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.