Studies on Homer

Sect. VIII. — On the Three Greater Homeric Appellatives

a. Danaans. b. Argives. c. Achæans.

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

Modes of formation for Names of Peoples.

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

They appear to come either

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

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

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

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

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

τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουρότροφος. Odyss. ix. 27.

Again, from Αἰγίαλος, the district afterwards called Achæa, we have, in later Greek613, the name Αἰγιαλεῖς for the inhabitants. This does not occur in Homer, but we have what is equivalent to it in the name of Αἰγιάλεια, who was wife of Diomed, and daughter of Adrastus, the former king of Sicyon in Ægialus. This is an instance of the application of the principle, not to the inhabitants at large, but to an individual inhabitant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homer’s use of them distinctive.

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

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

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

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

Such a rule of difference is easy to be traced.

For example. In the Catalogue614 and elsewhere, if in the course of the action he refers to the soldiers who proceeded from the country afterwards called Bœotia, he calls them Βοιωτοί. But where Agamemnon has, or rather makes, occasion to tell a story of the same people acting in prior history, he calls them, not Βοιωτοὶ, but once Καδμεῖοι, and once by the equivalent name Καδμειῶνες615. The tale is an account of the mission of Tydeus from Thebes to Mycenæ, in company with Polynices, which had occurred under the Pelopid dynasty.

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

ἔνθ’ αὖτ’ ἀγγελίην ἐπὶ Τύῃ στεῖλαν Ἀχαιοί.

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

Proofs of the distinctive use.

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

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

ἤδη ἀνὴρ γέγον’ ἐσθλὸς, ὃς Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάξει.

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

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

ὅς ῥ’ ἐκ δήμου ἔλασσεν, ἐπεὶ πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν
Ἀργείων.

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

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

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

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

In the narrative of this raid616, he commonly terms the one side Epeans, and the other Pylians. But he once calls the Epeans, who were inhabitants of Elis, Elians. This is natural enough: for as the Elian name afterwards (and so soon as in the time of Homer) prevailed in that race and country, it might very well have been already beginning to come into use. But he also calls the Pylians Achæans; and he uses the name distinctively, for it is where he is speaking of them as the conquering party617. For this there is clearly no corresponding reason. It is equally clear that Homer does not call the Pylians Ἀχαιοὶ, simply in the sense of being Greeks, for then the name would not have been distinctive: the enemy too would have been included with them, which would turn the passage into nonsense. Homer, then, (there is no other alternative) means to say that the Pylians were, in some particular sense, of the Achæan race.

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

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

Again. Homer uses the word Ἀργεῖος in the feminine singular fifteen times. Twice it is with reference to Juno. Of course this application of the term is figurative. But though it be figurative, the figure is evidently founded on her close and intimate relation, not to the Greeks at large only, but to the Argive name; and to the persons, but more particularly to the place, that was so specially associated with it618.

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

Again, if the epithet Argive, as applied to Helen, meant simply Greek, it might be suitable enough in the mouth of a Trojan speaking among Trojans, but it would have been weak and unmeaning, and therefore most unlike Homer, in the mouth of a Greek or a friend of Greeks; or when, as in the Odyssey619, Helen is no longer among strangers, but at home. Yet it is used in the following passages among others, (1) by Juno to Minerva, Il. ii. 161, (2) by Minerva to Ulysses, Il. ii. 177; and here in a near juxtaposition with the Achæan appellative, which goes far to prove of itself that Ἀργείη has a meaning more specific than merely Greek. The passage is,

Ἀργείην Ἑλένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ Ἀχαιῶν
ἐν Τροίῃ ἀπόλοντο.

I doubt whether Homer ever places in such proximity the two epithets with the same meaning for each620. The tautology would be gross, if Achæan and Argeian each meant neither more nor less than Greek: but if Ἀργείη have the local sense, nothing awkward remains. (3) It is used by Agamemnon, Il. iii. 458, in addressing the Trojans; (4) Il. iv. 174, in addressing Menelaus; (5) Il. ix. 140, in addressing the Greek Council. It seems quite clear, from even this enumeration, that Ἀργείη, as applied to Helen, must mean something different from the mere fact that she belonged to the Greek nation at large.

Nor is it difficult to find a meaning. Homer indeed leaves us but narrow information as to the extraction of Helen. He calls her sometimes εὐπατέρεια621, and many times Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα622. In the Third Iliad he shows her to be the sister of Castor and Pollux, and in the Eleventh Odyssey he shows them to be the children of Tyndareus and Leda623. Who Tyndareus was we do not know from him. But the common tradition, which makes him a sovereign in Eastern Peloponnesus, is thoroughly accordant with the slight notices in Homer. For, as we see from the cases of Eurystheus and Prœtus, it was in Eastern Peloponnesus that the Argive power and name prevailed; and Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus is, as we have also seen, characteristically with him the Argive Helen. Thus then it may now be lawful to say, we are supplied with a meaning for the name which makes it especially appropriate in the mouth of Agamemnon, the head of the Pelopids. For they were the race who, coming in at the head of the Achæans, had from the West overpowered and superseded the Argive power of the East, while they also held as heirs to it by marriage: and if a royal Argive house at the epoch of the war survived only in Helen and her sister Clytemnestra, she in part at least represented its title, and, as a lawful wife of Menelaus, added to his throne whatever authority the name and rights of her race were capable of conferring.

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

The Danaans of Homer.

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

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

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

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

His epithets for the three designations.

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

The epithets of Δαναοὶ are exclusively military epithets:

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

The epithets of Ἀργεῖοι are as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(4) Words descriptive of personal beauty: ἑλικῶπες and καρηκομόωντες.
(5) The word δῖοι, which signifies generally the possession of some kind of excellence.
(6) Words relating to well made and well finished armour: εὐκνήμιδες, χαλκοκνήμιδες, χαλκοχίτωνες.

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

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

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

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

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

It will be observed by readers of the poems, that Homer often brings two of the three great appellatives, or even all the three, into juxtaposition so near, as would be inconvenient upon the supposition that they are purely synonymous. For instance, in Il. i. 71, we have Ἀργεῖοι and Ἀχαιοὶ in the same line, and in Il. i. 90, 91, Δαναοὶ and Ἀχαιοὶ in two successive lines. It is, I think, obvious, that this inconvenience will be mitigated or removed, if it can be shown that each of these three names, though they were most commonly applied to mean the same body of persons, nevertheless had its own shade of meaning. And we shall presently have to examine cases, where a determination of this kind appears to be required by the sense624.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danaan name dynastic.

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

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

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

Compared with the Cadmean.

Except in the one point, that the name Καδμεῖοι had had a clear and undeniable place in prior history, there is a marked analogy between the modes in which Homer treats the Cadmean and the Danaan stories. In each of the two cases, general tradition tells us of a foreigner, who enters Greece and founds a dynasty. This dynasty, after acting powerfully on the destinies of the country for some generations, in the course of time disappears, the name dying with it. All this, in the first of the two instances, we have seen to be sufficiently supported by inference and suggestion from Homer. Yet Homer never mentions Cadmus, except as it were by chance, in the act of giving the extraction of Leucothee625; nor states that he came from abroad; nor that he founded a dynasty at all. He gives us Cadmus, father of Leucothee, and Cadmeans, and lets us make of them what we can. So here he gives us Danaans, and not indeed a Danaus, but a Danae, who is presumably related to Danaus.

2. In Iliad xiv., Jupiter renders an account of his passion for various women, all of them persons in the very highest positions; and among these for Danae626.

        Δανάης καλλισφύρου Ἀκρισιώνης,
ἣ τέκε Περσῆα, πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν.

The line of Danae.

In this passage we have Danae exhibited as the head of a line of sovereigns through Perseus, who occupied the most ancient and most distinguished seat of power in Greece, that of the Eastern Peloponnesus. From her, indeed, the derivation of sovereignty is locally continuous down to the time of Homer. Perseus is the father of Sthenelus627, and Sthenelus of Eurystheus. Next to him, we find Pelops in possession of the throne, with a new sceptre, betokening a new sovereignty. That is to say, he was no longer a merely local sovereign, whose highest honour it was to be first in that class, primus inter pares; but he had also acquired an extensive supremacy, reaching beyond his own borders, or those of the Achaic Argos, and embracing all Greece, with a multitude of islands628.

Such is the line of Danae downwards: beginning with a son, whose paternal extraction we shall consider hereafter629. And her epoch, as we shall see, is six generations before the Trojan war. For tracing her upwards, we have no means from Homer, except such as are afforded by the word Ἀκρισιώνη. The use of a patronymic which describes Danae as the daughter (most probably) of Acrisius, in some degree makes it likely that Acrisius either was the brother of Danaus, or otherwise collaterally related, rather than directly descended from him. For, had Danae herself been descended from Danaus, it seems improbable that she would have drawn her patronymic from the less distinguished Acrisius, unless Danaus was a very remote ancestor. But this is very improbable: for seven generations before Troy form the utmost limit of Homer’s historical knowledge; and where all besides falls within that line, it is improbable that there should be a single exception reaching greatly beyond it. And again, from the course of migration, it is likely that we should find his oldest traditions in Asia, and not in Europe. On the other hand, that Homer should stop short in tracing the lineage onwards, just before he came to the foreign immigrant, is in exact conformity with what he has done in omitting to connect Œdipus and Epicaste630 with Cadmus, or Pelops with Tantalus. In the former of these two cases, the omission all the more cogently suggests design, because Epicaste is the only woman introduced in the Νεκυΐα without mention of her husband, among all those, eight in number, of whose cases he gives us the detail. It is most probable, therefore, that Homer meant the genealogy to stand as follows: and at the least, it must not be thought that the text of Homer gives countenance either directly or indirectly to those later fables, which throw back the first Greek dynasties into a very remote antiquity.

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

Epoch of the dynasty.

According to these presumptions, Danaus is contemporary with Dardanus631: and also is just such a person as Homer’s poetic use of the name Δαναοὶ would lead us to expect; one who came from abroad, and is on that account kept in majestic shadow; one who founded a throne, but did not introduce a race: one who may have given his people the name of Δαναοὶ, as Cadmus gave that of Καδμεῖοι, for the time while his dynasty was in power, but whose name disappeared, together with its sway. We have, it will be remembered in Homer, no Homeric legends of the period of the Danaids, so that we do not know whether the name Δαναοὶ was then in any degree national or not.

According to the post-Homeric tradition, Danaus was an Egyptian632, brother of Ægyptus. He migrated into Greece, and became king of Argos. Acrisius and Prœtus were reputed to be his great-grandsons.

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

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

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

          πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν
Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γάρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν633.

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

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

Danaus has been mentioned by Hesiod, the first among the later authorities. This poet states, that he relieved Argos from drought: an operation which harmonises well with the tradition that brings him from a country dependent on the irrigation of the Nile, as the conditions of cultivation there could not but lead at an early date to care in the management of water. He likewise calls Perseus by the name of Δαναίδης, and also terms him the son of Danae634.

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

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

Post-Homeric tradition.

The evidence of Æschylus in the Supplices supports the tradition which makes them immediately follow the Pelasgi635, or which, more strictly, represents their name as the first of those borne by the Greek nation after it had ceased to be simply Pelasgic.

By Euripides was conveyed a kindred tradition, that Danaus, having come to Argos, colonized the city of Inachus; and that the Peloponnesians, previously called Pelasgiotes, were thereafter called Danai636.

Πελασγιῶτας δ’ ὠνομασμένους, τὸ πρὶν
Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ’ ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα.

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

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

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

Applications of the name Argos.

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

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

ἀνδρὸς, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος637.

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

πολλῇσιν νήσοισι, καὶ Ἄργει παντὶ ἀνάσσειν638.

3. And again, with the proper name Ἀχαïὶς,

Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον, καὶ Ἀχαïίδα καλλιγύναικα639.

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

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

τῷ νῦν σοι μὲν ἐγὼ ξεῖνος φίλος Ἄργεï μέσσῳ
εἰμὶ, σὺ δ’ ἐν Λυκίῃ640.

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

ὅσσ’ ἀγόμην ἐξ Ἄργεος ἡμέτερον δῶ641:

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

νωνύμνους ἀπολέσθαι ἀπ’ Ἄργεος ἐνθάδ’ Ἀχαιούς642.

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

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

ὦ πόποι, ἢ μέγα πένθος Ἀχαίïδα γαῖα ἱκάνει643.

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

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

λαὸν ἀγείροντες κατ’ Ἀχαίïδα πουλυβότειραν644.

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

οὐ γάρ πω σχέδον ἦλθον Ἀχαίïδος, οὐδέ πω ἀμῆς
γῆς ἐπέβην645.

