Moreover, two things may deserve remark with reference to the variation which makes Charis the wife of Vulcan in the Iliad, and Venus in the Odyssey.
First, from the plan of the Iliad, which placed Venus and Vulcan in the sharpest opposition, the conjugal relation between them would have been, for that poem, inadmissible. The Poet could not have introduced Venus, where he has introduced Charis: and he must thus have given up a strikingly poetical picture, and one most descriptive of the works of high art in metal.
Secondly, it may not be certain, but it is by no means improbable, that the worship of Venus may have attained to much wider vogue in Greece when Homer composed the Odyssey, than at the period when he gave birth to the Iliad. We have seen already the signs that it was a recent worship. We have seen it in Cyprus and then more advanced in Cythera, not in continental Greece. Now it was in the Iliad that Venus had the name of Cypris; in the Odyssey this is exchanged for Cytherea: that is to say, she was known sometime before as a goddess worshipped in Cyprus and not properly Greek; but she was now, such is the probable construction, known also as a goddess worshipped in Cythera, and therefore become Greek. On this account, as well as because the opposition between them had disappeared, she might with poetical propriety be made to bear a character in the Odyssey, which could not attach to her during the continuance of the great Trojan quarrel.
Vulcan in and out of his art.
Beyond his own function as god of fire, and of metallic art in connection with it, Vulcan is nobody. But within it he is supreme, and no deity can rival him in his own kind. His animated works of metal are among the boldest figures of poetry. Even his lameness is propped by bronze damsels of his own manufacture. And the lock, which he puts for Juno on her chamber-door, is one that not even any other deity can open[496]. But this is not so much an exemplification of the power and elevation of mythological godhead, as of the skill and exclusive capacity of a professional person in his own art.
Finally, the Vulcan of Homer conforms in all respects to the inventive, as opposed to the traditional type of deity.
Ἠέλιος, or the Sun.
The Ἠέλιος of Homer.
In the case of Ἠέλιος, or the Sun, as in various others, we appear to see the curious process by which the Greek mythology was constructed, not only in its finished result, but even during the several stages of its progress. It lies before us like the honeycomb in the glass beehive; and it tends strongly to the conclusion that the Poet is himself the queen bee. The Philosopher did not then exist. The Priest, we know, was not a religious teacher. The Seer or Prophet interpreted the Divine will only for the particular case, and did not rise to generalization. Who was it, then, that gathered up the thoughts and arrested the feelings of the general mind, and that, reducing the crude material to form and beauty, made it a mythology? The answer can only be, that for the heroic age it was the Bard.