Between the shadows of the vine-branches
Floated the glowing sun-light as she moved.
Upon the whole, I should confidently cite the treatment of Venus in the poems as being among the most satisfactory indications of the state of heroic Greece, and one of the most honourable tokens of the disposition of her Poet.
Vulcan.
The Vulcan of Homer.
Besides Juno and Bacchus, Hephæstus or Vulcan is the only Homeric deity who bears upon him this unequivocal, or at least significant, mark of novelty, that we are supplied with a distinct tradition of his childhood[491]. In his youth he was rickety and lame. His mother Juno wished to conceal him, and she let him fall into the sea. Here Thetis and Eurynome received him, and reared him in a submarine cave, not, however, under the Mediterranean, but the Ocean; and in that cave for nine years the boy-smith employed himself in making ornaments for women.
He is thus associated by his traditions with the two opposing elements of water and fire; with water by the history of his childhood, and with fire as the grand instrument and condition of his art. The latter was by much the stronger association, for it was continually fed by the history and progress of the art itself; so that he became the impersonation of that element itself, and in the phrase φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο it is his name which gives the distinctive force; for φλὸξ in Homer seems to mean the flame or light of fire[492], and is not used to signify fire proper, except with some other word in conjunction to it or near it. But the explanation of the seeming contrariety is probably to be found in the hypothesis, that his worship was of Phœnician introduction; as the Phœnicians seem to have made the Greeks acquainted with the use of fire in working metals. If they made the deity known to the Greeks, this will account for his association with the idea of fire: and as accounts and traditions, which they had supplied, were evidently the source of all the more remote maritime delineations of Homer, (since they alone frequented Ocean and the distant seas,) this is the natural and easy explanation for the tradition of his childish arts in the oceanic cave. That he is thus, like the Phœnicians, for Homer, the meeting point of fire and water, appears clearly to stamp him as Phœnician or oriental in his origin, relatively to Greece.
Accordingly, true to the association between Phœnician and Hellenic elements, he is one of the five Hellenizing deities in the Trojan war; in which, as the element of fire, he opposes and subdues the river Xanthus. He was not, however, unknown to the Trojans; for Dares, his priest, had two sons in their army. His introduction to Troas may have been due to his conjugal connection with Venus; or it may have been due to the neighbourhood of Lemnos, the island on which, when hurled from Olympus by Jupiter, he fell, and which thenceforward formed his favourite earthly habitation. With Lemnos and other isles Troy was in communication, at least from the time of Laomedon, for that prince threatened to seize Apollo and to sell him, νήσων ἔπι τηλεδαπάων[493]. A regular commerce was established between Lemnos and the camp during the Trojan war[494].
Among the deities of Vulcan’s generation we find but one married couple, and they are a strangely assorted pair, Vulcan himself and Venus. Neither character nor occupation will account for this singular union: on the contrary, there is no case in which the extremes of repugnance must so decidedly be supposed. It is questionable whether the hypothesis, that Venus represents the beauty which gives perfection to works of art, is in entire keeping with the tone of the Homeric system. Indeed Venus with Homer represents absolutely nothing, except sensual passion in a fine exterior form which can hardly be severed from it. One explanation, and one only, may suggest itself as more natural. It is this: that the worship of Vulcan and that of Venus came in, not distinctly connected with those of any other deity, at about the same time, and from the same quarter. We have already seen upon Venus those marks of comparative modernism, and of an eastern extraction, which we now find in Vulcan; and here probably is to be found, either wholly or in part, the actuating suggestion of their ill-starred wedlock.
Though we find the works of Vulcan scattered promiscuously abroad, there is no notice of his worship, or of any site or endowment belonging to him in the Greece of Homer. He was available to the Poet for embellishment, but he probably had not become for the Greek nation a regular object of adoration.