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
εἰ δέ τοι Ἀτρείδης μὲν ἀπήχθετο κηρόθι μᾶλλον,
αὐτὸς καὶ τοῦ δῶρα, σὺ δ’ ἄλλους περ Παναχαιοὺς
τειρομένους ἐλέαιρε κατὰ στρατόν.
‘Still, if you detest (the king) Atrides from your heart ever so
much, him and his gifts, yet pity the Greeks throughout the army, now
suffering from the highest to the lowest.’ The force of the Παναχαιοὶ
κατὰ στρατὸν is here very marked.
Lastly, in the Odyssey we find the line thrice repeated,
τῷ κέν οἱ τυμβὸν μὲν ἐποίησαν Παναχαιοί,
and always in the same connection with the death of some select and
beloved hero of the army. Its obvious sense is, ‘all classes of the
Greeks would have joined to do him honour, by lending a hand to raise
his funeral mound.’
In every one of these cases therefore the word Παναχαιοὶ seems to
express the combination of all classes, and thus to point distinctly
to the word Ἀχαιοὶ as capable of signifying something less than all
classes, namely, one, that is, the ruling class.
The construction thus put upon Παναχαιοὶ is in conformity with Homer’s
usual mode of employing such words as the adjective πᾶς and the
preposition σὺν in composition. We have previously seen the intensive
force of πᾶς in πᾶν Ἄργος and Πανέλληνες. And πᾶς itself receives
additional power from σύν. As in Il. i., where Achilles, having just
before reminded Calchas of his office as Seer to the Δαναοὶ, proceeds
to assure him that no one of the Greeks shall hurt him for doing his
duty, it is now no one, not of the Δαναοὶ merely, but of the σύμπαντες
Δαναοί; no, not even if he name Agamemnon himself as the guilty
person[735].
It is hardly necessary to point out how accurately all this coincides
with the general results to which we have been already led. According
to these, the bulk of the Greeks were a Pelasgian population, under the
sway of ruling tribes and families, belonging to another race; among
which the most powerful were those belonging to the Achæan stock; and
whose Argeian name was etymologically, and perhaps practically, a sort
of substitute for the older Pelasgian one.
Nor is there difficulty in conceiving how, if the Achæans became the
dominant race in the most important parts of Greece, they might,
without constituting a numerical majority, give their name to the mass
of the people, and to the country itself, as Britain and Britons became
England and English from the Angles, or as Lombardy took its name from
the Lombards, and, unhappily, European Turkey, once the civil head of
Christendom, from the Turks.
_The Æolid and Æolian names._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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