To proceed first with what is most clear, I think it may be taken for certain that Ἀχαίïς, with or without the affix γαῖα or αἶα646, means nothing less than the whole of Greece in the passages where Homer uses this appellative alone. One passage, indeed, taken alone, affords decisive proof for itself that even the islands are included. Telemachus647 thus describes his mother as unrivalled in Greece:

οἵη νῦν οὐκ ἔστι γύνη κατ’ Ἀχαίïδα γαῖαν
οὔτε Πύλου ἱερῆς, οὔτ’ Ἄργεος, οὔτε Μυκήνης,
οὔτ’ αὐτῆς Ἰθάκης, οὔτ’ ἠπείροιο μελαίνης.

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

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

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

1. Ἕλλας.
2. μέσον Ἄργος.

In the second they are,

1. Ἄργος.
2. Ἀχαίïς.

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

1. Πανέλληνες.
2. Ἀχαιοί.

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

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

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

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

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

But what does the Ἄργος ἱππόβοτον mean?

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

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

ἤτοι ἐμοὶ τρεῖς μὲν πολὺ φίλταται εἰσὶ πόληες
Ἄργος τε, Σπάρτη τε, καὶ εὐρυάγυια Μυκήνη.
τὰς διαπέρσαι κ.τ.λ.

2. It is a limited territory, probably such as was afterwards the State of Argolis. For when Telemachus is quitting Sparta, Theoclymenus joins him648, φεύγων ἐξ Ἄργεος. And again, when Melampus quitted Pylos, he came to Argos:

          ὁ δ’ ἄλλων ἵκετο δῆμον
Ἄργος ἐς ἱππόβοτον649.

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

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

μυχῷ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Sisyphus dwells at Ephyre, μυχῷ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο, the word means the north eastern district Peloponnesus650.

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

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

Achaic and Iasian Argos.

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

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

Of the four passages where we read the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, the two first651 relate to the return of Agamemnon and the Greeks, and appear to admit therefore either of the limited sense of a portion of Peloponnesus as the most eminent part, or of the extended one of all Greece, better than of the intermediate one of Peloponnesus itself, with which neither Agamemnon, nor the whole body of the Greeks, had any separate and defined relation, as they had with the dominions of Agamemnon in the capacity of their supreme Chief, and perhaps with those of the Pelopid family jointly, so as to include Menelaus.

In the third case it is used of Juno, as she goes to hasten the birth of Eurystheus652,

καρπαλίμως δ’ ἵκετ’ Ἄργος Ἀχαιïκὸν, ἔνθ’ ἄρα ᾔδη
ἰφθίμην ἄλοχον Σθενέλου Περσηïάδαο.

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

But the fourth passage requires a larger signification for this phrase. It is the question of Telemachus, asking where Menelaus had been during all the time that Ægisthus was about his crime653;

ποῦ Μενέλαος ἔην;
ἢ οὐκ Ἄργεος ἦεν Ἀχαιïκοῦ, ἀλλὰ πῇ ἄλλῃ
πλάζετ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους;

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

Undoubtedly Strabo treats Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος as meaning the whole of Peloponnesus (viii. 5. p. 365, ibid. 6. p. 369), but the argument from Homer’s text seems to be against him: and even he admits from Od. iii. 249, that the term applied also to Laconia in particular: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰδίως τὴν Λακωνικὴν οὕτω προσαγορευθῆναι654.

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

Iasian Argos.

We now come to Ἴασον Ἄργος.

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

εἰ παντές σε ἴδοιεν ἀν’ Ἴασον Ἄργος Ἀχαιοί.

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

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

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

Nor are we wholly without information from Homer on the subject of the original Iasus himself, from whom the name appears to be derived; and whose name we find still subsisting in Attica at the time of the Troica655.

For a passage in the Eleventh Odyssey informs us that Amphion, son of Iasus656, was a powerful prince in Minyeian Orchomenus: that his youngest daughter, the beautiful Chloris, was queen of Pylos: and that Neleus, marrying her, founded there the dynasty of the Neleids. Thus through Pylos we connect a powerful Iasid family with Western Peloponnesus, possibly five generations before the Trojan war, and at a time when we find from Homer that the Danaids or Perseus must have been reigning in Eastern Peloponnesus. This seems enough to justify putting the sense of Western Peloponnesus upon the phrase Ἴασον Ἄργος in the speech of Eurymachus.

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

Lastly, the place μέσον Ἄργος seems to be equivalent to the English expression, ‘through the breadth of Argos,’ or all over Argos; and though we may think that Ἄργος alone means one side of the Peloponnesus, μέσον Ἄργος may very well mean the whole. In the speech of Diomed657 to Glaucus, it cannot mean less than this: on the other hand, from its being the counterpart of Lycia, it may perhaps not less probably signify the whole of settled Greece, and thus be the equivalent of πᾶν Ἄργος in Il. ii. 108. But the more convenient sense for Od. xv. 80 is plainly the Peloponnesus, because then it squares precisely with Hellas in the same passage, and the two together make up the whole of Greece. But without disturbing the signification of the word Hellas, as meaning Northern and Middle Greece, we might still give to μέσον Argos the force of ‘all Greece.’ The words of Menelaus would then stand as if an inhabitant of London said to his friend a foreigner, ‘I will take you through Scotland and all Britain.’ It is difficult, however, to decide absolutely between these two senses of μέσον Ἄργος. What we see plainly is, that the word Ἄργος had taken the deepest root, and a very wide range, in connection with Greek settlements, and with such settlements only.

And now with respect to the line so much criticised,

ἐγχείῃ δ’ ἐκέκαστο Πανέλληνας καὶ Ἀχαιούς658.

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

The Apian land.

We find in Il. i. 270, iii. 49, and in Od. vii. 25, xvi. 18, the expression ἀπίη γαίη, which some of the grammarians, and the common opinion mentioned by Strabo659, have explained to mean the Peloponnesus, while modern scholars render it simply distant660. In the two passages of the Iliad, the former construction is certainly more suitable: and the combination with τηλόθεν in Il. i. 270, is tautological, flat, and un-Homeric, if ἀπίη mean merely distant. In Od. xvi. 18 either sense will serve the passage. In Od. vii. 25 (when we again have τηλόθεν) Ulysses states himself to have come ἐξ ἀπίης γαίης. As he had not come from Peloponnesus, it is assumed that this is not the meaning. I question the reasoning. Ulysses everywhere, when questioned, shows an immense fertility in fiction about himself: in every case, however, carefully reporting himself to be come from a distant spot. I see no reason therefore why we should not construe Ἀπίη γαῖα to mean the Peloponnesus; in conformity with the tradition which Æschylus661 reports concerning Apis, and with the undoubted usage of the tragedians. As I interpret the Outer or Romance-geography of the Odyssey, the Peloponnesus would be understood by the Phæacians of Homer to be extremely remote from their country. The difference of quantity is no sufficient reason against this construction. Plainly Ἀπίη γαίη, if it be a proper name at all, means the whole Peloponnesus, and not a part of it, for Nestor in Il. i. 270 uses it so as to include the Western side, and Hector, Il. iii. 49, so as to include the Eastern.

Geographical definitions.

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

1.	Ἀχαïὶς
	Ἀχαïὶς γαῖα			invariably mean the whole of Greece.
	Ἀχαιῒς αἶα

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Ἴασον Ἄργος means Western Peloponnesus.

8. The word Ἕλλας means

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

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

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

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

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

In the first place let us remark how rarely it is used for a city; in the strict sense of the word, we cannot be said to find it more than once. Its proper meaning is evidently a tract of country.

From this it is limited to the city to which the tract of country belonged: or it is extended to the country at large, of which the particular tract was the capital or governing part. Both these significations are what are termed improper: the latter is also political, and has no relation to race, or to an eponymist, or to any physical features of soil or scenery, whether the word Ἄργος may have had such reference or not, when used in its original, proper, and usual application, to mean a district.

As previously with populations, let us now set out the various descriptions of source, to which the Homeric names of countries and places owe their origin.

They appear to be derived either

1. From an individual eponymist, as Ithaca from Ithacus, Od. xvii. 207; Dardania from Dardanus, Il. xx. 216; Ascanie from Ascanius, Il. ii. 863; while we see the intermediate stage of the process in the name Ἀπίη, joined with γαῖα, supposed to indicate the Peloponnesus, and to be derived from Apis.

2. From a race in occupation: as in the case of Ἀχαïὶς γαῖα and Ἀχαïὶς simply, from the Achæans; Ἕλλας from the Ἕλλοι; Κρήτη or Κρηταὶ (Od. xiv. 199) from the Κρῆτες.

3. From its physical features or circumstances directly, such as Αἰγίαλος from being a narrow strip along the shore of the Corinthian gulf, between the mountains and the sea: there is also a town Αἰγίαλος of the Paphlagonians, Il. ii. 855. Probably we may add Εὔβοια, Eubœa, from the adaptation of that fertile island to tillage, which afterwards made it the granary of Athens.

4. From some race occupying it: and in the cases where that race has been named from any feature of the country, then, not directly but derivatively, from the country itself.

For instance, Θρῄκη from Θρῇκες, Thracians, which word again must come from a common root with τρᾶχυς. The name Τρηχῖν has obviously a similar origin.

So again in the later Greek we find the old Αἰγίαλος named Αἰγιάλεια from the intermediate formation Αἰγιαλεῖς: and perhaps Ἄργολις from the Ἀργεῖοι, who inhabited it, and took their name from Ἄργος.

And so in Homer we have Φθίη; from that apparently comes Φθῖοι, and from this again, in the later Greek, Phthiotis.

Such then are the ordinary sources, as far as we know, of the territorial names of Homer.

The three aids which we have for judging of the meaning of the name Ἄργος are, the Homeric text, etymology, and the later tradition.

Etymology of the word Argos.

None of these in any manner connect the name Ἄργος either with an eponymist, or with a race of inhabitants, either mediately or immediately, as its root. We can only therefore look for its origin in something related to the physical features of the country, or countries, to which it was applied.

The word ἄργος itself is frequently found in Homer otherwise than as a proper name. It is used as an adjective in the following combinations:

1. κύνες ἀργοὶ Il. i. 50.

2. βόες ἀργοὶ Il. xxiii. 30.

3. ἀργὴν χῆνα Od. xv. 161.

So also we have the compounds ἀργὴς (κέραυνος) ἀργικέραυνος, ἀργεστὴς (Νότος), ἀργενναὶ (ὀΐες, ὀθόναι), ἀργινόεις (Κάμειρος), ἀργιόδοντες (ὕες), ἀργιπόδες (κύνες), Ποδάργης (horse of Achilles).

And it is usual to give to the word ἀργὸς662 in these several forms the several senses of

1. Swift, as in swift dogs, swift thunderbolt.

2. White, as in white goose, white (chalky) Cameirus.

3. Sleek, shining, as in sleek oxen, with glistening coats.

It is said truly, that what is swift in motion gives an appearance of shining: and what shines is in some degree akin to whiteness. But it is neither easy to say, in this view of the matter, which is the primary, and which the secondary, meaning of the word, nor what is its etymology. Nor does it show the slightest resemblance to the local name Ἄργος, which, from the variety of its applications, apart from any question of race or political connection, must have had some etymological signification.

Nor, as regards the βόες ἀργοὶ in particular, is it very easy to believe in the sleekness of the oxen in Homer’s time, (this seems to be rather an idea borrowed from the processes and experience of modern times,) or of the camp oxen of any time. Nor is the matter mended by two forced attempts, one to construe βόες ἀργοὶ as oxen having white fat within them, or again, as slow oxen. From these sources, then, we can at present obtain no light.

Now I submit that the just signification of the proper name Ἄργος is to be found by considering it as akin to the word ἔργον, which plainly appears in Homer to have agricultural labours for its primary object. And it seems pretty clear, that by the transposition of letters which so commonly occurs in popular speech, especially during the infant state of languages, the word ἄγρος, ‘a field,’ is no more than a form of Ἄργος.

K. O. Müller, as we have seen, considers that Ἄργος with the ancients means a plain663: I would add a plain, not as being a flat surface, but as being formed of cultivable ground, or else it means a settlement formed upon such ground.

In speaking of the word plain as applied to Greece, we use it relatively, not as it would be employed in reference to Russia or Hungary, but as meaning the broader levels between the hills, and commonly towards the sea: such as those valleys of Scotland which are called carses, or those called straths.

Now in the first place I know no other meaning of the word Ἄργος which will suit its various uses in Homer as Pelasgic Argos, Achaic Argos, Iasian Argos. What is the one common physical feature of the several regions that accounts for the common factor in these three compound expressions, if it be not that of plain, that is to say, cultivable, and cultivated, or settled country?

