Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/355

 HISTORY. 339 Why did the poet seek a people so far removed from the scene of action as were the Lycians, when he could so easily have found others better fitted, one would think, to fill their place the Paphlagonians, Phrygians, and Mseonians, for instance, whose situation was comparatively near the Troad ? Inspection of the materials out of which the Iliad was composed, now irretrievably lost, would doubtless give us the clue to the secret cause which prompted Homer in his selection. But even as it is, we think we can understand that if he acted in that way, it was because he was vaguely reminiscent of the relationship that once had existed between the ancestors of Hector and those of Sarpedon. Are not Tros and Tlos, one the name of the Trojans, the other that of a Lycian city, doublets, twin forms of the same word made slightly different by pronunciation ? Troad has a river called Xanthus, but so has Lycia. Again, is there not some degree of probability that not only did the Lycians inhabit a canton of Mysia, the valley of ^sepus, but that they had spread along the coast, where later rose the Ionian centres ? This, we think, may be inferred both from certain lines in Homer, as well as numerous traditions found in later writers. 1 In this suppo- sition, the northern Louka would be a rear-guard of the bands which had at one time overrun Asia Minor and Lycia; when, along with the Iliouna, they sallied forth and broke through the Egyptian frontiers. Swept away from their homes by the wave of the barbarous invasions which, in the seventh century B.C., laid waste the peninsula, they were, in time, fused with the adjacent populations amongst which they had found shelter ; whilst those of their brethren who settled south of Taurus prospered, and 1 Pandarus is represented in the Iliad, both as a native of Lycia (v. 105, 173), and the chief of the Trojans " who dwell at the foot of Ida and drink the black water of ^sepus (ii. 824, 825). The historian of Alexander, Callisthenus, basing his narrative upon the testimony of the elegiac poet Callinus, wrote that Sardes was twice captured ; first by the Cimmerians, then by the joint efforts of the Trerse and the Lycians (Strabo, VIII. iv. 8). The former seem to have been a Thracian clan which met the Lycians in their southward progress, when they marched together against rich Lydia. Of course, the southern Lycians were outside their line of march. . When the lonians, driven from continental Greece, settled in Asia Minor, not a few of their bands, says Herodotus (i. 147), chose their leaders from among the descendants of Lycian Glaucus. On the other hand, Pausanias numbers Lycians among the component parts of the primitive population of Erythrae, prior to the arrival of the lonians there (VIII. iii. 7). In regard to the question under notice, consult TREUBER, Geschichte, pp. 14-18, 50, 51.