On which we may observe

1. That the power divided between them had apparently been monarchical in the preceding generation.

2. That the name of their father points to his having been born in Thessaly[888], which from its richness was peculiarly open to revolutions.

3. That he was the son of Hercules, with whose name disturbance and convulsion are so much associated.

In the case of the sons of Asclepius, there is the same presumption that they divided a power which had been monarchical: and although the epithet κλωμακόεσσα given to Ithome, the site of which is unknown[889], may suggest rough and broken ground, yet the territory is within the limits of Thessaly[890], and on the river Peneus. Tricce was known in the historic times; and it is mentioned in Homer with the epithet ἱππόβοτος, indicating fertility.

Here, then, and particularly in the Bœotian and Elian cases, we have considerable signs of the weakening and gradual breaking up of the old highland institutions: I distinguish between those two and the rest, because where the division is only between two brothers, it may have implied little deviation from the monarchical form. Still that little might be the first stage of a deviation which was soon to grow indefinitely large.

There are other signs to the same effect, both in the Iliad, and to a greater extent in the Odyssey.

For example: the dynasty of the Œneids had disappeared among the Ætolians[891]: the dynasty of the Æolids, and the name Ephyre, from Corinth[892]: Polyxeinus, the grandson of Augeias, an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, is not described as an ἄναξ, or lord, at all: Hercules had laid waste the cities about Ephyre, and the cities about Pylos[893]: Tlepolemus, at war with his Heraclid relations, had been driven to emigrate to Rhodes: and all this since the family of the Perseids had disappeared before the Pelopids.

The changes observable in the Odyssey are such as connect themselves with a species of deluge, which had apparently overspread the face of the political society of Greece. They would merit a full examination, in connection with a view of the relation of that poem to the Iliad. Here it need only be observed, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears nowhere in the action of the Odyssey: the phrase is used but twice, and then only with reference to the dead Agamemnon: and that the partial disappearance of the word from the later work of Homer evidently accompanies a great approach towards disorganisation of the old order of things and ideas in the political state of Greece.

I may now collect the results, as far as they are related to the present subject, of our whole ethnological inquiry.

1. From the Homeric text, the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears not to have belonged to political preeminence or power, or to personal heroism, or to the distinction of wealth, or to divine descent as such; but to the archaic form of sovereignty which united it continuously with the headship in blood of a ruling family or clan, inhabiting the country which was the reputed cradle of the nation, or able to trace lineally its derivation from that country. A tradition of original descent from Jupiter attached in all cases essentially to the possession of the title.

2. In each of the six instances where Homer employs it, he appears to do so in strict conformity with the rules thus indicated.

3. The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was either a synonym, or a part.

4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to the family was still palpable and near.

5. The resemblances of the Helli and the Dardans afford, together with the probabilities of the case, strong evidence of their having some common affinity to the same branch of the great stem, from which a large part of Europe was peopled with its ruling race.

6. Finally, we may with reasonable grounds conjecture, that the patriarchal system denoted by the patriarchal chieftaincies, which had been shaken before the Trojan war, was further and violently disturbed by it, and by its direct and indirect political consequences; and that this system had vanished before the line of the post-Homeric Greek poets, to be reckoned from Hesiod, had begun. Thus, the basis of the title being removed, the title itself naturally disappeared from literature as well as history; and if we find, that in later times the key to its meaning had been lost, it is but a new mark of the abruptness and width of the breach that lies between Homer and his successors, of the paucity of continuous traditions, and of the limited means possessed by the Greeks of the historic ages for research into the earlier periods of their national existence.

SECT. X.
On the connection of the Hellenes and Achæans with the East.

We have reached the close of this inquiry, so far as it regards the origin, character, and pursuits of the Pelasgians; the character of the Hellenic tribes, and their relations to the Pelasgians; and the position of the Achæans among the Hellenes, as the first national representatives of the Hellenic stock. But who were these Achæans, and whence did they come? We have at present been able only to describe them by negatives. They were not the descendants of a legendary Achæus: they did not take their name from a Greek territory, nor from any pursuit that they followed; and the word has no apparent root in the etymology of the Greek tongue.

