VIII. LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES

The earliest names in Lacônian genealogy are, an autochthonous Lelex and a Naiad nymph Kleochareia. From this pair sprung a son Eurôtas, and from him a daughter Sparta, who became the wife of Lacedæmôn, son of Zeus and Taygetê, daughter of Atlas. Amyklas, son of Lacedæmôn, had two sons, Kynortas and Hyacinthus—the latter a beautiful youth, the favorite of Apollo, by whose hand he was accidentally killed while playing at quoits: the festival of the Hyacinthia, which the Lacedæmônians generally, and the Amyklæans with special solemnity, celebrated throughout the historical ages, was traced back to this legend. Kynortas was succeeded by his son Periêrês, who married Gorgophonê, daughter of Perseus, and had a numerous issue—Tyndareus, Ikarius, Aphareus, Leukippus, and Hippokoon. Some authors gave the genealogy differently, making Periêrês, son of Æolus, to be the father of Kynortas, and Œbalus son of Kynortas, from whom sprung Tyndareus, Ikarius and Hippokoon.[400]

[400] Compare Apollod. iii. 10, 4. Pausan. iii. 1, 4.

Both Tyndareus and Ikarius, expelled by their brother Hippokoon, were forced to seek shelter at the residence of Thestius, king of Kalydôn, whose daughter, Lêda, Tyndareus espoused. It is numbered among the exploits of the omnipresent Hêraklês, that he slew Hippokoon and his sons, and restored Tyndareus to his kingdom, thus creating for the subsequent Hêrakleidan kings a mythical title to the throne. Tyndareus, as well as his brothers, are persons of interest in legendary narrative: he is the father of Kastôr, of Timandra, married to Echemus, the hero of Tegea,[401] and of Klytæmnêstra, married to Agamemnôn. Pollux and the ever-memorable Helen are the offspring of Lêda by Zeus. Ikarius is the father of Penelopê, wife of Odysseus: the contrast between her behavior and that of Klytæmnêstra and Helen became the more striking in consequence of their being so nearly related. Aphareus is the father of Idas and Lynkeus, while Leukippus has for his daughters, Phœbê and Ilaëira. According to one of the Hesiodic poems, Kastôr and Pollux were both sons of Zeus by Lêda, while Helen was neither daughter of Zeus nor of Tyndareus, but of Oceanus and Têthys.[402]

[401] Hesiod. ap Schol. Pindar, Olymp. xi. 79.

[402] Hesiod. ap. Schol. Pindar, Nem. x. 150. Fragm. Hesiod. Düntzer, 58. p. 44. Tyndareus was worshipped as a god at Lacedæmôn (Varro ap. Serv. ad Virgil. Æneid. viii. 275).

The brothers Kastôr and (Polydeukês, or) Pollux are no less celebrated for their fraternal affection than for their great bodily accomplishments: Kastôr, the great charioteer and horse-master; Pollux, the first of pugilists. They are enrolled both among the hunters of the Kalydônian boar and among the heroes of the Argonautic expedition, in which Pollux represses the insolence of Amykus, king of the Bebrykes, on the coast of Asiatic Thrace—the latter, a gigantic pugilist, from whom no rival has ever escaped, challenges Pollux, but is vanquished and killed in the fight.[403]

[403] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 1-96. Apollod. i. 9, 20. Theocrit. xxii. 26-133. In the account of Apollônius and Apollôdorus, Amykus is slain in the contest; in that of Theocritus he is only conquered and forced to give in, with a promise to renounce for the future his brutal conduct; there were several different narratives. See Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 106.

The two brothers also undertook an expedition into Attica, for the purpose of recovering their sister Helen, who had been carried off by Thêseus in her early youth, and deposited by him at Aphidna, while he accompanied Perithous to the under-world, in order to assist his friend in carrying off Persephonê. The force of Kastôr and Pollux was irresistible, and when they re-demanded their sister, the people of Attica were anxious to restore her: but no one knew where Thêseus had deposited his prize. The invaders, not believing in the sincerity of this denial, proceeded to ravage the country, which would have been utterly ruined, had not Dekelus, the eponymus of Dekeleia, been able to indicate Aphidna as the place of concealment. The autochthonous Titakus betrayed Aphidna to Kastôr and Pollux, and Helen was recovered: the brothers in evacuating Attica, carried away into captivity Æthra, the mother of Thêseus. In after-days, when Kastôr and Pollux, under the title of the Dioskuri, had come to be worshipped as powerful gods, and when the Athenians were greatly ashamed of this act of Thêseus—the revelation made by Dekelus was considered as entitling him to the lasting gratitude of his country, as well as to the favorable remembrance of the Lacedæmônians, who maintained the Dekeleians in the constant enjoyment of certain honorary privileges at Sparta,[404] and even spared that dême in all their invasions of Attica. Nor is it improbable that the existence of this legend had some weight in determining the Lacedæmônians to select Dekelia as the place of their occupation during the Peleponnêsian war.

[404] Diodôr. ix. 63. Herod. iv. 73. Δεκελέων δὲ τῶν τότε ἐργασαμένων ἔργον χρήσιμον ἐς τὸν πάντα χρόνον, ὡς αὐτοὶ Ἀθηναῖοι λέγουσι. According to other authors, it was Akadêmus who made the revelation, and the spot called Akadêmia, near Athens, which the Lacedæmônians spared in consideration of this service (Plutarch, Thêseus, 31, 32, 33, where he gives several different versions of this tale by Attic writers, framed with the view of exonerating Thêseus). The recovery of Helen and the captivity of Æthra were represented on the ancient chest of Kypselus, with the following curious inscription:

Τυνδαρίδα Ἑλέναν φέρετον, Αἴθραν δ᾽ Ἀθέναθεν Ἕλκετον.

Pausan. v. 19, 1.

The fatal combat between Kastôr and Polydeukês on the one side, and Idas and Lynkeus on the other, for the possession of the daughters of Leukippus, was celebrated by more than one ancient poet, and forms the subject of one of the yet remaining Idylls of Theocritus. Leukippus had formally betrothed his daughters to Idas and Lynkeus; but the Tyndarids, becoming enamored of them, outbid their rivals in the value of the customary nuptial gifts, persuaded the father to violate his promise, and carried off Phoebê and Ilaëira as their brides. Idas and Lynkeus pursued them and remonstrated against the injustice: according to Theocritus, this was the cause of the combat. But there was another tale, which seems the older, and which assigns a different cause to the quarrel. The four had jointly made a predatory incursion into Arcadia, and had driven off some cattle, but did not agree about the partition of the booty—Idas carried off into Messênia a portion of it which the Tyndarids claimed as their own. To revenge and reimburse themselves, the Tyndarids invaded Messênia, placing themselves in ambush in the hollow of an ancient oak. But Lynkeus, endued with preternatural powers of vision, mounted to the top of Taygetus, from whence, as he could see over the whole Peleponnêsus, he detected them in their chosen place of concealment. Such was the narrative of the ancient Cyprian Verses. Kastôr perished by the hand of Idas, Lynkeus by that of Pollux. Idas, seizing a stone pillar from the tomb of his father Aphareus, hurled it at Pollux, knocked him down and stunned him; but Zeus, interposing at the critical moment for the protection of his son, killed Idas with a thunderbolt. Zeus would have conferred upon Pollux the gift of immortality, but the latter could not endure existence without his brother: he entreated permission to share the gift with Kastôr, and both were accordingly permitted to live, but only on every other day.[405]

[405] Cypria Carm. Fragm. 8. p. 13, Düntzer. Lycophrôn, 538-566 with Schol. Apollod. iii. 11, 1. Pindar, Nem. x. 55-90. ἑτερήμερον ἀθανασίαν: also Homer, Odyss. xi. 302, with the Commentary of Nitzsch, vol. iii. p. 245.

The combat thus ends more favorably to the Tyndarids; but probably the account least favorable to them is the oldest, since their dignity went on continually increasing, until at last they became great deities.

The Dioskuri, or sons of Zeus,—as the two Spartan heroes, Kastôr and Pollux, were denominated,—were recognized in the historical days of Greece as gods, and received divine honors. This is even noticed in a passage of the Odyssey,[406] which is at any rate a very old interpolation, as well as in one of the Homeric hymns. What is yet more remarkable is, that they were invoked during storms at sea, as the special and all-powerful protectors of the endangered mariner, although their attributes and their celebrity seem to be of a character so dissimilar. They were worshipped throughout most parts of Greece, but with preëminent sanctity at Sparta.

[406] Odyss. xxi. 15. Diodôr. xv. 66.

Kastôr and Pollux being removed, the Spartan genealogy passes from Tyndareus to Menelaus, and from him to Orestês.

Originally it appears that Messênê was a name for the western portion of Lacônia, bordering on what was called Pylos: it is so represented in the Odyssey, and Ephorus seems to have included it amongst the possessions of Orestês and his descendants. Throughout the whole duration of the Messênico-Dôrian kingdom, there never was any town called Messênê: the town was first founded by Epameinondas, after the battle of Leuctra. The heroic genealogy of Messênia starts from the same name as that of Lacônia—from the autochthonous Lelex: his younger son, Polykaôn, marries Messênê, daughter of the Argeian Triopas, and settles the country. Pausanias tells us that the posterity of this pair occupied the country for five generations; but he in vain searched the ancient genealogical poems to find the names of their descendants.[407] To them succeeded Periêrês, son of Æolus; and Aphareus and Leukippus, according to Pausanias, were sons of Periêrês. Idas and Lynkeus are the only heroes, distinguished for personal exploits and memorable attributes, belonging to Messênia proper. They are the counterpart of the Dioskuri, and were interesting persons in the old legendary poems. Marpêssa was the daughter of Euênus, and wooed by Apollo: nevertheless Idas[408] carried her off by the aid of a winged chariot which he had received from Poseidôn, Euênus pursued them, and when he arrived at the river Lykormas, he found himself unable to overtake them: his grief caused him to throw himself into the river, which ever afterwards bore his name. Idas brought Marpêssa safe to Messênia, and even when Apollo there claimed her of him, he did not fear to risk a combat with the god. But Zeus interfered as mediator, and permitted the maiden to choose which of the two she preferred. She attached herself to Idas, being apprehensive that Apollo would desert her in her old age: on the death of her husband she slew herself. Both Idas and Lynkeus took part in the Argonautic expedition and in the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[409]

[407] Pausan. iv. 2, 1.

[408] Iliad, ix. 553. Simonidês had handled this story in detail (Schol. Ven. II. ix. p. 553). Bacchylidês (ap. Schol. Pindar. Isthm. iv. 92) celebrated in one of his poems the competition among many eager suitors for the hand of Marpêssa, under circumstances similar to the competition for Hippodameia, daughter of Œnomaus. Many unsuccessful suitors perished by the hand of Euênus: their skulls were affixed to the wall of the temple of Poseidôn.

[409] Apollod. i. 7, 9. Pausan. iv. 2, 5. Apollônius Rhodius describes Idas as full of boast and self-confidence, heedless of the necessity of divine aid. Probably this was the character of the brothers in the old legend, as the enemies of the Dioskuri.

The wrath of the Dioskuri against Messênia was treated, even in the historical times, as the grand cause of the subjection of the Messênians by the Spartans: that wrath had been appeased at the time when Epameinondas reconstituted Messênê (Pausan. iv. 27, 1).

Aphareus, after the death of his sons, founded the town of Arênê, and made over most part of his dominions to his kinsman Nêleus, with whom we pass into the Pylian genealogy.

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IX. ARCADIAN GENEALOGY

The Arcadian divine or heroic pedigree begins with Pelasgus, whom both Hesiod and Asius considered as an indigenous man, though Akusilaus the Argeian represented him as brother of Argos and son of Zeus by Niobê, daughter of Phorôneus: this logographer wished to establish a community of origin between the Argeians and the Arcadians.

Lykaôn son of Pelasgus and king of Arcadia, had, by different wives, fifty sons, the most savage, impious and wicked of mankind: Mænalus was the eldest of them. Zeus, in order that he might himself become a witness of their misdeeds, presented himself to them in disguise. They killed a child and served it up to him for a meal; but the god overturned the table and struck dead with thunder Lykaôn and all his fifty sons, with the single exception of Nyktimus, the youngest, whom he spared at the earnest intercession of the goddess Gæa (the Earth). The town near which the table was overturned received the name of Trapezus (Tabletown).

This singular legend (framed on the same etymological type as that of the ants in Ægina, recounted elsewhere) seems ancient, and may probably belong to the Hesiodic Catalogue. But Pausanias tells us a story in many respects different, which was represented to him in Arcadia as the primitive local account, and which becomes the more interesting, as he tells us that he himself fully believes it. Both tales indeed go to illustrate the same point—the ferocity of Lykaôn’s character, as well as the cruel rites which he practised. The latter was the first who established the worship and solemn games of Zeus Lykæus: he offered up a child to Zeus, and made libations with the blood upon the altar. Immediately after having perpetrated this act, he was changed into a wolf.[410]

[410] Apollodôr. iii. 8, 1. Hygin. fab. 176. Eratosthen. Catasterism. 8. Pausan. viii. 2, 2-3. A different story respecting the immolation of the child is in Nikolaus Damask. Frag. p. 41, Orelli. Lykaôn is mentioned as the first founder of the temple of Zeus Lykæus in Schol. Eurip. Orest. 1662; but nothing is there said about the human sacrifice or its consequences. In the historical times, the festival and solemnities of the Lykæa do not seem to have been distinguished materially from the other agônes of Greece (Pindar, Olymp. xiii. 104; Nem. x. 46): Xenias the Arcadian, one of the generals in the army of Cyrus the younger, celebrated the solemnity with great magnificence in the march through Asia Minor (Xen. Anab. i. 2, 10). But the fable of the human sacrifice, and the subsequent transmutation of the person who had eaten human food into a wolf, continued to be told in connection with them (Plato, de Republic. viii. c. 15. p. 417). Compare Pliny, H. N. viii. 34. This passage of Plato seems to afford distinct indication that the practice of offering human victims at the altar of the Lykæan Zeus was neither prevalent nor recent, but at most only traditional and antiquated; and it therefore limits the sense or invalidates the authority of the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue, Minos, c. 5.

“Of the truth of this narrative (observes Pausanias) I feel persuaded: it has been repeated by the Arcadians from old times, and it carries probability along with it. For the men of that day, from their justice and piety, were guests and companions at table with the gods, who manifested towards them approbation when they were good, and anger if they behaved ill, in a palpable manner: indeed at that time there were some, who having once been men, became gods, and who yet retain their privileges as such—Aristæus, the Krêtan Britomartis, Hêraklês son of Alkmêna, Amphiaraus the son of Oiklês, and Pollux and Kastôr besides. We may therefore believe that Lykaôn became a wild beast, and that Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, became a stone. But in my time, wickedness having enormously increased, so as to overrun the whole earth and all the cities in it, there are no farther examples of men exalted into gods, except by mere title and from adulation towards the powerful: moreover the anger of the gods falls tardily upon the wicked, and is reserved for them after their departure from hence.”

Pausanias then proceeds to censure those who, by multiplying false miracles in more recent times, tended to rob the old and genuine miracles of their legitimate credit and esteem. The passage illustrates forcibly the views which a religious and instructed pagan took of his past time—how inseparably he blended together in it gods and men, and how little he either recognized or expected to find in it the naked phænomena and historical laws of connection which belonged to the world before him. He treats the past as the province of legend, the present as that of history; and in doing this he is more sceptical than the persons with whom he conversed, who believed not only in the ancient, but even in the recent and falsely reported miracles. It is true that Pausanias does not always proceed consistently with this position: he often rationalizes the stories of the past, as if he expected to find historical threads of connection; and sometimes, though more rarely, accepts the miracles of the present. But in the present instance he draws a broad line of distinction between present and past, or rather between what is recent and what is ancient: his criticism is, in the main, analogous to that of Arrian in regard to the Amazons—denying their existence during times of recorded history, but admitting it during the early and unrecorded ages.

In the narrative of Pausanias, the sons of Lykaôn, instead of perishing by thunder from Zeus, become the founders of the various towns in Arcadia. And as that region was subdivided into a great number of small and independent townships, each having its own eponym, so the Arcadian heroic genealogy appears broken up and subdivided. Pallas, Orestheus, Phigalus, Trapezeus, Mænalus, Mantinêus, and Tegeatês, are all numbered among the sons of Lykaôn, and are all eponyms of various Arcadian towns.[411]

[411] Paus. viii. 3. Hygin. fab. 177.

The legend respecting Kallistô and Arkas, the eponym of Arcadia generally, seems to have been originally quite independent of and distinct from that of Lykaôn. Eumêlus, indeed, and some other poets made Kallistô daughter of Lykaôn; but neither Hesiod, nor Asius, nor Pherekydês, acknowledged any relationship between them.[412] The beautiful Kallistô, companion of Artemis in the chase, had bound herself by a vow of chastity. Zeus, either by persuasion or by force, obtained a violation of the vow, to the grievous displeasure both of Hêrê and Artemis. The former changed Kallistô into a bear, the latter when she was in that shape killed her with an arrow. Zeus gave to the unfortunate Kallistô a place among the stars, as the constellation of the Bear: he also preserved the child Arkas, of which she was pregnant by him, and gave it to the Atlantid nymph Maia to bring up.[413]

[412] Apollod. iii. 8, 2.

[413] Pausan. viii. 3, 2. Apollod. iii. 8, 2. Hesiod. apud Eratosthen. Catasterism. 1. Fragm. 182, Marktsch. Hygin. f. 177.

Arkas, when he became king, obtained from Triptolemus and communicated to his people the first rudiments of agriculture; he also taught them to make bread, to spin, and to weave. He had three sons—Azan, Apheidas, and Elatus: the first was the eponym of Azania, the northern region of Arcadia; the second was one of the heroes of Tegea; the third was father of Ischys (rival of Apollo for the affections of Korônis), as well as of Æpytus and Kyllên: the name of Æpytus among the heroes of Arcadia is as old as the Catalogue in the Iliad.[414]

[414] Homer, Iliad, ii. 604. Pind. Olymp. vi. 44-63.

The tomb of Æpytus, mentioned in the Iliad, was shown to Pausanias between Pheneus and Stymphalus (Pausan. viii. 16, 2). Æpytus was a cognomen of Hermês (Pausan. viii. 47, 3).

The hero Arkas was worshipped at Mantineia, under the special injunction of the Delphian oracle (Pausan. viii. 9, 2).

Aleus, son of Apheidas and king of Tegea, was the founder of the celebrated temple and worship of Athênê Alea in that town. Lykurgus and Kêpheus were his sons, Augê his daughter, who was seduced by Hêraklês, and secretly bore to him a child: the father, discovering what had happened, sent Augê to Nauplius to be sold into slavery: Teuthras, king of Mysia in Asia Minor, purchased her and made her his wife: her tomb was shown at Pergamus on the river Kaïkus even in the time of Pausanias.[415]

[415] Pausan. viii. 4, 6. Apollod. iii. 9, 1. Diodôr. iv. 33.

A separate legend respecting Augê and the birth of Têlephus was current at Tegea, attached to the temple, statue, and cognomen of Eileithyia in the Tegeatic agora (Pausan. viii. 48, 5).

Hekatæus seems to have narrated in detail the adventures of Augê (Pausan. viii. 4, 4; 47, 3. Hekatæ. Fragm. 345, Didot.).

Euripidês followed a different story about Augê and the birth of Têlephus in his lost tragedy called Augê (See Strabo, xiii. p. 615). Respecting the Μυσοὶ of Æschylus, and the two lost dramas, Ἀλεαδαὶ and Μυσοὶ of Sophoklês, little can be made out. (See Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. p. 53, 408-414).

The child Têlephus, exposed on Mount Parthenius, was wonderfully sustained by the milk of a doe: the herdsmen of Korythus brought him up, and he was directed by the Delphian oracle to go and find his parents in Mysia. Teuthras adopted him, and he succeeded to the throne: in the first attempt of the army of Agamemnôn against Troy, on which occasion they mistook their point and landed in Mysia, his valor signally contributed to the repulse of the Greeks, though he was at last vanquished and desperately wounded by the spear of Achilles—by whom however he was afterwards healed, under the injunction of the oracle, and became the guide of the Greeks in their renewed attack upon the Trojans.[416]

[416] Têlephus and his exploits were much dwelt upon in the lost old epic poem, the Cyprian Verses. See argument of that poem ap. Düntzer, Ep. Fragm. p. 10. His exploits were also celebrated by Pindar (Olymp. ix. 70-79); he is enumerated along with Hectôr, Cycnus, Memnôn, the most distinguished opponents of Achilles (Isthm. iv. 46). His birth, as well as his adventures, became subjects with most of the great Attic tragedians.

From Lykurgus,[417] the son of Aleus and brother of Augê, we pass to his son Ankæus, numbered among the Argonauts, finally killed in the chase of the Kalydônian boar, and father of Agapenôr, who leads the Arcadian contingent against Troy,—(the adventurers of his niece, the Tegeatic huntress Atalanta, have already been touched upon),—then to Echemus, son of Aëropus and grandson of the brother of Lykurgus, Kêpheus. Echemus is the chief heroic ornament of Tegea. When Hyllus, the son of Hêraklês, conducted the Hêrakleids on their first expedition against Peloponnêsus, Echemus commanded the Tegean troops who assembled along with the other Peloponnêsians at the isthmus of Corinth to repel the invasion: it was agreed that the dispute should be determined by single combat, and Echemus, as the champion of Peloponnêsus, encountered and killed Hyllus. Pursuant to the stipulation by which they had bound themselves, the Hêrakleids retired, and abstained for three generations from pressing their claim upon Peloponnêsus. This valorous exploit of their great martial hero was cited and appealed to by the Tegeates before the battle of Platæa, as the principal evidence of their claim to the second post in the combined army, next in point of honor to that of the Lacedæmônians, and superior to that of the Athenians: the latter replied to them by producing as counter-evidence the splendid heroic deeds of Athens,—the protection of the Hêrakleids against Eurystheus, the victory over the Kadmeians of Thêbes, and the complete defeat of the Amazons in Attica.[418] Nor can there be any doubt that these legendary glories were both recited by the speakers, and heard by the listeners, with profound and undoubting faith, as well as with heart-stirring admiration.

[417] There were other local genealogies of Tegea deduced from Lykurgus: Bôtachus, eponym of the Dême Bôtachidæ at that place, was his grandson (Nicolaus ap. Steph. Byz. v. Βωταχίδαι).

[418] Herodot. ix. 27. Echemus is described by Pindar (Ol. xi. 69) as gaining the prize of wrestling in the fabulous Olympic games, on their first establishment by Hêraklês. He also found a place in the Hesiodic Catalogue as husband of Timandra, the sister of Helen and Klytæmnêstra (Hesiod, Fragm. 105, p. 318, Marktscheff.).

One other person there is—Ischys, son of Elatus and grandson of Arkas—in the fabulous genealogy of Arcadia whom it would be improper to pass over, inasmuch as his name and adventures are connected with the genesis of the memorable god or hero Æsculapius, or Asklêpius. Korônis, daughter of Phlegyas, and resident near the lake Bœbëis in Thessaly, was beloved by Apollo and became pregnant by him: unfaithful to the god, she listened to the propositions of Ischys son of Elatus, and consented to wed him: a raven brought to Apollo the fatal news, which so incensed him that he changed the color of the bird from white, as it previously had been, into black.[419] Artemis, to avenge the wounded dignity of her brother, put Korônis to death; but Apollo preserved the male child of which she was about to be delivered, and consigned it to the Centaur Cheirôn to be brought up. The child was named Asklêpius or Æsculapius, and acquired, partly from the teaching of the beneficent leech Cheirôn, partly from inborn and superhuman aptitude, a knowledge of the virtues of herbs and a mastery of medicine and surgery, such as had never before been witnessed. He not only cured the sick, the wounded, and the dying, but even restored the dead to life. Kapaneus, Eriphylê, Hippolytus, Tyndareus and Glaukus were all affirmed by different poets and logographers to have been endued by him with a new life.[420] But Zeus now found himself under the necessity of taking precautions lest mankind, thus unexpectedly protected against sickness and death, should no longer stand in need of the immortal gods: he smote Asklêpius with thunder and killed him. Apollo was so exasperated by this slaughter of his highly-gifted son, that he killed the Cyclôpes who had fabricated the thunder, and Zeus was about to condemn him to Tartarus for doing so; but on the intercession of Latôna he relented, and was satisfied with imposing upon him a temporary servitude in the house of Admêtus at Pheræ.

[419] Apollodôr. iii. 10, 3; Hesiod, Fragm. 141-142, Marktscheff.; Strab. ix. p. 442; Pherekydês, Fragm. 8; Akusilaus, Fragm. 25, Didot.

Τῷ μὲν ἄρ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε κόραξ, ἱερῆς ἀπὸ δαιτὸς Πυθὼ ἐς ἠγαθέην, καὶ ῥ᾽ ἔφρασεν ἔργ᾽ ἀΐδηλα Φοίβῳ ἀκερσεκόμῃ, ὅτι Ἴσχυς γῆμε Κόρωνιν Εἰλατίδης, Φλεγύαο διογνήτοιο θύγατρα. (Hesiod, Fr.)

The change of the color of the crow is noticed both in Ovid, Metamorph. ii. 632, in Antonin. Liberal. c. 20, and in Servius ad Virgil. Æneid. vii. 761, though the name “Corvo custode ejus” is there printed with a capital letter, as if it were a man named Corvus.

