Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

These general considerations, which tend to show that the identity of name in a Trojan and a Greek deity may be compatible with much of dissimilarity in the popular development of the functions, will relieve us from difficulties, which we should otherwise have had to meet, in accounting for the place of some of the Olympian divinities in Trojan worship. We have found reason to suppose, that Vulcan may have come into Greece through Phœnicia. But the Trojans appear to have had very little connection with Phœnicia. The precious κειμήλιον of Priam, the cup that he carried to Achilles, was not Phœnician but Thracian297. The only token of intercourse mentioned is, that Paris brought textile fabrics from Sidon298. Again, Vulcan was especially worshipped in Lemnos, and had his terrestrial abode there. But this goes more naturally to account for the works of metal in Thrace, than for the position of Vulcan in Troas; higher as it was, apparently, than in Greece. Again, it is worth notice, that the Vulcan of the Romans was, like their Mars, one of the old gods of Etruria, a country stamped with many Pelasgian characteristics. It may be, that we ought to look back to Egypt for the origin of all these Vulcans. In the time of Herodotus299, the Egyptian priests claimed him as their own: and Phtah, the principal deity of Memphis, was held by the later Greeks to correspond with their Ἥφαιστος. Even the two names carry tokens of relationship. From that fountain-head might be propagated diverging copies of the deity: and, as far as we can judge, the Vulcan worshipped in Troy was much more like the common ancestor, than the highly idealized artificer of Olympus, upon whom the Poet has worked out all his will300.

Worship of Juno and Gaia in Troas.

There is another of its points of contact with the Olympian system, in which this list of Trojan deities is remarkable. While investigating the Greek mythology, we have found reason to suppose that Juno, Ceres, and Gaia are but three different forms of the same original tradition of a divine feminine: of whom Ceres is the Pelasgian copy, Juno the vivid and powerful Hellenic development, and Gaia the original skeleton, retaining nothing of the old character, but having acquired the function of gaol-keeper for perjurors when sent to the other world301. In the retention however of all three within the circle of religion, we see both the receptiveness and the universalism of the Greek mythology. Now, in Troy, where there was less of imaginative power, the case stands very differently. Of Ceres, who represents the Pelasgian impression of the old earth-worshipping tradition, we hear nothing in Troas. Probably she was not there, because Gaia, her original, was still a real divinity for the Trojans. But how are we to explain the fact that Gaia and Juno are both there? I venture to suggest, that it is because these are different names, the foreign and the domestic one, for the same thing. When Hector swears to Dolon, it is by Jupiter, ‘the loud-thundering husband of Here:’ which almost appears as if Juno held, in the Trojan oath, a place more or less resembling the place occupied in the Greek oaths (where Juno does not appear at all) by Gaia.

Again, it is obvious that, if this relation exists between Gaia and Juno, it explains the fact that we do not find both, so to speak, thriving together. In Troas Gaia is worshipped, but Juno scarcely appears. In Greece Juno is highly exalted, but Gaia has lost all body, and has dwindled to a spectral phantasm. It is the want of imagination in the Trojan mythology, which makes it a more faithful keeper of traditions, stereotyped in the forms in which they were had from their inventors.

Worship of Mercury in Troas.

Next, as to Mercury. I have already adverted to the fact that Priam302, notwithstanding his obligations to Mercury in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, takes no notice of his divinity. I think that a close examination of the narrative tends to show, that the Greek Mercury was not worshipped in Troy; and leaves us to conclude that Homer uses a merely poetical mode of speech in saying that this god gave increase to the flocks of Phorbas303: even as when he makes Priam call Iris an Olympian messenger304.

He appears before Priam and his companion Idæus, when they are on their way to the Greek camp, in the semblance of a young and noble Myrmidon. There were, we know305, certain visible signs, by which deities could in general be recognised or, at least, guessed as such. Both Idæus, however, and Priam himself, saw nothing of this character in Mercury, and simply took him for a Greek enemy306. Mercury, after some genial conversation, conducts his chariot to the quarters of Achilles, and then, before quitting him, announces himself. Not, however, like Apollo to Hector (Il. xv. 256), and Minerva to Ulysses (Od. xiii. 299), simply by giving his name: but he also declares himself to be an Immortal, θεὸς ἄμβροτος (460). This unusual circumstance raises a presumption, that he was not already known as a divinity to Priam; and the presumption seems to become irrefragable, when we find that Priam, though given to the observances of religion, uses no act or expression of reverence or even recognition to his benefactor, either on his first declaration and departure (460, 7), or upon his second nocturnal appearance (682), followed by a second and final flight to Olympus (694).

