II. ETHNOLOGY. (continued 5)

So much for the general idea of Games in Homer; but, to draw the distinction with any force between what is Hellic and what is Pelasgic, we must refer to those passages which afford glimpses of the earlier state of Greece, and see what light they afford us.

According to the Homeric text, Elis and Corinth were the portions of the Peloponnesus, where the early notes of the presence of the Hellenic races are most evident. Now of these Elis had the greatest and oldest Greek Games, while the Isthmian festival at Corinth was held to stand next to them.

The invention of these gymnastic exercises was ascribed in the later mythology to Mercury, who is in Homer a Hellenic, as opposed to Pelasgian, deity.

It has been observed, that the Hermes of Homer bears no trace of this function: but we have no proof in Homer of the formal institution of Games at all, although we have clear signs of them as a known and familiar practice; and the Mercury of the poems is even yet more Phœnician than he is Hellenic. Aristophanes[571] produces the Ἑρμῆς Ἐναγώνιος, and supplies a fresh link of connection by referring to ἀγῶνες in music, as well as in feats of corporal strength and skill. So does Pindar[572].

In truth, these Games were the exercise and pleasure of the highest orders only. For we see that, in Homer’s Twenty-third Book, not a single person takes a part in any of the eight matches that is not actually named among the ἡγεμόνες and κοίρανοι of the Catalogue, with three such exceptions as really confirm the rule. They are Antilochus, the heir apparent of Pylos, Teucer the brother of Ajax, and Epeus, (only however in the boxing match,) who appears from the Odyssey[573] to have been a person of importance, as he contrived the stratagem of the horse. Even the σόλος αὐτοχόωνος, the iron lump, part of the booty of Achilles, had formerly been used for the sport only of a king[574].

The Greek Games presuppose leisure, and therefore the accumulation of property, or the concentrated possession of lands: but this comports much more with Hellenic than with what we know of Pelasgic society, in which we do not find the same signs as in the former, of an aristocracy occupying the middle place between the people at large, and the royal house. Let us now examine another part of the Homeric evidence.

In the Eleventh Iliad, Nestor’s legend acquaints us that, at the time of the war between Pylians and Elians, Neleus the king appropriated a part of the Pylian spoil, in respect of a ‘debt’ owed him in Elis, the nature of which he explains[575]:

There were then, it is plain, chariot races regularly established (for the Games are here spoken of without explanation, as a matter familiarly known) in Olympia: and this was during the boyhood of Nestor, or about two generations before the Trojan war. The tribes, which we here see concerned in these Games, are first, the Pylians, and next the Elians, of whom Augeas was king. It will be seen in a subsequent part of this inquiry[576], that both of these tribes were Hellic, and not Pelasgian. Yet certainly there is nothing here to show directly the non-participation of Pelasgians in the games.

There is however another passage of our useful friend Nestor in the Twenty-third Book, which supplies in some degree even this form of evidence. ‘Would,’ says he in his usual phrase, ‘would I were young and strong[577],’

Here is a distinct testimony to the custom of funeral Games in Elis, nearly two generations before the Troica. They embraced, as we find further down in the record, 1. Chariot races, with the best prize; 2. Boxing; 3. Wrestling; 4. Running; and 5. Hurling the spear. But we have a further most valuable passage. There was no person present, says Nestor, equal to myself; and then he adds an exhaustive enumeration of the races that furnished the company:

For the Epeans (or Elians) and Pylians, I repeat the reference already made. Nor can I doubt that the Ætolians, the subjects of Œneus and his illustrious family, belonged to the same stock. I do not inquire whether, as they were always in later times held to belong to the Æolian branch of the Greeks, so their name may have been radically akin to, or identical with, the name of Æolus, which is often with Homer Αἴωλος. But we find Meleager (independently of the reference to him, evidently as a great national hero, in the Catalogue[578],) selected by Phœnix for the subject of an episode of great length, and held out as a warning and example to Achilles[579]. It may safely be assumed he would have chosen no character for this purpose, except that of an hero of pure Hellic origin. And the description of Tydeus, the father of Diomed, by the epithet Αἰτώλιος[580], again serves to identify the Ætolian name with the Hellic races.

The tribes present, then, at the Games were all Hellic, and they were all conterminous: the Epean inhabitants, the Pylians, neighbours on the South, the Ætolians from the other side of the narrow strait, which was the most frequented passage into Peloponnesus. In fact, it was evidently an assemblage of the neighbouring tribes; but with a most remarkable exception, that of the eastern neighbours of Elis, those same Arcadians, whom by many signs we are enabled to conclude to have been Pelasgian.

A third instance in which Homer notices gymnastic exercises, is in Il. iv. 389. Here Tydeus, having gone to Thebes, finds a solemn banquet proceeding in the palace of Eteocles. Alone among many, and on questionable terms with his hosts, he nevertheless at once challenges them to gymnastic games, and beats them all.

Achæan, that is Hellene, himself, he is, if not among Hellenes, yet among the members and adherents of that Phœnician dynasty which had established itself, to all appearance, in Bœotia, at a somewhat early date: even as, at a period slightly later[581], Minos established from Phœnicia a Throne in Crete, which soon became wholly Greek in character.

And again, in Il. xxiii. 678-80, we are told, that Mecisteus, on the death of Œdipus, went to Thebes to the even then customary funeral Games, and there was victor over all the Καδμείωνες who opposed him, by the aid of Minerva. Euryalus, the son of Mecisteus, was an Argive, and was the colleague of Diomed and Sthenelus. The same observations are applicable here, as in the last case.

There is therefore nothing in any one of these cases to connect the gymnastic celebrations with the Pelasgian, but every thing to associate them with the Hellic races.

Of the Greek Games, the Pythian are those which, as being under Apollo, might most be suspected of Pelasgic origin. But these did not apparently begin as a national gymnastic festival until about 586 B. C.[582] The Olympic contests had then been regularly recorded for nearly two hundred years, since 776 B. C. And in the laws of Solon there was a reward of 500 drachms for every Athenian who should gain an Olympic prize, of 100 only for an Isthmian: while of the Nemean and Pythian Games, as being merely local, they take no notice. So these Games, besides being secondary, belonged to times much later, and also purely Hellenic.

The Panathenaic Games are apparently of similar date. And with this evidence from the earlier historic times before us, no importance can attach to a tradition so late as that of Pausanias, who makes Theseus found the Panathenaica, and Lycaon, son of Pelasgus, the Λύκαια[583]. But it is well worthy of remark, that in reporting this tradition he adds, that the Olympic Games were much older, that they mounted to the very highest antiquity of the human race, and that Κρόνος and Jupiter were said to have contended at them for prizes. Again, great fame attached to the Games said to have been celebrated by Acastus on the death of his father Pelias. Stesichorus, who lived in the seventh century, wrote a poem upon them; but Pelias, the brother of Neleus, and son of Tyro, (having Neptune for his father,) was of undoubted Hellic origin[584].

Minor instances of the addiction of the Hellic races to Games may be found in the constant practice of the Ithacan Suitors, and in the resort of the Myrmidons before Troy, during the seclusion of Achilles, to this method of beguiling their time[585].

The case stands only a little less distinctly as to song. There is an ἀοιδὸς in the palace of Priam, as well as in that of Ulysses; one in that of Agamemnon, and one in that of Alcinous. The Muses are Olympian Muses. Olympus geographically was quite as much Hellic as Pelasgian, and in every other sense, as I believe, far more. We may perhaps most fairly estimate its national character, by contrasting the Jupiter of Olympus with the Jupiter of Dodona, and the home of the large and varied group of Grecian gods with the solitary grandeur which affords a trace of the old Pelasgian worship. In this view Olympus and the Muses will be clearly Hellic. Further[586], Thamyris in his boast supposes the Muses to be contending against him at the public matches. If I have been correct in tracing such matches to an Hellic source, Thamyris must have regarded the Muses as Hellic when he made this supposition. Again, Thamyris himself is a Θρὴξ, that is to say, a highlander: this connects him with the Helli of the hills, not with the Pelasgians of the more open country. The place, too, where the punishment is inflicted upon Thamyris, is in the dominions of Pylus: which, at any rate for a term equal to three generations before the Troica, had been Achæan, that is, Hellic[587].

Apollo was doubtless an object of Pelasgian worship: the Apollo of Homer however is not confined to the Pelasgians, but is by many signs, scattered throughout the poems, placed in close as well as friendly relations with the whole Greek nation. Among these may be reckoned his acceptance of the propitiation and prayer offered by Calchas. In truth, though it is his business, as the organ of Jupiter, to assist the Trojans, he no where shows any of that hostility to their opponents, which Neptune and Juno show to them.

As to poetry and music.

In later times, the traditions of Orpheus, Musæus, and Eumolpus, always Θρῇκες, supported the tradition which derives Greek song from the mountain tribes.

Why has Arcadia a muse of her own, but because the Pelasgian poetry is not the Hellic? and does not the reputed character of that muse oblige us to assign a Hellic origin to the higher national poetry?

Hesiod, as author of the Works and Days, is so enormously different from Homer in his frame of mind, as well as his diction, that it is hard to trace, even in the most general form, a complete national affinity between them. The Theogony, by its subject, brought him nearer to Homer, but it is quite destitute of the heroic power and fire: a calm and low-toned beauty, as in the legend of the Ages, is all to which Hesiod ever rises. To my conjecture, he seems to personify the one-stringed instrument which might suffice for Pelasgian song: while the Diapason of Homer, embracing with its immeasurable sweep things small and things great, things sublime and things homely, all objects that human experience had suggested, and all thoughts that the soul of man had imagined or received, presents to us that Greek mind, full, varied, energetic, lively, profound, exact, which was destined to give form for so many ages to the genius of the world.

