WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 57 



Peleus with the Greek name for mud (7777X05), and the fact that the mother of 

 the hero was a sea-goddess ; and on this notion Forchhammer, I believe, or some 

 one of the erudite fancymongers beyond the Rhine, constructed a theory that 

 the Iliad is really a great geological poem, in which water power is represented 

 by Achilles, and land power by Hector (from fya), to hold, restrain, keep back) ! 

 This is really too bad. If a man in Thurso, to take a modern example, named 

 Waters — and it is a characteristic name in that quarter, were to marry a woman 

 called Loch — a well-known name in Sutherland — and a daughter, the offspring 

 of this marriage, should join herself in wedlock to an English gentleman named 

 Rivers, no sane person could see in this conjunction of congruous etymologies 

 anything but one of those curious coincidences which amuse a newspaper reader 

 for a minute, and then are forgotten. Why, then, we ask, should the occurrence 

 of water, and mud, and a sea-nymph, among the family names of an old Thessa- 

 lian throne, be supposed to possess any more profound significance, even on the 

 supposition that the etymologies are certain, which they certainly are not % 

 And accordingly, we find this favourite water theory discarded by the Germans 

 themselves, the moment it does not suit the theory of the interpreter. To Max 

 Muller Achilles can be nothing but a solar god ; for his imagination, fired 

 with sunlight from the flaming east, can see nothing in the stout battles of 

 Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad but the grand struggle between the powers of 

 light and darkness. Of the probability of this theory I have sought in vain for 

 the shadow of a proof. If Helen of Troy, whose name can obviously be identi- 

 fied with brightness (cre'Xas aehjvr)), must on this account take her place with 

 her brothers, as a sidereal phenomenon (sic Fratres Helenas, lucid a sldera), this 

 does seem to me an exceeding weak foundation for the transformation of the 

 whole topographical and traditional heroes of the Iliad into a meteoric 

 spectacle. 



If, according to the views set forth in this paper, there is no scientific 

 ground for raising Achilles into the category of gods, whether aquarian or 

 solar, much stronger are the reasons which induce us, with unsophisticated 

 old Plutarch, to see in Theseus no myth, but a great historical reality. If the 

 principle be once accepted, that a single miraculous fact or incredible story con- 

 nected in the popular imagination with a great popular name, shall deprive him 

 simpliciter of all claim to a historical existence, we shall make strange havoc, I 

 fear, with some of the most brilliant and the most instructive pages of national 

 record. There is no need of believing all the wonderful stories that Athenian 

 reverence and wonder accumulated round the name of Theseus, as little as there 

 is of believing all the silly miracles that the Lausiac history narrates of the 

 Egyptian ascetics ; but there is certainly as little wisdom in roundly denying 

 the historical germ to which, in all such cases, these accretions were attached. 



I have thus pointed out, in a rapid and succinct way, what seem to be the 

 vol. xxvi. part 1. p 



