SECTION II.—DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
With several of the daughters of Æolus memorable mythical pedigrees and narratives are connected. Alcyonê married Kêyx, the son of Eôsphoros, but both she and her husband displayed in a high degree the overweening insolence common in the Æolic race. The wife called her husband Zeus, while he addressed her as Hêrê, for which presumptuous act Zeus punished them by changing both into birds.[306]
Canacê had by the god Poseidôn several children, amongst whom were Epôpeus and Alôeus.[307] Alôeus married Imphimêdea, who became enamored of the god Poseidôn, and boasted of her intimacy with him. She had by him two sons, Otos and Ephialtês, the huge and formidable Alôids,—Titanic beings, nine fathoms in height and nine cubits in breadth, even in their boyhood, before they had attained their full strength. These Alôids defied and insulted the gods in Olympus; they paid their court to Hêrê and Artemis, and they even seized and bound Arês, confining him in a brazen chamber for thirteen months. No one knew where he was, and the intolerable chain would have worn him to death, had not Eribœa, the jealous stepmother of the Alôids, revealed the place of his detention to Hermês, who carried him surreptitiously away when at the last extremity; nor could Arês obtain any atonement for such an indignity. Otos and Ephialtês even prepared to assault the gods in heaven, piling up Ossa on Olympus and Pêlion on Ossa, in order to reach them. And this they would have accomplished had they been allowed to grow to their full maturity; but the arrows of Apollo put a timely end to their short-lived career.[308]
The genealogy assigned to Calycê, another daughter of Æolus, conducts us from Thessaly to Elis and Ætôlia. She married Aëthlius (the son of Zeus by Prôtogeneia, daughter of Deukaliôn and sister of Hellên), who conducted a colony out of Thessaly and settled in the territory of Elis. He had for his son Endymiôn, respecting whom the Hesiodic Catalogue and the Eoiai related several wonderful things. Zeus granted him the privilege of determining the hour of his own death, and even translated him into heaven, which he forfeited by daring to pay court to Hêrê: his vision in this criminal attempt was cheated by a cloud, and he was cast out into the under-world.[309] According to other stories, his great beauty caused the goddess Sêlêne to become enamored of him, and to visit him by night during his sleep:—the sleep of Endymiôn became a proverbial expression for enviable, undisturbed, and deathless repose.[310] Endymiôn had for issue (Pausanias gives us three different accounts, and Apollodôrus a fourth, of the name of his wife) Epeios, Ætôlus, Pæôn, and a daughter Eurykydê. He caused his three sons to run a race on the stadium at Olympia, and Epeios, being victorious, was rewarded by becoming his successor in the kingdom: it was after him that the people were denominated Epeians.
Both the story here mentioned, and still more, the etymological signification of the names Aëthlius and Endymiôn, seem plainly to indicate (as has before been remarked) that this genealogy was not devised until after the Olympic games had become celebrated and notorious throughout Greece.
Epeios had no male issue, and was succeeded by his nephew Eleios, son of Euykydê by the god Poseidôn: the name of the people was then changed from Epeians to Eleians. Ætôlus, the brother of Epeios, having slain Apis, son of Phorôneus, was compelled to flee from the country: he crossed the Corinthian gulf and settled in the territory then called Kurêtis, but to which he gave the name of Ætôlia.[311]
The son of Eleios,—or, according to other accounts, of the god Hêlios, of Poseidôn, or of Phorbas,[312]—is Augeas, whom we find mentioned in the Iliad as king of the Epeians or Eleians. Nestôr gives a long and circumstantial narrative of his own exploits at the head of his Pylian countrymen against his neighbors the Epeians and their king Augeas, whom he defeated with great loss, slaying Mulios, the king’s son-in-law, and acquiring a vast booty.[313] Augeas was rich in all sorts of rural wealth, and possessed herds of cattle so numerous, that the dung of the animals accumulated in the stable or cattle enclosures beyond all power of endurance. Eurystheus, as an insult to Hêraklês, imposed upon him the obligation of cleansing this stable: the hero, disdaining to carry off the dung upon his shoulders, turned the course of the river Alpheios through the building, and thus swept the encumbrance away.[314] But Augeas, in spite of so signal a service, refused to Hêraklês the promised reward, though his son Phyleus protested against such treachery, and when he found that he could not induce his father to keep faith, retired in sorrow and wrath to the island of Dulichiôn.[315] To avenge the deceit practised upon him, Hêraklês invaded Elis; but Augeas had powerful auxiliaries, especially his nephews, the two Molionids (sons of Poseidôn by Molionê, the wife of Aktôr), Eurytos and Kteatos. These two miraculous brothers, of transcendent force, grew together,—having one body, but two heads and four arms.[316] Such was their irresistible might, that Hêraklês was defeated and repelled from Elis: but presently the Eleians sent the two Molionid brothers as Theôri (sacred envoys) to the Isthmian games, and Hêraklês, placing himself in ambush at Kleônæ, surprised and killed them as they passed through. For this murderous act the Eleians in vain endeavored to obtain redress both at Corinth and at Argos; which is assigned as the reason for the self-ordained exclusion, prevalent throughout all the historical age, that no Eleian athlête would ever present himself as a competitor at the Isthmian games.[317] The Molionids being thus removed, Hêraklês again invaded Elis, and killed Augeas along with his children,—all except Phyleus, whom he brought over from Dulichiôn, and put in possession of his father’s kingdom. According to the more gentle narrative which Pausanias adopts, Augeas was not killed, but pardoned at the request of Phyleus.[318] He was worshipped as a hero[319] even down to the time of that author.
It was on occasion of this conquest of Elis, according to the old mythe which Pindar has ennobled in a magnificent ode, that Hêraklês first consecrated the ground of Olympia, and established the Olympic games. Such at least was one of the many fables respecting the origin of that memorable institution.[320]
Phyleus, after having restored order in Elis, retired again to Dulichiôn, and left the kingdom to his brother Agasthenês, which again brings us into the Homeric series. For Polyxenos, son of Agasthenês, is one of the four commanders of the Epeian forty ships in the Iliad, in conjunction with the two sons of Eurytos and Kteatos, and with Diôrês son of Amarynceus. Megês, the son of Phyleus, commands the contingent from Dulichiôn and the Echinades.[321] Polyxenos returns safe from Troy, is succeeded by his son Amphimachos,—named after the Epeian chief who had fallen before Troy,—and he again by another Eleios, in whose time the Dôrians and the Hêrakleids invade Peloponnêsus.[322] These two names, barren of actions or attributes, are probably introduced by the genealogists whom Pausanias followed, to fill up the supposed interval between the Trojan war and the Dôrian invasion.
We find the ordinary discrepancies in respect to the series and the members of this genealogy. Thus some called Epeios son of Aëthlius, others son of Endymiôn:[323] a third pedigree, which carries the sanction of Aristotle and is followed by Conôn, designated Eleios, the first settler of Elis, as son of Poseidôn and Eurypylê, daughter of Endymiôn, and Epeios and Alexis as the two sons of Eleios.[324] And Pindar himself, in his ode to Epharmostus the Locrian, introduces with much emphasis another king of the Epeians named Opus, whose daughter, pregnant by Zeus, was conveyed by that god to the old and childless king Locrus: the child when born, adopted by Locrus and named Opus, became the eponymous hero of the city so called in Locris.[325] Moreover Hekatæus the Milesian not only affirmed (contrary both to the Iliad and the Odyssey) that the Epeians and the Eleians were different people, but also added that the Epeians had assisted Hêraklês in his expedition against Augeas and Elis; a narrative very different from that of Apollodôrus and Pausanias, and indicating besides that he must have had before him a genealogy varying from theirs.[326]
It has already been mentioned that Ætôlus, son of Endymiôn, quitted Peloponnêsus in consequence of having slain Apis.[327] The country on the north of the Corinthian gulf, between the rivers Euênus and Achelôus, received from him the name of Ætôlia instead of that of Kurêtis: he acquired possession of it after having slain Dôrus, Laodokus and Polypœtes, sons of Apollo and Phthia, by whom he had been well received. He had by his wife Pronoê (the daughter of Phorbas) two sons, Pleurôn and Kalydôn, and from them the two chief towns in Ætôlia were named.[328] Pleurôn married Xanthippê, daughter of Dôrus, and had for his son Agênôr, from whom sprang Portheus, or Porthaôn, and Demonikê: Euênos and Thestius were children of the latter by the god Arês.[329]
Portheus had three sons, Agrius, Melas and Œneus: among the offspring of Thestius were Althæa and Lêda,[330]—names which bring us to a period of interest in the legendary history. Lêda marries Tyndareus and becomes mother of Helena and the Dioskuri: Althæa marries Œneus, and has, among other children, Meleager and Deianeira; the latter being begotten by the god Dionysus, and the former by Arês.[331] Tydeus also is his son, the father of Diomêdês: warlike eminence goes hand in hand with tragic calamity among the members of this memorable family.
We are fortunate enough to find the legend of Althæa and Meleager set forth at considerable length in the Iliad, in the speech addressed by Phœnix to appease the wrath of Achilles. Œneus, king of Kalydôn, in the vintage sacrifices which he offered to the gods, omitted to include Artemis: the misguided man either forgot her or cared not for her;[332] and the goddess, provoked by such an insult, sent against the vineyards of Œneus a wild boar, of vast size and strength, who tore up the trees by the root and laid prostrate all their fruit. So terrible was this boar, that nothing less than a numerous body of men could venture to attack him: Meleager, the son of Œneus, however, having got together a considerable number of companions, partly from the Kurêtes of Pleurôn, at length slew him. But the anger of Artemis was not yet appeased, and she raised a dispute among the combatants respecting the possession of the boar’s head and hide,—the trophies of victory. In this dispute, Meleager slew the brother of his mother Althæa, prince of the Kurêtes of Pleurôn: these Kurêtes attacked the Ætôlians of Kalydôn in order to avenge their chief. So long as Meleager contended in the field the Ætôlians had the superiority. But he presently refused to come forth, indignant at the curses imprecated upon him by his mother: for Althæa, wrung with sorrow for the death of her brother, flung herself upon the ground in tears, beat the earth violently with her hands, and implored Hadês and Persephonê to inflict death upon Meleager,—a prayer which the unrelenting Erinnys in Erebus heard but too well. So keenly did the hero resent this behavior of his mother, that he kept aloof from the war; and the Kurêtes not only drove the Ætôlians from the field, but assailed the walls and gates of Kalydôn, and were on the point of overwhelming its dismayed inhabitants. There was no hope of safety except in the arm of Meleager; but Meleager lay in his chamber by the side of his beautiful wife Kleopatra, the daughter of Idas, and heeded not the necessity. While the shouts of expected victory were heard from the assailants at the gates, the ancient men of Ætôlia and the priests of the gods earnestly besought Meleager to come forth,[333] offering him his choice of the fattest land in the plain of Kalydôn. His dearest friends, his father Œneus, his sisters, and even his mother herself added their supplications, but he remained inflexible. At length the Kurêtes penetrated into the town and began to burn it: at this last moment, Kleopatra his wife addressed to him her pathetic appeal, to avert from her and from his family the desperate horrors impending over them all. Meleager could no longer resist: he put on his armor, went forth from his chamber, and repelled the enemy. But when the danger was over, his countrymen withheld from him the splendid presents which they had promised, because he had rejected their prayers, and had come forth only when his own haughty caprice dictated.[334]
Such is the legend of Meleager in the Iliad: a verse in the second book mentions simply the death of Meleager, without farther details, as a reason why Thoas appeared in command of the Ætôlians before Troy.[335] Though the circumstance is indicated only indirectly, there seems little doubt that Homer must have conceived the death of the hero as brought about by the maternal curse: the unrelenting Erinnys executed to the letter the invocations of Althæa, though she herself must have been willing to retract them.
Later poets both enlarged and altered the fable. The Hesiodic Eoiai, as well as the old poem called the Minyas, represented Meleager as having been slain by Apollo, who aided the Kurêtes in the war; and the incident of the burning brand, though quite at variance with Homer, is at least as old as the tragic poet Phrynichus, earlier than Æschylus.[336] The Mœræ, or Fates, presenting themselves to Althæa shortly after the birth of Meleager, predicted that the child would die so soon as the brand then burning on the fire near at hand should be consumed. Althæa snatched it from the flames and extinguished it, preserving it with the utmost care, until she became incensed against Meleager for the death of her brother. She then cast it into the fire, and as soon as it was consumed the life of Meleager was brought to a close.
We know, from the sharp censure of Pliny, that Sophoklês heightened the pathos of this subject by his account of the mournful death of Meleager’s sisters, who perished from excess of grief. They were changed into the birds called Meleagrides, and their never-ceasing tears ran together into amber.[337] But in the hands of Euripidês—whether originally through him or not,[338] we cannot tell—Atalanta became the prominent figure and motive of the piece, while the party convened to hunt the Kalydônian boar was made to comprise all the distinguished heroes from every quarter of Greece. In fact, as Heyne justly remarks, this event is one of the four aggregate dramas of Grecian heroic life,[339] along with the Argonautic expedition, the siege of Thêbes, and the Trojan war. To accomplish the destruction of the terrific animal which Artemis in her wrath had sent forth, Meleager assembled not merely the choice youth among the Kurêtes and Ætôlians (as we find in the Iliad), but an illustrious troop, including Kastôr and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus, Pêleus and Telamôn, Thêseus and Peirithous, Ankæus and Kêpheus, Jasôn, Amphiaraus, Admêtus, Eurytiôn and others. Nestôr and Phœnix, who appear as old men before the walls of Troy, exhibited their early prowess as auxiliaries to the suffering Kalydônians.[340] Conspicuous amidst them all stood the virgin Atalanta, daughter of the Arcadian Schœneus; beautiful and matchless for swiftness of foot, but living in the forest as a huntress and unacceptable to Aphroditê.[341] Several of the heroes were slain by the boar, others escaped by various stratagems: at length Atalanta first shot him in the back, next Amphiaraus in the eye, and, lastly, Meleager killed him. Enamoured of the beauty of Atalanta, Meleager made over to her the chief spoils of the animal, on the plea that she had inflicted the first wound. But his uncles, the brothers of Thestius, took them away from her, asserting their rights as next of kin,[342] if Meleager declined to keep the prize for himself: the latter, exasperated at this behavior, slew them. Althæa, in deep sorrow for her brothers and wrath against her son, is impelled to produce the fatal brand which she had so long treasured up, and consign it to the flames.[343] The tragedy concludes with the voluntary death both of Althæa and Kleopatra.
Interesting as the Arcadian huntress, Atalanta, is in herself, she is an intrusion, and not a very convenient intrusion, into the Homeric story of the Kalydônian boar-hunt, wherein another female Kleopatra, already occupied the foreground.[344] But the more recent version became accredited throughout Greece, and was sustained by evidence which few persons in those days felt any inclination to controvert. For Atalanta carried away with her the spoils and head of the boar into Arcadia; and there for successive centuries hung the identical hide and the gigantic tusks of three feet in length, in the temple of Athênê Alea at Tegea. Kallimachus mentions them as being there preserved, in the third century before the Christian æra;[345] but the extraordinary value set upon them is best proved by the fact that the emperor Augustus took away the tusks from Tegea, along with the great statue of Athênê Alea, and conveyed them to Rome, to be there preserved among the public curiosities. Even a century and a half afterwards, when Pausanias visited Greece, the skin worn out with age was shown to him, while the robbery of the tusks had not been forgotten. Nor were these relics of the boar the only memento preserved at Tegea of the heroic enterprise. On the pediment of the temple of Athênê Alea, unparalleled in Peloponnêsus for beauty and grandeur, the illustrious statuary Skopas had executed one of his most finished reliefs, representing the Kalydônian hunt. Atalanta and Meleager were placed in the front rank of the assailants, and Ankæus, one of the Tegean heroes, to whom the tusks of the boar had proved fatal,[346] was represented as sinking under his death-wound into the arms of his brother Epochos. And Pausanias observes, that the Tegeans, while they had manifested the same honorable forwardness as other Arcadian communities in the conquest of Troy, the repulse of Xerxês, and the battle of Dipæ against Sparta—might fairly claim to themselves, through Ankæus and Atalanta, that they alone amongst all Arcadians had participated in the glory of the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[347] So entire and unsuspecting is the faith both of the Tegeans and of Pausanias in the past historical reality of this romantic adventure. Strabo indeed tries to transform the romance into something which has the outward semblance of history, by remarking that the quarrel respecting the boar’s head and hide cannot have been the real cause of war between the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians; the true ground of dispute (he contends) was probably the possession of a portion of territory.[348] His remarks on this head are analogous to those of Thucydidês and other critics, when they ascribe the Trojan war, not to the rape of Helen, but to views of conquest or political apprehensions. But he treats the general fact of the battle between the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians, mentioned in the Iliad, as something unquestionably real and historical—recapitulating at the same time a variety of discrepancies on the part of different authors, but not giving any decision of his own respecting their truth or falsehood.
In the same manner as Atalanta was intruded into the Kalydônian hunt, so also she seems to have been introduced into the memorable funeral games celebrated after the decease of Pelias at Iôlkos, in which she had no place at the time when the works on the chest of Kypselus were executed.[349] But her native and genuine locality is Arcadia; where her race-course, near to the town of Methydrion, was shown even in the days of Pausanias.[350] This race-course had been the scene of destruction for more than one unsuccessful suitor. For Atalanta, averse to marriage, had proclaimed that her hand should only be won by the competitor who could surpass her in running: all who tried and failed were condemned to die, and many were the persons to whom her beauty and swiftness, alike unparalleled, had proved fatal. At length Meilaniôn, who had vainly tried to win her affections by assiduous services in her hunting excursions, ventured to enter the perilous lists. Aware that he could not hope to outrun her except by stratagem, he had obtained by the kindness of Aphroditê, three golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, which he successively let fall near to her while engaged in the race. The maiden could not resist the temptation of picking them up, and was thus overcome: she became the wife of Meilaniôn and the mother of the Arcadian Parthenopæus, one of the seven chiefs who perished in the siege of Thêbes.[351]
We have yet another female in the family of Œneus, whose name the legend has immortalized. His daughter Deianeira was sought in marriage by the river Achelôus, who presented himself in various shapes, first as a serpent and afterwards as a bull. From the importunity of this hateful suitor she was rescued by the arrival of Hêraklês, who encountered Achelôus, vanquished him and broke off one of his horns, which Achelôus ransomed by surrendering to him the horn of Amaltheia, endued with the miraculous property of supplying the possessor with abundance of any food or drink which he desired. Hêraklês was rewarded for his prowess by the possession of Deianeira, and he made over the horn of Amaltheia as his marriage-present to Œneus.[352] Compelled to leave the residence of Œneus in consequence of having in a fit of anger struck the youthful attendant Eunomus, and involuntarily killed him,[353] Hêraklês retired to Trachin, crossing the river Euênus at the place where the Centaur Nessus was accustomed to carry over passengers for hire. Nessus carried over Deianeira, but when he had arrived on the other side, began to treat her with rudeness, upon which Hêraklês slew him with an arrow tinged by the poison of the Lernæan hydra. The dying Centaur advised Deianeira to preserve the poisoned blood which flowed from his wound, telling her that it would operate as a philtre to regain for her the affections of Hêraklês, in case she should ever be threatened by a rival. Some time afterwards the hero saw and loved the beautiful Iolê, daughter of Eurytos, king of Œchalia: he stormed the town, killed Eurytos, and made Iolê his captive. The misguided Deianeira now had recourse to her supposed philtre: she sent as a present to Hêraklês a splendid tunic, imbued secretly with the poisoned blood of the Centaur. Hêraklês adorned himself with the tunic on the occasion of offering a solemn sacrifice to Zeus on the promontory of Kênæon in Eubœa: but the fatal garment, when once put on, clung to him indissolubly, burnt his skin and flesh, and occasioned an agony of pain from which he was only relieved by death. Deianeira slew herself in despair at this disastrous catastrophe.[354]
We have not yet exhausted the eventful career of Œneus and his family—ennobled among the Ætôlians especially, both by religious worship and by poetical eulogy—and favorite themes not merely in some of the Hesiodic poems, but also in other ancient epic productions, the Alkmæênis and the Cyclic Thêbais.[355] By another marriage, Œneus had for his son Tydeus, whose poetical celebrity is attested by the many different accounts given both of the name and condition of his mother. Tydeus, having slain his cousins, the sons of Melas, who were conspiring against Œneus, was forced to become an exile, and took refuge at Argos with Adrastus, whose daughter Deipylê he married. The issue of this marriage was Diomêdês, whose brilliant exploits in the siege of Troy were not less celebrated than those of his father at the siege of Thêbes. After the departure of Tydeus, Œneus was deposed by the sons of Agrios, and fell into extreme poverty and wretchedness, from which he was only rescued by his grandson Diomêdês, after the conquest of Troy.[356] The sufferings of this ancient warrior, and the final restoration and revenge by Diomêdês, were the subject of a lost tragedy of Euripidês, which even the ridicule of Aristophanês demonstrates to have been eminently pathetic.[357]
Though the genealogy just given of Œneus is in part Homeric, and seems to have been followed generally by the mythographers, yet we find another totally at variance with it in Hekatæus, which he doubtless borrowed from some of the old poets: the simplicity of the story annexed to it seems to attest its antiquity. Orestheus, son of Deukaliôn, first passed into Ætôlia, and acquired the kingdom: he was father of Phytios, who was father of Œneus. Ætôlus was son of Œneus.[358]
The original migration of Ætolus from Elis to Ætôlia—and the subsequent establishment in Elis of Oxylus, his descendant in the tenth generation, along with the Dôrian invaders of Peloponnêsus—were commemorated by two inscriptions, one in the agora of Elis, the other in that of the Ætôlian chief town, Thermum, engraved upon the statues of Ætôlus and Oxylus,[359] respectively.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PELOPIDS.
