The objections from internal evidence are stated by Payne Knight[179].
1. That the Greeks had no temples at the time of the Troica.
2. That as Ἄρουρα is superficies non orbis Terræ, so it was not a known personification at the time of Homer.
As to the first of these, we hear of Trojan temples in the Iliad; probably also of the Greek temple of Apollo in Il. ix. 404; and of Greek temples in the Odyssey, beyond all reasonable doubt. We hear of Ætolian priests in Il. ix. 575; while it is not likely that there should have been priests without temples.
Again, the circumstances of the Greeks in the Iliad were not such as to lead to the mention of temples usually or frequently. Therefore this is not a ground of suspicion against the passage.
As to the second objection, it should be borne in mind that the Earth, Γαῖα, as well as Ἄρουρα, was apparently to Homer, not less than to the other ancients, a surface, not a solid (κυκλοτερὴς ὡς ἀπὸ τόρνου, Herod. iv. 36.) The objection really is, that Ἄρουρα means a particular class of ground, namely, arable or cultivable land; and that to personify this class of land by itself is artificial, far-fetched, and not in the manner of Homer.
To me it appears clear that it would be unnatural for us, but very doubtful whether it was so for Homer. We could not in poetry well treat Corn-field or Garden as a person: but the corn-bearing Earth (ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα) had for the Greeks in their early days a vividness of meaning, which it has not for us. To us, to the modern European mind, the gifts of Ceres are but one item in an interminable list of things enjoyable and enjoyed: to man when yet youthful, while in his first ruder contact with his mother Earth and the elements, while possessed of few instruments and no resources, this idea was as determinate, as it was likewise suggestive and poetical. The Latins have no word by which to render the word Ἄρουρα in its full meaning, though arvum must have been taken from it, or from the same root with it. It nearly corresponds with the English ‘glebe’ in its proper use[180]. It signifies not only corn land, but all productive land, for instance, vine land, in Il. iii. 246. But to them, so pregnant was the idea, that besides a crop of epithets such as πολύφορβος and τραφέρη, it threw off its own inverted image in the epithet, habitual with Homer, of ἀτρύγετος for θάλασσα, the un-cornbearing sea. Now when the idea of corn land had been thus vividly conceived, the next step, that of viewing Ἄρουρα as Γαῖα, was one not very hard to take. The objection seems to arise out of our unconsciously reading Homer in the false light of our own familiar associations.
His text affords evidence in support of these views. May it not be said that the phrase πάτρις Ἄρουρα[181] for patria shows us a great step towards personification? In the Νεκυία (Od. xi. 489), ἐπάρουρος is equivalent to ‘alive;’ compare Il. xvii. 447. Again, Ulysses, the moment he escapes from the river mouth to the shore, kisses the ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα[182] among the reeds: which seems to show an use of the term nearly synonymous with Γαῖα or earth. And again, praying for the glory of Alcinous[183], he says,
τοῦ μέν κεν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν
ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη.
The fame of Alcinous could not be confined to fields. So the setting sun casts shadows on the ἐρίβωλος Ἄρουρα[184]. In both cases the term so approximates to the meaning of Earth, doubtless by metonymy, as to be indistinguishable from it. Again Il. iv. 174, σέο δ’ ὄστεα πύσει Ἄρουρα. Surely the meaning here is Earth, for we are not to suppose Homer meant to say the bodies of his warriors would lie on the cultivable land only. But another passage brings us up to actual personification, that respecting Otus and Ephialtes