SECT. III. The inventive Element of the Homeric Theo-mythology.

I come now to that mass of Homeric deities, who are either wholly mythological, or so loaded with mythological features, that their traditive character is depressed, and of secondary importance.

Jupiter.

The character of Jupiter, which commonly occupies the first place in discussions of the Greek mythology, has been in some degree forestalled by our prior examination of the position of other figures in the system, which are both more interesting and more important, from their bearing more significant resemblances to and traces of the truth of Divine Revelation.

Nevertheless, this character will well repay attention. To be understood and appreciated, it must be viewed in a great variety of aspects. When so viewed, it will be found to range from the sublime down to the brutal, and almost even down to the ridiculous. Upon the whole, when we consider that the image which we thus bring before us was during so many ages, for such multitudes of the most remarkable portion of mankind, the chief representative of Godhead, it must leave a deep impression of pain and melancholy on the mind.

The Jupiter of Homer is to be regarded in these four distinct capacities:

1. As the depository of the principal remnants of monotheistic and providential ideas.

2. As the sovereign lord of meteorological phenomena.

3. As the head of the Olympian community.

4. As the receptacle and butt of the principal part of such earthly, sensual, and appetitive elements, as, at the time of Homer, anthropophuism had obtruded into the sphere of deity.

Jupiter, as Providence.

There are three modes in which Homer connects Jupiter with the functions of Providence.

1. He procures or presides over the settlement, by deliberation in the Olympian Court, of great questions connected with the course of human affairs. In the Court of the Fourth Iliad, and in the Assembly of the Eighth, he himself takes the initiative; in the Seventh and Twentieth Books he listens to the proposals of Neptune; in the Twenty-fourth, Apollo introduces the subject; in the First and Fifth Odyssey, Minerva does the like.

2. He is a kind of synonym for Providence with reference to its common operations, to the duties and rights of man, and to the whole order of the world. Perhaps there are an hundred, or more, passages of the poems, where he appears in this manner. But they are all open to this observation, that his name seems, in most of them, to be used as a mere formula, and to be a sort of a caput mortuum without the enlivening force of the idea that he is really acting in the manner or upon the principle described.

3. On certain occasions, however, he appears as a supreme God, though single-handed, and not acting either for or with the Olympian assembly. The grandest of these occasions is at the close of the Twenty-fourth Odyssey, where Minerva, stimulated by her own sympathizing keenness, seems to have winked at the passionate inclination of Ulysses to make havock among his ungrateful and rebellious subjects. Jupiter, who had previously counselled moderation, launches his thunderbolt, and significantly causes it to fall at the feet of Minerva, who thereupon gives at once the required caution to the exasperated sovereign. Peace immediately follows[301].

Jupiter, with some of the substantial, has all the titular appendages of a high supremacy. He is habitually denominated the Father of gods and men. He is much more frequently identified with the general government of the world, than is any other deity. He is universally the ταμίης πολέμοιο. He governs the issue of all human toil, and gives or withholds success. It is on his floor that the caskets rest, which contain the varying, but, in the main, sorrowful incidents of human destiny[302]. He has also this one marked and paramount distinction, that he does not descend to earth to execute his own behests, but in general either sends other deities as his organs, to give effect to his will, or else himself operates from afar, by his power as god of air. If however he is more identified with the general idea of Providence than are Apollo and Minerva, it is plain, on the other hand, that his agency is more external, abstract, and remote; theirs more inward and personal: especially, the function of moral discipline seems, as we have already found, to belong to Minerva.

Nägelsbach[303] considers that Jupiter alone can act from a distance: but the prayer of Glaucus to Apollo, followed immediately by the healing of his wounds, seems to prove the reverse conclusively. Again, Minerva reminds Telemachus that the deity can save even when at a distance (Od. iii. 231): we have no authority for absolutely confining this to Jupiter, and none for affixing a limit to the space within which Apollo or Minerva can act. That Jupiter always acts from far, may be due in part to his representing the tradition of the one God; but the argument is also in some degree incidental to the nature of his special and mythological gifts, as god of the atmosphere and its phenomena.

Upon the whole, the marks of affinity to ancient tradition are stronger in the Homeric Minerva and Apollo than in Jupiter. He is the ordinary Providence, but this is an external Providence. He undoubtedly excels them in force, and in the majesty which accompanies it. But the highest of the divine prerogatives, of which we have but glimpses indeed in any of them, are hung more abundantly around these his favoured children, than around himself. The secret government of the minds of men, the invisible supremacy over natural laws, the power of unravelling the future (except perhaps as to the destinies of states), the faculty of controlling death, are scarcely to be discovered in Jupiter, but are oftener made clearly legible in Apollo or Minerva. Indeed Minerva appears always to have latent claims, which Homer himself could not fully understand or describe, to the very first place. It is only by supposing the existence of vague traditions to this effect, that we can explain such passages as that in which she delights, that Menelaus had prayed to her in preference to any other deity[304];

This sentiment may be accounted for in two ways. It may be due to the vulgar vanity of a merely mythological divinity scuffling for precedence. It may be a remnant of the tradition of a wisdom that knew no superior. The former cause would be scarcely suitable even to the deities of invention in Homer. The latter seems wholly in keeping with the character and position of his Minerva.

It may be asked, in which of the two capacities does Jupiter chiefly influence the government of the world? is it as the Supreme Deity, acting in the main by his own will and power? or is it as the head of the Olympian community, to whose deliberate decisions he, in a species of executive capacity, gives effect?

I think there can be no doubt that the activity of Jupiter is principally made available in the latter capacity. Not that the Poet had defined for himself the distinction. But there were two processes, each of which had been actively advancing: the breaking up of Godhead into fragments, which diminished the relative distance between Jupiter and the other Immortals: and the reflection of human ideas of polity upon Olympus, which gave a growing prominence to the element of aristocracy.

Upon the whole, then, I should say that the traditive ideas of monotheism, and of a personal Providence represented in the Homeric Jupiter, are on almost all occasions things of the past. They are like the old jewels of a family, beautiful and imposing for occasions of state: but they scarcely enter into his everyday life. Indeed, their chief effect is the negative one of withdrawing him, on the score of dignity, from immediate contact with mortals and with their concerns; and, were it not for his atmospheric prerogatives, this isolated supremacy would carry him into insignificance as compared with a deity like Minerva, who is ever in the view of man, and ever making herself felt both in his mind and in his affairs.

There are occasions, but they are not very numerous, when, under the influence of an unwonted zeal, we find Jupiter himself taking a part in the detailed action of the Iliad; his interferences being usually confined to the greater crises or indications, such as the one mentioned in Il. ii. 353, and such as the occasions when the τάλαντα are produced. As examples of minor interposition, I may cite his inspiring Ajax with fear, his launching a thunderbolt in the path of Diomed, his breaking the bow-string of Teucer, and his advising Hector to avoid an encounter with Agamemnon[305].

Jupiter as Lord of Air.

But the position assigned to him in the mythology of Olympus, which provides him with the second of his characters, is chosen with great skill. Although at first sight Sea may appear a more substantive and awful power than Air, and Earth a more solid and worthy foundation of dominion than either, yet consideration must readily show, that as the king of the atmosphere, Jupiter is possessed of far more prompt, effective, and above all, universal means of acting upon mankind, than he would have been had the lottery been so arranged as to give him either of those other provinces.

The tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead evidently leaves its traces on the Greek mythology in the curious fable of the three Kronid brothers. For the lottery of the universe, in which they draw on equal terms, is not founded upon, but is at variance with, Greek ideas. Those ideas embodied the system, more or less defined, of primogeniture: and therefore, had the Olympian system been wholly inventive, the very least it could have assigned to Jupiter would have been a priority of choice among the different portions of the universe. This lottery is evidently founded upon the idea of an essential equality in those who draw. Happily the result is such as to coincide with the order of natural precedence: and the value and weight of the three charges is graduated according to the standing of the brothers, though their abstract equality is so rigidly asserted by Neptune, who declares himself ἰσόμορον καὶ ὁμῇ πεπρωμένον αἴσῃ (Il. xv. 209).

The exclusion of Earth from the lottery is singular: but it appears to have a double justification. In the first place, we must bear in mind the regularity of its operations, combined with the fact that it sensibly acts on nothing, but is passive under other agencies, such as those of Sun, Wind, and Sea. This would have rendered the conception of it as a deity comparatively feeble in the Greek mind. In the second place, it is probable that when the Olympian mythology took its shape, that province was preoccupied: that the Eastern religions, observing its jointly passive and productive character, had personified it as feminine. But even this did not content the Greek imagination. The conception of the bride of the chief deity was disengaged from brute matter, and uplifted into a divinity having for its office the care and government of a civilized and associated people. The Homeric Juno may almost be defined as the goddess of Greece. There rose up in her place, like a low mist of evening, from the ground, the comparatively obscure Homeric Γαῖα, who has no life or function, except in connection with the idea of vengeance to be executed upon the wicked; and this she probably derives from the belief, that the rebel spirits were punished in the subterranean prisons, of which she was as it were, by physical laws, the necessary keeper.