Among the ancient legendary genealogies, there was none which figured with greater splendor, or which attracted to itself a higher degree of poetical interest and pathos, than that of the Pelopids—Tantalus, Pelops, Atreus and Thyestês, Agamemnôn and Menelaus and Ægisthus, Helen and Klytæmnêstra, Orestês and Elektra and Hermionê. Each of these characters is a star of the first magnitude in the Grecian hemisphere: each name suggests the idea of some interesting romance or some harrowing tragedy: the curse which taints the family from the beginning inflicts multiplied wounds at every successive generation. So, at least, the story of the Pelopids presents itself, after it had been successively expanded and decorated by epic, lyric and tragic poets. It will be sufficient to touch briefly upon events with which every reader of Grecian poetry is more or less familiar, and to offer some remarks upon the way in which they were colored and modified by different Grecian authors.
Pelops is the eponym or name-giver of the Peloponnêsus: to find an eponym for every conspicuous local name was the invariable turn of Grecian retrospective fancy. The name Peloponnêsus is not to be found either in the Iliad or the Odyssey, nor any other denomination which can be attached distinctly and specially to the entire peninsula. But we meet with the name in one of the most ancient post-Homeric poems of which any fragments have been preserved—the Cyprian Verses—a poem which many (seemingly most persons) even of the contemporaries of Herodotus ascribed to the author of the Iliad, though Herodotus contradicts the opinion.[360] The attributes by which the Pelopid Agamemnôn and his house are marked out and distinguished from the other heroes of the Iliad, are precisely those which Grecian imagination would naturally seek in an eponymus—superior wealth, power, splendor and regality. Not only Agamemnôn himself, but his brother Menelaus, is “more of a king” even than Nestôr or Diomêdês. The gods have not given to the king of the “much-golden” Mykênæ greater courage, or strength, or ability, than to various other chiefs; but they have conferred upon him a marked superiority in riches, power and dignity, and have thus singled him out as the appropriate leader of the forces.[361] He enjoys this preëminence as belonging to a privileged family and as inheriting the heaven-descended sceptre of Pelops, the transmission of which is described by Homer in a very remarkable way. The sceptre was made “by Hêphæstos, who presented it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Hermês, Hermês to the charioteer Pelops; Pelops gave it to Atreus, the ruler of men; Atreus at his death left it to Thyestês, the rich cattle-owner; Thyestês in his turn left it to his nephew Agamemnôn to carry, that he might hold dominion over many islands and over all Argos.”[362]
We have here the unrivalled wealth and power of the “king of men, Agamemnôn,” traced up to his descent from Pelops, and accounted for, in harmony with the recognized epical agencies, by the present of the special sceptre of Zeus through the hands of Hermês; the latter being the wealth-giving god, whose blessing is most efficacious in furthering the process of acquisition, whether by theft or by accelerated multiplication of flocks and herds.[363] The wealth and princely character of the Atreids were proverbial among the ancient epic poets. Paris not only carries away Hellen, but much property along with her:[364] the house of Menelaus, when Têlemachus visits it in the Odyssey, is so resplendent with gold and silver and rare ornament,[365] as to strike the beholder with astonishment and admiration. The attributes assigned to Tantalus, the father of Pelops, are in conformity with the general idea of the family—superhuman abundance and enjoyments, and intimate converse with the gods, to such a degree that his head is turned, and he commits inexpiable sin. But though Tantalus himself is mentioned, in one of the most suspicious passages of the Odyssey (as suffering punishment in the under-world), he is not announced, nor is any one else announced, as father of Pelops, unless we are to construe the lines in the Iliad as implying that the latter was son of Hermês. In the conception of the author of the Iliad, the Pelopids are, if not of divine origin, at least a mortal breed specially favored and ennobled by the gods—beginning with Pelops, and localized at Mykênæ. No allusion is made to any connection of Pelops either with Pisa or with Lydia.
The legend which connected Tantalus and Pelops with Mount Sipylus may probably have grown out of the Æolic settlements at Magnêsia and Kymê. Both the Lydian origin and the Pisatic sovereignty of Pelops are adapted to times later than the Iliad, when the Olympic games had acquired to themselves the general reverence of Greece, and had come to serve as the religious and recreative centre of the Peloponnêsus—and when the Lydian and Phrygian heroic names, Midas and Gygês, were the types of wealth and luxury, as well as of chariot driving, in the imagination of a Greek. The inconsiderable villages of the Pisatid derived their whole importance from the vicinity of Olympia: they are not deemed worthy of notice in the Catalogue of Homer. Nor could the genealogy which connected the eponym of the entire peninsula with Pisa have obtained currency in Greece unless it had been sustained by preëstablished veneration for the locality of Olympia. But if the sovereign of the humble Pisa was to be recognized as forerunner of the thrice-wealthy princes of Mykênæ, it became necessary to assign some explanatory cause of his riches. Hence the supposition of his being an immigrant, son of a wealthy Lydian named Tantalus, who was the offspring of Zeus and Ploutô. Lydian wealth and Lydian chariot-driving rendered Pelops a fit person to occupy his place in the legend, both as ruler of Pisa and progenitor of the Mykenæan Atreids. Even with the admission of these two circumstances there is considerable difficulty, for those who wish to read the legends as consecutive history, in making the Pelopids pass smoothly and plausibly from Pisa to Mykênæ.
I shall briefly recount the legends of this great heroic family as they came to stand in their full and ultimate growth, after the localization of Pelops at Pisa had been tacked on as a preface to Homer’s version of the Pelopid genealogy.
Tantalus, residing near Mount Sipylus in Lydia, had two children, Pelops and Niobê. He was a man of immense possessions and preëminent happiness, above the lot of humanity: the gods communicated with him freely, received him at their banquets, and accepted of his hospitality in return. Intoxicated with such prosperity, Tantalus became guilty of gross wickedness. He stole nectar and ambrosia from the table of the gods, and revealed their secrets to mankind: he killed and served up to them at a feast his own son Pelops. The gods were horror-struck when they discovered the meal prepared for them: Zeus restored the mangled youth to life, and as Dêmêtêr, then absorbed in grief for the loss of her daughter Persephonê, had eaten a portion of the shoulder, he supplied an ivory shoulder in place of it. Tantalus expiated his guilt by exemplary punishment. He was placed in the under-world, with fruit and water seemingly close to him, yet eluding his touch as often as he tried to grasp them and leaving his hunger and thirst incessant and unappeased.[366] Pindar, in a very remarkable passage, finds this old legend revolting to his feelings: he rejects the tale of the flesh of Pelops having been served up and eaten, as altogether unworthy of the gods.[367]
Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, was married to Amphiôn, and had a numerous and flourishing offspring of seven sons and seven daughters. Though accepted as the intimate friend and companion of Lêtô, the mother of Apollo and Artemas,[368] she was presumptuous enough to triumph over that goddess, and to place herself on a footing of higher dignity, on account of the superior number of her children. Apollo and Artemas avenged this insult by killing all the sons and all the daughters: Niobê, thus left a childless and disconsolate mother, wept herself to death, and was turned into a rock, which the later Greeks continued always to identify on Mount Sipylus.[369]
Some authors represented Pelops as not being a Lydian, but a king of Paphlagônia; by others it was said that Tantalus, having become detested from his impieties, had been expelled from Asia by Ilus the king of Troy,—an incident which served the double purpose of explaining the transit of Pelops to Greece, and of imparting to the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn the character of retribution for wrongs done to his ancestor.[370] When Pelops came over to Greece, he found Œnomaus, son of the god Arês and Harpinna, in possession of the principality of Pisa, immediately bordering on the district of Olympia. Œnomaus, having been apprized by an oracle that death would overtake him if he permitted his daughter Hippodameia to marry, refused to give her in marriage except to some suitor who should beat him in a chariot-race from Olympia to the isthmus of Corinth;[371] the ground here selected for the legendary victory of Pelops deserves attention, inasmuch as it is a line drawn from the assumed centre of Peloponnêsus to its extremity, and thus comprises the whole territory with which Pelops is connected as eponym. Any suitor overmatched in the race was doomed to forfeit his life; and the fleetness of the Pisan horses, combined with the skill of the charioteer Myrtilus, had already caused thirteen unsuccessful competitors to perish by the lance of Œnomaus.[372] Pelops entered the lists as a suitor: his prayers moved the god Poseidôn to supply him with a golden chariot and winged horses; or according to another story, he captivated the affections of Hippodameia herself, who persuaded the charioteer Myrtilus to loosen the wheels of Œnomaus before he started, so that the latter was overturned and perished in the race. Having thus won the hand of Hippodameia, Pelops became Prince of Pisa.[373] He put to death the charioteer Myrtilus, either from indignation at his treachery to Œnomaus,[374] or from jealousy on the score of Hippodameia: but Myrtilus was the son of Hermês, and though Pelops erected a temple in the vain attempt to propitiate that god, he left a curse upon his race which future calamities were destined painfully to work out.[375]
Pelops had a numerous issue by Hippodameia: Pittheus, Trœzen and Epidaurus, the eponyms of the two Argolic cities so called, are said to have been among them: Atreus and Thyestês were also his sons, and his daughter Nikippê married Sthenelus of Mykênæ, and became the mother of Eurystheus.[376] We hear nothing of the principality of Pisa afterwards: the Pisatid villages became absorbed into the larger aggregate of Elis, after a vain struggle to maintain their separate right of presidency over the Olympic festival. But the legend ran that Pelops left his name to the whole peninsula: according to Thucydidês, he was enabled to do this because of the great wealth which he had brought with him from Lydia into a poor territory. The historian leaves out all the romantic interest of the genuine legends—preserving only this one circumstance, which, without being better attested than the rest, carries with it, from its commonplace and prosaic character, a pretended historical plausibility.[377]
Besides his numerous issue by Hippodameia, Pelops had an illegitimate son named Chrysippus, of singular grace and beauty, towards whom he displayed so much affection as to rouse the jealousy of Hippodameia and her sons. Atreus and Thyestês conspired together to put Chrysippus to death, for which they were banished by Pelops and retired to Mykênæ,[378]—an event which brings us into the track of the Homeric legend. For Thucydidês, having found in the death of Chrysippus a suitable ground for the secession of Atreus from Pelops, conducts him at once to Mykênæ, and shows a train of plausible circumstances to account for his having mounted the throne. Eurystheus, king of Mykênæ, was the maternal nephew of Atreus: when he engaged in any foreign expedition, he naturally entrusted the regency to his uncle; the people of Mykênæ thus became accustomed to be governed by him, and he on his part made efforts to conciliate them, so that when Eurystheus was defeated and slain in Attica, the Mykênæan people, apprehensive of an invasion from the Hêrakleids, chose Atreus as at once the most powerful and most acceptable person for his successor.[379] Such was the tale which Thucydidês derived “from those who had learnt ancient Peloponnêsian matters most clearly from their forefathers.” The introduction of so much sober and quasi-political history, unfortunately unauthenticated, contrasts strikingly with the highly poetical legends of Pelops and Atreus, which precede and follow it.
Atreus and Thyestês are known in the Iliad only as successive possessors of the sceptre of Zeus, which Thyestês at his death bequeathes to Agamemnôn. The family dissensions among this fated race commence, in the Odyssey, with Agamemnôn the son of Atreus, and Ægisthus the son of Thyestês. But subsequent poets dwelt upon an implacable quarrel between the two fathers. The cause of the bitterness was differently represented: some alleged that Thyestês had intrigued with the Krêtan Aeropê, the wife of his brother; other narratives mentioned that Thyestês procured for himself surreptitiously the possession of a lamb with a golden fleece, which had been designedly introduced among the flocks of Atreus by the anger of Hermês, as a cause of enmity and ruin to the whole family.[380] Atreus, after a violent burst of indignation, pretended to be reconciled, and invited Thyestês to a banquet, in which he served up to him the limbs of his own son, and the father ignorantly partook of the fatal meal. Even the all-seeing Hêlios is said to have turned back his chariot to the east in order that he might escape the shocking spectacle of this Thyestêan banquet: yet the tale of Thyestêan revenge—the murder of Atreus perpetrated by Ægisthus, the incestuous offspring of Thyestês by his daughter Pelopia—is no less replete with horrors.[381]
Homeric legend is never thus revolting. Agamemnôn and Menelaus are known to us chiefly with their Homeric attributes, which have not been so darkly overlaid by subsequent poets as those of Atreus and Thyestês. Agamemnôn and Menelaus are affectionate brothers: they marry two sisters, the daughters of Tyndareus king of Sparta, Klytæmnêstra and Helen; for Helen, the real offspring of Zeus, passes as the daughter of Tyndareus.[382] The “king of men” reigns at Mykênæ; Menelaus succeeds Tyndareus at Sparta. Of the rape of Helen, and the siege of Troy consequent upon it, I shall speak elsewhere: I now touch only upon the family legends of the Atreids. Menelaus, on his return from Troy with the recovered Helen, is driven by storms far away to the distant regions of Phœnicia and Egypt, and is exposed to a thousand dangers and hardships before he again sets foot in Peloponnêsus. But at length he reaches Sparta, resumes his kingdom, and passes the rest of his days in uninterrupted happiness and splendor: being moreover husband of the godlike Helen and son-in-law of Zeus, he is even spared the pangs of death. When the fulness of his days is past he is transported to the Elysian fields, there to dwell along with “the golden-haired Rhadamanthus” in a delicious climate and in undisturbed repose.[383]
Far different is the fate of the king of men, Agamemnôn. During his absence, the unwarlike Ægisthus, son of Thyestês, had seduced his wife Klytæmnêstra, in spite of the special warning of the gods, who, watchful over this privileged family, had sent their messenger Hermês expressly to deter him from the attempt.[384] A venerable bard had been left by Agamemnôn as the companion and monitor of his wife, and so long as that guardian was at hand, Ægisthus pressed his suit in vain. But he got rid of the bard by sending him to perish in a desert island, and then won without difficulty the undefended Klytæmnêstra. Ignorant of what had passed, Agamemnôn returned from Troy victorious and full of hope to his native country; but he had scarcely landed when Ægisthus invited him to a banquet, and there with the aid of the treacherous Klytæmnêstra, in the very hall of festivity and congratulation, slaughtered him and his companions “like oxen tied to the manger.” His concubine Kassandra, the prophetic daughter of Priam, perished along with him by the hand of Klytæmnêstra herself.[385] The boy Orestês, the only male offspring of Agamemnôn, was stolen away by his nurse, and placed in safety at the residence of the Phokian Strophius.
For seven years Ægisthus and Klytæmnêstra reigned in tranquillity at Mykênæ on the throne of the murdered Agamemnôn. But in the eighth year the retribution announced by the gods overtook them: Orestês, grown to manhood, returned and avenged his father by killing Ægisthus, according to Homer; subsequent poets add, his mother also. He recovered the kingdom of Mykênæ, and succeeded Menelaus in that of Sparta. Hermionê, the only daughter of Menelaus and Helen, was sent into the realm of the Myrmidons in Thessaly, as the bride of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, according to the promise made by her father during the siege of Troy.[386]
Here ends the Homeric legend of the Pelopids, the final act of Orestês being cited as one of unexampled glory.[387] Later poets made many additions: they dwelt upon his remorse and hardly-earned pardon for the murder of his mother, and upon his devoted friendship for Pylades; they wove many interesting tales, too, respecting his sisters Iphigeneia and Elektra and his cousin Hermionê,—names which have become naturalized in every climate and incorporated with every form of poetry.
These poets did not at all scruple to depart from Homer, and to give other genealogies of their own, with respect to the chief persons of the Pelopid family. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Agamemnôn is son of Atreus: in the Hesiodic Eoiai and in Stesichorus, he is son of Pleisthenês the son of Atreus.[388] In Homer, he is specially marked as reigning at Mykênæ; but Stesichorus, Simonidês and Pindar[389] represented him as having both resided and perished at Sparta or at Amyklæ. According to the ancient Cyprian Verses, Helen was represented as the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis: in one of the Hesiodic poems she was introduced as an Oceanic nymph, daughter of Oceanus and Têthys.[390] The genealogical discrepancies, even as to the persons of the principal heroes and heroines, are far too numerous to be cited, nor is it necessary to advert to them, except as they bear upon the unavailing attempt to convert such legendary parentage into a basis of historical record or chronological calculation.
The Homeric poems probably represent that form of the legend, respecting Agamemnôn and Orestês, which was current and popular among the Æolic colonists. Orestês was the great heroic chief of the Æolic emigration; he, or his sons, or his descendants, are supposed to have conducted the Achæans to seek a new home, when they were no longer able to make head against the invading Dôrians: the great families at Tenedos and other Æolic cities even during the historical æra, gloried in tracing back their pedigrees to this illustrious source.[391] The legends connected with the heroic worship of these mythical ancestors form the basis of the character and attributes of Agamemnôn and his family, as depicted in Homer, in which Mykênæ appears as the first place in Peloponnêsus, and Sparta only as the second: the former the special residence of “the king of men;” the latter that of his younger and inferior brother, yet still the seat of a member of the princely Pelopids, and moreover the birth-place of the divine Helen. Sparta, Argos and Mykênæ are all three designated in the Iliad by the goddess Hêrê as her favorite cities;[392] yet the connection of Mykênæ with Argos, though the two towns were only ten miles distant, is far less intimate than the connection of Mykênæ with Sparta. When we reflect upon the very peculiar manner in which Homer identifies Hêrê with the Grecian host and its leader,—for she watches over the Greeks with the active solicitude of a mother, and her antipathy against the Trojans is implacable to a degree which Zeus cannot comprehend,[393]—and when we combine this with the ancient and venerated Hêræon, or temple of Hêrê, near Mykênæ, we may partly explain to ourselves the preëminence conferred upon Mykênæ in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Hêræon was situated between Argos and Mykênæ; in later times its priestesses were named and its affairs administered by the Argeians: but as it was much nearer to Mykênæ than to Argos, we may with probability conclude that it originally belonged to the former, and that the increasing power of the latter enabled them to usurp to themselves a religious privilege which was always an object of envy and contention among the Grecian communities. The Æolic colonists doubtless took out with them in their emigration the divine and heroic legends, as well as the worship and ceremonial rites, of the Hêræon; and in those legends the most exalted rank would be assigned to the close-adjoining and administering city.
Mykênæ maintained its independence even down to the Persian invasion. Eighty of its heavy-armed citizens, in the ranks of Leonidas at Thermopylæ, and a number not inferior at Platæa, upheld the splendid heroic celebrity of their city during a season of peril, when the more powerful Argos disgraced itself by a treacherous neutrality. Very shortly afterwards Mykênæ was enslaved and its inhabitants expelled by the Argeians. Though this city so long maintained a separate existence, its importance had latterly sunk to nothing, while that of the Dôrian Argos was augmented very much, and that of the Dôrian Sparta still more.
