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
It is by no means unlikely, I would venture to suggest, that a similar
force may lie in the epithet Salmoneus, who is here called ἀμύμων.
That epithet is indeed sometimes applied on the ground of personal
character. But Homer also gives it to the villain Ægisthus, which
appears quite inexplicable except on the ground of the divine descent
of the Pelopids[749]. The later tradition has loaded Salmoneus with
the crime of audacious profanity: and it has also, beginning with
Hesiod[750], made him a son of Æolus. The word ἀμύμων, combined with
the εὐπατέρεια of Tyro, leaves little room for doubt that perhaps both,
and certainly the latter of these representations are agreeable to the
sense of Homer. If so, then Tyro was a granddaughter of Æolus; and we
can at once fix his date from Homer, as follows:
1. Æolus.
2. Salmoneus, Od. xi. 235-7.
3. Tyro = Cretheus, ibid.
4. Pheres, Od. xi. 259.
5. Admetus, Il. ii. 711-15, 763.
6. Eumelus, ibid. and Od. iv. 798.
From which last cited passage I set down Eumelus as the contemporary
of his brother-in-law Ulysses, and half a generation senior to the
standard age of the war.
We have also the collateral line of Sisyphus from Æolus as follows: 1.
Sisyphus; 2. Glaucus (1); 3. Bellerophon; 4. Hippolochus; 5. Glaucus
(2), contemporary with the war[751]. According to this table Sisyphus
might be either the son or the grandson of Æolus.
And again, Cretheus, who like Sisyphus is Αἰολίδης, may have been
either the uncle or the cousin of his wife Tyro. The Fragment of Hesiod
would make both him and Sisyphus sons of Æolus, and therefore uncles to
Tyro.
These genealogies are in perfect keeping with what Homer tells us of
the Neleid line. Tyro, he says, fell in love with Enipeus. In the
likeness of that river, Neptune had access to her, and she bore to
him two sons, Pelias and Neleus. Neleus is the father of Nestor: and
Nestor stands one generation senior to Eumelus; for he was in his third
tri-decadal period[752], if the expression may be allowed, during the
action of the Iliad. Thus we have (as before), 3. Tyro; 4. Neleus; 5.
Nestor; 6. Nestor. The maternal genealogy of Eumelus brings us exactly
to the same point: for Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, was married to
his father Admetus[753].
Thus the Æolid genealogies are laid down by Homer with great clearness,
except as to the first interval, and with a singular self-consistency.
Perseus[754], as we have seen, belongs to the fifth generation before
the war. This is nearly the same with Sisyphus, and with Cretheus: and
we are thus enabled to determine with tolerable certainty the epoch of
the first Hellenic infusion into Greece. It precedes the arrival of
Portheus in Ætolia by one generation, and that of Pelops by two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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