Again, look at the relation of Ἄργος to Ἀργεῖοι. What except a physical and geographical meaning, still adhering to the word, and holding it somewhat short of the mature and familiar use of a proper name, can account for the fact that we have in the history and geography of Greece so many cases of an Argos, without Argives, that is local or provincial Argives, belonging to it? Achaic Argos indeed has Ἀργεῖοι belonging to it, but Pelasgic and Iasian Argos have none. Just so we might speak of the Highlands of Saxony, or of the Lowlands of Switzerland; but the inhabitants of the first are not known as Highlanders, nor those of the latter as Lowlanders664.

I believe there are no phrases, which more nearly translate the words Ἄργος and Ἀργεῖοι, than Lowlands and Lowlanders respectively. For the word Lowlands means land not only lying low, but both lying low, and also being favourable for cultivation: and these ideas more truly represent the land fitted for the sort of settlement called Ἄργος, than the mere idea of level plains.

If this be the idea of the word Argos, we see the propriety of its application to the city of Argos and its district. For this city stood, as a city of the town and more open country, in a certain opposition to Mycenæ, which nestled among the hills; and which bore geographically much the same relation to Argos, as Dardania to Ilion. It afterwards fell also into the same political analogy.

In the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, Homer deals with a case where, as it is sometimes applied without an epithet, Ἄργος may justly be called a proper name, like the European Pays-bas; but there is no evidence of this in his ‘Pelasgic Argos,’ and ‘Iasian Argos,’ and it seems likely that he rather intends in those phrases to employ the term Argos as a word simply descriptive, and to speak of the Pelasgian Lowlands, and the Iasian Lowlands. The difference of sense is just that which we should indicate in English by the absence of the capital letter.

There is evidence that the name had not exhausted its elasticity even after Homer’s time. In later ages we find an Argos of Orestis in Macedonia; an Argos of Amphilochia in Western Greece; an Argos near Larissa in Thessaly665, and other cases more remote. Nothing but a geographical force still adhering to the word will account for this extension.

The same is the inference to be drawn from the epithets and quasi-epithets, or descriptive phrases, applied to it by Homer. With the exception of one passage, where he gives it the political epithet666 κλυτὸν, they are all physical; being ἱππόβοτον, πολυδίψιον, πολύπυρον, and οὖθαρ ἀρούρης. Of these four epithets, the first is in Homer peculiarly connected with the specific form and character of the country: accordingly, while it is the standing epithet of Argos, being used with it eleven times out of only fifteen in which the word has any epithet or quasi-epithet attached to it, it is never found with Achæis, or with Hellas. And the proof of its physically descriptive character lies in the passage where Telemachus gives to Menelaus an account of Ithaca;

ἐν δ’ Ἰθάκῃ οὔτ’ ἀρ’ δρόμοι εὔρεες, οὔτε τι λείμων·
αἰγίβοτος, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος ἱπποβότοιο667.

The ἱππόβοτος of Homer, again, does not point merely to fertility, but also to labour and its results; not merely to pasture, but also to grain, for the horses of Homer are fed on this as well as on herbage,

κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλεύρας668.

Now, in referring the word Ἄργος to a common root and significancy with ἔργον, we are not bound to hold that it attains its initial vowel by junction with the particle ἀ used in its intensive sense. For we have the word, and also its derivatives, in this form, coming down to us from the old Greek. Among the four tribes of Attica which subsisted until the time of Cleisthenes669, one was that of the Ἄργαδες or husbandmen: and in the Elian inscription supposed to date about the Fortieth Olympiad670, or more than 600 years B. C., we have the very word ἔργον in the form ἄργον, with the digamma, in a passage which I copy,

ΑΙΤΕϜΕΠΟΣ ΑΙΤΕϜΑΡΓΟΝ

This inscription, says the Article in the Museum Criticum, is of older date than any other which has either been brought in copy from Greece, or is to be found on the marbles. The matter of it is a public treaty, between the Elians and some of their neighbours, concluded for an hundred years.

Another good example of the interchange of the vowels α and ε is in the word ἀρόω, which it is obvious to derive from ἔρα, the earth. In the Latin we see both forms preserved, the one in aro to plough, the other in sero to sow. And this latter suggests the derivation of the Greek σπείρω from a similar source.

If then the meaning of Ἄργος be an agricultural settlement, and its root the same with that of ἔργον, we need not now discuss at large whether that root be the old word ἔρα or terra, which however appears to be probable, and which accounts both for the especial reference of the word ἔργον in Homer to tillage, the oldest industry, and for the subsequent extension of its meaning to labour and its results in general.

The etymology tested by kindred words.

Now, having this view of the words Ἄργος and ἔργον, we shall find, in the fundamental idea of labour itself, a meaning which will furnish a basis for the Homeric adjective, and for all its compounds in all their varied applications. That idea is always in relation with what is earnest, and (so to speak) strengthful; sometimes this takes the form of keenness, and then comes in the idea of swiftness in conjunction with labour: sometimes, again, it takes the form of patience, and then labour suggests slowness. The labour of a dog is swift, that of an ox is patient: hence the κύνες ἄργοι are laborious dogs, therefore swift; and hence too the βόες ἄργοι are laborious oxen, therefore slow; the office of the one being to cover space, and of the other to overcome resistance. We may bring the two senses near without any loss in either case, by calling the oxen sturdy or sedulous, and the dogs strenuous or keen.

The third sense of whiteness legitimately attaches to the effect of rapid motion upon the eye.

The sense of sleekness does not appear to be required in Homer: but it may be a derivative from that of whiteness.

By one or more of the three first senses, or by the original sense of labour in its (so to speak) integral idea, all the Homeric words may be justly rendered. Some of them will bear either the sense of swift, or that of white: for instance, ἀργὴς with κεραυνός. In Aristotle671, de Mundo, c. 4, we have τῶν κεραυνῶν... οἱ ταχέως διάττοντες, ἀργῆτες λέγονται. And again, ἀργεστὴς with Νότος. This may mean the fleet Notus: it may also mean white, as carrying the light white cloud from over the sea, in the sense taken by Horace, who appears to have been an accurate and careful observer of Homeric epithets; and who says,

Albus ut obscuro deterget nubila cœlo
  Sæpe Notus672.

This sense of the word Argos will suit other uses of it which have not been yet named.

For instance, it will suit the ship Argo, which we may consider as swift, or, and perhaps preferably, as stout, strong, doing battle with the waves: as we now say, a good ship, or a gallant ship. Again, it suits the noble dog Argus of the Odyssey, whose character would be but inadequately represented by either patient, swift, or white. Considering this word as the adjective of the word which describes what has been well called by a writer of the present day, “noble, fruitful labour,” we at once see him before us, swift as he had been, and patient as he was, but also brave, faithful, trustful, and trustworthy. Argus the spy, named in the Ἀργειφόντης of Homer, represents one side of the early meaning of the word673. The adjective ἀργαλέος, exaggerating as well as isolating that element of difficulty which the root comprises, represents another: and the later word ἀργοῦντες674, the idle, catching the idea of slowness at the point where it passes into inertness, similarly represents yet another.

Such being the case in regard to the name Ἄργος, we shall now have an easy task in dealing with Ἀργεῖοι.

Homer employs this word in four places (to speak in round numbers) for three in which he uses Δαναοί.

He employs it as an epithet, sometimes with the name of Juno, and frequently with the name of Helen.

The Danaan Argives of Od. viii. 578.

In the Odyssey675 we have this singular and rare juxtaposition of the words:

Ἀργείων Δαναῶν ἠδ’ Ἰλίου οἶτον ἀκούων.

Nitzsch676 observes, that we might almost suppose the word Ἀργείων to be an epithet, and this observation is quoted by G. Crusius. Eustathius, the Scholiast, Barnes, Payne Knight, do not notice it. It seems to me more agreeable to Homeric laws to treat Ἀργείων as the substantive, and Δαναῶν as the adjective. For as Homer knows of an Achaic, an Iasian, a Pelasgic Argos, so he may consistently speak of Danaan Argives, with the latent idea that there might be, and were, other Lowlanders out of Greece. But there were not, so far as we know, any other Danaans than a single Greek dynasty.

Homer also in other places uses Δαναοὶ677 as an adjective, with the substantives ἥρωες and αἰχμηταί. He has no corresponding use of Ἀργεῖοι: thus the old idea of a colonus or farming settler seems still to colour the word, and lingers in it, even after it has grown to be in common use a proper name.

In the application of the word Ἀργείη as an epithet to Juno and Helen, he appears not to mean simply Greek but Argive Juno, Argive Helen, so that the word here is not properly the singular of Ἀργεῖοι the national name, but simply the adjective formed from Ἄργος, in the sense of that part of Peloponnesus which formed the Pelopid dominions. To these Helen belonged: and for that family, as previously for the Perseid race, Juno felt her chief anxiety, evidently because they were the political heads of Greece.

Thus the use of Argeian as an adjective seems to be quite clearly limited to a local sense of the word: and this being the case, it seems remarkable that the attention of the commentators before Nitzsch should not have been directed to the line in the Eighth Odyssey, and that Nitzsch, with ἥρωες Δαναοὶ and αἰχμηταὶ Δαναοὶ to guide him, should suggest the sense of Argive Danaans, instead of Danaan Argives.

The local use, however, of the Argeian name must not be dismissed without a more full investigation. Let us first dispose of its use for Juno and Helen.

The proof that Helen is meant to be described as not merely Greek, but as connected with Achaic Argos or Eastern Peloponnesus, has already been sufficiently678 set forth.

As respects Juno, we shall find that her affections always centre in the house that was paramount in the chief seat of Hellenic power, the Eastern Peloponnesus. Her tenacious attachments are constantly directed to the nation, and they survive dynastic changes. Hence her keen and venturesome feeling for Eurystheus; her never dying, never sleeping hatred to his rival Hercules; her esteem for Agamemnon equally with Achilles679, though they were so unequal in fame and valour: perhaps suggesting that Achilles was regarded by her either because he was necessary for the purposes of Agamemnon, or because he was closely allied to the chief Achæan stock680. Hence it is that, when he has assumed his arms681, she thunders in his honour: and hence her especial love for the three cities, which were the symbols of Greek power, Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ682. So intense is her attachment, that she could wish to be the actual mother of the Greeks, even as she would readily devour the Trojans upon occasion683. Hence, once more, even in the Odyssey, where she is almost a mute, it is mentioned, that Agamemnon684 came safe across the sea, for Juno protected him. This is quite enough to fix the sense of Ἀργείη, when it is applied to Juno, as a local sense.

In fact, Homer’s use of this word with a restrained and local sense is not only clear, but most carefully defined, both as to time and as to place.

While in the army before Troy he freely interchanges Danaan, Argive, and Achæan, as they are near enough to identity for his purpose, he never applies Danaan at all to the Greeks at home, and employs the other two names with the most accurate discrimination.

Transition from Argeians to Achæans.

The Argeian name is confined in place to the Eastern Peloponnesus, and in time to the Perseid epoch. Upon the transfer of the sovereignty to the Pelopid house, the Argeian name ceases to be applied to their immediate subjects. Let us now examine passages which may illustrate the case.

1. Two or nearly three generations before the Troica, in the time when Bellerophon was young, Prœtus ruled over the Ἀργεῖοι,

          πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν
Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γὰρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν685.

Now Prœtus was certainly not lord of Greece. There was no lord paramount of Greece before the Pelopids: and near the time of Prœtus we have Eurystheus, Œneus and his line, Cadmus and his line, Neleus and his line, Minos and his line, as well as probably other thrones, each in its own place. But Prœtus falls within the period of the Perseids, and within the local circumscription of the Eastern Peloponnesus where they reigned.

2. But neither is Eurystheus spoken of by Homer as sovereign of Greece; though he is king of the Argives686,

ὃς Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάξει.

For when Juno fraudulently asks and obtains from Jupiter the promise that the person to be born that day shall enjoy a certain sovereignty, it is not over the Argives, but over the περικτίονες:

ἦ μὲν τὸν πάντεσσι περικτιόνεσσιν ἀνάξειν
ὅς κεν ἐπ’ ἤματι τῷδε πέσῃ μετὰ ποσσὶ γυναικός.

Thus the promise is the babe shall reign over περικτίονες, a word clearly inapplicable to the whole of that straggling territory, which was occupied irregularly by the Greeks. But when the fulfilment is claimed, it is that he shall reign over Ἀργεῖοι. Therefore the two names are coextensive, and accordingly Ἀργεῖοι does not mean all Greeks; for example, it does not include the line of Cadmus then ruling in Bœotia.

3. But we come down to the time of Tydeus, who was lord of Argos during the epoch of the Pelopid sovereigns. And now we find that his subjects cease to be called Ἀργεῖοι (see Il. v. 803. iv. 384) in the legends, where Homer observes a peculiar nicety in the application of these important words.