[420] Schol. Eurip. Alkêst. 1; Diodôr. iv. 71; Apollodôr. iii. 10, 3; Pindar, Pyth. iii. 59; Sextus Empiric. adv. Grammatic. i. 12. p. 271. Stesichorus named Eriphylê—the Naupaktian verses, Hippolytus—(compare Servius ad Virgil. Æneid. vii. 761); Panyasis, Tyndareus; a proof of the popularity of this tale among the poets. Pindar says that Æsculapius was “tempted by gold” to raise a man from the dead, and Plato (Legg. iii. p. 408) copies him: this seems intended to afford some color for the subsequent punishment. “Mercede id captum (observes Boeckh. ad Pindar. l. c.) Æsculapium fecisse recentior est fictio; Pindari fortasse ipsius, quem tragici secuti sunt: haud dubie a medicorum avaris moribus profecta, qui Græcorum medicis nostrisque communes sunt.” The rapacity of the physicians (granting it to be ever so well-founded, both then and now) appears to me less likely to have operated upon the mind of Pindar, than the disposition to extenuate the cruelty of Zeus, by imputing guilty and sordid views to Asklêpius. Compare the citation from Dikæarchus, infrà, p. 249, note 1.

Asklêpius was worshipped with very great solemnity at Trikka, at Kôs, at Knidus, and in many different parts of Greece, but especially at Epidaurus, so that more than one legend had grown up respecting the details of his birth and adventures: in particular, his mother was by some called Arsinoê. But a formal application had been made on this subject (so the Epidaurians told Pausanias) to the oracle of Delphi, and the god in reply acknowledged that Asklêpius was his son by Korônis.[421] The tale above recounted seems to have been both the oldest and the most current. It is adorned by Pindar in a noble ode, wherein however he omits all mention of the raven as messenger—not specifying who or what the spy was from whom Apollo learnt the infidelity of Korônis. By many this was considered as an improvement in respect of poetical effect, but it illustrates the mode in which the characteristic details and simplicity of the old fables[422] came to be exchanged for dignified generalities, adapted to the altered taste of society.

[421] Pausan. ii. 26, where several distinct stories are mentioned, each springing up at some one or other of the sanctuaries of the god: quite enough to justify the idea of these Æsculapii (Cicero, N. D. iii. 22).

Homer, Hymn ad Æsculap. 2. The tale briefly alluded to in the Homeric Hymn. ad Apollin. 209. is evidently different: Ischys is there the companion of Apollo, and Korônis is an Arcadian damsel.

Aristidês, the fervent worshipper of Asklêpius, adopted the story of Korônis, and composed hymns on the γάμον Κορωνίδος καὶ γένεσιν τοῦ θεοῦ (Orat. 23. p. 463, Dind.).

[422] See Pindar, Pyth. iii. The Scholiast puts a construction upon Pindar’s words which is at any rate far-fetched, if indeed it be at all admissible: he supposes that Apollo knew the fact from his own omniscience, without any informant, and he praises Pindar for having thus transformed the old fable. But the words οὐδ᾽ ἔλαθε σκόπον seem certainly to imply some informant: to suppose that σκόπον means the god’s own mind, is a strained interpretation.

Machaôn and Podaleirius, the two sons of Asklêpius, command the contingent from Trikka, in the north-west region of Thessaly, at the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn.[423] They are the leeches of the Grecian army, highly prized and consulted by all the wounded chiefs. Their medical renown was further prolonged in the subsequent poem of Arktinus, the Iliu-Persis, wherein the one was represented as unrivalled in surgical operations, the other as sagacious in detecting and appreciating morbid symptoms. It was Podaleirius who first noticed the glaring eyes and disturbed deportment which preceded the suicide of Ajax.[424]

[423] Iliad, ii. 730. The Messênians laid claim to the sons of Asklêpius as their heroes, and tried to justify the pretension by a forced construction of Homer (Pausan. iii. 4, 2).

[424] Arktinus, Epicc. Græc. Fragm. 2. p. 22, Düntzer. The Ilias Minor mentioned the death of Machaôn by Eurypylus, son of Têlephus (Fragm. 5. p. 19, Düntzer).

Galen appears uncertain whether Asklêpius (as well as Dionysus) was originally a god, or whether he was first a man and then became afterwards a god;[425] but Apollodôrus professed to fix the exact date of his apotheosis.[426] Throughout all the historical ages the descendants of Asklêpius were numerous and widely diffused. The many families or gentes called Asklêpiads, who devoted themselves to the study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the temples of Asklêpius whither sick and suffering men came to obtain relief—all recognized the god not merely as the object of their common worship, but also as their actual progenitor. Like Solôn, who reckoned Nêleus and Poseidôn as his ancestors, or the Milêsian Hekatæus, who traced his origin through fifteen successive links to a god—like the privileged gens at Pêlion in Thessaly,[427] who considered the wise Centaur Cheirôn as their progenitor, and who inherited from him their precious secrets respecting the medicinal herbs of which their neighborhood was full,—Asklêpiads, even of the later times, numbered and specified all the intermediate links which separated them from their primitive divine parent. One of these genealogies has been preserved to us, and we may be sure that there were many such, as the Asklêpiads were found in many different places.[428] Among them were enrolled highly instructed and accomplished men, such as the great Hippocratês and the historian Ktêsias, who prided themselves on the divine origin of themselves and their gens[429]—so much did the legendary element pervade even the most philosophical and positive minds of historical Greece. Nor can there be any doubt that their means of medical observation must have been largely extended by their vicinity to a temple so much frequented by the sick, who came in confident hopes of divine relief, and who, whilst they offered up sacrifice and prayer to Æsculapius, and slept in his temple in order to be favored with healing suggestions in their dreams, might, in case the god withheld his supernatural aid, consult his living descendants.[430] The sick visitors at Kôs, or Trikka, or Epidaurus, were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklêpiads.[431]

[425] Ἀσκληπιός γέ τοι καὶ Διόνυσος, εἴτ᾽ ἄνθρωποι πρότερον ἤστην εἴτε καὶ ἀρχῆθεν θεοί (Galen, Protreptic. 9. t. 1. p. 22, Kühn.). Pausanias considers him as θεὸς ἐξ ἀρχῆς (ii. 26, 7). In the important temple at Smyrna he was worshipped as Ζεὺς Ἀσκληπιός (Aristidês, Or. 6. p. 64; Or. 23. p. 456, Dind.).

[426] Apollodôr. ap. Clem. Alex. Strom. i. p. 381; see Heyne, Fragment. Apollodôr. p. 410. According to Apollodôrus, the apotheosis of Hêraklês and of Æsculapius took place at the same time, thirty-eight years after Hêraklês began to reign at Argos.

[427] About Hekatæus, Herodot. ii. 143; about Solôn, Diogen. Laërt. Vit. Platon. init.

A curious fragment, preserved from the lost works of Dikæarchus, tells us of the descendants of the Centaur Cheirôn at the town of Pêlion, or perhaps at the neighboring town of Dêmêtrias,—it is not quite certain which, perhaps at both (see Dikæarch. Fragment. ed. Fuhr, p. 408). Ταύτην δὲ τὴν δύναμιν ἓν τῶν πολιτῶν οἶδε γένος, ὁ δὴ λέγεται Χείρωνος ἀπόγονον εἶναι· παραδίδωσι δὲ καὶ δείκνυσι πατὴρ υἱῷ, καὶ οὕτως ἡ δύναμις φυλάσσεται, ὡς οὐδεὶς ἄλλος οἶδε τῶν πολιτῶν· οὐχ ὅσιον δὲ τοὺς ἐπισταμένους τὰ φάρμακα μισθοῦ τοῖς καμνοῦσι βοηθεῖν, ἀλλὰ προῖκα.

Plato, de Republ. iii. 4 (p. 391). Ἀχιλλεὺς ὑπὸ τῷ σοφωτάτῳ Χείρωνι τεθραμμένος. Compare Xenophôn, De Venat. c. 1.

[428] See the genealogy at length in Le Clerc, Historie de la Médecine, lib. ii. c. 2. p. 78, also p. 287; also Littré, Introduction aux Œuvres Complètes d’Hippocrate, t. i. p. 35. Hippocratês was the seventeenth from Æsculapius.

Theopompus the historian went at considerable length into the pedigree of the Asklêpiads of Kôs and Knidus, tracing them up to Podaleirius and his first settlement at Syrnus in Karia (see Theopomp. Fragm. 111, Didot): Polyanthus of Kyrênê composed a special treatise περὶ τῆς τῶν Ἀσκληπιαδῶν γενέσεως (Sextus Empiric. adv. Grammat. i. 12. p. 271); see Stephan. Byz. v. Κῶς, and especially Aristidês, Orat. vii. Asclêpiadæ. The Asklêpiads were even reckoned among the Ἀρχηγέται of Rhodes, jointly with the Hêrakleids (Aristidês, Or. 44, ad Rhod. p. 839, Dind.).

In the extensive sacred enclosure at Epidaurus stood the statues of Asklêpius and his wife Epionê (Pausan. ii. 29, 1): two daughters are coupled with him by Aristophanês, and he was considered especially εὔπαις (Plutus, 654); Jaso, Panakeia and Hygieia are named by Aristidês.

[429] Plato, Protagor. c. 6 (p. 311). Ἱπποκράτη τὸν Κῶον, τὸν τῶν Ἀσκληπιαδῶν; also Phædr. c. 121. (p. 270). About Ktêsias, Galen, Opp. t. v. p. 652, Basil.; and Bahrt, Fragm. Ktêsiæ, p. 20. Aristotle (see Stahr. Aristotelia, i. p. 32) and Xenophôn, the physician of the emperor Claudius, were both Asklêpiads (Tacit. Annal. xii. 61). Plato, de Republ. iii. 405, calls them τοὺς κομψοὺς Ἀσκληπιάδας.

Pausanias, a distinguished physician at Gela in Sicily, and contemporary of the philosopher Empedoklês, was also an Asklêpiad: see the verses of Empedoklês upon him, Diogen. Laërt. viii. 61.

[430] Strabo, viii. p. 374; Aristophan. Vesp. 122; Plutus, 635-750; where the visit to the temple of Æsculapius is described in great detail, though with a broad farcical coloring.

During the last illness of Alexander the Great, several of his principal officers slept in the temple of Serapis, in the hope that remedies would be suggested to them in their dreams (Arrian, vii. 26).

Pausanias, in describing the various temples of Asklêpius which he saw, announces as a fact quite notorious and well-understood, “Here cures are wrought by the god” (ii. 36, 1; iii. 26, 7; vii. 27, 4): see Suidas, v. Ἀρίσταρχος. The Orations of Aristidês, especially the 6th and 7th, Asklêpius and the Asklêpiadæ, are the most striking manifestations of faith and thanksgiving towards Æsculapius, as well as attestations of his extensive working throughout the Grecian world; also Orat. 23 and 25, Ἱερῶν Λόγος, 1 and 3; and Or. 45 (De Rhetoricâ, p. 22. Dind.), αἵ τ᾽ ἐν Ἀσκληπιοῦ τῶν ἀεὶ διατριβόντων ἀγελαὶ, etc.

[431] Pausan. ii. 27, 3; 36, 1. Ταύταις ἐγγεγραμμένα ἐστὶ καὶ ἀνδρῶν καὶ γυναικῶν ὀνόματα ἀκεσθέντων ὑπὸ τοῦ Ἀσκληπιοῦ, πρόσετι δὲ καὶ νόσημα, ὅ,τι ἕκαστος ἐνόσησε, καὶ ὅπως ἰάθη,—the cures are wrought by the god himself.

The genealogical descent of Hippocratês and the other Asklêpiads from the god Asklêpius is not only analogous to that of Hekatæus and Solôn from their respective ancestoral gods, but also to that of the Lacedæmônian kings from Hêraklês, upon the basis of which the whole supposed chronology of the ante-historical times has been built, from Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus down to the chronologers of the present century.[432] I shall revert to this hereafter.

[432] “Apollodôrus ætatem Herculis pro cardine chronologiæ habuit” (Heyne, ad Apollodôr. Fragm. p. 410).

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X. ÆAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS.—ÆGINA, SALAMIS, AND PHTHIA

The memorable heroic genealogy of the Æakids establishes a fabulous connection between Ægina, Salamis, and Phthia, which we can only recognize as a fact, without being able to trace its origin.

Æakus was the son of Zeus, born of Ægina, daughter of Asôpus, whom the god had carried off and brought into the island to which he gave her name: she was afterwards married to Aktôr, and had by him Menœtius, father of Patroclus. As there were two rivers named Asôpus, one between Phlius and Sikyôn, and another between Thêbes and Platæa—so the Æginêtan heroic genealogy was connected both with that of Thêbes and with that of Phlius: and this belief led to practical consequences in the minds of those who accepted the legends as genuine history. For when the Thêbans, in the 68th Olympiad, were hard-pressed in war by Athens, they were directed by the Delphian oracle to ask assistance of their next of kin: recollecting that Thêbê and Ægina had been sisters, common daughters of Asôpus, they were induced to apply to the Æginêtans as their next of kin, and the Æginêtans gave them aid, first by sending to them their common heroes, the Æakids, next by actual armed force.[433] Pindar dwells emphatically on the heroic brotherhood between Thêbes, his native city, and Ægina.[434]

[433] Herodot. v. 81.

[434] Nem. iv. 22. Isthm. vii. 16.

Æakus was alone in Ægina: to relieve him from this solitude, Zeus changed all the ants in the island into men, and thus provided him with a numerous population, who, from their origin, were called Myrmidons.[435] By his wife Endêis, daughter of Cheirôn, Æakus had for his sons Pêleus and Telamôn: by the Nereid Psamathê, he had Phôkus. A monstrous crime had then recently been committed by Pelops, in killing the Arcadian prince, Stymphalus, under a simulation of friendship and hospitality: for this the gods had smitten all Greece with famine and barrenness. The oracles affirmed that nothing could relieve Greece from this intolerable misery except the prayers of Æakus, the most pious of mankind. Accordingly envoys from all quarters flocked to Ægina, to prevail upon Æakus to put up prayers for them: on his supplications the gods relented, and the suffering immediately ceased. The grateful Greeks established in Ægina the temple and worship of Zeus Panhellênius, one of the lasting monuments and institutions of the island, on the spot where Æakus had offered up his prayer. The statues of the envoys who had come to solicit him were yet to be seen in the Æakeion, or sacred edifice of Æakus, in the time of Pausanias: and the Athenian Isokratês, in his eulogy of Evagoras, the despot of Salamis in Cyprus (who traced his descent through Teukrus to Æakus), enlarges upon this signal miracle, recounted and believed by other Greeks as well as by the Æginêtans, as a proof both of the great qualities and of the divine favor and patronage displayed in the career of the Æakids.[436] Æakus was also employed to aid Poseidôn and Apollo in building the walls of Troy.[437]

[435] This tale, respecting the transformation of the ants into men, is as old as the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. See Düntzer, Fragm. Epicc. 21. p. 34; evidently an etymological tale from the name Myrmidones. Pausanias throws aside both the etymology and the details of the miracle: he says that Zeus raised men from the earth, at the prayer of Æakus (ii. 29, 2): other authors retained the etymology of Myrmidons from μύρμηκες, but gave a different explanation (Kallimachus, Fragm. 114, Düntzer). Μυρμιδόνων ἐσσῆνα (Strabo, viii. p. 375). Ἐσσὴν, ὁ οἰκιστής (Hygin. fab. 52).

According to the Thessalian legend, Myrmidôn was the son of Zeus by Eurymedusa, daughter of Kletor; Zeus having assumed the disguise of an ant (Clemens Alex. Admon. ad Gent. p. 25. Sylb.).

[436] Apollod. iii. 12, 6. Isokrat. Evagor. Encom. vol. ii. p. 278, Auger. Pausan. i. 45, 13; ii. 29, 6. Schol. Aristoph. Equit. 1253.

So in the 106th Psalm, respecting the Israelites and Phinees, v. 29, “They provoked the Lord to anger by their inventions, and the plague was great among them;” “Then stood up Phinees and prayed, and so the plague ceased;” “And that was counted unto him for righteousness, among all posterities for evermore.”

[437] Pindar, Olymp. viii. 41, with the Scholia. Didymus did not find this story in any other poet older than Pindar.

Pêleus and Telamôn, the sons of Æakus, contracting a jealousy of their bastard brother, Phôkus, in consequence of his eminent skill in gymnastic contests, conspired to put him to death. Telamôn flung his quoit at him while they were playing together, and Pêleus despatched him by a blow with his hatchet in the back. They then concealed the dead body in a wood, but Æakus, having discovered both the act and the agents, banished the brothers from the island.[438] For both of them eminent destinies were in store.

[438] Apollod. iii. 12, 6, who relates the tale somewhat differently; but the old epic poem Alkmæônis gave the details (ap. Schol. Eurip. Andromach. 685)—

Ἔνθα μὲν ἀντίθεος Τελαμὼν τροχοειδέϊ δίσκῳ Πλῆξε κάρη· Πηλεὺς δὲ θοῶς ἀνὰ χεῖρα τανύσσας Ἀξίνην ἐΰχαλκον ἐπεπλήγει μετὰ νῶτα.

While we notice the indifference to the moral quality of actions implied in the old Hesiodic legend, when it imputes distinctly and nakedly this proceeding to two of the most admired persons of the heroic world—it is not less instructive to witness the change of feeling which had taken place in the age of Pindar. That warm eulogist of the great Æakid race hangs down his head with shame, and declines to recount, though he is obliged darkly to glance at the cause which forced the pious Æakus to banish his sons from Ægina. It appears that Kallimachus, if we may judge by a short fragment, manifested the same repugnance to mention it.[439]

[439] Pindar, Nem. v. 15, with Scholia, and Kallimach. Frag. 136. Apollônius Rhodius represents the fratricide as inadvertent and unintentional (i. 92); one instance amongst many of the tendency to soften down and moralize the ancient tales.

Pindar, however, seems to forget this incident when he speaks in other places of the general character of Pêleus (Olymp. ii. 75-86. Isthm. vii. 40).

Telamôn retired to Salamis, then ruled by Kychreus, the son of Poseidôn and Salamis, who had recently rescued the island from the plague of a terrible serpent. This animal, expelled from Salamis, retired to Eleusis in Attica, where it was received and harbored by the goddess Dêmêtêr in her sacred domicile.[440] Kychreus dying childless left his dominion to Telamôn, who, marrying Peribœa, daughter of Alkathoos, and grand-daughter of Pelops, had for his son the celebrated Ajax. Telamôn took part both in the chase of the Kalydônian boar and in the Argonautic expedition: he was also the intimate friend and companion of Hêraklês, whom he accompanied in his enterprise against the Amazons, and in the attack made with only six ships upon Laomedôn, king of Troy. This last enterprise having proved completely successful, Telamôn was rewarded by Hêraklês with the possession of the daughter of Laomedôn, Hêsionê—who bore to him Teukros, the most distinguished archer amidst the host of Agamemnôn, and the founder of Salamis in Cyprus.[441]

[440] Apollod. iii. 12, 7. Euphoriôn, Fragm. 5, Düntzer, p. 43, Epicc. Græc. There may have been a tutelary serpent in the temple at Eleusis, as there was in that of Athênê Polias at Athens (Herodot viii. 41. Photius, v. Οἰκοῦρον ὄφιν. Aristophan. Lysistr. 759, with the Schol.).

[441] Apollod. iii. 12, 7. Hesiod. ap. Strab. ix. p. 393.

The libation and prayer of Hêraklês, prior to the birth of Ajax, and his fixing the name of the yet unborn child, from an eagle (αἰετὸς) which appeared in response to his words, was detailed in the Hesiodic Eoia, and is celebrated by Pindar (Isthm. v. 30-54). See also the Scholia.

Pêleus went to Phthia, where he married the daughter of Eurytiôn, son of Aktôr, and received from him the third part of his dominions. Taking part in the Kalydônian boar-hunt, he unintentionally killed his father-in-law Eurytiôn, and was obliged to flee to Iôlkos, where he received purification from Akastus, son of Pelias: the danger to which he became exposed by the calumnious accusations of the enamoured wife of Akastus has already been touched upon in a previous section. Pêleus also was among the Argonauts; the most memorable event in his life however was his marriage with the sea-goddess Thetis. Zeus and Poseidôn had both conceived a violent passion for Thetis. But the former, having been forewarned by Promêtheus that Thetis was destined to give birth to a son more powerful than his father, compelled her, much against her own will, to marry Pêleus; who, instructed by the intimations of the wise Cheirôn, was enabled to seize her on the coast called Sêpias in the southern region of Thessaly. She changed her form several times, but Pêleus held her fast until she resumed her original appearance, and she was then no longer able to resist. All the gods were present, and brought splendid gifts to these memorable nuptials: Apollo sang with his harp, Poseidôn gave to Pêleus the immortal horses Xanthos and Balios, and Cheirôn presented a formidable spear, cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pêlion. We shall have reason hereafter to recognize the value of both these gifts in the exploits of Achilles.[442]

[442] Apollodôr. iii. 13, 5. Homer, Iliad, xviii. 434; xxiv. 62. Pindar, Nem. iv. 50-68; Isthm. vii. 27-50. Herodot. vii. 192. Catullus, Carm. 64. Epithal. Pel. et Thetidos, with the prefatory remarks of Dœring.

The nuptials of Pêleus and Thetis were much celebrated in the Hesiodic Catalogue, or perhaps in the Eoiai (Düntzer, Epic. Græc. Frag. 36. p. 39), and Ægimius—see Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 869—where there is a curious attempt of Staphylus to rationalize the marriage of Pêleus and Thetis.

There was a town, seemingly near Pharsalus in Thessaly, called Thetideium. Thetis is said to have been carried by Pêleus to both these places: probably it grew up round a temple and sanctuary of this goddess (Pherekyd. Frag. 16, Didot; Hellank. ap. Steph. Byz. Θεστιδεῖον).

The prominent part assigned to Thetis in the Iliad is well known, and the post-Homeric poets of the Legend of Troy introduced her as actively concurring first to promote the glory, finally to bewail the death of her distinguished son.[443] Pêleus, having survived both his son Achilles and his grandson Neoptolemus, is ultimately directed to place himself on the very spot where he had originally seized Thetis, and thither the goddess comes herself to fetch him away, in order that he may exchange the desertion and decrepitude of age for a life of immortality along with the Nêreids.[444] The spot was indicated to Xerxês when he marched into Greece by the Iônians who accompanied him, and his magi offered solemn sacrifices to her as well as to the other Nêreids, as the presiding goddesses and mistresses of the coast.[445]

[443] See the arguments of the lost poems, the Cypria and the Æthiopis, as given by Proclus, in Düntzer, Fragm. Epic. Gr. p. 11-16; also Schol. ad Iliad. xvi. 140; and the extract from the lost Ψυχοστασία of Æschylus, ap. Plato. de Republic. ii. c. 21 (p. 382, St.).

[444] Eurip. Androm. 1242-1260; Pindar, Olymp. ii. 86.

[445] Herodot. vii. 198.

Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, too young to engage in the commencement of the siege of Troy, comes on the stage after the death of his father as the indispensable and prominent agent in the final capture of the city. He returns victor from Troy, not to Phthia, but to Epirus, bringing with him the captive Andromachê, widow of Hectôr, by whom Molossus is born to him. He himself perishes in the full vigor of life at Delphi by the machinations of Orestês, son of Agamemnôn. But his son Molossus—like Fleance, the son of Banquo, in Macbeth—becomes the father of the powerful race of Molossian kings, who played so conspicuous a part during the declining vigor of the Grecian cities, and to whom the title and parentage of Æakids was a source of peculiar pride, identifying them by community of heroic origin with genuine and undisputed Hellênes.[446]

[446] Plutarch, Pyrrh. 1; Justin, xi. 3; Eurip. Androm. 1253; Arrian, Exp. Alexand. i. 11.

The glories of Ajax, the second grandson of Æakus, before Troy, are surpassed only by those of Achilles. He perishes by his own hand, the victim of an insupportable feeling of humiliation, because a less worthy claimant is allowed to carry off from him the arms of the departed Achilles. His son Philæus receives the citizenship of Athens, and the gens or dême called Philaidæ traced up to him its name and its origin: moreover the distinguished Athenians, Miltiadês and Thucydidês, were regarded as members of this heroic progeny.[447]

[447] Pherekydês and Hellanikus ap. Marcellin. Vit. Thucydid. init.; Pausan. ii. 29, 4; Plutarch, Solôn, 10. According to Apollodôrus, however, Pherekydês said that Telamôn was only the friend of Pêleus, not his brother,—not the son of Æakus (iii. 12, 7): this seems an inconsistency. There was however a warm dispute between the Athenians and the Megarians respecting the title to the hero Ajax, who was claimed by both (see Pausan. i. 42, 4; Plutarch, l. c.): the Megarians accused Peisistratus of having interpolated a line into the Catalogue in the Iliad (Strabo, ix. p. 394).

Teukrus escaped from the perils of the siege of Troy as well as from those of the voyage homeward, and reached Salamis in safety. But his father Telamôn, indignant at his having returned without Ajax, refused to receive him, and compelled him to expatriate. He conducted his followers to Cyprus, where he founded the city of Salamis: his descendant Evagoras was recognized as a Teukrid and as an Æakid even in the time of Isokratês.[448]

[448] Herodot. vii. 90; Isokrat. Enc. Evag. ut sup.; Sophokl. Ajax, 984-995; Vellei. Patercul. i. 1; Æschyl. Pers. 891, and Schol. The return from Troy of Teukrus, his banishment by Telamôn, and his settlement in Cyprus, formed the subject of the Τεῦκρος of Sophoklês, and of a tragedy under a similar title by Pacuvius (Cicero de Orat. i. 58; ii. 46); Sophokl. Ajax, 892; Pacuvii Fragm. Teucr. 15.—

“Te repudio, nec recipio, natum abdico, Facesse.”

The legend of Teukros was connected in Attic archæology with the peculiar functions and formalities of the judicature, ἐν Φρεαττοῖ (Pausan. i. 28, 12; ii. 29, 7).