As Lord of the air, Jupiter came to be endowed with a multitude of active powers the most palpable, and the most replete with at least outward influence for man. The years are his years, the thunder and lightning his thunder and lightning, the rain his rain; the rivers, or the most illustrious among them, the Διϊπετεῖς ποταμοὶ, are his: the clouds and tempests obey his compelling, the winds blow at his command. The hail and snow come from him[306]: he impels the falling star[307], and, when he desires a more effective weapon or a more solemn lesson than usual, he launches the scathing thunderbolt[308]. All signs and portents whatever, that appear in air, belong primarily to him; as does the genial sign of the rainbow,

And when these or any of them are used by other deities, it is only by such as have a peculiar relationship, either traditive or mythological, to him.

But as the tradition of the lottery adorns and strengthens, so in another view it circumscribes him. His sway is unknown in the regions of the dead, where his brother holds the sceptre, as the Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος[310]. Accordingly, when Hercules is sent to fetch Cerberus, Jupiter obtains for him the aid of Minerva. The more traditive deity escapes the circumscriptions of the less; the daughter eclipses the sire.

Much of the higher power exerted by Juno is in fact her use of the atmospheric prerogatives of her husband.

Jupiter as Head of Olympus.

But the most considerable and characteristic manifestation of the Homeric Jupiter is that, in which he appears as Head of the Olympian Family and Polity. Of this let us now consider so much, as is not more immediately connected with the subject of the divine Polity.

He is carefully marked out as supreme in the mythological prerogatives, which are for Olympus as the Crown and Sword of State on Earth. He is the original owner of the Ægis. To him the gods rise up at their meetings[311]. He is not tied to swear by Styx[312], and invokes no infernal power to be the sanction of his word, but condescends only to use the symbol of a nod.

Of omnipotence, as we understand the word, it would not appear that Homer had any idea. He had however the idea of a being superior in force to all other gods separately, or perhaps even when combined. This being was Jupiter. But the conception in his mind was a wavering one, so that, though it was present to him, we cannot say that he embraced it as a truth. If by some parts of the poems it is supported, by others it is brought into question or overthrown. As respects Briareus, who was not a god, his superiority in mere force to Jupiter is expressly declared (Il. i. 404).

In the Assembly of the Eighth Book, Jupiter loudly proclaims his personal superiority in strength to all the other gods and goddesses combined; and boasts that, while by a golden chain they could not unitedly drag him down to earth, he could drag them all, with earth and sea to boot behind them.

Again, when in the same Book Juno[313] suggests to Neptune the plan of a combination among all the Hellenizing gods to restrain Jupiter, and to assist the Greeks in despite of him, Neptune replies that he at least will have nothing to say to such a proceeding, for Jupiter is far too strong[314].

But in the First Book we learn that a rebellion headed by Juno, Neptune, and Minerva, was too much for him. It is, however, clear that he had not actually been put in chains by these deities; but they were about to do it, when Briareus came to the rescue, and by his mere appearance reestablished Jupiter in secure supremacy. This legend has a mark of antiquity in the fact that Briareus has two names; he is known as Briareus among the gods, and as Ægæon among all mankind[315].

When, in the Fifteenth Book, Jupiter apprehends a stubborn resistance from Neptune, and the necessity of his personally undertaking the execution of his own commands, he is far from easy. With the aid of Juno, his brother can, he thinks, easily be managed[316]. When he finds Neptune has retired, he frankly owns it is much better for them both; as to have put him down by force[317] would have been a tough business (οὔ κεν ἀνιδρωτί γ’ ἐτελέσθη).

Juno and Minerva, single or combined, he threatens freely, and the first of these he had once severely punished: but Neptune was stronger, though in mind inferior; and we have no direct evidence that he was present in the Assembly of the Eighth Book, when Jupiter bragged of his being stronger than them all together. Neither he nor Juno obeyed the command of Jupiter, to observe neutrality until his purpose of glorifying Hector should have been accomplished.

On the whole, the superiority of Jupiter to any one god is clear, though not immeasurable. His superiority to the whole is doubtful. The point in his favour is, that he never was actually coerced. The point against him is, that his will seems to give place, and this too on very great occasions, to the sentiments of the weightiest part of the Olympian Court.

In his government of the other gods, the moral element disappears. He does not appeal to their sense of right, nor profess to be ruled in his own proceedings towards them by impartial justice. On the contrary, he desires the wounded Mars not to sit whining by his side; and, before ordering Paieon to heal his hurts, makes a distinct declaration, that had he been the son of any deity other than himself, he should have been ejected from heaven into a lower place, apparently meaning the dark and dismal Tartarus, on account of his love of quarrels. A profound attachment to ease and self-enjoyment lies at the root of his character. He never disturbs the established order; and he is averse to movement and innovation, come from whence it may. The spirit of Juno[318], so restless on behalf of Greece, is vexatious to him in the highest degree: and his love of Troy, if it has reference to any thing beyond liberality in sacrifices and the descent of Dardanus, may perhaps be referred to its representing the stereotyped form of society. It is probably on account of this indolence of temperament that, when he has brought Hector and the Trojans as far as the Ships, he feels he has had enough for the moment of the spectacle of blood; and accordingly he turns his eyes over Thrace and the country of the Mysians, the Hippemolgians, and the righteous and therefore presumably peaceful Abii[319]. Wearied with the perpetual din, he finds satisfaction in a change of prospect; but at another time, refreshed as we may suppose, he coolly states that he shall enjoy a sight of the battle:

His political spirit.

The political element of Jupiter’s character, reflected more narrowly and turbulently in Juno, is, however, that which deserves the greatest attention.

It was so deeply implanted in him, that it entered into his personal conduct even when he was not in immediate contact with the Olympian body. For example, in the Sixteenth Iliad, Jupiter debates with himself whether he shall save Sarpedon from death by the hand of Patroclus. Juno, to whom he had made a sort of appeal for approval, protests according to the Olympian formula,

She suggests in preference a prompt rescue and disposal of the dead body. Jupiter is not here in actual contact with any one but Juno. She, however, menaces him with the spleen of the Immortals, and he, averse to trouble, and fearful of shaking his own seat, acquiesces, though at the cost of the utmost pain[321].

Over and above the mere insignia of sovereignty, Jupiter holds some of his best prerogatives, both terrestrial and Olympian, in the capacity of head of the community of Immortals.

Hence it is that he is the steward of sovereignty, and the champion of social rights. All princes and rulers hold from him, and administer justice under his authority. He gave their sceptre to the family of Pelops: even the heralds are his agents, Διὸς ἄγγελοι, and act in his name.

On Olympus it falls to him in this capacity, not only to conduct and superintend the proceedings of the whole body of Immortals, as a body, but to exercise a very large influence over their relations individually with men, and with one another. The Sun carries to Jupiter in full court, as head of the body, his complaint against the crew of Ulysses, and Jupiter at once undertakes to avenge it[322]. Juno, again, appeals to him on the conduct of Mars[323], and he permits her to let loose Minerva on him. Mars, when wounded, goes to Jupiter with his complaint[324], and Diana also, when requested, makes him privy to hers, after she has taken her seat upon his knee[325]. When any two deities are in any manner at issue or in collision, or when any of the more dependent gods have a quarrel with men, then Jupiter finds his place as the natural arbiter, and from this source he obtains great support for his power. The surest of all its guarantees is indeed found in the skill with which, by making the will of Olympus his own, he makes his own will irresistible.

Thus then the Jupiter of Homer has varied elements of grandeur, traditional, physical, and political. Something also accrues to him by the sheer necessity of the metaphysical order. Wherever the mind demands a personal origin or cause, he alone can offer to supply its want. He still continues to represent, in a certain degree, the principle of unity; and he derives strength from that principle. Nor does the solid might of Destiny interfere with his claims to the same extent in Homer, as it does in the later Greek poetry.

Thus equipped with august prerogatives, the Jupiter of Homer is evidently, to the popular view, the most sublime object in the Olympian mythology. His breadth and grandeur of dimension commended him to the admiring favour of the Greek artist, who made it his supreme effort to embody the conception of the Sovereign of Olympus: and we may judge of his elevation in the public apprehension over all other deities, by the greater sublimity of the material forms, in which the idea of his divinity has been enshrined.

But the figure of Jupiter, as it is the principal, so it is also the most anomalous, in the whole Homeric assemblage. Although he is, and even because he is, the depository of so many among the most primitive and venerable ideas, he becomes also the butt alike of the infirmity, and the wantonness, and insolence of human thought, in the alterative operations which it continually prosecutes upon the ancient and pure idea of Godhead. Hence not only in his character, as in other cases, does the inventive power everywhere sap, corrode, invade, and curtail the ancient traditionary conception of divine truths, but it is in him that we find both systems culminating at once, both exhibiting in him, raised to the highest power, their separate and discordant characteristics.

From one point of view Jupiter is the most sublime of all the deities of Homer, because he is the first personal source and origin of life, the father of gods and men, the supreme manifestation of Power and knowledge, the principal, though imperfect living representation of a Providence and Governor of the world.

Regarded from another point of view, as we see disclosed the large intrusion of the human and carnal element into the ethereal sphere, the character of Jupiter becomes the most repulsive in the whole circle of Olympian life[326]. The emancipation from truth, the self-abandonment to gross passion, the constant breach of the laws he administers, are more conspicuous in the chief god than in any of the subordinate gods, and are more offensive in proportion to the majesty with which they are unnaturally associated.

Jupiter as the type of animalism.

