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
In the Catalogue he also throws some light upon the habits of the
Arcadians: first, by describing them as heavy armed, ἀγχιμάχηται:
secondly, by stating that they had no care for maritime pursuits.
In both respects their relation to the Trojans is remarkable. With
the exception of the Arcadians, the epithet ἀγχιμάχηται is nowhere
used except for the substantive Δάρδανοι, and the position of the
Dardanians in Troas very much corresponded with that of the Arcadians
in Greece. Again, the Trojans, as we know, were so entirely destitute
of ships, that Paris had to build them by way of special undertaking.
These resemblances tend to suggest a further likeness. As the Trojans
appear to have been peculiarly given to the pursuits of peace, it is
reasonable to suppose the poet had the same idea of the Arcadians. The
ἀγχιμάχηται is connected with the habits of settled cultivators. A
peasantry furnishes heavy infantry, while light troops are best formed
from a population of less settled habits and ruder manners. And as the
use of ships had much less to do with regular commerce than with piracy
and war,[151] so the absence of maritime habits tends, for the heroic
age, to imply a pacific character. In those days the principal purpose
of easy locomotion was booty: and there was no easy locomotion for
bodies of men, except by ships. Though inclosed by hills, Arcadia was a
horse feeding[152], therefore relatively not a poor country. In later
times it was, next to Laconia[153], the most populous province of the
Peloponnesus; and even in Homer, although its political position was
evidently secondary, it supplied no less than sixty ships with large
crews to each[154]. All this is favourable to the tradition which gives
it a Pelasgian character.
Again, the Arcadians were commanded by Agapenor the son of Ancæus[155].
He would appear not to have been an indigenous sovereign. For we
learn from a speech of Nestor in the twenty-third Book[156], that
games were celebrated at the burial of Amarynceus by the Epeans, in
which he himself overcame in wrestling Ancæus the Pleuronian. Ancæus
therefore was not an Arcadian but an Ætolian: and his son Agapenor was
probably either the first Arcadian of his race, or else a stranger
appointed by Agamemnon to command the Arcadians in the Trojan war.
Their having ships from Agamemnon, and a chief either foreign or of
non-Arcadian extraction, are facts which tend to mark the Arcadians as
politically dependent, and therefore _pro tanto_ as Pelasgian: for it
cannot be doubted that whatever in Greece was Pelasgian at the epoch
of the _Troica_, was also subordinate to some race of higher and more
effective energies.
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