CHAP. character of the persons out of the question, is the intercourse implied in it between Troy and Sparta. B.C. 1184. As to the heroine, it would be sufficient to raise a strong suspicion of her fabulous nature, to observe that she is classed by Herodotus with Io, and Europa, and Medea, all of them persons who, on distinct grounds, must clearly be referred to the domain of mythology. This suspicion is confirmed by all the particulars of her legend; by her birth 1; by her relation to the divine Twins, whose worship seems to have been one of the most ancient forms of religion in Peloponnesus, and especially in Laconia; and. by the divine honours paid to her at Sparta, and elsewhere. But a still stronger reason for doubting the reality of the motive assigned by Homer for the Trojan War is, that the same incident recurs in another circle of fictions, and that, in the abduction of Helen, Paris only repeats an exploit also attributed to Theseus. This adventure of the Attic hero seems to have been known to Homer; for he introduces Æthra, the mother of Theseus, whom the Dioscuri were said to have carried off from Attica, when they invaded it to recover their sister, in Helen's company at Troy. Theseus, when he came to bear her away, is said to have found her dancing in the temple of the goddess, whose image her daughter, Iphigenia, was believed to have brought home from Scythia; a feature in the legend which perhaps marks the branch of the Lacedæmonian worship to which she 1 Homer describes her as the daughter of Jupiter, but does not mention her mother Leda, the wife of Tyndareus. The fable, that she was the daughter of Nemesis (Paus. i. 33. 7.), sounds to us, who are only familiar with the later idea of Nemesis, as an allegorical fiction; but it may be quite as ancient as the other, perhaps originally the same as Hesiod's (Schol. Pind. N. x. 150.), that she was a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. 2 Herod. vi. 61. At Rhodes she was worshipped under the epithet derdρîris, and a legend was devised to account for it. (Paus. iii. 19. 10.) Compare also the accounts of the temple which she dedicates to Ilithyia (Paus. ii. 22. 6.), of the temple of Aphrodite at Trozen (Paus. ii. 32. 7.), with Plut. Thes. c. 20, 21. 3 Il. iii. 144. The line, indeed, has been suspected of being an Attic interpolation (Bode, Gesch. d. Hell. Dichtkunst, i. p. 303.), but apparently without sufficient ground (see Welcker, Ep. Cycl. p. 377.). CHAP. V. belonged. According to another tradition, Helen was carried off by Idas and Lynceus, the Messenian pair of heroes who answer to the Spartan Twins,1-vari- B.c. 1184. ations which seem to show that her abduction was a theme for poetry originally independent of the Trojan war, but which night easily and naturally be associated with that event.2 Connection between the and the Argonautic If however we reject the traditional occasion of the Trojan War, we are driven to conjecture in order to explain the real connection of the events; yet not so as to be wholly without traces to direct us. We have expedition. already observed that the Argonautic expedition was sometimes represented as connected with the first conflict between Greece and Troy. This was according to the legend which numbered Hercules among the Argonauts, and supposed him, on the voyage, to have rendered a service to the Trojan king, Laomedon, who afterwards defrauded him of his recompence. The main fact however that Troy was taken and sacked by Hercules, is recognised by Homer; and thus we see it already provoking the enmity, or tempting the cupidity of the Greeks, in the generation before the celebrated war; and it may easily be conceived that if its power and opulence revived after this blow, it might again excite the same feelings. The expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest Expedition a doubt, whether it was not an earlier and simpler against form of the same tradition, which grew at length into Troy. the argument of the Iliad; for there is a striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycena and that of the Eacids; so in the first the Argive 1 Plut. Thes. 31. On the mythical character of Helen, see an essay of Uschold's in Zimmermann's Zeitschrift, 1835. nr. 105-107., entitled, Bedeutung der Helena und ihrer Wanderungen. of Hercules CHAP. V. Hercules is accompanied by the Eacid Telamon 1; and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the allied B.C. 1184. chiefs are features common to both traditions. Nor perhaps should it be overlooked that, according to a legend which was early celebrated in the epic poetry of Greece 2, the Greek fleet sailed twice from Aulis to the coast of Asia. In the first voyage it reached the mouth of the Caicus, where the army landed, and gained a victory over Telephus, king of Mysia; but on leaving the Mysian coast the fleet was dispersed by a storm, and compelled to reassemble at Aulis. There seems to be no reason for treating this either as a fictitious episode, or as a fact really belonging to the history of the Trojan War. It may have been originally a distinct legend, grounded, like that of Hercules, on a series of attacks made by the Greeks on the coast of Asia, whether merely for the