Apollo, then, with Latona and Diana, forms a group; and the origin of the combination is to be sought in primitive tradition. It is not necessary to show that the personages thus associated maintained their association in all the religions of the East. I admit that we are not to suppose, that the idea of this combination passed direct from the patriarchs into Greece. The most natural place in which to seek for traces of it would be, in the religion of the Persians, anterior to the time of Homer. Unfortunately we have no accounts of it at any such date. But our failing to find these three deities in a company, or to find any germ which might have been developed into that company, in accounts later by probably five or six centuries at least, raises no presumption whatever against the hypothesis that we may owe the representation, as it stands in Homer, to historical derivation through the forefathers of the Hellic tribes, from some such period as that when, for example, Abraham dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees[271].
The Iris of Homer.
Iris, the messenger goddess, the last, and also by much the least important of the personages to whom I ascribe a traditive origin, is perhaps not the least clear in her title to it.
Her title to rank as one of the deities of the ordinary Olympian assemblage is not subject to doubt. It depends partly on the fact that she is always at hand there. But it is established more distinctly still by the passage, which represents her as carrying to the palace of Zephyr the prayer of Achilles. She finds the Winds engaged in a banquet, and they eagerly solicit her to sit and feast with them. She answers them, like one desirous to escape from second-rate into first-rate company, to the effect that she has not time: the Ethiopians are just about supplying the greater gods with a banquet from their hecatombs; and she must repair to that quarter accordingly, as otherwise she will lose her share of the offerings[272].
With respect to her position generally, we have no mark of her being foreign; and all the traditive deities, it may be observed, are sufficiently, though not exclusively national. Again, we have no mark of her being recent; on the contrary, she is without parents, and this, though not conclusive, is a sign to the opposite effect.
Iris has no original action whatever, but is simply a willing servant of other deities; nor does she disdain spontaneously to officiate on behalf of a distinguished human object of their favour, like Achilles[273]. Only once have we an account of her bringing an order without the name of the sender: it is when she appears to Helen, and exhorts her to repair to the Wall[274]. She is not, however, said even in this place to act on her own account; and we ought probably to understand that, according to the general rule, she comes from Jupiter. It is added, that she inspired Helen with a longing sentiment towards her former husband and country, but this, as is most likely, is meant simply to describe the effect of her words in the ordinary manner of their operation on the understanding. This ancillary character of Iris is exactly what she would bear, if her origin really lay in the primitive tradition of the rainbow.
But what seems decisively to establish her relation to that tradition is, that she is firmly connected in Homer with two things that have in themselves no connection whatever, and between which that ancient tradition is the only link.
In the first place, her identity of name is the witness to her original connection with the rainbow[275]: which, however, as a standing and ordinary phenomenon of nature, did not bear, apart from positive appointment, in any manner the character of a messenger: and hence we find that by disintegration the two ideas had been entirely separated before the time of Homer, and the name itself is the only remaining witness in the poems to their having been at some former period associated. The function of the messenger was kept in action by the occasions of the Olympian family and polity. In this manner, as the stronger of the two ideas, it held its ground, and took possession of the personal Iris, while the rainbow, though still conceived of as a sign to mortals[276], appears to have been regarded as separate.
Of the character of the messenger we find that Iris had so completely become the model, that her name, only modified into Iros, is given to Arnæus, the ribald and burly beggar of the Odyssey, only because he was a go-between, or errand-carrier:
οὕνεκ’ ἀπαγγέλλεσκε κιὼν, ὅτε πού τις ἀνώγοι[277].