Local sense of the former name retained.

4. Still the Argeian name continues to preserve its local application to the inhabitants of Argos and its district, or of Achaic Argos.

At the games on the death of Patroclus, Idomeneus thinks he discerns Diomed coming in as the winner, and he describes him thus:

          δοκέει δέ μοι ἔμμεναι ἀνὴρ
Αἴτωλος γενέην, μετὰ δ’ Ἀργείοισιν ἀνάσσει687.

It is plain that here Idomeneus means among Argives, and not among Greeks.

1. Because not Diomed was lord among the Greeks, but Agamemnon.

2. Because Diomed was lord over a part of the Argives.

3. Because the word is used in evident contradistinction to, and correspondence with, the foregoing word Αἴτωλος, which is undoubtedly local.

Again, when we are told that Orestes made a funeral feast for the Ἀργεῖοι688, we may probably presume that we have here again the local sense.

Thus we see plainly enough the history of the rise of the Argive name. Belonging to the subjects of the ruling part of Greece, it grows so as to be applicable to all Greeks, in cases where no confusion can arise from its being thus employed. Thus the Roman name became applicable to Campanians or Calabrians as subjects of Rome, in contradistinction to Germans, Dacians, or Parthians; but if the subject in hand were domestic and Italian, the domestic distinction would naturally revive. Even so Homer’s Greeks are all Argeians in the Troica: but at home they have their local meaning, like Cadmeans, Ætolians, Pylians, Elians, Epeans, Arcadians, Locrians, and also, as we shall find, Achæans.

It is at the very period of the local prevalence of the Argive name, that we find also from Homer unequivocal appearances of a Cretan empire, circumscribing it by sea, and possibly more or less by land, though perhaps the Minoan power and dynasty may not at once have acquired its Grecian character. If then, with respect to the word Ἀργεῖοι, we see that it was originally of limited and local application; we have no reason whatever to suppose that the Danaan name could ever have been of wider scope. Two questions then arise.

First, why does Homer use the Danaan and Argive names as national, when they were only local?

Secondly, the priority of the Danaan name being clear, as we see that the Danaan dynasty preceded that one whose subjects were called Argives, why did the Argive name supplant or succeed the Danaan?

The first question will be resumed hereafter, but I will now touch upon the second.

The name Danaan, in all likelihood, was that of a dynasty originating beyond seas; and if so, it could not well, until softened by the mellow haze of distance, be more popular with the Greeks, when they had awakened under Hellic influence to a full consciousness of national life, than it would have been with the English in the last century to be called Hanoverians or Brunswickers.

The Danaid line ceased, when Perseus came to the throne, as he was descended on the father’s side from another source.

Nothing could be more natural, than that with this change of dynasty an old and merely dynastic name should disappear. But why should it be succeeded by the name Ἀργεῖοι?

Relation of Argeian and Pelasgian names.

I hope it will not be thought too bold, if, founding myself on the probable, perhaps I might say, plain resemblance of meaning between Πελασγοὶ and Ἀργεῖοι, I conjecture that on the disappearance from use of the name Δαναοὶ, instead of falling back upon the old agricultural name Πελασγοὶ, which had by a Danaan conquest become that of a subordinate, if not servile class, the people may have come to bear the name Ἀργεῖοι; borrowed, like the other, from the region they inhabited, and from their habits of life in it, and of equal force, but without the taint which attached to the designation of a depressed race.

In this view, the name Ἀργεῖοι may be defined to be the Hellic equivalent of the old Pelasgic appellation of the people of the country: and it naturally takes root upon the passing away of the Danaan power, within the dominions of those to whom that power had been transferred.

I shall hereafter have occasion to consider further, what was the first historic use of the Argeian name.

There are signs in the later Greek of the affinity, which I have here supposed, between the Pelasgian and Argeian names, and of the assumption of the functions of the former by the latter. I do not enter on the question of etymological identity, but I refer to similarity of application alone.

Illustrations of the Etymology.

In Suidas we find the proverb Ἀργείους ὁρᾷς, with this explanation; παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν ἀτενῶς καὶ καταπληκτικῶς ὁρώντων. Now we know nothing of the Argives, that is, the inhabitants of Argolis, which would warrant the supposition that they were of particularly savage and wild appearance. But if Ἀργεῖοι, as has been shown, originally meant settlers in an agricultural district, and if in process of time the population gathered into towns, in lieu of their old manner of living κωμηδὸν, then, in consequence of the change, Ἀργεῖοι would come to mean rustics, as opposed to townspeople, and from this the transition would be slight and easy to the sense of a wild and savage aspect, as in the proverb.

Let us compare with it the Latin word agrestis. This I take to be precisely similar, indeed identical, etymologically, with Ἀργεῖος. The point of divergence is when Ἄργος by transposition becomes ἀγρὸς, whence are ager and agrestis. Materially this Latin word is in still closer correspondence with ἀργηστὴς, a Greek derivative of ἄργος. Ideally, it passes through the very same process as has been shown in the case of Ἀργεῖος, and here it is strongly supported by the common Homeric word ἄγριος, rude or savage, which comes from ἄγρος, made ready by transposition to yield such a derivative.

This name we find not only as an adjective, but likewise as a proper name. It is applied to a brother of Œneus and Melas, a son of Portheus689: and in these names we appear to see described the first rude Hellic invaders of Ætolia, at an epoch three generations before the Troica. The agrestis, or agricultural settler, next comes to mean the class of country folk, as opposed to the inhabitants of towns or urbani; and then, while urbanus, with its Greek correlative ἀστεῖος, passes on to acquire the meaning of cultivated and polished, agrestis, on the other hand, following a parallel movement with Ἀργεῖος, and in the opposite direction, comes to mean uneducated, coarse, wild, barbarous. Thus Ovid says of the river Achelous, when he had been mutilated by the loss of his horn in the combat with Hercules,

        Vultus Achelous agrestes
Et lacerum cornu mediis caput abdidit undis690.

Thus Cicero, in the Tusculans, after a description of the battles of the Spartan youths, carried on not only with fists and feet, but with nails and teeth, asks, Quæ barbaria India (al. barbaries Indica) vastior atque agrestior?

We also find in Suidas the phrase Ἀργεῖοι φῶρες, and this explanation: Ἐπὶ τῶν προδήλως πονηρῶν· οἱ γὰρ Ἀργεῖοι ἐπὶ κλοπῇ κωμῳδοῦνται. Ἀριστοφάνης Ἀναγύρῳ.

No part of this play remains, so that we are left to general reasoning: but it seems a most natural explanation of this proverb or phrase, that the word Ἀργεῖος, meaning wild and savage, should be applied to banditti: theft in the early stages of society, always frequenting solitary places, as in the later ones, it rather draws to the most crowded haunts of men.

Again, Æschines, in the Περὶ Παραπρεσβείας, brings the grossest personal charges against Demosthenes, for offences, which he says had brought upon him various nicknames. Among these, he thus accuses him: Ἐκ παιδῶν δὲ ἀπαλλαττόμενος, καὶ δεκαταλάντους δίκας ἑκαστῷ τῶν ἐπιτρόπων λαγχάνων, Ἄργας ἐκλήθη. This passage is noticed by both Suidas and Hesychius under Ἀργὰς, and it is explained ὄνομα ὀφέως. A serpent, either generally or of some particular kind, had, it seems, the name of Ἀργὰς, which we can easily derive from ἄργος, taken in the same sense as that in which it became the name of Argus the spy. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field691.’ But this does not seem to satisfy the intention of the highly vituperative passage in Æschines. This imputation of extreme cleverness or craft would not have been perhaps a very effective one in Greece. I think he more probably means to call Demosthenes a swindler or plunderer, homo trium literarum, from whom his guardians were trying to recover, and who was likely to be exposed, not like the serpent, to get off: and in this sense the word Ἀργὰς at once attaches itself to the reported passage in Aristophanes, and through that to the old meaning of agrestis or Ἀργεῖος. Nor is Ἀργεῖος, a thief, more remote in sense from Ἀργεῖος, a rural settler, than is paganus, an idolater, from paganus, a villager.

I will take yet one more illustration, Hesychius under Ἀργεῖοι gives this explanation; ἐκ τῶν Εἱλώτων οἱ πιστευόμενοι οὕτως ἐλέγοντο, ἢ λαμπροί. Now the sense of λαμπροὶ might easily be derived from the primitive sense, in the same way as that of whiteness. But it is quite distinct from the explanation respecting that select and trusted class of Helots, who were called Ἀργεῖοι. This usage both serves to explain history, and is explained by it. Ἀργεῖοι was the name of the Greek citizen in Eastern Peloponnesus under the Perseids; it appears in part to have retained its local force throughout the period of the Pelopids; for though in the legend of Tydeus the inhabitants of Argolis we at least find the name Ἀχαιοὶ among them, yet in the Twenty-third Iliad, and in the Third Odyssey, they are called Ἀργεῖοι. In the local usage, then, the Helot meaning a serf, the emancipated Helot would be a citizen, an Ἀργεῖος. But neither serfship nor citizenship were in those days rigidly defined, and the one ran into the other. What could under such circumstances be more natural, than that any Helot who was separated from his brethren, by being taken into the confidence of his master, and living on easy terms with him, should acquire the name of Ἀργεῖος, and, that the class who had thus obtained it in a somewhat peculiar sense, that is to say, the sense of a free rural settler, or (so to speak) freeholder, should continue to bear it as descriptive of their own position, even when it had ceased to be generally applicable to the free Greeks of that particular district? which of course it could no longer be when the family and dynastic tie between Argolis and Lacedæmon came to be dissolved.

And if I am right in supposing that even in Homer692 the name Ἀργεῖοι evidently leans towards the masses, and that of Ἀχαιοὶ towards the select few or chiefs, such a distinction is in marked harmony with the whole of this inquiry respecting the force of the former phrase.

Different extent of Ἀργεῖοι and Ἄργος .

According to the view which has been here given, we must carefully distinguish between the sense of Ἀργεῖοι, as a national name in Homer, and that of Ἄργος, in this respect. The name Ἀργεῖοι was raised to the distinction of a national name apparently in consequence of the political ascendancy of a house that reigned over territories specially named Ἄργος, and over subjects named from the region Ἀργεῖοι. I say this without undertaking to determine whether there actually was a period in which the Greeks were as a nation called Ἀργεῖοι, a supposition which seems to me improbable: or whether it was a name which Homer applied to them poetically, like the name Δαναοὶ, because it had once been the proper designation of those who held the seat of Greek supremacy. In either view, however, the case of the name Ἄργος is different. That name had not its root in political power, actual or remembered: it kept its place, as being founded in a good physical description, so far as it went, of the general character of the principal habitable parts of the peninsula which the Hellic tribes, swarming downwards from their hills, successively and gradually occupied. Hence the substantive was, as we see, capable of spreading beyond the adjective in space, since, while we have an Iasian and a Pelasgian Ἄργος, we have no Iasian or Pelasgian Ἀργεῖοι. Thus they were detached one from the other. In Homer the epithet has a larger range of clear signification than the substantive. But apart from Homer the substantive appears from etymology to have been the older, and from history either to have reached points at which the adjective never arrived, or to have long survived its desuetude.

The Achæans

Particulars of the use of the Achæan name.

The lights, which we have already obtained in considering the Danaan and Argive names, will assist the inquiry with respect to the Achæans. At the same time, the fullest view of that name and race cannot be attained, until we shall have succeeded in fixing what we are to understand by the Homeric ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

I now proceed, however, to show from the text of the poems,

1. That of the three great appellatives of the nation, the name Ἀχαιοὶ is the most familiar.

2. That the manner of its national use indicates the political predominance of an Achæan race, in the Homeric age, over other races, ranged by its side in the Troic enterprise, and composing along with it the nation, which owned Agamemnon for its head.

3. That, besides its national use, the name Ἀχαιοὶ has also an important local and particular use for a race which had spread through Greece, and which exercised sway among its population.

4. That the manner of its local and particular use points out to us, with considerable clearness, the epoch at which it acquired preponderance, namely that when Pelops and his family acquired ascendancy in Greece.

As respects the first of these propositions, the numerical test, although a rude one, yet appears to be conclusive. We find that Homer uses the name Ἀργεῖοι in the plural two hundred and five times, of which twenty-eight are in the Odyssey; besides fifteen passages in which the singular is used. And the name Δαναοὶ about one hundred and sixty times, of which thirteen are in the Odyssey. But we find the name Ἀχαιοὶ, employed from seven to eight hundred times: that is to say, five hundred and ninety-seven times in the Iliad, and one hundred and seventeen times in the Odyssey; all these in the plural number, besides thirty-two places of the poems in which it is used in the singular, or in its derivatives Ἀχαίïς or Ἀχαιïκός.

