Again, look at the relation of Ἄργος to Ἀργεῖοι. What except a physical and geographical meaning, still adhering to the word, and holding it somewhat short of the mature and familiar use of a proper name, can account for the fact that we have in the history and geography of Greece so many cases of an Argos, without Argives, that is local or provincial Argives, belonging to it? Achaic Argos indeed has Ἀργεῖοι belonging to it, but Pelasgic and Iasian Argos have none. Just so we might speak of the Highlands of Saxony, or of the Lowlands of Switzerland; but the inhabitants of the first are not known as Highlanders, nor those of the latter as Lowlanders[664].
I believe there are no phrases, which more nearly translate the words Ἄργος and Ἀργεῖοι, than Lowlands and Lowlanders respectively. For the word Lowlands means land not only lying low, but both lying low, and also being favourable for cultivation: and these ideas more truly represent the land fitted for the sort of settlement called Ἄργος, than the mere idea of level plains.
If this be the idea of the word Argos, we see the propriety of its application to the city of Argos and its district. For this city stood, as a city of the town and more open country, in a certain opposition to Mycenæ, which nestled among the hills; and which bore geographically much the same relation to Argos, as Dardania to Ilion. It afterwards fell also into the same political analogy.
In the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, Homer deals with a case where, as it is sometimes applied without an epithet, Ἄργος may justly be called a proper name, like the European Pays-bas; but there is no evidence of this in his ‘Pelasgic Argos,’ and ‘Iasian Argos,’ and it seems likely that he rather intends in those phrases to employ the term Argos as a word simply descriptive, and to speak of the Pelasgian Lowlands, and the Iasian Lowlands. The difference of sense is just that which we should indicate in English by the absence of the capital letter.
There is evidence that the name had not exhausted its elasticity even after Homer’s time. In later ages we find an Argos of Orestis in Macedonia; an Argos of Amphilochia in Western Greece; an Argos near Larissa in Thessaly[665], and other cases more remote. Nothing but a geographical force still adhering to the word will account for this extension.
The same is the inference to be drawn from the epithets and quasi-epithets, or descriptive phrases, applied to it by Homer. With the exception of one passage, where he gives it the political epithet[666] κλυτὸν, they are all physical; being ἱππόβοτον, πολυδίψιον, πολύπυρον, and οὖθαρ ἀρούρης. Of these four epithets, the first is in Homer peculiarly connected with the specific form and character of the country: accordingly, while it is the standing epithet of Argos, being used with it eleven times out of only fifteen in which the word has any epithet or quasi-epithet attached to it, it is never found with Achæis, or with Hellas. And the proof of its physically descriptive character lies in the passage where Telemachus gives to Menelaus an account of Ithaca;
ἐν δ’ Ἰθάκῃ οὔτ’ ἀρ’ δρόμοι εὔρεες, οὔτε τι λείμων·
αἰγίβοτος, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος ἱπποβότοιο[667].
The ἱππόβοτος of Homer, again, does not point merely to fertility, but also to labour and its results; not merely to pasture, but also to grain, for the horses of Homer are fed on this as well as on herbage,
κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλεύρας[668].