who are weaker, and where they may most
easily hold their ground, or even acquire power afresh. In other words,
in the case before us, an Hellenic exile would very naturally betake
himself among a Pelasgian people.
While however the indications of a predominating Pelasgian character
among the Athenians at the epoch of the _Troica_ appear to be varied
and powerful, I must admit that they are crossed by one indication,
which is at first sight of an opposite character, I mean that which is
afforded by their name. Even though we were to surrender the entire
passages in the Catalogue respecting them, it would still be difficult
to contend that the name of Athens and of Athenians is forged in six
other places of the poems where one or the other of them is found,
besides that there is a second allusion to Erechtheus in the Odyssey.
Here we have then, attached to a people whom we suppose Pelasgian, a
name connecting them immediately with a deity commonly reputed to be
of strong Hellic propensities: connecting them, indeed, in a manner
so special as to be exclusive, because no other city or population in
Homer takes its name from a deity at all. This indicates a relation of
the closest description: and it is quite independent of the suspected
passage, which represents Minerva as the nurse or foster-mother of
Erechtheus.
_Athenian relations with Minerva._
Now it will be found, upon close examination, that Minerva plays a
very different part in the Iliad from Juno, the great protectress
of the Greeks, and from Neptune, their actual comrade in fight. The
difference even at first sight is this, that theirs appears to be
a national, hers more a personal and moral sentiment. In Juno, it
is sympathy with the Greeks as Greeks; in Neptune, antipathy to the
Trojans as Trojans: but both cases are plainly distinguishable from the
temper and attitude of Minerva.
Her protection of Ulysses, whose character is the human counterpart
of her own, is the basis of the whole theurgy of the Odyssey, and is
also strongly marked in the Δολώνεια. Again, she comes, in the first
book[207], at the instance of Juno, to restrain and guide Achilles:
for Juno, it is stated, loved both Agamemnon and Achilles alike; which
may imply, that this was not the exact case with Minerva. So again,
she inspires Diomed[208] for the work of his ἀριστεῖα, with a view to
his personal distinction[209]. On each of the two occasions when the
two goddesses come down together from heaven, it is Juno that makes
the proposal. When Minerva prompts Pandarus to treachery, it is by
the injunction of Jupiter, issued on the suggestion of Juno[210]. In
the seventh book, however, she descends of herself on seeing that the
Greeks lose ground, tells Apollo that she was come, as he was, with
the intention to stay the battle[211], and the result of their counsel
is one of the single fights (that between Hector and Ajax), which were
sure to issue in glory to the Greek heroes. Still she has not the rabid
virulence against Troy which distinguishes Juno, which makes her exact
the decision for its destruction in the Olympian assembly, and which
leads Jupiter to say to her sarcastically, that if she could but
eat Priam and his children and subjects raw, then her anger would be
satiated.
In fact, Juno has all the marks of a deity entirely Hellic: both in the
passionate character of her attachment, and in the absence of all signs
whatever of any practical relation between her and the Trojan people.
It is not so with Pallas. Pitilessly opposed to the Trojans in the
war, she is nowhere so identified with the Greeks as to exhibit her
in the light of one of those deities, whose influence or sympathies
were confined to any one place or nation. Her enmity to Troy is
mythologically founded on the Judgment of Paris[212]: but it has a more
substantive ethical ground in the nature of the quarrel between the two
countries.
Unlike Juno and Neptune, she was regularly worshipped at Troy, where
she had a priestess of high rank, and a temple placed, like that of
Apollo, on the height of Pergamus.
Distinct proof, however, that Minerva was neither originally at war
with the Trojans, nor unknown to them by her beneficial influences, is
afforded by the case of Phereclus son of Harmonides, the carpenter;
this Phereclus was the builder of the ships of Paris, and was a highly
skilled workman[213] by her favour,
ἐξόχα γάρ μιν ἐφίλατο Πάλλας Ἀθήνη.
The name of Harmonides may be fictitious; but the relation to Pallas
deserves remark, if we assume Troy to have been fundamentally
Pelasgian; and it affords a strong presumption, that there was nothing
in the character of Minerva to prevent her being propitious to a
Pelasgian country. Her attributes as the goddess of industry, or more
strictly, in our phrase, of manufacture, were indeed in no special
harmony with the character of the Pelasgians, as she had nothing to do
with works of agriculture: but neither was there any antagonism between
them.
