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
Of Sisyphus we know from Homer, that he lived at an Ephyre on or near
the Isthmus of Corinth. It is not so clear whether Cretheus ever came
into the Peloponnesus. There is an Enipeus of Elis: but there is also
one[755] of Thessaly, which was doubtless its original. The name,
however, of the Thessalian stream appears to have been written Eniseus.
Nitzsch[756] determines, on insufficient grounds as far as I can judge,
that the passage of Od. xi. cannot mean the Enipeus of Pisatis. I can
find no conclusive evidence either way: but Sisyphus was certainly in
Southern Greece at or before this time, so that we need not wonder
if Cretheus, another Æolid, was there also. His reputed son Neleus
founded, without doubt, the kingdom of Pylos. Post-Homeric tradition
places even Salmoneus, the father of Tyro, in Elis.
_Earliest Hellenic thrones in Greece._
We have now before us an outline of the first entrance of Hellic
elements into Greece, south of Thessaly. It seems to have been effected
by five families;
1. The house of Perseus.
2. That of Sisyphus.
3. The illegitimate line of Cretheus, or the Neleids.
4. Probably the legitimate line of Salmoneus, represented in Augeas.
5. Next to these will come Portheus, the head of the Œneidæ in Ætolia:
and only then follows the great house of the Pelopids, not alone, but
in conjunction with a race, to whose history we now must turn.
Of the Danaid and Perseid princes we have no reason to suppose, that
they enjoyed the extended power which was wielded by Agamemnon. Not
only would they appear to have been circumscribed, latterly at least,
by the Minoan empire founded in Crete, but Homer gives us no intimation
that their dominion at any time included the possession of a supremacy
over a number of subordinate princes beyond their own immediate
borders, or reached beyond the territory which may be generally
described as the Eastern Peloponnesus.
A direct inference bearing on this subject may be obtained from the
passage concerning the sceptre of Agamemnon[757]: for the Pelopids do
not succeed to that of Eurystheus and the Perseids, but they hold from
Jupiter: which seems to imply that they acquired much more, than had
been under the sway of their predecessors. Probably therefore we shall
do well to conclude that Eurystheus, for example, had a limited realm,
and that by land only: Agamemnon, a certain supremacy by land and sea,
within the range of which the old Minoan empire had now fallen. Still
the kingdom of Eurystheus was probably in its own day the greatest, and
was also probably the oldest, of all properly Hellenic kingdoms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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