Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/91

69 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECF. G9 hero either unknown to or accidentally never mentioned by Homer. Achilles was throughout represented as the chief hero, created for the purpose of destroying the race of man by manly strength, as Helen by female beauty; hence also these two beings, who otherwise could not have become personally known to each other, were brought together in a marvellous manner by Thetis and Amphitrite. As, however, the war, conducted in the manner above described, did not destroy a sufficient number of men, Zeus at last resolves, for the purpose of effectually granting the prayer of the Earth, to stir up the strife between Achilles and Agamemnon, and thus to bring about all the great battles of the Iliad. Thus the Cypria referred altogether to the Iliad for the com- pletion of its own subject; and at the same time added to the motive supposed in the latter poem, the prayer of Thetis, a more general one, the prayer of the Earth, of which the Iliad knows nothing. In the Cypria a gloomy destiny hovers over the whole heroic world ; as in Hesiod* the Theban and Trojan war is conceived as a general war of extermination between the heroes. The main origin of this fatality is, moreover, the beauty of the woman, as in Hesiod's mythus of Pan- dora, The unwarlike Aphrodite, who in Homer is so little fitted for mingling in the combats of heroes, is here the conductor of the whole ; on this point the Cyprian poet may have been influenced by the im- pressions of his native island, where Aphrodite was honoured before all other deities. § 5. Between the poems of Arctinus and Lesches and the Odyssey came the epic of AciAsf the Troezenian, divided into five books, the Nostui. A poem of this kind would naturally be called forth by the Odyssey, as the author in the very commencement supposes that all the other heroes, except Ulysses, had returned home from Troy. Even in Homer's time there existed songs on the subject of the homeward voyages of the heroes; but these scattered lays naturally fell into ob- livion upon the appearance of Agias's poem, which was composed with almost Homeric skill, and all the intimations to be found in Homer were carefully made use of, and adopted as the outlines of the action £. Agias began his poem with describing how Athene executed her plan of ven- geance, by exciting a quarrel between the Atridae themselves, which pre- vented the joint return of the two princes. The adventures of the Atridaj furnished the main subject of the poem§. In the first place the wan- derings of Menelaus, who first left the Trojan coast, were narrated almost up to his late arrival at home ; then Agamemnon, who did not sail till afterwards, was conducted by a direct course to his native land : f 'Ayias is the correct form of his name, in Ionic 'lly'ias -, Auyias is a corruption. I See particularly Od. lii. 135. § Hence, probably, the same poem is more than once in Athenauis called h toj« '.~££l5a>V X.£.(tO0f.
 * Hesiod. Op. et I). 160,*??.