THE WAR OF ILION. 169 CHAP VIII. popular and Surya Bai, are the story also of Achilleus and Oidipous, of Perseus and Theseus, of Helen and Odysseus, of Baldur and Rustem and Sigurd. Everywhere there is the search Aryan for the bright maiden who has been stolen away, everywhere traditions, the long struggle to recover her. The war of Ilion has been fought out in every Aryan land. Either, then, the historical facts which lie at the root of the narrative of the Iliad took place before the dispersion of the Aryan tribes from their common home, or they are facts which belong to the beautiful cloudland, where the misty Ilion rises into towers' at early dawn. In either case the attempts recently made to exhibit the war in the plains of Troy to the south of the Hellespont as an historical reality are rendered plausible only by ignoring the real point at issue. CHAPTER IX. MODERN EUEMERISM. The Its results. WHATEVER may have been the sins of Euêmeros against truth and honesty, his method aimed simply at the extraction of historical facts from the legends of his country by stripping them altogether of their supernatural character, and rejecting all the impossible or improbable incidents related in them. · Making no pretence of access to documents more trustworthy than the sources from which the poets had drawn their inspiration, he claimed to be regarded as a historian, merely because, after depriving him of all divine powers, he left Zeus a mortal man, who, for benefits done to his fellows, was worshipped as a god.1 Although in more recent times this system has been eagerly adopted and obstinately maintained, Euêmeros was not popular among his countrymen. To them the process which reduced the gods to the level of mankind seemed to resolve itself into mere atheism. Still, except as applying his method to the stories of the gods as well as to the legends For a detailed account of Euêmeros, see Grote, History of Greece, part i. ch. xvi. His method has been reproduced in all its completeness or nakedness in the article on Mythology inserted in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Having told us that the adventures of Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, Minerva or Pallas, Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, Proserpine, Pluto, Neptune, and the other descendants and coadjutors of the ambitious family of the Titans, furnish by far the greatest part of the mythology of Greece,' the writer with prodigious assurance adds, "They left Phoenicia, we think, in the days of Moses; they settled in Crete, a large and fertile island; from this region they made their way into Greece.' There they introduced art, religion, law, custom, polity, and good order; but, oddly enough, in spite of all these wholesome and sobering influences, the Greeks remained a ‘deluded rabble, who insisted on paying them divine honours.' The mere enunciation of such absurdities is disgraceful in any work which professes to speak to educated readers, and would deserve even a severer condemnation if addressed to the unlearned. But it is altogether inexcusable, in an article to which are affixed references to the works of Grimm, K. O. Müller, Max Müller, Hermann, and others. For the amusing Euemerism of the Abbé Banier, see Max Müller, Lectures, second series, 400. EUEMERISM AND PHILOLOGY. of the epical heroes, he gave no cause of offence which had not already been given by Herodotos and Thucydides. To the historian of the Persian war the legends of Iô and Eurôpê, of Medeia and Helen, were valuable simply as supplying links in the chain of human causes which led to that great struggle. For this purpose he either availed himself of the least improbable versions of these myths current in his own day, or he placed the myths, full as they were of dragons and speaking heifers, into the crucible of probabilities, and was rewarded with a residuum of plausible fiction which would have gladdened the heart of De Foe. This method, as applied by Thucydides to the story of the Trojan war, produces results which make it difficult to believe that his knowledge of that strife was obtained only from the poems which told of the wrongs and woes of Helen. Yet so it is. Although in these poems their career was inwoven into the whole fabric of the narrative, Helen is gone, and Paris and Achilleus; Hektôr and Sarpêdôn have vanished, with Memnon and Athênê and Aphroditê; and there remains only a chieftain who undertakes the expedition not at all to rescue a woman who may never have existed, and a war' which lasted ten years, not because Zeus so willed it,' but because want of men made it necessary that part of the forces should betake themselves to tilling the ground and raising crops on the Thrakian Chersonesos, while the rest carried on the siege." That such a method should find favour at the present day with writers who have made themselves in any degree acquainted with the results of comparative grammar is indeed astonishing. Argynnis and Phoroneus, Brisêis and Achilleus, Paris and Helen, names of persons in Hellenic legend, are in the earliest songs of the Aryan family found still in their original application as names of the morning, of the sun, or of darkness; and as it is with these, so is it also with Kerberos and the Charites, with Orthros, with Varuna, and Zeus himself. That these names and these tales could have overrun the world from chance, or that the incidents which they relate could have a distinct historical foundation in a series 2 Thucyd. i. 9-11. 'Iliad, ii. 328. 171 CHAP. IX. Its antawith the gonism, science of language. BOOK of incidents occurring in the same sequence and with the same results in every Aryan land, are positions which few would now venture to maintain; yet such were the theories which attempted, with some show of reason, to account for their origin and diffusion before the sciences of comparative grammar and mythology came into being. There can scarcely be a greater extravagance of credulity than that which frames an infinite series of the most astounding miracles in the vain effort to solve mysteries which must all be opened by one and the same key, or by none. No absurdity needs to startle us if we are ready to believe that four or five independent writers could describe a series of events in exactly the same words; 1 it is, if possible, even more absurd to suppose that tribes, savage and civilised, many of them utterly unknown to each other, should hit upon the same stories, should disfigure them by the same indecencies, should atone for these blots by the same images of touching pathos and grace and beauty. Yet some such demand is made on our powers of belief by a writer who holds that they who literally accept Scripture cannot afford to ridicule mythology,' and who, looking about for traces of an historical character in Greek mythical tradition, concludes that there are the fairest reasons for supposing that Hercules was not an allegorical hero, typical of ideal prowess, endurance, and physical strength; but a real man, who, living in very remote times, and in some part of the world where the land was infested with savage beasts and perhaps the sea with pirates, earned the gratitude of a defenceless people by clearing earth and sea of monsters, as a remarkably uniform tradition ascribes to him. The Cyclopes were probably a race of pastoral and metal-working people from the East, characterised by their rounder faces, whence In the supposed case of a number of special correspondents sending home to English journals accounts of a battle or a campaign, the narrative of which was in all nearly word for word the same in several passages, Mr. Froude says that, were the writers themselves, with their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no intercommunication, and no story preexisting of which they had made use, and that each had written bonâ fide from his own original observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence could have occurred.'-Short Studies on Great Subjects, i. 246. It is enough to say that the application of any such hypothesis of independent origination to the mythology of the Aryan nations involves difficulties, if possible, still more stupendous. GREEK MYTHICAL NAMES. arose the story of their one eye.' In the myth of Atlas, the Home and Foreign Review, No. VII. p. 111, 1864. It is possible, and even likely, that the distinguished critic whose well-known initials appended to this article make it unnecessary to keep up any disguise may have modified or rejected these conclusions. It is unnecessary to say that among modern thinkers none can be found actuated by a more earnest and single-minded desire to ascertain the truth of facts without regard to any secondary considerations than Mr. Paley. If he has examined 173 CHAP.' IX. |