and how Achilles, the bravest and mightiest chief of this army, was the first also in beauty and in size; for Ajax is always recorded as next to him, and at the same time as before all others[907]; except Nireus, who was beautiful, but who as a soldier was mere trash.
And, lastly, as to the auburn hair, which was with Homer in such esteem. Menelaus is ξανθός (passim); so is Meleager (Il. ii. 642); so is Rhadamanthus (Od. iv. 564); Agamede (Il. xi. 739); Ulysses (Od. xiii. 399, 431); lastly, Achilles (Il. i. 197). But never once, I think, does Homer bestow this epithet upon a Pelasgian name. None of the Trojan royal family, so renowned for beauty, are ξανθοί: none of the Chiefs, not even Euphorbus[908], of whose flowing hair the Poet has given us so beautiful and even so impassioned a description. Nothing Pelasgian, but Ceres[909] the καλλιπλόκαμος, is admitted to the honour of the epithet. It could hardly be denied to the goddess of the ruddy harvest:
Excutit et flavas aurea terra comas[910].
Now Tacitus, describing the Germani, gives them truces et cærulei oculi, rutilæ comæ, magna corpora[911]. His treatise supplies many other points of comparison.
It is obvious, to compare the names of Scythæ, Getæ, Gothi, Massagetæ, Mœsi, Mysi, as carrying the marks of their own relationship; and the reader will find in Dr. Donaldson’s New Cratylus[912] the various indications recorded by ancient writers of the extension of the Medians over Northern Egypt: namely, from Herodotus (v. 9), Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 7), and Diodorus (ii. 43). The last of these authors recognises the similarity of tongue between Greeks and Hyperboreans (ii. 47): and Clemens Alexandrinus, after reciting a series of inventions which the Greeks owed to the barbarians, records among them the saying of Anacharsis, whom some of the Greeks placed among their ‘seven wise men,’ and adds ἐμοὶ δὲ πάντες Ἕλληνες Σκυθίζουσι[913].
And again, Herodotus (i. 125) gives us a list of names belonging to the different tribes of Persia: the Persia, that is to say, of his own day. Six of these are settled or agricultural, and four nomad. Of the six, the Pasargadæ are the first. Then come the Μαράφιοι and Μάσπιοι. Three more follow, of whom one is named Γερμάνιοι. The precise correspondence of name immediately suggests that the modern Germans derive their appellation from this Persian tribe. But it is customary to derive that name from wehr and man, or from heer and man, thus giving it a military sense: and it is also observed[914] that, if it had borne this sense in the time of Herodotus, he would probably have assigned to it a higher place in his list. But he does not give us to understand, that he means to point out these tribal names as being the descriptive names of the various classes in one and the same homogeneous community, or as having, in any degree, the character of caste. To the first three, indeed, he assigns a political supremacy: for they were the tribes by whose means Cyrus effected his designs. But the idea of particular employments, and social duties, does not seem to belong even to these, and there is no sign of it with the others. It may have been that the Γερμάνιοι meant martial, as Κεφάλληνες seems to have meant Head or Chief Hellenes, and yet that, as the latter were not the chiefs of all the Hellenes, so the former were not the soldiery of all Persia. Again, as the Δωριέες of Homer lay undistinguished in the Hellenic mass, yet afterwards, and on the very same arena, attained to a long-lived supremacy, so, and yet more naturally, may it have happened that a tribe, secondary in Persia itself, may have taken or acquired the lead in a northward and westward migration from it, and may have given its name to the people, which afterwards coagulated (so to speak) around that migration.
Traces in Homer of the Persian name.
There are not wanting either Homeric or post-Homeric traces of a connection between early Greece and Persia. In Homer, Perseus, father of a line of Peloponnesian kings, is the son of Jupiter and Danae[915]. A son of Nestor bears the same name[916]. We have also the name Περσεφόνεια, wife of Aidoneus or Pluto, and Perse, daughter of Oceanus, who bears Circe and Æetes to Ἠέλιος, the Sun[917].
When Homer makes Perseus the son of Jupiter, he certainly implies of this sovereign, as of Minos, that he had no known paternal ancestry, and perhaps that he falsely claimed a maternal one, in the country where he attained to fame. But further, it very decidedly appears from the use of the word Ἀργεῖοι for the subjects of the Perseids, and from the intense attachment of the Homeric Juno to that family, that they were an Hellenic house, following upon the probably Egyptian dynasty of the Danaids. With them appears to begin what Homer esteems to be the really national history. Perseus therefore probably may have brought his name direct from among the Hellenes of the north. Why should it not have come to the Helli from Persia? Let it be recollected that we have two other links with the east supplied: one in Perse, daughter of the Eastern Oceanus, and bride of the Sun, the other in Persephoneia, whose ἄλσεα, as I hope to show in treating of the Outer Geography, are in the same quarter.
In Herodotus we find a tradition that Perseus visited Cepheus[918], the Persian king, at the period when the people were called by the Greeks Cephenes; that he married his daughter Andromeda, and had a son, Perses, who remained behind him, succeeded Cepheus, and gave his name to the country. This tale has the appearance of a palpable fiction, intended to cover what may have been a fact; that Perseus—who in Homer has himself all the appearance of an immigrant into Peloponnesus—was a stranger, and derived his name from that of the Persians. Now this was the version current among the Persians; who reported that Perseus, born one of themselves, became an Hellene, but that his ancestors had not been Hellenes. To this Persian account Herodotus appears to give his own adhesion: and he states that the Greeks reckoned Hellenic kings up to Perseus[919], but that before him they were Egyptian. This is in entire harmony with what can be gathered from the indirect, but consistent and converging, notices supplied by Homer. And again, the whole mass of the later reports concerning Perseus keep him in close relation with that outer circle of traditions, which I have designated as Phœnician; with the Gorgons of Hades, with Tartessus on the Ocean, with Æthiopia and Atlas. Lastly; the continuance of the name as a royal name, down to the very extinction of nationality in Greece—for the last Macedonian king was a Perseus—may probably be connected with a stream of tradition, that drew from Persia the oldest of the national monarchs.