he wanders disconsolate and maniac over the face of Hellas. Passing through Arcadia, he is hospitably received by Phegeus, prince of Psophis, who purifies him from the blood-stain, and gives him his daughter Arsinoë in marriage. The bridegroom bestows on his spouse, among other nuptial gifts, the golden necklace and royal mantle with which his mother had been bribed by Polynices to her acts of treachery. But neither his matrimonial ties, nor the lustral rite of Phegeus, afford him permanent relief from his disease of mind. He again has recourse to the oracle, which now enjoins him to seek the apparently hopeless refuge, of "a land which had not witnessed his crime, as not yet in existence at the period of its commission." After a further series of wanderings, during which he is hospitably received by Eneus, king of Ætolia, he at length settles in an island recently formed at the mouth of the river Acheloüs by the alluvial deposit of the stream. Having thus fulfilled the instructions of the oracle, he obtains relief and repose. Careless of his Arcadian kindred, he now marries Calliroë, daughter of the river god, who bears him two sons, Acarnan and Amphoterus. His new spouse coceives a longing for the possession of the celebrated necklace and mantle. Alemæon accordingly journeys to the court of Phegeus, and having, under pretext of a divine order to dedicate those precious objects at the shrine of Delphi, procured them from Arsinoë, he sets out on his return to Acarnania, to present them to Calliroë. Phegeus, however, apprized of the deceit, sends his two sons in pursuit of his treacherous son-in-law, who is overtaken and slain. Calliroë, frantic with grief for the loss of her husband, supplicates Jove that her own two infant boys may be suddenly advanced to manhood, in order to avenge their parent's death. Her vow his gratified. The two young heroes assault and destroy not only the murderers of their father, but the old king Phegeus and his wife in the royal residence at Psophis. After defeating the citizens of Psophis in battle, they dedicate the necklace and mantle to the god of Delphi, and return triumphant to their native kingdom of Acarnania. That this series of adventures formed the subject of the Alcmæonis may, apart from their own fine adaptation to epic treatment, be inferred from the extent to which they have been reproduced in the page the tragic poets. To Sophocles they have furnished of matter certainly for one, probably for two, dramas; to Euripides, Ennius, and Accius for one each1; while nowhere has a similar prominence been assigned to this hero in any tragedy connected with the Theban war. As the tragedians drew their materials solely or chiefly from epic sources, it may be the more confidently inferred that they were here indebted to the Alcmæonis. To this circumstantial evidence may be added that supplied by the existing remains of, or appeals to, the text of the poem.2 Several of these bear reference to the later vicissitudes of the life of the hero; in no case to the Theban wars. In one, the allusion to the history of Eneus and his family connects itself with the hospitality afforded by that prince to Alcmæon during his wanderings. In a second, mention occurs of the mythical connexion of the Laertian royal family with Acarnania, the name of which country was derived from Alcmæon's son by Calliroë. A third appears to be descriptive of the contumelious treatment of the corpses of Alcmæon's murderers. The remaining quotations, in one of which Atreus and his golden-fleeced ram, in another certain exploits of Peleus and Telamon are mentioned, bear no direct reference to any adventure of Alemæon, and may have belonged to the incidental or illustrative parts of the narrative. The poem, there can be little doubt, was the popular epopee of the Acarnanian Hellenes, of the citizens of Amphilochian Argos, Eniadæ, and other states tracing their mythical foundation to the heroes of the Etolian and Theban wars. The six remaining lines are in pure epic style, but are distinguished by no marked peculiarity either of sentiment or expression. 1 Heyn. Obss. ad Apollod. p. 254. sqq. ? Düntz. frgm. p. 7. frg. Iv. sqq. 1 OF HOMER AND DANTE. ABUNDANT evidence exists, that it was quite consistent with the laws of Greek epic poetry, in every age, for the same author to give prominence in different works to very different versions of the same fable. Pindar, for example, in one of his odes, represented Orpheus as son of Apollo; in another, as son of the Thracian river Eagrus. In one, he described the dithyramb as invented in Naxos; in another, at Thebes; in a third, at Corinth.2 In one place he described Homer as a native of Smyrna; in another, as a native of Chios.3 Nor do Heyne, Hermann, and other keenest of Homeric separatists, make any difficulty in assuming Eschylus to have represented the punishment of Prometheus, in different dramas, as taking place in different parts of the world. That this license is not peculiar to the antients will be manifest from the following example, derived from the poet of modern times between whose general character and that of Homer there is so great analogy, and where the parallel to P. Knight's imputed case of discrepancy in the Greek poet is also very remarkable. Dante, in the pathetic episode of Count Ugolino in the Inferno, has described the four younger victims of party rage who perished in the Tower of Famine, as sons of the count, and as young boys or youths of tender age." But it is certain, from the authentic records of the period, that two only of his fellow-sufferers were his sons; that the other two were his grandsons; and that all four were grown men, active members of their parent's faction, and taken in arms with himself. Of this Dante could not be ignorant, being not only a con 1 Boeckh, Fragm. Pind. 188. Frg. 43. 