Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/895

Rh for their sins, and presumably himself in the same predicament, as the sense of grief is assigned to him: it is in wailing that he addresses Odysseus. Accordingly, while on earth, he is thrasumemnon, huperthumos, a doer of megala erga, which with Homer commonly are crimes. He is profane, for he wounded Herè, the specially Achaian goddess; and he is treacherous, for be killed Iphitos, his host, in order to carry off bis horses A mixed character, no doubt, or be would not have had Herè for a partner; but those which I have stated are some of the difficulties which Dr. Réville quietly rides over to describe him as lawgiver, peacemaker, and liberator. But I proceed.

Nearly everything, with Dr. Réville, and, indeed, with his school, has to be pressed into the service of the solar theory; and, if the evidence will not bear it, so much the worse for the evidence. Thus Ixion, tortured in the later Greek system on a wheel, which is sometimes represented as a burning wheel, is made (p. 105) to be the sun; the luminary whose splendor and beneficence had rendered him, according to the theory, the center of all Aryan worship. A sorry use to put him to; but let that pass. Now the occasion that supplies an Ixion and a burning wheel available for solarism—a system which prides itself above all things on its exhibiting the primitive state of things—is that Ixion had loved unlawfully the wife of Zeus. And first as to the wheel: We hear of it in Pindar; but as a winged not a burning wheel. This "solar" feature appears, I believe, nowhere but in the latest and most defaced and adulterated mythology. Next as to the punishment. It is of a more respectable antiquity. But some heed should surely be taken of the fact that the oldest authority upon Ixion is Homer; and that Homer affords no plea for a burning or any other wheel, for, according to him, instead of Ixion's loving the wife of Zeus, it was Zeus who loved the wife of Ixion.

Errors, conveyed without testimony in a sentence, commonly require many sentences to confute them. I will not dwell on minor cases, or those purely fanciful; for mere fancies, which may be admired or the reverse, are impalpable to the clutch of argument, and thus are hardly subjects for confutation. Paulò majora canamus. I continue to tread the field of Greek mythology, because it is the favorite sporting-ground of the exclusivists of the solar theory.

We are told (p. 80) that because waves with rounded backs may have the appearance (but query) of horses or sheep throwing themselves tumultuously upon one another, therefore "in maritime regions, the god of the liquid element, Poseidon or Neptune, is the breeder, protector, and trainer of horses." Then why is he not also the breeder, protector, and trainer of sheep? They have quite as good a maritime title; according to the fine line of Ariosto:

I am altogether skeptical about these rounded backs of horses, which, more, it seems, than other backs, become conspicuous like a wave. The resemblance, I believe, has commonly been drawn between the horse, as regards his mane, and the foam tipped waves, which are still sometimes called white horses. But we have here, at best, a case of a great superstructure built upon a slight foundation; when it is attempted, on the groundwork of a mere simile, having reference to a state of sea which in the Mediterranean is not the rule but the rare exception, to frame an explanation of the close, pervading, and almost profound relation of the Homeric Poseidon to the horse. Long and careful investigation has shown me that this is an ethnical relation, and a key to important parts of the ethnography of Homer. But the proof of this proposition would require an essay of itself. I will, therefore, only refer to the reason which leads Dr. Réville to construct this (let me say) castle in the air. It is because he thinks he is accounting hereby for a fact, which would indeed, if established, be a startling one, that the god of the liquid element should also be the god of the horse. We are dealing now especially with the Homeric Poseidon, for it is in Homer that the relation to the horse is developed; and the way to a true explanation is opened when we observe that the