Note 457 — Chapter XIV · FICTION IN THE HOMERIC POEMS.

This point seems to me to be of fundamental importance; but it is apparently not always recognised. Prof. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, II p. 207) holds, rightly as I think, that there is no valid reason for doubting that Troy actually was destroyed by a king of Mycenae. Yet elsewhere (ib., p. 186 f., etc.) he regards Agamemnon himself as a Spartan deity and most of the other chief Achaean heroes as mythical or fictitious or at least unconnected originally with the story of Troy. According to my view the interest in heroic poetry, Greek as well as Teutonic, Welsh or Servian, was from the beginning essentially bound up with individual characters, e.g. not with a (nameless) king of Mycenae—which is comparatively seldom mentioned (cf. p. 274)—but with King Agamemnon. It is true that under certain conditions one name occasionally does displace another in heroic stories; but we have seen no reason for believing that the conditions favourable to such changes ever prevailed in the history of Greek heroic poetry. Neither the name Ἀγαμέμνων nor the later inferences to Ζεύς Ἀγαμέμνων seem to me to afford any valid ground for doubting that Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae originally concerned in the story.