But we have seen manifest indications that the Hellic name did not first come into being on the western side of the Dardanelles: and if the Achæi were the first leaders of the Helli, why should we not trace them too beyond the Straits, and thus follow perhaps the Helli also, by their means, and as represented in them, up to a fountain-head?

At the same time, if I presume to affiliate the Hellic nation upon any Eastern parentage, and, again, to suggest relationships between that nation and others, which had also migrated from the first nurseries of man towards the West, it will, I hope, be understood, that all such propositions are asserted, not only as not demonstrable, but as likewise being, even within their own limits, those of merely probable truth, subject, by an admission tacitly carried all along, to every kind of qualification. The succession and intermixture of races, the combinations of language, the sympathetic and imitative communication of ideas and institutions, form a mass of phenomena complex enough, and difficult to describe, even by contemporaries; how much more so by the aid only of those faint and scattered rays that we can now find cast upon them.

Let us then proceed to consider what aid can be had from other sources in support of those presumptions, arising out of the text of Homer, which tend to connect the Hellenes of his day, and the Achæans as their leading tribe, with the East.

And here we may look first, as far as regards the general outlines of race and language, to the ethnological evidences afforded by the course of migration from Central Asia over Europe.

Next, to the evidence of those among ancient authors, who have taken notice of this diffusion in such a manner as in any degree to guide us towards the sources of the great factors of the Greek nation.

After that, we will inquire whether the names themselves, which are employed in Homer for the contemporary Greeks, can, by comparison with cognate names elsewhere, afford us any light.

And lastly, whether in the quarter to which these lines of information would lead us, we can discover any of those resemblances of manners and character with the Greeks which, if found, would afford the most satisfactory corroboration to the argument in favour of the derivation of one from the other.

The labours of ethnologists have associated together in one great family, at first called Indo-Germanic, and then Indo-European, but threatening to expand even beyond the scope of that comprehensive name, a mass of leading languages from the Celtic regions in the west to the plains of India in the east.

This great family, says Dr. Donaldson[894], divides itself into two groups. To these two groups respectively belong the Low German and the High German tongues: the former spoken in the plain countries to the north of Europe, the latter in the more mountainous countries to the south. The Low German languages contain evidence of greater antiquity, and those who speak them appear to have been driven onward in their migrations by the High Germans following them: the latter entering Europe by Asia Minor, the former to the north of the Euxine.

The distinction runs back to the earlier seat of the race in Ariana or Iran, a portion of Asia which may be loosely defined as lying between the Caspian and the Indian ocean to the north and south, the Indus and the Euphrates to the east and west. Within these limits are to be found two forms of language, holding the same relation to one another as that which subsists between the High German and Low German tongues; the first, corresponding with the High German, was spoken among the countries of the south-west, where lies Persia proper, and the other in its more northern and eastern portions, of which Media formed a central part. The population of this great tract issued forth in the direction of the south-east, over the northern parts of India; and again towards Asia Minor and Europe, in the direction of the north-west. Those who came first proceeded from Media, and supplied the base of what have been called, the Low German nations: Sarmatians, Saxons, Getæ (or Scythians or Goths). The language of these emigrants was that which, when it assumed an organized or classical form, and with due allowance for changes which the lapse of time must have introduced, became the tongue now best represented, at least as a literary language, by the Sanscrit.

The whole course of history seems to indicate a struggle of races in that quarter of the world, which may be used to illustrate the present inquiry. To a certain extent the scene of that struggle may be pointed out on the map. From the Caspian towards the south, and from the head of the Persian Gulf towards the north, the land soon rises to a great general elevation, but with marked and also highly diversified inequalities. Media would appear to have occupied the principal part of the great central space, defined by the mountains which form the outer line of this elevation. It corresponds with what is now the Province of Irak, and Ispahan is its principal city. Here, says Malcolm[895], we find the happiest climate that Persia can boast. To the south, near the Gulf, the summer heat is overpowering: as the country rises towards Shiraz the climate becomes temperate, and further improves as we advance northward, until we approach the hills that divide Irak from Mazenderan on the Caspian, where it deteriorates.