The particulars next to be stated will bear at once upon the first and upon the second proposition.

Homer very rarely attaches any epithet to the name Ἀργεῖοι, more frequently by much to Δαναοὶ, and still oftener to Ἀχαιοί. To the first only six times in all: to the second twenty-four: and to the third near one hundred and forty times. It is not likely that metrical convenience is the cause of this diversity. We have already seen that Ἀργεῖοι is susceptible of a substantive force, which will carry one at least of the other names by way of epithet, as if it indicated an employment, and not properly the name of a race. A like inference may be drawn from the greater susceptibility of carrying descriptive epithets, which we now find the Danaan and Achæan names evince. For example, the name of the Scotts, Douglasses, or Grahams, four centuries ago, would have afforded larger scope for characteristic epithets than such a name as Farmers or Colonists, when used to point out a particular people, or than such a name as Lowlanders, while it still retained its descriptive character, and had not yet become purely titular or proper. We must probably look, then, to political significance for the basis of the use made by Homer of the Achæan name.

When we examine the character of the epithets, this presumption is greatly corroborated. Homer uses with the word Ἀχαιοὶ, and with this word only, epithets indicating, firstly, high spirit, secondly, personal beauty, and thirdly, finished armour693. I take these to be of themselves sufficient signs, even were others wanting, to point to the Achæans as being properly the ruling class, or aristocracy, of the heroic age.

The Achæan name, again, attains with Homer to a greater variety of use and inflexion than the Danaan or Argeian names.

He has worked it into the female forms Ἀχαιΐδες, Ἀχαιïάδες, Ἀχαιαὶ, as on the other side he has done with the names Τρῶες into Τρωὲς, Τρωάδες, and Τρωαὶ, and Δάρδανοι into Δαρδανίδες: but he has not made any such use of the names Ἀργεῖοι and Δαναοί. The female use of the former appears indeed in the singular with the names of Juno and of Helen, but never as applicable to Greek women in general, or to a Greek woman simply as such.

He uses it in the singular to describe ‘a Greek’ Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ, Il. iii. 167, 226: which he never does for the two other names. In the same manner he uses Δάρδανος ἄνηρ, Il. ii. 701. This form seems to indicate the full and familiar establishment of a name; and the Dardanians had, we know, been Dardanians for seven generations before the Troica (Il. xx. 215-40).

In the opening passage of the First Iliad, not less than in that of the Odyssey, Homer has, as it is generally observed by critics, intentionally given us a summary or ‘Argument’ of his poem. But I doubt whether sufficient notice has been taken of the very effective manner in which he has given force to his purpose, by taking care in that passage to use the most characteristic words. Achilles is there the son of Peleus, for his extraction, as on both sides divine, but especially as on the father’s side from Jupiter, is the groundwork of his high position in the poem. Agamemnon is likewise here introduced under the title which establishes the same origin for him, and more than any thing else enhances the dignity of his supremacy before men694. And the Greeks too, if I am correct, are not without significancy here introduced to us, as is right, under their highest and also their best established designation, that of Achæans. Nor is it until they have been five times called Achæans695 that he introduces the Danaan name696 at all. The Argive name, as if the weakest, when it is first employed, is placed in an awkward nearness to the title of Achæans, perhaps by way of explanation:

          ὃς μέγα πάντων
Ἀργείων κρατέει, καὶ οἱ πείθονται Ἀχαιοί697.

Again the paramount force of the Achæan name may justly be inferred from its being the only territorial name which had clearly grasped the whole of Greece at the epoch of the Troica698.

Turning now entirely to what indicates more or less of peculiar character in the Achæans, I would observe, that the adjective δῖοι appears to be the highest of all the national epithets employed by Homer; and this he couples, as has been observed by Mure699, (who recognises a peculiar force in the term,) with the Achæan designation alone among the three. He also applies it to the Pelasgi; for whom, as we have found, he means it to be a highly honourable epithet. Probably the Achæans are δῖοι because of preeminence, the Pelasgians because of antiquity. To no other nation or tribe whatever does he apply this epithet. His very chary use of it in the plural is a sign of its possessing in his eyes some peculiar virtue.

Signs of its leaning to the aristocracy.

Of its feminine forms one has been selected to convey the most biting form of reproach to the army, in the speech of Thersites. Now it is remarkable that in that speech, of which an inflated presumption is the great mark, the Achæan name is used five times within nine lines, and neither of the other names is used at all. I do not doubt that the upstart and braggart uses this name only because it was the most distinguished or aristocratic name, as an ill-bred person always takes peculiar care to call himself a gentleman. And doubtless it is for the same reason that he takes the feminine of Ἀχαιὸς, instead of using Δανααὶ or Ἀργειαὶ for his interpretative epithet, when he wants to sting the soldiery as ‘Greekesses and not Greeks.’

Somewhat similar evidence is supplied by the Homeric phrase υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, which has nothing corresponding to it under the Danaan or Argive names. This is an Homeric formula, and the form υἷες seems to belong exclusively to the Achæan name. To the Greeks who always asked the stranger who were his parents, this phrase would carry a peculiar significance. What addressed them as the sons of honoured parents would be to them the sharpest touchstone of honour or disgrace. And what the patronymic was to the individual, this form of speech was to the nation, an incentive under the form of an embellishment. It is a principle that runs throughout Homer; it is every where μηδὲ γένος πατέρων αἰσχύνεμεν. The poet could not say sons of Danaans, for their forefathers were not Danaan: nor sons of Argeians, for this would recall the ploughshare and not the sword: though the army are addressed from time to time as ἥρωες Δαναοὶ, and ἥρωες Ἀχαιοὶ, they are never ἥρωες Ἀργεῖοι. But to be sons of the Achæans was the great glory of the race, even as to degenerate from being Achæan warriors into effeminacy would have been its deepest reproach: and the fact that he calls a mixed race sons of the Achæans is conversely a proof that the Achæan element was the highest and most famous element in the compound of their ancestry.

But, unless I am mistaken, we have many passages in Homer where the use of the simple term Ἀχαιοὶ is shown from the context to have a special and peculiar, sometimes perhaps even an exclusive reference to the chiefs and leaders of the army. I think it may be shown that the word has in fact three meanings:

1. That of a particular Greek race, which extended itself from point to point, acquiring power everywhere as it spread, by inherent superiority.

2. That of the aristocracy of the country, which it naturally became by virtue of such extension and assumption.

3. That of the whole nation, which takes the name from its prime part.

We have now to examine some passages in support of the second meaning: and I know not why, but certainly these passages appear in the Iliad to be most abundant near the opening of the poem.

Chryses solicits ‘all the Achæans and most the two Atridæ700.’ All the Achæans assent, except Agamemnon. Now the priest could not solicit the army generally except in an assembly: and there is no mention of one, indeed the reply of Agamemnon701 is hardly such as would have been given in one. It is likely, then, that those whom he addressed were Agamemnon’s habitual and ordinary associates; in other words, the chiefs.

When Calchas proceeds to invoke the vengeance of Apollo, which is to fall upon the army at large, it is no longer the Ἀχαιοὶ of whom he speaks, but his prayer is,

τισείαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν702.

Although I do not concur with those, who find no element of real freedom in the condition of the Greek masses, whether at home or in the camp, yet it seems plain enough, from the nature of the case, that the questions relating to the division of booty, as being necessarily an executive affair, must have been decided by the chiefs. Now whenever questions of this class are handled, we generally find such an office ascribed to Ἀχαιοί. Agamemnon says703, ‘Do not let me alone of the Argeians go without a prize;’ and in conformity with this we find Nestor stimulating the host at large with the expectation of booty704. But Achilles replies to Agamemnon, ‘that the Achæans have it not in their power to compensate him there and then, for they have no common stock:’ but ‘when Troy is taken, then we the Achæans will repay you three and four fold705.’ The same subject is again touched in i. 135, 162, 392. ii. 227: and both times with reference to the Ἀχαιοὶ as the distributors of the spoil. In Il. ii. 255 it is allotted by the ἥρωες Δαναοί.

In the same way we find a decided leaning to the use of the word Ἀχαιοὶ, when reference is made to other governing duties.

For instance, in the adjuration of Achilles by the staff or sceptre. ‘It has been stripped of leaf and bark, and now the υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, who are intrusted by Jupiter with sovereign functions, bear it in hand706.’ It is hardly possible here to construe the phrase without limiting it to the chiefs.

I have referred to the passage where Homer introduces the word Ἀργεῖοι for the first time, under the shadow, as it were, of Ἀχαιοί. Now, if we examine that passage, we shall perceive that unless there be some shade whatever of difference in the meaning, the words are tautological, an imputation which Homer never merits. But if we admit in the Achæan name a certain bias towards the nobles of the army, then the sense and expressions are alike appropriate. ‘I fear the resentment of him, who mightily lords it over (all) the Greeks, and to whom even the Achæans (or chiefs) submit themselves707.’

Again the phrase Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ708, twice used by Homer, and both times in the mouth of Priam from the Trojan wall, both times also refers to noble and chieftainlike figures, which his eye, keen for beauty, discerns among the crowd. The second case is particularly worthy of notice:

τίς τ’ ἄρ’ ὅδ’ ἄλλος Ἀχαιὸς ἀνὴρ ἤυς τε μέγας τε,
ἔξοχος Ἀργείων κεφάλην ἠδ’ εὔρεας ὤμους;

Of which the effect seems to be expressed in these words:

Who is th’ Achæan Chieftain
  So beautiful and tall?
His shoulders broad surmount the crowd,
  His head outtops them all.

Here again, if Achæan and Argeian be synonymous, the use of the latter word is in the highest degree insipid, but if the reference be to the chief, excelling in height the mass of the soldiery, a perfect propriety is maintained.

I need not extend these illustrations to other passages, such as Il. ii. 80, 346. ix. 670. And, on the other hand, it is easy to point to passages where the force of the Achæan and Argeian names is obviously identical, such as Il. ix. 521: or again where Achæan and Danaan must agree, as in Il. ix. 641, 2. The most frequent use of the Achæan name is, I believe, for the nation, and not the race or class: yet a number of passages remain to show the native bias and primitive meaning of the word.

I will however point out two more places, one in each poem, where that shading of the sense, for which I contend, will either greatly facilitate the rendering of the text, or even may be called requisite in order to attain a tolerable construction.

1. It deserves particular notice, that Homer sometimes places the words in very close proximity, as in the following passage;

          νηῶν ἐπ’ ἀρίστερα δηιόωντο
λαοὶ ὑπ’ Ἀργείων· τάχα δ’ ἂν καὶ κῦδος Ἀχαιῶν
ἔπλετο· τοῖος γὰρ Γαιήοχος Ἐννοσίγαιος
ὤτρυν’ Ἀργείους·

This is in Il. xiii. 676-8, and Δαναῶν follows in 680. The nearness of the words, and the place of Ἀχαιοὶ, between the twice used Ἀργεῖοι, is highly insipid and un-Homeric, if they are pure equivalents. But now it seems by no means impossible, that the Poet may in this passage have in view a distinction between the leaders and the mass. He may have meant to say, ‘Hector had not yet learned that his men were suffering havock on the left from the Greek troops. But so it was; and the chiefs might now perhaps have won fame, such was the might with which Neptune urged on their forces,’ but that, &c.

2. It is difficult, except upon the supposition of a different shade of meaning in these appellatives, to construe at all such a passage as

          ἐξερέεινεν ἕκαστα,
Ἴλιον, Ἀργείων τε νέας, καὶ νόστον Ἀχαιῶν709.

Here the juxtaposition of the words, if they are synonymous, becomes absolutely intolerable. But the sense runs easily and naturally, if we render it ‘he inquired (of me) all about (the fall of) Troy, and the fleet (or armament) of the Greeks, and the adventures of the chiefs while on their way home.’

The Odyssey, however, appears to offer a larger contribution towards our means of comprehending the Homeric use of Ἀχαιοὶ, than can be supplied by the mere citation of particular passages.

Its application within Ithaca.

There is considerable evidence of a division of races in Ithaca: and also of the application of the Achæan name to the aristocracy of the country.

The length of time during which Ulysses had been absent, will account for much disorganization in his dominions: and their lying chiefly in separate insular possessions would tend to aggravate the evil. Still not only Nestor, Idomeneus710, Philoctetes, Neoptolemus, but also Menelaus, who was absent almost as long as Ulysses himself, appear to have resumed their respective thrones without difficulty; so that we are led to suppose there must have been much peculiarity in the case of Ithaca. Part of this we may find in the fact, that the family of Ulysses may but recently have attained to power, and that the consolidation of races was imperfect. Besides his force of character, he had accumulated711 great wealth, following in the footsteps of his father Laertes, who was both a conqueror and an economist712. His power, thus depending on what was personal to himself, could not but be shaken to its very base by his departure, and by his long detention in foreign parts.

So far as we can learn from the text of Homer, the family of Ulysses had come, like the other Hellic families, from the north: and it had only reigned in Ithaca at most for two generations. His extraction is not stated further back than his paternal grandfather Arceisius713. But his connections all appear to be in the north. His maternal grandfather, Autolycus714, lived by Parnesus, or Parnassus, in Phocis, near to Delphi. And his wife’s father, Icarius, had a daughter Iphthime, who was married to Eumelus715, heir-apparent of Pheræ in the south of Thessaly: a circumstance which affords a presumption of proximity in their dominions. Thus it is probable that Laertes may have married in Thessaly; and, as we have no mention of the sovereignty of Arceisius, it is highly probable that Laertes was the first, either to acquire the Ithacan throne, or at least to hold it for any length of time.

The fountain near the city, which supplied it with water, and which probably marks its foundation, was constructed, as we are told, by Ithacus, Neritus, and Polyctor716.

The first must have been the Eponymist of the island: the second of its principal mountain717.

Peisander, called ἄναξ and Πολυκτορίδης718, is one of four principal Suitors, whose gifts to Penelope are specifically mentioned in the Eighteenth Odyssey. Thus he would appear to have been most probably nephew to the Eponymist of the island. Sometimes indeed the patronymic is derived from a grandfather, or even, as in the case of Priam (Δαρδανίδης, Il. xxiv. 629, 631), from a remote ancestor; but then he must apparently be a founder, or one of the highest fame. But Peisander at the least may have been the son of Polyctor; and he was probably the representative of the family, which had been displaced from the Sovereignty by the house of Laertes. He afterwards appears among the leaders in the struggle of the Suitors with Ulysses719.

The names applied to the subjects of Ulysses in the Odyssey are three: Κεφαλλῆνες, Ἰθακήσιοι, and Ἀχαιοί. In accordance with its use in the Iliad, the first of these, which is but four times720 used, appears to be a name of the whole people of the state; and, judging from what we have seen of the force of the word, it implies that the Hellenic element was dominant. The difference in the use of the other two is very marked.

In the first place, the Suitors are commonly called Ἀχαιοὶ721, never Ἰθακήσιοι, nor ever Δαναοὶ or Ἀργεῖοι. Either, being the aristocracy, they were an Achæan race; or else, without all being of Achæan race, they were called Achæan, because they were the aristocracy. Of that class they are stated to have constituted the whole722.

The more probable of these two suppositions is, that they were by no means exclusively of Achæan blood, but took the name from their birth and station. It is most natural to suppose that the displaced family of Peisander, and probably others, were not Achæan, but belonged to an older stock. This stock may have been Hellenic; for, as we know, there were Hellenic, and in particular Æolid, families in Greece long before we hear of the Achæans there.

The house of Ulysses still indeed had friends in the island, like Mentor, like Noemon, son of Phronius, (or the class represented by these names, if they be typical only,) or like Peiræus, who took charge of Theoclymenus at the request of Telemachus723. But the bulk of the people were neutral, or else unfriendly. The best that Telemachus can say is, that the whole people is not hostile724. And in the last Book, whilst more than one half the Assembly take up arms against Ulysses the rest simply725 remain neutral: so that he has no one to rely upon but his father, his son, and a mere handful of dependents.

While the Achæan name is thus exclusively applied to the Suitors, and apparently to them because they formed the aristocracy, the people, when assembled, are invariably addressed as Ἰθακήσιοι. It is said indeed, that the Achæans726 were summoned by the heralds to the Assembly of the Second Book: but it seems to have been customary to send a special summons only to principal persons, as we find in Scheria727; though all classes were expected to attend, and did attend.

I do not, however, venture to treat it as certain, that the word Ἀχαιοὶ is not applied to the population of Ithaca generally. When Euripides addresses the Assembly, and incites the people to revenge the death of the Suitors, we are told that οἶκτος δ’ ἕλε πάντας Ἀχαιούς. This may mean the aristocratic party in the Assembly, as we know that there were two sections very differently minded. At any rate, if the whole people be meant, it is by the rarest possible exception. The name is applied, as we should expect, to the soldiers who sailed with Ulysses to Troy: but within Ithaca it seems clear that the name properly denotes the nobles. And upon the whole it seems most probable, that these Ἀχαιοὶ, in the Twenty-third Book, are the party of the Suitors, with reference rather to their position in society than their extraction: while the minority, who do not join in the movement against Ulysses, are probably the old population of the island, who have no cause of quarrel to make them take up arms against him, and yet no such tie with him, either of race or of ancient subordination, as to induce them to move in his favour.

Ithaca was ill fitted for tillage, or for feeding anything but sheep and goats. And Ithacus, its eponymist, being a very modern personage, it seems highly probable that, whether Achæan or not, he and his race were Hellenic, and gave to the population that peculiar name of Cephallenes, under which Laertes describes them as his subjects. But there were probably anterior inhabitants of the old Pelasgian stock, submerged beneath two Hellenic immigrations, caring little which of their lords was uppermost, and forming the supine minority of the final Assembly.

The use of the Achæan name in Ithaca, in broad separation from the Ithacesian, must then prove either its connection with a race, or its bias towards a class, and may prove both. But quitting the latter as sufficiently demonstrated, I now proceed to trace the local use of the Achæan name.

And, first of all, we find it locally used in the North; in that Thessaly, where the name of Hellas came into being, and from whence it extended itself to the Southward; therefore in the closest connection with the Hellic stem.

We are told in the Catalogue, with respect to the division under Achilles, after the names of the districts and places from which they came,

Μυρμίδονες δὲ καλεῦντο, καὶ Ἕλληνες, καὶ Ἀχαιοί728.

Now we find throughout the Iliad, that the local or divisional name of this body is unchanging: the troops of Achilles are uniformly denominated Myrmidons. Therefore Homer does not mean that one part were Myrmidons, another Hellenes, another Achæans, but that the three names attached to the whole body, of course in different respects. They were then Myrmidons, whatever the source of that name may have been, by common designation. They were Hellenes, because inhabitants of Hellas, of the territory from whence the influence and range of that name had already begun to radiate, more properly and eminently therefore Hellenes, than others who had not so positively acquired the name, though they may have been included in the Πανέλληνες. And manifestly they could only be called Ἀχαιοὶ, because known to be under leaders of the pure Achæan stock, who were entitled to carry the name in their own right, instead of bearing it only in a derivative sense, and because it had spread all over Greece. Of this peculiar and eminent Achæanism in the Peleid stock, we have, I think, two other signs from the poems: one in the possible meaning of the love of Juno, which we have seen extended to Achilles in an equal degree with Agamemnon; the other in the marriage of Hermione to Neoptolemus, which was founded upon a promise given by Menelaus her father while before Troy. Doubtless the eminent services of Neoptolemus might be the sole ground of this promise: but it may also have had to do with kin, as some special relation, of neighbourhood or otherwise, appears commonly to accompany these matrimonial connections. In conformity with this passage, the name Ἀχαίιδες is applied by Achilles in the Ninth Book to the women of Hellas and Phthia.

Local uses of the Achæan name.

It is wonderfully illustrative of the perspicacity and accuracy of Homer, to find that in this very spot, which he has so especially marked with the Achæan name, it continued to subsist as a local appellation, and to subsist here almost exclusively, all through the historic ages of Greece. On this subject we shall have further occasion to touch.

2. Of the five races who inhabited Crete at the time of the Troica, one was Achæan729:

          ἐν μὲν Ἀχαιοὶ
ἐν δ’ Ἐτεοκρῆτες μεγαλήτορες, ἐν δὲ Κύδωνες,
Δωριέες τε τριχάïκες, δῖοί τε Πελασγοί.

The presence of an Achæan tribe in Crete may have been due to its constant intercourse with Eastern Peloponnesus730, where the Achæans had for some time been dominant: or to those relations with Thessaly, to which the name of Deucalion in Homer bears probable witness. In any case, the passage clearly establishes the local virtue of the name. It also exhibits to us Achæans as distinct from Dorians, and shows us that there were a variety of branches, known to Homer, of the Hellenic tree. And the enumeration of the Achæan and Pelasgian races with others in this place, compared with the uniform description in the Iliad of the whole force of Idomeneus as Cretan, shows us how careful Homer was to avoid such confusion as the juxtaposition of Achæans and Pelasgians would have caused with reference to the main ethnical division in the Iliad.

3. In the Pylian raid of the Eleventh Book, Nestor carefully distinguishes between the parties, as Epeans, also called Elians, on the one side, and Pylians, also called Achæans, on the other731. This raid took place in his early youth, perhaps forty or fifty years before the Troica, and within the Achæan epoch. And as he withholds the Achæan name from the other party, they plainly were not Achæan in the limited sense. And yet they were Hellenic: for, among other Hellenic signs, Augeas, the king of the Epeans, was an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Thus again we have Achæan fixed as a subdivision, though probably the principal subdivision, of the Hellenic race.

4. A fourth case, in which the Achæan name appears clearly to have a limited signification, is in a second passage of the Greek Catalogue, where a part of the forces of Diomed are described as those,

οἵ τ’ ἔχον Αἰγίνην, Μάσητά τε, κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν732.

Although Mases has been taken to be a town, yet its junction here with Ægina perhaps rather points to it as an island. It appears to be admitted that its site is unknown. And an extra-Homeric tradition733 reports, that the small islands off the Trœzenian coast were called after Pelops. It is impossible not to observe the correspondence between this tradition, and the indirect traditions afforded us by Homer’s language in this verse. For in the Catalogue he seems carefully to avoid repeating the general Greek appellatives in connection with the inhabitants of particular places, and to give them local and special names only. It follows irresistibly, that therefore he must be understood here to speak of the distinct race and local name of Achæans: to which race and name would naturally belong any settlers brought by Pelops into Southern Greece.

And, as Homer does not discontinue altogether the application of the Argeian name to the inhabitants of Argolis, he probably in this place means to distinguish Achæans not only from other Greek races, but even from other subjects of Tydeus and of Diomed, who would most properly be called Argeians.

It thus appears, that twice in the Catalogue Homer has occasion to use the Achæan name locally, and in its original or, so to speak, gentile sense. And accordingly he has been careful not to risk confusion by employing it in its wider signification either at the commencement of the Catalogue or at the close. In both cases he uses the word Δαναοί; the only one of his great appellatives which nowhere takes a local or otherwise varied meaning. When he begins he invites the Muse to tell him, v. 487,

οἵτινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

So also at the close, v. 760, he sums up in these words,

οὗτοι ἀρ’ ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν.

5. As Nestor applies the Achæan name to the inhabitants of Pylos, so from the time of the Pelopid sway it becomes applicable to those of Eastern Peloponnesus generally, in a sense wider than that of Il. ii. 562, but yet narrower than the national one. In Il. iv. 384, and Il. v. 803, those, from among whom Tydeus set out for Thebes, are called Ἀχαιοί. So also in the colloquy with Glaucus, Diomed calls the comrades of his father on that occasion by the same name (Il. vi. 223). He repeats the name in his prayer to Minerva, Il. x. 286, 7; and here he is careful to distinguish them from the Thebans of that epoch, who are Καδμεῖοι (288).

The name Παναχαιοι .

6. In further prosecution of the same subject, we have yet to consider the force of the kindred Homeric word Παναχαιοί.

This is undoubtedly a term that challenges particular notice. No writer is so little wont as Homer to vary his expressions without a reason for it. But since the word Ἀχαιοὶ is used many hundred times as the simple equipollent of Greek, it cannot require the prefix παν to enable it to convey this sense effectually. Therefore to suppose that Παναχαιοὶ means Greeks and nothing more, would render the prefix unmeaning, and I conclude that such cannot be an adequate explanation of its purpose. But if we construe the word as having a specific reference not only to the aggregate, but to the parts of which it is made up, then the prefix παν becomes abundantly charged with meaning. The word Παναχαιοὶ will in this view mean what we should call ‘all classes of the Greeks,’ ‘the Greeks from the highest to the lowest.’

It is used, in all, eleven times. Of these eleven passages, seven times it appears in the expression ἀριστῆες Παναχαιῶν. Here the preceding word ἀριστῆες at once directs the mind to this notice of the different classes, and receives much force from the distinctive particle παν: as we may judge from the fact that Homer never but once (ἀριστῆες Δαναῶν, Il. xvii. 225) appends the appellative in its simple form to ἀριστῆες. The prefix παν seems to strip the idea of conventionality, and to make it real: the chiefs are the pick and flower of the whole Greek array.

