an emotion, which I do not remember to have found recorded on any apparition of a divinity to a Greek hero.
Poverty of Trojan Mythology.
Thus far then it would appear probable, that in the Trojan mythology the list of major deities was more contracted than in Greece, and that the minor deities were almost unknown. But perhaps the most marked difference between the two systems is in the copious development on the Greek side of the doctrine of a future state, compared with the jejune and shadowy character of that belief among the Trojans.
Jejune doctrine of a Future State.
In the narrative of the sack of Hypoplacian Thebes, and again in her first lament over Hector, Andromache does indeed speak of her husband, father, and brothers, respectively, as having entered the dwellings of Aides[342]. But these references are slight, and it may almost be said perfunctory. Not another word is said either in the Twenty-second Book, or in the whole of the Twenty-fourth, about the shade of Hector.
When Pope closed his Iliad with the line
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade,
it probably did not occur to him, that he was not merely altering the poetry of Homer, but falsifying also his picture of the Trojan religion; which had indeed its funeral rites, but so described as to leave us no means of concluding, that they were in any degree directed to procuring the comfort and tranquillity of the dead. The silence observed about the spirit of Hector is remarkable from the contrast with the case of Patroclus. Both are mourned for passionately, by those who love them best: but the shade of Patroclus is the great figure in the mourning of Achilles, while Hector’s existence after death is but once owned, faintly and in the abstract. Nor, as we see from the Odyssey, was this homage to the shade of Patroclus a thing occasional or accidental. We there meet the souls of all the great departed of the War, in the under-world. That region, opened to Ulysses, had formerly been opened to Hercules. Even the dissolute Suitors cannot be dismissed from life, without our being called to accompany their spirits past the Leucadian rock to the place of their destination. The warriors slain in battle with the Cicones are thrice invoked by the survivors[343]. Nay Elpenor himself, most insignificant of men, is duly brought before us in his last home[344].
We are, however, enabled to open another chapter of evidence, that bears upon this interesting subject. It is obtained through the medium of the oaths of the two nations respectively.
Displacing the elemental powers from their ordinary religion, the Greeks made them gaolers, as it were, of the under-world, and gave them this for their proper business. Hence they are paraded freely in the Greek oaths[345]. Agamemnon before the Pact invokes, with Jupiter, the Sun, the Rivers, the Earth, the infernal gods. In the Nineteenth book, the same; omitting however the Rivers, and naming, instead of simply describing, the Erinües[346]. In the Fourteenth Iliad, Juno apparently swears by Styx, Earth, Sea, and the infernal gods[347]. In the Fifteenth, by Earth, Heaven, Styx, the head of Jupiter, and their marriage bed[348]. Calypso swears, for the satisfaction of Ulysses, and according to his fashion as the imponens, by Earth, Heaven, and Styx[349]. Thus the Greeks made an effective use of these earthy and material divinities, in connection with their large development of the Future State, by installing them as the official punishers of perjury. Now the Trojans appear, from what we have seen, to have worshipped this class of deities; but as super-terranean, not as sub-terranean gods. Had they not been thus worshipped at the least, Agamemnon could not have included them in the Invocation of the Pact, where he had to act and speak for both nations[350]. And while we see they sacrificed lambs to Earth and Sun, still we have a curious proof that these deities were not worshipped in Troy as avengers of perjury. For when in the Tenth Book Hector swears to Dolon, he invokes no divinity, except Jupiter the loud-thundering husband of Juno. There may, as we have seen here, be a faint reference to the earthy character of the Trojan Juno; but there is no well-developed system, which uses a particular order of powers for the punishment of perjurors in a future state. We can hardly doubt that this was primarily because the doctrine of the Future State was wanting in deep and practical roots, so far as we can see, among the Trojans. A materializing religion seems essentially hostile to the full development of such a doctrine. And it is not a little curious to find that in this same country, where the oath was less solemn than in Greece, and the life after death less a subject of practical and energetic belief, perjury and breach of faith should have been, as we shall find they were, so much more lightly regarded.