On In of nes al by ur ng riê, is ing hich causes him wholly to displace Iris in the Odyssey from her office as messenger, she being a personage wholly Hellenic and probably indigenous to the brain of Homer. Again, it must be on account of this Phoenician colour that he appears, instead of Athenê, as the guide and guardian of Odysseus in the Eastern, that is to say the Phoenician, region. Once more; he seems to be in general communciation with Kalypso, an entirely Phoenician personage (Od. xii. 390). His office as conductor of the dead cannot be discussed here, but it supplies additional evidence in the same direction. L Having thus far touched upon the ethnographical and religious aspects of the case, I now come to the seemingly insignificant or uninviting article of diet. And I do not hesitate to lay it down that in Homer the use of the pork diet is perceptibly a mark of what I should term Phoenicianism, that is to say of South-Eastern extraction or affinities. I have found it extremely difficult to obtain adequate lights upon this subject from ordinary modern sources, and have applied to the most learned of my friends for aid without any beneficial result. But I will now simply endeavour, in the first place, to give a view of the direct and as I think curious evidence on the subject, which is derivable from the text of Homer. Although an army encamped in a foreign land cannot afford to be particular as to food, we only once (ix. 208) hear of pork in the Iliad as an article of diet. In the Odyssey, the all-devouring cannibalism of the Cyclop throws no light upon the subject. But in the orderly household of Alkinoos, the King of Scheriê, pork is not the exclusive, yet it is the special, food at his banquets; and supplies the chosen portion which is given to the guest Odysseus, part whereof is by him presented to the minstrel. The menu of this feast in Scheriê is given us in Od. viii. 59, 60. Alkinoos sacrificed twelve sheep, eight hogs, and two oxen: and the selection of the chine of hog's flesh as the note of honour for the guest is remarkable. When he is about to depart, Alkinoos sacrifices an ox (Od. xiii. 24) to Zeus of the dark cloud who is lord of all; for Poseidon was the implacable foe of the hero. From the Cyclopian land the ox wholly disappears: only goats and sheep are heard of. Kirkê stocks the ship of Odysseus exclusively with mutton (x. 572, xi. 4). In the Pylian feasts of Nestor the ox alone appears: but the ox is the only animal mentioned in Homer as offered to Poseidon: and Nestor, though his family is Hellenised by tract of time, is of Poseidonian, that is of Phoenician, extraction. When we come into Ithaca, we lose sight of this divinity; and it is not too much to say that the rearing of swine, and the consumption of them as food, become the most prominent feature of the food supply, especially for a certain class of the population, the distinction probably having regard to a difference of race or of station, or both. In Od. ii. 296-300, Telemachos finds the Suitors about to feast. Aug on goats and swine: there is no mention of beef or mutton. In Od. xiv. 5-23, we have an elaborate description of the sties or pens, in which Eumaios kept no fewer than six hundred sows with three hundred and sixty fat hogs, seemingly for the daily consumption of the Suitors throughout the year. Eumaios however selects two young porkers to entertain Odysseus, xiv. 73, the fat hogs being reserved (81) for the table of their betters. At the banquet for the Suitors in the palace (xvii. 180-2) the four kinds of flesh meat are mentioned together. The same enumeration reappears in Od. xx. 250, 1. Earlier in the book we learn whence the banquet was provided. Eumaios drives down for it no fewer than three of the best fatted hogs. And Philoitios, the cowherd, brings a barren cow together with fat goats; all these not of Ithaca, but carried over from Cefalonia by the aid of the ferry (162, 3, 185-8). Thus pork was a chief article in the dietary of the higher class, and was specially reared in the island. But as in the case of Eumaios, so again when we have to deal with the household of Laertes, Odysseus invites them to a meal on a selected porker (xxiv. 215). It is worth while to note in passing the use which Kirkê, a member of the Phoenician circle, makes of her magical powers on the crew of Odysseus. They find her surrounded with wolves and lions (x. 212), but them she transforms into hogs (239). As respects the Ithacan narrative, especially when we read it in the light cast on it by what happened in Scheriê, the prominence given to the hog, and to his place in the dietary, seems evidently to point to a Phoenician relationship. Although recent study has not, so far as I am aware, thrown any light upon this subject, yet older scholars have carefully collected the testimonies of the ancients which bear upon it, except indeed that I have found no notice of the evidence supplied by the text of Homer. Spencer (De Legibus Hebræorum, pp. 131-8) and Bochart (Hierozoicon, B. ii. c. 57) have examined the matter in connection with the remarkable prohibitions and denunciations contained in the Old Testament, where the consumption of swine's flesh is treated as a very grave offence. Inquiring into the reason of these provisions, and the possibility of attraction or repulsion between the Jewish rule and the practice of other nations, they have gathered a mass of evidence, which at first sight is by no means harmonious. As to the Phoenicians proper, for example, there seems to be a direct contradiction between Herodian and Lampridius, of whom (ibid. col. 702) the first declares that their law prohibited the use of pork, while the second treats it as a main article of their diet, so that Bochart, in his despair, has to append the words, quæ quomodo concilientur fateor me non videre satis. 5 Professor Sayce has kindly given me the benefit of his compre This is however sus, not sialos. 5 And Mr. R. Brown, of Barton-on-Humber, has been so good as to enlarge for me the references collected by the older scholars, with material which tends to confirm the 'Phoenicianism' of pork diet. 1 hensive acquaintance with the Egyptian monuments and the Assyrian and Accadian discoveries. The old Accadian god Uras, the messenger of Mul-Lib, the god of the ghost world,' is called 'the lord of the swine.' It is interesting in connection with this to observe that Eumaios offers swine's flesh to Hermes, whose association with the under-world is so close. Again, a herd of swine, tended by a slave, appears in a wall-painting at Thebes, contemporary with the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty. easy This is not the place to examine the effect of the evidence as a whole. It is scanty for the time called pre-historic, and it is not to reduce to harmony. The testimony of Herodotos records chiefly prohibitions and restraints which themselves appear to witness to a practice, but to one that it was found needful to restrain. The evidence supplied by the Homeric text, however, is clear as far as it goes; and it goes to the point of establishing a special relation between the Phoenician element in the population and the use of pork in the Greek peninsula as an important article of food. Present discrepancies may perhaps be reconciled by prospective additions to the stock of knowledge. Varieties of condition in life, as well as of race, probably have had to do with them. And it seems just possible also that some of the Gentile prohibitions or abstentions may have had a relation to the distinction between swine self-reared, as foul feeders, and the carefully tended and regularly fattened hogs, such as those which Eumaios reared for the banquets of the local aristocracy. There are, however, various signs of what may be called Phonicianism in Ithaca besides those of race, religion, and dietary. The port of Phorkus is one among them. There the Phaiakian crew, who are Phoenician all over, deposit the sleeping hero. Thoösa, the mother of Polyphemos, is also the daughter of Phorkus: which at once establishes the connection. It may be said with truth, that the curiously landlocked character of this Ithacan harbour marked it out as an excellent place of shelter for the large sea-going ships of the Phoenicians, apart from any idea of settlement. But then the same thing, the formation of the harbour, pointed it out as convenient also for settlement. And the island appears to have been a house of call for the Phoenician mariners. Hence it is natural for the Taphian Mentes to appear there, although Ithaca yielded neither of the commodities which he was dealing in: neither the grey iron that he carried with him, nor the copper that was to load his vessel in return. Hence, probably, the easy supply of domestic slaves, such as Eurukleia and Eumaios, dropped by the passing vessels. Mentes himself was lord of the Taphians, who are believed to be a seafaring race inhabiting Cyprus, and Phoenician by extraction. Now he had an ancient bond of hospitality with the Arkeisian family. On arriving, he bids Telemachos refer to his grandfather Laertes to attest it, and says it had subsisted (ex arches) from the beginning (i. 187, 8). What was this archê? Could it be anything else than the first settlement of the family in Ithaca? And if they were immigrants they were probably Phoenician immigrants. There are marks of recency in the settlement of the island itself, because Ithakos, its eponymist, and Neritos, eponymist of its chief mountain, were brothers of Poluctor, and Peisandros the Suitor is called Poluctorides: and except in the case of Priam who is called Dardanides I do not. recollect a case in Homer of a patronymic which goes beyond the second generation. Again, we find in Ithaca, and nowhere else in the Poems, a person named Aiguptios. He is a person of consideration, for (Od. iv. 15, 25) he takes a leading part in the Assembly. Such a name could hardly have been given except to a person of Egyptian extraction. He seems to have no relation