the devouring by him of his children, and the deception,reversed in the historical version, that is practised on him in the matter. The mythus of Tereus and Philomela, of * The same story, it will be recollected, occurs in the traditions of the Pelopids of Argos,—the Thyestean banquet, transferred from Asia, there can be little doubt, as a religious mythus, and transformed in Greece into a biographical anecdote of the Phrygian family of princes with whom it was introduced. I here assume, it may be noticed, that the legendary relation between Phrygia and Elis was a fact in history. How can I do otherwise? Monumental Lycia vindicates the Homeric accounts of the intimate relationships of Lycian, and Argive or Corinthian princes; and, if possible, the argument from undesigned coincidences numerous, is à fortiori for the existence of analogous relations between Phrygia and ante-Homeric Greece. How came the chief hero (and Ajax too is a branch of the Æacidæ) and the most glorious tribe, of the great national poem to be of Phthia? The answer is found in the circumstance that Phthia was the original seat of the Achæans of Agamemnon, the dominant race of Greece, who had descended on Peloponnesus with his ancestor Pelops. Thus the poet of the people appealed to the native traditions and early associations of the people. The songs of the dispersed Achæans naturally affected most the heroic family most properly their own. Thus the Achæans of Argos have no royal family of their own genuine race. Agamemnon, “of many isles, and of all Argos king," is a Pelopid; their own royal race was that of which Peleus, acus, and Phocus were the mythical heads; branches of it spread to Cyprus (Teucer and Ajaces), and hence perhaps the identity of the sympathies of the Cyclic Cypria with the Homeric Epic. Homer notices Thessalian Achaia, Il. ii. 69; iii. 75; Odyss. xxi. 107. Herodotus also, vii. 132, 173, 197. Thucydides, viii. 3. The subjects of Achilles are Myrmidons, Hellenes, Achæans; Il. ii. 634. Strabo refers the Achæans to Phthia, though, a little before, he derives them thence mediately only through Xuthos, colonist of Attica, father of Achæus, and son of Deucalion of Phthia. Οι δε Αχαιοι Φθιωται μεν ησαν το γενος, ᾤκησαν δ ̓ εν Λακεδαιμονι.—Strab. 2, 219; viii. 7. So Pausanias calls Achæus, son of Xuthus, exiled from Thessalia, Phthiotis, vii. 1. Αχαιους γαρ τους Φθιωτας φασι συγκατελθοντας Πελοπι ες την Πελοπόννησον οικησαι Thy Aanwvinny.-Strab. ii. 189; viii. 3. That a district like Thessalian Achaia should have poured forth such a flood of population, is not a difficulty; it is a fact illustrated by numerous cognate significance to that of Chronos, presents the deception in the same form as the anecdote of the Mede. The same set of incidents,-violence, incest, parricide, unnatural revenge, and transformation into birds, is told by Hyginus, 242, and Parthenius, (Erot. 13,) of a Clymenus and-observe the name, Harpalice. There is ground enough here for a sceptical speculator, to dispute the personality of the lieutenant of Cyrus altogether; but, pondered soberly, the evidence seems simply to show that Herodotus, whether at first or second hand, transformed a hieros logos or sacred legend of a divinity, others in the early history of this country. Refer to Müller, (Dorians,) for some observations on the most remarkable parallel, the multitudinous diffusion of the Dorian tribe from their parish, it may almost be called, in Thessaly. The question then is left,-whence the original connection of Pelops, i. e. of the race or family he represents, with Thessalian Achaia? He was son of Tantalus, whose mythical story, localized equally in Europe and Asia-in Magnesia, by Mt. Sipylus and the Achelous, (Iliad xxiv. 615; Paus. ix. 34,) intimates communication of population or princes. Pelops, it is said, leaves Asia under the compulsion of the increasing power of Troy; and thus the expedition of his descendants, bears something of the retaliative character of the wars of the English kings in southern France. The quoted passages intimate that Laconia was pre-eminently occupied by the Achæans; and it is observable that Menelaus is treated by the poet with decidedly more favour in his fortunes and destiny than his more distinguished brother Agamemnon, professedly (Odyss.) in consequence of his alliance with Helen, daughter of Zeus. This may be but a poetical version of such an alliance between the foreign prince and native family, as policy dictated to Norman Henry, with the Saxon princess Matilda— Godric and Godiva. Pausanias mentions numerous tumuli in Laconia as connected with the Phrygians and Pelops; these may be found and explored some day, and settle the question. into an historical incident in the life of a personage who bore the divinity's name. The story of Adrastus and the son of Croesus is probably an example of this error, in its exaggerated form ;* but great caution is required in these obliterations, or Criticism will depopulate Antiquity entirely, and exhibit it as a series of great and remarkable events, occurring independently of the activity of any great and remarkable men whatever.† * In this story, Crœsus, forewarned and forearmed against the peril impending over his only son competent to succeed him, loses him, notwithstanding, by the very instrumentality of, his most refined precautions, slain by Adrastus, the Inevitable; Adrastus, whose own story exemplifies the doctrine of fatalism in its gloomiest form. His name is associated with this doctrine in Europe, in legends and religious ceremonies at Argos and Sicyon; and in Asia the Goddess of Necessity, Nemesis, was worshipped at Cyzicus under the title Adrasteia, and her temple was said to have been built by Adrastus. The principle of inevitable fate appears in the legend of the destruction of Thebes by Adrastus; and so in the Iliad it is embodied in the stories of Adrastus slain by Agamemnon, just as Menelaus consented to spare him; and the Adrastus, who notwithstanding warning and foreknowledge of his divining father, went to Troy to fall by the spear of Diomed. This analysis I have found curiously confirmed by a notice by F. Lajard, (Annali dell' Instituto, v. 106,) of the fact of analogies between Greek and Magian mythology, that I was only in a position to suspect: "Un des rapprochements les plus importans a signaler est sans doute cette double circonstance, qu' Ormuzd et Jupiter sont tous deux fils du Temps et fils d'un père qui dévore ou absorbe ses enfans." |