I cannot however part from this subject, and leave the Hellenic races in possession of the honour of having principally contributed to mould the powerful imagination of the Greeks, without noticing the opposite conclusion of Mr. Fergusson, in his admirable ‘Handbook of Architecture.’

He treats the Greek nation as made up chiefly of two ingredients, the Dorian and the Pelasgian. He takes the Greeks of the Trojan Epoch to have been Pelasgian, and so to have continued until the return of the Heraclidæ. Then, according to him, began the Hellenic, which he treats as synonymous with the Doric, preponderance; and, having Sparta before him as the one great Hellic type, he observes that the race was far better adapted “for the arts of war and self-government, than for the softer arts of poetry and peace[588].”

But the supposition of a Pelasgic supremacy in Homeric Greece, is contrary to all the evidence afforded by the text of Homer, and, I think we may add, to the belief alike of ancient and of modern times. Even the limited part of the Homeric evidence which is connected with the names Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες, seems large enough to overthrow any such hypothesis. Though the Dorian race was Hellenic, it was apparently a late outgrowth from the stock, and has no pretension whatever to be considered as the universal type of its products. In Sparta, the excessive development of policy was doubtless unfavourable to human excellence in other forms; among others, to poetry and art. Still, neither verse, music, nor architecture are disconnected from the Dorian name and race. It seems quite impossible to refer the war-poetry of the Iliad, the grandest in the world, for its origin to a people so unwarlike, in reference especially to the changeful, romantic, and poetic side of war, as the Pelasgi.

The adventurous tone and tenour of the Odyssey, and its wide range over the world, and over the sea, are as little in keeping with what we can see of Pelasgic habits in the heroic age. Above all, that largeness and unimpaired universality of type, which belongs to human character as drawn by Homer, and especially to Achilles and Ulysses, demonstrate (I cannot use a weaker word) that all the materials of Grecian greatness were in his time fully ripened.

Pelasgian sense of beauty.

At the same time it is not necessary to deny, that the Pelasgians may have been endowed with a high sense of beauty. Not that Homer appears to have had a vivid conception of beauty in connection with architecture, their great reputed accomplishment; for he seems, on the contrary, to have had little idea of ornament in buildings, beyond the blaze of plates of polished metal: far different here from what he shows himself to be in dealing with dress, or armour, or the forms of men and horses. But we have before us the fact that through Athens itself preeminently, and likewise through its colonies to the east, the Greek race earned in after-times the very highest honours in poetry and the fine arts. On the one hand, however, a large share of these honours, especially in early times, fell to the share of the race called Æolian, which was clearly Hellic, and a principal part of the Hellic family. On the other hand, Arcadia, which remained more purely Pelasgian, while Athens received all sorts of mixtures, never attained to high distinction in art, nor rose above a modest and tranquil strain of verse. The great tragedians and the great artists were of a race the most composite in all Greece. The natural inference would seem to be, that whatever the Pelasgians may have contributed to the general result, however they may have afforded for poetry and art (as also they did for war) a good raw material, it was only when in combination with other elements from other sources, that they could attain to great practical excellence. A lively sense of beauty is, doubtless, not only a condition, but even a foundation: yet a great organising power is as necessary for the production of the great works of imagination, as it was to Lycurgus for the Spartan constitution, or to Aristotle for philosophical analysis and construction; and this was the commanding and sovereign faculty in a mind such as that of Homer.

The connection between the Homeric Greeks and the traditions of huntsmen is, I think, sufficiently evident from Homer. His hunting legends, and the multitude of his hunting similes, are so many signs of it; and many indications, I think, concur towards forming a belief that the Greeks owed their fondness for the chace to their Hellic, not to their Pelasgic habits and blood.

I take first the relation between Achilles and his instructors. Chiron was the teacher of Achilles in the surgical art, while Phœnix had charge of his higher education. Surgery and war would obviously go together. But Chiron too gave his father the ashen spear from Pelion, which none but Achilles could wield: he was the most civilized (δικαιότατος) of the Centaurs, the one to whom the ideas of right, on which society is founded, were most congenial. But he seems to dwell on Mount Pelion, not like Phœnix, in the court of Peleus; he is, therefore, without doubt, a huntsman, and is in fact a link between the old and rude, and the new and more civilized life of the Hellic tribes.

Again. Of the Hellic legends of Homer, which are not in all very numerous, two have hunting for their subject: as,

1. That of the Calydonian Boar in Il. ix.

2. That of the visit of Ulysses to the court of Autolycus, in Od. xix.

Now these two legends are the only ones in the poems, that do not relate to war. Though the Trojans dwelt by Ida, we never hear of their hunts: but their princes feed sheep upon its slopes, or tend horses in the plain below.

Evidence as to hunting.

Even apart from particular evidence, we might presume that, if the nation derived its warlike turn from a Hellic source, so it must likewise have been with hunting, which was next of kin to war.

Lastly, if this supposition be correct, it helps to account for what is otherwise an anomaly in the poems. Diana fights on the Trojan side: yet we find no evidence that she was worshipped among the Trojans, or even known to them in the character, in which she has the greatest mythical celebrity. She is mentioned but once, I think, among them; it is by Andromache, and that is as having put a period to her mother’s life[589], nowhere in her character as a huntress. But among the Greeks she constantly appears otherwise than as in connection with death. Her epithets, ἀγροτέρη, κελαδεινὴ, ἰοχέαιρα, are far more suitable to the huntress, than to the more solemn function of the ministry of Death among human beings. Again, Helen is compared to her in appearance. The calamities of the Kalydonians came upon them in consequence of their neglect as to her worship on a particular occasion[590]; and the particular punishment inflicted is the sending a wild boar upon them. Nausicaa[591] is elaborately compared to her, and in this simile she is described as hunting in Taygetus and Erymanthus. Thus while among the more Pelasgic Trojans, she appears only in virtue of the relation to death which (we shall find) she holds from a traditive source[592]; it is the Hellic influence, which superadds the mythical and imaginative attributes of the beautiful huntress: and which, in so doing, supplies a marked proof of the addiction of the Hellic tribes to that pursuit.

Evidence as to navigation.

It is not easy to judge whether the turn of the Greeks for navigation ought to be referred in any degree to a Pelasgian source. Plainly, if there was such a source, it was not the main one. We have seen that only the most elementary words connected with propulsion by rowing, appear to bear any sign on them of proceeding from that stock. We cannot argue from the maritime excellence of the Athenians at a much later date to their nautical character in the time of Homer, on account of the important ethnical changes, which in the mean time they had gradually, but most thoroughly, undergone. On the other hand, our finding the pure Pelasgian population of Arcadia resorting to the inland country, and wholly destitute of ships, affords a negative indication. A stronger, and indeed very remarkable one, is supplied by the total want of ships among the Trojans, notwithstanding that their situation was one highly favourable to the acquisition of maritime power. Yet Paris needed to have ships built for him in order to effect his tour[593], and the building of them appears in the Iliad as having been an event of much note in Troy. On the other hand, Homer is full of indications of the locomotive tendencies of the Hellic races. Among these may be mentioned, the wide circle embraced in the adventures of Hercules: the offer of Menelaus[594] to accompany Telemachus on a journey about Greece: the sojourn of Neoptolemus[595] in Scyros: the frequent visits of Idomeneus[596] to Sparta before the war: the marriage of Theseus[597] to a daughter of the king of Crete: the journey of Nestor[598] into Thessaly: the pleasure visits of Autolycus to Ithaca, and of the young Ulysses[599] to Autolycus: the evident familiarity of the Poet with the idea of travelling to recover debts[600]: the existence of places of wide resort for Games and Oracles[601]: the custom of assembling from a group of districts at the funerals of great men[602]: nay, the very choice of the voyages of Ulysses for the subject of so great a part of the Odyssey, and the lengthened tour of Menelaus. And while the Pelasgians appear to be akin to the land-loving Egyptians, we have found the Hellenes to be strongly sympathetic in character with the Phœnicians, the great masters of navigation in the heroic age.

From the speech of the Pseudo-Ulysses in the Fourteenth Odyssey, we have the strongest evidence that navigation and agricultural pursuits, which were those of the Pelasgians, stood in sharp opposition to one another. He could not bear tillage, but loved ships and war[603].

It is also plain, from two circumstances at least, that Homer regarded travelling as one great means of mental and practical culture. One is, that he describes this benefit as attained in the case of his great hero Ulysses;

The other is that, in the very remarkable simile of the Thought, he treats travelling as the great stimulus to the growth of the mind of man:

Both as to navigation then, and as to locomotion, which stand nearly related to each other, it would seem that we ought probably to regard the Hellic stock as the parent of the Greek accomplishment.

Summary of the case.

After this laborious and microscopic investigation, we may now be justified in taking a survey more at ease of the ground which we have traversed so slowly, and in endeavouring to embody our general results in a rude sketch of the succession, places, and functions of the two great races of early Greece.

Relying, therefore, upon what has been produced in the way of proof, I will proceed to fill up its interstices with such conjectures as probable reasoning will supply.

The Greek nation was originally formed of two great coefficients, the Hellic and Pelasgic races respectively: and there is no evidence, that any other race entered largely into its composition, or modified it sensibly: although individual foreigners or companies of emigrants, which left little impression on the names of districts or races, may notwithstanding have exercised a powerful influence from time to time. We may consider the Leleges, Caucones, and other pre-Hellenic tribes as branches of the Pelasgian family, or as akin to it rather than to the Hellic stem.

