I do not, however, venture to treat it as certain, that the word Ἀχαιοὶ is not applied to the population of Ithaca generally. When Euripides addresses the Assembly, and incites the people to revenge the death of the Suitors, we are told that οἶκτος δ’ ἕλε πάντας Ἀχαιούς. This may mean the aristocratic party in the Assembly, as we know that there were two sections very differently minded. At any rate, if the whole people be meant, it is by the rarest possible exception. The name is applied, as we should expect, to the soldiers who sailed with Ulysses to Troy: but within Ithaca it seems clear that the name properly denotes the nobles. And upon the whole it seems most probable, that these Ἀχαιοὶ, in the Twenty-third Book, are the party of the Suitors, with reference rather to their position in society than their extraction: while the minority, who do not join in the movement against Ulysses, are probably the old population of the island, who have no cause of quarrel to make them take up arms against him, and yet no such tie with him, either of race or of ancient subordination, as to induce them to move in his favour.
Ithaca was ill fitted for tillage, or for feeding anything but sheep and goats. And Ithacus, its eponymist, being a very modern personage, it seems highly probable that, whether Achæan or not, he and his race were Hellenic, and gave to the population that peculiar name of Cephallenes, under which Laertes describes them as his subjects. But there were probably anterior inhabitants of the old Pelasgian stock, submerged beneath two Hellenic immigrations, caring little which of their lords was uppermost, and forming the supine minority of the final Assembly.
The use of the Achæan name in Ithaca, in broad separation from the Ithacesian, must then prove either its connection with a race, or its bias towards a class, and may prove both. But quitting the latter as sufficiently demonstrated, I now proceed to trace the local use of the Achæan name.
And, first of all, we find it locally used in the North; in that Thessaly, where the name of Hellas came into being, and from whence it extended itself to the Southward; therefore in the closest connection with the Hellic stem.
We are told in the Catalogue, with respect to the division under Achilles, after the names of the districts and places from which they came,
Μυρμίδονες δὲ καλεῦντο, καὶ Ἕλληνες, καὶ Ἀχαιοί[728].
Now we find throughout the Iliad, that the local or divisional name of this body is unchanging: the troops of Achilles are uniformly denominated Myrmidons. Therefore Homer does not mean that one part were Myrmidons, another Hellenes, another Achæans, but that the three names attached to the whole body, of course in different respects. They were then Myrmidons, whatever the source of that name may have been, by common designation. They were Hellenes, because inhabitants of Hellas, of the territory from whence the influence and range of that name had already begun to radiate, more properly and eminently therefore Hellenes, than others who had not so positively acquired the name, though they may have been included in the Πανέλληνες. And manifestly they could only be called Ἀχαιοὶ, because known to be under leaders of the pure Achæan stock, who were entitled to carry the name in their own right, instead of bearing it only in a derivative sense, and because it had spread all over Greece. Of this peculiar and eminent Achæanism in the Peleid stock, we have, I think, two other signs from the poems: one in the possible meaning of the love of Juno, which we have seen extended to Achilles in an equal degree with Agamemnon; the other in the marriage of Hermione to Neoptolemus, which was founded upon a promise given by Menelaus her father while before Troy. Doubtless the eminent services of Neoptolemus might be the sole ground of this promise: but it may also have had to do with kin, as some special relation, of neighbourhood or otherwise, appears commonly to accompany these matrimonial connections. In conformity with this passage, the name Ἀχαίιδες is applied by Achilles in the Ninth Book to the women of Hellas and Phthia.
Local uses of the Achæan name.
It is wonderfully illustrative of the perspicacity and accuracy of Homer, to find that in this very spot, which he has so especially marked with the Achæan name, it continued to subsist as a local appellation, and to subsist here almost exclusively, all through the historic ages of Greece. On this subject we shall have further occasion to touch.
2. Of the five races who inhabited Crete at the time of the Troica, one was Achæan[729]: