Sect. IX. — On the Homeric Title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν — Studies on Homer by W. E. Gladstone

Sect. IX. — On the Homeric Title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν

Difference between Epithets and Titles.

Both in modern society, and in the forms of modern language, the distinction is a familiar one, which separates between descriptive affixes or epithets, and titles properly so called.

A descriptive affix, be it substantive, like Δαναοὶ αἰχμηταὶ, or adjective, like Δαναοὶ φιλοπτόλεμοι, describes a quality, and challenges from the reader, like any other phrase conveying an idea, assent to the justice of its description. These descriptive affixes have a tendency, from repeated use, to grow into formulæ, and then at length they approximate to the nature of titles.

But a title is quite a different thing from a descriptive affix. A title is the current coin of language, which is intended to pass from mouth to mouth without examination. It is like a pronoun, having for its office simply to indicate, or to stand for, a particular person. It is the index of a rank or office, a thing determinate in its nature, like an unit of number: and it has no relation, when once fixed as a title, to personal character, though in its origin it may have been founded on the real or presumed existence of personal qualities. Like a descriptive affix, a title may be either adjective, as ‘most noble,’ or substantive, as ‘marquis.’

Titles evidently presume a certain progress in the organization of political society; while descriptive epithets must be used, in order to meet the purposes of human speech, even in its first stages.

This degree of progress must have been attained in the time of Homer; for the use of titles in the poems, as well as of descriptive epithets, can be clearly made out.

Among the descriptive epithets of Homer we find, of substantives, ἡγεμόνες, ἀριστῆες, and also βασιλεῖς, ἀοιδοί. Of adjectives, applied to classes, σκηπτοῦχοι (βασιλῆες), ὑπερμενέες (βασιλῆες), θεῖοι (ἀοιδοί): and applied to persons, ἐχεφρὼν Πηνελόπεια, Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος, πολύμητις Ὀδύσσευς: and many more.

In modern phraseology, duke, earl, baron, knight, esquire, are titles: nobles, clergy, freeholders, burgesses, are descriptive phrases. Of a descriptive epithet or affix which has grown to be a title, we may find instances among those just cited; knight (knecht) meant originally a servant, then a person performing particular service to the king; and esquire (scudiero, écuyer) meant a person who bore the arms of a knight, particularly his shield. In process of time these became titles. Again, words may hang doubtfully upon the confine between title and epithet; as the much criticised expressions of the English Common Prayer Book, ‘(our) most religious and gracious (king).’

We find in Homer that the word βασιλεὺς, a king, had already begun to pass from the function of a mere descriptive word towards that of a title; for, though rarely, he attaches it to the names of individuals, besides freely using it without them; and it is an usual note of titles properly so called, that they can, even if substantives, either be combined with the name of the person, or, in addressing them, substituted for it. In the Iliad we find Ἀλεξάνδρῳ βασιλῆι, and in the Odyssey Ἔχετον βασιλῆα. Again, we find βασίλεια used in the Odyssey in the vocative 764, which in like manner marks it as a title.

The word ἄναξ, again, in Homer, which must on no account be confounded with βασιλεὺς 765, is commonly a descriptive epithet, nearly equivalent to our word lord, and, like it, having an extraordinary elasticity of sense; for as a person may now be lord, so he might then be ἄναξ, of a kingdom, a people, a field, a mine, a slave, a horse, or a dog. Instances are countless. Sometimes the meaning is lord, or master, relatively to a particular object, as of the horses of Nestor,

οἱ δὲ ἄνακτος ὑποδδείσαντες ὁμοκλὴν....766

Sometimes it means in the abstract a class of persons,

οἷοί τε ἀνάκτων παῖδες ἔασιν.767

where the ἀνάκτων παῖδες nearly corresponds with our ‘children of the higher orders,’ i.e. the masters of slaves.

On the other hand, in reference to the immortals, ἄναξ is sometimes a title: as in Il. xvi. 233,

Ζεῦ ἄνα, Δωδώναιε, Πελασγικέ.

Examples of titles.

There are, however, in Homer various words which are undoubtedly and uniformly titular. Such are in particular the adjectives Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, which are very nearly equivalent in power to the phrase ‘Royal Highness’ of the present day. They commonly accompany the name of the individual, or of the class, to which they belong: and they are confined, with one single exception, in the Iliad, to persons of the highest known rank, that of βασιλεὺς or king. The exception is Phœnix, who is in one place addressed by Achilles as γέραιε Διοτρεφές. But Achilles says this χαριζόμενος, when petting and coaxing the old man, and therefore the instance does not destroy the force of the general rule.

In one place we have ὁ Διογενὴς 768 used for Achilles in the third person without his name: which still more strikingly marks the word as a title. Also Διοτρεφὴς is not unfrequently used in the vocative, without, as well as with, the name of the person to whom it is addressed. It may possibly be worth notice, that these words, Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, are never applied to Agamemnon, as if they had, again like the phrase ‘Royal Highness,’ a limit upwards as well as downwards, and were not applicable to the supreme head of the nation. There is indeed one passage where Agamemnon is addressed as Διοτρεφὴς, but it is in the universally suspected 769 νεκυΐα of the Twenty-fourth Odyssey. Plainly this fact cannot be referred to metrical considerations, even as to Διοτρεφὴς, because either in the genitive, or in the vocative, it would easily have been made available: especially in the latter inflexion, for Agamemnon is addressed vocatively some five and twenty times in the poems. I admit that Ulysses may allude to him in the line,

θυμὸς δὲ μέγας ἐστὶ Διοτρεφέος βασιλῆος 770.

But the phrase here is more abstract than personal: it is perhaps as we should say, ‘our royal master.’

The word βασιλεὺς may have borne originally a merely descriptive character. But it has only partial traces of that character still adhering to it, as it is used in the Iliad. The chief note of such a sense, that I can find, is, that it is used in the comparative and superlative to distinguish the Pelopid house from the other kings. Agamemnon is βασιλεύτατος, Il. ix. 69, and Menelaus is evidently intended in the βασιλεύτερος of Il. x. 239; where Diomed is bidden to choose the best man, irrespectively of rank, and not to tie himself to the βασιλεύτερος.

As the Odyssey represents a period of political disorganization, brought about by the long absence of the chiefs, it is not surprising that we find the word βασιλεὺς, and its proper epithet Διοτρεφὴς, used in this poem with greater laxity. The βασιλῆες and the Διοτρεφεῖς 771, are here not the kings but the aristocracy of Scheria, and of the dominions of Ulysses: and it is a compliment paid to Telemachus by Theoclymenus, when he says 772,

ὑμετέρου δ’ οὐκ ἔστι γένος βασιλεύτερον ἄλλο
ἐν δημῷ Ἰθάκης.

Yet even here the special and official sense of βασιλεὺς remains: no one is ever called individually a βασιλεὺς unless he is on the throne, though Antinous is said to resemble one of the king-class,

βασιλῆι γὰρ ἀνδρὶ ἔοικας 773.

And the same Antinous sarcastically expresses his hope, that Jupiter will not make Telemachus βασιλεὺς in Ithaca, notwithstanding his right of succession by birth 774. If βασιλεὺς only indicated a certain station, Telemachus without doubt was βασιλεὺς already.

The sense proper to it in Homer is that in which, for some thousands of years, it appears to have maintained a world-wide celebrity.

Common interpretations of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν .

And now as respects the constructions which have been put upon the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. It is not noticed by Heyne or by Crusius. Of the translators I have already spoken. As regards the Lexicographers, Scott and Liddell say ‘Agamemnon as general-in-chief is specially ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, while Orsilochos is called ἄναξ ἄνδρεσσιν in Il. v. 546;’ but the phrase is πολέεσσ’ ἄνδρεσσιν ἄνακτα, which I take to be simply equivalent to ἀνάσσοντα, and to have no relation to a phrase or formula.

Damm 775 says it indicates supreme dignity united with military command.

Again; Mure 776 remarks, that in common with ποιμὴν λαῶν and κρείων, ‘it denotes the office of any king or chieftain, but more particularly that of a supreme ruler or commander.’

That these explanations are entirely beside the mark, I am convinced after a somewhat minute consideration.

In answer to Damm, I would observe that the phrase was applied to Æneas, who was a commander, but not a sovereign: it was applied to Anchises, who was a sovereign, but not a commander; it was applied to Eumelus, who was neither a sovereign, nor a warrior of any note, and who commanded no more than eleven ships.

It does not then depend upon the highest degree either of military or of civil elevation.

Nor does it in all cases attach to divine descent, even though that descent be from Jupiter; nor even if it be immediate or next to immediate: as among the living, Sarpedon the son of Jupiter has it not, neither has Polypœtes his grandson (Il. ii. 740). So, among the dead, it is not given either to Hercules or to Rhadamanthus 777, sons of Jupiter. If, as is probable, reputed extraction from Jupiter in all cases attached to it, it was a remote and not a near extraction, and thus the title was the ornament of an antique lineage; certainly divine descent was not the immediate qualification for the particular dignity.

I do not dispute, that an idea of divine descent attaches generally and immediately to sovereigns as such, at least in the Iliad. But this is represented by the words Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς, as they bear witness by their etymology, and not by ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Indeed we seem to find the word Διοτρεφὴς used for heaven-born, without reference to political power, in that line of the Odyssey (v. 378), where Neptune applies it to the Phæacians:

εἰσόκεν ἀνθρώποισι Διοτρεφέεσσι μιγείης.

But of those Homeric titles which are specifically Greek, by far the most remarkable is the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Particulars of its use.

It is used by the Poet fifty-two times: fifty times in the Iliad, twice only in the Odyssey.

It is applied forty-six times to Agamemnon, and six times to five other persons, once for each in four cases, and twice in one. The persons are,

Eumelus, a living Greek.

Augeias, dead Greeks.
Euphetes,

Anchises, living Trojans.
Æneas,

It appears and perishes with Homer, not being found in the writings of any other Greek author.

It is never used in any of the cases, except the nominative: never separated from the proper name of the person to whom it is applied, except once (Il. i. 7), and then only by the particle τε: it always precedes the name except in that single passage: it always ends with the first half of the fifth foot of the verse, except in that same passage: and again, the word ἄναξ is never separated from the word ἀνδρῶν, except once in the Odyssey by the word δέ.

It is applied to no person whose name does not begin with a vowel, and to no person whose name is not of the metrical value necessary to enable it to form the last foot and a half of the hexameter: as, Agamemnon, of two short syllables and two long ones; Euphetes, three long ones; Eumelus, two long and one short. Circumstances, these last, which, if they stood alone, would raise a presumption that the use of it was determined by metrical considerations only.

That metrical considerations had some degree of influence on the use of phrases in Homer, we may sufficiently judge, by observing that while Homer uses the name of Achæans four times for that of Argeians once, he uses the forms Ἀχαίοισι and Ἀχαίοισιν but twelve times, whereas he uses Ἀργείοισι and Ἀργείοισιν more than sixty times.

But we may observe that no metrical considerations could have prevented Homer from applying the phrase to Diomedes, Polypœtes, or others, whose names differ from that of Agamemnon only in having a consonant at the beginning of them: and yet he has not done this: the names of all his six ἄνακτες ἀνδρῶν begin with a vowel. Thus as he restrains himself beyond what metre requires, he may have had some reason other than metre to govern his use of the title.

The question is, whether there are, evidently or probably, other conditions of substance, which, besides these of sound, meet in the persons designated by the title, and which enable us to trace and fix its purport?

With reference to Mure’s explanation I observe, that it does not appear to take account of the difference between descriptive words in general, and titles, as applicable to Homer; but rather to assume that the Homeric phrases are simply of the former class.

It is plain that the word κρείων is a term of that class only: which, pro tanto, is indicated by its relationship to the established and ordinary epithet of comparison κρείσσων. It clearly describes the class of those, who bore single-handed rule, in the address to Jupiter, ὕπατε κρειόντων 778; and it answers to the epithet princely in Il. xxiv. 538.

ὅττι οἱ οὔτι
Παίδων ἐν μεγάροισι γονὴ γένετο κρειόντων.

‘For he had not as yet a princely offspring in his home.’

Lower than Βασιλεὺς, which corresponds to the rank implied by our term ‘majesty,’ and less wide in sense than ἄναξ, which corresponds very nearly with ‘lord,’ it is generally the equivalent as to rank of prince or princely, according to the English sense of the terms; but it is in Homer always a descriptive word only, and never a title. Accordingly it is found in the later Greek writers, when both ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and even ποιμὴν λαῶν have disappeared.

The ποιμὴν λαῶν of Homer.

The phrase ποιμὴν λαῶν is more largely used than κρείων, and with more appearance of approximation to that substantive character, and susceptibility of individual application, which belongs to a title. Thus in

Οἱ δ’ ἐπανέστησαν, πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν,
σκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες 779,

the βασιλῆες are the members of the Greek βουλὴ, and ποιμὴν λαῶν means Agamemnon. Like κρείων, it was applicable to those who held secondary sovereignties, the feudatories, so to speak, of the principal chiefs: as for instance, we find among the secondary commanders of the Pylian division,

Αἵμονά τε κρείοντα, Βίαντά τε, ποιμένα λαῶν 780.

It reaches down to persons, of whom we know and can infer nothing, but that they may probably have held small fiefs (so to call them) with derivative sovereignty of some kind, such as were, among the Trojans 781, Bienor, Hypeiron, Apisaon, Hypsenor: and it is also applied to the sons of the greater chiefs, for example, Thrasymedes and Agenor 782, as well as to the chiefs themselves, including Agamemnon. It is likewise given to Ægisthus, when he was, de facto, in possession of the throne of Agamemnon 783. It is therefore applicable to the idea of political rule in the very widest sense, differing however from ἄναξ in so far that, while it is assigned to personages of smaller note politically, it is confined to the expression of that kind of superiority, and has nothing whatever to do with property.

I find it, on the whole, impossible to detect in this phrase any thing of a definite character, except that it expresses political rule at large, and expresses it under the form of a figure adapted to the early and patriarchal state of society. I hesitate then to call it with confidence a title, because the class to which it applies is somewhat indeterminate, and therefore it is wanting in specific meaning: yet it may partake somewhat of that character. We must, however, distinguish broadly between the element of subordination to Agamemnon, such as we see it in Nestor and Diomed, and that of the class to which the lower ποιμένες λαῶν belonged. These were as widely separated as the great feudatories of mediæval France, from the petty lords who so much abounded in this island.

In its form, the phrase bears an external, rather than a real resemblance to ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. For ποίμην figuratively used expresses no more than the office of a ruler in his political relation to his subjects; while ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is much more peculiar in character, since ἄναξ exhibits the idea of master as well as ruler, and he is not merely ἄναξ of a people, but ἄναξ of individual men, in respect to something appertaining to man as such, of which he is the possessor or usufructuary. The ποιμὴν λαῶν expresses a relation, which implies that political society is already formed, for λαὸς means a body united in that form.

Again, we are scarcely entitled to presume that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν denotes the office of ‘any king or chieftain,’ when, though it is used in some fifty passages, it is only applied to six persons: nor is it less hazardous to say that it means especially the office of a supreme ruler or commander, when out of these six persons only one at all answers to that description, and when at least three are persons of insignificant power, as well as individually obscure.

Once more, it is the manner of Homer, where he applies an epithet or phrase characteristically to one of his greater personages, to give them the exclusive use of it, such as the ποδωκὴς δῖος for Achilles, κορυθαίολος for Hector, πολύμητις and πολυτλὰς δῖος for Ulysses. For example, κορυθαίολος is used thirty-eight times for Hector, never for any other hero: though it is used once for Mars, in Il. xx. 38. It would be strange if he departed from this usage in the case before us. But if ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν be a mere phrase of description, as Mure supposes, he does depart from it in the strangest manner; for while he applies it forty-six times to Agamemnon, he likewise gives it to the very insignificant Eumelus. If it be a phrase simply serving the purpose, as an epithet would, of denoting the great political position of Agamemnon, how can its force be more utterly shattered than by bestowing it not only upon Eumelus, who does nothing except drive a chariot, but upon Euphetes, who is mentioned but once in the poems of Homer, without any epithet or circumstance whatever except this to distinguish him, and who is named nowhere else at all? If it describes a ruler as supreme among rulers, why is it thus debasingly, as well as loosely, applied? But if it describes a ruler generally, then why is it employed so restrictedly? The actual mode and conditions of its use require us to examine whether it does not in fact cover some specific idea, derived from a form of society which, even in the days of Homer, had become, or, at the least, was becoming obsolete; perhaps already in some part a monument of the past, and cutting across, rather than fitting into, the arrangements and usages of his time.

Ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν has a specific meaning.

The peculiar formula ‘lord of men’ appears well adapted to mark the period of transition from the patriarchal to the political construction of society; in the family, sovereignty and the possession of property are united, and the βασιλεὺς naturally follows after and grows out of the ἄναξ. Authority is here clothed in a form more extended than that of a mere family connection, yet the idea of it remains indeterminate: there is no distinct formation of class; superiors are not yet viewed under the formal political notion of kings, nor (as in λαὸς) have men yet come to conceive of themselves as subjects. There are human beings with a superior: but there is no society with a head. In that state of things, power, if less secure and rooted, was more absolute: witness the projected sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac.

To sum up, however, what we have said upon the other phrases, it appears that we have in Homer four words commonly used to express the ruling office, from the highest form of that office downwards: they are,

1. βασιλεὺς, the most limited: confined in the Iliad to those who both were practically supreme, and ruled over considerable territory, or else were of primary importance from personal prowess or other qualities.

2. κρείων, the next; embracing the very highest, but descending to secondary princes, though commonly confined to the more considerable.

3. ποιμὴν λαῶν, which, also capable of application to the highest, yet, as expressing political dominion in the widest form, embraces the subordinate, derivative, and petty principalities even of persons who do not appear to have been in any sense independent sovereigns.

4. More varied in its application than any of these, perhaps older, and related to the time when the only known form of sovereignty implied indeterminate, and so far absolute powers of disposal, the word ἄναξ involves the double idea of political authority and of ownership; it accompanies them both, like our word lord, when they separate, and it adheres to each of them in all its forms.

