text stringlengths 14 5.77M | meta dict | __index_level_0__ int64 0 9.97k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|
module Admin::TasksHelper
def all_tasks_chart_data
first_completion_at = Score.order("created_at").first().try(:created_at) || 3.weeks.ago
first_completion_at -= 1.day
tasks_by_day = Score.group("date(scores.created_at)").count()
data = (first_completion_at.to_date..Date.today).map do |date|
{
date: date,
count: tasks_by_day[date.to_s] || 0
}
end
end
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,878 |
Q: MYSQL : If no data I have the following mysql query:
$products = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM dpweb_products WHERE id='$id'") or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_array($products);
What I would like to know is if this row is empty:
$row['description']
I want it to display "No Product Description Available" but otherwise display the description value from the database.
Could do with pointing in the right direction.
Thanks
A: Try this:
if (empty($row['description'])
echo 'No Product Description Available';
else
echo $row['description'];
A: echo $row['description'] === '' ? 'No Product Description Available' : $row['description'];
A: This should do it:
$products = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM dpweb_products WHERE id='$id'");
if($products === false){ // better way to handle querys
echo 'There was a problem with the query';
} else {
if(mysql_num_rows($products) == 0) {
echo 'No Product Description Available';
}else{
$row = mysql_fetch_array($products);
echo $row['description'];
}
}
die(); will kill the page. You might not want this.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,336 |
\section{INTRODUCTION}\label{intro}
In the concordance $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, galaxies,
galaxy groups, and galaxy clusters form hierarchically.
High-density regions condense and virialize,
forming bound structures known as halos.
Halos grow through the continual accretion of
smaller objects. These accreted objects
may survive within the virialized region of the primary halo
as smaller, self-bound, orbiting dark matter clumps dubbed
``subhalos'' or ``substructure'' \citep{Ghigna00,klypin99a,diemand04,kravtsov04a}.
Halos of sufficient mass are the natural sites of galaxy formation, with
baryons cooling and condensing towards potential well minima
\citep{whiterees78,blumenthal86}. When a halo is accreted by a larger
halo, thus becoming a subhalo, the galaxy within it becomes a ``satellite''
galaxy within a group or cluster. Understanding the detailed relationship
between (satellite) galaxies and (sub) halos is a long-standing focus of galaxy
formation theory.
In the hierarchical paradigm, these smaller objects, upon merging,
become victims of intense tidal fields and interactions within the
larger systems in which they reside. The dark matter mass associated
with a subhalo may be rapidly stripped upon infall. This stripping
acts on the periphery of the subhalo first, suggesting that the
luminous galaxy, residing in the center of the subhalo, may be
relatively unharmed. After enough time has elapsed, stripping of
stars may begin to occur as well. These liberated stars that are
ripped from galaxies are the likely source of ``intrahalo light''
\citep[IHL:
e.g.,][]{gallagher_ostriker72,merritt83,byrd_valtonen90,gnedin03,murante04,
lin_mohr04,willman04,sommerlarsen06,conroy07,skibba07,purcell_etal07,purcell_etal08,yang09b,
rudick09,rudick11}. This has been studied in great detail \emph{at
the scale of individual galaxies}, often categorized as
"stellar halos" or "tidal streams"
\citep{morrison93,sackett94,wetterer_mcgraw96,morrison97,weil97,chiba_beers00,
ivezic00,lequeux98,abe99,morrison00,yanny00,siegel02,irwin05,zibetti_ferguson04,
guhathakurta05,chapman06,kilarai06,McConnachie06,hood07,mackey10,bailin11},
\emph{galaxy groups}
\citep{feldmeier01,castrorodriguez03,white_P03,darocha05,aguerri06,feldmeier06,darocha08},
and \emph{galaxy clusters} \citep[where it is known as the
intra-cluster light, or ICL, e.g.,
][]{gallagher_ostriker72,merritt83,melnick77,thuan_kormendy77,byrd_valtonen90,
uson91,bernstein95,calc_rold00,gnedin03,murante04,lin_mohr04,willman04,mihos05,
zibetti05,krick06,sommerlarsen06,conroy07,seigar07,gonzalez07,pierini08,rudick09,
rudick11,toledo11,romanowsky12}.
In this paper, we seek to understand the liberation of stars from
satellite galaxies by connecting stellar mass loss\footnote{By ``stellar
mass loss'', we refer to stars being stripped from a galaxy and not
gas lost from stars via winds.} to subhalo dark matter mass loss using
\emph{galaxy clustering} and \emph{intrahalo light} observations.
We employ the model for halo substructure
introduced in \citet[][hereafter Z05]{zentner05} in order to
constrain this relationship. We compare our model predictions to observations
of the IHL over a large range of host halo mass scales. The aim of this
paper (Paper I) is to introduce our modeling framework and its predictive
power. In a forthcoming paper (Paper II) we will extend our analysis to high
redshift in order to study the assembly of the IHL across cosmic time.
The paper is laid out as follows. In \S~\ref{sec:motivation} we
discuss the motivation for this study. In \S~\ref{sec:dynamical_model}
we review the Z05 model for cold dark matter (CDM) substructure.
In \S~\ref{sec:stripping_models} we describe our models that connect
stellar mass loss to dark matter mass loss and in
\S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering} we demonstrate how we constrain these models
using galaxy clustering. In \S~\ref{sec:lum_dependence} we
show the luminosity dependence of satellite galaxy stellar mass loss.
In \S~\ref{sec:predict_IHL} we use our models to make IHL predictions,
and compare to observations at low redshift. Finally, in
\S~\ref{sec:conclusion} we give a summary of our results and discuss
directions for future work.
\section{MOTIVATION}\label{sec:motivation}
A simple, yet remarkably powerful technique for connecting dark matter
halo mass to either stellar mass or luminosity has emerged in recent
years. By assuming a monotonic relation between halo mass (or
maximum circular velocity $V_\mathrm{max} = \mathrm{max}[\sqrt{GM(<r)/r}]$)
and luminosity $L$ (or stellar
mass) one can ``abundance match'' to make the correspondence between
dark matter (sub)halos and an observable galaxy property
\citep[e.g.,][]{kravtsov04a,vale_ostriker04,tasitsiomi_etal04,vale_ostriker06,
conroy06,conroy_wechsler09,moster10,behroozi10,guo10,simha10}.
For example, this can be done by matching the observed number density
of galaxies, $n_{g}$, above some luminosity to the number density of
halos and subhalos, $n_{h}$, above a certain $V_\mathrm{max}$,
\begin{equation}
n_{g}(>L) = n_{h}(>V_\mathrm{max}) .
\end{equation}
This yields an implicit relationship between $L$ and $V_\mathrm{max}$ that
preserves the observed luminosity function of galaxies.
\citet{conroy06} used this method to assign luminosities to halos and
subhalos in a cosmological N-body simulation at several redshifts.
They predicted the luminosity-dependent clustering of galaxies
and found that the two-point correlation function (2PCF) of halos and
subhalos matched that of galaxies for a wide range of luminosities
and redshifts.
The authors made the physically-motivated choice
that $V_\mathrm{max}$ should be the maximum circular velocity of subhalos
\emph{at the time of accretion}, $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$, instead of at the
time of observation \citep[see also][]{nagai05,vale_ostriker06,berrier06}.
The reasoning behind this choice is as follows. Upon merging into a
larger host, the $V_\mathrm{max}$ of a subhalo will decrease due to mass loss
\citep{hayashi03,kravtsov04a}. Dark matter on the periphery of the
subhalo will be lost first, because it is less bound to the subhalo.
On the other hand, the stellar mass of the satellite galaxy is
concentrated at the center of the subhalo and thus more tightly bound.
Tidal stripping can significantly alter the surrounding subhalo, but
possibly leave the galaxy largely unperturbed for some period of time
(using N-body simulations, \citealt{P08b} found that halos need to
lose $\sim90\%$ of their original mass before tides begin to affect the
kinematics of stars). Consequently, while $V_\mathrm{max}$ of the subhalo
decreases, the stellar mass of the galaxy may remain unchanged for
long periods of time. It follows that galaxy observables such as
luminosity or stellar mass should correlate with $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$ instead
of the final $V_\mathrm{max}$ \citep{nagai05}. \citet{conroy06} lent
empirical support to this picture by showing that the choice of
$V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$ was essential in order to achieve agreement with the
observed clustering of galaxies.
It is well known that galaxy groups and clusters are replete with
diffuse stellar material. This material is widely thought to be the
remains of disrupted satellites (see \S~\ref{intro}).
However, the choice to associate galaxy luminosity with $V_\mathrm{max}$
at the time of satellite accretion is tantamount to assuming that
no stars become unbound from satellite galaxies. In this case,
why can using $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$ accurately reproduce the observed clustering?
There is a crucial subtlety to simply using $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$ for abundance
matching. When matching galaxy and subhalo number densities with
the $L - V_\mathrm{max}$ relation by choosing $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$, there is an inherent
second threshold in the final $V_\mathrm{max}$ of subhalos. This is a threshold
below which objects are ``operationally removed from consideration''
due to the limited resolution of the simulation that is used to
perform the calculation. In the study of \citet{conroy06}, this
threshold was $\sim 80\unit{km \ s^{-1}}$ -- the completeness limit of halos in
their simulation. Therefore, an accreted subhalo will be
artificially destroyed if it becomes sufficiently small such that its
structure is not well resolved within the simulation. These so-called
``orphans'' are neglected and they unwittingly act to model the
stripping of stars. The galaxies that would have been associated with
these halos, had they not become unresolved, are effectively removed
from the final galaxy sample, just as if they were disrupted. This
elimination of subhalos directly affects the 2PCF, which is very
sensitive to subhalo abundance \citep[see][]{watson_powerlaw11}.
Including these \emph{orphans} should result in a boost of the
small-scale correlation function, implying that pure abundance
matching using $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc}$ may not accurately reproduce the observed
clustering on small scales
\citep[see][]{kitzbichler08,moster10,wetzel_white10}. In fact, we
have performed a test in which we selected a $V_\mathrm{max}^\mathrm{acc} > 210 \unit{km \ s^{-1}}$
(corresponding to $\sim L^{\ast}$ galaxies and brighter) threshold with
two, secondary final $V_\mathrm{max}$ thresholds, $V_\mathrm{max} > 20 \unit{km \ s^{-1}}$ and $V_\mathrm{max}
> 80 \unit{km \ s^{-1}}$, to mimic this resolution limit effect. Increasing this
threshold from $20$ to $80 \unit{km \ s^{-1}}$ resulted in a $\sim 20\%$ decrease in
the 2PCF\footnote{We explain the tools we use to calculate correlation
functions in \S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering}.} at scales less than
$1\Mpc$. We speculate that below this resolution limit is where much
of the stripped stellar material may originate.
The above discussions bring us to the motivation of this work. Including
stellar mass loss in the abundance matching technique is necessary to
describe the observed clustering of galaxies in a manner that does not
include implicit selections. Observed galaxy clustering therefore
has the potential to constrain the typical amount of stellar mass
loss from a subhalo. In this work, we develop models that relate
satellite galaxy stellar mass loss to subhalo dark matter mass loss.
We use these models, together with the abundance matching technique,
to predict the observed 2PCF (see \S~\ref{sec:stripping_models} and
\S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering} for details). Comparing to
measurements allows us to constrain our stellar mass loss models.
This requires a detailed understanding of the evolution of subhalos
within hosts. We use the Z05 analytic model for halo
substructure, which is not subject to any intrinsic resolution
effects. The model is capable of tracking surviving subhalos down to
$V_\mathrm{max} \ll 80\ \unit{km \ s^{-1}}$, so predictions are not affected by the
``orphan'' population of galaxies. Our models yield stellar mass loss
histories from satellite galaxies, so we can make predictions for the
amount of intrahalo light at varying scales and compare to
observations. This provides an independent check of our stellar mass
loss constraints. This modeling can also be done at varying redshifts
in order to study the evolution of stellar mass loss and the assembly
of IHL over time. Ultimately, this investigation could enable a single
model to track the stellar-to-halo mass relation as a function of time
such that abundance matching at multiple redshifts would be unnecessary.
\section{THE SUBHALO EVOLUTION MODEL}\label{sec:dynamical_model}
We construct models in which the stellar mass loss of a satellite
galaxy is linked to the dark matter mass loss of its subhalo.
Consequently, we require a detailed understanding of the evolution of
subhalos within hosts. For this we use the Z05 model, which is based
on \citet{zentner03} and is similar to the independent models of
\citet{TB04a,TB05b,TB05c} and \citet{PenarrubiaBenson05}, and shares
many features with other approximate treatments of subhalo populations
\citep{OguriLee04,vdBosch05,faltenbacher_matthews05,purcell_etal07,
giocoli_etal08,giocoli_etal09,gan10,yang11a}. The Z05 model produces subhalo
mass functions, occupation statistics, and radial distributions within
hosts that are in good agreement with a number of high-resolution $N$-body
simulations \citep[Z05, and the recent comparison in][]{koushiappas_etal10}.
The analytic model proceeds as follows. For a host halo at a given
redshift $z$, and mass $M$, we generate a halo merger tree
using the mass-conserving implementation of the excursion set
formalism (\citealt{bond91,LaceyCole93,LaceyCole94}; see
\citealt{zentner07} for a review) developed by \citet{somerville99}.
This provides the entire history of all halos that merged to form the
final, host halo. We assign all halos \citet[][hereafter NFW]{nfw97}
density profiles with concentrations determined by their merger
histories according to \citet{wechsler02}. When a halo merges into a
larger halo, it becomes a subhalo and is assigned initial orbital
parameters drawn from distributions measured in N-body simulations
(Z05; also see \citealt{benson05} for similar formalisms). We then
integrate each subhalo orbit within the gravitational field of the host,
subjecting the subhalos to orbital decay via
dynamical friction and mass loss through tides and interactions.
We estimate dynamical friction with an updated form of the
\citet{chandrasekhar43} approximation \citep{hashimoto_etal03,zentner03},
and allow for dark matter mass loss beyond the tidal radius on a timescale
comparable to the local dynamical time. Finally, we account for internal
heating so that scaling relations describing the internal structures of
subhalos are obeyed \citep{hayashi03,kazantzidis_etal04,kravtsov04b}.
We refer the reader to Z05 for specific details of these ingredients.
The lack of a resolution limit in the Z05 model allows us to track
subhalos regardless of how much mass they have lost. Therefore, we do
not lose subhalos due to mass loss. However, we do consider a subhalo
to be effectively ``destroyed'' if its orbital apocenter sinks to less
than $r_{\rm apo} < 5$~kpc distance from the center of its host halo.
This choice is physically motivated because the galaxy within such a
subhalo would likely have merged with the central galaxy, or at least
be observationally indistinguishable from it. This criterion thus
models the cannibalism of satellite galaxies by central galaxies. We
show in \S~\ref{sec:predict_IHL} that inclusion of these cannibalized
subhalos in our predictions for intrahalo light is negligible, so
this criterion actually has little effect on our modeling results.
In practice, subhalos lose the vast majority of their mass prior to
achieving such small apocenters, so this cut serves only to
terminate the integration of that particular orbit. In the end, we
amass catalogs of all surviving subhalos in the final host halo at
the time of ``observation'' and we know exactly how much dark matter
has been lost from each subhalo. A halo that merges into a larger
host may contain subhalos of its own. These ``subs-of-subs'' of
sufficiently high mass to host an observable galaxy are only abundant
inside very large host masses. They are present in our model, but
rare.
\begin{figure*}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=1.\textwidth]{f1.eps}
\caption{The average fraction of dark matter lost from subhalos,
$f_\mathrm{DM \ loss} = (\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}} - \MDM_{\mathrm{fin}})/\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}$,
as a function of host halo mass for three bins of subhalo accretion
epoch $z_{\mathrm{acc}}$ (shown by the three point types), and three
bins of subhalo mass (at accretion; shown by the three panels),
according to the Z05 semi-analytic model. Each point represents
an average over all subhalos in a given bin of accretion epoch and
subhalo mass, from 500 model realizations of a specific host mass,
and errorbars show the $1\sigma$ scatter. The points representing
different accretion epoch bins are slightly staggered for clarity.
Accretion time is the dominant factor that determines $f_\mathrm{DM \ loss}$,
with subhalos that have merged earlier having more time to be
stripped of their dark matter.}
\label{fig:frac_mass_loss}
\end{center}
\end{figure*}
To properly sample the distribution of halos in the universe, we compute
subhalo populations for a grid of host halo masses in the range $ 11 \le \log (M/\hMsun) \le 15$
(in steps of 0.1). To account for statistical variation among halos and subhalos,
we perform 500 statistical realizations of the subhalo population at each host
mass. The result is 500 host halos along with their subhalos at each of
41 distinct masses, giving a total of 20,500 distinct subhalo populations.
The model predicts the amount of dark matter lost from each
subhalo as it orbits in the tidal field of its host halo.
Figure~\ref{fig:frac_mass_loss} shows the fraction of subhalo mass lost
as a function of host halo mass, in bins of accretion epoch
$z_{\mathrm{acc}}$, and subhalo mass (at accretion). This fraction is
defined as $f_\mathrm{DM \ loss} = (\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}} -
\MDM_{\mathrm{fin}})/\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}$, where $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}$
is the subhalo mass at accretion and $\MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}$ is the
final subhalo mass. Each panel of the figure represents a bin of
subhalo mass and the three sets of points in each panel represent
bins of accretion epoch: $z_{\mathrm{acc}}=0.25-0.5$ (green circles),
$z_{\mathrm{acc}}=1.0-1.25$ (red $X$ symbols), and
$z_{\mathrm{acc}}=1.75-2.0$ (blue diamonds). Each point thus represents
an average over all subhalos in a bin of accretion epoch and subhalo
mass, from the 500 model realizations of a specific host halo mass, and
errorbars show the $1\sigma$ scatter. It is clear that accretion time
is crucial towards determining $f_\mathrm{DM \ loss}$, with subhalos that
have merged earlier having more time to be stripped of their dark matter.
Moreover, the scatter in $f_\mathrm{DM \ loss}$ shrinks for earlier
accretion times. At fixed accretion epoch, the average value of
$f_\mathrm{DM \ loss}$ is remarkably constant. However, there is a
slight increase as we move to lower host halo mass at fixed subhalo mass,
or as we move to higher subhalo mass at fixed host mass. This is a
result of dynamical friction playing a stronger role for subhalos that are considerable
in size compared to their host halos. The larger a subhalo relative to its host,
the more rapidly its orbit will decay and it will sink within the host potential.
The tidal field of the host is stronger towards the host center,
and this induces more dark matter mass loss.
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.85\textwidth]{f2.ps}
\caption{Schematic of how satellite galaxy stellar mass loss occurs in
Model~1 and Model~2. From the time the subhalo merges into the host
halo, $t_\mathrm{merge}$, until the final redshift under
consideration, $t_\mathrm{final}$, our semi-analytic subhalo model
predicts the amount of dark matter mass loss, $\Delta \MDM \equiv
\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}-\MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}$. Model~1 assumes that the
amount of stellar mass lost, $\Delta M^{\ast}$, is proportional to
$\Delta \MDM$. Model~2 defines a radius, $r'$, such that
stellar mass is only lost if dark matter is lost within that radius.
If this is the case, then $\Delta M^{\ast}$ is only proportional to the
amount of dark matter lost inside of this radius. See
\S~\ref{sec:stripping_models} for detailed descriptions of the models.}
\label{fig:cartoon}
\end{center}
\end{figure*}
\section{MODELS FOR SATELLITE GALAXY STELLAR MASS LOSS}\label{sec:stripping_models}
We now present the models we use to describe satellite galaxy stellar
mass loss. The exact way in which stars are stripped from the subhalo
they inhabit is likely quite complicated. However, we can make some
simple, physically-motivated approximations aimed at capturing the
gross, relevant behavior. In this sense, we pursue the question
of the evolution of stellar mass using a philosophy similar to that
which underlies abundance matching. We aim to make a set of minimal,
yet effective assumptions that serve to distill the enormous amount of
information contained in survey data. Indeed, we aim in part to extend
the abundance matching techniques by making the lower threshold
for stellar mass explicit, rather than implicit.
We consider two models in which we relate the amount of satellite
galaxy stellar mass lost to the corresponding amount of subhalo dark
matter lost. Combined with the Z05 model that makes detailed
predictions for dark matter mass loss, these models can predict the
stellar mass loss for any given halo. It is important to note that
the Z05 prescription for mass loss does not include the effects that
baryons can have on dark matter. \emph{Adiabatic Contraction} (AC)
\citep{blumenthal86,ryden_gunn87,gnedin04} may increase the central
density as the gas condenses and sinks to to the center of the dark
matter potential well
\citep{diemand04,fukushige04,reed05,delpopolo09}. Conversely,
processes during halo formation, such as gravitational heating from
merger events, can counteract AC \citep[e.g.,][]{zappacosta06} and, in
fact, the central density may decrease through baryonic feedback
\citep{governato12}. These effects can impact the survival of
satellite galaxies \citep[see][]{PenarrubiaBenson10}, however
consideration of these detailed effects in our modeling is beyond the
objective of this paper.
\subsection{Model 1}\label{model_1}
Our first model sets the fraction of stellar mass that
is lost from a galaxy to a fixed proportion of the fraction of
dark matter that is lost from its subhalo. The model works as follows.
Any halo of sufficiently large dark matter mass will have some stellar mass
associated with the galaxy it contains at the time of accretion,
$M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}$. This stellar mass will be some fraction of
the mass in dark matter, $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}$. After the halo merges
into a larger halo, becoming a subhalo, it orbits within the host halo
potential and loses mass. At the time of
observation, the subhalo has a smaller mass, $\MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}$.
We relate the fraction of stellar mass that is lost during this time
to the fraction of dark matter mass that is lost through a single
parameter $\epsilon$,
\begin{equation}
\frac{\Delta M^{\ast}}{M^{\ast}} = \epsilon \ \frac{\Delta \MDM}{\MDM},
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\frac{M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}} -
M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}}}{M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}} = \epsilon \
\frac{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}} - \MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}}{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}},
\end{equation}
which can be re-written as,
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:main_equation}
M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}} =M^{\ast}_\mathrm{acc} \left[1 - \epsilon \times
\Big(
\frac{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}} -
\MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}}{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}}\Big) \right]
\end{equation}
The left-hand side of Figure~\ref{fig:cartoon} is a cartoon schematic of
how stellar mass loss occurs in Model~1. From the time the subhalo
merges into the host halo, $t_\mathrm{merge}$, until the final
redshift under consideration, $t_\mathrm{final}$, the Z05 model (see
\S~\ref{sec:dynamical_model} for model details) predicts the amount of
subhalo dark matter mass loss $\Delta \MDM$ with the stellar mass loss
$\Delta M^{\ast}$ being related to the dark matter mass loss via
$\epsilon$. Therefore, we are left with a simple parametric equation
governed by a single free parameter. For example, if $\epsilon=0.5$,
then a subhalo that loses 50\% of its dark matter will lose 25\% of
its stellar mass. As we mentioned above, stellar mass loss should be
less efficient than dark matter mass loss, so we should generally
expect $\epsilon < 1$.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{f3.eps}
\caption{The stellar-to-halo mass relation (SHMR) for our host halos
and subhalos with the adopted \citet{behroozi10} SHMR. The black
curve shows the mean of the SHMR and grey points illustrate the
assumed 0.15 dex scatter by sampling 1 million halos and subhalos from
all of the model realizations. The bottom panel is the same as the top
with the y-axis divided by halo mass to highlight the characteristic
mass ($\sim 10^{12} \hMsun$) where star formation is most efficient.
}
\label{fig:SHMR_Behroozi}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
In order to compute the final stellar mass of a galaxy via
Eqn.~\ref{eqn:main_equation}, we need to know the stellar mass of a
satellite galaxy as a function of the subhalo mass at the time of
accretion. The stellar mass of a galaxy depends on many physical
processes, including mergers, gas cooling, star formation, feedback
from supernovae, feedback from active galactic nuclei, making
\emph{ab initio} predictions highly non-trivial. However, there are
several empirical methods for obtaining the stellar-to-halo mass
relation (SHMR), which have recently appeared in the literature
\citep[e.g.,][]{yang03,wang06,
conroy_wechsler09,wang_jing10,moster10,guo10,behroozi10,neistein11}.
We assign stellar masses to halos with the SHMR of \citet[][hereafter
B10]{behroozi10}. Specifically, we employ the relation used in Eqn.~21
of B10, with the mean parameter values given by the $\mu = \kappa = 0$
model in their Table~2. Therefore, for every halo and subhalo in our
catalog, we can use the halo mass \emph{at the time of accretion} to
assign a stellar mass to the galaxy hosted by the halo. The top panel
of Figure~\ref{fig:SHMR_Behroozi} shows how stellar masses are related
to our host halos and subhalos with the B10 SHMR. The black curve
shows the mean of the SHMR and grey points illustrate the assumed 0.15
dex scatter given in B10. We show one million points randomly drawn
from the full distribution of halos and subhalos over the host
halo mass range $ 11 \le \log (M/\hMsun) \le 15$.
Stellar mass rapidly increases as a function of halo mass at
low masses before turning over and becoming shallower at higher host
masses. The bottom panel is the same as the top with the y-axis
divided by halo mass in order to highlight the characteristic mass
where this turnover occurs, $M_{\rm halo} \sim 10^{12} \hMsun$. This
characteristic mass is the halo mass at which star formation is most
efficient.
For most applications, SHMRs are developed by linking the halo mass
function to the galaxy stellar mass function (SMF) through abundance
matching. This is typically done using the subhalo mass at accretion
which, by definition, presumes that no stellar stripping occurs.
However, even if stellar stripping occurs (i.e., if $\epsilon$ is
non-zero) we can still use a SHMR relation that assigns stellar mass
at the time the subhalo merges, due to the fact that the SMF is
\emph{strongly} dominated by central galaxies. We emphasize that
while there are many SHMRs in the literature, we are not very
sensitive to the particular choice of SHMR. As we will discuss in
\S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering}, we assign stellar masses to halos and
subhalos and then rank them in stellar mass in order to find the
stellar mass cut-off ($M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}}$) that matches the
observed number density of a given galaxy luminosity threshold sample.
Therefore, two SHMRs that yield the same rank order for the halos and
subhalos will be indistinguishable from each other, even though the
values of $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}}$ will be different (as well as the
mass-to-light ratios). All published SHMRs are monotonically
increasing functions, so this behavior is general. On the other
hand, the scatter in the SHMR is important, as this will change the
rank order. We use the B10 scatter of 0.15~dex throughout our
analysis, though we test the effect of changing the scatter on our
results in \S~\ref{scatter}. We also note that we do not consider
the fact that the stellar mass of a galaxy may actually
\emph{increase} for some time after merging and becoming a satellite,
as it has been recently shown that star formation in active satellites
may continue for several $\Gyr$ \citep[see][]{wetzel_etal11}. Such
detailed modeling is beyond the scope and intention of this work.
In summary, we take the following steps in Model~1 for assigning final
stellar masses to an ensemble of halos.
\begin{enumerate}
\item
We use the Z05 model for subhalo evolution to obtain a list of halos
and subhalos for a range of host halo masses, and we determine the
fractional amount of dark matter mass lost from each subhalo.
\item
We use the B10 stellar-to-halo mass relation to assign stellar masses
to host halos and subhalos at the time of accretion.
\item
For every subhalo, we compute a final stellar mass by relating the
fractional amount of stellar mass lost to the fractional amount of
dark matter mass lost through the single free parameter $\epsilon$,
as described in Eqn.~\ref{eqn:main_equation}.
\end{enumerate}
\subsection{Model 2}\label{model_2}
Model~1 operates under the basic assumption that the fractional amount
of satellite galaxy stellar mass loss is proportional to
subhalo dark matter loss through the free parameter $\epsilon$. This
means that even a small amount of dark matter stripping will be
accompanied by some stellar stripping. However, as we argued in
\S~\ref{sec:motivation}, a subhalo may lose a considerable amount of
dark matter before its galaxy is significantly disturbed. For example, subhalos
in high-resolution simulations lose a significant fraction of mass at
their outskirts rapidly upon merging into a larger system,
while their interiors remain unaltered by this mass loss \citep[e.g.,][]{diemand_etal07}.
Accordingly, we consider an alternative model that incorporates a
delay between the initial loss of dark matter mass and stellar
mass loss.
Our second model states that stellar mass will only be lost if a
sufficient amount of dark matter is lost first. The model works as
follows. We first define an approximate \emph{radius of influence}
that a galaxy has within its subhalo, corresponding to the region
within which the gravity due to the stellar component is comparable
to that from dark matter. To estimate this radius, we first assign a
stellar mass to each subhalo at the time of accretion,
$M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}$, using the B10 formalism. Next we assume,
for simplicity, that this is a point mass and we do not consider the
total amount of ``cold baryons'' or assume a galaxy profile. To find the radius
of influence, $\rinfl$, of the stellar mass associated with the
galaxy, we calculate where the dark matter mass enclosed within the
subhalo is equal to $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}$. We thus integrate the
NFW mass profile,
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:enclose_mass}
\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<\rinfl) = 4\pi\rho_{0}r_{s}^{3}\Bigg[\mathrm{ln}\bigg(1 +
\frac{\rinfl}{r_{s}}\bigg) - \frac{\rinfl/r_{s}}{1 +\rinfl/r_{s}}
\Bigg] ,
\end{equation}
where $\rho_0$ and $r_s$ are the NFW parameters, and solve for $\rinfl$
by setting $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<\rinfl) = M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}$.
The radius $\rinfl$ gives the rough scale within which mass must be lost
before significant \emph{stellar} mass is lost; however, we allow for
flexibility in this final prescription for stellar mass loss.
We assume that a galaxy will start losing stellar mass once
dark matter is stripped from inside a radius that scales linearly
with $\rinfl$. We define a new radius, $r' = \psi \times \rinfl$,
where $\psi$ is a free parameter of order unity.
If the subhalo loses so much dark matter that its
final mass is less than $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r')$, we allow
stellar stripping to occur. Furthermore, we assume that the fraction
of stellar mass lost is equal to the fraction of dark matter lost
\emph{after the bound mass of the subhalo crosses below this threshold}.
The final stellar mass of the galaxy is thus
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:main_equation_delay_model}
M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}} = M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}
\left[1 - \mathrm{max}\left\{0,
\left( \frac{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r') - \MDM_{\mathrm{fin}}}{\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r')}\right)\right\}\right],
\end{equation}
which is analogous to Eqn.~\ref{eqn:main_equation}.
The right-hand side of Figure~\ref{fig:cartoon} illustrates how Model~2
works. After accretion, if the subhalo shrinks enough due to mass
loss such that its mass at the final redshift of interest is less
than $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r')$, then stellar mass will be lost
($\Delta M^{\ast}$) in proportion to the additional amount of dark matter
lost. However, if mass loss does not reduce the subhalo
mass to less than $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r')$, no stellar
mass is lost. Model~2 incorporates a delay between the
stripping of the outer layers of dark matter and the stripping of the
stellar material residing in the depths of the subhalo potential well.
The single free parameter of Model~2, $\psi$, allows us to vary the
amount of lag. As was the case for $\epsilon = 0$ in Model~1,
setting $\psi=0$ in Model~2 leads to zero stellar mass loss in all subhalos.
In summary, we take the following steps in Model~2 for assigning final
stellar masses to an ensemble of halos.
\begin{enumerate}
\item
We obtain a population of halos and assign stellar masses at the time
of accretion as described in the first two steps of the Model~1 summary.
\item
For each subhalo, we calculate $\rinfl$ using Eqn.~\ref{eqn:enclose_mass}.
We then scale this radius using the free parameter $\psi$, to get
$r' = \psi \times \rinfl$.
\item
We calculate the dark matter mass at accretion that is enclosed by
$r'$, $\MDM_{\mathrm{acc}}(<r')$. If insufficient dark matter
loss has occurred, such that the final subhalo mass is greater than this,
then we assume that no stellar mass loss has taken place. Otherwise,
we estimate a final stellar mass using Eqn.~\ref{eqn:main_equation_delay_model}.
\end{enumerate}
It is important to note the effect of allowing the stellar and dark
matter components to have distinct density profiles. Using N-body
simulations, \citet{P08} studied the tidal evolution of satellite
galaxies embedded in dark matter halos. They adopted the
observationally-motivated assumption that stellar components have
cored (King) profiles, while dark matter follow cuspy NFW models. They
helped explain the extremely large mass-to-light (M/L) ratios of
ultrafaint MW dwarfs by showing that the cuspy nature of the NFW
profile keeps the central dark matter component more tightly bound
than the stars. For our Model~2, we have taken $\epsilon = 1$ for
simplicity in order to illustrate the basic features of a simple model
as well as the manner in which it can be constrained. Taking
$\epsilon=1$ in this model allows for stellar mass loss with a
particular time dependence. Specifically, M/L ratios can evolve only
when mass loss does not occur interior to the threshold radius
$r'$. Any additional mass loss interior to $r'$ keeps the
M/L ratios fixed. There are two considerations to this end. First,
allowing $\epsilon$ to take on a value other than 1 would give a
time-dependent M/L ratio even for mass loss interior to $r'$.
However, our goal is to present a simple model and illustrate
constraints on such a model. A second parameter would lead to
inevitable degeneracies among parameters and introduce complexities
that would detract from the broader point of the current paper, and
we show below that a single-parameter model adequately describes
various observational data. Second, in even greater detail, we could
consider a time-varying $\epsilon=\epsilon(t)$, to describe a very
broad range of variations in M/L ratios with time. Though
not currently necessary to describe the data we consider, such a model
may be more physically appropriate, and the time variation of
$\epsilon$ could be derived, at least approximately, from specific
assumed stellar mass profiles. In follow-up work, we are building on
the complexity of the models we present here, though the details of
these broader models are well beyond the scope and intent of this
paper.
\section{CONSTRAINING SATELLITE GALAXY STELLAR MASS LOSS USING GALAXY CLUSTERING}
\label{sec:compare_clustering}
We now turn to constraints on the relationship between stellar mass and
halo mass imposed by the clustering of galaxies. Our two stellar mass
loss models specify the final stellar mass in any halo or subhalo, given a
value for the parameter $\epsilon$ (for Model~1) or $\psi$ (for Model~2).
With stellar masses assigned to all halos and subhalos, we can
predict a \emph{halo occupation distribution}
\citep[HOD: e.g.,][]{peacock00a,scoccimarro01a,berlind02,cooray02}
for any given stellar mass threshold.
In particular, we compute the mean number of galaxies as a function
of host halo mass, $\langle N \rangle_\mathrm{M}$. We calculate the
mean over the 500 host halo realizations at each host mass.
We use this function to compute the number density of galaxies by weighting the
host halo abundances by $\langle N \rangle_\mathrm{M}$ and integrating over all
halo masses,
\begin{equation}
\bar{n}_{g} = \int_{0}^{\infty}dM\frac{dn}{dM}\langle N \rangle_{M} .
\end{equation}
We adopt the \citet{warren06} halo mass function, $dn/dM$, in this
calculation, though our results are not sensitive to the
specific choice of mass function. In this way, we find the stellar mass
threshold that yields a galaxy number density equal to that of the
observed sample with which we aim to compare.
We compare our model predictions to four of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
\citep[SDSS:][]{york00a} luminosity threshold galaxy samples measured
by \citet{zehavi11}. Specifically, we consider volume-limited
samples with $r$-band absolute magnitude thresholds of $M_r \le -18$,
$-19$, $-20$, and $-21$ (number densities for these samples are listed in Table~2 of
\citealt{zehavi11}). We do not consider the fact that the observed relationship
between stellar mass and luminosity is not one-to-one (i.e., galaxies of
a fixed luminosity can have different stellar masses which, for instance,
is manifested as scatter in the Tully-Fisher relation -- \citealt{bell01}).
However, including this scatter should be similar to increasing the scatter
in the B10 relation between dark matter mass and $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{acc}}$,
which has a very small effect, as we show in \S~\ref{scatter}.
Once we have determined the appropriate stellar mass threshold, we
use the resulting HOD to calculate the predicted clustering of the model.
We place galaxies within the host halos in a N-body simulation to
measure the 2PCF. We use a single realization of the ``Consuelo''
simulation (with a box size of
$420 h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$ and $1400^{3}$ particles), which is part of the
\emph{LasDamas} suite of simulations (McBride et al., in prep.).
The cosmology assumed in our semi-analytic subhalo model is set to match that of the
LasDamas simulations\footnote{Throughout the paper, we work within the standard,
vacuum-dominated, cold dark matter ($\Lambda$CDM) cosmological model
with $\Omega_{\mathrm{m}}=0.25$, $\Omega_{\Lambda}=0.75$,
$\Omega_{\mathrm{b}}=0.04$, $h_{0}=0.7$, $\sigma_{8}=0.8$, and
$n_{\mathrm{s}}=1.0$.} and is similar to the recent WMAP7 values
\citep{komatsu_WMAP711}. We use the spherical over-density (SO) halo
finder ``Rockstar'' \citep{behroozi_rockstar11} to identify halos.
We use an SO halo finder because the SO algorithm mimics the assumptions
made in our semi-analytic model. Both the
Z05 model and the halo finder define virial masses based on the
virial threshold definition of \citet{bryan_norman98}. We note, however,
that our results are not sensitive to the choice of halo finder. We
have repeated our analysis using a Friends-of-Friends halo finder and
derived similar results. We populate host halos
with galaxies according to our $\langle N\rangle_{M}$ model predictions.
In order to compare to data, we convert our real-space correlation
functions, $\xi(r)$, to \emph{projected} correlation functions, $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$,
by integrating along lines of sight \citep{davis83,zehavi04a}:
\begin{equation}
w_{\mathrm{p}}\rp = 2\int_0^{y_{\mathrm{max}}}
\xi\Big(\sqrt{r_{\mathrm{p}}^2+y^2}\Big)dy .
\end{equation}
For each luminosity threshold, we integrate out to the same
$y_{\mathrm{max}}$ as \citet[][listed as $\pi_\mathrm{max}$ in their
Table~2]{zehavi11}. We predict $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$ for the four luminosity
samples, given any value of $\epsilon$ from
Model~1 or $\psi$ from Model~2. In order to constrain our stellar
mass loss models, we run a grid of $\epsilon$ and $\psi$ values in
steps of $\Delta \epsilon = 0.1$ and $\Delta \psi = 0.05$. For each parameter
value and each luminosity threshold, we compute $\chi^{2}$ by
comparing our model prediction to the \citet{zehavi11} measurement of
$w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$, using only diagonal errors (not the full covariance matrices).
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{f4.eps}
\caption{Clustering predictions for Model~1. Model~1 sets the
fractional amount of satellite galaxy stellar mass loss to be
proportional to the fractional amount of subhalo dark matter mass loss
through the free parameter $\epsilon$ (see \S \ref{model_1} for model
details and Fig.~\ref{fig:cartoon} for an illustration). Each panel
shows results for a different galaxy luminosity threshold. Solid red
curves show model predictions for $\epsilon = 0$, equivalent to no
stellar mass loss. Dashed red curves show the $\epsilon = 1$ case,
where the stellar mass loss occurs at the same rate as subhalo dark
matter mass loss. Grey curves show the $\epsilon$ values that match
the observed SDSS clustering measurements of \citet[][black points]{zehavi11}.}
\label{fig:model1_comparison}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{f5.eps}
\caption{Clustering results for Model~2. Model~2 defines a radius of
influence, $\rinfl$, for a galaxy within a subhalo. If a subhalo
loses sufficient dark matter mass such that it starts to lose mass
inside of $\rinfl$, then stellar mass is lost at a rate proportional
to the subsequent subhalo mass loss. The free parameter $\psi$
allows $\rinfl$ to grow or shrink, thus a larger value of $\psi$ means
that more stellar mass loss will occur on average for satellite
galaxies. Solid red curves show model predictions for $\psi = 0$,
equivalent to no stellar mass loss, thus the same as $\epsilon = 0$
for Model~1. Dashed red curves show the predictions for $\psi = 2$,
an arbitrary value chosen to represent how too much stellar mass
loss will under-predict $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$. Grey curves show the $\psi$ values
that match the observed clustering for the same luminosity threshold
samples as in Fig.~\ref{fig:model1_comparison}.}
\label{fig:model2_comparison}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
Figure~\ref{fig:model1_comparison} shows clustering results for
Model~1 compared to measurements from \citet{zehavi11} for our four
SDSS luminosity threshold samples: $M_{r} < -18, -19, -20 \text{ and }
-21$. To reiterate, Model~1 assumes that the fractional amount of
satellite galaxy stellar mass loss is proportional to the fractional
amount of subhalo dark matter mass loss with proportionality constant
$\epsilon$. Adopting $\epsilon = 0$ specifies no stellar mass loss and
is equivalent to using $V_\mathrm{max}$ at the epoch of accretion for abundance matching.
On the other hand, adopting $\epsilon =1$ means that stellar mass is lost
at the same rate as dark matter. For each
luminosity sample, we show the $\epsilon = 0$ and~1 cases as red
solid and dashed lines, respectively.
At each luminosity, $\epsilon = 0$ predicts small-scale
clustering that is stronger than the data indicate and this
gets to the essence of using clustering to constrain stellar mass loss.
This over-prediction can be attributed to the fact that no stellar mass loss
has occurred for satellite galaxies, resulting in too many satellites with
high stellar masses. This leads to enhanced clustering on small scales
\citep[e.g.][]{watson_powerlaw11}. To be consistent with the data,
some stellar mass loss needs to occur. However, the $\epsilon = 1$
result demonstrates that too much stellar mass loss leads to weaker clustering
than the data require. The grey curves in
Figure~\ref{fig:model1_comparison} correspond to intermediate
amounts of stellar mass loss and represent the $\epsilon$
with the lowest $\chi^{2}$ values.\footnote{We note that none of our
model predictions match the large-scale clustering for the $M_{r} <
-18$ sample. This may be attributed to the finite volume of the
sample, as discussed in \S~3.2 of \citet{zehavi11}.} Despite the fact
that Model~1 paints a simplified picture of how stars are stripped
from the galaxies they reside in, we show that it is very effective
at matching the observed clustering. Moreover, it is striking that
$\epsilon$ decreases with increasing luminosity. We will discuss
this luminosity dependence in detail in \S~\ref{sec:lum_dependence}.
Figure~\ref{fig:model2_comparison} shows similar results for Model~2.
This model was designed to allow dark matter on the periphery of a
subhalo to be lost due to the strong tidal field of the host, without
significantly altering the luminous galaxy residing deep in the core of the subhalo.
Model~2 mimics this ``lag'' by defining a critical radius within each subhalo and
only allowing for stellar mass loss if the subhalo loses mass from within that
radius. This radius can be varied through the parameter $\psi$. The
limit $\psi = 0$ corresponds to no stellar mass loss and is equivalent
to abundance matching using $V_\mathrm{max}$ at accretion.
In Model~1, $\epsilon =1$ is analogous to using the
subhalo mass at the final redshift output for abundance matching.
In Model~2, this happens when the critical radius is larger than the
size of the subhalo at accretion. This occurs at a different value of
$\psi$ for each subhalo. Thus, we choose an arbitrary value $\psi = 2$
to again illustrate how too much stellar mass loss will under-predict
clustering.
As was the case for Model~1, we are able to match the observed
clustering and we see a strong evolution in $\psi$ as a function of
luminosity. This emphasizes what was found for Model~1, that low-luminosity
galaxies experience more efficient stellar stripping throughout their
evolution in a host halo than luminous galaxies.
\subsection{The Effect of Scatter in the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation}\label{scatter}
Observations indicate that halos of a given mass can host galaxies
with a range of luminosities and stellar masses
\citep[e.g.,][]{vdBosch07,zheng07,yang08,more09b}. For this reason, it
is overly restrictive to assume a one-to-one relation between halo mass
and stellar mass, whereas a relationship with some intrinsic
scatter is more appropriate. This is especially true for
abundance matching because the presence of scatter changes the rank
order of galaxies. We rank our halos and subhalos by stellar mass, so
the rank order will be affected by the assumed amount of scatter. Scatter is
typically accounted for by assuming a distribution of stellar mass at
fixed halo mass, with the mean value of stellar mass given by a
particular SHMR. For example, the B10 scatter that we adopt in this
paper is a log-normal distribution with a dispersion $\sigma=0.15$.
We implement this scatter by randomly drawing from this distribution
when we assign stellar masses to halos and subhalos at the time of
accretion. The results shown in Figures~\ref{fig:model1_comparison}
and~\ref{fig:model2_comparison} include this scatter.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{f6.eps}
\caption{
The effect of the scatter in the stellar mass -- halo mass relation,
on the clustering of a stellar mass threshold galaxy sample. \emph{Top panel}:
The grey curve shows the predicted correlation function from Model~1 with
$\epsilon = 0.3$ and our assumed scatter of $\sigma = 0.15$ dex, given by
\citet{behroozi10}. Solid and dashed black curves show results for changing
the scatter to $\sigma = 0.1$ dex and 0.2 dex, respectively. Each curve is
averaged over three realizations of that amount of scatter.
\emph{Bottom panel}: The percent deviations in the correlation function from
the fiducial scatter of $\sigma=0.15$. At the scale of the innermost data
point of \citet{zehavi11} that we compare our model results to ($\sim 0.17 h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$),
lowering the scatter to $\sigma =0.1$ increases $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$ by $\sim 8\%$
and increasing the scatter to $\sigma=0.2$ lowers $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$ by $\sim 5\%$.
On larger scales the effect is much smaller.
}
\label{fig:scatter_effect}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.85\textwidth]{f7.eps}
\caption{The luminosity dependence of satellite galaxy stellar mass
loss. \emph{Left panel}: The best-fit Model~1 parameter $\epsilon$ as a
function of absolute $r$-band magnitude. The decreasing trend of $\epsilon$
with increasing luminosity means that low-luminosity satellite galaxies experience
greater stellar mass loss relative to subhalo dark matter mass loss than
luminous galaxies. \emph{Right panel}: The best-fit Model~2 parameter $\psi$
as a function of absolute $r$-band magnitude. The decreasing trend of $\psi$
with increasing luminosity means that low-luminosity satellite galaxies have a
greater radius of influence (causing more stellar mass loss) than luminous galaxies.