The name of Mykênæ is imperishably enthroned in the Iliad and Odyssey; but all the subsequent fluctuations of the legend tend to exalt the glory of other cities at its expense. The recognition of the Olympic games as the grand religious festival of Peloponnêsus gave vogue to that genealogy which connected Pelops with Pisa or Elis and withdrew him from Mykênæ. Moreover, in the poems of the great Athenian tragedians, Mykênæ is constantly confounded and treated as one with Argos. If any one of the citizens of the former, expelled at the time of its final subjugation by the Argeians, had witnessed at Athens a drama of Æschylus, Sophoklês, or Euripidês, or the recital of an ode of Pindar, he would have heard with grief and indignation the city of his oppressors made a partner in the heroic glories of his own.[394] But the great political ascendency acquired by Sparta contributed still farther to degrade Mykênæ, by disposing subsequent poets to treat the chief of the Grecian armament against Troy as having been a Spartan. It has been already mentioned that Stêsichorus, Simonidês and Pindar adopted this version of the legend: we know that Zeus Agamemnôn, as well as the hero Menelaus, was worshipped at the Dôrian Sparta,[395] and the feeling of intimate identity, as well as of patriotic pride, which had grown up in the minds of the Spartans connected with the name of Agamemnôn, is forcibly evinced by the reply of the Spartan Syagrus to Gelôn of Syracuse at the time of the Persian invasion of Greece. Gelôn was solicited to lend his aid in the imminent danger of Greece before the battle of Salamis: he offered to furnish an immense auxiliary force, on condition that the supreme command should be allotted to him. “Loudly indeed would the Pelopid Agamemnôn cry out (exclaimed Syagrus in rejecting this application), if he were to learn that the Spartans had been deprived of the headship by Gelôn and the Syracusans.”[396] Nearly a century before this event, in obedience to the injunctions of the Delphian oracle, the Spartans had brought back from Tegea to Sparta the bones of “the Lacônian Orestês,” as Pindar denominates him:[397] the recovery of these bones was announced to them as the means of reversing a course of ill-fortune, and of procuring victory in their war against Tegea.[398] The value which they set upon this acquisition, and the decisive results ascribed to it, exhibit a precise analogy with the recovery of the bones of Theseus from Skyros by the Athenian Cimôn shortly after the Persian invasion.[399] The remains sought were those of a hero properly belonging to their own soil, but who had died in a foreign land, and of whose protection and assistance they were for that reason deprived. And the superhuman magnitude of the bones, which were contained in a coffin seven cubits long, is well suited to the legendary grandeur of the son of Agamemnôn.
CHAPTER VIII.
LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.
The earliest names in Lacônian genealogy are, an autochthonous Lelex and a Naiad nymph Kleochareia. From this pair sprung a son Eurôtas, and from him a daughter Sparta, who became the wife of Lacedæmôn, son of Zeus and Taygetê, daughter of Atlas. Amyklas, son of Lacedæmôn, had two sons, Kynortas and Hyacinthus—the latter a beautiful youth, the favorite of Apollo, by whose hand he was accidentally killed while playing at quoits: the festival of the Hyacinthia, which the Lacedæmônians generally, and the Amyklæans with special solemnity, celebrated throughout the historical ages, was traced back to this legend. Kynortas was succeeded by his son Periêrês, who married Gorgophonê, daughter of Perseus, and had a numerous issue—Tyndareus, Ikarius, Aphareus, Leukippus, and Hippokoon. Some authors gave the genealogy differently, making Periêrês, son of Æolus, to be the father of Kynortas, and Œbalus son of Kynortas, from whom sprung Tyndareus, Ikarius and Hippokoon.[400]
Both Tyndareus and Ikarius, expelled by their brother Hippokoon, were forced to seek shelter at the residence of Thestius, king of Kalydôn, whose daughter, Lêda, Tyndareus espoused. It is numbered among the exploits of the omnipresent Hêraklês, that he slew Hippokoon and his sons, and restored Tyndareus to his kingdom, thus creating for the subsequent Hêrakleidan kings a mythical title to the throne. Tyndareus, as well as his brothers, are persons of interest in legendary narrative: he is the father of Kastôr, of Timandra, married to Echemus, the hero of Tegea,[401] and of Klytæmnêstra, married to Agamemnôn. Pollux and the ever-memorable Helen are the offspring of Lêda by Zeus. Ikarius is the father of Penelopê, wife of Odysseus: the contrast between her behavior and that of Klytæmnêstra and Helen became the more striking in consequence of their being so nearly related. Aphareus is the father of Idas and Lynkeus, while Leukippus has for his daughters, Phœbê and Ilaëira. According to one of the Hesiodic poems, Kastôr and Pollux were both sons of Zeus by Lêda, while Helen was neither daughter of Zeus nor of Tyndareus, but of Oceanus and Têthys.[402]
The brothers Kastôr and (Polydeukês, or) Pollux are no less celebrated for their fraternal affection than for their great bodily accomplishments: Kastôr, the great charioteer and horse-master; Pollux, the first of pugilists. They are enrolled both among the hunters of the Kalydônian boar and among the heroes of the Argonautic expedition, in which Pollux represses the insolence of Amykus, king of the Bebrykes, on the coast of Asiatic Thrace—the latter, a gigantic pugilist, from whom no rival has ever escaped, challenges Pollux, but is vanquished and killed in the fight.[403]
The two brothers also undertook an expedition into Attica, for the purpose of recovering their sister Helen, who had been carried off by Thêseus in her early youth, and deposited by him at Aphidna, while he accompanied Perithous to the under-world, in order to assist his friend in carrying off Persephonê. The force of Kastôr and Pollux was irresistible, and when they re-demanded their sister, the people of Attica were anxious to restore her: but no one knew where Thêseus had deposited his prize. The invaders, not believing in the sincerity of this denial, proceeded to ravage the country, which would have been utterly ruined, had not Dekelus, the eponymus of Dekeleia, been able to indicate Aphidna as the place of concealment. The autochthonous Titakus betrayed Aphidna to Kastôr and Pollux, and Helen was recovered: the brothers in evacuating Attica, carried away into captivity Æthra, the mother of Thêseus. In after-days, when Kastôr and Pollux, under the title of the Dioskuri, had come to be worshipped as powerful gods, and when the Athenians were greatly ashamed of this act of Thêseus—the revelation made by Dekelus was considered as entitling him to the lasting gratitude of his country, as well as to the favorable remembrance of the Lacedæmônians, who maintained the Dekeleians in the constant enjoyment of certain honorary privileges at Sparta,[404] and even spared that dême in all their invasions of Attica. Nor is it improbable that the existence of this legend had some weight in determining the Lacedæmônians to select Dekelia as the place of their occupation during the Peleponnêsian war.
The fatal combat between Kastôr and Polydeukês on the one side, and Idas and Lynkeus on the other, for the possession of the daughters of Leukippus, was celebrated by more than one ancient poet, and forms the subject of one of the yet remaining Idylls of Theocritus. Leukippus had formally betrothed his daughters to Idas and Lynkeus; but the Tyndarids, becoming enamored of them, outbid their rivals in the value of the customary nuptial gifts, persuaded the father to violate his promise, and carried off Phoebê and Ilaëira as their brides. Idas and Lynkeus pursued them and remonstrated against the injustice: according to Theocritus, this was the cause of the combat. But there was another tale, which seems the older, and which assigns a different cause to the quarrel. The four had jointly made a predatory incursion into Arcadia, and had driven off some cattle, but did not agree about the partition of the booty—Idas carried off into Messênia a portion of it which the Tyndarids claimed as their own. To revenge and reimburse themselves, the Tyndarids invaded Messênia, placing themselves in ambush in the hollow of an ancient oak. But Lynkeus, endued with preternatural powers of vision, mounted to the top of Taygetus, from whence, as he could see over the whole Peleponnêsus, he detected them in their chosen place of concealment. Such was the narrative of the ancient Cyprian Verses. Kastôr perished by the hand of Idas, Lynkeus by that of Pollux. Idas, seizing a stone pillar from the tomb of his father Aphareus, hurled it at Pollux, knocked him down and stunned him; but Zeus, interposing at the critical moment for the protection of his son, killed Idas with a thunderbolt. Zeus would have conferred upon Pollux the gift of immortality, but the latter could not endure existence without his brother: he entreated permission to share the gift with Kastôr, and both were accordingly permitted to live, but only on every other day.[405]
The Dioskuri, or sons of Zeus,—as the two Spartan heroes, Kastôr and Pollux, were denominated,—were recognized in the historical days of Greece as gods, and received divine honors. This is even noticed in a passage of the Odyssey,[406] which is at any rate a very old interpolation, as well as in one of the Homeric hymns. What is yet more remarkable is, that they were invoked during storms at sea, as the special and all-powerful protectors of the endangered mariner, although their attributes and their celebrity seem to be of a character so dissimilar. They were worshipped throughout most parts of Greece, but with preëminent sanctity at Sparta.
Kastôr and Pollux being removed, the Spartan genealogy passes from Tyndareus to Menelaus, and from him to Orestês.
Originally it appears that Messênê was a name for the western portion of Lacônia, bordering on what was called Pylos: it is so represented in the Odyssey, and Ephorus seems to have included it amongst the possessions of Orestês and his descendants. Throughout the whole duration of the Messênico-Dôrian kingdom, there never was any town called Messênê: the town was first founded by Epameinondas, after the battle of Leuctra. The heroic genealogy of Messênia starts from the same name as that of Lacônia—from the autochthonous Lelex: his younger son, Polykaôn, marries Messênê, daughter of the Argeian Triopas, and settles the country. Pausanias tells us that the posterity of this pair occupied the country for five generations; but he in vain searched the ancient genealogical poems to find the names of their descendants.[407] To them succeeded Periêrês, son of Æolus; and Aphareus and Leukippus, according to Pausanias, were sons of Periêrês. Idas and Lynkeus are the only heroes, distinguished for personal exploits and memorable attributes, belonging to Messênia proper. They are the counterpart of the Dioskuri, and were interesting persons in the old legendary poems. Marpêssa was the daughter of Euênus, and wooed by Apollo: nevertheless Idas[408] carried her off by the aid of a winged chariot which he had received from Poseidôn, Euênus pursued them, and when he arrived at the river Lykormas, he found himself unable to overtake them: his grief caused him to throw himself into the river, which ever afterwards bore his name. Idas brought Marpêssa safe to Messênia, and even when Apollo there claimed her of him, he did not fear to risk a combat with the god. But Zeus interfered as mediator, and permitted the maiden to choose which of the two she preferred. She attached herself to Idas, being apprehensive that Apollo would desert her in her old age: on the death of her husband she slew herself. Both Idas and Lynkeus took part in the Argonautic expedition and in the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[409]
Aphareus, after the death of his sons, founded the town of Arênê, and made over most part of his dominions to his kinsman Nêleus, with whom we pass into the Pylian genealogy.
CHAPTER IX.
ARCADIAN GENEALOGY.
The Arcadian divine or heroic pedigree begins with Pelasgus, whom both Hesiod and Asius considered as an indigenous man, though Akusilaus the Argeian represented him as brother of Argos and son of Zeus by Niobê, daughter of Phorôneus: this logographer wished to establish a community of origin between the Argeians and the Arcadians.
Lykaôn son of Pelasgus and king of Arcadia, had, by different wives, fifty sons, the most savage, impious and wicked of mankind: Mænalus was the eldest of them. Zeus, in order that he might himself become a witness of their misdeeds, presented himself to them in disguise. They killed a child and served it up to him for a meal; but the god overturned the table and struck dead with thunder Lykaôn and all his fifty sons, with the single exception of Nyktimus, the youngest, whom he spared at the earnest intercession of the goddess Gæa (the Earth). The town near which the table was overturned received the name of Trapezus (Tabletown).
This singular legend (framed on the same etymological type as that of the ants in Ægina, recounted elsewhere) seems ancient, and may probably belong to the Hesiodic Catalogue. But Pausanias tells us a story in many respects different, which was represented to him in Arcadia as the primitive local account, and which becomes the more interesting, as he tells us that he himself fully believes it. Both tales indeed go to illustrate the same point—the ferocity of Lykaôn’s character, as well as the cruel rites which he practised. The latter was the first who established the worship and solemn games of Zeus Lykæus: he offered up a child to Zeus, and made libations with the blood upon the altar. Immediately after having perpetrated this act, he was changed into a wolf.[410]
“Of the truth of this narrative (observes Pausanias) I feel persuaded: it has been repeated by the Arcadians from old times, and it carries probability along with it. For the men of that day, from their justice and piety, were guests and companions at table with the gods, who manifested towards them approbation when they were good, and anger if they behaved ill, in a palpable manner: indeed at that time there were some, who having once been men, became gods, and who yet retain their privileges as such—Aristæus, the Krêtan Britomartis, Hêraklês son of Alkmêna, Amphiaraus the son of Oiklês, and Pollux and Kastôr besides. We may therefore believe that Lykaôn became a wild beast, and that Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, became a stone. But in my time, wickedness having enormously increased, so as to overrun the whole earth and all the cities in it, there are no farther examples of men exalted into gods, except by mere title and from adulation towards the powerful: moreover the anger of the gods falls tardily upon the wicked, and is reserved for them after their departure from hence.”
Pausanias then proceeds to censure those who, by multiplying false miracles in more recent times, tended to rob the old and genuine miracles of their legitimate credit and esteem. The passage illustrates forcibly the views which a religious and instructed pagan took of his past time—how inseparably he blended together in it gods and men, and how little he either recognized or expected to find in it the naked phænomena and historical laws of connection which belonged to the world before him. He treats the past as the province of legend, the present as that of history; and in doing this he is more sceptical than the persons with whom he conversed, who believed not only in the ancient, but even in the recent and falsely reported miracles. It is true that Pausanias does not always proceed consistently with this position: he often rationalizes the stories of the past, as if he expected to find historical threads of connection; and sometimes, though more rarely, accepts the miracles of the present. But in the present instance he draws a broad line of distinction between present and past, or rather between what is recent and what is ancient: his criticism is, in the main, analogous to that of Arrian in regard to the Amazons—denying their existence during times of recorded history, but admitting it during the early and unrecorded ages.
In the narrative of Pausanias, the sons of Lykaôn, instead of perishing by thunder from Zeus, become the founders of the various towns in Arcadia. And as that region was subdivided into a great number of small and independent townships, each having its own eponym, so the Arcadian heroic genealogy appears broken up and subdivided. Pallas, Orestheus, Phigalus, Trapezeus, Mænalus, Mantinêus, and Tegeatês, are all numbered among the sons of Lykaôn, and are all eponyms of various Arcadian towns.[411]
The legend respecting Kallistô and Arkas, the eponym of Arcadia generally, seems to have been originally quite independent of and distinct from that of Lykaôn. Eumêlus, indeed, and some other poets made Kallistô daughter of Lykaôn; but neither Hesiod, nor Asius, nor Pherekydês, acknowledged any relationship between them.[412] The beautiful Kallistô, companion of Artemis in the chase, had bound herself by a vow of chastity. Zeus, either by persuasion or by force, obtained a violation of the vow, to the grievous displeasure both of Hêrê and Artemis. The former changed Kallistô into a bear, the latter when she was in that shape killed her with an arrow. Zeus gave to the unfortunate Kallistô a place among the stars, as the constellation of the Bear: he also preserved the child Arkas, of which she was pregnant by him, and gave it to the Atlantid nymph Maia to bring up.[413]
Arkas, when he became king, obtained from Triptolemus and communicated to his people the first rudiments of agriculture; he also taught them to make bread, to spin, and to weave. He had three sons—Azan, Apheidas, and Elatus: the first was the eponym of Azania, the northern region of Arcadia; the second was one of the heroes of Tegea; the third was father of Ischys (rival of Apollo for the affections of Korônis), as well as of Æpytus and Kyllên: the name of Æpytus among the heroes of Arcadia is as old as the Catalogue in the Iliad.[414]
Aleus, son of Apheidas and king of Tegea, was the founder of the celebrated temple and worship of Athênê Alea in that town. Lykurgus and Kêpheus were his sons, Augê his daughter, who was seduced by Hêraklês, and secretly bore to him a child: the father, discovering what had happened, sent Augê to Nauplius to be sold into slavery: Teuthras, king of Mysia in Asia Minor, purchased her and made her his wife: her tomb was shown at Pergamus on the river Kaïkus even in the time of Pausanias.[415]
The child Têlephus, exposed on Mount Parthenius, was wonderfully sustained by the milk of a doe: the herdsmen of Korythus brought him up, and he was directed by the Delphian oracle to go and find his parents in Mysia. Teuthras adopted him, and he succeeded to the throne: in the first attempt of the army of Agamemnôn against Troy, on which occasion they mistook their point and landed in Mysia, his valor signally contributed to the repulse of the Greeks, though he was at last vanquished and desperately wounded by the spear of Achilles—by whom however he was afterwards healed, under the injunction of the oracle, and became the guide of the Greeks in their renewed attack upon the Trojans.[416]
From Lykurgus,[417] the son of Aleus and brother of Augê, we pass to his son Ankæus, numbered among the Argonauts, finally killed in the chase of the Kalydônian boar, and father of Agapenôr, who leads the Arcadian contingent against Troy,—(the adventurers of his niece, the Tegeatic huntress Atalanta, have already been touched upon),—then to Echemus, son of Aëropus and grandson of the brother of Lykurgus, Kêpheus. Echemus is the chief heroic ornament of Tegea. When Hyllus, the son of Hêraklês, conducted the Hêrakleids on their first expedition against Peloponnêsus, Echemus commanded the Tegean troops who assembled along with the other Peloponnêsians at the isthmus of Corinth to repel the invasion: it was agreed that the dispute should be determined by single combat, and Echemus, as the champion of Peloponnêsus, encountered and killed Hyllus. Pursuant to the stipulation by which they had bound themselves, the Hêrakleids retired, and abstained for three generations from pressing their claim upon Peloponnêsus. This valorous exploit of their great martial hero was cited and appealed to by the Tegeates before the battle of Platæa, as the principal evidence of their claim to the second post in the combined army, next in point of honor to that of the Lacedæmônians, and superior to that of the Athenians: the latter replied to them by producing as counter-evidence the splendid heroic deeds of Athens,—the protection of the Hêrakleids against Eurystheus, the victory over the Kadmeians of Thêbes, and the complete defeat of the Amazons in Attica.[418] Nor can there be any doubt that these legendary glories were both recited by the speakers, and heard by the listeners, with profound and undoubting faith, as well as with heart-stirring admiration.
One other person there is—Ischys, son of Elatus and grandson of Arkas—in the fabulous genealogy of Arcadia whom it would be improper to pass over, inasmuch as his name and adventures are connected with the genesis of the memorable god or hero Æsculapius, or Asklêpius. Korônis, daughter of Phlegyas, and resident near the lake Bœbëis in Thessaly, was beloved by Apollo and became pregnant by him: unfaithful to the god, she listened to the propositions of Ischys son of Elatus, and consented to wed him: a raven brought to Apollo the fatal news, which so incensed him that he changed the color of the bird from white, as it previously had been, into black.[419] Artemis, to avenge the wounded dignity of her brother, put Korônis to death; but Apollo preserved the male child of which she was about to be delivered, and consigned it to the Centaur Cheirôn to be brought up. The child was named Asklêpius or Æsculapius, and acquired, partly from the teaching of the beneficent leech Cheirôn, partly from inborn and superhuman aptitude, a knowledge of the virtues of herbs and a mastery of medicine and surgery, such as had never before been witnessed. He not only cured the sick, the wounded, and the dying, but even restored the dead to life. Kapaneus, Eriphylê, Hippolytus, Tyndareus and Glaukus were all affirmed by different poets and logographers to have been endued by him with a new life.[420] But Zeus now found himself under the necessity of taking precautions lest mankind, thus unexpectedly protected against sickness and death, should no longer stand in need of the immortal gods: he smote Asklêpius with thunder and killed him. Apollo was so exasperated by this slaughter of his highly-gifted son, that he killed the Cyclôpes who had fabricated the thunder, and Zeus was about to condemn him to Tartarus for doing so; but on the intercession of Latôna he relented, and was satisfied with imposing upon him a temporary servitude in the house of Admêtus at Pheræ.
Asklêpius was worshipped with very great solemnity at Trikka, at Kôs, at Knidus, and in many different parts of Greece, but especially at Epidaurus, so that more than one legend had grown up respecting the details of his birth and adventures: in particular, his mother was by some called Arsinoê. But a formal application had been made on this subject (so the Epidaurians told Pausanias) to the oracle of Delphi, and the god in reply acknowledged that Asklêpius was his son by Korônis.[421] The tale above recounted seems to have been both the oldest and the most current. It is adorned by Pindar in a noble ode, wherein however he omits all mention of the raven as messenger—not specifying who or what the spy was from whom Apollo learnt the infidelity of Korônis. By many this was considered as an improvement in respect of poetical effect, but it illustrates the mode in which the characteristic details and simplicity of the old fables[422] came to be exchanged for dignified generalities, adapted to the altered taste of society.
