Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 1 of 3 / I. Prolegomena II. Achæis; or, the Ethnology of the Greek Races

by W. E. Gladstone

Dorians appropriate the Pelopid succession.

Now it is no more than we might expect, that the Achæans should, in their depressed fortunes, fondly cherish the recollections of their glory, by preserving and honouring the memory of the last of that race, who, through being their sovereigns, were also the heads of the Greek nation. But why did the Dorians exhibit an anxiety of a kind in their position so remarkable? Such a feeling could hardly have existed, had there not been a special character attaching to the Pelopid race, as possessed not only of an actual supremacy, but of some peculiar title by descent, to which it was worth the while of the Dorian sovereigns to lay claim, as a kind of heirs by adoption. We do not find that when the Pelopids came in with their Achæans, they had shown any corresponding solicitude to connect themselves with the memory of Danaids or of Perseids: on the contrary, Homer expressly disconnects the dynasties, by assigning to the Pelopids a new sceptre, fresh by the hands of Mercury from Jupiter. It seems to follow, that in all likelihood the Pelopids had something which neither Danaids nor Perseids possessed before them, and which the Dorians too did not hold at all, or did not hold by so clear a title: the honour, namely, not of Hellenic blood alone, but of being ruled by a family which represented an original and primitive sovereignty over the Hellenic nation, through its foremost, or Achæan tribe.

This is the more remarkable, because the Dorian sovereigns of Sparta claimed Hercules, and through him Jupiter, for their progenitor. But the patriarchal chieftaincy, though not more directly connected with a divine stock, had superadded to it that accumulation of dignity, which depends upon the unbroken transmission of power from the most remote historic origin: and Hercules was modern in comparison with those to whom some of the Hellenic families were able (as we have seen) to trace their ancestry.

Were we to give credit to the common tradition respecting Hellen and his sons, I admit that it would raise a new difficulty in the way of the construction, which I propose to attach to the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Instead of seeing Agamemnon invested with it because he is head of the Achæans, and highly favoured by a special, nay by an almost exclusive appropriation of it, because they are the foremost Hellenic tribe, we should have to own in them the youngest of all the branches from that stem, with Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians too, taking precedence of them: and we should have to look, and look in vain, for any trace or presumption whatever of his descent from that Achæus, whom the tradition feigns to have existed.

But with the acknowledgment of Homer’s historical authority, the credit of that tradition falls; as indeed it is etymologically self-convicted by the formation of its cardinal name Hellen.

The Achæan prominence in Homer rests on grounds sufficiently clear: over the Ionians, who appear to be not even an Hellenic race; over the Dorians, latent in the Pylian town of Dorion, or among the sister races of Crete, where they are as yet wholly undistinguished: over the Æolids, (for there are no Æolians,) because these are single shoots only, while the Achæans are a branch, a principal section of the Hellenic race; and also, as I think may be shown[811], because of all Hellenes they appear really to have had the most normal connection with the true fountain-head of their race.

Nowhere among the Dorians, and (of course, if the Ionians are Pelasgian,) nowhere among the Ionians, have we any trace of the name ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, or of the thing indicated by it. May not this be the reason that the Dorian kings of Sparta sought (so to speak) to serve themselves heirs to the house of Agamemnon?

I may observe in passing, as to the Ionians, that it has recently been held that they are not only Hellenic, but the oldest Hellenes: that they parted from the rest of the race in Asia, came into Greece by the islands, and were its great sea-faring race. This theory, ably as it has been supported, is but doubtfully agreeable to the positive or negative evidence of Homer: still it is not less fatal to the current tradition of Hellen and his family, than that which views the Ionians as more nearly connected with the Pelasgians[812].

Only among Achæans, Æolids, and Dardanians, do we find the patriarchal title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. The Dardan house fell with the Trojan war. The throne of Augeias had given way even before that great crisis. It is probable that the line of Euphetes was then no longer in existence; else we must have heard of it in the Catalogue, or during the action. The realm of Eumelus was remote and small, and if it had been wrecked in the convulsions of the period, it would leave nothing upon which the Dorians could lay hold as a point of junction with the past. But they had come into the very dominions of the family of Pelops, though with a transfer of the metropolis from Mycenæ to Sparta. Here was the true Greek Patriarchate, of which for purposes of policy they might well desire to become the ostensible representatives.