Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/369

 HOMERIC AND HISTORICAL TROAI). 337 hostile to the Trojans : and Arktinus described the Palladium as the capital protection of the city. But perhaps the most remark- able feature of identity between the Homeric and the historical ^Eolis, is, the solemn and diffused worship of the Sminthian Apollo. Chryse, Killa and Tenedos, and more than one place called Smin- thium, maintain the surname and invoke the protection of that god during later times, just as they are emphatically described to do by Homer. 1 When it is said that the Post-Homeric Greeks gradually Hel- lenized this entire region, we are not to understand that the whole previous population either retired or was destroyed. The Greeks settled in the leading and considerable towns, which enabled them both to protect one another and to gratify their predominant tastes. Partly by force but greatly also by that superior activity, and power of assimilating foreign ways of thought to their own, which distinguished them from the beginning they invested all the public features and management of the town with an Hellenic air, distributed all about it their gods, their heroes and their legends, and rendered their language the medium of public administration, religious songs and addresses to the gods, and generally for com- munications wherein any number of persons were concerned. But two remarks are here to be made : first, in doing this they could not avoid taking to themselves more or less of that which belonged 1 Strabo. x. p. 473; xiii. p. 604-605. Polemon. Fragm. 31. p. 63, ed. Preller. Polemon was a native of Ilium, and had written a periegesis of the place ( about 200 B. c., therefore earlier than Demetrius of Skepsis) : he may have witnessed the improvement in its position effected by the Romans. He noticed the identical stone upon which Palamedes had taught the Greeks to play at dice. The Sminthian Apollo appears inscribed on the coin&of Alexandreia Troas ; and the temple of the god was memorable even down to the time of the em- peror Julian (Ammian. Marcellin. xxii. 8). Compare Menander (the Rhetor) irepl 'EmdeiKTiKtiv, iv. 14; apud Walz. Collect. Rhetor, t. ix. p. 304; also irtpl 'Zfifir&iaKtJv, iv. 17. 2zuvi?of, both in the Kretan and the JEolic dialect, meant a field-mouse : the region seems to have been greatly plagued by these little animals. Polemo could not have accepted the theory of Demetrius, that Hium was not the gennine Troy : his Periegesis, describing the localities and relics of Ilium, implied the legitimacy of the place as a matter of course. VOL. i. 15 22oc.