In other words, the same qualitative luminosity trend is seen in both models.}
\label{fig:epsilon_psi_vs_luminosity}
\end{center}
\end{figure*}
We repeat our analysis with different dispersions in order to test
the sensitivity of our results to uncertainty of the scatter in the SHMR.
Figure~\ref{fig:scatter_effect} Shows the effect of changing the SHMR
dispersion for one of the models that matches the clustering of
$M_{r} < -21$ galaxies:~Model~1 with $\epsilon=0.3$. This sample is the
most sensitive to scatter because the slope of the SHMR is shallowest
for luminous galaxies and thus a given amount of scatter in stellar
mass at fixed halo mass translates into a large scatter in halo mass
at a fixed stellar mass threshold (see Fig.~\ref{fig:SHMR_Behroozi}).
The top panel of Figure~\ref{fig:scatter_effect} shows the correlation
function for three SHMR dispersions: $\sigma=0.1$, 0.15, and 0.2.
The bottom panel depicts percent deviations from the
fiducial scatter of $\sigma=0.15$. This range is conservative, as it
is larger than the errors in scatter quoted in B10 (especially at the
low end). The figure demonstrates that changing the scatter has a
small effect on $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$, in the sense that more scatter generally
leads to a lower amplitude of clustering on small scales. Over the
range of data points from the \citet{zehavi11} data that we model,
there is a maximum $\sim 8\%$ and $\sim 5\%$ shift in $w_{\mathrm{p}}(r_{\mathrm{p}})$ for the
$\sigma=0.1$ and $\sigma=0.2$ cases, respectively. This is not a
large effect and does not result in a significant change to the
best-fit values of $\epsilon$ or $\psi$.
Uncertainties in the scatter of the SHMR do not significantly alter
our results or our primary conclusions.
\section{Luminosity Dependence of Satellite Galaxy Stellar Mass Loss}\label{sec:lum_dependence}
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=1.\textwidth]{f8.eps}
\caption{$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ predictions for the two extreme cases of Model~1:
$\epsilon = 0$ and 1. $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ is the combined amount of stellar
mass from the brightest halo galaxy (BHG) and the intrahalo light
(IHL) divided by the total stellar mass of a system (the BHG, IHL, and
the stellar mass still associated with surviving subhalos). Thick solid
black curves show the mean $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ as a function of host halo mass and
are computed from 500 model realizations of each host mass, while
grey curves represent the median. Light and dark purple shaded
regions represent the $68\%$ and $95\%$ range of the model
distributions. BHG and IHL contributions are shown individually as
dashed and dotted curves, respectively. Red points show the
\citet{gonzalez07} data measurements for comparison. \emph{Left
panel}: $\epsilon = 0$ means that no stellar mass loss occurs,
resulting in no IHL. As a result, $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ is strongly
under-predicted at cluster scales ($M_\mathrm{{halo}}\sim 14-15
\hMsun$) relative to the data. \emph{Right panel}: $\epsilon = 1$
means that stellar mass loss occurs at the same rate as subhalo dark
matter mass loss. This results in an over-prediction of the IHL.
Note: data points are shifted by $\sim 40\%$ in order to convert
the $M_{500}$ ($\Delta_{\mathrm{crit}}=500$) masses given in
\citet{gonzalez07} to our virial masses (using the definition $\Delta_{\mathrm{vir}} = 377$).}
\label{fig:fIHL_eps0_eps1}
\end{center}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=1.\textwidth]{f9.eps}
\caption{$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ predictions for our best-fit Model~1 (left panel)
and Model~2 (right panel). We compute each subhalo's contribution
to the IHL according to its initial stellar mass by using the
appropriate best-fit values of $\epsilon$ or $\psi$. For example, a
subhalo with a stellar mass that corresponds to a galaxy of absolute
$r$-band magnitude equal to -18.5 loses stellar mass according to
$\epsilon=0.8$ (in Model~1), whereas a subhalo with a stellar mass
corresponding to $M_r=-20.5$ loses stellar mass according to
$\epsilon=0.5$. Shaded regions, curves, and points are as in
Fig.~\ref{fig:fIHL_eps0_eps1}. Our stellar mass loss models predict
that the mean IHL fraction in halos increases from a few
percent at the scale of individual galaxies ($M_\mathrm{{halo}}\sim
10^{12}\hMsun$) to $\sim 20 - 25\%$ at cluster scales
($M_\mathrm{{halo}}\sim 10^{14}-10^{15}\hMsun$). Both models succeed in
matching the mean trend observed by \citet{gonzalez07}. However,
Model~1 seems to under-predict the scatter in $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$, whereas
Model~2 predicts a scatter that is more consistent with the data
measurements. We thus find that this more physically-motivated model
for satellite galaxy stellar mass loss is favored over Model~1.}
\label{fig:fIHL}
\end{center}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{f10.eps}
\caption{Histograms of the number of satellites that contribute $75\%$
of the total IHL to a host halo of mass $10^{14}\hMsun$ for 500
realizations of Model~1 (solid histogram) and Model~2 (dotted
histogram). It is clear that in Model~2
the same amount of IHL comes from a much smaller number of satellites
that have each been stripped of more stars than in Model~1. Since fewer
satellites contribute to the IHL in Model~2, the Poisson scatter in
this model is larger and is evident in the $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ scatter in
Fig.~\ref{fig:fIHL}}.
\label{fig:scatter}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
Figures~\ref{fig:model1_comparison} \&~\ref{fig:model2_comparison}
indicate that the best-fit values of both $\epsilon$ and $\psi$
vary with luminosity. We highlight these trends in
Figure~\ref{fig:epsilon_psi_vs_luminosity}. The left-hand panel
summarizes results from Model~1, and demonstrates that the best-fit value
of $\epsilon$ drops from $\epsilon=0.8$ for $M_{r} < -18$ galaxies
to $\epsilon=0.3$ for $M_{r} < -21$ galaxies. There is a strong luminosity dependence
associated with satellite galaxy stellar mass loss, such that relatively
low-luminosity satellite galaxies lose more stellar material per unit of
dark matter than more luminous satellite galaxies. The right-hand panel of
Figure~\ref{fig:epsilon_psi_vs_luminosity} summarizes results from Model~2,
which show a consistent trend. The best-fit value of $\psi$ drops from $\psi=0.95$ for
$M_{r} < -18$ galaxies to $\psi=0.35$ for
$M_{r} < -21$ galaxies. Lower values of $\psi$ indicate
less stellar mass loss for a given amount of dark matter mass loss.
The two models we explore absorb a significant number of subtle
effects into simple assumptions. Model~1 and Model~2 differ substantially in detail,
yet both analyses indicate that the luminosity dependence of galaxy
clustering can be explained if low-luminosity satellite galaxies
lose stars more efficiently than luminous galaxies.
What does this result mean? Presumably it means that the stars within
luminous galaxies are more tightly bound -- relative to their surrounding
dark matter -- than the stars in less luminous galaxies. This could be
due to luminous galaxies having more compact stellar density profiles.
In fact, it may be that this result can be explained by the well-known
correlation between galaxy luminosity and morphology, whereby luminous
galaxies are more likely to be ellipticals than low-luminosity galaxies.
For example, \citet{blanton03} showed that the mean S\'ercic index
of galaxies roughly doubles from $M_r=-18$ to $M_r=-21$ (looking at their
Fig.~9 and converting $i$-band to $r$-band magnitudes). We must, of
course, keep in mind that these morphology-luminosity correlations
apply to all galaxies, of which satellites are only a small portion.
It may be that these correlations would vanish in samples containing
only satellite galaxies.
An ancillary consideration is the relative size of galaxies compared
to the typical (sub)halos they occupy. For instance, using a sample
of 140,000 SDSS galaxies, \citet{shen_etal03} showed the size distribution
(half-light radii) of early- and late-type galaxies as a function of
$r$-band luminosity and stellar mass. Examining their Figs.~2 \&~3, the
half-light radius $\overline{R}$ increases roughly by a factor of $\sim3$ from $M_{r} <
-19.25$ to $-22.25$ for late-type galaxies, and by a factor of $\sim5$
for early types. However, if we consider the typical halo masses that
host these galaxies (see $M_\mathrm{min}$ values for $M_{r} < -19$ and $-22$
from Table~3 of \citealt{zehavi11}), they correspond to virial radii
of $\sim 125h^{-1}\mathrm{kpc}$ and $\sim 750h^{-1}\mathrm{kpc}$, respectively, a factor of 6.
In other words, at a very approximate level, larger (more luminous)
galaxies are slightly deeper within their host halo potential wells
than smaller (less luminous) galaxies, and are relatively
less susceptible to stellar stripping.
The luminosity trend that we have found demonstrates the power of our
modeling approach. We use one observational measurement, galaxy
clustering, to shed light on an important physical process that is
essentially unobservable: stellar mass loss from satellite galaxies
relative to dark matter mass loss. In the next section we show how our
models can be used to predict a different observable, the IHL. The
IHL is a remnant of stellar mass loss, so it may be used to probe the
liberated stellar debris, and thus provide an important cross-check on
our results.
\section{PREDICTIONS FOR INTRAHALO LIGHT AT VARYING SCALES}\label{sec:predict_IHL}
If stars are freed from their host galaxies they will presumably
become part of the IHL. Some of the IHL is a diffuse background,
while some may be composed of coherent streams, a prominent example of
which is the Sagittarius Stream in our own galaxy
\citep[e.g.,][]{ibata01,dohm_palmer01,newberg02}, if the stars were
stripped from a subhalo in the past few dynamical times.
Observations of the IHL are notoriously difficult, and
\citet{gonzalez07} argue that the proper quantity to measure is the
sum of the light from the host central galaxy (the ``brightest halo
galaxy'' or BHG) and the diffuse intrahalo light component, because it
is non-trivial to disentangle the two. Our models assign stellar
masses to all halos (both hosts and subhalos), so we can compute the
contribution of the BHG to the total stellar mass of the system. This
combination is also less subject to theoretical uncertainty because
collisions between the BHG and an infalling satellite can disperse
stellar mass into the IHL. While parsing of the stellar mass of the
BHG and IHL individually is sensitive to the fraction of stellar mass
ejected in such collisions, the sum is robust to uncertainties in
this process.
We start by investigating the predictions for the $\epsilon=0$ and
$\epsilon=1$ cases from Model~1. These extremes were shown in
\S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering} to over- and under-predict the
observed clustering, respectively, for each luminosity threshold. In
Figure~\ref{fig:fIHL_eps0_eps1}, we show the fraction of the total
stellar mass of a system (including stellar mass in satellite
galaxies), that is contained within both the IHL and the BHG,
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$, as a function of host halo mass, $M_{\rm halo}$. The
thick solid black curves in Figure~\ref{fig:fIHL_eps0_eps1} show the
mean value of $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ obtained from our 500 realizations of host
halos, and grey curves represent the median. The inner and outer
shaded regions represent the $68\%$ and $95\%$ ranges of the model
distributions. The mean individual BHG and IHL contributions are
shown distinctly as dashed and dotted curves, respectively. The
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ data from \citet{gonzalez07} are shown as red circles
with errorbars, and are the same in both panels.
For $\epsilon=0$ there is no stellar mass loss, and thus no
contribution to the total stellar mass of the system from the IHL.
The stellar mass of the BHG alone provides a decent description of the
data for halo masses below group mass scales, $M_{\rm halo} \lesssim
10^{13}\, \hMsun$. While less massive systems have been observed to
have some detectable IHL (see \S~\ref{intro}), it is mainly large group-
and cluster-size objects that are known to have significant IHL components.
It is therefore not surprising that the $\epsilon=0$ model underestimates
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ on these scales.
At the other extreme, the $\epsilon=1$ model assumes that stellar
mass is lost with the same efficiency as dark matter. We argued in
\S~\ref{sec:stripping_models} that this over-estimates stellar mass
loss, so it is not surprising that choosing $\epsilon=1$ leads to an
overestimate of $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ for systems greater than large groups
($M_{\rm halo} \gtrsim 10^{13.5}\, \hMsun$). At lower masses, typical
infalling satellites have halo masses below
$\MDM_{\rm acc} \lesssim 10^{11}\, \hMsun$ and
bring with them only a small amount of stellar mass (B10). This is
the regime of the SHMR where stellar mass rapidly decreases with
decreasing halo mass (see Fig.~\ref{fig:SHMR_Behroozi}). Data are not
yet precise enough to be sensitive to the stellar mass carried into
the systems by such small, infalling subhalos. Consequently,
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG} \approx f_{\rm BHG}$ and can be adequately described in
low-mass systems at both the $\epsilon=1$ and $\epsilon=0$ extremes.
We note that in our model predictions for the IHL, we only consider
the stellar mass stripped from satellite galaxies that have stellar
masses equivalent to $M_{r} < -18$ galaxies and brighter. We ignore
stellar mass loss from less luminous (less massive) satellites in the
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ calculation. However, the stellar mass locked up in these
lower mass ``uncounted'' subhalos only amounts to $\sim 3\%$ of the
total stellar mass within a given host halo, so neglecting them has a
negligible effect on our $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ model predictions. We also note
that in Figure~\ref{fig:fIHL_eps0_eps1} we have shifted the data
points to higher masses by $\sim 40\%$ in order to convert the
$M_{500}$ ($\Delta_{\mathrm{crit}}=500$) masses given in
\citet{gonzalez07} to our virial masses (using the definition
$\Delta_{\mathrm{vir}}=377$). We assumed an NFW profile to
perform this conversion.
Having shown that these two extreme cases are not able to describe the
data accurately, we turn to the predictions of our models. To make $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$
predictions at a given host halo mass scale we need to assign each
(sub)halo an $\epsilon$ value for Model~1 and a $\psi$ value for
Model~2. Let us examine just the Model~1 case for simplicity. When
we found the best-fit value of $\epsilon$ for each luminosity
threshold sample in \S~\ref{sec:compare_clustering}, we also
determined a final stellar mass threshold for the sample through
abundance matching. For example, the $M_r<-20$ sample was found to
correspond to halos and subhalos with final stellar masses greater
than some value $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},20}$, where final stellar masses
are predicted using $\epsilon=0.5$. The $M_r<-21$ sample corresponds to
stellar masses greater than $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},21}$, where final
stellar masses are predicted using $\epsilon=0.3$, and so on. We assign
each subhalo a value of $\epsilon$ using these stellar mass
thresholds. For example, if a subhalo has a stellar mass at accretion
that falls between $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},20}$ and
$M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},21}$, we assign it $\epsilon=0.5$. If, instead,
it has a mass between $M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},19}$ and
$M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin},20}$, we assign it $\epsilon=0.7$. It is awkward
to use the stellar mass at accretion to assign subhalos to ranges in
$M^{\ast}_{\mathrm{fin}}$, but we cannot estimate final stellar masses
without having a value of $\epsilon$ in the first place, so we are
stuck with this approximate method. We follow the same process for
Model~2 by choosing the appropriate $\psi$ values. We emphasize that
these $\epsilon$ and $\psi$ values are not ``tuned'' to agree with the
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ observations, rather are genuine predictions that result
from parameter values found from matching to clustering data.
Figure \ref{fig:fIHL} shows the Model~1 (left panel) and Model~2
(right panel) $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ predictions, as well as the individual IHL
and BHG contributions. While $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ rapidly decreases with
increasing host halo mass, the contribution to $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ from the
IHL increases. This supports a picture in which galaxy-mass
halos have very few luminous satellite galaxies and little IHL,
so the stellar masses of these systems are dominated by the BHGs.
Galaxy size halos accrete the majority of their mass from small
subhalos that have very high mass-to-light ratios \citep{purcell_etal07}.
Therefore, shredded satellites deposit very little stellar mass into
the IHL. The number of large satellites increases with host halo mass.
The larger and more common subhalos within larger host halos may form
stars more efficiently (have lower mass-to-light ratios) and provide a
source for developing significant IHL. Both models find that host masses
of $M_{\rm host}/\hMsun = 10^{12}, 10^{13}, 10^{14}$, and $10^{15}$,
contain mean IHL fractions of $f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 2\%, 10\%, 20\%$, and $25\%$,
respectively. This is in good agreement with several previous studies,
as we discuss in \S~\ref{sec:conclusion}. The IHL thus provides
an independent check of our stellar mass loss results.
Figure \ref{fig:fIHL} contains a comparison between our model
predictions and the \citet{gonzalez07} data. Both models predict mean
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ fractions that are consistent with the observations.\footnote{
We note that this discussion assumes that the \citet{gonzalez07} data are
accurate, whereas they may be systematically overestimated due to an
assumed constant mass-to-light ratio \citep{leauthaud11c}.
}
Interestingly, we find that the scatter predicted by Model~1 is
substantially smaller than it is for Model~2 and it appears to be
inconsistent with the scatter found by \citet{gonzalez07}.
On the other hand, Model~2 is more successful in reproducing the observed
scatter in $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$. To quantify this, we calculate the probability
that the scatter in the \citet{gonzalez07} data points could result from
the model distributions. We do this as follows. First, we restrict the
comparison to the high mass regime (the last 8 data points) because we
wish to investigate the scatter at fixed mass (if we include lower mass
points, the measured scatter will be affected by the mean trend of
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ vs. mass). We next create a model data set by choosing
a single model realization of a host halo (out of the 500) for each
\citet{gonzalez07} data point, at the appropriate halo masses. This leads
to 8 model values of $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$. We then add a Gaussian random error
to these values, using the corresponding \citet{gonzalez07} errorbars.
To fully sample the distribution of data sets that could arise from
our models, we repeat this process 10,000 times. Finally, we measure the
weighted standard deviation of $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ values for the observed data, as
well as each of the 10,000 model data sets. We find that in Model~1,
only 0.8\% of the model data sets have a scatter that exceeds that of the
\citet{gonzalez07} data, whereas in Model~2, 25\% of the model data
sets have a larger scatter.
This statistical test indicates that Model~1 should be rejected (at
the 2.7$\sigma$ level) in favor of Model~2, an indication that is not
entirely surprising given that Model~2 accounts for delayed stellar
mass loss that is to be expected on physical grounds. Model~1 assumes
that stellar mass loss is simply proportional to subhalo mass loss, so
the scatter predicted by this model must be primarily caused by the
scatter in the total amount of dark matter mass loss, with a secondary
amount of scatter coming from the SHMR. However, the
"all or nothing" action provided by the radius of influence in
Model~2 somehow amplifies this scatter. Upon closer
investigation, we find that the difference in scatter between the two
models arises from simple Poisson statistics. Figure \ref{fig:scatter} shows the
distribution of the number of satellites that contribute $75\%$ of the
IHL to a host halo of mass $10^{14} \hMsun$, measured from 500
realizations for both Model~1 (solid histogram) and Model~2 (dotted histogram). It is clear that in Model~2
the same amount of IHL comes from a much smaller number of satellites
that have each been stripped of more stars than in Model~1. This is
a direct result of the nature of Model~2: most subhalos do not lose
stars, but if they do, it is at a high rate. Since fewer
satellites contribute to the IHL in Model~2, the Poisson scatter in
this model is larger and is manifested in the greater $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ scatter
seen in Fig. \ref{fig:fIHL}.
\section{SUMMARY \& DISCUSSION}\label{sec:conclusion}
While galaxy formation is complex, we have shown in this paper that an
understanding of the fates of satellite galaxies provides key insight
into the galaxy formation puzzle. Satellite galaxies live extremely
tumultuous lives. Their spatial clustering can shed light on how
they lose stellar mass and contribute to building the IHL over a large
range of host halo mass scales. Part of our motivation for using
galaxy clustering to constrain stellar mass loss stems from possible
shortcomings in the commonly-employed abundance matching
technique \citep[e.g.,][Reddick et al., in prep.]{wetzel_white10,yang11b},
which suggest natural generalizations with the gross form of the particular
models we study. The standard method of abundance matching
involves mapping galaxies to halos by assuming a
relationship between halo (and subhalo) mass (or circular velocity)
and a galaxy property (luminosity or stellar mass) at a particular
time. A galaxy luminosity assignment according to halo mass \emph{at
the time the halo was first accreted onto a larger system} provides
a very useful description of known galaxy clustering properties \citep[e.g.,][]{conroy06}.
However, this type of assignment implies that \emph{no
stellar mass loss will occur}. This is contrary to many
aspects of galaxy, group, and cluster evolution, including
the prevailing paradigm in which the IHL is produced by stellar
mass liberated from infalling galaxies by interactions in the
group environment \citep[e.g.,][]{conroy07,purcell_etal07,yang09b}.
Abundance matching is also sensitive to
the resolution of the cosmological simulation on which it is
implemented. Subhalos are artificially destroyed by falling below
the numerical resolution limit and immediately removed from the
galaxy population irrespective of their circular velocities
at their accretion times. This can lead to differing predictions
for the small-scale clustering of galaxies of a particular luminosity
among simulations with a fixed mapping of halo size onto luminosity.
These considerations persuaded us to explore simple models that
associate stellar masses to subhalo masses and constrain satellite
galaxy \emph{stellar mass loss} by matching to clustering data. We
implemented two distinct models. Model 1 related the fractional amount
of stellar mass loss to that of the subhalo dark matter mass loss from the
time of accretion until the final redshift through a single free
parameter $\epsilon$. Model 2 was introduced to mimic a ``lag'' in
stellar mass loss wherein the satellite galaxy at the core of the
subhalo experiences no stellar mass loss until the subhalo has been
stripped of sufficient dark matter on its periphery. Stellar mass
loss in this model only occurs once dark matter has been lost
interior to a radius of influence of the satellite galaxy. We
introduced the free parameter $\psi$ that dictated how the radius of
influence could expand or shrink allowing for more or less stellar
mass loss. We calculated the values of $\epsilon$ and $\psi$ that
matched the observed clustering of SDSS galaxies over a large range of
luminosity threshold samples. Matching to the observed clustering at each
luminosity threshold directly informs us of the amount of stellar mass lost
from satellite galaxies and, thus, will comprise the IHL.
This procedure enables predictions for the amount of IHL or IHL+BHG compared to the total
stellar mass of a host system of a given mass ($f_\mathrm{IHL}$ and $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$,
respectively). Observationally, it has been established that the
amount of diffuse material is nearly negligible at the scale of
individual galaxies
\citep[e.g.,][]{sackett94,morrison97,weil97,lequeux98,abe99,zibetti_ferguson04,bailin11}.
For example, M33, which is $\sim 10^{11}\ M_{\odot}$, has been estimated
to have an $f_\mathrm{IHL} \leq 1\%$ \citep{McConnachie06,hood07}. Our own
Milky Way is thought to have an $f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 1\%$
\citep[e.g.,][]{morrison93,wetterer_mcgraw96,chiba_beers00,ivezic00,morrison00,yanny00,siegel02}
or $\sim 2\%$ when including the stars from the Sagittarius stream
\citep{law05}. Our analog M31 has an $f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 2-5\%$
\citep{irwin05,guhathakurta05,chapman06,kilarai06}. Recently,
\citet{bailin11} showed that NGC 235, which is of comparable
luminosity to the Milky Way and M31, has $f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 6\%$. On group
scales, $\sim 10^{13} - 10^{14}\ M_{\odot}$, measured $f_\mathrm{IHL}$ percentages
tend to be higher than on galaxy scales, though there can be
considerable variation from group to group (e.g., $f_\mathrm{IHL}$ on the order
of a few percent: \citealt{feldmeier01,castrorodriguez03,feldmeier06},
$f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 5-30\%$: \citealt{darocha05,aguerri06,darocha08}, and as
high as $f_\mathrm{IHL} \sim 45\%$: \citealt{white_P03,mcgee_balogh10}). For
clusters scales, IHL fractions are typically much higher. There is
still substantial scatter, but $f_\mathrm{IHL}$ values range from $\sim 10 -
40\%$
\citep{melnick77,thuan_kormendy77,uson91,bernstein95,calc_rold00,lin_mohr04,mihos05,zibetti05,krick06,seigar07}.
As discussed in \S \ref{sec:predict_IHL}, \citet{gonzalez07} posit
that the relevant quantity is $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$, because it can be difficult
to disentangle the stellar mass associated with central galaxy from
the diffuse IHL component. It has been found that $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG} \sim
30\%$ on average on cluster scales
\citep{zibetti05,gonzalez07,pierini08,toledo11}.
Our modeling of satellite galaxy stellar mass loss
has yielded the following principal results and conclusions.
\begin{itemize}
\item
Abundance matching with $\epsilon = 0$ and $\psi = 0$ (``traditional''
abundance matching, akin to using the subhalo mass at the time of
infall) over-predicts the correlation function on small
scales ($\lesssim 1\Mpc$) for each luminosity threshold sample.
\item
For each luminosity threshold, we found both the $\epsilon$ and $\psi$
value that predicted a correlation function that matched the data. We
found that $\epsilon$ and $\psi$ were decreasing functions of
luminosity. This means that low-luminosity satellite galaxies are more
efficiently stripped of stellar material than luminous satellites.
\item
Our predictions for $f_\mathrm{IHL}$ from both Model~1 and
Model~2 are in good agreement with observational
studies over an enormous range of host halo mass scales. For host
masses of $10^{12}$ (individual galaxy scale), $10^{13} - 10^{14}$
(group to small cluster scales), and $10^{14} - 10^{15}$ (cluster
scales), we find mean IHL fractions of a few percent, $10-20\%$, and
$20 - 25\%$, respectively. These are in accord with previous
observational studies, though there is substantial scatter in the
$f_\mathrm{IHL}$ measurements in the literature.
\item
The more physically-motivated Model~2 is consistent with the
$f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ measurements of \citet{gonzalez07} from small group scales
all the way through cluster mass systems. The scatter in the Model~2
results is comparable to the scatter observed in the data. On the
contrary, the scatter among $f_\mathrm{IHL+BHG}$ values predicted by Model~1 is
insufficient to describe the scatter among the observed systems.
This suggests that Model~1, in which stellar mass loss occurs in
proportion to dark matter mass loss, can be rejected by current data.
\end{itemize}
We have shown that \emph{galaxy clustering} can be used as a powerful
tool to understand how satellite galaxies lose stellar mass. We have
found the interesting result that low-luminosity galaxies lose more
stellar mass relative to subhalo dark matter mass loss than luminous
galaxies. Moreover, we were able to predict current IHL observations
and thus further constrain our stellar mass loss models. These
results show that our modeling framework can mitigate potential
problems associated with the conventional abundance matching approach.
Also, our approach is generalizable. It allows for the flexibility to
make more detailed predictions within this framework (for instance,
examining the photometric properties of the IHL as compared to
galaxies).
In Paper~II, we will take advantage of clustering measurements at
high redshifts, allowing us to study the evolution of satellite galaxy
stellar mass loss as a function of \emph{time}. This will enable us
to make predictions for the build-up of the IHL over cosmic time. A
possible extension of this program is to also explore stellar mass-selected
threshold samples directly rather than the luminosity threshold
samples we have used in this paper. This is a natural choice for
refining this class of studies because dynamical models most directly
treat stellar mass loss.
A further useful avenue to pursue as a result of this work will be to
connect detailed theoretical models of stellar mass loss in
individual galaxies more directly to the statistical models of stellar
mass loss that can be explored with large-scale survey data, such as
we have done. Models of stellar mass loss that are consistent with
survey data must also be representative of detailed dynamical models
of stellar mass loss. It will be very interesting to develop a set of
simple, yet powerful models for the build-up and dispersal of the
stellar mass in satellite galaxies that simultaneously describe the
evolution of galaxy clustering and intrahalo light over cosmic time.
\section{acknowledgments}
We thank Chris Purcell and Jeff Newman for insightful discussions.
The work of DFW and AAB is supported by Vanderbilt University, the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF)
through grant AST-1109789. The work of ARZ is funded by the
Pittsburgh Particle physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology Center (PITT
PACC) at the University of Pittsburgh and by the NSF through grants
AST-0806367 and AST-1108802.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 3,860 |
Q: Dockerfile ADD and COPY do not work properly We have a vagrant machine running under windows 10.
Inside that vagrant, we want to create a docker image using a Dockerfile.
Version of docker inside the vagrant is:
$ docker --version
Docker version 1.12.2, build bb80604
The docker file is this one:
FROM ubuntu:16.04
RUN mkdir ~/opt
COPY test.tgz ~/opt/.
RUN ls -la ~/opt/.
ADD ./test.tgz ~/opt/.
RUN cd ~/opt/. &&\
pwd &&\
tar xvzf ./test.tgz
and the output of the image creation command:
$ docker build -t frojasg1/test:20210601 .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 3.072 kB
Step 1 : FROM ubuntu:16.04
---> 9ff95a467e45
Step 2 : RUN mkdir ~/opt
---> Running in caee3cbc00e0
---> 73a0a9da81ba
Removing intermediate container caee3cbc00e0
Step 3 : COPY test.tgz ~/opt/.
---> e4e413ad3bab
Removing intermediate container fa81c5ef7775
Step 4 : RUN ls -la ~/opt/.
---> Running in 82897cb5c488
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 1 09:40 .
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jun 1 09:40 ..
---> 143f6660707e
Removing intermediate container 82897cb5c488
Step 5 : ADD ./test.tgz ~/opt/.
Error processing tar file(exit status 1): Error setting up pivot dir: mkdir /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/e68ae154a12a660708f7a348ed09ebf01cd10177617141312bc70c4af88637ae/rootfs/~/opt/.pivot_root077529346: not a directory
You can download the whole directory contents at:
https://frojasg1.com/stackoverflow/20210601.dockerfile/test.zip
Does anyone know what is happening ?
A: We have finally been able to debug the problem:
$ docker build .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 4.096 kB
Step 1 : FROM ubuntu:16.04
---> 9ff95a467e45
Step 2 : RUN mkdir ~/opt
---> Using cache
---> 8da7855961a7
Step 3 : COPY test.tgz ~/opt/.
---> Using cache
---> 46acb39109cc
Step 4 : RUN ls -la ~/opt/.
---> Running in c4b7e327b8cf
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 2 10:25 .
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jun 2 10:25 ..
---> c199f8b7b22d
Removing intermediate container c4b7e327b8cf
Step 5 : ADD ./test.tgz ~/opt/.
Error processing tar file(exit status 1): Error setting up pivot dir: mkdir /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/f7cb413cecaef0e0378c20e7de8d076512e993a6e8859d79ca2f73bfc5f11609/rootfs/~/opt/.pivot_root409667951: not a directory
to debug the problem, we have taken the latest intermediate image, and entered to see what had happened:
$ docker run --rm -ti 46acb39109cc /bin/bash
root@a3bb9ca87d90:/# ls -la ~
total 20
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jun 2 10:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Jun 2 11:04 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3106 Oct 22 2015 .bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 148 Aug 17 2015 .profile
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 2 10:25 opt
root@a3bb9ca87d90:/# pwd
/
root@a3bb9ca87d90:/# ls
bin boot dev etc home lib lib64 media mnt opt proc root run sbin srv sys tmp usr var ~
root@a3bb9ca87d90:/# cd ~
root@a3bb9ca87d90:~# pwd
/root
root@a3bb9ca87d90:~# exit
exit
The problem is that folder a folder ~ is created at /
But when changing directory to ~, it locates at /root
The solution seems to change ~ by /root inside the Dockerfile (as the user is root in our Dockerfile)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 349 |
const { utils } = require('../../utils');
const { WebGLFunctionNode } = require('../web-gl/function-node');
/**
* @class WebGL2FunctionNode
* @desc [INTERNAL] Takes in a function node, and does all the AST voodoo required to toString its respective webGL code.
* @extends WebGLFunctionNode
* @returns the converted webGL function string
*/
class WebGL2FunctionNode extends WebGLFunctionNode {
/**
* @desc Parses the abstract syntax tree for *identifier* expression
* @param {Object} idtNode - An ast Node
* @param {Array} retArr - return array string
* @returns {Array} the append retArr
*/
astIdentifierExpression(idtNode, retArr) {
if (idtNode.type !== 'Identifier') {
throw this.astErrorOutput(
'IdentifierExpression - not an Identifier',
idtNode
);
}
const type = this.getType(idtNode);
const name = utils.sanitizeName(idtNode.name);
if (idtNode.name === 'Infinity') {
retArr.push('intBitsToFloat(2139095039)');
} else if (type === 'Boolean') {
if (this.argumentNames.indexOf(name) > -1) {
retArr.push(`bool(user_${name})`);
} else {
retArr.push(`user_${name}`);
}
} else {
retArr.push(`user_${name}`);
}
return retArr;
}
}
module.exports = {
WebGL2FunctionNode
}; | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 8,671 |
Potassium niobate crystals dopped with Fe, Ni, Cu, Ce, Rh and Co were grown in order to optimize the photorefractive response over an extended spectral range. Extrinsic properties important for the photorefractive effect: absorption, and two- beam coupling, are discussed. Modification of the charge transport parameters in order to improve the response time of photoiduced refractive index changes is obtained by means of post growth annealing at temperatures of 400-900 °C in a controlled atmosphere.
We examine novel applications of photorefractive KNbO3:Fe in hexagonal array generation, edge enhancement and image broadcasting. Edge enhancement, as well as phase conjugation, is readily achieved using a two beam coupling geometry. Pertinent theories are also discussed, especially, the instability criteria leading to hexagon generation, assuming transmission and reflection gratings.
Photorefractive holographic recording at 780 nm in Bi12SiO20 which exhibits dual,dynamic and semipermanent, behaviour is investigated. The semipermanent holograms present very long decay times (up to 3600 sec) for relatively high reading and consequently erasing beam intensities. Experimental investigation of this behavior is performed and comparison with theoretical results is made. Finally, image processing applications, such as addition and subtraction of images and incoherent-to-coherent information transfer, utilizing this dual recording character as well as the special properties of the material, are presented.
Photo-induced effective nonlinearity, n2, of a BSO crystal is measured by using a Z-scan method which is based on self-focusing/defocusing effect. The Z-scan technique is an simple yet accurate way to measure, n2. An optical limiter utilizing the photo-induced lensing is investigated and the influences of spatial self phase modulation for strong CW illumination is presented.
1. Kawata Y, Kawata S, Minami S, J Opt Soc, Am B,7(1990)2362-2368.
2. Bairamov B K, Zakharchenya B P, Khashkhozhev Z M, Sov Physics-Solid State, 14(1973)2357-2362.
3. Sheik-Bahae M, Said A A, Wei T H, Hagan D J,Van Stryland E W, IEEE J Quantum Electronics, 26(1990)760-769.
4. Sheik-Bahae M, Said A A, Wei T H, Hagan D J,Soileau M J, Van Stryland E W,Opt Eng, 30(1991)1228-1235.
5. Banerjee P P, Misra R M, Maghraoui M, J Opt Soc, Am B, 8(1991)1072-1080.
6. Song Q W, Zhang C, Gross R, Birge R, Opt Lett, 18(1993)775-777.
7. Tanguay A R (Jr), Ph D Dissertation, 1977, Yale University, pp64-73.
8. Durbin S D, Arakelian S M,Shen Y R,Opt Lett, 6(1981)411-413.
Potential applications of photorefractive ring resonators in optical computing are reviewed. Using an electronics-like point of view of photorefractive optical circuits, we propose a model of an optical transistor based on the operation of photorefractive ring oscillators. Both unidirectional and bidirectional rings are considered as models for different optical logic gates. We also discuss applications such as optical amplification, polarisation rotation and switiching. We comment on the advantages and disadvantages that such arrangements offer. The role of transverse effects and instabilities in the operation of these devices is discussed briefly.
In this paper, the angular and the wavelength selectivities of a multiplexed fiber hologram, using couple theory, are evaluated. We have shown that the reflective-type fiber hologram has a uniform and a higher wavelength sensitivity than the transmission type. Cross-talk noise among the multiplexed channels and the recording-erasure dynamics in a fiber hologram are also calculated, in which we have shown that the wavelength-multiplex reflection-type fiber hologram would be the best choice for high density data storage. Experiments to demonstrate the feasibility are also provided.
Photorefractive materials and their applications: A bibliographic review for the year 1994.
Ever since the discovery of photorefractive (PR effect), phenomenal progress in this field has been achieved through sustained research and development efforts. The PR materials have been the stepping stone to the successful demonstration of many applications in optical computing, and image processing, holographic interferometry, holographic associative memories, neural networks, and phase locking of lasers etc. Theories have been formulated which reveal and scrutinize many new and prospective aspects of the PR process not yet explored. The study with its scientific maturity pervades many scientific disciplines, including numerical analysis, crystal growth, solid state physics, material characterization, nonlinear optics, real time optical image processing, holography and robotic vision etc.
The present article furnishes a qualitative review along with a comprehensive listing of various articles that have appeared on the subject in the year 1994. We hope that this literature survey will provide help to the researchers in the field to keep themselves abreast of the recent progress. The contents of the article have been broadly subdivided into four sections: PR processes, materials, devices and applications.. Although, this article is dedicated to the PR materials and associated phenomena, for the sake of completeness, we have included few articles on phase conjugation obtained in materials such as dyes, saturated laser gain media, and liquid crystals etc. We do not claim the listing of the articles to be complete and would welcome any suggestions as to the addition of missing references. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,719 |
<?php
require_once PATH::lib() . '/meekrodb.2.3.class.php'; //Even better version of class.DB.php, with OO'd database management.
function db_error_handler($params){
$out = 'DB ERROR: ';
if(strpos($params['error'],'Unable to connect to MySQL server!'))$params['error'].=" (Did you accidentally upload CONFIG.local.php?)";
if (isset($params['query'])) $out .= "QUERY: " . $params['query'] . '<br />';
if (isset($params['error'])) $out .= "ERROR: " . $params['error'] . '<br />';
trigger_error($out,E_USER_ERROR);
die;
}
class DBExt{//A few more features to add to MeekroDB.
public static function parseWhereClause($where, $args){//Better whereclause creation, to be used in placeholding %l. (may not necessarily be a whereclause)
//Does not deal with replacement params.
if(!is_array($args)) $args = array();
if(is_object($where) && get_class($where)=='WhereClause'){//Well, it's already a WhereClause.
array_unshift($args,'TRUE');
call_user_func_array(array($where,'add'),$args);
return $where;
}
if(empty($where)){//If it's an empty string or something, you've still got that "WHERE %l" hanging there.
return ' TRUE ';
}
elseif(is_array($where)){//Associative array of field-value pairs/array of actual wherestrings
$wc = new WhereClause('and');
array_unshift($args,'TRUE');
call_user_func_array(array($wc,'add'),$args);
foreach($where as $field=>$val){
if(is_int($field))$wc->add($val);//Just a string in the array
else $wc->add('%b=%s',$field,$val);//Actually associative
}
return $wc;
}
else{//Single actual wherestring
$wc = new WhereClause('and');
array_unshift($args,$where);
call_user_func_array(array($wc,'add'),$args);
return $wc;
}
}
public static function queryCount(){ //Counts the number of rows in a table, where something.
$args = func_get_args();
$table = array_shift($args);
$where = array_shift($args);
$pass = array('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM %b WHERE %l',$table,self::parseWhereClause($where,$args));
return intval(call_user_func_array('DB::queryFirstField',$pass));
}
public static function timeRelativeToSQL($s){ //+5m becomes ( NOW() + INTERVAL 5 MINUTE ), etc...
$e = str_split($s);
$unit = array_pop($e);
$sign = array_shift($e);
switch($unit){
case 's': $unit = 'SECOND'; break;
case 'm': $unit = 'MINUTE'; break;
case 'd': $unit = 'DAY'; break;
case 'M': $unit = 'MONTH'; break;
case 'y': $unit = 'YEAR'; break;
default: trigger_error('Invalid time specification.',E_USER_ERROR);
}
return ' ( NOW() '.$sign.' INTERVAL '.intval(implode('',$e)).' '.$unit.' ) ';
}
public static function timeInInterval($field,$start,$end){
$wc = new WhereClause('and');
if(!empty($start))//Assume goes off to neg infinity
$wc->add('%b > %l',$field,self::timeRelativeToSQL($start));
if(!empty($end))//Assume goes off to pos infinity
$wc->add('%b < %l',$field,self::timeRelativeToSQL($end));
return $wc;
}
}
?> | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,793 |
The Vampire King
Book One in Big Bad Wolf spinoff series,
The Kings
By Heather Killough-Walden
Copyright 2012 Heather Killough-Walden
Smashwords Edition
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I LOVE MY READERS!
The Vampire King
By Heather Killough-Walden
Book one in the BBW spinoff series, The Kings
Visit Heather's Facebook pages at:
<http://www.facebook.com/killoughwalden>
and
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heather-Killough-Walden/204947809542189
for paranormal romance news, teasers, updates, contests, and giveaways!
Also follow Heather on Twitter at:
@killoughwalden
_Visit Heather's website and sign up for her newsletter to receive all the latest at:_ www.killough-walden.com
The Kings, book one: The Vampire King
A Big Bad Wolf spinoff series
And a Big Bad World book
By Heather Killough-Walden
Prologue
_It hurts,_ she thought. _God, it really hurts._ Gingerly, Evie cradled her gauze-wrapped wrists against her chest and closed her eyes. Her heart was doing tricks in her chest now, the beat uneven and faint. Her head hurt and her legs felt numb. When she took the time to think about what it all meant, despair threatened, and she choked down a sob.
"I can take the pain away from you," he said as he watched her curl in on herself against the cold basement wall. "Why do you continue to defy me?"
Evie felt tears on her cheeks and marveled at her ability to form them after all the blood he'd taken. But these were the same tears that had been threatening to escape since he'd brought her here. She'd been strong enough... she could allow herself this.
Evie dropped her head onto her bent knees. _I'm not really here_ , she tried to tell herself, though the pain fought her attempt. She wasn't supposed to be there in that dark basement under a house in the middle of an impossible nowhere. Two days ago, she'd lived in another world. Two days ago, she'd been an author with a normal life and at least another thirty or forty years ahead of her.
But now....
Now, as she hugged her small body against the damp gloom of the horrible space that had become her waking nightmare, she felt a wretched anguish poke at her outer casing. That casing had become fragile and thin, like the shell of an egg. Any second now, any god-awful minute now, one of those tap-tap-taps would break through, and she would crack. Just like that.
It was what _he_ wanted, the man who had ripped her from her happiness and thrust her into this hellish darkness. It was what he was waiting for. What he apparently would do anything to acquire. _Anything_....
A part of her still clung to disbelief, despite everything she'd witnessed over the last few days. The rest of her was transformed, however. Born again. She _believed_. It was the overwhelming proof that did it – proof that Roman D'Angelo had given her when he swept her off her feet and pulled her into his amazing, fantastical world.
And it was proof that Roman's enemy now ruthlessly inflicted upon her over and over again that had finally bent her perception of fact and fiction. She could no longer hide from the truth of what had been laid before her.
Roman was a vampire. Her kidnapper was also a vampire. They were real.
They were _real_.
And that meant that there was no way out. A human was fallible. A human could be tricked or overtaken. But a vampire was....
There was no way out. None that she knew of, anyway.
_Roman_... Evie thought. She couldn't help it. Where was he now? The tall, dark, intense man who had changed her life forever. It was pointless to yearn for him. Vampire King or not, he could do nothing to help her now. Her captor had seen to that. At least, that was what he told her, and she believed him. She had no choice, because Roman wasn't here... and she was dying.
"Just say the words, Evie. For the love of God," her captor said as he knelt in front of her and took her chin once more in his hand. She kept her eyes closed, unable or unwilling to meet his gaze even one more time. "You can make all of this stop," he told her. "You can make it so that you never have to feel pain or fear again."
Evie moaned softly in response. Her body hurt so much. Her captor released her chin and Evie's head fell back against the wall. She felt colder than she had ever felt before.
She almost said the words then. She almost surrendered and gave him what he wanted. She just wanted the torture to stop.
All you have to do is say three little words. Just three little words.
Evie shook her head, dizzy as it made her, and pushed the thoughts from her mind. _No_ , she told herself. _Just hang on a little while longer._
Her heart seemed to flutter, as if sighing in helpless response.
_Oh God, Roman_ , she thought miserably. _Please hurry._
*****
Charles Alexander Ward sighed heavily when he'd returned to the living room and re-locked the basement door. He sat on the couch and leaned forward thoughtfully, resting his elbows on his knees.
She was a tough one, and he had to admit that this last part of his plan was taking a lot longer than he'd anticipated. But he could hear the dawning despair that laced the edges of each of her breaths. The tide was turning. It wouldn't be long before she either broke – or died.
He wondered how much time he had left with her. D'Angelo had no doubt been scouring the world for his love. Charles could imagine the Vampire King's edict spreading far and wide in no time at all. He could imagine the king's eyes and what they must look like at that moment. The thought gave Charles an uncommon chill.
But it didn't matter. The king couldn't reach him here. Charles just needed a little more time... an hour, maybe, tops. He just needed his precious captive to say three short words.
Offspring were creatures born of the union between an enigmatic, dark, and dangerous race known as the Akyri and the infamous mortals of magic, the warlocks. Because of this combination, Offspring were beings of magic above all else. Every vampire in existence possessed the intrinsic powers of a warlock – and the innate legerdemain charms of the undead.
However, they were also a cursed race. The inherent darkness of their parentage tainted the blood in their veins, and over the years they'd come to know themselves by another name: vampires.
The rules a vampire had to live by were few and uncomplicated, but difficult at best. The sun was caustic, no _deadly_ , to an Offspring. However, despite the popular Hollywood portrayal of their kind, in reality, living in the dinge of night was neither an appealing nor acceptable choice for vampires, so they turned to their magic to fix the problem. Through the use of spells or items imbibed with the power of said spells, Offspring cleared the way for their kind to walk beneath the rays of the sun.
The second quintessential truth of being an Offspring was that blood was also a necessity. A vampire had to feed. How often the feeding had to be done was dictated largely by the environment chosen by an Offspring. It was healthier to live in humidity, near the ocean, and preferably shaded by forest. For this reason, places like Louisiana and the northwest coast were very popular for vampires. Those who either chose to live in the desert or were given no choice due to their careers were forced to feed more often, as if to make up for the lack of moisture in the air.
Feeding fell into two different categories. Long ago, vampires automatically killed their victims while taking their blood. It was easiest that way, and it wasn't as if humans were very skilled at tracking down killers – when they cared at all.
