Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/896

876 Homeric Poseidon is not the god of the liquid element at all.

The truth is that the Olympian and ruling gods of Homer are not elemental. Some few of them bear the marks of having been elemental in other systems; but, on admission into the Achaian heaven, they are divested of their elemental features. In the case of Poseidon, there is no sign that he ever had these elemental features. The signs are unequivocal that he had been worshiped as supreme, as the Zeus-Poseidon, by certain races and in certain, viz., in far southern, countries. Certainly he has a special relation to the sea. Once, and once only, do we hear of his having a habitation under water. It is in "II.," xiii, where he fetches his horses from it, to repair to the Trojan plain. He seems to have been an habitual absentee; the prototype, he might be called, of that ill-starred, ill-favored class. We hear of him in Samothrace, on the Solyman Mountains, as visiting the Ethiopians who worshiped him, and the reek of whose offerings he preferred at such times to the society of the Olympian gods debating on Hellenic affairs; though, when we are in the zone of the Outer Geography, we find him actually presiding in an Olympian assembly marked with foreign associations. Now compare with this great mundane figure the true elemental gods of Homer: first Okeanos, a venerable figure, who dwells appropriately by the farthest bound of earth, the bank of the Ocean-river, and who is not summoned even to the great Olympian assembly of the Twentieth Book; and secondly, the graybeard of the sea, whom only from the patronymic of his Nereid daughters we know to have been called Nereus, and who, when reference is made to him and to his train, is on each occasion to be found in one and the same place, the deep recesses of the Mediterranean waters. If Dr. Réville still doubts who was for Homer the elemental god of water, let him note the fact that while neros is old Greek for wet, nero is, down to this very day, the people's word for water. But, conclusive as are these considerations, their force will be most fully appreciated only by those who have closely observed that Homer's entire theurgic system is resolutely exclusive of Nature-worship, except in its lowest and most colorless orders, and that where ho has to deal with a Nature-power of serious pretensions, such as the Water-god would be, he is apt to pursue a method of quiet suppression, by local banishment or otherwise, that space may be left him to play out upon his board the gorgeous and imposing figures of his theanthropie system.

As a surgeon performs the most terrible operation in a few seconds, and with unbroken calm, so does the school of Dr. Réville, at least within the Homeric precinct, marshal, label, and transmute the personages that are found there. In touching on the "log," by which Dr. Réville says Hera was represented for ages, she is quietly described as the "Queen of the shining Heaven" (p. 79). For this assumption, so naïvely made, I am aware of no authority whatever among the Greeks—a somewhat formidable difficulty for others than solarists, as we are dealing with an eminently Greek conception. Euripides, a rather late authority, says, she dwells among the stars, as all deities might be said, ex officio, to do; but gives no indication either of identity or of queenship. Etymology, stoutly disputed, may afford a refuge. Schmidt refers the name to the Latin hera; Curtius and Preller to the Sanskrit svar, meaning the heaven; and Welcker, with others, to what appears the more obvious form of ἕρα, the earth. Dr. Réville, I presume, makes choice of the Sanskrit svar. Such etymologies, however, are, though greatly in favor with the solarists, most uncertain guides to Greek interpretation. The effect of trusting to them is that, if a deity has in some foreign or anterior system had a certain place or office, and if this place or office has been altered to suit the exigencies of a composite mythology, the Greek idea is totally misconceived. If we take the pre-name of the Homeric Apollo, we may with some