The ungovernable self-indulgence, which even so early as in the time of Homer has begun to taint through and through the whole human conception of the Immortals, rises to its climax, as was to be expected, in Jupiter. The idea of the Supreme, or at least by far the First being of the universe, had not yet, indeed, descended so low as it did in after-times, when it was even associated with lusts contrary to nature. Of these there is no trace in Homer. But the law which governs the relation of sex, as it exists among men, was utterly relaxed and disorganized for him. In the first place, monogamy, established for all Greeks, for the chief god of Greece became polygamy; and in the second, marriage was no bar against incessant adultery.

A certain distinction between the wives, and the mere paramours, of Jupiter is clearly traceable in Homer. Latona, for instance, is a wife, an ἄλοχος of Jupiter. Mercury says of her[327]—

But the intrigues with the wife of Ixion, or with the daughter of Phœnix, who bore to him the great Minos, mark mere adultery, and involve no kind of permanent relation between Jupiter and this class of the mothers of his children. Hence we do not find any such person possessed of an interest in him, like that which led him to take part in the vengeance inflicted on Niobe and her family by the children of Latona[328]. Again, as he is not a personal providence, and does not take charge of the destiny or guide the conduct of individuals, nor ever touches the depths of human nature, so he has at once the largest share of the passions and the smallest stock of the sympathies of man.

From an intermediate point between the grandeur and the vileness of Jupiter, we may observe how unequal the human mind had already proved to sustain its own idea. He ought to be supreme in knowledge; but he is thrice deluded by the cunning of Juno[329], who not only outwits him, but sends Iris down to earth without his knowledge, just as Neptune moves (λάθρη) on the plain of Troy unseen by him[330]. He ought to be supreme in force, and he boasts that he could drag with ease all the deities of Olympus, whom he addressed, but he is, notwithstanding, on the point of being overpowered by a combination of inferior deities, when he is saved by the timely arrival of Briareus with the hundred hands. His faculty of vision does not seem to be limited by space when he chooses to employ it[331], but it is subject to interruption, both voluntary and involuntary, from sleep[332].

Although there is great scenic grandeur in the part which he plays in the Iliad, in the Odyssey he is until nearly the close practically a mute, and does little more than assent to the plans and representations of Minerva.

In the action, however, of the Iliad, the only glimpse of a personal attachment is to Hector; and this is founded simply on the abundance of his sacrifices. Jupiter is the great propounder of the animal view of that subject: and accordingly in the Odyssey[333], Minerva pleads the case of Ulysses very much on this ground before Jupiter, though, in all her intercourse with that chief, there is no sign of her valuing the offerings on her own account. In every point of sensual susceptibility, Jupiter leads the way for the Immortals.

Qualified by his parental instincts.

In Jupiter, as in the almost brutal Mars, we find remaining that relic of personal virtue which depends least upon reflection, and flows most from instinct, namely, parental affection. Mars is wrought up to fury by learning the death of his son Ascalaphus; and Jupiter, after much painful rumination on consenting to the fall of Sarpedon, sheds gouts of blood over the dearest of his children[334]. This is singularly grand as poetry, and far superior to the sheer mania of Mars. Indeed it is evident that Homer exerted himself to the utmost in adorning this majestic figure, as a mere figure, with the richest treasures of his imagination.

When, in the Twenty-First Iliad, the great battle of the gods begins, Jupiter has no part to take. He sits aloft in his independent security, while they contend together, even as he was afterwards supposed to keep aloof from trouble and responsibility for human affairs. The same sentiment appears in the determination of Neptune and Apollo not to quarrel on account of mortals. But in the case of Jupiter, the selfish principle comes out with greater force: he is not merely indifferent, but he absolutely rejoices in the strife of the Immortals:

Upon the whole it is certainly the Jupiter of Homer in whom, of all his greater gods, notwithstanding his abstract attributes, we see, first, the most complete surrender of personal morality and self-government to mere appetite; secondly, the most thoroughly selfish groundwork of character: the germ, and in no small degree the development, of what was afterwards to afford to speculation the materials for the Epicurean theory respecting the divine nature, as it is set forth in the verse of Lucretius, or in the arguments of the Ciceronian Cotta.

Juno.

The Juno of Homer.

The Juno of the Iliad is by far the most conspicuous and splendid, as she is also the most evidently national, product of the inventive power to be found in the entire circle of the theo-mythology.

Not that Greek invention created her out of nothing. On the contrary, she represented abundant prototypes in the mythologies of the East. Her Greek name, Ἥρη, is, I apprehend, a form of ἔρα, the earth[335]; and in her first form she probably represented one of its oriental impersonations. But they all had to pass through the crucible, and they came out in a form as purely Hellenic as if it had been absolutely original.

It is plain from the nature of the case, that she can have had no place in primitive tradition. But it may be well before discussing her mythological origin, her dignity and positive functions, to refer to certain indications from which we may make sure that Homer has handled the character in the mode observed by him for deities of invention only.

There is, then, about Juno a liability to passion, and a want of moral elevation, which are among the certain marks of mythological origin. Jupiter declares his belief that, if she could, she would eat the Trojans; nor does she resent the imputation[336]. When Vulcan is born, angry at the mean appearance and lameness of the infant, she pitches him down into the sea[337]. These representations are entirely at variance with the constant dignity and self-command, which mark the deportment of the great traditive deities. Her whole activity in the Iliad is not merely energetic, but in the highest degree passionate and ardent.

So again, taking into consideration the comparative purity attaching to her sex, which we see so fully maintained in Diana, her resort to the use of sensual passion, in Il. xiv., even though only as an instrument for an end, is a mark that the character is, in its basis, mythological.

Nor do we anywhere find ascribed to her ethical, or what may be called theistic sentiments: pure power and policy are her delight; and she nowhere enters individually within the line of the moral and Providential order at all, nor takes any share in superintending it[338].

In the Iliad, of which the martial movement is appropriate to her, and where the Greek nationality is placed in sharp contrast with a foreign one, she plays a great part, is ever alert and at work, and contributes mainly to the progress of the action. But in the Odyssey, a poem more simply theistic and ethical, and without any opposition of nationalities, she has no share in the action, and may be said practically to disappear from view. To appreciate the force of this circumstance, we must contrast it with Homer’s treatment of another deity, inferior to her in the Olympian community. The three greatest deities, among those who embody much of primitive tradition, are Jupiter, Minerva, and Apollo. Of these, Jupiter, in the character of Providence, has everywhere a place ready made for him; Minerva, as the guide and protectress of Ulysses, has ample opportunities for her activity; but it is not so with Apollo: and in consequence Homer has been careful to supply in the poem points of contact with him, by the introduction of Theoclymenus, and of the grand imagery of the second sight, which is his gift; by fixing the critical day at the new moon, which was sacred to him, and by causing the crisis to turn upon the bow, his famous weapon: as though these three, Jupiter, Minerva, and Apollo, were the universal, permanent, and indispensable deities; but the others occasional, and to be used according to circumstances. Juno has no such place or office provided for her in the Odyssey, as they have.

There is yet another mark adhering to Juno, which clearly separates between her and the Homeric deities of strongly marked traditional character: namely, that she was not exempt from the touch of defeat and dishonour. For, in the course of her long feud with Hercules, that hero wounded her with an arrow in the left breast, and caused her to suffer desperate pain[339]. Again, she was ignominiously punished by Jupiter; who suspended her with her hands in chains, and with anvils hanging from her feet[340].

Her intense nationality.

Her strong and profound Greek nationality has obtained for her the name of Argeian Juno. The fervour of this nationality is most signally exemplified in the passage where Jupiter tells her, that she regards the Greeks as her children[341]; and again, where she lets us know that it was she[342] who collected the armament against Troy. She conducts Agamemnon the head of the Greek nation safely on the sea[343]; and carries Jason through the Πλαγκταί[344]. This is the vivifying idea of her whole character, and fills it with energy, vigilance, determination, and perseverance. Her hatred of Hercules cannot have been owing to conjugal jealousy, with which she is not troubled in Homer, for Jupiter recites his conquests in addressing her on Ida; indeed, had she been liable to this emotion, it must, from the frequent recurrence of its occasions, have supplied the main thread of her feeling and action. It was her identification in soul with the Perseid dynasty, the legitimate representative, in its own day, of the Hellenic race, and in occupation of its sovereign seat, that made her filch, on behalf of Eurystheus, the effect of the promise intended by Jupiter for Hercules, and that engaged her afterwards in a constant struggle to bear down that elastic hero, whose high personal gifts still threatened to eclipse his royal relative and competitor. So again, unlike Minerva[345], even while seeking to operate through Trojans, she studiously avoids contact with them. Minerva is sent as agent to Pandarus[346]; but this is on the suggestion of Juno. In truth, this intensely national stamp localizes the divinity of Juno, and, being counteracted by no other sign, fixes on her the note both of invention, and of Greek invention.

With respect now to her dignity and positive functions, these are of a very high order.

The Olympian gods rise from their seats to greet her (as they do to Jupiter) when she comes among them[347].