Since D'Angelo had been king, however, the ritual of feeding had taken a positive turn as far as humans were concerned. Vampires were taught to take only what they needed from a victim. Eventually, a kill was necessary. Offspring did not last long without imbibing of a victim's last drop. But now it was more seldom. Younger vampires could go for a week or two without killing. Older vampires, several months.
Lastly, there was only one way for a vampire to create another vampire.
And it was a secret.
The Offspring were just that – offspring. In general, they were born, not created, and within the social circles of his kind, no set way of turning a mortal into an immortal had ever been officially documented.
It was possible to use vampire blood to keep a mortal young. Such a thing had been done by the vampire princess, Isabel Marie Wraythe; a steady ingestion of her blood had kept a certain werewolf young for give or take five decades. At the same time, that blood had tainted the inside of Byron Caige's veins, causing him to be sensitive to sunlight.
The "taint" of vampire blood was well known. The Offspring had used their blood to heal mortals in the past, and when this happened, there were always side effects. It was best to draw the blinds after sharing with a human. At least for a little while.
But the act of sharing blood and its side effects did not, in and of themselves, create another vampire. "Turning" a human into a vampire, as mortals would refer to it, was impossible.
Or, it was _supposed_ to be. That was what Roman D'Angelo would have everyone believe.
Malachi Wraythe, the late Warlock King, had been Charles' oldest and closest friend. Over the years, Charles had learned much from Malachi. He'd been _given_ much. After the warlock king's also-dead daughter, Charles was listed first and foremost in Wraythe's will, and one of the gifts he'd been bequeathed was a book – filled with _secrets_.
Wraythe had been a lot older than he'd looked. His daughter was a vampire, the Offspring of Wraythe and his captive bride, the Akyri queen. Hence, part of his seemingly eternal youth was most likely due to borrowed vampire blood. However, black magic was also very useful in these endeavors. In truth, Wraythe was very old, and in that time, he'd acquired a lot of knowledge.
Knowledge in general was powerful. However, warlock knowledge was particularly potent; an evil edge could make _anything_ so. Charles now had access to warlock spells that had been hidden from the sight of man for hundreds of years. It was how he remained hidden from his king now. And that wasn't all.
He also knew how to turn a mortal into a vampire. The secret had been hidden away by the Vampire King eons ago.
It was so easy. So simple. The taking of blood was necessary, of course. That was to be expected. Even werewolves had to do it. But when a werewolf claimed his dormant, he whispered words to her that sealed the deal. So, why wouldn't it be different for an Offspring? It turned out that it _wasn't_ different. Charles was surprised none of them had thought of it before. Or perhaps some of them had and just hadn't known which words it would take.
Charles smiled now as he thought of this. _He_ knew.
The words were ancient, so old that they had yet to be translated from their original language. Yet, it wasn't this that made them difficult to produce. It was the speaker, the person who had to _say_ the words, that made transformation from mortal to vampire so unlikely.
A werewolf could claim his mate. As he took her, _he_ became the dominant, the one with the power, and in this power he made her his. Offspring had not been given this luxury. With vampires, it was so much more complicated, but not because there were more steps. It was more complicated because for a mortal to become a vampire, he or she must _want_ it of their own accord. They must accept it through their own will.
And say the words.
_Addo nox noctis_. Bring the night.
Down in the basement, young Evelynne Grace Farrow, known as Evie to everyone close to her, most likely struggled with her inner demons, and Charles caught the faintest sound of a shuddering sob. His lips formed a decidedly cruel smile.
He'd played his hand very carefully over the past few weeks, and the cards had fallen perfectly into place. The warlock seer had been right about everything so far.
Several weeks earlier, Charles had visited the old woman in the darkness of the underground cavern she dwelled in, and he'd told her he wanted revenge. It was as simple as that. She wasn't surprised. For a warlock, there were few other reasons. Hatred, revenge – the ilk of that murky, painful clan – were the driving forces that brought people to their doors.
So, she took his blood and cast a spell....
Charles clenched his teeth together behind closed lips as he brought the blade in a quick slash across his palm and squeezed his fist over the warlock's black stone bowl. He could feel her excitement as she watched the blood pour from his wound to fill the vessel beneath it. Within seconds, the cut began to heal, but he'd filled the bowl half-way, and apparently that was enough because the warlock seer raised her hand in a stop gesture.
Charles lowered his fist and stepped back. The seer in turn moved forward.
Charles watched as she bent and whispered over the bowl. The stench of burning blood wafted toward him and the bowl began to steam. He felt his fangs lengthen in his mouth, every muscle in his body prepared for fight or flight.
He was crossing the point of no return by doing this. He knew that. And there was a certain amount of fear that came with knowing you were officially signing your own death warrant, to be sure. But there was also a driving fury, because one didn't reach the point of no return by accident, and it was that burning rage that straightened Charles' spine and narrowed his gaze as the wicked witch spat her venomous words into the spell that was his deciding fate.
" _A woman," she finally said aloud, her voice rising to fill the shadows that darkened her cavern's corners._
Charles frowned. "What?"
The warlock seer turned to glance at him over her black-clad shoulder. "A woman, blood sucker. It is a woman you seek." She turned back to the bowl, which Charles guessed was carved out of a solid piece of onyx or obsidian, and she peered into the murky, crimson depths of his boiling blood. She seemed to consider something he could not see. Then she exhaled a shuddering sigh and nodded. "A very special woman."
Charles had never considered himself the settling down type. Malachi had known well enough. The two of them had roughly the same tastes when it came to women and how they should be treated, especially in the bedroom. However, little Evie presented a nuance to his existence that up until quite recently simply hadn't been there.
She was a lovely thing, there was no denying that. Her thick brown hair was fine and soft and touched with honey-colored highlights that caught the hints gold in her brown eyes. She was small, but strong, with curves that made a man ache to dig his fingers in. And she was smart. It was her intelligence that intrigued him the most. Earlier in the month, he'd spent a bit of time in and out of her mind, listening in on the thoughts she thought were private. They were deep, sometimes intense, and undeniably different than what he was used to. There was an unidentifiable subtlety to her essence that fascinated him. He wouldn't be able to put a name to it if he tried. Whatever it was, it captivated him.
It made sense. Where he'd been capable of reading her mind before, he could no longer do so now. His warlock magic didn't work on her either. She'd grown stronger against his kind somehow. She was not at all like other humans.
And the way she tasted made his fangs throb in his gums at the mere memory.
According to the warlock seer, Evie Farrow was supposed to be the undoing of the vampire king. It _would_ take a special woman to bring about the downfall of Roman D'Angelo.
Once he decided what the best and hence most painful course of action for D'Angelo would be, all Charles had had to do was hang back and wait. The seer assured him that Farrow and D'Angelo would meet. She'd been right. And, also just as the seer had claimed, the vampire king had fallen instantly and deeply in love with young Evelynne.
Now that Charles had witnessed Evie's unwitting charms and even tasted her first-hand, he couldn't blame his king. He was also beginning to believe that this plan might actually work. Evie Farrow could bring about _any_ man's downfall.
He'd originally planned to allow the two to fall in love – and then to kill the woman. It would be fast and brutal and the blow to D'Angelo would be immense. However, Roman D'Angelo had lost a loved one to death before. He'd gotten over it and he'd moved on. _This_ would be so much worse. It would be so much better than killing her. The king would never recover.
Charles was going to enjoy teaching Evie the ropes once she'd made the transformation to vampire. She would need to feed. She would probably resist at first, but he'd learned how to deal with resistant women. That part would be fun. She would probably try to escape as well. Aided by the strength afforded to her by her newfound vampirism, she would attempt to run, to fly, and even to hide. It was something Charles could both count on and look forward to. Women were so much more enjoyable when they fought back.
Eventually, she would give in, and that would be the sweetest triumph of all. For when she did, Charles would have what the vampire king so desperately wanted for himself. The thing he wanted most of all. His queen would belong to another.
Charles might even have _her_ kill _him_.
He smiled at that thought. Malachi Wraythe would be avenged. And Roman D'Angelo would be no more.
Chapter One
Three weeks earlier....
It was perhaps the most difficult thing he'd ever had to do, but Charles somehow managed to make it through the meeting without giving himself away. Across the long mahogany table, the Vampire King sat regal and tall, silent and still, ever the imposing figure of dark, steady calm. It made Charles sick. And this sickness would have singled him out to D'Angelo in a heartbeat if it hadn't been for the spells Charles had cast prior to coming to the king's mansion.
They were imperative. They were words and phrases and bits of power learned through his friendship with the late warlock king and over the course of ages. They'd taken aggravating years to perfect, but now, as he faced down his enemy, surrounded by minions to the throne, he was ever grateful he'd put in the effort that he had. The ring he wore on his right middle finger protected his thoughts. The medallion he wore around his neck and tucked beneath his button-up shirt protected his heartrate and the smell of cortisol and adrenaline that ran through his blood. Finally, the spell he'd cast upon himself before leaving his flat acted as a shield.
Vampires possessed the ability to use magic. Despite their dark heritage, most of them tended toward the kind of magic used by well-meaning witches in covens across the globe. However, Charles' magic had always possessed a more unnatural bent. His talents leaned toward the warlock side of the spectrum. It was one of the reasons behind his camaraderie with Malachi Wraythe.
But such magic would not go over well with the Vampire King, who maintained a strict hold over his kingdom. He was the iron fist in the velvet glove that no vampire in their right mind would dare go up against.
Charles had little choice. He was what he was – had been born that way. Wraythe understood this. Long ago, he'd taken him under his wing and shown him the way. Malachi taught Charles everything he knew, and it was this forbidden knowledge that Charles' many shields kept from his king's incredible perception.
Of course... there was a chance that D'Angelo knew anyway.
D'Angelo knew _everything_. That was what they said.
The king's eyes were more keen than any Charles had ever peered into. They were dark, the absence of light, as if all knowledge was sucked into them and hidden in fathomless depths, never to be released again. He had a way about him, a way of seeing things that weren't quite there and hearing things that no one had yet said. Where magic was the sixth sense, Roman D'Angelo possessed a seventh.
Nothing escaped him.
This was how Charles knew that D'Angelo had played the primary role in Wraythe's demise. D'Angelo had never liked the Warlock King. He'd forbidden his people from working with him and those closest to him. He didn't like Wraythe's daughter, the vampire princess, and it was well known in Offspring circles that D'Angelo had a particular problem with the way Wraythe had more or less enslaved his wife, the Akyri queen, Olivia.
Rumor was that D'Angelo was responsible for the vampire princess's murder. Shortly afterward, when Wraythe himself was killed, Charles was on a mission personally assigned to him by D'Angelo. Why?
It was as if the Vampire King knew that Charles would attempt to interfere. But for this to be true, D'Angelo would also have to be aware of Charles and Wraythe's friendship.
And it was for this reason that despite the precautions Charles had taken before coming to the mandatory meeting of the members of the king's court, he now sat down a polished wooden table from the enigmatic, powerful man and feared that D'Angelo knew something anyway. That he could read his thoughts.
And that he would realize Charles planned on killing him.
"Mr. Ward," D'Angelo suddenly spoke softly, his incredibly charismatic voice carrying the power of ages behind it.
Charles almost jumped. But that would have been too obvious, so instead, he licked his lips and attempted to meet his king's gaze. It was nearly impossible. There was no gaze on Earth like D'Angelo's.
"Yes, My Lord?"
"You seem troubled," D'Angelo said, his calm completely unruffled, his dark eyes wholly unnerving. "Are you not well?"
"I'm hungry, that is all," Charles said. "Please continue."
They'd been discussing the werewolf community and the effects of the reversal of a four-thousand-year-old werewolf curse. Up until a few weeks ago, male werewolves had held all of the cards in their particular society. They were the ones with superhuman strength, the ability to heal from most wounds, an aging rate that was half to one-third that of mortals and much more. Each male werewolf alpha was born with a certain power that set him apart from the others. But their female kin possessed none of these traits or abilities. Most detrimental was the fact that female werewolves were not capable of producing werewolf children. Because of this, male wolves had been forced to hunt down special women, women who could produce werewolf children – women known as dormants. These dormants had become essential to werewolf survival.
Until now. Several weeks earlier, with the death of Malachi Wraythe and a sacrifice made by a dormant now known throughout supernatural circles as the "Curse Breaker," came the end of the black-magic curse that had forced the powers of werewolf females into nonexistence. Now the women were just as strong as the men in every possible way. More importantly, werewolf females were suddenly revealing that they were a few weeks pregnant.
These sudden and intensely imperative changes were having major repercussions that spread like shockwaves across the supernatural societies of the world. The population of viable werewolves had basically doubled overnight. Where there had been perhaps five thousand, there were now ten.
The vampire hierarchy, also known as the "Court," had joined in this meeting in order to discuss what should be done on their end to deal with these changes and the havoc they were wreaking.
"Two hundred women in New York suddenly woke up and had the powers their brothers or fathers have always had," said one of the men at the table. He had shoulder-length dark blond hair, incredibly broad shoulders, and piercing blue eyes. His name was Saxon, and though there was no human position like his, the closest comparison would be to say that he was the general in D'Angelo's vampire army.
"You can imagine what kind of an effect that had," Saxon finished. Charles could feel that the Vampire King's eyes were still trained on him and had yet to focus on Saxon. D'Angelo was suspicious of something, and that suspicion was nearly palpable.
"You don't have to imagine it," said another vampire at the table. She had bright red hair that had been cut into a razored bob, a small up-turned nose, and pretty, fairy-like features. Her name was Samantha, and to Charles' knowledge, she was the single most brilliant techno-geek carrying vampire blood. She was also the youngest vampire he knew of, at just twenty-five human years. "I've been scrubbing YouTube of impromptu videos for the last three days. A fist fight in a high school parking lot saw a rather mousy young woman nearly break the neck of her much larger opponent with a single punch. And don't get me started on the sudden sightings of wolves where they're supposed to be extinct."
"It's actually much more complicated," said another woman at the table. She was older than the redhead, perhaps forty to forty-five, and starkly beautiful. Her thick black hair fell in waves over her shoulders and down her back. Her green eyes were piercing and highly intelligent. Her broad lips were seductive and perfect. She looked pointedly at each of the individuals at the table before she went on. "Many female-born werewolves who have grown up without powers and never believing they would _have_ powers have married mortal men and have given birth to mortal children." She paused, allowed this information to sink in, and then continued. "They're now having to somehow break the news of their real ancestry to their husbands, who might at any moment catch their wives performing incredible feats of strength or even flashing into wolf form."
"There's also the matter of beta wolves," chimed in yet another vampire. Charles turned to look at him. David Cade was a soft-spoken man with the looks of a movie star and the brain of an eccentric genius. He was shy and perhaps overly sensitive and mostly kept to himself, and Charles was fairly certain that he was one of D'Angelo's most trusted bosom companions. He was also deceiving. He may have been on the quiet side, but Charles knew that Cade could take charge of a situation with incredible speed and acumen.
"Beta werewolves who had never planned on having werewolf children because they couldn't win a dormant for a mate are now capable of having werewolf children of their own," Cade said softly, his intelligent, bright hazel eyes looking down at the table as he spoke. "What are they going to tell their mortal wives?"
"That's the least of our worries," Saxon said, though his tone was not disrespectful, only concerned. "If enough female-borns mess up in public to expose the werewolf population for what it truly is, it paves the way for the exposure of every other supernatural race on the planet. Hunters will have a field day with us _all_ then."
"They're certainly having a field day _now_ ," said Samantha. "If we thought that Gabriel Phelan was as bad as it could get, we were dead wrong. The Hunters' new leader is ten times worse and apparently he's backed by some kind of magic. He's been able to organize the Hunters like never before and their numbers are growing, not dwindling. They're listening in on police scanners and following 'wolf' sightings to their targets, among other things." Sam shook her head and sat back in her chair. "The blood bath continues."
"These issues and more are being dealt with by members of the werewolf community as we speak," D'Angelo said, his calm and low voice once more overriding everything else in the room. "And the _way_ in which said issues are dealt with will have an undeniable effect upon not only their community, but ours." D'Angelo leaned forward, folded his hands on the table, and allowed his presence to be truly felt. "It can be safely assumed that werewolves will be much stronger players in the game now. Whether they are allies or opponents is up to us."
Silence stretched over the inhabitants of D'Angelo's meeting room. The king's point had been clearly made. It was up to the Offspring society to help wherever and whenever they could.
"Court is adjourned," D'Angelo said then, his voice so soft it was nearly a sigh. He backed up his chair and stood, exuding grace with every tiny movement he made. The rest of the vampires at the table followed suit until everyone was standing. D'Angelo excused them all and the eight of them began to leave the room. Charles glanced over his shoulder as he exited through the meeting room's massive double doors. David Cade remained behind; the other vampire was watching him. For a brief moment, their eyes met, and a thrum of fear went through Charles. Cade was a very smart man. Did he know something? Had he figured something out?
Luckily, Charles' magic would hide any subliminal signs of nervousness. It was up to Charles to hide the rest. He forced his expression to remain neutral, turned away from the room, and left the mansion.
*****
"He has a darkness about him," Cade said. "I don't trust him."
Roman gave David a sidelong glance. The corners of his mouth turned up in the slightest of smiles. David Cade was not only highly intelligent, but incredibly astute. "Neither do I," Roman admitted softly.
David turned away from the open doors through which the members of the court had disappeared and gave Roman a long, searching look. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?" he questioned.
"Indeed."
"Let me know if you need my help," David offered as he then made his way through the double doors himself. Roman knew he was talking about Charles Ward and not the werewolf situation. He nodded, just once, and David returned the gesture before disappearing entirely.
Now alone once more, Roman waited a moment in the hollow emptiness of the room. Then he turned, flicking his wrist as he faced the hearth against one wall. The double doors swung gently shut behind him. Flames erupted in the empty fireplace, at once crackling to life and filling the room with a welcome glow.
Roman closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he pressed his palms to the mantle and leaned forward to drop his head.
"Troubled, Roman?"
He'd known she was there. It was the reason he'd started the fire; her old bones preferred the warmth – and he preferred her company. "My sleep has been troubled," he said softly without looking up and without turning around.
"I thought vampires didn't need to sleep," Lalura said, both genuine curiosity and a hint of teasing in her slightly gravelly voice.
Roman's lips cracked a smile. He lifted his head and pushed off of the mantle to turn and face the old witch. She wasn't looking at him. She was eyeing the tall wooden-backed chairs at the meeting table with obvious disdain. Lalura Chantelle preferred much softer seating accommodations.
Roman spoke a few arcane words and zeroed in on the table and chairs. A soft, glittering glow began to emanate from their surfaces. That glow spread, intensified, and then flashed bright white. When it was gone, so were the mahogany table and the unforgiving wooden chairs.
In their place rested the set of double-stuffed love seats Lalura seemed to favor from Roman's study. Between the two seats sat a small glass coffee table, upon which waited a steaming teapot and two empty mugs.
Lalura didn't hesitate and she didn't at all seem surprised. Instead, the tiny, bent woman with long, thick white hair and piercing blue eyes harrumphed as if to say, "That's better," or "Damn straight" and made her way around one of the seats before plopping unceremoniously into it.
She shut her eyes for a moment, sighed to herself, and then pinned the teapot with her blue, blue eyes. "This got the milk in it already?" she asked as she leaned forward and picked up the teapot.
"Of course," Roman replied. He found that the smile she'd placed on his lips moments ago had only grown.
Lalura proceeded to pour the contents of the teapot into each of the mugs, and then picked hers up and waved it under her nose. Roman waited, feeling oddly tense as she seemed to consider the tea. And then she nodded, more to herself than anyone else, and took a tentative sip.
Roman relaxed at once and made his way to the love seat opposite her. He sat down, leaned forward, and placed his elbows on his knees. "To what do I owe the pleasure, Lalura?" he asked.
Lalura eyed him steadily, her expression hard and unreadable. "Give me a break, Roman, I'm ancient, and I'm growing older by the second. You know damn well why I'm here."
Roman's brow lifted. He sat back in the seat and cocked his head to one side. If he'd wanted to, he could have read her thoughts, but he'd always considered it rude to do so without permission or probable cause, and Lalura was the most respectable – and _respected_ – individual he'd ever come to know. To break the trust he had with her would rub him very wrong.
And in this instance, she was right. He knew why she was there. He took a deep breath and said, "I'm dreaming of her."
"I figured," Lalura said. "When you said your sleep was troubled." She paused. "I'm also assuming you're not talking about Ophelia."
Roman turned away from Lalura to gaze out the window across the room. As did all of the windows in his mansion, this one looked out over an inner courtyard. At the center of the courtyard stood a marble fountain, its middle statue of a beautiful woman who gazed longingly up at the night sky.
Two hundred years ago, Roman had been engaged to a young London socialite. She had been very lovely and very sought after. But of all of the men who courted her, she chose him.
Before they could be married, disaster struck. The papers that morning read that a carriage's horses were spooked and the young beauty was killed.
It was so long ago....
"No," he said. "Not Ophelia."
"How long now?" Lalura asked. Roman turned back to her. She was watching him intently over the rim of her steaming mug.
"Since well before your cryptic warning last week," he said, meeting her gaze head-on.
Lalura lowered her mug a touch and lifted her chin. She seemed to hesitate.
Just after the death of the Warlock King and the lift of the werewolf curse that was now causing so many changes in their society, the old witch had paid Roman a visit. And just before she'd left, she'd told him something....
"I know you were playing chess with my pieces again, by the way," she accused.
Roman nodded, just once. "She needed my help."
"Indeed," Lalura agreed. "And on that note, Roman," she said as she raised her hand and prepared to snap. Always the drama. "Someone else out there needs your help more."
And then, with the typical smoke and pixie dust that was Lalura Chantelle, the witch had once more disappeared to leave Roman to his solitude.
Now the Vampire King settled his unsettling gaze on his ancient companion and allowed the seriousness of his emotion to find its way into his calm, deep voice. "Perhaps you should let me in on the joke, Lalura."
Lalura sighed and set down her mug. "I would if I could, Roman," she told him frankly. "The truth is, I know nothing more than you do." She shrugged. "I know that you're meant to help someone. How? When? I haven't a clue. I know that she will play a very important role for you in the days soon to come." She slapped her hands onto her lap. "And that's about the whole enchilada."
Roman considered this and leaned back once more into the cushions of his seat. He thought of the dreams he'd been having. They were indistinct, fractured, and troubling. And in all of them, he saw a set of pain-filled eyes that both mesmerized and infuriated him. He wanted to take their pain away. He wanted to find their owner. He wanted to do things he hadn't thought of doing in ages.
When he awoke, it was always the same. He was angry and he was hungry. He'd been feeding more often of late because of it. If things didn't change soon, he would have to make a kill long before he should have to.
"My advice to you, your majesty," said Lalura as she slowly pushed herself up on to her rickety legs, "would be to get off of your royal ass and try to find that girl."
Roman watched as the witch hobbled around her seat to an open spot in the room. She brushed her robe-like clothes straight and glanced back at the coffee table. The half-full teapot still steamed, forever magically warm. She eyed it greedily, pointed a magic finger at it, and watched it disappear.
"I'll return the pot later." She nodded, as if to herself, and then sighed. "Time's running out, Roman. That much, I do know."
With a grand flourish, the old witch waved her arm above her head. The air began to stir and fill with the vibration of time and space magic. Roman stood. It was customary for a gentleman to stand as a lady entered and left a room.
Lalura looked back over at him and went still, her arm poised ready over her head. "And Roman," she said.
He waited, almost dreading what was about to come.
"It smells like black magic in here."
With that, she snapped her fingers. This time, the air filled with pink crackling, the sound of static, and an unmistakable _zap_ of a transportation spell. Moments later, Lalura was gone.
Chapter Two
"Okay, no let's go back. Just close everything you have open and look down at the screen on your iPhone." Evie tucked her phone beneath her chin for a second, thanked the man behind the counter for her sugar-free vanilla latte, and took her coffee to a more private section of the coffee shop. On the other end of the line, her father had his own iPhone to his ear while he fiddled with her _mother's_ iPhone, mumbling under his breath as he did so. Evie waited. "Are you on the main screen yet?"
She listened. "Okay, now do you see the app icon?" She blinked. "What's an icon? Well, it's just one of the little symbols on the main screen of the phone. Yeah, that. Okay, so tap on that." She waited again. "You need to do a search for the Kindle app now..... A search? Just type in what you're looking for. In the search bar. It looks like, well, an empty space where you type something. Like a Google bar. Yes, it has a magnifying glass on it. Okay, so tap on the search bar and then type in Kindle."
Evie took a second to sip on her coffee, closed her eyes with the warm, delicious comfort of it, and continued to listen to her father on the other end. "It should be free. Yes. Click on it."
Evie glanced up as another group of people entered the shop. The chilled mist of the Portland, Oregon morning curled in behind them, and everyone in the store hunkered down into their sweaters for a moment as the doors let in the December cold.
The door shut behind the newcomers, but then opened again, almost to a collective groan to the shop's patrons. But when Evie saw who walked through the door, her stomach tightened and chemicals released in her brain. He was decidedly handsome. Even from across the shop, she could tell he had distinctive, vivid eyes. Green, maybe – it was hard to tell at this distance. Or a very light blue. Evie was an eye girl. Nothing made her melt like an intense set of peepers.
The man moved forward so that the door could close behind him and then scanned the inhabitants of the coffee shop. When he got to Evie, he paused, their gazes caught, and Evie felt a flush of something warm across her chest. Light blue, then.
But her father was saying something to her through her phone's speaker.
"What was that dad?" She looked down, looked back up, and found that the stranger was still looking at her. He smiled, flashing beautiful white teeth. Heat infused Evie's face and she hastily looked back down at the floor. _Stupid_ , she thought. _You could have at least smiled back_. "Yes, you'll need to enter your password," she said into her phone, feeling as though she were torn between two realities. "I don't know what your password is. No, dad. You don't remember it? Maybe try a few different things?" Evie bit her lip. Something was slipping away.
She chanced another look up to find that the handsome newcomer was now at the counter and ordering his own drink. It gave her a chance to look him over. He was tall and slim and had nice shoulders. Strong jaw and chin. Thick blond-brown hair cut stylishly.... She frowned. "What? It did what? Well, okay. Just start over again then. Wait," she said, as a twinge of pain suddenly struck between her eyes. If she'd had a free hand, she would have pinched the bridge of her nose. As it was, however, she was holding her coffee cup with one hand, the phone with the other, and her laptop was tucked precariously beneath her elbow. "Let me get outside," she sighed.
And with that, she gave up on the stranger with the beautiful eyes, exited through the coffee shop's second door onto the frigid, deserted patio, and resigned herself once again to being single. Not that she'd actually had a chance at being anything but single just because a handsome coffee drinker had walked in at the same time that she'd been there – but that was how it felt at that very moment.
Evie had known that they would hit a snag somewhere. It was never easy when it came to helping her parents through the technological labyrinth of every day modern life. It wasn't easy when it came to helping her parents at _all_ , in fact.
Her mother was sixty-two and disabled due to a brain tumor surgery several years earlier. Her father was sixty-six and in constant pain due to advanced arthritis. The two had filed bankruptcy four years earlier and Evie, being the oldest child in the family and the only one who was either mentally or financially available to her parents, had suddenly found herself in the position of caregiver.
On the one hand, there was a lot of serendipity involved with the circumstance. Her parents' financial situation hit the skids at the same time that Amazon released Kindle and self-publishing became a possibility. If that hadn't been the case, Evie wouldn't have been able to do what she did for them. She was fortunate enough to be able to make money doing something she was really good at and loved to do, and that career had allowed her sick and tired parents to throw in the towel and stop killing themselves at a dry cleaning business that should have been burned to the ground a decade earlier.
It filled Evie with a sense of pride and peace to be able to send them a check every month. She was lucky.
At the same time, she was an indie author publishing her own work, and it was a lot of work at that. To keep up with her current fiscal demands, she needed to publish a book every two months. That meant writing a three to four-hundred page book in a month and a half and spending the rest of the time editing, creating an effective cover, marketing the work, corresponding with readers, producing video trailers, and posting the book online.
Over the last few years, she'd cut down on a lot of things that she used to spend more time doing – like bike riding and roller blading. Working out in general had more or less fallen by the wayside. Evie was blessed with a small body and a fast metabolism, not to mention a penchant for strong coffee, so burning the calories was fortunately never a problem. Plus, she had nice curves that always seemed to carry the occasional extra weight with grace. But she did sometimes worry about her heart.
Especially since she'd also given up on sleep because it was in the darkest hours of night that inspiration struck the hardest. She never caught up on the lost sleep because during the day, she had responsibilities. She worked part-time at a no-kill shelter in town, where the animals came into custody in droves and there were never enough beds for them all.
When she wasn't at the shelter, she was helping her parents with the scheduling of doctor visits and obtaining the proper prescriptions, making phone calls to attorneys and accountants, marketing herself on Twitter, keeping up with readers and fans on Facebook and through email, and attending to the plethora of everyday tasks everyone had to tend to such as laundry and dishes and vacuuming.
There were mornings that she awoke alone in her bed and imagined what it would be like to wake up in a man's arms. But she was an author. Many very famous authors had been quoted as saying that family and writing did not mix. Evie was afraid to give too much of herself over to the task of "finding" someone. It would take time, it would take energy, and Evie hadn't a lot of either of them these days.
There were brief, blink-like moments when she felt pangs of jealousy for the couple in the grocery store picking out veggies together or the family in the park feeding the ducks. She was thirty and had yet to settle down with anyone, much less have children. But then she remembered that she already had two other mouths to feed, and she tended to get over it pretty quickly. The loneliness remained; a hollow feeling where there should possibly have been something else. But she'd gotten very good at ignoring it and moving on.
She moved on not only because she was used to it, but because a part of her preferred it that way. It made no sense, but she'd always been like this. She'd had plenty of opportunities to form lasting "friendships" in high school and in college. But there was always something keeping her from making more of it. The boys were... not.... Quite frankly, they were all too human and fallible. It was the drama queen, the creative freak, and the imagination junkie in Evie that forced her to want more in her mate.
And that nonstop inner yearning for the impossible, for the vampires or werewolves or archangels she wrote about incessantly, had certainly contributed to her single status. She was helpless. So, she shrugged it off when it happened.
Like right now.
It would never have worked out with coffee shop boy. He was human just like all the others.
Evie took a deep, somewhat painful breath of frosty air, put her paper cup of coffee down on the metal round table in the coffee shop's patio, and switched her phone to her other ear. "Okay, listen dad and I'll walk you through it again."
Her coffee was going to get cold. It was just going to be that kind of day.
*****
Charles watched as the woman across the shop exited through the backdoors and onto the patio outside. Frost covered the cement and most of the black wrought-iron tables, but she put her coffee and laptop down nonetheless and seemed to accept the fated cold. She was tough. That much was clear from the get-go.
She was also very fetching. The warlock seer hadn't told him about that part. She was a petite thing, perhaps only coming to five feet and two or three inches. She was curvy in all of the right places and in such a way that made every one of her movements more feminine, more alluring. Her thick, lustrous brown hair fell in waves over her shoulders and down her back. It shone with natural health and begged to be touched. Long, thick lashes framed eyes that were a combination of dark and light; they were brown, almost black, but both ringed and flecked with flakes of gold. The contrast was intensely alluring.
At first glance, a man would be surprised not to find a ring on her finger. But Charles had been reading her thoughts for the last five minutes, and the reasons for her single status had been made very clear. There was something almost supernatural about her, despite her obvious mortality, and that part of her was most unsatisfied by what the mortal world had to offer her.
_Interesting_ , he thought.
There was more, too. She was committed enough to too many things in her life already, and very honestly feared a further commitment of any kind. The fact that she'd hurriedly escaped through the backdoor was proof enough of that. She literally ran from the slightest chance of companionship.
Charles took an unnecessary sip of his coffee and was able to get it down thanks to more magic. Offspring lived under a host of spells from day to day, some of them constant and eternal, some of them re-cast upon awakening in the morning or evening. So many of them existed amongst the humans and under the same guise, eating in front of mortals had become a necessary illusion, and one perfected long ago.
Charles moved to the side of the shop that she had vacated and sat down at an empty round table. He could feel the eyes of several of the girls in the store on him; he was used to it. Offspring attracted attention everywhere they went. There was a magnetism to them that was undeniable, and he was certainly no different. Normally, he would scan the area for an interesting mind and scope out that night's entertainment. But this morning, his attention was riveted on the young woman who'd just left, and he easily ignored the others.
Evelynne Grace Farrow. That was her name. He plucked it from the depths of her consciousness as he listened to her speak to her father. The man's distant voice was enough to convey that he lived out of town – four or five hundred miles, in fact. He was out of state. Possibly in Montana.
Charles continued to eavesdrop, taking the occasional sip of his coffee, until he heard something that concerned him. She was planning on going to visit her parents. They were sick, and driving had become difficult for them. They had medical appointments coming up.
This would not do. Nothing must interrupt the sequence of events that would lead to the culmination of Charles' plan.
He narrowed his gaze thoughtfully. Outside, Evelynne hung up her phone, picked up her laptop and coffee, and headed toward the parking lot. Charles stood and discreetly followed.
She made her way to a Ford pickup truck on the far end of the parking lot and used her coffee hand to fish a set of keys from the front pocket of her jeans. It wasn't a new vehicle; he could tell by the slight fading of the paint and the older style of the chrome accents. Even from where he stood, he caught the scents of animal all around it. She'd washed it, but clearly used it to transport dogs and cats from point A to point B. Still, there were no visible dents or dings. She'd taken good care of it and seemed to be a safe driver.
Once she had the car door open and was putting her things inside, Charles began to chant. He spoke softly and made certain his back was turned toward the coffee shop's windows. In the truck, Evelynne, who apparently went by Evie with friends and her parents, turned her key in the ignition.
Nothing happened.
Charles smiled. The truck's engine was dead and his spell had worked.
Evie tried again, and again failed. He concentrated on the sounds coming from the truck's cab and almost chuckled when he heard her softly swear under her breath. He watched as her lovely little profile put its head on the steering wheel in temporary defeat.
A few seconds later, she straightened and began dialing a number on her phone.
"Hi dad, it's me. I'm having some car trouble. Yeah. I did get the oil changed; I always do that. Dad, listen – I may be late getting to Billings." She sighed heavily. "I might not make it at all, in fact." She was silent for a moment and then continued. "I'll call Beth. She might be able to help you this week, okay?" More silence. "I love you too. Bye."
Charles tossed his coffee cup into the nearest trash receptacle and headed toward his own vehicle, a black Escalade with dark tinted windows. He glanced in his rearview mirror as he pulled out of the lot. Evie was still behind the wheel of her non-working truck.
Problem one averted.
His smile was back as he pulled out into traffic and down the busy street.
Chapter Three
Roman sat back in the leather seat of the Lincoln Town Car limousine and took a deep breath. Lalura was right, of course. He needed to actively search for the angel who haunted his dreams and plagued his every waking thought of late.
The world had become a more dangerous place ever since the lifting of the werewolf curse. It was a good thing that the wolves would no longer have to struggle so hard to remain amongst the living and that the women were no longer weak compared to their male brethren.
The Hunters were everywhere. The Curse Breaker, Katherine Dare, soon to be Katherine Caige, had unleashed a whirlwind of power, both good and bad. Roman couldn't help but wonder what part his little dream angel played in all of it. Why did she need his help? What kind of trouble was she in? Where was she?
How did he find her?
Lalura had initially spoken of her weeks ago, and at that time he had already been dreaming of her. But Lalura was not a seer. What she "sensed" about the world was purely due to the fact that she was so old and so seeped in the legerdemain, the fabric of her spirit constructed a part of its web. It was natural for fragments to get stuck in it every once in a while. And when they did, she said something, just as she had with him.
But that was all she could do. If Roman wanted further answers from a magic user, he was going to have to go somewhere else. Which was what he was doing now.
In the driver's seat, Roman's longtime and loyal servant pulled the car out of the mansion's lot and into the busy streets of Portland beyond.
This location was one of many in which Roman kept a careful and constant vigil over his realm. The mansion was a public place, maintained for meetings and for entertaining guests. His _actual_ home, the one to which he retreated when all was said and done and the deepest kind of exhaustion made its way into his soul, was much different, and he alone knew of its existence.
Roman D'Angelo was a very powerful king amongst very powerful men. Among mortals, positions of power were constantly the focus of underhanded plotting and political back-stabbing. It was no different among those in the supernatural community, and in fact could often be worse. For this reason, Roman took nothing for granted. And because he took nothing for granted, he'd been king for thousands of years.
"My Lord, we will be arriving at the train station shortly," the intercom sounded. He would take the train to Trinidad, California, where Lucas Caige and the witch known as the Healer currently resided. The Healer's best friend was the herald of her coven, and Roman had a feeling it would be the best place to start. That particular coven had seen a lot of hardship and action and they knew of the existence of the Offspring. At the very least, diplomatic dealings with them would be less difficult than they would with other covens.
Roman could have transported there, but there was no reason to. If he wanted, he could transport _everywhere_. Eventually, a soul yearned for some sense of normality, and Roman liked trains anyway.
He turned away from the car's interior to look out the window. It was late afternoon and the winter sun was already setting. It was at times like this that Roman couldn't help but think of the traditional vampire and the way the world perceived it. If he'd been what Hollywood wanted him to be, he would only be rising now.
How little did they know.
Something strange and foreboding suddenly flashed through Roman's brain as if in warning, and he found himself straightening. He sat up, his expression darkening.
"My Lord? Are you well?" Jaxon asked from the front seat.
Roman held up his hand as if to say, "I'm fine," but the warning sensation sliced through him yet again, and he lowered his hand.
"Jax, stop the car," he whispered.
Jaxon, being a vampire as well, heard him very clearly despite his quiet tone. Without question and without hesitation, the driver began to pull the long black limousine over to the side of the road.
The turnoff for a driveway offered a convenient escape from the traffic, and Jaxon took it. Roman watched the car turn with only half of his attention. The rest was focused inward, where something nasty was unwinding. His heart was hammering; it hadn't done that in ages. His senses were prickling. His hearing was becoming sharper and expanding outward in an ever growing radius.
Cars honked outside. Engines rumbled. A dog was barking in the yard of a house several blocks down. The traffic lights hummed. Someone spoke into the receiver of a speaker at a drive-thru. Horses' hooves clopped.
Roman frowned. Horses' hooves?
He reached for his door handle and was climbing out before Jaxon could realize what he was doing. The driver scrambled to catch up, popping open his own door and rushing to his king's side. Roman barely noticed him. His dark, dark eyes scanned the street and sidewalks. He moved away from the car to round a group of trees and Jaxon was immediately moving with him, as if it were his job to act as not only driver but bodyguard to the king.
It wasn't pride that had Roman admitting to himself that he was the last vampire on earth who needed a bodyguard. There was a reason he'd become king in the first place. But Jaxon meant well, and Roman certainly didn't mind the company.
"Is that a horse-drawn carriage?" Roman asked as he stood at the corner of the intersection and peered across two streets to the parking lot of a mall two blocks down.
"Yes, I believe it is, My Lord," Jaxon replied.
The holidays were upon the mortal world. Street lights were wrapped in tinsel streamers and wreaths hung from the traffic light cords up above. Tiny holiday lights lit up windows and trees in front of businesses, families were dressed in red overcoats bedecked in holiday pins, and pictures of Santa Claus and menorahs could be seen in advertisements upon every city block.
Roman's gaze narrowed in on the horse-drawn carriage and the giggling family riding in the back and he realized that this was yet another holiday attraction for the mortal world. Some businesses must be selling "sleigh rides," and children would of course jump at the chance to get up close and personal with the horses and wave at the drivers who passed them by. It didn't matter that there was no snow on the ground; it was the spirit of the thing they would love.
That warning sensation struck at Roman again. For a split second, he thought of the Hunters and their new leader. But he didn't feel any of their kind around him. This was not a premeditated danger. This was different.
He stood stock-still, staring long and hard at the horses and the open carriage they pulled. As he did, memories assaulted him, caveat niggled at him, and the magic channels inside of him opened up, readying for what might lay ahead.
"Jaxon, remain with the car," Roman ordered, his concern not for the car but for his servant.
"Yes sir," Jaxon replied, though the tightness in his voice made it clear that he didn't like the idea of being left behind if his king was about to waltz into some kind of danger.
Roman's black camel hair trench coat whipped in a sudden wind as he made his way down the sidewalk toward the mall's parking lot. He could feel that the people around him were struck by his appearance. He made an imposing figure; always had. From the top of his very black hair to his black trench coat and dark gray suit, he was the image of a very wealthy, very charismatic and powerful businessman alone on a sidewalk in the dark of night. There were only so many kinds of men who could foot that particular bill.
He could smell the disease in some people – and the alcohol in others. The partying had begun early this night, it would seem.
A sharp, hard wave of treachery rolled through Roman, drawing him to a sudden halt on the sidewalk. He spun just as the atmosphere changed. Time seemed to hiccup; it froze – and then jumped into hyper speed. There was no screeching of tires, no applying of brakes to lessen the impact before the collision occurred. The sound of metal crunching on metal was deafening.
Roman had lived through countless generations and just as many horrible happenstances. The sudden stench of disaster, the way time slipped and slithered, and the chaotic echo of death were nothing new to Roman, and so it was with a practiced ease unlike any other that the words of a spell slipped past his lips and infiltrated the horror-struck atmosphere.
Up ahead, beneath the long curve of an overpass, a turning, twisting car that had been vaulted into the air by another vehicle was suddenly halted in its skyward progress. It froze in the air, an anomaly to nature, a joke at gravity's expense. It was an impossibility, and yet it was nothing more than a passing whim for the vampire who controlled it down below.
On the street underneath the suspended automobile, another car had burst into flame. Roman quenched the fire, choked the blaze, and dispersed the smoke into thin air. A third vehicle rolled onto its side, its momentum driving it further and further down the street, half on the sidewalk, half on the tarmac. Roman stilled the car, lifted it onto its flattened tires, and focused on the man behind the wheel.
Alcohol tainted the blood that dripped from the man's multiple wounds. Roman turned away from him, scanned the unconscious body of the woman in the airborne car, and found a concussion. He lowered the car gently to the ground on a patch of grass in front of a closed bank. Nearby, the couple in the no-longer-flaming sedan were more or less unharmed, but very shaken up.
The whispers came then. Those whispers turned into chatter that eventually became shouts and cries of disbelief. Chaos was spinning to life, people diving for cell phones, dialing numbers, trying to film the proceedings.
Roman closed his eyes.
Within seconds, he had infiltrated the mind of every man, woman and child on the streets in a half-mile radius. He prepared to erase their memories, clean their thoughts of all trace of his interference...
And that was when he sensed her.
His eyes flew open. Her presence there amongst the others felt like spotting a white butterfly amongst a sea of black moths. She was stark and clean; a light for him to see by. He couldn't help but focus upon her.
He turned – but it was too late. There, where the horse drawn carriage had been coasting steadily along with its passengers seconds before, the passengers were now sprawled on the parking lot ground and the carriage dragged and sparked along behind a pair of horses that had gone insane.
A mother cried out, pushed herself up from the ground, and dove for her son. Roman was in the mother's mind; he knew her thoughts and could have controlled her, but not without great effort. A desperate mother trying to protect her child was the most difficult kind of mind to subjugate. He held back, watching with a growing sense of unease.
The child rolled, reached up, and the mother had him. They ran for the safety of cars nearby as the horses bucked and the carriage went flying. _BANG_. It smacked into a nearby car, smashing the headlight and breaking the windshield. And then the horses were running again.
And Roman saw where they were headed.
_Oh God,_ he heard. The voice was unmistakable. It was smooth and a little husky. It was familiar and somehow precious. His vision focused, zoomed in. There at the other end of the parking lot and directly in the horses' crazed path stood the angel from his dreams.
He'd never seen all of her before. He'd only seen her eyes. He'd only felt the spirit of her, strong and special. He'd only heard her speak unintelligible words that were both indistinct and maddeningly beautiful. He'd only ever sensed the desperation in her.
Desperation she was now feeling very strongly.
Roman couldn't control the minds of nonhuman animals. If he could have, he would have done so. Instead, he moved.
Offspring possessed immense, incredible, mind-blowing speed. The stronger of his kind could move in such a way that they seemed to blur to the humans around them. Roman's body disappeared from all natural sight in that moment – and reappeared before his dream angel, directly in-between her and the horses.
The past assaulted him and he stared it down. He saw it in the eyes of the spooked animals and heard it in the thrum of their hooves. And the strange thing was, he hadn't been there the morning Ophelia had been run over. He hadn't even been able to bring himself to lift the lid and peer into her coffin at the funeral. Yet, there he was, living her demise all over again.
Behind him, he heard the woman gasp.
_Evelynne_. He caught her name, ripped it from her vast, compelling mind, and memorized it in the same instant that he spun, grabbed her around the waist, and took her to the skies. The air erupted around him, casting itself into a vicious wind that propelled him upward and held him aloft. In his arms, Evelynne went stiff.
At once he was flooding her with his power, sending her into a deep hypnosis. But even as he worked, he noticed things. It was disturbing. He'd never been bothered by mortal things before. He'd never experienced the weakness of human distraction. But he noted the way she felt beneath his palms, beneath his fingertips. She was soft and yielding and warm. She filled him with the urge to hold her tighter – to squeeze her to him.
He heard her heartbeat, monitored it as it slowed from its breakneck pace to the even rhythm of trance, and to him it sounded like a lullaby. _Confounding_. His own pulse beat in time with the thoughts in her head as if they were the harmony, and his heart the drum.
The gold ring around her dark irises struck him with some kind of spiritual solidarity. They looked like a promise, freely given, and called out for some like commitment of the eternal kind.
He wanted to give it. Right there, in the dark cold night, with the scent of her cherry blossoms all around him, he wanted to pledge his soul.
And he didn't even know her, this stranger from his dreams.
Yes you do.
The moment pulled at him and begged to be further explored. He was in her head, and it was a strange place filled with alluring passageways and countless tributaries of creativity that he itched to go down. There was also something different there, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. It was like a light at the end of a long tunnel or an object moving in his periphery vision. He couldn't place it, and it would take time to do so.
But there were injured mortals below them, and a host of memories to erase. Reality tugged at him, relentless in its desire to go on. There was nothing for it.