Machaôn and Podaleirius, the two sons of Asklêpius, command the contingent from Trikka, in the north-west region of Thessaly, at the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn.[423] They are the leeches of the Grecian army, highly prized and consulted by all the wounded chiefs. Their medical renown was further prolonged in the subsequent poem of Arktinus, the Iliu-Persis, wherein the one was represented as unrivalled in surgical operations, the other as sagacious in detecting and appreciating morbid symptoms. It was Podaleirius who first noticed the glaring eyes and disturbed deportment which preceded the suicide of Ajax.[424]
Galen appears uncertain whether Asklêpius (as well as Dionysus) was originally a god, or whether he was first a man and then became afterwards a god;[425] but Apollodôrus professed to fix the exact date of his apotheosis.[426] Throughout all the historical ages the descendants of Asklêpius were numerous and widely diffused. The many families or gentes called Asklêpiads, who devoted themselves to the study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the temples of Asklêpius whither sick and suffering men came to obtain relief—all recognized the god not merely as the object of their common worship, but also as their actual progenitor. Like Solôn, who reckoned Nêleus and Poseidôn as his ancestors, or the Milêsian Hekatæus, who traced his origin through fifteen successive links to a god—like the privileged gens at Pêlion in Thessaly,[427] who considered the wise Centaur Cheirôn as their progenitor, and who inherited from him their precious secrets respecting the medicinal herbs of which their neighborhood was full,—Asklêpiads, even of the later times, numbered and specified all the intermediate links which separated them from their primitive divine parent. One of these genealogies has been preserved to us, and we may be sure that there were many such, as the Asklêpiads were found in many different places.[428] Among them were enrolled highly instructed and accomplished men, such as the great Hippocratês and the historian Ktêsias, who prided themselves on the divine origin of themselves and their gens[429]—so much did the legendary element pervade even the most philosophical and positive minds of historical Greece. Nor can there be any doubt that their means of medical observation must have been largely extended by their vicinity to a temple so much frequented by the sick, who came in confident hopes of divine relief, and who, whilst they offered up sacrifice and prayer to Æsculapius, and slept in his temple in order to be favored with healing suggestions in their dreams, might, in case the god withheld his supernatural aid, consult his living descendants.[430] The sick visitors at Kôs, or Trikka, or Epidaurus, were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklêpiads.[431]
The genealogical descent of Hippocratês and the other Asklêpiads from the god Asklêpius is not only analogous to that of Hekatæus and Solôn from their respective ancestoral gods, but also to that of the Lacedæmônian kings from Hêraklês, upon the basis of which the whole supposed chronology of the ante-historical times has been built, from Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus down to the chronologers of the present century.[432] I shall revert to this hereafter.
CHAPTER X.
ÆAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS.—ÆGINA, SALAMIS, AND PHTHIA.
The memorable heroic genealogy of the Æakids establishes a fabulous connection between Ægina, Salamis, and Phthia, which we can only recognize as a fact, without being able to trace its origin.
Æakus was the son of Zeus, born of Ægina, daughter of Asôpus, whom the god had carried off and brought into the island to which he gave her name: she was afterwards married to Aktôr, and had by him Menœtius, father of Patroclus. As there were two rivers named Asôpus, one between Phlius and Sikyôn, and another between Thêbes and Platæa—so the Æginêtan heroic genealogy was connected both with that of Thêbes and with that of Phlius: and this belief led to practical consequences in the minds of those who accepted the legends as genuine history. For when the Thêbans, in the 68th Olympiad, were hard-pressed in war by Athens, they were directed by the Delphian oracle to ask assistance of their next of kin: recollecting that Thêbê and Ægina had been sisters, common daughters of Asôpus, they were induced to apply to the Æginêtans as their next of kin, and the Æginêtans gave them aid, first by sending to them their common heroes, the Æakids, next by actual armed force.[433] Pindar dwells emphatically on the heroic brotherhood between Thêbes, his native city, and Ægina.[434]
Æakus was alone in Ægina: to relieve him from this solitude, Zeus changed all the ants in the island into men, and thus provided him with a numerous population, who, from their origin, were called Myrmidons.[435] By his wife Endêis, daughter of Cheirôn, Æakus had for his sons Pêleus and Telamôn: by the Nereid Psamathê, he had Phôkus. A monstrous crime had then recently been committed by Pelops, in killing the Arcadian prince, Stymphalus, under a simulation of friendship and hospitality: for this the gods had smitten all Greece with famine and barrenness. The oracles affirmed that nothing could relieve Greece from this intolerable misery except the prayers of Æakus, the most pious of mankind. Accordingly envoys from all quarters flocked to Ægina, to prevail upon Æakus to put up prayers for them: on his supplications the gods relented, and the suffering immediately ceased. The grateful Greeks established in Ægina the temple and worship of Zeus Panhellênius, one of the lasting monuments and institutions of the island, on the spot where Æakus had offered up his prayer. The statues of the envoys who had come to solicit him were yet to be seen in the Æakeion, or sacred edifice of Æakus, in the time of Pausanias: and the Athenian Isokratês, in his eulogy of Evagoras, the despot of Salamis in Cyprus (who traced his descent through Teukrus to Æakus), enlarges upon this signal miracle, recounted and believed by other Greeks as well as by the Æginêtans, as a proof both of the great qualities and of the divine favor and patronage displayed in the career of the Æakids.[436] Æakus was also employed to aid Poseidôn and Apollo in building the walls of Troy.[437]
Pêleus and Telamôn, the sons of Æakus, contracting a jealousy of their bastard brother, Phôkus, in consequence of his eminent skill in gymnastic contests, conspired to put him to death. Telamôn flung his quoit at him while they were playing together, and Pêleus despatched him by a blow with his hatchet in the back. They then concealed the dead body in a wood, but Æakus, having discovered both the act and the agents, banished the brothers from the island.[438] For both of them eminent destinies were in store.
While we notice the indifference to the moral quality of actions implied in the old Hesiodic legend, when it imputes distinctly and nakedly this proceeding to two of the most admired persons of the heroic world—it is not less instructive to witness the change of feeling which had taken place in the age of Pindar. That warm eulogist of the great Æakid race hangs down his head with shame, and declines to recount, though he is obliged darkly to glance at the cause which forced the pious Æakus to banish his sons from Ægina. It appears that Kallimachus, if we may judge by a short fragment, manifested the same repugnance to mention it.[439]
Telamôn retired to Salamis, then ruled by Kychreus, the son of Poseidôn and Salamis, who had recently rescued the island from the plague of a terrible serpent. This animal, expelled from Salamis, retired to Eleusis in Attica, where it was received and harbored by the goddess Dêmêtêr in her sacred domicile.[440] Kychreus dying childless left his dominion to Telamôn, who, marrying Peribœa, daughter of Alkathoos, and grand-daughter of Pelops, had for his son the celebrated Ajax. Telamôn took part both in the chase of the Kalydônian boar and in the Argonautic expedition: he was also the intimate friend and companion of Hêraklês, whom he accompanied in his enterprise against the Amazons, and in the attack made with only six ships upon Laomedôn, king of Troy. This last enterprise having proved completely successful, Telamôn was rewarded by Hêraklês with the possession of the daughter of Laomedôn, Hêsionê—who bore to him Teukros, the most distinguished archer amidst the host of Agamemnôn, and the founder of Salamis in Cyprus.[441]
Pêleus went to Phthia, where he married the daughter of Eurytiôn, son of Aktôr, and received from him the third part of his dominions. Taking part in the Kalydônian boar-hunt, he unintentionally killed his father-in-law Eurytiôn, and was obliged to flee to Iôlkos, where he received purification from Akastus, son of Pelias: the danger to which he became exposed by the calumnious accusations of the enamoured wife of Akastus has already been touched upon in a previous section. Pêleus also was among the Argonauts; the most memorable event in his life however was his marriage with the sea-goddess Thetis. Zeus and Poseidôn had both conceived a violent passion for Thetis. But the former, having been forewarned by Promêtheus that Thetis was destined to give birth to a son more powerful than his father, compelled her, much against her own will, to marry Pêleus; who, instructed by the intimations of the wise Cheirôn, was enabled to seize her on the coast called Sêpias in the southern region of Thessaly. She changed her form several times, but Pêleus held her fast until she resumed her original appearance, and she was then no longer able to resist. All the gods were present, and brought splendid gifts to these memorable nuptials: Apollo sang with his harp, Poseidôn gave to Pêleus the immortal horses Xanthos and Balios, and Cheirôn presented a formidable spear, cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pêlion. We shall have reason hereafter to recognize the value of both these gifts in the exploits of Achilles.[442]
The prominent part assigned to Thetis in the Iliad is well known, and the post-Homeric poets of the Legend of Troy introduced her as actively concurring first to promote the glory, finally to bewail the death of her distinguished son.[443] Pêleus, having survived both his son Achilles and his grandson Neoptolemus, is ultimately directed to place himself on the very spot where he had originally seized Thetis, and thither the goddess comes herself to fetch him away, in order that he may exchange the desertion and decrepitude of age for a life of immortality along with the Nêreids.[444] The spot was indicated to Xerxês when he marched into Greece by the Iônians who accompanied him, and his magi offered solemn sacrifices to her as well as to the other Nêreids, as the presiding goddesses and mistresses of the coast.[445]
Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, too young to engage in the commencement of the siege of Troy, comes on the stage after the death of his father as the indispensable and prominent agent in the final capture of the city. He returns victor from Troy, not to Phthia, but to Epirus, bringing with him the captive Andromachê, widow of Hectôr, by whom Molossus is born to him. He himself perishes in the full vigor of life at Delphi by the machinations of Orestês, son of Agamemnôn. But his son Molossus—like Fleance, the son of Banquo, in Macbeth—becomes the father of the powerful race of Molossian kings, who played so conspicuous a part during the declining vigor of the Grecian cities, and to whom the title and parentage of Æakids was a source of peculiar pride, identifying them by community of heroic origin with genuine and undisputed Hellênes.[446]
The glories of Ajax, the second grandson of Æakus, before Troy, are surpassed only by those of Achilles. He perishes by his own hand, the victim of an insupportable feeling of humiliation, because a less worthy claimant is allowed to carry off from him the arms of the departed Achilles. His son Philæus receives the citizenship of Athens, and the gens or dême called Philaidæ traced up to him its name and its origin: moreover the distinguished Athenians, Miltiadês and Thucydidês, were regarded as members of this heroic progeny.[447]
Teukrus escaped from the perils of the siege of Troy as well as from those of the voyage homeward, and reached Salamis in safety. But his father Telamôn, indignant at his having returned without Ajax, refused to receive him, and compelled him to expatriate. He conducted his followers to Cyprus, where he founded the city of Salamis: his descendant Evagoras was recognized as a Teukrid and as an Æakid even in the time of Isokratês.[448]
Such was the splendid heroic genealogy of the Æakids,—a family renowned for military excellence. The Æakeion at Ægina, in which prayer and sacrifice were offered to Æakus, remained in undiminished dignity down to the time of Pausanias.[449] This genealogy connects together various eminent gentes in Achaia Phthiôtis, in Ægina, in Salamis, in Cyprus, and amongst the Epirotic Molossians. Whether we are entitled to infer from it that the island of Ægina was originally peopled by Myrmidones from Achaia Phthiôtis, as O. Müller imagines,[450] I will not pretend to affirm. These mythical pedigrees seem to unite together special clans or gentes, rather than the bulk of any community—just as we know that the Athenians generally had no part in the Æakid genealogy, though certain particular Athenian families laid claim to it. The intimate friendship between Achilles and the Opuntian hero Patroclus—and the community of name and frequent conjunction between the Locrian Ajax, son of Oïleus, and Ajax, son of Telamôn—connect the Æakids with Opus and the Opuntian Locrians, in a manner which we have no farther means of explaining. Pindar too represents Menœtius, father of Patroclus, as son of Aktôr and Ægina, and therefore maternal brother of Æakus.[451]
CHAPTER XI.
ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES.
The most ancient name in Attic archæology, as far as our means of information reach, is that of Erechtheus, who is mentioned both in the Catalogue of the Iliad and in a brief allusion of the Odyssey. Born of the Earth, he is brought up by the goddess Athênê, adopted by her as her ward, and installed in her temple at Athens, where the Athenians offer to him annual sacrifices. The Athenians are styled in the Iliad, “the people of Erechtheus.”[452] This is the most ancient testimony concerning Erechtheus, exhibiting him as a divine or heroic, certainly a superhuman person, and identifying him with the primitive germination (if I may use a term, the Grecian equivalent of which would have pleased an Athenian ear) of Attic man. And he was recognized in this same character, even at the close of the fourth century before the Christian æra, by the Butadæ, one of the most ancient and important Gentes at Athens, who boasted of him as their original ancestor: the genealogy of the great Athenian orator Lykurgus, a member of this family, drawn up by his son Abrôn, and painted on a public tablet in the Erechtheion, contained as its first and highest name, Erechtheus, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth. In the Erechtheion, Erechtheus was worshipped conjointly with Athênê: he was identified with the god Poseidôn, and bore the denomination of Poseidôn Erechtheus: one of the family of the Butadæ, chosen among themselves by lot, enjoyed the privilege and performed the functions of his hereditary priest.[453] Herodotus also assigns the same earth-born origin to Erechtheus:[454] but Pindar, the old poem called the Danais, Euripidês and Apollodôrus—all name Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth, as the being who was thus adopted and made the temple-companion of Athênê, while Apollodôrus in another place identifies Erichthonius with Poseidôn.[455] The Homeric scholiast treated Erechtheus and Erichthonius as the same person under two names:[456] and since, in regard to such mythical persons, there exists no other test of identity of the subject except perfect similarity of the attributes, this seems the reasonable conclusion.
We may presume, from the testimony of Homer, that the first and oldest conception of Athens and its sacred acropolis places it under the special protection, and represents it as the settlement and favorite abode of Athênê, jointly with Poseidôn; the latter being the inferior, though the chosen companion of the former, and therefore exchanging his divine appellation for the cognomen of Erechtheus. But the country called Attica, which, during the historical ages, forms one social and political aggregate with Athens, was originally distributed into many independent dêmes or cantons, and included, besides, various religious clans or hereditary sects (if the expression may be permitted); that is, a multitude of persons not necessarily living together in the same locality, but bound together by an hereditary communion of sacred rites, and claiming privileges, as well as performing obligations, founded upon the traditional authority of divine persons for whom they had a common veneration. Even down to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the demots of the various Attic dêmes, though long since embodied in the larger political union of Attica, and having no wish for separation, still retained the recollection of their original political autonomy. They lived in their own separate localities, resorted habitually to their own temples, and visited Athens only occasionally for private or political business, or for the great public festivals. Each of these aggregates, political as well as religious, had its own eponymous god or hero, with a genealogy more or less extended, and a train of mythical incidents more or less copious, attached to his name, according to the fancy of the local exegetes and poets. The eponymous heroes Marathôn, Dekelus, Kolônus, or Phlius, had each their own title to worship, and their own position as themes of legendary narrative, independent of Erechtheus, or Poseidôn, or Athênê, the patrons of the acropolis common to all of them.
But neither the archæology of Attica, nor that of its various component fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece. Theseus is noticed both in the Iliad and Odyssey as having carried off from Krête Ariadnê, the daughter of Minos—thus commencing that connection between the Krêtan and Athenian legends which we afterwards find so largely amplified—and the sons of Thêseus take part in the Trojan war.[457] The chief collectors and narrators of the Attic mythes were, the prose logographers, authors of the many compositions called Atthides, or works on Attic archæology. These writers—Hellanikus, the contemporary of Herodotus, is the earliest composer of an Atthis expressly named, though Pherekydês also touched upon the Attic fables—these writers, I say, interwove into one chronological series the legends which either greatly occupied their own fancy, or commanded the most general reverence among their countrymen. In this way the religious and political legends of Eleusis, a town originally independent of Athens, but incorporated with it before the historical age, were worked into one continuous sequence along with those of the Erechtheids. In this way, Kekrops, the eponymous hero of the portion of Attica called Kekropia, came to be placed in the mythical chronology at a higher point even than the primitive god or hero Erechtheus.
Ogygês is said to have reigned in Attica[458] 1020 years before the first Olympiad, or 1796 years B. C. In his time happened the deluge of Deukaliôn, which destroyed most of the inhabitants of the country: after a long interval, Kekrops, an indigenous person, half man and half serpent, is given to us by Apollodôrus as the first king of the country: he bestowed upon the land, which had before been called Actê, the name of Kekropia. In his day there ensued a dispute between Athênê and Poseidôn respecting the possession of the acropolis at Athens, which each of them coveted. First, Poseidôn struck the rock with his trident, and produced the well of salt water which existed in it, called the Erechthêis: next came Athênê, who planted the sacred olive-tree ever afterwards seen and venerated in the portion of Erechtheion called the cell of Pandrosus. The twelve gods decided the dispute; and Kekrops having testified before them that Athênê had rendered this inestimable service, they adjudged the spot to her in preference to Poseidôn. Both the ancient olive-tree and the well produced by Poseidôn were seen on the acropolis, in the temple consecrated jointly to Athênê and Erechtheus, throughout the historical ages. Poseidôn, as a mark of his wrath for the preference given to Athênê, inundated the Thriasian plain with water.[459]
During the reign of Kekrops, Attica was laid waste by Karian pirates on the coast, and by invasions of the Aônian inhabitants from Bœôtia. Kekrops distributed the inhabitants of Attica into twelve local sections—Kekropia, Tetrapolis, Epakria, Dekeleia, Eleusis, Aphidna, Thorikus, Braurôn, Kythêrus, Sphêttus, Kêphisius, Phalerus. Wishing to ascertain the number of inhabitants, he commanded each man to cast a single stone into a general heap: the number of stones was counted, and it was found that there were twenty thousand.[460]
Kekrops married the daughter of Aktæus, who (according to Pausanias’s version) had been king of the country before him, and had called it by the name of Aktæa.[461] By her he had three daughters, Aglaurus, Ersê and Pandrosus, and a son, Erysichthôn. Kekrops is called by Pausanias contemporary of the Arcadian Lykaôn, and is favorably contrasted with that savage prince in respect of his piety and humanity.[462] Though he has been often designated in modern histories as an immigrant from Egypt into Attica, yet the far greater number of ancient authorities represent him as indigenous or earth-born.[463]
Erysichthôn died without issue, and Kranaus succeeded him,—another autochthonous person and another eponymus,—for the name Kranai was an old denomination of the inhabitants of Attica.[464] Kranaus was dethroned by Amphiktyôn, by some called an autochthonous man; by others, a son of Deukaliôn: Amphiktyôn in his turn was expelled by Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth,—the same person apparently as Erechtheus, but inserted by Apollodôrus at this point of the series. Erichthonius, the pupil and favored companion of Athênê, placed in the acropolis the original Palladium or wooden statue of that goddess, said to have dropped from heaven: he was moreover the first to celebrate the festival of the Panathenæa. He married the nymph Pasithea, and had for his son and successor Pandiôn.[465] Erichthonius was the first person who taught the art of breaking in horses to the yoke, and who drove a chariot and four.[466]
In the time of Pandiôn, who succeeded to Erichthonius, Dionysus and Dêmêtêr both came into Attica: the latter was received by Keleos at Eleusis.[467] Pandiôn married the nymph Zeuxippê, and had twin sons, Erechtheus and Butês, and two daughters, Proknê and Philomêla. The two latter are the subjects of a memorable and well-known legend. Pandiôn having received aid in repelling the Thêbans from Têreus, king of Thrace, gave him his daughter Proknê in marriage, by whom he had a son, Itys. The beautiful Philomêla, going to visit her sister, inspired the barbarous Thracian with an irresistible passion: he violated her person, confined her in a distant pastoral hut, and pretended that she was dead, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from revealing the truth. After a long interval, Philomêla found means to acquaint her sister of the cruel deed which had been perpetrated; she wove into a garment words describing her melancholy condition, and despatched it by a trusty messenger. Proknê, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger, took advantage of the free egress enjoyed by women during the Bacchanalian festival to go and release her sister: the two sisters then revenged themselves upon Têreus by killing the boy Itys, and serving him up for his father to eat: after the meal had been finished, the horrid truth was revealed to him. Têreus snatched a hatchet to put Proknê to death: she fled, along with Philomêla, and all the three were changed into birds—Proknê became a swallow, Philomêla a nightingale, and Têreus an hoopoe.[468] This tale, so popular with the poets, and so illustrative of the general character of Grecian legend, is not less remarkable in another point of view—that the great historian Thucydidês seems to allude to it as an historical fact,[469] not however directly mentioning the final metamorphosis.