Such was the splendid heroic genealogy of the Æakids,—a family renowned for military excellence. The Æakeion at Ægina, in which prayer and sacrifice were offered to Æakus, remained in undiminished dignity down to the time of Pausanias.[449] This genealogy connects together various eminent gentes in Achaia Phthiôtis, in Ægina, in Salamis, in Cyprus, and amongst the Epirotic Molossians. Whether we are entitled to infer from it that the island of Ægina was originally peopled by Myrmidones from Achaia Phthiôtis, as O. Müller imagines,[450] I will not pretend to affirm. These mythical pedigrees seem to unite together special clans or gentes, rather than the bulk of any community—just as we know that the Athenians generally had no part in the Æakid genealogy, though certain particular Athenian families laid claim to it. The intimate friendship between Achilles and the Opuntian hero Patroclus—and the community of name and frequent conjunction between the Locrian Ajax, son of Oïleus, and Ajax, son of Telamôn—connect the Æakids with Opus and the Opuntian Locrians, in a manner which we have no farther means of explaining. Pindar too represents Menœtius, father of Patroclus, as son of Aktôr and Ægina, and therefore maternal brother of Æakus.[451]

[449] Hesiod, Fragm. Düntz. Eoiai, 55, y. 43.—

Ἀλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδαισι, Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδῃσι.

Polyb. v. 2.—

Αἰακίδας, πολέμῳ κεχαρηότας ἠΰτε δαιτί.

[450] See his Æginetica, p. 14, his earliest work.

[451] Pindar, Olymp. ix. 74. The hero Ajax, son of Oïleus, was especially worshipped at Opus; solemn festivals and games were celebrated in his honor.

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XI. ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES

The most ancient name in Attic archæology, as far as our means of information reach, is that of Erechtheus, who is mentioned both in the Catalogue of the Iliad and in a brief allusion of the Odyssey. Born of the Earth, he is brought up by the goddess Athênê, adopted by her as her ward, and installed in her temple at Athens, where the Athenians offer to him annual sacrifices. The Athenians are styled in the Iliad, “the people of Erechtheus.”[452] This is the most ancient testimony concerning Erechtheus, exhibiting him as a divine or heroic, certainly a superhuman person, and identifying him with the primitive germination (if I may use a term, the Grecian equivalent of which would have pleased an Athenian ear) of Attic man. And he was recognized in this same character, even at the close of the fourth century before the Christian æra, by the Butadæ, one of the most ancient and important Gentes at Athens, who boasted of him as their original ancestor: the genealogy of the great Athenian orator Lykurgus, a member of this family, drawn up by his son Abrôn, and painted on a public tablet in the Erechtheion, contained as its first and highest name, Erechtheus, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth. In the Erechtheion, Erechtheus was worshipped conjointly with Athênê: he was identified with the god Poseidôn, and bore the denomination of Poseidôn Erechtheus: one of the family of the Butadæ, chosen among themselves by lot, enjoyed the privilege and performed the functions of his hereditary priest.[453] Herodotus also assigns the same earth-born origin to Erechtheus:[454] but Pindar, the old poem called the Danais, Euripidês and Apollodôrus—all name Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth, as the being who was thus adopted and made the temple-companion of Athênê, while Apollodôrus in another place identifies Erichthonius with Poseidôn.[455] The Homeric scholiast treated Erechtheus and Erichthonius as the same person under two names:[456] and since, in regard to such mythical persons, there exists no other test of identity of the subject except perfect similarity of the attributes, this seems the reasonable conclusion.

[452] Iliad, ii. 546. Odyss. vii. 81.—

Οἳ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ Ἀθήνας εἶχον ... Δῆμον Ἐρεχθῆος μεγαλήτορος, ὅν ποτ᾽ Ἀθήνη Θρέψε, Διὸς θυγάτηρ, τέκε δὲ ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα, Κὰδ δ᾽ ἐν Ἀθήνῃσ᾽ εἷσεν ἑῷ ἐνὶ πίονι νηῷ, Ἐνθάδε μιν ταύροισι καὶ ἀρνειοῖς ἱλάονται Κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων, περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν.

[453] See the Life of Lykurgus, in Plutarch’s (I call it by that name, as it is always printed with his works) Lives of the Ten Orators, tom. iv. p. 382-384, Wytt. Κατῆγον δὲ τὸ γένος ἀπὸ τούτων καὶ Ἐρεχθέως τοῦ Γῆς καὶ Ἡφαίστου ... καὶ ἐστὶν αὐτὴ ἡ καταγωγὴ τοῦ γένους τῶν ἱερασαμένων του Ποσειδῶνος, etc. Ὃς τὴν ἱερωσύνην Ποσειδῶνος Ἐρεχθέως εἶχε (pp. 382, 383). Erechtheus Πάρεδρος of Athênê—Aristidês, Panathenaic. p. 184, with the Scholia of Frommel.

Butês, the eponymus of the Butadæ, is the first priest of Poseidôn Erichthonius: Apollod. iii. 15, 1. So Kallias (Xenoph. Sympos. viii. 40), ἱερεὺς θεῶν τῶν ἀπ᾽ Ἐρεχθέως.

[454] Herodot. viii. 55.

[455] Harpokration, v. Αὐτοχθών. Ὁ δὲ Πίνδαρος καὶ ὁ τὴν Δαναΐδα πεποιηκὼς φασιν, Ἐριχθόνιον ἐξ Ἡφαίστου καὶ Γῆς φανῆναι. Euripidês, Ion. 21. Apollod. iii. 14, 6; 15, 1. Compare Plato, Timæus, c. 6.

[456] Schol. ad Iliad, ii. 546, where he cites also Kallimachus for the story of Erichthonius. Etymologicon Magn. Ἐρεχθεύς. Plato (Kritias, c. 4) employs vague and general language to describe the agency of Hêphæstos and Athênê, which the old fable in Apollodôrus (iii. 14, 6) details in coarser terms. See Ovid, Metam. ii. 757.

We may presume, from the testimony of Homer, that the first and oldest conception of Athens and its sacred acropolis places it under the special protection, and represents it as the settlement and favorite abode of Athênê, jointly with Poseidôn; the latter being the inferior, though the chosen companion of the former, and therefore exchanging his divine appellation for the cognomen of Erechtheus. But the country called Attica, which, during the historical ages, forms one social and political aggregate with Athens, was originally distributed into many independent dêmes or cantons, and included, besides, various religious clans or hereditary sects (if the expression may be permitted); that is, a multitude of persons not necessarily living together in the same locality, but bound together by an hereditary communion of sacred rites, and claiming privileges, as well as performing obligations, founded upon the traditional authority of divine persons for whom they had a common veneration. Even down to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the demots of the various Attic dêmes, though long since embodied in the larger political union of Attica, and having no wish for separation, still retained the recollection of their original political autonomy. They lived in their own separate localities, resorted habitually to their own temples, and visited Athens only occasionally for private or political business, or for the great public festivals. Each of these aggregates, political as well as religious, had its own eponymous god or hero, with a genealogy more or less extended, and a train of mythical incidents more or less copious, attached to his name, according to the fancy of the local exegetes and poets. The eponymous heroes Marathôn, Dekelus, Kolônus, or Phlius, had each their own title to worship, and their own position as themes of legendary narrative, independent of Erechtheus, or Poseidôn, or Athênê, the patrons of the acropolis common to all of them.

But neither the archæology of Attica, nor that of its various component fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece. Theseus is noticed both in the Iliad and Odyssey as having carried off from Krête Ariadnê, the daughter of Minos—thus commencing that connection between the Krêtan and Athenian legends which we afterwards find so largely amplified—and the sons of Thêseus take part in the Trojan war.[457] The chief collectors and narrators of the Attic mythes were, the prose logographers, authors of the many compositions called Atthides, or works on Attic archæology. These writers—Hellanikus, the contemporary of Herodotus, is the earliest composer of an Atthis expressly named, though Pherekydês also touched upon the Attic fables—these writers, I say, interwove into one chronological series the legends which either greatly occupied their own fancy, or commanded the most general reverence among their countrymen. In this way the religious and political legends of Eleusis, a town originally independent of Athens, but incorporated with it before the historical age, were worked into one continuous sequence along with those of the Erechtheids. In this way, Kekrops, the eponymous hero of the portion of Attica called Kekropia, came to be placed in the mythical chronology at a higher point even than the primitive god or hero Erechtheus.

[457] Æthra, mother of Theseus, is also mentioned (Homer, Iliad, iii. 144).

Ogygês is said to have reigned in Attica[458] 1020 years before the first Olympiad, or 1796 years B. C. In his time happened the deluge of Deukaliôn, which destroyed most of the inhabitants of the country: after a long interval, Kekrops, an indigenous person, half man and half serpent, is given to us by Apollodôrus as the first king of the country: he bestowed upon the land, which had before been called Actê, the name of Kekropia. In his day there ensued a dispute between Athênê and Poseidôn respecting the possession of the acropolis at Athens, which each of them coveted. First, Poseidôn struck the rock with his trident, and produced the well of salt water which existed in it, called the Erechthêis: next came Athênê, who planted the sacred olive-tree ever afterwards seen and venerated in the portion of Erechtheion called the cell of Pandrosus. The twelve gods decided the dispute; and Kekrops having testified before them that Athênê had rendered this inestimable service, they adjudged the spot to her in preference to Poseidôn. Both the ancient olive-tree and the well produced by Poseidôn were seen on the acropolis, in the temple consecrated jointly to Athênê and Erechtheus, throughout the historical ages. Poseidôn, as a mark of his wrath for the preference given to Athênê, inundated the Thriasian plain with water.[459]

[458] Hellanikus, Fragm. 62; Philochor. Fragm. 8, ap. Euseb. Præp. Evang. x. 10. p. 489. Larcher (Chronologie d’Hérodote, ch. ix. s. 1. p. 278) treats both the historical personality and the date of Ogygês as perfectly well authenticated.

It is not probable that Philochorus should have given any calculation of time having reference to Olympiads; and hardly conceivable that Hellanikus should have done so. Justin Martyr quotes Hellanikus and Philochorus as having mentioned Moses,—ὡς σφόδρα ἀρχαίου καὶ παλαιοῦ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἄρχοντος Μωϋσέως μέμνηνται—which is still more incredible even than the assertion of Eusebius about their having fixed the date of Ogygês by Olympiads (see Philochor. Fragm. 9).

[459] Apollod. iii. 14, 1; Herodot. viii. 55; Ovid. Metam. vi. 72. The story current among the Athenians represented Kekrops as the judge of this controversy (Xenoph. Memor. iii. 5, 10).

The impressions of the trident of Poseidôn were still shown upon the rock in the time of Pausanias (Pausan. i. 26, 4). For the sanctity of the ancient olive-tree, see the narrative of Herodotus (l. c.), relating what happened to it when Xerxes occupied the acropolis. As this tale seems to have attached itself specially to the local peculiarities of the Erechtheion, the part which Poseidôn plays in it is somewhat mean: that god appears to greater advantage in the neighborhood of the Ἱπποτὴς Κολωνὸς, as described in the beautiful Chorus of Sophoklês (Œdip. Colon. 690-712).

A curious rationalization of the monstrous form ascribed to Kekrops διφυὴς in Plutarch (Sera Num. Vindict. p. 551).

During the reign of Kekrops, Attica was laid waste by Karian pirates on the coast, and by invasions of the Aônian inhabitants from Bœôtia. Kekrops distributed the inhabitants of Attica into twelve local sections—Kekropia, Tetrapolis, Epakria, Dekeleia, Eleusis, Aphidna, Thorikus, Braurôn, Kythêrus, Sphêttus, Kêphisius, Phalerus. Wishing to ascertain the number of inhabitants, he commanded each man to cast a single stone into a general heap: the number of stones was counted, and it was found that there were twenty thousand.[460]

[460] Philochor. ap. Strabo. ix. p. 397.

Kekrops married the daughter of Aktæus, who (according to Pausanias’s version) had been king of the country before him, and had called it by the name of Aktæa.[461] By her he had three daughters, Aglaurus, Ersê and Pandrosus, and a son, Erysichthôn. Kekrops is called by Pausanias contemporary of the Arcadian Lykaôn, and is favorably contrasted with that savage prince in respect of his piety and humanity.[462] Though he has been often designated in modern histories as an immigrant from Egypt into Attica, yet the far greater number of ancient authorities represent him as indigenous or earth-born.[463]

[461] The Parian chronological marble designates Aktæus as an autochthonous person. Marmor Parium, Epoch. 3. Pausan. i. 2, 5. Philochorus treated Aktæus as a fictitious name (Fragm. 8, ut sup.).

[462] Pausan. viii. 2. 2. The three daughters of Kekrops were not unnoticed in the mythes (Ovid, Metam. ii. 739): the tale of Kephalus, son of Hersê by Hermês, who was stolen away by the goddess Eôs or Hêmera in consequence of his surpassing beauty, was told in more than one of the Hesiodic poems (Pausan. i. 3, 1; Hesiod. Theog. 986). See also Eurip. Ion. 269.

[463] Jul. Africanus also (ap. Euseb. x. 9. p. 486-488) calls Kekrops γηγενὴς and αὐτοχθών.

Erysichthôn died without issue, and Kranaus succeeded him,—another autochthonous person and another eponymus,—for the name Kranai was an old denomination of the inhabitants of Attica.[464] Kranaus was dethroned by Amphiktyôn, by some called an autochthonous man; by others, a son of Deukaliôn: Amphiktyôn in his turn was expelled by Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth,—the same person apparently as Erechtheus, but inserted by Apollodôrus at this point of the series. Erichthonius, the pupil and favored companion of Athênê, placed in the acropolis the original Palladium or wooden statue of that goddess, said to have dropped from heaven: he was moreover the first to celebrate the festival of the Panathenæa. He married the nymph Pasithea, and had for his son and successor Pandiôn.[465] Erichthonius was the first person who taught the art of breaking in horses to the yoke, and who drove a chariot and four.[466]

[464] Herod. viii. 44. Κρανααὶ Ἀθῆναι, Pindar.

[465] Apollod. iii. 14. Pausan. i. 26, 7.

[466] Virgil, Georgic iii. 114.

In the time of Pandiôn, who succeeded to Erichthonius, Dionysus and Dêmêtêr both came into Attica: the latter was received by Keleos at Eleusis.[467] Pandiôn married the nymph Zeuxippê, and had twin sons, Erechtheus and Butês, and two daughters, Proknê and Philomêla. The two latter are the subjects of a memorable and well-known legend. Pandiôn having received aid in repelling the Thêbans from Têreus, king of Thrace, gave him his daughter Proknê in marriage, by whom he had a son, Itys. The beautiful Philomêla, going to visit her sister, inspired the barbarous Thracian with an irresistible passion: he violated her person, confined her in a distant pastoral hut, and pretended that she was dead, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from revealing the truth. After a long interval, Philomêla found means to acquaint her sister of the cruel deed which had been perpetrated; she wove into a garment words describing her melancholy condition, and despatched it by a trusty messenger. Proknê, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger, took advantage of the free egress enjoyed by women during the Bacchanalian festival to go and release her sister: the two sisters then revenged themselves upon Têreus by killing the boy Itys, and serving him up for his father to eat: after the meal had been finished, the horrid truth was revealed to him. Têreus snatched a hatchet to put Proknê to death: she fled, along with Philomêla, and all the three were changed into birds—Proknê became a swallow, Philomêla a nightingale, and Têreus an hoopoe.[468] This tale, so popular with the poets, and so illustrative of the general character of Grecian legend, is not less remarkable in another point of view—that the great historian Thucydidês seems to allude to it as an historical fact,[469] not however directly mentioning the final metamorphosis.

[467] The mythe of the visit of Dêmêtêr to Eleusis, on which occasion she vouchsafed to teach her holy rites to the leading Eleusinians, is more fully touched upon in a previous chapter (see ante, p. 50).

[468] Apollod. iii. 14, 8; Æsch. Supplic. 61; Soph. Elektr. 107; Ovid, Metamorph. vi. 425-670. Hyginus gives the fable with some additional circumstances, fab. 45. Antoninus Liberalis (Narr. 11), or Bœus, from whom he copies, has composed a new narrative by combining together the names of Pandareos and Aêdôn, as given in the Odyssey, xix. 523, and the adventures of the old Attic fable. The hoopoe still continued the habit of chasing the nightingale; it was to the Athenians a present fact. See Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 212.

[469] Thucyd. ii. 29. He makes express mention of the nightingale in connection with the story, though not of the metamorphosis. See below, chap. xvi. p. 544, note 2. So also does Pausanias mention and reason upon it as a real incident: he founds upon it several moral reflections (i. 5, 4; x. 4, 5): the author of the Λόγος Ἐπιτάφιος, ascribed to Demosthenês, treats it in the same manner, as a fact ennobling the tribe Pandionis, of which Pandiôn was the eponymus. The same author, in touching upon Kekrops, the eponymus of the Kekropis tribe, cannot believe literally the story of his being half man and half serpent: he rationalizes it by saying that Kekrops was so called because in wisdom he was like a man, in strength like a serpent (Demosth. p. 1397, 1398, Reiske). Hesiod glances at the fable (Opp. Di. 566), ὀρθογόη Πανδιονὶς ὦρτο χελιδών; see also Ælian., V. H. xii. 20. The subject was handled by Sophoklês in his lost Têreus.

After the death of Pandiôn, Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom, and his brother, Butês, became priest of Poseidôn Erichthonius, a function which his descendants ever afterwards exercised, the Butadæ or Eteobutadæ. Erechtheus seems to appear in three characters in the fabulous history of Athens—as a god, Poseidôn Erechtheus[470]—as a hero, Erechtheus, son of the Earth—and now, as a king, son of Pandiôn: so much did the ideas of divine and human rule become confounded and blended together in the imagination of the Greeks in reviewing their early times.

[470] Poseidôn is sometimes spoken of under the name of Erechtheus simply (Lycophrôn, 158). See Hesychius, v. Ἐρεχθεύς.

The daughters of Erechtheus were not less celebrated in Athenian legend than those of Pandiôn. Prokris, one of them, is among the heroines seen by Odysseus in Hadês: she became the wife of Kephalus, son of Deionês, and lived in the Attic dême of Thorikus. Kephalus tried her fidelity by pretending that he was going away for a long period; but shortly returned, disguising his person and bringing with him a splendid necklace. He presented himself to Prokris without being recognized, and succeeded in triumphing over her chastity. Having accomplished this object, he revealed to her his true character: she earnestly besought his forgiveness, and prevailed upon him to grant it. Nevertheless he became shortly afterwards the unintentional author of her death: for he was fond of hunting, and staid out a long time on his excursions, so that Prokris suspected him of visiting some rival. She determined to watch him by concealing herself in a thicket near the place of his midday repose; and when Kephalus implored the presence of Nephelê (a cloud) to protect him from the sun’s rays, she suddenly started from her hiding-place: Kephalus, thus disturbed, cast his hunting-spear unknowingly into the thicket and slew his wife. Erechtheus interred her with great magnificence, and Kephalus was tried for the act before the court of Areopagus, which condemned him to exile.[471]

[471] Pherekydês, Fragm. 77, Didot; ap. Schol. ad Odyss. xi. 320; Hellanikus Fr. 82; ap. Schol. Eurip. Orest. 1648. Apollodôrus (iii. 15, 1) gives the story differently.

Kreüsa, another daughter of Erechtheus, seduced by Apollo, becomes the mother of Iôn, whom she exposes immediately after his birth in the cave north of the acropolis, concealing the fact from every one. Apollo prevails upon Hermês to convey the new-born child to Delphi, where he is brought up as a servant of the temple, without knowing his parents. Kreüsa marries Xuthus, son of Æolus, but continuing childless, she goes with Xuthus to the Delphian oracle to inquire for a remedy. The god presents to them Iôn, and desires them to adopt him as their son: their son Achæus is afterwards born to them, and Iôn and Achæus become the eponyms of the Iônians and Achæans.[472]

[472] Upon this story of Iôn is founded the tragedy of Euripidês which bears that name. I conceive many of the points of that tragedy to be of the invention of Euripidês himself: but to represent Iôn as son of Apollo, not of Xuthus, seems a genuine Attic legend. Respecting this drama, see O. Müller, Hist. of Dorians, ii. 2. 13-15. I doubt however the distinction which he draws between the Ionians and the other population of Attica.

Oreithyia, the third daughter of Erechtheus, was stolen away by the god Boreas while amusing herself on the banks of the Ilissus, and carried to his residence in Thrace. The two sons of this marriage, Zêtês and Kalaïs, were born with wings: they took part in the Argonautic expedition, and engaged in the pursuit of the Harpies: they were slain at Tênos by Hêraklês. Kleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia, was married to Phineus, and had two sons, Plexippus and Pandiôn; but Phineus afterwards espoused a second wife, Idæa, the daughter of Dardanus, who, detesting the two sons of the former bed, accused them falsely of attempting her chastity, and persuaded Phineus in his wrath to put out the eyes of both. For this cruel proceeding he was punished by the Argonauts in the course of their voyage.[473]

[473] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 2; Plato, Phædr. c. 3; Sophok. Antig. 984; also the copious Scholion on Apollôn. Rhod. i. 212.

The tale of Phineus is told very differently in the Argonautic expedition as given by Apollônius Rhodius, ii. 180. From Sophoklês we learn that this was the Attic version.

The two winged sons of Boreas and their chase of the Harpies were noticed in the Hesiodic Catalogue (see Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 296). But whether the Attic legend of Oreithyia was recognized in the Hesiodic poems seems not certain.

Both Æschylus and Sophoklês composed dramas on the subject of Oreithyia (Longin. de Sublimit. c. 3). “Orithyia Atheniensis, filia Terrigenæ, et a Borea in Thraciam rapta.” (Servius ad Virg. Æneid. xii. 83). Terrigenæ is the γηγενὴς Ἐρεχθεύς. Philochorus (Fragm. 30) rationalized the story, and said that it alluded to the effects of a violent wind.

On more than one occasion the Athenians derived, or at least believed themselves to have derived, important benefits from this marriage of Boreas with the daughter of their primæval hero: one inestimable service, rendered at a juncture highly critical for Grecian independence, deserves to be specified.[474] At the time of the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, the Grecian fleet was assembled at Chalcis and Artemision in Eubœa, awaiting the approach of the Persian force, so overwhelming in its numbers as well by sea as on land. The Persian fleet had reached the coast of Magnêsia and the south-eastern corner of Thessaly without any material damage, when the Athenians were instructed by an oracle “to invoke the aid of their son-in-law.” Understanding the advice to point to Boreas, they supplicated his aid and that of Oreithyia, most earnestly, as well by prayer as by sacrifice,[475] and the event corresponded to their wishes. A furious north-easterly wind immediately arose, and continued for three days to afflict the Persian fleet as it lay on an unprotected coast: the number of ships driven ashore, both vessels of war and of provision, was immense, and the injury done to the armament was never thoroughly repaired. Such was the powerful succor which the Athenians derived, at a time of their utmost need, from their son-in-law Boreas; and their gratitude was shown by consecrating to him a new temple on the banks of the Ilissus.

[474] Herodot. vii. 189. Οἱ δ᾽ ὦν Ἀθηναῖοί σφι λέγουσι βοηθήσαντα τὸν Βορῆν πρότερον, καὶ τότε ἐκεῖνα κατεργάσασθαι· καὶ ἱρὸν ἀπελθόντες Βορέω ἱδρύσαντο παρὰ ποταμὸν Ἴλισσον.

[475] Herodot. l. c. Ἀθηναῖοι τὸν Βορῆν ἐκ θεοπροπίου ἐπεκαλέσαντο, ἐλθόντος σφι ἄλλου χρηστηρίου, τὸν γαμβρὸν ἐπίκουρον καλέσασθαι. Βορῆς δὲ, κατὰ τὸν Ἑλλήνων λόγον ἔχει γυναῖκα Ἀττικὴν, Ὠρειθυίην τὴν Ἐρεχθῆος. Κατὰ δὴ τὸ κῆδος τοῦτο, οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, συμβαλλεόμενοί σφι τὸν Βορῆν γαμβρὸν εἶναι, etc.

The three remaining daughters of Erechtheus—he had six in all[476]—were in Athenian legend yet more venerated than their sisters, on account of having voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the safety of their country. Eumolpus of Eleusis was the son of Poseidôn and the eponymous hero of the sacred gens called the Eumolpids, in whom the principal functions, appertaining to the mysterious rites of Dêmêtêr at Eleusis, were vested by hereditary privilege: he made war upon Erechtheus and the Athenians, with the aid of a body of Thracian allies; indeed it appears that the legends of Athens, originally foreign and unfriendly to those of Eleusis, represented him as having been himself a Thracian born and an immigrant into Attica.[477] Respecting Eumolpus however and his parentage, the discrepancies much exceed even the measure of license usual in the legendary genealogies, and some critics, both ancient and modern, have sought to reconcile these contradictions by the usual stratagem of supposing two or three different persons of the same name. Even Pausanias, so familiar with this class of unsworn witnesses, complains of the want of native Eleusinian genealogists,[478] and of the extreme license of fiction in which other authors had indulged.

[476] Suidas and Photius, v. Πάρθενοι: Protogeneia and Pandôra are given as the names of two of them. The sacrifice of Pandôra, in the Iambi of Hippônax (Hippônact. Fragm. xxi. Welck. ap. Athen. ix. p. 370), seems to allude to this daughter of Erechtheus.