She acts immediately upon the thoughts of men: as when, at the outset of the Iliad, she prompts Achilles to call the first Greek assembly; τῷ γὰρ ἐπὶ φρεσὶ θῆκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη[348]. On various occasions, she suggests action to Minerva, and it follows[349]: in the First Book, Juno is even said to send her, though by another arrangement the Poet has provided against attaching inferiority to that goddess[350]. It may be that in her seeming to employ Minerva, as in so many of her highest functions, she is reflecting one of the high prerogatives of Jupiter. Certain it is that by the side of her ceaseless and passionate activity, even Minerva appears, except on the battle-field, to play, in the Iliad, a part secondary to hers. She was so powerful[351], not only as to form one of the great trine rebellion against Jupiter, which so nearly dethroned him, but as to make him feel greatly relieved and rejoiced, in his differences with Neptune, when she promises to side with him[352]: ‘with your aid,’ so thinks Jupiter, ‘he will easily be kept in order, and will have to act as we could wish.’ She is certainly the most bold, untiring, zealous, and effective assistant to the Greeks: while she never bates a hair of her wrath, in compassion or otherwise, towards any Trojan.

Her mythological functions.

Like Neptune and others, she assumes the human form[353], and evokes a cloud of vapour this way or that: but she does much more. Her power displays itself in various forms, both over deities, and over animate and inanimate nature. In some of these particularly, her proceedings seem to be a reflected image of her husband’s. Iris[354] is not only his messenger, but her’s. She not only orders the Winds, but she sends the Sun to his setting[355], in spite of his reluctance. When, in her indignation at the boast of Hector, she rocks on her throne, she shakes Olympus[356]. She endows the deathless horses of Achilles with a voice[357]. And conjoined with Minerva, she thunders in honour of Agamemnon when just armed. Except the case of the horse, all these appear to be the reflected uses of the power of Jupiter as god of air.

We find from the speech of Phœnix, that with Minerva she can confer valour[358]. In a curious passage of the Odyssey, Homer tells us how the daughters of Pandarus were supplied by various goddesses with various qualities and gifts. Diana gave them size, Juno gave them εἶδος καὶ πινυτήν. We should rather have expected the last to come from Minerva: but she endowed them with ἔργα or industrial skill, so that her dignity has been in another way provided for. But if the lines are genuine, then in the capacity of Juno to confer the gift of πινυτὴ or prudence, we see a point of contact between her powerful but more limited, and Minerva’s larger character[359].

The full idea of her mind is in fact contained in the union of great astuteness with her self-command, force, and courage: which, in effect, makes it the reflection of the genius of the Greeks when deprived of its moral element: and places it in very near correspondence with that of the Phœnicians, who are like Greeks, somewhat seriously maimed in that one great department. This full idea is exhibited on two great occasions. Once when she outwits Jupiter, by fastening him with an oath to his promise, and then, hastening one birth, and by her command over the Eilithuiæ retarding another, proceeds to make Eurystheus the recipient of what Jupiter had intended for another less remote descendant of his own. Again, in the Fourteenth Iliad, by a daring combination, she hoaxes Venus to obtain her capital charm, induces Sleep by a bribe to undertake an almost desperate enterprise, and then, though on account of his sentiments towards Troy she felt disgust (Il. xiv. 158) as she looked upon Jupiter, enslaves him for the time through a passion of which she is not herself the slave, but which she uses as her instrument for a great end of policy. She is, in short, a great, fervid, unscrupulous, and most able Greek patriot, exhibiting little of divine ingredients, but gifted with a marked and powerful human individuality.

It may be worth while to observe in passing, an indication as to the limited powers of locomotion which Homer ascribed to his deities. The horses of Juno, when she drives, cover at each step a space as great as the human eye can command looking along the sea. But when she has the two operations to perform on the same day, one upon the mother of Eurystheus, and the other on the mother of Hercules, she attends to the first in her own person, and apparently manages the other by command given to the Eilithuiæ (Il. xix. 119). If so, then she was evidently in the Poet’s mind subject to the laws of space and corporal presence: and his figure of the horse’s spring was one on which he would not rely for the management of an important piece of business.

There are three places, and three only, in the poems, which could connect Juno with the Trojans. One is the Judgment of Paris (Il. xxiv. 29). The others are no more than verbal only. Hector swears by Jupiter “the loud thundering husband of Here[360].” And again, he wishes he had as certainly Jupiter for his father, and Juno for his mother[361], as he is certain that the day will bring disaster to the Greeks. We cannot, then, say that she was absolutely unknown to the Trojans in her Hellenic form, while they may have been more familiar with her eastern prototypes[362]. It does not, however, follow, that she was a deity of established worship among them. There is no notice of any institution or act of religion on the one side, or of care on the other, between her and any member of their race. In the mention of her among the Trojans, we may perhaps have an instance of the very common tendency of the heathen nations to adopt, by sympathy as it were, deities from one another; independently of all positive causes, such as migration, or ethnical or political connection.

Her mythological origin.

The origin of Juno, which would thus on many grounds appear to have been Hellenic, appears to be referable to the principle, which I have called œconomy, and under which the relations of deities were thrown into the known forms of the human family. This process, according to the symmetrical and logical turn of the Greek mind, began when it was needed for its purpose, and stopped when it had done its work. Gods, that were to generate or rear other gods, were coupled; and partners were supplied by simple reflection of the character of the male, where there was no Idea or Power ready for impersonation that would serve the turn. Thus, Ῥέα, Earth or Matter, found a suitable mate for Κρόνος, or Time. But to make a match for Oceanus, his own mere reflected image, or feminine, was called into being under the name of Tethys. Such was, but only after the time of Homer, Amphitrite for Neptune, and Proserpine for Hades. In Homer the latter is more, and the former less than this. It was by nothing less than an entire metamorphosis, that the Greek Juno was educed from, or substituted for, some old deification of the Earth. She is much more a creation than an adaptation. What she really represents in Olympus, is supernatural wifehood; of which the common mark is, the want of positive and distinct attributes in the goddess. With this may be combined a negative sign not less pregnant with evidence; namely, the derivation and secondary handling of the prerogatives of the husband. The case of Juno is clear and strong under both heads. Her grandeur arises from her being clothed in the reflected rays of her husband’s supremacy, like Achilles in the flash of the Ægis. But positive divine function she has none whatever, except the slender one of presiding over maternity by her own agency, and by that of her figurative daughters, the Eilithuiæ. She is, when we contemplate her critically, the goddess of motherhood and of nothing else. And in truth, as the fire made Vulcan, and war made Mars, her mythological children, so motherhood made Juno, and is her type in actual nature. She became a goddess, to give effect to the principle of œconomy, to bring the children of Jupiter into the world, to enable man, in short, to construct that Olympian order, which he was to worship. Having been thus conceived, she assumed high powers and dignities in right of her husband, whose sister she was fabled to be, upon becoming also his wife, because either logical instinct, or the ancient traditions of our race rendered it a necessity for the Greeks to derive the divine, as well as the human, family from a single pair.

However strictly Hellenic may have been the position of Juno, we must reckon her as the sister of Jupiter to have been worshipped, in Homer’s time, from beyond the memory of man. For she carries upon her no token, which can entitle us to assign to her a recent origin. Recent, I mean, in her Hellenic form: apart from the fact that she was not conceived by the Greeks, so to speak, out of nothing; and that she, in common with many other deities, represents the Greek remodelling, in this case peculiarly searching and complete, of eastern traditions. The representation in theology of the female principle was eastern, and, as we have seen, even Jewish. Had Juno been simply adopted, she would probably have been an elemental power, corresponding with Earth in the visible creation. In lieu of this she became Queen of Olympus, and, in relation to men, goddess of Greece. Earth remains, in Homer, almost unvivified in consequence. But it may have been on account of this affinity, as well as of her relation to Jupiter, that she has been so liberally endowed with power over nature.

Neptune.

The Neptune of Homer.

Neptune is one of three sons of Κρόνος and Ῥέα, and comes next to Jupiter in order of birth. In the Fifteenth Iliad he claims an equality of rank, and avers that the distribution of sovereignties among the three brothers was made by lot. The Sea is his, the Shades are subject to Aides, Jupiter has the Heaven and Air; Earth and Olympus are common to them all. Wherefore, says Neptune, I am no mere satellite of Jupiter: great as he is, let him rest content with his own share; and if he wants somebody to command, let him command his own sons and daughters. Perhaps there may here be conveyed a taunt at Jupiter with respect to the independent and adverse policy of Minerva. This very curious speech is delivered by Neptune in reply to the command of Jupiter, that he should leave the field of battle before Troy, which was backed by threats. Iris, the messenger, who hears him, in her reply founds the superiority of Jupiter on his seniority only. To this Neptune yields: but reserves his right of resentment if Jupiter should spare Troy[363]. Nor does Jupiter send down Apollo to encourage the Trojans, until Neptune has actually retired: he then expresses great satisfaction at the withdrawal of Neptune without a battle between them, which would have been heard and felt in Tartarus; possibly implying that Neptune would have been hurled into it[364], but referring distinctly to the certain difficulty of the affair;

We have now clearly enough before us the very singular combination of ideas that entered into the conception of the Homeric Neptune, and we may pronounce, with tolerable confidence, upon the manner in which each one of them acquired its place there. They are these:

1. As one of the trine brotherhood, who are jointly possessed of the highest power over the regions of creation, he is part-representative of the primeval tradition respecting the Divine Nature and Persons.