I admit that the construction which it is now proposed to put upon ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν has not, so far as I am aware, been heretofore propounded; and that this is, pro tanto, a presumption against it. But in lieu of pro tanto, I would in this case crave to write pro tantillo; for it seems to be the fact, that, as only of late has Ethnology been systematically studied, so only of late have the text and diction of Homer been subjected to minute investigation; and it is reasonable to expect, that the further application of critical attention to it may yet disclose to our view much, which has heretofore been unsuspected. It is the more allowable to proceed upon this view in the case of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, because so few readers of Homer appear even to have observed that it is ever applied to any person besides Agamemnon, and therefore the common opinion rests upon an inaccurate impression as to the elementary facts. My purpose, accordingly, may more justly be described as an attempt to open a new question, than as an attack upon a critical verdict regularly delivered.

Let us now proceed to examine what the facts really are respecting the use of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in Homer.

Persons to whom it is applied.

It is applied to Agamemnon in the following passages:

Il. i. 7, 172, 442, 506.
ii. 402, 434, 441, 612.
iii. 81, 267, 455.
iv. 148, 255, 336.
v. 38.
vi. 33.
vii. 162, 314.
viii. 278.
ix. 96, 114, 163, 672, 677, 697.
x. 64, 86, 103, 119, 233.
xi. 99, 254.
xiv. 64, 103, 134.
xviii. 111.
xix. 51, 76, 146, 172, 184, 199.
xxiii. 161, 895.

Od. viii. 77.
xi. 396.

It is also applied to

Anchises, Il. v. 268.
Æneas, Il. v. 311.
Augeias, Il. xi. 701, 739.
Euphetes, Il. xv. 532.
Eumelus, Il. xxiii. 288.

Now although, as we have seen, the term is in fact employed only with names nearly akin to one another in point of metrical value, yet the Poet has given us the most distinct evidence that the employment of it was not a mere metrical expedient to assist him in the use of names otherwise unmanageable. This we learn in the two following forms:

1. The name Eumelus is one of those to which he applies the phrase: but the metrical conjunction of it with this name is by no means particularly convenient, for out of five places in which Homer mentions Eumelus in the nominative case, he only once gives him his title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Again, it is evident that he has no preference for the end of the verse as a place for the name of Eumelus; for he places it elsewhere, at the beginning, and in τὴν Εὔμηλος ὄπυιε (Il. ii. 714. Od. iv. 798), on the only two occasions when he uses the nominative without a title annexed. He only puts it at the end of the verse in order to couple it with ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and with κρείων (Il. xxiii. 288, 354). So far then from being a metrical convenience, this phrase rather forces him out of his way in order to introduce it. So it is with Æneas. Homer uses his name very many times, but never once places it at the end of a verse, except in the single case in which he attaches it to the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Again, then, the phrase compels him to adopt a position which he is uniformly careful to avoid elsewhere for Æneas, and this in little short of forty instances.

Persons to whom it might have been applied.

2. Besides the names to which Homer applies the phrase, he employs a great number of names, of persons having high or the very highest rank, which possess exactly the same metrical value as one or another of the six names above quoted; but yet to none of these does he at any time give the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Of such names I have observed the following: and I exclude from the list the merely local characters of the Odyssey, and all persons in inferior station.

(1) Of the same metrical value with Eumelus:

Patroclus.
Pheidippus.
Euneus.
Eudorus.
Euphemus.
Ægisthus.
Admetus.
Amphius.
Euphorbus.

And of the dead,

Isandros.
Adrestus.

(2) Of the same metrical value with Augeias, Euphetes, Æneas, Anchises:

Antenor.
Sarpedon.
Pyræchmes.
Hercules (Heracles).
Eurystheus.

(3) Of the same metrical value with Agamemnon:

Diomedes.
Polypœtes.
Megapenthes.
Thrasymedes.
Eteoneus.
Agapenor.
Euphenor.
Prothoenor.
Hyperenor.

(4) Of the same metrical value with Agamemnon, except having the last syllable short:

Menelaus.
Echepolus.
Melanippus.
Polydorus.

And of the dead,

Rhadamanthus.
Meleagros.

Here are thirty-five names as susceptible of conjunction with the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν as the six to which he attaches it. How comes it to be attached, significant as it is primâ facie, to the six, and never to the thirty-five? Did it come and go by accident, or had Homer a meaning in it?

Moreover, I would by no means be understood to admit, that metrical obstacles would have sufficed to prevent Homer from applying almost any title to almost any name: such were the resources of his genius and his ear, and such the freedom that the youthful elasticity of the language secured to him.

It must be remembered too that he has given us an instance (in Il. i. 7) of a second site, so to speak, for ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in the Greek hexameter, which would have enabled him at once to combine it with all such proper names as come within the compass of a dactyl and trochee, or a spondee and trochee. Such as Πουλυδάμας γὰρ... Καὶ Πρίαμος μὲν... Καὶ γὰρ Τευκρὸς... Θησεὺς αὐτὸς... Δάρδανος αὐτὸς.... And even without altering its usual position in the verse, by a break of it, or a cæsura, which is not unfrequent with him, he might have given us (for example) ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν γὰρ Ἐρεχθεύς. Or he might by tmesis, more liberally used, have further widened the field for its employment.

Or again, he would have been free, by the rules of his own usage, to have said in the vocative, ἀνδρῶν ἄνα.

Homer’s reverence for this title.

His abstinence from inflexion absolutely, and from tmesis almost entirely, in the use of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, I think deserves remark. We might be struck, even in another author, by finding a word fifty-six times in the nominative singular, and never in any other form: but in Homer these slight circumstances have a value and significance, which in ordinary cases it would be more dangerous to assign to them. It seems to me possible, that this restraint in the use of the name, which always assigns to it the most commanding place in the sentence, was not unconnected with a sense of reverence towards it. I think that if we were to examine the correspondence, for example, between British Ministers and their Sovereign, we might find that the phrase ‘Your Majesty’ was placed, under a sort of natural and unconscious bias, by the writers, in the nominative case, in a proportional number of instances far exceeding that which the pronoun ‘you’ would supply in an ordinary letter.

It is difficult to define this delicate and subtle sentiment: but it may perhaps be illustrated by the feeling on which is founded the prevailing usage of addressing among ourselves the very highest ranks, and in some languages all persons of consideration, in the third rather than the second person. And again, it is the same description of sentiment, which, when carried into the sphere of religion, has led Dante invariably to forbear, when he introduces the name ‘Cristo’ at the close of a verse, from placing any other word in rhyme with it, so that he makes it its own echo (so to speak), and repeats it thrice, in no less than four passages, to meet the full demand of his metre 784.

Or again, as Homer appears to have possessed a fineness of ear which is not only wonderful, but by us in some part inappreciable, it may be that he attached an importance, which we cannot measure, to preserving a perfect uniformity in this dignified and sonorous title, as a means of producing popular impression, not less than of satisfying his own taste.

Other instances might be given from Homer, bearing upon the case.

Ἐνοσίχθων is used forty times, and only once out of the nominative, though metrical reasons could not hamper the poet with respect to any of the cases of this noun. Διογενὴς is used in the nominative and vocative only. Κύδιστος is used sixteen times, and in the vocative alone. The feminine form however is found in the nominative, but only in two passages (one of them with a rival reading) applied to Minerva. Εὐρυκρείων is found twelve times, and only in the nominative.

Perhaps again the rarity and slightness of his use of tmesis may be accounted for, not by euphony alone, but by the circumstance that these two words had grown by titular use almost into one.

The fact that the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν should have disappeared with Homer himself, while his heroes were incessantly sung by later poets, of itself raises a presumption that it belonged to a state of things which, when after a wide interval the race of his successors began, had wholly ceased to exist.

That stage of society, in the closing stages of which Homer lived, and which we know through him alone of classical authors, was the patriarchal stage in its last phasis. By the patriarchal stage of society, I mean the stage in which rights on the one hand, and powers and duties on the other, were still indeterminate, and were gradually passing from the state of nebula into that of body. Now, if the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν belonged to it, without doubt it must at the outset have exhibited its unvarying characteristic, the union of sovereign political power not only with hereditary descent, but with a reference to some original stock as an object of deep veneration, if not to a relationship of blood more or less remote between the royal family and their subjects, or to the dominant race among them.

Its relation to Patriarchal Chieftaincy.

The chieftaincies of the Celtic tribes in our own island, such as they existed until within only one century back, afford us a partial analogy. The primary idea is that of the headship of an extended family, sometimes approximating to the character of a nation; sometimes more limited, so that many of such families or tribes may be regarded as belonging to the same nation. One marked characteristic of these chieftaincies is that the preeminence and power, which they attached to birth, is separable from, though capable of union with, sovereignty strictly so called, that is, an absolute political supremacy, and subsists in its main particulars even after the division; neither does it become ambiguous or indefinite, where the field for its exercise is a narrow one. The splendour of the name increases with the range of dominion, but its integrity subsists even in the most contracted sphere, so long as the organization on which it is dependent remains.

It is at least conceivable, that the Greek and the Celtic chieftaincies thus far agree. They differ in this, that the Hellenes, whenever we hear of them, appear more or less clearly as the subjugators of some race in prior occupancy of the soil, and as the masters of slaves: so that, while the relation of the Highland Chief to his clan was elevated and softened by union in blood, a Greek chieftaincy rather affected the relation between the head of the tribe and, not the whole, but only a privileged part, of the community.

The fundamental idea of this chieftainship would lie in the possession of the powers of government, patriarchally organized, by lineal descent, and traced up to the point which was the recognised fountain-head of the traditions of the race.

Where the idea of succession by primogeniture was well defined, there probably would be but one line in existence at a time that could hold the title for any one race. But there might be cases where the rule of primogeniture was unknown, or not consistently applied, or where the fact of elder descent was contested, or where common descent from some one acknowledged race and period might confer the title on a variety of families, situated at remote points from one another, in each of which it might afterwards be confined to the lineal heir. In such cases there would be a plurality of lines, all running up into the stem of a common ancestor, and all bearing in their own separate successions the title of chieftainships.

Again, among these chieftains one might be politically supreme over the rest within a given country. Such were the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, in Scotland, who claimed to be kings as well as chieftains: and such in Ireland were the Kevanaghs, O’Ruarcs, and O’Briens.

If therefore I am right in interpreting the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν to mean properly (together with something more) Chieftain, in a sense including the main elements of Celtic chieftaincy, or Patriarch, (but the latter phrase is less applicable from its conventional connection with advanced age), then it need excite no surprise if we find an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν on each side, and not in the supreme command. At the same time, though there are vast differences in power between one Homeric ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν and another, they are all, so far as we see, strictly in the position of princes ordinarily independent within their dominions, though owning, it might be, the prerogatives of a qualified political supremacy lodged in other hands.

Case of Agamemnon

Mode of its use for Agamemnon.

It is very worthy of remark, that Homer scarcely ever describes Agamemnon by personal epithets. In a few passages (I see seven noticed) he uses the word δῖος in connection with the name: but this is one of the least specific among the Homeric epithets for individuals, and is employed not only for Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, and others, but for a crowd of inferior personages, so that, as a word of the most general purport, it has little or no defining or individualizing power. It means preeminence in some particular kind, among a class, and it is applicable to any class; to Agamemnon greatest among sovereigns, and to Eumæus worthiest among swineherds. A few times Homer calls him ἥρως, a word which he also applies to the entire Greek army (Il. ii. 110). In all other places, (I omit, of course, the invectives of Achilles,) he is characterised only by words taken from his position or descent. The principal of these are Ἀτρείδης, which he enjoys in common with Menelaus: κρείων, applied to him and to various other chiefs: ποιμὴν λαῶν, yet more largely and loosely used: εὐρυκρείων, which is exclusively his own among men, and which is the epithet used by Homer as properly descriptive of his wide-reaching sway. It is also applied to Neptune among the immortals, because vastness was with Homer a principal feature of the θάλασσα, his domain. Lastly, Agamemnon is ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, which, as I hold, describes his position by birth as the head or chieftain of the Achæans properly so called.

There are two remarkable passages, which are evidently intended to supply the key-note, as it were, for our conception of the material power of Agamemnon: the first, Il. ii. 108, respecting the sceptre: the second, in the Catalogue, Il. ii. 576-80: in both of these he is called κρείων, in neither ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. This fact entirely accords with the supposition that neither a determinate form of political power, nor military command, is the vital idea of the phrase.

On the other hand, although the Poet does not seem to connect this phrase with imperial power, yet that he intended to use it as one highly characteristic, we may at once deem probable from his having employed it in that remarkable passage 785 with which the poem begins, and which so succinctly, yet so broadly opens the subject of it. For here he has taken the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν out of its usual, and elsewhere its only place in the verse, and has subjoined it, contrary in this likewise to his uniform practice elsewhere, to the name of the person described by it. The line is

Ἀτρείδης τε, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Evidently this is done for greater emphasis: as ‘great Alexander’ is less emphatic than ‘Alexander the Great,’ and ‘king Darius’ than ‘Darius the king.’ It may be admitted that the epithet δῖος, used in this place for Achilles, is not one of the most characteristic: but Achilles had already been described (in v. i.) by that distinguished patronymic which formed his chief glory 786, as it connected him, through his father and his grandfather, with Jupiter.

All these presumptions drawn from the case of Agamemnon converge upon a point: they tend to show, that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν means preeminence indeed, but yet a particular kind of preeminence; and one distinct from, and more specific than, the general idea of sovereignty.

Extraction and station of Agamemnon.

The so-called genealogy of Agamemnon differs from every other one given by Homer in this, that it does not describe the descent in a right line. For as Thyestes, one of his three predecessors on the Pelopid throne was the father of Ægisthus, who was the contemporary, but yet not the brother of Agamemnon, he must without doubt have been brother to Atreus, Agamemnon’s father. It is in fact not a genealogy simply, but rather a succession in dignities. The dignity of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν may have combined with that of the political supremacy to lead Homer into this unusual course. If, as I suppose, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν required the double derivation both of lineage and of sovereignty, this was the way, and the only way, in which Homer could attain his end. And his having pursued this method seems to imply that such was his end.

I cannot therefore under the conditions of the definition given above, explain the application of the phrase to Agamemnon by mere reference to his political supremacy. It will be necessary to prove, either by direct or by presumptive evidence, his lineal connection with the primitive Grecian or Hellenic stock, the trunk of the tree from which other Achæan families were branches and offshoots only.

I propose to do this by showing,

First, that no appreciable value is to be attached to the notions which represent him as the grandson of an Asiatic immigrant; while even if this descent could be made good, we should not on that account be justified in at once proceeding to deny that the Pelopids were of pure Hellenic blood.

Secondly, that he was not merely at the moment the political head of Greece, but that he was also the hereditary chief of the Achæans, then the ruling tribe of the country.

Thirdly, that this Achæan tribe was in all likelihood derived from Thessaly, where it was especially rooted and distinguished: as Thessaly was itself fed from the Helli of the mountains, and constituted the secondary and immediate source from whence the Hellenic races successively issued, and spread themselves over the peninsula.

I do not pretend to carry the proof of a patriarchal position or lineal chieftaincy in the case of Agamemnon further. We do not know what was the strictly original royal stock of the Hellenic tribes. The current tradition of Hellen and his sons would be very convenient, but it is too obviously accommodated to after-times, and too flatly at variance with the earliest, that is to say with the Homeric accounts, to be in the slightest degree trustworthy as an historic basis. We may take the Hesiodic tradition as affording evidence of the belief that there was a primitive royal stock, and that the ruling families had been derived from it, since within these limits it does not contradict Homer; but we can justly build upon it nothing further. Undoubtedly the very employment of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, if the proposed construction of it can be made good, will greatly fortify this belief. But this can only be made good in a presumptive manner: as by showing that the phrase was only given in ruling families: and only in the representative lines of ruling families: and only in families which ruled over tribes of the dominant race; and which had so ruled from time immemorial—that is to say, they must be families of which it cannot be shown that at any time they had acquired their position in their own tribe. If a first ancestor, apparently the channel of the title, is indicated, he must be one from whom history begins: there must be nothing before him, nothing to show that he or his line had ever been less than what he came to be. Lastly, the tribes, over which the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν rules, must be in visible or presumable connection locally with the original seat or cradle of the nation; and it will be a further confirmation of the argument if, as we ascend the lineal lines, we find in them a tendency to converge towards an unity of origin, which we shall find poetically expressed as the divine parentage of Jupiter, and thus covered with the golden clouds of a remote antiquity, that not even the sun can pierce 787. Perhaps we may even find reason to suppose it likely that descent from Jupiter was an essential qualification for the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Arguments against his Hellenic descent.

First, then, let us deal with the negative or adverse presumptions, which would go to prove that Agamemnon was not Hellenic at all.

It may be urged,

1. That we see, even from Homer, that Pelops was a recent hero, only two generations before the Troica, so that Agamemnon has no antiquity to boast of.

2. That, according to extraneous tradition, there is no connection between Agamemnon and the Hellic stock: as Pelops is reputed to be the son of Tantalus, and Tantalus the king of Phrygia.

To the first I answer, that the list of names in Il. ii. 101-8, is not simply a genealogy, for it includes Thyestes, who is not in the right line; but it is a succession of kings on a common throne, and can only therefore begin with Pelops, as the first who sat upon that throne.

But, further, even if it were a genealogy, yet Homer seems usually to begin his genealogies not with the first known ancestor of a person, but with the first ancestor of his who settled in the place where he exercises power. Thus Nestor, though we acquire indirectly a knowledge of his earlier descent through the Νεκυΐα, has no genealogy beyond Neleus his father, because he was the ancestor that migrated into Peloponnesus, or, at least, that first acquired the Pylian throne, by marriage into a prior, and perhaps a Pelasgian house 788. Ulysses has none beyond Arceisius; and it is plain, from the records of the earlier dynasty in Ithaca, that there could have been no king of that house before him. Dardanus and Minos, heads of genealogies, were also the founders of sovereignties. Again, Portheus is given us as the head of the Œneid line in Ætolia: and we have found it probable that he was the first of his race 789 who migrated into that country. The same considerations, in all likelihood, hold good with regard to Pelops.

Now with respect to the second objection.

We are to remember that Homer has nowhere asserted the connection between Pelops and Tantalus, or between Tantalus and Phrygia.

But not even the latter connection, and far less the former, would disprove the title of Agamemnon to represent lineally the character of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. For, as we have seen, that title subsisted in the line of Dardanus, and the causes which planted it there might also have planted it in Phrygia; which is not irrationally supposed to have been the line of march for the Hellic race in its original movement westwards 790. Moreover, Phrygia is not a name confined to Asia.

