ναῖον δ’ ἐσχατίην Φθίης, Δολόπεσσιν ἀνάσσων[879].
Besides that he occupied a great position, and was of the highest
descent, I think it is clear from the Catalogue that the Myrmidons,
over whom Peleus reigned, were Achæans, and therefore a strictly Hellic
race.
And again, the character of Achilles makes it quite clear that his
family were from the Hellic stock. For it is in him that Homer has
chosen to exhibit the prime and foremost pattern of the whole Greek
nation: and he could surely never have chosen for such a purpose any
family of foreign, or of doubtful blood.
It is not however in every Hellic race or family, but only among the
known representatives by descent of the principal or senior branches,
that we are justified in expecting to find the patriarchal title. And
still less do we know whether the Myrmidons, even though Hellic and
Achæan, were a principal tribe of that stock.
The evidence as to the descent of Achilles may throw further light upon
this part of the subject.
In those cases where a long line of ancestry purported to begin with
Jupiter, as, for instance, the Trojan genealogy, it is doubtless
natural to treat this as a sort of necessary introduction to a period,
beyond which the memory of man, unaided as it was, did not run.
But when we find the paternity of a person contemporary with the Trojan
war, or of some near ancestor of his, referred to Jupiter, the most
proper interpretation of this legendary statement seems to be, that
they were, so to speak, _novi homines_, who having come suddenly into
the blaze of celebrity, and living among a nation accustomed to ask
of every passing stranger who were his parents, yet having no parents
to quote, or none worth quoting, gilded their origin by claiming some
great deity for their father. I do not speak now of the distinct
and yet cognate case, where a similar pretext was used to shield
illegitimacy: as for example, not to travel from the line before us, in
the instance of the son of Polydora[880], sister to Achilles himself.
But the same principle applies to both: divine progenitorship was used
to keep from view something that it was desirable to hide, whether this
were the shame of a noble maiden, or the undistinguished ancestry of a
great house or hero. Such a hero perhaps, according to this rule, was
Hercules: such a house more clearly was that of the Æacids; for Æacus,
grandfather of Achilles, was son of Jupiter[881]. He did not therefore
represent a patriarchal family, and could not bear the title.
According to extra-Homeric tradition, the Myrmidons fled from Ægina to
Thessaly under Peleus[882].
6. Further examples may be taken from the Pelopid family. The Menelaus
of the Iliad belongs to the highest order: he is more kingly than the
other kings[883]. In the Odyssey he desires to transplant Ulysses to a
portion of his dominions (Od. iv. 174). And Ægisthus actually occupies
for years, during the exile of Orestes, the Pelopid throne: the name of
either Menelaus or Ægisthus is of the metrical value most convenient
for union with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν: but neither the one nor the other was
the representative of the great Achæan house of Pelops, and accordingly
neither the one nor the other receives the title.
7. Diomed is a Greek of the very highest descent: of him alone, among
the kings before Troy, we may confidently say, that he was himself a
hero, had a hero for his father, a hero for his uncle, and a hero for
his grandfather. Œneus, Tydeus, Meleager, are three names not easily
to be matched in early Greek story. They were likewise near the stock,
as we may probably infer from the name of the founder of the race,
Portheus, the Destroyer. He was father of Œneus and also of Ἄγριος the
Rude, and Μέλας the Swarthy, all names indicating that the first stage
of arrival within the precinct of civilization had not yet been passed.
He commanded, too, one of the largest contingents: yet neither he nor
his uncle Meleager, the Achilles of his day, is ever called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.
The reason doubtless is that, in the case of the Œneid family, there is
no connection with a leading Greek ancestry. They are neither Æolid nor
Pelopid; and they stand in no relation to the characteristic names of
Ephyre and the Selleeis.
8. Let me notice, lastly, the case of Nestor. He had been a warrior
of the first class. His rich dominions supplied a contingent of ninety
ships to the war; larger even than that of Diomed, or of any chief
whatever, except Agamemnon, who had one hundred. His father, Neleus,
was of great fame. He had actually more influence in council than any
other chief, and always took the lead there. He was descended from
Neptune, who indeed was but his grandfather: while his grandmother,
Tyro, was probably, as we have found, a granddaughter of Æolus.
But he could not be ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, because not in lineal male descent
from the primary ancestor Æolus: nor was he the tribal head of the
Hellenic race among which he ruled, which was an Achæan one (Il. xi.
759), since the Achæans owned the Pelopids for their chiefs. Also his
father Neleus, apparently the younger twin, had migrated from the
North, leaving Pelias the elder, as is probable, in possession. Thus
Nestor presents none of the four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Yet this
title attached to an insignificant relative, Eumelus, his first cousin
once removed, doubtless because he possessed them.