There is Homeric and post-Homeric evidence, which seems to shew us the Pelasgians established through Greece from Macedonia in the north, to Crete in the south: as well as in Italy, and elsewhere beyond the borders of Greece.

It is on the whole most probable, that the Pelasgians principally entered Greece from the south by Crete; but they may have entered it in both directions. In either case, there is no other people to dispute with them in continental Greece the title of its first regular settlers. They chose their habitations in the plains, and were essentially a lowland people. It is even likely that they derive their name from this characteristic, and that it marks them at once as agriculturists.

As respects the religion of Greece, its most essential features were probably common to the two races: a principle illustrated by the fact that the Helli, by a kind of natural succession, become the wardens and interpreters of the great Pelasgian shrine of Jupiter at Dodona.

The first form of the religion of Greece was probably due to the Pelasgians; and moreover it would appear to be from them that it received, in the main, its ritual and hierarchical, as contradistinguished from its imaginative, development. They appear to have incorporated it in visible institutions, and to have given social order to the country; probably in that form in which men live sparsely, and not in the large aggregations of considerable cities. But social order in any form implies some means of defence against the lawless: and we must view the Pelasgians as having introduced the construction of works of this class, which were then of prime necessity to the existence of communities. Their standing pursuit was evidently that of agriculture: the only link of connection established by Homer between them and the beautiful in art, is the doubtful one of the epithets περικαλλέα and καλὰ[606] applied to the architecture of the palaces of Priam and Paris respectively.

In general, the Pelasgian race, though without the vivid temperament of the Hellic tribes, yet would appear to have been both brave and solid in character.

The stream of Pelasgic immigration, flowing chiefly northward, is met by the counter-stream of Hellic tribes, proceeding from the highland nation of the Helli, which had taken its seat in the mountains to the north of Thessaly.

They in their southward course overspread the same countries which the Pelasgi had already occupied; successive tribes of immigrants going forth from the parent stock at different times, as the pressure of population on the means of subsistence required it, and under different names, taken in all likelihood from their leaders.

In the nest of mountaineers, barbarism, or at least rudeness, continues: but as the young broods go forth, and make their way into more favourable conditions of physical and social life, their great capacities for development find scope, and they rapidly assume a new character.

By their greater energy and activity, they became everywhere the dominant race. Policy and war fell into their hands: they supplied the more vigorous, intellectual, and imaginative element in the wonderful composition of the Greek mind. Of the Pelasgian imagination it is difficult to speak in a definite manner: but it probably had not that masculine tone, and energetic movement, when alone, which marks the mind of Greece.

Far more expansive than their Pelasgian antecessors, the Hellic tribes availed themselves of the great advantages which the country offers for extended navigation, which was so essential as a means both of communication, and of attracting the elements of civilization from abroad. They were apt pupils under apt instructors, the Phœnician mariners. They developed the Pelasgic religion into their more enlarged and diversified mythology: they idealized the visible world together with human nature, and established those peculiar and pervasively poetical relations between the seen and the unseen spheres of existence, which are the basis of the Greek mythology. Their keen sense of the beautiful led them to adorn both the body and the mind of man with the attributes of deity, while their imaginative power continually prompted them both to clothe celestial objects in shapes borrowed from the visible world, and to equip the gods with sentiments and passions drawn from the sphere of every day experience.

They likewise brought with them the gymnastic element of the Greek system, the education of the body; and they made provision for this education, in conjunction with a powerful means of national union, in the Games which became so famous through so many ages.

The same qualities which found employment in fashioning the relations of earth to heaven, were likewise busy in uniting the past with the present, by the agency of history in the form of song.

Of this race were the Achæans, who by their power and extension through Greece, gave to it and to its people their first famous designation, that which they bore in the Homeric times. From the same source proceeded all the Hellenes, derivatively so called, and the Myrmidons. Under the great Achæan name, understood in its special sense, are probably included with the Pelopids, the Pylians, Cephallenians, Epeans, Myrmidons, Loerians. Nor can we be certain that it did not also include those Æolid families whose power and extension subsequently impressed large portions of Greece with the Æolian name.

While imperial cares and aims, and the refinements and enjoyments, together with the stir, movement, and solicitude of life, fell to the Hellic portion of the Greek societies, and took its form from them, the Pelasgian element, though depressed below the surface, continued to live and act with vigour; it predominated in the classes which form the solid substratum of society, those on which rural industry, if not those on which mechanical pursuits depended, and from which the upper surface, when exhausted by the prolonged performance of its functions, may draw in every society successive stocks of new materials to renovate its vital forces.

While Homer himself seems to represent the unbounded wealth and fulness, and the manifold and versatile power, of the composite Greek mind, we appear to have, in the rural strains of Hesiod, if not in the unenlivened theogonic traditions ascribed to him, the just and natural exemplification of all that we might expect in a Pelasgic poet.

States especially Hellic or Pelasgic.

In later, as well as in Homeric times, the Arcadians seem in the most marked manner to have exhibited the Pelasgic aspect of the Greek mind and life: and they show it much in the same relation to the Hellic races, as that of the Saxons to the Norman chivalry. Like the Saxons, it was not in bravery that they failed: they were ἐγχεσίμωροι and ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν: but in energy and passion, and likewise in governing and organizing powers, they were beneath the competing race, and therefore they gave way: while, from their enduring and solid qualities, they were well qualified in after generations to supply the greater waste caused by a more vivid temperament and keener action in the soil above them.

Among the Spartans we find developed, in a very peculiar degree, two of the imperial elements of the Greek character. The first is that political faculty of the Hellic races, by which, as Strabo says, they preserved their ἡγεμονία from the time of Lycurgus, down to the fifth century.

And the second is, the idea of the education of the body, as an essential and main part of human training: a sentiment which to us may seem narrow, but we must remember that the Greeks kept fully in their view what we have dropped from our theories, though it may be hoped, not wholly from our practice, namely, the influence of bodily exercise and discipline in forming mental qualities and habits.

It was to Attica, however, that was reserved the offices of exhibiting in the fullest degree the manysidedness of the Greek character: and the efficient cause, by which she was fitted to fulfil this function, probably may have been that constant infusion of new blood by the successive immigrations of the different Greek races, without the absolute displacement of any of them on a large scale, which, as we have seen, Thucydides remarks to have been her special characteristic. Hence she always exhibited both the ancient and the fresh; both, too, in the highest degree; urging, like Arcadia, the autochthonic origin of her population, which must refer to its Pelasgic element; contending with that state, and with Argos[607], for the honour of the traditions touching Pelasgus and the worship of Ceres; but richer at the same time than any other Greek State, in the varied aggregate of the qualities, which the composite or entire Greek mind appears to have owed to Hellic infusion. Hence the breadth of the transition which, according to Herodotus[608], she had made from the Pelasgic to the Hellenic character: and yet she had made it without any visible breach in the continuity of her social and political traditions.

Though Thessaly was the country in which, to all appearance, the Hellic tribes, coming down from the poverty and rudeness of their highland life, first began to develope their amazing powers, and to acquire civilization, yet it was rather, so to speak, their caravansera or halting house, than their abode.

The Helli, thus travelling through Hellas, give it a name, and receive from it one in return; so that when they pass on to the southward, they are no longer Helli but Hellenes, and have only a secondary and derivative relation to their original home and stock. It is intelligible, that they should not wish to claim too close a kindred with the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι of Homer[609], although most ready to own the relationship in solemn appeals to the ancient seat of Jupiter. Even in Homer’s time, they had advanced very far ahead of the habits thus ascribed to them: for when the Greek chiefs return from the Doloneia, they first wash in the sea, then pass into the bath, and thirdly are anointed, before they begin their well-earned meal[610].

The rapidity of their growth in numbers, and of their propagation southwards, might be due to their having settled on a fertile plain; while necessities, arising from the vicissitudes of climate, would be the probable and less copious cause of migration from the hills. But in any case, whether from the rapidity of their passage through Thessaly, or from their having actually occupied no more than a small portion of it, they left it in the Homeric, and apparently also in the Hesiodic period, still partly impressed, as they must have found it, with the Pelasgic name[611]. The prolonged existence of this appellation indicates in part perhaps the predominance of the Pelasgic element in this country, in part the fugacious character of the Hellic settlement, of which only the Achæan portion lived through the historic times in such a degree of force as to maintain its visible identity: this, too, according to post-Homeric tradition, was peopled by the Myrmidons from the south, and not directly from the region of the Helli.

Thessaly, then, was the nursery or cradle of the Hellic or Hellenic races, but it was no more. Consequently with the lapse of time, as it wanted the true mixture of ingredients, Thessaly became less and less Greek in its essential habits and sympathies: while from its preserving a federal constitution, under a federal head, the τάγος, we may also refer to its more Pelasgian character the apparent fact, that it was not so liable to political change, or νεωτέρισις, as were the less Pelasgian parts of Greece. When, after centuries of vicissitude, the outward notes of its original blood were almost gone, Pelasgian feeling still survived: for Thucydides relates that, when Brasidas entered Thessaly at the head of the Lacedæmonian army, he found the mass of the people attached by affection to the Athenian cause, and had to rely on aristocratic influence to furnish him with guides[612].

SECT. VIII. On the three greater Homeric appellatives.

a. Danaans. b. Argives. c. Achæans.

We now come to the great Homeric appellatives, Danaan, Argive, and Achæan. As Thucydides has said (i. 3), Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι, καὶ Ἀργείους, καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. Why has the great historian arranged the three names in this order? It cannot be with reference to the comparative frequency of their use: for the first is employed the smallest number of times, and the third is by far the most frequent. For the present let us postpone seeking after the cause; and simply note it as probable, even if no more than probable, that there is a cause.

