The World of Homer
that Hades fought vainly against Heracles in his raid on Nestor's town.
But Homer never elsewhere uses pylos for "a gate."
The affair is confusing, but later legend associated Heracles's feud
against Neleus with the rites of purification. Nestor does not tell us,
but the Venetian scholiast on his speech does tell us that Neleus had
refused to purify Heracles for the murder of Iphitus, his guest, under
trust.[28]
Was the Homeric poet of Nestor's speech (xi. 693) ignorant of this
"cause of wrath," and is it a later invention after the custom of
purification came in; or did Homer "expurgate" a rite which he found in
pre-Achaean tradition?
The certain fact is that the society for which the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ was composed did not practise the sanguinary rite, and
took no interest in it. In Mr. Ridgeway's theory, Heracles is not
Achaean, he is Pelasgic. If, then, the poet, whether Achaean or,
in Mr. Ridgeway's view, a Pelasgian minstrel of an Achaean lord,
adopted Heracles from Pelasgian legend, and if that legend spoke of
purification, the poet ignored it, as a thing not in the manners of his
Achaean audience.
[1] Mr. Murray takes this view, _R. G. E_. p. 64; but there is no trace
of such ideas in Homer.
[2] _Odyssey_, xxii. 407-416.
[3] Monro, Note to _Odyssey_, xxii. 408.
[4] _Odyssey_, iii. 420-472.
[5] _Iliad_, i. 447-468.
[6] _Iliad_, x. 291-294. Mr. Murray compares Nestor's "timid,
religious, almost tender sacrifice of the ox" with "the habitual
sacrifices of the Iliad," which "seem like the massacres of a
slaughter-house, followed by the gorging of pirates." In his opinion
Nestor's cow was a kind of member of the family, "the common blood
running in the veins of all," while the alien cattle at Troy are not
the most distant relations of the invaders (_R. G. E._ pp. 59-65).
Homer knows nothing of these ideas, as we see; all depends on the
degree of solemnity and on the occasion of the sacrifice. If it be
solemn, the same rites are used in Troyland during war as in Pylos
during peace.
[7] _Iliad_, vi. 308-310.
[8] xxii. 170-172.
[9] _Odyssey_, vi. 10.
[10] _Iliad_, ix. 404.
[11] _Odyssey_, viii. 79-81.
[12] _Iliad_, i. 39.
[13] _Iliad_, v. 445-448, vi. 297-310.
[14] Od. vii. 81.
[15] _Ibid_. ii. 305, 306. Mr. Murray supposes that the author of
Iliad, i. 39, is later than the author of Iliad, i. 446 ff. The
"earlier" poet of i. 446 makes Chryses sacrifice many oxen in the
open air. The "later" author of i. 39 makes Chryses talk of roofing a
temple. "The writer of that line did not observe that in his original
there had been no temple, only an altar. To him an altar implied a
temple, so he took the temple for granted" (_R. G. E._ p. 150). By such
devices is the Iliad torn into tatters, later and earlier. Surely a
god may have a temple, though the slaughter of hundreds of oxen is not
carried on within its walls!
[16] _Iliad_, iii. 292-310, xix. 250-268.
[17] _Ibid_. vi. 297-301. Mr. Leaf remarks that "it is needless to seek
for Athenian inspiration" in this passage.
[18] _R. G. E._ p. 123, for another view.
[19] See _R. G. E._ pp. 123, 124, for the religious vow of celibacy.
[20] _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 362.
[21] _Iliad_, i. 311-316.
[22] Miss Harrison, _Proleg. Greek Rel_. p. 29.
[23] _Laws_, ix. 865.
[24] Hdt. i. 35.
[25] _Eumenides_, 273.
[26] _Proleg. Greek Religion_, 59, 60, quoting Athenaeus, ix. 78, 409
E, who cites two writers on Athenian rites, Kleidemus and Doritheus.