Immediately to the south of Irak, and touching the Persian gulf, a little to the east of the Karoon and Jerokh, which are the eastern tributaries of the great central rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, is the Province of Fars, which ascends the hills to its capital town Shiraz, and then extends in a north-easterly direction towards the sandy deserts. This is the province[896] where the Persian race is still to be found in its greatest purity; and from this tract the name of Persia, attached by Europeans to the empire of Iran, is supposed to be derived[897]. From Fars or Pars, for both forms are understood to exist, is drawn the name Parsee, borne by the fire-worshippers, who migrated for safety into India: and the same root appears to be clearly traceable in the great Persian tribe of Pasargadæ, named by Herodotus[898] as the leading tribe of the country. But though the province of Fars now embraces a considerable range of country and diversity of climate, all that is recorded of the ancient Persians would seem to connect them particularly with its ruder and more mountainous parts: for we have every reason to believe that Herodotus spoke truly when he described the Persians, properly so called, as poor, and their country as hard and barren in comparison with the rich valleys of Media, which at an early date attracted and repaid the labours of agriculture. It was inhabited, as Herodotus[899] says, κατὰ κώμας, that is, in the Pelasgian fashion, at the time when Dejoces acquired the throne.

The conflict of race between a bold highland people of superior energies, and the more advanced, but also more relaxed inhabitants of the more favoured district, is indicated even amidst the indistinctness of the earliest efforts of history. Ethnologically the general character of the movement is that of a pressure, to adopt the language of Dr. Donaldson[900], of the High upon the Low Iranians; I would be understood, however, to signify by the terms High and Low a distinction in language and not one in altitude of site. The overthrow of the Median empire by the Persians, related in different forms by Ctesias and Herodotus, and again in Holy Scripture, whatever be its chronological epoch, may be taken as a great crisis in the struggle, at which the High Iranians established themselves in the country of the Low, and in permanent political ascendancy among them. The Magian revolution, doubtless a great reaction against this ascendancy, was of short duration. The invasion of Media by the Scythians, which Herodotus has reported as proceeding from beyond the Euxine and the Palus Mæotis, but which was more probably from the east of the Caspian[901], indicates, it is probable, another form of this reaction. This invasion took place under Cyaxares, the grandson of Dejoces: and we may perhaps consider Media as having at this time received Persian influences, possibly by the immigration of groups of Persian families, before the general ascendancy of that race, just as we see the Æolid houses, and the family of Perseus, finding their way into Southern Greece before the days of the Achæan race, and of the general Hellenic ascendancy in the country.

The resemblance of the modern Persian to the modern High German language has been observed[902]: and it has even been thought probable, for reasons which will presently be considered, that the German name may have been derived from that quarter. The Hellic ingredient of the Greek tongue is referred to a similar origin. On the other hand, we are told that a traveller[903], taking a popular rather than a scientific view of language, has noticed the strong resemblance between the Latin and the modern Sclavonian forms. Again, the structure of the Latin language, from its repelling certain more modern tendencies of the Greek, is taken to indicate an antiquity beyond that of the Greek: and there is also an opinion that the older Greek forms, like the Latin, bear marks of correspondence with the Sclavonic. All this would tend to sustain the belief that the Pelasgians, who formed the older portion, and the basis, of the population of Italy and Greece, were offshoots from the old, or Low Iranian tribes: and that the more recent element was High Iranian or Persian.

Ethnological affinities, illustrative of what has here been advanced, have not escaped the attention of the Greek and Roman writers. What Strabo has said on this subject is particularly deserving of notice. His derivation of the German name from the Latin word Germanus may indeed be passed by as a notion which cannot be maintained, although it is supported by the opinion of Tacitus[904], that the name was recent: since even Roman inscriptions show, that it existed three hundred years before that historian. It is however very remarkable, that Strabo asserts the Germans and the Celts to have been nearly associated: μικρὸν ἐξαλλάττοντες τοῦ Κελτικοῦ φύλου τῷ τε πλεονασμῷ τῆς ἀγριότητος, καὶ τοῦ μεγέθους, καὶ τῆς ξανθότητος, τἄλλα δὲ παραπλήσιοι καὶ μορφαῖς, καὶ ἤθεσι, καὶ βίοις ὄντες[905].

