876 



THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



Homeric Poseidon ia not the god of the 

 liquid element at all. 



The truth is that the Olympian and 

 ruling gods of Ilomer are not elemental. 

 Some few of them bear the marks of having 

 been elemental in other systems ; but, on 

 admission into the Achaian heaven, they 

 are divested of their elemental features. 

 In the case of Poseidon, there is no sign 

 that he ever had these elemental features. 

 The signs are unequivocal that he had been 

 worshiped as supreme, as the Zeus-Poseidon, 

 by certain races and in certain, viz., in far 

 Boutheni, countries. Certainly he has a 

 special relation to the sea. Once, and once 

 only, do we hear of his having a habitation 

 under water.* It is in "II.," xiii, where he 

 fetches his hortes from it, to repair to the 

 Trojan plain. He seems to have been an 

 habitual absentee ; the prototype, he might 

 be called, of that ill-starred, ill-favored 

 class. "We hear of him in Samothrace, on 

 the Solyman fountains, as visiting the 

 Ethiopians f who worshiped him, and the 

 reek of whose offerings he preferred at 

 such times to the society of the Olympian 

 gods debating on Hellenic affairs ; though, 

 when we are in the zone of the Outer 

 Geography, we find him actually presiding 

 in an Olympian assembly marked with for- 

 eign associations.^ Now compare with this 

 great mundane figure the true elemental 

 gods of Ilomer: first Okeanos, a vener- 

 able figure, who dwells appropriately by 

 the farthest § bound of earth, the bank 

 of the Ocean-river, and who is not sum- 

 moned I even to the great Olympian as- 

 sembly of the Twentieth Book ; and sec- 

 ondly, the graybeard of the sea, whom only 

 from the patronymic of his Nereid daugh- 

 ters we know to have been called Nereus, 

 and who, when reference is made to him 

 and to his train, is on each occasion ^ to be 

 found in one and the same place, the deep 

 recesses of the Mediterranean waters. If 

 Dr. R6villc still doubts who was for Ilomer 

 the elemental god of water, let him note 

 the fact that while ncros is old Greek for 

 wf/, ncro is, down to -this very day, the peo- 

 ple's word for water. But, conclusive as 

 are these considerations, their force will be 



• " II.," xill, 17-81. t "Od.," I, 26, 26. 

 X " 0(1.," Tlii, 321-CC. § " II.," xiv, 201. 

 I " II.," XX, 7. 1 " IIV i, 853 ; xviii, 3C. 



most fully appreciated only by those who 

 have closely observed that Homer's entire 

 theurgic system is resolutely exclusive of 

 Nature-worship, except in its lowest and 

 most colorless orders, and that where he 

 has to deal with a Nature-power of serious 

 pretensions, such as the Water-god would 

 be, he is apt to pursue a method of quiet 

 suppression, by local banishment or other- 

 wise, that space may be left him to play out 

 upon his board the gorgeous and imposing 

 figures of his thcanthropic system. 



As a surgeon performs the most terri- 

 ble operation in a few seconds, and with 

 unbroken calm, so does the school of Dr. 

 Reville, at least within the Homeric pre- 

 cinct, marshal, label, and transmute the 

 personages that arc found there. In touch- 

 ing on the " log," by which Dr. R6ville 

 says Hera was represented for ages, she is 

 quietly described as the " Queen of the 

 shining Heaven" (p. 79). For this assump- 

 tion, so naively made, I am aware of no 

 authority whatever among the Greeks — a 

 somewhat formidable dilficulty for others 

 than solarists, as we are dealing with an 

 eminently Greek conception. Euripides, a 

 rather late authority, says,* she dwells 

 among the stars, as all deities might be 

 said, ex officio, to do ; but gives no indica- 

 tion either of identity or of quecnship. Ety- 

 mology, stoutly disputed, may afford a ref- 

 uge. Schmidt \ refers the name to the 

 Latin hera ; Curtius \ and Preller § to the 

 Sanskrit svar, meaning the heaven ; and 

 Welcker, || with others, to what appears the 

 more obvious form of tpa, the earth. Dr. 

 Reville, I presume, makes choice of the 

 Sanskrit svar. Such etymologies, however, 

 are, though greatly in favor with the solar- 

 ists, most uncertain guides to Greek inter- 

 pretation. The effect of trusting to them is 

 that, if a deity has in some foreign or an- 

 terior system had a certain place or office, 

 and if this place or office has been altered 

 to suit the exigencies of a composite my- 

 thology, the Greek idea is totally miscon- 

 ceived. If we take the pre-name of the 

 Homeric Apollo, we may with some plausi- 



* Eurip., "Helena," 109. 



t Smith's " Diet." art. " Ilera." 



X " Griech. Etytnol.," p. 119. 



§ Preller, "(iriech. Mytliol.," i, 121. 



[ " Griech. Gotterlchre," i, 862-8. 