Miss Harrison supposes that the ghost drinks the blood of the slain
animal, washed off the body of the slayer, in place of the slayer's
blood.
[27] Frazer, _Pausanius_, vol. iii pp. 278, 593.
CHAPTER XIV
HOMER AND IONIA
_Who were the Ionians_?
While the ancients believed that the Homeric poems were composed in the
Greek settlements on the Asian coast, and brought from Ionia to Hellas,
modern critics often hold that the earliest lays were made in Greece,
but that our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ contain a large percentage of much
later Ionian work. In these circumstances it is natural to ask, _Who
were the Ionians_? a point on which Homer throws no light. The Ionian
name is not mentioned in the Catalogue any more than the Aeolian and
Dorian names, and "the tunic-trailing Iaones" only appear in _Iliad_,
xiii. 685, where they are very hard pressed in defending the part of
the Achaean wall where it was lowest, near the ships of Aias and the
dead Protesilaus. They are brigaded with Locrian light-armed archers,
the Boeotians, Phthians, and Epeians of Elis, and "the picked men of
the Athenians," whose leaders are Menestheus, king of Athens, as in the
Catalogue, and three others. Thus the Ionians appear to be equivalent
to the Athenians. The epithet "chiton-trailers" occurs but this once
in Homer, and, of course, is inappropriate to the warlike occasion:
the Ionians of the seventh century certainly wore the short tight
_cypassis_, not the chiton, when actively engaged. In the Ionian hymn
to Apollo the Ionians are "chiton-trailers," but the occasion is a
public festival.
The whole passage, according to Mr. Leaf, is "very probably an Attic
interpolation, with the object of giving respectable antiquity to the
hegemony of Athens over the Ionian tribes"; but, as the Ionians of
Asia were proud of their connection with Athens, and far from proud,
says Herodotus, of the name Ionian, _they_ are as likely as the
Athenians to have added the lines. In short, the Ionian name, like the
Dorian and the Aeolian names, never occurs in the _Iliad_; while the
Athenian king, Menestheus, never draws sword or throws spear in the
poem. It will be observed that, when he does mention Athenian leaders,
Menestheus the king, Bias, Stichios, and Pheidas, Homer does not, as is
his custom, assign to any one of them a divine ancestor, nor even name
the father of any one of them, except Petoos, father of Menestheus. He
tells no anecdote about any of them. In the Catalogue (ii. 546-551) the
Athenians alone appear as worshippers of dead men, though in Mycenaean
pre-Homeric Greece this rite was certainly part of religion, as also
in historic Greece, and in Attica it has an uninterrupted record. It
is not inconceivable, though by no means certain, that the Athenians
interpolated their own mention in the Catalogue, with the very few
allusions to their king, Menestheus; but except for these, the epics
almost ignore Attica, ignore the Ionians, and, to learn anything of
their early history, we must turn to other sources.
By the time of Pausanias (post-Christian) and much earlier, for
Euripides wrote a play against the myth, and it was current in the time
of Herodotus, the Athenians and Ionians had arranged for themselves a
fabulous genealogy. Their purpose was to connect themselves with the
supposed most genuine prehistoric Hellenes, namely, those of Achilles's
realm in Hellas, part of the kingdom of Peleus, in south-west Thessaly.
In precisely the same way the Scottish makers of fabulous genealogy
connected the Stewart kings,--really Fitz Alans, with the Dalriadic
Royal House of the Scoti from Ireland (descendants of the Scythian
princess, Scota), who invaded Argyll about 500 A.D. The name of these
Scoti of Ireland had finally been given to the whole country north of
Tweed and Esk, and so its kings must be _Eteoscoti_, genuine Scots.
The Athenian and Ionian genealogists worked on the same principles.