Roman returned to the Earth, his form and that of Evelynne's like descending angels – his considerably darker than hers.
When he touched down, Jaxon was beside him in an instant. "My Lord?" he questioned softly, respectfully. He looked from his king to the woman in his arms, his calm eyes taking in her small form and the way he clutched her to him so protectively. Roman couldn't blame the man for wondering.
Evelynne's soft hair brushed Roman's face as the wind caught it and blew a few strands about her like a halo. The cherry blossom scent grew stronger.
She radiated heat where his hands so strongly gripped her small waist. Her right breast pressed temptingly against his left bicep, and quite suddenly, Roman had the incredibly strong urge to hold on forever. She was precious and vulnerable.
And essential.
In front of them, Jaxon continued to look on with questions in his eyes. The world behind them waited to resume its pace, and the Vampire King was not himself. He was draining himself holding onto all of their human minds for so long, suspending them in that mental bubble of time, but he barely noticed and he couldn't have cared. Evelynne's small, curvy body seemed to pulse with absolute life and even power. It was as if she could forever sustain the strength he needed to use his magic – just by being close to him like this.
"Jaxon," Roman finally forced himself to speak. "Take her." It was an order much more difficult than it should have been. "Put her in the car and keep her under, but be gentle." His look meant business, but there was no doubt that Jaxon could tell all on his own that Roman's feelings toward the woman were, for lack of a better term, very deep.
"Yes, My Lord," Jaxon replied respectfully as he slowly moved forward and almost lovingly put his arms around Evelynne's hypnotized form.
"I will see to the others," Roman continued. "There are injuries."
If there had been a werewolf nearby or if the Healer had been in the vicinity, they would have helped those who had been hurt. Thousands of humans everywhere who believed they'd been in accidents only to miraculously walk away from them without so much as a scratch were actually the secret beneficiaries of supernatural aid. They would never know that they'd received a taste of werewolf blood or that Dannai Caige, the Healer, had laid her hands on them to cure them of their wounds. They knew what the supernatural world wanted them to know – only that they were very lucky.
But werewolves were hard to come by, despite the turning of the curse recently, and the Healer was only one woman, so ninety-nine percent of the time, it was up to _humans_ to help humans.
"Make certain that the medics arrive," Roman instructed. Jaxon would give them a call while Roman took care of the more difficult business of setting everything right and erasing people's memories.
The servant nodded. "I will, sir." But he gave the king a look that was part reassurance and part gently beseeching. Roman frowned. He looked down – and then realized that he hadn't freely released Evelynne from his hold.
_Evie_ , he thought. That was what her friends and family called her. It danced through his mind like a butterfly. He stared at his own hand where it still held possessively to Evie's wrist. His gaze narrowed on it as if the appendage were no longer under his control. And then, as he felt the fangs behind his lips lengthen, he let her go. It nearly hurt to do so.
"I'll see that she's safe My Lord," Jax reassured once more as he again wrapped his arms gently around Evelynne and led her toward the waiting limousine. She went without question and without a fight; Roman's power made sure of that. Her striking gaze was unseeing and her lips were parted slightly. She was submissive and subdued in his vampire trance, and Roman felt an uncomfortable stirring as he watched another man handle her, no matter how careful that handling might be.
Jaxon tucked Evie into the back of the limo, and Roman shut his eyes, cursing inwardly. There was a royal mess behind him that needed tending to, and he'd wasted an inordinate amount of time. All because of this stranger who had come to him in his dreams.
The Vampire King had no idea what it could mean. He had no clue as to what part this woman was going to play in his life or why she affected him the way she did. But he would find out.
As he turned and almost ruthlessly infiltrated the minds of every human on the accident scene, Evelynne Grace Farrow was all he could think about.
Chapter Four
Jason Alberich felt the weight of inordinate amounts of magic press in around him as his form began to materialize in the dark abandoned alley several blocks down from the designated meeting area. He wasn't even at the hotel yet, and already he could tell that more power had gathered in New York than he'd ever before encountered.
The meeting would be held at six p.m., just after sunset. Jason casually brushed his hand over the lapel of his black sports coat and then exited the alley. There were probably ten thousand different ways he could have come to the meeting, ten thousand different first impressions he could have made. However, he was one of the Thirteen now. Once a member, a member for life. There was no point in being anything but himself.
New York was cold in December. He'd known it would be so and he'd taken the trouble to cast a protective spell upon himself to keep the worst of it at bay. Even so, his breath steamed the air as he made his way down the busy sidewalk.
The feeling of heady power grew stronger and the crowd got thicker when he entered a more heavily populated area of the city. At points, it seemed he was working against the flow, an individual man weaving through an ocean of faces. Each had a look of stark concentration, and none were smiling. He knew that the cold had something to do with it; the streets were part wet and part frozen, and the combination was painful. But there was more to it than a natural disdain of the weather. These people were headed somewhere for some purpose and needed to be there by some time, and it was miserably clear that they'd rather be doing something else.
This was where they usually were, here on these streets, no matter what the season. And that meant that this was how they spent the majority of their lives. A humongous fraction of their precious, short existence spent in misery and disappointment. For what?
It was perplexing to Jason and always had been. He'd never denied himself the things that made him happy. Perhaps it was that willingness to take life by the balls and make it your slave that cast a wizard into a warlock's darker colors. If that was the case, then so be it. He was a warlock through and through.
"It's better than being unhappy," he muttered to himself.
"Does that mean you're finally happy then, Jason?" came an all-too-familiar voice.
Jason stopped in his tracks and stared down at the woman who looked like a cross between a dwarf and an elf and who had, until recently, been an elder in his coven. She stood in the middle of the flow of bodies, and for all the world, it seemed as though they moved around her like water, affording her and Jason a wide girth and a generous bubble of space in a place where there wasn't much to spare.
"Lalura." The shock of seeing her there so suddenly moved through him, wore off quickly, and was replaced at once by wariness. Lalura's question seemed too on the spot to have been born of his single spoken sentence. It was as if she'd been following along with his thoughts. "Are you reading my mind now?" he asked, not at all sure that he'd be surprised if she was. She was a very unpredictable and exceedingly ancient witch.
Lalura Chantelle waved her hand dismissively and rolled her eyes. " _Gods_ , no. That would really be the shits. I can only imagine what kinds of nonsense I would be pulling off of all of these people. New York," she said with a shake of her head, "is not a place you want to be reading people's minds."
The rest of the world ignored them, continuing to flow around them like an oblivious river.
"Why are you here?" Jason asked.
"To check on you, of course," Lalura said easily. She hobbled forward a few steps, closing the distance between them. Jason held his ground, towering over her by a good two and a half feet. "You happened upon this position by accident, Jason. You're a warlock, yes," she said, taking a deep breath and sighing. "But you're not Malachi Wraythe."
Jason's lips twitched. "Am I supposed to take that as an insult or a compliment?" he asked softly. Despite his quiet tone, his words carried clearly in the cacophony of pedestrian and street traffic.
"It's meant as neither," Lalura answered. "It's an observation. Warlocks work in the confines of a darker kind of magic, Jason," she said, her tone now becoming more personal. "You were thrust into position of king due to the fact that with Wraythe's death, you now have more of this kind of power than any other living warlock. Why?" She shrugged. "I have no idea. You were born with it and that power is also growing, like everything else is these days." She glanced around her, seemed to contemplate something else for a moment, and then turned back to Jason. "And perhaps it's unimportant. The important thing is that you're now in charge of a whole host of black magic users." She paused, narrowed her stark blue gaze, and added, "And you're about to meet the other kings."
"You know about the meeting then."
She just looked at him.
Jason smiled a toothy smile. "Of course you do."
"Be forewarned, kiddo," she told him then as she suddenly turned around and began to walk away through the crowd, her afforded bubble following her as she went. "There's more of the supernatural in that one room than you'll see in all the combined days of the rest of your long life."
Jason watched her go. For a second, the bubble of humanity closed in around her, and when it opened again, Lalura Chantelle was gone.
Jason lifted his chin and took a deep breath through his nose. For a few seconds more, he stared at the spot where she had disappeared, considering her words. She was right, of course, but her warning had been unnecessary. Jason was well aware of what he was about to experience.
The Thirteen were the Thirteen Kings. One or two of them, he was now familiar with, such as the Vampire King Roman D'Angelo. D'Angelo was arguably the most powerful member of the Thirteen, but it was arguable for good reason. Every King was notable in some manner.
Jason also knew of the Akyri king, a fairly ruthless man with an insatiable appetite for women. There were a few he'd heard rumor of, such as the Shadow, Dragon, and Phantom Kings. There was talk of turning the Thirteen into the Fourteen by inviting the werewolf Overseer into the fold, but as of now, the issue was on the table, most likely due to the fact that Jesse Graves was not the kind of man to want to have anything to do with politics of any kind and had only happened upon the position of Overseer through a kind of bequeathing.
The other Kings were complete strangers to Jason's knowledge; he didn't even know what they were kings _of_. This would be his first time meeting _any_ of them personally. It was sure to be an experience he would never forget.
The Warlock King took another deep breath and moved forward to continue his way down the busy sidewalk. The smell of curry, taxi exhaust, and trash bins was too strong to be completely drowned out by the cold. Jason's ice-green eyes scanned the crowd as he moved; the magic in the air had him on high alert. His fingers twitched, his jaw tensed.
And then he saw her.
She was waving down a taxi, her long, slim form rushing to the curb to meet it half-way. He stopped in his tracks, his chest suddenly tight. She smiled a gorgeous, white-toothed smile at the taxi driver, tucked a stray lock of blond hair behind her right ear, and readjusted the purse over her shoulder as she opened the backdoor.
It was a big purse; a travel bag. She was going away.
The realization struck Jason with an inordinate amount of stress. A kind of separation anxiety burgeoned inside of him, both freezing him to the spot and filling him with the urge to rush forward, grab her by the arm, and send the taxi on its way.
She paused, glanced over her shoulder just once, and her tropical sea foam eyes roved over the crowd until they met his.
He caught her gaze and held it.
At once, he recognized who – or rather _what_ – she was. He'd never seen her before in his life, and yet even from this distance, he could feel the darkness in her aura. Outwardly, she was a stunning smile and long golden hair and eyes the color of the Pacific shore. But on the inside, she was hungry. She was an Akyri. She looked nothing like her kind normally looked; Akyri were usually dark from head to foot. But he recognized the signature on her soul nonetheless.
He could tell it had been too long since she'd last fed from a warlock. Her own essence was weak, more mortal now than immortal. No Akyri that he'd ever known had gone as long as she apparently had without benefiting from the symbiotic relationship of a warlock's power.
And she was running away.
As he stared her down, fear, palpable and real, crossed her beautiful features. He saw her swallow hard and watched her upper lip twitch with decided nervousness before she broke eye contact, spun on her heel, and hurried into the back of the cab, slamming the door shut behind her.
Alarm shot through Jason.
_I can't let her get away_ , he thought.
But the taxi was pulling from the curb, and more importantly, if he went after her, he would be late for the meeting.
Still, he was torn. Turning up late for the first time in front of the Thirteen would be all kinds of stupid. But the unique Akyri beauty with the ocean eyes was speeding away in a yellow car that blended with the thousands of other cars around it. And she wasn't coming back.
An unprecedented rage spurned by shocking panic surged through Jason's mind, releasing tendrils of his magic. It was as if he had no control over it. Without premeditation, he infiltrated the receding taxi, whispering the words to a spell that would afford him glimpses of his target's thoughts.
... _a warlock... but gone now... it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay..._
Jason's green gaze narrowed, taking on an eerie, bright cast. He focused, concentrated, and shot deeper.
Thoughts of escape, of sanctuary and solitude, skirted through her mind. She saw an ocean, much the same color as her eyes, and she saw an empty beach. Jason felt her lean against the back seat of the cab and exhale softly as she let her mind wander. The car was pulling out of his spell's range now, but just before the connection was lost, he heard a single word, breathed like a mental sigh.
Maui.
Jason pulled his power back, straightened, and smiled a slow, triumphant smile. He knew where she was going. It made no sense that he should care. He had no idea who she was. He hadn't even pulled her name from her thoughts before leaving them. She was a stranger in every sense of the word but one. He knew she was an Akyri and he could feel the predatory pull of her flight. Men couldn't help but want to chase what ran from them.
Jason was no different. If anything, the dominant in him enjoyed it more. And the Akyri pulled at him as nothing ever had in his life. Not even Dannai had filled him with the urges he was experiencing just then, in that decisive moment.
_Run away_ , he thought tauntingly. _Run, run as fast as you can_.
Still smiling, he turned back to the sidewalk and continued to make his way down the street.
A few minutes later, the Akyri had taken a back seat in his mind to the situation directly at hand. Jason passed through the revolving glass doors that led to the marble-floored lobby beyond. He didn't pause at the security desk and didn't slow as he passed through the metal detectors. His magic pulsed around him, protecting him from the sight of both cameras and man as he made his way to the elevators and waved his hand over the button.
At once, a set of gold-gilded double doors slid open. Jason stepped inside, once more waving his hand over the buttons on the inside. Every one of the dozens of floors lit up at once. Jason's gaze narrowed on them. He released a last pulse of his power, and a final button appeared beneath the others. It was unlabeled. Jason pressed it, it lit up a bright red, then orange, then yellow, until it had highlighted every color of the rainbow. And then Jason felt the elevator budge into gentle motion. It was impossible to tell whether it was headed up or down; the sensation was unlike that of a normal elevator.
Jason moved to the center of the elevator, closed his eyes, and corralled his power around him. The elevator came to a stop, dinged softly, and the doors slid open once more. Jason opened his eyes.
"Welcome, warlock," came the most charismatic voice Jason had ever heard. Jason nodded respectfully and stepped off of the elevator.
Chapter Five
Evie blew out a frustrated sigh. She'd been sitting in the same spot, her fingers poised over the keyboard for at least five minutes. It never took her this long to figure out what to write. The words were there, swimming through her mind, but none of them would pair up properly. It was all nonsense.
It didn't help that the trio of teenage boys at the next table couldn't stop describing the gore of some horror flick in vivid and very loud detail. That was distracting, to say the least. But it wasn't just that.
For the most part, the words in her head were nonsense because the last two days of her life had been a strange sort of blur. She didn't drink or take recreational drugs, but she could have sworn that what she'd suffered was like a kind of blackout.
One minute, she'd been crossing a parking lot to the grocery store – the next, she'd been waking up in her bed as usual, warm and comfortable and a little more sleepy than normal. She couldn't help but wonder whether the events of the night before had been a dream. Dreams often went unfinished. It would make sense.
But since then, she'd been experiencing... _flashes_ of things. They were like bits of a movie reel separated from the rest of the film and highlighted for only a second. She saw horses, or smelled and heard them anyway. There was wind. Holiday lights.
And a man.
Evie closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep, shaky breath, and sat back in her chair, dropping her arms. The man was all-encompassing.
Evie had always had vivid dreams. Some of those dreams contained men in them, men so charismatic that they'd earned special places in her stories and books. Entire series had been plotted around some of them, in fact.
But never before in her life had she dreamed of a man like this. He was quite literally inconceivable. She never could have made him up on the fly or on her own. Most frustrating of all was that despite the fact that this man was positively the most powerful persona she'd ever witnessed in a dream, she couldn't seem to find the right way to bring him to life. She desperately wanted to use him for her writing. But instead... it seemed he was using her.
"... No, man, the shit was coming out of her mouth then 'cuz her throat was sewed on to that dude's..."
_Crap_ , Evie thought furiously. She'd never been more tempted to tell someone to shut up. It was fortunate for the boys behind her that there were no children around; they would have afforded Evie the excuse she needed to get nasty.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Almost at once, she saw _him_ again. It was just a flash, but so powerful, so omnipresent, it honestly felt as though he was watching her then and there.
_If I could put people like him to paper, I'd sell like Malcolm Cole_ , she thought. The thriller writer, Malcolm Cole, had dominated the New York Times bestsellers list for years and probably would for years to come. His descriptions of people and places were so in-depth and three-dimensional, it was as if the author had experienced them himself. Evie would give just about anything to be as good as he was. As _successful_ as he was.
She bit her lip and racked her brain for more memory detail. But all she could come up with was what she witnessed in those strange, fast flashes. A gleaming, expensive wrist watch. The smell of high-end cologne or aftershave. He was taller than her – _way_ taller. She could just barely make out the perception of his form in front of her, larger than life and... and...
Evie made a small sound of frustration and ran a hard hand through her brown hair. It tangled almost at once, and she remembered that she hadn't brushed it that morning.
_Ugh, I must be a mess_ , she thought. It wouldn't have bothered her at home, but she'd gone to the trouble to leave the apartment this morning in order to ignore the building laundry and dishes and dust and focus on her writing. She needed to. She needed to get another book out soon. Her parents were depending on her and tax time was just around the corner. To say nothing of Christmas.
She swore under her breath. Her stomach was knotting up and by the return expressions she was getting from the people around her at the coffee shop, she knew that the look on her face was probably pretty unpleasant. Either that or they were just as irritated by the teenage trio as she was.
The no-kill shelter she volunteered at had lost a dog that morning. He'd been hit by a car and then brought into the shelter because the person who hit him couldn't afford to take him to the vet. The shelter employed a vet, but the doctor didn't make it on time. It hurt. Every time it happened, it hurt in a new way. Evie had been volunteering at the shelter for four years; she'd thought that by now she would be used to it. But nothing ever changed. She saw each animal as its _own_ animal with its own soul and its own story to tell, and when it died, it was like reading the last page of that story.
So many of those stories were far too short.
It left her with a withered sensation, a little more helpless, a little less hopeful.
She was also worried about her parents. Her truck had been acting up lately and she hadn't been able to make it to Billings to help them out as she'd planned this week. Plane tickets were too expensive at this short a notice. Her mother had two medical appointments to make it to, and neither she nor her father could drive. Her youngest brother, Stephen, was a marine enlisted in Afghanistan. As a result, Evie had been forced to call upon her other brother to ask for help.
Derek... was begrudging at best. And that worried Evie more than anything. The last thing she wanted was for her parents to feel that they were a burden to anyone. They'd taken good care of their kids for as long as they'd been capable of doing so. They deserved to be treated better in return.
Her stomach knotted again, a cramp of anxiety, and Evie ran a fast hand over her face. It was flushed hot, though her body felt cold. _Sugar_ , she thought. _I need a sugar fix and some more coffee_.
The coffee shop always sold a plethora of uber unhealthy, ultra fattening dollops of sin that she normally turned a blind eye to and that would more than do the trick this time around. Evie grabbed her wallet out of her purse and headed to the front counter. Her pant size wasn't going to thank her for this, but frankly, she couldn't give a shit. She was really starting to stress, and as far as she was concerned stressed out people should be afforded an extra calorie allowance.
*****
Roman's dark, dark eyes followed Evelynne Grace Farrow as she stood from her small round table and made her way to the coffee shop's front counter. They tracked every tiny movement she made, each breath, every idiosyncratic twitch. They noted and memorized the angles of her chin, each emotion that crossed her face, every thought that skated across the spellbinding gold and brown of her eyes.
He'd been watching her like this for two days. He'd been shadowing her ever since saving her life from a group of rogue horses in a parking lot outside of a mini-mall. He remained close by, always within a vampire's arm's reach. He could see her, but she couldn't see him.
Roman D'Angelo was hidden from the sights of humanity beneath the shield of a spell, and from the solitude of this invisibility, he played guardian angel to his unwitting target. He was transfixed by her. He couldn't pull away.
He'd been in her head, reading her thoughts like a fledgling vampire for the last forty-eight hours. It wasn't like him. Such invasive Offspring behavior was the kind carried out by the young and rash and power-crazed. Roman had been around for _millennia_. There was a kind of exhaustion that came with the wisdom of time. They went hand in hand. He no longer treated the mortals around him as lesser beings with fewer rights, and hadn't for a long time, partly because he knew better – and partly because he was too tired to care.
But Evie....
She'd been thinking about him, _remembering_ him, despite the immense strength of the spell that he had placed over her. It was unheard of for a human to work past such mental walls. Who was she that she could do such a thing? It boggled his mind, fanning the flames of his curiosity into a bonfire of obsession.
Just now, she had been thinking about her parents. She was preoccupied with her responsibilities, saddened by the loss of one of the animals she helped care for, afraid for her parents' safety, stressed over finances. The inner turmoil was causing her physical pain. He didn't miss the way her heart rate sped up as a cramp claimed her abdomen and a headache developed behind her eyes. He wanted to interfere. With so little effort, he could fix everything and ease all of her worries away. At least, he could with anyone else. But if her resistance to his memory wipe was any indication, Evie was somehow at least partially immune to his powers.
Amazing....
Evie Farrow had shoved herself under his supernatural skin the moment she'd unwittingly come to him in his dreams. Her voice, her eyes, her very presence were confoundingly alluring. And then he'd held her above that parking lot two nights ago, and all reason had flown from his mind. He wasn't himself now. She'd bewitched him.
But she was a mortal, not a witch. He'd have known otherwise.
At his command, Roman's men had done their homework on her. What he hadn't pulled from her mind, they'd discovered the old-fashioned way. She was an "indie" published author with works in several different genres, and she hoped to one day win a Pulitzer.
She wanted to change the world, so she volunteered for a no-kill animal shelter in town that had too many animals and not enough funding. She was one of those souls who were the saving grace of the human race. Many people were unhappy with the way things were, but few bothered to make any kind of sacrifice in order to change the status quo. Evie was one of those few.
She was supporting two parents who had recently fallen on hard times, she had two brothers, both younger. She was born on Halloween night thirty years ago. She lived modestly, in a two-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from here in the heart of Portland on the West bank of the river. She was a loner, preferring long-distance friendships to those up close. She'd never had any serious illnesses or surgeries, and had never earned so much as a speeding ticket. She donated to several charities on a sporadic spur of the moment, and her Netflix cache contained more British comedies than anything else.
She was level-headed but for the occasional panic attack due to an anxiety disorder, so she would never suspect that she had what amounted to a seriously dangerous supernatural stalker tracking every one of her moves, both past and present. In the past two days, Roman had read all thirteen of her published novels. He now most likely knew more about little Evie Farrow than she knew about herself.
He knew she loved Night Wish. She blasted it into her poor defenseless ear drums every time her concentration drifted enough to piss her off. He knew she loved big, heavy boots; they were her weakness, perhaps. She wore a different pair every day of the week, though Portland winter weather called for them and more. She enjoyed vacuuming because the triangles it made in the carpet made her feel productive and calm. She loved watching British comedy to help herself through fits of anxiety, and she escaped to the train tracks when life got to be overwhelming, where she placed coins on the tracks and later collected them.
He knew she had no ingestible vices save caffeine, which she imbibed of at a fairly constant pace throughout the day and which had the opposite effect than expected, calming rather than stimulating her. She was a vegetarian, she took her vitamins, and she showered with a gel scented of cherry blossoms. It surrounded her like an ethereal veil, wafting temptingly around her as she moved.
There were things she hated about herself, and this self-degradation both endeared Roman to her and made him edgy. She had that charm of one who is lovely but doesn't know it. Even so, he had the impulse to erase the negative emotions from her mind, or at least to try. He couldn't stand the thought of her berating herself over things as inconsequential and meaningless as her petite height and delicious curves, especially when she was so... _good_. But he schooled his impulses, as he was well-versed in doing, and chalked her esteem issues up to being human. No mortal was ever fully happy, no matter what they claimed. Roman knew better than anyone that even the Dalai Lama most likely had skeletons in his spiritual closet.
But of all of the fascinating facts he'd gleaned from Evelynne Farrow's mind, there was one bit of information that affected Roman more than the others.
He knew what kind of man she was attracted to.
It was easy enough to determine as much by simply reading her work. The leading men in her stories had different features. Some were blonde, some were brunette, some were taller than others and broader than others. They had different colored eyes, skin, and nationalities. But there was one thing they all had in common. Almost every single one of them was literally more than human, and _all_ of them were positively larger than life. At least as far as the life _she_ knew was concerned.
It made sense. There was an otherness to Evie's mind that belied explanation. Her imagination was profound; he'd ventured into her dreams over the last two nights and had come away breathless with the color, detail and creativity of each one. She was vastly intelligent in that capacity. But there was something else. It was that light at the end of the tunnel that he had yet to identify. Whatever it was, it set her apart. It made sense that her eventual mate should be set apart as well.
And it was as if Evie knew this on a subconscious level. It was part of the reason that she had yet to develop any lasting or meaningful relationship with a man. She knew that a human would ultimately disappoint. Unfortunately, in a mortal world, this would have condemned her to a life of spinsterhood.
_Fortunately_ , she did not live in a purely mortal world. Not any more – and never again. Not now that he'd found her.
Roman watched her approach the counter as her turn arrived. The salesman greeted her warmly and she returned the gesture before ordering.
The man behind the counter smiled a teasing smile. "Cheesecake and sugar free coffee," he repeated jokingly. "Got it."
Evie laughed. "I know it makes no sense. But I can't stand drinking my calories."
_Too bad_ , Roman thought. _It's all a vampire does._ And then he blinked. The thought had come unbidden, as well as the accompanying image that had floated before his mind's eye: Evie – as a vampire.
It was impossible. Or, rather, it was no longer done. Roman had seen to that long, long ago. Offspring were born, not made. So why had he imagined her as one just then? And why had the picture caused his heart to race and his gut to clench in longing?
The man behind the counter took Evie's money, handed her the slice of cheesecake, and nodded a farewell to her as she left for her seat to wait for her coffee. A charge hit the air between his table and hers, and Roman sat up a little straighter.
His dark gaze narrowed as a human slowly, somewhat nervously approached Evie, coming at her from the side and a little behind. A would-be flirter. Roman's teeth erupted in his gums and his fingers curled into his palms. He could read the man's thoughts plainly.
I don't think so.
A pulse of Roman's power struck the man's mind, and the newcomer stopped in his tracks, his expression at once going blank.
Leave.
The command was simple and effective. The man frowned, turned on his heel, and headed toward the coffee shop's exit. Roman watched him retreat, thoughts of violence occupying a part of him where no such thoughts had been entertained for thousands of years.
_What's wrong with me?_ he thought, turning back to watch his target as she slowly pulled a bite of cheesecake from her lucky fork.
Beside them, a group of teenagers rattled on about some disgusting film in which all sorts of inhumane things were done to humane people. Roman would normally pay them no heed, but they were bothering Evie.
She was turning him inside out and she hadn't so much as made eye contact with him. Enough was enough. It was time young Evie met one of her dark heroes up close and personal.
Chapter Six
Charles placed his fingers to his lips thoughtfully. His light blue eyes threatened a glow. He was hungry, but it wasn't serious yet, and he was pretty sure that he'd just located dinner.
Her type was not his usual fare. When Offspring had to feed to obtain a victim's last drop of blood, they were required by vampire law to go after people who were either doomed to die anyway or that deserved to do so and that no one would miss, such as the terminally ill and homeless. The Vampire King was far more powerful than most Offspring, and because of this, he could afford to be more choosy. D'Angelo regularly rid the world of criminals – rapists, murderers, psychopaths – and in doing so, also erased the memories of their existences from those who would otherwise care.
Charles did not have the luxury of such powerful mind control. His killing meals were filthy, smelly, and used up. He was accustomed to picking off these victims quickly and efficiently and disposing of the bodies without giving it too much thought. Thinking about it made it worse. It was a necessity, tolerable at best.
But Charles felt strange lately. Ever since he'd looked into Evelynne Farrow's eyes and delved into her mind, he'd been on edge. Unsatisfied. She'd awakened something inside of him.
It was not fortuitous. She was ultimately meant to die. Roman D'Angelo would fall in love, and then lose that which he cared for. It was retribution, cold and hard and merciless. There was no room for infatuation in Charles' plan. Yet, it was happening all the same, it seemed.
Now every time Charles thought of feeding, it was little Evie's slim neck he imagined sinking his fangs into. The glimpse he'd had of her spirit only made him yearn to go deeper and find out more. He wanted to drink her in, both literally and figuratively. To the last drop.
Charles watched his next mortal victim leave the university library. She was younger than Evie, a mere junior in college, but there was enough of a similarity there to pique Charles' interest and hopefully at least temporarily quell his thirst. Charles was intrigued by the girl's thick brown hair, not quite as lustrous as Evie's, but close. She had brown eyes. They lacked the ring and flecks of gold, but again – they were close. And then there was the intelligence.
Evie Farrow was a bright girl. She possessed the mental faculties to keep a vampire entertained for many, many years. In fact, he could see himself taking on the years with her at his side.
It posed a possibility to Charles that he hadn't previously considered. There were other ways to have his revenge. Evie might not have to die.
Charles stood and made his way out of the library after his young mark. As he exited the building, the night moved in to welcome him, wrapping around him with friendly familiarity. He was Offspring; the night was his natural habitat, all daytime protective spells aside.
With exceptional ease, Charles infiltrated the mind of the woman thirty paces ahead. An anticipatory smile crossed his handsome features, exposing his deadly fangs.
*****
Ramses turned in the rare solitude of his empty quarters and caught his own reflection in the mirror against the opposite wall. It had been a long time since he'd truly looked upon himself. There were no mirrors in the desert, no pools of water to faithfully cast your image back to you.
And he'd been sleeping.
With slow, unnatural grace, Ramses crossed the room until he stood before the tall looking glass. Even at its length, it barely encompassed his impressive height. He stared into the mirror – and the handsome, dark-haired image of Amon, the god of gods, gazed back at him through ancient, fathomless eyes.
Ramses raised his arms at his sides. Wrapped around each generous bicep was a string of black tattooed hieroglyphs, archaic and potent. They were well visible just beneath the edges of the short-sleeved shirt he currently wore. They labeled him for who and what he was.
With slow deliberation, he ran his left hand over the markings on his right arm. At his touch, they lit up one at a time. He watched them glow for a moment, reminding him of older, better days, and then they slowly faded back into deep, dark black.
Once more, he turned to the mirror and took in his reflection. It was a mortal reflection. He always took this form when he walked the Earth. With the form came all of the current knowledge of the human race – its cultures, its languages, its technologies. Never before had so much information hit him so hard, so fast. This day and age was new indeed.
Ramses' keen gaze trailed over the figure in the mirror, taking in the simple modern garb he wore of a black shirt and jeans and the heavy boots that would have been so uncomfortable in the desert. It had been a very long time since he'd felt the thickness of human muscle and the hardness of mortal bone encasing his form. It was always uncomfortable at first, a touch smothering. But in time, he grew accustomed to the form and could even appreciate some of its attributes.
Mortal women certainly appreciated it.
Ramses thought of this now and frowned. There were several female members in the organization he had recently subjugated. They were strong and fast and unafraid. It pleased Ramses that the women of this age seemed more readily capable of recognizing their inherent potential. It had not always been so, and eons ago, he had wondered whether things would ever change.
But it was not these women who had drawn him to the waking world. They were not why he was here.
He was here for _her_.
Amunet.
He could feel her somewhere out there. He could hear her heartbeat; it was faint, barely there. Each pulse encompassed a day and a night, so slow as to be nearly nonexistent. She was weak, but she was real and awake, and if it was the last thing Amon ever did, he would find her.
_Ramses Amon_ , he thought. _Ramses_. It was the name he took in this form. It was nearly as ancient as he was. It suited him.
Behind him, there was a tentative knock on his door. Ramses glanced over his shoulder. He waited a moment and then slowly turned to face the door. "Come," he said softly. It was a voice that encompassed one-one-hundredth the power it was capable of, but humans were sensitive and he had no wish to harm or frighten them.
The door opened to emit one of the very women he had just been thinking of. She was very young; perhaps only nineteen or twenty human years.
"Sir?" she asked, obviously unsure as to whether she should be intruding on his privacy. To her thinking, Ramses was her superior officer. He was new in this position, but had more than proven his right to own it. In that, despite his desires, he had succeeded in scaring the mortals around him to some extent anyway.
"Yes?" he replied, gesturing for her to enter all the way and have a seat on one of the large over-stuffed chairs inside.
She blushed a little, as all women did in his presence, and fumbled with the door behind her as she shut it and entered. "Sir, you asked that I retrieve the surveillance information from sectors eleven through nineteen. Here it is." She removed a pack from her shoulder and pulled out a single memory stick, placing the small black object on the coffee table before her.
Ramses nodded his thanks. "You've done well."
"Thank you, sir. You'll be pleased with the results. We've located five more werewolf demons, some very strange energy readings at various coffee shops and their surrounding areas in Portland, and... something else as well."
Ramses' gaze narrowed. There were ten thousand things that comment could mean, and only a few of them were of interest to him. "Explain."
"Well sir, I believe we have caught what must be a witch on tape as well. There's no other way to explain what she did."
"What did she do?" he asked, his interest indeed piqued.
The girl hesitated, for some reason uncomfortable with what she was about to reveal. "I believe she was healing someone, sir."
Ramses remained silent for several seconds as he considered her words. And then he nodded, just once. "That will be all. Leave the thumb drive here."
The girl nodded, stood immediately, and left the room, closing the door once more behind her.
In the renewed silence and solitude, Ramses made his way to the small table and looked down. As he did, a lock of his shoulder-length jet-black hair fell before his eyes. He brushed it aside absent-mindedly.
_I believe she was healing someone, sir_.
Amunet had possessed the ability to heal. She alone could erase a mortal wound as if it had never occurred.
Could it be?
If it was her, if there was the slightest possibility that he'd found her, what did it mean that she was in the company of werewolves?
It was the supernatural creatures of the world who preyed upon the mortals that worshipped him and Amunet. Their kind – the werewolves, the vampires, the dragons – routinely slaughtered the innocent in order to satisfy their unnatural hungers, erasing entire lineages as they did so, along with the memories they held that kept Amon and his heritage alive.
When Ramses had recently awoken, he'd immediately sought out the most powerful organization capable of fighting these otherworldly forces. Hunters had existed in one form or another for as long as supernatural beings had roamed the earth to draw their attention and earn their hatred.
Recently, the Hunters had undergone hard changes, experienced various losses, and had all but fallen apart. Ramses found them, drew them together, and within days, he was in charge, his ultimate goal of a two-fold design. He would help the mortals in ridding the world of this constant, evil threat. And as he did, he would hunt the world, right along with his Hunters, in search of his queen.
With fingers that nearly shook as a mortal's would, Ramses leaned over and picked up the small data recording device. Then, with a quiet resolution and a pain in his heart that felt all too human, the god of gods made his way to the surveillance system against one wall, slipped the drive into its respective slot, and waited for it to open.
Chapter Seven
Evie swallowed the fresh, hot coffee and closed her eyes, thoroughly enjoying the way the liquid burned slightly as it slipped past her lips, over her tongue, and poured down her throat. At once, she felt a little better. It was like magic.
Taxes were coming up and she had a plethora of expenses and she really shouldn't be spending the exorbitant amount that she did on coffee, but a part of her completely rebelled at the thought of giving it up. _Not this_ , _damn it,_ she thought stubbornly. _Just leave me this._
Evie carefully sucked in her second mouthful of steaming therapy and was about to swallow when one of the boys at the table behind her said something so foul, a wave of queasiness passed through her. She gulped down the liquid, burned herself a little, and cringed. Her head started to hurt.
And then the air around her shifted. It felt like a sudden charge, as if lightning were about to strike. Evie straightened and turned to glance over her shoulder.
"You. Leave. _Now_."
Evie's heart slammed hard against the wall of her ribs and then skipped as if it had hurt itself. Her jaw felt slack, her eyes wide. Her body flushed warm and the breath stilled in her lungs.
A man stood beside the table with the trio of teenagers. All three boys seemed frozen, unable to move as they stared up at him despite the order he'd just given them, and Evie could see why. She could scarcely believe her own eyes. What she was seeing was impossible.
_Oh my God,_ she thought.
Because the man was the same man from her flashes and dreams.
He was so tall, Evie would place him at six and a half feet. His eyes were like midnight skies, endless and deep. His skin was slightly tanned and touched with olive, unblemished and smooth. His bone structure was strong and perfect, his physique honestly reminiscent of a Greek god's. His thick, short-cropped hair was the color of a raven's feathers. It brushed the top of what looked to be a dark gray silk and cashmere blend sports coat, the starched white shirt beneath it open at the collar.
She swore internally. He was sex incarnate, the entirety of him nearly breathtaking in its promising temptation. She somehow took a breath anyway, and when she did, she caught a hint of expensive cologne.
Just like she remembered.
_No_ , she thought. It couldn't be. It couldn't be that she'd clearly and perfectly imagined a living, breathing man that she had never before met – because that would mean that she was magic or something. Or that _he_ was. What was happening had a logical explanation. She was going nuts. That was all.
Suddenly, all three boys at the table jumped into sporadic motion, their lanky bodies scrambling to push out their chairs. Without a single sound of protest or contempt, the boys rounded the table, rushed through the coffee shop, and filed out through the exit.
The tall, dark stranger watched them leave, but every other set of eyes in the coffee shop was on _him_ , Evie's included.
In the fresh silence, Evie could hear her own heartbeat. At long last, the man looked away from the shop's door and turned around.
His dark eyes found hers at once and the rest of the world receded. Evie felt herself go very, very still, as if he could shackle her with no more than a look. Thoughts flew from her mind.
She heard her mouth speak without any conscious thought and could only hope it wasn't saying something damningly stupid.
"Thank you," she said, her voice a thousand miles away. "That was... pretty incredible."
The stranger's dark, dark eyes seemed to sparkle as if she could suddenly see their stars, and a second later, he smiled a smile that once more left Evie feeling breathless. His teeth were perfect, straight and white, and the expression softened his starkly handsome features into the visage of some Michelangelo angel. She felt, in that moment, as though one of the sculptor's statues had come to life and entered the coffee shop.
"May I join you?" he asked, gesturing gracefully to the empty seat across from her at the small round table. His deep, smooth voice was like black velvet.
Evie opened her mouth again to reply – _no, yes, of course you can, oh god please do_ – but nothing came out. _Stupid_ , she thought. _Stupid! You were able to speak before! At least smile at him!_
Instead, she nodded.
Great. You dork.
*****
As he always did, Roman allowed the invisibility around him to slip with a deep, subconscious gradualness. People in the shop imagined that he'd just walked in, or perhaps that he'd been there all along and they hadn't noticed him until now. Dropping the shield was something he'd done a million times around humans, and that now came as second nature.
He stood slowly and gracefully, brushing the front of his immaculate suit jacket as he pushed out his chair and came to his full impressive height.
The trio of adolescent boys at the table beside Evie had gone quiet for once. Roman met each of their gazes and noted the natural, old-brain fear that blossomed there. With a measured patience, he moved around the table, noting that the entire coffee shop had fallen into a hush.
"You," he said softly as he came to stand beside the boys' table. They froze, their eyes wide, their pallor pale. "Leave," he said. "Now." There was of course no need to raise his voice. His tone and the eons of built up power behind it were enough.
Oh my god.
Her husky, beautiful voice was as clear in her thoughts as it was when she spoke aloud. He felt Evie's eyes upon him, heard her heart literally skip a beat, and it was everything Roman could do not to crow.
The teenagers waited another two seconds. And then all three boys were jumping into action, scrambling to get their chairs out from under them so that they could do as he commanded.
Before a full quarter of a minute had passed, they'd left the shop and Roman had turned his full attention upon his prize.
Now he tried very hard not to laugh. It was difficult; he could hear her thoughts loud and clear as she called herself a dork and tried not to die of embarrassment. She was too cute. Fumbling, innocent and naïve – and _way_ too cute. He could just eat her.
The thought caused his gums to ache. He felt his gaze heat in response. Evie noted the change and her blush deepened as he pulled the second chair out from the table.
He was about to sit down when the hair on the back of his neck prickled and time seemed to slow. A buzzing filled the air, riding along his skin like rivulets of electricity. The magic within him coiled, building upon itself like a massive spring. The sensation was not new to him; he'd felt it many times before. It was a warning, hard and focused.
His body tensed, each muscle flexing beneath the layers of his clothes, and his senses went on high alert. In a split moment, he could hear everything, smell everything, and see for miles.
In this new, slowed-down stillness, Roman D'Angelo turned to peer through the coffee shop's dark windows into the mystery of night beyond. What he found there filled him with dual emotions: stark confusion, and sudden, sharp wrath.
With that, he was simultaneously blurring into motion and sending out an enormous pulse of his power. It wasn't enough to stop the Hunter's attack altogether; the bullets had already been fired and the glass would be shattered either way. Roman had the faculty to realize that the weapons had expertly been discharged in such a way as to minimize the chance of harming any of the humans, even where the glass was concerned, but he hadn't the luxury of figuring out _why_ at the moment.
The shockwave of his power struck the windows like the blast of a bomb, instantly cracking them into a billion tiny shards and then sending those shards outward in a dazzling and dangerous display. The Hunters outside seemed to react in slow motion, diving for the ground and covering their heads as the blast rode over them. On its way, his power wave picked up the bullets mere inches from the barrels of their mother guns and spun them back toward the men who had fired them.
Roman didn't bother aiming any of the lead slugs; it wasn't his intent to injure the Hunters, only to stop them. His more immediate concern was the one who was standing right now, also in slow motion, her brown-gold eyes as large as saucers in her lovely face.
For the second time in as many days, the Vampire King pulled Evelynne Farrow into his strong embrace and held her with a fierceness that barely echoed the ferocity of his emotions. A kind of shock was setting in in the shop around him, striking Evie with the same chaos that it did the others in the shop. She struggled in his grasp, but it was short-lived before Roman felt his eyes glow in his face and his fangs grow in his mouth once more.
He turned with Evie, tucking her into his chest despite her mounting fear. _Stop_ , he commanded. After a few seconds in which she fought his mental control, which seemed an impossibility in and of itself, Evie finally went still, hypnotized by him once more. A part of him felt like roaring in anger. He hated that he was doing this to her again. He wanted to be gentle with her. He had only wanted to sit and talk with her. But the Hunters were making any attempt at normalcy an impossibility for him. They'd come for him and he had no idea how or why. Since when did Hunters hunt anyone but werewolves?
Outside, those same Hunters picked themselves up off of the ground and regrouped with uncommon efficiency. Roman felt the focus in their brains and sensed their sights upon him once more. It had been mere seconds since the first attack. This was different.
But it was shoot first, ask questions later when targeted in such a manner, and Roman didn't hesitate before releasing a second pulse of power. This one was stronger than the first, meant to bring the situation to an abrupt end.
A visible rivulet of force cascaded out from Roman's tall form, enveloping the entirety of the coffee shop as it once more struck the windows and walls. The glass was already gone, but the walls cracked under the pressure. Beyond those, the cars that were lined up along the side of the walk leapt into the air and flew back several yards. One truck flipped onto its tailgate. A female Hunter was slammed against the vehicle's undercarriage, and her gun went flying.
Roman scanned her system quickly to reassure himself that she was alive. As he did, he ruthlessly scoured her brain, hoping to extract the information he was looking for. But someone had taken the pains to protect her from just such an intrusion, and he got nothing worthwhile.
A second later, he spoke a quick word of magic and transported both him and Evie to safety. As he and his small charge warped through time and space, the Vampire King sent out a mental call.
David Cade and Jaxon were waiting for him when he rematerialized outside of one of the various safe houses he kept around the globe. David's expression was grim when he saw the glow in his king's eyes. Jaxon immediately recognized Evie.
"What happened?" Cade asked, his tone somber.
"Hunters," replied Roman simply. He pulled back a little and looked down at Evie's face. It was passive, as it had been the first time he'd hypnotized her, but there was something in her eyes that wasn't there before. It looked like knowledge.
"Hunters?" Cade frowned. "Sam was right, then. They've become stronger."
"You have no idea," Roman told him. "Cade, I need you to take several Offspring to the attack site and clean it up. The last thing we need is more press, as Hunters seem to be using it to their advantage."
Cade nodded, spoke a word of transportation, and disappeared.
"Sir, is miss Farrow alright?"
For once in his long life Roman wasn't certain how to answer a question. "I...."
_Was_ Evie alright? It had taken far too much pressure to put her under this time around, and even now, he could sense some kind of struggle going on inside of her. Physically, she was unharmed. But there was so much more to a person than the physical, especially, it seemed, where Evie was concerned.
"I'm not sure, Jax," he finally said. "I'm taking her inside. Please have some of her belongings brought to the house." He took a deep breath, and a new kind of dread unraveled within him. Little by little, he could feel his influence over Evie slip. It had never happened before, not _ever_. The fact that it was happening now and with _her,_ of all people, was more than slightly unsettling. "I have a feeling the next few days are going to be difficult."
Chapter Eight
There was a hollowness to the air that Evie could feel even through the veil of half-sleep. She felt edgy and off. She felt misplaced, as if she'd put herself somewhere and had forgotten where. Her memories churned and boiled, and queasiness threatened her belly.
Something popped and crackled – _fire_ – and it sounded strange. She woke slowly, all too aware of this echo-like quality, to blink her blurry eyes against a contrast of light and dark. It took a few seconds for her vision to adjust. When it did, it settled upon the fire that crackled in the hearth across the room.
The flames were perfect, each one a warm and comforting yellow-orange that at once settled the worst of her nerves. Her wooziness lifted. She focused on the fire for a moment, allowing her vision to clear the rest of the way. _Just breathe._
Despite the peaceful effect of the fire, there was a waiting panic sitting in the pit of her stomach, threatening to stand and dance around. She tried to dominate it, to stamp it down. Panicking never did anyone any good. But even as she attempted to take control of her emotions, memories continued to assault her, flying at her like crazed bats in the darkness as she sat up and took in the rest of the room....
Soft bed, three quilts, feather pillow.
In her memories, she saw a face that was painfully handsome. She heard a voice that sounded like sex.
Brick walls, tapestries hanging from hooks.
She caught a whiff of cologne, saw a man's tall, strong profile in expensive clothing, and heard the sound of glass shattering.
Fire in the hearth, one door. No windows.
Evie swallowed hard and heard the sound she made in the silence. She didn't recognize where she was. It happened in books and movies all the time, but in the real world, when this happened, the fear that accompanied it was paralyzing. It meant that you'd lost control at some point. At some point, you had no longer been in charge of your own faculties, your own memories or your own fate. Someone else was. And you could only hope against hopes that whoever it was didn't mean you harm.
