HESSE PIlILIPl'STHAL IIETAIREIA. 



719 



Meissenheim. The capital is Homburg, with 3490 

 inhabitants. Revenue, 180,000 guilders ; debt, 

 450,000 guilders; contingent for the confederacy, 200 

 men. The present landgrave is Louis, lieutenant- 

 general in the service of Prussia, born August 29, 

 1770. 



HESSE-PHILIPPSTHAL ; a collateral line of 

 Hesse-Cassel. (q. v.) 



HESSE-PHILIPPSTHAL-BARCHFELD; a col- 

 lateral line of Hesse-Cassel. (q. v.) 



HESSE ROTHENBURG ; a collateral line of 

 Hesse-Cassel. (q. v.) (Catholic.) 



HESSIA. The Hessians, called, in the early his- 

 tory of Germany, Catti, lived in the present Hessia ; 

 part of them emigrated to the Netherlands, and were 

 called Batavi, They are mentioned under Augus- 

 tus. German icus, son of Drusus, conquered them, 

 burnt their chief place, Mattium (Marburg), and led 

 a daughter of a Cattian prince, together with a 

 priest, in Jiis triumph. At a later period, they 

 belonged to the great empire of the Franks. Even 

 before the time of Charlemagne, Christian churches 

 were built at Hersfeld, Fritzlar, and Amoneburg. 

 The German king Adolphus of Nassau made Hessia 

 an imperial principality in 1292. According to the 

 injudicious habit of those ages to divide countries 

 among all the sons of a prince, and sometimes even 

 the daughters, Hessia was often divided and re- 

 united. In 1500, William II. was in possession of 

 the whole of Hessia. He died in 1509, and left 

 the landgraviate to his son Philip, then five years 

 old. Many disturbances in Hessia, and in Germany 

 in general, induced the emperor Maximilian to 

 declare Philip of age in 1518, when only fourteen 

 years old. In 1523, he put an end to the disturb- 

 ances caused by Francis of Sickingen, defeated, in 

 1526, the peasants in the peasant war, and was at 

 the same time a zealous promoter of the reformation. 

 He founded the university of Marburg and four hos- 

 pitals, from the property of suppressed convents. 

 He was also the author of the celebrated conference 

 between Luther and Zwinglius, at Marburg, in 1529, 

 in the hope of uniting them ; and, with the elector 

 of Saxony, he accepted the direction of the Smal- 

 caldic league. The battle of Muhlberg, in 1547, so 

 unfortunate for the Protestants, obliged him to sur- 

 render, unconditionally, to Charles V., who kept him 

 for five years near his person. He afterwards ruled 

 his country in peace. His character was impetuous. 

 By his will (1562) he divided Hessia among his four 

 sons. But Philip died in 1585, and Louis in 1604, 

 without heirs ; from the others sprung the two exist- 

 ing lines of Hesse-Cassel and Hesse-Darmstadt, 

 (q. v.) 



HESYCHASTES (from the Greek f, ft > x *$u,, to be 

 quiet ;) the name of a party among the monks on 

 mount Athos, noted, in the fourteenth century, for 

 their fantastic notions. They regarded the navel as 

 the seat of the soul, and consequently as the object of 

 contemplation. After long perseverance in prayer, 

 with their chin on their breast, and their eyes fixed 

 on their navel, they believed they would finally have 

 a sensible perception of the divine light, and might 

 enjoy the bliss of beholding God. This light, in 

 which the Godhead dwells, and which emanates 

 from the Godhead, they pronounced uncreated, and 

 yet distinct from the being of the Godhead. In a 

 controversy concerning the nature of this light, in 

 which they were opposed by the Calabrian monk 

 Barlaam, under the protection of the Greek emperor 

 Andronicus Paloeologus the younger, the zeal of their 

 defender Palama, archbishop of Thessalonica, gained 

 them the superiority iu a synod held at Constantino- 

 ple in 1341. A change of government deprived the 

 Hesychastes of their superiority, and the other con- 



tests of the church consigned this error to oblivion. 