[477] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 3; Thucyd. ii. 15; Isokratês (Panegyr. t. i. p. 206; Panathenaic. t. ii. p. 560, Auger), Lykurgus, cont. Leocrat. p. 201, Reiske, Pausan. i. 38, 3; Euripid. Erechth. Fragm. The Schol. ad. Soph. Œd. Col. 1048 gives valuable citations from Ister, Akestodôrus and Androtiôn: we see that the inquirers of antiquity found it difficult to explain how the Eumolpids could have acquired their ascendant privileges in the management of the Eleusinia, seeing that Eumolpus himself was a foreigner.—Ζητεῖται, τί δήποτε οἱ Εὐμολπίδαι τῶν τελετῶν ἐξάρχουσι, ξένοι ὄντες. Thucydidês does not call Eumolpus a Thracian: Strabo’s language is very large and vague (vii. p. 321): Isokratês says that he assailed Athens in order to vindicate the rights of his father Poseidôn to the sovereign patronage of the city. Hyginus copies this (fab. 46).

[478] Pausan. i. 38. 3. Ἐλευσίνιοί τε ἀρχαῖοι, ἅτε οὐ προσόντων σφισι γενεαλόγων, ἄλλα τε πλάσασθαι δεδώκασι καὶ μάλιστα ἐς τὰ γένη τῶν ἡρώων. See Heyne ad Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4. “Eumolpi nomen modo communicatum pluribus, modo plurium hominum res et facta cumulata in unum. Is ad quem Hercules venisse dicitur, serior ætate fuit: antiquior est is de quo hoc loco agitur ... antecessisse tamen hunc debet alius, qui cum Triptolemo vixit,” etc. See the learned and valuable comments of Lobeck in his Aglaophamus, tom. i. p. 206-213: in regard to the discrepancies of this narrative he observes, I think, with great justice (p. 211), “quo uno exemplo ex innumerabilibus delecto, arguitur eorum temeritas, qui ex variis discordibusque poetarum et mythographorum narratiunculis, antiquæ famæ formam et quasi lineamenta recognosci posse sperant.”

In the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr, the most ancient testimony before us,—composed, to all appearance, earlier than the complete incorporation of Eleusis with Athens,—Eumolpus appears (to repeat briefly what has been stated in a previous chapter) as one of the native chiefs or princes of Eleusis, along with Triptolemus, Dioklês, Polyxeinus and Dolichus: Keleos is the king, or principal among these chiefs, the son or lineal descendant of the eponymous Eleusis himself. To these chiefs, and to the three daughters of Keleos, the goddess Dêmêtêr comes in her sorrow for the loss of her daughter Persephonê: being hospitably entertained by Keleos she reveals her true character, commands that a temple shall be built to her at Eleusis, and prescribes to them the rites according to which they are to worship her.[479] Such seems to have been the ancient story of the Eleusinians respecting their own religious antiquities: Keleos, with Metaneira his wife, and the other chiefs here mentioned, were worshipped at Eleusis, and from thence transferred to Athens as local gods or heroes.[480] Eleusis became incorporated with Athens, apparently not very long before the time of Solôn; and the Eleusinian worship of Dêmêtêr was then received into the great religious solemnities of the Athenian state, to which it owes its remarkable subsequent extension and commanding influence. In the Atticized worship of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr, the Eumolpids and the Kêrŷkes were the principal hereditary functionaries: Eumolpus, the eponym of this great family, came thus to play the principal part in the Athenian legendary version of the war between Athens and Eleusis. An oracle had pronounced that Athens could only be rescued from his attack by the death of the three daughters of Erechtheus; their generous patriotism consented to the sacrifice, and their father put them to death. He then went forth confidently to the battle, totally vanquished the enemy, and killed Eumolpus with his own hand.[481] Erechtheus was worshipped as a god, and his daughters as goddesses, at Athens.[482] Their names and their exalted devotion were cited along with those of the warriors of Marathôn, in the public assembly of Athens, by orators who sought to arouse the languid patriot, or to denounce the cowardly deserter; and the people listened both to one and the other with analogous feelings of grateful veneration, as well as with equally unsuspecting faith in the matter of fact.[483]

[479] Homer, Hymn, ad Cerer. 153-475.—

... Ἡ δὲ κίουσα θεμιστοπόλοις βασιλεῦσι Δεῖξεν Τριπτολέμῳ τε, Διόκλεΐ τε πληξίππῳ, Εὐμόλπου τε βίῃ, Κελέῳ θ᾽ ἡγήτορι λαῶν, Δρησμοσύνην ἱερῶν.

Also v. 105.

Τὴν δὲ ἴδον Κελέοιο Ἐλευσινίδαο θύγατρες.

The hero Eleusis is mentioned in Pausanias, i. 38, 7: some said that he was the son of Hermês, others that he was the son of Ogygus. Compare Hygin. f. 147.

[480] Keleos and Metaneira were worshipped by the Athenians with divine honors (Athenagoras, Legat. p. 53, ed. Oxon.): perhaps he confounds divine and heroic honors, as the Christian controversialists against Paganism were disposed to do. Triptolemus had a temple at Eleusis (Pausan. i. 38, 6).

[481] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4. Some said that Immaradus, son of Eumolpus, had been killed by Erechtheus (Pausan. i. 5, 2); others, that both Eumolpus and his son had experienced this fate (Schol. ad Eurip. Phœniss. 854). But we learn from Pausanias himself what the story in the interior of the Erechtheion was,—that Erechtheus killed Eumolpus (i. 27, 3).

[482] Cicero, Nat. Deor. iii. 19; Philochor. ap. Schol. Œdip. Col. 100. Three daughters of Erechtheus perished, and three daughters were worshipped (Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4; Hesychius, Ζεῦγος τριπάρθενον; Eurip. Erechtheus, Fragm. 3, Dindorf); but both Euripidês and Apollodôrus said that Erechtheus was only required to sacrifice, and only did sacrifice, one,—the other two slew themselves voluntarily, from affection for their sister. I cannot but think (in spite of the opinion of Welcker to the contrary, Griechisch. Tragöd. ii. p. 722) that the genuine legend represented Erechtheus as having sacrificed all three, as appears in the Iôn of Euripidês (276):—

IÔN. Πατὴρ Ἐρεχθεὺς σὰς ἔθυσε συγγόνους; CREÜSA. Ἔτλη πρὸ γαίας σφάγια παρθένους κτανεῖν. IÔN. Σὺ δ᾽ ἐξεσώθης πῶς κασιγνήτων μόνη; CREÜSA. Βρέφος νέογνον μητρὸς ἦν ἐν ἀγκάλαις.

Compare with this passage, Demosthen. Λόγος Ἐπιταφ. p. 1397, Reisk. Just before, the death of the three daughters of Kekrops, for infringing the commands of Athênê, had been mentioned. Euripidês modified this in his Erechtheus, for he there introduced the mother Praxithea consenting to the immolation of one daughter, for the rescue of the country from a foreign invader: to propose to a mother the immolation of three daughters at once, would have been too revolting. In most instances we find the strongly marked features, the distinct and glaring incidents as well as the dark contrasts, belong to the Hesiodic or old Post-Homeric legend; the changes made afterwards go to soften, dilute, and to complicate, in proportion as the feelings of the public become milder and more humane; sometimes however the later poets add new horrors.

[483] See the striking evidence contained in the oration of Lykurgus against Leocratês (p. 201-204. Reiske; Demosthen. Λόγ. Ἐπιταφ. l. c.; and Xenophon, Memor. iii. 5, 9): from the two latter passages we see that the Athenian story represented the invasion under Eumolpus as a combined assault from the western continent.

Though Erechtheus gained the victory over Eumolpus, yet the story represents Poseidôn as having put an end to the life and reign of Erechtheus, who was (it seems) slain in the battle. He was succeeded by his son Kekrops II., and the latter again by his son Pandiôn II.,[484]—two names unmarked by any incidents, and which appear to be mere duplication of the former Kekrops and Pandiôn, placed there by the genealogizers for the purpose of filling up what seemed to them a chronological chasm. The Attic legends were associated chiefly with a few names of respected eponymous personages; and if the persons called the children of Pandiôn were too numerous to admit of their being conveniently ascribed to one father, there was no difficulty in supposing a second prince of the same name.

[484] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 5; Eurip. Iôn, 282; Erechth. Fragm. 20, Dindorf.

Apollodôrus passes at once from Erechtheus to his son Kekrops II., then to Pandiôn II., next to the four sons of the latter, Ægeus, Pallas, Nisus and Lykus. But the tragedians here insert the story of Xuthus, Kreüsa and Iôn; the latter being the son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but given by the god to Xuthus, and adopted by the latter as his own. Iôn becomes the successor of Erechtheus, and his sons Teleon, Hoplês, Argadês and Aigikorês become the eponyms of the four ancient tribes of Athens, which subsisted until the revolution of Kleisthenês. Iôn himself is the eponym of the Iônic race both in Asia, in Europe, and in the Ægean islands: Dôrus and Achæus are the sons of Kreüsa by Xuthus, so that Iôn is distinguished from both of them by being of divine parentage.[485] According to the story given by Philochorus, Iôn rendered such essential service in rescuing the Athenians from the attack of the Thracians under Eumolpus, that he was afterwards made king of the country, and distributed all the inhabitants into four tribes or castes, corresponding to different modes of life,—soldiers, husbandmen, goatherds, and artisans.[486] And it seems that the legend explanatory of the origin of the festival Boëdromia, originally important enough to furnish a name to one of the Athenian months, was attached to the aid thus rendered by Iôn.[487]

[485] Eurip. Iôn. 1570-1595. The Kreüsa of Sophoklês, a lost tragedy, seems to have related to the same subject.

Pausanias (vii. 1, 2) tells us that Xuthus was chosen to arbitrate between the contending claims of the sons of Erechtheus.

[486] Philochor. ap. Harpocrat. v. Βοηδρόμια; Strabo, viii. p. 383.

[487] Philochor. ap. Harpocrat. v. Βοηδρόμια.

We pass from Iôn to persons of far greater mythical dignity and interest,—Ægeus and his son Thêseus.

Pandiôn had four sons, Ægeus, Nisus, Lykus, and Pallas, between whom he divided his dominions. Nisus received the territory of Megaris, which had been under the sway of Pandiôn, and there founded the seaport of Nisæa. Lykus was made king of the eastern coast, but a dispute afterwards ensued, and he quitted the country altogether, to establish himself on the southern coast of Asia Minor among the Termilæ, to whom he gave the name of Lykians.[488] Ægeus, as the eldest of the four, became king of Athens; but Pallas received a portion both of the south-western coast and the interior, and he as well as his children appear as frequent enemies both to Ægeus and to Thêseus. Pallas is the eponym of the dême Pallênê, and the stories respecting him and his sons seem to be connected with old and standing feuds among the different dêmes of Attica, originally independent communities. These feuds penetrated into the legend, and explain the story which we find that Ægeus and Thêseus were not genuine Erechtheids, the former being denominated a supposititious child to Pandiôn.[489]

[488] Sophokl. ap. Strab. ix. p. 392; Herodot. i. 173; Strabo, xii. p. 573.

[489] Plutarch, Thêseus, c. 13. Αἰγεὺς θετὸς γενόμενος Πανδίονι, καὶ μηδὲν τοῖς Ἐρεχθείδαις προσήκων. Apollodôr. iii. 15, 6.

Ægeus[490] has little importance in the mythical history except as the father of Thêseus: it may even be doubted whether his name is anything more than a mere cognomen of the god Poseidôn, who was (as we are told) the real father of this great Attic Hêraklês. As I pretend only to give a very brief outline of the general territory of Grecian legend, I cannot permit myself to recount in detail the chivalrous career of Thêseus, who is found both in the Kalydônian boar-hunt and in the Argonautic expedition—his personal and victorious encounters with the robbers Sinnis, Procrustês, Periphêtês, Scirôn and others—his valuable service in ridding his country of the Krommyonian sow and the Marathônian bull—his conquest of the Minotaur in Krête, and his escape from the dangers of the labyrinth by the aid of Ariadnê, whom he subsequently carries off and abandons—his many amorous adventures, and his expeditions both against the Amazons and into the under-world along with Peirithous.[491]

[490] Ægeus had by Mêdea (who took refuge at Athens after her flight from Corinth) a son named Mêdus, who passed into Asia, and was considered as the eponymus and progenitor of the Median people. Datis, the general who commanded the invading Persian army at the battle of Marathôn, sent a formal communication to the Athenians announcing himself as the descendant of Mêdus, and requiring to be admitted as king of Attica: such is the statement of Diodôrus (Exc. Vatic. vii.-x. 48: see also Schol. Aristophan. Pac. 289).

[491] Ovid, Metamorph. vii. 433.—

... “Te, maxime Theseu, Mirata est Marathon Cretæi sanguine Tauri: Quodque Suis securus arat Cromyona colonus, Munus opusque tuum est. Tellus Epidauria per te Clavigeram vidit Vulcani occumbere prolem: Vidit et immanem Cephisias ora Procrustem. Cercyonis letum vidit Cerealis Eleusin. Occidit ille Sinis,” etc.

Respecting the amours of Thêseus, Ister especially seems to have entered into great details; but some of them were noticed both in the Hesiodic poems and by Kekrops, not to mention Pherekydês (Athen. xiii. p. 557). Peirithous, the intimate friend and companion of Thêseus, is the eponymous hero of the Attic dême or gens Perithoidæ (Ephorus ap. Photium, v. Περιθοῖδαι).

Thucydidês delineates the character of Thêseus as a man who combined sagacity with political power, and who conferred upon his country the inestimable benefit of uniting all the separate and self-governing dêmes of Attica into one common political society.[492] From the well-earned reverence attached to the assertion of Thucydidês, it has been customary to reason upon this assertion as if it were historically authentic, and to treat the romantic attributes which we find in Plutarch and Diodôrus as if they were fiction superinduced upon this basis of fact. Such a view of the case is in my judgment erroneous. The athletic and amorous knight-errant is the old version of the character—the profound and long-sighted politician is a subsequent correction, introduced indeed by men of superior mind, but destitute of historical warranty, and arising out of their desire to find reasons of their own for concurring in the veneration which the general public paid more easily and heartily to their national hero. Thêseus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, fights with the Lapithæ against the Centaurs: Thêseus, in the Hesiodic poems, is misguided by his passion for the beautiful Æglê, daughter of Panopeus:[493] and the Thêseus described in Plutarch’s biography is in great part a continuation and expansion of these same or similar attributes, mingled with many local legends, explaining, like the Fasti of Ovid, or the lost Aitia of Kallimachus, the original genesis of prevalent religious and social customs.[494] Plutarch has doubtless greatly softened down and modified the adventures which he found in the Attic logographers as well as in the poetical epics called Thêsêis. For in his preface to the life of Thêseus, after having emphatically declared that he is about to transcend the boundary both of the known and the knowable, but that the temptation of comparing the founder of Athens with the founder of Rome is irresistible, he concludes with the following remarkable words: “I pray that this fabulous matter may be so far obedient to my endeavors as to receive, when purified by reason, the aspect of history: in those cases where it haughtily scorns plausibility and will admit no alliance with what is probable, I shall beg for indulgent hearers, willing to receive antique narrative in a mild spirit.”[495] We see here that Plutarch sat down, not to recount the old fables as he found them, but to purify them by reason and to impart to them the aspect of history. We have to thank him for having retained, after this purification, so much of what is romantic and marvellous; but we may be sure that the sources from which he borrowed were more romantic and marvellous still. It was the tendency of the enlightened men of Athens, from the days of Solôn downwards, to refine and politicize the character of Thêseus:[496] even Peisistratus expunged from one of the Hesiodic poems the line which described the violent passion of the hero for the fair Æglê:[497] and the tragic poets found it more congenial to the feelings of their audience to exhibit him as a dignified and liberal sovereign, rather than as an adventurous single-handed fighter. But the logographers and the Alexandrine poets remained more faithful to the old fables. The story of Hekalê, the hospitable old woman who received and blessed Thêseus when he went against the Marathônian bull, and whom he found dead when he came back to recount the news of his success, was treated by Kallimachus:[498] and Virgil must have had his mind full of the unrefined legends when he numbered this Attic Hêraklês among the unhappy sufferers condemned to endless penance in the under-world.[499]

[492] Thuc. ii. 15. Ἐπειδὴ δὲ Θησεὺς ἐβασίλευσε, γενόμενος μετὰ τοῦ ξυνετοῦ καὶ δυνατὸς, τά τε ἄλλα διεκόσμησε τὴν χώραν, καὶ κατάλυσας τῶν ἄλλων πόλεων τά τε βουλευτήρια καὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς, ἐς τὴν νῦν πόλιν ... ξυνῴκισε πάντας.

[493] Iliad, i. 265; Odyss. xi. 321. I do not notice the suspected line, Odyss. xi. 630.

[494] Diodôrus also, from his disposition to assimilate Thêseus to Hêraklês, has given us his chivalrous as well as his political attributes (iv. 61).

[495] Plutarch, Thêseus, i. Εἴη μὲν οὖν ἡμῖν, ἐκκαθαιρόμενον λόγῳ τὸ μυθῶδες ὑπακοῦσαι καὶ λαβεῖν ἱστορίας ὄψιν· ὅπου δ᾽ ἂν αὐθαδῶς τοῦ πιθανοῦ περιφρονῇ, καὶ μὴ δέχηται ~τὴν πρὸς τὸ εἰκὸς μίξιν~, εὐγνωμόνων ἀκροατῶν δεησόμεθα, καὶ πρᾴως τὴν ἀρχαιολογίαν προσδεχομένων.

[496] See Isokratês, Panathenaic. (t. ii. p. 510-512, Auger); Xenoph. Memor. iii. 5, 10. In the Helenæ Encomium, Isokratês enlarges more upon the personal exploits of Thêseus in conjunction with his great political merits (t. ii. p. 342-350, Auger).

[497] Plutarch, Thêseus, 20.

[498] See the epigram of Krinagoras, Antholog. Pal. vol. ii. p. 144; ep. xv. ed. Brunck. and Kallimach. Frag. 40.

Ἀείδει δ᾽ (Kallimachus) Ἑκάλης τε φιλοξείνοιο καλιὴν, Καὶ Θησεῖ Μαραθὼν οὓς ἐπέθηκε πόνους.

Some beautiful lines are preserved by Suidas, v. Ἐπαύλια, περὶ Ἑκάλης θανούσης (probably spoken by Thêseus himself, see Plutarch, Theseus, c. 14).

Ἴθι, πρηεῖα γυναικῶν, Τὴν ὁδὸν, ἣν ἀνίαι θυμαλγέες οὐ περόωσιν· Πόλλακι σεῖ᾽, ὦ μαῖα, φιλοξείνοιο καλιῆς Μνησόμεθα· ξυνὸν γὰρ ἐπαύλιον ἔσκεν ἅπασι.

[499] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 617. “Sedet æternumque sedebit Infelix Thêseus.”

Two however among the Thêseian fables cannot be dismissed without some special notice,—the war against the Amazons, and the expedition against Krête. The former strikingly illustrates the facility as well as the tenacity of Grecian legendary faith; the latter embraces the story of Dædalus and Minos, two of the most eminent among Grecian ante-historical personages.

The Amazons, daughters of Arês and Harmonia,[500] are both early creations and frequent reproductions of the ancient epic—which was indeed, we may generally remark, largely occupied both with the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and daughters of the Grecian heroes—and which recognized in Pallas Athênê the finished type of an irresistible female warrior. A nation of courageous, hardy and indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men, permitting only a short temporary intercourse for the purpose of renovating their numbers, and burning out their right breast with a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely,—this was at once a general type stimulating to the fancy of the poet and a theme eminently popular with his hearers. Nor was it at all repugnant to the faith of the latter—who had no recorded facts to guide them, and no other standard of credibility as to the past except such poetical narratives themselves—to conceive communities of Amazons as having actually existed in anterior time. Accordingly we find these warlike females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally accepted as past realities. In the Iliad, when Priam wishes to illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phyrgia, on the banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable Amazons. When Bellerophôn is to be employed on a deadly and perilous undertaking,[501] by those who indirectly wish to procure his death, he is despatched against the Amazons. In the Æthiopis of Arktinus, describing the post-Homeric war of Troy, Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons, appears as the most effective ally of the besieged city, and as the most formidable enemy of the Greeks, succumbing only to the invincible might of Achilles.[502] The Argonautic heroes find the Amazons on the river Thermôdon, in their expedition along the southern coast of the Euxine. To the same spot Hêraclês goes to attack them, in the performance of the ninth labor imposed upon him by Eurystheus, for the purpose of procuring the girdle of the Amazonian queen, Hippolytê;[503] and we are told that they had not yet recovered from the losses sustained in this severe aggression when Thêseus also assaulted and defeated them, carrying off their queen, Antiopê.[504] This injury they avenged by invading Attica,—an undertaking (as Plutarch justly observes) “neither trifling nor feminine,” especially if according to the statement of Hellanikus, they crossed the Cimmerian Bosporus on the winter ice, beginning their march from the Asiatic side of the Paulus Mæotis.[505] They overcame all the resistances and difficulties of this prodigious march, and penetrated even into Athens itself, where the final battle, hard-fought and at one time doubtful, by which Theseus crushed them, was fought—in the very heart of the city. Attic antiquaries confidently pointed out the exact position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons rested upon the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the Amazoneion; the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held. The details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the final triumph and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as complete faith and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Platæa by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb or pillar of Antiopê near the western gate of the city—the spot called the Horkomosion near the temple of Thêseus—even the hill of Areiopagus itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the Amazons at the periodical festival of the Thêseia—were all so many religious mementos of this victory;[506] which was moreover a favorite subject of art both with the sculptor and the painter, at Athens as well as in other parts of Greece.

[500] Pherekyd. Fragm. 25, Didot.

[501] Iliad, iii. 186; vi. 152.

[502] See Proclus’s Argument of the lost Æthiopis (Fragm. Epicor. Græcor. ed. Düntzer, p. 16). We are reduced to the first book of Quintus Smyrnæus for some idea of the valor of Penthesileia; it is supposed to be copied more or less closely from the Æthiopis. See Tychsen’s Dissertation prefixed to his edition of Quintus, sections 5 and 12. Compare Dio. Chrysostom. Or. xi. p. 350, Reiske. Philostratus (Heroica, c. 19, p. 751) gives a strange transformation of this old epical narrative into a descent of Amazons upon the island sacred to Achilles.

[503] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 966, 1004; Apollod. ii. 5-9; Diodôr. ii. 46; iv. 16. The Amazons were supposed to speak the Thracian language (Schol. Apoll Rhod. ii. 953), though some authors asserted them to be natives of Libyia, others of Æthiopia (ib. 965).

Hellanikus (Frag. 33, ap. Schol. Pindar. Nem. iii. 65) said that all the Argonauts had assisted Hêraklês in this expedition: the fragment of the old epic poem (perhaps the Ἀμαζόνια) there quoted mentions Telamôn specially.

[504] The many diversities in the story respecting Thêseus and the Amazon Antiopê are well set forth in Bachet de Meziriac (Commentaires sur Ovide, t. i. p. 317).

Welcker (Der Epische Cyclus, p. 313) supposes that the ancient epic poem called by Suidas Ἀμαζόνια, related to the invasion of Attica by the Amazons, and that this poem is the same, under another title, as the Ἀτθὶς of Hegesinous cited by Pausanias: I cannot say that he establishes this conjecture satisfactorily, but the chapter is well worth consulting. The epic Thêsêis seems to have given a version of the Amazonian contest in many respects different from that which Plutarch has put together out of the logographers (see Plut. Thês. 28): it contained a narrative of many unconnected exploits belonging to Thêseus, and Aristotle censures it on that account as ill-constructed (Poetic. c. 17).

The Ἀμαζονὶς or Ἀμαζονικὰ of Onasus can hardly have been (as Heyne supposes, ad Apollod. ii. 5, 9) an epic poem: we may infer from the rationalizing tendency of the citation from it (Schol. ad Theocrit. xiii. 46, and Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1207) that it was a work in prose. There was an Ἀμαζονὶς by Possis of Magnêsia (Athenæus, vii. p. 296).

[505] Plutarch, Thêseus, 27. Pindar (Olymp. xiii. 84) represents the Amazons as having come from the extreme north, when Bellerophôn conquers them.

[506] Plutarch, Thêseus, 27-28; Pausan. i. 2, 4; Plato, Axiochus, c. 2; Harpocratiôn, v. Ἀμαζονεῖον; Aristophan. Lysistrat. 678, with the Scholia. Æschyl. (Eumenid. 685) says that the Amazons assaulted the citadel from the Areiopagus:—

Πάγον τ᾽ Ἄρειον τόνδ᾽, Ἀμαζόνων ἕδραν Σκηνάς τ᾽, ὅτ᾽ ἦλθον Θησέως κατὰ φθόνον Στρατηλατοῦσαι, καὶ πόλιν νεόπτολιν Τήνδ᾽ ὑψίπυργον ἀντεπύργωσάν ποτε.