"Never in a million years would I mean you harm, Evie."
Evie jumped, inhaled a sharp gasp, and scrambled out of the bed with insane speed. Her hair whipped around her face as she spun to face each corner of the strange windowless room. The shadows there were long and dark and endless.
But there were stars in the darkness – two stars that grew brighter as a man stepped out of the shadows. The light struck his handsome features, illuminating him.
_Oh holy...._ Curses speared through Evie's mind, frantic and terrified. It was the man from her memories, all six and a half starkly beautiful feet of him. _No_.... She shook her head. The dichotomy of emotions that came with her attraction to him and what his appearance before her meant was wreaking havoc on her senses. The memories were coming harder and faster now and connecting themselves together like the animated pieces of a sentient puzzle. They made no sense. They were impossible.
_Fantasies_.
In the dance of color, light and sound of her memories, the tall, dark man came out of nowhere, took her to the skies to save her from a team of runaway horses, and then greeted her in a coffee shop. There were shots fired, the windows exploded, and he was again pulling her to him....
Her memories hiccupped as she recalled the way she felt when his arms encircled her. His grip was tight but gentle, sure and solid. He felt warm and, despite the craziness of it, he felt _safe_.
They were impossible fantasies. She really _had_ gone mad.
_Who are you?_ she wanted to scream. _Where am I? What the hell is happening to me?_ But her lips would form no words. She was frozen in the wake of the images that unfolded before her – and the thrall of the man standing several feet away.
It was too much. She felt herself slipping, as if life had become a muddy slope and the maw of insanity chattered, gaping and red below her.
"I am so sorry, Evie," the man whispered. She gazed into his bottomless eyes, so dark and filled with what looked like genuine regret. "Somehow you have developed an immunity to my influences. I can no longer protect you-"
" _Who are you?_ " Evie suddenly screamed, her voice having finally bubbled up and exploded from her mouth as if her lungs were a volcano. "How do you know me?" she demanded next. Her heart hammered. "Where am I?" Her words trailed off, becoming dangerously high pitched as she looked from him to the room they stood in.
"Evelynne Farrow," the man said then, his velvet voice seeming to amplify. It made its way into her head, temporarily overriding the memories, fear and the gnawing insanity. It demanded her attention – and she gave it. With a shaky breath that rode the barrier of hysterics, Evie turned back to peer once more into his fathomless eyes.
"First you must understand that I mean you no harm. You will not be hurt in any fashion while I am with you," he told her. "While you are here," he gestured to the room around them. "You are in my care and believe me when I tell you that danger will have to go through me to get to you."
Evie heard his words, somehow processed them, and against all odds, actually began to feel a touch calmer.
He took a step toward her, his polished shoes echoing slightly on the stone tile floor. "Do you understand?" he asked. His tone was gentle but insistent, as if he were speaking to an injured child.
Evie wasn't stupid. She knew very well that serial killers and psychopaths had very strange ideas about what constituted harm to another individual. She knew that it was insane to trust him. But the world _was_ insane just then – and as she stared up into his incredible eyes and felt his voice wrap around her, she couldn't deny that she wanted to believe him. Very much so.
She nodded. It was all she could manage.
The man took a slow, deep breath and said, "My name is Roman. This is my home." He paused and glanced at the doorway and walls for a second. "One of them, anyway." He turned back to her. "I've brought you here to protect you."
"F-from what?" she asked automatically.
_From the horses_ , her mind laughed. It wasn't a reassuring laugh. _No_ , she told it sternly, like a school teacher hushing a giggling student. _From whatever was outside_.... Her memories solidified, slowing down in time. She looked inward, as if stepping into a movie that played in her head. She saw the danger – felt it just outside the coffee shop windows. She looked at the windows, _through_ them, and saw figures crouched, dark, and waiting. It was there for her. Death. _No_ , not for her.
For Roman.
"They are called Hunters," he told her. "And now that they've seen you with me, they'll be hunting you as well."
Evie blinked. She swallowed, or tried to, but her throat caught on the dry lump that had formed there. Tears sprung to her eyes with the effort, blurring her vision again. She ran her shaking hands down her jeans, looked down, and realized she was still fully dressed clear down to her thick wool socks. All that had been removed were her boots.
It was something reassuring.
Still looking down, as she found that it was easier to think when she wasn't looking into Roman's eyes, Evie said, "How did you get me here?"
"I transported with you. It's a very simple spell for one such as myself."
A spell....
The world darkened a little, and Evie felt that muddy slope beneath her once more. She thought of the parking lot and the horse-drawn carriage. She could even hear a crashing sound as the image became more real. "And the first time?" she asked, her voice having dropped into little more than a whisper. "With the horses?"
Roman hesitated. It was a damning pause.
"The first time I rescued you, we flew."
*****
Roman didn't understand why it was happening, but as Evie had slept off the effects of his trance, her memory fought the influence of his wiping spell, each past event surfacing with fierce stubbornness. Little by little, her subconscious won the battle for control of her mind, and within a few short hours, Roman was no longer able to decide what she remembered about the last two days. The images were there, clear as day, for her to re-assemble and witness.
There was nothing for it now but to tell her the truth. Roman was the most powerful vampire on the planet. He'd walked the Earth's surface since before most cultures had recorded history. There was not supposed to be a human soul alive who could withstand his power.
But Evie could. She was remembering things now – and that wasn't all. Little by little, her aura became stronger, blocking his waves of influence like a shield. Who the hell was she that she could do this? And why.... _Why_ did it have to be _her_? Why now? When she needed his help the most?
Fear churned her stomach; he could feel her discomfort as if it were his own. He didn't know how this was possible when he'd already pulled out of her mind and she'd shaken off his influence without even trying to do so. But he could nonetheless. It was making her sick inside, this chaos of confusion, and because she was withstanding him, he could do nothing about it.
Not unless she wanted him to. Not unless she let him in and dropped her shields.
Her suffering was eating him up inside just as surely as if it were his own. It was draining him like nothing else had in a long time. It had been a while since he'd fed. He'd been busy with issues regarding Hunters and werewolves and meetings – and then he'd spent every possible moment he could with Evie. Even as his angst for Evie's discomfort grew, so did his hunger for her. It was an extremely volatile situation.
And now he could feel her anxiety ratchet up a notch. He could almost hear the tight twang of her rope of sanity as it pulled taut and threatened to break. She was a level-headed girl, and everything he was presenting her with made no sense, not in her world. Not according to everything she had learned for the last thirty years.
Suddenly, Evie ran a hand through her hair and he noted that the hand was shaking badly. She cocked her head to one side, broke eye contact, and took a rather stiff step to her right. She looked down at the ground.
"Unbelievable," she said, shaking her head. "Absolutely unbefuckinglievable." She began to pace then, and Roman was tempted to push as hard as he could to get past her newly developed defenses so that he would know exactly what was going on inside her head. He felt helpless and that was brand new for him. It was like being behind the wheel of a very large vehicle with no brakes.
"My whole life, I fantasized about people like you, you know that?" Her voice was pitched a touch higher than normal as she turned and began pacing quickly in the opposite direction. "I wrote about you, dreamed about you, and believe you me, I wished and wished and fucking wished that you were real. It would have been _so_ nice to know that there was magic in the world and that I wasn't holding out for nothing." She shook her head again, put her hands on her hips, and turned around once more, pacing a fast line back and forth.
She laughed harshly. "My mother told me I was too picky, my brother called me a shrew, and half of my high school class was positive I was gay because I just couldn't be bothered to get into the boys around me." She threw up her hands, spun, and paced again. "They were so damned _human_!" She laughed, louder this time. "And me, in my idiotic holdout for something more, was bored _stupid_ by humans!"
She turned on him then, her brown-gold eyes flashing into a striking amber with her anger. "Why do you think I write?" she asked, as if she were actually expecting him to answer – which she wasn't. "Why do you think I nearly flunked out of high school because all I could do was write story after story about people who were _more_ than human?"
She spun away from him, making a loud sound of stark frustration. "God!" she said. "I begged the world to send me something different so many times! I lamented the fact that there was nothing better to life than reality!"
Her voice shook, and Roman could sense that she was on the verge of tears. His chest felt tight and his fingers twitched. His fangs were fighting to erupt in his mouth.
"But nothing came! Nothing magical _ever_ _happened_!" She whirled on him again, the amber in her eyes now nearly yellow. Roman had the instant impression of heat, as if Evie were warming up, not just emotionally but magically. That otherworldliness about her that he'd sensed before was amplified. He felt it coming off of her in waves much like others could sense his own power. It was alarming.
_Impressive_ , but alarming. He feared an oncoming fight, a _real_ one. And because he had no idea what it was he was up against, and because he could never bring himself to harm Evie Farrow, for the first time in his life the Vampire King wondered whether he would win.
"And that's the worst tragedy of all," she said next, spearing him with those powerful, golden eyes. "You filled me with hope and then dashed those hopes again and again." Roman saw the moisture fall from beneath her left eye – one tiny but significant tear drop. "You let me believe against hopes. You may as well have just killed me."
_Never_ , he thought.
She shook her head, and the speed of it gradually slowed. He could feel a change come over her then, as if reality were once more settling in and she was out of mental defenses to keep it at bay.
"What... _are_ you, anyway?" she asked next, her voice once more very quiet. She hugged herself, and Roman knew it wasn't because she was cold.
She stared up at him for the longest time and the silence between them stretched. Roman felt the world stop, the Earth's heart stilling in its chest as it waited for him to reply.
A pulse of fate beat loud in his eardrums as he took a breath and said the words he had never before uttered to a human. "I'm a vampire."
Chapter Nine
Roman had read all of her novels, so he knew well that the vampire was her favored literary character. As he'd read, the idea that she liked vampires had filled him with a mixture of pride and hope. It had been interesting, intriguing, and a little amusing. What he had completely missed and failed to consider was that there might be a _reason_ for this fascination of hers.
Her descriptions of a vampire's emotions, of his or her inner trials and tribulations, were amazingly astute. He'd chalked it up to the characteristics of a good author, but she seemed to understand things about vampires that a human shouldn't – such as their hunger, their urges, and their ultimate loneliness.
Now, as he gazed down at her small, precious form and saw the desperation in her nearly glowing eyes, he had no choice but to believe there was something more to it. He felt odd about her and had since he'd first witnessed her in his dreams. He felt obsessed, painfully and desperately interested. And this was the way she'd felt about his kind for most of her life.
_Desperately_ interested.
There was a reason this was happening. There was a reason she was who she was and had done what she'd done with her life. There was a reason he literally couldn't take her off of his mind for more than a second and didn't want to leave her side for anything.
It was plainly evident, both in the way he now lacked control over her and in the growing supernatural qualities of her petite form. Evelynne Grace Farrow had lived the life of a human for thirty years. But she wasn't a human. Not fully.
She seemed to stare up at him forever, and he had no idea what she was thinking. Finally, she repeated his words, and her tone was enigmatic. "A vampire."
Roman could only nod, just once.
"Show me," she said, and her gaze slipped to his lips. He knew what she was asking. It was what anyone would ask. A vampire's fangs were quintessential. He allowed them to fully extend, and then bared them, all the while watching her reactions with hawk-like eyes – and fearing the worst.
Evie looked at his fangs, her expression still mysterious. He saw her swallow hard, normally an indication of fear. But she didn't try to back up, and she offered no other evidence of a mounting sense of terror. Instead, she looked back up into his eyes and asked, "Are you going to kill me, Roman?"
Roman experienced a horrified moment of disbelief. He opened his mouth to answer, but she went on before he could.
"Because it doesn't make any sense that you would save me twice just to kill me."
Again, Roman opened his mouth to answer, and again she interrupted before he could speak.
"And I gotta tell you that it would totally ruin my image of you if you went all psycho on me and started ripping me limb from limb." Her pitch of her voice had risen a little again, indicating that once-more rising fear he knew he had sensed.
It was now clear to Roman that she actually continued to talk because she was afraid of what he was going to say. She wanted to know if he was going to kill her – and she also really didn't.
This time, he cut in before she could do so to him. "Not for anything would I hurt you, Evie. I thought I made that clear."
Evie licked her lips, the act drawing his gaze to her mouth. It was a nervous gesture on her part, but it didn't help to quell his growing hunger. She ran her hands over her jeans again, another nervous habit. And then she asked, "Can you read my mind?"
He almost laughed. At least he could be honest with her about that.
"No."
It was another long moment before she spoke again. She seemed to be gauging everything he did and said, working something out in her head.
"What do you want with me?"
That was the question of the century. He had no idea what to tell her that wouldn't scare the shit out of her. He wanted....
To lay you out on my bed.
"I want to help you," he said. At least that was the truth, even if by far it wasn't the whole truth.
Evie's honey-colored gaze narrowed. She didn't believe him. It had been a very long time since someone had not believed him. Though he couldn't blame her; he didn't believe him either.
"You want to help me." She straightened a little, still visibly trembling but somehow regaining her wits.
Roman knew she didn't understand. How could she when he didn't understand himself? He showed her his open hands in a gesture of well-meaning and said, "I don't know why, but I'm drawn to you. It's why I was able to save you, Evie." He took another step forward, unable to help himself. The distance between them was just too far and it was driving him a little nuts. "I was there when danger struck because I couldn't stand to be far from your side." He paused when a look of panic floated across Evie's beautiful face. "I think it has something to do with what you are," he said softly.
Evie took a step back and Roman's heart sank. "And what exactly would that be?" she asked, her tone still clearly frightened, despite her obvious strength of character. "Human?"
Roman waited a moment. And then he shook his head. "I don't believe you really are, Evie." He paused. " _Human_."
"You're insane," she said suddenly. Roman might not have been able to delve into her mind, but his hearing was still top rate, so he caught the sound when her pulse quickened and began to race. "You're one of those crazy guys who gets fang implants, aren't you. I don't know how you managed to mess with my mind – hypnotism? Or did you just knock me out with some kind of drug?" She exhaled shakily and shook her head. "Oh man, I almost believed you – Jesus, what the hell is wrong with me? I must still be drugged up. I almost fell for your bullshit. But you messed up here, _Roman_." She said his name with clear distaste and anger. "When you suggested I was anything but human. Because if I were Superwoman, I sure as hell wouldn't be here right now."
"Evie –"
"No!" she yelled, holding up her hand as if to stop him. "My name is _Evelynne_ ," she said. She swallowed, her eyes went to his mouth, where he'd hidden his fangs behind his lips. Then their beautiful gold skirted to his shoulders – broad and possibly frightening to her. She shifted from one foot to the other. "Evelynne," she repeated.
And then she blinked. Her gaze narrowed again and flew back up to his eyes. "Wait. How did you know people call me Evie?"
Roman swore internally. This wasn't going well at all. He was going to have to nip this deteriorating exchange in the bud.
She wanted proof?
Fine. He would give it to her.
With all of the speed his supernatural form was capable of producing, Roman shot forward, wrapped his arms around Evie, and spoke the word that would transport them out of the room. It happened so fast, Evie didn't fully realize what he had done until they were rematerializing at his destination, and he was letting her go.
She stumbled for a moment, her breath catching, her heart hiccupping with shock, and then stared at him with wide eyes. "What... Oh my God, what did you just do?"
"This is the transportation spell I was telling you about."
Evie's eyes remained wide and her breathing fast. She turned in an unsteady circle to survey their surroundings.
Roman watched her small, shaking form take it all in, and then his own gaze skirted to the world around him. It was one of his favorite places in the world. It encompassed everything he loved about life, and nothing he didn't. He had created it himself – and no one else on the planet knew it existed.
The cavern was enormous, stretching the length of two football fields, its ceiling so high up, it was barely visible. Bioluminescent mushrooms, algae, and even flower blooms that had yet to be named by science carpeted the ceiling and part of the walls, shedding enough light to mimic the sun just before twilight. A waterfall against one wall poured fresh, clean drinking water into a river that ran through the center of the cavern. That crystal clear river divided the cave's ground into what appeared to be islands. Each rounded island was connected by small wooden bridges.
The bridges were intricately carved as if by expert hand. Some possessed ropes of flowers twined around their railings. Others were graced with gas lights that flickered invitingly. Each separate island possessed a single tree growing from its thick bed of shamrocks or moss. The branches of these trees stretched over their islands like Banyan tree benches, waiting to be climbed and rested upon. The buds on these branches were brightly colored, and some contained sweet, refreshing fruit that Roman knew no human had ever tasted. As a vampire, he didn't need to eat such things, but a part of him had always enjoyed the flavors of the mortal world. These were his own creation, a combination of his favorite fruits in one.
The air in the cavern was the perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold. The waterfall provided a far-off static, the rivers babbled and flowed at a constant, calming pace, but most inviting of all was the small thatch-roofed cottage that rested upon the biggest island. It was impossible to tell from the outside, but Roman knew that it was two-story. A tiny kitchen, dining set, and rocking chairs occupied the first floor. A winding wooden staircase led to a loft, and in that loft was Roman's sleeping place.
There were two fireplaces in the cottage, one on the first floor and one on the far wall of the loft. Smoke curled from the single chimney, in the cottage's roof, but the air in the vast cavern remained magically pure and fresh.
All along the walls, crystals of various colors and size grew and glimmered, dressing the cave in what looked like gemstones. Some of them _were_ gemstones, both precious and semi-precious.
It was a magical place, to say the least. It was born of magic, of spell upon spell upon spell, layered over the course of thousands of years. It had taken Roman countless lifetimes to create the place he stood in at that moment. And never, not in all of that time, had he even considered bringing another being into it with him.
Not until now.
He turned his gaze from the cavern he'd hidden from the world, and looked down at the woman he'd finally shared it with. She had gone very still, her breath barely audible over the babbling of the various brooks and the distant roar of the falls. She was turned away from him at the moment, but very slowly, she came full circle – and finally looked up at him.
"Where are we?"
"This is my home," he told her. "My _real_ home."
She glanced around again, her gold-touched eyes still wide with awe. Her mouth was open, her expression bewildered. She shook her head a little. "I've never...." She stopped, swallowed, and then did the most wonderful thing Roman had ever seen. She smiled. "I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life," she whispered, looking back up at him once more.
Roman exhaled, only then realizing that he'd been holding his breath since they'd rematerialized in the cavern. "You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that."
She waited, gazing up at him, her lovely features filled with child-like fascination.
"Because I've never shared it with anyone before," he told her. "You're the first."
She turned a full circle in place, clearly overwhelmed by what she was seeing. And then she shook her head. "The first?"
"In the thousands of years I have existed, Evelynne, I have never felt about a woman what I feel for you. And that's why you're here."
Chapter Ten
Evie hugged the steaming cup between her hands and watched the vapor rise from the hot tea inside. The fire in the small fireplace crackled merrily. The air was just as perfect in here as it had been outside in the cavern, but it was scented like cinnamon and cloves and fresh baked bread.
She felt calm.
It made very little sense. She knew she should have been crying hysterically or maybe jabbering like a hyena and rocking back and forth on the ground. She'd fallen down a freaking rabbit hole. The cavern outside was literal proof.
But despite conventional psychology, the truth was, after Roman had brought her to the cave and showed her that what he claimed was actually fact... Evie's heart rate began to slow. She felt her lungs opening up a little more. Her mind stopped spinning.
For lack of a better description, it felt like something inside of Evie began to slide into place. And now as she sat at the small polished wooden dining table and Roman served her hot tea and bread with butter, she was hearing it _click_.
It felt almost like a high. It was similar to the way it felt when you'd suffered a vast amount of pain and suddenly the pain killers kicked in and the pain was gone and you were tired and thankful and filled with peace.
That was how she felt, despite everything he'd told her over the last hour or so. He'd told her that he'd been dreaming about her, that a very old and respectable witch had foretold her existence, and that there was something... different about Evie. He couldn't tell her exactly what that different thing was, but it set her as apart from other humans as his own "difference" did him.
Evie was dubious about that. Roman D'Angelo was a freaking vampire. How much more different could you get?
"Evie," Roman said softly. Just as it had every time he'd spoken, his incredible voice gave her an almost physical feeling of sexual pleasure.
She steeled herself, turned slightly on the wooden bench, and looked up at him. _Christ_ , she thought witlessly. It didn't get any better the more times she looked at him. Roman was quite literally the most handsome man she had ever seen. _That gaze,_ she thought _. It's Michael Fassbender plus Richard Armitage times a bazillion_. He'd taken off his sports jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white button-up shirt. The effect was mind-blowing.
"May I join you?" he asked. Evie hesitated. It was the same thing he'd asked her at the coffee shop... where the Hunters had attacked.
_The Hunters_ , she thought, her brow furrowing. The memory of the shots fired and the windows shattering was enough to take her mind temporarily off of Roman's incredible good looks.
Temporarily.
"I might not be reading your mind," Roman told her, "but I've lived a long time." He smiled a damnably beautiful smile and Evie melted there on the bench. "I can tell what you're thinking all the same." He paused, allowing the double entendre to simmer – not that it had to. "There is much we need to discuss, not the least of which is the Hunters."
Evie swallowed, cleared her throat, and said "It's your house." She nodded toward the bench opposite her own.
Roman sat down. She watched him over the rim of her mug while trying her best to hide her blush behind it. It didn't work, of course, and the effort of trying to digest the current mind-boggling situation, not go whacko, and play it somewhat cool around the first member of the undead she'd ever met was giving Evie the beginnings of a migraine.
"Your head hurts."
Evie blinked. "You _are_ reading my mind."
He laughed, the sound so fucking delicious, she almost put down her mug to enjoy it. But somehow she managed to remain absolutely still.
"I promise I'm not," he insisted softly. "I told you that I couldn't. It's one of the reasons I know you are different, Evie." He paused, looked down at the table, and placed his hands atop it to casually lace his fingers together. He leaned in, causing his forearms to bulge with powerful muscle, and Evie's throat went dry. He was so much _bigger_ than her.
He was still looking down when we went on. "You're an author, so I know that you spend a lot of time noticing things." He looked up then, pinning her with a look that speared her to the core. "And I know it must have occurred to you that you notice more now than you did when you were twenty. Or when you were ten." He paused then and must have suddenly experienced something akin to nervousness, because he looked back down at the table top, and Evie saw his fingers flex where they held each other. "Imagine how much more you would notice after a hundred years. Or five hundred."
He stopped again, the air grew thick with words waiting to be born, and Evie absolutely _knew_ what he was going to say next.
"Or a thousand," he said, proving her right.
Even though she'd been expecting it, the admission took the wind from her sails. She froze there on the bench, unable to speak and not knowing what she would say if she could.
"So I can tell when you have a headache, Evie," he said, looking up at her once again. Amusement touched the corners of his eyes, causing the stars in their depths to sparkle.
God, he's beautiful.
"And if you'd like, I can take it away from you."
It was a while before Evie could form words. When she finally did, she had to clear her throat twice. "I'm... I'm fine. It's not that bad, really."
Roman watched her carefully, his eyes burning through her as if she had past lives and he wanted to read each and every one of them. Finally, he cocked his head slightly to one side and took a deep breath, smiling a little. "Then let's talk about the Hunters."
*****
Roman would have given just about anything in that moment to be able to read Evie's mind again. He felt like a fish out of water, completely unable to head off her fears or concerns, unable to get a head start on their communication. It was brand new territory for him and exceedingly uncomfortable. Despite all of the restraint he'd practiced and learned over the centuries, it was making him edgy.
In filling her in on their situation, he'd started from the beginning, not only for her sake but for the relative ease that chronology afforded his explanation. It was just simpler to begin at the start. He'd told her that as far as people were concerned, the world consisted of both humans and nonhumans, but as she'd plainly observed for the majority of her life, the nonhumans remained hidden.
He explained why, more or less sticking to the same notion authors and screenwriters had always put forth – that humans weren't given the truth because, quite frankly, they couldn't handle it. The color in Evie's cheeks had darkened as he'd admitted this, and he knew she was thinking of the way she herself had reacted when confronted with the truth. A human would feel it was natural to react this way. And that was the problem. No mortal in their right mind could really, truly fathom that there were more things in the world than what they were already aware of. It was like a fish trying to imagine a bird.
Still, he had to admit that she was handling it better than most people would. She seemed to have accepted the proof he'd presented to her so far and was now re-ordering things inside her mind. He was impressed with how she'd gradually steadied her nerves, forced herself to calm down, and was willing to hear him out. He wouldn't deny that some humans possessed the ability to see reason this way, but he did have a feeling that in this case, it was at least in part due to the fact that she was _different_.
Roman had gone on to tell her about the werewolves, their curse, and the Hunters. And this was where her anxiety clearly ratcheted up a notch. He didn't have to be able to read her mind to know that much. But it couldn't be helped. In fact, if anything, fear was the right reaction when dealing with Hunters.
"They've gone after werewolves all this time," Evie said, staring down at the table and its half-empty dishes of cookies and fruit. "Why did they go after you at the coffee shop?"
"A lot is changing suddenly," Roman reasoned. He'd been wondering the same thing, of course. It was something he would have every intelligent, immortal mind under his sovereignty working on by the end of the night. But for now, Evie was his primary concern.
"Whatever their reasons, Evie," he said, allowing the gravity of his next words to be carried by the weight of his tone. "They will no doubt associate you with me now. I'm afraid I've put you in very great danger."
Evie was so still and so quiet, Roman could hear his own heart beating. His fingernails dug into his knuckles where they were laced over the table. She was so beautiful in repose, so regal and silent, like a painting or a princess. Her long lashes brushed the tops of her cheeks as she stared at the table, her thoughts having taken her prisoner.
"Roman," she said, lassoing every ounce of his attention with a single word, "you said that I was... not human." She looked up at him now, her honey-colored eyes wide and earnest, and Roman had to rather brutally force himself not to move over the table, grab hold of her, and kiss her then and there. "What did you mean by that?"
Roman swore internally. He'd known she would eventually want an explanation. He'd felt it coming. But he had no idea what to tell her. He could sense that she was different, that there was something incredibly special about her, but for the life of him, he could not figure out what it was. He couldn't control her mind or take care of her fear or discomfort unless she actively let him in, he couldn't read her thoughts, and he couldn't make her forget. Her spirit literally felt as ancient as his own, but she was a mere thirty years old. Three decades.
He'd lived one hundred times that long. And he'd never met anyone like her. The closest he had ever come to feeling as suddenly and furiously obsessed with a being as he was with Evie was when he'd become enamored with Ophelia in 1798. And comparing the two was like comparing a candle's flame with a bonfire.
Or the sun.
"The truth is, Evie, I don't –"
He cut off in mid-sentence as a warning vibration thrummed through him hard, fast, and sudden. At once, he was opening his mind, sending a whiplash-like wave of his power out into the waking world above. His men were communicating with him, reaching out to him. He found Jaxon's mind, Cade's mind, and the others and he dove in without hesitation.
A body had been found.
A woman in her early twenties, brown hair, brown eyes... drained of blood and half-burned. It had only been a few hours, and already, alarms were being raised.
"Evie, I'm so sorry," he said softly as he stood from the table and moved around it. "But I have to go."
Evie blinked, her eyes went wide, and she was immediately standing as well. "What? What do you mean? Go where?"
He looked down at her and couldn't help but take her in, from the heavy combat boots she wore on her small feet to the thick pink-peach sweater she wore that so perfectly touched on the slight blush to her cheeks and lips. He'd transported all of her belongings into the cottage, he'd filled the cabinets with food, and the cottage was warm, inviting, and safe.
"I want you to stay here."
"What?"
"There's been a murder and I'm afraid...." He trailed off suddenly, realizing at once that his fear that the killer was a vampire was the very last thing on Earth he wanted to share with Evie Farrow. He didn't want her thinking of his kind as killers. It was true that Offspring had not always been under his command, and had not always been as careful as they were now. But he had worked very hard to maintain a sovereignty that was nothing like the twenty-four-seven blood bath portrayed in some Hollywood vampire fiction. And he didn't want Evie thinking otherwise.
"What? How do you know this?" she asked.
"Several of my men discovered it."
"And you're communicating with them or something?" she asked. She was clearly still trying to figure things out. This was an alien world for her, but she was giving it hell.
"In a manner of speaking," he replied.
"Who was killed?" she asked, suddenly turning the conversation back to the very thing he didn't wish to share with her.
Roman shook his head. "Evie, please stay here, if only for a few hours. I'll be back –"
"Was it a woman?" she asked next, as if she could read his mind.
Roman swore internally. Again. "Yes."
"Was it the Hunters who did it?" And then recognition flickered in her beautiful eyes and she straightened, her expression darkening. "It was a vampire, wasn't it?"
Now Roman swore out loud, but softly. "We're not certain," he admitted.
"You never did tell me how you feed," she said. Her tone had lowered, her voice dropping to almost a whisper. "I mean... do you _have_ to feed? Drink blood? And if you do," she swallowed hard and went on, "do you kill your victims?"
A current of desperation abraded Roman, and his skin felt prickly. This was a discussion he had both known was coming and had tried very hard to avoid. Now he was faced with the worst of it when he had the least amount of time. He had never been more tempted to use magic on an unsuspecting human as he was just then. He might not have been able to control her with his inherent Offspring powers, but a simple magic spell and she would be in dream land.
But he held himself in check. Somehow, he knew that such a path was the wrong one to go down with Evie Farrow.
"I promise that I will answer all of your questions in short order, Evie," he told her. "But at the moment, I'm desperately needed elsewhere." He lifted his chin and asked, "Will you please stay here?"
"No."
Roman stilled. He blinked. He hadn't been expecting her defiance, though he wasn't sure why. Given the fact that he no longer had mental control over her, and given what he'd learned of her spirit over the last few days, it would have been logical to expect it.
But this cavern.... It was almost everything he loved about life and was quite literally magical. Wouldn't _anyone_ want to stay here? Especially in comparison to where he had to go just then?
"What?" he asked, feeling completely out of his element.
Evie lowered her head and narrowed her gaze, piercing him with a look so severe, Roman was hit with the instant impression of strength. She was so small – but so tough – and he was witnessing evidence to that effect right now.
"You will not leave me here, D'Angelo," she said softly, her voice so strict, so no-nonsense, it was as if she were speaking to a misbehaving child. "Over the last few hours, you have kidnapped me, used magic on me, and shown me that everything I thought I knew was real _isn't_." She paused, took a deep breath, and continued. "If I'm not actually in a hospital bed imagining this entire ordeal, then the fact is, I'm feeling unsteady right now." She stopped, looked him up and down as if she wasn't sure she wanted to say the next bit, and her coloring paled. "And... I don't want to be a prisoner," she told him. She shook her head, gestured to the house and cave around them, and added, "No matter how gold-gilded the cage might be."
Roman gazed down at the woman who had turned his world upside down in the course of a single day and thought about her words. Not being able to read her mind was throwing him off of his game. Why hadn't he been able to tell that she would see things like that? He wasn't used to being in the position he found himself in now. He felt, for lack of a better word, _mortal_.
Evie's refusal to stay alone left him with very few choices. He could knock her out with a spell, in which case she would hate him upon awakening. He could leave her here kicking and screaming, in which case she would again hate him. Or... he could take her with him.
Roman felt a heaviness settle in his gut. Again, he swore internally, the ancient words offering little comfort.
He closed his eyes and sighed. "Take my hand," he told her as he held it out for her. "I will transport us again."
Evie looked down at his offered hand for a moment, glanced back up at him, and then straightened, sliding her small hand into his.
The sensation was startling. Her touch was altogether distracting, warm and soft and almost literally electric. He stared down at their joined hands and allowed his fingers to close over hers. It was the most gratifying thing he had done in a very long time. He wanted to squeeze tight, use his grip to pull her into his arms, and never let her go.
With effort, Roman martialed his thoughts. He looked back up at Evie. "Please accept my apologies in advance," he told her. "The city morgue is quite literally the last place I dreamed of taking you."
Chapter Eleven
It was like being pushed through a balloon. That was the immediate and strong impression Evie got as Roman "transported" them from the fantastical cavern. It was uncomfortable, but not overly so. The feeling of being stretched and pulled and pushed intensified, however. Just when she thought she might say something, they were coming out of whatever space-time bubble they'd been in, and Evie felt Roman steady her with a strong grip as the world became solid beneath her feet.
At once, she noticed the mass of milling bodies. All around her, doctors, nurses, and a few police officers, some in uniform and some in plain clothes, froze in place. Some of them dropped the files or folders they were carrying. One released a coffee mug so that it shattered on the polished, disinfected floor, and one or two stumbled while coming to a sudden stop.
In the wake of the new stillness and silence, Evie exhaled a shaky breath and looked around. She recognized her surroundings at once. They were in a hospital, most likely below ground. The medical uniforms, lack of windows, and the over-bright halogens above gave her that impression.
There were roughly two dozen people in the crowded hall. There was a pair of elevators off to one side, a door leading to a stairwell, and at the end of the long corridor were a set of swinging metal doors.
Aside from the doctors and other officials, there were two other men in the room – they stood beside Roman, nearly as tall, almost as handsome. Maybe it was another delusion and maybe she really _was_ dreaming, but it seemed that Evie instantly recognized that these men were more than human. She experienced another quick pang of resentment; for thirty years, the supernatural world had hidden itself from her no matter how hard she had railed against reality, and then in the course of one night, they'd appeared in force.
But overriding the resentment was the pulsing sense of danger Evie had as she took everything in.
One of the nonhuman men had blond hair and blue eyes. The other had brown hair and green eyes. Both sets of eyes were piercing and stark, the kind models immediately took to agents and that turned Hollywood stars into legends.
Evie absorbed very quickly, and then she turned back to the doctors, nurses and police officers in the hall. They were all staring at Roman, their eyes wide, their jaws open.
Naturally, Evie looked up as well. Roman's own intense eyes were now glowing as red as stoplights. Evie inhaled sharply. The unexpected picture was beyond eerie, filling her with sudden and renewed apprehension.
The rest of the world receded as the face of the most handsome man she had ever seen came into sharp focus. Everything she'd "learned" in the last few hours ran like a loop through her head, and Evie had an epiphany.
_This is no dream_ , she thought. _He's really a vampire._
"Evie, stay close," he said softly. Then he spoke some arcane, strange set of words, and Evie felt what could only be described as a ripple in the air. She turned to watch in stunned silence as the people in the hall straightened, almost as one. Their hands dropped to their sides, and they stared straight ahead at nothing.
They were zombies, living and breathing.
_What has he done?_ she thought. How _did he do it?_
It was highly upsetting to see other human beings manipulated in such a manner. This kind of thing happened in movies all the time, and viewers lacked the empathy required to feel anything for the victims on the screen. It was make-believe anyway.
But now that she was faced with it first-hand, she was shaken. It felt so intrusive. It felt as if their privacy were being violated. Their bodies, their minds – all of it, just _violated_.
A cold chill went through Evie at the thought. But Roman took her hand in his again, and this time the sensation she received when he touched her was not only shockingly sensual, but foreboding. A part of her wanted to pull away.
Roman looked down at her, his red eyes burning like Hell's fires. His eerie gaze narrowed, his expression becoming quite grim. His grip tightened around her fingers as if he'd been reading her thoughts.
But he told me he wasn't.
She had no further time to contemplate the upsetting notion before he was moving, taking long graceful strides down the hall toward the metal doors at the other end. His words replayed through her mind.
The city morgue is quite literally the last place I dreamed of taking you.
Above the swinging doors were the words "Forensic Science." _Oh God_ , Evie thought. _He really is taking me in there. With the dead bodies. The moms and dads and baby girls and baby boys who have all been taken before their times. Oh no...._
Beside her, Roman stopped and looked down at her again. She met his gaze and watched as the red began to leak away from his irises, going from a flickering lava-like color to an indigo and, finally, to black once more. Endless, bottomless black.
"Evie, are you all right?"
_God no_ , Evie thought. _You're a vampire and those two there_ – She looked at the two men following them toward the morgue doors – _are vampires too, and you're taking me into a morgue, for Christ's sake!_
She swallowed hard, noticing for the first time that she had been trying to pull her hand out of his. He, however, had yet to let her go. She stared down at the hand, trying desperately to get a grasp on her situation. It was all real. All of it. And it was happening way to fucking fast.
She shook her head. "No," she said.
"Then let me in," he told her simply. Her head jerked up and she met his gaze once more. His expression was hard, unyielding. With his free hand, he gently tapped the side of her head. "Here," he said. "I can make this easier on you."
Evie felt her eyes go wide. She glanced at the other two behind Roman. They were watching her in silence, their expressions untelling.
_Pull it together, Evie_ , she told herself. _You aren't getting out of this one_. A hard, cold fear ran like a metal rod through her core, straightening her spine and almost hurting her heart. All at once she realized what she was dealing with. For all intents and purposes, she was dealing with _monsters_.
As convincingly as she could, she said, "I mean I'm fine."
Roman watched her in silence for a moment. And then he took a deep breath and let it out in a weary sigh. "Like hell you are," he whispered. Then he let her go.
Evie rubbed her hand gingerly as Roman turned to face one of the men behind him. "Watch her," he instructed. "I'll keep everyone under and handle this alone."
The man with brown hair and green eyes nodded and came forward. He seemed familiar to her, and Evie had a flash of a memory. _Jaxon_ , she thought. _Jaxon is his name_.
Jaxon nodded. "Yes My Liege."
_My Liege?_ Evie thought, her heart doing a somersault in her chest. _Did he just call him his liege?_
*****
Roman could both hear and smell Evie's mounting unease. It was evident in the scent of cortisol and adrenaline running through her tempting little veins, and it was made more so by the ever-quickening pounding of her heart.
The situation was freaking her out. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken so long.
He cursed his misfortune. He couldn't leave her alone now because of the Hunters. He couldn't take things slow and get to know her in a normal fashion. He couldn't ease her into the supernatural world he'd grown so accustomed to.
Instead, fate had made it so that she was being thrown to the sharks, and despite her obvious strengths, she was finally beginning to feel the stresses of it.
He was a vampire. That would be enough to scare the hell out of _any_ mortal.
But now he was dragging her into a hospital, hypnotizing two dozen people with magic, and facing Evie with the prospect of witnessing dead bodies. One of which had probably been placed there by another vampire.
So, it was of little surprise to Roman that she was finally starting to flip out a bit. However, it was definitely of concern.
He released her hand with extreme reservation. He had the impression that she would bolt at any moment now, and since he lacked the ability to subjugate her mind, he would have no choice but to overpower her physically. It was the last thing he wanted to do with her.
Actually – that wasn't true at all. It was _not_ the last thing he wanted to do with her, and that was what scared him. He wanted to... hold her down. He wanted things he was starkly ashamed of. It wasn't like him to lose control over his desires. It hadn't been for a very long time. Her blood had smelled good to start with, but now there was a nuance to it that grew with every passing hour. It smelled like magic – a very special, very unique kind of magic. And it was mouth-watering.
He turned to Jaxon behind him. David was there as well; the two had transported to meet him at the hospital as soon as they'd received word of the murder and shared as much with him.
He'd been catching their thoughts since his arrival; Cade wondered who the woman was and wondered even more why he wasn't able to read her mind. Jaxon recognized Evie, of course, but not only was he still highly curious about her significance, he was concerned about her attendance here in this place and at this juncture.
"Watch her," Roman instructed. "I'll keep everyone under and handle this alone."
"Yes, My Liege," Jaxon replied. He came forward as if to put his arms around Evie, but she pulled back – just as Roman had feared she would. He could sense a power struggle coming on, creeping ever closer. It felt inevitable. He just hoped it didn't have to happen here and now.
"Evie, I don't want you to have to see what is inside," Roman told her, meaning every word. "No one should have to see it." He'd heard that the body was badly burned, as if an Offspring had attempted to hide the evidence of his crime and failed. Evie had a big heart and hated the unfairness in the world. This was not something he wanted her to witness.
She was already on edge. She'd lied to him about being fine. He didn't like being lied to, much less by her, but what made it worse was that she was doing it because she was afraid of him.
It was something he was going to have to deal with later. In the meantime, he needed to get in, see the body, and determine whether it was one of his men who had taken the life of an innocent. "Please remain here with Jaxon," he requested.
"No."
That magic he scented in her blood intensified. It was like it swelled around her defiance, was _fueled_ by it. He froze in the wake of it as his hunger blossomed to life and he felt a little more of his infamous, never-failing control begin to slip from his grasp.
"Don't leave me here, Roman."
It was spoken softly, a technical command and also a plea.
The sound of his name on her lips was like the brush of silk across his skin. Every time she said it, that feeling grew stronger. It gave him enough pause to consider her request.
" _Please_."
He lifted his chin. "Very well." He offered her his hand again then. It was a direct challenge. If she wished to come with him, she would do so under his own terms.
Evie gritted her teeth; he could see the muscles flex in her jaw. The power struggle had begun, it seemed. And contrary to his expectations, he'd been the one to start it.
Ever the brave, Evie slipped her small hand into his. He could feel the tremor of trepidation that ran through her bones as he curled his fingers over hers once more. As his grip tightened, he experienced a thrill of triumph. It was unexpected and even unfitting of one of his incredible age and stature, but he actually enjoyed this small surrender on her part. He enjoyed it all too much.
Without waiting any longer, Roman turned with Evie and headed back down the hallway toward the double doors that led to the coroner's morgue beyond.
Chapter Twelve
It was standard procedure for situations like this. Vampires had been getting in and out of monitored locations for years without leaving behind the slightest bit of evidence that they'd ever been present. So, David Cade knew that when he and Jaxon met up with D'Angelo at the hospital morgue, Roman would immediately start taking control of every human mind nearby, as well as whatever cameras might be recording in the vicinity.
It happened just as he'd expected, as far as that was concerned. He and Jaxon rematerialized out of their transportation spell and Roman was there to meet them, rematerializing at the same time. At once, the king's power shot out, like tendrils of invisible lightning, and took control of every single mortal present, from the basement all the way up to level three. For all intents and purposes, the humans would behave no differently than the walking dead until Roman released them.
The cameras that whirred and clicked overhead in the corners of the hallways were being taken care of as well. D'Angelo's magic fried the wiring, erased the footage, and made certain nothing would ever show that vampires had at one point walked the halls.
Because of his experience, all of this David had known would happen. What he _hadn't_ been counting on was the appearance of the woman that rematerialized beside the king in the hallway. What he also hadn't been expecting was the way D'Angelo was behaving toward her.
_Interesting_ , David thought. It was intriguing, to say the very least. Not in all the time he'd known him had David witnessed his king act like this toward a woman.
D'Angelo actually seemed off his game, to be honest. The air around him was charged as if lightning could be pulled from it at any moment, and his demeanor was tense. It wasn't like D'Angelo to be tense.
The woman herself was just as intriguing in her own right. She was lovely, certainly. She was small and perfectly shaped, her eyes were striking, and her hair looked like spun caramel with honey thrown in. But it was absolutely more than that. He couldn't read her mind, for one thing. Not so much as a floating surface thought. She was like a holiday present, all wrapped up in layers of sparkling giftwrap. He had no idea what treasures waited inside, and given the way the king was behaving toward her, he wouldn't be finding out any time soon either.
If Roman's grip on her wrist was any indication, this woman was one present no vampire in his right mind would attempt to unwrap.
There was something else as well. There was something in her _blood_. It was a kind of magic, he would bet his right incisor on it. She smelled human in that delicate way that cried out for protection and kid gloves. But she also smelled like morning dew and fog, and the way the air smelled just before lightning struck. It was all around her, an aura of some kind, a shiny, impenetrable wall of glittering otherworldliness. Whoever – _whatever_ – she was, he couldn't blame D'Angelo for the death grip on her wrist.
David trusted that if it was important, Roman would explain about the woman eventually, when there was time. For now however, David understood enough about his duties as Roman's best friend and loyal companion to accept that if the king felt she was imperative, it was David's responsibility to feel that way as well.
David glanced at Jaxon beside him. Jax was probably thinking along the same lines. The three were usually on the same wavelength, which was one reason their friendship was so cohesive. Whoever the woman was, she would have their combined protection.
Ahead of them, Roman entered the double doors that lead to the coroner's morgue beyond. David steeled his nerves. He wasn't as old as Roman by far, but he'd been around a while, and yet when things like this happened, it had a profound effect upon him. He was an Offspring and one of the most dangerous predators on the planet, but at the same time, he despised those who preyed upon the weak and helpless. He always had and he always would.
The doors swung shut behind them and Roman led them through the cold metal space to a table that waited against one wall. It was fortunate that the room was presently empty. The medical examiner had either come and gone or had yet to arrive. Either way, the Offspring had the room to themselves.
The four of them approached the table, upon which rested a misshapen form covered in a white sheet, and David experienced a moment of apprehension. He didn't want the woman to see what waited under that sheet. It didn't matter who she might be; _no one_ should have to witness what was on that table unless they absolutely had to.
"Evie, I don't want you to look," Roman told her. David exhaled a relieved breath when the woman nodded and turned her face away. She didn't have to be told twice, obviously, and he had a feeling that the first time hadn't been necessary either. She didn't want to see any more than they did.
With his free hand, Roman reached down and pulled the sheet from the body on the slab. It was as bad as David had feared it would be. At once, he was filled with revulsion, however it wasn't the gore of what lay before him that turned his stomach, but the act that had brought it there in the first place.
Half of the body had been burned, but some trick of fate – an impromptu storm or a strong gust of suffocating wind – had belied the murderer's efforts and saved the remaining half. The result was that the telling puncture wounds in the neck were still there.
Roman's expression hardened, and the red in his eyes was back. He straightened. "It was one of our own."
Long ago, before Roman had become their sovereign, Offspring were undisciplined and selfish. They needed to feed to their victim's "last drop" far less often than they were doing, and the murders piled up, tainting the world in red. But for three thousand years, things had been different. D'Angelo had seen to that. Now when a vampire had to feed on the entirety of his or her victim's blood, the kill was directed at criminals or addicts or those who were terminally ill.
Innocents such as this were protected. This was a terrible crime not only amongst the humans, but amongst the Offspring as well.
Beside Roman, "Evie" made a small sound, half-sigh, half-moan, drawing everyone's immediate attention. Roman released her wrist and she leaned down, placing both of her hands on her knees as if to steady herself. "It smells like coffee," she said softly.
David frowned. _Coffee_? That was the last thing he smelled. It smelled like charred flesh, chemicals, and antiseptic.
"Evie –" Roman moved forward – and Evie fell. It happened fast, and a mortal man might not have been able to catch her, but Roman had her in his arms long before she would have hit the ground.