Connection of Tantalus with the Greeks.

There are, however, many indirect Homeric indications, as well as much extra-Homeric tradition, which tend to connect Pelops both with Tantalus and with Greece.

First, even if Tantalus were known to Homer as the father of Pelops, he could not have been named in the tradition of Il. ii. 101-8, unless he had occupied, like Pelops, the throne to which Agamemnon succeeded.

From the appearance of Tantalus in the Νεκυΐα, it is probable that Homer regarded him as Greek, either by birth or by what we may call naturalization. This he might be in the Poet’s view, if the traditions concerning him, without assigning to him Greek birth or even residence, made him the father of one who became a great Greek sovereign. If, for instance, we take the name of Æolus; it is the source of some of the most famous Greek houses, yet Homer never mentions it, except in the patronymic, and gives us no means of absolutely attaching it to any part of Greece. Æolus may have been known only as the father of Greeks. So Minos was not of Greek birth; but was naturalized, and therefore appears in the Νεκυΐα as the judge of the nether world. All the other personages, without exception, who are introduced there, are apparently Greek: Sisyphus, Hercules, Tityus, Theseus, Pirithous, from clear marks of residence: even Orion, since he is made the hero of a scene in Delos 791, appears, whatever his origin, to have been already Hellenized by tradition. Nor is it easy to avoid the same assumption with respect to Tantalus.

Again, we may be quite sure, that Tantalus was a person of the highest rank and position. None others seem to have been distinguished by an express notice of their fate after death. Orion was the object of the passion of Aurora (Od. v. 121). Tityus was an offender so lofty, that he became the occasion of a voyage of Rhadamanthus himself to deal with his crime 792. Sisyphus was, as we have found reason to believe 793, of the most exalted stock.

The punishment of Tantalus in the nether world is probably, as in other cases, the reflection of a previous catastrophe, certainly of a previous character, upon earth. The nature of his punishment is a perpetual temptation, of irresistible force, presented to the appetites of hunger and thirst, while the gratification of it is wholly and perpetually denied. This shews that his offence on earth must have been some form of πλεονεξία, of greediness, presumption, or ambition. It is therefore not unlikely that by restless attempts at acquisition, he may have convulsed his dominions, and caused his son to migrate.

Now this supposed vein of character in Tantalus would thoroughly accord with that of the Pelopid line. He is punished for covetousness or acquisitiveness. His son gains a kingdom through Mercury, who is the god of increase by fair means or foul. His grandson Thyestes gathers wealth (πολύαρς, Il. ii. 106): his great-grandson Agamemnon is deeply marked by the avarice everywhere glanced at in the Iliad: and finally we have the reckless and guilty cravings of the ambition of Ægisthus.

We are by no means without reasons from the poems for placing Tantalus, as the later tradition places him, among the heroes of the stock of Jupiter. One ground is afforded us by the text of the Eleventh Odyssey for supposing that he was, I do not say a son, but at least a descendant of Jupiter. It is this; that apparently all the heroes, to whom we are thus introduced, were at least of divine extraction. They are, besides Tantalus, as follows:—

1. Minos, who was a son of Jupiter. (Od. xi. 568.)

2. Orion: he was of divine extraction according to the later tradition. In Homer he has no parentage, but he had at least attained to divine honours, inasmuch as he was translated into a star. (Od. v. 274 et alibi.)

3. Tityus, son of Γαῖα. (Od. xi. 596, and vii. 324.)

4. Sisyphus, son of Æolus; therefore descended from Jupiter.

5. Hercules, son of Jupiter (ibid. 620.)

But I rely specially upon the passages towards the end, where these are all called ἄνδρες ἥρωες, and where Ulysses says he might have seen others, namely, Θήσεα Πειρίθοόν τε, θεῶν ἐρικύδεα τέκνα, illustrious children of the gods: as if to be a child of the gods were a condition of appearing in this august, though mournful, company.

Hereas, a Megarian author of uncertain age, is quoted by Plutarch 794 as having declared that the last cited verse was among the interpolations of Pisistratus. But Hereas was as likely to be wrong in this statement, through Megarian antipathy, as Pisistratus to have interpolated the verse in favour of Athenian vanity. The internal evidence is, I think, in its favour. For the phrase θεῶν ἐρικύδεα τέκνα is, according to the view here given, really characteristic. It is, at the same time, characteristic through the medium of an idea which, though it can be deduced fairly from the text, is not obvious upon its surface; namely the idea that all the heroes of the Νεκυΐα were divine. The verse is therefore supported by something in the nature of a spontaneous or undesigned coincidence.

The post-Homeric tradition makes Niobe the daughter of Tantalus; and, if this be so, then we may derive from her very high position a further support to the presumption that Tantalus was of the race of Jupiter, as also to the hypothesis of his personal connection with Greece. For that the tradition of Niobe is Greek we see, from its being cited by Achilles; and that she was a sovereign is clearly implied by the combined effect of various circumstances. The first is her being compared by Achilles with Priam. The second, that the vaunt of an inferior person would hardly have been noticed by the direct intervention of the gods. The third is the singular extent and dignity of that intervention: Apollo slays the sons, Diana the daughters; Jupiter converts the people to stone; the Immortals at large bury the dead. The fourth is the use of the term λαοὺς, which means plainly the subjects of the kingdom where Niobe was queen.

We cannot now carry farther the presumptions that Tantalus was the descendant of Jupiter, and Agamemnon of Tantalus: but if, in considering the cases of the other members of his class, we shall sufficiently shew that they were all descended in common repute from Jupiter, we shall then perhaps be warranted in relying more decidedly upon the connection, which is suggested by the text in the case of Agamemnon through his presumed ancestor Tantalus.

It is difficult to find more than slight traces of the seat of the power of Tantalus from Homer.

He mentions a mountain called Sipylus 795, near the Achelous, and thus near the principal passage from Northern and Middle into Southern Greece. Here it is that he places the mourning Niobe. But Pausanias places the tomb of Pelops on the summit of Mount Sipylus, meaning, apparently, the hill of that name in Lydia 796. Again, the Phryges, over whom the later tradition reports him to have reigned, are also made known to us as a Thracian people 797: a designation quite capable of embracing any of the hill tribes in the neighbourhood of Thessaly. We have another sign of the extension of this name in the Phrygians of Attica, mentioned by Thucydides (ii. 22): and the Phrygian alphabet is closely akin to that of Greece.

Strabo, however, observes, that the state of these traditions is so greatly confused, so as to make them scarcely tractable for the purposes of history 798.

Place of Pelops in Greek history.

The connection of Pelops with Southern Greece is well supported by the ancient name of Peloponnesus. No notice of this name is found in Homer; but we need not be surprised, if Pelops was the first of his race in that part of the country, at finding him sparely recognised by the Poet: it is the uniform manner of the poet with strangers or novi homines.

The Homeric notices of Pelops are not more liberal than of Tantalus. 1. We find him called πλήξιππος 799 in such a way as shows that something connected with the driving of a chariot must have been attached either to the known habits, or to some great crisis of his life, or to both. In either mode, it agrees with the common tradition, according to which, by success in the chariot race, he won the hand of Hippodameia, daughter of king Œnomaus, and therewith the throne of Pisa. We have another fact from Homer which tends to support this tradition, namely, that in the earliest youth of Nestor there were, as we have seen, public games, which included chariot-races, in Elis.

2. The common tradition is also further supported by the passage in the Second Iliad, which gives us the line of Pelopid sovereigns. For we are there told that Vulcan wrought the Pelopid sceptre for Jupiter: that Jupiter gave it to Mercury, and Mercury to Pelops the horse-driver, who handed it on to Atreus and the rest. From this statement two things clearly appear. First, that the throne of Pelops was gained either by craft, or at least by enterprise, of his own. Secondly, that it was a new power which he erected, and that he was not merely the transferee of the power of the Perseid line.

Nor is it difficult to discern wherein the novelty consisted. This sceptre carried the right of paramount lordship over all Greece—

πολλῇσιν νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν 800—

whereas the Perseids had been local sovereigns, though probably the first in rank and power among their contemporaries of Continental Greece.

Now this sovereignty, thus extended, was plainly an Achæan sovereignty. For we have seen that, contemporaneously with its erection, Homer drops the marked and exclusive use of the word Ἀργεῖοι for the inhabitants of that quarter, and calls them by preference Ἀχαιοὶ, the older name falling into the shade. Thus, then, the Achæans rose with the house of Pelops: and this being the case, we can the better understand why it was that that house rose to so great an elevation. It was because the Achæan race had now acquired extension in the North and in the South of Greece, in Eastern and Western Peloponnesus, and because it usually predominated wheresoever it went. Thus the house of Pelops had an opportunity of gaining influence and power, which had not been enjoyed by the preceding dynasties, though they ruled from the same sovereign seat. They were families only: the Pelopids were chiefs of a race.

What we have thus seen from Homer, with respect to the high position attained by Pelops, is confirmed by the later tradition.

Pausanias notices the local traces of Tantalus, as well as of Pelops, in Elis. A harbour there bore the name of Tantalus 801: and Pelops was worshipped in a sanctuary hard by the temple of Jupiter Olympius. It was on the right hand, in front of that temple, a very marked situation in all likelihood: and Pausanias says, that the Elians reverenced Pelops among heroes, like Jupiter among gods. It was probably on this account, and as a memorial of the worship from high places, that the θρόνος, or seat of Pelops, was, as he says, not only in Sipylus, but on the summit of the mountain.

Another tradition makes Pelops the original king of Pisa, the rival town to Elis, which at length succumbed to it. And a further tradition reports, that he became the son-in-law of Œnomaus, king of Pisa, by conquering him in the chariot-race: and together with this, that he restored the Olympian Games. Another tradition reports him to have come from Olenos in Achaia: and as the Dorians, with the Heraclids, came into Peloponnesus by that route, probably as the easiest, so, and for the same reason, may Pelops probably have done. Lastly, while Homer places Achæans in Ægina and in Mases, (of which the site is unknown,) Pausanias (b. ii. c. 34) states that nine islands (νησίδες) off the coast of Methana, which lies directly opposite Ægina, were in his time called the Islands of Pelops.

Before quitting the subject of Pelops, I would observe, that his worship in Olympia with such peculiar honours is connected with a tradition, that he raised the Olympian Games to a distinction which they had never before attained. Now if we view him as the principal chief who brought the Achæans into Peloponnesus, this tradition tends to support the view which has been taken in a former section of the relation between the Hellic race and the institution of public Games. Nor is there any thing more intrinsically probable, than that a chief from the great breeding region of Thessaly should have either founded the chariot or horse-races of Olympia, or should have raised them to an unprecedented celebrity, and secured for them the truly national position that they for so long a time maintained.

We have seen thus far,

1. That the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is employed by Homer as the chief distinction of Agamemnon.

2. That most probably Agamemnon was descended from Tantalus, as well as from Pelops, that the line was a line of sovereigns all along, and Tantalus in all likelihood a reputed descendant of Jupiter himself.

3. That the Achæans emerge in company with the Pelopids, from the cavern of pre-historic night, and that the Pelopids are therefore to be taken as in all likelihood the chief and senior house of the Achæan tribe.

But we have still to ask, whence came the Achæans themselves? and how are we to prove their connection with the Hellenic name and stock?

And first, as to Homeric evidence.

Achæans from Thessaly.

We have already seen, in considering Homer’s account of the contingent of Achilles, and also from Il. ix. 395, that the Achæan race appears to have been the dominant one in the proper and original Hellas of Thessaly: which appears to place it beyond doubt, that the Achæans were they who first carried with them extensively into Greece the Hellenic name, a name always following in the wake of the Achæan one, and in Homer extending to all Greece, unless we except that part which was the sovereign seat of Achæan power.

The first form of the name is with the Helli of Northern Thessaly: the second is developed into the Hellas proper of Southern Thessaly; we find the third in the more large and less determinate use of the word for Greece to the northward of the Isthmus. The name gains this extension apparently just during the period while the Achæans are moving southward, as the house of Ulysses to Ithaca, the house of Neleus, perhaps with an Achæan train, to Pylos, the Pelopids to Mycenæ and Sparta, Tydeus from Ætolia to Argos.

And again, we must observe this distinction. We see the Achæans come into the Peloponnesus, and we can, from the text of Homer, point out the time when they were not there. But we do not see them come into Thessaly from among the Helli of the mountains. We simply find their name prominent there; from which we must conclude, that Homer meant to point them out as the first representatives on an adequate scale of Hellas in that country.

All this is strongly confirmed by the later tradition as to the connection of Pelops with the Achæans of Thessaly, and by the clear historical proofs in our possession of the profound root which the Achæan name had taken there.

Strabo, in a passage where he chooses a particular tradition from among many, as peculiarly worthy of record, says 802,

Ἀχαιοὺς γὰρ τοὺς Φθιώτας φασὶ συγκατελθόντας Πέλοπι εἰς τὴν Πελοπόννησον, οἰκῆσαι τὴν Λακωνικὴν· τοσοῦτον δ’ ἀρετῇ διενεγκεῖν, ὥστε τὴν Πελοπόννησον, ἐκ πολλῶν ἤδη χρόνων Ἄργος λεγομένην, τότε Ἀχαϊκὸν Ἄργος λεχθῆναι.

Thus he at once asserts the connection of Pelops with the Achæans, and of the Achæans with Thessaly. He proceeds to say, that Laconia was considered to have a peculiar title to the name of Achaic Argos 803; that some construed Od. iii. 251 as supporting it, and that the Achæans, driven by the Dorians out of Laconia, in their turn displaced an Ionian race from Achaia, and took possession of the district.

Herodotus 804, in treating of the Peloponnesus, describes the Arcadians and Cynurians as αὐτόχθονες, who had never changed their habitation; four other races, including the Dorians, as ἐπήλυδες, and the Achæans as having migrated about the Peloponnesus, but never left it. He does not explicitly place the Achæans in either class; and this tradition does not throw much light on the origin of the Achæans, which would seem not to have been within his knowledge, but only deals with matter subsequent to their entry into Peloponnesus.

Pausanias 805, again, would seem rather to draw the Thessalian Achæans from Peloponnesus than vice versa. He tells us that, after the death of Xuthus, Achæus went with an army from Ægialus, and established himself in Thessaly. But with Homer before us, we may boldly say, that there was no such person as either the Xuthus or the Achæus of the later tradition, and that there were, on the other hand, Achæans in Thessaly long before the time assigned to this Achæus, namely, the epoch when the race took refuge in Ægialus. This tradition, then, is late and worthless, and, even if it directly contradicted that of Strabo, which it does not, could not be put in competition with it.

The tradition which made Phthiotis in Southern Thessaly the cradle of the Achæan race, where it first grew into conscious life, seems to have been an undying one.

Duration of the name in Thessaly.

Here again history comes in to our aid. Throughout the historic times of Greece, and down to the era of Polybius, there were Achæans of Phthiotis. When, 205 years before Christ, Quintius, the Roman general, examined into the origin of the Greek cities, and made a classification of them 806, the Achæans of Phthiotis were declared to be Thessalians: and he appears to use the name for all Phthians, since he calls Phaxidas 807 an Achæan, seemingly for no other reason than that he was an inhabitant of Melitea, a city of Phthiotis.

I take it then to be sufficiently proved, that Agamemnon and his house were the proper heads of the Achæan race, which rose with them. The proof is doubled by the fact that they fell with it: for in the post-Homeric literature, all of which follows the Dorian conquest, the Achæan name has ceased to be a living name for the nation of the Greeks.

And as the Pelopids were the leaders of the Achæans, so I now assume it to be sufficiently shown from Homer, that the Achæans were in his time at the head of all the Hellenic families and tribes; of the Dorians, the Æolids, the Cephallenes, and whatever others came from the same stock, and were in fact, for their age, the proper type of Hellenism itself.

That most remarkable supremacy of Agamemnon over the Greek nation, which is so strongly marked on the page of Homer, and to the force of which Thucydides ascribes the wonderful movement of the Trojan war, left behind it a tradition which it was thought worth while by the ruling race of Dorians to appropriate, even after the shipwreck of the old political system.

Orestes came to the throne of Agamemnon, and Tisamenus to that of Orestes. He was cast out by the Heraclids with the Dorians, and they made Sparta the chief seat of their power. Thus established in the primacy of Greece, they held it, under the name of Ἡγεμονία, contested sometimes, but only after the lapse of several ages, by Athens: never absolutely taken away, until it passed, as Polybius says, unexpectedly, into the hands of the Thebans, in the fourth century before the Christian era.

Tisamenus and his Achæans went into Ægialus, and gave it their own name. But the imperial Spartans found it for their interest to put in their claim to the old Agamemnonian title. So, as Pausanias 808 informs us, even down to his day, the Tomb of Tisamenus was shown in Sparta, and hard by it the Lycurgian feast of Pheiditia was kept; with a tradition that their fathers, admonished by an oracle, had fetched the remains of the last Pelopid sovereign from Helice in Achæa. On the other hand, the Achæans, who in the time of Polybius 809 had not yet ceased to keep the image of their legendary ancestor Achæus, and whose claim to that image was recognised by the Roman general, likewise cherished a tradition that the family of Tisamenus had been continued, and had reigned among them down to the time of Ogygus 810, when their League was formed upon the basis of democratic institutions.

Dorians appropriate the Pelopid succession.

Now it is no more than we might expect, that the Achæans should, in their depressed fortunes, fondly cherish the recollections of their glory, by preserving and honouring the memory of the last of that race, who, through being their sovereigns, were also the heads of the Greek nation. But why did the Dorians exhibit an anxiety of a kind in their position so remarkable? Such a feeling could hardly have existed, had there not been a special character attaching to the Pelopid race, as possessed not only of an actual supremacy, but of some peculiar title by descent, to which it was worth the while of the Dorian sovereigns to lay claim, as a kind of heirs by adoption. We do not find that when the Pelopids came in with their Achæans, they had shown any corresponding solicitude to connect themselves with the memory of Danaids or of Perseids: on the contrary, Homer expressly disconnects the dynasties, by assigning to the Pelopids a new sceptre, fresh by the hands of Mercury from Jupiter. It seems to follow, that in all likelihood the Pelopids had something which neither Danaids nor Perseids possessed before them, and which the Dorians too did not hold at all, or did not hold by so clear a title: the honour, namely, not of Hellenic blood alone, but of being ruled by a family which represented an original and primitive sovereignty over the Hellenic nation, through its foremost, or Achæan tribe.