There is also something that deserves notice in the speech in which
Minerva expresses to Juno her resentment at the restraint put upon
her by Jupiter. She accuses him of forgetting the services she had
so often rendered to Hercules when he was oppressed by the labours
that Eurystheus had laid upon him, and declares that it was she who
effected his escape from Hades[214]. Now this has all the appearance of
being the fabulous dress of the old tradition, which reports that the
children of Hercules had taken refuge in Attica, and had been harboured
there; that Eurystheus invaded the country in consequence of the
protection thus given, and that he was slain while upon the expedition.
It seems therefore possible, that this reception of the Heraclids may
have had something to do with the special relation, at the epoch of
the _Troica_, between Athens and Minerva as its tutelary goddess? In
connection with Hercules personally, the Iliad affords us another mark
that friendly relations might subsist between Troy and Pallas. She, in
conjunction with them,
Τρῶες καὶ Πάλλας Ἀθήνη[215],
erected the rampart in which Hercules took refuge from the pursuing
monster.
But the full answer to the objection is of a wider scope, and is to
be found in the general character of this deity, which did not, like
inferior conceptions, admit of being circumscribed by the limits of a
particular district or people.
It will hereafter be shewn, that, like Latona and Apollo in
particular, Minerva in Pagan fiction represents a disguised and
solitary fragment of the true primeval tradition[216]. All such
deities we may expect to find, and we do find, transmitted from the
old Pelasgians into the mythologies both of Greece and Rome, or those
common to Pelasgian and Hellene. We expect to find, and we do find,
them worshipped both among the Greeks and among the Trojans as gods,
not of this or that nation, but of the great human family. In theory,
exclusive regard to the one side or the other comports far better with
the idea of such deities as represent unruly passions or propensities
of our nature like Mars and Venus, or Mercury; or chief physical forces
like Neptune; or such as, like Juno, are the sheer product of human
imagination reflected upon the world above, and have no relation to any
element or part of a true theology. But the Homeric Jupiter, in so far
as he is a representative of supreme power and unity, and the Pallas
and Apollo of the poems by a certain moral elevation, and by various
incidents of their birth or attributes, show a nobler parentage[217].
In the capacity of a traditive deity, Minerva is with perfect
consistency worshipped alike among Trojans and Greeks, Hellenic and
Pelasgian tribes. There is nothing strange, then, in our finding her
the patroness of a Pelasgian people. The only strangeness is her being
(if so she was) more specially their patroness than of any other
people. The very fact that, for the purposes of the war, Homer gives
her to the Greeks, might perhaps have prepared us to expect that we
should find her special domicile among the Hellic portions of that
nation: but it supplies no absolute and conclusive reason for such
a domicile. But I close the discussion with these observations. In
the first place, the Pelasgian character of the Athenians in early
times is established by evidence too strong to be countervailed by
any such inference as we should be warranted in drawing to a contrary
effect from the special connection with Minerva. Again, it may be that
the connection of both with Hercules may contain a solution of the
difficulty. But lastly, if, as we shall find reason to believe, the
traditive deities were the principal gods of ancient Greece, and if the
entrance of the Hellic tribes brought in many new claimants upon the
divine honours, it may after all seem not unreasonable that we should
find, in one of the most purely Pelasgian States, the worship of this
great traditive deity less obscured than elsewhere by competition with
that of the invaders, and consequently in more peculiar and conspicuous
honour.
An examination of the etymology of certain names in Homer will
hereafter, I trust, confirm these reasonings on the Athens of
the heroic age: with this exception, we may now bid adieu to the
investigation of the Homeric evidence of Pelasgianism in Attica.
_Post-Homeric evidence._
That evidence certainly receives much confirmation, positive and
negative, from without. In the first place, though Hesiod supplies us
with an Hellen, and with a Dorus and Æolus among his sons, he says not
a word of an Ion; and the tradition connecting Ion with Hellen through
Xuthus is of later date: probably later than Euripides, who makes
Ion only the adopted son of Xuthus an Achæan[218], and the real son
of Creusa, an Erectheid; with Apollo, a Hellic, but also a Pelasgian
deity, for his father. Again, in the legendary times we do not hear of
the Athenians as invaders and conquerors, which was the character of
the Hellic tribes, but usually as themselves invaded; for example, by
Eurystheus from the Peloponnesus.
