Trojan impersonations from Nature rare. 163

Laomedon; and another nymph of the same class bears Satnius to Enops. A third similar case is recorded in the Twentieth Book". 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 auúμov; 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 persone.

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 Phoenix gives us the Parable of "AT" and the Arai: 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 Alcyone. The speech of Agamemnon, in the Ninee Il. xxii. 435. xxiv. 209. Il. ix. 559.

c Il. xiv. 444. d Il. xx. 384.

teenth Book, affords us another example. 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 tale : Penelope, praying to Diana in the extremity of her grief, recites the tale of the daughters of Pandareush. Even the Suitor Antinous points his address to Ulysses with the semi-divine legend of the Centaurs and Lapithæi. 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-treek 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

f Il. xix. 90-133.

i Od. xxi. 295-304.

g Il. xxiv. 602-17.

h Od. xx. 66. Il. v. 697, and vii. 60.

Poverty of Trojan Mythology.

165

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 sisterin-law Laodice. She delivers her message to Priam in the Twenty-fourth Book without disguise; perhaps because it was necessary 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 ism

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἄκουσα θεοῦ καὶ ἐσέδρακον ἄντην.

And again, he calls her an Olympian messenger" 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

1 Il. xxiv. 220.

m Il. xxiv. 223, 194.

n

Sup. p. 155.

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.

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.

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 Aides". But these references are slight, and it may almost be said perfunctory. Not another word is said either in the Twenty-second Book, or in the whole of the Twenty-fourth, about the shade of Hector.

When Pope closed his Iliad with the line.

And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade,

it probably did not occur to him, that he was not merely altering the poetry of Homer, but falsifying also his picture of the Trojan religion; which had indeed its funeral rites, but so described as to leave us no means of concluding, that they were in any degree directed to procuring the comfort and tranquillity of the dead. The silence observed about the spirit of Hector is remarkable from the contrast with the case

n Il. vi. 422. xxii. 482.

Jejune doctrine of a Future State.

167

of Patroclus. Both are mourned for passionately, by those who love them best: but the shade of Patroclus is the great figure in the mourning of Achilles, while Hector's existence after death is but once owned, faintly and in the abstract. Nor, as we see from the Odyssey, was this homage to the shade of Patroclus a thing occasional or accidental. We there meet the souls of all the great departed of the War, in the under-world. That region, opened to Ulysses, had formerly been opened to Hercules. Even the dissolute Suitors cannot be dismissed from life, without our being called to accompany their spirits past the Leucadian rock to the place of their destination. The warriors slain in battle with the Cicones are thrice invoked by the survivors. Nay Elpenor himself, most insignificant of men, is duly brought before us in his last home".

We are, however, enabled to open another chapter of evidence, that bears upon this interesting subject. It is obtained through the medium of the oaths of the two nations respectively.

Displacing the elemental powers from their ordinary religion, the Greeks made them gaolers, as it were, of the under-world, and gave them this for their proper business. Hence they are paraded freely in the Greek oaths. Agamemnon before the Pact invokes, with Jupiter, the Sun, the Rivers, the Earth, the infernal gods. In the Nineteenth book, the same; omitting however the Rivers, and naming, instead of simply describing, the Erinües". In the Fourteenth Iliad, Juno apparently swears by Styx, Earth, Sea, and the infernal gods. In the Fifteenth, by Earth, Heaven, Styx, the head of Jupiter, and their marriage bed. Calypso q Il. iii. 276. r Il. xix. 258. t Il. xv. 36-40.

• Od. ix. 65. P Od. xi.. 51. s Il. xiv. 271-4, 278, 9.