Modes of formation for Names of Peoples.

Let me, by way of preface to the examination of these names, consider the various ways in which, so far as we have the means of tracing them (which is but to a limited extent), the names attached by Homer to the inhabitants of particular countries are derived.

They appear to come either

1. From an eponymist directly, who is also an original founder, as Δαρδανοὶ, Τρῶες, from Dardanus, and Tros, in relation to Dardania and Troja respectively.

2. From the land they live in: and thus from an eponymist, if there has originally been one for the territory.

For example, we find Ἰθακήσιοι from an island Ἰθακὴ, which again was derived from Ἰθακός. In a case like this, when the appellation of the people comes not directly, but mediately from the name-giver, a territorial designation intervening, we can draw no inference as to the oneness of race between them and him. Thus in the case before us, Ἰθακήσιοι, though connected with Ἰθακὴ, has not as of necessity, any connection whatever with Ἰθακὸς personally.

3. From the land they live in, as described by its most prominent physical characteristic.

For example, the Thracians (Θρῇκες), must evidently be so called from the roughness of the country, as a cognate word to τρῆχυς, which is thus applied to Ithaca,

Again, from Αἰγίαλος, the district afterwards called Achæa, we have, in later Greek[613], the name Αἰγιαλεῖς for the inhabitants. This does not occur in Homer, but we have what is equivalent to it in the name of Αἰγιάλεια, who was wife of Diomed, and daughter of Adrastus, the former king of Sicyon in Ægialus. This is an instance of the application of the principle, not to the inhabitants at large, but to an individual inhabitant.

4. The name of a population may be derived secondarily from that of another population. Thus while we must derive Ἕλληνες from Ἕλλας, this in its turn can only be drawn from the Ἕλλοι.

5. In the single case of the Athenians, we find the name of a population derived from that of a deity.

6. It is presumable, though not certain, that entire populations took their name from ruling individuals or races. It seems hardly possible to explain, for example, the name Καδμεῖοι, which nowhere connects itself with any of the foregoing sources of eponymism, otherwise than by reference to an individual Cadmus, whom Homer mentions in Od. v. 333.

The idea prevails extensively, at least by sufferance, that these three great names are in Homer mere synonyms, and have no reference to any actual and historical differences, either existing when Homer wrote, or known by him to have existed at a previous period.

This question it is proposed now to examine. I commence by making a broad admission. It is this.

Upon the face of the poems, and on almost all ordinary occasions, Homer seems at first sight to use, and he very frequently does use, as equivalent and interchangeable, those three principal designations which he applies to the Greeks in common.

Homer’s use of them distinctive.

It is a very important question, however, whether Homer knew of and observed any distinctions between these names. For if he did, then these mere commonplace words, as they are taken to be, may involve in them the germ of much early history.

In this investigation, we have the advantage of dealing in great part, not with mere traditional assertion, but with facts. The use of particular names, at particular epochs, for particular tribes, affords (if the text can be trusted for genuineness) a class of evidence analogous to that supplied by coins and inscriptions for history, or that afforded by geological phænomena with respect to the formation of the globe.

The poems of Homer, particularly the Iliad, abound in passages relating to prior occurrences. These passages are not in general of a high order of poetical beauty, as compared with the rest of the poem; they often cause the action to hang rather heavily; many of them make up the speeches of old men, whose natural leaning to loquacity it appears that the Poet has, with his usual skill, made to minister to the accomplishment of his own marked historic aims. But they are repositories stored, we may almost say packed, with the most curious and suggestive information.

Some of them may be without date: but the time is generally fixed within limits sufficiently close, either by genealogies, or by the period in the lives of the narrators, to which the tales belong. The war of the Elians and Pylians in the Eleventh Book took place in the boyhood of Nestor: probably from fifty to sixty years before the war of Troy. The birth of Eurystheus, related in the Nineteenth Book, was probably earlier still by ten or twenty years. The other legends fall into the interval between these events and the Troica. Now if we can trace a difference in the application by Homer of his appellatives, either as to the times or the places, he may hereby conclusively, though unconsciously, tell us a good deal about his view of the succession, and the local distribution, of ruling races in Greece.

Such a rule of difference is easy to be traced.

For example. In the Catalogue[614] and elsewhere, if in the course of the action he refers to the soldiers who proceeded from the country afterwards called Bœotia, he calls them Βοιωτοί. But where Agamemnon has, or rather makes, occasion to tell a story of the same people acting in prior history, he calls them, not Βοιωτοὶ, but once Καδμεῖοι, and once by the equivalent name Καδμειῶνες[615]. The tale is an account of the mission of Tydeus from Thebes to Mycenæ, in company with Polynices, which had occurred under the Pelopid dynasty.

In this story it appears, that Tydeus and Polynices, first obtained a promise of the help they wanted; but that, after they had departed, there was a change of resolution. Hence messengers were sent to acquaint Tydeus, and apparently to recall the force. The expression is (Il. iv. 384),

An allusion to this occurrence is again put into the mouth of Minerva in Il. v. 800-7. The resemblance in the names used is so precise as to be almost precisian. Again, the Mycenians are named once, and named as Ἀχαιοί. Again, the Thebans are named twice, and once it is as Καδμεῖοι, once as Καδμείωνες.

Proofs of the distinctive use.

These two instances fortify one another to such a degree by their concurrence, that, as I would submit, they would, even if they stood alone, amount to a demonstration that Homer had regard to the times and circumstances under which the several races prevailed, in those passages of his work which refer to particular incidents of prior history, personal and local. But there is no lack of other evidence.

First, we have other pieces of prior history, which affect the same portion of Greece. The first of these probably preceded the Troica by only two, or, at the utmost, two and a half generations. It is the account of the birth of Eurystheus, given by Agamemnon himself in the Nineteenth Book. The scene of it is described as Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκόν. He calls it indeed by the name, which it still bore at the time when he spoke, and which was understood by the hearers, for it remained the same country as it had been in former times. But the same people, who in the time of Tydeus, living under the Pelopids, were Ἀχαιοὶ, in the time of Eurystheus, and therefore before the predominance of the Pelopids, are described as Ἀργεῖοι. In Il. xix. 122, Juno thus speaks of the birth of Eurystheus

And again, v. 124, the same term is used.

Again, it appears from the Sixth Iliad that Prœtus, who expelled Bellerophon about the same time, was king of the Ἀργεῖοι (Il. vi. 158);

According to extra-Homeric tradition, Prœtus was the brother of Eurystheus. According to Homer, his power extends over Ephyre, and over the Argives: and as Æolid dynasties were then ruling in the west, it is the country afterwards called the Argos of the Achæans, within some part of which he must have ruled. But in telling both the story of Prœtus, and the story of Eurystheus, with reference to the same side of Peloponnesus, and entirely out of connection with one another, the text of Homer, true to itself, calls the subjects of each at that period, only by the name Ἀργεῖοι, never Δαναοὶ or Ἀχαιοί.

Thus, one generation before the Troica he calls people Achæans, and calls them by that name only, whom one or two generations earlier he describes, and repeatedly and uniformly describes, as having been Argives. There can hardly be stronger circumstantial evidence of the fact, that to each term he attached its own special meaning.

And yet it is not simply that Homer has made the Argive the more ancient, and the Achæan the more recent, name. On the contrary, he uses both the one and the other with marked respect to place as well as to time. For at the great Argive epoch he has Achæans: and at the great Achæan epoch, that of the poems, he has Argive associations, and a local Argive designation, still remaining.

In the Eleventh Book, Nestor detains Patroclus with a speech of great length. In the beginning of this harangue, he refers to the circumstances of the moment, and, having ended his preface, he travels back to his own early youth, indeed almost his childhood, to give the story of a war, or foray, between the Epeans and the Pylians. When he has ended this tale, he returns to the actual position of affairs before Troy.

In the narrative of this raid[616], he commonly terms the one side Epeans, and the other Pylians. But he once calls the Epeans, who were inhabitants of Elis, Elians. This is natural enough: for as the Elian name afterwards (and so soon as in the time of Homer) prevailed in that race and country, it might very well have been already beginning to come into use. But he also calls the Pylians Achæans; and he uses the name distinctively, for it is where he is speaking of them as the conquering party[617]. For this there is clearly no corresponding reason. It is equally clear that Homer does not call the Pylians Ἀχαιοὶ, simply in the sense of being Greeks, for then the name would not have been distinctive: the enemy too would have been included with them, which would turn the passage into nonsense. Homer, then, (there is no other alternative) means to say that the Pylians were, in some particular sense, of the Achæan race.

This is the more worthy of remark, when we look to the preamble and peroration of the speech. For in both of these, which refer to the whole body of the Greeks and to the Trojan epoch, he employs his usual names, and calls them both Danaans (Δαναῶν οὐ κήδεται, v. 665, also vid. 797), and Argives (Ἀργείων ἀέκητι, v. 667): finally Achæans (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, 800).

Thus then he calls the Pylians Achæans at the time of the Argive predominance: for this local war could hardly have been more than ten or twenty years after the birth of Eurystheus, and must therefore have been before, or else during his reign; that is to say, at a time when his own subjects are called Ἀργεῖοι.

Again. Homer uses the word Ἀργεῖος in the feminine singular fifteen times. Twice it is with reference to Juno. Of course this application of the term is figurative. But though it be figurative, the figure is evidently founded on her close and intimate relation, not to the Greeks at large only, but to the Argive name; and to the persons, but more particularly to the place, that was so specially associated with it[618].