After the death of Pandiôn, Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom, and his brother, Butês, became priest of Poseidôn Erichthonius, a function which his descendants ever afterwards exercised, the Butadæ or Eteobutadæ. Erechtheus seems to appear in three characters in the fabulous history of Athens—as a god, Poseidôn Erechtheus[470]—as a hero, Erechtheus, son of the Earth—and now, as a king, son of Pandiôn: so much did the ideas of divine and human rule become confounded and blended together in the imagination of the Greeks in reviewing their early times.
The daughters of Erechtheus were not less celebrated in Athenian legend than those of Pandiôn. Prokris, one of them, is among the heroines seen by Odysseus in Hadês: she became the wife of Kephalus, son of Deionês, and lived in the Attic dême of Thorikus. Kephalus tried her fidelity by pretending that he was going away for a long period; but shortly returned, disguising his person and bringing with him a splendid necklace. He presented himself to Prokris without being recognized, and succeeded in triumphing over her chastity. Having accomplished this object, he revealed to her his true character: she earnestly besought his forgiveness, and prevailed upon him to grant it. Nevertheless he became shortly afterwards the unintentional author of her death: for he was fond of hunting, and staid out a long time on his excursions, so that Prokris suspected him of visiting some rival. She determined to watch him by concealing herself in a thicket near the place of his midday repose; and when Kephalus implored the presence of Nephelê (a cloud) to protect him from the sun’s rays, she suddenly started from her hiding-place: Kephalus, thus disturbed, cast his hunting-spear unknowingly into the thicket and slew his wife. Erechtheus interred her with great magnificence, and Kephalus was tried for the act before the court of Areopagus, which condemned him to exile.[471]
Kreüsa, another daughter of Erechtheus, seduced by Apollo, becomes the mother of Iôn, whom she exposes immediately after his birth in the cave north of the acropolis, concealing the fact from every one. Apollo prevails upon Hermês to convey the new-born child to Delphi, where he is brought up as a servant of the temple, without knowing his parents. Kreüsa marries Xuthus, son of Æolus, but continuing childless, she goes with Xuthus to the Delphian oracle to inquire for a remedy. The god presents to them Iôn, and desires them to adopt him as their son: their son Achæus is afterwards born to them, and Iôn and Achæus become the eponyms of the Iônians and Achæans.[472]
Oreithyia, the third daughter of Erechtheus, was stolen away by the god Boreas while amusing herself on the banks of the Ilissus, and carried to his residence in Thrace. The two sons of this marriage, Zêtês and Kalaïs, were born with wings: they took part in the Argonautic expedition, and engaged in the pursuit of the Harpies: they were slain at Tênos by Hêraklês. Kleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia, was married to Phineus, and had two sons, Plexippus and Pandiôn; but Phineus afterwards espoused a second wife, Idæa, the daughter of Dardanus, who, detesting the two sons of the former bed, accused them falsely of attempting her chastity, and persuaded Phineus in his wrath to put out the eyes of both. For this cruel proceeding he was punished by the Argonauts in the course of their voyage.[473]
On more than one occasion the Athenians derived, or at least believed themselves to have derived, important benefits from this marriage of Boreas with the daughter of their primæval hero: one inestimable service, rendered at a juncture highly critical for Grecian independence, deserves to be specified.[474] At the time of the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, the Grecian fleet was assembled at Chalcis and Artemision in Eubœa, awaiting the approach of the Persian force, so overwhelming in its numbers as well by sea as on land. The Persian fleet had reached the coast of Magnêsia and the south-eastern corner of Thessaly without any material damage, when the Athenians were instructed by an oracle “to invoke the aid of their son-in-law.” Understanding the advice to point to Boreas, they supplicated his aid and that of Oreithyia, most earnestly, as well by prayer as by sacrifice,[475] and the event corresponded to their wishes. A furious north-easterly wind immediately arose, and continued for three days to afflict the Persian fleet as it lay on an unprotected coast: the number of ships driven ashore, both vessels of war and of provision, was immense, and the injury done to the armament was never thoroughly repaired. Such was the powerful succor which the Athenians derived, at a time of their utmost need, from their son-in-law Boreas; and their gratitude was shown by consecrating to him a new temple on the banks of the Ilissus.
The three remaining daughters of Erechtheus—he had six in all[476]—were in Athenian legend yet more venerated than their sisters, on account of having voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the safety of their country. Eumolpus of Eleusis was the son of Poseidôn and the eponymous hero of the sacred gens called the Eumolpids, in whom the principal functions, appertaining to the mysterious rites of Dêmêtêr at Eleusis, were vested by hereditary privilege: he made war upon Erechtheus and the Athenians, with the aid of a body of Thracian allies; indeed it appears that the legends of Athens, originally foreign and unfriendly to those of Eleusis, represented him as having been himself a Thracian born and an immigrant into Attica.[477] Respecting Eumolpus however and his parentage, the discrepancies much exceed even the measure of license usual in the legendary genealogies, and some critics, both ancient and modern, have sought to reconcile these contradictions by the usual stratagem of supposing two or three different persons of the same name. Even Pausanias, so familiar with this class of unsworn witnesses, complains of the want of native Eleusinian genealogists,[478] and of the extreme license of fiction in which other authors had indulged.
In the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr, the most ancient testimony before us,—composed, to all appearance, earlier than the complete incorporation of Eleusis with Athens,—Eumolpus appears (to repeat briefly what has been stated in a previous chapter) as one of the native chiefs or princes of Eleusis, along with Triptolemus, Dioklês, Polyxeinus and Dolichus: Keleos is the king, or principal among these chiefs, the son or lineal descendant of the eponymous Eleusis himself. To these chiefs, and to the three daughters of Keleos, the goddess Dêmêtêr comes in her sorrow for the loss of her daughter Persephonê: being hospitably entertained by Keleos she reveals her true character, commands that a temple shall be built to her at Eleusis, and prescribes to them the rites according to which they are to worship her.[479] Such seems to have been the ancient story of the Eleusinians respecting their own religious antiquities: Keleos, with Metaneira his wife, and the other chiefs here mentioned, were worshipped at Eleusis, and from thence transferred to Athens as local gods or heroes.[480] Eleusis became incorporated with Athens, apparently not very long before the time of Solôn; and the Eleusinian worship of Dêmêtêr was then received into the great religious solemnities of the Athenian state, to which it owes its remarkable subsequent extension and commanding influence. In the Atticized worship of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr, the Eumolpids and the Kêrŷkes were the principal hereditary functionaries: Eumolpus, the eponym of this great family, came thus to play the principal part in the Athenian legendary version of the war between Athens and Eleusis. An oracle had pronounced that Athens could only be rescued from his attack by the death of the three daughters of Erechtheus; their generous patriotism consented to the sacrifice, and their father put them to death. He then went forth confidently to the battle, totally vanquished the enemy, and killed Eumolpus with his own hand.[481] Erechtheus was worshipped as a god, and his daughters as goddesses, at Athens.[482] Their names and their exalted devotion were cited along with those of the warriors of Marathôn, in the public assembly of Athens, by orators who sought to arouse the languid patriot, or to denounce the cowardly deserter; and the people listened both to one and the other with analogous feelings of grateful veneration, as well as with equally unsuspecting faith in the matter of fact.[483]
Though Erechtheus gained the victory over Eumolpus, yet the story represents Poseidôn as having put an end to the life and reign of Erechtheus, who was (it seems) slain in the battle. He was succeeded by his son Kekrops II., and the latter again by his son Pandiôn II.,[484]—two names unmarked by any incidents, and which appear to be mere duplication of the former Kekrops and Pandiôn, placed there by the genealogizers for the purpose of filling up what seemed to them a chronological chasm. The Attic legends were associated chiefly with a few names of respected eponymous personages; and if the persons called the children of Pandiôn were too numerous to admit of their being conveniently ascribed to one father, there was no difficulty in supposing a second prince of the same name.
Apollodôrus passes at once from Erechtheus to his son Kekrops II., then to Pandiôn II., next to the four sons of the latter, Ægeus, Pallas, Nisus and Lykus. But the tragedians here insert the story of Xuthus, Kreüsa and Iôn; the latter being the son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but given by the god to Xuthus, and adopted by the latter as his own. Iôn becomes the successor of Erechtheus, and his sons Teleon, Hoplês, Argadês and Aigikorês become the eponyms of the four ancient tribes of Athens, which subsisted until the revolution of Kleisthenês. Iôn himself is the eponym of the Iônic race both in Asia, in Europe, and in the Ægean islands: Dôrus and Achæus are the sons of Kreüsa by Xuthus, so that Iôn is distinguished from both of them by being of divine parentage.[485] According to the story given by Philochorus, Iôn rendered such essential service in rescuing the Athenians from the attack of the Thracians under Eumolpus, that he was afterwards made king of the country, and distributed all the inhabitants into four tribes or castes, corresponding to different modes of life,—soldiers, husbandmen, goatherds, and artisans.[486] And it seems that the legend explanatory of the origin of the festival Boëdromia, originally important enough to furnish a name to one of the Athenian months, was attached to the aid thus rendered by Iôn.[487]
We pass from Iôn to persons of far greater mythical dignity and interest,—Ægeus and his son Thêseus.
Pandiôn had four sons, Ægeus, Nisus, Lykus, and Pallas, between whom he divided his dominions. Nisus received the territory of Megaris, which had been under the sway of Pandiôn, and there founded the seaport of Nisæa. Lykus was made king of the eastern coast, but a dispute afterwards ensued, and he quitted the country altogether, to establish himself on the southern coast of Asia Minor among the Termilæ, to whom he gave the name of Lykians.[488] Ægeus, as the eldest of the four, became king of Athens; but Pallas received a portion both of the south-western coast and the interior, and he as well as his children appear as frequent enemies both to Ægeus and to Thêseus. Pallas is the eponym of the dême Pallênê, and the stories respecting him and his sons seem to be connected with old and standing feuds among the different dêmes of Attica, originally independent communities. These feuds penetrated into the legend, and explain the story which we find that Ægeus and Thêseus were not genuine Erechtheids, the former being denominated a supposititious child to Pandiôn.[489]
Ægeus[490] has little importance in the mythical history except as the father of Thêseus: it may even be doubted whether his name is anything more than a mere cognomen of the god Poseidôn, who was (as we are told) the real father of this great Attic Hêraklês. As I pretend only to give a very brief outline of the general territory of Grecian legend, I cannot permit myself to recount in detail the chivalrous career of Thêseus, who is found both in the Kalydônian boar-hunt and in the Argonautic expedition—his personal and victorious encounters with the robbers Sinnis, Procrustês, Periphêtês, Scirôn and others—his valuable service in ridding his country of the Krommyonian sow and the Marathônian bull—his conquest of the Minotaur in Krête, and his escape from the dangers of the labyrinth by the aid of Ariadnê, whom he subsequently carries off and abandons—his many amorous adventures, and his expeditions both against the Amazons and into the under-world along with Peirithous.[491]
Thucydidês delineates the character of Thêseus as a man who combined sagacity with political power, and who conferred upon his country the inestimable benefit of uniting all the separate and self-governing dêmes of Attica into one common political society.[492] From the well-earned reverence attached to the assertion of Thucydidês, it has been customary to reason upon this assertion as if it were historically authentic, and to treat the romantic attributes which we find in Plutarch and Diodôrus as if they were fiction superinduced upon this basis of fact. Such a view of the case is in my judgment erroneous. The athletic and amorous knight-errant is the old version of the character—the profound and long-sighted politician is a subsequent correction, introduced indeed by men of superior mind, but destitute of historical warranty, and arising out of their desire to find reasons of their own for concurring in the veneration which the general public paid more easily and heartily to their national hero. Thêseus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, fights with the Lapithæ against the Centaurs: Thêseus, in the Hesiodic poems, is misguided by his passion for the beautiful Æglê, daughter of Panopeus:[493] and the Thêseus described in Plutarch’s biography is in great part a continuation and expansion of these same or similar attributes, mingled with many local legends, explaining, like the Fasti of Ovid, or the lost Aitia of Kallimachus, the original genesis of prevalent religious and social customs.[494] Plutarch has doubtless greatly softened down and modified the adventures which he found in the Attic logographers as well as in the poetical epics called Thêsêis. For in his preface to the life of Thêseus, after having emphatically declared that he is about to transcend the boundary both of the known and the knowable, but that the temptation of comparing the founder of Athens with the founder of Rome is irresistible, he concludes with the following remarkable words: “I pray that this fabulous matter may be so far obedient to my endeavors as to receive, when purified by reason, the aspect of history: in those cases where it haughtily scorns plausibility and will admit no alliance with what is probable, I shall beg for indulgent hearers, willing to receive antique narrative in a mild spirit.”[495] We see here that Plutarch sat down, not to recount the old fables as he found them, but to purify them by reason and to impart to them the aspect of history. We have to thank him for having retained, after this purification, so much of what is romantic and marvellous; but we may be sure that the sources from which he borrowed were more romantic and marvellous still. It was the tendency of the enlightened men of Athens, from the days of Solôn downwards, to refine and politicize the character of Thêseus:[496] even Peisistratus expunged from one of the Hesiodic poems the line which described the violent passion of the hero for the fair Æglê:[497] and the tragic poets found it more congenial to the feelings of their audience to exhibit him as a dignified and liberal sovereign, rather than as an adventurous single-handed fighter. But the logographers and the Alexandrine poets remained more faithful to the old fables. The story of Hekalê, the hospitable old woman who received and blessed Thêseus when he went against the Marathônian bull, and whom he found dead when he came back to recount the news of his success, was treated by Kallimachus:[498] and Virgil must have had his mind full of the unrefined legends when he numbered this Attic Hêraklês among the unhappy sufferers condemned to endless penance in the under-world.[499]
Two however among the Thêseian fables cannot be dismissed without some special notice,—the war against the Amazons, and the expedition against Krête. The former strikingly illustrates the facility as well as the tenacity of Grecian legendary faith; the latter embraces the story of Dædalus and Minos, two of the most eminent among Grecian ante-historical personages.
The Amazons, daughters of Arês and Harmonia,[500] are both early creations and frequent reproductions of the ancient epic—which was indeed, we may generally remark, largely occupied both with the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and daughters of the Grecian heroes—and which recognized in Pallas Athênê the finished type of an irresistible female warrior. A nation of courageous, hardy and indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men, permitting only a short temporary intercourse for the purpose of renovating their numbers, and burning out their right breast with a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely,—this was at once a general type stimulating to the fancy of the poet and a theme eminently popular with his hearers. Nor was it at all repugnant to the faith of the latter—who had no recorded facts to guide them, and no other standard of credibility as to the past except such poetical narratives themselves—to conceive communities of Amazons as having actually existed in anterior time. Accordingly we find these warlike females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally accepted as past realities. In the Iliad, when Priam wishes to illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phyrgia, on the banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable Amazons. When Bellerophôn is to be employed on a deadly and perilous undertaking,[501] by those who indirectly wish to procure his death, he is despatched against the Amazons. In the Æthiopis of Arktinus, describing the post-Homeric war of Troy, Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons, appears as the most effective ally of the besieged city, and as the most formidable enemy of the Greeks, succumbing only to the invincible might of Achilles.[502] The Argonautic heroes find the Amazons on the river Thermôdon, in their expedition along the southern coast of the Euxine. To the same spot Hêraclês goes to attack them, in the performance of the ninth labor imposed upon him by Eurystheus, for the purpose of procuring the girdle of the Amazonian queen, Hippolytê;[503] and we are told that they had not yet recovered from the losses sustained in this severe aggression when Thêseus also assaulted and defeated them, carrying off their queen, Antiopê.[504] This injury they avenged by invading Attica,—an undertaking (as Plutarch justly observes) “neither trifling nor feminine,” especially if according to the statement of Hellanikus, they crossed the Cimmerian Bosporus on the winter ice, beginning their march from the Asiatic side of the Paulus Mæotis.[505] They overcame all the resistances and difficulties of this prodigious march, and penetrated even into Athens itself, where the final battle, hard-fought and at one time doubtful, by which Theseus crushed them, was fought—in the very heart of the city. Attic antiquaries confidently pointed out the exact position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons rested upon the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the Amazoneion; the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held. The details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the final triumph and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as complete faith and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Platæa by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb or pillar of Antiopê near the western gate of the city—the spot called the Horkomosion near the temple of Thêseus—even the hill of Areiopagus itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the Amazons at the periodical festival of the Thêseia—were all so many religious mementos of this victory;[506] which was moreover a favorite subject of art both with the sculptor and the painter, at Athens as well as in other parts of Greece.
No portion of the ante-historical epic appears to have been more deeply worked into the national mind of Greece than this invasion and defeat of the Amazons. It was not only a constant theme of the logographers, but was also familiarly appealed to by the popular orators along with Marathôn and Salamis, among those antique exploits of which their fellow-citizens might justly be proud. It formed a part of the retrospective faith of Herodotus, Lysias, Plato and Isokratês,[507] and the exact date of the event was settled by the chronologists.[508] Nor did the Athenians stand alone in such a belief. Throughout many other regions of Greece, both European and Asiatic, traditions and memorials of the Amazons were found. At Megara, at Trœzen, in Laconia near Cape Tænarus, at Chæroneia in Bœôtia, and in more than one part of Thessaly, sepulchres or monuments of the Amazons were preserved. The warlike women (it was said), on their way to Attica, had not traversed those countries, without leaving some evidences of their passage.[509]
Amongst the Asiatic Greeks the supposed traces of the Amazons were yet more numerous. Their proper territory was asserted to be the town and plain of Themiskyra, near the Grecian colony of Amisus, on the river Thermôdôn, a region called, after their name by Roman historians and geographers.[510] But they were believed to have conquered and occupied in early times a much wider range of territory, extending even to the coast of Iônia and Æolis. Ephesus, Smyrna, Kymê, Myrina, Paphos and Sinopê were affirmed to have been founded and denominated by them.[511] Some authors placed them in Libya or Ethiopia; and when the Pontic Greeks on the north-western shore of the Euxine had become acquainted with the hardy and daring character of the Sarmatian maidens,—who were obliged to have slain each an enemy in battle as the condition of obtaining a husband, and who artificially prevented the growth of the right breast during childhood,—they could imagine no more satisfactory mode of accounting for such attributes than by deducing the Sarmatians from a colony of vagrant Amazons, expelled by the Grecian heroes from their territory on the Thermôdôn.[512] Pindar ascribed the first establishment of the memorable temple of Artemis at Ephesus to the Amazons. And Pausanias explains in part the preëminence which this temple enjoyed over every other in Greece by the widely diffused renown of its female founders,[513] respecting whom he observes (with perfect truth, if we admit the historical character of the old epic), that women possess an unparalleled force of resolution in resisting adverse events, since the Amazons, after having been first roughly handled by Hêraklês and then completely defeated by Thêseus, could yet find courage to play so conspicuous a part in the defence of Troy against the Grecian besiegers.[514]
It is thus that in what is called early Grecian history, as the Greeks themselves looked back upon it, the Amazons were among the most prominent and undisputed personages. Nor will the circumstance appear wonderful if we reflect, that the belief in them was first established at a time when the Grecian mind was fed with nothing else but religious legend and epic poetry, and that the incidents of the supposed past, as received from these sources, were addressed to their faith and feelings, without being required to adapt themselves to any canons of credibility drawn from present experience. But the time came when the historians of Alexander the Great audaciously abused this ancient credence. Amongst other tales calculated to exalt the dignity of that monarch, they affirmed that after his conquest and subjugation of the Persian empire, he had been visited in Hyrcania by Thalestris, queen of the Amazons, who admiring his warlike prowess, was anxious to be enabled to return into her own country in a condition to produce offspring of a breed so invincible.[515] But the Greeks had now been accustomed for a century and a half to historical and philosophical criticism—and that uninquiring faith, which was readily accorded to the wonders of the past, could no longer be invoked for them when tendered as present reality. For the fable of the Amazons was here reproduced in its naked simplicity, without being rationalized or painted over with historical colors.
