BAW^Y OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 



^75 



fering for their sins, and presumably him- 

 self in the same predicament, as the sense 

 of grief is assigned to him : it is in wailing 

 that he addresses Odysseus.* Accordingly, 

 while on earth, he is thrasumcmnon,\ hu- 

 perthumos^X a doer of mcrjala crc/a,^ which 

 with Homer commonly are crimes. He is 

 profane, for he wounded Here, the specially 

 Achaian goddess ; || and he is treacherous, 

 for he killed Iphitos, his host, in order to 

 carry off his horses.\ A mixed character, 

 no doubt, or he would not have had Heb5 

 for a partner ; but those which I have stated 

 are some of the difficulties which Dr. Re- 

 ville quietly rides over to describe him as 

 lawgiver, peacemaker, and liberator. But I 

 proceed. 



\early everything, with Dr. Reville, and, 

 indeed, with his school, has to be pressed 

 into the service of the solar theory ; and, if 

 the evidence will not bear it, so much the 

 worse for the evidence. Thus Ixion, tor- 

 tured in the later Greek system on a wheel, 

 which is sometimes represented as a burn- 

 ing wheel, is made (p. 105) to be the sun; 

 the luminary whose splendor and beneficence 

 had rendered him, according to the theory, 

 the center of all Aryan worship. A sorry 

 use to put him to ; but let that pass. Now 

 the occasion that supplies an Ixion and a 

 burning wheel available for solarism — a 

 system which prides itself above all things 

 on its exhibiting the primitive state of 

 things — is that Ixion had loved unlawfully 

 the wife of Zeus. And first as to the wheel : 

 We hear of it in Pindar ; ** but as a winged 

 not a burning wheel. This " solar " feature 

 appears, I believe, nowhere but in the latest 

 and most defaced and adulterated mythology. 

 Next as to the punishment. It is of a more 

 respectable antiquity. But some heed should 

 surely be taken of the fact that the oldest 

 authority upon Ixion is Homer; and that 

 Homer affords no plea for a burning or any 

 other wheel, for, according to hira,f f instead 

 of Ixion's loving the wife of Zeus, it was 

 Zeus who loved the wife of Ixion. 



Errors, conveyed without testimony in a 

 sentence, commonly require many sentences 

 to confute them. I will not dwell on minor 



*"Od.,"xi, 605-16. 

 t "II.," xiv, 250. 

 C "II.," V, 392. 

 ♦* " Pyth.," ii, 89. 



t " Od.," xi, 26T. 

 §"Od.,"xxi, 26. 

 1 " Od.," xxi. 26-30. 

 +t " II.," xiv, 317. 



cases, or those purely fanciful ; for mere 

 fancies, which may be admired or the re- 

 verse, arc impalpable to the clutch of argu- 

 ment, and thus are hardly subjects for con- 

 futation. Paulo niajora canarmis. I con- 

 tinue to tread the field of Greek mythology, 

 because it is the favorite sporting-ground of 

 the cxclusivists of the solar theory. 



We are told (p, 80) that because waves 

 with rounded backs may have the appear- 

 ance (but query) of horses or sheep throw- 

 ing themselves tumultuously upon one an- 

 other, therefore " in maritime regions, the 

 god of the liquid element, Poseidon or Nep- 

 tune, is the breeder, protector, and trainer 

 of horses." Then why is he not also the 

 breeder, protector, and trainer of sheep ? 

 They have quite as good a maritime title ; 

 according to the fine line of Ariosto : 



"Muggeudo van per mare i gran montoni." 



I am altogether skeptical about these 

 rounded backs of horses, which, more, it 

 seems, than other backs, become conspicu- 

 ous like a wave. The resemblance, I be- 

 lieve, has commonly been drawn between the 

 horse, as regards his mane, and the foam- 

 tipped waves, which are still sometimes 

 called white horses. But we have here, at 

 best, a case of a great superstructure built 

 upon a slight foundation; when it is at- 

 tempted, on the groundwork of a mere 

 simile, having reference to a state of sea 

 which in the Mediterranean is not the rule 

 but the rare exception, to frame an expla- 

 nation of the close, pervading, and almost 

 profound relation of the Homeric Poseidon 

 to the horse. Long and careful investiga- 

 tion has shown me that this is an ethnical 

 relation, and a key to important parts of 

 the ethnography of Homer. But the proof 

 of this proposition would require an essay 

 of itself. I will, therefore, only refer to 

 the reason which leads Dr. Reville to con- 

 struct this (let me say) castle in the air. It 

 is because he thinks he is accounting here- 

 by for a fact, which would indeed, if estab- 

 lished, be a startling one, that the god of 

 the liquid element should also be the god 

 of the horse. We are dealing now espe- 

 cially with the Homeric Poseidon, for it is 

 in Homer that the relation to the horse is 

 developed ; and the way to a true explana- 

 tion is opened when we observe that the 