In all the other thirteen places, the epithet is joined with the name of Helen. Does it for her mean simply Greek, or something special and beyond this? Now if it meant simply Greek, it would be strange that she is never called, I will not say Δαναὴ, because the Danaan name has no singular use in Homer, but certainly Ἀχαιὴ or Ἀχαίïς. Especially as the word Ἀχαιὸς is used as an epithet, be it remembered, many times oftener, than is Ἀργεῖος: and it alone is used to describe the women of Greece generally.

Again, if the epithet Argive, as applied to Helen, meant simply Greek, it might be suitable enough in the mouth of a Trojan speaking among Trojans, but it would have been weak and unmeaning, and therefore most unlike Homer, in the mouth of a Greek or a friend of Greeks; or when, as in the Odyssey[619], Helen is no longer among strangers, but at home. Yet it is used in the following passages among others, (1) by Juno to Minerva, Il. ii. 161, (2) by Minerva to Ulysses, Il. ii. 177; and here in a near juxtaposition with the Achæan appellative, which goes far to prove of itself that Ἀργείη has a meaning more specific than merely Greek. The passage is,

I doubt whether Homer ever places in such proximity the two epithets with the same meaning for each[620]. The tautology would be gross, if Achæan and Argeian each meant neither more nor less than Greek: but if Ἀργείη have the local sense, nothing awkward remains. (3) It is used by Agamemnon, Il. iii. 458, in addressing the Trojans; (4) Il. iv. 174, in addressing Menelaus; (5) Il. ix. 140, in addressing the Greek Council. It seems quite clear, from even this enumeration, that Ἀργείη, as applied to Helen, must mean something different from the mere fact that she belonged to the Greek nation at large.

Nor is it difficult to find a meaning. Homer indeed leaves us but narrow information as to the extraction of Helen. He calls her sometimes εὐπατέρεια[621], and many times Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα[622]. In the Third Iliad he shows her to be the sister of Castor and Pollux, and in the Eleventh Odyssey he shows them to be the children of Tyndareus and Leda[623]. Who Tyndareus was we do not know from him. But the common tradition, which makes him a sovereign in Eastern Peloponnesus, is thoroughly accordant with the slight notices in Homer. For, as we see from the cases of Eurystheus and Prœtus, it was in Eastern Peloponnesus that the Argive power and name prevailed; and Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus is, as we have also seen, characteristically with him the Argive Helen. Thus then it may now be lawful to say, we are supplied with a meaning for the name which makes it especially appropriate in the mouth of Agamemnon, the head of the Pelopids. For they were the race who, coming in at the head of the Achæans, had from the West overpowered and superseded the Argive power of the East, while they also held as heirs to it by marriage: and if a royal Argive house at the epoch of the war survived only in Helen and her sister Clytemnestra, she in part at least represented its title, and, as a lawful wife of Menelaus, added to his throne whatever authority the name and rights of her race were capable of conferring.

Having, I trust, seen enough to justify the belief that some at least of these names in the mind of Homer had a definite as well as a more general meaning, let us now, taking them in succession, proceed to examine what that meaning is.

The Danaans of Homer.

Among the three great Homeric appellatives, let us direct our attention first to the one, which is presumably the oldest. The word Δαναοὶ, from the comparative paucity of the signs and indications connected with it, evidently answers to this description.

We will take first the Homeric, and then the later, evidence respecting it. Of the former, the greater number of particulars are negative. Indeed we have but two positive notes to dwell upon; both of these, however, are of great importance.

1. The Danaan name is with Homer a standing appellation of the Greeks. I think, however, it can be shown that it never means the Greek nation, but always the Greek armament or soldiery.

It is used in the Iliad one hundred and forty-seven times. The name Ἀργεῖοι is employed oftener, namely, one hundred and seventy-seven times in the plural, besides eleven times in the singular as a personal epithet: and Ἀχαιοὶ much more frequently still.

His epithets for the three designations.

If we observe the shadings, attached to these words respectively by means of the epithets which Homer annexes to them, we shall find they establish perceptible distinctions.

The epithets of Δαναοὶ are exclusively military epithets:

1. ἥρωες. 2. θεράποντες Ἄρηος. 3. φιλοπτόλεμοι. 4. αἰχμηταί. 5. ἀσπισταί. 6. ἴφθιμοι. 7. ταχύπωλοι.

The epithets of Ἀργεῖοι are as follows:

1. ἰόμωροι, Il. iv. 242. xiv. 479. 2. ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι, Il. xiv. 479. 3. θωρηκτοί, Il. xxi. 429. 4. φιλοπτόλεμοι, Il. xix. 269. 5. ἐλεγχέες, Il. iv. 242.

Upon these we may observe, first, that they are few in number; secondly, that they are used with extreme rarity; being only applied in four passages altogether, whereas the word Δαναοὶ has epithets in twenty-two. Thirdly, this word only twice in the whole of the poems has a military epithet attached to it. For I must follow those, who do not translate ἰόμωροι as corresponding with ἐγχεσίμωροι: (1) because the Greeks were not archers, (2) because the derivation from ἴα, ‘the voice,’ giving the sense of braggart, harmonises exactly with the accompanying phrase ἀπειλάων ἀκόρητοι: as well as (3) for the presumptive, but in Homer by no means conclusive, reason, that ἴον in composition is long.

The epithets of Ἀχαιοὶ are numerous, highly varied, and of very frequent use. They are these:

1. ἀπειλητῆρες. 2. μάχης ἀκόρητοι. 3. ἀνάλκιδες. 4. δῖοι. 5. ἑλικῶπες. 6. εὐκνήμιδες. 7. ἥρωες. 8. καρηκομόωντες. 9. μεγάθυμοι. 10. μένεα πνείοντες. 11. χαλκοκνήμιδες. 12. χαλκοχίτωνες. 13. ὑπερκύδαντες. 14. ἀρηίφιλοι. 15. φιλοπτόλεμοι.

These epithets are used in nearly one hundred and thirty passages, and they may be classified as comprising,

(1) One or two words of sarcastic reproach, very rarely used.

(2) Words descriptive of courage and spirit: such are μεγάθυμοι, μένεα πνείοντες.

(3) Words indicating that disposition to brag, which is more or less traceable in the military conduct of the Greeks, as well as glaringly palpable among the Trojans.

(4) Words descriptive of personal beauty: ἑλικῶπες and καρηκομόωντες.

(5) The word δῖοι, which signifies generally the possession of some kind of excellence.

(6) Words relating to well made and well finished armour: εὐκνήμιδες, χαλκοκνήμιδες, χαλκοχίτωνες.

And of the epithets of the three appellatives respectively we may say,

(1) Those of Ἀχαιοὶ are highly diversified, extended, and elevated in meaning: and are not suitable for soldiers exclusively.

(2) Those of Ἀργεῖοι are so slight and rare that they may be passed over.

(3) Those of Δαναοὶ are most properly neither those of chiefs, nor of a nation at large, but of a soldiery.

In the Odyssey the Danaan name is used thirteen times: but it never signifies either the Greeks contemporary with the action of that poem, or the Greek nation in its prior history: it is employed always retrospectively, and always of the soldiery in the Trojan war.

It will be observed by readers of the poems, that Homer often brings two of the three great appellatives, or even all the three, into juxtaposition so near, as would be inconvenient upon the supposition that they are purely synonymous. For instance, in Il. i. 71, we have Ἀργεῖοι and Ἀχαιοὶ in the same line, and in Il. i. 90, 91, Δαναοὶ and Ἀχαιοὶ in two successive lines. It is, I think, obvious, that this inconvenience will be mitigated or removed, if it can be shown that each of these three names, though they were most commonly applied to mean the same body of persons, nevertheless had its own shade of meaning. And we shall presently have to examine cases, where a determination of this kind appears to be required by the sense[624].

All the rest of the Homeric evidence connected with the name Δαναοὶ is of a negative character.

It is never used in the singular number, either as an adjective, or as a substantive. Nor is it ever applied to women: a point not immaterial, in connection with the question, whether with Homer it does not mean the Greeks of the army exclusively. There is, again, nothing in his use of it which associates it with a particular class of the army, either the lower or the higher; but it appears to be essentially general, comprehensive, and, I may add, likewise invariable in its meaning.

Still less should we expect to find it, nor do we find it, connected with the inhabitants of any particular part of the country: it has not, like the Cadmean or Cephallenian name, a local habitation within Greece. Nor has it in itself any root, or any derivative, which would associate it with any territory, as Αἰγιαλεῖς refers us to Αἰγίαλος, or even as Ἄρκαδες is related to Ἀρκαδίη.

Its use in the Iliad is in exact harmony with that in the Odyssey: it is never associated with the history of the Greeks or any part of them: in short, there is no clear evidence of its existence or application beyond the limits of the camp.

Neither has it any thing related to the physical character of the country, or to any of the races known to have inhabited it, or to any employment or habit of life, or to any deity. It floats before us like Delos on the Ægean, without any visible or discoverable root. And the only question is, whether the slight positive evidence at our command is not so limited, and so hemmed in on all sides by negatives, as to determine the hypothesis that may be drawn from it to one particular form, by forbidding us to move, except in one particular direction.

It is quite plain that the Danaan name must have had some root, lying very deep in the history or legends of Greece: since it would not have been possible for Homer, as a poet of the people, handling a subject the most profoundly national, to describe the Greek army under any name, except one associated with some of the most splendid, or the most venerable, traditions of the country.

Danaan name dynastic.