Some literary men indeed, among whom were Dêmêtrius of Skepsis, and the Mitylenæan Theophanês, the companion of Pompey in his expeditions, still continued their belief both in Amazons present and Amazons past; and when it becomes notorious that at least there were none such on the banks of the Thermôdôn, these authors supposed them to have migrated from their original locality, and to have settled in the unvisited regions north of Mount Caucasus.[516] Strabo, on the contrary, feeling that the grounds of disbelief applied with equal force to the ancient stories and to the modern, rejected both the one and the other. But he remarks at the same time, not without some surprise, that it was usual with most persons to adopt a middle course,—to retain the Amazons as historical phænomena of the remote past, but to disallow them as realities of the present, and to maintain that the breed had died out.[517] The accomplished intellect of Julius Cæsar did not scruple to acknowledge them as having once conquered and held in dominion a large portion of Asia;[518] and the compromise between early, traditional, and religious faith on the one hand, and established habits of critical research on the other, adopted by the historian Arrian, deserves to be transcribed in his own words, as illustrating strikingly the powerful sway of the old legends even over the most positive-minded Greeks:—“Neither Aristobulus nor Ptolemy (he observes), nor any other competent witness, has recounted this (visit of the Amazons and their queen to Alexander): nor does it seem to me that the race of the Amazons was preserved down to that time, nor have they been noticed either by any one before Alexander, or by Xenophôn, though he mentions both the Phasians and the Kolchians, and the other barbarous nations which the Greeks saw both before and after their arrival at Trapezus, in which marches they must have met with the Amazons, if the latter had been still in existence. Yet it is incredible to me that this race of women, celebrated as they have been by authors so many and so commanding, should never have existed at all. The story tells of Hêraklês, that he set out from Greece and brought back with him the girdle of their queen Hippolytê; also of Thêseus and the Athenians, that they were the first who defeated in battle and repelled these women in their invasion of Europe; and the combat of the Athenians with the Amazons has been painted by Mikôn, not less than that between the Athenians and the Persians. Moreover Herodotus has spoken in many places of these women, and those Athenian orators who have pronounced panegyrics on the citizens slain in battle, have dwelt upon the victory over the Amazons as among the most memorable of Athenian exploits. If the satrap of Media sent any equestrian women at all to Alexander, I think that they must have come from some of the neighboring tribes, practised in riding and equipped in the costume generally called Amazonian.”[519]
There cannot be a more striking evidence of the indelible force with which these ancient legends were worked into the national faith and feelings of the Greeks, than these remarks of a judicious historian upon the fable of the Amazons. Probably if any plausible mode of rationalizing it, and of transforming it into a quasi-political event, had been offered to Arrian, he would have been better pleased to adopt such a middle term, and would have rested comfortably in the supposition that he believed the legend in its true meaning, while his less inquiring countrymen were imposed upon by the exaggerations of poets. But as the story was presented to him plain and unvarnished, either for acceptance or rejection, his feelings as a patriot and a religious man prevented him from applying to the past such tests of credibility as his untrammelled reason acknowledged to be paramount in regard to the present. When we see moreover how much his belief was strengthened, and all tendency to scepticism shut out by the familiarity of his eye and memory with sculptured or painted Amazons[520]—we may calculate the irresistible force of this sensible demonstration on the convictions of the unlettered public, at once more deeply retentive of passive impressions, and unaccustomed to the countervailing habit of rational investigation into evidence. Had the march of an army of warlike women, from the Thermôdôn or the Tanais into the heart of Attica, been recounted to Arrian as an incident belonging to the time of Alexander the Great, he would have rejected it no less emphatically than Strabô; but cast back as it was into an undefined past, it took rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic antiquity,—gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument.[521]
CHAPTER XII.
KRETAN LEGENDS.—MINOS AND HIS FAMILY.
To understand the adventures of Thêseus in Krête, it will be necessary to touch briefly upon Minôs and the Krêtan heroic genealogy.
Minôs and Rhadamanthus, according to Homer, are sons of Zeus, by Europê,[522] daughter of the widely-celebrated Phœnix, born in Krête. Minôs is the father of Deukaliôn, whose son Idomeneus, in conjunction with Mêrionês, conducts the Krêtan troops to the host of Agamemnôn before Troy. Minôs is ruler of Knossus, and familiar companion of the great Zeus. He is spoken of as holding guardianship in Krête—not necessarily meaning the whole of the island: he is farther decorated with a golden sceptre, and constituted judge over the dead in the under-world to settle their disputes, in which function Odysseus finds him—this however by a passage of comparatively late interpolation into the Odyssey. He also had a daughter named Ariadnê, for whom the artist Dædalus fabricated in the town of Knossus the representation of a complicated dance, and who was ultimately carried off by Thêseus: she died in the island of Dia, deserted by Thêseus and betrayed by Dionysos to the fatal wrath of Artemis. Rhadamanthus seems to approach to Minôs both in judicial functions and posthumous dignity. He is conveyed expressly to Eubœa, by the semi-divine sea-carriers the Phæacians, to inspect the gigantic corpse of the earth-born Tityus—the longest voyage they ever undertook. He is moreover after death promoted to an abode of undisturbed bliss in the Elysian plain at the extremity of the earth.[523]
According to poets later than Homer, Europê is brought over by Zeus from Phœnicia to Krête, where she bears to him three sons, Minôs, Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. The latter leaves Krête and settles in Lykia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions of Asia Minor, is connected by various mythical genealogies with Krête, though the Sarpêdôn of the Iliad has no connection with Krête, and is not the son of Europê. Sarpêdôn having become king of Lykia, was favored by his father, Zeus, with permission to live for three generations.[524] At the same time the youthful Milêtus, a favorite of Sarpêdôn, quitted Krête, and established the city which bore his name on the coast of Asia Minor. Rhadamanthus became sovereign of and lawgiver among the islands in the Ægean: he subsequently went to Bœôtia, where he married the widowed Alkmênê, mother of Hêraklês.
Europê finds in Krête a king Astêrius, who marries her and adopts her children by Zeus: this Astêrius is the son of Krês, the eponym of the island, or (according to another genealogy by which it was attempted to be made out that Minôs was of Dôrian race) he was a son of the daughter of Krês by Tektamus, the son of Dôrus, who had migrated into the island from Greece.
Minôs married Pasiphaê, daughter of the god Hêlios and Perseïs, by whom he had Katreus, Deukaliôn, Glaukus, Androgeos, names marked in the legendary narrative,—together with several daughters, among whom were Ariadnê and Phædra. He offended Poseidôn by neglecting to fulfil a solemnly-made vow, and the displeased god afflicted his wife Pasiphaê with a monstrous passion for a bull. The great artist Dædalus, son of Eupalamus, a fugitive from Athens, became the confidant of this amour, from which sprang the Minôtaur, a creature half man and half bull.[525] This Minôtaur was imprisoned by Minôs in the labyrinth, an inextricable inclosure constructed by Dædalus for that express purpose, by order of Minôs.
Minôs acquired great nautical power, and expelled the Karian inhabitants from many of the islands of the Ægean, which he placed under the government of his sons on the footing of tributaries. He undertook several expeditions against various places on the coast—one against Nisus, the son of Pandiôn, king of Megara, who had amongst the hair of his head one peculiar lock of a purple color: an oracle had pronounced that his life and reign would never be in danger so long as he preserved this precious lock. The city would have remained inexpugnable, if Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, had not conceived a violent passion for Minôs. While her father was asleep, she cut off the lock on which his safety hung, so that the Krêtan king soon became victorious. Instead of performing his promise to carry Scylla away with him to Krête, he cast her from the stern of his vessel into the sea:[526] both Scylla and Nisus were changed into birds.
Androgeos, son of Minôs having displayed such rare qualities as to vanquish all his competitors at the Panathenaic festival in Athens, was sent by Ægeus the Athenian king to contend against the bull of Marathôn,—an enterprise in which he perished, and Minôs made war upon Athens to avenge his death. He was for a long time unable to take the city: at length he prayed to his father Zeus to aid him in obtaining redress from the Athenians, and Zeus sent upon them pestilence and famine. In vain did they endeavor to avert these calamities by offering up as propitiatory sacrifices the four daughters of Hyacinthus. Their sufferings still continued, and the oracle directed them to submit to any terms which Minôs might exact. He required that they should send to Krête a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, periodically, to be devoured by the Minôtaur,[527]—offered to him in a labyrinth constructed by Dædalus, including countless different passages, out of which no person could escape.
Every ninth year this offering was to be despatched. The more common story was, that the youths and maidens thus destined to destruction were selected by lot—but the logographer Hellanikus said that Minôs came to Athens and chose them himself.[528] The third period for despatching the victims had arrived, and Athens was plunged in the deepest affliction, when Thêseus determined to devote himself as one of them, and either to terminate the sanguinary tribute or to perish. He prayed to Poseidôn for help, and the Delphian god assured him that Aphroditê would sustain and extricate him. On arriving at Knossus he was fortunate enough to captivate the affections of Ariadnê, the daughter of Minôs, who supplied him with a sword and a clue of thread. With the former he contrived to kill the Minôtaur, the latter served to guide his footsteps in escaping from the labyrinth. Having accomplished this triumph, he left Krête with his ship and companions unhurt, carrying off Ariadnê, whom however he soon abandoned on the island of Naxos. On his way home to Athens, he stopped at Dêlos, where he offered a grateful sacrifice to Apollo for his escape, and danced along with the young men and maidens whom he had rescued from the Minôtaur, a dance called the Geranus, imitated from the twists and convolutions of the Krêtan labyrinth. It had been concerted with his father Ægeus, that if he succeeded in his enterprise against the Minôtaur, he should on his return hoist white sails in his ship in place of the black canvas which she habitually carried when employed on this mournful embassy. But Thêseus forgot to make the change of sails; so that Ægeus, seeing the ship return with her equipment of mourning unaltered, was impressed with the sorrowful conviction that his son had perished, and cast himself into the sea. The ship which made this voyage was preserved by the Athenians with careful solicitude, being constantly repaired with new timbers, down to the time of the Phalerian Dêmêtrius: every year she was sent from Athens to Dêlos with a solemn sacrifice and specially-nominated envoys. The priest of Apollo decked her stern with garlands before she quitted the port, and during the time which elapsed until her return, the city was understood to abstain from all acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was unlawful to put to death any person even under formal sentence by the dikastery. This accidental circumstance becomes especially memorable, from its having postponed for thirty days the death of the lamented Socratês.[529]
The legend respecting Thêseus, and his heroic rescue of the seven noble youths and maidens from the jaws of the Minôtaur, was thus both commemorated and certified to the Athenian public, by the annual holy ceremony and by the unquestioned identity of the vessel employed in it. There were indeed many varieties in the mode of narrating the incident; and some of the Attic logographers tried to rationalize the fable by transforming the Minôtaur into a general or a powerful athlete, named Taurus, whom Thêseus vanquished in Krête.[530] But this altered version never overbore the old fanciful character of the tale as maintained by the poets. A great number of other religious ceremonies and customs, as well as several chapels or sacred enclosures in honor of different heroes, were connected with different acts and special ordinances of Thêseus. To every Athênian who took part in the festivals of the Oschophoria, the Pyanepsia, or the Kybernêsia, the name of this great hero was familiar, and the motives for offering to him solemn worship at his own special festival of the Thêseia, became evident and impressive.
The same Athenian legends which ennobled and decorated the character of Thêseus, painted in repulsive colors the attributes of Minôs; and the traits of the old Homeric comrade of Zeus were buried under those of the conqueror and oppressor of Athens. His history like that of the other legendary personages of Greece, consists almost entirely of a string of family romances and tragedies. His son Katreus, father of Aëropê, wife of Atreus, was apprized by an oracle that he would perish by the hand of one of his own children: he accordingly sent them out of the island, and Althæmenês, his son, established himself in Rhodes. Katreus having become old, and fancying that he had outlived the warning of the oracle, went over to Rhodes to see Althæmenês. In an accidental dispute which arose between his attendants and the islanders, Althæmenês inadvertently took part and slew his father without knowing him. Glaukus, the youngest son of Minôs, pursuing a mouse, fell into a reservoir of honey and was drowned. No one knew what had become of him, and his father was inconsolable; at length the Argeian Polyeidus, a prophet wonderfully endowed by the gods, both discovered the boy and restored him to life, to the exceeding joy of Minôs.[531]
The latter at last found his death in an eager attempt to overtake and punish Dædalus. This great artist, the eponymous hero of the Attic gens or dême called the Dædalidæ, and the descendant of Erechtheus through Mêtion, had been tried at the tribunal of Areiopagus and banished for killing his nephew Talos, whose rapidly improving skill excited his envy.[532] He took refuge in Krête, where he acquired the confidence of Minôs, and was employed (as has been already mentioned) in constructing the labyrinth; subsequently however he fell under the displeasure of Minôs, and was confined as a close prisoner in the inextricable windings of his own edifice. His unrivalled skill and resource however did not forsake him. He manufactured wings both for himself and for his son Ikarus, with which they flew over the sea: the father arrived safely in Sicily at Kamikus, the residence of the Sikanian king Kokalus, but the son, disdaining paternal example and admonition, flew so high that his wings were melted by the sun and he fell into the sea, which from him was called the Ikarian sea.[533]
Dædalus remained for some time in Sicily, leaving in various parts of the island many prodigious evidences of mechanical and architectural skill.[534] At length Minôs bent upon regaining possession of his person, undertook an expedition against Kokalus with a numerous fleet and army. Kokalus affecting readiness to deliver up the fugitive, and receiving Minôs with apparent friendship, ordered a bath to be prepared for him by his three daughters, who, eager to protect Dædalus at any price, drowned the Krêtan king in the bath with hot water.[535] Many of the Krêtans who had accompanied him remained in Sicily and founded the town of Minoa, which they denominated after him. But not long afterwards Zeus roused all the inhabitants of Krête (except the towns of Polichna and Præsus) to undertake with one accord an expedition against Kamikus for the purpose of avenging the death of Minôs. They besieged Kamikus in vain for five years, until at last famine compelled them to return. On their way along the coast of Italy, in the Gulf of Tarentum, a terrible storm destroyed their fleet and obliged them to settle permanently in the country: they founded Hyria with other cities, and became Messapian Iapygians. Other settlers, for the most part Greeks, immigrated into Krête to the spots which this movement had left vacant, and in the second generation after Minôs occurred the Trojan war. The departed Minôs was exceedingly offended with the Krêtans for coöperating in avenging the injury to Menelaus, since the Greeks generally had lent no aid to the Krêtans in their expedition against the town of Kamikus. He sent upon Krête, after the return of Idomeneus from Troy, such terrible visitations of famine and pestilence, that the population again died out or expatriated, and was again renovated by fresh immigrations. The intolerable suffering[536] thus brought upon the Krêtans by the anger of Minôs, for having coöperated in the general Grecian aid to Menelaus, was urged by them to the Greeks as the reason why they could take no part in resisting the invasion of Xerxês; and it is even pretended that they were advised and encouraged to adopt this ground of excuse by the Delphian oracle.[537]
Such is the Minôs of the poets and logographers, with his legendary and romantic attributes: the familiar comrade of the great Zeus,—the judge among the dead in Hadês,—the husband of Pasiphaê, daughter of the god Hêlios,—the father of the goddess Ariadnê, as well as of Androgeos, who perishes and is worshipped at Athens,[538] and of the boy Glaukus, who is miraculously restored to life by a prophet,—the person beloved by Scylla, and the amorous pursuer of the nymph or goddess Britomartis,[539]—the proprietor of the Labyrinth and of the Minôtaur, and the exacter of a periodical tribute of youths and maidens from Athens as food for this monster,—lastly, the follower of the fugitive artist Dædalus to Kamikus, and the victim of the three ill-disposed daughters of Kokalus in a bath. With this strongly-marked portrait, the Minôs of Thucydidês and Aristotle has scarcely anything in common except the name. He is the first to acquire Thalassokraty, or command of the Ægean sea: he expels the Karian inhabitants from the Cyclades islands, and sends thither fresh colonists under his own sons; he puts down piracy, in order that he may receive his tribute regularly; lastly, he attempts to conquer Sicily, but fails in the enterprise and perishes.[540] Here we have conjectures, derived from the analogy of the Athenian maritime empire in the historical times, substituted in place of the fabulous incidents, and attached to the name of Minôs.
In the fable, a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens is paid to him periodically by the Athenians; in the historicized narrative this character of a tribute-collector is preserved, but the tribute is money collected from dependent islands;[541] and Aristotle points out to us how conveniently Krête is situated to exercise empire over the Ægean. The expedition against Kamikus, instead of being directed to the recovery of the fugitive Dædalus, is an attempt on the part of the great thalassokrat to conquer Sicily. Herodotus gives us generally the same view of the character of Minôs as a great maritime king, but his notice of the expedition against Kamikus includes the mention of Dædalus as the intended object of it.[542] Ephorus, while he described Minôs as a commanding and comprehensive lawgiver imposing his commands under the sanction of Zeus, represented him as the imitator of an earlier lawgiver named Rhadamanthus, and also as an immigrant into Krête from the Æolic Mount Ida, along with the priests or sacred companions of Zeus called the Idæi Dactyli. Aristotle too points him out as the author of the Syssitia, or public meals common in Krête as well as at Sparta,—other divergences in a new direction from the spirit of the old fables.[543]
The contradictory attributes ascribed to Minôs, together with the perplexities experienced by those who wished to introduce a regular chronological arrangement into these legendary events, has led both in ancient and in modern times to the supposition of two kings named Minôs, one the grandson of the other,—Minôs I., the son of Zeus, lawgiver and judge,—Minôs II., the thalassokrat,—a gratuitous conjecture, which, without solving the problem required, only adds one to the numerous artifices employed for imparting the semblance of history to the disparate matter of legend. The Krêtans were at all times, from Homer downward, expert and practised seamen. But that they were ever united under one government, or ever exercised maritime dominion in the Ægean is a fact which we are neither able to affirm nor to deny. The Odyssey, in so far as it justifies any inference at all, points against such a supposition, since it recognizes a great diversity both of inhabitants and of languages in the island, and designates Minôs as king specially of Knôssus: it refutes still more positively the idea that Minôs put down piracy, which the Homeric Krêtans as well as others continue to practise without scruple.
Herodotus, though he in some places speaks of Minôs as a person historically cognizable, yet in one passage severs him pointedly from the generation of man. The Samian despot “Polykratês (he tells us) was the first person who aspired to nautical dominion, excepting Minôs of Knôssus, and others before him (if any such there ever were) who may have ruled the sea; but Polykratês is the first of that which is called the generation of man who aspired with much chance of success to govern Iônia and the islands of the Ægean.”[544] Here we find it manifestly intimated that Minôs did not belong to the generation of man, and the tale given by the historian respecting the tremendous calamities which the wrath of the departed Minôs inflicted on Krête confirms the impression. The king of Knôssus is a god or a hero, but not a man; he belongs to legend, not to history. He is the son as well as the familiar companion of Zeus; he marries the daughter of Hêlios, and Ariadnê is numbered among his offspring. To this superhuman person are ascribed the oldest and most revered institutions of the island, religious and political, together with a period of supposed ante-historical dominion. That there is much of Krêtan religious ideas and practice embodied in the fables concerning Minôs can hardly be doubted: nor is it improbable that the tale of the youths and maidens sent from Athens may be based in some expiatory offerings rendered to a Krêtan divinity. The orgiastic worship of Zeus, solemnized by the armed priests with impassioned motions and violent excitement, was of ancient date in that island, as well as the connection with the worship of Apollo both at Delphi and at Dêlos. To analyze the fables and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic invention, and the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must forever remain indissolubly amalgamated as the poet originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his auditors. Hoeckh, in his instructive and learned collection of facts respecting ancient Krête, construes the mythical genealogy of Minôs to denote a combination of the orgiastic worship of Zeus, indigenous among the Eteokrêtes, with the worship of the moon imported from Phœnicia, and signified by the names Europê, Pasiphaê, and Ariadnê.[545] This is specious as a conjecture, but I do not venture to speak of it in terms of greater confidence.
From the connection of religious worship and legendary tales between Krête and various parts of Asia Minor,—the Trôad, the coast of Milêtus and Lykia, especially between Mount Ida in Krête and Mount Ida in Æôlis,—it seems reasonable to infer an ethnographical kindred or relationship between the inhabitants anterior to the period of Hellenic occupation. The tales of Krêtan settlement at Minoa and Engyiôn on the south-western coast of Sicily, and in Iapygia on the Gulf of Tarentum, conduct us to a similar presumption, though the want of evidence forbids our tracing it farther. In the time of Herodotus, the Eteokrêtes, or aboriginal inhabitants of the island, were confined to Polichna and Præsus; but in earlier times, prior to the encroachments of the Hellênes, they had occupied the larger portion, if not the whole of the island. Minôs was originally their hero, subsequently adopted by the immigrant Hellênes,—at least Herodotus considers him as barbarian, not Hellenic.[546]
CHAPTER XIII.
ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.
The ship Argô was the theme of many songs during the oldest periods of the Grecian epic, even earlier than the Odyssey. The king Æêtês, from whom she is departing, the hero Jasôn, who commands her, and the goddess Hêrê, who watches over him, enabling the Argô to traverse distances and to escape dangers which no ship had ever before encountered, are all circumstances briefly glanced at by Odysseus in his narrative to Alkinous. Moreover, Eunêus, the son of Jasôn and Hypsipylê, governs Lemnos during the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn, and carries on a friendly traffic with the Grecian camp, purchasing from them their Trojan prisoners.[547]
The legend of Halus in Achaia Phthiôtis, respecting the religious solemnities connected with the family of Athamas and Phryxus (related in a previous chapter), is also interwoven with the voyage of the Argonauts; and both the legend and the solemnities seem evidently of great antiquity. We know further, that the adventures of the Argô were narrated not only by Hesiod and in the Hesiodic poems, but also by Eumêlus and the author of the Naupactian verses—by the latter seemingly at considerable length.[548] But these poems are unfortunately lost, nor have we any means of determining what the original story was; for the narrative, as we have it, borrowed from later sources, is enlarged by local tales from the subsequent Greek colonies—Kyzikus, Heraklêia, Sinopê, and others.
Jasôn, commanded by Pelias to depart in quest of the golden fleece belonging to the speaking ram which had carried away Phryxus and Hellê, was encouraged by the oracle to invite the noblest youth of Greece to his aid, and fifty of the most distinguished amongst them obeyed the call. Hêraklês, Thêseus, Telamôn and Pêleus, Kastôr and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus—Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas—Meleager, Amphiaraus, Kêpheus, Laertês, Autolykus, Menœtius, Aktôr, Erginus, Euphêmus, Ankæus, Pœas, Periklymenus, Augeas, Eurytus, Admêtus, Akastus, Kæneus, Euryalus, Pêneleôs and Lêitus, Askalaphus and Ialmenus, were among them. Argus the son of Phryxus, directed by the promptings of Athênê, built the ship, inserting in the prow a piece of timber from the celebrated oak of Dodona, which was endued with the faculty of speech:[549] Tiphys was the steersman, Idmôn the son of Apollo and Mopsus accompanied them as prophets, while Orpheus came to amuse their weariness and reconcile their quarrels with his harp.[550]
First they touched at the island of Lêmnos, in which at that time there were no men; for the women, infuriated by jealousy and ill-treatment, had put to death their fathers, husbands and brothers. The Argonauts, after some difficulty, were received with friendship, and even admitted into the greatest intimacy. They staid some months, and the subsequent population of the island was the fruit of their visit. Hypsipylê, the queen of the island, bore to Jasôn two sons.[551]
They then proceeded onward along the coast of Thrace, up the Hellespont, to the southern coast of the Propontis, inhabited by the Doliones and their king Kyzikus. Here they were kindly entertained, but after their departure were driven back to the same spot by a storm; and as they landed in the dark, the inhabitants did not know them. A battle took place, in which the chief, Kyzikus, was killed by Jasôn; whereby much grief was occasioned as soon as the real facts became known. After Kyzikus had been interred with every demonstration of mourning and solemnity, the Argonauts proceeded along the coast of Mysia.[552] In this part of the voyage they left Hêraklês behind. For Hylas, his favorite youthful companion, had been stolen away by the nymphs of a fountain, and Hêraklês, wandering about in search of him, neglected to return. At last he sorrowfully retired, exacting hostages from the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Kius that they would persist in the search.[553]
They next stopped in the country of the Bebrykians, where the boxing contest took place between the king Amykus and the Argonaut Pollux:[554] they then proceeded onward to Bithynia, the residence of the blind prophet Phineus. His blindness had been inflicted by Poseidôn as a punishment for having communicated to Phryxus the way to Kolchis. The choice had been allowed to him between death and blindness, and he had preferred the latter.[555] He was also tormented by the harpies, winged monsters who came down from the clouds whenever his table was set, snatched the food from his lips and imparted to it a foul and unapproachable odor. In the midst of this misery, he hailed the Argonauts as his deliverers—his prophetic powers having enabled him to foresee their coming. The meal being prepared for him, the harpies approached as usual, but Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas, drove them away and pursued them. They put forth all their speed, and prayed to Zeus to be enabled to overtake the monsters; when Hermês appeared and directed them to desist, the harpies being forbidden further to molest Phineus,[556] and retiring again to their native cavern in Krête.[557]
Phineus, grateful for the relief afforded to him by the Argonauts, forewarned them of the dangers of their voyage and of the precautions necessary for their safety; and through his suggestions they were enabled to pass through the terrific rocks called Symplêgades. These were two rocks which alternately opened and shut, with a swift and violent collision, so that it was difficult even for a bird to fly through during the short interval. When the Argô arrived at the dangerous spot, Euphêmus let loose a dove. which flew through and just escaped with the loss of a few feathers of her tail. This was a signal to the Argonauts, according to the prediction of Phineus, that they might attempt the passage with confidence. Accordingly they rowed with all their might, and passed safely through: the closing rocks, held for a moment asunder by the powerful arms of Athênê just crushed the ornaments at the stern of their vessel. It had been decreed by the gods, that so soon as any ship once got through, the passage should forever afterwards be safe and easy to all. The rocks became fixed in their separate places, and never again closed.[558]
After again halting on the coast of the Mariandynians, where their steersman Tiphys died, as well as in the country of the Amazons, and after picking up the sons of Phryxus, who had been cast away by Poseidôn in their attempt to return from Kolchis to Greece, they arrived in safety at the river Phasis and the residence of Æêtês. In passing by Mount Caucasus, they saw the eagle which gnawed the liver of Prometheus nailed to the rock, and heard the groans of the sufferer himself. The sons of Phryxus were cordially welcomed by their mother Chalciopê.[559] Application was made to Æêtês, that he would grant to the Argonauts, heroes of divine parentage and sent forth by the mandate of the gods, possession of the golden fleece: their aid in return was proffered to him against any or all of his enemies. But the king was wroth, and peremptorily refused, except upon conditions which seemed impracticable.[560] Hêphæstos had given him two ferocious and untamable bulls, with brazen feet, which breathed fire from their nostrils: Jasôn was invited, as a proof both of his illustrious descent and of the sanction of the gods to his voyage, to harness these animals to the yoke, so as to plough a large field and sow it with dragon’s teeth.[561] Perilous as the condition was, each one of the heroes volunteered to make the attempt. Idmôn especially encouraged Jasôn to undertake it,[562] and the goddesses Hêrê and Aphroditê made straight the way for him.[563] Mêdea, the daughter of Æêtês and Eidyia, having seen the youthful hero in his interview with her father, had conceived towards him a passion which disposed her to employ every means for his salvation and success. She had received from Hekatê preëminent magical powers, and she prepared for Jasôn the powerful Prometheian unguent, extracted from an herb which had grown where the blood of Promêtheus dropped. The body of Jasôn having been thus pre-medicated, became invulnerable[564] either by fire or by warlike weapons. He undertook the enterprise, yoked the bulls without suffering injury, and ploughed the field: when he had sown the dragon’s teeth, armed men sprung out of the furrows. But he had been forewarned by Mêdea to cast a vast rock into the midst of them, upon which they began to fight with each other, so that he was easily enabled to subdue them all.[565]
The task prescribed had thus been triumphantly performed. Yet Æêtês not only refused to hand over the golden fleece, but even took measures for secretly destroying the Argonauts and burning their vessel. He designed to murder them during the night after a festal banquet; but Aphroditê, watchful for the safety of Jasôn,[566] inspired the Kolchian king at the critical moment with an irresistible inclination for his nuptial bed. While he slept, the wise Idmôn counselled the Argonauts to make their escape, and Mêdea agreed to accompany them.[567] She lulled to sleep by a magic potion the dragon who guarded the golden fleece, placed that much-desired prize on board the vessel, and accompanied Jasôn with his companions in their flight, carrying along with her the young Apsyrtus, her brother.[568]
Æêtês, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the stratagem of Mêdea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Æêtês on reaching the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped.[569] The spot on which the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi.[570] This fratricide of Mêdea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation of Zeus, that he condemned the Argô and her crew to a trying voyage, full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home. The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until its junction with the Nile,[571] they came down the Nile into Egypt, from whence they carried the Argô on their shoulders by a fatiguing land-journey to the lake Tritônis in Libya. Here they were rescued from the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god Tritôn, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphêmus a clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed by the flourishing and powerful city of Kyrênê,[572] whose princes the Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphêmus.
Refreshed by the hospitality of Tritôn, the Argonauts found themselves again on the waters of the Mediterranean in their way homeward. But before they arrived at Iôlkos they visited Circê, at the island of Ææa, where Mêdea was purified for the murder of Apsyrtus: they also stopped at Korkyra, then called Drepanê, where Alkinous received and protected them. The cave in that island where the marriage of Mêdea with Jasôn was consummated, was still shown in the time of the historian Timæus, as well as the altars to Apollo which she had erected, and the rites and sacrifices which she had first instituted.[573] After leaving Korkyra, the Argô was overtaken by a perilous storm near the island of Thêra. The heroes were saved from imminent peril by the supernatural aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an arrow which pierced the waves like a track of light, caused a new island suddenly to spring up in their track and present to them a port of refuge. The island was called Anaphê; and the grateful Argonauts established upon it an altar and sacrifices in honor of Apollo Æglêtês, which were ever afterwards continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating adventure.[574]
On approaching the coast of Krête, the Argonauts were prevented from landing by Talôs, a man of brass, fabricated by Hêphæstos, and presented by him to Minôs for the protection of the island.[575] This vigilant sentinel hurled against the approaching vessel fragments of rock, and menaced the heroes with destruction. But Mêdea deceived him by a stratagem and killed him; detecting and assailing the one vulnerable point in his body. The Argonauts were thus enabled to land and refresh themselves. They next proceeded onward to Ægina, where however they again experienced resistance before they could obtain water—then along the coast of Eubœa and Locris back to Iôlkos in the gulf of Pagasæ, the place from whence they had started. The proceedings of Pelias during their absence, and the signal revenge taken upon him by Mêdea after their return, have already been narrated in a preceding section.[576] The ship Argô herself, in which the chosen heroes of Greece had performed so long a voyage and braved so many dangers, was consecrated by Jasôn to Poseidôn at the isthmus of Corinth. According to another account, she was translated to the stars by Athênê, and became a constellation.[577]
Traces of the presence of the Argonauts were found not only in the regions which lay between Iôlkos and Kolchis, but also in the western portion of the Grecian world—distributed more or less over all the spots visited by Grecian mariners or settled by Grecian colonists, and scarcely less numerous than the wanderings of the dispersed Greeks and Trojans after the capture of Troy. The number of Jasonia, or temples for the heroic worship of Jasôn, was very great, from Abdêra in Thrace,[578] eastward along the coast of the Euxine, to Armenia and Media. The Argonauts had left their anchoring-stone on the coast of Bebrykia, near Kyzikus, and there it was preserved during the historical ages in the temple of the Jasonian Athênê.[579] They had founded the great temple of the Idæan mother on the mountain Dindymon, near Kyzikus, and the Hieron of Zeus Urios on the Asiatic point at the mouth of the Euxine, near which was also the harbor of Phryxus.[580] Idmôn, the prophet of the expedition, who was believed to have died of a wound by a wild boar on the Mariandynian coast, was worshipped by the inhabitants of the Pontic Hêrakleia with great solemnity, as their Heros Poliuchus, and that too by the special direction of the Delphian god. Autolykus, another companion of Jasôn, was worshipped as Œkist by the inhabitants of Sinopê. Moreover, the historians of Hêrakleia pointed out a temple of Hekatê in the neighboring country of Paphlagonia, first erected by Mêdea;[581] and the important town of Pantikapæon, on the European side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, ascribed its first settlement to a son of Æêtês.[582] When the returning ten thousand Greeks sailed along the coast, called the Jasonian shore, from Sinopê to Hêrakleia, they were told that the grandson of Æêtês was reigning king of the territory at the mouth of the Phasis, and the anchoring-places where the Argô had stopped were specially pointed out to them.[583] In the lofty regions of the Moschi, near Kolchis, stood the temple of Leukothea, founded by Phryxus, which remained both rich and respected down to the times of the kings of Pontus, and where it was an inviolable rule not to offer up a ram.[584] The town of Dioskurias, north of the river Phasis, was believed to have been hallowed by the presence of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô, and to have received from them its appellation.[585] Even the interior of Mêdea and Armenia was full of memorials of Jasôn and Mêdea and their son Mêdus, or of Armenus the son of Jasôn, from whom the Greeks deduced not only the name and foundation of the Medes and Armenians, but also the great operation of cutting a channel through the mountains for the efflux of the river Araxes, which they compared to that of the Peneius in Thessaly.[586] And the Roman general Pompey, after having completed the conquest and expulsion of Mithridatês, made long marches through Kolchis into the regions of Caucasus, for the express purpose of contemplating the spots which had been ennobled by the exploits of the Argonauts, the Dioskuri and Hêraklês.[587]
In the west, memorials either of the Argonauts or of the pursuing Kolchians were pointed out in Korkyra, in Krête, in Epirus near the Akrokeraunian mountains, in the islands called Apsyrtides near the Illyrian coast, at the bay of Caieta as well as at Poseidônia on the southern coast of Italy, in the island of Æthalia or Elba, and in Libya.[588]
Such is a brief outline of the Argonautic expedition, one of the most celebrated and widely-diffused among the ancient tales of Greece. Since so many able men have treated it as an undisputed reality, and even made it the pivot of systematic chronological calculations, I may here repeat the opinion long ago expressed by Heyne, and even indicated by Burmann, that the process of dissecting the story, in search of a basis of fact, is one altogether fruitless.[589] Not only are we unable to assign the date or identify the crew, or decipher the log-book, of the Argô, but we have no means of settling even the preliminary question, whether the voyage be matter of fact badly reported, or legend from the beginning. The widely-distant spots in which the monuments of the voyage were shown, no less than the incidents of the voyage itself, suggests no other parentage than epical fancy. The supernatural and the romantic not only constitute an inseparable portion of the narrative, but even embrace all the prominent and characteristic features; if they do not comprise the whole, and if there be intermingled along with them any sprinkling of historical or geographical fact,—a question to us indeterminable,—there is at least no solvent by which it can be disengaged, and no test by which it can be recognized. Wherever the Grecian mariner sailed, he carried his religious and patriotic mythes along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of the long wanderings of Jasôn, Odysseus, Perseus, Hêraklês, Dionysus, Triptolemus or Iô; it was pleasing to him in success, and consoling to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular with the seaman, than the history of the primæval ship Argô and her distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and especially the Tyndarids Kastôr and Pollux, the heavenly protectors invoked during storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argô in the minds of future comers or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.
The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown space in the same manner as with past and unrecorded time. They created a mythical geography for the former, and a mythical history for the latter. But there was this material difference between the two: that while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as authentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old mythes; and this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians and geographers of antiquity,—for it was painful to them to abandon any portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable basis of truth.
Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod, and the other Greek poets and logographers,—Erytheia, the garden of the Hesperides, the garden of Phœbus,[590] to which Boreas transported the Attic maiden Orithyia, the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, the Elysian plain,[591] the fleeting island of Æolus, Thrinakia, the country of the Æthiopians, the Læstrygones, the Kyklôpes, the Lotophagi, the Sirens, the Cimmerians and the Gorgons,[592] etc. These are places which (to use the expression of Pindar respecting the Hyperboreans) you cannot approach either by sea or by land:[593] the wings of the poet alone can carry you thither. They were not introduced into the Greek mind by incorrect geographical reports, but, on the contrary, had their origin in the legend, and passed from thence into the realities of geography,[594] which they contributed much to pervert and confuse. For the navigator or emigrant, starting with an unsuspicious faith in their real existence, looked out for them in his distant voyages, and constantly fancied that he had seen or heard of them, so as to be able to identify their exact situation. The most contradictory accounts indeed, as might be expected, were often given respecting the latitude and longitude of such fanciful spots, but this did not put an end to the general belief in their real existence.
In the present advanced state of geographical knowledge, the story of that man who after reading Gulliver’s Travels went to look in his map for Lilliput, appears an absurdity. But those who fixed the exact locality of the floating island of Æolus or the rocks of the Sirens did much the same,[595] and, with their ignorance of geography and imperfect appreciation of historical evidence, the error was hardly to be avoided. The ancient belief which fixed the Sirens on the islands of Sirenusæ off the coast of Naples—the Kyklôpes, Erytheia, and the Læstrygones in Sicily—the Lotophagi on the island of Mêninx[596] near the Lesser Syrtis—the Phæakians at Korkyra—and the goddess Circê at the promontory of Circeium—took its rise at a time when these regions were first Hellenized and comparatively little visited. Once embodied in the local legends, and attested by visible monuments and ceremonies, it continued for a long time unassailed; and Thucydidês seems to adopt it, in reference to Korkyra and Sicily before the Hellenic colonization, as matter of fact generally unquestionable,[597] though little avouched as to details. But when geographical knowledge became extended, and the criticism upon the ancient epic was more or less systematized by the literary men of Alexandria and Pergamus, it appeared to many of them impossible that Odysseus could have seen so many wonders, or undergone such monstrous dangers, within limits so narrow, and in the familiar track between the Nile and the Tiber. The scene of his weather-driven course was then shifted further westward. Many convincing evidences were discovered, especially by Asklepiadês of Myrlea, of his having visited various places in Ibêria:[598] several critics imagined that he had wandered about in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Strait of Gibraltar,[599] and they recognized a section of Lotophagi on the coast of Mauritania, over and above those who dwelt on the island of Mêninx.[600] On the other hand, Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus treated the places visited by Odysseus as altogether unreal, for which scepticism they incurred much reproach.[601]
The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed Geryôn with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the circumfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartêssus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gadês. But the historian Hekatæus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Hêraklês should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryôn to Eurystheus at Mykênæ, and he pronounced Geryôn to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Mykênæ (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian, who cites this passage from Hekatæus, concurs in the same view,—an illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.[602]
Both the track and the terminus of the Argonautic voyage appear in the most ancient epic as little within the conditions of reality, as the speaking timbers or the semi-divine crew of the vessel. In the Odyssey, Æêtês and Circê (Hesiod names Mêdea also) are brother and sister, offspring of Hêlios. The Ææan island, adjoining the circumfluous ocean, “where the house and dancing-ground of Eôs are situated, and where Hêlios rises,” is both the residence of Circê and of Æêtês, inasmuch as Odysseus, in returning from the former, follows the same course as the Argô had previously taken in returning from the latter.[603] Even in the conception of Mimnermus, about 600 B. C., Æa still retained its fabulous attributes in conjunction with the ocean and Hêlios, without having been yet identified with any known portion of the solid earth;[604] and it was justly remarked by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis in antiquity[605] (though Strabo vainly tries to refute him), that neither Homer nor Mimnermus designates Kolchis either as the residence of Æêtês, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But some of the poems ascribed to Eumêlus were the first which mentioned Æêtês and Kolchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian mythical genealogy.[606] These poems seem to have been composed subsequent to the foundation of Sinopê, and to the commencement of Grecian settlement on the Borysthenês, between the years 600 and 500 B. C. The Greek mariners who explored and colonized the southern coast of the Euxine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and its barbarous inhabitants: it was the easternmost point which Grecian navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained, and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus.[607] They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found “the house of Eôs (the morning) and the rising place of the sun,” and that the river Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct them to the circumfluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of Æa, and the fabulous and real title gradually became associated together into one compound appellation,—the Kolchian Æa, or Æa of Kolchis.[608] While Kolchis was thus entered on the map as a fit representative for the Homeric “house of the morning,” the narrow strait of the Thracian Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplêgades, or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argô had been the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Hêrakleia and Sinopê, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to give this direction to the voyage; so that in the time of Hekatæus it had become the established belief that the Argô had started from Iôlkos and gone to Kolchis.