He turned with her, cradling her unconscious form against his chest. "Jaxon, I'm taking her back to the safe house. Alert the guard and call a meeting. One of our own has gone rogue."
*****
Lalura was still on her bed; the atmosphere in the room was quiet in the early hours of dawn. Outside, no cars traveled the icy roads, and no jets split the sky overhead. Snow had fallen all night; the world was now travel-free and wholly, peacefully silent.
But in the sleeping confines of the ancient witch's mind, there were voices. They spoke to her in jumbled masses, their whispers and words a mixed-up mess that she could not understand. She floated in a strange darkness as something blurry and blue took shape up ahead.
There was a table, black and smooth as an onyx plane. It reflected some unknown light, and atop it was a....
A chess board.
Lalura floated toward the board, ever closer to the object of her imagination. As she neared it, shapes materialized upon it, taking up the squares beneath them with a regal purpose. Lalura counted them. One, two, three....
Thirteen kings. Different colors, all tall and gleaming beneath the magical light, all with a waiting majesty.
Lalura stepped forward, her feet now firmly planted on the ground, the vision around her now solidified. The room was empty other than the table and chess board. She moved to stand beside the table and looked down at the pieces.
There were twenty-six now.
Thirteen kings.
And on the opposite end of the board, their smaller forms huddled together as if to hide from her sight, were thirteen queens. They were slightly different, all of them. But they were still indistinct, and there was that frustrating feeling about them; Lalura knew that if she tried to reach out to touch them, they would disappear.
She squinted at them, noticing that one was separate. It was further forward on the board – as was one of the kings.
With a sudden start unhealthy for one so old, Lalura woke from the telling dream and sat up in her feather bed. Her fine white hair waved about her face like a wispy halo. She exhaled a shaky breath and the hair around her face danced.
A snow plow rumbled by outside her window. Lalura's stark blue gaze narrowed with irritation. The noise was disturbing, but the sound was a secondary annoyance. What really troubled Lalura was what she had just seen.
And what it had to mean.
Now she understood. Now she knew who Roman's mystery woman was.
And now she knew this was just the beginning.
*****
Roman felt her presence drawing near. He always did. But he made no move to acknowledge her this time. He did not rise from where he sat beside Evie's unconscious form, and he did not take his eyes from her sleeping face.
"Well, I hate to be the one who states the obvious," Lalura said as she came up behind him, her steps slow and labored, as usual. She came up beside him and looked down at Evie as well. "But you seem to have found her."
"Tell me what's wrong with her," Roman commanded softly. He could no longer make it past Evie's barriers in any fashion, and she wouldn't wake up. As the minutes and the hours passed by and the sun rose higher in the morning sky, his thoughts turned darker. He was considering things no vampire had been allowed to consider for thousands of years.
Beside him, Lalura made a harrumphing sound and he could feel her sharp eyes land on him. "You don't know?" she asked, clearly bemused by the idea.
Roman shook his head.
"Then I assume you can't scan her or read her or whatever it is you boys call it?" she asked, putting two and two together the way he knew she would.
Again, Roman shook his head.
Lalura fell silent. Then she nodded and he watched as she raised her hand over the woman's sleeping body. She spoke her own cryptic words, releasing tendrils of her magic that curled like wisps of white smoke from her palm to Evie's form.
The magic surrounded Evie, enveloping her in a shroud of glowing curiosity. Finally, Lalura lowered her hand, and the magic disappeared.
"I suggest you tell me everything, Roman D'Angelo," the old woman said. "And start from the beginning."
Roman gently brushed a lock of Evie's beautiful hair from her forehead and secretly marveled at its softness. Behind her eyelids, her eyes moved, just for a moment, as if she were dreaming. Roman took a deep breath and nodded.
"Very well."
He told her everything, from the rescue on the intersection to the way he'd studied Evie for two days, to the incident in the coroner's morgue. He even told her about the cavern – not that he told her where it was.
When he'd finished, he realized that he hadn't moved from where he yet remained on the edge of the bed. The bed was a king sized bed that he hadn't slept in for some time; the room was only one of the master bedrooms he possessed around the world. This safe house had simply been the one nearest to the hospital when he'd transported from the morgue.
He realized then that he'd come here instead of to the cavern because he'd known that Lalura would come looking for him. He'd felt it in his bones. And he desperately wanted her help.
Lalura processed the information in silence, and then asked, "You said she smelled coffee?"
"Yes. That's what she said before she fell."
"Interesting." She paused another moment more, and Roman turned to glance at her. The old witch's expression was deeply contemplative. Roman could tell at once that she knew something he didn't and that for some reason, she wasn't sharing.
"Lalura, tell me what you know." He didn't want to make demands around her. He didn't want to come on strong with Lalura Chantelle. But there was a desperation burning in his veins. It felt like fire, spurring on a hunger he barely recognized, and the scent of Evie's magic blood wasn't helping.
He needed answers yesterday.
Lalura's eyes cut to him. "What I know?" she repeated. She cocked her old head to one side and pursed her wrinkled lips. "I know that coffee sounds good, but quite frankly I've always preferred tea."
For once, Lalura did not wait for Roman to provide their refreshments, but instead turned and muttered her own words of magic into the chamber's still air. On the coffee table on the other side of the room, a tea set shimmered to life. The pot was steaming.
Lalura moved away from the bed to make her way to the sitting area. "Roman, come and sit down and share a cup of tea with me," she said.
Roman stayed where he was, watching as the witch took a slow seat on one of the padded chairs and exhaled a tired breath. "We need to have a nice, long talk, you and I," she continued, "and there's no way in hell I'm doing it on my feet."
Chapter Thirteen
It was the strangest holiday shopping Dannai had ever experienced. As "The Healer" and one of the more powerful witches in her coven, normally at this time of year, Danny, as she was called by her friends and relatives, would be preparing for the Winter Solstice. She would be baking, humming happy tunes, and creating fabulous, glittering decorations with a bit of magic. This had always been her favorite time of year.
_This_ year, however, a dark cloud hung over her world, casting what would otherwise be a joyous occasion into shadows of doubt. The Hunters were on the loose again, this time led by a man who apparently possessed magic powers of his own. And now she wasn't only a witch – she was a werewolf.
Danny glanced at her reflection in the shop windows they passed. She was three months pregnant but had yet to show. The image that reflected back at her – tall, slim, dark tanned skin, long black hair and multi-colored "kaleidoscope" eyes simply looked more healthy than it had in a long time.
To her right, her best friend Imani walked by her side. The African American goddess was several inches taller than Danny and looked like a model. She was a witch as well, and the herald of their coven. On Danny's other side walked "Charlie," or Claire St. James, another werewolf. Charlie was their physical opposite in skin tone and hair with a very fair complexion, a slight smattering of fetching freckles, and long, thick strawberry blond hair.
The three of them looked very different, but together they were a formidable team for good, and normally they were accompanied by two other werewolves who rounded out them out perfectly – Lily Kane, a "seer," and Katherine Dare, the "curse breaker."
These girls knew how to take care of themselves. But since the Hunters had reformed and grown almost exponentially in numbers, the werewolf council overseer, Jesse Graves, had put into effect several new rules.
No important member of the werewolf community went anywhere any longer without at least one enforcer in tow. The werewolf enforcers were the biggest and the strongest that alphas had to offer. Graves had been one himself at one time.
Danny looked over her shoulder now and spotted the four enforcers that had been assigned to watch over her and her friends. The large men tried to hang back and blend in, but it was hopeless. They looked like weight lifting models, bulging out of their jeans and t-shirts, their thick hair and dark glasses all-too conspicuous.
But then maybe that was part of the point. If the Hunters saw them first, maybe they would ignore the girls.
"Oh, I want to stop in here," said Charlie, breaking their companionable silence. The three girls stopped in the hall and looked up at the Hot Topic sign. "Remember that girl I told you about who was having a hard time in school since getting her werewolf powers?" Charlie continued, taking Danny's hand and pulling her inside. "She's way into Robert Pattinson in white face paint. I'm gonna see what they have left here."
Danny shrugged and went along with it, and Imani followed behind. Charlie was a drummer in a band called Black Squirrel. As such, she was a bit of a role model for quite a few teenage girls, and since Katherine had unwittingly broken the werewolf curse that kept female-born wolves from having the same supernatural powers their brothers and fathers shared, a lot of those girls had been writing to Charlie via email and through snail mail to ask for advice.
Charlie, of course, was thrilled to be able to give that help and more. A few of the girls, Charlie had sort of taken under her wing. It was one of the things Danny loved about her. Charlie was the toughest woman Danny had ever known. She'd been through so much pain herself, and yet she didn't hesitate to assist others whenever possible. In fact, maybe it was _because_ of that pain and not in spite of it that she fought so hard to keep others from suffering. She had empathy – more than a person should have to have.
"Oh yay," said Imani in a droll tone. "I love those really pasty white boys."
"Liar, liar," came an incredibly deep voice from behind them. "Pants on fire."
Danny jumped and spun, as did Charlie. They hadn't noticed anyone coming up behind them. But Imani couldn't turn around, because Jesse Graves was standing at her back, and his arms had slid around hers, holding her in place.
Imani looked up at the massive black man who curled over her and pinned her with his stark amber eyes. She blushed furiously, which was impressive for her dark skin tone.
"Jesse!" Danny said, exhaling a relieved breath. "What are you doing here?"
The Overseer looked up, not moving from where he held the coven herald in his strong grasp. "Proving to you that you are not in fact capable of taking care of yourselves," he said softly, raising a single brow.
"Oh?" said Imani, despite her obvious flustering. "I could turn you into a soft, cuddly chinchilla right now."
Jesse looked down at her and smiled a bright white, predatory smile. "Baby, if you want to cuddle with me, all you gotta do is ask."
He and Imani had been dating on and off for a few months now, and Danny was sure Imani knew all about "cuddling" with the man. Imani elbowed him in the gut, to which he just chuckled, but he did let her go. Then he smoothed his button-up shirt and straightened to his full, impressive height.
Jesse had almost always played an important role in werewolf society. He was the Overseer now, the head of the werewolf council, and the most important position in the werewolf world. However, before becoming Overseer, he'd been a Sentinel. Sentinels were very rare, very highly trained enforcers used to guard VIP's of werewolf society. Enforcers, in and of themselves, were the strongest and fastest of the werewolves. Jesse was the crème of the crop.
The former Overseer had been Charlie's grandfather, Alexander Kavanagh. Kavanagh had died destroying a very evil man, and in his last will and testament, he'd called for Jesse to take his place.
Jesse wasn't much for suits and never had been. While he was a Sentinel in the werewolf world, in the human world he'd worked as an attorney prior to becoming Overseer, and even then he'd only worn a suit when actually in court. But the role of Overseer called for at least a semi-formal dress almost all the time, so he wore the most expensive sports coats and slacks money could buy.
Danny had to admit he looked good in them, too. _Really_ good.
"And there's also the fact that neither Cole nor Caige would allow me to give you three permission to go out on your own unless I'd promised to check in on you myself," Jesse told them.
Danny's eyes widened. The three girls spoke at once. "They _what_?"
Jesse held up his hands in placation. "You all know the risks right now. You're lucky you have this time. Don't argue with me."
Danny's mouth shut with a snap. She felt furious just then, but that could have been hormones, and anyway she could definitely see Jesse's point. "Cole" was Malcolm Cole, the famous author, the rather notorious werewolf, and Charlie's fiancé. "Caige" was Danny's husband. Naturally, the men were worried. The Hunters had been ripping a jagged hole in the supernatural world for the last few weeks.
Just a few days ago, they'd injured a few fledgling female-borns so badly that the girls hadn't known how to heal themselves adequately and Danny had been called in to do the mending. She possessed the unique ability to heal wounds by simply placing her hands on a wounded body and visualizing it as it once was. As far as they all knew, she was the only one among them with this talent.
Jesse's gaze squared on her. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
Danny was carrying Lucas's twins. The pregnancy was throwing her for a bit of a loop, in all honesty. The last time she'd used her powers to heal had been more difficult for her than usual. She was drained, as every pregnant woman was. She hadn't wanted to let on that healing someone had caused her weakness, but Lucas had simply _known_. And he'd begged her not to do it again.
"I'm fine," she said. "The twins are fine." She took a deep breath and tried to let go of her mounting tension. "We're all fine. Now you can go."
"Yeah," Charlie agreed. "Before we kick the Overseer's ass."
Jesse's grin was still ear to ear. It wasn't every person who could talk to the werewolf council Overseer in such a manner, but where Charlie was concerned, it was allowed, for many reasons. He settled his amber gaze on Charlie and shook his head. "Oh baby girl. We've been down that road before and I think we both know who's gonna win."
Charlie's own expression first switched to one of shock, and then slid into one of sly defiance. She and Jesse _had_ definitely been down that road before; Danny knew all about it. The two were very, very close friends, and at one point – long before Malcolm Cole, Charlie's mate had arrived on the scene – they'd been friends with _benefits_.
Danny could feel the stares of a few of the patrons in the store now; Jesse Graves was a powerful man in every sense of the word, and anywhere he went, women tended to notice and men tended to get antsy. Now a few of the shoppers had overheard bits of their conversation and things were probably getting a little too public for comfort.
She cleared her throat. "Seriously, Jesse," she said, lowering her voice and moving forward so that she wouldn't be overheard. "We really are okay. We're well guarded." She gestured to the men who were watching from the hall. Two had taken seats on a bench where Danny could have sworn some other guys had been sitting a few minutes ago, and two were on opposite ends of the hall, leaning casually against the walls. "You have enough muscle on us to keep – " She was cut off mid-sentence by the sound of bullets thunking into metal and stone all around them.
The Overseer was in motion at once, grabbing Danny and yanking her into his arms before he hit the ground with her, cushioning her fall.
There was a brief silence in which the world tried to catch up with what was happening, and then that silence erupted into screams. Danny blinked, her hands immediately going to her stomach. Her werewolf hearing at once caught the separate heartbeats of her little girl and boy. _They're okay._
Above her, there was a scrambling motion, fast and furious. Danny curled in on herself when she heard more bullet thunks along the walls and the glass storefront shattered. Jesse's body was a protective weight above her.
And then the noise stopped, and the world went eerily still. Jesse was moving immediately, coming to his feet with the grace of everything he'd ever been trained to be. Danny couldn't tell exactly what he was doing; a part of her was too shell shocked to get up. It was slowly sinking in that someone had fired a gun on them in a public place full of innocent humans.
_The Hunters_ , she thought numbly.
"Danny," someone said above her. Danny recognized the voice as Charlie's. "Danny, you okay?"
Danny rolled over, looked up at her redheaded, blue-eyed friend, and sat up. Danny had been through a lot in the last year, and she and the others were no strangers to violence. But for some strange reason, she felt slightly numb this time.
Still, she knew she needed to reassure Charlie, and she managed to nod. Charlie patted her once and was up and moving again, no doubt either going after whoever had done the shooting or tending to anyone who might be wounded.
Wounded.
_Oh hell_ , Danny thought, coming at once to her feet. She began to scan her surroundings. They were filled with broken glass, overturned displays, and chunks of plaster and paint. Jesse was nowhere around, and now neither was Charlie. They _had_ gone after the shooters. It was like Charlie to do so; she never backed down from a fight. And as the Overseer, of course Jesse would.
The enforcers the werewolf council had assigned to them had split up. Two were moving through the crowd, checking on people who had hit the ground. Two were standing on either side of Danny.
Imani was coming up beside Danny even as she finished scanning her surroundings. "One injury," Imani said softly. "No one was killed. Not a normal Hunter attack." She turned to face Danny fully. "But I'm gonna have a hell of a lot of mind-wiping to do, and the one injury is actually pretty bad." She pointed to a group of huddled teenagers kneeling beside a girl who was laying in a small puddle of blood near the back of the store.
Danny's heart flip-flopped. At once, she was moving in that direction, but one of her guardian enforcers stepped in her path. "Mrs. Caige, we can't let you do this," he said as she looked up at him questioningly.
Imani was beside her. "He might be right, Danny. You were pretty drained last time."
"Get the hell out of my way," Danny demanded, her gaze narrowing. She could smell the girl's blood and knew instinctively that there was too much of it. However the human had been harmed, an artery had been punctured. She needed to be healed.
The enforcer shook his head.
And Danny's hormone-fueled anger reached a peak. She whispered a powerful arcane word and held up her hand, palm-out. A blast of something invisible rushed over the enforcer in front of her and he stumbled back, shaking his head. Without blinking, she spun and did the same to the second enforcer as he came up at her side. The two moved away, temporarily discombobulated.
"Stunned," Imani whispered, nodding sagely beside her. "A safe bet I guess. But I'll ask you honestly, girl – you sure this is a good idea?"
"Positive." Danny brushed past her best friend and made her way to the girl on the ground. "Hang tight, sweetie," she said softly. "Everything's going to be just fine."
*****
Several blocks away, Ramses watched the young pregnant woman through the clear crystal of the telescope one of the Hunters had supplied him with. Their attack had worked. And the recordings Ramses had watched earlier hadn't lied.
Dannai Caige possessed the ability to heal.
What was more... she was an orphan who had been raised by a well-meaning witch. She had no idea who her parents were. Who her _mother_ was.
But Ramses did. Dannai was Amunet's daughter.
Chapter Fourteen
When Evie woke up, the smell of coffee was still strong in her nostrils, and a heavy sense of dread had settled in her gut. She came awake with a start and rose in the bed to find that she was back in the safe house room Roman had originally transported them to before taking her to his cavern. Roman wasn't there, but she wasn't alone.
"Miss Farrow, you're awake," came a familiar voice. There were two men in the room; they were the two who had been at the hospital with her and Roman. There was also an old woman.
The old woman sat on the edge of the bed and watched her through some of the bluest eyes Evie had ever seen. She said nothing, and Evie's sense of confusion and doom deepened.
The one called Jaxon came forward now and stood beside the bed while the other man immediately turned toward the door and exited the room through it. "He'll be notifying Roman that you're awake," Jaxon told her.
"There's no need," the old woman said finally, her voice so positively ancient, it sounded like dried leaves skittering across a deserted Autumn park. "He knows. He's on his way." She turned and reached for a tall glass of drinking water on the night stand beside the bed. "Here child, drink this," she offered, holding it out for her.
Evie cleared her throat and shook her head. She had no idea who the old woman was and she had barely been around the others long enough to keep her from hysterics about waking up amongst strangers, but at the moment, the only thing she wanted to do was speak to Roman before the images from her strange sleep disappeared and she lost them entirely. The dread that had glued itself to her in her dreams still clung menacingly, speeding up her heartrate and threatening her with panic. "No. No water," she said, clearing her throat to continue. "I need to talk to Roman."
"Oh, he's on his way my dear, I can assure you," the woman repeated.
"Oh God...." Evie's fingers curled into fists. She needed to hang on to what she'd seen, but at the same time, she'd have given anything at that moment to be able to forget the images playing before her mind just then. "I know who killed that girl!" she cried, the trembling of her body causing her voice to quiver. She couldn't hold it in any longer. She wasn't sure the old woman would even know what she was talking about – but Jaxon would.
She looked up at him. "The girl that was burned, the one in the morgue," she repeated, her words speeding up and her voice rising with mounting hysterics. "I know who killed her! I saw the whole thing!"
Jaxon frowned down at her, his vivid eyes blinking in confusion. "But miss, that's impossible."
"Nonsense," said the old woman, shaking her head in reprimand. "You of all people should know better, Jax. You're a vampire for crying out loud. What the hell could be impossible compared to that?"
The old woman turned back to Evie and cocked her head to one side thoughtfully. "I'm Lalura," she said by way of introduction. "And you are Evie. Roman's told me all about you." She nodded once as if to close off the subject. "Now what is this about the killer?"
Evie was baffled. But more than that, she was scared.
She'd seen everything. She would never forget the killer's face now. What he had done to the innocent girl in the morgue turned Evie's stomach to lead and clouded her brain with an oncoming migraine. It was a waking nightmare. But worst of all – absolutely most terrifying of all – was the fact that the murderer was not a stranger. Not to her.
She'd come close to him. Within mere feet. She'd even found him attractive.
Evie swallowed hard now and closed her eyes. "He followed her home from the school," she said, seeing it behind her closed lids as if it were a movie. "Light brown hair and blue eyes. His name...." It was there, floating around her subconscious like a bunch of jumbled, blurry letters that floated frustratingly close to being in the right order.
"His name...." She froze, the letters came together, and she opened her eyes. "His name is Charles."
It was the man from the coffee shop, the one with the piercing blue eyes who had been watching her from across the store while she tried to tell her father how to download the Kindle app on his phone. Charles was the murderer. He was also a vampire.
He's a vampire.
And it was more than that. Evie shook her head and felt a comforting hand on her shoulder. Her head began to pound. Her chest felt tight and her fingers tingled. A panic attack was coming on.
There would be no avoiding it. Evie was absolutely petrified.
The man from the coffee shop was a vampire and he'd drained an innocent girl of every last drop of blood for one horrifying reason. He'd done it because the girl looked just like Evie.
"Breathe," Lalura said. "In for five counts, hold for two, out for five counts, repeat." She leaned forward, her voice stern, her blue eyes flashing. Evie automatically did as she was told. She would do anything to prevent the attack. She felt as if she were dying.
She breathed in slowly, held it, and let it out just as slowly. A bit of the nausea passed, the throbbing in her head lessened, but the tingling fingers and the tight chest remained.
"There now. You're doing what you can. I'll take care of the rest." The old woman raised her right hand, held two fingers over Evie's heart, and spoke a string of the most beautiful cryptic words Evie had ever heard.
*****
There were six where there should have been eight, and as the doors to the meeting chamber closed and Roman's heady gaze landed on the second of the remaining empty seats, a number of puzzle pieces slid into place.
David Cade was missing, but Roman knew where he was. He'd remained with Lalura to keep an eye on Evie.
The other missing court member was Charles Ward. It was beginning to make sense now.
The eight members of Roman's court had been chosen for very good reason. Each warlock in existence possessed powers particular to them and them alone. For the most part, they all shared the ability to perform the same basic spells such as transportation and telekinesis. However, just as each individual human on the planet was special in some manner that was his or her own, be it incredible athletic prowess or great cooking skills, each member of the supernatural world was different from the others.
Some alpha werewolves possessed the power to change into animals other than wolves, such as the infamous and late Gabriel Phelan had been capable of doing. Some could control human minds to some extent, such as Malcolm Cole, the famous author and even more famous werewolf was capable of doing.
Warlocks were no different. And because Offspring were the product of a warlock communion with an Akyri, vampires also tended to possess unique powers. Those with the most useful abilities were called in to Roman's court.
Samantha Chance was the youngest in his court, only pulled in a few short years ago. She was a technological genius in more ways than one. She possessed an inherent know-how when it came to nearly anything computer-related. And because she was also a technopath, what she could not coerce or finesse with this know-how and a college try, she simply manipulated with the powers of her mind.
Saxon had been a member of the vampire court for more than a thousand years. His particular ability was one of great value when it came to protecting Offspring society from other supernatural factions. He was a trained warrior, and because he'd lived so long, he had become proficient in nearly every weapon on the planet. He was also immune to attacks from all of them. Bullets bounced off of him or simply missed altogether. Swords scraped along his skin as if it were made of metal. And when it came to magical attacks, Saxon's abilities were perhaps most impressive, for he was able to absorb the attack and turn it back around on his opponent. With such abilities, Saxon had long ago earned the right to train and teach Roman's "army," a fairly sizeable group of Offspring warriors who luckily were needed less and less with each passing year.
Philip Diego had joined the vampire court in 1451, a fellow countryman of the land of DaVinci, though much, much younger than Roman. The king asked him to join when he discovered that Diego possessed the ability to summon a being from anywhere on the planet to where he was at any given time. Transportation of one's self was difficult enough. To be able to cast the spell on an unwitting individual was not only rare, it was valuable. Of course, Diego had to know where the person _was_ in order for the spell to be successful. That was the one downside.
Lizbeth Knight was a voice of reason and intuition among court members. She was a beautiful woman, inside and out, and one of her two special powers reflected as much. She had been born on a blue moon five hundred years ago, and so once a blue moon, she chose a certain mortal to become the recipient of her "gift." This mortal, she fed from. As she did so, that mortal's inner beauty took residence on the outside, in effect making them just as lovely on the surface as they were deep down.
The fact that this gift brought Lizbeth such joy touched Roman's heart, and he cared very deeply for the woman. They were as close to brother and sister as two people without blood siblings could become. They treated one another like siblings as well. In fact, true to a sister's form, for the last several centuries, she'd been on him constantly about his lack of a meaningful love life.... She would probably have a blast with the news once she heard about Evie.
Lizbeth was a close confidante. However, it was Lizbeth's _other_ power which had granted her a seat at the court's table.
Roses and orchids were Lizbeth's favorite flowers. Her favorite animals were sea turtles. But it was _every_ flower and _every_ fauna that she possessed a psychic link to. Lizbeth was the world's first and true druid, able to communicate and even control, up to a certain point, the aspects of nonhuman, mortal life. She'd set a swarm of bees on Roman once in a fit of pique. Fortunately for him, his magic was not weak either.
Quinn Adams had been a court member for a decade short of three centuries. The Irish man's unique Offspring ability allowed him to "merge" with another person, mortal or immortal, in order to combine, not only their bodies, but their abilities. The person he joined with had to be willing to merge, or the attempt would fail, but when it did work and the combination included another Offspring, the results were impressive, to say the least. The power had also saved Quinn's life at one point. The town he'd grown up in found him out, turned on him, and were dead set on exposing him to the daylight. However, a mortal woman who had fallen in love with him allowed him to merge with her. In doing so, he successfully "hid" inside of her until the mob dispersed and he was able to escape into the night.
David Cade was Roman's oldest and dearest friend and had been a member of the vampire court since its inception. David's ability was perhaps the most modest of them all, and undoubtedly the most useful. He possessed the ability to temporarily lend his power to another. In any given battle, Cade could focus his inherent magic onto Roman, or another member of the vampire court, so that their own powers were magnified or doubled.
At the moment, however, despite all of these people and their combined talents, Roman felt like the butt of a joke. He'd sensed the wrongness rising, he'd had his doubts, and he'd ignored his intuition – and David's – and he'd failed to apprehend Charles Ward when he'd had the chance.
_And Roman, it smells like black magic in here._ Lalura had known as well.
Ward's absence from the meeting was as good as a confession. It was bad news on more than one level.
Ward was a murderer who had broken Roman's long-standing edict and destroyed an innocent mortal. What was worse was that the mortal woman had very closely physically resembled Evelynne Farrow.
Worst of all, however, was that Charles Alexander Ward was a formidable adversary with an impressive amount of power of his own. It was the reason he sat on the vampire court. Roman had never trusted Ward. There was something about the man that rubbed Roman the wrong way. However, he knew that if he didn't ask Ward to join the court, Ward would become suspicious. He was certainly powerful enough to have earned the position.
There were only two living, breathing individuals that Roman knew of who possessed the special power Ward utilized, and Ward was still much more practiced in the art. It was another clue to the darkness about Charles that Roman had until now more or less ignored. Ward was an astral master, capable of pulling a person through to the astral plane as soon as they were asleep and dreaming.
It had to be done through touch, however, which was why Roman had left David with Lalura and Evie. Once pulled into that other plane, nothing could pull an individual back out again but another astral traveler.
Years ago, when Roman first considered this ability, he did what he felt was the intelligent thing to do and invited Ward to join the court. There was the added bonus that while Ward was seated at Roman's table, the king could keep a close eye on him.
However... little good it had done. And now Charles Ward was on the run and very, very dangerous.
It made horrible, perfect sense. When Roman had killed Malachi Wraythe's daughter, a barely noticeable change had come over Charles, and Roman's suspicions about Ward's alignment on the magic front had spiked. He'd heard rumor in the past that Ward and Wraythe were not strangers to one another. And in fact, Roman began to wonder whether they might be friends.
Because of this, he made certain that Ward was nowhere around when Wraythe and the werewolf community went head to head over the Curse Breaker and her mate. A battle between the Hunters, Wraythe and his men, and the werewolves and their allied witches had ensued. In the end, and with a bit of unseen help from Roman, Wraythe was killed.
The unsettled aura around Charles Ward had grown stronger after that.
Now Roman had a feeling he knew why. The former Warlock King Malachi Wraythe and Charles Ward had indeed been close. Charles somehow knew about Roman's otherwise secret involvement in Wraythe's death. And now Charles was out for revenge. And because he'd somehow found out that Roman cared for her, he was no doubt planning on using Evie to get it.
All of this had taken very little time for Roman to muse over, and now that everyone had gotten comfortable in their seats, Roman took a deep breath.
"I want every Offspring on the lookout," he began, his voice soft, his tone serious and low. The sound was ominous and beautiful; he'd always had the ability to take control of a room with his spoken words. "Charles Alexander Ward has broken my laws and destroyed an innocent human life."
He allowed this information to set in, his gaze combing the room as he did so. No one seemed surprised. The women looked down at the table, the men looked at one another, and all of them took deep breaths before their gazes once more returned to him.
"He will not be alone, he will be on the offensive, and," Roman paused, made certain that everyone present would understand the weight of what he was about to say next, and continued. "He has his sights set on Evelynne."
"The woman you are looking after?" Lizbeth inquired.
"The one under your protection at the safe house?" Samantha asked next.
Roman nodded.
"She is of great interest to you," Lizbeth inferred. He could almost hear the wheels in her head turning.
Roman met her gaze. "She is more than that," he told them all softly. "Evelynne Farrow is to have the protection of every vampire in my kingdom."
The members of his court digested the edict and nodded their assent. "Granted," they said, one after another.
"I'll see that it's done," Saxon assured him.
Lizbeth caught his eye. Her expression was a mixture of things that all made Roman uncomfortable. She looked inquisitive and hopeful. She also looked as though she wanted to crow. "You will have our full support of course," she said softly, her green eyes twinkling. "But might I ask, your majesty, what it is about this young woman that makes her both the target of Ward's aggression and the recipient of your protection?"
He should have known she would put him on the spot. She waited in silence, already well aware of what he was going to say.
"Evie is Ward's target because I care for her," he told them frankly. "And she is has my protection... and my love," he continued, his voice dropping to an intimate near-whisper, "because she is my queen."
Chapter Fifteen
Roman sat still in the silence that stretched past his announcement. The air in the room was thick with unvoiced questions and a myriad of unexpressed emotions. He didn't bother to read their minds; he almost never did unless it was necessary, but he could imagine what was going through their heads.
Roman was not a celibate man by any means, but Lizbeth was right about his more meaningful relationships. There had only been the one.
Thinking on it now, Roman realized how vastly different infatuation felt than love.
Love?
His ancient heart slammed against his rib cage. He'd just admitted it aloud to his entire court. He hadn't felt this way about Ophelia. At the time, he would have sworn up and down and left and right that she was the one for him, even that he loved her.
But he'd never called her his queen. He'd never even told her he was a vampire, much less the vampire _king_.
But with Evie, here he was, prepared to send an entire vampire nation out after the man who threatened her. He had never loved Ophelia, and what Evie meant to him went beyond words.
Lalura had told him about her vision. Thirteen kings on a chess board – and thirteen queens. The witch felt that Evie was the first of many to come. The first queen.
_His_ queen.
Roman met five gazes one by one and held them steady. So many questions.... And it was nothing compared to what he would no doubt be up against when he presented the vision to the other twelve kings at one of _their_ meetings.
He opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could mutter a sound, he stopped. The air had shifted. It actually felt as if the lights in the room became brighter to him. He caught the faintest scent of cherry blossoms, and at once, he was pushing out his chair and standing.
"Court is adjourned," he said swiftly as he made his way to the door. The silence remained behind him, and he ignored it. He made it out of the room and into the hall just as David materialized in front of him.
"She's awake," Roman said before David could speak. David's brow raised, and the corner of his mouth twitched, but he simply nodded his assent. "Accompany me," Roman said as he cast up his transportation magic and the hall around him began to warp away.
He and David reappeared moments later in the hall outside of the master bedroom in the safe house. The sensation of Evie's distress hit him like a tidal wave. He strode through the door and into the room, preparing himself for whatever he might encounter, but the only other presences he sensed were Jaxon's and Lalura's.
Evie's distress was internal.
Lalura looked up at him as he entered. Evie was sitting in front of her on the bed with her eyes closed, breathing deeply. A split second passed, in which he automatically attempted to brush her mind for the information he needed before he remembered that it wouldn't work with her. Evie's eyes flew open.
They were glowing.
They looked like honey-colored suns in the lovely frame of her face, stark and beautiful and all too telling. She was indeed something more than human, and if he hadn't already decided on that, this would have clinched it.
"She's a seer," Lalura told him. "Among other things, I believe, but this is the first of her abilities to rear its head."
Roman looked over at Lalura and waited for her to go on. But before she could, Evie inhaled quickly and said, "Roman, I know who killed that girl."
Roman turned back to her. "You saw him."
Evie nodded. "I saw the whole thing." Her face was so pale, and there were dark circles beneath her beautiful eyes. Her sleep had been troubled in a truly terrible way.
"His name is Charles Ward," he said softly. "I know."
"What you don't know is that he was at the coffee shop with me the other day," she went on.
"I'm guessing that's why she smelled coffee at the morgue," Lalura said.
Evie spoke up again. "I think he killed that girl because she looked like me."
Roman swore internally. So much for trying not to scare her. Yes, he did know that the girl's murder had something to do with the similarity in their appearances.
_Wait_. Roman made his way to the bed and peered down at Evie with eyes he knew were beginning to heat up. "What do you mean he was _with_ you at the coffee shop?"
"He was watching her from across the store, Roman," Lalura said, her tone reprimanding. "It wasn't like they were on a date, so cool your jets."
Roman blinked, both taken aback and ashamed that Lalura was on the money. Roman _had_ been jealous.
Again, he swore on the inside. He needed to be more careful; Evie was capable of bringing out his monster with the slightest provocation.
The fact that Charles Ward had been in the same room with Evie, much less that he had been _watching_ her, wasn't doing much to ease his temper. He'd gotten closer than Roman had thought. If he'd managed to do that, then what else was he capable of doing under Roman's radar?
"My Liege, might I bring you and the lady some tea? Chamomile?" Jaxon suggested from behind them.
Evie immediately straightened in the bed and raised her hand as if she were a child in a classroom. "Okay, I'm sorry," she said, "but what the hell is the deal with him calling you his liege all the time?"
Beside her, Lalura stood, wobbly but strong, and grabbed her swan-tipped cane from where it leaned on the wall next to her. She stepped aside, limping slightly. It crossed Roman's mind that she'd never used a cane before. She was getting older ever more quickly, and Roman realized that it was something he didn't want to think on.
"Jax, come with," she said, gesturing for Jaxon to accompany her. "I think it's time we be moving along. I need a decent chair to sit my rump in and you mentioned your wonderful tea. A piece of pie would be nice as well. Think you can manage?"
David and Jaxon both moved forward to help her, taking the old witch gently by her elbows and leading her toward the door. Jaxon took everything in expert stride. "For you, Miss Chantelle, of course," he said softly. The three of them moved out into the hall, and closed the door behind them.
Roman and Evie were now alone.
"Evie, there are some important things we need to talk about that have taken a back seat in the wake of the attack and the murder," Roman said, knowing that there was no better way to breach these particular subjects than to run head-long into them.
"Like what?" Evie asked, at once wary. He could hear her heart rate kick up and smell the slight adrenaline increase in her blood. Noticing it was a mistake. The thought of her blood made him feel strange inside, hungry and aggressive. He was no fledgling vampire, and he managed to tamp the rising fierceness in him down, but it was less easy than it should have been.
Roman looked down at the thick plush carpet beneath his shoes and walked toward the hearth along the opposite wall. "I think Jaxon might have had the right idea," he said softly. "Tea might help."
He leaned against the mantle, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
_Control yourself_ , he reprimanded.
Behind him, on the small coffee table that rested at the center of the large master bedroom, a serving tray complete with steaming teapot shimmered into existence.
He heard Evie's stillness behind him. She was trying to digest everything, this latest evidence of his magic no different.
Finally, she sighed. "Sometimes I still think I'm dreaming."
Roman looked at her over his broad shoulder. She was staring at the teapot, her expression lost. She looked so beautiful, so vulnerable sitting there, it tore at his heart. "You're not dreaming, Evie," he said. He straightened and faced her once more, waving his fingers at the empty hearth as he did so. A fire leapt to life behind him, the perfect size, the perfect flames, the perfect amount of light and heat.
It crackled merrily in the otherwise quiet, and Evie gazed at it with what must have been numb comprehension.
"No," she said. "I know I'm not."
"Evie," Roman began, striding slowly toward the waiting teapot and mugs. He lifted the pot, poured some of the steaming liquid into one of the mugs, and went to her side. "Drink this. It'll help."
Evie looked at the mug, said, "It needs cream," and then looked up at him.
Roman stared down into those beautiful amber glowing eyes and almost laughed. If he'd been able to read her mind, he would have known she wanted cream. Instead, he was having to fumble through this like a human.
He glanced at the mug and it automatically filled with rich white cream, mixing perfectly with the black tea. This was how Lalura liked it as well; he was betting that the two had more than a few things in common.
"Thank you," she said, taking the mug from him.
"You're welcome. It's not coffee, which I know you're much more fond of, but it might be better for your panic attacks."
Evie stopped mid-sip, swallowed hard, and looked up at him. She hesitated a moment and then asked, "How did you know about my panic attacks?"
Roman blinked. He thought fast. "I believe you were having one just before I came in." It was something he'd learned about her when he was watching her several day sago, but it was also something he'd pulled from Lalura's mind upon entering the master bedroom – thank God. "I could hear it in your heartbeat and... smell it in your blood." It wasn't a _complete_ lie.
Evie seemed to consider this. "Oh," she finally said and continued to drink her tea. "I get them sometimes. I have since I was little. But coffee doesn't make them worse, actually." She took another swallow of tea and smiled. "This is good."
"I'm glad you approve," he said, meaning it. Then he backed up, took a deep breath, and said, "You wanted to know why Jaxon calls me by the names he uses."
"It's like you're his king or something," Evie remarked, lowering the mug.
"That's because I am."
The silence stretched for several beats. "You're what?"
"I'm his king, Evie. In fact, I rule as sovereign over all of the vampires, the _Offspring_ , on the planet." He paused, took a breath to steady himself, and said, "I have for a very long time."
Whatever Evie was thinking then, it kept her quiet. Her expression was unreadable, and Roman would have given just about anything to be able to skim even the smallest of thoughts from the top of her head.
" _How_ long?" she finally asked, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper.
Roman sensed the trouble coming then. It felt familiar now, and he knew that answering this question would open the door to it and let it inside. But there was no hope for it. He couldn't lie to her. "Three thousand years."
More silence, but for the ever increasing thumping of her little heart.
"Give or take."
Chapter Sixteen
Summoning and trapping an Akyri was risky business. Normally, it was the Akyri who located the warlock. Their lives depended upon a symbiotic relationship with the dark magic users. For this reason, they were drawn to the call of the power, the certain vibrations in the air, and before long, a warlock was presented with a deal. Sustenance for servitude. It happened the same way every time.
However, the problem with warlocks is that they achieved their reputation as black magic users by using black magic. They could never be trusted – Charles should know. He and Wraythe had pushed the envelope when it came to the darker spectrum of spells. The werewolf community had suffered all too well the result of Wraythe's labors: A spell to change a made wolf back into a dormant? Done. A spell to remove a mate's mark from a dormant? No problem.
Others enjoyed the silver lining of a warlock's forbidden brand of magic: Bringing back the dead was a walk in the park for a well trained warlock.
A warlock could make a victim feel anything he or she wanted that victim to feel by doing no more than touching them. That was the kind of power a black magic user wielded. It was wicked, unpredictable, and awesome.
And now Charles used that magic to perform one of the most vile functions a warlock could engage in. It was cruel and it might have terrible consequences, but at this stage, Charles barely cared.
He knew that time was up for him. Roman D'Angelo had suspected him for some time. The feelings were there, the suspicion an egg that merely needed to hatch. And now young Evelynne Grace Farrow had apparently developed the abilities of a seer and ratted him out.
Charles had to smile at that. It was a nasty smile.
He was right to suspect that Evie was different. He'd known deep down that his attraction to her had to do with something more than her lovely features and the fact that the king had fallen for her. He wanted revenge, yes, and he would damn well have it. But there was no reason he couldn't get something out of it for himself in the process. Evie Farrow promised to deliver.
The six Akyri he was now summoning and entrapping were going to help him on that front.
For the moment, Charles stood alone on the top of the craggy hill overlooking the sea on one side and a crumbling cemetery on the other. The night whipped at his hair and clothes and the moon reflected in the stark blue of his eyes. There was no sound but the distant crashing of waves on the rocks far below and the wind howling against the cliff face and whispering through the sparse tall grasses.
Before him on the ground rested a circle of stones. He'd built it himself, large enough to comfortably fit six humanoid forms, but small enough to contain them well within the grasp of his magic.
In his left hand, Charles held the black leather bound book that Wraythe had left him. Its cover was devoid of decoration and it bore no lock or clasp to secure its secrets. It didn't need them. Every word inside had been written in Wraythe's blood, scribed with the essence of his being, and no one but the appointed would be able to pry apart its covers and read what graced its pages.
Charles gazed down at the book for a moment, allowing the night to get used to him and preparing himself for what lie ahead. Then, with his right hand, he flipped the book open to a certain page – and without hesitation, ripped that page completely out of the journal. There was a flash of separation, the book closed on its own, and the torn page began to glow red. The symbols etched upon its surface illuminated, casting a blood-like glow across Charles' right hand and arm.
The warlock vampire closed his eyes, whispered a magic word, and released the page. It hovered in place for a moment, the wind having no effect on it. Then, with the gradual deliberation of a spell taking hold, the page floated forward, riding on an unseen force until it was suspended in place directly above the center of the large circle.
Charles could feel the magic pull on him then. It sucked at his spirit, draining him from the core of what he was. He was stealing six lives, taking six will powers and stifling them, binding them to him in the most unnatural manner. Non magic-users would have automatically assumed resurrection to be the most difficult spell possible. Or perhaps some form of heavy telekinesis or even transportation.
But this – this grabbing of the strings of fate for half a dozen strong individuals and pulling them into a knot in his hand – was much, _much_ harder. A bead of perspiration broke out upon his brow. Charles ignored it, focusing his strength toward the center of the circle and the page that floated within it.
He forced the final words, hissing them through clenched teeth and fangs that had extended in pain. The wind rushed by once more, stronger than before. And then it settled and something inside of Charles clicked like a lock sliding into place.
He opened his eyes to find six pairs of glowing orbs staring back at him.
Charles released an exhausted breath and looked them over. They glared from where they stood, every one of them male. That was good; it was as he'd intended, though it had made the spell that much more difficult. He needed all of the extra muscle he could get, and the fact of the matter was, female Akyri were too smart, too cunning. He couldn't chance having to watch over them that closely when there was already so much on his plate.
The Akyri males were tall and strong, and as was customary for Akyri, their hair color was dark and they were dressed in black from head to toe. In their anger, their eyes were rimmed with red.
They said nothing, only stared at him with cold, handsome faces and glowing, angry eyes, but Charles knew that they would have given anything in that moment for the chance to rip him limb from limb. There was little that an Akyri, who under normal circumstances _willingly_ gave his or her loyalty in exchange for the simple right to continue living, liked less than being entrapped with a spell. Akyri were not meant to be bound; it abraded their spirits and drew out their wrath like nothing else could. For them, it was a violation of their trust and a breach of their natures.
Charles would have to maintain absolute control over the half a dozen "demons" before him, or he would wind up in straits as dire as he'd intended for the Vampire King.
However, fortunately that control wasn't going to be a problem.
"I have a series of commands for you to follow," he said now, keeping his voice calm and allowing the power in it to ride the winds around the circle. "Once you have completed the tasks I set forth, I will have no further use for you. When I have no further use for you, I will return you to where you came from."
The men continued to gaze at him in hatred-filled silence. Charles pressed his right hand to the cover of the book he still held and unleashed one final rope of power. "To ensure your obedience," he said softly, knowing full well they would hear him anyway.
A blast of red energy shot from the book to the necks of all six men. They fell to their knees, gritting their teeth in pain. Their hands went to the sides of their throats, but it was too late. The mark had already been branded there, scrawled across their flesh in blood-red magic-laden ink. It would bind them to him irreparably. His commands would compel them as nothing else could, and should any of them raise a finger to harm him in any way, their efforts would backfire on them and they would be destroyed. It was as simple as that.
*****
"Three thousand years," Evie repeated, allowing the words to trail off of her tongue. They still felt strange, though. She couldn't wrap her head around them. "Three thousand years." She knew she was just mumbling, but her head was elsewhere.
How did an individual live three thousand years? How did they go from one day to the next and not wind up completely insane? In the mere thirty years she had lived, she'd seen so much death and sadness, the pain the planet had to endure often sent her into panic attacks.
She'd read an article on women in Sudan that had left her sleepless for weeks. She curled in on herself a little more every time a kitten or stray dog took its last shuddering breaths. She hated the homelessness in the cities and the diseases that ran rampant through children, and she was only three decades old.
Roman was three _millennia_ old. What he must have seen in those years boggled her mind.
"Three thousand...." Her voice trailed off this time. She shook her head and tried to swallow, but a lump had literally formed in her throat. Her eyes watered as she tried to get past it. "I don't...." _I don't understand_ , she thought. And it was true. She simply couldn't comprehend it.
So she had to let it go. At least for now.
What she _could_ grasp and cling to was that along with the fact that he was old enough to have witnessed the fall of Rome, he'd just admitted something _else_ to her.
"Evie, I know that such a thing must be difficult to grasp," Roman said as he gazed down at her with his stark eyes. "If you'll allow me to, I can help you –"
"And you're the vampire king?" she said suddenly, focusing on that bit of startling information with everything she had. She watched as a strange look crossed his too-handsome features, darkening his expression and increasing the red in his eyes.
"Yes."
"What does that mean, exactly?" she asked.
Roman watched her in silence, and she felt the weight of that gaze as if it were a ton of bricks.
