Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/118

 86 HISTORY OF GREECE. Argeian women, and among them 16 the king's daughter, coming on board to purchase, were seized and carried off by the crew, who sold 16 in Egypt. 1 The Phoenician antiquarians, however, while they admitted the circumstance that 16 had left her own country in one of their vessels, gave a different color to the whole by affirming that she emigrated voluntarily, having been engaged in an amour with the captain of the vessel, and fearing that her parents might come to the knowledge of her pregnancy. Both Persians and Phoenicians described the abduction of 16 as the first of a series of similar acts between Greeks and Asiatics, committed each in revenge for the preceding. First came the rape of Europe from Phoenicia by Grecian adventurers, per- haps, as Herodotus supposed, by Kretans : next, the abduction of Medeia from Kolchis by Jason, which occasioned the retaliatory act of Paris, when he stole away Helena from Menelaos. Up to this point the seizures of women by Greeks from Asiatics, and by Asiatics from Greeks, had been equivalents both in number and in wrong. But the Greeks now thought fit to equip a vast conjoint expedition to recover Helen, in the course of which they took and sacked Troy. The invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes were intended, according to the Persian antiquarians, as a long-delayed retribution for the injury inflicted on the Asiatics by Agamemnon and his followers. 2 The account thus given of the adventures of 16, when con- trasted with the genuine legend, is interesting, as it tends to illus* 1 The story in Parthenius (Narrat. 1 ) is built upon this version of 16's adventures. 2 Herodot. i. 1-6. Pausanias (ii. 15, 1) will not undertake to determine whether the account given by Herodotus, or that of the old legend, respect- ing the cause which carried 16 from Argos to Egypt, is the true one : Ephorus (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 168) repeats the abduction of 16 to Egypt, by the Phoenicians, subjoining a strange account of the Etymology of the name Bosporus. The remarks of Plutarch on the narrative of Herodotus are curious : he adduces as one proof of the Hcmof/deia (bad feeling) of Herod- otus, that the latter inserts so discreditable a narrative respecting 16, daugh- ter of Inachus, " whom all Greeks believe to have been divinized by foreign- ers, to have given name to seas and straits, and to be the source of the most Illustrious regal families." He also blames Herodotus for rejecting Epaphus, 16, lasus and Argos, as highest members of the Perseid genealogy. He calls Herodotus <]>iloj3upl3apoe /Plutarch, De Malign. Herodoti, c. xi. xii. xir pp. 856, 857).