No portion of the ante-historical epic appears to have been more deeply worked into the national mind of Greece than this invasion and defeat of the Amazons. It was not only a constant theme of the logographers, but was also familiarly appealed to by the popular orators along with Marathôn and Salamis, among those antique exploits of which their fellow-citizens might justly be proud. It formed a part of the retrospective faith of Herodotus, Lysias, Plato and Isokratês,[507] and the exact date of the event was settled by the chronologists.[508] Nor did the Athenians stand alone in such a belief. Throughout many other regions of Greece, both European and Asiatic, traditions and memorials of the Amazons were found. At Megara, at Trœzen, in Laconia near Cape Tænarus, at Chæroneia in Bœôtia, and in more than one part of Thessaly, sepulchres or monuments of the Amazons were preserved. The warlike women (it was said), on their way to Attica, had not traversed those countries, without leaving some evidences of their passage.[509]

[507] Herodot. ix. 27, Lysias (Epitaph, c. 3) represents the Amazons as ἄρχουσαι πολλῶν ἔθνων: the whole race, according to him, was nearly extinguished in their unsuccessful and calamitous invasion of Attica. Isokratês (Panegyric. t. i. p. 206, Auger) says the same; also Panathênaic. t. iii. p. 560, Auger; Demosth. Epitaph, p. 1391. Reisk. Pausanias quotes Pindar’s notice of the invasion, and with the fullest belief of its historical reality (vii. 2, 4) Plato mentions the invasion of Attica by the Amazons in the Menexenus (c. 9), but the passage in the treatise De Legg. c. ii. p. 804,—ἀκούων γὰρ δὴ μύθους παλαιοὺς πέπεισμαι, etc.—is even a stronger evidence of his own belief. And Xenophon in the Anabasis, when he compares the quiver and the hatchet of his barbarous enemies to “those which the Amazons carry,” evidently believed himself to be speaking of real persons, though he could have seen only the costumes and armature of those painted by Mikôn and others (Anabas. iv. 4, 10; compare Æschyl. Supplic. 293, and Aristophan. Lysistr. 678; Lucian. Anachars, c. 34. v. iii. p. 318).

How copiously the tale was enlarged upon by the authors of the Atthides, we see in Plutarch, Thêseus, 27-28.

Hekatæus (ap. Steph. Byz. Ἀμαζονεῖον; also Fragm. 350, 351, 352, Didot) and Xanthus (ap. Hesychium, v. Βουλεψίη) both treated of the Amazons: the latter passage ought to be added to the collection of the Fragments of Xanthus by Didot.

[508] Clemens Alexandr. Stromat, i. p. 336; Marmor Parium, Epoch. 21.

[509] Plutarch, Thês. 27-28. Steph. Byz. v. Ἀμαζονεῖον. Pausan. ii. 32, 8; iii. 25, 2.

Amongst the Asiatic Greeks the supposed traces of the Amazons were yet more numerous. Their proper territory was asserted to be the town and plain of Themiskyra, near the Grecian colony of Amisus, on the river Thermôdôn, a region called, after their name by Roman historians and geographers.[510] But they were believed to have conquered and occupied in early times a much wider range of territory, extending even to the coast of Iônia and Æolis. Ephesus, Smyrna, Kymê, Myrina, Paphos and Sinopê were affirmed to have been founded and denominated by them.[511] Some authors placed them in Libya or Ethiopia; and when the Pontic Greeks on the north-western shore of the Euxine had become acquainted with the hardy and daring character of the Sarmatian maidens,—who were obliged to have slain each an enemy in battle as the condition of obtaining a husband, and who artificially prevented the growth of the right breast during childhood,—they could imagine no more satisfactory mode of accounting for such attributes than by deducing the Sarmatians from a colony of vagrant Amazons, expelled by the Grecian heroes from their territory on the Thermôdôn.[512] Pindar ascribed the first establishment of the memorable temple of Artemis at Ephesus to the Amazons. And Pausanias explains in part the preëminence which this temple enjoyed over every other in Greece by the widely diffused renown of its female founders,[513] respecting whom he observes (with perfect truth, if we admit the historical character of the old epic), that women possess an unparalleled force of resolution in resisting adverse events, since the Amazons, after having been first roughly handled by Hêraklês and then completely defeated by Thêseus, could yet find courage to play so conspicuous a part in the defence of Troy against the Grecian besiegers.[514]

[510] Pherekydês ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rh. ii. 373-992; Justin, ii. 4; Strabo, xii. p. 547, Θεμίσκυραν, τὸ τῶν Ἀμαζόνων οἰκητήριον; Diodôr. ii. 45-46; Sallust ap. Serv. ad Virgil. Æneid. xi. 659; Pompon. Mela, i. 19; Plin. H. N. vi. 4. The geography of Quintus Curtius (vi. 4) and of Philostratus (Heroic c. 19) is on this point indefinite, and even inconsistent.

[511] Ephor. Fragm. 87, Didot. Strabo, xi. p. 505; xiii p. 573; xiii. p. 622. Pausan. iv. 31, 6; vii. 2. 4. Tacit. Ann. iii. 61. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 965.

The derivation of the name Sinopê from an Amazon was given by Hekatæus (Fragm. 352). Themiskyra also had one of the Amazons for its eponymus (Appian, Bell. Mithridat. 78).

Some of the most venerated religious legends at Sinopê were attached to the expedition of Hêraklês against the Amazons: Autolykus, the oracle-giving hero, worshipped with great solemnity even at the time when the town was besieged by Lucullus, was the companion of Hêraclês (Appian, ib. c. 83). Even a small mountain village in the territory of Ephesus, called Latoreia, derived its name from one of the Amazons (Athenæ. i. p. 31).

[512] Herodot. iv. 108-117, where he gives the long tale, imagined by the Pontic Greeks, of the origin of the Sarmatian nation. Compare Hippokratês, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, c. 17; Ephorus, Fragm. 103; Skymn. Chius, v. 102; Plato, Legg. vii. p. 804; Diodôr. ii. 34.

The testimony of Hippokrates certifies the practice of the Sarmatian women to check the growth of the right breast: Τὸν δέξιον δὲ μαζὸν οὐκ ἔχουσιν. Παιδίοισι γὰρ ἐοῦσιν ἔτι νηπίοισιν αἱ μητέρες χαλκεῖον τετεχνήμενον ἐπ᾽ αὐτέῳ τούτῳ διάπυρον ποιέουσαι, πρὸς τὸν μαζὸν τιθέασι τὸν δέξιον· καὶ ἐπικαίεται, ὥστε τὴν αὔξησιν φθείρεσθαι, ἐς δὲ τὸν δέξιον ὦμον καὶ βραχίονα πᾶσαν τὴν ἴσχυν καὶ τὸ πλῆθος ἐκδιδόναι.

Ktêsias also compares a warlike Sakian woman to the Amazons (Fragm. Persic. ii. pp. 221, 449, Bähr).

[513] Pausan. iv. 31, 6; vii. 2, 4. Dionys. Periêgêt. 828.

[514] Pausan. i. 15, 2.

It is thus that in what is called early Grecian history, as the Greeks themselves looked back upon it, the Amazons were among the most prominent and undisputed personages. Nor will the circumstance appear wonderful if we reflect, that the belief in them was first established at a time when the Grecian mind was fed with nothing else but religious legend and epic poetry, and that the incidents of the supposed past, as received from these sources, were addressed to their faith and feelings, without being required to adapt themselves to any canons of credibility drawn from present experience. But the time came when the historians of Alexander the Great audaciously abused this ancient credence. Amongst other tales calculated to exalt the dignity of that monarch, they affirmed that after his conquest and subjugation of the Persian empire, he had been visited in Hyrcania by Thalestris, queen of the Amazons, who admiring his warlike prowess, was anxious to be enabled to return into her own country in a condition to produce offspring of a breed so invincible.[515] But the Greeks had now been accustomed for a century and a half to historical and philosophical criticism—and that uninquiring faith, which was readily accorded to the wonders of the past, could no longer be invoked for them when tendered as present reality. For the fable of the Amazons was here reproduced in its naked simplicity, without being rationalized or painted over with historical colors.

[515] Arrian, Exped. Alex. vii. 13; compare iv. 15; Quint. Curt. vi. 4; Justin, xlii. 4. The note of Freinshemius on the above passage of Quintus Curtius is full of valuable references on the subject of the Amazons.

Some literary men indeed, among whom were Dêmêtrius of Skepsis, and the Mitylenæan Theophanês, the companion of Pompey in his expeditions, still continued their belief both in Amazons present and Amazons past; and when it becomes notorious that at least there were none such on the banks of the Thermôdôn, these authors supposed them to have migrated from their original locality, and to have settled in the unvisited regions north of Mount Caucasus.[516] Strabo, on the contrary, feeling that the grounds of disbelief applied with equal force to the ancient stories and to the modern, rejected both the one and the other. But he remarks at the same time, not without some surprise, that it was usual with most persons to adopt a middle course,—to retain the Amazons as historical phænomena of the remote past, but to disallow them as realities of the present, and to maintain that the breed had died out.[517] The accomplished intellect of Julius Cæsar did not scruple to acknowledge them as having once conquered and held in dominion a large portion of Asia;[518] and the compromise between early, traditional, and religious faith on the one hand, and established habits of critical research on the other, adopted by the historian Arrian, deserves to be transcribed in his own words, as illustrating strikingly the powerful sway of the old legends even over the most positive-minded Greeks:—“Neither Aristobulus nor Ptolemy (he observes), nor any other competent witness, has recounted this (visit of the Amazons and their queen to Alexander): nor does it seem to me that the race of the Amazons was preserved down to that time, nor have they been noticed either by any one before Alexander, or by Xenophôn, though he mentions both the Phasians and the Kolchians, and the other barbarous nations which the Greeks saw both before and after their arrival at Trapezus, in which marches they must have met with the Amazons, if the latter had been still in existence. Yet it is incredible to me that this race of women, celebrated as they have been by authors so many and so commanding, should never have existed at all. The story tells of Hêraklês, that he set out from Greece and brought back with him the girdle of their queen Hippolytê; also of Thêseus and the Athenians, that they were the first who defeated in battle and repelled these women in their invasion of Europe; and the combat of the Athenians with the Amazons has been painted by Mikôn, not less than that between the Athenians and the Persians. Moreover Herodotus has spoken in many places of these women, and those Athenian orators who have pronounced panegyrics on the citizens slain in battle, have dwelt upon the victory over the Amazons as among the most memorable of Athenian exploits. If the satrap of Media sent any equestrian women at all to Alexander, I think that they must have come from some of the neighboring tribes, practised in riding and equipped in the costume generally called Amazonian.”[519]

[516] Strabo, xi. p. 503-504; Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 103; Plutarch, Pompeius, c. 35. Plin. N. H. vi. 7. Plutarch still retains the old description of Amazons from the mountains near the Thermôdôn. Appian keeps clear of this geographical error, probably copying more exactly the language of Theophanês, who must have been well aware that when Lucullus besieged Themiskyra, he did not find it defended by the Amazons (see Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 78). Ptolemy (v. 9) places the Amazons in the imperfectly known regions of Asiatic Sarmatia, north of the Caspian and near the river Rha (Volga). “This fabulous community of women (observes Forbiger, Handbuch der alten Geographie, ii. 77, p. 457) was a phænomenon much too interesting for the geographers easily to relinquish.”

[517] Strabo, xi. p. 505. Ἴδιον δέ τι συμβέβηκε τῷ λόγῳ τῷ περὶ τῶν Ἀμαζόνων. Οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλοι τὸ μυθῶδες καὶ τὸ ἱστορικὸν διωρίσμενον ἔχουσι· τὰ γὰρ παλαιὰ καὶ ψευδῆ καὶ τερατώδη, μῦθοι καλοῦνται· [Note. Strabo does not always speak of the μῦθοι in this disrespectful tone; he is sometimes much displeased with those who dispute the existence of an historical kernel in the inside, especially with regard to Homer.] ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία βούλεται τἀληθὲς, ἄντε παλαιὸν, ἄντε νέον· καὶ τὸ τερατῶδες ἢ οὐκ ἔχει, ἢ σπάνιον. Περὶ δὲ τῶν Ἀμαζόνων τὰ αὐτὰ λέγεται καὶ νῦν καὶ παλαὶ, τερατώδη τ᾽ ὄντα, καὶ πίστεως πόῤῥω. Τίς γὰρ ἂν πιστεύσειεν, ὡς γυναικῶν στράτος, ἢ πόλις, ἢ ἔθνος, συσταίη ἂν πότε χωρὶς ἀνδρῶν; καὶ οὐ μόνον συσταίη, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐφόδους ποιήσαιτο ἐπὶ τὴν ἀλλοτρίαν, καὶ κρατήσειεν οὐ τῶν ἐγγὺς μόνον, ὥστε καὶ μέχρι τῆς νῦν Ἰωνίας προελθεῖν, ἀλλὰ καὶ διαπόντιον στείλαιτο στρατίαν μέχρι τῆς Ἀττικῆς; Ἀλλὰ μὴν ταῦτά γε αὐτὰ καὶ νῦν λέγεται περὶ αὐτῶν· ~ἐπιτείνει δὲ τὴν ἰδιότητα καὶ τὸ πιστεύεσθαι τὰ παλαιὰ μᾶλλον ἢ τὰ νῦν~. There are however, other passages in which he speaks of the Amazons as realities.

Justin (ii. 4) recognizes the great power and extensive conquests of the Amazons in very early times, but says that they gradually declined down to the reign of Alexander, in whose time there were just a few remaining; the queen with these few visited Alexander, but shortly afterwards the whole breed became extinct. This hypothesis has the merit of convenience, perhaps of ingenuity.

[518] Suetonius, Jul. Cæsar, c. 22. “In Syriâ quoque regnasse Semiramin (Julius Cæsar said this), magnamque Asiæ partem Amazonas tenuisse quondam.”

In the splendid triumph of the emperor Aurelian at Rome after the defeat of Zenobia, a few Gothic women who had been taken in arms were exhibited among the prisoners; the official placard carried along with them announced them as Amazons (Vopiscus Aurel. in Histor. August. Scrip. p. 260, ed. Paris).

[519] Arrian, Expedit. Alexand. vii. 13.

There cannot be a more striking evidence of the indelible force with which these ancient legends were worked into the national faith and feelings of the Greeks, than these remarks of a judicious historian upon the fable of the Amazons. Probably if any plausible mode of rationalizing it, and of transforming it into a quasi-political event, had been offered to Arrian, he would have been better pleased to adopt such a middle term, and would have rested comfortably in the supposition that he believed the legend in its true meaning, while his less inquiring countrymen were imposed upon by the exaggerations of poets. But as the story was presented to him plain and unvarnished, either for acceptance or rejection, his feelings as a patriot and a religious man prevented him from applying to the past such tests of credibility as his untrammelled reason acknowledged to be paramount in regard to the present. When we see moreover how much his belief was strengthened, and all tendency to scepticism shut out by the familiarity of his eye and memory with sculptured or painted Amazons[520]—we may calculate the irresistible force of this sensible demonstration on the convictions of the unlettered public, at once more deeply retentive of passive impressions, and unaccustomed to the countervailing habit of rational investigation into evidence. Had the march of an army of warlike women, from the Thermôdôn or the Tanais into the heart of Attica, been recounted to Arrian as an incident belonging to the time of Alexander the Great, he would have rejected it no less emphatically than Strabô; but cast back as it was into an undefined past, it took rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic antiquity,—gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument.[521]

[520] Ktêsias described as real animals, existing in wild and distant regions, the heterogeneous and fantastic combinations which he saw sculptured in the East (see this stated and illustrated in Bähr, Preface to the Fragm. of Ktêsias, pp. 58, 59).

[521] Heyne observes (Apollodôr. ii. 5, 9) with respect to the fable of the Amazons, “In his historiarum fidem aut vestigia nemo quæsiverit.” Admitting the wisdom of this counsel (and I think it indisputable), why are we required to presume, in the absence of all proof, an historical basis for each of those other narratives, such as the Kalydônian boar-hunt, the Argonautic expedition, or the siege of Troy, which go to make up, along with the story of the Amazons, the aggregate matter of Grecian legendary faith? If the tale of the Amazons could gain currency without any such support, why not other portions of the ancient epic?

An author of easy belief, Dr. F. Nagel, vindicates the historical reality of the Amazons (Geschichte der Amazonen, Stutgart, 1838). I subjoin here a different explanation of the Amazonian tale, proceeding from another author who rejects the historical basis, and contained in a work of learning and value (Guhl, Ephesiaca, Berlin, 1843. p. 132):—

“Id tantum monendum videtur, Amazonas nequaquam historice accipiendas esse, sed e contrario totas ad mythologiam pertinere. Earum enim fabulas quum ex frequentium hierodularum gregibus in cultibus et sacris Asiaticis ortas esse ingeniose ostenderit Tolken, jam inter omnes mythologiæ peritos constat, Amazonibus nihil fere nisi peregrini cujusdam cultus notionem expressum esse, ejusque cum Græcorum religione certamen frequentibus istis pugnis designatum esse, quas cum Amazonibus tot Græcorum heroes habuisse credebantur, Hercules, Bellerophon, Theseus, Achilles, et vel ipse, quem Ephesi cultum fuisse supra ostendimus, Dionysus. Quæ Amazonum notio primaria, quum paulatim Euemeristicâ (ut ita dicam) ratione ita transformaretur, ut Amazones pro vero feminarum populo haberentur, necesse quoque erat, ut omnibus fere locis, ubi ejusmodi religionum certamina locum habuerunt, Amazones habitasse, vel eo usque processisse, crederentur. Quod cum nusquam manifestius fuerit, quam in Asiâ minore, et potissimum in eâ parte quæ Græciam versus vergit, haud mirandum est omnes fere ejus oræ urbes ab Amazonibus conditas putari.”

I do not know the evidence upon which this conjectural interpretation rests, but the statement of it, though it boasts so many supporters among mythological critics, carries no appearance of probability to my mind. Priam fights against the Amazons as well as the Grecian heroes.

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XII. KRETAN LEGENDS.—MINOS AND HIS FAMILY

To understand the adventures of Thêseus in Krête, it will be necessary to touch briefly upon Minôs and the Krêtan heroic genealogy.

Minôs and Rhadamanthus, according to Homer, are sons of Zeus, by Europê,[522] daughter of the widely-celebrated Phœnix, born in Krête. Minôs is the father of Deukaliôn, whose son Idomeneus, in conjunction with Mêrionês, conducts the Krêtan troops to the host of Agamemnôn before Troy. Minôs is ruler of Knossus, and familiar companion of the great Zeus. He is spoken of as holding guardianship in Krête—not necessarily meaning the whole of the island: he is farther decorated with a golden sceptre, and constituted judge over the dead in the under-world to settle their disputes, in which function Odysseus finds him—this however by a passage of comparatively late interpolation into the Odyssey. He also had a daughter named Ariadnê, for whom the artist Dædalus fabricated in the town of Knossus the representation of a complicated dance, and who was ultimately carried off by Thêseus: she died in the island of Dia, deserted by Thêseus and betrayed by Dionysos to the fatal wrath of Artemis. Rhadamanthus seems to approach to Minôs both in judicial functions and posthumous dignity. He is conveyed expressly to Eubœa, by the semi-divine sea-carriers the Phæacians, to inspect the gigantic corpse of the earth-born Tityus—the longest voyage they ever undertook. He is moreover after death promoted to an abode of undisturbed bliss in the Elysian plain at the extremity of the earth.[523]

[522] Europê was worshipped with very peculiar solemnity in the island of Krête (see Dictys Cretensis, De Bello Trojano, i. c. 2).

The venerable plane-tree, under which Zeus and Europê had reposed, was still shown, hard by a fountain at Gortyn in Krête, in the time of Theophrastus: it was said to be the only plane-tree in the neighborhood which never cast its leaves (Theophrast. Hist. Plant. i. 9).

[523] Homer, Iliad, xiii. 249, 450; xiv. 321. Odyss. xi. 322-568; xix. 179; iv. 564-vii. 321.

The Homeric Minôs in the under-world is not a judge of the previous lives of the dead, so as to determine whether they deserve reward or punishment for their conduct on earth: such functions are not assigned to him earlier than the time of Plato. He administers justice among the dead, who are conceived as a sort of society, requiring some presiding judge: θεμιστεύοντα νεκύεσσι, with regard to Minôs, is said very much like (Odyss. xi. 484) νῦν αὖτε μέγα κρατέεις νεκύεσσι with regard to Achilles. See this matter partially illustrated in Heyne’s Excursus xi. to the sixth book of the Æneid of Virgil.

According to poets later than Homer, Europê is brought over by Zeus from Phœnicia to Krête, where she bears to him three sons, Minôs, Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. The latter leaves Krête and settles in Lykia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions of Asia Minor, is connected by various mythical genealogies with Krête, though the Sarpêdôn of the Iliad has no connection with Krête, and is not the son of Europê. Sarpêdôn having become king of Lykia, was favored by his father, Zeus, with permission to live for three generations.[524] At the same time the youthful Milêtus, a favorite of Sarpêdôn, quitted Krête, and established the city which bore his name on the coast of Asia Minor. Rhadamanthus became sovereign of and lawgiver among the islands in the Ægean: he subsequently went to Bœôtia, where he married the widowed Alkmênê, mother of Hêraklês.

[524] Apollodôr. iii. 1, 2. Καὶ αὐτῷ δίδωσι Ζεὺς ἐπὶ τρεῖς γενεὰς ζῇν. This circumstance is evidently imagined by the logographers to account for the appearance of Sarpêdôn in the Trojan war, fighting against Idomeneus, the grandson of Minôs. Nisus is the eponymus of Nisæa, the port of the town of Megara: his tomb was shown at Athens (Pausan. i. 19, 5). Minôs is the eponym of the island of Minoa (opposite the port of Nisæa), where it was affirmed that the fleet of Minôs was stationed (Pausan. i. 44, 5).

Europê finds in Krête a king Astêrius, who marries her and adopts her children by Zeus: this Astêrius is the son of Krês, the eponym of the island, or (according to another genealogy by which it was attempted to be made out that Minôs was of Dôrian race) he was a son of the daughter of Krês by Tektamus, the son of Dôrus, who had migrated into the island from Greece.

Minôs married Pasiphaê, daughter of the god Hêlios and Perseïs, by whom he had Katreus, Deukaliôn, Glaukus, Androgeos, names marked in the legendary narrative,—together with several daughters, among whom were Ariadnê and Phædra. He offended Poseidôn by neglecting to fulfil a solemnly-made vow, and the displeased god afflicted his wife Pasiphaê with a monstrous passion for a bull. The great artist Dædalus, son of Eupalamus, a fugitive from Athens, became the confidant of this amour, from which sprang the Minôtaur, a creature half man and half bull.[525] This Minôtaur was imprisoned by Minôs in the labyrinth, an inextricable inclosure constructed by Dædalus for that express purpose, by order of Minôs.

[525] Apollodôr iii. 1, 2.

Minôs acquired great nautical power, and expelled the Karian inhabitants from many of the islands of the Ægean, which he placed under the government of his sons on the footing of tributaries. He undertook several expeditions against various places on the coast—one against Nisus, the son of Pandiôn, king of Megara, who had amongst the hair of his head one peculiar lock of a purple color: an oracle had pronounced that his life and reign would never be in danger so long as he preserved this precious lock. The city would have remained inexpugnable, if Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, had not conceived a violent passion for Minôs. While her father was asleep, she cut off the lock on which his safety hung, so that the Krêtan king soon became victorious. Instead of performing his promise to carry Scylla away with him to Krête, he cast her from the stern of his vessel into the sea:[526] both Scylla and Nisus were changed into birds.

[526] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 8. See the Ciris of Virgil, a juvenile poem on the subject of this fable; also Hyginus, f. 198; Schol. Eurip. Hippol. 1200. Propertius (iii. 19, 21) gives the features of the story with tolerable fidelity; Ovid takes considerable liberties with it (Metam. viii. 5-150).

Androgeos, son of Minôs having displayed such rare qualities as to vanquish all his competitors at the Panathenaic festival in Athens, was sent by Ægeus the Athenian king to contend against the bull of Marathôn,—an enterprise in which he perished, and Minôs made war upon Athens to avenge his death. He was for a long time unable to take the city: at length he prayed to his father Zeus to aid him in obtaining redress from the Athenians, and Zeus sent upon them pestilence and famine. In vain did they endeavor to avert these calamities by offering up as propitiatory sacrifices the four daughters of Hyacinthus. Their sufferings still continued, and the oracle directed them to submit to any terms which Minôs might exact. He required that they should send to Krête a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, periodically, to be devoured by the Minôtaur,[527]—offered to him in a labyrinth constructed by Dædalus, including countless different passages, out of which no person could escape.

[527] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 8.

Every ninth year this offering was to be despatched. The more common story was, that the youths and maidens thus destined to destruction were selected by lot—but the logographer Hellanikus said that Minôs came to Athens and chose them himself.[528] The third period for despatching the victims had arrived, and Athens was plunged in the deepest affliction, when Thêseus determined to devote himself as one of them, and either to terminate the sanguinary tribute or to perish. He prayed to Poseidôn for help, and the Delphian god assured him that Aphroditê would sustain and extricate him. On arriving at Knossus he was fortunate enough to captivate the affections of Ariadnê, the daughter of Minôs, who supplied him with a sword and a clue of thread. With the former he contrived to kill the Minôtaur, the latter served to guide his footsteps in escaping from the labyrinth. Having accomplished this triumph, he left Krête with his ship and companions unhurt, carrying off Ariadnê, whom however he soon abandoned on the island of Naxos. On his way home to Athens, he stopped at Dêlos, where he offered a grateful sacrifice to Apollo for his escape, and danced along with the young men and maidens whom he had rescued from the Minôtaur, a dance called the Geranus, imitated from the twists and convolutions of the Krêtan labyrinth. It had been concerted with his father Ægeus, that if he succeeded in his enterprise against the Minôtaur, he should on his return hoist white sails in his ship in place of the black canvas which she habitually carried when employed on this mournful embassy. But Thêseus forgot to make the change of sails; so that Ægeus, seeing the ship return with her equipment of mourning unaltered, was impressed with the sorrowful conviction that his son had perished, and cast himself into the sea. The ship which made this voyage was preserved by the Athenians with careful solicitude, being constantly repaired with new timbers, down to the time of the Phalerian Dêmêtrius: every year she was sent from Athens to Dêlos with a solemn sacrifice and specially-nominated envoys. The priest of Apollo decked her stern with garlands before she quitted the port, and during the time which elapsed until her return, the city was understood to abstain from all acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was unlawful to put to death any person even under formal sentence by the dikastery. This accidental circumstance becomes especially memorable, from its having postponed for thirty days the death of the lamented Socratês.[529]

[528] See, on the subject of Thêseus and the Minôtaur, Eckermann, Lehrbuch der Religions Geschichte und Mythologie, vol. ii. ch. xiii. p. 133. He maintains that the tribute of these human victims paid by Athens to Minôs is an historical fact. Upon what this belief is grounded, I confess I do not see.