 The remembrance of it was recalled by the Quietism 

 of the seventeenth century, and it may, perhaps, re- 

 ceive some physiological explanation from the Mag- 

 netism of the nineteenth. 



HESYCHIUS, the author of a Greek glossary, 

 which has probably come to us in an abridged form, 

 and which he partly collected from former diction- 

 aries, and partly enlarged by many new words and 

 examples from Homer, the dramatic and lyric poets, 

 the orators, physicians, and historians, was a native 

 of Alexandria, and according to some lived about 

 the end of the fourth, or, as others say, in the fifth or 

 sixth century after Christ. Of the circumstances of 

 his life, nothing is known. The best editions of his 

 glossary are Alberti and Ruhnken's (Leyden, 1746 

 (56, 2 vols., folio) and Schow's (Leipsic, 1792), as a 

 supplement to the former. 



HET^IRA (Greek iraiga, a female friend); the 

 name given by the Greeks to a concubine, a mistress, 

 &c. Even Venus as worshipped in some places 

 under the surname of Heteera ; and her priestesses 

 were also called by this name. The notions of the 

 ancients concerning domestic virtue, their passionate 

 admiration for the beautiful and the real accomplish- 

 ments of many of the hetcerce, occasioned their society 

 to be sought by men of the highest eminence, even 

 Plato and Socrates. No shame was attached to as- 

 sociating with them. Aspasia is the most renowned 

 of these het&ree. The names of Leontium, Theo- 

 data, &c., are also well known. They may be com- 

 pared to Ninon de 1'Enclos, Sophie Arnault, &c., in 

 modern times. Het&rce, less intellectually famous, 

 were Cratina, Lais, whom Aristippus the philosopher 

 loved, Phryne and others. They also became famous 

 for their connexion with the works of art. Praxite- 

 les made a marble and gold statue of the latter, and 

 she was also the model for his Venuses. His son, 

 Cephissodorus, acquired his fame, as several others 

 did, by making statues of hetcerce. They were not 

 generally natives of the places where they lived, and 

 at Athens, where citizenship was a subject of great 

 pride, foreign women in general were despised, by 

 the Athenian women, and the term foreign, as applied 

 to a female, had much the same signification as 

 hetcera. See Corinth. 



HETAIREIA, or HET^ERIA (Greek; brother- 

 hood, or society of friends). In 1814, a society of 

 the friends of the Greeks was formed in Vienna, by 

 the co-operation of the count Capo d'lstrias and the 

 archbishop Ignatius (who lived in retirement at Pisa), 

 having for its object the diffusion of Christian instruc- 

 tion and true religion, both among the ignorant 

 papas (the inferior clergy) and among the people, by 

 schools and other means. The statutes of this as- 

 sociation were printed in the modern Greek and the 

 French languages. Princes, ministers, scholars of all 

 nations, and the rich Greeks of the Fanar, joined it, 

 and the association soon consisted of upwards of 

 80,000 members. The symbol of the society was a 

 ring, with the image of the owl and of Chiron, who, 

 as the educator of heroes, has a boy on his back. 

 Its treasury was at Munich. Originally, the Hetaeria 

 had no political object; but by degrees the desire 

 was awakened to co-operate actively in the emanci- 

 pation of Greece from the Turkish yoke. This 

 desire took the deepest hold of the educated part of 

 the Grecian youth. Powerful allies were sought 

 and found ; considerable means were accumulated, 

 that every thing might be in readiness. Odessa was 

 the point of union of the Hetaeria with Constanti- 

 nople, where the society made preparations for a 

 great struggle. As soon as Ypsilauti (See Greece, 

 Modern, Insurrection of) called the Greeks to liberty 

 at Jassy, in March, 18*1, the youths of the Heteriu 