Now, the result of all that we have drawn from Homer thus far would be to connect the Celts with the Pelasgi, with Media, and with the Low Iranian countries: the ‘Germans’ with the Helli and with Persia. Observe, then, how the differences, noted by Strabo between Celts and ‘Germans,’ correspond with the Homeric differences between Helli and Pelasgi. First, as to ἀγριότης: let us call to mind the history of the name Ἀργεῖος; the use of Ἄγριος as an early Hellic proper name; the absence of names of this class among the Pelasgians; the rude manners of the Helli and the Pheres; the pacific habits, wealth, and advanced agriculture of the Pelasgian populations. Then as to stature: how this gift has Diana for its goddess, how it is a standing and essential element of beauty for women as well as men, how the Greek Chiefs in the Third Iliad are distinguished from the crowd by size,

and how Achilles, the bravest and mightiest chief of this army, was the first also in beauty and in size; for Ajax is always recorded as next to him, and at the same time as before all others[907]; except Nireus, who was beautiful, but who as a soldier was mere trash.

And, lastly, as to the auburn hair, which was with Homer in such esteem. Menelaus is ξανθός (passim); so is Meleager (Il. ii. 642); so is Rhadamanthus (Od. iv. 564); Agamede (Il. xi. 739); Ulysses (Od. xiii. 399, 431); lastly, Achilles (Il. i. 197). But never once, I think, does Homer bestow this epithet upon a Pelasgian name. None of the Trojan royal family, so renowned for beauty, are ξανθοί: none of the Chiefs, not even Euphorbus[908], of whose flowing hair the Poet has given us so beautiful and even so impassioned a description. Nothing Pelasgian, but Ceres[909] the καλλιπλόκαμος, is admitted to the honour of the epithet. It could hardly be denied to the goddess of the ruddy harvest:

Now Tacitus, describing the Germani, gives them truces et cærulei oculi, rutilæ comæ, magna corpora[911]. His treatise supplies many other points of comparison.

It is obvious, to compare the names of Scythæ, Getæ, Gothi, Massagetæ, Mœsi, Mysi, as carrying the marks of their own relationship; and the reader will find in Dr. Donaldson’s New Cratylus[912] the various indications recorded by ancient writers of the extension of the Medians over Northern Egypt: namely, from Herodotus (v. 9), Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 7), and Diodorus (ii. 43). The last of these authors recognises the similarity of tongue between Greeks and Hyperboreans (ii. 47): and Clemens Alexandrinus, after reciting a series of inventions which the Greeks owed to the barbarians, records among them the saying of Anacharsis, whom some of the Greeks placed among their ‘seven wise men,’ and adds ἐμοὶ δὲ πάντες Ἕλληνες Σκυθίζουσι[913].

And again, Herodotus (i. 125) gives us a list of names belonging to the different tribes of Persia: the Persia, that is to say, of his own day. Six of these are settled or agricultural, and four nomad. Of the six, the Pasargadæ are the first. Then come the Μαράφιοι and Μάσπιοι. Three more follow, of whom one is named Γερμάνιοι. The precise correspondence of name immediately suggests that the modern Germans derive their appellation from this Persian tribe. But it is customary to derive that name from wehr and man, or from heer and man, thus giving it a military sense: and it is also observed[914] that, if it had borne this sense in the time of Herodotus, he would probably have assigned to it a higher place in his list. But he does not give us to understand, that he means to point out these tribal names as being the descriptive names of the various classes in one and the same homogeneous community, or as having, in any degree, the character of caste. To the first three, indeed, he assigns a political supremacy: for they were the tribes by whose means Cyrus effected his designs. But the idea of particular employments, and social duties, does not seem to belong even to these, and there is no sign of it with the others. It may have been that the Γερμάνιοι meant martial, as Κεφάλληνες seems to have meant Head or Chief Hellenes, and yet that, as the latter were not the chiefs of all the Hellenes, so the former were not the soldiery of all Persia. Again, as the Δωριέες of Homer lay undistinguished in the Hellenic mass, yet afterwards, and on the very same arena, attained to a long-lived supremacy, so, and yet more naturally, may it have happened that a tribe, secondary in Persia itself, may have taken or acquired the lead in a northward and westward migration from it, and may have given its name to the people, which afterwards coagulated (so to speak) around that migration.