In one way alone could this name fulfil the required condition. If its root was not territorial, nor tribal, nor religious, it could only be personal. Was there, then, a Danaus known to the early history of Greece, who founded a dynasty in its centre of power, at a period anterior to the Hellenic history of the country, so as not to be in competition with the honours of that race? If so, then it is intelligible that the Greeks might be called Δαναοὶ by Homer. If that dynasty had passed away, we can well understand why Δαναοὶ should not be a name of contemporary Greeks as such: just as Καδμεῖοι was not an admissible designation for contemporary Bœotians. Further, if it had never been an historical appellative at all, but was the mere reflection cast by the figure of a great primitive personage, and incorporated, for the Poet’s purpose, in a designation made national by him, then we can see how natural it was, that he should limit the word altogether to an heroic and martial sense; just as Cambrian for Welshman, or Caledonian for Scotchman, or Gael for Highlander, or son of Albion for Englishman, would be an appellation naturally appropriated to romance, or war, or any strain impregnated with a strong vein of imagery or passion, but yet would not be suitable for the purposes of pure history.

In this inquiry concerning the Danaan name, we must, I think, carry along with us, as a cardinal element in the case, that which we know from other sources respecting the manner in which Homer was wont to veil all traces of the entry from elsewhere of races, persons, or influences into Greece. It must never be forgotten, that, throughout the whole of the poems, there is apparently not one single statement, made to us with the intention of conveying information respecting the colonization of Greece from abroad. It seems to be the Poet’s intention that we should assume all Greek manners, institutions, and races, to have sprung out of the very soil: and it is only accidentally that he imparts to us any information or suggestion on this subject, when he is in quest of some other purpose, and unawares lets fall a gleam of light upon some foreign settlement or immigration.

All this is conformable to the course of natural feeling. Shakespeare found it worth his while to sing of Lear, but not of Hengist and Horsa; of the English in France, not of the Normans in England. And though Danish invasions have not robbed our great Alfred of his fame, yet for a long time, in order to guard its brilliancy, it may have been that we coloured in our own favour the military history of the period. Arrivals from abroad, in the early periods of the life of a nation, are usually the conquests, in one form or another, of foreigners over natives: of what is strange to the soil over what is associated with it. It can hardly be, that such narratives should be popular. An abnormal instance to the contrary may be found in the fable, which deduced the Julian line in Rome from Æneas: but this was for poetry composed a thousand years after the date of its narrative; composed when the line of national continuity with those, whom Æneas was taken to have conquered, had been completely broken; and composed for the ears of a court, when the pulse of national life had become almost insensible. Even the process, by which Hellenes mastered Pelasgians, is nowhere professedly related by Homer; whose purpose it was to unite more closely the elements of the nation, and not to record that they had once been separate.

Compared with the Cadmean.

Except in the one point, that the name Καδμεῖοι had had a clear and undeniable place in prior history, there is a marked analogy between the modes in which Homer treats the Cadmean and the Danaan stories. In each of the two cases, general tradition tells us of a foreigner, who enters Greece and founds a dynasty. This dynasty, after acting powerfully on the destinies of the country for some generations, in the course of time disappears, the name dying with it. All this, in the first of the two instances, we have seen to be sufficiently supported by inference and suggestion from Homer. Yet Homer never mentions Cadmus, except as it were by chance, in the act of giving the extraction of Leucothee[625]; nor states that he came from abroad; nor that he founded a dynasty at all. He gives us Cadmus, father of Leucothee, and Cadmeans, and lets us make of them what we can. So here he gives us Danaans, and not indeed a Danaus, but a Danae, who is presumably related to Danaus.

2. In Iliad xiv., Jupiter renders an account of his passion for various women, all of them persons in the very highest positions; and among these for Danae[626].

The line of Danae.

In this passage we have Danae exhibited as the head of a line of sovereigns through Perseus, who occupied the most ancient and most distinguished seat of power in Greece, that of the Eastern Peloponnesus. From her, indeed, the derivation of sovereignty is locally continuous down to the time of Homer. Perseus is the father of Sthenelus[627], and Sthenelus of Eurystheus. Next to him, we find Pelops in possession of the throne, with a new sceptre, betokening a new sovereignty. That is to say, he was no longer a merely local sovereign, whose highest honour it was to be first in that class, primus inter pares; but he had also acquired an extensive supremacy, reaching beyond his own borders, or those of the Achaic Argos, and embracing all Greece, with a multitude of islands[628].

Such is the line of Danae downwards: beginning with a son, whose paternal extraction we shall consider hereafter[629]. And her epoch, as we shall see, is six generations before the Trojan war. For tracing her upwards, we have no means from Homer, except such as are afforded by the word Ἀκρισιώνη. The use of a patronymic which describes Danae as the daughter (most probably) of Acrisius, in some degree makes it likely that Acrisius either was the brother of Danaus, or otherwise collaterally related, rather than directly descended from him. For, had Danae herself been descended from Danaus, it seems improbable that she would have drawn her patronymic from the less distinguished Acrisius, unless Danaus was a very remote ancestor. But this is very improbable: for seven generations before Troy form the utmost limit of Homer’s historical knowledge; and where all besides falls within that line, it is improbable that there should be a single exception reaching greatly beyond it. And again, from the course of migration, it is likely that we should find his oldest traditions in Asia, and not in Europe. On the other hand, that Homer should stop short in tracing the lineage onwards, just before he came to the foreign immigrant, is in exact conformity with what he has done in omitting to connect Œdipus and Epicaste[630] with Cadmus, or Pelops with Tantalus. In the former of these two cases, the omission all the more cogently suggests design, because Epicaste is the only woman introduced in the Νεκυΐα without mention of her husband, among all those, eight in number, of whose cases he gives us the detail. It is most probable, therefore, that Homer meant the genealogy to stand as follows: and at the least, it must not be thought that the text of Homer gives countenance either directly or indirectly to those later fables, which throw back the first Greek dynasties into a very remote antiquity.

1. Danaus = Acrisius | 2. Danae 3. Perseus 4. Sthenelus 5. Eurystheus (= Hercules) = Pelops 6. Atreus = Thyestes 7. Agamemnon = Ægisthus.

Epoch of the dynasty.

According to these presumptions, Danaus is contemporary with Dardanus[631]: and also is just such a person as Homer’s poetic use of the name Δαναοὶ would lead us to expect; one who came from abroad, and is on that account kept in majestic shadow; one who founded a throne, but did not introduce a race: one who may have given his people the name of Δαναοὶ, as Cadmus gave that of Καδμεῖοι, for the time while his dynasty was in power, but whose name disappeared, together with its sway. We have, it will be remembered in Homer, no Homeric legends of the period of the Danaids, so that we do not know whether the name Δαναοὶ was then in any degree national or not.

According to the post-Homeric tradition, Danaus was an Egyptian[632], brother of Ægyptus. He migrated into Greece, and became king of Argos. Acrisius and Prœtus were reputed to be his great-grandsons.

In Homer, too, we have an Acrisius and a Prœtus: but Prœtus is contemporary with Bellerophon, two generations before the Troica, so that he is later by four generations than Acrisius, and later by at least four than Danaus.

The more recent tradition, contradicting Homer positively in this, as in so many instances, carries Prœtus back to the time of Acrisius, and then, paying some respect to the interval between Prœtus and Danaus, gives compensation by thrusting Danaus himself three generations further back.

Of the posterity of the Homeric Prœtus we hear nothing, and with him the Danaid line, prolonged in a junior branch, may have expired. Tradition places him on the throne of Tiryns. His holding a separate sovereignty in Argolis is not of itself in conflict with the Homeric account of the Perseids, who reigned at Mycenæ; because we find in Argos itself a separate sovereignty under Diomed at the epoch of the Troica. But the terms used are peculiar. Prœtus ruled over Ἀργεῖοι;

The account of Eurystheus in the Nineteenth Book may, however, imply that he was king of all the Ἀργεῖοι: and at first sight there is some conflict here, because both Eurystheus and Prœtus may be said to date two generations before the Troica. The solution is probably as follows. The passion of Antea, wife of Prœtus, for Bellerophon, suggests that her husband was more advanced in life than Bellerophon, whom, as the grandfather of Glaucus, we may take as justly representing in time the second generation before the war. On the other hand, as Eurystheus was the contemporary of Hercules, and Hercules had a son, as well as grandsons in the war, we may assume Eurystheus to have been junior to the generation, as Prœtus was its senior; so that they need not have been contemporary princes.

The historic place assigned to Danaus, either as we might fix it from Homer, or as the later tradition would determine it, keeps him clear of the earliest Hellic traditions in southern Greece. None of these can well be carried back beyond Sisyphus; and Sisyphus stands at five generations before the war, while Danaus cannot be less than seven. Had Homer made Danaus synchronise with the earlier Hellic sovereignties, it would have been, in my view, a presumption against his Egyptian origin, or his existence altogether. For an Egyptian stranger was little likely to attain to power, where Hellenes were already in the field: the more energetic genius would subdue the less vigorous. The expulsion of the Hellenic Bellerophon, and the plot against his life, may really have been connected with the political jealousies of the Danaids towards the formidable new-comers of the Æolid stem: nor do I read the fable of Jupiter with Danae otherwise than as a veil, used to give dignity to the commencement of an Hellic sovereignty, which, in the person of Perseus, partly succeeded, partly supplanted, the Danaid throne.

Danaus has been mentioned by Hesiod, the first among the later authorities. This poet states, that he relieved Argos from drought: an operation which harmonises well with the tradition that brings him from a country dependent on the irrigation of the Nile, as the conditions of cultivation there could not but lead at an early date to care in the management of water. He likewise calls Perseus by the name of Δαναίδης, and also terms him the son of Danae[634].