[529] Plato, Phædon, c. 2, 3; Xenoph. Memor. iv. 8. 2. Plato especially noticed τοὺς δὶς ἕπτα ἐκείνους, the seven youths and the seven maidens whom Thêseus conveyed to Krête and brought back safely: this number seems an old and constant feature in the legend, maintained by Sappho and Bacchylidês as well as by Euripidês (Herc. Fur. 1318). See Servius ad Virgil Æneid. vi. 21.

The legend respecting Thêseus, and his heroic rescue of the seven noble youths and maidens from the jaws of the Minôtaur, was thus both commemorated and certified to the Athenian public, by the annual holy ceremony and by the unquestioned identity of the vessel employed in it. There were indeed many varieties in the mode of narrating the incident; and some of the Attic logographers tried to rationalize the fable by transforming the Minôtaur into a general or a powerful athlete, named Taurus, whom Thêseus vanquished in Krête.[530] But this altered version never overbore the old fanciful character of the tale as maintained by the poets. A great number of other religious ceremonies and customs, as well as several chapels or sacred enclosures in honor of different heroes, were connected with different acts and special ordinances of Thêseus. To every Athênian who took part in the festivals of the Oschophoria, the Pyanepsia, or the Kybernêsia, the name of this great hero was familiar, and the motives for offering to him solemn worship at his own special festival of the Thêseia, became evident and impressive.

[530] For the general narrative and its discrepancies, see Plutarch, Thês. c. 15-19; Diodôr. iv. 60-62; Pausan. i. 17, 3; Ovid, Epist. Ariadn. Thês. 104. In that other portion of the work of Diodôrus which relates more especially to Krête, and is borrowed from Kretan logographers and historians (v. 64-80), he mentions nothing at all respecting the war of Minôs with Athens.

In the drama of Euripidês called Thêseus, the genuine story of the youths and maidens about to be offered as food to the Minotaur was introduced (Schol. ad Aristoph. Vesp. 312).

Ariadnê figures in the Odyssey along with Thêseus: she is the daughter of Minôs, carried off by Thêseus from Krête, and killed by Artemis in the way home: there is no allusion to Minôtaur, or tribute, or self-devotion of Thêseus (Odyss. xi. 324). This is probably the oldest and simplest form of the legend—one of the many amorous (compare Theognis, 1232) adventures of Thêseus: the rest is added by post-Homeric poets.

The respect of Aristotle for Minôs induces him to adopt the hypothesis that the Athenian youths and maidens were not put to death in Krête, but grew old in servitude (Aristot. Fragm. Βοττιαίων Πολιτεία, p. 106. ed. Neumann. of the Fragments of the treatise Περὶ Πολιτειῶν, Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. p. 298).

The same Athenian legends which ennobled and decorated the character of Thêseus, painted in repulsive colors the attributes of Minôs; and the traits of the old Homeric comrade of Zeus were buried under those of the conqueror and oppressor of Athens. His history like that of the other legendary personages of Greece, consists almost entirely of a string of family romances and tragedies. His son Katreus, father of Aëropê, wife of Atreus, was apprized by an oracle that he would perish by the hand of one of his own children: he accordingly sent them out of the island, and Althæmenês, his son, established himself in Rhodes. Katreus having become old, and fancying that he had outlived the warning of the oracle, went over to Rhodes to see Althæmenês. In an accidental dispute which arose between his attendants and the islanders, Althæmenês inadvertently took part and slew his father without knowing him. Glaukus, the youngest son of Minôs, pursuing a mouse, fell into a reservoir of honey and was drowned. No one knew what had become of him, and his father was inconsolable; at length the Argeian Polyeidus, a prophet wonderfully endowed by the gods, both discovered the boy and restored him to life, to the exceeding joy of Minôs.[531]

[531] Apollodôr. iii. cap. 2-3.

The latter at last found his death in an eager attempt to overtake and punish Dædalus. This great artist, the eponymous hero of the Attic gens or dême called the Dædalidæ, and the descendant of Erechtheus through Mêtion, had been tried at the tribunal of Areiopagus and banished for killing his nephew Talos, whose rapidly improving skill excited his envy.[532] He took refuge in Krête, where he acquired the confidence of Minôs, and was employed (as has been already mentioned) in constructing the labyrinth; subsequently however he fell under the displeasure of Minôs, and was confined as a close prisoner in the inextricable windings of his own edifice. His unrivalled skill and resource however did not forsake him. He manufactured wings both for himself and for his son Ikarus, with which they flew over the sea: the father arrived safely in Sicily at Kamikus, the residence of the Sikanian king Kokalus, but the son, disdaining paternal example and admonition, flew so high that his wings were melted by the sun and he fell into the sea, which from him was called the Ikarian sea.[533]

[532] Pherekyd. Fragm. 105; Hellanik. Fragm. 82 (Didot); Pausan. vii. 4, 5.

[533] Diodôr. iv. 79; Ovid, Metamorph. viii. 181. Both Ephorus and Philistus mentioned the coming of Dædalus to Kokalus in Sicily (Ephor. Fr. 99; Philist. Fragm. 1, Didot): probably Antiochus noticed it also (Diodôr. xii. 71). Kokalus was the point of commencement for the Sicilian historians.

Dædalus remained for some time in Sicily, leaving in various parts of the island many prodigious evidences of mechanical and architectural skill.[534] At length Minôs bent upon regaining possession of his person, undertook an expedition against Kokalus with a numerous fleet and army. Kokalus affecting readiness to deliver up the fugitive, and receiving Minôs with apparent friendship, ordered a bath to be prepared for him by his three daughters, who, eager to protect Dædalus at any price, drowned the Krêtan king in the bath with hot water.[535] Many of the Krêtans who had accompanied him remained in Sicily and founded the town of Minoa, which they denominated after him. But not long afterwards Zeus roused all the inhabitants of Krête (except the towns of Polichna and Præsus) to undertake with one accord an expedition against Kamikus for the purpose of avenging the death of Minôs. They besieged Kamikus in vain for five years, until at last famine compelled them to return. On their way along the coast of Italy, in the Gulf of Tarentum, a terrible storm destroyed their fleet and obliged them to settle permanently in the country: they founded Hyria with other cities, and became Messapian Iapygians. Other settlers, for the most part Greeks, immigrated into Krête to the spots which this movement had left vacant, and in the second generation after Minôs occurred the Trojan war. The departed Minôs was exceedingly offended with the Krêtans for coöperating in avenging the injury to Menelaus, since the Greeks generally had lent no aid to the Krêtans in their expedition against the town of Kamikus. He sent upon Krête, after the return of Idomeneus from Troy, such terrible visitations of famine and pestilence, that the population again died out or expatriated, and was again renovated by fresh immigrations. The intolerable suffering[536] thus brought upon the Krêtans by the anger of Minôs, for having coöperated in the general Grecian aid to Menelaus, was urged by them to the Greeks as the reason why they could take no part in resisting the invasion of Xerxês; and it is even pretended that they were advised and encouraged to adopt this ground of excuse by the Delphian oracle.[537]

[534] Diodôr. iv. 80.

[535] Pausan. vii. 4, 5; Schol. Pindar. Nem. iv. 95; Hygin. fab. 44; Conon, Narr. 25; Ovid, Ibis, 291.—

“Vel tua maturet, sicut Minoia fata, Per caput infusæ fervidus humor aquæ.”

This story formed the subject of a lost drama of Sophoklês, Καμίκιοι or Μίνως; it was also told by Kallimachus, ἐν Αἰτίοις, as well as by Philostephanus (Schol. Iliad, ii. 145).

[536] This curious and very characteristic narrative is given by Herodot. vii. 169-171.

[537] Herodot. vii. 169. The answer ascribed to the Delphian oracle, on the question being put by the Krêtan envoys whether it would be better for them to aid the Greeks against Xerxês or not, is highly emphatic and poetical: Ὦ νήπιοι, ἐπιμέμφεσθε ὅσα ὑμῖν ἐκ τῶν Μενελέω τιμωρημάτων Μίνως ἔπεμψε μηνίων δακρύματα, ὅτι οἱ μὲν οὐ ξυνεξεπρήξαντο αὐτῷ τὸν ἐν Καμίκῳ θάνατον γενόμενον, ὑμεῖς δὲ κείνοισι τὴν ἐκ Σπάρτης ἁρπασθεῖσαν ὑπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς βαρβάρου γυναῖκα.

If such an answer was ever returned at all, I cannot but think that it must have been from some oracle in Krête itself, not from Delphi. The Delphian oracle could never have so far forgotten its obligations to the general cause of Greece, at that critical moment, which involved moreover the safety of all its own treasures, as to deter the Krêtans from giving assistance.

Such is the Minôs of the poets and logographers, with his legendary and romantic attributes: the familiar comrade of the great Zeus,—the judge among the dead in Hadês,—the husband of Pasiphaê, daughter of the god Hêlios,—the father of the goddess Ariadnê, as well as of Androgeos, who perishes and is worshipped at Athens,[538] and of the boy Glaukus, who is miraculously restored to life by a prophet,—the person beloved by Scylla, and the amorous pursuer of the nymph or goddess Britomartis,[539]—the proprietor of the Labyrinth and of the Minôtaur, and the exacter of a periodical tribute of youths and maidens from Athens as food for this monster,—lastly, the follower of the fugitive artist Dædalus to Kamikus, and the victim of the three ill-disposed daughters of Kokalus in a bath. With this strongly-marked portrait, the Minôs of Thucydidês and Aristotle has scarcely anything in common except the name. He is the first to acquire Thalassokraty, or command of the Ægean sea: he expels the Karian inhabitants from the Cyclades islands, and sends thither fresh colonists under his own sons; he puts down piracy, in order that he may receive his tribute regularly; lastly, he attempts to conquer Sicily, but fails in the enterprise and perishes.[540] Here we have conjectures, derived from the analogy of the Athenian maritime empire in the historical times, substituted in place of the fabulous incidents, and attached to the name of Minôs.

[538] Hesiod, Theogon. 949; Pausan. i. 1, 4.

[539] Kallimach. Hymn. ad Dian. 189. Strabo (x. p. 476) dwells also upon the strange contradiction of the legends concerning Minôs: I agree with Hoeckh (Kreta, ii. p. 93) that δασμόλογος in this passage refers to the tribute exacted from Athens for the Minôtaur.

[540] Thucyd. i. 4. Μίνως γὰρ, παλαίτατος ὧν ἀκοῇ ἴσμεν, ναυτικὸν ἐκτήσατο, καὶ τῆς νῦν Ἑλληνικῆς θαλάσσης ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐκράτησε, καὶ τῶν Κυκλάδων νήσων ἦρξέ τε καὶ οἰκιστὴς αὐτὸς τῶν πλείστων ἐγένετο, Κᾶρας ἐξελάσας καὶ τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας ἡγεμόνας ἐγκαταστήσας· τό τε λῃστικὸν, ὡς εἰκὸς, καθῄρει ἐκ τῆς θαλάσσης, ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἠδύνατο, τοῦ τὰς προσόδους μᾶλλον ἰέναι αὐτῷ. See also c. 8.

Aristot. Polit. ii. 7, 2, Δοκεῖ δ᾽ ἡ νῆσος καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν τὴν Ἑλληνικὴν πεφυκέναι καὶ κεῖσθαι καλῶς ... διὸ καὶ τὴν τῆς θαλάσσης ἀρχὴν κατέσχεν ὁ Μίνως, καὶ τὰς νήσους τὰς μὲν ἐχειρώσατο, τὰς δὲ ᾤκισε· τέλος δ᾽ ἐπιθέμενος τῇ Σικελίᾳ τὸν βίον ἐτελεύτησεν ἐκεῖ περὶ Κάμικον.

Ephorus (ap. Skymn. Chi. 542) repeated the same statement: he mentioned also the autochthonous king Krês.

In the fable, a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens is paid to him periodically by the Athenians; in the historicized narrative this character of a tribute-collector is preserved, but the tribute is money collected from dependent islands;[541] and Aristotle points out to us how conveniently Krête is situated to exercise empire over the Ægean. The expedition against Kamikus, instead of being directed to the recovery of the fugitive Dædalus, is an attempt on the part of the great thalassokrat to conquer Sicily. Herodotus gives us generally the same view of the character of Minôs as a great maritime king, but his notice of the expedition against Kamikus includes the mention of Dædalus as the intended object of it.[542] Ephorus, while he described Minôs as a commanding and comprehensive lawgiver imposing his commands under the sanction of Zeus, represented him as the imitator of an earlier lawgiver named Rhadamanthus, and also as an immigrant into Krête from the Æolic Mount Ida, along with the priests or sacred companions of Zeus called the Idæi Dactyli. Aristotle too points him out as the author of the Syssitia, or public meals common in Krête as well as at Sparta,—other divergences in a new direction from the spirit of the old fables.[543]

[541] It is curious that Herodotus expressly denies this, and in language which shows that he had made special inquiries about it: he says that the Karians or Leleges in the islands (who were, according to Thucydidês, expelled by Minôs) paid no tribute to Minôs, but manned his navy, i. e. they stood to Minôs much in the same relation as Chios and Lesbos stood to Athens (Herodot. i. 171). One may trace here the influence of those discussions which must have been prevalent at that time respecting the maritime empire of Athens.

[542] Herodot. vii. 170. Λέγεται γὰρ Μίνω κατὰ ζήτησιν Δαιδάλου ἀπικόμενον ἐς Σικανίην, τὴν νῦν Σικελίην καλουμένην, ἀποθανεῖν βιαίῳ θανάτῳ. Ἀνὰ δὲ χρόνον Κρῆτας, θεοῦ σφὶ ἐποτρύνοντος, etc.

[543] Aristot. Polit. ii. 7, 1; vii. 9, 2. Ephorus, Fragm. 63, 64, 65. He set aside altogether the Homeric genealogy of Minôs, which makes him brother of Rhadamanthus and born in Krête.

Strabo, in pointing out the many contradictions respecting Minôs, remarks, Ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἄλλος λόγος οὐχ ὁμολογούμενος, τῶν μὲν ξένον τῆς νήσου τὸν Μίνω λεγόντων, τῶν δὲ ἐπιχώριον.. By the former he doubtless means Ephorus, though he has not here specified him (x. p. 477).

The contradictory attributes ascribed to Minôs, together with the perplexities experienced by those who wished to introduce a regular chronological arrangement into these legendary events, has led both in ancient and in modern times to the supposition of two kings named Minôs, one the grandson of the other,—Minôs I., the son of Zeus, lawgiver and judge,—Minôs II., the thalassokrat,—a gratuitous conjecture, which, without solving the problem required, only adds one to the numerous artifices employed for imparting the semblance of history to the disparate matter of legend. The Krêtans were at all times, from Homer downward, expert and practised seamen. But that they were ever united under one government, or ever exercised maritime dominion in the Ægean is a fact which we are neither able to affirm nor to deny. The Odyssey, in so far as it justifies any inference at all, points against such a supposition, since it recognizes a great diversity both of inhabitants and of languages in the island, and designates Minôs as king specially of Knôssus: it refutes still more positively the idea that Minôs put down piracy, which the Homeric Krêtans as well as others continue to practise without scruple.

Herodotus, though he in some places speaks of Minôs as a person historically cognizable, yet in one passage severs him pointedly from the generation of man. The Samian despot “Polykratês (he tells us) was the first person who aspired to nautical dominion, excepting Minôs of Knôssus, and others before him (if any such there ever were) who may have ruled the sea; but Polykratês is the first of that which is called the generation of man who aspired with much chance of success to govern Iônia and the islands of the Ægean.”[544] Here we find it manifestly intimated that Minôs did not belong to the generation of man, and the tale given by the historian respecting the tremendous calamities which the wrath of the departed Minôs inflicted on Krête confirms the impression. The king of Knôssus is a god or a hero, but not a man; he belongs to legend, not to history. He is the son as well as the familiar companion of Zeus; he marries the daughter of Hêlios, and Ariadnê is numbered among his offspring. To this superhuman person are ascribed the oldest and most revered institutions of the island, religious and political, together with a period of supposed ante-historical dominion. That there is much of Krêtan religious ideas and practice embodied in the fables concerning Minôs can hardly be doubted: nor is it improbable that the tale of the youths and maidens sent from Athens may be based in some expiatory offerings rendered to a Krêtan divinity. The orgiastic worship of Zeus, solemnized by the armed priests with impassioned motions and violent excitement, was of ancient date in that island, as well as the connection with the worship of Apollo both at Delphi and at Dêlos. To analyze the fables and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic invention, and the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must forever remain indissolubly amalgamated as the poet originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his auditors. Hoeckh, in his instructive and learned collection of facts respecting ancient Krête, construes the mythical genealogy of Minôs to denote a combination of the orgiastic worship of Zeus, indigenous among the Eteokrêtes, with the worship of the moon imported from Phœnicia, and signified by the names Europê, Pasiphaê, and Ariadnê.[545] This is specious as a conjecture, but I do not venture to speak of it in terms of greater confidence.

[544] Herodot. iii. 122. Πολυκράτης γὰρ ἐστὶ πρῶτος τῶν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν Ἑλλήνων, ὃς θαλασσοκρατέειν ἐπενοήθη, παρὲξ Μίνωός τε τοῦ Κνωσσίου, καὶ εἰ δή τις ἄλλος πρότερος τούτου ἦρξε τῆς θαλάττης· ~τῆς δὲ ἀνθρωπηΐης λεγομένης γενεῆς~ Πολυκράτης ἐστὶ πρῶτος ἐλπίδας πολλὰς ἔχων Ἰωνίης τε καὶ νήσων ἄρξειν.

The expression exactly corresponds to that of Pausanias, ix. 5, 1, ἐπὶ τῶν καλουμένων Ἡρώων, for the age preceding the ἀνθρωπηΐη γενέη; also viii. 2. 1, ἐς τὰ ἀνωτέρω τοῦ ἀνθρώπων γένους.

[545] Hoeckh, Kreta, vol. ii. pp. 56-67. K. O. Müller also (Dorier. ii. 2, 14) puts a religious interpretation upon these Kreto-Attic legends, but he explains them in a manner totally different from Hoeckh.

From the connection of religious worship and legendary tales between Krête and various parts of Asia Minor,—the Trôad, the coast of Milêtus and Lykia, especially between Mount Ida in Krête and Mount Ida in Æôlis,—it seems reasonable to infer an ethnographical kindred or relationship between the inhabitants anterior to the period of Hellenic occupation. The tales of Krêtan settlement at Minoa and Engyiôn on the south-western coast of Sicily, and in Iapygia on the Gulf of Tarentum, conduct us to a similar presumption, though the want of evidence forbids our tracing it farther. In the time of Herodotus, the Eteokrêtes, or aboriginal inhabitants of the island, were confined to Polichna and Præsus; but in earlier times, prior to the encroachments of the Hellênes, they had occupied the larger portion, if not the whole of the island. Minôs was originally their hero, subsequently adopted by the immigrant Hellênes,—at least Herodotus considers him as barbarian, not Hellenic.[546]

[546] Herodot. i. 173.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIII. ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION

The ship Argô was the theme of many songs during the oldest periods of the Grecian epic, even earlier than the Odyssey. The king Æêtês, from whom she is departing, the hero Jasôn, who commands her, and the goddess Hêrê, who watches over him, enabling the Argô to traverse distances and to escape dangers which no ship had ever before encountered, are all circumstances briefly glanced at by Odysseus in his narrative to Alkinous. Moreover, Eunêus, the son of Jasôn and Hypsipylê, governs Lemnos during the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn, and carries on a friendly traffic with the Grecian camp, purchasing from them their Trojan prisoners.[547]

[547] Odyss. xii. 69.—

Οἴη δὴ κείνη γε παρέπλει ποντόπορος νῆυς, Ἀργὼ πασιμέλουσα, παρ᾽ Αἰήταο πλέουσα· Καὶ νύ κε τὴν ἔνθ᾽ ὦκα βάλεν μεγάλας ποτὶ πέτρας, Ἀλλ᾽ Ἥρη παρέπεμψεν, ἐπεὶ φίλος ἦεν Ἰήσων.

See also Iliad, vii. 470.

The legend of Halus in Achaia Phthiôtis, respecting the religious solemnities connected with the family of Athamas and Phryxus (related in a previous chapter), is also interwoven with the voyage of the Argonauts; and both the legend and the solemnities seem evidently of great antiquity. We know further, that the adventures of the Argô were narrated not only by Hesiod and in the Hesiodic poems, but also by Eumêlus and the author of the Naupactian verses—by the latter seemingly at considerable length.[548] But these poems are unfortunately lost, nor have we any means of determining what the original story was; for the narrative, as we have it, borrowed from later sources, is enlarged by local tales from the subsequent Greek colonies—Kyzikus, Heraklêia, Sinopê, and others.

[548] See Hesiod, Fragm. Catalog. Fr. 6. p. 33, Düntz.; Eoiai, Frag. 36. p. 39; Frag. 72. p. 47. Compare Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. i. 45; ii. 178-297, 1125; iv. 254-284. Other poetical sources—

The old epic poem Ægimius, Frag. 5. p. 57, Düntz.

Kinæthôn in the Hêraklêia touched upon the death of Hylas near Kius in Mysia (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1357).

The epic poem Naupactia, Frag. 1 to 6, Düntz. p. 61.

Eumêlus, Frag. 2, 3, 5, p. 65, Düntz.

Epimenidês, the Krêtan prophet and poet, composed a poem in 6500 lines, Ἀργοῦς ναυπηγίαν τε, καὶ Ἰάσονος εἰς Κόλχους ἀποπλοῦν (Diogen. Laër. i. 10, 5), which is noticed more than once in the Scholia on Apollônius, on subjects connected with the poem (ii. 1125; iii. 42). See Mimnerm. Frag. 10, Schneidewin, p. 15.

Antimachus, in his poem Lydê, touched upon the Argonautic expedition, and has been partially copied by Apollônius Rhod. (Schol. Ap. Rh. i. 1290; ii. 296: iii. 410; iv. 1153).

The logographers Pherekydês and Hekatæus seem to have related the expedition at considerable length.

The Bibliothek der alten Literatur und Kunst (Göttingen, 1786, 2tes Stück, p. 61) contains an instructive Dissertation by Groddeck, Ueber die Argonautika, a summary of the various authorities respecting this expedition.

Jasôn, commanded by Pelias to depart in quest of the golden fleece belonging to the speaking ram which had carried away Phryxus and Hellê, was encouraged by the oracle to invite the noblest youth of Greece to his aid, and fifty of the most distinguished amongst them obeyed the call. Hêraklês, Thêseus, Telamôn and Pêleus, Kastôr and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus—Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas—Meleager, Amphiaraus, Kêpheus, Laertês, Autolykus, Menœtius, Aktôr, Erginus, Euphêmus, Ankæus, Pœas, Periklymenus, Augeas, Eurytus, Admêtus, Akastus, Kæneus, Euryalus, Pêneleôs and Lêitus, Askalaphus and Ialmenus, were among them. Argus the son of Phryxus, directed by the promptings of Athênê, built the ship, inserting in the prow a piece of timber from the celebrated oak of Dodona, which was endued with the faculty of speech:[549] Tiphys was the steersman, Idmôn the son of Apollo and Mopsus accompanied them as prophets, while Orpheus came to amuse their weariness and reconcile their quarrels with his harp.[550]

[549] Apollôn. Rhod. i. 525; iv. 580. Apollodôr. i. 9, 16. Valerius Flaccus (i. 300) softens down the speech of the ship Argô into a dream of Jasôn. Alexander Polyhistor explained what wood was used (Plin. H. N. xiii. 22).

[550] Apollônius Rhodius, Apollodôrus, Valerius Flaccus, the Orphic Argonautica, and Hyginus, have all given Catalogues of the Argonautic heroes (there was one also in the lost tragedy called Λήμνιαι of Sophoklês, see Welcker Gr. Trag. i. 327): the discrepancies among them are numerous and irreconcilable. Burmann, in the Catalogus Argonautarum, prefixed to his edition of Valerius Flaccus, has discussed them copiously. I transcribe one or two of the remarks of this conscientious and laborious critic, out of many of a similar tenor, on the impracticability of a fabulous chronology. Immediately before the first article, Acastus—“Neque enim in ætatibus Argonautarum ullam rationem temporum constare, neque in stirpe et stemmate deducenda ordinem ipsum naturæ congruere videbam. Nam et huic militiæ adscribi videbam Heroas, qui per naturæ leges et ordinem fati eo usque vitam extrahere non potuêre, ut aliis ab hac expeditione remotis Heroum militiis nomina dedisse narrari deberent a Poetis et Mythologis. In idem etiam tempus avos et Nepotes conjici, consanguineos ætate longe inferiores prioribus ut æquales adjungi, concoquere vix posse videtur.”—Art. Ancæus: “Scio objici posse, si seriem illam majorem respiciamus, hunc Ancæum simul cum proavo suo Talao in eandem profectum fuisse expeditionem. Sed similia exempla in aliis occurrent, et in fabulis rationem temporum non semper accuratam licet deducere.”—Art. Jasôn: “Herculi enim jam provectâ ætate adhæsit Theseus juvenis, et in Amazoniâ expeditione socius fuit, interfuit huic expeditioni, venatui apri Calydonii, et rapuit Helenam, quæ circa Trojanum bellum maxime floruit: quæ omnia si Theseus tot temporum intervallis distincta egit, secula duo vel tria vixisse debuit. Certe Jason Hypsipylem neptem Ariadnes, nec videre, nec Lemni cognoscere potuit.”—Art. Meleager: “Unum est quod alicui longum ordinem majorum recensenti scrupulum movere possit: nimis longum intervallum inter Æolum et Meleagrum intercedere, ut potuerit interfuisse huic expeditioni: cum nonus fere numeretur ab Æolo, et plurimi ut Jason, Argus, et alii tertiâ tantum ab Æolo generatione distent. Sed sæpe jam notavimus, frustra temporum concordiam in fabulis quæri.”