The case of Scamander will require particular notice: because it is immediately connected with the question, whether the Trojans partook of that tendency to a large imaginative development of religion, which so eminently distinguishes the Grecian supernaturalism.

We will therefore consider carefully the facts relating to this deity, and such other kindred facts as Homer suggests.

He speaks of Dolopion as follows307;

ὑπερθύμου Δολοπίονος, ὅς ῥα Σκαμάνδρουἀρητὴρ ἐτέτυκτο, θεὸς δ’ ὣς τίετο δήμῳ.

This is entirely in keeping, as to particulars, with the Pelasgian and Trojan institutions. The ἀρητὴρ of Homer is apparently always the priest. Dolopion was a man in very high station and honour, like the priests of Rome, and of early Ætolia308; but not like those of later Greece. And he had been ‘made’ or ‘appointed’ priest; as Theano was chosen to be priestess by the people. The priesthood of the Homeric age never appears as a caste in these latitudes. The only approximation to caste is in the gift of the μάντις, which, as we find from the Odyssey, was hereditary in the family of Melampus309. Thus far, then, the evidence respecting Scamander certainly would appear to belong to the category of Homer’s historical statements.

Beyond this, everything assumes a figurative stamp. Scamander fights as a deity with Achilles, and his waters are so powerful that they can only be subdued by the immediate action of the god of fire. The hero, too, is aided by the powerful blasts of Zephyr and of Notus, whom Juno rouses up to scorch the Trojans310. As we can hardly doubt, that the plague in the First Book represents some form of marsh-fever, so here it appears likely that the Poet takes very skilful advantage of a flood, caused by summer rains, which had annoyed the Greeks, and which had been followed by the subsidence of the waters upon the return of hot weather.

Scamander is very great in the Iliad, but with a purely local greatness. As a person, he speaks both to men and to gods. He addresses Simois as his beloved brother; but it is entirely on the affair of the deluge and the heat. Though he takes part in the war, the distinction is not awarded to him of being a member of the smaller and select Olympian community: he merely stands included by presumption in the general category of Rivers311.

Worship of Scamander.

We have a description from the mouth of Achilles of certain sacrifices, as belonging to the worship of Scamander312:

οὐδ’ ὑμῖν ποταμός περ ἐΰῤῥοος ἀργυροδίνηςἀρκέσει, ᾧ δὴ δηθὰ πολέας ἱερεύετε ταύρους,ζωοὺς δ’ ἐν δίνῃσι καθίετε μώνυχας ἵππους.

This offering of live horses is peculiar, and unlike anything else represented to us in the Homeric poems. Not only the youths, but even the dogs, whom Achilles offers to the Shade of Patroclus, are slain before they are cast into the fire. The same thing is not mentioned with respect to the four horses, who are also among the victims; but it is probably, even from the physical necessities of the case, to be presumed.

It may, perhaps, be argued, that this speech of Achilles partakes of the nature of a sarcasm. The fine Trojan horses were reared and pastured on the river banks; taunts often pass between the warriors of the two sides: the δὴ δηθὰ may have had the force of forsooth. Some doubt may attach to the evidence, which the passage gives, on this ground; and also from the singularity of the practice that is imputed. It is, on the whole, however, safest to assume that it is trustworthy.

The case will then stand thus; that we have apparently one single case in Troy of a pure local impersonation of a power belonging to external nature. Now this might happen under peculiar circumstances, and yet a very broad distinction might subsist between the religion of the two nations as to imaginative development.