This is the more remarkable, because the Dorian sovereigns of Sparta claimed Hercules, and through him Jupiter, for their progenitor. But the patriarchal chieftaincy, though not more directly connected with a divine stock, had superadded to it that accumulation of dignity, which depends upon the unbroken transmission of power from the most remote historic origin: and Hercules was modern in comparison with those to whom some of the Hellenic families were able (as we have seen) to trace their ancestry.

Were we to give credit to the common tradition respecting Hellen and his sons, I admit that it would raise a new difficulty in the way of the construction, which I propose to attach to the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Instead of seeing Agamemnon invested with it because he is head of the Achæans, and highly favoured by a special, nay by an almost exclusive appropriation of it, because they are the foremost Hellenic tribe, we should have to own in them the youngest of all the branches from that stem, with Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians too, taking precedence of them: and we should have to look, and look in vain, for any trace or presumption whatever of his descent from that Achæus, whom the tradition feigns to have existed.

But with the acknowledgment of Homer’s historical authority, the credit of that tradition falls; as indeed it is etymologically self-convicted by the formation of its cardinal name Hellen.

The Achæan prominence in Homer rests on grounds sufficiently clear: over the Ionians, who appear to be not even an Hellenic race; over the Dorians, latent in the Pylian town of Dorion, or among the sister races of Crete, where they are as yet wholly undistinguished: over the Æolids, (for there are no Æolians,) because these are single shoots only, while the Achæans are a branch, a principal section of the Hellenic race; and also, as I think may be shown 811, because of all Hellenes they appear really to have had the most normal connection with the true fountain-head of their race.

Nowhere among the Dorians, and (of course, if the Ionians are Pelasgian,) nowhere among the Ionians, have we any trace of the name ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, or of the thing indicated by it. May not this be the reason that the Dorian kings of Sparta sought (so to speak) to serve themselves heirs to the house of Agamemnon?

I may observe in passing, as to the Ionians, that it has recently been held that they are not only Hellenic, but the oldest Hellenes: that they parted from the rest of the race in Asia, came into Greece by the islands, and were its great sea-faring race. This theory, ably as it has been supported, is but doubtfully agreeable to the positive or negative evidence of Homer: still it is not less fatal to the current tradition of Hellen and his family, than that which views the Ionians as more nearly connected with the Pelasgians 812.

Only among Achæans, Æolids, and Dardanians, do we find the patriarchal title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. The Dardan house fell with the Trojan war. The throne of Augeias had given way even before that great crisis. It is probable that the line of Euphetes was then no longer in existence; else we must have heard of it in the Catalogue, or during the action. The realm of Eumelus was remote and small, and if it had been wrecked in the convulsions of the period, it would leave nothing upon which the Dorians could lay hold as a point of junction with the past. But they had come into the very dominions of the family of Pelops, though with a transfer of the metropolis from Mycenæ to Sparta. Here was the true Greek Patriarchate, of which for purposes of policy they might well desire to become the ostensible representatives.

Spurious Tradition of the Hellenidæ.

The legend of the Hellenidæ might probably be meant to cooperate towards the same end. Its determinate form I have ventured to discard: but its spirit and intention have their importance in connection with the subject of the extraction of the Greeks. It affords early witness to the general belief in the derivation of the Greek races from Thessaly: and though it does not suffice of itself to prove that a Dorus or an Ion came from thence, yet it is of great importance as a testimony to their general connection with Thessaly, and it powerfully corroborates evidence such as Homer affords to that effect in the case of the Achæans. Nor are we entirely without Homeric evidence of a connection between the Dorians and the Achæans, and thus between the Dorians and Thessaly. For the Dorians are found in Crete together with the Achæans (Od. xix.), and in the dominions of Nestor peopled by Achæans we find the town called Δώριον, Il. ii. 594. As, however, the great Dorian mass came into Peloponnesus not under a family of Dorian rulers, but under Heraclids, their connection with the old Hellas was not maintained by any regal tradition, and hence perhaps the need of the legend of Hellen to revive the memory of it.

Let us now endeavour to gather together the threads of the argument.

It is plain that Agamemnon was not called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν on account of his great monarchy; because other great monarchs want the title, and, again, other insignificant lords hold it.

Nor did he possess it on the ground of autochthonism: for the Achæans were immigrants into the Peloponnesus, and not autochthons, and they had been preceded by other races.

Neither was it borne by him on the ground of a divine descent more direct or more illustrious than that of others: for his divine descent would in that case at least have been specifically stated, instead of being left to remote and hazardous inference. Nor is the title borne by Achilles, who was the great grandson of Jupiter, or by Hercules or Minos, who were his sons.

If sovereignty and antiquity be connected with the title, they are not of themselves sufficient to confer it: and if divine descent be a condition of it, this must be joined with other conditions.

These negatives, established in the case of Agamemnon, leave room, I believe, for but one supposition; namely, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν must indicate chieftaincy, or in other words, the lineal headship, passing by seniority, of one among the ruling or royal houses, who represent the stem of a particular race, in his case the Achæan branch of the Hellenic family; and who govern, and have continuously governed, those of their own name or branch. Of these royal houses there might be many, allied together by common derivation, at the same or different epochs, from a common stem.

Summary of the Evidence.

In sum, the Homeric picture appears to be as follows.

First we have the remote and wintry Dodona of Thessaly, the most ancient and most awful seat of the religious worship of the Greeks; in connection with which Achilles invokes Jupiter for the success and safe return of Patroclus.

Around Dodona dwell the Selli or Helli. The special veneration paid to the place points it out as the oldest site of the national worship; and the possession of this oldest site again points out the tribe as the mother-tribe of that wonderful Greek race, whose fame is graven ineffaceably upon the rock with a pen of iron.

From among the Helli of the mountains, who nowhere appear among the contingents of the Greek army, must have proceeded the migratory bands who gave to the Thessalian plain the name of Hellas. Their descendants fix themselves as settlers there. Beguiled into civilization, they become Hellenes; they spread, by their inborn elastic energies, towards the south, and carry with them, only a little in their rear, the very title of their Hellenic origin, as well as their own peculiar name.

The ruling families of their septs or clans give each to its actual head, if not to its heir, the dignity of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and this title they carry forth with them to the southern provinces in which they plant themselves.

One of these ruling families, the head of the great sept of the Achæans, carries the right to this title in the case of Agamemnon: and inasmuch as it betokens what is both oldest and highest in descent and in civil authority in the whole group of the Hellenic tribes, it forms an appropriate and characteristic designation for their chief ruler and leader.

Having thus considered the case of Agamemnon, the great Achæan chieftain, in this view, we may proceed to the other cases of Anchises and Æneas, of Augeias, Euphetes, and Eumelus.

In none of these cases, however, have we the same right to assume in limine the character of chieftainship by known lineage from an Hellenic family, as in the case of the Achæans. The cases of Anchises and Æneas may indeed be treated on grounds of their own. In the other instances, we must inquire what ground Homer furnishes for especially connecting these persons with the headship of ruling families, and with Hellas or Thessaly.

This I shall do, subject to the general rule, that if in any particular case there can be found a special mark of connection with Thessaly or Hellas in or about a particular spot, it is thereupon to be inferred that in that particular place the connection was known and commemorated. If, for example, we find at a given point an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, reason binds us to presume that, as the local name might show the derivation from the first seat of the race, so by this title the lineal descent from a ruling family there was meant to be commemorated and marked.

The Cases of Anchises and Æneas

But first for Anchises and Æneas.

Homer is the historian as well as the poet of Greece: but he is neither the poet nor the historian of Troy, further than as it was necessary for him to describe generally to the Greeks the race with whom they had been engaged in a death-struggle.

The strong resemblance between the two nations, and especially their partaking, to a certain extent, of a common lineage, seems to have constituted a difficulty in his way. Already in his time the sentiment of Greek nationality was strong. Whether he chiefly found or made it so, is nothing to the present purpose. This sentiment of nationality required to be circumscribed by a clear line, marking the extent of the Greek political organisation; and if it was unfavourable to the acknowledgment of relationship to any race beyond that line, especially was it so in the case of a race that the Greeks had conquered. Probably therefore the purpose of Homer required that he should instinctively as it were keep in special obscurity the notes of kindred between the two countries.

In the case of the Greeks, Homer has intelligibly pointed out the origin of the race among the hills of Northern Thessaly round the ancient Dodona, and near Olympus, its poetical counterpart, and the residence of Jupiter with his gorgeous train. Yet more clearly has he in the case of the Trojans enabled us to trace them to their fountain-head, again in the mountains, and beside the roots, of Ida, where they worshipped the Idæan Jove 813. We have here the race without predecessors, residing in the very spot where they were planted by their divine progenitor, and coming down by a clear line of seven generations to the cousins Hector and Æneas.

Cases of Anchises and Æneas.

But although the conditions of chieftaincy are thus obviously fulfilled in the race of Dardanus, yet difficulty presents itself in a new form. Why is the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν applied to Anchises and to his son Æneas, but never to Priam, or to his son Hector, or to any of his family?

The answer to this question opens a curious chapter of Homeric history and speculation. In going through it I shall endeavour carefully to separate between positive statement, and interpretation or conjecture.

These facts then are on the face of the poem.

1. Anchises nowhere personally appears in it. And yet there was at Troy an assembly of δημογέροντες (Il. iii. 146-8). Of the persons there mentioned, Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon were brothers of Priam; others, for example, Panthus and Antenor, were in the exercise of at the very least a subaltern sovereignty. They were present at Troy, while their sons fought in the Trojan ranks. The reason, therefore, of the absence of Anchises is not to be sought in his being represented by Æneas. Nor in the immunity of his dominions, through their being placed among the mountains, from war: for Æneas himself, before he came to Troy, had only been rescued by divine interposition from the hands of Achilles 814. Why then does Anchises never appear? Either surely because of the high rank of his sovereignty, or because of some unexplained rivalry between the families.

Evidence as to Æneas.

2. It does not appear that Æneas took any part in the councils of the Trojans. But still he is always represented as a personage of the greatest importance. It is said of him, as of Hector, θεὸς δ’ ὡς τίετο δήμῳ 815. Yet his character would seem to be wholly unmarked by any great or striking quality, such as we find in Sarpedon and in Polydamas. Something peculiar then in his birth and position must have been the cause of the importance attached to him, as it is not to be found in his personal qualities.

3. Accordingly, there are clear indications of a jealousy between Æneas himself and the Trojan royal family. In the great battle of B. x. 118, Deiphobus, wanting aid, goes to seek Æneas (459-61).

τὸν δ’ ὕστατον εὗρεν ὁμίλου
ἐστάοτ’· αἰεὶ γὰρ Πριάμῳ ἐπεμήνιε δίῳ
οὕνεκ’ ἀρ’, ἔσθλον ἔοντα μετ’ ἀνδράσιν, οὔτι τίεσκεν.

Now this aversion is wholly foreign to the character of Priam, which was genial and kindly: nor can it be accounted for by any thing in the very neutral character of Æneas. There is an opinion of some critics, that he and Anchises had given offence by advising the restoration of Helen. This, however, seems (B. iii. 159) to have been the general wish of the δημογέροντες, to whom it is expressly ascribed; and it is Antenor, who proposes it in the Assembly; why then should it not, if it existed, be mentioned by Homer in the case of Æneas and Anchises? Yet there is not the faintest reference to it. It would still, however, appear insufficient to account for the feeling imputed to Priam. Coupling it with the high position of Æneas, and the absence of Anchises, I cannot but think there is most probably a reference here to the headship of the family, which is designated by the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Nothing could be more natural than this jealousy between the recent and wealthy city of the plain on the one hand, and the ancient but comparatively poor city of the hills on the other, if the ruling family of Dardania claimed by seniority the chieftaincy of the race.

4. Another remarkable indication of the peculiar position of Æneas is afforded by the taunt of Achilles (Il. xx. 179-83),

ἦ σέ γε θυμὸς ἐμοὶ μαχέσασθαι ἀνώγει
ἐλπόμενον Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξειν ἱπποδάμοισιν
τιμῆς τῆς Πριάμου;

‘But you will not get it,’ he proceeds, ‘for Priam has children of his own, and is no fool.’

To this taunt Æneas makes no reply, except by stating his genealogy, for which Achilles had not asked. Is not this very like justifying his expectation of the throne? or what other connecting link can be pointed out between the taunt of Achilles, and the genealogy given in answer to the challenge it conveyed?

5. While Ilion, the city of Priam, was later by several generations, probably having been founded in the reign of Ilus, Anchises reigned in Dardania, the original seat (Il. xx. 216) of the race. The fact of his sovereignty there seems to be indicated by our finding Æneas in command of the Dardanians, with two sons of Antenor, who probably served as his lieutenants (ii. 819-23): by the connection which that passage establishes between Anchises and the hill country, inhabited (Il. xx. 216) by the Dardanians; by the division of the royal line at the point where the Ilian name first appears (Il. xx. 231); and by a number of places showing the high position in the army which Æneas held, as head of the Dardanian force.

6. The rank of Æneas was without any rival or parallel in the Trojan army, except Hector. Though strictly speaking Dardanian, he is addressed as

Αἰνεία, Τρώων βουλήφορε·

His name is often combined with that of Hector, and when so combined frequently precedes it. Thus we have (vi. 75),

εἰ μὴ ἄρ’ Αἰνείᾳ τε καὶ Ἕκτορι εἶπε κ.τ.λ.

To this are subjoined, by Helenus, words which assign to Æneas a parity of command with Hector:

Αἰνεία τε καὶ Ἕκτορ, ἐπεὶ πόνος ὔμμι μάλιστα
Τρώων καὶ Λυκίων ἐγκέκλιται 816.

If it be thought that metrical considerations had to do with putting Æneas in these places as well as in xx. 240, before Hector, so they might have to do with placing Ilus before Assaracus in the genealogy.

It is asserted of him by Mars in the person of Acamas, Il. v. 467,

κεῖται ἀνὴρ ὅντ’ ἶσον ἐτίομεν Ἕκτορι δίῳ,
Αἰνείας, υἱὸς μεγαλήτορος Ἀγχίσαο.

Lastly, we have the prophecy of Neptune that the sceptre of Dardanus should continue in the line of Anchises (Il. xx. 302-8).

And, as regards the application to Æneas of the title which properly belonged to Anchises, this seems to connect itself with the practice of the heroic age as to a devolution of sovereignty, either partial or total, by aged men upon their heirs. We seem to find another example of this in the case of Eumelus; and the instances of Achilles, and especially of Ulysses, are also in point.

7. As the character of Æneas does not account for the jealousy felt towards him, so neither does his conduct. He nowhere thwarts Hector by opposition, or tries him by advice that he is not inclined to take. Of this course of proceeding we have an instance; but it is in Polydamas. If, then, neither the character nor the conduct of Æneas supply the explanation, we must look for it in some claims that he was entitled to make in virtue of lineage, and that consequently attracted jealousy towards him.

8. Although it has been assumed that Priam was the head of the Trojan race and federation, this is not stated by Homer. In Il. xxiv. 544 it is only said that he excelled the other princes of that region, (1) in his wealth, and (2) in the number, or possibly it may mean the excellence of his sons. On the contrary, it is doubtful, by the mere words of the poem, whether Priam represented the senior or the junior line, and when we compare and draw inferences from the text, we may arrive at the conclusion that it was the junior line, quite as easily as at an opposite one; especially if we shall find, that the rights of seniority itself were less determinate in Troas, than in Greece.

In the genealogy of the Twentieth Book, we find no assistance towards elucidating this question, except in the precedence given to names. The three sons of Tros stand in the following order:

1. Ilus.
2. Assaracus.
3. Ganymedes.

Then (1) the fate of Ganymedes is described;

(2) the line of Ilus is traced down to Priam;

(3) that of Assaracus is traced to Anchises.

Here the line of Priam has precedence: but on the other hand, lastly, Æneas proceeds to state his own birth from Anchises, before that of Hector from Priam,

αὐτὰρ ἔμ’ Ἀγχίσης, Πρίαμος δ’ ἔτεχ’ Ἕκτορα δῖον 817.

9. In the Fifth Iliad we learn, that Jupiter presented some horses of a particular breed to Tros, as a compensation for the loss of his son Ganymedes. Anchises brought his mares to them in the time of Laomedon without leave, and thus got possession of the breed. And it is in this place that Homer calls him ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν 818. It may also be observed that this was the act of a young man; for Laomedon, on whom he played this trick, was one generation higher in the family tree. It is here shown undoubtedly that the horses of Tros, the common ancestor, descended to the line of Priam; which was the more wealthy and powerful, and occupied the plain country, where the horses fed in great numbers (xx. 221); but again, does it not seem as if this very proceeding of Anchises may have had reference to a rivalry between the two houses, and a claim on his part to the headship of the family? especially from the use in this very narrative of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν for Anchises (v. 268), and shortly after for his heir Æneas (v. 311).

Summary of the Evidence.

To sum up the evidence. We find the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν applied to two persons only among the Trojans. Those two are a father advanced in years, and his heir apparent. The father is plainly enough the sovereign of Dardania, as well as descended from Dardanus; and Dardania, though secondary in power, was the original seat of the race. We cannot say positively whether Anchises represented the elder or the younger branch of the family: for precedence of name is sometimes given to one, and sometimes to the other line. But as Troy was powerful, and Dardania poor, we can understand the precedence of the Trojan line, even although it be supposed junior: whereas it seems difficult to account for the fact that the precedence is sometimes given to Æneas, or for the jealousy felt both towards him, and by him, except on the supposition that his family in its humbler circumstances either were the rightful representatives of Dardanus, whose sceptre, after the fall of Troy, Æneas and his sons were undoubtedly to transmit 819; or at least were in a condition, whether by primogeniture in Assaracus, or whether by holding the original seat of the race, to make fair and plausible pretensions to the distinction.

It is important to bear in mind, that we have not the same clear assertion of the right of the elder branch to succeed to power in Asia, which the cases of Agamemnon, Protesilaus, Thrasymedes, and perhaps others, supply in Greece. On the contrary, we shall find Sarpedon first leader of the Lycians, though of a junior branch to Glaucus, and likewise representing only the female line. We shall also find great reason to question whether Hector, even if he was the heir expectant of the succession, was not, nevertheless, junior to Paris. This want of definiteness in the rule of succession is exactly what would bring it into dispute, and perhaps into prolonged dispute. And if the right of seniority was not fully acknowledged in Asia, this would at once explain, why Homer did not observe an uniform order in the genealogy: perhaps it might also explain his not being historically aware what that order was.