Read also the articles Castôr and Pollux, Nestôr Pêleus, Staphylus, etc.

We may stand excused for keeping clear of a chronology which is fertile only in difficulties, and ends in nothing but illusions.

First they touched at the island of Lêmnos, in which at that time there were no men; for the women, infuriated by jealousy and ill-treatment, had put to death their fathers, husbands and brothers. The Argonauts, after some difficulty, were received with friendship, and even admitted into the greatest intimacy. They staid some months, and the subsequent population of the island was the fruit of their visit. Hypsipylê, the queen of the island, bore to Jasôn two sons.[551]

[551] Apollodôr. i. 9, 17; Apollôn. Rhod. i. 609-915; Herodot. iv. 145. Theocritus (Idyll, xiii. 29) omits all mention of Lêmnos, and represents the Argô as arriving on the third day from Iôlkos at the Hellespont. Diodôrus (iv. 41) also leaves out Lêmnos.

They then proceeded onward along the coast of Thrace, up the Hellespont, to the southern coast of the Propontis, inhabited by the Doliones and their king Kyzikus. Here they were kindly entertained, but after their departure were driven back to the same spot by a storm; and as they landed in the dark, the inhabitants did not know them. A battle took place, in which the chief, Kyzikus, was killed by Jasôn; whereby much grief was occasioned as soon as the real facts became known. After Kyzikus had been interred with every demonstration of mourning and solemnity, the Argonauts proceeded along the coast of Mysia.[552] In this part of the voyage they left Hêraklês behind. For Hylas, his favorite youthful companion, had been stolen away by the nymphs of a fountain, and Hêraklês, wandering about in search of him, neglected to return. At last he sorrowfully retired, exacting hostages from the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Kius that they would persist in the search.[553]

[552] Apollôn. Rhod. 940-1020; Apollodôr. i. 9, 18.

[553] Apollodôr. i. 9, 19. This was the religious legend, explanatory of a ceremony performed for many centuries by the people of Prusa: they ran round the lake Askanias shouting and clamoring for Hylas—“ut littus Hyla, Hyla omne sonaret.” (Virgil, Eclog.) ... “in cujus memoriam adhuc solemni cursatione lacum populus circuit et Hylam voce clamat.” Solinus, c. 42.

There is endless discrepancy as to the concern of Hêraklês with the Argonautic expedition. A story is alluded to in Aristotle (Politic, iii. 9) that the ship Argô herself refused to take him on board, because he was so much superior in stature and power to all the other heroes—οὐ γὰρ ἐθέλειν αὐτὸν ἄγειν τὴν Ἀργὼ μετὰ τῶν ἄλλων, ὡς ὑπερβάλλοντα πολὺ τῶν πλωτήρων. This was the story of Pherekydês (Fr. 67, Didot) as well as of Antimachus (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1290): it is probably a very ancient portion of the legend, inasmuch as it ascribes to the ship sentient powers, in consonance with her other miraculous properties. The etymology of Aphetæ in Thessaly was connected with the tale of Hêraklês having there been put on shore from the Argô (Herodot. vii. 193): Ephorus said that he staid away voluntarily from fondness for Omphalê (Frag. 9, Didot). The old epic poet Kinæthôn said that Hêraklês had placed the Kian hostages at Trachin, and that the Kians ever afterwards maintained a respectful correspondence with that place (Schol. Ap. Rh. i. 1357). This is the explanatory legend connected with some existing custom, which we are unable further to unravel.

They next stopped in the country of the Bebrykians, where the boxing contest took place between the king Amykus and the Argonaut Pollux:[554] they then proceeded onward to Bithynia, the residence of the blind prophet Phineus. His blindness had been inflicted by Poseidôn as a punishment for having communicated to Phryxus the way to Kolchis. The choice had been allowed to him between death and blindness, and he had preferred the latter.[555] He was also tormented by the harpies, winged monsters who came down from the clouds whenever his table was set, snatched the food from his lips and imparted to it a foul and unapproachable odor. In the midst of this misery, he hailed the Argonauts as his deliverers—his prophetic powers having enabled him to foresee their coming. The meal being prepared for him, the harpies approached as usual, but Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas, drove them away and pursued them. They put forth all their speed, and prayed to Zeus to be enabled to overtake the monsters; when Hermês appeared and directed them to desist, the harpies being forbidden further to molest Phineus,[556] and retiring again to their native cavern in Krête.[557]

[554] See above, chap. viii. p. 169.

[555] Such was the old narrative of the Hesiodic Catalogue and Eoiai. See Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 181-296.

[556] This again was the old Hesiodic story (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 296),—

Ἐνθ᾽ οἵγ᾽ εὔχεσθον Αἰνηΐῳ ὑψιμέδοντι.

Apollodôrus (i. 9, 21), Apollônius (178-300), and Valerius Flacc. (iv. 428-530) agree in most of the circumstances.

[557] Such was the fate of the harpies as given in the old Naupaktian Verses (See Fragm. Ep. Græc. Düntzer, Naupakt. Fr. 2. p. 61).

The adventure of the Argonauts with Phineus is given by Diodôrus in a manner totally different (Diodôr. iv. 44): he seems to follow Dionysius of Mitylênê (see Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 207).

Phineus, grateful for the relief afforded to him by the Argonauts, forewarned them of the dangers of their voyage and of the precautions necessary for their safety; and through his suggestions they were enabled to pass through the terrific rocks called Symplêgades. These were two rocks which alternately opened and shut, with a swift and violent collision, so that it was difficult even for a bird to fly through during the short interval. When the Argô arrived at the dangerous spot, Euphêmus let loose a dove. which flew through and just escaped with the loss of a few feathers of her tail. This was a signal to the Argonauts, according to the prediction of Phineus, that they might attempt the passage with confidence. Accordingly they rowed with all their might, and passed safely through: the closing rocks, held for a moment asunder by the powerful arms of Athênê just crushed the ornaments at the stern of their vessel. It had been decreed by the gods, that so soon as any ship once got through, the passage should forever afterwards be safe and easy to all. The rocks became fixed in their separate places, and never again closed.[558]

[558] Apollodôr. i. 9, 22. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 310-615.

After again halting on the coast of the Mariandynians, where their steersman Tiphys died, as well as in the country of the Amazons, and after picking up the sons of Phryxus, who had been cast away by Poseidôn in their attempt to return from Kolchis to Greece, they arrived in safety at the river Phasis and the residence of Æêtês. In passing by Mount Caucasus, they saw the eagle which gnawed the liver of Prometheus nailed to the rock, and heard the groans of the sufferer himself. The sons of Phryxus were cordially welcomed by their mother Chalciopê.[559] Application was made to Æêtês, that he would grant to the Argonauts, heroes of divine parentage and sent forth by the mandate of the gods, possession of the golden fleece: their aid in return was proffered to him against any or all of his enemies. But the king was wroth, and peremptorily refused, except upon conditions which seemed impracticable.[560] Hêphæstos had given him two ferocious and untamable bulls, with brazen feet, which breathed fire from their nostrils: Jasôn was invited, as a proof both of his illustrious descent and of the sanction of the gods to his voyage, to harness these animals to the yoke, so as to plough a large field and sow it with dragon’s teeth.[561] Perilous as the condition was, each one of the heroes volunteered to make the attempt. Idmôn especially encouraged Jasôn to undertake it,[562] and the goddesses Hêrê and Aphroditê made straight the way for him.[563] Mêdea, the daughter of Æêtês and Eidyia, having seen the youthful hero in his interview with her father, had conceived towards him a passion which disposed her to employ every means for his salvation and success. She had received from Hekatê preëminent magical powers, and she prepared for Jasôn the powerful Prometheian unguent, extracted from an herb which had grown where the blood of Promêtheus dropped. The body of Jasôn having been thus pre-medicated, became invulnerable[564] either by fire or by warlike weapons. He undertook the enterprise, yoked the bulls without suffering injury, and ploughed the field: when he had sown the dragon’s teeth, armed men sprung out of the furrows. But he had been forewarned by Mêdea to cast a vast rock into the midst of them, upon which they began to fight with each other, so that he was easily enabled to subdue them all.[565]

[559] Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 850-1257.

[560] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 320-385.

[561] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 410. Apollodôr. i. 9, 23.

[562] This was the story of the Naupaktian Verses (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 515-525): Apollônius and others altered it. Idmôn, according to them, died in the voyage before the arrival at Kolchis.

[563] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 50-200. Valer. Flacc. vi. 440-480. Hygin. fab. 22.

[564] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 835. Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Valer. Flacc vii. 356 Ovid, Epist. xii. 15.

“Isset anhelatos non præmedicatus in ignes Immemor Æsonides, oraque adunca boum.”

[565] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1230-1400.

The task prescribed had thus been triumphantly performed. Yet Æêtês not only refused to hand over the golden fleece, but even took measures for secretly destroying the Argonauts and burning their vessel. He designed to murder them during the night after a festal banquet; but Aphroditê, watchful for the safety of Jasôn,[566] inspired the Kolchian king at the critical moment with an irresistible inclination for his nuptial bed. While he slept, the wise Idmôn counselled the Argonauts to make their escape, and Mêdea agreed to accompany them.[567] She lulled to sleep by a magic potion the dragon who guarded the golden fleece, placed that much-desired prize on board the vessel, and accompanied Jasôn with his companions in their flight, carrying along with her the young Apsyrtus, her brother.[568]

[566] The Naupaktian Verses stated this (see the Fragm. 6, ed. Düntzer, p. 61, ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 59-86).

[567] Such was the story of the Naupaktian Verses (See Fragm. 6. p 61 Düntzer ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 59, 86, 87).

[568] Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 220.

Pherekydês said that Jasôn killed the dragon (Fr. 74, Did.).

Æêtês, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the stratagem of Mêdea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Æêtês on reaching the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped.[569] The spot on which the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi.[570] This fratricide of Mêdea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation of Zeus, that he condemned the Argô and her crew to a trying voyage, full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home. The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until its junction with the Nile,[571] they came down the Nile into Egypt, from whence they carried the Argô on their shoulders by a fatiguing land-journey to the lake Tritônis in Libya. Here they were rescued from the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god Tritôn, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphêmus a clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed by the flourishing and powerful city of Kyrênê,[572] whose princes the Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphêmus.

[569] This is the story of Apollodôrus (i. 9, 24), who seems to follow Pherekydês (Fr. 73, Didot). Apollônius (iv. 225-480) and Valerius Flaccus (viii. 262 seq.) give totally different circumstances respecting the death of Apsyrtus; but the narrative of Pherekydês seems the oldest: so revolting a story as that of the cutting up of the little boy cannot have been imagined in later times.

Sophoklês composed two tragedies on the adventures of Jasôn and Mêdea, both lost—the Κολχίδες and the Σκύθαι. In the former he represented the murder of the child Apsyrtus as having taken place in the house of Æêtês: in the latter he introduced the mitigating circumstance, that Apsyrtus was the son of Æêtês by a different mother from Mêdea (Schol. Apollôn Rhod. iv. 223).

[570] Apollodôr. i. 9, 24, τὸν τόπον προσηγόρευσε Τόμους. Ovid. Trist. iii. 9. The story that Apsyrtus was cut in pieces, is the etymological legend explanatory of the name Tomi.

There was however a place called Apsarus, on the southern coast of the Euxine, west of Trapezus, where the tomb of Apsyrtus was shown, and where it was affirmed that he had been put to death. He was the eponymus of the town, which was said to have been once called Apsyrtus, and only corrupted by a barbarian pronunciation (Arrian. Periplus, Euxin. p. 6; Geogr. Min. v. 1). Compare Procop. Bell. Goth. iv. 2.

Strabo connects the death of Apsyrtus with the Apsyrtides, islands off the coast of Illyria, in the Adriatic (vii p. 315).

[571] The original narrative was, that the Argô returned by navigating the circumfluous ocean. This would be almost certain, even without positive testimony, from the early ideas entertained by the Greeks respecting geography; but we know further that it was the representation of the Hesiodic poems, as well as of Mimnermus, Hekatæus and Pindar, and even of Antimachus. Schol. Parisina Ap. Rhod. iv. 254. Ἑκαταῖος δὲ ὁ Μιλήσιος διὰ τοῦ Φάσιδος ἀνελθεῖν φησὶν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸν Ὠκεανόν· διὰ δὲ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ κατελθεῖν εἰς τὸν Νεῖλον· ἐκ δὲ τοῦ Νείλου εἰς τὴν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς θάλασσαν. Ἡσίοδος δὲ καὶ Πίνδαρος ἐν Πυθιονίκαις καὶ Ἀντίμαχος ἐν Λυδῇ διὰ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ φασὶν ἐλθεῖν αὐτοὺς εἰς Λιβύην· εἶτα βαστάσαντας τὴν Ἀργὼ εἰς τὸ ἡμέτερον ἀφικέσθαι πέλαγος. Compare the Schol. Edit. ad iv. 259.

[572] See the fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar, and Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1551-1756.

The tripod of Jasôn was preserved by the Euesperitæ in Libya, Diod. iv. 56: but the legend, connecting the Argonauts with the lake Tritônis in Libya, is given with some considerable differences in Herodotus, iv. 179.

Refreshed by the hospitality of Tritôn, the Argonauts found themselves again on the waters of the Mediterranean in their way homeward. But before they arrived at Iôlkos they visited Circê, at the island of Ææa, where Mêdea was purified for the murder of Apsyrtus: they also stopped at Korkyra, then called Drepanê, where Alkinous received and protected them. The cave in that island where the marriage of Mêdea with Jasôn was consummated, was still shown in the time of the historian Timæus, as well as the altars to Apollo which she had erected, and the rites and sacrifices which she had first instituted.[573] After leaving Korkyra, the Argô was overtaken by a perilous storm near the island of Thêra. The heroes were saved from imminent peril by the supernatural aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an arrow which pierced the waves like a track of light, caused a new island suddenly to spring up in their track and present to them a port of refuge. The island was called Anaphê; and the grateful Argonauts established upon it an altar and sacrifices in honor of Apollo Æglêtês, which were ever afterwards continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating adventure.[574]

[573] Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1153-1217. Timæus, Fr. 7-8, Didot. Τίμαιος ἐν Κερκύρᾳ λέγων γενέσθαι τοὺς γάμους, καὶ περὶ τῆς θυσίας ἱστορεῖ, ἔτι καὶ νῦν λέγων ἄγεσθαι αὐτὴν κατ᾽ ἐνιαυτὸν, Μηδείας πρῶτον θυσάσης ἐν τῷ τοῦ Απολλῶνος ἱερῷ. Καὶ Βωμοὺς δέ φησι μνημεῖα τῶν γάμων ἱδρύσασθαι συνεγγὺς μὲν τῆς θαλάσσης, οὐ μακρὰν δὲ τῆς πόλεως. Ὀνομάζουσι δὲ τὸν μὲν, Νυμφῶν· τὸν δὲ, Νηρηΐδων.

[574] Apollodôr. i. 9, 25. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1700-1725.

On approaching the coast of Krête, the Argonauts were prevented from landing by Talôs, a man of brass, fabricated by Hêphæstos, and presented by him to Minôs for the protection of the island.[575] This vigilant sentinel hurled against the approaching vessel fragments of rock, and menaced the heroes with destruction. But Mêdea deceived him by a stratagem and killed him; detecting and assailing the one vulnerable point in his body. The Argonauts were thus enabled to land and refresh themselves. They next proceeded onward to Ægina, where however they again experienced resistance before they could obtain water—then along the coast of Eubœa and Locris back to Iôlkos in the gulf of Pagasæ, the place from whence they had started. The proceedings of Pelias during their absence, and the signal revenge taken upon him by Mêdea after their return, have already been narrated in a preceding section.[576] The ship Argô herself, in which the chosen heroes of Greece had performed so long a voyage and braved so many dangers, was consecrated by Jasôn to Poseidôn at the isthmus of Corinth. According to another account, she was translated to the stars by Athênê, and became a constellation.[577]

[575] Some called Talôs a remnant of the brazen race of men (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 1641).

[576] Apollodôr. i. 9, 26. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1638.

[577] Diodôr. iv. 53. Eratosth. Catasterism. c. 35.

Traces of the presence of the Argonauts were found not only in the regions which lay between Iôlkos and Kolchis, but also in the western portion of the Grecian world—distributed more or less over all the spots visited by Grecian mariners or settled by Grecian colonists, and scarcely less numerous than the wanderings of the dispersed Greeks and Trojans after the capture of Troy. The number of Jasonia, or temples for the heroic worship of Jasôn, was very great, from Abdêra in Thrace,[578] eastward along the coast of the Euxine, to Armenia and Media. The Argonauts had left their anchoring-stone on the coast of Bebrykia, near Kyzikus, and there it was preserved during the historical ages in the temple of the Jasonian Athênê.[579] They had founded the great temple of the Idæan mother on the mountain Dindymon, near Kyzikus, and the Hieron of Zeus Urios on the Asiatic point at the mouth of the Euxine, near which was also the harbor of Phryxus.[580] Idmôn, the prophet of the expedition, who was believed to have died of a wound by a wild boar on the Mariandynian coast, was worshipped by the inhabitants of the Pontic Hêrakleia with great solemnity, as their Heros Poliuchus, and that too by the special direction of the Delphian god. Autolykus, another companion of Jasôn, was worshipped as Œkist by the inhabitants of Sinopê. Moreover, the historians of Hêrakleia pointed out a temple of Hekatê in the neighboring country of Paphlagonia, first erected by Mêdea;[581] and the important town of Pantikapæon, on the European side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, ascribed its first settlement to a son of Æêtês.[582] When the returning ten thousand Greeks sailed along the coast, called the Jasonian shore, from Sinopê to Hêrakleia, they were told that the grandson of Æêtês was reigning king of the territory at the mouth of the Phasis, and the anchoring-places where the Argô had stopped were specially pointed out to them.[583] In the lofty regions of the Moschi, near Kolchis, stood the temple of Leukothea, founded by Phryxus, which remained both rich and respected down to the times of the kings of Pontus, and where it was an inviolable rule not to offer up a ram.[584] The town of Dioskurias, north of the river Phasis, was believed to have been hallowed by the presence of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô, and to have received from them its appellation.[585] Even the interior of Mêdea and Armenia was full of memorials of Jasôn and Mêdea and their son Mêdus, or of Armenus the son of Jasôn, from whom the Greeks deduced not only the name and foundation of the Medes and Armenians, but also the great operation of cutting a channel through the mountains for the efflux of the river Araxes, which they compared to that of the Peneius in Thessaly.[586] And the Roman general Pompey, after having completed the conquest and expulsion of Mithridatês, made long marches through Kolchis into the regions of Caucasus, for the express purpose of contemplating the spots which had been ennobled by the exploits of the Argonauts, the Dioskuri and Hêraklês.[587]

[578] Strabo. xi. p. 526-531.

[579] Apollôn. Rhod. i. 955-960, and the Scholia.

There was in Kyzikus a temple of Apollo under different ἐπικλήσεις; some called it the temple of the Jasonian Apollo.

Another anchor however was preserved in the temple of Rhea on the banks of the Phasis, which was affirmed to be the anchor of the ship Argô. Arrian saw it there, but seems to have doubted its authenticity (Periplus, Euxin. Pont. p. 9. Geogr. Min. v. 1).

[580] Neanthês ap. Strabo. i. p. 45. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1125, and Schol. Steph. Byz. v. Φρίξος.

Apollônius mentions the fountain called Jasoneæ, on the hill of Dindymon. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 532, and the citations from Timosthenês and Herodôrus in the Scholia. See also Appian. Syriac. c. 63.

[581] See the historians of Hêrakleia, Nymphis and Promathidas, Fragm. Orelli, pp. 99, 100-104. Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 247. Strabo, xii. p. 546. Autolykus, whom he calls companion of Jasôn, was, according to another legend, comrade of Hêraklês in his expedition against the Amazons.

[582] Stephan. Byz. v. Παντικαπαῖον, Eustath. ad Dionys. Periêgêt. 311.

[583] Xenophôn, Anabas. vi. 2, 1; v. 7, 37.

[584] Strabo, xi. p. 499.

[585] Appian, Mithridatic. c. 101.

[586] Strabo, xi. p. 499, 503, 526, 531; i. p. 45-48. Justin, xlii. 3, whose statements illustrate the way in which men found a present home and application for the old fables,—“Jason, primus humanorum post Herculem et Liberum, qui reges Orientis fuisse traduntur, eam cœli plagam domuisse dicitur. Cum Albanis fœdus percussit, qui Herculem ex Italiâ ab Albano monte, cum, Geryone extincto, armenta ejus per Italiam duceret, secuti dicuntur; quique, memores Italicæ originis, exercitum Cn. Pompeii bello Mithridatico fratres consalutavêre. Itaque Jasoni totus fere Oriens, ut conditori, divinos honores templaque constituit; quæ Parmenio, dux Alexandri Magni, post multos annos dirui jussit, ne cujusquam nomen in Oriente venerabilius quam Alexandri esset.”

The Thessalian companions of Alexander the Great, placed by his victories in possession of rich acquisitions in these regions, pleased themselves by vivifying and multiplying all these old fables, proving an ancient kindred between the Medes and Thessalians. See Strabo, xi. p. 530. The temples of Jasôn were τιμώμενα σφόδρα ὑπὸ τῶν βαρβάρων (ib. p. 526).

The able and inquisitive geographer Eratosthenês was among those who fully believed that Jasôn had left his ships in the Phasis, and had undertaken a land expedition into the interior country, in which he had conquered Media and Armenia (Strabo, i. p. 48).

[587] Appian, Mithridatic. 103: τοὺς Κόλχους ἐπήει, καθ᾽ ἰστορίαν τῆς Ἀργοναυτῶν καὶ Διοσκούρων καὶ Ἡρακλέους ἐπιδημίας, καὶ μάλιστα τὸ πάθος ἰδεῖν ἐθέλων, ὃ Προμηθεῖ φασὶ γενέσθαι περὶ τὸ Καύκασον ὄρος. The lofty crag of Caucasus called Strobilus, to which Promêtheus had been attached, was pointed out to Arrian himself in his Periplus (p. 12. Geogr. Minor vol. i.).

In the west, memorials either of the Argonauts or of the pursuing Kolchians were pointed out in Korkyra, in Krête, in Epirus near the Akrokeraunian mountains, in the islands called Apsyrtides near the Illyrian coast, at the bay of Caieta as well as at Poseidônia on the southern coast of Italy, in the island of Æthalia or Elba, and in Libya.[588]

[588] Strabo, i. pp. 21, 45, 46; v. 224-252. Pompon. Mel. ii. 3. Diodôr. iv. 56. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 656. Lycophron, 1273.—

Τύρσιν μακεδνὰς ἀμφὶ Κιρκαίου νάπας Ἀργοῦς τε κλεινὸν ὅρμον Αἰήτην μέγαν.

Such is a brief outline of the Argonautic expedition, one of the most celebrated and widely-diffused among the ancient tales of Greece. Since so many able men have treated it as an undisputed reality, and even made it the pivot of systematic chronological calculations, I may here repeat the opinion long ago expressed by Heyne, and even indicated by Burmann, that the process of dissecting the story, in search of a basis of fact, is one altogether fruitless.[589] Not only are we unable to assign the date or identify the crew, or decipher the log-book, of the Argô, but we have no means of settling even the preliminary question, whether the voyage be matter of fact badly reported, or legend from the beginning. The widely-distant spots in which the monuments of the voyage were shown, no less than the incidents of the voyage itself, suggests no other parentage than epical fancy. The supernatural and the romantic not only constitute an inseparable portion of the narrative, but even embrace all the prominent and characteristic features; if they do not comprise the whole, and if there be intermingled along with them any sprinkling of historical or geographical fact,—a question to us indeterminable,—there is at least no solvent by which it can be disengaged, and no test by which it can be recognized. Wherever the Grecian mariner sailed, he carried his religious and patriotic mythes along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of the long wanderings of Jasôn, Odysseus, Perseus, Hêraklês, Dionysus, Triptolemus or Iô; it was pleasing to him in success, and consoling to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular with the seaman, than the history of the primæval ship Argô and her distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and especially the Tyndarids Kastôr and Pollux, the heavenly protectors invoked during storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argô in the minds of future comers or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.

[589] Heyne, Observ. ad Apollodôr. i. 9, 16. p. 72. “Mirum in modum fallitur, qui in his commentis certum fundum historicum vel geographicum aut exquirere studet, aut se reperisse, atque historicam vel geographicam aliquam doctrinam, systema nos dicimus, inde procudi posse, putat,” etc.

See also the observations interspersed in Burmann’s Catalogus Argonautarum, prefixed to his edition of Valerius Flaccus.

The Persian antiquarians whom Herodotus cites at the beginning of his history (i. 2-4—it is much to be regretted that Herodotus did not inform us who they were, and whether they were the same as those who said that Perseus was an Assyrian by birth and had become a Greek, vi. 54), joined together the abductions of Iô and of Eurôpê, of Mêdea and of Helen, as pairs of connected proceedings, the second injury being a retaliation for the first,—they drew up a debtor and creditor account of abductions between Asia and Europe. The Kolchian king (they said) had sent a herald to Greece to ask for his satisfaction for the wrong done to him by Jasôn and to re-demand his daughter Mêdea; but he was told in reply that the Greeks had received no satisfaction for the previous rape of Iô.