3 Frg. 189. 5 Canto XXXIII. 88. temporary of Ugolino, but the man of all others of that day most conversant with the details of Tuscan history. He has therefore artfully given to the primary fact of the younger sufferers being the offspring of the principal victim the turn most conducive to poetical effect. But, it may be urged, the anomaly in Homer is not so much in the extreme youth assigned to Achilles in the Iliad, as that the same poet should have described the same hero, in the Odyssey, as father of a full-grown son. The analogy, however, will here also be found complete, by reference to the second subdivision of the Tuscan bard's mythological poem. The catastrophe of the Tower of Famine took place in 1288; Dante's mystical journey in 1300, twelve years afterwards. Among the departed souls with whom he converses in the " "Purgatory," "1 is that of Nino Visconti, another grandson of Ugolino. This person, it appears, from his own account of himself in the poem, as well as from contemporary history, was of advanced age at the epoch of his passage to the other world, and, to say the least, of mature manhood in 1288, the date of his grandfather's death in the tower. He appears, in fact, as early as 1282, acting as the able and popular leader of a powerful Pisan faction opposed to that of his grandfather. The representation, consequently, by Dante, in the Inferno, of no fewer than four of Nino's uncles as young boys in 1288, involves a discrepancy between that poem and the Purgatorio which, upon modern Separatist principles, would infallibly prove the two works to be by different authors. APPENDIX B. (p. 158.) IMPUTED DISCREPANCIES IN THE COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY OF THE ILIAD AND ODYSSEY. In order to avoid an accumulation of controversial details in the text, the remarks suggested by the remaining objections, to which, under the heads of religion and manners, importance has been attached by Payne Knight and Nitzsch, the two leading advocates of the Separatist doctrine, have been reserved for this Appendix. 1 Purg. cant. VIII. 47. sqq. 2 See Giov. Vill. Istor. Fior. vII. lxxxiii, cxx, cxxiii. 1. The Abode of the Gods. The abode of the gods, it is maintained, appears, as represented in the two poems, under as broad features of dissimilarity as the deities by whom it is inhabited. "In the Odyssey," it is said, "there is not a single allusion which appears to characterise Olympus as a mountain. It is never called snowy, never manytopped, or steep, or rugged, or by any other epithet of the class so frequently occurring in the Iliad. The gods are described as dwelling behind the clouds, and their seat on Olympus is painted in the same glowing colours as the Elysian Fields." These allegations are, as will be shown, like others already examined, altogether groundless. But even were they well-founded, it might be a question whether the distinction drawn could properly be considered as more than a natural result of the difference of subject in the two poems. In the Iliad, the action is far more immediately connected with Olympus than in the Odyssey, owing to the number of Olympian deities of first rank who take part in the adventures of the former poem, and to their frequent journeys to and fro on their own account, or by order of Jove, who habitually maintains his seat on the summit of the mountain. The action of the Odyssey, on the other hand, as of comparatively local interest, is to Jove a matter of proportionally little concern; to Juno and the other properly Olympian deities, with the exception of Minerva, of none whatever. Hence, as a natural consequence of this distinction, the name Olympus occurs five times more frequently in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. Even, therefore, had the more peculiarly characteristic epithets of the mountain been omitted, in whole or in part, in the latter poem, that omission would scarcely have supplied ground on which to construct a theory. The fact is, however, that such epithets not only do occur in the Odyssey, but are proportionally as numerous in that poem as in the Iliad, and perhaps still more specific. The " many tops" of the mountain are mentioned, and Minerva is described as walking down them. It is frequently designated as lofty3 by the term μakpós, which with Homer is the proper epithet of lofty mountains, but is never applied to the heaven in its independant capacity. Olympus is also described as snowy by the epithet aiyλnes", "glittering;" a term which can here bear no other sense than that of "glittering 2 1. 102., XXIV. 488. 4 XX. 103. |