_Persons with the notes yet without the title._
It is certainly true that there are a few cases where Homer has _not_
applied the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν to particular persons, to whom he
might have given it consistently with the suppositions, as to its
meaning, of which I have attempted to show the truth. They are, in one
word, the ancestors of the persons to whom he has actually given the
title. But all of these, such as Pelops and his line, Dardanus with his
line as far as Tros, and the earlier descendants of Æolus, are persons
mentioned in the poems for the most part but once, and rarely more than
twice or thrice. Now, as Homer mentions frequently without the prefix,
ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, those to whom on other occasions he gives it, we are not
entitled to require its application to all persons capable of bearing
it, whom he mentions but once.
And again, if I am right in holding that this was strictly a title
attaching to lineage, then it was wholly needless, when he had
designated a particular person, as an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, to grace his
predecessors also with the title, because, as a matter of course,
inasmuch as they were his predecessors, it attached to them. No
historic aim then was involved, and no purpose would have been gained
if Admetus, for example, had been mentioned with this title as well as
his son Eumelus.
But, I confess, it appears to me to afford no small confirmation to the
arguments and the conclusions of these pages, when we remember that
not only do the four rules for the sense of the phrase suit, as far as
we can tell, all the six persons to whom it is applied, but that there
is absolutely no other living person named in the poems, whom they
would not effectually exclude, with the insignificant exceptions, first
of Admetus, who has just been mentioned, and next of Orestes. In the
Iliad, Orestes is only named in one single passage (twice repeated), of
the Ninth Book[884]. In the Odyssey he is named several times, but the
title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is less suitable to the political state of Greece
as it appears in this poem, and also to the subject. It never appears,
except retrospectively.
A few words may perhaps be due to the case of Polyxeinus, grandson of
Augeias, who, it is just possible, though unlikely, may have retained
the position of his grandfather. It is just possible, because we are
not assured of the contrary; but most unlikely, because Augeias appears
as lord of the Epeans, Polyxeinus only as commanding a division of
them. Again, Polyxeinus is only once mentioned. It is also evident that
the loss of his grandfather’s throne, by a revolution in Elis, might
naturally put an end to the application of the title in his particular
case, by a process exactly the same with that to which its general and
final extinction, now so speedily to arrive, was due.
It might indeed be of some interest to inquire why it is that, when
Homer makes no practical or effective use of the phrase for any one
except Agamemnon, he has notwithstanding been careful to register,
as it were, a title to it on behalf of five other persons? Nor can I
doubt that the just answer would be, that he did this because, with his
historic aims, he may have deemed it a matter of national interest to
record a title of such peculiar and primitive significance.
_Its disappearance with Homer._
But of all the negative arguments that tend to show ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν not to
have been a merely vague title, there is none on which I dwell with
more confidence than its total disappearance with the Homeric age.
For it was not so with the other less peculiar forms, βασιλεὺς, ἄναξ,
and κρείων. Although they were supplanted in actual use by the term
τυραννὸς, which became for the Greeks the type of supreme power in
the hands of a single person, yet the idea of them was traditionally
retained. Accordingly, even the name βασιλεὺς was applied by Greek
writers to contemporary kings out of Greece, and to the old bygone
Greek monarchies: and Thucydides has given it to them as a class, where
he describes the πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι[885]. But the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν,
the most specific of them all, disappears even from retrospective
use: and the inference is, that its proper meaning had ceased to be
represented in the institutions either of Greece or of the known world
beyond the Greek borders; that it had passed away with the archaic
system, of which it was the peculiar token.
Even independently of direct testimony, we might be assured that
the patriarchal and highland constitution of society could not very
long survive the multiplication of settlements in the plains. For
the wealth, which these settlements created through the increased
efficiency of labour, the greater bounty of the earth, and the
augmented means of communication and exchange, could not but bring with
it at once new temptations, and new sources of disturbance; whereas the
art of controlling these evils was but painfully and slowly, and most
incompletely learned. Among highland tribes, there might be war and
pillage with a view to immediate wants: but stored wealth could not be
stolen, where, except in its simplest forms, it did not exist: and men
do not overturn hereditary power, or drag society into revolutions,
without an object.