Scamander was indeed a great power for the Trojans; it was the great river of the country, the μέγας ποταμὸς βαθυδίνης. The child of the great Hector was named by him Scamandrius, while Simoeisius313 was the son of a very insignificant person. Another Scamandrius was a distinguished huntsman, taught by Diana, in a country where the accomplishment was rare314. His floods, however useful in time of war, would in time of peace do fearful damage. It is possibly the true explanation of the last among the lines quoted from the speech of Achilles, that he carried away, in sudden spates, many of the horses that were pastured on his banks. The Trojans, then, may have had strong motives for deifying Scamander, and particularly for providing him with a priest, who might beseech him to keep down his waters. And it will be remembered, from the case of Gaia, that the Trojan religion was, without doubt, favourable to the idea of purely elemental deities: what lacked was the vivid force of fancy, that revelled in profuse multiplication.

Different view of Rivers in Troas.

For we cannot fail to perceive, that the idea of a river-god did not enter into the Trojan as it did into the Greek life. Ulysses, when in difficulty, at once invokes the aid of the Scherian river315, at whose mouth he lands. Now the Trojans are driven in masses into the Scamander by the terrible pursuit of Achilles, and they hide and sculk, or come forth and fight, about its banks and waters. Yet no one of them invokes the River, although that River was a deity contending on their side. So entirely was he without place in their consciousness as a power able to help, even though he may have been publicly worshipped in deprecation of a calamity, which he was known to be able to inflict.

With this remarkable silence we may compare, besides the prayer and thanksgiving of Ulysses, the invocation of Achilles to Spercheius316. On his leaving home, his father Peleus had dedicated his hair as an offering to be made to the River on his return, and to be accompanied by a hecatomb. This would have been a thank-offering; and as such, in accordance with the prayer of Ulysses, it implies the power of the River deity to confer benefits. Nor is that power rendered doubtful by the fact, that in the particular case the prayer is not fulfilled, and that the hair is therefore devoted to the remains of Patroclus. We may remark, again, the sacrifice offered, apparently almost as matter of course, by the Pylian army to Alpheus, on their merely reaching his banks317. And, as a whole, the multitudinous impersonations of natural objects in the Greek mythology are, both with Homer and in the later writers, of a benign and genial character. This bright and sunny aspect is in contrast with the formidable character of Scamander, and of the worship offered to him.

There is, perhaps, enough of resemblance between the Scamander of the Trojan mythology, and the Spercheus or Alpheus of the Greek, to suggest the question, whether the deification of this river may possibly have been due to the Hellic influences, which resided in the royal houses of the country. There are not wanting signs, that the family of Priam was closely connected with the river and its banks. The name given to Hector’s child is one such token; and we know that the mares of Erichthonius were fed upon the marshes near Scamander318. It is also worth observation that the Priest of Scamander was called Dolopion, while Dolops was the name of a son of Lampus, a Trojan of the highest rank, brother to Priam, and one of the δημογέροντες of Troy319.

But though there may be a special relation between the worship of Scamander, and the influence of the royal family, I think the explanation is chiefly to be sought in the specific differences which separate it from River-worship, as generally conceived in the Olympian system.

There is another aspect of River-worship in Greece, with which it seems to have more affinity. There is the terrible adjuration of Styx, which implies its vindictive agency320. This river is represented on earth by a branch from itself, called Titaresius, near the Perrhæbian Dodona321. The Rivers are expressly invoked, in this character, by Agamemnon in the adjuration of the Pact: and are associated with the deities that punish perjury after death. Moreover, it is curious that, when Agamemnon makes an adjuration before Greeks alone, he omits the appeal to the Rivers, whom he had named when he was acting for the two peoples jointly322. This seems to show that the invocation of Rivers, or of some class of Rivers, in a retributive capacity, was familiar, and may have been peculiar, to the Trojans.

True aspect of Trojan River-worship.

In effect, then, the grand distinction seems to be this. The worship of Scamander in Troas belonged to the elemental system and earth-worship, which the Greeks, for the purposes of their Olympus, had refined away into a poetical vivifying Power, replete with more bland influences: retaining it, more or less, for the purpose of adjuration, in the darker and sterner sense. Accordingly, while Scamander, who is also called Xanthus, has, as a god, a mark of antiquity in the double name323, he shows none of the Greek anthropophuistic ingredients. Even for speech and action, he does not take the human form; but he is, simply and strictly, the element alive.