"You never told me how many vampires there were in the world," she said, recalling the details of his brief supernatural history lesson as they sat at the table in his private cottage in the magical cavern. Strangely enough, other than the most basic information, such as the fact that vampires were Offspring created through the union of warlocks and some sort of demon called an Akyri, he'd kept most of the information about vampires to himself. "How many are there?"
"Thousands," he told her softly.
"And you rule over them all."
His expression darkened further, uncoiling a thread of uneasiness within her. He nodded, just once.
"So... there must be a reason you are in charge," she hedged, a part of her wanting to know what that reason was – and the rest of her not.
Again, he nodded.
"Was it a royal blood kind of thing?" she asked.
"No."
"Did they vote you in?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Not as such."
"Then tell me why."
Roman straightened, and Evie could feel the aura of his power around him like static electricity. It was charging up. "The position of king is won."
"Won," Evie repeated, her gaze slipping to his broad shoulders, his thick, corded muscles, his incredible height and stature. "Did you fight someone to the death for it?"
"Yes."
A sort of leaden heat rolled through Evie, anchoring her in place on the bed. _He killed someone_ , her mind told her as she looked up at the man standing over a mere two feet away. This was the real world, there were few democracies, and beauty was often a mask for evil. Roman D'Angelo was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. What kind of evil did that beauty hide?
He killed someone.
"I've killed _many_ men," Roman told her then, his mesmerizing voice lowered, his tone dangerously calm. Evie felt her lungs freeze in her chest – no air going in, no air going out. "And no, I'm not reading your mind, Evie. I told you already that I am not capable. Your thoughts come written in your beautiful, glowing eyes."
There was too much. It was coming at her too quickly again, too much information, too much insanity.
"When you live as long as I have, it becomes a demand of survival," he went on, taking a step that split the distance between them in half. "It's kill or be killed, and that is the reason I decided to become king. I wanted to change the way the Offspring existed. I wanted to bring vampires to an age of peace," he said. "And that is what I have done."
He moved as if he were going to take another step, and Evie found herself springing out of the bed and rushing to the side. She moved faster than she'd thought herself capable. She guessed that was what fear would get you.
Roman, however, was not pleased. Though he stood still and deceptively calm, waves of upset magic poured off of him, licking out at her with unknown intent. Evie took another step back, inching her way to the master bedroom's door.
"You must know by now that I mean you no harm, Evie," he said, his tone heavily laced with what sounded remarkably like pain. "Please don't judge me by my age and the blood that runs through my veins. I know you. You're better than that."
"You don't know anything about me!" Evie cried out, not even knowing why she'd chosen to do so.
He raised a brow. "I know you have been fascinated with vampires since you were a child. Your work says as much. Why do you think this is, Evie?"
"I don't know!" she yelled, feeling panic edge threateningly close again. Her chest was tight, her heart hammered, and dizziness tingled at the boundaries of her awareness. The witch, Lalura Chantelle, had cast some sort of spell on her to make it go away the first time, but fear was a relentless foe that was resurrected with the slightest provocation.
Despite her mounting fear, something he'd just said niggled at her. She was just too upset to give it proper attention.
"You were meant to enter my life, Evie," he told her, taking that second step now and making up for the space she'd put between them. "And not as an enemy." He shook his head. "When was the last time you read about one of my people doing some of the horrible things you have them doing in your books?"
"Last night," she said flatly.
Roman came up short, blinked, and actually cracked a small smile. It was a sad smile. "Granted. Your timing stinks. Charles Ward is the first vampire to break any of my laws in thirty centuries."
"How can I believe that?" she asked. "How can I believe anything you say?"
"Why wouldn't you?" he countered, taking another step. Evie's gaze flitted to his shoes and she found herself backing into the door behind her. "What have I done to make you think you can't trust me?"
She had no idea. The truth was, she could barely think coherently at all. "I want to go home," she said, meaning it more than she ever had. She wanted to take a long, hot shower and then drink ten cups of chamomile tea and watch twenty episodes of Doc Martin or The Vicar of Dibley, and then she wanted to find a Valium somewhere in her medicine drawer and fall into oblivion. That was what she wanted, and now that she'd considered it, it was almost all she could concentrate on. It was solid. It was routine. It was her world and she knew it.
She clearly didn't know anything else from Adam.
"I want to go home. _Please_."
Roman D'Angelo, the Vampire King, sighed heavily through his nose. He shook his head, dashing her hopes. "You know that isn't going to happen, Evie. The Hunters are still at large and Ward no doubt has plans to come after you."
"Those are _your_ problems," she said, her voice quivering. "This is _your_ world, not mine." She shook her head, her hands feeling along the door at her back. "I want out. My parents need me, I have obligations. How dare you just... just...." She didn't even know what she was saying any longer. Her chest was hurting now and the dizziness had become strong. A wave of it washed over her, forcing her to lean heavily on the door at her back.
"How dare I what, Evie?" he asked softly, taking another threatening step closer. "How dare I fulfill your dreams? Show you what you claim to have yearned for all your life? Is that what you have a problem with?" He took that final step that brought them together just as Evie's hand found the door knob behind her. She ripped the door open, spun around, and flew out into the hall as if the devil were on her heels.
Chapter Seventeen
"Where exactly are you trying to go, Evie?" Roman asked her from where he stood in front of her in the hall. One second, he'd been behind her in the room, and now he was there, blocking her path. He seemed deceptively at ease, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked to one side, his gaze narrowed inquisitively. Evie skidded to a halt and put her hands out to steady herself. She felt her lungs expand and contract too quickly, verging on hyperventilation.
"I told you!" she said. "I have obligations!" She spoke without thinking, her mind concentrating on finding a way out – a way out of the safe house, a way out of Roman's intoxicating presence, a way out of this waking half dream, half nightmare. But there was only the one hall, and behind her was the room she'd come from, and in front of her was the Vampire King.
"Your parents have your brothers to rely on and will survive without you for a few days," he told her, moving toward her once more. "Your readers can wait a while longer for their next book, and the animal shelter relies too heavily on you as it is. Your place is here, Evie."
Evie was looking over her shoulder at the door she'd just come through and wondering whether she could make it through the bedroom window when Roman's words hit home. Her head whipped back around and her gaze narrowed. "How did you know about the shelter?"
She'd never told him she volunteered with the animals. She'd never told him about her family life or her parents either. In fact, she had yet to tell him much of anything at all about her. Since meeting him, things had happened so fast – _too_ fast. So, how the hell did he know _any_ of this?
"You said you couldn't read my mind," she accused. Her voice was shaking so badly, it was like listening to a bad actress in a B horror movie, only this time it was real.
Roman D'Angelo stopped in his tracks and a look of stark surprise crossed his features. His eyes went from red-tinged to black to red-tinged again. A muscle in his jaw twitched and his hands came out of his pockets to curl slightly at his sides.
"You lied to me," she said.
"No I didn't," he insisted softly. "I can't read your mind."
Evie shook her head, trying to clear it. Her legs felt numb, as if they would bend beneath her any second now. If he wasn't reading her mind, then how did he know the things he knew? "You've been watching me?" Did she say that out loud? Her voice seemed far off and muffled.
She could sense that he was coming closer, but the world felt fuzzy. "Spying on me?" she asked, again hearing her voice as if through a tunnel.
"Evie, I want you to sit down."
_He's been spying on me. For how long?_ she wondered. And where? When she was at home? Showering? Going to the bathroom? What else did he know? Why would he do such a thing? _What has happened to me?_ she questioned. _What the hell is happening to my world...._
"Evie, sit down _now_."
Something bumped the backs of her legs and they gave out. She hit the chair rather hard, and even as she tried to figure out why there was suddenly a chair behind her, Roman's strong hand was on her back, shoving her forward. Evie bent at the waist, bracing her palms on her knees. This wasn't her first rodeo. So instead of fighting the weight on her back, she let her head hang between her legs and closed her eyes, concentrating on breathing.
As soon as Roman was satisfied she wasn't going to fight, he removed his hand. Evie was almost sorry for the loss of contact. It was exasperating.
"You spied on me," she said, her voice muffled because of how she was seated.
"Yes," he admitted easily. "I did." No apologies, just a confession. _Bastard_.
He was standing tall over her; she could feel his god-forsaken powerful presence pouring over her like some kind of infernal aphrodisiac. In his nearness, with his magic surrounding her as it was, the idea of him watching her suddenly did more than anger her. Against all common sense, it actually made her feel somewhat... cherished.
Oh my God.
It was even fucking turning her on.
She moaned a little, shutting her eyes tight against the realization. It was wrong. He was messing her up inside. His world and everything in it was twisted. She needed out.
"How dare you." It wasn't a question.
Above her, Roman was quiet. Evie just breathed, her body trembling.
"The moment I laid eyes on you, my world changed," he finally said, his smooth voice caressing her nerve endings like silk. "You were standing in a parking lot, the street lights igniting highlights in your hair and reflecting off of the gold in your eyes." He paused and she listened carefully. "You were the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen. In three thousand years, I've been through peasants and princesses. I've taken the matriarchs of empires to my bed, Evie. For three thousand years, I was always the one in control. I could always walk away."
Evie felt that her breathing was under control now, and her heart had stopped hammering. But it felt funny somehow. She slowly straightened and looked up at Roman.
"But you mesmerized me in an instant," he told her. Very slowly, very gracefully, Roman lowered himself to one knee in front of her so that they were eye to eye. "I took to the skies with you and nearly forgot the rest of the world. You rocked me to my core, Evie. Your heart sounded like music to me. The smell of you, the feel of you in my arms.... It was magic."
Evie didn't know what to say. She didn't even know if she'd be able to speak if she figured out what to say anyway.
"I couldn't let you go," he admitted softly. All Evie could do was stare into those bottomless eyes and listen. "I watched you. I didn't even know you, and yet the thought of anything happening to you in my absence was more than I could bear." He shrugged and offered her a helpless look. "So I made sure I wasn't absent."
"How did you know about my parents?" she asked, apparently knowing what to say after all.
"I know a lot about you, Evie." Roman stood then, and once more he felt closed off and intense, as if he were preparing for a fight. The feeling made Evie instantly wary again as well. "You were born on Halloween night thirty years ago. You prefer your friends at a distance, most likely because of your anxiety. I know you love trains and that every train in the world is on your bucket list. I know what kinds of music you like, what kinds of foods, and I know you have an impressively large array of boots in your closet." He stopped, as if to take a breath, and Evie held her hand out.
"Stop!" She demanded, her teeth bared. "How the hell do you know these things?" Spying on her would have shown him the basic routine of her every day life, but not _this_!
"I don't want to lie to you, and an omission of fact is the same thing," he told her. "The truth is I can't read your mind, Evie. Not now." He paused. "But I could at first."
" _What_?" Outrage surged up within Evie, nearly choking her. She slowly got to her feet, her eyes wide. He followed her up. "You read my _mind_?"
"Yes," he said quite simply. Again, it was just an admission of guilt. Again, there was no apology.
"You are unbelievable," she hissed, and for once, despite her creative writing capabilities, she was unable to come up with an insult that would have suited the depths to which her opponent had sunk. "Oh my God, you are just unbelievable." She turned away from him, running a shaking hand through her hair. "Jesus, I guess that means you know all of my dirty little secrets then, huh?" She thought of all of the things about her that she wasn't proud of. She wasn't perfect. She had faults.
She recycled, but resented how difficult it always was. She helped animals, but secretly couldn't stand the way a stray dog smelled. She always glared at empty handicapped parking spaces when she couldn't find a place to park. She swore like a sailor when she was alone, she forgot to shave for days at a time, and she rarely disinfected her shower.
There were things about her body and mind that she despised, and the thought of Roman being in her head to hear those self accusations right along with her was an inexcusable violation of her privacy.
And it made her hate herself even more.
"I know that I care for you, Evelynne Farrow," Roman told her. His voice had deepened, becoming commanding. It filled the hall with a kind of magic, arresting her attention and freezing her in place. "I know that every single thing I learned about you up here," he tapped the side of his head with his fingers, "deepened my affection for you here," he tapped those same fingers over his heart, "ten-fold."
He dropped his hand. "I can't excuse what I've done and I won't even try, but I wouldn't take it back either," he said. "In fact, if I could, I would do it again."
Evie stared up at him, lost for words and mystified. _Why_? she thought.
"Because you fill me with a passion I've never known," he told her, once more answering her unspoken question as if he'd taken the thought from her mind. "You and I were made for one another, Evie. You are so much more than you think you are. So much more than you know." He shook his head, his expression suddenly taking on a bewildered cast. "I wouldn't feel this way about you if you weren't special. Evie, I showed you my cave!"
Evie froze. She blinked. The indomitable vampire king looked different in that moment – vulnerable, innocent. His chest rose and fell with emotion, all too human. He was right, he _had_ shown her his cave. The notion was undeniably deep, romantically sweet, and passionately perfect. It was also hilarious.
She wanted to laugh, but was afraid it was hysterics finally breaking free, and somehow she managed to keep it down.
And then, all at once, the laughter spilled out anyway.
Roman watched her as she doubled over and held her stomach. She couldn't help it, and she could feel his eyes on her. But it was just so funny.
And then there was that gorgeous, amazing voice again – laughing right along with her. She looked up through the curtain of her hair to see him leaning against the wall, his hands on his hips, his head bent, his broad perfect shoulders shaking with his laughter. It was the most incredible vision. He was perfection, broken down – with a good sense of humor.
He looked up at her through his own thick wavy hair, and his dark eyes sparkled in the overhead lights. His chuckle wrapped around her, caressing her skin as if with tangible fingers.
Evie stopped laughing and straightened, shaking her head. "You know," she said as she tucked her hair back behind her ears, "I once wrote a book about a vampire king with an amazing voice."
"I know," he said, his expression changing just a little. "I read it."
She looked up at him with unblinking eyes. "Roman, this is gonna take some getting used to."
"We have centuries." He finally closed the distance between them and Evie hadn't even realized he had been moving toward her the entire time.
" _You_ do, Roman. Not me."
Without hesitation, he reached down and took her hand in his. "I have never taken a queen, not in three thousand years. Do you know why?"
Evie shook her head. She seriously couldn't speak. The feel of his skin on hers was exactly the way she'd always written it as feeling between her heroes and a heroines – electric. Magnetic. _Powerful_.
"Because I have never wanted one. I've never cared, Evie. Not until now."
"Why now?" she whispered. "Why me?"
"I don't know why it's you, little one, but it _is_ ," he said, smiling down at her. That smile felt like a punch to Evie's gut. It took her breath away. He was too beautiful; she couldn't concentrate. She looked away, lowering her head so that she could think.
But Roman's free hand encircled her neck in a touch so personal, so intimate, Evie inhaled sharply. It was the way a lover would touch another. His fingers brushed lightly over her pulse points as he tilted her chin, raising her gaze and trapping it with his once more. "Don't try to hide from me, Evie," he told her. "I will always find you anyway."
With that, he lowered his lips to hers. Evie's instinct was to pull away, but his grip on her throat tightened ever so slightly, holding her in place. She heard her own breath hitch as his mouth touched upon hers. She closed her eyes.
His lips were soft and dry, his advance slow and incredibly tender. But his free hand slid around her waist, strong and secure as an iron band, and as he leaned over her and deepened the kiss, Evie's nerve endings hummed to delicious life.
Warmth pooled in her midsection and began to spread. Thoughts of vampire kingdoms and murderers and mind reading flew from her consciousness like scattering leaves on the wind.
She heard someone moan and wondered if it was her. Then she heard someone growl and she knew it was Roman. The vibration moved through her, a deep treble that hardened her nipples against her shirt and made her head swim. His hand slid to the back of her head where he grasped a fist full of her hair and tilted her further into him.
He deepened the kiss, pushing harder and demanding more, stealing her breath from her as if he were drowning. The heat that coiled in her belly and between her legs began to throb, demanding something more with each passing second.
Open to me.
She heard his voice in her mind and was only marginally aware that it shouldn't have been there. The command moved through her and she obeyed it, opening to him to allow him to taste of her and drink deep. He made another harsh animal sound, one of lust and hunger and the hand he had at her back found its way beneath her shirt. Skin on skin; the sensation was delirious.
More. I want more.
She didn't know whether the thought were hers or his; it could have been a combination of voices, echoing through her mind, bouncing off of the walls of her desire like a kind of madness.
More.
Just as she was nearing the ledge of lascivious insanity, something sharp pricked her lip and Evie's eyes flew open.
Roman stilled above her, and she was transfixed by the hard angles of stark need in his beautiful face. His incisors had once again extended, hard, dangerous evidence of what he was. He opened his eyes and Evie gasped. They burned as red as funeral pyres, scorching her to her core. She could feel her pulse run through her body, the ache beating between her legs in time with the rapid thud of her heart.
She wanted him. Life was insane and he was three thousand years old, but damn it all to hell, she wanted him like she'd never wanted anything.
Roman pulled slightly away from her, just enough for her to raise her fingers to her lips. They came away wet and she glanced down. Blood.
He'd bitten her. She somehow understood that he hadn't meant to do it. But there it was. His teeth had pierced her flesh.
And now, as she gazed back up at him and saw the monstrous hunger blazing in his eyes and racking his tall, strong body, she realized something else as well. He wanted to eat her.
And she wanted the same.
Chapter Eighteen
There was a split second of indecision between the two of them, the kind where a person must make a choice between going past the point of no return or pulling back – and then the world exploded.
There was a brief flash, someone called out to them, and in the next split moment, the glass in the hall windows erupted inward, shattering into a dazzling display of shimmering glass that cascaded across the hall in all directions. At the same time, Roman's body jerked in front of Evie. He released her, the red glow leaked from his eyes to leave them black, and he fell.
Evie saw blood, heard strange thumping sounds, and as if in slow motion, she looked down to follow Roman's progress as he hit the floor. What she witnessed, she processed with amazing speed, but a part of her mind could not accept it.
He'd been shot in the head; half of it was missing. Blood and bits of brain were smattered across the carpet and walls. Evie heard more thunking and felt something make contact with her leg. Her arm. The side of her neck.
She was falling as well, but as she did she raised her hand to the side of her throat. A dart? She pulled at it, ignoring the pain and the fact that blood now poured down her own neck.
She was going numb. There was no feeling in her any longer. The color disappeared from her vision, turning the dark red and brown and black carpet into dark gray. A tunnel took her vision next. She couldn't see peripherally any longer, so she barely noticed when she hit the floor, her body half laying on top of Roman's.
A few seconds later, the world went black. She could still hear, though, and she caught the sound of more breaking glass, but this time crunching to bits as if under the weight of boots.
And then there was nothing.
*****
"Sorry about the darts, sweetheart. I would have preferred a simple sleeping spell, but there was a chance it would have taken too long or alerted D'Angelo, and we had to move fast."
Sound was the first thing to open up once again for Evie. The voice speaking to her was one she didn't recognize. Her brain felt fuzzy, and his words left trails of echo along the walls of her mind. She tried to open her eyes and failed.
"Shh, take it slow and easy. We pumped you pretty full."
Evie did as she was told, not because she thought it was a good idea, but because she had no choice. Her body wouldn't respond to her mental commands.
"You're a very unique individual, Evelynne Farrow," the voice continued. It was deep and melodic, though not anything like Roman's.
Roman....
_Roman_! Evie's heart hammered as adrenaline poured into her blood stream. He'd been shot in the head! Could a vampire come back from something like that? And who would do that? Who _could_ do that?
The person talking to her right now.
"It appears you're immune to every single vampire ability I have up my sleeve," the voice continued. "I can't read your mind or control your actions and I can't help but wonder why that is."
Evie tried to open her eyes again, and this time she was successful, though it did her little good. The world was one blurry blob of color.
"If I'd been able to control you as a vampire should, I would have had you awake an hour ago. But no matter," the voice said and she could sense someone rising above her. The blurry shapes and colors moved. "You're awake now."
The world was clearing more quickly now, and Evie could feel her fingers and toes. They tingled a bit, as if coming back to life after falling asleep. She tried to move her legs. They twitched and jumped a little.
There was laughter beside her. "You'll be fine," the voice said. Evie felt hands lifting her under her arms until she was sitting up. It helped somehow. "Give it a few more seconds."
He was right. Evie's vision cleared the rest of the way and her body began to get its feeling back. The relief she felt at this development was short-lived, however, because the man standing over her was none other than the man from the coffee shop. The one with the brown hair and beautiful blue eyes.
The vampire.
Who had killed that woman.
At once, Evie was trying to get her feet under her so that she could run, but her legs were wobbly and slow to react, and she fumbled on her knees for a moment and then fell back against whatever surface it was upon which she was leaning.
"I see you know who I am," the man said. What was his name? Evie racked her brain.
Charles.
He was dressed in a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his mid-forearms and a pair of dress slacks. He looked as though he was fresh from a meeting and had just stripped off his tie and relaxed a little.
Charles sighed heavily and paced away from her, giving Evie a chance to look around.
What the hell?
The "room" they were in was nothing more than a chamber that seemed to be constructed of multi-colored fog. The walls swirled and moved and coalesced like rainbows in a blender. The floor looked as though it was made of frosted glass, and those same swirls of color turned and churned beneath it, casting light across Evie's skin and clothes.
The air was still, and as she breathed in, she could swear it was the cleanest breath of air she had ever inhaled.
"Your instinct now will be to run, but I feel I must inform you that such a thing isn't an option for you, Evie," Charles said as he stopped near the far "fog" wall and turned to face her.
"Don't call me Evie," she said. Her voice was weak, but workable. She felt her strength returning quickly.
Charles smiled, flashing the fangs she'd seen him use to kill the woman in her vision. Evie winced and looked away.
"The room you find yourself in at the moment does not exist on the Earth as you know it. This is the astral plane," he told her. Evie looked up to find him gesturing to the rainbow fog walls. "It's just you and me Evie, and nowhere to run to."
Evie looked at the walls, strangely transfixed by the way they swirled and curled, and she wondered whether she were dreaming again. Maybe this was a vision? Or maybe she had died and this was actually Hell. She could believe that.
But there was a niggling at the back of her mind and everything felt very, very real. And she couldn't stop thinking about Roman.
She knew this was real. Deep down, she knew that everything Roman had told her in the last few days, everything she'd witnessed with her own two eyes and processed with her own mind, was true. Roman was the Vampire King, Charles Ward was a vampire rogue murderer, and this really was the astral plane.
Whatever the hell that was.
"You mean like the place that you go if you have an out of body experience?" she found herself asking, truly wanting to understand.
Charles smiled again and nodded, his expression impressed. "Yes, in a way."
"How are we here?"
"One of my abilities has always been to pull others into the astral plane along with me – so long as they are asleep when the attempt is made."
Evie thought about this. She remembered the darts that had hit her legs and arms and embedded themselves in the side of her neck. "The darts," she said. "They were poisoned with some kind of sleeping agent."
Charles' smile broadened, his wicked fangs ever threatening. Evie shivered. "On the money," he admitted. "You're incredibly astute, Evie –"
"Stop calling me that!" she yelled.
He ignored her and continued. "I'm going to enjoy having you around for a while."
"Did you kill him?" she asked, her heart aching as she prayed he would answer her honestly – and then prayed it would be the answer she wanted to hear. She didn't think Roman was dead. She felt that she would _know_ if he was. But she had to hear it from Charles' lips anyway.
"You mean the king?" His brows raised, his expression nonchalant. "Of course not. He's a tough son of a bitch. It would take a hell of a lot more to kill the royal pain in the ass. But you have to admit that it was an effective way of taking him temporarily out of the picture."
Evie closed her eyes, relief flooding her system. Then she tried to stand once again, and this time she was successful. She made it to her feet and leaned against the fog-filled wall. It was a strange sensation. It rippled beneath her touch as if she were laying against a vertical water bed.
"What do you want with me?"
"So many things," Charles said, tilting his head to one side and appraising her from head to toe. She felt slightly sick. Ward was a handsome man, and in a normal world devoid of vampire rogue murderers, he would have seemed an impossible prospect. But at the moment, and in this current situation, she felt as if she were staring into the adoring eyes of a living nightmare. "But first and foremost, you will act as an instrument of vengeance, little Evie. And I believe you will do an amazing job of it."
"I won't do _shit_ for you," Evie hissed at him. _That was stupid_ , was the thought that piggybacked on it. Why provoke the psychopath vampire? She closed her mouth and looked away once more, her heart hammering along as if it were content to just beat the shit out of the inside of her lungs.
Charles, for his part, seemed utterly unruffled. "Not at first, you won't. Not willingly." He shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress slacks and began pacing around the strange astral room. "But no one can find us here, Evie. Like I said, it's just you and me." He looked up at her then, and Evie swallowed hard as his blue eyes began to glow with an eerie, hungry light. "And with no one else to feed from, I'm sure to get hungry." He showed her those fangs again in a promising smile. "How many times do you think I'll have to drink from you before you break?"
Evie felt a cold chill go through her. "You could pull anyone else in here," she said. "As long as they're asleep." It's what he'd told her, more or less, wasn't it? He was just trying to scare her. And it was working.
"I have to be in close proximity with someone for the trick to work," he told her, almost conversationally. He resumed pacing, but his gaze remained on her. "I have to be able to touch them. And it wouldn't be wise for me to leave here. At first, D'Angelo will no doubt assume the attack was carried out by Hunters. I made certain to heavily shield our presence, after all. But before long, he'll figure it out." His gaze dropped to the ground, and his expression became contemplative. He turned his steps toward her, closing in on her. "And then he'll come for you." He looked up again, fixing her with an unwavering, decisive gaze. Evie felt her legs go to jelly again and found herself desperately wanting to move back. But there was nowhere to go.
"We'll need to be finished with our business by then," he said, his voice having lowered conspiratorially. "So I won't be leaving for any reason, Evie. In fact, I'm going to be doing everything within my power to speed things along."
He stopped in front of her and Evie wondered whether he could hear her heart. It was deafening in her ear drums. "What do you want?" she asked again.
"I want you to say three little words, Evie. And I will take care of everything else."
He braced his hand against the strange wall by her head and leaned in. Evie flinched when the glow in his eyes brightened, enveloping her in their blue topaz magic. "What three words?"
" _Addo nox noctis,"_ he whispered, his breath fanning out across her cheek as he spoke. He was so close, she feared he might try to kiss her. His fangs peeked out from behind his lips, and she remembered that she had been kissing Roman only moments ago. His fangs had drawn her blood....
"Thousands of years ago, the new king created and enforced a law which prevented vampires from creating new vampires from mortals," Charles explained, all the while gazing steadily into her eyes. "He was probably right to do so," he said, his tone clearly disapproving, "as our kind were ripping through the human race without a care, creating slaves left and right. Those slaves did not possess the inherent powers of Offspring because they had no warlocks as parents, and hence the sun was as deadly to them as ever."
Charles stopped and his gaze flicked to Evie's lips. She held her breath and turned her head. All she could think about was the woman he had killed and the bullet that had taken off half of Roman's brain.
Charles took her chin in his hand and forced her to face him once more. Evie tried not to wince with the pain of his cruel grip. "For three thousand years, our kind have lived without creating companions who could accompany us into immortality." He roughly released her and stepped back, his expression going hard. "Even if he hadn't hidden away the means with which to do it, we're all too afraid of D'Angelo's almighty wrath."
"What has that got to do with me?" she asked, rubbing her chin gingerly and glaring at him with everything she had.
"You're going to change that, Evie. You will be the first one created since the start of D'Angelo's reign. And you're going to be mine."
Evie stared at him.
"You will repeat those three words and effectively cast the spell," he told her, giving her the command as if she were a recalcitrant child. "Then you will take my blood." He smiled a devilish smile. "And I will take yours – to the very last drop."
Don't faint, don't faint, don't faint.
"And when I've finished with you, Evelynne Grace Farrow, you will become the first mortal turned vampire in three thousand years." He laughed, the sound harsh and ugly in the clean air. "And you will break Roman D'Angelo's precious heart."
Chapter Nineteen
"I'm sorry, My Liege." Saxon's deep voice was the first thing Roman heard as the world returned him to consciousness. "I returned to the mansion to speak with you about sending a few of your men after Ward and when I arrived, you were under attack."
Roman sat up, all senses and awareness slamming into him at once as if he were a magnet. The safe house was in ruins. Glass and debris decorated the floors and walls, as did blood and other bodily matter. Roman saw his reflection in one of the shards of glass beside him on the floor; he was whole and didn't bear a scratch. But he knew damn well that something had hit him hard. Only the worst kind of injury could have taken him out in such a manner.
Evie!
"Evie," he whispered.
"She's been taken, My Lord."
"Hunters?" he asked as he quickly came to his feet, his dark gaze scanning for any sign of his future queen. He could smell her – cherry blossoms and blood - but despite the rage it opened up inside of him, she wasn't there.
"It would appear that way, but something doesn't add up," Saxon said as he joined Roman in surveying the damage. Roman had no time for finesse or permission; he scanned Saxon's thoughts and memories in order to see the attack from a new set of eyes.
But it didn't do much good. There was the flash of Saxon's rematerialization after a transport spell, the other vampire saw Roman and Evie standing together, he called out to warn Roman – and then the world exploded in shards of glass and bullets. A split second after Roman went down, Saxon did as well, most likely from the same kind of wound.
Roman shook his head. "Does the son of a bitch think I was born yesterday?" he asked, to no one in particular.
"My Liege?" Saxon questioned.
"This was Ward," Roman growled. "He took Evie."
Saxon considered this a moment, turned in place, and seemed to sniff the air. "He poisoned her."
"Yes," Roman agreed, his blood boiling.
"And took her to the astral plane," Saxon surmised.
Roman was beyond words. So much rage simmered inside of him, he felt as if his veins were carrying lava. How the hell had this happened? How the fuck had Ward gotten in and out of the safe house grounds without tripping any of the alarms or shield spells?
Curses poured through Roman's soul, burning him up from the inside out. At his side, Saxon took a step back, drawing Roman's glance. The blond vampire looked concerned – and impressed – and rightly so. The air around Roman was crackling with angry energy as if he were a barely contained storm.
"My Lord, can you not travel to the astral realm?"
"I can," came Roman's simply reply. He was the only other living being in the world who he knew could do so. And in a fair world, he would be able to make it into that other plane, find Charles Ward, and rip out his traitorous, kidnapping, black-magic-using spine.
Unfortunately it wasn't that easy. The astral plane was enormous, consisting of one long valley of multi-colored nothingness and air and twenty million doorways. To make matters worse, Ward was able to manipulate the plane the way the Shadow King manipulated darkness. He could steal Evie away through a labyrinth of ether so vast and complicated, it would take one of two things for Roman to find Evie. It would either take a miracle, or it would take forever.
Forever wasn't an option.
A miracle was in order.
"Saxon, gather as many men as you need, get Samantha's help, and track down everything having to do with Charles Ward. Search his living quarters, his resting places, and pull all of his files. When you've learned everything you can, erase him from existence." Going through Ward's belongings probably wouldn't turn up much, but Roman wasn't known for leaving stones unturned. If there was the slightest possibility that he and his men could find whatever it was that was aiding Ward with this newfound windfall of power, then it was worth the search. Most of all, however, Roman was pissed. He wanted everything that Charles had ever held dear completely and utterly destroyed. It was the least Roman owed him.
In the meantime, Roman knew what he had to do. He was certainly capable of traveling the astral plane himself, and while it was true that he was the only _living_ being he knew of who could do so other than Ward, it was the "living" bit that was the important distinction. There were technically other creatures capable of traveling astrally. Getting to them was going to cost him. But at that moment, Roman would have given anything to have Evie back safe and sound.
Saxon nodded once. "Yes sir. Consider it done."
"Good," Roman said. "There's someone I need to see – alone. Have David contact me when you've finished."
Again Saxon nodded. Roman took one last look at the mess around him and spoke the single word necessary to transport him away from it.
*****
"Comfortable?"
"Fuck you."
Charles laughed. "Oh in time, sweetheart. In time." He stood in the cellar doorway, outlined by the light behind him. The basement was new. The stairs leading out of it were new. Even the doorway and the entire house that rested beyond it were new. Charles had created all of them, molding them and forming them from whatever strange substance the astral plane was made of.
Evie wouldn't have believed such a thing possible if she hadn't witnessed it herself, but then nearly everything she was witnessing these days was something she would have otherwise thought impossible.
Now she sat on a bare stone floor against the wall of the basement of a house that shouldn't exist and she'd been there for what she would guess was an hour. She was cold, which made no sense. The air in the rainbow fog room they'd first appeared in had been the perfect temperature. Clearly either she was transferring some of her misery to the air now or Charles was capable of bringing this illusion to life to the very last uncomfortable detail.
A while ago, he had magically formed the cellar around her, threatened her again with a showing of his fangs, and then disappeared up the stairs and through the door. Now he was back.
Evie turned away from his tall outline and stared straight ahead at the dim, dank gray of the concrete room. She heard his footsteps descend the stairs to her level and every muscle in her body tensed.
"I may not be able to read your mind, but I can hear your heart, Evie. You're afraid of me."
"Congratulations. You must feel like a real man."
Evie heard his footsteps draw near, slow, and stop a short foot away. "I'm curious," he said. "You're immune to vampire powers. I wonder how you would do against warlock abilities."
Evie didn't even have time to fully contemplate what he could mean by that before he was grabbing her roughly by the front of her shirt and lifting her off of the ground. She made a small squealing sound and her fingers automatically wrapped around his wrist, but of course he was much stronger than she was.
Her back slid against the stone wall behind her until she was at eye level with him. "Did you know that a warlock can make his victim feel anything he wishes her to feel simply by touching her?"
_Oh no,_ she thought. _Here comes the pain. God I hope I can take it._
His gaze narrowed and his blue eyes took on an otherworldly cast as his magic spread out from him and she could feel it ooze over her. The air grew warmer, thicker, as if charged with humid electricity. But that was all.
Nothing else happened. There was no pain. Only the cold of the wall behind her seeping through her clothing and the ever-present threat in the blue of her captor's eyes.
Finally, his lips spread in a smile. "It's as I thought," he said, his words, his voice so close, they abraded Evie's nerve endings. "You're immune to that as well." Very slowly, he allowed her to slide back down the wall until she was standing on her own two feet again.
Evie had the sudden urge to shove at him, to kick him in the balls, to head butt him in the nose – anything that would make him step away from her. But he was relatively calm at the moment, and any violence she showed him would only anger him. She knew damn well she couldn't really hurt him.
Charles released her shirt and curled his finger beneath her chin. Evie stiffened. "It's fortunate I didn't waste time attempting a spell on you at the safe house," he said. "It clearly wouldn't have worked."
He stared long and hard into her eyes, and when Evie tried to look away, his grip on her chin tightened. "It does make me wonder," he said, almost conversationally, "what kind of blood it is that runs through your body. You're obviously not entirely human."
That was what Roman had told her. And though the man touching her at the moment made her feel queasy, she had to admit that she was curious about herself as well. It had been swimming beneath the surface of her consciousness since she'd seen the vision of Charles and his murder victim. Why had she seen it?
She had grown immune to Roman's mind-reading abilities, apparently in addition to other vampire powers. And now a warlock's magic was failing against her as well. It was a strange dichotomy of emotions that were evoked within her. The truth was, she felt a little empowered to have this ability against vampires and warlocks. But she was also scared. Because she didn't understand _why_.
Was she about to turn into some kind of monster? Had she been one all along?
"I think I'll take a taste," Charles said then, completely focusing her attention on him once more. His smile broadened, his white fangs glistened in the light from the doorway, and all of a sudden, he was moving back, grabbing her hand, and shoving her long sleeve up her arm.
At once, Evie tried to pull away. But Charles moved with blurring speed, and she cried out as his fangs sank cruelly into the veins in her wrist, digging deep and holding tight. He pulled viciously, causing her blood to rush through torn skin to meet his demand.
Evie tried to push him away, but he was a vampire. He had been doing this for so very long, it was second nature to him to waylay the efforts of his victims. He simply grabbed her free wrist, pinned it to the wall behind her, and moved his body so that it pressed against hers.
She whimpered as he mercilessly pulled again. She closed her eyes, just hoping that he wouldn't take so much that he killed her.
_I'll have to remember this_ , she thought faintly. _There is no pleasure in this. I've been writing it all wrong._
It seemed like he drank forever. The pain in her wrist throbbed and spread, enveloping her hand, her fingers, and her arm to her elbow. Her heart skipped a beat, fluttering in her chest. Her legs felt weak once more.
Finally, as nausea once more churned in her gut, her captor decided he'd had enough and slowly pulled his fangs from her wrist. Evie's eyes flew open and her teeth gritted with pain. She whimpered; it _hurt_. Her skin clung to his teeth, ripping fresh tears in her skin until they were finally free and all that remained behind were two gaping holes that oozed precious blood.
Evie looked from the bleeding arm he still held in a fast grip to the face of the man who had wounded her. His inhuman eyes throbbed between blue and red, and her blood painted his lips. Every muscle in his body was held taut, the vein in the side of his neck stuck out, and his expression was one of great effort. His grip on her other wrist tightened as well, grinding her bones, and Evie could feel the hard evidence of a different kind of need where his body pressed hers into the wall.
"You..." he said, his voice quaking, "taste like untapped power."
Evie held her breath. Terror, cold and heavy, sat inside of her like a rock.
"I would like almost nothing more than to finish you right now," he growled. His voice had gone gruff with what she could only imagine was hunger or lust or something in-between. "But then there'd be nothing left for D'Angelo to lose."
And with that, he released her, shoving her hard against the wall. Evie's head bumped the stone, but she caught herself and remained upright even though her legs felt like jelly. Gingerly, she wrapped her fingers around her wrist above the dual puncture wounds he'd left. They continued to bleed, rivulets of crimson staining her hand and dripping off of her fingers.
Charles' gaze followed the rivers of red. "We'll have to do something about that," he said as he appeared to get himself under control once more. "The downside of being immune to magic, sweetheart, is that it won't heal you either."
Evie glared at him. "So this open wound in my body is _my_ fault."
Charles laughed, the sound harsh in the cold cellar air. "A vampire's bite heals instantly on its own," he informed her, "so long as the victim is not immune to the magic." He held up his right hand, palm-up, and there was a brief flash. When the light diminished, a roll of bandages remained in his hand.
"Come here," he commanded.
Evie's instinct was to tell him to screw himself and stay where she was. But he'd already bitten her. If he wanted to do her more harm right now, he would do it whether she obeyed or not. Plus, she was bleeding and he had something that would help that bleeding stop. So, what was the point?
She came forward and he smiled triumphantly. Then, with practiced skill that reminded her of just how old his kind were, he commenced wrapping her wound. She hissed slightly when he finished, ripped the gauze away from the roll, and applied pressure to wrist. Blood stained the white wrappings and she instinctively tried to pull away.
This time he let her go.
"You could have just _magicked_ the stupid gauze onto my arm," she accused through clenched teeth, cradling her arm.
"True," he admitted calmly. "But then I wouldn't have been able to torture you so."
Evie glared at his back as he turned away from her to make his way to the staircase that led from the basement once more. "Enjoy the respite, Evie," he said as he climbed them one at a time. "Because it'll be short-lived." He glanced at her over his broad shoulder, and she caught the glint of hungry eyes. "I'll be back soon for the other wrist."
Chapter Twenty
It had been a very long time since he'd received a visitor in his own home. In his own realm. The meetings of the Thirteen took place in the mortal world, and it was there that Thanatos had last seen the man who approached him now.
It was not only the rarity of this situation that struck Thanatos, it was the nature of the man who approached. Of the thirteen figures who sat at that particular table, the man Thanatos watched right now was quite possibly the last that the Phantom King expected to walk through his door.
The visitor was tall and broad-shouldered, and in the harsh desert light, his notably handsome features were white-washed. The wind brushed by, sending dry dust into the air and tumbling a Russian Thistle across the empty expanse. Wind chimes hanging from Thanatos' porch tinkled against one another, the sound lonely and lost.
Thanatos, known by Thane to those closer to him, looked back down at his bike, finished tightening the screw he had a handle on, and then dumped his wrench into the tool box beside him. He wiped his palms on the front of his jeans and stood.
His uninvited guest made his way toward the small, weathered garage and Thane watched him come. There was a measured grace to the man's step and an aura of absolute power surrounding him, but his normally pitch-black eyes were glowing red – and his fangs were showing.
Thane waited as the Vampire King stopped in the doorway to the worn-out garage and gazed inside with those burning eyes.
"A desert ghost town," D'Angelo said. "Subtle."
Thane almost smiled. "What is it that brings the man who would defy death to death's door, D'Angelo?"
Roman D'Angelo had clearly seen better days. His dark suit was of the finest make, Thane knew, but the tie was missing, the suit coat was open at the waist, and the entire outfit was smeared and dotted with blood. The effect was that he appeared a little like James Bond fresh-from-the-fight, but for the fact that he was obviously a vampire.
"I've come to ask for your help," D'Angelo said as he made his way across the threshold of the garage and into the shade. "One of my own has betrayed me and killed an innocent."
Thane's stormy gaze narrowed. "You forget who you're talking to. I know all about the mortal woman your vampire killed." He turned away from the other king and gave his bike a once-over. "I dealt with her just yesterday."
D'Angelo fell silent, seemingly contemplative. His power brushed against Thane's, rather more unchecked than it normally was.
Thane straightened and glanced at him over his broad shoulder. "The last time you came to my home, you were looking for a woman you thought you loved."
"Ophelia," Roman acknowledged, shadows crossing his handsome face.
Two hundred years ago, Roman D'Angelo had come into Thane's realm in search of a woman who had apparently died before her time. Since Thanatos ruled over the spirits of people who had died wrongful deaths, D'Angelo assumed she would be under his care.
But she wasn't. Thane had told the king of the vampires as much, but D'Angelo didn't believe him. And it was clear from their limited interactions since then that he _still_ didn't believe him, even after all this time.
"Right," said Thane, allowing the silence to stretch for a moment. He looked away again and knelt to examine his rear disc brakes. "I can't imagine you've come all this way now because you want me to give you the woman who was just killed."
There was a pulse of power behind him, and Thane closed his eyes against it, as the contact was just a little painful. He wasn't certain whether D'Angelo had meant to do it, but either way, it wouldn't be good to let on that it had affected him.
"No," came the simple reply.
Thane digested that. "Then what is it you want from me?" he asked, turning to look up at the vampire king.
"Charles Ward is a warlock. He has taken my queen to the astral plane," D'Angelo stated. "I want you to help me find him."
Thane placed his hand against his bike's frame to steady himself. He felt as if the ground beneath his feet tilted a little. The wind outside died down, the air thickened, and for the first time in eons, he felt stunned.
"Your queen."
Roman D'Angelo's gaze didn't falter. His energy pulsed as if in time with his heart. Thane had never seen him in such a state. If he'd actually decided to take a queen, that would explain a lot, especially if someone had absconded with her.
But three thousand years ago, Roman implemented a law that forbade vampires from creating other vampires out of mortals. Was his queen also an Offspring? Or was he breaking his own law for this woman?
"She is not one of us," D'Angelo stated, clearly having gleaned the surface thoughts from Thane's mind.
_The latter then_ , Thane thought, feeling more stunned by the moment. The implications were enormous. If Roman D'Angelo was willing to break his own law for a woman, then it meant he truly loved her. And if it was possible for a man as old as Roman to find someone he cared for that much, then maybe it was possible for others with blood just as ancient. Like Thane.
"We have much to discuss Thane, but not now," said D'Angelo. "You know I will never find Ward in that realm, not in time." Roman came forward, closing the distance between them. "But you and your Animes can."
The spirits of those who had died wrongful deaths became _Anime_ , animated energy that was sometimes angry, often desperate, and always forlorn. After a certain amount of time, the energy dispersed and was reabsorbed by the universe. But until this happened, they lingered, and every once in a while, this energy was so strong, it was tangible.
Strong or weak, the Anime were plentiful in Thane's realm. And being that he was the Phantom King, he controlled them all.
Thane stood and turned to face D'Angelo. "It'll cost you," he said softly. Outside, the wind picked up again, growing so strong, it sent sand blasting against the building's worn exterior. The wind chimes on the porch slammed into the roof from which they hung, clattering madly.
Inside the garage, all was still. And then Roman nodded. "Name it."
"Oh, I will," said Thane, flashing a bright white smile with fangs of his own. "When the time is right." With that, he brushed past Roman and headed for the screen door that led from the garage into the small white wood and adobe house. The Vampire King didn't follow him in because, while the myth about having to invite a vampire into a home was a load of crock in the mortal world, when it came to other realms and those who ruled them, the rule held fast.
Thane grabbed the things he needed and a moment later came back out into the garage, letting the screen door slam shut behind him.
"How far of a head start did he get?" Thane asked as he strapped on a double shoulder holster and slipped two Glock pistols into their places. Ward was a vampire, and that gave him some very nifty immunities to most weapons. However, according to D'Angelo, he was also a warlock and, unfortunately for him, in addition to the added magic, that saddled him with one very strong weakness: silver bullets.
"An hour, maybe two."
"Ward is an astral master. He'll have the place filled with boobie traps by now."
"I'm aware," Roman said, his tone dry. Thane glanced up. "Why else would I come to you?" The king's pallor was a tad gaunt, his aura hungry.
"Just out of curiosity," Thane postulated as he slipped a black leather jacket over his ensemble, "when was the last time you fed?"
"I want to be hungry when I find Ward," Roman said. His expression changed then, and Thane went still. The Vampire King looked absolutely terrifying as he smiled the cruelest smile Thane had ever witnessed. "I want to be _famished_."
It was a while before Thane said anything. Finally, he nodded. "Okay, then."
*****
"Three little words, Evie," he taunted, repeating the same thing he'd said what felt like ten thousand times since he'd brought her to this God-awful place. He walked away from her, his shoes sounding hollowly on the cement under his feet. Evie let her head drop back against the wall behind her and closed her eyes.
"Go to hell, Ward."
"Hell?" Charles stopped midway across the cellar and she could hear him turn to face her. She opened her eyes. He had one brow raised. "You mean fire and brimstone?" As he spoke, the cellar changed, its gray stone walls morphing into waving, crackling walls of flame. Evie gasped and moved away from the wall she'd been sitting against. "Great chasms filled with weeping souls?" Beneath her feet, the stone rumbled and fissures opened up in the ground, emitting steam and smoke.