But the Catalogue, as well as other parts of the Homeric poems, show
us how the causes thus indicated had already worked. Of the Greek
States comprised in that invaluable enumeration, some were, as is
plainly asserted or implied, monarchically governed: for example, the
Mycenians, the Spartans, the Pylians, the Myrmidons, the Arcadians,
the Eubœans[886], and the Ætolians. We may reasonably infer the same
with regard to the followers of those great chiefs, who are treated as
Βασιλεῖς in the body of the poems: the Salaminians and Locrians, each
under their Ajax, the Cephallenians under Ulysses, the Cretans, or else
a portion of them, under Idomeneus, the Argives under Diomed. In each
of these cases, either there is but a single leader, or, as in the two
last, the text makes it obvious that the chief first named is supreme
in rank. We may probably infer that monarchy prevailed in all the
instances, including the Athenians, when only a single general appears.
The expression δῆμος, applied to Athens, is perfectly compatible with
kingship in Homer. But there remain six cases, where there are a
plurality of leaders, apparently on an equal footing. These are the
cases of
1. The Bœotians.
2. The people of Aspledon and the Minyeian Orchomenus; who are in fact
a second Bœotian contingent.
3. The Phocians.
4. The Elians or Epeans: who differ from the others in being formally
distributed into four divisions, under four leaders, and who are
therefore strictly acephalous.
5. The Nisurians, &c.
6. The people of Tricce, Ithome, and Œchalia, under the sons of
Asclepius.
It is observable with respect to the four first of these, that
they were all in the comparatively open, and rich country; liable,
therefore, to the influences which, as Thucydides observes[887],
made Bœotia, Thessaly, and most of Peloponnesus peculiarly liable to
revolutions; and whence doubtless it is, that Homer has been led to
tell us that Amphion and Zethus built walls for Thebes, because they
could not hold it without them.
With respect to the Nisurians, in stating that they were under
Pheidippus and Antiphus, Homer adds that these were (Il. ii. 679)
Θεσσαλοῦ υἷε δύω Ἡρακλείδαο ἄνακτος.
On which we may observe
1. That the power divided between them had apparently been monarchical
in the preceding generation.
2. That the name of their father points to his having been born
in Thessaly[888], which from its richness was peculiarly open to
revolutions.
3. That he was the son of Hercules, with whose name disturbance and
convulsion are so much associated.
In the case of the sons of Asclepius, there is the same presumption
that they divided a power which had been monarchical: and although the
epithet κλωμακόεσσα given to Ithome, the site of which is unknown[889],
may suggest rough and broken ground, yet the territory is within the
limits of Thessaly[890], and on the river Peneus. Tricce was known
in the historic times; and it is mentioned in Homer with the epithet
ἱππόβοτος, indicating fertility.
_Signs of political disorganisation._
Here, then, and particularly in the Bœotian and Elian cases, we have
considerable signs of the weakening and gradual breaking up of the
old highland institutions: I distinguish between those two and the
rest, because where the division is only between two brothers, it may
have implied little deviation from the monarchical form. Still that
little might be the first stage of a deviation which was soon to grow
indefinitely large.
There are other signs to the same effect, both in the Iliad, and to a
greater extent in the Odyssey.
For example: the dynasty of the Œneids had disappeared among the
Ætolians[891]: the dynasty of the Æolids, and the name Ephyre, from
Corinth[892]: Polyxeinus, the grandson of Augeias, an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, is
not described as an ἄναξ, or lord, at all: Hercules had laid waste the
cities about Ephyre, and the cities about Pylos[893]: Tlepolemus, at
war with his Heraclid relations, had been driven to emigrate to Rhodes:
and all this since the family of the Perseids had disappeared before
the Pelopids.
The changes observable in the Odyssey are such as connect themselves
with a species of deluge, which had apparently overspread the face of
the political society of Greece. They would merit a full examination,
in connection with a view of the relation of that poem to the Iliad.
Here it need only be observed, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears nowhere
in the action of the Odyssey: the phrase is used but twice, and then
only with reference to the dead Agamemnon: and that the partial
disappearance of the word from the later work of Homer evidently
accompanies a great approach towards disorganisation of the old order
of things and ideas in the political state of Greece.
_Summary of the whole._
I may now collect the results, as far as they are related to the
present subject, of our whole ethnological inquiry.
1. From the Homeric text, the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears not to have
belonged to political preeminence or power, or to personal heroism,
or to the distinction of wealth, or to divine descent as such; but to
the archaic form of sovereignty which united it continuously with the
headship in blood of a ruling family or clan, inhabiting the country
which was the reputed cradle of the nation, or able to trace lineally
its derivation from that country. A tradition of original descent from
Jupiter attached in all cases essentially to the possession of the
title.
2. In each of the six instances where Homer employs it, he appears to
do so in strict conformity with the rules thus indicated.
3. The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this
primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was
either a synonym, or a part.
