For the sake of realizing to ourselves the contrast between the religious system of Troy, as we thus at least by glimpses seem to perceive it, and the wonderful imaginative richness of the preternatural system of the Greeks as exhibited in Homer, it may be well to point briefly to a few cases, which are the more illustrative, because they are the accessories, and not the main pillars of the system. Take, then, the personifications of all the forms of Terror in the train of Mars: the transport, by Sleep and Death, of the body of Sarpedon to his home; the tears of blood wept by Jupiter; the agitation of the sea in sympathy with Neptune’s warlike parade; the dread of Aidoneus lest the crust of earth should give way under the tramp of the gods in battle; the mourning garb of Thetis for the friend of her son’s youth; the long train of Nymphs, rising from the depths of the sea to accompany her, when she mounts to visit the sorrowing Achilles; the redundant imagery of the nether world; the inimitable tact with which he preserves the identity of his great chieftains when visited below, but presents each under a deep tint of sadness. All this makes us feel not only that war, policy, and poetry, are indissolubly blended in the great mind of Homer, and of his race, but that the harmonious association of all these with the Olympian religion was the work of a vivifying imagination, which was a peculiar and splendid part of their inheritance.
Worship from the hills.
There is a more marked trace in the Trojan worship, than is to be found among the Greeks, of the practice of the Persian; who paid homage to the Deity,
To loftiest heights ascending, from their tops,
With myrtle-wreathed tiara on his brow[351].
For Hector offered to Jupiter sometimes (which may be referred to a different cause) on the highest ground of the city, sometimes on the tops of Ida[352]:
Ἴδης ἐν κορυφῇσι πολυπτύχου, ἀλλότε δ’ αὖτε
ἐν πόλει ἀκροτάτῃ.
At all events we may say, that the only sign remaining in Greece of this principle of worship, was one common to it with Troy, and seen in the epithet ὑψίζυγος applied to Jupiter, as well as in the association between the seats of the gods, and the highest mountains.
On the other hand, the religion of the Trojans appears to have abounded more in positive observance and hierarchical development, than that of the Greeks.