2. As god of the Sea, he provides an impersonation to take charge of one of the great domains of external nature.

3. As the eldest and strongest, next to Jupiter, of the Immortal family, he represents the nucleus of rivalry and material, or main-force, opposition to the head of the Olympian family.

His traits chiefly mythological.

With respect to the first, the proposition itself seems to contain nearly all that can be said to belong to Neptune in right of primitive tradition, except indeed as to certain stray relics. One of these seems to hang about him, in the form of an extraordinary respect paid to him by the children of Jupiter. Apollo is restrained by this feeling (αἰδὼς) from coming to blows with him[366]: a similar sentiment restrains Minerva, not only from appearing to Ulysses in her own Phæacian ἄλσος[367], but even, as she says, from assisting him at all during his previous adventures[368]. But this is all. The prerogatives which are so conspicuous in Apollo and Minerva, and which establish their origin as something set higher than the lust of pure human invention, are but rarely and slightly discernible in Neptune. In simple strength he stands with Homer next to Jupiter, for to no other deity would Jupiter have paid the compliment of declaring it a serious matter to coerce him. But there is no sign of intellectual or moral elevation about him. Of the former we may judge from his speeches; for the speeches of gods are in Homer nearly as characteristic as those of heroes. As to the latter, his numerous human children show that he did not rise above the mythological standard; and his implacable resentment against Ulysses was occasioned by a retribution that the monster Polyphemus had received, not only just in itself, but even relatively slight.

It does not appear that prayer is addressed to him except in connection with particular places, or in virtue of special titles; as when the Neleids, his descendants, offer sacrifice to him on the Pylian shore[369], or the Phæacians[370] seek to avert threatened disaster, or when Polyphemus his son roars to him for help[371]. The sacrifices to him have apparently a local character: at Onchestus is his ἄλσος[372], and Juno appeals to him in the name of the offerings made to him by the Greeks at Helice and Ægæ[373]. The Envoys of the Ninth Iliad pray to him for the success of their enterprise; but it is while their mission is leading them along the sea-beach[374]. He can assume the form of a man; can carry off his friends in vapour, or lift them through the air[375]; can inspire fire and vigour into heroes, yet this is done only through a sensible medium, namely, by a stroke of his staff[376]. He blunts, too, the point of an hostile spear[377]. But none of these operations are of the highest order of power. And when Polyphemus faintly expresses the idea that Neptune can restore his eye, (which however he does not ask in prayer,) Ulysses taunts him in reply with it as an undoubted certainty, that the god can do no such thing. With this we may contrast the remarkable bodily changes operated by Minerva upon Ulysses: they do not indeed involve the precise point of restoring a destroyed member; but they are far beyond anything which Homer has ascribed to his Neptune. Nor does the Poet ever speak of any operation of this kind as exceeding the power of Minerva; who enjoyed in a larger form, and by a general title, something like that power of transformation, which was the special gift and function of Circe and the Sirens. The discussion of the prerogatives of that half-sorceress, half-goddess, will throw some further light upon the rank of Neptune.

Except, then, in his position as brother and copartner, Neptune is very feebly marked with the traditional character. Again, in no deity is the mere animal delight in sacrifice more strongly developed. By offerings, his menaced destruction of the Phæacian city seems to be averted. His pleasure in the sacrifice of bulls is specially recorded[378]: and his remarkable fondness for the Solyman mountains, and the Ethiopian quarter, is perhaps connected with the eminent liberality of that people at their altars.

One traditive note, however, we find upon him, when we regard him as god of the sea: and it is this, that he is provided with a Secondary. It seems as though it was felt, that he did not wholly satisfy the demands of the mere element: and accordingly a god simply elemental has been provided in the person of Nereus, who is the centre of the submarine court, and who appears never to quit the depths. Nereus is the element impersonated: Neptune is its sovereign, has not his origin in it, but comes to it from without.

Neither is his command over the waters quite exclusive. He can of course raise a storm at sea. He can break off fragments, as the sea does, from rocks upon the coast[379]: and he threatens to overwhelm the Phæacian city by this means[380]. In conjunction with his power over the sea, he can let loose the winds, and darken the sky. On the other hand, not Jupiter only, but Juno and Minerva, can use the sea independently of him, as an instrument of their designs.

Again, while not fully developed as the mere elemental sea-god, he has clinging to him certain traditions which it is very difficult to attach to any portion whatever of his general character. I do not find any key to his interest in Æneas, whom he rescues from Achilles: unless it may possibly be, that the gods, in the absence of any particular motive the other way, took a common interest in the descendants of their race, or of Jupiter as its head. Still less is it feasible to explain the legend of his service under Laomedon in company with Apollo, so as to place it in any clear relation to the other traditions respecting him. He has, again, a peculiar relation to the horse, for though a sea-god, he employs the animal to transport him to Troas; and it was he, who presented Xanthus and Balius to Peleus[381]. Again, he, in conjunction with Jupiter[382], conferred the gift of managing the horse on his descendant Antilochus.

In the legend of the Eighth Odyssey, he does not share the unbecoming laughter of the other deities at the ridiculous predicament and disgrace of Mars, but earnestly labours for his release, and actually becomes his security for the damages due[383]. What was the cause of this peculiar interest? It is difficult to conceive the aim of the Poet in this place. Some have suggested the comic effect[384] which he has produced by putting the petition in the mouth of Neptune, whose mere opinion that Mars would pay was valueless, inasmuch as he was far too powerful to be called to account by Vulcan for any thing which he might have said. It seems to me more likely that, as being, in the possible absence of Jupiter as well as the goddesses, the senior and gravest of the deities, he becomes the official guardian of Olympian decorum; and that he acts here as the proper person to find an escape from a dilemma which, while ludicrous, is also embarrassing, and requires poetically a solution.

Amphitrite, the wife of Neptune in the later mythology, is not so named in Homer, by whom she is but doubtfully personified. Yet there is, as it were, an anticipation of the union, in the passage where he tells us that she rears monster-fishes to do the will of Neptune. Or it may be meant here, that she is the wife of Nereus.

His relation to the Phœnicians.

The connection of Neptune with the sea naturally raises the question, whether the introduction of his worship into Greece can have been owed to the Phœnicians. For an auxiliary mark, we have the fact that Ino, of Phœnician extraction, is a strictly maritime deity[385],

The very frequent intrigues of Neptune with women may be the mythical dress of the adventures of Phœnician sailors in this kind: such as that which is recounted[386] in the story of Eumæus. We may notice, too, that in the Iliad, he does not particularly love the Greeks, but simply hates the Trojans. He, with Jupiter, we are told, loved Antilochus[387]. Jupiter, no doubt, because he had a regard for him as a Greek: Neptune, plainly, because he was his descendant. And in this way perhaps we may best explain the connection between Neptune and some abode in the East, far away from his own domain. He is absent from the Assembly of the First Odyssey[388], among the Ethiopians: and he sees Ulysses, on his voyage homewards, from afar, namely off the Solyman mountains; with which we must suppose he had some permanent tie, as no special cause is stated for his having been there. It little accords with his character as a marine god: but it is in harmony with the view of him as belonging to the circle of the Phœnician traditions, that he should visit a nation, of which Homer, I believe, conceived as being but a little beyond Phœnicia.

But we have still to consider the fragments of information which concern Neptune, under the third of the heads above given.

And to the tradition of the Evil One.

No ancient tradition appears to have been split and shivered into so many fragments in the time of Homer, as that which related to the Evil Principle. This was the natural prelude to its becoming, as it shortly afterwards did, indiscernible to the human eye[389]. Among these rivulets of tradition, some of the most curious connect themselves with the name of Neptune, who was, in his mythological character, prepared to be its recipient: for in that character he was near to Jupiter in strength, while his brotherly relation by no means implied any corresponding tie of affection.

With Juno and Minerva, he took part in the dangerous rebellion recorded in the First Iliad. He refuses to join in a combination of Hellenizing gods against him, on the ground of its hopelessness: but afterwards, when all others acquiesce in the prohibition, he alone comes down to aid and excite the Greeks. The Juno of the Iliad is the active and astute intriguer against her husband: but it is Neptune, on whom in effect the burden and responsibility of action chiefly fall. Still, his principal points of contact with the traditions of resistance to the Supreme Will are mediate; and the connection is through his offspring.

In his favourite son, the Cyclops, we have the great atheist of the poems. It is Providence, and not idols only, that he rejects, when saying[390],

The whole of this dangerous class, the kindred of the gods, seem to have sprung from Neptune[391]. The Læstrygones, indeed, are not expressly said to be his children. But they are called οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν: and the Giants are expressly declared to be divinely descended in a speech of Alcinous[392]:

Neptune was the father of Nausithous and the royal house of Scheria, through Peribœa: but she was daughter of Eurymedon, and Eurymedon was king of the Giants, and was the king who led them, with himself, evidently by rebellion, into ruin[393];

Thus we have Neptune placed in the relation of ancestor to the rebellious race, whom it is scarcely possible to consider as other than identical with the Titans condemned to Tartarus[394].