There are not wanting either Homeric or post-Homeric traces of a connection between early Greece and Persia. In Homer, Perseus, father of a line of Peloponnesian kings, is the son of Jupiter and Danae[915]. A son of Nestor bears the same name[916]. We have also the name Περσεφόνεια, wife of Aidoneus or Pluto, and Perse, daughter of Oceanus, who bears Circe and Æetes to Ἠέλιος, the Sun[917].

When Homer makes Perseus the son of Jupiter, he certainly implies of this sovereign, as of Minos, that he had no known paternal ancestry, and perhaps that he falsely claimed a maternal one, in the country where he attained to fame. But further, it very decidedly appears from the use of the word Ἀργεῖοι for the subjects of the Perseids, and from the intense attachment of the Homeric Juno to that family, that they were an Hellenic house, following upon the probably Egyptian dynasty of the Danaids. With them appears to begin what Homer esteems to be the really national history. Perseus therefore probably may have brought his name direct from among the Hellenes of the north. Why should it not have come to the Helli from Persia? Let it be recollected that we have two other links with the east supplied: one in Perse, daughter of the Eastern Oceanus, and bride of the Sun, the other in Persephoneia, whose ἄλσεα, as I hope to show in treating of the Outer Geography, are in the same quarter.

In Herodotus we find a tradition that Perseus visited Cepheus[918], the Persian king, at the period when the people were called by the Greeks Cephenes; that he married his daughter Andromeda, and had a son, Perses, who remained behind him, succeeded Cepheus, and gave his name to the country. This tale has the appearance of a palpable fiction, intended to cover what may have been a fact; that Perseus—who in Homer has himself all the appearance of an immigrant into Peloponnesus—was a stranger, and derived his name from that of the Persians. Now this was the version current among the Persians; who reported that Perseus, born one of themselves, became an Hellene, but that his ancestors had not been Hellenes. To this Persian account Herodotus appears to give his own adhesion: and he states that the Greeks reckoned Hellenic kings up to Perseus[919], but that before him they were Egyptian. This is in entire harmony with what can be gathered from the indirect, but consistent and converging, notices supplied by Homer. And again, the whole mass of the later reports concerning Perseus keep him in close relation with that outer circle of traditions, which I have designated as Phœnician; with the Gorgons of Hades, with Tartessus on the Ocean, with Æthiopia and Atlas. Lastly; the continuance of the name as a royal name, down to the very extinction of nationality in Greece—for the last Macedonian king was a Perseus—may probably be connected with a stream of tradition, that drew from Persia the oldest of the national monarchs.