Only in one other passage of the Iliad do we find Παναχαιοί; it is in the peroration of the speech of Ulysses to Achilles734:

εἰ δέ τοι Ἀτρείδης μὲν ἀπήχθετο κηρόθι μᾶλλον,
αὐτὸς καὶ τοῦ δῶρα, σὺ δ’ ἄλλους περ Παναχαιοὺς
τειρομένους ἐλέαιρε κατὰ στρατόν.

‘Still, if you detest (the king) Atrides from your heart ever so much, him and his gifts, yet pity the Greeks throughout the army, now suffering from the highest to the lowest.’ The force of the Παναχαιοὶ κατὰ στρατὸν is here very marked.

Lastly, in the Odyssey we find the line thrice repeated,

τῷ κέν οἱ τυμβὸν μὲν ἐποίησαν Παναχαιοί, and always in the same connection with the death of some select and beloved hero of the army. Its obvious sense is, ‘all classes of the Greeks would have joined to do him honour, by lending a hand to raise his funeral mound.’

In every one of these cases therefore the word Παναχαιοὶ seems to express the combination of all classes, and thus to point distinctly to the word Ἀχαιοὶ as capable of signifying something less than all classes, namely, one, that is, the ruling class.

The construction thus put upon Παναχαιοὶ is in conformity with Homer’s usual mode of employing such words as the adjective πᾶς and the preposition σὺν in composition. We have previously seen the intensive force of πᾶς in πᾶν Ἄργος and Πανέλληνες. And πᾶς itself receives additional power from σύν. As in Il. i., where Achilles, having just before reminded Calchas of his office as Seer to the Δαναοὶ, proceeds to assure him that no one of the Greeks shall hurt him for doing his duty, it is now no one, not of the Δαναοὶ merely, but of the σύμπαντες Δαναοί; no, not even if he name Agamemnon himself as the guilty person735.

It is hardly necessary to point out how accurately all this coincides with the general results to which we have been already led. According to these, the bulk of the Greeks were a Pelasgian population, under the sway of ruling tribes and families, belonging to another race; among which the most powerful were those belonging to the Achæan stock; and whose Argeian name was etymologically, and perhaps practically, a sort of substitute for the older Pelasgian one.

Nor is there difficulty in conceiving how, if the Achæans became the dominant race in the most important parts of Greece, they might, without constituting a numerical majority, give their name to the mass of the people, and to the country itself, as Britain and Britons became England and English from the Angles, or as Lombardy took its name from the Lombards, and, unhappily, European Turkey, once the civil head of Christendom, from the Turks.

The Æolid and Æolian names.

It has been customary to speak of the question whether Homer was an Æolian Greek: to give the Æolian name to the forms of the Greek language prevailing in his time: and to describe the Achæans as a branch of the Æolians. With certain exceptions, says Strabo736, the Æolian name still prevails outside the Isthmus; and it also covered the Peloponnesus, till a mixture took place. The Ionians from Attica had occupied Ægialus; and when the Heraclids, with the Dorians, became masters of many Peloponnesian cities, the Ionians were expelled in their turn ὑπὸ Ἀχαιῶν, Αἰολικοῦ ἔθνους, after which two ἔθνη only remained in Peloponnesus, the Æolian and the Dorian.

Again, as respects the digamma, Heyne737 most justly observes that it may much more justly be called Pelasgic than Æolic; since the Æolians, as far as we know, only retained it, after having found it in use with the Pelasgi. But in general, to those who ground their judgments on the Homeric text, the whole view of the relation of Achæans and Æolians, as it is commonly given, will appear a false one. In the first place the Æolians as a nation or tribe are wholly post-Homeric: unless we are bold enough to find some modification of their name in the Αἴτωλοι. The Æolid families, indeed, of Homer have evidently a great position, which we shall further discuss738: but they simply fall for the time under the general name of Achæans, as much as any other families, and more than families like the Æacidæ, who were in close political relations with a race bearing a designation of its own, namely, the Myrmidons. This nowhere appears to have been the case with the Æolians. On the contrary, the Neleids, though they were of illegitimate birth, may perhaps be considered as belonging to the Æolidæ; but their subjects actually bore the name of Achæans, besides their territorial name of Pylians739. With respect to the epoch of the Troica, instead of calling the Achæans an Æolic race, it would be more reasonable to call the Æolids (as there was nothing more extensive than a patronymic connected with that name) Achæan houses. I do not however mean that they were properly such: for the Æolid name appears in Southern Greece before the Achæan, and was probably an older branch from the same trunk.

The subsequent prevalence of the Æolian as compared with the Achæan name, (the Hellenic, however, overlying and soon absorbing both,) appears to point to one of two suppositions. Either there was an original Æolian tribe, which has escaped notice altogether in Homer, as the Dorians have all but escaped it: or else, and more probably, it may have happened that part at least of these Æolian houses held their ground in Greece, while the Achæan name, which had been elevated by the political predominance of the Pelopid sovereigns, collapsed upon the loss of that predominance. It was to be expected that the name should share in the downfall of the race, when the Heraclid and Dorian invasion expelled the bearers of it from the seat of their power, and reduced them first to be fugitives, and then to settle in a mere strip of the Peloponnesus; a single region of narrow scope, and, as is remarked by Polybius740 after many centuries, of small weight and influence, which from them was called Achæa. The fact that the Dorian name is all but unknown to Homer, while the Achæan one is at its zenith, not only heroically, as in the Iliad, but in the every day familiar use of Ithaca throughout the Odyssey, is to me one of several strong presumptions, not countervailed by any evidence of equal strength, that Homer could not have lived to see that great revolution, which so completely effaced the ethnical landmarks, and altered the condition, of Southern Greece.

The Heraclids in Homer.

There is certainly a striking analogy between the relation of the Æolid houses named in Homer to the afterwards prevalent and powerful Æolian race, and that of the Heraclid families, also named by him, to the Dorian race, which in like manner grew from obscurity in the Homeric period to such great after-celebrity. Hercules himself appears before us in the ancient legend as the great Dorian hero, ‘everywhere paving the road for his people and their worship, and protecting them from other races741.’ The only Heraclids mentioned nominally by Homer are Tlepolemus, Pheidippus, Antiphus; and there are others without names specified742; none of these, or of the Greeks of the expedition, are called Dorians, while, again, none of the Heraclids of Homer are called by the Achæan or Æolid names. They may have been Dorian houses, like the Æolid houses; and the name may have become tribal afterwards, when they rose to power. The tradition of the reception of certain Heraclids in Attica appears to have been recognised by the Lacedæmonians in the historic ages743, and in the supposition of a friendship thus established, we may perhaps find the true explanation of the Decelean privilege mentioned by Herodotus744.

In arranging chronologically the Danaan, Argeian, and Achæan names of Homer, we give the first place to Danaan, and the next to Argeian, so as to bring the Danaans nearest to the Pelasgi. But the real meaning of this is simply that the three names were suggested to Homer by three periods of Greek history, which stand in the order given to the names. If, however, instead of tracing the purpose of the Poet, we are to look for ethnical history, then we must state that the Danaan name does not denote a change of race, but it is a mere foreign affix to the closing portion of the Pelasgian period. Nor does the Argeian name, if we suppose it to have been a sort of translation or reconstruction of the Pelasgian, directly indicate the Hellenic infusion; but the mere fact of its substitution for a preceding appellation appears to presuppose a cause. Homer, indeed, gives us no Greek stories of the Danaid period, so that we do not certainly know that he might not have described the Greeks of that period also as Argeian. All we can say positively is, that his use of the Argeian name de facto begins with the epoch of the first Hellenic throne in Greece, that of the Perseids. I hope to show that the Achæan name and that of Perseus belong in truth to the same stock and origin745: but it is with the Pelopids only that the Achæan name appears, and it denotes the second stage of the Hellenic preponderance, as the Argeian name marks the first, and the Dorian the third. The first, or Argeian, stage belongs partly, as I believe, to the house of Perseus, but partly, as is clear from the Homeric text, to the houses descended from Æolus.

Descent of the Æolids.

Æolus himself is nowhere mentioned in Homer. The oldest Αἰολίδαι given to us as such are Sisyphus and Cretheus. The patronymic does not of itself enable us to determine whether these were sons of Æolus, or were more remotely descended from him. But indirectly we may perhaps be enabled to fix his date, as follows:

1. Bellerophon the grandson of Sisyphus746, is called by the contemporary Lycian king, the offspring of the deity, that is, of Jupiter:

γίγνωσκε θεοῦ γόνον ἠῢν ἐόντα747.

The meaning of this can only be that the person, whom Homer has indicated as the founder of the race, namely Æolus, was a reputed son of Jupiter.

2. In the Νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey we are introduced to Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, and the wife of Cretheus748. She is decorated with the epithet εὐπατέρεια, never given elsewhere by Homer except to Helen, and apparently an equivalent with him for Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα.

It is by no means unlikely, I would venture to suggest, that a similar force may lie in the epithet Salmoneus, who is here called ἀμύμων. That epithet is indeed sometimes applied on the ground of personal character. But Homer also gives it to the villain Ægisthus, which appears quite inexplicable except on the ground of the divine descent of the Pelopids749. The later tradition has loaded Salmoneus with the crime of audacious profanity: and it has also, beginning with Hesiod750, made him a son of Æolus. The word ἀμύμων, combined with the εὐπατέρεια of Tyro, leaves little room for doubt that perhaps both, and certainly the latter of these representations are agreeable to the sense of Homer. If so, then Tyro was a granddaughter of Æolus; and we can at once fix his date from Homer, as follows:

1. Æolus.
2. Salmoneus, Od. xi. 235-7.
3. Tyro = Cretheus, ibid.
4. Pheres, Od. xi. 259.
5. Admetus, Il. ii. 711-15, 763.
6. Eumelus, ibid. and Od. iv. 798.

From which last cited passage I set down Eumelus as the contemporary of his brother-in-law Ulysses, and half a generation senior to the standard age of the war.

We have also the collateral line of Sisyphus from Æolus as follows: 1. Sisyphus; 2. Glaucus (1); 3. Bellerophon; 4. Hippolochus; 5. Glaucus (2), contemporary with the war751. According to this table Sisyphus might be either the son or the grandson of Æolus.

And again, Cretheus, who like Sisyphus is Αἰολίδης, may have been either the uncle or the cousin of his wife Tyro. The Fragment of Hesiod would make both him and Sisyphus sons of Æolus, and therefore uncles to Tyro.

These genealogies are in perfect keeping with what Homer tells us of the Neleid line. Tyro, he says, fell in love with Enipeus. In the likeness of that river, Neptune had access to her, and she bore to him two sons, Pelias and Neleus. Neleus is the father of Nestor: and Nestor stands one generation senior to Eumelus; for he was in his third tri-decadal period752, if the expression may be allowed, during the action of the Iliad. Thus we have (as before), 3. Tyro; 4. Neleus; 5. Nestor; 6. Nestor. The maternal genealogy of Eumelus brings us exactly to the same point: for Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, was married to his father Admetus753.

Thus the Æolid genealogies are laid down by Homer with great clearness, except as to the first interval, and with a singular self-consistency. Perseus754, as we have seen, belongs to the fifth generation before the war. This is nearly the same with Sisyphus, and with Cretheus: and we are thus enabled to determine with tolerable certainty the epoch of the first Hellenic infusion into Greece. It precedes the arrival of Portheus in Ætolia by one generation, and that of Pelops by two.

Of Sisyphus we know from Homer, that he lived at an Ephyre on or near the Isthmus of Corinth. It is not so clear whether Cretheus ever came into the Peloponnesus. There is an Enipeus of Elis: but there is also one755 of Thessaly, which was doubtless its original. The name, however, of the Thessalian stream appears to have been written Eniseus. Nitzsch756 determines, on insufficient grounds as far as I can judge, that the passage of Od. xi. cannot mean the Enipeus of Pisatis. I can find no conclusive evidence either way: but Sisyphus was certainly in Southern Greece at or before this time, so that we need not wonder if Cretheus, another Æolid, was there also. His reputed son Neleus founded, without doubt, the kingdom of Pylos. Post-Homeric tradition places even Salmoneus, the father of Tyro, in Elis.

Earliest Hellenic thrones in Greece.

We have now before us an outline of the first entrance of Hellic elements into Greece, south of Thessaly. It seems to have been effected by five families;

1. The house of Perseus.

2. That of Sisyphus.

3. The illegitimate line of Cretheus, or the Neleids.

4. Probably the legitimate line of Salmoneus, represented in Augeas.

5. Next to these will come Portheus, the head of the Œneidæ in Ætolia: and only then follows the great house of the Pelopids, not alone, but in conjunction with a race, to whose history we now must turn.

