It is difficult to find more than slight traces of the seat of the power of Tantalus from Homer.
He mentions a mountain called Sipylus[795], near the Achelous, and thus near the principal passage from Northern and Middle into Southern Greece. Here it is that he places the mourning Niobe. But Pausanias places the tomb of Pelops on the summit of Mount Sipylus, meaning, apparently, the hill of that name in Lydia[796]. Again, the Phryges, over whom the later tradition reports him to have reigned, are also made known to us as a Thracian people[797]: a designation quite capable of embracing any of the hill tribes in the neighbourhood of Thessaly. We have another sign of the extension of this name in the Phrygians of Attica, mentioned by Thucydides (ii. 22): and the Phrygian alphabet is closely akin to that of Greece.
Strabo, however, observes, that the state of these traditions is so greatly confused, so as to make them scarcely tractable for the purposes of history[798].
Place of Pelops in Greek history.
The connection of Pelops with Southern Greece is well supported by the ancient name of Peloponnesus. No notice of this name is found in Homer; but we need not be surprised, if Pelops was the first of his race in that part of the country, at finding him sparely recognised by the Poet: it is the uniform manner of the poet with strangers or novi homines.
The Homeric notices of Pelops are not more liberal than of Tantalus. 1. We find him called πλήξιππος[799] in such a way as shows that something connected with the driving of a chariot must have been attached either to the known habits, or to some great crisis of his life, or to both. In either mode, it agrees with the common tradition, according to which, by success in the chariot race, he won the hand of Hippodameia, daughter of king Œnomaus, and therewith the throne of Pisa. We have another fact from Homer which tends to support this tradition, namely, that in the earliest youth of Nestor there were, as we have seen, public games, which included chariot-races, in Elis.
2. The common tradition is also further supported by the passage in the Second Iliad, which gives us the line of Pelopid sovereigns. For we are there told that Vulcan wrought the Pelopid sceptre for Jupiter: that Jupiter gave it to Mercury, and Mercury to Pelops the horse-driver, who handed it on to Atreus and the rest. From this statement two things clearly appear. First, that the throne of Pelops was gained either by craft, or at least by enterprise, of his own. Secondly, that it was a new power which he erected, and that he was not merely the transferee of the power of the Perseid line.
Nor is it difficult to discern wherein the novelty consisted. This sceptre carried the right of paramount lordship over all Greece—
πολλῇσιν νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν[800]—
whereas the Perseids had been local sovereigns, though probably the first in rank and power among their contemporaries of Continental Greece.