4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the
Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those
institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and
who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the
earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to
the family was still palpable and near.
5. The resemblances of the Helli and the Dardans afford, together with
the probabilities of the case, strong evidence of their having some
common affinity to the same branch of the great stem, from which a
large part of Europe was peopled with its ruling race.
6. Finally, we may with reasonable grounds conjecture, that the
patriarchal system denoted by the patriarchal chieftaincies, which had
been shaken before the Trojan war, was further and violently disturbed
by it, and by its direct and indirect political consequences; and that
this system had vanished before the line of the post-Homeric Greek
poets, to be reckoned from Hesiod, had begun. Thus, the basis of the
title being removed, the title itself naturally disappeared from
literature as well as history; and if we find, that in later times
the key to its meaning had been lost, it is but a new mark of the
abruptness and width of the breach that lies between Homer and his
successors, of the paucity of continuous traditions, and of the limited
means possessed by the Greeks of the historic ages for research into
the earlier periods of their national existence.
FOOTNOTES:
[764] Od. iv. 697.
[765] This caution is not needless, as the error is a common one.
Damm, indeed, most strangely says, ἄναξ _ex multo augustius nomen
quam_ βασιλεὺς (in voc. ἄναξ). The English translators, Chapman, Pope,
Cowper, and others, render ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, king of men. Voss, with his
usual precision, though probably without a very specific meaning,
translates it, ‘_der herrscher des volks_.’
[766] Il. xxiii. 417.
[767] Od. xiii. 223.
[768] Il. xx. 17.
[769] V. 121.
[770] Il. ii. 196.
[771] Od. i. 394.
[772] Od. xv. 533.
[773] Od. xvii. 416.
[774] Od. i. 386; cf. 401.
[775] In voc. ἄναξ.
[776] Lit. Greece, vol. ii. p. 78.
[777] Il. xiv. 322.
[778] Il. viii. 31. Od. i. 45.
[779] Il. ii. 85.
[780] Il. iv. 296.
[781] Il. ix. 92. v. 144. xi. 578. xiii. 411.
[782] Il. ix. 81. xiii. 600.
[783] Od. iv. 528.
[784] Paradiso, xii. 71. xiv. 104. xix. 104. xxix. 11.
[785] Il. i. 1-7.
[786] See Il. xx. 106.
[787] Il. xiv. 343.
[788] Od. xi. 281.
[789] Sup. p. 398.
[790] See E. Curtius, Ionier vor der Ionischen Wanderung, p. 9.
[791] Od. v. 121. also see Il. xviii. 436.
[792] Od. vii. 323.
[793] Sup. sect. viii. pp. 427, 8.
[794] Thes. 20.
[795] Il. xxiv. 615.
[796] Pausan. ii. 23. 4.
[797] Strabo, xii. p. 579. xiv. p. 680.
[798] Strabo xii. 572, 3.
[799] Il. ii. 104.
[800] Il. ii. 108.
[801] Paus. v. xiii. 1-4.
[802] Book viii. 5, 5. p. 365.
[803] See sup. p. 381.
[804] Herod. viii. 7, 73.
[805] Pausan. vii. 1.
[806] Polyb. xviii. c. 30.
[807] v. 65. 3 and 11.
[808] Paus. vii. 1. 3.
[809] Polyb. xl. 8. 10.
[810] Polyb. ii. 41. 4. iv. i. 5.
[811] See sect. x.
[812] Die Ionier vor der Ionischen Wanderung: von E. Curtius, Berlin,
1855.
[813] Il. iii. 276. vii. 202. ix. 47, 8. xvi. 605. xxiv. 290, 308.
[814] Il. xx. 90-3, 128-31.
[815] Il. xi. 58.
[816] Il. vi. 77.
[817] Il. xx. 240.
[818] Il. v. 268.
[819] Il. xx. 303.
[820] Il. iii. 297, 320.
[821] Od. iv. 125-35.
[822] Od. xiv. 276-86.
[823] Od. iii. 302.
[824] Il. iii. 48. xix. 324.
[825] Od. iii. 48. xx. 219. Il. xvi. 550.
[826] See also Dolon’s description, Il. x. 418-21.
[827] Strabo, p. 338.
[828] Il. xii. 30.
[829] Il. xvii. 432.
[830] Il. i. 350.
[831] Il. vii. 86. Od. xxiv. 82.
[832] Il. xxiv. 545.
[833] Il. ix. 360.
[834] Il. xii. 19-23.
[835] Il. xxiii. 293-9.
[836] Il. xi. 759.
[837] Il. ii. 592 et seqq.
[838] Il. ii. 596, 621.
[839] Il. xvi. 189.
[840] Il. ii. 513.
[841] Cramer’s Greece, i. 449.
[842] Il. ii. 511.
[843] Thuc. iv. 76. Strabo, 356, 432. Cramer’s Greece, i. 207, 399.
[844] Il. ii. 608, 695.
[845] Il. ii. 682.
[846] Strabo, b. viii. p. 351.
[847] Schol. Il. vii. 135. Od. xv. 297. Cramer, Geogr. Gr. iii. 87.
[848] Paus. Lac. b. III. c. xx. 5, 3.
[849] Cramer iii. 221.
[850] Il. ii. 743.
[851] Il. xiii. 301.
[852] New Cratylus iii. 1. p. 282, 286.
[853] Heyne Exc. iii. ad Hom. Il. xix. vol. vii. p. 770.
[854] Comp. Gram. sect. 490.
[855] See Il. xi. 222. xx. 485, compared with x. 436, 545-7.
[856] Od. iv. 635; and xxi. 347.
[857] Compare Propertius, b. ii. El. v. 1.
_Ephyreæ Laidos ædes_.
[858] Ver. 301.
[859] Od. i. 259.
[860] Od. ii. 326.
[861] Od. xviii. 245.
[862] Od. xxiv. 430.
[863] Od. i. 251.
[864] Eumelus, sup. p. 428.
[865] Il. xv. 530.
[866] Il. ii. 658.
[867] Il. ii. 667.
[868] Il. xi. 688-95.
[869] Il. xvi. 179.
[870] Il. xiii. 692.
[871] Il. ii. 625-30.
[872] Strabo p. 459.
[873] Il. ii. 711-15.
[874] Cramer’s Greece, vol. i. p. 392.
[875] Il. ii. 763.
[876] Od. xi. 258.
[877] Ibid. xi. 237.
[878] St. Luke iii. 38.
[879] Il. ix. 483.
[880] Il. xvi. 175.
[881] Il. xxi. 189.
[882] Strabo ix. 5. p. 433.
[883] Il. x. 239.
[884] Il. ix. 142, 284.
[885] Thuc. i. 13.
[886] Compare Il. ii. 540 with iv. 363.
[887] Thuc. i. 2.
[888] The name of Thessaly is not found in Homer; and it is marked
by Thucydides as modern: ἡ νῦν Θεσσαλία καλουμένη. May it not be
reasonably conjectured, that when the great Dorian tribe had evacuated
Hellas to reconquer the Peloponnesus, this Thessalid branch of the
Heraclidæ, which had migrated to the south-east, went back thither, and
imparted to it the name of their ancestor?
[889] Cramer i. 360.
[890] Il. iv. 202.
[891] Il. ii. 641.
[892] Il. vi. 152, compared with ii. 570.
[893] Il. ii. 659, 60, and xi. 689, 91.
SECT. X.
_On the connection of the Hellenes and Achæans with the East._
We have reached the close of this inquiry, so far as it regards the
origin, character, and pursuits of the Pelasgians; the character of
the Hellenic tribes, and their relations to the Pelasgians; and the
position of the Achæans among the Hellenes, as the first national
representatives of the Hellenic stock. But who were these Achæans, and
whence did they come? We have at present been able only to describe
them by negatives. They were not the descendants of a legendary Achæus:
they did not take their name from a Greek territory, nor from any
pursuit that they followed; and the word has no apparent root in the
etymology of the Greek tongue.
But we have seen manifest indications that the Hellic name did not
first come into being on the western side of the Dardanelles: and if
the Achæi were the first leaders of the Helli, why should we not trace
them too beyond the Straits, and thus follow perhaps the Helli also, by
their means, and as represented in them, up to a fountain-head?
At the same time, if I presume to affiliate the Hellic nation upon any
Eastern parentage, and, again, to suggest relationships between that
nation and others, which had also migrated from the first nurseries
of man towards the West, it will, I hope, be understood, that all
such propositions are asserted, not only as not demonstrable, but as
likewise being, even within their own limits, those of merely probable
truth, subject, by an admission tacitly carried all along, to every
kind of qualification. The succession and intermixture of races, the
combinations of language, the sympathetic and imitative communication
of ideas and institutions, form a mass of phenomena complex enough, and
difficult to describe, even by contemporaries; how much more so by the
aid only of those faint and scattered rays that we can now find cast
upon them.
Let us then proceed to consider what aid can be had from other sources
in support of those presumptions, arising out of the text of Homer,
which tend to connect the Hellenes of his day, and the Achæans as their
leading tribe, with the East.