sake of plunder, or with a view to permanent settlements. As to the expedition which ended in the fall of Ilion, while the leading facts are so uncertain, it must clearly be hopeless to form any distinct conception of its details. It seems scarcely necessary to observe, that no more reliance can be placed on the enumeration of the Greek forces in the Iliad, than on the other parts of the poem which have a more poetical aspect, especially as it appears to be a compilation adapted to a later state of things. That the numbers of the armament are, as Thucydides observed, exaggerated by the poet, may easily be believed; and perhaps we may very well dispense with the historian's supposition, that a detachment was employed in the cultivation of the Thracian Chersonesus. "My 1 Welcker, however (in an essay on the Ajax of Sophocles, in the Rh. Mus.), thinks that the genealogy by which Telamon was connected with the line of Eacus was invented after Homer. It was rejected by Pherecydes (Apollod. iii. 12. 6. 8.), who represented Telamon as the friend only, not the brother, of Peleus. * From which it passed into the Cypria of Stasinus, who is probably not later than the eighth century, B.C. СНАР. V. view of the Trojan war. father," says the son of Hercules in the Iliad, "came hither with no more than six ships, and few men: yet he laid Ilion waste, and made her streets deso- B.C. 1184. late." A surprising contrast indeed to the efforts and success of Agamemnon, who, with his 1200 ships and 100,000 men, headed by the flower of the Grecian chivalry, lay ten years before the town, often ready to abandon the enterprise in despair, and at last was indebted for victory to an unexpected favourable turn of affairs. It has been conjectured that after Historical the first calamity the city was more strongly fortified and rose rapidly in power during the reign of Priam; but this supposition can scarcely reconcile the imagination to the transition from the six ships of Hercules to the vast host of Agamemnon.1 On the other hand there is no difficulty in believing that, whatever may have been the motives of the expedition, the spirit of adventure may have drawn warriors together from most parts of Greece, among whom the southern and northern Achæans, under Pelopid and Eacid princes, took the lead, and that it may thus have deserved the character, which is uniformly ascribed to it, of a national enterprise. The presence of several distinguished chiefs, each attended by a small band, would be sufficient both to explain the celebrity of the achievement, and to account for the event. If it were not trespassing too far on the field of poetry, one might imagine that the plan of the Greeks was the same which we find frequently adopted in later times, by invaders whose force was comparatively weak: that they fortified themselves in a post, from which they continued to annoy and distress the enemy, till stratagem or treachery gave them possession of the town. Though there can be little doubt that the expe- conse 1 See Dio Chrys. Trojana (i. p. 329. Reisk.). quences of the war. CHAP. V. B.C. 1184. dition accomplished its immediate object,1 it seems to be also clear that a Trojan state survived for a time the fall of Ilion; for an historian of great authority on this subject both from his age and his country, Xanthus the Lydian, related that such a state was finally destroyed by the invasion of the Phrygians, a Thracian tribe, which crossed over from Europe to Asia after the Trojan War. And this is indirectly confirmed by the testimony of Homer, who introduces Poseidon predicting that the posterity of Æneas should long continue to reign over the Trojans, after the race of Priam should be extinct. To the conquerors the war is represented as no less disastrous in its remote consequences, than it was glorious in its immediate issue. The returns of the heroes formed a distinct circle of epic poetry, of which the Odyssey includes only a small part, and they were generally full of tragical adventures. This calamitous result of a successful enterprise seems to have been an essential feature in the legend of Troy; for Hercules also, on his return, was persecuted by the wrath of Heré, and driven out of his course by a furious tempest. We shall hereafter touch on the historical foundation of this part of the story: for the present we will only remark, that if, as many traces indicate, the legend grew up and spread among the Asiatic Greeks, when newly settled in the land where their forefathers, the heroes of a better generation, had won so many glorious fields, it would not be difficult to conceive how it might take this melancholy turn. The siege of Troy was the last event to which the emigrants could look back with joy and pride. But If Dio's Trojana had been designed to expose the futility of historical reasoning on such subjects, it would have been a very able performance. As it is, it would not be easy to refute its arguments on its own ground, or to elude the force of the remark, that the consequences attributed to the Trojan war would have been far more likely to ensue, if the expedition had failed, and the besiegers had withdrawn baffled and discomfited. p. 358. foll. Strabo, xiv. 680. xii. 572. |