a yvwun about youth and age. But the most scandalous of all the Trojan proceedings seems to have been the effort made, though unsuccessfully, to have Menelaus put to death, when he came on a peaceful mission to demand the restoration of his wifef.

Nothing of this admiration for fraud apart from force appears either in the conduct of the Greeks during the war, or in their prior history: and the passage respecting Autolycus, which, more than any other, appears to give countenance to knavery, takes his case out of the category of ordinary human action by placing it in immediate relation to a deity; so that it illustrates, not the national character as it was, but rather the form to which the growing corruptions of religion tended to bring it. Yet, while Homer gives to the Trojans alone the character of faithlessness, he everywhere, as we must see, vindicates the intellectual superiority of the Greeks in the stratagems of the war. And if, as I think is the case, I have succeeded in proving above that the doctrine of a future state was less lively and operative among the Trojans than among the Greeks, it is certainly instructive to view that deficiency in connection with the national want of all regard for truth. This difference teaches us, that the imprecations against perjurers, and the prospects of future punishment, were probably no contemptible auxiliaries in overcoming the temptations to present falseness, with which human life is everywhere beset.

As respects sensuality, the chief points of distinction are, that we find a particular relation to this subject running down the royal line of Troy; and that, whereas in Greece we are told occasionally of some beautiful woman who is seduced or ravished by a deity, in Troas we find the princes of the line are those to whose f Il. xi. 139.

The Trojans more sensual and false.

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names the legends are attached. The inference is, that in the former case a veil was thrown over such subjects, but that in the latter no sense of shame required them to be kept secret. The cases that come before us are those of Tithonus, who is said to become the husband of Aurora; of Anchises, for whom Venus conceives a passion; and of Paris, on whom the same deity confers the evil gift of desire, and to whom she promises the most beautiful of women, the wife of Menelaus. All these are stories, which seem to have tended to the fame of the parties concerned on earth, and by no means to their discredit with the Immortals. And again, if, as some may take to be the case, we are to interpret the three vuupai of Troas as local deities, how remarkable is the fact that Homer should thus describe them as tainted with passions, which nowhere appear among the corresponding order within the Greek circle! There, male deities alone are licentious. Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Persephone, whom alone we can call properly Greek goddesses of the period, have no such impure connection with mortals, as the goddesses both of the Trojan and of the Phoenician traditions.

We hear indeed of Orion, who was also the choice of Aurora: but we cannot tell whether he belonged more to the Trojan than to the Greek branch of the common stem. To the Greek race he cannot have been alien, as he is among Greek company in the Eleventh Odyssey but then he is not there as an object of honour; he appears in a state of modified suffering, engaged in an endless chase. We also find Iasion, probably in Crete, who is reported to have been loved by Ceres1 but he was immediately consumed for it by

the thunderbolt of Jupiter. And so the detention of Ulysses by the beautiful and immortal Calypso is not in Homer a glory, but a calamity; and it allays none of the passionate longings of that hero for his wife and home.

The marked contrast, which these groups of incidents present, is perhaps somewhat heightened by the enthusiastic observation of the Trojan Elders on the Wall in the Third Iliad'. Though susceptible of a good sense, yet, when the old age of the persons is taken into view, the passage seems to be in harmony with the Trojan character at large, rather than the Greek and perhaps it may bear some analogy to the licentious glances of the Suitors". If so, it is very significant that Homer should assign to the most venerable elders of Troy, what in Greece he does not think of imputing except to libertines, who are about to fall within the sweep of the divine vengeance.

The difference between the races in this respect seems to have been deeply rooted, for there is evidently some corresponding difference between their views and usages in respect to marriage.

The character of Priam, which has been so happily conceived by Mure", undoubtedly bears on its very surface the fault of over indulgence, along with the virtues of gentleness and great warmth and keenness of the affections. But it may be doubted, whether the poems warrant our treating him as individually dissolute. His life was a domestic life: but the family was one constructed according to Oriental manners. According to those manners, polygamy and wholesale concubinage were in some sense the privilege, in an

1 Il. iii. 154–60.

m Od. xviii. 160-212. n Lit. Greece, vol. i. p. 341 and seqq.

Trojan ideas and usages of marriage.

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other view almost the duty, of his station; confined, as these abuses must necessarily be from their nature (and as they even now are in Turkey), to the highest ranks wherever they prevail. The household of Priam, notwithstanding his diversified relations to women, is as regularly organized as that of Ulysses: and when he speaks of his vast family, constituted as it was, he makes it known to Achilles, in a moment of agonizing sorrow, and evidently by way of lodging a claim for sympathy", though the effect upon modern ears may be somewhat ludicrous. 'I had,' he says, 'fifty sons: nineteen from a single womb: the rest from various mothers in my palace.' He might have added that he had also twelve daughters, whom he probably does not need to mention on the occasion, as in this department he was not a bereaved parent."

Hecuba, the mother of the nineteen, was evidently possessed of rights and a position peculiar to herself. The very passage last quoted distinguishes her from the yuvaîkes, and throughout the poem she moves alone.

Of the children of Priam we meet with a great number in various places of the poem.

There are, I think, five expressly mentioned as children of Hecuba.

Hector, Il. vi. 87.

Helenus, ibid.

Laodice, vi. 252.

Deiphobus, Il. xxii. 333.

Paris, (because Hecuba was èkupǹ to Helen,) Il. xxiv. Next, we have two children of Laothoe, daughter of Altes, lord of the Lelegians of Pedasus.

Lycaon, Il. xxi. 84.

o Il. xxiv. 493-7.

Polydorus, ibid. 91.

p II. vi. 248.

9 See particularly vi. 87 and seqq. 364 and seqq.

Next Gorgythion, son of Kastianeira, who came from Aisume, (II. viii. 302).

Then we have, without mention of the mother,

The most important conclusion derivable from the comparison of the names thus collected is, that the children of Priam, and consequently their mothers, fell into three ranks:

1. The children of Hecuba.

2. The children of his other wives.

3. The children of concubines, or of chance attachments, who were, vólo, bastards.

The name voos with Homer, at least among the Greeks, ordinarily marks inferiority of condition. The mothers of the four vólot are never named. This may, however, be due to accident. At any rate Lycaon appears to have the full rank of a prince: he was once ransomed with the value of a hundred oxen, and, when again taken, he promises thrice as much; again, in describing himself as the half-brother of Hector, he avows nothing like spurious birth. The reference

r Possibly one of these is vólos, illegitimate for they are together in the same chariot, as Antiphus and Isus were. One of

the two would be the charioteer; who was commonly, though not always, an inferior.