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 will take yet one more illustration, Hesychius under Ἀργεῖοι gives
this explanation; ἐκ τῶν Εἱλώτων οἱ πιστευόμενοι οὕτως ἐλέγοντο, ἢ
λαμπροί. Now the sense of λαμπροὶ might easily be derived from the
primitive sense, in the same way as that of whiteness. But it is quite
distinct from the explanation respecting that select and trusted
class of Helots, who were called Ἀργεῖοι. This usage both serves to
explain history, and is explained by it. Ἀργεῖοι was the name of the
Greek citizen in Eastern Peloponnesus under the Perseids; it appears
in part to have retained its local force throughout the period of the
Pelopids; for though in the legend of Tydeus the inhabitants of Argolis
we at least find the name Ἀχαιοὶ among them, yet in the Twenty-third
Iliad, and in the Third Odyssey, they are called Ἀργεῖοι. In the local
usage, then, the Helot meaning a serf, the emancipated Helot would be
a citizen, an Ἀργεῖος. But neither serfship nor citizenship were in
those days rigidly defined, and the one ran into the other. What could
under such circumstances be more natural, than that any Helot who was
separated from his brethren, by being taken into the confidence of his
master, and living on easy terms with him, should acquire the name of
Ἀργεῖος, and, that the class who had thus obtained it in a somewhat
peculiar sense, that is to say, the sense of a free rural settler, or
(so to speak) freeholder, should continue to bear it as descriptive of
their own position, even when it had ceased to be generally applicable
to the free Greeks of that particular district? which of course it
could no longer be when the family and dynastic tie between Argolis and
Lacedæmon came to be dissolved.
And if I am right in supposing that even in Homer[692] the name Ἀργεῖοι
evidently leans towards the masses, and that of Ἀχαιοὶ towards the
select few or chiefs, such a distinction is in marked harmony with the
whole of this inquiry respecting the force of the former phrase.
_Different extent of Ἀργεῖοι and Ἄργος._
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