The species of deification, implied in earth-worship, scarcely lifted the objects of it in any degree out of the sphere of purely material conceptions. Thus, while Scamander, from his superior power, is no more than Nature put in action, all the other Rivers of Troas exhibit to us Nature purely passive, a blind instrument in the hand of deity. The total silence and inaction of Simois324, after the appeal of Scamander, makes his impersonality more conspicuous, than if he had not been addressed. Again, when the Greeks have quitted the country, Apollo takes up the streams of the eight rivers that descend from Ida, including great Scamander, like so many firemen’s hose, and turns them upon the rampart to destroy it. We have no example in Homer of this mechanical mode of handling Greek rivers.

The distinction of treatment seems to be due to a difference in the mythology of the two countries as its probable source. And I find an analogous method of proceeding with reference to the Winds. In the Iliad they are deities, addressed in prayer, and capable of receiving offerings. In the Odyssey they are mere senseless instruments of nature, under the control of Æolus. But then in the Iliad Homer deals with them for a Greek purpose (for I do not except the impersonation of Boreas, Il. xx. 203, where the Dardanid family is concerned): it is Achilles who prays to them: it is the Greek war-horse that they beget. In the Odyssey he introduces them amidst a system of foreign, that is to say, of Phœnician traditions.

Turning now to other objects, let us next see whether further inquiry will confirm the suggestions, which I have founded on the cases of Gaia and of Scamander.

At the head of Scamander are two fountains, and hard by them are the cisterns, which the women of the city frequent for washing clothes. Thus the spot is one of great notoriety; yet there is not a word of any deity connected with these fountains. This is in remarkable contrast with what we meet in Homer’s Greek topography. Ulysses325, immediately on being aware that he has been disembarked in Ithaca, prays to the Nymphs of the grotto, which was dedicated to them. There they had their bowls and vases, and their distaffs of stone, with which they spun yarn of sea-purple326. And the harbour, in which he was landed, was the harbour of Phorcys, the old man of the sea327. So again at the fountain, where the people of the town drew water, there was an altar of the Nymphs that presided over it, upon which all the passers-by habitually made offerings328. Nor could this be wonderful, as all groves, all fountains, all meadows, and probably all mountains, had their proper indwelling Nymphs according to the Greek mythology; while the Rivers were impersonated as deities, and the sea too teemed at every point with preternatural life.

Trojan impersonations from Nature rare.

Homer has named many, besides Scamander, of the rivers of Mount Ida; but to none, not even to Simois, nor again to Ida or Gargarus themselves, does he assign any of these local inhabitants.

There are, however, three curious cases of Nymphs assigned by him to Troas. The νύμφη νηῒς, called Abarbaree, bears two sons to Bucolion329, a spurious child of Laomedon; and another nymph of the same class bears Satnius to Enops330. A third similar case is recorded in the Twentieth Book331. These would appear to be simple cases of spurious births, and to have no proper connection with mythology. For the mother of Satnius is called ἀμύμων; a name never applied by Homer to the Immortals. If, however, the Nymphs be deities, they mark another difference between Greece and Troy: for Homer never attributes lusts to the Nymphs of the Greek Olympus.

Amidst the whole detail of the Iliad, in one instance only have we Trojan Nymphs conceived after the Greek fashion: it is when those of the mountains, according to the speech of Andromache, planted elms round about the fresh-made tomb of her father Eetion.

As a general rule, no Trojan refers in speech either to any legend, or to any intermediate order, of supernatural beings. Destiny, named by Hecuba, is, as we have seen, a metaphysical idea, rather than a person332.