In ancient tradition generally, the Athenians appear on the defensive
against Bœotians[219], Cretans, or others. And the reputed Pylian and
Neleid descent of the Pisistratid family is a curious illustration of
the manner in which Attica was reported to have imported from abroad
the most energetic elements of her own population[220], and also of the
(so to speak) natural predominance of Hellic over Pelasgic blood.
Thucydides[221] informs us, that the Athenians were first among the
Greeks to lay aside the custom of bearing arms, and to cultivate ease
and luxury. Of this we have perhaps already had an indication in the
words ἑλκεχίτωνες.
He also states that, on account of the indifferent soil[222], which
offered no temptation comparable to those supplied by the more fertile
portions of Greece, there was no ejection of the inhabitants from
Attica by stronger claimants. Τὴν γοῦν Ἀττικὴν, ἐκ τοῦ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον διὰ
τὸ λεπτογέων ἀστασίαστον οὖσαν, ἄνθρωποι ᾤκουν οἱ αὐτοὶ ἀεί. This is
simply stating in another form what was usually expressed by declaring
them autochthons. It is part of their Pelasgian title.
A remarkable passage in Herodotus covers the whole breadth of the
ground that has here been taken; and it is important, because no doubt
it expresses what that author considered to be the best of the current
traditions, founded in notoriety, and what Crœsus likewise learned
upon a formal inquiry, undertaken with a view to alliances in Greece,
respecting the origin of the Athenians. Herodotus, like Homer, makes
the Athenians Ionian; and in conformity with the construction here
put upon Homer, he declares the Ionians not to be Hellenic, but to be
Pelasgian[223]. The Attic people, he goes on to say, having once been
Pelasgian became Hellenic[224]. According to some opinions[225], this
change occurred when the Ionians came into Attica: but the evidence
of Homer, I think, makes Athens Ionian at the same epoch when it
is Pelasgian. I therefore construe the statement of Herodotus as
signifying that the Athenians, in the course of time, received among
themselves Hellenic immigrants from the more disturbed and changeful
parts of Greece, and these immigrants impressed on Attica, as they had
done on other states[226], the Hellenic character and name; only with
the difference that, instead of a conflict, and the subjugation of
the original inhabitants, there came a process of more harmonious and
genial absorption, and in consequence, a development of Greek character
even more remarkable for its fulness than in any other Grecian race.
Even in the case of Attica, however, the Hellenic character was not
finally assumed without a collision, though perhaps a local and partial
one only, which ended in the ejectment of the Pelasgians. This conflict
is reported to us by Herodotus from Hecatæus[227], and if we find that
in it, according to the Athenian version of the story, the Pelasgians
were the wrong-doers, it is probably upon the ground that the winner
is always in the right: and the Athenians had the more need of a case,
because their policy demanded a justification, when, under Miltiades,
they followed the Pelasgians to Lemnos, and again subdued them there.
Each version of the Attican quarrel contains indications of being
related to the truth of the case: for the Pelasgians are made to
declare, that the Athenians drove them out from the soil of which they
were the prior occupants, and which they cultivated so carefully as to
arouse their envy, while the Athenians alleged that when, before the
days of slavery, their children went to draw water at the Nine-Springs
(Ἐννεάκρουνοι), the Pelasgians of the district insulted them. What more
likely than that, when the Hellenic part of the population was coercing
the other portion of it into servitude, their resentment should
occasionally find vent in rustic insolence to boys and maidens?
The doctrine thus propagated by Herodotus concerning Attica is even
more strongly represented in Strabo as respects its Ionian character.
Τὴν μὲν Ἰάδα τῇ παλαίᾳ Ἀτθίδι τὴν αὐτὴν φαμέν· καὶ γὰρ Ἴωνες ἐκαλοῦντο
οἱ τότε Ἀττικοὶ, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν εἰσιν οἱ τὴν Ἀσίαν ἐποικήσαντες Ἴωνες,
καὶ χρησάμενοι τῇ νῦν λεγομένῃ γλώττῃ Ἰάδι[228]. The poverty of their
soil kept them, he adds, apart as of a different race (ἔθνος), and of a
different speech (γλώττη).
And thus again Herodotus reports that the same letter which the Dorians
called San, the Ionians called Sigma. Is not this more than a dialectic
difference, and does it not indicate a deeper distinction of race?[229]
The connection of the Pelasgians with ancient Attica will receive
further illustration from our inquiry hereafter into the general
evidence of the later tradition respecting that race.
_Egypt._
_Egypt and the Pelasgians._