If this be so, the apparent anomaly of the application, on the Trojan side, to secondary persons only of the title so constantly given to the highest Greek, disappears, and becomes the consistent application of a rule. And Anchises with Æneas may then offer the most perfect model of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, as uniting with continued sovereignty not only known lineal descent from the first ancestor, and from Jupiter, but also the continued possession of the original seat.

It may however be asked, why, even if we allow that ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is among the Greeks a title of patriarchal chieftaincy, should we therefore assume that it had the same defined meaning among a people of different blood and institutions?

Let me briefly answer this question.

It is to the Helli that we have looked back as the most probable source of those ideas and institutions of clanship, which gave rise to the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. But the Helli were a mountain people, (for they were around the wintry Dodona,) and so were the Dardanians: and the institutions of highlanders in different parts, even at wide intervals of space and time, often present strong mutual resemblances. The limited means and pursuits of man in such a physical position check development, and tend to maintain uniformity.

The Dardan highlanders worshipped Jupiter on Ida, as the Helli worshipped him at Dodona. That it was the same Jupiter, we may infer with the greatest confidence, from the fact that Homer makes one formula of invocation common to his Trojans and his Greeks 820.

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν Ἀχαιῶν τε Τρώων τε·
Ζεῦ πάτερ, Ἴδηθεν μεδέων, κύδιστε, μέγιστε, κ.τ.λ.

The bulk of the religion was nearly the same on both sides, as far as the principal deities were concerned.

Signs of kin between Trojans and Greeks.

As the first among the proofs of affinity in blood, I should be inclined to cite that very visit of Paris to Menelaus, which gave occasion to the war. We have no other instance recorded in Homer of a foreign prince, received as such in domestic hospitality by a Greek chieftain. Nor can we, inversely, find that Greek chieftains were similarly entertained by foreigners. We have indeed an account of gifts received by Menelaus in Egypt 821; and we have the kindly reception by the Egyptian king and his people of the Pseudo-Ulysses as a suppliant 822; and the similar entertainment of Ulysses, again as a suppliant, in Scheria. But these cases fall greatly short of the case of Paris. Again, Homer calls the Egyptians ἀλλόθροοι ἄνθρωποι 823: and that phrase is an usual one with him, evidently representing a familiar idea. But he never calls the Trojans ἀλλόθροοι, nor speaks of them as having different manners or religion from the Greeks. The strongest word applied to them is ἀλλοδάπος 824. But this word seems to mean simply ‘from another place,’ and does not convey the proper and full idea of a foreigner. For not only the Lycian Sarpedon is an ἀλλοδάπος to the Trojans, but Greek pirates are usually said to attack ἀλλοδάποι, whereas they evidently were wont to plunder those of their own nation, even down to the time of Thucydides: and above all Eumæus, disgusted and worn out with the profligate misdeeds of the Suitors, thinks of moving off ἄνδρας ἐς ἀλλοδάπους, together with his oxen (ἰόντ’ αὐτῇσι βόεσσιν), by which he could not have meant more than a short passage to the Greek continent 825. On the whole, I think that all this permits the supposition that the Trojans were admitted to be a kindred, though they were not a Greek people.

But further, the poems are full of testimony to the affinities between the Trojans and the Greeks. It is true they also bear witness to considerable differences: but both nations had been settled in the plain country for several generations before the Trojan War; and, with the growth of agriculture and trade, arts and wealth, they might well have diverged from the close parallelism of a ruder age.

At this point, however, we must call to mind some matters, which have been more largely discussed already.

Among these resemblances of a general character it may be observed, that there evidently are Pelasgi on both sides of the great quarrel. The Πελασγοὶ of the Trojans are among the ἐπίκουροι (Il. ii. 840): the Πελασγοὶ of the Greeks appear as one of the Cretan races, distinct from the Dorians and Achæans, and probably as the first founders of those lowland settlements in Thessaly (ii. 681), over which the Hellenic and Achæan names seem principally to have prevailed. Thus the Pelasgian name forms a decided bond of union between the two races: though, from the Poet’s mentioning it on the Trojan, and suppressing it on the Greek side, we at once infer that the Pelasgian element was stronger and more palpable among the Trojans.

Signs connected with the Helli.

Next, it may be recollected that, according both to antecedent probability and to tradition, those Helli who colonized the tract about Dodona must have come from, that is, come by way of, Dardania. There is thus every likelihood of a similarity, either of race or of manners, between those who passed onwards, and those who dropped off the movement, and remained behind.

Nor are there wanting some indications, small in amount, but trustworthy in their nature, of primitive identity between the Dardans, or some portion of them, and the Helli.

The Trojan Catalogue divides itself into two principal parts. The latter of these (840-877) recites the names of the allied nations. The former (816-39) mentions no names of races but the Trojan and Dardanian; which were really one, and were even in name sometimes treated as identical: for Æneas is addressed, though commander of the Dardans 826, as

Αἰνεία, Τρώων βουλήφορε.

This division of the Catalogue is clearly indicated by the verse which introduces it,

ἔνθα τότε Τρῶές τε διέκριθεν ἠδ’ ἐπίκουροι·

where the word Τρῶες evidently includes the Dardanians.

And that every thing is Trojan, or Dardan, which lies within the division, vv. 816-839, may further be inferred from Dolon’s description of the bivouac of the ἐπίκουροι in Il. x. 428-31. He enumerates nine nations, some of whom appear among the eleven described in Il. ii. 840-77, but not one among those portions of the force which are described 816-839. I therefore gather, that every thing in this part of the Catalogue is strictly Trojan or Dardan. But here we have

Ἄσιος Ὑρτακίδης, ὃν Ἀρίσβηθεν φέρον ἵπποι
αἴθωνες μεγάλοι, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελλήεντος.

The mention of this river is repeated in Il. xii. 96, 7.

Now the name of a river Selleeis at once suggests a connection with the tribe of Selli or Helli: and further on we shall find, that Ephyre is a sign of the Helli, as Larissa is of the Pelasgi, and that one at least of the Ephyres of Greece, probably one situated in Thessaly, was by a river Selleeis. In later times Sicyon 827, and in Homer Elis, if not Thessaly, show each their Ephyre with a river Selleeis.

It has been already noticed, that in the Games of the Twenty-third Iliad, Homer tells us that the σόλος, or ball of iron given by Achilles as a prize, had previously been hurled by the strong arm of king Eetion. And as all the traces of gymnastic exercises in Homer lead us to refer them to Hellic families, we may perhaps be justified in taking this as an indication that Eetion, the father of Andromache, belonged to this stock.

The Hellespont of Homer.

Another trace of the name of the Helli is found in the grammatical structure of the ancient Homeric word Hellespont. Its composition declares it to be the sea of Helle. Helle would be the descriptive name of a woman of the tribe of Helli. Nor could any thing be more natural, than that the Strait and neighbouring water should take its appellation from the tribe of Helli, or even from a person of that tribe, when we have every reason to believe they made the passage in the course of their migration westward.

In later times, the name Hellespont has been restricted to the narrow strait between the Sea of Marmora and the Archipelago. In Homer it bore this sense, at least occasionally or inclusively, because he calls it ἀγάῤῥοος 828. At other times he calls it πλατὺς, and the commentators have been much puzzled to show how a narrow strait could be a broad one, while the interpretation salt has also been suggested for the epithet. It is just possible, that this adjective might apply to what was afterwards known as the Hellespont, and might describe it as broad, in comparison with the bay in which lay the Greek ships: but it is much more natural to construe it more freely, and to understand by it the broad Hellespont, in opposition to the narrow Hellespont; that is, the open sea, in opposition to the ἀγάῤῥοος, which signifies the Strait. The expression πλατὺς Ἑλλήσποντος is used but thrice; once 829 for the water near the part of the camp occupied by Achilles, which we know was by the open sea 830, and twice 831 with reference to the sepulchral mounds which were to be erected there, and for which the most conspicuous spot would of course be chosen. What πλατὺς suggests, another epithet, ἀπείρων 832, surely requires: for it is incredible that this word should be applied to the mere Strait. And in truth, independently of epithets, it is demonstrable that the word in Homer sometimes means, not the strait, but the Archipelago. For Achilles, announcing his intention to sail home, says he will be seen passing Ἑλλήσποντον ἐπ’ ἰχθυόεντα 833, over the Hellespont, which, having his vessels already at the mouth of it, he clearly could not do if it meant the strait only. And, in truth, the etymology of the word speaks for itself: the Greeks never would have given the name πόντος at all to a narrow strip of water. The connection, which was thus established between this quarter and Greece through the medium of the name Helle, was recognised by the later Greeks: but they naturally altered its form, by keeping to their own country the honours of the fountain-head, while they made the eastward traces of the name to be secondary and derivative. In Apollonius, Phryxus and Helle are the children of Athamas, and grandchildren of Æolus: and they are carried from Thessaly on the back of a ram to the Troic sea, where she is dropped, and gives her name to it. This tradition is summed up in the argument to the Argonautica, and exhibits the belief of the Greeks in the early relationship of the countries.

All this marks the Helli not only as a people who had crossed the straits, but as one which had left its name associated with the northern coast of the Ægean, and moreover upon the country in the neighbourhood of the straits, up to the river Selleeis; a stream which we see must have been at a considerable distance beyond Troy, because all the rivers that descended from Mount Ida were employed in clearing away the Greek earthworks, and this one is not among them 834.

The gift of Echepolus.

We find an insulated yet remarkable note of kin between the Dardan house and the Greeks in the case of Echepolus. He was a son of Anchises, and he resided in Sicyon. He was possessed of great wealth, and apparently he had also the fine breed of horses which was in his family: for he presented Agamemnon with the mare Αἴθη 835, as a consideration for not being required to follow him against Troy.

Now there was evidently at this time no commercial class formed in Greece. Echepolus must therefore have had a territorial fortune. To find a wealthy member of the Dardan house domesticated in Greece, and peacefully remaining there during the expedition, must excite some surprise. It seems to supply a new and strong presumption of the Hellic origin of the royal families of Troas. The name too, and the gift of a horse, are in remarkable conformity with the horse-rearing and horse-breaking pursuits of the highest Trojans.

We have already seen stray signs of the Pelasgic affinities between the two contending parties: but it would now appear, that there were affinities in the Hellic line also: and if so, then this institution of chieftaincy, standing above merely political supremacy, and indicated by the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, may probably have subsisted among Trojans as well as Greeks.

The less warlike character of the Trojans, their more oriental manners, and their less multiform and imaginative religion, all point to considerable differences in the composition of the people. The Pelasgic ingredient was probably stronger in Troy: it appears to have had more influence over religion, manners, and institutions. But the circumstances mentioned above are tokens of an infusion of Hellic blood in the populations that inhabited Troas. Now this was nowhere so likely to be found as in the royal family; for we see the governing faculty everywhere accompanying the Hellic tribes through Greece, and asserting itself both by the acquisition of political power, and by the energetic use of it. Everywhere it rises, by a natural buoyancy, to the summit of society; and gives their first vent, in miniature, to those energies, which were afterwards to defy, or even to subdue the world.

At the same time, though it is in connection with the Hellic families alone that we find the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν among the Greeks, we need not proceed so far as to deny the possibility that it might also have been a Pelasgic institution, and that its non-appearance, in connection with their name, might be sufficiently accounted for simply by their loss of political power. We have no reason to suppose the Pelasgi and Helli to have been families of mankind whose characters were in radical and absolute opposition to one another: the completeness of their fusion after a short period seems to prove, that, though with a different distribution of capacities and tendencies, they must have had many and important points of contact.

IV. Case of Augeias

Let us take next the case of Augeias.

He appears in three passages of the Iliad.

1. The Epeans, who inhabited Elis, with Bouprasium and other towns enumerated in the Catalogue, and lying in the north-western corner of the Peloponnesus, sent to the Trojan war forty ships, in four divisions, under four separate leaders, and without any head over the whole contingent. The fourth named of these is Polyxeinus, son of Agasthenes, himself a lord (ἄναξ), and the son of Augeias.

2. In the Eleventh Book, Nestor gives the curious history of the war of his boyhood or earliest youth, between the Elians (v. 671), called also Epeans (688), and the Pylians.

Neleus had sent to Elis a chariot with four horses to contend in the games, of which a tripod was the prize. The horses were detained by Augeias (v. 701).

τοὺς δ’ αὖθι ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Αὐγείας
κάσχεθε.

Nestor and the Pylians invaded Elis in return, and brought off an immense booty. The Elians then took arms and besieged Thryoessa (in the Catalogue Thryon), the border city of Pylos, at the ford of the Alpheus. Minerva brought the tidings to Pylos. The Pylian forces spent one night on the boundary river Minyeius, and marched to the Alpheus, beside which they spent a second night.

3. In the morning the battle was fought: the Epeans were defeated, and driven all the way to Bouprasium and the Olenian rock, upon the sea shore, in the western part of what was afterwards Achæa. There Pallas turned them back. The Pylians, who returned home, are called Achæans 836.

The case of Augeias.

Nestor in the first fight had slain a warrior named Μούλιος. He was the son-in-law of Augeias, married to his eldest daughter Agamede, who was profoundly skilled in drugs (v. 741);

ἣ τόσα φάρμακα ᾔδη, ὅσα τρέφει εὐρεῖα χθών.

K. O. Müller (Orchomenus, p. 355) infers from the Catalogue, that Augeias was lord only of a fourth part of Elis. But this assumption seems quite gratuitous in connection with the passage in the Catalogue, and utterly in contradiction to the tenour of the history of the Pylian raid in B. xi. On the contrary, I infer with considerable confidence, from the acephalous state of the Elian division of the army, in which it differs from the other divisions, that there had been a revolution in that state since the time of Augeias; and if so, then indirectly the Catalogue confirms the Elian monarchy described in the Eleventh Book.

Thus then we find this ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, Augeias, lord of Elis two generations before the Trojan war. He is neighbour to Achæans, whom we have already traced in Hellas: and he appears to have belonged to the same national origin with them, because they sent their chariots to run races at his games. Again, the fact of his holding these games at all, and at a place which subsequently contended for and obtained the superintendence of the great national assemblages celebrated at Olympia, testifies to his known connection with the cradle of the race whose custom it was to celebrate them; because these festivities had a religious and national character, and as such could not but have depended very greatly upon traditionary title. This race we have previously found to be the Hellenic race.

Notes of connection between Elis and the North.

We may however find other indications of the descent of Augeias from a ruling Hellenic family, in local and personal notices which connect Elis, his own territory, with the north, and with Thessaly in particular.

For example: it was at the Alpheus in Elis that Thamyris suffered his calamity: and he was coming at the time from Œchalia 837, in the valley of the Upper Peneus, a part of the Homeric Thessaly or Hellas proper. (Il. ii. 730.)

The name Θρῂξ, too, which is applied to him, never seems to have spread farther southwards than the hills about Thessaly.

Further, he was coming from Eurytus of Œchalia, who is again named as the lord, apparently, of that city, in ii. 730. But the name Eurytus was one current among the descendants of Actor 838, for a descendant of Actor who bore it is named in the Catalogue a little below: and this latter Eurytus was an Epean chief: and the descendants of Actor are found in the Epean or Elian army of the Eleventh Book. (xi. 709, 739.)

Again, they are found in Thessaly or Phthiotis, for when Mercury had deflowered Polymele, the daughter of Phylas a Thessalian, Echecles, a descendant of Actor, married her; and yet again, they are found near Aspledon 839 and the Minyeian Orchomenos, between Bœotia and Phocis 840.

Again, the Pylian army halted, at a day’s march from the Alpheus, on the Minyeius, a river evidently named from the Minyæ of Peloponnesus. But there was a Minya also in Thessaly 841, of which the site was not precisely known in historic times: and the northern Orchomenos was called Minyeius 842.

There is no part of Middle or of Southern Greece which so abounds in the local and personal notes of connection with Thessaly and the North as Elis and its neighbourhood. Some indications of it have already been given, and many more might be added. As for example, there was an Enipeus 843, a river of Elis, so there was of Pieria and of Phthiotis. Doris, beneath Œta, is reflected or prefigured in the Homeric Dorium of the Pylian territories: the Thessalian Larissa in a Larissa, and a river Larissus, of Elis. The Thessalian name Œchalia is repeated in the district, over which Nestor ruled at the epoch of the Troica; and there is an Arcadian Orchomenos as well as a northern one. Cyparissus in Elis corresponds, again, with a Cyparissus in Phocis. Some other more doubtful indications may close the list. The Parrhasie of Arcadia may be from the same root with the Πύρασος 844 of the dominions of Protesilaus. Perhaps the Thessalian Helos and Pteleos may be akin to Alos in the country of Peleus 845. The resemblance of names is not confined to the extremities of the line, but is scattered along the path of migration from north to south. It extends also to Laconia.

Nestor in his youth is summoned all the way from Pylos (τηλόθεν), to fight with Pirithous and others in Thessaly; (from whence Polypœtes, the son of Pirithous, led a division of the Greek army,) against the Φῆρες.

Thus far we find some presumptions as to the descent of Augeias, as to his connection with the Hellic institution of the games, and as to the relation between Elis, over which he reigned, and the line northwards into Thessaly; all tending, together with the evidently Hellic character of the Epeans, to shew that he was the representative of one of their ruling tribes.

But he also bears a distinct local mark, the nature of which I shall now endeavour to investigate.

The chieftainship of Agamemnon has been traced and identified by means of his Achæan connection, without any assistance from local or territorial names connected with the abode of his family.

In such a case as his, we could not look for aid of that description: for his house had only been possessed for two generations of their dominions: we have no precise knowledge before that time of the place of their sojourn: and when they rose to power, it was in a territory, and in cities, which appear to have been already of historic fame. It was not therefore likely that their abodes should bear names such as, if they had come in the characters of founders and not of inheritors, they would probably have affixed to them.

In the case of the Dardan house, we have found, among other indications of their Hellic affinities, the two evidently Hellic names of the Hellespont and the River Selleeis.

The name of Ephyre.

