Again, when we are told that Orestes made a funeral feast for the Ἀργεῖοι[688], we may probably presume that we have here again the local sense.
Thus we see plainly enough the history of the rise of the Argive name. Belonging to the subjects of the ruling part of Greece, it grows so as to be applicable to all Greeks, in cases where no confusion can arise from its being thus employed. Thus the Roman name became applicable to Campanians or Calabrians as subjects of Rome, in contradistinction to Germans, Dacians, or Parthians; but if the subject in hand were domestic and Italian, the domestic distinction would naturally revive. Even so Homer’s Greeks are all Argeians in the Troica: but at home they have their local meaning, like Cadmeans, Ætolians, Pylians, Elians, Epeans, Arcadians, Locrians, and also, as we shall find, Achæans.
It is at the very period of the local prevalence of the Argive name, that we find also from Homer unequivocal appearances of a Cretan empire, circumscribing it by sea, and possibly more or less by land, though perhaps the Minoan power and dynasty may not at once have acquired its Grecian character. If then, with respect to the word Ἀργεῖοι, we see that it was originally of limited and local application; we have no reason whatever to suppose that the Danaan name could ever have been of wider scope. Two questions then arise.
First, why does Homer use the Danaan and Argive names as national, when they were only local?
Secondly, the priority of the Danaan name being clear, as we see that the Danaan dynasty preceded that one whose subjects were called Argives, why did the Argive name supplant or succeed the Danaan?
The first question will be resumed hereafter, but I will now touch upon the second.
The name Danaan, in all likelihood, was that of a dynasty originating beyond seas; and if so, it could not well, until softened by the mellow haze of distance, be more popular with the Greeks, when they had awakened under Hellic influence to a full consciousness of national life, than it would have been with the English in the last century to be called Hanoverians or Brunswickers.
The Danaid line ceased, when Perseus came to the throne, as he was descended on the father’s side from another source.
Nothing could be more natural, than that with this change of dynasty an old and merely dynastic name should disappear. But why should it be succeeded by the name Ἀργεῖοι?
Relation of Argeian and Pelasgian names.