In the works of Homer, we find the first of these conceptions exceedingly prominent and powerful. It approaches almost to a worship: and yet is scarcely at all tainted with the second, scarcely presents the smallest deflection from the very loftiest type. In Homer, that is to say, in the Homeric descriptions of human characters and life, we never find Beauty and Vice pleasurably associated: he seems to have felt in the sanctuary of his mind as much at least as this, if not more; that a derogation from purity involved of itself a descent from the highest to a lower form of beauty: and therefore he never associates his highest descriptions of beauty with vice: differing in this not only from so many heathen, but even from many Christian authors. ~_The Dardanid traditions._~ But yet it is most remarkable that, even in Homer’s time, the level of popular tradition on the subject of beauty had begun to descend, and though he had escaped the taint, yet it had touched his age. Let us, for example, take that most striking series of traditions in the Dardanian royal family, which are recorded in the poems of Homer. That family appears to have had personal beauty for an almost entailed inheritance. Not only Hector, Deiphobus, Æneas, as well as Paris, possessed it, but Priam, even in his old age and affliction, was divinely beautiful as he entered the apartment of Achilles; and, as they sat at meat, and he admired Achilles, Achilles returned his admiration[738]. [738] Il. xxiv. 483, 631. Sup. Ilios, p. 216. The line of traditions in this family, to which I now refer, affords the best illustration of the idea of beauty as ever striving, by an inner law, to rise to a heavenly life. There are four of these traditions: and as we pass from the older to the more recent, at each step that we make, we lose some grain of the first ethereal purity. The earliest of them all is the translation, since coarsely and without ground called the rape, of Ganymede: consistently indeed so called, according to the idea of the fable which has prevailed in later ages, but most absurdly, if it be applied to the tradition in the shape in which it stands with Homer. With him the tale of Ganymede is the most simple and perfect assertion of the principle that beauty, heavenly in its origin, is heavenly also in its destiny; and that the heaven-born and heaven-bound should contract no taint upon its intermediate passage. There were three sons, says Homer, born to Tros; Ilus was one, Assaracus another: and the third was Ganymede, a match for gods. Ganymede, the most beauteous of men, whom, for his beauty, and seemingly before he had come to maturity for succession, the gods snatched up and made the cupbearer of Jupiter, that he might dwell for ever among the Immortals[739]: [739] Il. xx. 233-5. ὃς δὴ κάλλιστος γένετο θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· τὸν καὶ ἀνηρείψαντο θεοὶ Διὶ οἰνοχοεύειν κάλλεος εἵνεκα οἷο, ἵν’ ἀθανάτοισι μετείη.