There is nothing in Homer absolutely to contradict the opinion that Danaus was Egyptian; but neither is there anything which suffices conclusively to establish it. And if he considered the Egyptians to approach to the Pelasgian type, this may cast some slight doubt on the Egyptian origin of Danaus. The Poet certainly would not choose a Pelasgian name, unless fully naturalized, for one of the characteristic national designations of the Achæans. But he is too good a Greek to give us particular information about any foreign eminence within his fatherland. It seems, however, possible that in the name ἀπίη, given to Peloponnesus, there may lie a relation to the Egyptian Apis. Apis was the first of the four divine bulls of Egypt[234]; and the ox was the symbol of agriculture which, according to the tradition conveyed by Æschylus[235], Danaus introduced into the Peloponnesus. The paucity of intercourse however between Greece and Egypt in the time of Homer does not put a negative on the supposition that there may have been early migration from the latter country to the former. It has been questioned how far the ancient Egyptians were conversant with the art of navigation. The affirmative is fully argued by Mr. M’Culloch[236] in his commentaries on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But it is plain that the Egyptians were not known to Homer as a nautical people. Not only do we never on any occasion hear of them in connection with the use of ships, but we hear of the plunder of their coast by pirates, when they confined themselves to resistance by land. This want of nautical genius agrees with all that we learn of them in Holy Scripture. And it places them in marked resemblance to the Pelasgian races generally: to the Arcadians[237]; to the Trojans; to the early Romans, who paid no serious attention to the creation of a fleet until the second Samnite War B.C. 311, or, as Niebuhr thinks, then only first had a fleet at all[238]: and again, to the landsmanlike spirit of Hesiod, who calls himself οὔτε τι ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος, οὔτε τι νηῶν, limits it entirely to a certain season, never was at sea except crossing from Aulis to Eubœa, and considers the whole business of going to sea one that had better be avoided[239]. That with Homer the fabulous element enters into his view of the Egyptians seems plain, from his calling them the race of Paieon, in the same way as he calls the Phæacians the race of Neptune: and in some degree also from the place which he gives them in the wanderings of Menelaus, since they lay, like those of Ulysses, in the exterior and unascertained sphere of geography.