There is another local name in Homer of paramount importance as a key to the question respecting the ruling Hellic tribes, the name of Ephyre (Ἐφύρη).

Let us endeavour to collect the scattered lights which either the etymology, or the use and associations of the term in Homer, may supply.

Its cognate names.

And, first, we may notice in Homer a large cluster of names which are found running over Greece, and which are evidently in etymological association with one another: I will bring these together, before endeavouring to estimate their relation to the name Ephyre.

1. Φᾶρις, Il. ii. 582. In Lacedæmon.

2. Φεραὶ, Il. ii. 711. In Thessaly.

3. Φήρη, Il. v. 543. Between Pylus and Sparta.

4. Φήραι, Il. ix. 151, 293. Od. iii. 488. The same.

5. Φεαὶ, Od. xv. 296 846. Otherwise read Φεραὶ, and, according to the Scholiast, the same with Φῆραι. The site is on the sea, between Pylus and Sparta.

6. Φεῖα, Il. vii. 135. On the Iardanus: and probably also on the Arcadian frontier towards Pylus: but, in the opinion of the Scholiast 847, the same with Φεαί.

Besides these names of places, we have also,

1. Φηρητιάδης, Il. ii. 763. xxiii. 376, the name of Eumelus; who was the son of Admetus, the lord of Φεραὶ in Il. ii. 711.

2. Φέρης, one of the sons of Cretheus, a Thessalian king, Od. xi. 259.

3. The Φῆρες, termed ὀρέσκῳοι in Il. i. 268, and λαχνηέντες in Il. ii. 743; the shaggy mountaineers, on whom Pirithous made war, when he was attended by Nestor.

With respect to the six local names, and the two first of the three personal names, there can be little doubt of their identity in root. It is directly probable from the text, that Φήρη and Φηραὶ were the same place. The name of Eumelus, who lives at Φεραὶ, and who is the grandson of Φέρης, yet is called Φηρητιάδης, clearly establishes the etymological relationship. Thus there is, again, no difficulty whatever in recognising between Φεραὶ and Φεαὶ, or again between Φεαὶ and Φείαι; and it is in the manner of Homer to give the name of the same country both in the singular and in the plural, as Μυκήνη, Il. iv. 52, and Μυκηναὶ, Il. ii. 569. Φᾶρις, the only remaining name, gives us the Doric or Æolic α for η, and an altered form of declension. This however is not at all incompatible with the manner of Homer, who not only uses Πηνελόπη and Πηνελόπεια, Ἀστυόχη and Ἀστυόχεια, Πηρείη (according to one reading), Il. ii. 766, and Πιερίη, Od. v. 50, but Ἑρμῆς and Ἑρμείας, Πατροκλέης and Πατρόκλος; and for towns, the Θρύον of Il. ii. 591 appears again as Θρυόεσσα in Il. xi. 711.

In general it is to be remembered that the instrument of language, at the time when Homer lived was as yet in a highly elastic state: it was in the state as it were of gristle; it had not yet hardened into bone, nor assumed the strict conventional forms which a formed literature requires. And for the same reasons that it has presented variations as between one time and another, it could not but do the like as between one place and another.

The very same causes which made change a law of language would give to that course of change in one place a greater, and in another a less velocity, older forms succumbing at a given time in one place, and yet surviving in another. Such a state of facts around him would give great liberty to a poet, independently of the exigencies of his verse; which appear indeed to have caused to such a man, and with such a language, little difficulty.

But we hardly require the benefit of these general considerations to cover the case of a varying declension for the name of a town. The true explanation probably is the very simple one, that in one declension it has been used substantively, and in the other adjectively. And this will be the more plain if we consider that the name of the town would usually be the representative of an idea, either in conjunction with a person, or directly. Thus θρύον is a rush, and θρυοεὶς rushy. The town Θρύον in the Catalogue is at the ford of the Alpheus, and in Il. xi. 711 it is τις Θρυόεσσα πόλις, αἰπεῖα κολώνη, which exhibits to us the adjective use in an actual example. So again by analogy we might have Φῆρις from Φήρα or Φήρη, as πάτρις from πάτρα, ἀναλκὶς from ἄλκη.

We have a curious extra-Homeric remnant of geographical evidence with respect to this Pharis. Pausanias 848 relates to us, that the place where it was reported to have stood was in his time called Alesiæ, and that near it there was a river bearing the peculiar name of Phellias; which it seems most natural to regard as a corrupted form of the Homeric name Σελληείς. This connection of Pharis with Selleeis becomes in its turn an argument for relationship between Pharis and Ephyre, with which Selleeis is associated in the places where Homer mentions it as the name of a Greek river.

Nor are we without other traces, in this region, of that name which so often attends upon Ephyre: for Laconia had for its key on the north the town of Sellasia 849. The Προέληνοι of Arcadia should also here be borne in mind.

Thus then we appear to find the name of Ephyre according to one or other of its forms in Laconia, in Pylus, and in that part of Thessaly which was ruled by Admetus. The ruling race in the two former was Achæan, and therefore Hellic. Admetus was himself an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and his Hellic origin will be shown presently. So far, therefore, we have a presumption established that the name of Ephyre signifies some peculiar connection with the Helli.

Etymologically it is obvious to connect these words with ἔρα as their root, and to suppose that they retain the prefix, which it had lost in the common Greek usage even before the days of Homer, as he employs ἔραζε without the digamma: and which prefix we find reproduced in the Latin terra.

The Φῆρες .

Let us now pass on to the Φῆρες.

The Φῆρες of Homer are, like the Ἕλλοι, a mountain people, Il. i. 268, rude in manners (ii. 743), and aggressive upon the inhabitants of the plains; for the war in which Nestor engaged was evidently retributive, as the expression used is ἐτίσατο 850, Pirithous ‘paid them off;’ and he was sovereign of a part of the plain country, called Pelasgic Argos. Nor does any adverse presumption arise from our finding a Hellic tribe (if such they were) of the mountains, making war on tribes of similar origin in the plain: any more than we are surprised at war between the Pylians and the Epeans, both apparently Hellic, though probably not both Achæan.

It may be well to remember, that the Dardans of Homer are often included in Trojans; as well as often separately designated: and that the Cephallenians are also apparently included among his Ἀχαιοί. Neither of these pairs of names are territorial: while in each pair one probably indicates a subdivision of the other.

The Φῆρες thus resembling the Ἕλλοι, we are led by their designation to another link between the name of Φῆραι with its cognates and the Hellic race. It seems thus far as if Φηραὶ were the appropriate name of a settlement formed by Φῆρες.

Having proceeded thus far, we may now observe the relation of the word Φὴρ,

1. To the Greek ἔρα, which evidently, from its passing into the Latin terra, had at one time a Greek prefix. With this we may probably associate the Greek ἔαρ, and the Latin ver.

2. To the Greek θὴρ, a wild beast.

3. To the Latin fera, with the same meaning.

4. To the Latin terra, meaning the earth.

5. To the Italian terra, the old classical name, in that beautiful tongue, not for a district, but for an inclosed, walled, or fortified place. This word seems in Italian to be rarely, if at all, used for a district, but so generally for a town, that it is difficult to suppose the signification was derived in the same manner as Argos in Greek, from the tract of country in which it was situated. In Italian terra seems often to mean tellus, often humus, very rarely ager, constantly oppidum or castrum. Thus in Dante (Inferno, C., v. 97), ‘Siede la terra, dove nata fui.’

This being so, it is natural to suppose that, while the correlative of the Greek ἔρα became in Latin terra, so as directly to signify tellus or humus, that of the Greek Φηρὰ became in Italian terra, so as to signify a walled place; or, in other words, that the original word, whatever it was, of the common mother language, which became Φηρὰ in Greek, in Italy became terra for this latter purpose. The exchange of θ for t we see in ἐσθὴς becoming vestis: and of t for f (= φ) in τρυγάω compared with fruges.

This sense of terra seems to have dropped altogether out of the Latin, and especially Pelasgian, branch of the old Italian tongue.

The relation between Φὴρ and θὴρ, the one applicable to men, and the other to wild beasts, appears evidently to throw us back upon that which the mountain tribes of men had in common with animals, namely, a wild and savage life, and the free possession of the earth. Thus the two stand in a common and near relation to the word ἔρα, the earth, and they seem to have ἐρ or ἠρ for their common root.

Before passing on to Ἐφύρη, I would remark that in this instance again we seem to derive light from Homer’s unequalled point and precision in the use of epithets. His Φῆρες appear to be in fact the rude and uncombed mountaineers, who also have the name of Ἕλλοι in the same or other tribes. These Φῆρες are λαχνηέντες, shaggy. They come down to the plains, and acquire settled and civilised habits: from Φῆρες they are become Ἀχαιοὶ, but their long hair has not left them, and from λαχνηέντες they are now καρηκομόωντες.

Now we find the word Ἐφύρη used many times in Homer: and once we have the name Ἔφυροι, applied to a people apparently Thessalian, on whom Mars 851, with his son Φόβος, makes war from out of Thrace.

Etymology of Ἐφύρη .

Can we then presume an etymological connection between the word Ἐφύρη, and that group of words which we have been discussing, and which we have found to show marks of connection with the Helli?

For if so, then we shall be supported by various other reasons, which, as we shall find, connect the word Ephyre with the Hellic races in a very remarkable manner.

What we have here to consider is,

1. The prefix ε.

2. The change of ε or η for υ.

Dr. Donaldson 852 has given a list of Greek words which have, as prefixes unconnected with the root, sometimes the letter α, sometimes ε, sometimes ο.

Such in the second class are

ἐ-ρέφω, whence roof.
ἐ-λεύθερος, whence liber.
ἐ-ρυθρὸς, whence ruber, rufus.
ἐ-ρετμὸς, whence remus.

This point being disposed of, how are we to account for finding φυρη, instead of φερη or φηρη?

Can it be because, in cases of Greek syllabic augment, there is a tendency to avoid reduplication, as in ἀτιτάλλω for ἀτατάλλω? In but a small proportion of the cases given in Dr. Donaldson’s table is the vowel prefix the same with the vowel following.

Can it be from that tendency of what we call comprehensively the digamma to lapse into the υ, which Heyne has observed 853?

Or, shall we found it on the principles laid down by Bopp 854, in his Comparative Grammar, that the α has a tendency to weaken itself into υ, and that liquids having a preference for that latter vowel, influence the generation of it? the conditions of interchange between α and υ resting, as he says, upon the laws of gravity or vocal equilibrium.

It must be observed that the original vowel of the root may, in this case, have been the α which we find in φᾶρις.

It is not only α that we may find supplanted by υ. The ε suffers the same fate in the Italian Siculus, which appears as the representative of the Greek Σίκελος. Again we have, in the Latin, the kindred words furo and fera. Perhaps I am wrong in dealing thus scrupulously with the variation from ε to υ, as if capable of affecting vitally the question of identity in the root. For in examining another root (that of κεφάλη), we have seen that its derivatives appear to include the whole, or nearly the whole range of the vowels of the alphabet.

Its probable signification.

Upon the whole it appears not unsafe, without pretending to any authoritative solution of a question fitted for philological scholars, among whom I cannot pretend to rank, to suppose that Ἐφύρη and Φηραὶ may be drawn etymologically from the same root. If so, that root will be probably the same with that of ἔρα, and of φῆρ of which we have ascertained that it is related to the Hellic races: and upon these suppositions we may already be prepared, I do not say to conclude, but to suspect that Ἐφύρη and Φεραὶ may properly denote, and may be the original and proper Hellic name for the terre (Ital.), or walled places, founded by the Hellic races; as Ἄργος signifies the open districts in which the Pelasgians were given to settling κωμηδὸν, for agricultural purposes.

I do not mean by this that the Pelasgian settlements contained no aggregations of houses, or that the Hellic were not connected with the cultivation of the soil. On the contrary, as the Pelasgians apparently built their Larissas for defence, so we seem to have indications connecting the name Ephyre with a fertile soil. When Homer represents the Ἔφυροι as objects of invasion by Mars from Thrace, he probably means by the name the inhabitants of a settled country in the plains, on whom predatory incursions were made by the Thracian highlanders. So that if we shall succeed in shewing a special connection between the local name Ephyre and the Hellic tribes, we may, by the reflected light of that conclusion, even venture to understand the word Ephyri as meaning Helli, who had come down into the low country, made settlements, and acquired something at least of the habits of civilized life.

Nor are we without further Homeric evidence to the effect that, wherever an Ephyre is found, there is usually an abundance of rich pasture and cultivable land, so that the name is well adapted to mark those spots which a conquering race would be apt to choose for its abodes.

For example, Elis has its Ephyre: and from the fact that Elis was the scene of the national chariot-races, we might at once conclude that it was famous for its horses, and if so, that it abounded in good soil and pasture, and in open country. Wherever in Homer we find the horse conspicuous, we find also good lands and opulence, whether it be in Troas, in the Thrace called ἐριβώλαξ 855, in Thessaly, or in Elis. For Homer gives us, as to the last, direct evidence of the fact, by his epithets εὐρύχορος, open, and ἱππόβοτος, horse-pasturing 856. Elis, in fact, was most probably for Peloponnesus what Bœotia was for Middle Greece: the first halting place, from its fertile soil, of those who entered the region; the scene, accordingly, of rapid successions, and therefore frequent revolutions, but also the place bearing the strongest marks, through nomenclature, of the country from which the new-comers had proceeded.

Again, the Ephyre of the Odyssey is expressly called (Od. ii. 328), πίειραν ἄρουραν. And when Hercules took Astyoche from Ephyre (Il. ii. 659), after despoiling that with many other cities, we may clearly infer, that they were rich, and not poor places which he plundered, therefore that this Ephyre also was rich, and if so, rich in its soil, the only wealth, for regions, then known to Greece. Again, the Ephyre of Sisyphus (Il. vi. 152) became Corinth, and Corinth was even in Homer’s time called ἄφνειος. This epithet is referred by some to its favourable position for commerce. But such an explanation is wholly unsuited to the age of Homer. For the commercial prominence of Corinth belongs to a later period; and we have nothing to support the idea, that commercial opulence existed in Greece at this period at all. The natural explanation seems to be, the fertility of the soil of the plain between the rock of Corinth and Sicyon. This seems to have become, in after-time, the subject of a proverb. Hence the χρησμόλογος in the Aves of Aristophanes says (Av. 968),

ἀλλ’ ὅταν οἰκήσωσι λύκοι πολιαί τε κορώναι
ἐν ταυτῷ τὸ μεταξὺ Κορίνθου καὶ Σικυῶνος.

In the same sense as where Shakespeare says,

When Birnam wood shall move to Dunsinane.

The Scholiast gives two explanations, of which the best is εὔφορος γὰρ αὕτη ἡ χώρα.

Again, it is certainly confirmatory of the supposition that Ἐφύρη was the name of the primitive Hellic, as Ἄργος was of the Pelasgic settlement, when we find that the first, though clearly meaning a settled place, has etymologically no reference to agricultural labour, while the second is entirely based upon that idea; since these significations of the word chosen to denote settlement, in the two cases agree, in their reciprocal difference, with the different specific character of the Hellic and Pelasgic tribes, the former emerging from the mountains, predatory and poor, ardent, bold, and enterprising; the latter peaceful in their habits, and looking to nothing beyond the cultivation of the soil.

So much for the root of Ephyre and Pheræ, and for the relation between the two.

Places bearing the name in Homer.

Now the Homeric testimony to the prevalence of these names is exactly such as most effectually establishes the connection between them on the one hand, and Thessaly with the Hellic races on the other.

First as to Ephyre.

1. Five generations before the Trojan war, Sisyphus, a son or descendant of Æolus, was settled, apparently as a subordinate prince or lord, in an Ephyre, which was near the territory of Prœtus, and was situated μύχῳ Ἄργεος ἱπποβότοιο. Bellerophon, the grandson of Sisyphus, was driven out by Prœtus, king of the Argives; and was a ξεῖνος of Œneus, the ancestor of Diomed. These circumstances, combined with the tradition that attached the name of Ephyre to the site of Corinth, leave no doubt that Homer means to place Sisyphus in what was afterwards Corinth 857. There was no other known Ephyre in a nook of Ἄργος, or what may be termed within reach of Prœtus and Œneus: whereas this Ephyre lay upon the pass that communicated with the North from that part of the Peloponnesus.

But the line of Sisyphus had been displaced in the person of Bellerophon, two generations before the Trojan war. Together with this line the old name of Ephyre had disappeared: we hear of it in the Iliad only as Corinth, and as part of the Mycenian dominions. Now tradition connects the Æolid title particularly with Thessaly, the Æolids always having been recognised as one of the great primitive Greek races. And Homer gives us Æolids in Thessaly, as well as in Peloponnesus. In the time of Sisyphus then we see this Æolid name, which is Eteo-Hellenic, conjoined with the local name Ephyre: at the epoch of the Trojan war, both have disappeared from the spot.

The traditional name Ephyre remained, indeed, in many parts of Greece down to later times. Strabo (p. 338) reckons one in Elis, one in Thesprotia, and one in Thessaly, besides Corinth: and also five κωμαὶ of the name. But even in Homer’s time, either these settlements had decayed, or else, which is more likely, the particular form Ἐφύρη had never acquired the precise force of a proper name, but remained rather in the category of a descriptive word: for otherwise it could hardly have happened, but that one or other of the Ephyres must have been named in the Catalogue of Homer. If a descriptive word, it was in all likelihood simply descriptive of primitive settlement for the Hellic race. Probably these Ἐφύραι were rude and small; and were, properly speaking, collections of a few buildings, rather than cities regularly formed.

2. That passage of the Thirteenth Iliad has already been mentioned, which places this name in the North. The Poet says, speaking of Mars and his son Φόβος,

τὼ μὲν ἄρ’ ἐκ Θρῄκης Ἐφύρους μέτα θωρήσσεσθον,
ἠὲ μετὰ Φλέγυας μεγαλήτορας 858.

Two circumstances warrant our placing these Ἔφυροι in Thessaly: the first, that the name of Thrace does not extend farther southward: and the second, that here is the only known seat of the Phlegyæ.

3. It may be convenient next to take the Ephyre, which is mentioned twice in the Odyssey.

In the first of these passages Pallas, in the character of Mentes, Lord of the Taphians, remembers Ulysses in the days when he undertook other journeys before his Trojan one: remembers him,

ἐξ Ἐφύρης ἀνίοντα παρ’ Ἴλου Μερμερίδαο.
ᾤχετο γὰρ καὶ κεῖσε θοῆς ἐπὶ νηὸς Ὀδυσσεὺς
φάρμακον ἀνδροφόνον διζήμενος 859.