But we have one yet more pointed passage for the establishment of this strange relationship. In the νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, Ulysses sees, among other Shades, Iphimedea, the wife of Aloeus, who bore to Neptune two children[395], Otus and Ephialtes; hugest of all creatures upon earth, and also most beautiful, after Orion. They, the sons of Neptune, while yet children, threatened war against Olympus, and planned the piling of the mountains: but Apollo slew them. Thus this, the most characteristic of all the traditions in Homer relating to the Evil One, hangs upon the person of Neptune, doubtless because his mythological place best fitted him for the point of junction. It must be observed, that Homer has, in bringing these young giants before us, used a somewhat artificial arrangement. He does not place them in the realm of Aides and Persephone, though he describes them to us, in connection with the figures in that gloomy scene, as the children of Iphimedea, who appears there in the first or feminine division. That he does not bring them before us in conjunction with Tityus and the other sufferers of that region, can only be because he did not intend them to be understood as belonging to it: and it is clear, therefore, that he means us to conceive of them as having their abode in Tartarus, among the Titans, doubtless by the side of Eurymedon and his followers.

We may perceive with peculiar clearness, in the case of Neptune, the distinction between the elevated prerogatives of such a deity within his own province, and his comparative insignificance beyond it. When he traverses the sea, it exults to open a path for him, and the huge creatures from its depths sport along his wake. Such is its sympathy with him, that when he is exciting the Greeks to war, it too boils and foams upon the shore of the Hellespont. And not only is maritime nature thus at his feet, but he has the gift of vision almost without limit of space, and of knowledge of coming events, so long as they are maritime. He who knows nothing of the woes of his son Polyphemus till he is invoked from the sea-shore, yet can discern Ulysses on his raft from the far Solyman mountains, and even is aware that he will escape from his present danger (ὀϊζὺς ἥ μιν ἱκάνει) by reaching the shore of Scheria. This knowledge is shared by the minor goddess Leucothee: and doubtless on the same principle, namely, that it is marine knowledge. So he can predict to Tyro that there will be more than one child born to her: here, too, he speaks of what is personal to himself. When we take Neptune out of his province, we find none of these extraordinary gifts, no sign of a peculiar subjugation of nature or of man to him. He shares in the government of the world only as a vast force, which it will cost Jupiter trouble to subdue. Even within his own domain some stubborn phenomena of nature impose limits on his power: for we are told he would not be able, even were he willing, to save Ulysses from Charybdis[396].

Thus it was that the sublime idea of one Governor of the universe, omnipotent over all its parts, was shivered into many fragments, and these high prerogatives, distributed and held in severalty, are the fragments of a conception too weighty and too comprehensive for the unassisted human mind to carry in its entireness.

His grandeur is material.

Upon the whole, the intellectual spark in Neptune is feeble, and the conception is much materialized. Ideally he has the relation to Jupiter, which the statue of the Nile bears to one of Jupiter’s statues. Within these limits, his position is grand. The ceaseless motion, the unconquerable might, the wide extent, of the θάλασσα, compose for him a noble monarchy. At first sight, when we read of the lottery of the universe, we are startled at finding the earth left without an owner. It was not so in the Asiatic religions. But mark here the influence of external circumstances. The nations of Asia inhabited a vast continent; for them land was greater by far than sea. The Greeks knew of nothing but islands and peninsulas of limited extent, whereas the Sea for them was infinite; since, except round the Ægean, they knew little or nothing of its farther shores. Thus the sceptre of Neptune reaches over the whole of the Outer Geography; while Earth, as commonly understood, had long been left behind upon the course of the adventurous Ulysses.

Aidoneus.

The Aidoneus of Homer.

There is a marked contrast between the mere rank of Aides or Aidoneus, and his want of substance and of activity, in the poems. He is one of the three Kronid Brothers, of whom Neptune asserts—and we are nowhere told that it is an unwarrantable boast—that they are of equal dignity and honour. He bears the lofty title of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος: and he is the husband of Persephone the Awful. It is plain that he belonged of right to the order of Olympian deities, because Dione states that he repaired to the divine abode, to have the wounds healed there by Paieon, which he had received from Hercules: but it is very doubtful whether we ought to understand him to have attended even the great Chapter, or Assembly, of the Twentieth Iliad. His ordinary residence is exclusively in the nether world. At the same time there is, in his position, and in that of Persephone, a remarkable independence. This the very title of subterranean Jupiter is enough to indicate. Neptune is never called the Jupiter of the sea. And it is quite plain that the power of Jupiter over the dead was limited. We cannot say it was null: for Castor and Pollux after death are still τιμὴν πρὸς Ζῆνος ἔχοντες, and they live accordingly on alternate days. But it was Minerva who interfered to carry Hercules safely through the Shades, and bring him back; and it appears that but for her Jupiter would not have been able to give effect to his design[397].

But the share of action ascribed to this divinity in any part of the poems is a very small one. In the Twentieth Iliad, the tramp of the Immortals, when engaged in fight, and the quaking of the earth under the might of Neptune, cause him to tremble. And his having received wounds from Hercules, though he shared this indignity with Juno, detracts from his mythological greatness.

Love of symmetry has sometimes led writers on the Greek mythology to find matrimonial arrangements for Jupiter’s brothers similar to his own, by giving to Neptune Amphitrite, and to Aidoneus Persephone, for their respective wives. The former of these two unions has no foundation in Homer; and the latter bears little analogy to that of Jupiter and Juno. For Proserpine is the real Queen of the Shades below: all the higher traditions and active duties of the place centre around her, while he appears there as a sort of King-Consort. There is no sign whatever of his exercising any influence over her, far less of her acting in the capacity of his organ. And while she has a cult or worship on earth, he apparently has none.

Under these circumstances, we do not expect to find her exhibiting any tokens of derivation from, or ideal dependance on him. They would appear to be respectively derived from traditions of independent origin.

Homer has not attached marks to Aidoneus which would enable us to trace him to any particular source beyond the limits of the Olympian system. It would be natural to seek his prototype among the darkest and earthiest of the elemental powers. But he appears before us in the poems rather as an independent and Hellenic creation, metaphysical in kind, and representing little beyond (1), a place in the trine number of the Kronid Brothers, which appears to be the Hellenic form of a great primitive tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead; and (2), the consciousness that there was a city and a government of the dead, and that a ruler must be provided for them, while the idea of the Supreme Deity had not retained enough of force and comprehensiveness to seem sufficient for the purpose.

As the representative of inexorable death, Aidoneus was the opposite of the bright and life-giving Apollo: and was naturally the most hateful to mortals of all the Olympian deities[398]. But the place in which the idea of punishment centres is the domain of Κρόνος rather than that of Aides: and he is the ruler over a state of the dead which is generally neither bliss nor acute suffering, but which is deeply overspread with chillness and gloom.

I shall refer hereafter[399] to the peculiar relation which appears to subsist between Aidoneus, together with Persephone, and the mysterious Ἐρινύες.

Demeter, or Ceres.

The Ceres or Demeter of Homer.

The goddess Demeter, the Ceres of the Latins, though afterwards of considerable dignity and importance, is but a feeble luminary in the Homeric heavens. That there are in the Iliad[400] only two distinct notices of her personality, might of itself be compatible with a contrary supposition: for in the Troica he introduces his divine personages on account of their relation to the subject, rather than for their general importance; and corn, which feeds man, has little affinity with war, which destroys him. But her weight is, if possible, even smaller in the Odyssey, where she is noticed but once[401], and that incidentally.

The use of the phrase Δημήτερος ἀκτὴ for corn, like the φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο for Vulcan, and Ἄρης for the spear, or for the battle, tends to indicate imperfect personality; to show that the deity was indistinctly realized; that the personal name was either recent or at least unfamiliar; and that it was used, not so much to designate a being, as to give life to an idea.

Homer has not asserted any connection between Demeter and Persephone: and the idea of it in later times may have arisen simply from the observation that in the poems Demeter stands as a mother without a child, and Persephone as a daughter without a mother.

Possibly, however, the connection may have been suggested by the name; which seems manifestly to be equivalent to Γῆ μήτηρ or Mother-Earth. And though the original reference was to the production of food by which man lives, the word might be susceptible of another sense, connecting it with the nether world, which had a material relation to Earth, and which, even in Homer, Tityus the son of Γαῖα, and in the later tradition the earth-born race generally, were reputed to inhabit.

The name in its proper sense indicates first the idea, and then the goddess of agriculture: and points to a Pelasgian, and perhaps farther back an Egyptian, rather than an Hellenic or a Phœnician connection. In Egypt, according to the reports collected by Diodorus[402], Isis was held nearly to correspond with her.

With this supposition agree the only notices contained in the poems that tend to attach the goddess Demeter to a particular locality. Her connection with Iasion was probably in Crete or Cyprus, or at any rate (from the name) in some country occupied, and ruled too, by Pelasgians. Her τέμενος[403] or dedicated lands in Thessaly, the Pelasgic Argos, suggest a similar presumption. In Middle Greece and Peloponnesus we never hear of her. The very solemn and ancient observance of her worship in Attica, which was so eminently a Pelasgian state in the time of Homer, entirely accords with the indications of the Homeric text.

The slight notice she obtains from Homer, compared with the dignity to which other tokens would tend to show that she was entitled, may have been owing to the incomplete amalgamation in his time of Hellenic and Pelasgian institutions.

