We find the ancient family of Cadmus established as a dynasty in Bœotia, about the same time, according to the common opinion, with the earliest appearances of the Hellenic race in the Greek peninsula. We have no reason to suppose that they were themselves of Hellic extraction: but we find them invested with the same marks of political superiority as the Hellenic families, and figuring among the Greek sovereigns in successive generations. They must have ejected previous occupants: for Amphion and Zethus first settled and fortified Thebes, and they were the sons of Jupiter and Antiope[415].
Ino Leucothee, the daughter of Cadmus, was already a deity in the time of Homer. She appears in that capacity to Ulysses, when he is tossed upon the waters between Ogygia and Phæacia; that is to say, when he was still beyond the limits of the Greek or Homeric world, and within the circle of those traditions, lying in the unknown distance, which the Greeks could only derive from the most experienced and daring navigators of the time; namely, the Phœnicians. This appears to mark Ino herself, and therefore her father Cadmus, as of Phœnician birth. And accordingly we may set down the position of this family in Greece, as the earliest token of relations between Phœnicia and Greece.
It is followed by one more significant still, and more clearly attested in Homer. Minos, a Phœnician, appears in Crete and founds an empire: he marries his daughter Ariadne to the Athenian hero Theseus; and so quickly does this empire assume the national character, that in the time of the Troica, Hellenic races are established in the island, the Cretan troops are numbered without distinction among the followers of Agamemnon; and Idomeneus, only the grandson of Minos, appears to be as Grecian as any of the other chiefs of the army. The grandfather himself is appointed to act as judge over the shades of Greeks in the nether world[416]: and his brother Rhadamanthus has a post of great dignity, if of inferior responsibility, in being intrusted with the police of Elysium[417].
Nowhere is Homer’s precision more remarkable, than in the numerous passages where he appears before us as a real geographer or topographer. Indeed, by virtue of this accuracy, he enables us to define with considerable confidence the sphere of his knowledge and experience; by which I mean not only the countries and places he had visited, but those with respect to which he had habitual information from his countrymen, and unrestricted opportunities of correcting error. In the direction of the west, it seems plain that he knew nothing except the coast of Greece and the coastward islands. Phæacia hangs doubtfully upon his horizon, and it is probable that he had only a very general and vague idea of its position. Towards the north, there is nothing to imply, that his experimental knowledge reached beyond the Thracian coast and, at the farthest, the Sea of Marmora. He speaks of Ida, as if its roots and spurs comprised the whole district, of which in that quarter he could speak with confidence[418]. To the east, he probably knew no region beyond Lycia on the coast of Asia Minor, and to the south Crete was probably his boundary: though he was aware, by name at least, of the leading geographical points of a maritime passage, not wholly unfrequented, to the almost unknown regions of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt. The apparent inconsistency however of his statements[419] respecting the voyage to Egypt, affords proof that it lay beyond the geographical circle, within which we are to consider that his familiar knowledge and that of his nation lay.
While he is within that circle, he is studious alike of the distances between places, the forms of country, and the physical character of different districts: but, when he passes beyond it, he emancipates himself from the laws of space. The points touched in the voyage of Ulysses are wholly irreconcilable with actual geography, though national partialities have endeavoured to identify them with a view to particular appropriation. Some of them, indeed, we may conceive that he mentally associated with places that had been described to him: nay, he may have intended it in all: but the dislocated knowledge, which alone even the navigators of the age would possess, has suffered, by intent or accident, such further derangement in its transfer to the mind of Homer, that it is hopeless to adjust his geography otherwise than by a free and large infusion of fictitious drawing. This outer sphere is, however, peopled with imagery of deep interest. For the purposes of the poem, the whole wanderings both of Menelaus and Ulysses lie within it, and beyond the limits of ordinary Greek experience. And throughout these wanderings the language of Homer is that of a poet who, as to facts, was at the mercy of unsifted information; of information which he must either receive from a source not liable to check or scrutiny, or else not receive at all: and who wisely availed himself of that character of the marvellous with which the whole was overspread, to work it up into pictures of the imagination, which were to fill both his contemporaries and all succeeding generations with emotions of interest and wonder.
Limits of Greek navigation.
In Homer we find that Greek navigation already extends, yet it is very slightly, beyond the limits of Greek settlement. The Pseudo-Ulysses of the Fourteenth Odyssey made nine voyages[420], ἀνδρὰς ἐς ἀλλοδάπους; and at length, inspired as he says by a wild impulse from on high, he planned and executed a voyage to Egypt. But he is represented as a Cretan, and the early fame of Crete in navigation is probably due to its connection through Minos with Phœnicia. Here too the representation is, that he is a Cretan of the highest class, the colleague of Idomeneus in his command[421], and thus, according to the law of poetical likelihood, to be understood as probably of a family belonging to the Phœnician train of Minos. The Thesprotian ship of the Fourteenth Odyssey trades for corn to Dulichium only. The Taphians, indeed, who from the xenial relation of their lord, Mentes[422], to Ulysses, must in all likelihood have lived in the neighbourhood of Ithaca, are represented as making voyages not only to an unknown Temese, which was in foreign parts (ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους[423]), but likewise to Phœnicia; the latter voyage, however, is only mentioned in connection with the purpose of piracy[424]. But these Taphians appear to have formed an insignificant exception to the general rule: we do not hear any thing of them in the great armament of the Iliad. Speaking generally, we may say that the Achæans had no foreign navigation: it was in the hands of the Phœnicians.
The Outer Geography Phœnician.
It is to that people that we must look as the established merchants, hardiest navigators, and furthest explorers, of those days. To them alone as a body, in the whole Homeric world of flesh and blood, does Homer give the distinctive epithet of ναυσικλυτοὶ ἄνδρες[425]. He accords it indeed to the airy Phæacians, but in all probability that element of their character is borrowed from the Phœnicians[426], and if so, the reason of the derivation can only be, that the Phœnicians were for that age the type of a nautical people. To them only does he assign the epithets, which belong to the knavery of trade, namely, πολυπαίπαλοι and τρωκταί. When we hear of their ships in Egypt or in Greece, the circumstance is mentioned as if their coming was in the usual course of their commercial operations. Some force also, in respect to national history, may be assigned to the general tradition, which almost makes the Mediterranean of the heroic age ‘a Phœnician lake:’ to their settlements in Spain, and the strong hold they took upon that country; and to the indirect Homeric testimony, as well as the judgment of Thucydides, respecting the maritime character of the Minoan empire.
Again, Homer knew of a class of merchants whom he calls πρηκτῆρες in the Eighth Odyssey (v. 152). But where Eumæus enumerates the δημιόεργοι, or ‘trades and professions’ of a Greek community, there are no πρηκτῆρες among them[427]. Again, as the poet knew of the existence of this class on earth, so he introduced them into his Olympian heaven, where gain and increase had their representative in Mercury. From whence could the prototype have been derived, except from intercourse with the Phœnicians?