The only point of connection between the Danaids and the Argive or Argeian name is, that Prœtus, the last of the Danaids, reigns over Argeians. But this is at a period when the Perseid house, which was evidently Hellenic, has already become the first in rank among the Greek thrones, and has given, as is probable, the Argeian name to the people of Eastern Peloponnesus. The whole evidence, therefore, throws the Danaan name, with all its incidents, back to a period anterior to that of Argeians and of Achæans.

But if the Danai were thus before the Ἀργεῖοι and before the Ἀχαιοὶ, whom did they follow?

Post-Homeric tradition.

The evidence of Æschylus in the Supplices supports the tradition which makes them immediately follow the Pelasgi[635], or which, more strictly, represents their name as the first of those borne by the Greek nation after it had ceased to be simply Pelasgic.

By Euripides was conveyed a kindred tradition, that Danaus, having come to Argos, colonized the city of Inachus; and that the Peloponnesians, previously called Pelasgiotes, were thereafter called Danai[636].

These traditions, received through the tragedians, coincide with the evidence of the Homeric text. For this text, in the first place, clearly throws the Danaan line farther back than that of any of the Hellic tribes. Secondly, by negative evidence, no where employing the Danaan name in the pre-Troic legends, he leaves us to infer that it must have been the oldest, and the most remote from common use, of his three great appellations. Thirdly, Homer supplies us with no other name which there is the smallest ground for inserting between the Danaans and the ancient Pelasgi, of whom we have found traces, direct and indirect, in so many places of the poems.

Thus, then, although we can plead little but conjecture from Homer with respect to the person Danaus, we seem to be justified in concluding from his testimony, that the appellation was dynastic, that the dynasty was pre-Hellenic, and that it stands in chronological order next to the Pelasgic time.

The name Ἀργεῖοι is the next with which we have to deal: and this name, applicable to persons, is so evidently founded on the name Ἄργος, applicable to territory, that with this latter word we must of necessity begin the investigation; just as in order to arrive at the meaning of the term Hellenes, we were obliged to begin with Hellas.

Applications of the name Argos.

And the word Ἄργος is so important, and as it were central, in the geography of Homer, that we had better first consider what are the various forms of expression which Homer uses when he wants to express in words the entire territory of the Greek nation:

1. We have already seen that he appears to use for this purpose the combined force of the names Hellas and Argos;

2. He employs other combinations for the like purpose. The first is that of Ἄργος, extended by the epithet πᾶν, and joined with the islands. These words taken together embrace the whole Empire of Agamemnon:

3. And again, with the proper name Ἀχαïὶς,

This is spoken by the Trojan herald of the possible adjustment of the quarrel, upon which, he says, we shall dwell quietly in Troy, and they will return to Argos and Achæis. By “they” he means all the Greeks, therefore the country to which they return means all Greece.

4. It may be a question whether Ἄργος, in combination with μέσος, includes the whole of Greece, as in the speech of Diomed to Glaucus:

5. It is also a question, what is the geographical force of Argos, even when standing alone. It is manifestly wide in certain passages. Thus Paris mentions the κτήματα,

and Polydamas, speaking of the possible destruction of the Greek army,

a line repeated elsewhere. On the other hand, the word in some places has undoubtedly a limited meaning only.

6. Again, we find the word Ἀχαίïς γαῖα, used apparently with the intention of signifying the whole Greek country; as in the first Iliad by Nestor;

7. And we have the same word Ἀχαίïς without γαῖα, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

For instance, when Nestor and Ulysses were collecting the Greek forces, they were

And Ulysses, addressing his mother in the Shades beneath, says,

To proceed first with what is most clear, I think it may be taken for certain that Ἀχαίïς, with or without the affix γαῖα or αἶα[646], means nothing less than the whole of Greece in the passages where Homer uses this appellative alone. One passage, indeed, taken alone, affords decisive proof for itself that even the islands are included. Telemachus[647] thus describes his mother as unrivalled in Greece:

For here are clearly enumerated as among the parts of Ἀχαίïς, several Peloponnesian states, the island of Ithaca, and the continent, evidently meaning that to the North of the Corinthian gulf.

And yet it may remain true that, though commonly meaning Greece at large, Ἀχαίïς may still have a more special connection with the South, as the whole of this island is called Britain, whereas the name has been derived especially from its southern inhabitants.

But in the passages numbered (1) and (3) we find the whole of Greece designated by the use, not of one, but of two expressions: in the first case they are,

1. Ἕλλας. 2. μέσον Ἄργος.

In the second they are,

1. Ἄργος. 2. Ἀχαίïς.

And with these we may compare the expression, evidently meant to cover all the Greeks, in Il. ii. 530, under the names

1. Πανέλληνες. 2. Ἀχαιοί.

Now there are here three ways in which the words may be used so as to convey their joint sense, which I assume to be that of Greece entire: viz.

1. That each word should cover a part, the two parts together making up the whole, i.e. that the words should be used distributively.

2. That each should cover the whole, and that the words should be used cumulatively.

3. That one of the words should apply to a part of Greece only, and should be overlapped as it were by the other, that other meaning the whole.

Now as Ἀχαίïς uniformly means all Greece in eight passages where it stands alone, this will naturally govern its sense in the two passages, where it is joined copulatively with Ἄργος. We shall also hereafter see the local use of the Ἀχαιοὶ so diffused, that it would hardly be possible to suppose any other meaning. Thus, then, we have one point fixed, from which to operate upon others.

But what does the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον mean?

It is demonstrable that in Homer the word Ἄργος has several meanings.

1. It is a city, as in Il. iv. 51,

2. It is a limited territory, probably such as was afterwards the State of Argolis. For when Telemachus is quitting Sparta, Theoclymenus joins him[648], φεύγων ἐξ Ἄργεος. And again, when Melampus quitted Pylos, he came to Argos:

The first proves that Sparta was not included in the geographical name Ἄργος: the second proves the same of Pylos: and this too is the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον.

The same phrase is used in Od. iii. 263, of Ægisthus, who endeavours to corrupt Clytemnestra,

Here Mycenæ is plainly meant by the μυχὸς, and the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον is Argolis, or something like it.

This district, including Mycenæ, was the head quarter of the Greek power. Now we find that the whole dominion of Priam was named Τροίη, while including many cities and much territory, and the name Τροίη was also sometimes applied to the capital, of which the proper name was Ilion. So Venezia at the present day means both a city and a territory, even though the city is outside the territory; the only distinction lying in the use or non-use of the article. Therefore it was sufficiently natural, that the Trojan herald should name the whole from the most excellent part, and so identify them: and on the other hand, it would not be otherwise than natural, were he to name the most excellent part, and likewise to name the whole, without verbally distinguishing them.

So that in Il. iii. 75, 258, the phrase Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον, according to what has preceded, may either mean,

1. The part of the Peloponnesus containing Argos and Mycenæ as its head quarter, (and then the line must be interpreted in the third of the modes above pointed out; as we might now say, ‘we visited Rome and Italy.’)

2. Or it may mean the whole of Greece, by transfer from its capital part, and then the line must be interpreted in the second mode, as might now be said, ‘to our Green Erin, our Ireland mother of the brave.’

The English ‘and’ would indeed mar the sense: but the Greek καὶ is much more elastic, and may be equivalent to the Italian ossia, or to the sign =.

I doubt if there be any passage in Homer where the word Argos stands alone, or with a characteristic epithet such as ἱππόβοτον, and where it requires any other sense than one of the three just given—the city—the north east of Peloponnesus—and (by metonymy) all Greece.

When Nestor (Il. ii. 348) denounces those Greeks who should think of returning home before the mind of Jupiter is known, and calls returning Ἄργοσδε ἰέναι, it seems indisputable that we must construe Ἄργος Greece.

When Paris says he brought the κτήματα from Argos, the most natural construction is, as the place was Sparta, and therefore not Argos in the narrow sense, from which he took them, that he means by Argos to signify Greece.

When Sisyphus dwells at Ephyre, μυχῷ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο, the word means the north eastern district Peloponnesus[650].

The word Ἄργος in the Catalogue (ii. 559) most probably means the city only.

As it is plain that in some passages it cannot mean the Peloponnesus, and as that meaning does not appear to be supported by superior probability in any place, such a meaning ought not to be admitted.

Achaic and Iasian Argos.

It is another question how we ought to construe the phrases μέσον Ἄργος—Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, used four times—and Ἴασον Ἄργος.

The two latter are evidently analogous to Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος, which we have already found to mean Thessaly.

Of the four passages where we read the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, the two first[651] relate to the return of Agamemnon and the Greeks, and appear to admit therefore either of the limited sense of a portion of Peloponnesus as the most eminent part, or of the extended one of all Greece, better than of the intermediate one of Peloponnesus itself, with which neither Agamemnon, nor the whole body of the Greeks, had any separate and defined relation, as they had with the dominions of Agamemnon in the capacity of their supreme Chief, and perhaps with those of the Pelopid family jointly, so as to include Menelaus.

In the third case it is used of Juno, as she goes to hasten the birth of Eurystheus[652],

This passage evidently admits the sense of the city, or a limited district, better than that of the Peloponnesus at large. Indeed, as the seat of the Perseid dominion is evidently intended, and as that dominion did not reach over all Peloponnesus, we may say that this could not be the meaning of the words.