Again, we find that the name Ἀχαιοὶ was the great descriptive name of the Hellic races in the Homeric age. Yet it is without any note of an Hellic or European origin. Let us therefore see, whether in the East we can find anything that stands, even though at first sight disguisedly, in affinity with it. Now Herodotus tells us, that in the leading tribe of Pasargadæ there was a family (φρήτρη), from which came the Persian kings; the family of the Ἀχαιμενίδαι. Even if it were not easy to trace the mode of the relationship, it would seem inevitable to recognise a connection between the name Ἀχαιμένης, or whatever is the proper Persian root of this Greek patronymic, and those Ἀχαιοὶ whom we find at the head of the Greek races. This connection receives a singular illustration from Strabo, who in describing the Asiatic country called Aria, which gives a name to the Arian race, states that it has three cities called after their founders, Artacaena, Alexandria, and Achaia. Artacaes was a distinguished Persian, of the army of Xerxes. The name of Alexander speaks for itself. With respect to either of these, Strabo may be understood to speak of what may, from the respective dates, have been genuine historical traditions. But he knew and could know nothing of a Persian Achæus, as the founder of the third city. And the Greek Achæus, if he existed at all, belonged to another country, and to a pre-historic antiquity. The real force of the tradition which reports that these cities bore the names of their founders, seems, however, to be pretty obvious. It must surely mean this: that they had borne the same names at all times within the memory of man. Thus we have the Achæan name thrown back, by a local testimony subsisting in Strabo’s time, to a remote antiquity: there it finds a holding-ground in the Achæmenidæ of Herodotus: and both these authors become witnesses, I think, to the derivation of the Ἀχαιοὶ of Homer from Persia[920]. I do not mean that the Achæmenes, who, according to the Behistun Inscription, gave his name to the Achæmenidæ, was the father of the Achæans of the poems, for he appears to have lived only five generations before Darius. But the coincidence of name between the ruling family in Persia, and the dominant race in Greece, bears witness, in harmony with other testimonies, to a presumptive identity of origin.

It appears, too, that the name thus viewed may well have had its root in the ancient Arian language, if we judge from its extant forms. The word signifying ‘friends,’ according to Sir H. Rawlinson, is in Sanscrit sakhá, and in Persian hakhá.

The word, then, if we may rely on this high authority, undergoes no other change, on passing into the Greek tongue, than the loss of the initial aspirate, (while the second is retained in χ,) and the addition of the Greek termination ος or ιος. In this description of a ruling race by their common bond as associates, there is something that resembles the European and feudal name of peers.

There is indeed another name still existing in Persia, that of the Eelliats or itinerant tribes, the form of which, and the circumstances under which it appears, will shortly be noticed[922].

We have now obtained various lights, which point out to us the Persians as the probable ancestry of the Greeks. It still remains to learn, whether from the history of ancient Persia we can raise a presumption that there were, through resemblances subsisting there, marked signs of affinity between the two.

Herodotus has given us a remarkable, and apparently a careful, account of the ancient Persians, both as to religion and as to manners, which upon the whole both exhibits striking points of resemblance to Greece, and likewise tends to attach that resemblance to the Hellic rather than the Pelasgian race.

In making the comparison, we must allow specially for two sources of error. The Hellic tribes of Homer’s time had been probably for not less than eight or ten generations (since we trace the Dardanians on their own ground for seven generations, the Perseids and Æolids for six) detached from the parent stock, and might well have modified their character and customs, especially since they had mingled with the Pelasgians in the plains. And again, the account of Herodotus is later probably by 500 years or more, than the manners described in Homer. The Persians of his day had long been mixed with the Medes: and had, as he tells us[923], adopted their costume: probably much else along with it.

The Persians, says Herodotus[924], have no temples, altars, nor statues of the gods. Tacitus[925] gives a like account of the Germans. Of these Homer only enables us to trace altars with clearness as having been adopted by the Hellenic races at the period of the Troica. But the tendency to sacerdotal development among the Pelasgi may have had its counterpart in ‘the symbolism and complicated ceremonial of Media[926].’

They worship Jupiter from high places. So did Hector. We have no reason to make the same assertion of the Trojans generally: but the place given to Jupiter on Ida, and the whole Olympian fabric, probably also the plan of scaling heaven by heaping mountains one on another, all belong to the same train of thought.

They, if we are to adopt the statement, call the whole circuit of the heaven by the name of Jupiter. This same is the share of the universe, which, in the Homeric mythology, falls to the lot of Jupiter, and the name Ζεὺς is said to be identical with the Sanscrit Dyaus, meaning ‘the sky[927]:’ a sense which we find in the sub dio and sub Jove of the Latin writers, belonging to the Augustan age. This elemental conception of him, however, is probably more Median than Persian.

They did not originally worship Venus (ἀρχῆθεν); but they learned the worship of her from others, apparently the Medes or Assyrians. This remarkably accords with the case of the Hellenes of Homer, who seem only to have been drawing towards, rather than to have accepted fully, the worship of Venus in his time[928].