The very name of Olympus itself is a symbol of nationality; and around it are grouped the forms, which either the popular belief, or the imagination of the Poet, incorporated into the company of objects for worship. They form a body wonderfully brilliant and diversified. They pervade the Greek mind in such a way, as to appear alike in its didactic, and its most deeply pathetic moods. The speech of Phœnix gives us the Parable of Ἄτη and the Λιταί: then the episode of Meleager, which is founded on the wrath of Diana: but into this legend itself, inserted into the speech, is again interpolated the separate legend of Apollo and Alcyone333. The speech of Agamemnon, in the Nineteenth Book, affords us another example334. The case is the same in the most pathetic strains. Achilles, in the interview with Priam, exhorts him to take food by the example of Niobe, and appends her tale335: Penelope, praying to Diana in the extremity of her grief, recites the tale of the daughters of Pandareus336. Even the Suitor Antinous points his address to Ulysses with the semi-divine legend of the Centaurs and Lapithæ337. Everywhere, and from all the receptacles of thought, mythology overflows. But in Troy the case is quite different. There the human mind never seems to resort to it, either for food or in sport. We find deities, priests, prophets, ceremonial, all apparently in abundance: in all of these, except the first, the Greeks are much poorer; but each of them, in and for himself, is in contact with an entire supernatural world, the creation of luxuriant and energetic fancy, which ranges alike over the spheres of sense and of metaphysics. Andromache, virtuous and sincere as Penelope, has no such mental wealth; her thoughts, and those of Hecuba and Priam, both ordinarily and also on the death of Hector, are limited to topics the most obvious and primitive, with which society, however undeveloped, is familiar. From this limitation, and from the nature of those legends respecting deities, of which the scene is laid in Troas, it seems reasonable to believe that the mythological dress is of purely Hellenic origin.

The dedication to Jupiter of the lofty and beautiful chestnut-tree338 near Troy, is in correspondence with the oak of Dodona, and indicates quite a different train of thought from those which conceived the Greek Olympus. It is probably both a fragment of nature-worship in its Oriental form, and likewise a portion of the external and ritual development, in which the religion of Troy was evidently prolific enough. And in this case the negative evidence of Homer is especially strong; because the great number of the particular spots on the plain of Troy, which he has had occasion to commemorate, constitute a much more minute topography there, than he has given us on any other scene, not even excepting Ithaca: so that he could hardly have avoided showing us, had it been the fact, that the religion of Troy entered largely into what Mr. Grote has so well called ‘the religious and personal interpretation of nature.’

Next as to those divine persons of the second order, who are so abundantly presented to us by Homer in relations with the Greeks. Iris visits the Trojans thrice. First, she repairs to their Assembly in the form of Polites. Secondly, she appears to Helen, as her sister-in-law Laodice. She delivers her message to Priam in the Twenty-fourth Book without disguise; perhaps because it was necessary339 that he should have the assistance of a deity seen and heard, in order to embolden him for a seemingly desperate enterprise. But there is nothing in his account of the interview, which requires us to suppose that the person Iris was known to Priam. The expression he uses is340

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἄκουσα θεοῦ καὶ ἐσέδρακον ἄντην.

And again, he calls her an Olympian messenger341 from Jupiter. Another passage carries the argument a point further, by showing us that the appearance of this benignant deity was alarming, doubtless because it was strange, to him. When she arrives, she addresses him very softly τυτθὸν φθεγξαμένη (170): but he is seized with dread;

τὸν δὲ τρόμος ἔλλαβε γυῖα·

an emotion, which I do not remember to have found recorded on any apparition of a divinity to a Greek hero.

Poverty of Trojan Mythology.

Thus far then it would appear probable, that in the Trojan mythology the list of major deities was more contracted than in Greece, and that the minor deities were almost unknown. But perhaps the most marked difference between the two systems is in the copious development on the Greek side of the doctrine of a future state, compared with the jejune and shadowy character of that belief among the Trojans.

Jejune doctrine of a Future State.

In the narrative of the sack of Hypoplacian Thebes, and again in her first lament over Hector, Andromache does indeed speak of her husband, father, and brothers, respectively, as having entered the dwellings of Aides342

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1

Page xvii.

2

Merope; by Matthew Arnold, pp. 94, 135.

3

Il. iv. 160-82.

4

Grote’s Hist. Greece, vol. ii. p. 83.

5

Ibid. p. 84.

6

Ibid. p. 102.

7

Ibid. p. 101.

8

Ibid. p. 86.

9

Ibid. pp. 90, 102.

10

Ibid. p. 92.

11

Ibid. p. 95.