with the Achaioi, and like Mentor and Halitherses to have stood aloof (xxiv. 456,62) during the final struggle. Let me here notice that I do not find in Ithaca all the notes of Phoenicianism. The main exceptions (besides the absence of the Poseidon worship) are (1) the horse, and (2) the use of drugs. But, as the Phoenician name embraces all importations over sea, and thus includes several countries, we need not be surprised if in Ithaca, as well as in the more markedly Phoenician Scheriê, we do not find the horse. In Ithaca there is the additional reason that the contour of the country was not suited to horserearing (Od. iv. 605). With regard to drugs, it is to be observed that the pharmakon is an Egyptian product (iv. 227–32), and also that Odysseus personally had to do with their use, as he made a journey for the purpose of procuring them (Od. i. 257-64). The signs of Phoenicianism in Ithaca are indeed generally connected rather with the navigating and building race, than with Egypt, the case of the individual Aiguptios being so far an exception. And as to building, the Phoenician indications are clear. Homer has three epithets applicable in particular to his fabrics of stone: rutos, signifying stone which is hauled, therefore large and massive; catoruches, for stone quarried, and xestos for stone smoothed or hewn. Wherever we find these, or any of them, it is a Phoenician indication, sometimes through Poseidon or Hephaistos, sometimes directly, as in the Posidëion of Scheriê (vi. 287), or in the pen built by the Cyclop (ix. 185). In the case of the wall of Troy, the description is more general: it is thick, strong, and of fine workmanship (Il. xxi. 446, 7). This note we have again in the hog-pen built by Eumaios. It was large, lofty, beautiful, and built of hauled stones. We do not find, except in Priam's palace of hewn stone (Il. vi. 243, 4), any similar description of human dwellings. Their ornamentation was, as it would appear, metallic and interior; and the Poet probably chose this illustration for his palaces, as being far more imposing for his hearers than the mere note of stone-building would Also pukinos, solid, in a simile, Il. xvi. 212. have been. He calls the palace of Alkinoos like in radiance to the sun or moon; from the plates of copper, probably fastened upon wood with which it was constructed. So the palace of Menelaos is divine (theios), and lofty, with the same brilliancy, though we have no particulars as to the metallic plating (Od. iv. 42-6): and Menelaos had travelled in the whole Phoenician region, and had become extremely rich by gifts (iv. 81-93). The wealth of Odysseus (like his ships) was on a less royal scale: but we have similar signs of the use, probably, of metallic plates, in the glittering doors (thurai phaeinai), while the fabric is described in general terms as large, lofty, beau ul, solid (i. 436), conspicuous (xvii. 265) by its walls and corni : battlements. Tracing the epithet phaeinai, we find des the palace of Odysseus (xxi. 45 it applie only to 230,256, nd I will now pass on from the consideration of particular inquire whether the Phoenicianism, of which it may be noped that sufficient indications have now been furnished, may not be referred to a source or cause grounded somewhat deeply in the fundamental ideas and aims of the Homeric Poems. I have spoken of the threefold composition of the Achaian nation, and of the two factors, respectively, out of the three upon which is concentrated our higher interest, namely the Hellenic and the Phoenician. The primary feature in the characters of the two Homeric protagonists respectively is, that Achilles is colossal, Odysseus manysided. The respective ideas are worked out with a marvellous fidelity. In the higher region, as warriors and statesmen, the two are harmonious: each excels in strength, courage, eloquence, affection, political genius. Achilles conquers everybody: Odysseus is never conquered. Odysseus had merits, and also defects, that we do not find in Achilles. He was a consummate artificer and ploughman, and was accomplished in all house-service (Od. xv. 319-24). On the other. hand, his intense curiosity more than once led him into rashness, even against the remonstrances of his companions; as in the land of the Cyclops, both on arrival and on departure (e.g. Od. ix. 224). He had in him also the element of craft, developed nearly or altogether into fraud. He has no tempests of passion. There are notes of special likeness between them. They hate Thersites in common (Il. ii. 220) with a hatred more ample and complete than that with which he was regarded by the rest of the army. Each was capable of a stern cruelty. That of Achilles was towards the Trojans, after the death of Patroclos. That of Odysseus towards not the Suitors only but the unchaste women who had yielded to them. As exhibited towards the last-named class of victims, I think that the action of Odysseus leans more towards savagery than the other. If we are asked why Odysseus is chosen |