They considered fire to be a god[929]: differing in this from the Egyptians, who held it to be an animal.

So we find that the worship of Vulcan appears to be Hellic more than Pelasgian, and that the fable of his origin distinctly points to what was for Homer the farthest east[930].

They paid a particular reverence to rivers[931]. Of this we have the amplest evidence in Homer among the Greeks as to Alpheus, Spercheus, and the River of Scheria: rivers, too, were honoured by a more distinct personification than was attributed to other natural objects. The Scamander is, indeed, similarly treated. But this is an exception to the general mode of representation: and no other Trojan River is actively personified[932]. Simois is addressed (Il. xxi. 308) by Scamander; but is himself a mute.

These, however, are particular points: let us also consider more at large the general outline which Herodotus has given us of the Persian religion.

They did not, he says, consider as the Greeks did that the gods were (ἀνθρωποφυέας) anthropophuistic[933]. They called the entire circle of heaven by the name of Jupiter. They originally worshipped no gods except the sun, the moon, the earth, fire, water, and the winds. Afterwards they learned from the Assyrians and Arabians to worship Οὐρανίη under the name of Mitra.

I shall not attempt in this place to discuss the difficult subject of the Persian or Magian religions as they are in themselves; farther than to observe, that they appear to have been different. Here we have only to consider the relation, if any, between that system which the sketch by Herodotus describes, and the religion of heroic Greece.

It appears that the religion of the Persians[934], either as anterior to, or as independent of that of Zoroaster and the Magi, embraced, (1) the belief in one Supreme and incorporeal God, and (2) the worship of the host of heaven.

The sketch of Herodotus appears to be a representation of this religion: it contains no evidence of dualism, and fire-worship appears in it only as a subordinate characteristic. Only it would appear as if the historian had reflected upon Persia the leading idea of the Greek mythology, namely, that which invested Jupiter, as the supreme deity, especially with the charge of the sky and atmosphere: and that when he says the Persians call the heavens Jupiter, he probably means that they consider the Supreme Being not to be circumscribed, but to pervade all space. The powers of outward Nature were doubtless worshipped by them, in the first instance, as organs of the Supreme Being.

In this sketch there is something to remind us of a primitive religion, or at least to suggest the traditional forms in which that religion was conveyed: it teaches the unity of God, and then steps only into the most natural and proximate form of deviation. It is well called by Dr. Döllinger ‘a monotheism with polytheistic elements[935].’

It is unlike the Homeric religion, inasmuch as it does not contain any evidences of traditive derivation nearly so abundant or so specific as, I think, we shall find manifest in the Homeric system[936]. But then we must remember that it is junior, by many centuries, to the system of Homer: and that these evidences had become far less palpable, at the epoch when Herodotus lived, in the contemporary religion of Greece.

On the other hand, with respect to its human, inventive, and polytheistic element, it is evidently akin to the Homeric religion; under which Nature is everywhere animated and uplifted, and teems at every pore with some expression of divinity. The Greek scheme is indeed still more human, (for it takes everywhere the human dress,) more poetical and imaginative, than the Persian one; but the generative principle is one and the same, namely, the impersonation, though not necessarily in both cases alike under human conditions, of all powers observed and felt in outward nature. The whole group may well remind us, both in letter and in spirit, of the invocation of Agamemnon, which after Jupiter enumerates the sun, the rivers, and the earth: though it also adds the infernal gods[937]. We find from another place in Herodotus, that he knew the Persians to believe in an infernal deity, to whom they offered human sacrifices[938].

If we conceive the Persians moving westward, and gathering mental and imaginative, as well as warlike and political energy, on their way, we shall see that they are only enlarging the scheme reported in Herodotus by a consistent application of its principles, and following them out in an imaginative and dramatic spirit to their results, when they people every meadow, wood, and fountain with deity, and when they construct the great Olympian court for heaven, with its several reflections; in the sea, around the throne of Nereus, and, in the nether world, under the gloomy sway of Aidoneus and Persephone.