Æêtês thus received his home from the legendary faith and fancy of the eastern Greek navigators: his sister Circê, originally his fellow-resident, was localized by the western. The Hesiodic and other poems, giving expression to the imaginative impulses of the inhabitants of Cumæ and other early Grecian settlers in Italy and Sicily,[609] had referred the wanderings of Odysseus to the western or Tyrrhenian sea, and had planted the Cyclôpes, the Læstrygones, the floating island of Æolus, the Lotophagi, the Phæacians, etc., about the coast of Sicily, Italy, Libya, and Korkyra. In this way the Ææan island,—the residence of Circê, and the extreme point of the wanderings of Odysseus, from whence he passes only to the ocean and into Hadês—came to be placed in the far west, while the Æa of Æêtês was in the far east,—not unlike our East and West Indies. The Homeric brother and sister were separated and sent to opposite extremities of the Grecian terrestrial horizon.[610]
The track from Iôlkos to Kolchis, however, though plausible as far as it went, did not realize all the conditions of the genuine fabulous voyage: it did not explain the evidences of the visit of these maritime heroes which were to be found in Libya, in Krêtê in Anaphê, in Korkyra, in the Adriatic Gulf, in Italy and in Æthalia. It became necessary to devise another route for them in their return, and the Hesiodic narrative was (as I have before observed), that they came back by the circumfluous ocean; first going up the river Phasis into the circumfluous ocean; following that deep and gentle stream until they entered the Nile, and came down its course to the coast of Libya. This seems also to have been the belief of Hekatæus.[611] But presently several Greeks (and Herodotus among them) began to discard the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, which had pervaded their old geographical and astronomical fables, and which explained the supposed easy communication between one extremity of the earth and another. Another idea was then started for the returning voyage of the Argonauts. It was supposed that the river Ister, or Danube, flowing from the Rhipæan mountains in the north-west of Europe, divided itself into two branches, one of which fell into the Euxine Sea, and the other into the Adriatic.
The Argonauts, fleeing from the pursuit of Æêtês, had been obliged to abandon their regular course homeward, and had gone from the Euxine Sea up the Ister; then passing down the other branch of that river, they had entered into the Adriatic, the Kolchian pursuers following them. Such is the story given by Apollônius Rhodius from Timagêtus, and accepted even by so able a geographer as Eratosthenês—who preceded him by one generation, and who, though sceptical in regard to the localities visited by Odysseus, seems to have been a firm believer in the reality of the Argonautic voyage.[612] Other historians again, among whom was Timæus, though they considered the ocean as an outer sea, and no longer admitted the existence of the old Homeric ocean-stream, yet imagined a story for the return-voyage of the Argonauts somewhat resembling the old tale of Hesiod and Hekatæus. They alleged that the Argô, after entering into the Palus Mæotis, had followed the upward course of the river Tanais; that she had then been carried overland and launched in a river which had its mouth in the ocean or great outer sea. When in the ocean, she had coasted along the north and west of Europe until she reached Gadês and the Strait of Gibraltar, where she entered into the Mediterranean, and there visited the many places specified in the fable. Of this long voyage, in the outer sea to the north and west of Europe, many traces were affirmed to exist along the coast of the ocean.[613] There was again a third version, according to which the Argonauts came back as they went, through the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont. In this way geographical plausibility was indeed maintained, but a large portion of the fabulous matter was thrown overboard.[614]
Such were the various attempts made to reconcile the Argonautic legend with enlarged geographical knowledge and improved historical criticism. The problem remained unsolved, but the faith in the legend did not the less continue. It was a faith originally generated at a time when the unassisted narrative of the inspired poet sufficed for the conviction of his hearers; it consecrated one among the capital exploits of that heroic and superhuman race, whom the Greek was accustomed at once to look back upon as his ancestors and to worship conjointly with his gods: it lay too deep in his mind either to require historical evidence for its support, or to be overthrown by geographical difficulties as they were then appreciated. Supposed traces of the past event, either preserved in the names of places, or embodied in standing religious customs with their explanatory comments, served as sufficient authentication in the eyes of the curious inquirer. And even men trained in a more severe school of criticism contented themselves with eliminating the palpable contradictions and softening down the supernatural and romantic events, so as to produce an Argonautic expedition of their own invention as the true and accredited history. Strabo, though he can neither overlook nor explain the geographical impossibilities of the narrative, supposes himself to have discovered the basis of actual fact, which the original poets had embellished or exaggerated. The golden fleece was typical of the great wealth of Kolchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by the rivers; and the voyage of Jasôn was in reality an expedition at the head of a considerable army, with which he plundered this wealthy country and made extensive conquests in the interior.[615] Strabo has nowhere laid down what he supposes to have been the exact measure and direction of Jasôn’s march, but he must have regarded it as very long, since he classes Jasôn with Dionysus and Hêraklês, and emphatically characterizes all the three as having traversed wider spaces of ground than any moderns could equal.[616] Such was the compromise which a mind like that of Strabo made with the ancient legends. He shaped or cut them down to the level of his own credence, and in this waste of historical criticism, without any positive evidence, he took to himself the credit of greater penetration than the literal believers, while he escaped the necessity of breaking formally with the bygone heroic world.
CHAPTER XIV.
LEGENDS OF THEBES.
The Bœôtians generally, throughout the historical age, though well endowed with bodily strength and courage,[617] are represented as proverbially deficient in intelligence, taste and fancy. But the legendary population of Thêbes, the Kadmeians, are rich in mythical antiquities, divine as well as heroic. Both Dionysus and Hêraklês recognize Thêbes as their natal city. Moreover, the two sieges of Thêbes by Adrastus, even taken apart from Kadmus, Antiopê, Amphiôn and Zethus, etc., are the most prominent and most characteristic exploits, next to the siege of Troy, of that preëxisting race of heroes who lived in the imagination of the historical Hellênes.
It is not Kadmus, but the brothers Amphiôn and Zethus, who are given to us in the Odyssey as the first founders of Thêbes and the first builders of its celebrated walls. They are the sons of Zeus by Antiopê, daughter of Asôpus. The scholiasts who desire to reconcile this tale with the more current account of the foundation of Thêbes by Kadmus, tell us that after the death of Amphiôn and Zethus, Eurymachus, the warlike king of the Phlegyæ, invaded and ruined the newly-settled town, so that Kadmus on arriving was obliged to re-found it.[618] But Apollodôrus, and seemingly the older logographers before him, placed Kadmus at the top, and inserted the two brothers at a lower point in the series. According to them, Bêlus and Agenôr were the sons of Epaphus, son of the Argeian Iô, by Libya. Agenôr went to Phœnicia and there became king: he had for his offspring Kadmus, Phœnix, Kilix, and a daughter Eurôpa; though in the Iliad Eurôpa is called daughter of Phœnix.[619] Zeus fell in love with Eurôpa, and assuming the shape of a bull, carried her across the sea upon his back from Egypt to Krête, where she bore to him Minôs, Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. Two out of the three sons sent out by Agenôr in search of their lost sister, wearied out by a long-protracted as well as fruitless voyage, abandoned the idea of returning home: Kilix settled in Kilikia, and Kadmus in Thrace.[620] Thasus, the brother or nephew of Kadmus, who had accompanied them in the voyage, settled and gave name to the island of Phasus.
Both Herodotus and Euripidês represent Kadmus as an emigrant from Phœnicia, conducting a body of followers in quest of Eurôpa. The account of Apollodôrus describes him as having come originally from Libya or Egypt to Phœnicia: we may presume that this was also the statement of the earlier logographers Pherekydês and Hellanikus. Conôn, who historicizes and politicizes the whole legend, seems to have found two different accounts; one connecting Kadmus with Egypt, another bringing him from Phœnicia. He tries to melt down the two into one, by representing that the Phœnicians, who sent out Kadmus, had acquired great power in Egypt—that the seat of their kingdom was the Egyptian Thêbes—that Kadmus was despatched, under pretence indeed of finding his lost sister, but really on a project of conquest—and that the name Thêbes, which he gave to his new establishment in Bœôtia, was borrowed from Thêbes in Egypt, his ancestorial seat.[621]
Kadmus went from Thrace to Delphi to procure information respecting his sister Eurôpa, but the god directed him to take no further trouble about her; he was to follow the guidance of a cow, and to found a city on the spot where the animal should lie down. The condition was realized on the site of Thêbes. The neighboring fountain Areia was guarded by a fierce dragon, the offspring of Arês, who destroyed all the persons sent to fetch water. Kadmus killed the dragon, and at the suggestion of Athênê sowed his teeth in the earth:[622] there sprang up at once the armed men called the Sparti, among whom he flung stones, and they immediately began to assault each other until all were slain except five. Arês, indignant at this slaughter, was about to kill Kadmus; but Zeus appeased him, condemning Kadmus to an expiatory servitude of eight years, after which he married Harmonia, the daughter of Arês and Aphroditê—presenting to her the splendid necklace fabricated by the hand of Hêphæstos, which had been given by Zeus to Eurôpa.[623] All the gods came to the Kadmeia, the citadel of Thêbes, to present congratulations and gifts at these nuptials, which seem to have been hardly less celebrated in the mythical world than those of Pêleus and Thetis. The issue of the marriage was one son, Polydôrus, and four daughters, Autonoê, Inô, Semelê and Agavê.[624]
From the five who alone survived of the warriors sprung from the dragon’s teeth, arose five great families or gentes in Thêbes; the oldest and noblest of its inhabitants, coeval with the foundation of the town. They were called Sparti, and their name seems to have given rise, not only to the fable of the sowing of the teeth, but also to other etymological narratives.[625]
All the four daughters of Kadmus are illustrious in fabulous history. Inô, wife of Athamas, the son of Æolus, has already been included among the legends of the Æolids. Semelê became the mistress of Zeus, and inspired Hêrê with jealousy. Misguided by the malicious suggestions of that goddess, she solicited Zeus to visit her with all the solemnity and terrors which surrounded him when he approached Hêrê herself. The god unwillingly consented, and came in his chariot in the midst of thunder and lightning, under which awful accompaniments the mortal frame of Semelê perished. Zeus, taking from her the child of which she was pregnant, sewed it into his own thigh: after the proper interval the child was brought out and born, and became the great god Dionysus or Bacchus. Hermês took him to Inô and Athamas to receive their protection. Afterwards, however, Zeus having transformed him into a kid to conceal him from the persecution of Hêrê, the nymphs of the mountain Nysa became his nurses.[626]
Autonoê, the third daughter of Kadmus, married the pastoral hero or god Aristæus, and was mother of Aktæôn, a devoted hunter and a favorite companion of the goddess Artemis. She however became displeased with him—either because he looked into a fountain while she was bathing and saw her naked—or according to the legend set forth by the poet Stesichorus, because he loved and courted Semelê—or according to Euripidês, because he presumptuously vaunted himself as her superior in the chase. She transformed him into a stag, so that his own dogs set upon and devoured him. The rock upon which Aktæôn used to sleep when fatigued with the chase, and the spring whose transparent waters had too clearly revealed the form of the goddess, were shown to Pausanias near Platæa, on the road to Megara.[627]
Agavê, the remaining daughter of Kadmus, married Echiôn, one of the Sparti. The issue of these nuptials was Pentheus, who, when Kadmus became old succeeded him as king of Thêbes. In his reign Dionysus appeared as a god, the author or discoverer of the vine with all its blessings. He had wandered over Asia, India and Thrace, at the head of an excited troop of female enthusiasts—communicating and inculcating everywhere the Bacchic ceremonies, and rousing in the minds of women that impassioned religious emotion which led them to ramble in solitary mountains at particular seasons, there to give vent to violent fanatical excitement, apart from the men, clothed in fawn-skins and armed with the thyrsus. The obtrusion of a male spectator upon these solemnities was esteemed sacrilegious. Though the rites had been rapidly disseminated and fervently welcomed in many parts of Thrace, yet there were some places in which they had been obstinately resisted and their votaries treated with rudeness; especially by Lykurgus, king of the Edonian Thracians, upon whom a sharp and exemplary punishment was inflicted by Dionysus.
Thêbes was the first city of Greece to which Dionysus came, at the head of his Asiatic troop of females, to obtain divine honors and to establish his peculiar rites in his native city. The venerable Kadmus, together with his daughters and the prophet Teiresias, at once acknowledged the divinity of the new god, and began to offer their worship and praise to him along with the solemnities which he enjoined. But Pentheus vehemently opposed the new ceremonies, reproving and maltreating the god who introduced them: nor was his unbelief at all softened by the miracles which Dionysus wrought for his own protection and for that of his followers. His mother Agavê, with her sisters, and a large body of other women from Thêbes, had gone out from Thêbes to Mount Kithærôn to celebrate their solemnities under the influence of the Bacchic frenzy. Thither Pentheus followed to watch them, and there the punishment due to his impiety overtook him. The avenging touch of the god having robbed him of his senses, he climbed a tall pine for the purpose of overlooking the feminine multitude, who detected him in this position, pulled down the tree, and tore him in pieces. Agavê, mad and bereft of consciousness, made herself the foremost in this assault, and carried back in triumph to Thêbes the head of her slaughtered son. The aged Kadmus, with his wife Harmonia, retired among the Illyrians, and at the end of their lives were changed into serpents, Zeus permitting them to be transferred to the Elysian fields.[628]
Polydôrus and Labdakus successively became kings of Thêbes: the latter at his death left an infant son, Laius, who was deprived of his throne by Lykus. And here we approach the legend of Antiopê, Zêthus and Amphiôn, whom the fabulists insert at this point of the Thêban series. Antiopê is here the daughter of Nykteus, the brother of Lykus. She is deflowered by Zeus, and then, while pregnant, flies to Epôpeus king of Sikyôn: Nykteus dying entreats his brother to avenge the injury, and Lykus accordingly invades Sikyôn, defeats and kills Epôpeus, and brings back Antiopê prisoner to Thêbes. In her way thither, in a cave near Eleutheræ, which was shown to Pausanias,[629] she is delivered of the twin sons of Zeus—Amphiôn and Zêthus—who, exposed to perish, are taken up and nourished by a shepherd, and pass their youth amidst herdsmen, ignorant of their lofty descent.
Antiopê is conveyed to Thêbes, where, after undergoing a long persecution from Lykus and his cruel wife Dirkê, she at length escapes, and takes refuge in the pastoral dwelling of her sons, now grown to manhood. Dirkê pursues and requires her to be delivered up; but the sons recognize and protect their mother, taking an ample revenge upon her persecutors. Lykus is slain, and Dirkê is dragged to death, tied to the horns of a bull.[630] Amphiôn and Zêthus, having banished Laius, become kings of Thêbes. The former, taught by Hermês, and possessing exquisite skill on the lyre, employs it in fortifying the city, the stones of the walls arranging themselves spontaneously in obedience to the rhythm of his song.[631]
Zêthus marries Aêdôn, who, in the dark and under a fatal mistake, kills her son Itylus: she is transformed into a nightingale, while Zêthus dies of grief.[632] Amphiôn becomes the husband of Niobê, daughter of Tantalus, and the father of a numerous offspring, the complete extinction of which by the hands of Apollo and Artemis has already been recounted in these pages.
Here ends the legend of the beautiful Antiopê and her twin sons—the rude and unpolished, but energetic, Zêthus—and the refined and amiable, but dreamy, Amphiôn. For so Euripidês, in the drama of Antiopê unfortunately lost, presented the two brothers, in affectionate union as well as in striking contrast.[633] It is evident that the whole story stood originally quite apart from the Kadmeian family, and so the rudiments of it yet stand in the Odyssey; but the logographers, by their ordinary connecting artifices, have opened a vacant place for it in the descending series of Thêban mythes. And they have here proceeded in a manner not usual with them. For whereas they are generally fond of multiplying entities, and supposing different historical personages of the same name, in order to introduce an apparent smoothness in the chronology—they have here blended into one person Amphiôn the son of Antiopê and Amphiôn the father of Chlôris, who seem clearly distinguished from each other in the Odyssey. They have further assigned to the same person all the circumstances of the legend of Niobê, which seems to have been originally framed quite apart from the sons of Antiopê.
Amphiôn and Zêthus being removed, Laius became king of Thêbes. With him commences the ever-celebrated series of adventures of Œdipus and his family. Laius forewarned by the oracle that any son whom he might beget would kill him, caused Œdipus as soon as he was born to be exposed on Mount Kithærôn. Here the herdsmen of Polybus king of Corinth accidentally found him and conveyed him to their master, who brought him up as his own child. In spite of the kindest treatment, however, Œdipus when he grew up found himself exposed to taunts on the score of his unknown parentage, and went to Delphi to inquire of the god the name of his real father. He received for answer an admonition not to go back to his country; if he did so, it was his destiny to kill his father and become the husband of his mother. Knowing no other country but Corinth, he accordingly determined to keep away from that city, and quitted Delphi by the road towards Bœôtia and Phôkis. At the exact spot where the roads leading to these two countries forked, he met Laius in a chariot drawn by mules, when the insolence of one of the attendants brought on an angry quarrel, in which Œdipus killed Laius, not knowing him to be his father. The exact place where this event happened, called the Divided Way[634], was memorable in the eyes of all literary Greeks, and is specially adverted to by Pausanias in his periegesis.
On the death of Laius, Kreôn, the brother of Jokasta, succeeded to the kingdom of Thêbes. At this time the country was under the displeasure of the gods, and was vexed by a terrible monster, with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a lion, called the Sphinx[635]—sent by the wrath of Hêrê and occupying the neighboring mountain of Phikium. The Sphinx had learned from the Muses a riddle, which she proposed to the Thêbans to resolve: on every occasion of failure she took away one of the citizens and ate him up. Still no person could solve the riddle; and so great was the suffering occasioned, that Kreôn was obliged to offer both the crown and the nuptials of his sister Jokasta to any one who could achieve the salvation of the city. At this juncture Œdipus arrived and solved the riddle: upon which the Sphinx immediately threw herself from the acropolis and disappeared. As a recompense for this service, Œdipus was made king of Thêbes, and married Jokasta, not aware that she was his mother.
These main tragical circumstances—that Œdipus had ignorantly killed his father and married his mother—belong to the oldest form of the legend as it stands in the Odyssey. The gods (it is added in that poem) quickly made the facts known to mankind. Epikasta (so Jokasta is here called) in an agony of sorrow hanged herself: Œdipus remained king of the Kadmeians, but underwent many and great miseries, such as the Erinnyes, who avenge an injured mother, inflict.[636] A passage in the Iliad implies that he died at Thêbes, since it mentions the funeral games which were celebrated there in honor of him. His misfortunes were recounted by Nestôr, in the old Cyprian verses, among the stories of aforetime.[637] A fatal curse hung both upon himself and upon his children, Eteoklês, Polynikês, Antigonê and Ismênê. According to that narrative which the Attic tragedians have rendered universally current, they were his children by Jokasta, the disclosure of her true relationship to him having been very long deferred. But the ancient epic called Œdipodia, treading more closely in the footsteps of Homer, represented him as having after her death married a second wife, Euryganeia, by whom the four children were born to him: and the painter Onatas adopted this story in preference to that of Sophoklês.[638]
The disputes of Eteoklês and Polynikês for the throne of their father gave occasion not only to a series of tragical family incidents, but also to one of the great quasi-historical events of legendary Greece—the two sieges of Thêbes by Adrastus, king of Argos. The two ancient epic poems called the Thêbaïs and the Epigoni (if indeed both were not parts of one very comprehensive poem) detailed these events at great length, and as it appears, with distinguished poetical merit; for Pausanias pronounces the Cyclic Thêbaïs (so it was called by the subsequent critics to distinguish it from the more modern Thêbaïs of Antimachus) inferior only to the Iliad and Odyssey; and the ancient elegiac poet Kallinus treated it as an Homeric composition.[639] Of this once-valued poem we unfortunately possess nothing but a few scanty fragments. The leading points of the legend are briefly glanced at in the Iliad; but our knowledge of the details is chiefly derived from the Attic tragedians, who transformed the narratives of their predecessors at pleasure, and whose popularity constantly eclipsed and obliterated the ancient version. Antimachus of Kolophôn, contemporary with Euripidês, in his long epic, probably took no less liberties with the old narrative. His Thêbaïd never became generally popular, but it exhibited marks of study and elaboration which recommended it to the esteem of the Alexandrine critics, and probably contributed to discredit in their eyes the old cyclic poem.
The logographers, who gave a continuous history of this siege of Thêbes, had at least three preëxisting epic poems—the Thêbaïs, the Œdipodia, and the Alkmæônis,—from which they could borrow. The subject was also handled in some of the Hesiodic poems, but we do not know to what extent.[640] The Thêbaïs was composed more in honor of Argos than of Thêbes, as the first line of it, one of the few fragments still preserved, betokens.[641]