Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/52

28 with 'recreaunt' or 'avaunt.' It comes from an Anglo-Norman original, in which the Sieur d'Agrivauns formed his accusative d' Agrivaunt.

The evidence of language is incomplete without some consideration of the matter of the poems. What nationality, for instance, would naturally be interested in the subject of the Iliad? The scene is in the Troad, on Æolic ground. The hero is Achilles, from Æolic Thessaly. The chief king is Agamemnon, ancestor of the kings of Æolic Kymê. Other heroes come from Northern and Central Greece, from Crete and from Lycia. The lonians are represented only by Nestor, a hero of the second rank, who is not necessary to the plot.

This evidence goes to discredit the Ionian origin of the main thread of the Iliad; but does not the same line of argument, if pursued further, suggest something still more strange—viz., a Peloponnesian origin? Agamemnon is king of Argos and Mycenæ; Menelaos is king of Sparta; Diomêdes, by some little confusion, of Argos also; Nestor, of Pylos in Messenia. The answer to this difficulty throws a most striking light on the history of the poems. All these heroes have been dragged down to the Peloponnese from homes in Northern Greece.

Diomêdes, first, has no room in Argos; apart from the difficulty with Agamemnon, he is not in the genealogy, and has to inherit through his mother. A slight study of the local worships shows what he is, an idealised Ætolian. He is the founder of cities in Italy; the constant