οὓς δὴ μηκίστους θρέψε ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα[185].
This objection to Ἄρουρα therefore will not hold good: and the passage cannot be condemned upon internal evidence. It is referred to by Plato, in the first Alcibiades[186].
(2)—Vss. 550, 1.
ἐνθάδε μιν ταύροισι καὶ ἀρνείοις ἱλάονται
κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων, περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν.
Some refer μιν to Minerva, and construe the passage with reference to the Panathenaic celebration. When so interpreted, as it is contended, the words betray a palpable anachronism.
Again it is alleged, (1) Homer does not in the Catalogue introduce general descriptions of the religious rites of Greece, and it is scarcely likely he should mention here a celebration, which he does not report to have had anything peculiar in its character. (2) From xi. 729 it appears that cows were sacrificed to Minerva, not bulls: (3) the tenour of the sentence directs us to Erechtheus, and it involves worship offered to a local hero.
With respect to the Panathenaica, a difficulty would undoubtedly arise, if we were obliged to suppose that it contained a reference to gymnastic games, which we have every reason to treat as having borne in the age of Homer a marked Hellenic character[187]. But the words imply no such reference. They speak, at the most, of no more than periodical sacrifices. This implies an established festival, and nothing beyond it. Now such a signification raises no presumption whatever against the genuineness of the passage: because we have one distinct and unquestionable case in Homer of an established festival of a deity, that namely of Apollo in the Odyssey. The day of the vengeance of Ulysses was the ἑορτὴ τοῖο Θεοῖο ἁγνή[188].
So considering the passage, let us next examine the objection taken to it, that it involves hero-worship[189], which was not known in the Homeric age.
Now we have in the Odyssey, as well as here in the Iliad, cases of mortals translated to heaven and to the company of immortals.