And again, when the Suitors apprehend that Telemachus meditates mischief, they ask whether he will bring allies from Pylus, or even from Sparta (which was more remote).

ἤ τινας ἐκ Πύλου ἄξει ἀμύντορας ἠμαθόεντος
ἢ ὅγε καὶ Σπάρτηθεν, ἐπεί νύ περ ἵεται αἰνῶς·
ἠὲ καὶ εἰς Ἐφύρην ἐθέλει, πίειραν ἄρουραν·
ἐλθεῖν, ὄφρ’ ἔνθεν θυμοφθόρα φάρμακ’ ἐνείκῃ 860.

For several reasons it appears probable that the Ephyre here meant was in Elis, and was therefore the Ephyre of Augeias.

1. Geographically it would appear likely to be in the Peloponnesus. Telemachus was little likely to make any more extended voyage. The intercourse of his family was generally with the Iasian Argos, or Western Peloponnesus. Hence it is said of Penelope 861, ‘Could all the Achæans of Iasian Argos see thee.’ And hence, in the Twenty-fourth Odyssey 862, the enemies of Ulysses anticipate that, unless prevented by them, he will resort either to Pylus or to Elis, where are the Epeans, for assistance. Hence, again, it is that, in the Second Odyssey, we find Ephyre joined with Pylus and Sparta (which last is mentioned as an extreme point, ἢ ὅγε καὶ Σπάρτηθεν,) as the quarters to which he might repair for aid. The names of Elis and the Epeans do not appear: and this of itself amounts nearly to a demonstration that Ephyre not only lay in, but actually stands in lieu of, Elis in this place.

We may however note one or two secondary points.

2. Corinth had now lost the name of Ephyre, that is to say, a new name had overshadowed the old one. But this Ephyre, if not Corinth, could only be the Elian Ephyre.

3. Post-Homeric tradition places an Ephyre in Elis.

We have already seen that Augeias was lord of Elis, that he ruled over an Hellenic race, that he is an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν: was this Ephyre the seat of his empire?

Even from the bare fact of being in Elis, it stands in significant connection with Augeias: but more especially, it seems impossible not to connect the peculiar knowledge of drugs, preserved at the Ephyre to which Ulysses repaired, with the former fame of Agamede, the daughter of Augeias (Il. xi. 740), from whom it had, in all probability, been handed down to the next following generation.

It may be asked, what place had Ilus, the son of Mermerus 863, in an Ephyre, where Augeias had been king or lord? We can give at least this negative answer: the Catalogue shews that Elis, in the time of the Trojan war, was no longer patriarchally ruled; for the Epeans had four coordinate leaders; of whom the grandson of Augeias was but one. Therefore an Ilus may have been in the time of Ulysses possessed of the place, which belonged to Augeias in Nestor’s boyhood: and we may observe, that no Epean or Elian chief, contemporary with the Troica, appears in Homer under the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Upon combining all these circumstances, we appear to have the strongest warrant for believing that Augeias was lord of Ephyre; that he was the head of one of the ruling families which derived themselves by a known and recorded lineage from Hellas and a Hellic tribe; and consequently that the archaic title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν was applied to him, not casually, but with a definite meaning, and in conformity to an established rule.

Summary of the evidence for Augeias.

The following brief synopsis will, after what has been said, serve to indicate the chief presumptive grounds of the title of Augeias to ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

1. Augeias is connected with the φάρμακα, Il. xi. 739-41.

2. The φάρμακα with Ephyre, Od. i. 259.

3. Ephyre with Sisyphus, Il. vi. 152, 3.

4. Sisyphus is the son of Æolus, Il. vi. 154.

5. Æolus is Eteo-Hellenic, as the common ancestor of several of the great Greek houses, and the lineal ancestor of at least one ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν 864.

6. Æolus is also of divine descent, for his descendant Bellerophon is θεοῦ γόνος, Il. vi. 191.

7. That is to say, he is a son of Jupiter; for θεὸς commonly means Jupiter, when there is no particular reference to any other deity in the context, and when a personal act or attribute is described.

The extra-Homeric tradition entirely supports this belief, for it makes Augeias the son of Salmoneus, and Salmoneus the son of Æolus.

And now, after we have considered so fully the term Ἐφύρη and its kindred words, we shall do well to notice that at least the dominions of Agamemnon are not void of some relation to this family of names; inasmuch as Φᾶρις, in the Catalogue, is one of the towns that provide his forces, and Φῆραι, in the Ninth Iliad, is one of the towns of which he promises to make Achilles lord. Of Phellias and Sellasia we have already treated.

V. Case of Euphetes

Case of Euphetes.

I proceed to the case of Euphetes.

He is mentioned only once in the Homeric Poems. It is when, in the Fifteenth Iliad, Dolops strikes at Meges, son of Phyleus, who is saved by his stout breastplate: by that breastplate,

τόν ποτε Φύλευς
ἤγαγεν ἐξ Ἐφύρης, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελλήεντος.
ξεῖνος γάρ οἱ ἔδωκεν ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Εὐφήτης 865.

This case, as it stands, is very simple. Euphetes is manifestly the king of Ephyre: the name of the place supplies the connection with the cradle of the Hellenes; the link is doubled by the name of the river Σελληείς, and his rank presumably stamps him as of a ruling race in the country; for he is a ξεῖνος to a sovereign, and the xenial relation appears to have been always one between persons equal, or nearly so.

The passage, however, affords us no aid towards determining where this Ephyre lay; for it does not tell us where to look for the residence of Phyleus.

Was it the Ephyre of Elis, or was it another Ephyre, mentioned in a passage that we have not yet examined? To this passage let us now turn.

In the Greek Catalogue, Tlepolemus, the son of Hercules, commands nine ships from Rhodes, whither he had migrated, on account of having slain his grand uncle Licymnius. His birth is described as follows,—

ὃν τέκεν Ἀστυόχεια βίῃ Ἡρακληείῃ·
τὴν ἄγετ’ ἐξ Ἐφύρης, ποταμοῦ ἀπὸ Σελληέντος,
πέρσας ἄστεα πολλὰ Διοτρεφέων αἰζηῶν 866.

Hercules then led off Astyocheia from Ephyre beside Selleeis, after having devastated many cities. The opinion may perhaps be sustained from this passage, that the Ephyre mentioned in it is not the Ephyre of Elis, for the following reasons.

1. Tlepolemus 867 emigrates to Rhodes in consequence of homicide. He is more likely to have done this from Thessaly than Elis, for we see no signs of communication between western Peloponnesus and the islands of Asia Minor near the base of the Ægean.

2. If Astyocheia, the mother of Tlepolemus, was also the Astyoche who bore to Mars Ascalaphus and Ialmenus (Il. ii. 513), then he was more likely to be Thessalian than Elian; for Mars, dwelling in Thrace, bordered upon Thessaly, but is not heard of in Southern Greece; and these princes ruled over the Minyeian Orchomenus, which is far from the Peloponnesus, but near Southern Thessaly.

3. Again, Nestor, in the Eleventh Book 868, where he sets forth the depression into which the Pylians had fallen, through the depredations of their neighbours the Elians, states that they had been unable to defend themselves against those ravages, because Hercules had devastated their country and slain their princes. Now he would hardly have said this, if the Elian Ephyre and its neighbourhood had likewise been devastated by Hercules, since his account would then have failed to explain the relative inferiority of the Pylians. But if it was not the Elian Ephyre, and since the situation of the Isthmus and its state make the passage inapplicable to the Corinthian Ephyre, then, still looking for some country known in connection with the exploits of Hercules, we must naturally take it to be the Ephyre of Thessaly, where the name Selleeis, as that of a neighbouring stream, would most naturally of all be looked for.

It is true that the geographers give us no record of a river Selleeis near the Thessalian Ephyre. But the fugitive character of the name Ephyre is manifest from the fact that, though there were several Ephyres in Homer’s time, none of them was of sufficient importance to furnish a military contingent worth naming. If by Ephyre was meant the first site of a new colony, that name might naturally disappear, not only with a removal to a more secure or convenient spot, but even perhaps on the growth of a mere group of inclosed buildings into a walled town. It is therefore no wonder if the site of many of these towns has been forgotten, or if the neighbouring streams in consequence cannot be identified.

The site of his Ephyre.

There is a tradition, external to Homer, but not at variance with him, that the Astyocheia whom Hercules carried off was the daughter of Phylas; and if so, Phylas was of course lord of the Ephyre, from which she was carried off. If we assume the veracity of this tradition, we can determine the seat of the Ephyre of Astyocheia to have been in Thessaly. For the five commanders under Achilles were of course all drawn from that country. But among them is Eudorus, the son of Polymele and grandson of Phylas 869.

It may here be asked, by the way, why is not this Eudorus an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? even his name is of the form to which the phrase is so well suited. The answer is that, though he was the son of Polymele, and the grandson of Phylas on the female side, his reputed father was Mercury, and he was therefore not descended in the male line from, and could not be called, the chieftain of a tribe.

If then Phylas was lord of the Thessalian Ephyre, and Euphetes was also lord of the Thessalian Ephyre, in what relation to one another are we to presume them to have stood as to time? There is here no appearance of discrepancy. Phyleus, as the father of Meges, was the ξεῖνος of Euphetes one generation before the Trojan war. Tlepolemus, contemporary of Meges, was by our supposition the grandson of Phylas. Phylas, lord of Ephyre, was therefore probably one generation earlier than Euphetes, and may have been his father.

Nor is it an objection to this reasoning, that Meges, son of Phyleus, was lord of Dulichium, and that we cannot suppose Phyleus to have been the ξεῖνος of one dwelling so far off as the Thessalian Ephyre. For first, Nestor the Pylian had fought in Thessaly. And next, Meges had been a fugitive from his father’s dwelling on account of a feud with him: which makes it even probable that he would remove to a distance, as we see that Tlepolemus went on a similar account from Thessaly, or at least from some part of Greece, to Rhodes.

If then Euphetes, who was an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, governed an Ephyre, and particularly if it was in Thessaly, the special seat of the Helli, we can have little difficulty in concluding that he bore the title as a patriarchal one, in right of his descent.

On the other hand, the Ephyre of Tlepolemus is certainly in the general opinion presumed to be the Ephyre of Elis. If this opinion be correct, it is still more easy to connect him with the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Augeias lives two generations before the Trojan war, rules in Ephyre, and is ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Euphetes is contemporary with the father of Meges, who fights in the war; and he is therefore one generation after Augeias, while he rules in the same place, and bears the same title. If then the Ephyre of Euphetes was Elian, it seems impossible to escape the presumption that Euphetes was the son of Augeias.

This view as to the Ephyre of Euphetes on the whole will more completely satisfy the Homeric text. For we find Meges in the Thirteenth Book fighting at the head of Epean troops 870. But the troops he led to Troy were from Dulichium and the Echinades 871. So we can only conclude one of two things. Either Meges commanded the Epeans of Elis in virtue of the connection of his family with that country; or he commanded Epeans, whom his father Phyleus had taken with him from Elis across the Corinthian gulf. Either way a relation between Elis and the family of Meges is made good, which tends to place Euphetes, as the friend of that family, in the Ephyre of Elis.

There is yet another supposition open. Homer has told us that Phyleus was Διὶ φίλος,—a distinction he very rarely confers,—and that he migrated, as he implies rather than asserts, from Elis, on account of a quarrel with his father:

ὃς πότε Δουλίχιόν δ’ ἀπενάσσατο πατρὶ χολωθείς.

He does not mention the cause; but this abrupt allusion to the father of Phyleus implies that he was a person of note. Strabo 872 may therefore only be filling up a void in Homer, when he tells us, of course from some tradition, that Augeias was the father of Phyleus.

If this were so, we have to ask, why is not Phyleus an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? and who, upon this supposition, could Euphetes be?

As we must infer from the Catalogue that the Elian kingdom of Augeias was broken up at the epoch of the Troica, and as in consequence we do not find Polyxeinus, his grandson, called by the title in question, so neither need we expect it of Phyleus.

If Phyleus was the son of Augeias, Euphetes cannot have been sovereign of the Elian Ephyre, for they would in this case not have been ξεῖνοι, but brothers.

But he might still have been sovereign either of the Ephyre mentioned by Homer, μυχῷ Ἄργεος, which appears as Corinth in the Catalogue: or possibly of the Thesprotian Ephyre with which we become acquainted in Strabo.

If Euphetes represented, with the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, one of the old Hellic chieftaincies at either of those places, nothing could be more natural than that the tie of hostship should subsist between him and Phyleus, the son of another Hellic chieftain of the same class.

In any case, though the Homeric evidence is palpably incomplete, yet by connecting the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν with the highly characteristic local title of Ephyre, and the name of the river Selleeis, it unequivocally supports the interpretation of that title as one indicating an original and purely Hellic chieftaincy.

VI. Case of Eumelus

Case of Eumelus.

It now only remains to consider the case of Eumelus, the last of the six persons to whom Homer gives the peculiar title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

He is introduced to us in the Catalogue as the φίλος παῖς 873 (φίλος meaning probably either the eldest or only son) of Admetus, who is never mentioned except in the oblique cases, and to whom therefore, consistently with his usage, Homer never applies the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. He is in command of his father’s forces; and, as Pheræ is the city first named in this list, we may infer that this was his principal city.

In the first place I would remark, that we have for this Pheræ a sign of wealth, which has been already noticed, the excellence, namely, of its breed of horses. There is also abundant evidence of the wealth and importance of Pheræ in the historic times 874. This mark then accords with the hypothesis, that it was probably one of the primitive lowland settlements made by the Hellic race in Thessaly. In fact, Pheræ stands relatively to Admetus, as Ephyre does relatively to Augeias, Euphetes, and the older Æolid, Sisyphus.

Through the medium of the name Pheræ we connect this family with Ἐφύρη, as its cognate name, and as the name which we have found, in the cases of Euphetes and Augeias, to be eminently characteristic of settlements under an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

Next it appears, that the father or ancestor of Admetus took his name from the place which he inhabited, and was called Pheres, for says the poet,

Ἵπποι μὲν μέγ’ ἄρισται ἔσαν Φηρητιάδαο,
τὰς Εὔμηλος ἔλαυνε 875.

The union between the names of the place and the person affords another sign of primitive settlement. Pheres was probably the founder of the town Φηραί.

Next, a passage in the Odyssey gives us an account of this Pheres 876. He was the son of Cretheus, by Tyro:

τοὺς δ’ ἑτέρους Κρηθῆϊ τέκεν βασίλεια γυναικῶν,
Αἴσονά τ’ ἠδὲ Φέρητ’ Ἀμυθάονα τ’ ἱππιοχάρμην.

Now Cretheus was a son or descendant of Æolus:

Φῆ δὲ Κρηθῆος γυνὴ ἔμμεναι Αἰολίδαο 877.

And we have already seen the Æolids of Homer directly connected with the characteristic name of Ephyre in the person of Sisyphus (Il. vi. 152, 211). Outside the Homeric text, all tradition ascribes to the Æolians, not less than the Achæans, an Eteo-Hellenic origin. Again, we may observe, that among the Greek genealogies of Homer, the longest are those of the Æolids. From Æolus to Glaucus II, in the Sixth Iliad, are six generations: and here in like manner from Cretheus to Eumelus are four, which number will be increased to five or to six, according as we take Cretheus to be the son or the grandson of Æolus, or estimate the age of Eumelus. According to the Homeric force of the patronymic, he may be either. Eumelus, however, himself was, as we have seen, presumably not young at the time of the Troica; since he was wedded to Iphthime, the sister of Penelope, who must be taken to stand, with her husband Ulysses (Il. xxiii. 791), as above the average age of the army.

To sum up; it thus far appears,

1. That Eumelus was heir to Admetus, a reigning prince of Thessaly or Hellas.

2. That the capital of this prince bore testimony by its name to its primitive or Eteo-Hellenic character.

3. That Eumelus was a descendant in the male line from Æolus, of whose lineage several, according to Homer, seem to have possessed the character and borne the title of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

4. In virtue of his descent from Æolus, he is sprung from Jupiter.

To estimate fully the force of the evidence, it may be well to observe, that a great many Thessalian princes and leaders are noticed in the Catalogue besides Eumelus; to the last alone, however, the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is applied. But no one of the others bears any mark, personal or local, of the peculiar descent and social position to which this title appears to belong: although among them are found Podaleirius and Machaon, the sons of Asclepius; Polypœtes, the son of Pirithous, and grandson of Jupiter; Eurypylus, the distinguished warrior; Protesilaus and Philoctetes, each the subject of distinct historical notices.

Again, I would, from the case of Eumelus, illustrate the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in another point of view.

He was descended by his mother Alcestis from Neptune. She was the daughter of Pelias, the son whom Tyro bore to the fabled ruler of the seas. This descent on the mother’s side is mentioned in the Catalogue, where a total silence is observed as to his paternal lineage from Æolus and Cretheus.

Εὔμηλος, τὸν ὑπ’ Ἀδμήτῳ τέκε δῖα γυναικῶν,
Ἄλκηστις, Πελίαο θυγατρῶν εἶδος ἀρίστη.

But it is plain that his descent from Jupiter by the father’s side was more worthy of notice than his descent from Neptune through the bastard Pelias. Yet Homer has nowhere taken notice of the descent from Jupiter, in the case of Eumelus, unless it is implied in the meaning of the term ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, though we know the descent as a fact: surely a strong proof that it is part of the meaning of the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, and is a thing not only inseparable from it, but conveyed by it.

The ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν descended from Jupiter.

With regard to the divine descent of the Homeric chieftains bearing this title, our direct evidence from the Poet stands as follows:

1. That the Dardan line springs originally from Jupiter.

2. That Tyro, being called εὐπατέρεια in common with Helen only, is evidently meant to be described as sprung from that deity.

3. That Bellerophon, also an Æolid, is also θεοῦ γόνος, therefore himself a descendant of Jupiter.

4. And if so, then Eumelus, who was Æolid too, falls within the same description.

5. Augeias in like manner attains to the same honour by the Homeric presumptions which make him an Æolid, as well as by all extra-Homeric tradition.