But the fourth passage requires a larger signification for this phrase. It is the question of Telemachus, asking where Menelaus had been during all the time that Ægisthus was about his crime[653];

This seems clearly to include Sparta in Achaic Argos; and, this being so, no meaning is so suitable to it in this place as Eastern Peloponnesus. This construction is also eminently suitable to the relation between Eastern Peloponnesus and the Achæan power, which had its central seat there.

Undoubtedly Strabo treats Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος as meaning the whole of Peloponnesus (viii. 5. p. 365, ibid. 6. p. 369), but the argument from Homer’s text seems to be against him: and even he admits from Od. iii. 249, that the term applied also to Laconia in particular: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰδίως τὴν Λακωνικὴν οὕτω προσαγορευθῆναι[654].

As then it appears that the sense of Eastern Peloponnesus will suit the phrase Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκὸν in all the four passages where it is employed, while the more extended meaning of the whole Peloponnesus is required by none, and could only be even admissible in one (Od. iii. 249), we may conclude that Eastern Peloponnesus is the proper meaning of the phrase.

Iasian Argos.

We now come to Ἴασον Ἄργος.

In Od. xviii. 245, Eurymachus the Suitor, in paying a compliment to the beauty of Penelope, says to her, you would have more suitors than you have,

Now it must first be admitted, that this does not refer to any country out of the Peloponnesus. For in the first place, that was the most distinguished part of the country, and the chief Achæan seat; so that the intention of this speech therefore most naturally bears upon it. But also we have nothing in Homer to connect any local use of the word Ἄργος with Middle Greece.

But if Eurymachus means nothing to the North of Peloponnesus, it is again most probable that he refers to that part of Peloponnesus with which Ithaca had most intercourse, where lay its relations of business, and of hospitality. Now this part was Western Peloponnesus, as we see from the journey of Ulysses to Ephyre (Od. i. 260); from the journey of Telemachus which, as it were, spontaneously takes that direction; from the course of public transactions implied in his speech (Od. iii. 82, cf. 72); from the χρεῖος, which Ulysses went to recover in Messene (Od. xxi. 15); from Nestor’s being the person to visit Ithaca in the matter of the great Trojan quarrel; and from the apprehension felt by the party of the Suitors, that Ulysses would forthwith repair to Elis, or to Pylos for aid. (Od. xxiv. 431.)

Just so the relations of Crete were with Eastern Peloponnesus; and therefore Helen at Troy recognises Idomeneus, because she has often seen him in Sparta. And this, I may observe in passing, is probably the reason why Ulysses, in the fictitious accounts which he gives of himself in Ithaca, is so fond of making himself a Cretan, namely that he may avoid any risk of detection, by placing his own proper whereabout at a distance beyond the ordinary range of intercourse.

Nor are we wholly without information from Homer on the subject of the original Iasus himself, from whom the name appears to be derived; and whose name we find still subsisting in Attica at the time of the Troica[655].

For a passage in the Eleventh Odyssey informs us that Amphion, son of Iasus[656], was a powerful prince in Minyeian Orchomenus: that his youngest daughter, the beautiful Chloris, was queen of Pylos: and that Neleus, marrying her, founded there the dynasty of the Neleids. Thus through Pylos we connect a powerful Iasid family with Western Peloponnesus, possibly five generations before the Trojan war, and at a time when we find from Homer that the Danaids or Perseus must have been reigning in Eastern Peloponnesus. This seems enough to justify putting the sense of Western Peloponnesus upon the phrase Ἴασον Ἄργος in the speech of Eurymachus.

We may justly inquire whether it is so certain, as seems to be taken for granted, that the Minyeian Orchomenus, where Amphion reigned, was the Orchomenus of Bœotia. For his daughter Chloris was sovereign of Pylos, and we must suppose that sovereignty to have been not acquired by herself, but inherited from her father. Now it is very improbable that Amphion could have been sovereign at the same time of Pylos and of the northern Orchomenos: between which intervened an Æolid family settled at the Isthmus, another race of Hellenic chiefs, the line of Portheus, in Ætolia, and perhaps also the dynasty of Cadmus in Bœotia. We have no instance in Homer of the possession by the same prince of territories not continuous. Now there was there a river Minyeius, between Pylos and Elis; in Arcadia as well as in Bœotia there was an Orchomenos at the period of Homer; it seems then probable, that the name of that town should be combined with the Minyeian name in Peloponnesus as well as in Bœotia. If it were so, the political connection with Pylos is natural, and the application of the Iasian name to Western Peloponnesus becomes still more easy of explication. But even though the Orchomenos here named be Bœotian, the case remains sufficiently clear. For it was once, or formerly (τότε) that Amphion reigned in Orchomenus; and the meaning may well be, that having in earlier life reigned there, he had afterwards accompanied the southward movement of the time, perhaps being expelled from his fat soil; and that he established, or re-established the connection between Western Peloponnesus and the Iasian name.

Lastly, the place μέσον Ἄργος seems to be equivalent to the English expression, ‘through the breadth of Argos,’ or all over Argos; and though we may think that Ἄργος alone means one side of the Peloponnesus, μέσον Ἄργος may very well mean the whole. In the speech of Diomed[657] to Glaucus, it cannot mean less than this: on the other hand, from its being the counterpart of Lycia, it may perhaps not less probably signify the whole of settled Greece, and thus be the equivalent of πᾶν Ἄργος in Il. ii. 108. But the more convenient sense for Od. xv. 80 is plainly the Peloponnesus, because then it squares precisely with Hellas in the same passage, and the two together make up the whole of Greece. But without disturbing the signification of the word Hellas, as meaning Northern and Middle Greece, we might still give to μέσον Argos the force of ‘all Greece.’ The words of Menelaus would then stand as if an inhabitant of London said to his friend a foreigner, ‘I will take you through Scotland and all Britain.’ It is difficult, however, to decide absolutely between these two senses of μέσον Ἄργος. What we see plainly is, that the word Ἄργος had taken the deepest root, and a very wide range, in connection with Greek settlements, and with such settlements only.

And now with respect to the line so much criticised,

The word Πανέλληνες may, we have seen, either mean the tribes of Greece beyond the Isthmus, or those of all Greece: in which latter and more likely sense it is coextensive with Ἀχαιοί. I here finally touch upon this verse along with those properly geographical, on account of the important combination which it involves.

The Apian land.

We find in Il. i. 270, iii. 49, and in Od. vii. 25, xvi. 18, the expression ἀπίη γαίη, which some of the grammarians, and the common opinion mentioned by Strabo[659], have explained to mean the Peloponnesus, while modern scholars render it simply distant[660]. In the two passages of the Iliad, the former construction is certainly more suitable: and the combination with τηλόθεν in Il. i. 270, is tautological, flat, and un-Homeric, if ἀπίη mean merely distant. In Od. xvi. 18 either sense will serve the passage. In Od. vii. 25 (when we again have τηλόθεν) Ulysses states himself to have come ἐξ ἀπίης γαίης. As he had not come from Peloponnesus, it is assumed that this is not the meaning. I question the reasoning. Ulysses everywhere, when questioned, shows an immense fertility in fiction about himself: in every case, however, carefully reporting himself to be come from a distant spot. I see no reason therefore why we should not construe Ἀπίη γαῖα to mean the Peloponnesus; in conformity with the tradition which Æschylus[661] reports concerning Apis, and with the undoubted usage of the tragedians. As I interpret the Outer or Romance-geography of the Odyssey, the Peloponnesus would be understood by the Phæacians of Homer to be extremely remote from their country. The difference of quantity is no sufficient reason against this construction. Plainly Ἀπίη γαίη, if it be a proper name at all, means the whole Peloponnesus, and not a part of it, for Nestor in Il. i. 270 uses it so as to include the Western side, and Hector, Il. iii. 49, so as to include the Eastern.

Geographical definitions.

I will now sum up the conclusions to which this inquiry has brought us, either by certain or by probable evidence, with respect to Homer’s geographical nomenclature for Greece at large, and for its principal members.

1.Ἀχαïὶς

Ἀχαïὶς γαῖαinvariably mean the whole of Greece.

Ἀχαιῒς αἶα

2. Ἄργος either alone, or with epithets other than those which concern geographical extension, means

(1) The city only, as in Il. iv. 52, and probably in Il. ii. 559.

(2) The immediate dominions of Agamemnon in the north and north-east of Peloponnesus, as in Od. iii. 263.

But it is possible, though by no means certain, that Ἄργος in this sense should be held to include the whole Pelopid dominions, which were looked upon as having a certain political unity, and thus to be the equivalent of Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκόν.

(3) By metonymy from this supreme and metropolitan quarter of Greece, it means the whole country.

3. The phrase πᾶν Ἄργος in Il. ii. 108 means the whole of Continental Greece.

4. The phrase μέσον Ἄργος means most probably the whole of Greece, or Greece at large; possibly the Peloponnesus only.

5. Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος is Thessaly, from Macedonia to Œta.

6. Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος means the Pelopid dominions of the Troic time, or in general words, Eastern Peloponnesus.

7. Ἴασον Ἄργος means Western Peloponnesus.

8. The word Ἕλλας means

(1) probably a portion of the dominions of Achilles, as in Il. ii. 683, ix. 395;

(2) certainly the country outside them to the southward of Phthia, down to the Isthmus of Corinth, and probably reaching northward through the rest of Thessaly: Il. ix. 447 and elsewhere;

(3) it is possible that Ἕλλας may mean all Greece in Od. i. 344, and xv. 80; but more likely that the sense is the same as in (2).

9. The phrase Ἀπίη γαίη most probably, though not certainly, means the entire Peloponnesus.

What then was this name Ἄργος, which Homer uses so much more frequently, and with so much more elasticity and diversity of sense, than any other territorial name whatever?