There was some ingenuity in thus binding together the old fables, so as to represent the invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxês as retaliations for the unexpiated destruction wrought by Agamemnôn.

The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown space in the same manner as with past and unrecorded time. They created a mythical geography for the former, and a mythical history for the latter. But there was this material difference between the two: that while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as authentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old mythes; and this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians and geographers of antiquity,—for it was painful to them to abandon any portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable basis of truth.

Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod, and the other Greek poets and logographers,—Erytheia, the garden of the Hesperides, the garden of Phœbus,[590] to which Boreas transported the Attic maiden Orithyia, the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, the Elysian plain,[591] the fleeting island of Æolus, Thrinakia, the country of the Æthiopians, the Læstrygones, the Kyklôpes, the Lotophagi, the Sirens, the Cimmerians and the Gorgons,[592] etc. These are places which (to use the expression of Pindar respecting the Hyperboreans) you cannot approach either by sea or by land:[593] the wings of the poet alone can carry you thither. They were not introduced into the Greek mind by incorrect geographical reports, but, on the contrary, had their origin in the legend, and passed from thence into the realities of geography,[594] which they contributed much to pervert and confuse. For the navigator or emigrant, starting with an unsuspicious faith in their real existence, looked out for them in his distant voyages, and constantly fancied that he had seen or heard of them, so as to be able to identify their exact situation. The most contradictory accounts indeed, as might be expected, were often given respecting the latitude and longitude of such fanciful spots, but this did not put an end to the general belief in their real existence.

[590] Sophokl. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 295.—

Ὑπέρ τε πόντον πάντ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἔσχατα χθονὸς, Νυκτός τε πηγὰς οὐρανοῦ τ᾽ ἀναπτυχὰς, Φοίβου τε παλαιὸν κῆπον.

[591] Odyss. iv. 562. The Islands of the Blessed, in Hesiod, are near the ocean (Opp. Di. 169).

[592] Hesiod, Theogon. 275-290. Homer, Iliad, i. 423. Odyss. i. 23; ix 86-206; x 4-83; xii. 135. Mimnerm. Fragm. 13, Schneidewin.

[593] Pindar, Pyth. x. 29.—

Ναυσὶ δ᾽ οὔτε πεζὸς ἰὼν ἂν εὕροις Ἐς Ὑπερβορέων ἀγῶνα θαυματὰν ὁδόν. Παρ᾽ οἷς ποτε Περσεὺς ἐδαίσατο λαγετὰς, etc.

Hesiod, and the old epic poem called the Epigoni, both mentioned the Hyperboreans (Herod. iv. 32-34).

[594] This idea is well stated and sustained by Völcker (Mythische Geographie der Griechen und Römer, cap. i. p. 11), and by Nitzsch in his Comments on the Odyssey—Introduct. Remarks to b. ix. p. xii.-xxxiii. The twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the History of Orchomenos, by O. Müller, are also full of good remarks on the geography of the Argonautic voyage (pp. 274-299).

The most striking evidence of this disposition of the Greeks is to be found in the legendary discoveries of Alexander and his companions, when they marched over the untrodden regions in the east of the Persian empire (see Arrian, Hist. Al. v. 3: compare Lucian. Dialog. Mortuor. xiv. vol. i. p. 212. Tauch) because these ideas were first broached at a time when geographical science was sufficiently advanced to canvass and criticize them. The early settlers in Italy, Sicily and the Euxine, indulged their fanciful vision without the fear of any such monitor: there was no such thing as a map before the days of Anaximander, the disciple of Thalês.

In the present advanced state of geographical knowledge, the story of that man who after reading Gulliver’s Travels went to look in his map for Lilliput, appears an absurdity. But those who fixed the exact locality of the floating island of Æolus or the rocks of the Sirens did much the same,[595] and, with their ignorance of geography and imperfect appreciation of historical evidence, the error was hardly to be avoided. The ancient belief which fixed the Sirens on the islands of Sirenusæ off the coast of Naples—the Kyklôpes, Erytheia, and the Læstrygones in Sicily—the Lotophagi on the island of Mêninx[596] near the Lesser Syrtis—the Phæakians at Korkyra—and the goddess Circê at the promontory of Circeium—took its rise at a time when these regions were first Hellenized and comparatively little visited. Once embodied in the local legends, and attested by visible monuments and ceremonies, it continued for a long time unassailed; and Thucydidês seems to adopt it, in reference to Korkyra and Sicily before the Hellenic colonization, as matter of fact generally unquestionable,[597] though little avouched as to details. But when geographical knowledge became extended, and the criticism upon the ancient epic was more or less systematized by the literary men of Alexandria and Pergamus, it appeared to many of them impossible that Odysseus could have seen so many wonders, or undergone such monstrous dangers, within limits so narrow, and in the familiar track between the Nile and the Tiber. The scene of his weather-driven course was then shifted further westward. Many convincing evidences were discovered, especially by Asklepiadês of Myrlea, of his having visited various places in Ibêria:[598] several critics imagined that he had wandered about in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Strait of Gibraltar,[599] and they recognized a section of Lotophagi on the coast of Mauritania, over and above those who dwelt on the island of Mêninx.[600] On the other hand, Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus treated the places visited by Odysseus as altogether unreal, for which scepticism they incurred much reproach.[601]

[595] See Mr. Payne Knight, Prolegg. ad Homer. c. 49. Compare Spohn—“de extremâ Odysseæ parte”—p. 97.

[596] Strabo. xvii. p. 834. An altar of Odysseus was shown upon this island, as well as some other evidences (σύμβολα) of his visit to the place.

Apollônius Rhodius copies the Odyssey in speaking of the island of Thrinakia and the cattle of Helios (iv. 965, with Schol.). He conceives Sicily as Thrinakia, a name afterwards exchanged for Trinakria. The Scholiast ad Apoll. (1. c.) speaks of Trinax king of Sicily. Compare iv. 291 with the Scholia.

[597] Thucyd. i. 25-vi. 2. These local legends appear in the eyes of Strabo convincing evidence (i. p. 23-26),—the tomb of the siren Parthenopê at Naples, the stories at Cumæ and Dikæarchia about the νεκυομαντεῖον of Avernus, and the existence of places named after Baius and Misênus, the companions of Odysseus, etc.

[598] Strabo, iii. p. 150-157. Οὐ γὰρ μόνον οἱ κατὰ τὴν Ἰταλίαν καὶ Σικελίαν τόποι καὶ ἄλλοι τινὲς τῶν τοιούτων σημεῖα ὑπογράφουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἰβηρίᾳ Ὀδύσσεια πόλις δείκνυται, καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς ἱερὸν, καὶ ἄλλα μύρια ἴχνη τῆς τε ἐκείνου πλάνης, καὶ ἄλλων τῶν ἐκ τοῦ Τρωϊκοῦ πολέμου περιγενομένων (I adopt Grosskurd’s correction of the text from γενομένων to περιγενομένων, in the note to his German translation of Strabo).

Asklepiadês (of Myrlea in Bithynia, about 170 B. C.) resided some time in Turditania, the south-western region of Spain along the Guadalquivir, as a teacher of Greek literature (παιδεύσας τὰ γραμματικὰ), and composed a periegesis of the Iberian tribes, which unfortunately has not been preserved. He made various discoveries in archæology, and successfully connected his old legends with several portions of the territory before him. His discoveries were,—1. In the temple of Athênê, at this Iberian town of Odysseia, there were shields and beaks of ships affixed to the walls, monuments of the visit of Odysseus himself. 2. Among the Kallæki, in the northern part of Portugal, several of the companions of Teukros had settled and left descendants: there were in that region two Grecian cities, one called Hellenês, the other called Amphilochi; for Amphilochus also, the son of Amphiaraus, had died in Iberia, and many of his soldiers had taken up their permanent residence in the interior. 3. Many new inhabitants had come into Iberia with the expedition of Hêraklês; some also after the conquest of Messênê by the Lacedæmonians. 4. In Cantabria, on the north. coast of Spain, there was a town and region of Lacedæmonian colonists. 5. In the same portion of the country there was the town of Opsikella, founded by Opsikellas, one of the companions of Antenôr in his emigration from Troy (Strabo, iii. p. 157).

This is a specimen of the manner in which the seeds of Grecian mythus came to be distributed over so large a surface. To an ordinary Greek reader, these legendary discoveries of Asklepiadês would probably be more interesting than the positive facts which he communicated respecting the Iberian tribes; and his Turditanian auditors would be delighted to hear—while he was reciting and explaining to them the animated passage of the Iliad, in which Agamemnôn extols the inestimable value of the bow of Teukros (viii. 281)—that the heroic archer and his companions had actually set foot in the Iberian peninsula.

[599] This was the opinion of Kratês of Mallus, one of the most distinguished of the critics on Homer: it was the subject of an animated controversy between him and Aristarchus (Aulus Gellius, N. A. xiv. 6; Strabo, iii. p. 157). See the instructive treatise of Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studiis, c. v. § 4. p. 251. Much controversy also took place among the critics respecting the ground which Menelaus went over in his wanderings (Odyss. iv.). Kratês affirmed that he had circumnavigated the southern extremity of Africa and gone to India: the critic Aristonikus, Strabo’s contemporary, enumerated all the different opinions (Strabo, i. p. 38).

[600] Strabo, iii. p. 157.

[601] Strabo, i. p. 22-44; vii. p. 299.

The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed Geryôn with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the circumfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartêssus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gadês. But the historian Hekatæus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Hêraklês should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryôn to Eurystheus at Mykênæ, and he pronounced Geryôn to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Mykênæ (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian, who cites this passage from Hekatæus, concurs in the same view,—an illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.[602]

[602] Stesichori Fragm. ed. Kleine; Geryonis, Fr. 5. p. 60; ap. Strabo. iii. p. 148; Herodot. iv. 8. It seems very doubtful whether Stesichorus meant to indicate any neighboring island as Erytheia, if we compare Fragm. 10. p. 67 of the Geryonis, and the passages of Athenæus and Eustathius there cited. He seems to have adhered to the old fable, placing Erytheia on the opposite side of the ocean-stream, for Hêraklês crosses the ocean to get to it.

Hekatæus, ap. Arrian. Histor. Alex. ii. 16. Skylax places Erytheia, “whither Geryôn is said to have come to feed his oxen,” in the Kastid territory near the Greek city of Apollônia on the Ionic Gulf, northward of the Keraunian mountains. There were splendid cattle consecrated to Hêlios near Apollônia, watched by the citizens of the place with great care (Herodot. ix. 93; Skylax, c. 26).

About Erytheia, Cellerius observes (Geogr. Ant. ii. 1, 227), “Insula Erytheia, quam veteres adjungunt Gadibus, vel demersa est, vel in scopulis quærenda, vel pars est ipsarum Gadium, neque hodie ejus formæ aliqua, uti descripta est, fertur superesse.” To make the disjunctive catalogue complete, he ought to have added, “or it never really existed,”—not the least probable supposition of all.

Both the track and the terminus of the Argonautic voyage appear in the most ancient epic as little within the conditions of reality, as the speaking timbers or the semi-divine crew of the vessel. In the Odyssey, Æêtês and Circê (Hesiod names Mêdea also) are brother and sister, offspring of Hêlios. The Ææan island, adjoining the circumfluous ocean, “where the house and dancing-ground of Eôs are situated, and where Hêlios rises,” is both the residence of Circê and of Æêtês, inasmuch as Odysseus, in returning from the former, follows the same course as the Argô had previously taken in returning from the latter.[603] Even in the conception of Mimnermus, about 600 B. C., Æa still retained its fabulous attributes in conjunction with the ocean and Hêlios, without having been yet identified with any known portion of the solid earth;[604] and it was justly remarked by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis in antiquity[605] (though Strabo vainly tries to refute him), that neither Homer nor Mimnermus designates Kolchis either as the residence of Æêtês, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But some of the poems ascribed to Eumêlus were the first which mentioned Æêtês and Kolchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian mythical genealogy.[606] These poems seem to have been composed subsequent to the foundation of Sinopê, and to the commencement of Grecian settlement on the Borysthenês, between the years 600 and 500 B. C. The Greek mariners who explored and colonized the southern coast of the Euxine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and its barbarous inhabitants: it was the easternmost point which Grecian navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained, and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus.[607] They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found “the house of Eôs (the morning) and the rising place of the sun,” and that the river Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct them to the circumfluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of Æa, and the fabulous and real title gradually became associated together into one compound appellation,—the Kolchian Æa, or Æa of Kolchis.[608] While Kolchis was thus entered on the map as a fit representative for the Homeric “house of the morning,” the narrow strait of the Thracian Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplêgades, or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argô had been the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Hêrakleia and Sinopê, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to give this direction to the voyage; so that in the time of Hekatæus it had become the established belief that the Argô had started from Iôlkos and gone to Kolchis.

[603] Hesiod, Theogon. 956-992; Homer, Odyss. xii. 3-69.—

Νῆσον ἐς Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ᾽ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης Οἴκια καὶ χόροι εἰσὶ, καὶ ἀντολαὶ ἠελίοιο.

[604] Mimnerm. Fragm. 10-11, Schneidewin; Athenæ. vii. p. 277.—

Οὐδέ κοτ᾽ ἂν μέγα κῶας ἀνήγαγεν αὐτὸς Ἰήσων Ἐξ Αἴης τελέσας ἀλγινόεσσαν ὁδὸν, Ὑβρίστῃ Πελίῃ τελέων χαλεπῆρες ἄεθλον, Οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἐπ᾽ Ὠκεανοῦ καλὸν ἵκοντο ῥόον. · · · · · Αἰήταο πόλιν, τόθι τ᾽ ὠκέος Ἠελίοιο Ἀκτῖνες χρυσέῳ κείαται ἐν θαλάμῳ, Ὠκεανοῦ παρὰ χείλεσ᾽, ἵν᾽ ὤχετο θεῖος Ἰήσων.

[605] Strabo, i. p. 45-46. Δημήτριος ὁ Σκήψιος ... πρὸς Νεάνθη τὸν Κυζικηνὸν ~φιλοτιμοτέρως~ ἀντιλέγων, εἰπόντα, ὅτι οἱ Ἀργοναῦται πλέοντες εἰς Φᾶσιν τὸν ὑφ᾽ Ὁμήρου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὁμολογούμενον πλοῦν, ἱδρύσαντο τὰ τῆς Ἰδαίας μητρὸς ἱερὰ ἐπὶ Κύζικον ... ~ἀρχήν φησὶ μηδ᾽ εἰδέναι τὴν εἰς Φᾶσιν ἀποδημίαν τοῦ Ἰάσονος Ὅμηρον~. Again, p. 46, παραλαβὼν μάρτυρα Μίμνερμον, ὃς ἐν τῷ Ὠκεανῷ ποιήσας οἴκησιν Αἰήτου, etc.

The adverb φιλοτιμοτέρως reveals to us the municipal rivalry and contention between the small town Skêpsis and its powerful neighbor Kyzikus, respecting points of comparative archæology.

[606] Eumêlus, Fragm. Εὐρωπία 7, Κορινθιακὰ 2-5. pp. 63-68, Düntzer.

[607] Arrian, Periplus Pont. Euxin. p. 12; ap. Geogr. Minor. vol. i. He saw the Caucasus from Dioskurias.

[608] Herodot i. 2; vii. 193-197. Eurip. Mêd. 2. Valer. Flacc. v. 51.

Æêtês thus received his home from the legendary faith and fancy of the eastern Greek navigators: his sister Circê, originally his fellow-resident, was localized by the western. The Hesiodic and other poems, giving expression to the imaginative impulses of the inhabitants of Cumæ and other early Grecian settlers in Italy and Sicily,[609] had referred the wanderings of Odysseus to the western or Tyrrhenian sea, and had planted the Cyclôpes, the Læstrygones, the floating island of Æolus, the Lotophagi, the Phæacians, etc., about the coast of Sicily, Italy, Libya, and Korkyra. In this way the Ææan island,—the residence of Circê, and the extreme point of the wanderings of Odysseus, from whence he passes only to the ocean and into Hadês—came to be placed in the far west, while the Æa of Æêtês was in the far east,—not unlike our East and West Indies. The Homeric brother and sister were separated and sent to opposite extremities of the Grecian terrestrial horizon.[610]

[609] Strabo, i. p. 23. Völcker (Ueber Homerische Geographie, v. 66) is instructive upon this point, as upon the geography of the Greek poets generally. He recognizes the purely mythical character of Æa in Homer and Hesiod, but he tries to prove—unsuccessfully, in my judgment—that Homer places Æêtês in the east, while Circê is in the west, and that Homer refers the Argonautic voyage to the Euxine Sea.

[610] Strabo (or Polybius, whom he has just been citing) contends that Homer knew the existence of Æêtês in Kolchis, and of Circê at Circeium, as historical persons, as well as the voyage of Jasôn to Æa as an historical fact. Upon this he (Homer) built a superstructure of fiction (προσμύθευμα): he invented the brotherhood between them, and he placed both the one and the other in the exterior ocean (συγγενείας τε ἔπλασε τῶν οὕτω διῳκισμένων, καὶ ἐξωκεανισμὸν ἀμφοῖν, i. p. 20); perhaps also Jasôn might have wandered as far as Italy, as evidences (σημεῖά τινα) are shown that he did (ib.).

But the idea that Homer conceived Æêtês in the extreme east and Circê in the extreme west, is not reconcilable with the Odyssey. The supposition of Strabo is alike violent and unsatisfactory.

Circê was worshipped as a goddess at Circeii (Cicero, Nat. Deor. iii. 19). Hesiod, in the Theogony, represents the two sons of Circê by Odysseus as reigning over all the warlike Tyrrhenians (Theog. 1012), an undefined western sovereignty. The great Mamilian gens at Tusculum traced their descent to Odysseus and Circê (Dionys. Hal. iv. 45).

The track from Iôlkos to Kolchis, however, though plausible as far as it went, did not realize all the conditions of the genuine fabulous voyage: it did not explain the evidences of the visit of these maritime heroes which were to be found in Libya, in Krêtê in Anaphê, in Korkyra, in the Adriatic Gulf, in Italy and in Æthalia. It became necessary to devise another route for them in their return, and the Hesiodic narrative was (as I have before observed), that they came back by the circumfluous ocean; first going up the river Phasis into the circumfluous ocean; following that deep and gentle stream until they entered the Nile, and came down its course to the coast of Libya. This seems also to have been the belief of Hekatæus.[611] But presently several Greeks (and Herodotus among them) began to discard the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, which had pervaded their old geographical and astronomical fables, and which explained the supposed easy communication between one extremity of the earth and another. Another idea was then started for the returning voyage of the Argonauts. It was supposed that the river Ister, or Danube, flowing from the Rhipæan mountains in the north-west of Europe, divided itself into two branches, one of which fell into the Euxine Sea, and the other into the Adriatic.

[611] See above, p. 239. There is an opinion cited from Hekatæus in Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 284. contrary to this, which is given by the same scholiast on iv. 259. But, in spite of the remarks of Klausen (ad. Fragment. Hekatæi, 187. p. 98), I think that the Schol. ad. iv. 284 has made a mistake in citing Hekatæus; the more so as the scholiast, as printed from the Codex Parisinus, cites the same opinion without mentioning Hekatæus. According to the old Homeric idea, the ocean stream flowed all round the earth, and was the source of all the principal rivers which flowed into the great internal sea, or Mediterranean (see Hekatæus, Fr. 349; Klausen, ap. Arrian. ii. 16, where he speaks of the Mediterranean as the μεγάλη θάλασσα). Retaining this old idea of the ocean-stream, Hekatæus would naturally believe that the Phasis joined it: nor can I agree with Klausen (ad Fr. 187) that this implies a degree of ignorance too gross to impute to him.

The Argonauts, fleeing from the pursuit of Æêtês, had been obliged to abandon their regular course homeward, and had gone from the Euxine Sea up the Ister; then passing down the other branch of that river, they had entered into the Adriatic, the Kolchian pursuers following them. Such is the story given by Apollônius Rhodius from Timagêtus, and accepted even by so able a geographer as Eratosthenês—who preceded him by one generation, and who, though sceptical in regard to the localities visited by Odysseus, seems to have been a firm believer in the reality of the Argonautic voyage.[612] Other historians again, among whom was Timæus, though they considered the ocean as an outer sea, and no longer admitted the existence of the old Homeric ocean-stream, yet imagined a story for the return-voyage of the Argonauts somewhat resembling the old tale of Hesiod and Hekatæus. They alleged that the Argô, after entering into the Palus Mæotis, had followed the upward course of the river Tanais; that she had then been carried overland and launched in a river which had its mouth in the ocean or great outer sea. When in the ocean, she had coasted along the north and west of Europe until she reached Gadês and the Strait of Gibraltar, where she entered into the Mediterranean, and there visited the many places specified in the fable. Of this long voyage, in the outer sea to the north and west of Europe, many traces were affirmed to exist along the coast of the ocean.[613] There was again a third version, according to which the Argonauts came back as they went, through the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont. In this way geographical plausibility was indeed maintained, but a large portion of the fabulous matter was thrown overboard.[614]

[612] Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 287; Schol. ad iv. 284; Pindar, Pyth. iv. 447, with Schol.; Strabo, i. p. 46-57; Aristot. Mirabil. Auscult. c. 105. Altars were shown in the Adriatic, which had been erected both by Jasôn and by Mêdea (ib.).

Aristotle believed in the forked course of the Ister, with one embouchure in the Euxine and another in the Adriatic: he notices certain fishes called τρίχιαι, who entered the river (like the Argonauts) from the Euxine, went up it as far as the point of bifurcation and descended into the Adriatic (Histor. Animal. viii. 15). Compare Ukert, Geographie der Griech. und Römer, vol. iii. p. 145-147, about the supposed course of the Ister.

[613] Diodôr. iv. 56; Timæus, Fragm. 53. Göller. Skymnus the geographer also adopted this opinion (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 284-287). The pseudo-Orpheus in the poem called Argonautica seems to give a jumble of all the different stories.

[614] Diodôr. iv. 49. This was the tale both of Sophoklês and of Kallimachus (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 284).

See the Dissertation of Ukert, Beylage iv. vol. i. part 2, p. 320 of his Geographie der Griechen und Römer, which treats of the Argonautic voyage at some length; also J. H. Voss, Alte Weltkunde über die Gestalt der Erde, published in the second volume of the Kritische Blätter, pp. 162, 314-326; and Forbiger, Handbuch der Alten Geographie-Einleitung, p. 8.

Such were the various attempts made to reconcile the Argonautic legend with enlarged geographical knowledge and improved historical criticism. The problem remained unsolved, but the faith in the legend did not the less continue. It was a faith originally generated at a time when the unassisted narrative of the inspired poet sufficed for the conviction of his hearers; it consecrated one among the capital exploits of that heroic and superhuman race, whom the Greek was accustomed at once to look back upon as his ancestors and to worship conjointly with his gods: it lay too deep in his mind either to require historical evidence for its support, or to be overthrown by geographical difficulties as they were then appreciated. Supposed traces of the past event, either preserved in the names of places, or embodied in standing religious customs with their explanatory comments, served as sufficient authentication in the eyes of the curious inquirer. And even men trained in a more severe school of criticism contented themselves with eliminating the palpable contradictions and softening down the supernatural and romantic events, so as to produce an Argonautic expedition of their own invention as the true and accredited history. Strabo, though he can neither overlook nor explain the geographical impossibilities of the narrative, supposes himself to have discovered the basis of actual fact, which the original poets had embellished or exaggerated. The golden fleece was typical of the great wealth of Kolchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by the rivers; and the voyage of Jasôn was in reality an expedition at the head of a considerable army, with which he plundered this wealthy country and made extensive conquests in the interior.[615] Strabo has nowhere laid down what he supposes to have been the exact measure and direction of Jasôn’s march, but he must have regarded it as very long, since he classes Jasôn with Dionysus and Hêraklês, and emphatically characterizes all the three as having traversed wider spaces of ground than any moderns could equal.[616] Such was the compromise which a mind like that of Strabo made with the ancient legends. He shaped or cut them down to the level of his own credence, and in this waste of historical criticism, without any positive evidence, he took to himself the credit of greater penetration than the literal believers, while he escaped the necessity of breaking formally with the bygone heroic world.

[615] Strabo, i. p. 45. He speaks here of the voyage of Phryxus, as well as that of Jasôn, as having been a military undertaking (στρατεία): so again, iii. p. 149, he speaks of the military expedition of Odysseus—ἡ τοῦ Ὀδυσσέως στρατία, and ἡ Ἡρακλέους στρατία (ib.). Again xi. p. 498. Οἱ μῦθοι, αἰνιττόμενοι τὴν Ἰάσονος στρατείαν προελθόντος μέχρι καὶ Μηδίας· ἔτι δὲ πρότερον τὴν Φρίξου. Compare also Justin, xlii. 2-3; Tacit. Annal. vi. 34.

Strabo cannot speak of the old fables with literal fidelity: he unconsciously transforms them into quasi-historical incidents of his own imagination. Diodôrus gives a narrative of the same kind, with decent substitutes for the fabulous elements (iv. 40-47-56).

[616] Strabo, i. p. 48. The far-extending expeditions undertaken in the eastern regions by Dionysus and Hêraklês were constantly present to the mind of Alexander the Great as subjects of comparison with himself: he imposed upon his followers perilous and trying marches, from anxiety to equal or surpass the alleged exploits of Semiramis, Cyrus, Perseus, and Hêraklês. (Arrian, v. 2, 3; vi. 24, 3; vii. 10, 12. Strabo, iii. p. 171; xv. p. 686; xvii. p. 81).

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VIII. LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES…

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