6. With regard to Euphetes and Agamemnon, we have no direct evidence. But we have seen strong reason to suppose, that Euphetes was himself an Æolid: and no inconsiderable presumption that Tantalus was according to Homer what the later tradition makes him, a son of Jupiter, and that Agamemnon was descended from Tantalus.

Perhaps also, without venturing to attach any conclusive weight to such a sign, we may interpret the annexation of Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς to Hellic kingship, as a sign that the earliest Hellic kingship, being also that which conveyed the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, was always associated with divine descent.

Among those who bear the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, we find no case of a descent from Jupiter reputed to be recent. The two lines in which the title is most clearly transmitted, those of Æolus and of Dardanus, are among the oldest genealogies in Homer. That of Agamemnon, apparently the shortest, interposes at the least four generations between Jupiter and him.

The line of Dardanus is apparently by one generation longer than any of the others belonging to an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. But nothing can be more natural: for any settlement, made by the Helli on the Hellespont during their eastward movement, would naturally precede by some time their descent from Olympus and the Thracian hills into Thessaly; so that the earlier date of the primary ancestor is a witness for, rather than against the relationship.

It cannot, however, be too carefully borne in mind, that the divine descent of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν from Jupiter is widely different from that of the more recent heroes, like Sarpedon or Hercules. We may suppose that in such cases as these the divine parent either screens the result of unlawful love, or perhaps indicates the sudden rise into eminence of a family previously obscure: with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν the case is quite distinct. The poetical meaning here is, that backward there lay nothing of family history beyond the ancestor from whom he claimed descent, whether it were Dardanus, or Æolus, or Tantalus: as if aiming at the effect legitimately produced by those words in the Gospel of St. Luke, with which the upward line of the genealogy given by him closes; ‘which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God 878.’ And the historic basis of the allegory may probably be this, that the person indicated was one of some ruling house, who, with his followers or kindred, separated from the migratory race of Helli as it swept westward along the hills, and founded a stable settlement, and a society more or less organized in orders and employments, in which his name became the symbol at once of sovereign rank, of the national point of origin, and of affinity in blood with a ruling race.

Four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν .

To conclude then: the notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in Homer, probable or demonstrative, are these:

1. He must be born of Jupiter ab antiquo.

2. He must hold a sovereignty, either paramount or secondary, and either in whole, or, like Æneas, by devolution in part, over some given place or tribe.

3. His family must have held this sovereignty continuously from the time of the primary ancestor.

4. He must be the head of a ruling tribe or house of the original Hellenic stock: and must be connected with marks of the presence of Hellenic settlement. These marks may, as in the case of Agamemnon, be supplied by a race or tribe: or they may be territorial, such as those afforded by the name of the river Selleeis, and more especially by the name Ephyre, and the family of cognate words.

Now each of the six persons, to whom alone Homer gives the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, partakes, by evidence either demonstrative or probable, of every one of these notes.

Negative proofs.

Among negative evidences that the title ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν conveys a peculiar sense, we may place the following:

1. The position of Priam in Troas, where he was the greatest man of North-western Asia, Il. xxiv. 543-6, and of Hector, or else Paris, as his heir, were such as called for the highest epithets of dignity. He had even a regular court of γέροντες, of whom it seems plain, that some at least, such as Antenor, were invested with some kind of sovereignty. Yet none of the Ilian family are called by the name of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

2. Alcinous in the Odyssey affords another example of a lord over lords, who does not belong to the historical Greek stem, and who therefore is not called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. The example may appear weak, because of the divine descent of the Phæacians. But if this phrase had, like κρείων, been one of merely general ornament, why should it not have been applied to him as κρείων is, or to his brother Rhexenor, or his father Nausithous? If the divine descent of the Phæacians from Neptune renders the phrase inapplicable to them, this is of itself a proof of its very specific nature.

3. Again; it may be asked why Glaucus was not an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, as he was descended from an Æolid sovereign. The answer is, he was no longer the chieftain of any Hellenic clan. His grandfather Bellerophon had migrated simply as an individual fugitive into a South-Asian country, of which the people had no immediate ties of race with him; and, while apart from his original tribe, he could not inherit a title as its head.

4. Sarpedon was under the same disqualification as Glaucus his brother king. Besides this, he was not descended in the male line from Æolus, but only through his mother Hippodamia.

5. Again, among the Greeks. Why, it may be asked, was not Peleus, or why was not Achilles an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? Here was a throne above thrones: for Patroclus was not only an ἄναξ, but was called Διογενὴς, which implies sovereignty; therefore Menœtius his father was the same: but Menœtius was in attendance at the court of Peleus. Phœnix again was tutor to that chief, though he ruled over the Dolopians by the gift of Peleus, as he tells us,

καί μ’ ἀφνειὸν ἔθηκε, πολὺν δέ μοι ὤπασε λαὸν,
ναῖον δ’ ἐσχατίην Φθίης, Δολόπεσσιν ἀνάσσων 879.

Besides that he occupied a great position, and was of the highest descent, I think it is clear from the Catalogue that the Myrmidons, over whom Peleus reigned, were Achæans, and therefore a strictly Hellic race.

And again, the character of Achilles makes it quite clear that his family were from the Hellic stock. For it is in him that Homer has chosen to exhibit the prime and foremost pattern of the whole Greek nation: and he could surely never have chosen for such a purpose any family of foreign, or of doubtful blood.

It is not however in every Hellic race or family, but only among the known representatives by descent of the principal or senior branches, that we are justified in expecting to find the patriarchal title. And still less do we know whether the Myrmidons, even though Hellic and Achæan, were a principal tribe of that stock.

The evidence as to the descent of Achilles may throw further light upon this part of the subject.

In those cases where a long line of ancestry purported to begin with Jupiter, as, for instance, the Trojan genealogy, it is doubtless natural to treat this as a sort of necessary introduction to a period, beyond which the memory of man, unaided as it was, did not run.

But when we find the paternity of a person contemporary with the Trojan war, or of some near ancestor of his, referred to Jupiter, the most proper interpretation of this legendary statement seems to be, that they were, so to speak, novi homines, who having come suddenly into the blaze of celebrity, and living among a nation accustomed to ask of every passing stranger who were his parents, yet having no parents to quote, or none worth quoting, gilded their origin by claiming some great deity for their father. I do not speak now of the distinct and yet cognate case, where a similar pretext was used to shield illegitimacy: as for example, not to travel from the line before us, in the instance of the son of Polydora 880, sister to Achilles himself. But the same principle applies to both: divine progenitorship was used to keep from view something that it was desirable to hide, whether this were the shame of a noble maiden, or the undistinguished ancestry of a great house or hero. Such a hero perhaps, according to this rule, was Hercules: such a house more clearly was that of the Æacids; for Æacus, grandfather of Achilles, was son of Jupiter 881. He did not therefore represent a patriarchal family, and could not bear the title.

According to extra-Homeric tradition, the Myrmidons fled from Ægina to Thessaly under Peleus 882.

6. Further examples may be taken from the Pelopid family. The Menelaus of the Iliad belongs to the highest order: he is more kingly than the other kings 883. In the Odyssey he desires to transplant Ulysses to a portion of his dominions (Od. iv. 174). And Ægisthus actually occupies for years, during the exile of Orestes, the Pelopid throne: the name of either Menelaus or Ægisthus is of the metrical value most convenient for union with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν: but neither the one nor the other was the representative of the great Achæan house of Pelops, and accordingly neither the one nor the other receives the title.

7. Diomed is a Greek of the very highest descent: of him alone, among the kings before Troy, we may confidently say, that he was himself a hero, had a hero for his father, a hero for his uncle, and a hero for his grandfather. Œneus, Tydeus, Meleager, are three names not easily to be matched in early Greek story. They were likewise near the stock, as we may probably infer from the name of the founder of the race, Portheus, the Destroyer. He was father of Œneus and also of Ἄγριος the Rude, and Μέλας the Swarthy, all names indicating that the first stage of arrival within the precinct of civilization had not yet been passed. He commanded, too, one of the largest contingents: yet neither he nor his uncle Meleager, the Achilles of his day, is ever called ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.

The reason doubtless is that, in the case of the Œneid family, there is no connection with a leading Greek ancestry. They are neither Æolid nor Pelopid; and they stand in no relation to the characteristic names of Ephyre and the Selleeis.

8. Let me notice, lastly, the case of Nestor. He had been a warrior of the first class. His rich dominions supplied a contingent of ninety ships to the war; larger even than that of Diomed, or of any chief whatever, except Agamemnon, who had one hundred. His father, Neleus, was of great fame. He had actually more influence in council than any other chief, and always took the lead there. He was descended from Neptune, who indeed was but his grandfather: while his grandmother, Tyro, was probably, as we have found, a granddaughter of Æolus.

But he could not be ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, because not in lineal male descent from the primary ancestor Æolus: nor was he the tribal head of the Hellenic race among which he ruled, which was an Achæan one (Il. xi. 759), since the Achæans owned the Pelopids for their chiefs. Also his father Neleus, apparently the younger twin, had migrated from the North, leaving Pelias the elder, as is probable, in possession. Thus Nestor presents none of the four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. Yet this title attached to an insignificant relative, Eumelus, his first cousin once removed, doubtless because he possessed them.

Persons with the notes yet without the title.

It is certainly true that there are a few cases where Homer has not applied the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν to particular persons, to whom he might have given it consistently with the suppositions, as to its meaning, of which I have attempted to show the truth. They are, in one word, the ancestors of the persons to whom he has actually given the title. But all of these, such as Pelops and his line, Dardanus with his line as far as Tros, and the earlier descendants of Æolus, are persons mentioned in the poems for the most part but once, and rarely more than twice or thrice. Now, as Homer mentions frequently without the prefix, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, those to whom on other occasions he gives it, we are not entitled to require its application to all persons capable of bearing it, whom he mentions but once.

And again, if I am right in holding that this was strictly a title attaching to lineage, then it was wholly needless, when he had designated a particular person, as an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, to grace his predecessors also with the title, because, as a matter of course, inasmuch as they were his predecessors, it attached to them. No historic aim then was involved, and no purpose would have been gained if Admetus, for example, had been mentioned with this title as well as his son Eumelus.

But, I confess, it appears to me to afford no small confirmation to the arguments and the conclusions of these pages, when we remember that not only do the four rules for the sense of the phrase suit, as far as we can tell, all the six persons to whom it is applied, but that there is absolutely no other living person named in the poems, whom they would not effectually exclude, with the insignificant exceptions, first of Admetus, who has just been mentioned, and next of Orestes. In the Iliad, Orestes is only named in one single passage (twice repeated), of the Ninth Book 884. In the Odyssey he is named several times, but the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is less suitable to the political state of Greece as it appears in this poem, and also to the subject. It never appears, except retrospectively.

A few words may perhaps be due to the case of Polyxeinus, grandson of Augeias, who, it is just possible, though unlikely, may have retained the position of his grandfather. It is just possible, because we are not assured of the contrary; but most unlikely, because Augeias appears as lord of the Epeans, Polyxeinus only as commanding a division of them. Again, Polyxeinus is only once mentioned. It is also evident that the loss of his grandfather’s throne, by a revolution in Elis, might naturally put an end to the application of the title in his particular case, by a process exactly the same with that to which its general and final extinction, now so speedily to arrive, was due.

It might indeed be of some interest to inquire why it is that, when Homer makes no practical or effective use of the phrase for any one except Agamemnon, he has notwithstanding been careful to register, as it were, a title to it on behalf of five other persons? Nor can I doubt that the just answer would be, that he did this because, with his historic aims, he may have deemed it a matter of national interest to record a title of such peculiar and primitive significance.

Its disappearance with Homer.

But of all the negative arguments that tend to show ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν not to have been a merely vague title, there is none on which I dwell with more confidence than its total disappearance with the Homeric age. For it was not so with the other less peculiar forms, βασιλεὺς, ἄναξ, and κρείων. Although they were supplanted in actual use by the term τυραννὸς, which became for the Greeks the type of supreme power in the hands of a single person, yet the idea of them was traditionally retained. Accordingly, even the name βασιλεὺς was applied by Greek writers to contemporary kings out of Greece, and to the old bygone Greek monarchies: and Thucydides has given it to them as a class, where he describes the πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι 885. But the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, the most specific of them all, disappears even from retrospective use: and the inference is, that its proper meaning had ceased to be represented in the institutions either of Greece or of the known world beyond the Greek borders; that it had passed away with the archaic system, of which it was the peculiar token.

Even independently of direct testimony, we might be assured that the patriarchal and highland constitution of society could not very long survive the multiplication of settlements in the plains. For the wealth, which these settlements created through the increased efficiency of labour, the greater bounty of the earth, and the augmented means of communication and exchange, could not but bring with it at once new temptations, and new sources of disturbance; whereas the art of controlling these evils was but painfully and slowly, and most incompletely learned. Among highland tribes, there might be war and pillage with a view to immediate wants: but stored wealth could not be stolen, where, except in its simplest forms, it did not exist: and men do not overturn hereditary power, or drag society into revolutions, without an object.

But the Catalogue, as well as other parts of the Homeric poems, show us how the causes thus indicated had already worked. Of the Greek States comprised in that invaluable enumeration, some were, as is plainly asserted or implied, monarchically governed: for example, the Mycenians, the Spartans, the Pylians, the Myrmidons, the Arcadians, the Eubœans 886, and the Ætolians. We may reasonably infer the same with regard to the followers of those great chiefs, who are treated as Βασιλεῖς in the body of the poems: the Salaminians and Locrians, each under their Ajax, the Cephallenians under Ulysses, the Cretans, or else a portion of them, under Idomeneus, the Argives under Diomed. In each of these cases, either there is but a single leader, or, as in the two last, the text makes it obvious that the chief first named is supreme in rank. We may probably infer that monarchy prevailed in all the instances, including the Athenians, when only a single general appears. The expression δῆμος, applied to Athens, is perfectly compatible with kingship in Homer. But there remain six cases, where there are a plurality of leaders, apparently on an equal footing. These are the cases of

1. The Bœotians.

2. The people of Aspledon and the Minyeian Orchomenus; who are in fact a second Bœotian contingent.

3. The Phocians.

4. The Elians or Epeans: who differ from the others in being formally distributed into four divisions, under four leaders, and who are therefore strictly acephalous.

5. The Nisurians, &c.

6. The people of Tricce, Ithome, and Œchalia, under the sons of Asclepius.

It is observable with respect to the four first of these, that they were all in the comparatively open, and rich country; liable, therefore, to the influences which, as Thucydides observes 887, made Bœotia, Thessaly, and most of Peloponnesus peculiarly liable to revolutions; and whence doubtless it is, that Homer has been led to tell us that Amphion and Zethus built walls for Thebes, because they could not hold it without them.

With respect to the Nisurians, in stating that they were under Pheidippus and Antiphus, Homer adds that these were (Il. ii. 679)

Θεσσαλοῦ υἷε δύω Ἡρακλείδαο ἄνακτος.

On which we may observe

1. That the power divided between them had apparently been monarchical in the preceding generation.

2. That the name of their father points to his having been born in Thessaly 888, which from its richness was peculiarly open to revolutions.

3. That he was the son of Hercules, with whose name disturbance and convulsion are so much associated.

In the case of the sons of Asclepius, there is the same presumption that they divided a power which had been monarchical: and although the epithet κλωμακόεσσα given to Ithome, the site of which is unknown 889, may suggest rough and broken ground, yet the territory is within the limits of Thessaly 890, and on the river Peneus. Tricce was known in the historic times; and it is mentioned in Homer with the epithet ἱππόβοτος, indicating fertility.

Signs of political disorganisation.

Here, then, and particularly in the Bœotian and Elian cases, we have considerable signs of the weakening and gradual breaking up of the old highland institutions: I distinguish between those two and the rest, because where the division is only between two brothers, it may have implied little deviation from the monarchical form. Still that little might be the first stage of a deviation which was soon to grow indefinitely large.

There are other signs to the same effect, both in the Iliad, and to a greater extent in the Odyssey.

For example: the dynasty of the Œneids had disappeared among the Ætolians 891: the dynasty of the Æolids, and the name Ephyre, from Corinth 892: Polyxeinus, the grandson of Augeias, an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, is not described as an ἄναξ, or lord, at all: Hercules had laid waste the cities about Ephyre, and the cities about Pylos 893: Tlepolemus, at war with his Heraclid relations, had been driven to emigrate to Rhodes: and all this since the family of the Perseids had disappeared before the Pelopids.

The changes observable in the Odyssey are such as connect themselves with a species of deluge, which had apparently overspread the face of the political society of Greece. They would merit a full examination, in connection with a view of the relation of that poem to the Iliad. Here it need only be observed, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears nowhere in the action of the Odyssey: the phrase is used but twice, and then only with reference to the dead Agamemnon: and that the partial disappearance of the word from the later work of Homer evidently accompanies a great approach towards disorganisation of the old order of things and ideas in the political state of Greece.

Summary of the whole.

I may now collect the results, as far as they are related to the present subject, of our whole ethnological inquiry.

1. From the Homeric text, the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears not to have belonged to political preeminence or power, or to personal heroism, or to the distinction of wealth, or to divine descent as such; but to the archaic form of sovereignty which united it continuously with the headship in blood of a ruling family or clan, inhabiting the country which was the reputed cradle of the nation, or able to trace lineally its derivation from that country. A tradition of original descent from Jupiter attached in all cases essentially to the possession of the title.

2. In each of the six instances where Homer employs it, he appears to do so in strict conformity with the rules thus indicated.

3. The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was either a synonym, or a part.

4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to the family was still palpable and near.

5. The resemblances of the Helli and the Dardans afford, together with the probabilities of the case, strong evidence of their having some common affinity to the same branch of the great stem, from which a large part of Europe was peopled with its ruling race.

6. Finally, we may with reasonable grounds conjecture, that the patriarchal system denoted by the patriarchal chieftaincies, which had been shaken before the Trojan war, was further and violently disturbed by it, and by its direct and indirect political consequences; and that this system had vanished before the line of the post-Homeric Greek poets, to be reckoned from Hesiod, had begun. Thus, the basis of the title being removed, the title itself naturally disappeared from literature as well as history; and if we find, that in later times the key to its meaning had been lost, it is but a new mark of the abruptness and width of the breach that lies between Homer and his successors, of the paucity of continuous traditions, and of the limited means possessed by the Greeks of the historic ages for research into the earlier periods of their national existence.

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