Their heroes are as apocryphal as Princess Scota of Scythia, and their
genealogies vary with the motives of each genealogist. They believed
that they were "Pelasgians," that they did not originally bear the name
which was by their time prepotent, "Hellenes," and was applied to all
Greeks; but, in the fable given by Pausanias they hitched themselves
thus on to the Hellenes and Achaioi whom Achilles led from Thessaly.
To the seacoast on the south of the Corinthian gulf, the _Aigialos_ or
"sea-board" (held by Agamemnon in the Catalogue) came Xuthus, son of
Hellen, out of Thessaly; being expelled, after Hellen's death, by his
brothers. He had first fled to Athens, which in all these fabrications
represents herself as not originally Hellenic or Achaean, but as
the constant asylum of all distressed Achaean princes; Theban, like
Oedipous, or Eleian, like the descendants of Nestor, and Orestes,
having here Homeric warrant (_Odyssey,_ iii. 306). We have a parallel
in the continuous efforts of Highland genealogists, at one period, to
claim descent from Normans who came north out of England and married
the heiresses of the Celtic chiefs; as the Campbells (Crooked-Mouths)
claimed descent from a Norman "De Campo Bello," or Beauchamp.
On these lines, then, the Hellene from Thessaly, Xuthus, married at
Athens the heiress of the king, the daughter of Erechtheus; and had
two sons, Achaeus and Ion. Thus the Achaeans of south-west Thessaly
have a little of Athenian blood, for Achaeus went back to Thessaly and
reigned there; and the Ionians of Athens are mixed up with the sons of
Hellen in a more roundabout way. Ion, son of Xuthus, son of Hellen, was
domiciled in the _Aigialos_, the south coast of the Corinthian gulf,
because his father, Xuthus, had been driven thither from Athens, and
reigned there. Ion succeeded to the throne of the _Aigialos_, but was
buried in Attica, having died there while in command of an Athenian
army. His seacoast subjects on the southern seaboard of the Corinthian
gulf, originally "Pelasgians," but now called after him "Ionians,"
were thus in relations with Attica, and they migrated thither in a
body, when they were driven from home by the Achaeans whom the Dorian
invaders had expelled from their seats in the southern and western
Peloponnese. The Ionians, so far, appear as a pre-Achaean people of
the northern coast of Peloponnesus, Hellenic only through their Royal
House, that of Ion; and later settled in Attica, among a people also
pre-Hellenic in origin.
Attica later offered an asylum to the Neleidae, descendants of Nestor,
who, like the Fitz Alan Stewarts in Scotland, obtained the throne of
the country in which they settled. When a son of Codrus, the last of
these Neleid kings of Athens, led a colony from Attica to the Asian
coast, the most part of the Attic emigrants were Ionians settled in
Attica, not Athenians, though some Athenians accompanied them; and the
Royal contingent, starting from Athens, settled at Miletus.[1]
Thus, in this legend, the people of Attica, in the main, are not
Hellenic, not Achaean in origin, but are connected with the Thessalian
Hellenes and Achaioi by Royal marriages; while, though not in origin
Ionians, they are intermingled, both in Attica and in the Asian
settlements, with that seacoast people, themselves only Achaean through
the grandson of Hellen, Ion, their king.
Historic Greek inquirers understood the matter in that way, and we must
first examine their "Pelasgian" theories.
With theories ancient or modern, fantastic or scientific, or both
scientific and fantastic, about "Pelasgians" and other "races" in
the prehistoric south of Europe; with deductions from place-names
in Greece, the isles, and the Asian coasts; with speculations about
"Aryans" and "non-Aryans," long-headed and short-headed, dark-haired
and light-haired peoples, I have nothing to do. We have not statistics
of pigmentation in prehistoric or in historic Greece, or craniological
statistics. We cannot translate certain fourth century inscriptions
from Crete, written in Greek characters, bat in a language which,
though not improbably "Indo-European," must have been to Greeks as
unintelligible as to ourselves. We cannot even read the characters of
Minoan writing. The much manipulated legends of movements of peoples