Upon this goddess, as upon so many others, sensual passion had laid hold. This is decidedly confirmatory of her Pelasgian or eastern, as opposed to properly Hellic associations. We see Venus coming from the east and worshipped in Pelasgian countries: of the three persons whom Aurora appropriates, Orion is pretty evidently the subject of a naturalized eastern tradition, and Tithonus is Asiatic: Calypso and Circe belong to the east by Phœnicia: it is in Troas and Asia that no less than three Nymphs appear as the bearers of children, fighting on the Trojan side, to human fathers[404]. Whereas among the more Hellenic deities, we have Minerva and Proserpine wholly exempt; and Juno using sensual passion it is true, but only for a political end. This assemblage of facts further confirms the supposition, that Ceres ought to be set down as a Pelasgian deity. Orion and Ino, shining in the heavens, seem to belong to the more astronomical form of eastern religion: Ceres to that which was probably transmitted through fertile and well-cultivated Egypt.

Her place in Olympus.

The title of Demeter to rank with the Olympian deities of Homer is not so absolutely clear, as that of many among them: but it may on the whole be sufficiently inferred from the arrangement of the passage in the Fourteenth Odyssey, where Jupiter recites a list of the various partners to whom he owed his offspring. The three first are women, who bore sons never deified, Pirithous, Perseus, and Minos: the two next are women, of whom one gave birth to Dionysus a god, the other to the substantially deified Hercules. The sixth and seventh are Demeter, or Ceres, and Latona; the children of neither are mentioned. Besides that Demeter is called καλλιπλόκαμος ἄνασσα, the two seem to be coupled together as goddesses. The structure of the passage is not chronological, but depends upon dignity advancing regularly towards a climax; so purposely indeed, that Dionysus, always an immortal, is mentioned after Hercules, a mortal born, though Semele had been named before Alcmene. All this appears to require the adoption of the conclusion, that Demeter was reckoned as an Olympian goddess in the Homeric system.

There is, however, another and more comprehensive solution of the question which arises out of the faint notices of Δημήτηρ in Homer. We ought, perhaps, to consider her as the Pelasgian, and Juno as the Hellenic, reproduction of those eastern traditions, which gave mythological impersonation to the female principle. They naturally centred upon the Earth as the recipient of productive influences, and as the great nurse and feeder of man, the τραφερὴ, the πολύφορβος, the πουλυβότειρα, the ζείδωρος. The Pelasgic Demeter may be a very fair and close copy, in all probability, from these traditions as they existed in Egypt. But when the same materials were presented to the Hellenic mind, they could not satisfy its active and idealizing fancy. For the Hellene, man was greater than nature: so that the great office of Jupiter as king of air was subordinated to his yet more august function as the supreme superintendent and controller of human affairs. As the political idea thus predominated in the chief of the Hellenic Immortals, it was requisite that a similar predominance of the intellectual and organizing element should be obtained in his divine Mate. Traditions, however, that had their root in earth, were of necessity wholly intractable for such a purpose, although the lighter and more spirit-like fabric of air was less unsuited to it. Earth was heavy, inactive; and was the prime representative of matter as opposed to mind. Hence the personality of the tradition was severed by the Greeks from its material groundwork; and Earth, the Nature-power, remained beneath, while the figure of Juno, relieved from this incumbrance, and invested with majestic and vigorous attributes, soared aloft and took the place of eldest sister and first wife of Jupiter. Hence doubtless it is that the Γαῖα of Homer is so inanimate and weakling: because she was but the exhausted residue of a tradition, from which the higher life had escaped. But the Ἥρη and the Γαῖα, according to this hypothesis, made up between them a full representation of the traditions from the East, relating to the chief female form of deity. This being so, no legitimate place was left in the mythology of Homer for Ceres; as she had nothing to represent but the same tradition in a form far less adapted to the Hellenic mind, a form indeed which it had probably repudiated. Hence while the Olympian system was young, and Juno not wholly severed from her Oriental origin, the Γῆ μήτηρ could not but remain a mere outlier. But as the poetry of the system was developed, and its philosophy submerged and forgotten, this difficulty diminished, and the later mythology found an ample space for Ceres as a great elemental power.

I may, then, observe, in conclusion, that the whole of this hypothesis is eminently agreeable to the Homeric representation of Ceres in its four main branches, (1) as Pelasgian, (2) as subject to lustful passion, (3) as a secondary wife of Jupiter, and (4) as immediately associated with productive Earth.

Persephone.

The Persephone of Homer.

Although the Persephone of Homer is rarely brought before us, and our information respecting her is therefore slight, there seems to be sufficient ground for asserting that she is not the mere female reflection of Hades or Aidoneus.

It is only for those deities from whom other deities are drawn by descent, that we find in Homer a regular conjugal connection provided. Thus Neptune, as we have seen, cannot be said to have a wife in Homer. Amphitrite appears in the poems with a faint and indeed altogether doubtful personality, though she afterwards grew into his spouse. Now Neptune was a deity much more in view than Aides: and it is not likely that we should have found Persephone more fully developed than Amphitrite, had she not represented some older and more independent tradition.

Again, in cases where the female deity is the mere reflection of the male, we do not find her invested with a share in his dominion, although, as in the case of Juno, she may occasionally and derivatively exercise some of the prerogatives, which in him have a higher and more unquestionable activity. Thus Tartarus is the region of Κρόνος, not of Ῥέα; air is the realm of Jupiter, not of Jupiter and Juno. But Persephone appears by the side of Hades as a substantive person; she is invoked with him by Althea to slay Meleager, in the Legend of the Ninth Iliad[405]: and the region in which she dwells is not less hers than his[406],

Indeed her personality is the better developed of the two: for no personal act is ascribed in the poems to Aides, except the indeterminate one of trembling, at the battle of the gods, lest the crust of earth should be broken through: and the name given him in the Iliad of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος, subterranean Jupiter, may possibly suggest that he was sometimes viewed as hardly more than a form or function of the highest god: whereas, in the under-world of the Eleventh Odyssey, all the active functions of sovereignty are placed in her hands. It is she who gathers the women-shades for Ulysses: and it is she who disperses them when they have been passed in review. It is by her that Ulysses apprehends the head of Gorgo may be sent forth to drive him off, should he linger too long; it is by her that he apprehends he may have been deluded with an εἴδωλον or shade, instead of a substance; most of all, it is she who endows Tiresias, alone among the dead, with the character of the Seer[407]. In fine, the whole of the active duties of the nether kingdom appear to be in her hands.

That she was generally worshipped by the Hellenic tribes we must infer from the cases mentioned in the Ninth Iliad, the one in Ætolia, the other farther North[408]; as well as from her office in regard to the thoroughly national region of the Shades.

Her marked and substantive character.

She has her own strongly marked set of epithets. Of these, one is ἁγνὴ, the severely pure; for with Homer ἁγνὸς is exclusively applicable to divine womanhood, and is given only to Diana and Persephone: then she is ἀγαυὴ, the dread: and lastly, she is ἐπαινὴ, an epithet appropriated to her exclusively, which appears to be Homer’s favourite method for sharply marking out individuality of character. Buttmann has also well observed, that she has this epithet only when mentioned along with Hades, that is, when shown very strictly in her official character; and that ἀγαυὴ is used when she appears alone. Upon this he observes; ‘this way of joining the name of Proserpine with that of Pluto was an old epic formula, handed down even to Homer and our oldest Greek poets from still earlier times, and which they used unchanged[409].’ He would read ἐπ’ αἰνὴ, instead of ἐπαινὴ, but this neither affects the sense (awful, terrible) nor the force of the exclusive appropriation.

There is another sign confirmatory of the belief that the origin of this mythical person must be sought, not in the necessity of finding a queen for Aidoneus, but in an anterior and distinct tradition. Namely, this; that, though she is a daughter of Jupiter[410], she is not provided with a mother. Thus she seems as if she were older than the Olympian œconomy. Venus, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, are all equipped with a full parentage. The later tradition, which made Persephone the daughter of Ceres, has no other support from Homer than this, that we are left to suppose that Ceres had some offspring by Jupiter, while none is named[411].

The chain of presumptions appears to me to become complete, when we take into view two other pieces of evidence supplied by the poems. In the far East[412], beyond the couch of the morning Sun, some distance up the stream of the great river Ocean, but to the south of the point where it is entered, and at a spot where the shore narrows very much—immediately, in short, before the point of descent—are the groves of Persephone. According to the general rules of interpretation applicable to Homer, this appears to convey to us that the seat of her worship was in the far Southern East, and that her office, as there understood, was that of the goddess or queen of Death. And if she is indeed the reflection, in the mirror of the lower world, of any other known deity, then, both from this great office, and from the peculiar epithet ἁγνὴ, it is most likely to be of Diana, with whom, in the later mythology, she was identified; and, again, through Diana, of Apollo, from whom the light of Diana herself was derived. Or, in other words, she may be for the lower world that reflection of Apollo, which the Homeric Diana was for this earth: and it is worth observation, that the gift of second sight, which she allows to Tiresias, and which therefore is at her disposal beneath ground[413], is the peculiar and exclusive property of Apollo.

Let us now lastly consider, what light the etymology of her remarkable name may afford us. Its meaning appears to be, either destruction by slaughter; from two roots, one that represented in ἔπερσα, from the verb πέρθω, and the other φόνη; or else, that of the destruction or slaughter of Persians. In the former view, the evidence leaves us where we were, or brings us a point nearer to Diana, whose function was not that of all death whatever, but of such death as might be called slaughter, because not due to disease, but brought about at the moment by a sudden process, though often the mildest of all ways of dying[414]. But the other etymology may be worth some further attention.

