either with Pisa or with Lydia.
[363] Iliad, xiv. 491. Hesiod. Theog. 444. Homer, Hymn. Mercur.
526-568, Ὄλβου καὶ πλούτου δώσω περικάλλεα ῥάβδον. Compare
Eustath. ad Iliad. xvi. 182.
[364] Iliad, iii. 72; vii. 363. In the Hesiodic Eoiai was the
following couplet (Fragm. 55. p. 43, Düntzer):—
Ἁλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδῃσιν,
Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδῃσι.
Again, Tyrtæus, Fragm. 9, 4.—
Οὐδ᾽ εἰ Τανταλίδεω Πέλοπος βασιλεύτερος εἴη, etc.
[365] Odyss. iv. 45-71.
The legend which connected Tantalus and Pelops with Mount Sipylus
may probably have grown out of the Æolic settlements at Magnêsia and
Kymê. Both the Lydian origin and the Pisatic sovereignty of Pelops
are adapted to times later than the Iliad, when the Olympic games had
acquired to themselves the general reverence of Greece, and had come to
serve as the religious and recreative centre of the Peloponnêsus—and
when the Lydian and Phrygian heroic names, Midas and Gygês, were the
types of wealth and luxury, as well as of chariot driving, in the
imagination of a Greek. The inconsiderable villages of the Pisatid
derived their whole importance from the vicinity of Olympia: they are
not deemed worthy of notice in the Catalogue of Homer. Nor could the
genealogy which connected the eponym of the entire peninsula with
Pisa have obtained currency in Greece unless it had been sustained
by preëstablished veneration for the locality of Olympia. But if the
sovereign of the humble Pisa was to be recognized as forerunner of the
thrice-wealthy princes of Mykênæ, it became necessary to assign some
explanatory cause of his riches. Hence the supposition of his being
an immigrant, son of a wealthy Lydian named Tantalus, who was the
offspring of Zeus and Ploutô. Lydian wealth and Lydian chariot-driving
rendered Pelops a fit person to occupy his place in the legend, both
as ruler of Pisa and progenitor of the Mykenæan Atreids. Even with the
admission of these two circumstances there is considerable difficulty,
for those who wish to read the legends as consecutive history, in
making the Pelopids pass smoothly and plausibly from Pisa to Mykênæ.
I shall briefly recount the legends of this great heroic family as they
came to stand in their full and ultimate growth, after the localization
of Pelops at Pisa had been tacked on as a preface to Homer’s version of
the Pelopid genealogy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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