Of the Danaid and Perseid princes we have no reason to suppose, that they enjoyed the extended power which was wielded by Agamemnon. Not only would they appear to have been circumscribed, latterly at least, by the Minoan empire founded in Crete, but Homer gives us no intimation that their dominion at any time included the possession of a supremacy over a number of subordinate princes beyond their own immediate borders, or reached beyond the territory which may be generally described as the Eastern Peloponnesus.

A direct inference bearing on this subject may be obtained from the passage concerning the sceptre of Agamemnon757: for the Pelopids do not succeed to that of Eurystheus and the Perseids, but they hold from Jupiter: which seems to imply that they acquired much more, than had been under the sway of their predecessors. Probably therefore we shall do well to conclude that Eurystheus, for example, had a limited realm, and that by land only: Agamemnon, a certain supremacy by land and sea, within the range of which the old Minoan empire had now fallen. Still the kingdom of Eurystheus was probably in its own day the greatest, and was also probably the oldest, of all properly Hellenic kingdoms.

If, then, neither of the prior dynasties of Danaus and Perseus reigned over all Greece, it is unlikely that either of them could give a name to the whole nation: though they might give a name to the part of the country which, having in their time been particularly famous and powerful, became under the Pelopids a metropolis, supreme throughout the rest of the country; and whose people then not only took the name of Ἀχαιοὶ for itself, but extended it over the whole of Greece.

Use of the Danaan and Argeian names poetical.

It is thus more than probable that the scope of the name Danai, (if we are to assume that it was then a name in actual use,) under the Danaids, and of the name Ἀργεῖοι under the Perseids, was local, and confined in the main to Eastern Peloponnesus, where those princes ruled; with the addition of any other parts of the country, over which they might for the time have extended their power. And if so, then we have to suppose that Homer, having received the traditions of the Danaan and Argeian princes as having been at the head in their own time of Greek history or legend, gave to the nation by way of a poetical name, but of a poetical name only, the appellation which their subjects respectively had borne, and which had never before been, and never became by any other title than his poetical authority, applicable to all the Greeks.

The Achæan name, on the other hand, differs from these, first, in denoting the extension of a particular race, though not over the whole country, yet through very many of its parts, and secondly, in the fact that the ruling house of those who bore the name enjoyed a real political supremacy over both the continent and the islands. So that it became the most legitimate exponent of Greek nationality, until it had lost both its extension and its power; the one by compression of its principal tribes into a narrow space: the other by the transfer of its political prerogatives to the great Dorian family of the Spartan kings, after the conquest of the Heraclidæ.

When the Achæans had ceased to predominate, there could be no reason why their name should remain stamped upon their brethren, who boasted of the same descent, and who had attained to greater force.

As in the Homeric times, while the Achæans were the leaders of Greece, they might claim to represent the whole Hellenic stock, so, when the Dorians had dethroned them and occupied the seat of power, when the Æolian name was widely diffused, and, again, when Athens with its mixed race became great, and claimed, along with its vaunts of antiquity and continuity, to pass over, as Herodotus says, to the Hellenic class, but without an Achæan descent, then the Achæan name could no longer adequately represent the title to nationality, and the various races naturally fell back on the designation which gave no exclusive right or preeminence to any of them, and which they were all entitled to enjoy in common. They apparently however chose to be connected with the rich plains of Thessaly, where they first learned civilization, and organized their collective or national life, rather than with the rude and coarse manners of their more remote ancestors in the hills. They were therefore not Helli, but Hellenes.

This may be considered as the rationale of the common and palpably manufactured tradition respecting Hellen and his family, of which we have the earliest form in Hesiod.

Summary of the Evidence.

Our conclusions respecting the names by which Homer describes the inhabitants of Greece may now be summed up as follows:

1. We set out from the point at which Greece is, probably for the first time, settled by a race given to tillage and pacific habits, under the general name of Pelasgians, with subdivision under minor names of particular tribes, or partially and locally intermixed with fragments of other races.

2. A dynasty of foreign origin, in a portion of Greece which then became, and ever after continued to be most famous, leads the march of events; and, apparently without displacing the Pelasgians themselves, yet seems to have displaced, in a certain quarter, the Pelasgic by the Danaan name; at any rate, it attains to such celebrity, that its history, in the eye of Homer, fills the whole breadth of its own epoch, and its name stands in after time, poetically at least, for a national title.

3. An Hellenic dynasty of Perseids, belonging to the Greek Peninsula, follows this dynasty; and, effacing the trace of foreign rule, governs its subjects under the Argeian or Argive name; which, without reviving the title of the Pelasgi, a word now becoming or become subordinate, yet like that title is founded on the physical character of the regions in which the population was settled, and upon the employments suited thereto.

4. Next appears upon the scene the Achæan name, which bears no mark of relationship to the soil, or to any particular employment, or to any particular eponymist, but appears to be the designation of a race, not indeed foreign, yet new to the Peloponnesus.

5. A warlike and highly gifted race gradually pervade different parts of Greece under this name: the Pelopids, its ruling family, possessing themselves of the throne of the Perseids, attain, perhaps through the extended sympathy of Achæan blood, to a national supremacy. The Achæans are, in fact, become the Greeks of the Troic age. They include Æolids and Æacids, Argives, Bœotians, Ætolians, Epeans, Abantes, Dorians, Arcadians, Ionians, and all the other local tribes, as well as the mass of old Pelasgians, who constitute the working population (so to speak) of the country; some of them by virtue of blood, and the rest by that political union, in which the Achæans had an undisputed ascendancy.

6. All the characteristics of this race, social and religious, and its close geographical proximity to, if not indeed its identity with, the first-named or Myrmidon Hellenes of Homer, appear to derive it from the North, to dissociate it from the Pelasgic, and to unite it with the Hellic stock.

7. Time passes on; we lose the guiding hand of Homer; but universal tradition assures us that the Dorians, emerging, like those who had preceded them, from the cradle of the nation, lead another and the last great Hellenic migration southward; the Pelopids are driven from the throne of that which may be termed the metropolitan region of Greece; they migrate to an inferior seat, with their followers, and become the obscure heads of a secondary State: and the name of Hellenes, belonging to all the great Greek tribes in common, whether of Achæan, Æolid, or Dorian blood or connection, becomes the grand historical designation of the nation at large.

8. After perhaps eight hundred years of fame and freedom for Hellas, the iron hand of Roman power descends upon her at a time when the old Achæan name has revived by means of a democratic confederacy, and has once more overspread758 the Peloponnesus. From this time, Hellas takes her place in history only as a minor portion of the Roman empire, even while, by an inward process, she is asserting her intellectual supremacy759, and moulding the literature and philosophy of her conquerors. But to them politically she is no more than an appendage of the Magna Græcia, whose glory it is to be a part of imperial Italy, and whose name the land of Homer’s song must now assume in virtue of a double relationship; the first, that of their common social base, the old Pelasgi, of whom the Greeks (Γραïκοὶ) were probably a part; and the second, that of a more recent colonization. Thus the Graic or Greek name, having existed, but never having emerged to what may be called visibility in Hellas, travels round to it again by the route of Italy, and finally becomes predominant in this its earliest seat.

Of this intermixture and succession of names dependent on the fusion of races, and on political supremacy, we have sufficient example in our own island. It has been inhabited by Britons, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. All came more or less as conquerors, one following upon the other. But two names only have left their mark, Britons and Angles: all the others, including the last or Norman conquerors, are submerged. So it has been with the succession of Pelasgians, Achæans, Hellenes, Greeks. Each of these names historically superseded the one before it. Apart from them, by the high privilege of Poetry, stand their names in another combination: the Iliad and Odyssey shew us Danaans, Argeians, and Achæans, as in the main synonymous before Troy: yet each with its own leaning, which makes Δαναοὶ most properly and by preference ‘the soldiery,’ Ἀργεῖοι, ‘the masses,’ and Ἀχαιοὶ, ‘the chiefs.’

It still remains to observe the immediately subsequent literary history of these three great appellatives, which the fiat of Homer made so famous.

Hesiod and the minor Greek poets afford us the only satisfactory illustration of actual usage, because the tragedians may probably have sought, in treating heroic subjects, to employ the nomenclature of the heroic age. The other poets spoke, of course, according to their own respective ages.

In Hesiod we do not find Δαναοὶ at all: Ἀργεῖος only in the singular for Juno: Ἀχαιοὶ is once used for the Greeks collectively, in a retrospective passage referring to the assembly at Aulis760. He uses Πανέλληνες761 in the same poem with the same sense. An important passage of Strabo762 testifies, that both Hesiod and Archilochus were acquainted with the use of the names Ἕλληνες and Πανέλληνες for the Greeks at large; and refers to works of theirs, now lost, by way of example as to the latter term. Both Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες are freely used in Simonides, who also has Ἀργεῖοι for the Argives only. And generally these old writers, coming next after Hesiod, knew nothing of the use of Ἀργεῖοι, or even of Ἀχαιοὶ, for the whole nation, while the word Δαναοὶ is not found in them at all.

This is strongly confirmatory, as it appears to me, of the propositions I have endeavoured to establish.

Among the tragedians the name Ἀχαιὸς, with its derivatives, used to some extent by Æschylus, progressively declines: the Danaan name holds its ground rather better, and Ἀργεῖος better still; though all are eclipsed by the great historical name of Hellenes, which probably had enjoyed an undisputed prevalence from the time of the Dorian conquest. Thus, for poetical use, dealing with the events and characters of the heroic age, they properly fall back upon the names which Homer employed.

Its value as primitive history.

From these successions of name, whether the particular appellation be founded upon lineage or upon physical incidents, it is not unreasonable to hold that we may draw the outlines of a primitive history, at least with more confidence and satisfaction than by efforts to compound and piece together the miscellaneous and promiscuous traditions of many ages and places, set wide apart from one another; in respect to which, even where we have not to lament the gnawing power of Time, we, at least, know that the faculties both of exaggeration and of invention, stimulated by vanity, rivalry, and self-interest in many other forms, have been at work. It is better to deal with slighter relics, of which we know the bona fides, than with an abundance of such as have been falsified. Besides, when we have effectually exhausted the power of the first, we may much more profitably use the subsidiary lights which the second will afford us. And the tendency of an attempt to invest the Homeric text with an unequivocal supremacy, is to substitute for complete and symmetrical systems, in which the hewn stone and the trash are not distinguishable one from another, very slight and partial indeed, but yet authoritative fragments and outlines, all the intervals of which are filled up by avowed conjecture. This conjecture is without a pretence to authority properly so called, but it is, at any rate, both kept visibly apart from what is authoritative, and likewise founded upon the suggestions which even fragmentary testimony, when genuine and near the source, is well qualified to make.

And the succession of names is in effect of itself almost a political history. For the names of nations are not arbitrarily changed, though such things have been done to particular cities within the dominion of particular states. The names of races, especially of races disposed, like the Greeks, to knit themselves closely with the past, are cherished as a material portion of their patrimony. When they alter, it is for some great and commanding political reason. Such as, for example, if some tribe or family, previously not advanced beyond its fellows, in some great national exigency becomes invested with the responsibility of acting for the whole body, and thus grows to be as well its representative and organ in all external relations, as also the representative of its inward life: or when some conquering dynasty and host have by the strong hand entered in upon prior occupants of the soil, and, reducing them to dependence or to servitude more or less qualified, or narrowing the circle of their possessions, have taken into their own custody, together with the best lands of the country, the whole range of public affairs, and have imposed laws upon the vanquished, and imparted to them manners. In this case, the different elements are welded into a political unity, by a power proceeding from that race which among them has possessed the greater physical and martial force. But unless there be more than the merely convulsive effort of conquest, unless deep roots be struck into the soil, and sharper furrows drawn upon it than the spear alone can carve, or than the wave of a mere deluge traces, unless, in a word, there be a predominant organizing faculty, the effect will not be permanent; and the crude mass of mere strength will sink down amid the surrounding milder, but more enduring and more prevailing impulses. In some instances it has been so: the body, which has been stronger in the hand, has proved weaker in the intellectual and moral, that is to say, the enduring, elements of power. The undying yet daily influences and sympathies of peace wear down the convulsive vibrations, which the shock of war and conquest have communicated to the social fabric. Victory must end in possession, like toil in sleep. Possession implies the dispersion of the conquerors, and, in such cases as these, their free intermixture with the vanquished. Ties of neighbourhood, of commerce, of marriage, ties belonging to all the transactions of life, are gradually multiplied between the new comers and the old; and by a gentle process, experience and opinion gradually decide, not imperiously in the spirit of party, but insensibly for the benefit of all, what laws, what manners, what language763, what religion shall predominate. The fate of the name follows that of the institutions and habits with which it was connected; and the old designation prevails ultimately over the new, or the new over the old, in proportion as the older inhabitants have contributed a larger or a smaller share towards the common national life resulting from the combination; in proportion as the newly arrived receive more of impression than they impart, or impart more than they receive.