Her connection with the East.

Besides that cluster of traditions, relating to remote places, which the Greeks derived from the Phœnician navigators, and which cannot but have included some eastward wanderings in the Black Sea, as well as westward experience in the Mediterranean, they must in all likelihood have had oriental traditions properly their own, brought by their Hellic forefathers with them from their cradle. We have already seen that that cradle was probably Persia; and we have found traces of the connection in the name of the great pre-Achæan hero, Perseus, and in the continuing use of that name in the high Achæan family of Nestor, as well as at much later historic dates. Another link, connecting the Homeric traditions with this name, and both with the East, is found in the name of Perse, who was the mother of Circe, an Eastern goddess; and who was the daughter of Ocean, and the wife of the Sun[415].

We must take these circumstances into view along with the force of the name Persephone, and with the evidence we have already had of the antiquity of the traditions relating to her. To this we have to add the absence of any Homeric evidence connecting her with any other local source. There is no sign of any institution, that belonged to her worship, except in those groves planted in the far East; and no sign of any other particular locality marked as her peculiar abode, which we have found to be a mark of such invented deities generally as had a well developed personality. There is no note of her whatever in Troas; and nothing to connect her with Egypt, or with the Pelasgians in any quarter. It is not likely that she came in with the Phœnicians, as she would then have had signs of a recent origin, and would not have attained to so august and mysterious a position as she actually holds. The two distinct notices of her worship are both in the Homeric Hellas; not in Southern Greece, nor in the islands.

It seems, therefore, on every ground reasonable to suppose, that the tradition of Proserpine was an original Hellic tradition brought into the country from the East, probably by the Hellic tribes, and from among their Persian forefathers; and that the name of the deity, as we find it in Homer, affords a new indication of the extraction of the race.

Accordingly, the unusually substantive aspect of her position in the nether world, which makes her relation to Aidoneus so different from that of the other mythological wives, or feminines, to their respective husbands, is such, that it seems most reasonable, instead of deriving her from him, as Juno was derived from Jupiter, or Tethys from Ocean, to consider them as representing the union of two independent impersonations, associated together primarily by their common subject matter. For there does not seem to be any thing improbable in the hypothesis, that Persephone may, in the belief of some country and age, have served alone for the ruler of the region of the dead. Just as so many subordinate ministers of Doom, the Fates, the Erinues, and the Harpies, assumed the female form in the process of impersonation, so it may have been with their sovereign. And if we are to look farther for the metaphysical groundwork of such a tradition, we may perhaps find it as follows. There is a relation of analogy between each function and its converse: and as in the pure mythology, all that gave life was feminine, so conversely, all that represented the destroying agency might assume a similar form.

Her relation to Olympus.

In her case, as in that of one or two others, it is difficult to discover whether Homer meant a particular deity to be included, or not, among the Olympian gods of the ordinary or smaller assembly. There is no indication in the poems, which directly connects Persephone with Olympus; and that celestial palace may seem to belong to the government of the living world, and to be almost incapable of relations with that of the departed. Nor is she connected specially with the Olympian system, like Aidoneus, by the position which birth confers. The ἄλσος, and the worship paid her there, can hardly belong to the departed spirits on their way to their abode, and more probably indicate an ancient tradition deriving her worship from the far East. On the other hand, her dignity and majesty in the poems are unquestionable, and indeed superior to those of any Olympian deity, after some five or six. I do not find materials for a confident judgment on the Homeric view of her place in his theo-mythology, with reference to this particular point of connection with Olympus.

Founding conjecture upon the facts before us, I venture, however, on a further extension of these hypotheses with respect to Persephone. We perceive in Persephone and Diana that kind of likeness which may be due to their common origin; if, as we suppose, both were images of Apollo. But it is not likely that two such images should have been formed by the same race for itself. Can we then, probably refer Diana and Persephone to different sources ethnically?

It is plain that Diana was worshipped in Troy and Greece. Persephone, so far as we know, in Greece only. This would agree with the supposition that Diana was originally Pelasgian, Persephone only Hellic.

Again, Diana was an earthly, Persephone a subterraneous reflection of Apollo. Now the Hellic tribes were lively believers in a future state: as we see from the communion of Achilles with the soul of Patroclus, and from many places in the Odyssey. But we have nowhere in Homer the slightest allusion among the Trojans to the belief in a future state, beyond the mere formula of entering the region of Aïdes. Neither the succinct account of the funeral rites of Hector, nor any one of the three addresses over his remains, contain the slightest allusion to his separate existence as a spirit. There is, indeed, mention of wine used to extinguish the flame of the funeral pile, but none of invocation along with it, as there is in the case of Patroclus[416]. And as we have no less than an hundred lines spoken over or otherwise bestowed upon the dead Hector, the omission is singular. It becomes still more significant, when we recollect that the Greeks, and their goddess Juno, invoke the deities of the under-world, and the powers connected with a future state, in their solemn oaths and imprecations[417]; but when Hector swears to Dolon, (our only example of a Trojan oath,) he adjures Jupiter alone[418]. Now it may be that the religion of Troy did not include so distinct a reference to a future state, as that of Greece, and that the Trojans knew nothing of Persephone, or of any deity holding her place. This hypothesis would at once accord with the features of the Homeric portrait, and with the striking absence among the Trojans of all pointed reference to a future life, or to the disembodied spirit. Nor need we consider it to be at all shaken by slight and formal allusions, or by the words in which Homer on his own part dismisses to Hades the spirit of the slain Hector[419]. The hypothesis which the circumstances appear to suggest is, not that the Trojans disbelieved a future existence, but that they neither felt keenly respecting it, nor gave a mythological development to the doctrine.

Mars.

The Mars of Homer.

Even in Homer, Mars is externally the most imposing figure among the masculine deities of pure invention. The greatest of war-bards could not but find him a fine subject for poetical amplification. But in the Roman period he had far outgrown the limits of his Homeric position. With the lapse of time, the forces and passions, which gave to this impersonation its hold upon human nature, were sure to prevail in a considerable degree over the finer elements from which Apollo was moulded. It requires an effort of mind to liberate ourselves from the associations of the later mythology, and contract our vision for the purpose of estimating the Mars of Homer as he really is.

Notwithstanding his stature, beauty, hand and voice, which constitute, taken together, a proud appearance, it seems as if Mars had stood lower in the mind of Homer than any Olympian deity who takes part in the Trojan war, except Venus only.

The Odyssey never once brings Mars before us, even by way of allusion, except in the licentious lay of Demodocus; and the spirit of that lay certainly seems to aim at making him ridiculous, especially in the manner of his release and withdrawal. In the Iliad his part is, of course, more considerable; but on no occasion whatever does Homer apparently seek to set him off, or give him a commanding attitude in comparison with other deities.

We have nowhere any account of any act of reverence or worship done to him, either in or out of Greece. For instance, he is never, even in the contingencies of war, the object of prayer. He never shows command over the powers of nature, or the mind of man; which he nowhere attempts to influence by suggestion. It is said, indeed, that he entered into Hector, as that warrior was putting on the armour of Achilles;

But no words could more conclusively fix his place in the Homeric system as the mere impersonation of a Passion. For with Homer no greater deity, indeed, no other of the Olympian gods, is ever said to enter into the mind of a mortal man. In the Fifth Book he stirs up the warlike passion of Menelaus; having, like Venus, a limited hold upon a particular propensity. His climax of honour in this department is his giving θάρσος to the Pseudo-Ulysses; but this he does only in conjunction with Minerva[421].

His limited worship and attributes.

His possession of the attributes of deity appears to have been most limited. The use of the word Ἄρης not only for the passion of war, but even for its weapons, shows us that the impersonation was in this case as yet very partially disengaged from the metaphysical ideas, or the material objects, in which it took its rise.

His function as god of war was confined to the merely material side of war, and had nothing to do with that aspect, in which war enlists and exhausts all the higher faculties of the human mind; so much so, indeed, that to be a great general is almost necessary in order to enter the first rank of greatness at all. Even of war in the lower sense he had not, as a god, exclusive possession, but he administered his office in partnership with a superior, Minerva. Besides being every thing else that she was, she presided, along with him, over war. On the shield of Achilles, he and Minerva lead the opposing hosts[422]. Over the body of Patroclus the struggle was one of which, says the Poet, neither Mars nor Minerva could think lightly[423]. Achilles, when pursuing the Trojans, calls for assistance; for, says he, neither Mars nor Minerva could undertake to dispose of such a multitude[424]. Mars and Minerva, says Jupiter, will take charge of the concerns of war[425].

But that in this partnership he was an inferior, and not an equal, is clear from the manner in which he is habitually handled by Minerva. She wounds him through the spear of Diomed, when, unless saved by flight, he himself apprehends he might have perished[426]. In the Theomachy, she twice over strikes him powerless to the ground. In the Olympian meeting of the Fifteenth Book, when his intended visit to the battlefield menaces the gods with trouble from the displeasure of Jupiter, Minerva strips his armour off his back, scolds him sharply, and replaces him in his seat[427]. And she is pointed out by Jupiter as the person, whose habitual duty it was to keep him in order by the severest means[428];