Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 1 of 3: I. Prolegomena II. Achæis; or, the Ethnology of the Greek RacesGladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
History
Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 1 of 3: I. Prolegomena II. Achæis; or, the Ethnology of the Greek Races
Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
Civilization, Homeric; Epic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism; Homer
I take first the relation between Achilles and his instructors.
Chiron was the teacher of Achilles in the surgical art, while Phœnix
had charge of his higher education. Surgery and war would obviously
go together. But Chiron too gave his father the ashen spear from
Pelion, which none but Achilles could wield: he was the most civilized
(δικαιότατος) of the Centaurs, the one to whom the ideas of right, on
which society is founded, were most congenial. But he seems to dwell
on Mount Pelion, not like Phœnix, in the court of Peleus; he is,
therefore, without doubt, a huntsman, and is in fact a link between the
old and rude, and the new and more civilized life of the Hellic tribes.
Again. Of the Hellic legends of Homer, which are not in all very
numerous, two have hunting for their subject: as,
1. That of the Calydonian Boar in Il. ix.
2. That of the visit of Ulysses to the court of Autolycus, in Od. xix.
Now these two legends are the only ones in the poems, that do not
relate to war. Though the Trojans dwelt by Ida, we never hear of their
hunts: but their princes feed sheep upon its slopes, or tend horses in
the plain below.
_Evidence as to hunting._
Even apart from particular evidence, we might presume that, if the
nation derived its warlike turn from a Hellic source, so it must
likewise have been with hunting, which was next of kin to war.
Lastly, if this supposition be correct, it helps to account for what
is otherwise an anomaly in the poems. Diana fights on the Trojan side:
yet we find no evidence that she was worshipped among the Trojans, or
even known to them in the character, in which she has the greatest
mythical celebrity. She is mentioned but once, I think, among them; it
is by Andromache, and that is as having put a period to her mother’s
life[589], nowhere in her character as a huntress. But among the Greeks
she constantly appears otherwise than as in connection with death. Her
epithets, ἀγροτέρη, κελαδεινὴ, ἰοχέαιρα, are far more suitable to the
huntress, than to the more solemn function of the ministry of Death
among human beings. Again, Helen is compared to her in appearance.
The calamities of the Kalydonians came upon them in consequence of
their neglect as to her worship on a particular occasion[590]; and the
particular punishment inflicted is the sending a wild boar upon them.
Nausicaa[591] is elaborately compared to her, and in this simile she is
described as hunting in Taygetus and Erymanthus. Thus while among the
more Pelasgic Trojans, she appears only in virtue of the relation to
death which (we shall find) she holds from a traditive source[592]; it
is the Hellic influence, which superadds the mythical and imaginative
attributes of the beautiful huntress: and which, in so doing, supplies
a marked proof of the addiction of the Hellic tribes to that pursuit.
_Evidence as to navigation._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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