In Homer, as in the earliest Chansons de Geste, there is the knightly poetic legend; and in the Cyclics, at least in the case of Thersites, there are the later expansions and continuations made under the influence of la manie cyclique. The dénouement of the Telegonia, the last of the Cyclics, is purely absurd. Telegonus marries his aged stepmother, Penelope, and Telemachus marries his father's mistress, Circe!
To explore the relations of Homer and of "saga" to Märchen, or popular tales, attached to real or fabulous heroes and heroines of the past, would require a volume.[37] Almost all Greek pseudo-historical tradition consists of a string of Märchen, known all over the world: any student of folk-lore who reads the Achaean legends in Grote can identify the masterless Märchen which have been attached to the heroic figures. In exactly the same way, Märchen are attached to Charlemagne in the Chansons de Geste; to Arthur in the romances; and we might as well look to them for political and personal history as to Homer. Naimes, Ganelon, Olivier, the expedition of Charlemagne to Constantinople, his wars with the Saracens, and other persons and events in the Chansons de Geste, yield no material to the historian; nor do Lancelot, Galahad, Palamedes, and Tristram, and Arthur's foreign conquests in the romances. What history there is rests obscure.
On the other hand, an attempt has recently been made to extract some grains of "tribal" history, before and after the Achaean migration to Asia, from the names of the heroes in the Iliad, and from the places where, in post-Homeric Greece, they received worship. This effort is made by Dr. Erich Bethe, in his Homer und die Heldensage, and Mr. Murray follows Bethe in The Rise of the Greek Epic. We may take a notable example of the method in the case of Hector. "Hector seems to belong to Boeotia." It may be worth while to examine the reasoning on which this most unexpected opinion is based. The idea was first propounded by Ferdinand Dümmler in a short Anhang to Studniczka's Cyrene. "Hector was worshipped as a hero in Boeotian Thebes," says Mr. Murray, quoting Dümmler, and Dümmler's source is apparently Pausanias.[38] If the Boeotians in the time of Pausanias regarded Hector as of Boeotian birth, the fact would be curious. But they did nothing of the kind. "The Thebans show the tomb of Hector near the Well of Oedipous. They say that Hector's remains were brought here from Ilium in accordance with the following oracle: "Ye Thebans, if you wish your country to be wealthy, bring to your city from Asia the bones of Hector the son of Priam, and respect the hero at the bidding of Zeus."[39]
This was a real or an imaginary case of the body-snatching of which Herodotus speaks frequently. The relics of St. Hector would be valuable to Thebes. The Thebans, in fact, may have wished to propitiate a hero who had slain, according to Homer, many Boeotians in battle, and who might still be hostile, and even fight against them in battle, as dead heroes were apt to do. Pausanias (ix. 4. 3, ix. 39. 3) mentions also the graves of certain Boeotian heroes, one of them wounded, the other slain by Hector, as still honoured in Boeotia. Hector slew, or wounded, or fought Homeric heroes from Phocis and from Boeotia; and Epeigeus, a suppliant of Peleus (Iliad, xvi. 570 et seqq.), and an Aetolian hero, an Athenian, a Mycenaean, an Elian, and so on. What follows? These names of heroes slain by Hector, Thessalians, Aetolians, Phocians, and Boeotians, are thought to suggest that, as Mr. Murray translates Dr. Bethe, "Hector, or rather the tribe which honoured Hector as their hero, migrated by this road,"—by the road on which these Aetolians, Thessalians, Phocians, and Boeotians—or the tribes which honoured them as heroes—used to live. "More accurately, the tribe gradually, in how many centuries none can tell, moved in a south-easterly direction, driven by a pressure which was no doubt exerted by the Aeolic tribe represented in the Epos by Achilles." "These are no pictures of phantasy that I let loose to play about here," says Dr. Bethe (p. 16).
What else but phantasies can we possibly call them? That Hector's tomb was shown in Thebes, does by no means prove that he, or a tribe which was the Hector tribe, once lived in Boeotia. Heroes, like saints, had tombs and chapels in many regions where they were not born, and which they never visited. The grave of St. James was shown—in Spain! Ariadne's ashes had been shown in Argos. Hector, in the Iliad, killed the men in his way. In addition to the victims chosen out by Dr. Bethe, he slew Stichios, an Athenian; Amphimachus, an Elian, and Periphetes of Mycenae.[40]
This does no more prove that Hector was a Boeotian than that he was an Athenian. He slew Schedios, a Phocian, yet he was no more a Phocian than an Athenian, he merely killed the men whom he met. If we are to argue, that he or the tribe which honoured him was driven out of Aetolia and Thessaly down to Boeotia, Phocis, and Attica, we must, by parity of reasoning, argue that the Hector tribe (in Gaelic, the MacEachans), were driven into Peloponnesus, to Mycenae and Elis, for Hector slew Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus, of Elis.[41] The Mycenaean, Elian, and Athenian are not mentioned by Dr. Bethe. Nor can Hector be converted into a Boeotian by the circumstance that he fought a kind of courteous duel with Aias, while Aias was really the Locrian Aias, we are told, and so a neighbour of the Boeotian Hector.[42] Hector's relations with Aias[43] are far from neighbourly and friendly.
This instance of Hector is one of many in which the names of heroes are taken to represent "tribes" which had a cult of these heroes, though Homer knows nothing about this cult as practised in heroic Greece, except in Athens. We learn nothing from Homer about "tribes" or clans with a sacred eponymous hero, or with any "hero" in the sense of the word as used in the Greece of history. We cannot assume that the Iliad introduces, in the combats of heroes, memories of tribal wars in Greece in the pre-Homeric age, and transfers them, in the shape of single combats, to the plain of Troy!
Heroic relationships were claimed long after Homer by peoples like the Dorians and Romans and English and many others, merely to connect themselves with the great legend of Troy; and the Greek cults of heroes, a religion unknown to Homer, were carried into regions with which Homer's men had no connection. We might as well look for Cymric tribal wars in the feuds and names of the knights in the Arthurian romances, or for Irish tribal feuds in the names of Ferdiad and Cuchullain, as for prehistoric migrations in the names of Hector, Leltus, Stichios of Attica, Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus of Elis.
"Hector," we are told, "was a great 'slayer of men,' and his victims in the Iliad make a sort of road from Thebes upward to the bounds of Achilles' region."[44] They also "make a sort of road" to Mycenae and Elis by way of Athens: that is the history of the tribe, preserved in the names of his victims,—names which, it appears, "are short" for defeated tribes. As for the evidence of a Helen tribe at Sparta, because Helen had a shrine and worship there, we have no evidence that the Achaeans had any heroic shrines or hero-worship,—the evidence is that they had none,—but the assumption is that Homer represents "another stream of history," and, apparently, that his people turned tribal names and tribal gods of an unknown past, into heroic men and women. The opposite theory is that the hero-worshipping people of historic Greece devoted themselves to such patron saints as they knew through Homer, as the Arabs have saints whom they know about through the Hebrew Scriptures.
I am not aware that in the bardic history, or "saga" of any people, tribes are spoken of under the names of their tribal heroes in such a way as to cause confusion. None is caused by Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, and so on in the Old Testament, but in other Biblical cases there may be trouble. Local tribes, as far as I am aware, are nowhere named by patronymics; certainly they are not in Australia, India, America, and Africa, except, among the Zulus, by the name of a man plus Ama, AmaFinn, and so forth. Thus the theory that Hector is the name of a prehistoric Boeotian local tribe seems to me fantastic. We might as well look for remnants of tribal history in Kay, Gawaine, Naimes, and Ganelon.