Evie scrambled back on her hands and knees, wincing in pain as she put weight on her injured wrist.
"You don't know what Hell is," Ward told her. She looked up at him through the curtain of her hair. "Losing someone you care about... someone you've trusted and depended on for seven hundred years. _That's_ Hell."
He waved his hand and the illusion disappeared, leaving them once more in the dank, dismal space of the astral basement.
"I find it exceedingly hard to believe that you could actually care for anyone but yourself," Evie told him, her growing discomfort egging her on. Her arm was throbbing, her head hurt, she was weak with blood loss and mounting hunger, and she was cold. For the first time since she'd regained consciousness to find herself kidnapped, she was beginning to wonder whether she would be able to hold out until Roman found her.
She knew he was looking for her. She could _feel_ it, for lack of a better term. It was like there was this fire in her blood, but it wasn't her own. It was _his_ fire, and something about their relationship meant that it burned through her as well. She could sense him out there, drawing nearer, clawing through the fabrics of space and time to get to her.
If she could just hold out a little longer, they might have a hope of defeating Ward. But... she'd never felt so miserable in her life. It was like suffering an anxiety attack while having the flu and knowing that this time, you really _were_ going to die. There was a hopelessness about her now that hadn't been there before.
Maybe that was Ward's reason for creating and sticking her in the basement; it was such a hopeless place. Maybe the warlock really knew what he was doing. Maybe he knew good and well how to break a person. Because Evie had to admit she felt pretty close to breaking.
"I'm actually quite sorry that you feel that way, Evie. Because you have two choices. You can either say the words I've instructed you to say and live the rest of your eternal life at my side, or you can die. I know you don't want to die," he said, coming toward her once again.
Evie braced herself on the inside; she knew what was coming. Slowly, she backed up and got to her feet. Ward kept coming.
"Your spirit is incredibly strong. You've suffered a lot of human pain in your life, but you would rather suffer this pain than die, even if it means you must suffer it over and over again."
Evie took a step back and he took a step forward. She could feel the wall creeping up behind her. She was running out of space.
"That means something, Evie. You're a survivor."
Evie's back hit the wall and she closed her eyes. Ward's next words were spoken less than an inch away; she could feel his breath on her cheek, on her neck, and her lungs ceased drawing in air.
"So why don't you just make this easier on yourself right now and say the words, Evie. _Addo Nox Noctis_."
She remained quiet.
"Say it!" he bellowed, slamming his palm into the wall beside her head.
"No!" she yelled back. "Never!" That wasn't strictly true, and she knew it. But her ire was up, her fear fueling her anger, and she could no longer be held accountable for what she did or said.
"Never is a very long time, Evie," Ward told her. "You shouldn't make promises you know you can't keep."
Evie cried out, unable to stop the piercing sound when Ward once more blurred into action, slamming her entire body into the wall behind her with brute force. With dizzying speed, he tore the sleeve of her uninjured wrist up her arm and drove his fangs into her flesh.
Chapter Twenty-One
Roman ran a fierce hand through his thick hair and scanned the horizon with a careful, burning gaze. In every direction as far as the eye could see stretched nothing but cracked earth and lightning-split skies. It was something out of a Lovecraft novel. There was no sign of life, no sign of movement other than the arcs of electricity that cracked the air into pieces.
Beside him stood Thanatos, the Phantom King. Roman cut him a glance, taking in his appearance. Thane was a rugged man, tall and strong as all of the Kings were, but rougher around the edges. It might have been the kind of soul he had to deal with day in and day out, but something caused his storm-gray eyes to glint like cold steel in a handsome, unshaven face. He wore black leather, his skin bore tattoos that were ever-changing, and his jeans were smeared with the oil and grime evidence of a hobby that made Thane the proud owner of more than two hundred rebuilt motorcycles. He kept them in his realm and rode them across Purgatory, a solitary figure against a harsh, unforgiving landscape.
Two hundred years ago, the first time Roman had been to Thanatos' realm, it had been horses he'd kept. With Thane, it was always something fast, powerful, and beautiful. It was just the way he was drawn.
When the Thirteen met, Thane dressed in a suit and bothered to shave. Seeing him again as he truly was had a strange effect on Roman. It made him realize for what was possibly the billionth time in his long life that looks could be deceiving.
"Wow," said Thane, shaking his head. "You think Ward might be sending a message that we're not wanted?"
"What have they found?" Roman asked, impatience scraping at him like fingernails across a chalk board.
"Give them some time," Thane responded, his own silver gaze searching. His Animes had spanned out, disappearing into the plane like wisps of smoke or fog.
"We don't _have_ time," Roman growled, unable to keep his fury completely in check any longer. He could feel that Evie was suffering. He couldn't read her mind, so communicating with her was impossible. But she was there – somewhere – and Charles Ward was hurting her. He could almost smell the blood he had spilled. It was everything Roman could do not to spontaneously combust.
And then Thane straightened; he cocked his head slightly to one side and his metal gaze became distant, as if he were listening. "They found him."
"Where." The question was growled in such a way that it really wasn't a question.
"I'll take you," Thane said, "but it's not that simple." He turned to face Roman, his expression grim. "He brought help. According to the Anime, there are no fewer than half a dozen Akyri trapped here with him. They're marked," Thane said, gesturing to the side of his neck, and Roman knew exactly what he was talking about. Ward had bound the Akyri. "And they'll do whatever they have to do to stop us."
This made things so much worse. Akyri were dangerous enemies when they had to be, and even if Roman got the upper hand, he wouldn't be able to kill them. They were there under duress and didn't deserve to die.
At that moment, the Vampire King had the disconcerting urge to rip through an entire army with his bare hands.
"Take me to him."
Thane was silent for a moment, his mercury eyes reflecting the lightning that decorated the skies. Finally, he nodded. "Prepare yourself." With that, he reached out, pressed his hand to Roman's chest, and the world warped into light speed. It was always like that when traveling great distances on the astral plane. The world broke into strings of light and movement that ended at a tunneled focal point.
Roman's body felt insubstantial as the dream-like realm whizzed past. But despite the lack of solid sensation, he could feel Evie drawing closer. The impression of suffering grew stronger until, at last, he could almost feel her heartbeat.
Thane removed his hand and he and Roman both turned. A two-story Victorian styled mansion stood before them, ominous, gray and solitary on the vast, broken landscape. The curtains in the windows were drawn, and no sound came from within. However, on the front porch stood three men in black, their dark eyes ringed in red. On the stairs stood two more. A sixth waited on the ground between the house and the newcomers.
All six Akyri watched Thane and Roman in silence. In the short distance, wispy white figures twisted and dissolved and rematerialized – the Anime who had located the mansion.
"Your call, Vampire King," Thane muttered, not taking his eyes from the figures ahead.
"I just need an in," said Roman.
"I can give you twenty seconds," Thane said, his gaze cutting to him.
"I'll take it."
With that, Thane pulled the guns from his holsters and began firing. Granted, though the bullets were silver, these were Akyri and not warlocks, and hence they wouldn't die from the wounds. But they had enough warlock energy within them from whatever symbiotic relationship they'd last taken part in that the bullets would trip them up for a few seconds.
And that's exactly what they did. Thane was an incredible shot, striking each demon square in the chest. Roman waited several intolerable moments as the Akyri went down one after another, and then his immortal, pissed-off body was blurring into action.
*****
_It hurts,_ she thought. _God, it really hurts._ Gingerly, Evie cradled her wrapped wrists against her chest and closed her eyes. Her heart was doing tricks behind her ribcage now, the beat uneven and faint. Her head hurt and her legs felt numb. When she took the time to think about what it all meant, despair threatened, and she choked down a sob.
"I can take the pain away from you," Charles said as he watched her curl in on herself against the cold basement wall. "Why do you continue to defy me?"
Evie felt tears on her cheeks and marveled at her ability to form them after all the blood he'd taken. But these were the same tears that had been threatening to escape since he'd brought her here. She'd been strong enough... she could allow herself this.
Evie dropped her head onto her bent knees. _I'm not really here_ , she tried to tell herself, though the pain fought her attempt. She wasn't supposed to be there in that dark basement under a house in the middle of an impossible nowhere. Two days ago, she'd lived in another world. Two days ago, she'd been an author with a normal life and at least another thirty or forty years ahead of her.
But now....
Now, as she hugged her small body against the damp gloom of the horrible space that had become her waking nightmare, she felt a wretched anguish poke at her outer casing. That casing had become fragile and thin, like the shell of an egg. Any second now, any god-awful minute now, one of those tap-tap-taps would break through, and she would crack. Just like that.
It was what _he_ wanted, the man who had ripped her from her happiness and thrust her into this hellish darkness. It was what he was waiting for. What he apparently would do anything to acquire. _Anything_....
Charles Ward was a vampire, and that meant that there was no way out. A human was fallible. A human could be tricked or overtaken. But a vampire was insurmountable. There was no way out. None that she knew of, anyway.
_Roman_ , Evie thought. She couldn't help it. Where was he now? The tall, dark, intense man who had changed her life forever. It was pointless to yearn for him. Vampire or not – vampire _king_ or not – he could do nothing to help her now. Her captor had seen to that. At least, that was what he told her. And she believed him. She had no choice, because Roman wasn't here... and she was dying.
"Just say the words, Evie. For the love of God," her captor said as he knelt in front of her and took her chin once more in his hand. She kept her eyes closed, unable or unwilling to meet his gaze even one more time. "You can make all of this stop," he told her. "You can make it so that you never have to feel pain or fear again."
Evie moaned softly in response. She knew he was lying. Even if she said the words and became like him, he would find a way to hurt her. Her body already hurt so much. She didn't underestimate Ward's potential for cruelty.
Her captor released her chin and Evie's head fell back against the wall. She felt colder than she had ever felt before.
"He isn't coming, Evie," he told her. "He can't find you, and you don't have long to go. I know you want to see your parents again. Your brothers. Speak the words, Evie, and you'll live to do so."
She almost said the words then. She almost surrendered and gave him what he wanted. She just wanted the torture to stop. But instead she shook her head, dizzy as it made her, and pushed the thoughts from her mind. _No_ , she told herself. _Just hang on a little while longer_.
Her heart seemed to flutter, as if sighing in helpless response. She'd lost too much blood. She could feel herself slipping.
_Oh God, Roman_ , she thought miserably. _Please hurry._
*****
Charles took a slow, deep breath when he'd returned to the first level and shut the basement door. He stood on the landing for a moment, regaining his composure before he turned toward the closed door and slowly ran his hand across it. The door rippled, shimmered, and vanished, leaving behind a smooth wall that bore no sign of entry.
Charles turned from the hidden wall and made his way into the living room where he sat on the couch and leaned forward thoughtfully, resting his elbows on his knees.
He contemplated the woman in the cellar below. It wasn't a real cellar – this wasn't a real house. But since he'd been an Offspring child, he'd been capable of escaping to the astral plane and molding it to his fit his desires.
He'd brought many women here to feed from them. None to the last drop, of course, as that would have broken the king's law, and Roman D'Angelo was the only other living, breathing person in the world who could travel the astral plane. He would have found out sooner or later.
But to Evie, the cellar was real enough and it was cold enough and it was depressing enough. She should have given in by now.
Charles ran his tongue over the tips of his fangs and swallowed. The taste of her blood was still in his mouth, temping him with an unnatural hunger for more. He was technically sated, but somehow insatiable.
He hadn't planned for this to go on for so long. He really thought she'd give up by now. One bite should have done it. He hadn't gone easy on her. He'd made sure it hurt. And the second bite had been rougher than the first.
But she continued to fight. He knew she held out hope that D'Angelo would find her, but it was more than that. There was an aura around her that was getting stronger with each passing second. She was physically weak, and he could hear her heart falter, but her spirit, her _essence_ , felt just the opposite.
"Oh little Evie," he said to himself as his blue gaze began to burn. "You'd better give in soon, sweetheart. Or all of that potential will be wasted." He sighed heavily, put his hands on his knees, and stood.
Distractedly, he ran a hand through his brown hair, but jerked with sudden surprise as the sound of gunfire split the astral plane. He turned at once to face the mansion's front door.
And Roman D'Angelo cold cocked him hard enough to send him flying into the wall on the opposite side of the room.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Roman strode across the room after him. The punch would have killed a human. Ward was not human, so it merely knocked him senseless for a few seconds, long enough to keep him out until he slid down the cracked plaster behind him and fell forward onto the hardwood.
Roman didn't hesitate before he bent, grabbed the vampire warlock by the front of his shirt, and lifted him up off of the floor once more. He could smell Evie's blood on Ward's breath as the two came face to face.
" _Where is she?_ " Roman hissed through fangs fully extended and itching to rip a canyon in the man's windpipe.
"You'll never find her," came the reply, blue eyes glaring, fangs gleaming.
A fissure of fear rippled through Roman. As soon as he'd entered, he'd scanned the house for any sign of Evie and couldn't find her. He could smell her. He could feel her. But he couldn't fucking _find_ her.
Roman hesitated as he considered this, and it was a half a second of hesitation too long. In that space of time, Ward recovered and struck back.
The ground bucked under Roman's feet, shooting upward and then splitting apart to reveal a chasm of rising steam. Roman spun, trying to move out of the way, but his grip on Charles' shirt slipped, and the warlock head butted him in the nose. Both bodies went tumbling to the ground as the buckling floor lifted like a volcano.
Roman slid down the side of the rising rock, rolling once before he got to his feet. Charles stood on the other side of the chasm, his eyes now blazing as red as Roman's. Steam warped the air between them.
"I can send her anywhere, Roman," Charles taunted, his fanged mouth grinning with hatred. "All I have to do is want it and she'll blink out of existence in one place and reappear in another. I own this realm, you know. It obeys my every command. You haven't got a chance."
Roman watched as Charles began to change then. Before his eyes, the warlock vampire grew taller. He grew broader. His skin darkened and took on the cast of scales. Wings erupted from his back, and his face elongated. Within seconds, he'd gone from humanoid to a Hollywood representation of what could only be called a dragon. It wasn't what a real dragon looked like – Roman knew this first hand. But Charles wouldn't. Charles Ward had never seen a dragon in real life. Charles would have no idea that the Dragon King was one of Roman's closest allies and friends.
Not that it mattered.
Roman's jaw ticked. His body tensed. Illusion or not and _accurate_ or not, on the astral plane, whatever Charles created would feel very, very real. He readied himself as the dragon went from red to black to some kind of mixture in-between, and that's when Roman noticed something odd.
There was an aura around Charles that fluctuated with every change in his form-altering spell. The aura surrounded him, but trailed off at his left, creating a stream of red-orange magic that Roman followed to its source.
It was coming from a small black leather-bound book that rested on a table against one wall of the astral house. The book bore no markings and no lock.
Roman had only a moment to register its existence before Ward was on him. At once, Roman opened his mind to the plane around him and called out into it.
Thane!
He needed someone to get to that book. Somehow it was helping Charles; Roman would bet almost anything on it. Roman was the Vampire King and practiced at mind control, yet Ward's mind was closed off to him, barriered by some kind of dark wall that felt inky and wrong. It also felt familiar. It was the way Malachi Wraythe used to feel.
Roman was betting that book used to belong to late Warlock King. If he could somehow get to it and destroy it, Ward would be a lot less difficult to deal with.
There was no response from Thane, but as Ward's massive claws swiped toward Roman and he blurred into motion to evade them, he felt an equal sense of urgency coming from outside of the illusory home. Thane's bullets had only done so much damage to the Akyri – and now he was taking them all on himself.
_Get to the book! The black book!_ Roman commanded, hoping Thane would hear him anyway.
For the briefest moment, it occurred to Roman that he might have done Thanatos a grave injustice by asking him to help in this. While Thane was not strictly living, he was not strictly dead either. And even in the astral plane, a mortal wound could destroy him forever.
But the momentary doubt fled quickly. Like all of the Thirteen, Thane was a king for a reason.
Roman gritted his teeth and made a pain-filled sound as he evaded both of Ward's claws and his massive toothy maw only to be slammed up against the wall by an enormous barbed tail. One of the spiky barbs shot through Roman's chest like a giant needle, slicing clean through to embed itself in the wall behind him.
He choked on his own blood as it welled inside his esophagus, but somehow managed to repair enough of the damage on the inside that the internal bleeding stopped almost as soon as it had begun. The spike would be a problem, however.
A vampire could become mist if he wished. He could transport away from any location. He could even change forms, taking on the visage of certain nonhuman animals, depending upon his age.
But Ward's tail was anchoring Roman. It was a magical shard of Universe that didn't belong within Roman. It disrupted the flow of his power, keeping him lodged firmly in place.
Roman had to admit that he was impressed with Ward's tactics. Not many vampires were aware that it was possible to anchor another vampire in this manner. Roman could see now up close that the scales on Ward's dragon body were metallic. Where they abraded Roman's skin, they felt cold. Ward had armored himself in this illusion. He'd covered all of his bases.
The dragon's laugh was monstrous, laced with a deep evil reminiscent of the devil as it echoed off of the crumbling walls around them and mixed in with the steam. His hot breath bathed Roman's face as the dragon leaned in, his once blue eyes burning with black fire. "Who made you judge and executioner?" Ward growled. "What gave you the right to interfere?"
Roman knew what he was talking about. Ward was well aware that Roman had aided in Malachi Wraythe's ultimate demise and Roman had been right. Ward wanted revenge.
With no further warning, Ward pulled back, raising his giant scaled head. To Roman's right, the black leather book pulsed with power and a thicker stream of magic poured forth from it to envelop Ward's dragon form.
Roman braced himself for what he knew was coming. Only two things could kill a vampire. The sun and fire. Ward was about to give him the latter with everything he had.
*****
Thane felt the Vampire King's power rush out from the mansion like a shock wave. It poured over him and the Akyri he was fighting. It felt like liquid lightning, and if he hadn't already been on the ground, it might have knocked him over.
Thane!
D'Angelo's voice roared through his head, and Thane's storm-gray eyes swirled with glowing, liquid metal. He bared his fangs, threw the Akyri off of his body, and made it to his booted feet. Another came at him without missing a beat. Thane had no attention to spare; he couldn't even answer.
_Get to the book!_ Roman bellowed next as if he could tell Thane didn't have the means to reply. _The black book!_
The connection broke off and there was a roar from within the mansion. The ground beneath Thane's boots shook again. He looked up, gauging the situation with practiced speed. Three Akyri were down and the other three were coming in for him again. It was exponentially more difficult to take down an enemy without killing him.
The mansion several yards away was beginning to fall in on itself. Smoke billowed from one of the windows. Behind the mansion were the several dozen wispy shapes of the anime Thane had sent out to find Ward. They waited now, on the periphery of Ward's astral illusion.
Thane spun in time to meet the Akyri behind him head-on. At the same time, he sent out a spiritual command.
*****
Evie had no idea what happened. One moment, she was sitting curled up against the damp wall of the horrid basement Ward had locked her in, and in the next, she was back in one of those foggy-walled rainbow rooms. Alone.
She was weak and pain still racked her body, but the cold was gone and the depressing illusion was gone and surprisingly, that seemed to be a lot of it. Within the clean, white clarity of the astral room that now surrounded her, Evie found a small respite.
Her heart still skipped and faltered. She knew that she had still lost too much blood. But this unexpected change allowed her to pull some kind of strength from somewhere deep inside, and she got to her feet.
Behind her, the astral wall rippled slightly like water behind a plastic sheet. She had no choice but to trust it as she braced herself on it and took a few tentative steps out into the middle of the room.
She stood at its center and waited.
And waited.
What was happening? Where was she?
Gingerly, Evie cleared her throat. It felt raw from screaming; the second time Ward had bitten her, she hadn't been able to hide how much it had hurt her.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, "Ward?" It came out a whisper, unsure and very uneager.
There was no response. Evie gave it a few seconds, turned in place, and peered into the opalesque mist of the walls. Nothing.
"Charles!"
She didn't exactly want him to answer, but Evie didn't know what else to do. Who else to call for.
And then the walls began to shift and move inward. Evie gasped, her body freezing in place as her head whipped around. The mists were separating, the walls breaking down. They were leaking into the room all around her like a shrinking prison cell.
_Oh no_ , Evie thought. What happened when there was no more room? Did she disappear? Become mist too? Everything she'd been through and _this_ was how she was going to die?
Evie licked her lips and turned back around to face the mists that were closest to her. With wide eyes, she watched them come.
And then she blinked, and frowned. The mists in front of her coalesced, swirling together as if caught in a mini-tornado. Evie became fascinated as the tornado grew taller and thicker and began taking on humanoid attributes.
An arm, two arms, a leg, a pair. A head.
A face.
The mist-girl's hair was long, though not quite as long as Evie's. Her eyes were roughly the same shape. And in a deciding moment filled with tragic epiphanies, Evie realized who it was she was staring at.
It was the girl that Charles Ward had murdered.
As Evie stared at her, she saw other things. Movie clips played in her mind's eye – a dorm room, a hand-me-down car, a pet dog, a bedroom in an old house kept exactly as it was when its owner left for college. "Diana Layton," Evie whispered, somehow knowing the girl's name. It was her life Evie had been seeing. Her powers as a seer were growing.
The girl studied Evie in odd, misty silence for several seconds and then the fog of her face moved forward and down and then back and up. She had just nodded.
Before Evie could do or even ask anything else, Diana's strange misty arms came around from behind her back. In her foggy fingers, she held a small black leather-bound book.
Evie looked at the book. It was out of place in this mist-filled, astral space. It was solid and dark and there was something about it that felt so wrong, she wouldn't have been able to describe the feeling if writing about it.
Diana's ghost came forward, holding the book before her like a gift. But the book pushed an aura of evil ahead of it almost as if it were a warning.
Evie took an unsteady step back. Her legs were weak. She felt uncertain.
Diana stopped in her forward motion, hovering over the spot Evie had just vacated. All around them, the walls had more or less reformed, but in the room with her were dozens of the wispy ghosts. None of them possessed the tangible qualities of Diana's ghost, but she knew what they were all the same.
Again, Diana held the book out, raising it a bit, insisting that Evie take it.
Evie looked from Diana's strange empty fog-formed eyes to the book and back again. Then she straightened. _Take it, Evie. Take the goddamned thing and destroy it._
It wasn't so much a mental command she gave herself as a shot of resolve. She reached out, grabbed the spine of the leather journal, and took it out of Diana's wispy grasp.
It felt heavier than it should have. It felt positively evil. The book nearly vibrated in Evie's grasp as she pulled it back to her and turned it over. Her fingers shook where they poised over the top right corner of the front cover. She'd never hesitated in opening a book before. She loved books. She was an author, after all.
But the otherworldly part of her – the part she was only now growing used to – knew that there were no words in this book worth reading.
Destroy it.
With that final bit of self-encouragement, Evie pried open the front cover. The first page was filled with red-brown ink symbols, ancient and strange. A whispering sound filled the air, ominous and low.
Evie grabbed the top of that first page and steeled her nerves. The book's vibration became stronger, the whispers louder, and Evie felt her weak heart hammering away with everything it had left.
She braced herself – and ripped downward, tearing the blood-covered page from the book.
There was a flash, bright and red and somewhat painful, and Evie stumbled as the room around her disappeared to be replaced with a vast, empty landscape. To her left stood a crumbling mansion. In front of her were several figures in black, fighting in hand to hand combat.
The horizon stretched in cracked earth and distant lightning.
From inside the mansion came an insidious sound, a roar like that of a giant wounded beast. Evie's blood ran cold. She stared at the mansion, waiting for the other shoe to drop even as she once more wrapped her fingers around the top of a page in the journal and tore it out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Thane pulled himself off of the dusty, cracked ground and straightened once more to his full height. He was sore but alive. Sort of. He'd never really been alive. He'd simply been _created_ one day by the incredible force of sheer need, and set to rule over a land that had grown too crowded with mistreated souls. It was a dirty job, right now in particular, but he guessed that someone had to do it.
A few yards away, the three Akyri he'd knocked out were coming-to and pulling themselves up off of the broken ground as well. Thane watched them through stormy eyes, his chest pumping with the effort he'd put forth in this fight.
In front of him, the demon who had temporarily gotten the upper hand with him gazed at Thane through red-ringed eyes that were both determined and contrite. The Akyri didn't want to be here doing this. None of them did. But they were bound.
_Thane!_ D'Angelo's vampire voice bounced off of the walls of his mind in what felt like a desperate last attempt at some kind of communication. Or a warning.
Thane watched the demon's body tense, ready to charge and attack once more, when suddenly the Akyri went stiff, his eyes grew wide, and a field of lightning crackled to life and cocooned him. The Akyri cried out in pain, fell to his knees, and slapped his palm over the insidious warlock's mark on his neck.
Thane looked to his left. The other Akyri were in the same boat. All were on their knees, their handsome faces contorted in pain, their hands clasping the sides of their necks.
The lightning continued for a few seconds more and then crackled away, leaving a group of heavily breathing men bent over in the dirt. Thane turned to watch the one closest to him. Slowly, the Akyri sat back on his heels and removed his hand from his neck. The mark was gone.
Thane's eyes widened. He glanced at the others. The marks were _all_ gone.
"What the –" he muttered. But then he heard a soft, female sound from behind him and spun in place. Maybe ten meters away, a beautiful young woman was kneeling on the parched ground, her head bent, and a small black book in her hands. Pages littered the ground around her, all of them glowing with a weak red light. The book itself, however, was encased in the same kind of crackling cocoon that had taken the Akyri.
Thane knew who she was at once. There was an aura around her that spelled it out for him as strongly as an actual introduction would have. She was D'Angelo's queen. And the book she held was the one he had directed his Anime to retrieve. Whatever she'd just done to the book had somehow freed the Akyri from the warlock's bonds.
Thane glanced over his shoulder at the Akyri. They were no longer watching him, however. They were no longer concerned with him in any way whatsoever. Every one of them was making his way toward the mansion – the mansion where they knew Charles Alexander Ward waited inside.
Thane didn't have to wonder what was going through their heads. They had murder on the brain. It was wrong on so many levels to bind an Akyri, he wouldn't know where to start.
But _they_ did.
He would have smiled if it wasn't for the woman. He turned back around to face her, concern thrumming through him. She was bent in such a way that her long, thick hair obscured her features now, and she appeared to be in pain. Both of her wrists were bound with gauze, but blood stained them anyway.
At once, he started in her direction, but he didn't get far. The blast that expanded from behind him was so strong, it lifted him up off of the ground and threw him dozens of feet into the air. The impact felt solid, as if someone had sucker punched him in the back; it stole the wind from his lungs and sent stars swimming before his vision.
Thane's eyes closed automatically, and his mind began to spiral. His body knew what to do, though. It began to evaporate. It felt strange; he'd done it before, but long, long ago. It was discombobulating. Suddenly, he was viewing the world through millions of tiny eyes, and they were blurry and indistinct. He wanted to shut them, but there were no eyes to shut, not really.
It was short-lived, thankfully, and Thane stumbled as his tall form once more coalesced and solidified, from the tips of his boots to the top of his dark head six and a half feet up. He regained his balance, ran a hand through his dusty hair, and settled his gaze on the astral plane's horizon.
In the distance, the illusory mansion Charles Ward had created was in flaming pieces that crackled noisily in the otherwise eerie silence.
*****
Roman's father had been a warlock, and that meant that there was an inherent magic to Roman that he was able to mold and shape around him to suit his needs. Over the years, this magic had only grown stronger and, as things were at the moment, he was one of the most magically powerful beings on the planet.
Even so, there was only so much he could do against fire.
A fledgling vampire could not protect himself against it at all. It was only Roman's incredible age that allowed him to pull the strength from within himself just then and form a shield around his body. He knew the shield wouldn't last long. Fire was the ultimate destroyer for his kind. Keeping the shield up, in fact, was sure to drain him faster than anything else could, save perhaps walking unprotected in the daylight.
But he was happy to have it when Ward reared his head, drew a deep, rumbling breath, and then released a jet of red-black flame upon Roman the likes of which he had never seen.
The blaze tore at his shield, warping it with angry heat. Roman felt sweat break out along his brow, dampening his hair and clothes. The effort to maintain the essential, magical barrier between himself and the flames that would have consumed him was so difficult, it was like trying to hold a snowflake in your hand in the summer heat without allowing it to melt.
Ward's wrathful blaze bludgeoned the force field, battering it with angry energy that little by little began to wear it away. Roman could feel it thinning. The air was heating up. His muscles began to ache as he pulled strength from his own physiology in order to hold the shield just a little while longer.
Thane!
He could only pray that Thane had gotten the message and that he wasn't so overwhelmed with Akyri muscle, there was nothing he could do, because there was still no reply.
The shield around Roman crackled, throbbing in its final death throes.
But something moved behind Ward. It was difficult to see at first through Roman's blurry sweat-soaked vision, but when he blinked and re-focused, he saw it again. Wisps of smoke. Tendrils of spirit.
The Anime were in the mansion.
He bared his teeth in pain and effort as he watched the Anime take the book from the table upon which it sat and disappear once more through the mansion's windows.
Just a while longer. Just a little bit....
A flicker of flame shot through a newly formed hole in his shield over his chest, licking out to kiss his skin with its infernal heat. Roman's strangled sound of pain was made through fangs that gleamed in the firelight and begged for blood.
_I imagine this is what Malachi felt when he died, Your Majesty_ , came the fierce, furious whisper in Roman's mind. _Brought down with a bolt of lightning. And what is lightning but white hot fire?_
Roman felt another breach form in his shield, but this one was fortunately at his back. It was fading fast and Ward's power wasn't waning, despite the now missing black book.
Roman glanced to where the book had been seconds ago. _And that's why_ , he thought. The book may have gone, but the string of magic that linked Ward to its powerful capabilities still existed; it ran from Ward's dragon body right out the window through which the Animes had escaped.
As long as that book still existed, Ward would be as he was now.
Roman inhaled a hiss of pain as the rift in the force field over his chest widened and more of Ward's evil fire made it through. As it was now, he wouldn't scar. He was old enough that his vampire blood would heal the wound. But if this went on much longer – more than a few _seconds_ longer – there would be no hope.
As it was, Roman felt himself faltering. His heart hammered hard, his lungs labored, and his eyes burned in his face with a fire almost as hot as Ward's.
Just when he felt the last of his strength to withstand the flames slipping, he sensed the change around him. It was abrupt and startling. It felt like the very air gasped.
Ward drew back, his fire retreated with him, and suddenly everything was still. A beat passed. And another. Roman could hear himself breathing, each intake ragged and choked with smoke.
All of a sudden, Ward's massive monster head reared and a screeching bellow of rage emitted from his dragon's throat. The sound shook the walls and ramrodded through Roman like the ultimate warning bell.
Something was coming. Roman couldn't tell what it was, but on the winds of time, the cold, metallic taste of it was drawing nearer. And this was Roman's chance. Ward was clearly distracted. Whatever was happening was forcing the warlock to ease up on the fire. So, with nearly everything Roman had left, he wrapped his hands around the metal tail spike that kept him impaled to the wall behind him and pulled. He screamed as he did it, a sound of sheer strength and pain, and little by little, the spike retreated, leaving him bleeding and pierced.
But free.
Once the tip of the spike appeared from his abdomen, Roman willed his body into mist. At once, he was light and malleable, and the wounds he had suffered began to regenerate. He moved through the mansion's living room, putting distance between himself and Ward.
Behind him, Ward's massive body began to morph a second time, shrinking and writhing as the scales and tale disappeared and the color of his skin muted back to its normal hue. Roman wondered why, but he had never been one to waste his chances. In light of the development, he considered taking on solid form again so that he could finish Ward once and for all, and with his bare hands.
But the appearance of no fewer than half a dozen tall, strong forms in the doorway of the mansion changed Roman's mind. The Akyri stood on the threshold of the house's foyer, their red-ringed eyes filled with hatred, their fists clenching and unclenching with the need for revenge.
If Roman took on human form right now, he would be competing with the Akyri for a chance to kill the warlock. There was no point. It took one look in their burning eyes to know that they could handle the job just fine on their own.
And Roman desperately wanted to find Evie. He could feel her again, closer this time than before, and he could swear that he could even smell her now for real. He smelled cherry blossoms. There was blood too, and the adrenaline that came with fear. But there were cherry blossoms. And that was Evie, up close and personal.
The Akyri crossed the threshold and Ward, now human once more, turned to face them. Recognition crossed his features, widening his eyes when he realized that not a single one of them bore his binding mark any longer.
And with that, Roman escaped through the same window the Anime had gone through, leaving the boundaries of the illusory house with incredible speed.
Almost at once, he caught sight of Thane as the Phantom King turned and began striding very quickly away from the house. Roman looked to see where he was going. A hundred feet away was a beautiful young woman on her knees, her small form bent in either pain or concentration, a small black leather book in her hands.
Evie.
And then everything exploded.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ker-thump.
Ker-thump.
Evie heard a heart beating. It was the only thing she heard. She felt warm and peaceful and there was no sound but the lub-dub like movement of blood through arteries.
But the sound was growing fainter.
Ker......thump. Ker........... thump.
And as she lay there, the warmth began to seep away as well. When she felt the pain, she opened her eyes, at once dragged back to the reality that had become her insane, terrifying world.
Her head rested in the crook of someone's arm. Evie blinked, clearing her vision, to find herself gazing up at the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
"Roman," she said softly, pleased that her voice worked despite everything.
Roman didn't respond, however. And his expression was stark.
"She can't come, Roman," said someone else. It was an old voice, harsh and scraping, like dried parchment. Evie glanced to her right, straining to see who had spoken.
The old woman who'd sat beside her on Roman's bed in the safe house what felt like an eternity ago came forward on her cane. Her blue eyes blazed with intelligence, and her lips were thin with concern. "I'm sorry," she said, and Evie could sense that she meant it deeply. "But Dannai fell gravely ill when she healed a young woman at the mall after a Hunter attack," the old woman explained.
_Lalura_ , Evie thought. _Her name is Lalura_.
Lalura glanced at her, almost as if she'd been able to read her mind. "She cannot heal her, Roman. As it is, she nearly lost her unborn children. And this... she would not be able to heal anyway."
Evie's fingers and toes felt cold. Not numb, but cold.
"Werewolf blood," Roman said, not taking his intense gaze from Evie.
"This is a different wound, Roman," said Lalura. "You know it." She came forward again, closing the distance between them so that she stood beside Evie, who lay on the ground, her upper body cradled on Roman's kneeling form. "Ward knew he was dying and decided to take her with him. He did not mean for her to survive."
Roman was trembling. She could feel it where he held her so tenderly. But as she stared up at him, something hard crossed his features and he asked, "Evie, can you sit up?"
Evie thought about it. She felt strangely weak. Growing colder by the second. But she couldn't tell why. Nothing in particular hurt except her wrists, where Ward's fangs had torn cruel gashes in her flesh.
She nodded. For him, she could sit up.
"What are you doing?" came a third voice. It was a man's voice.
_David Cade_ , Evie thought. She was so good, remembering all of these names.
Roman didn't answer, but only concentrated on helping Evie sit up on her own. His hands on her were strong, but gentle, and his touch warmed her where he made contact.
"He's going to turn her," came yet another voice.
Evie was sitting up now. She turned to take in her surroundings. They were in the living room of what she could only guess was another of Roman's safe houses. There were several people there. David, she recognized. And Jaxon. There were two other men there as well, both incredibly handsome and obviously vampires.
There were three other women. One was Lalura. One was a young redheaded girl who looked to be in her early twenties. The third was a gorgeous dark-haired woman with piercing green eyes. They were both clearly vampires as well; Evie was getting used to identifying them. The dark haired woman was the one who had spoken.
They were all watching her in stark silence, their expressions as intense as Roman's.
Evie blinked. _Wait_.
What had the dark-haired woman said?
"It's the only way, Evie," said Roman softly. His voice, so deep and melodic, acted as a salve on Evie's nerves. "I know that Ward told you what to say." He gently cupped her face in his warm, tender hands, and brushed his thumb across her lips, sending rivulets of pleasure across Evie's skin. "Say those words for me now."
Evie gazed at him, not comprehending. Everything felt fuzzy and disjointed. She felt light – _too_ light.
" _Please_ , Evie," Roman repeated, his hands shaking where he held her. "You don't have much time. Say the words." He closed his eyes and appeared as if he were fighting with something unseen when he said, "Say them, Evie. _Addo Nox Noctis_."
_The words_ , she thought. _The words_. She knew them now. She remembered what Ward had told her.
And as she remembered what Ward had told her, she realized what was happening.
"Ward's spell damaged you where nothing else can reach, Evie," said Lalura, her ancient voice nearly as charismatic in its own way as Roman's was. "He injured your soul, child. And nothing will save you now but this."
_If she says it, then it's true_ , thought Evie. Somehow, she simply knew that. If anyone knew anything at all about the way the world worked, it was Lalura Chantelle.
Evie opened her mouth and licked her lips. "Addo..." she said – and Roman went stiff beside her. His eyes flew open, their deep, deep darkness shimmering like stars on the verge of going supernova. The room had grown silent and still around her. The other vampires in the room waited; she could sense them holding their collective breaths.
_If I say this, I will become like him_ , she told herself.
"Nox..." she whispered. Behind Roman, the other vampires began to move forward. Roman's eyes widened and she caught the hint of fang behind his lips.
If I don't, I will die.
"Noctis."
"Restrain him!" Cade gave the command, turning to the Offspring men who had been waiting behind Roman. They responded at once, readily obeying the command.
The men blurred into vampire movement, and Roman suddenly had more than four pairs of hands on him, some securing his arms, some wrapped tightly around his broad chest.
Evie was confused, and that confusion fed into a dawning fear, but the black-haired woman was beside her, kneeling so that they were on eye level. "You have to feed from him, Evie," she told her quickly. "You've said the words – now you need to finish the spell and make the transition as soon as possible."
With vampire strength, the woman reached under Evie's arms and lifted her up until Evie could feel her knees beneath her. She braced herself, trying to steady her body. She was on eye level with Roman.
Never in her wildest writer's dreams could she have imagined eyes that looked like his. They had gone supernova. Now they pulsed with hellish light at every heartbeat. Those eyes ripped through her, their heat almost burning her physically. They could see into her again, into her mind – even into her soul. She knew because she could feel him there.
A dot of red caught Evie's attention. There at the base of Roman's neck, a small gash had been ripped. Blood welled at the opening, crimson and precious. It hadn't been there a second before, and Evie instinctively knew that her spoken words had opened it.
She trembled violently.
"Drink now," Cade instructed, glancing at his fellow vampires as if to tell them to hold their king with everything they had. Evie could see Roman's corded muscles straining against the grips of his subjects.
She could also feel the magic her words had released. It pulsed in the air around her as if it waited impatiently for Evie to finish what she'd started.
"Do it now, Evie," said the black-haired woman.
Gently, Evie placed her hands against Roman's chest, feeling the muscles tensed there beneath the black material of his shirt.
The wound her words had opened in his throat waited, small and red and promising. With strength that she had no idea where she obtained, Evie leaned in – and placed her lips over the tiny gash.
At once, Roman bucked against her and she could feel the vampires holding him communicating with one another. She could almost _hear_ it. As if she were already one of their kind. They tightened their holds on him, straining with the effort of keeping him in place. Evie could feel every one of his muscles beneath her fingertips had gone taut with barely contained power.
Slowly, tentatively, she brushed her tongue against the bleeding gash in his neck. A low growl emitted from somewhere deep within him. He tasted like a heady, potent, and salty wine. It burned across Evie's tongue and numbed her throat as it slid down. It felt good. _Very_ good.
At once, Evie closed her mouth tightly over the wound and began to suck. As she swallowed, the misery riding her body began to ebb away. The blood she lost was replaced, the wounds in her wrists stopped aching, and the fuzziness that had been sitting over her lifted and flittered away.
In its place remained a kind of peace. It was like drinking liquid bliss; it erased the agony, the uncertainty, and the torment and replaced it with soul-deep contentment. There was no greater pleasure than the cessation of pain, and this right here, right now, was the cessation of every kind of pain Evie had ever known. There was no more resentment at having lived a normal life in the midst of supernatural she had never known were there. There was no more panic or anxiety. It was all gone – _all_ of it.
She continued to drink from the vampire king, and every time she pulled and swallowed the magical liquid in his veins, Roman fought harder against the grips his men had upon him.
_What is wrong with him?_ Evie's sudden apprehension felt like a spear of hard, sharp light in a sea of warm, tranquil darkness. Her question was more to herself than anyone else, and went out on a mental link that she hadn't even known she'd formed.
_His blood is healing you,_ Cade answered, also mentally.
Evie's eyes widened... She'd just communicated telepathically with someone. She could actually hear the others now! Even so, she couldn't bring herself to stop drinking. Not just yet.
"When you drink from him, it is an act that fills him with a dangerous desire, Evie," said the woman beside her. "If we don't contain him, he will take you all the way to your last drop before you are strong enough to heal yourself when he's finished."
Evie could feel something happening inside. It was almost unnerving, but not quite, because there was no uncertainty and no fear attached to this change.
Somewhere outside, lightning split the Oregon sky and thunder rolled through the safe house. The surge of magic being taken from the king's veins and infused into Evie's was so powerful, she felt as if she were imbibing a liquid aphrodisiac. The heat that had numbed her tongue and throat spread through her chest and slipped lower, warming her belly and moistening her panties between her legs.
She moaned against Roman's throat, the sound involuntary and soft. In response, Roman lowered his head to her neck and Evie could feel his hot breath against her skin as his lips parted.
"Hold him!" the dark-haired woman shouted. "She's not ready! He'll kill her!"
"Forgive me, My Liege." David Cade grabbed a fist full of his thick black hair and just as Evie felt Roman's fangs graze the skin on her neck, the other vampire yanked the king's head back.
Roman roared in outrage, and the sound echoed off of the walls with more force than the thunder had. The lights overhead flickered. Tiny pieces of plaster and dried paint crumbled to the floor. Waves of his power rippled out in anger, abrading everything in the room, including the men who were holding him. They gritted their teeth in pain, their own fangs showing, their eyes beginning to glow. But they held on.
Evie saw them all, felt them all struggling behind Roman, and she experienced a hiccup of fear that she wouldn't make the change in time. They wouldn't be able to hold Roman for much longer.
And then, with a slowly mounting certainty, she felt it. There it was, clicking into place, as if it had heard her silent plea and answered her.
It was like realizing every dream she had ever had. It felt like every story she had ever written was coming true. With a sense of bewilderment that left her fingers and toes tingling, Evie slowly stopped drinking and pulled away. Then she dropped her hands from his chest and straightened.
The vampire king, in all of his broad-shouldered beauty, was shaking in his men's grasps. Evie could feel his power more tangibly now, as if it were a living, breathing entity. Where it grazed everything else in the room with unspent wrath, it wrapped around Evie possessively as if it didn't want her to pull away.
But she had power of her own now. She felt it building around her as surely as Roman's did around him. And that inherent magical strength allowed her to put enough space between her and the king that David was able to let him go.
Roman's gaze dropped to Evie's. It lingered there a moment, red and burning. The men holding Roman released him all at once and took a simultaneous step back. The vampire king didn't move at first; the room had fallen into silence. But his power still whipped out around him, and where it touched her own, it sent shivers of anticipation through Evie.
In a blur of impossible movement, Roman came forward. She felt his arms slide around her, but it was only one sensation among many. Everything happened at once. He spoke a word of magic, but it sounded in his mind, and because she could hear those thoughts now too, it sounded in hers as well. The transportation took hold, the room melted, time warped, and the other vampires that had been around them were gone.
The world pulsed outward, receded quickly, and solidified once more. Evie inhaled and looked around. They were alone in Roman's secret cavern, kneeling in a patch of thick grass and clover on one of the islands. The waterfall on one side of the cave filled the magical space with a static, peaceful sound. The tributaries of river babbled like brooks, and the trees on the individual islands swayed ever so slightly in some unfelt breeze. Smoke curled from the cottage several islands away, and Evie could smell fresh baked cookies.
Roman looked down at her now through eyes that pulsed between red and black.
"How do you feel?" he asked, his beautiful voice gruff with lust and unspent power.
Evie felt fantastic. Nothing hurt, there was no weariness, no anger. There was only the feeling of life – immortal and strong. It was his blood pumping through her veins.
"I feel good," she said, meaning it with all of her heart.
"Glad to hear it," he told her, his lips spreading into a grin so devious, so darkly determined, it was cruel. _Beautiful_ , and absolutely cruel.
And then he was on her, taking them both to the ground. Despite the fact that she carried Roman's blood, she barely saw him coming. His body blurred before her, his hands grasped her firmly but tenderly, and before she could blink, she was on her back and he was straddling her in the thick grass and clover.
She inhaled a surprised gasp and stared up at him through wide eyes. He loomed over her, his black button-up shirt open at the collar, his fangs bared. His muscles pressed threateningly, promisingly, against the tight material of his clothing, and his ultra-black hair curled in damp locks against his forehead and cheeks. He was breathtaking. Something out of a wet supernatural dream.
_Did you enjoy the way I taste_? he asked, smiling as he whispered the question into her mind. One of his strong hands expertly captured both of her slender wrists and pinned them to the clover above her head. She thought about fighting him just for fun, but abstained. He was the Vampire King. He'd lived three thousand years; he had a good two thousand, nine hundred and seventy on her. No matter how strong she'd just become from his infusion, he would win. And for once, it was fun to just give in.
_You're delicious_ , she told him, taunting him with a lascivious smile.
He chuckled above her, the sound sending tempting vibrations through her body from their point of contact at her hips.
Then you'll understand why I have to do this.
The words had barely registered in her mind before he was turning her head to one side with his free hand and she was crying out with surprise as he sank his fangs into her throat.
The sensation was mind-blowing. It was everything that Evie had ever imagined, written about, and dreamed of. And it was more.
The tips of Roman's fangs were razor-sharp. They slid into her throat with expert purpose, straight and fast, and lodged so deep within her that Evie felt well possessed. She was being owned in that moment, taken by a man who had ruled a supernatural kingdom for three thousand years. He was a man so indomitable, he occupied the fantasies of millions of women around the globe. And of all of those women, he had chosen her.
_There's no turning back, my love_ , Roman's words poured through Evie's mind, igniting the fire that erupted into an infernal blaze as he pulled for the first time and swallowed against her throat.
_Oh God...._ There was a deliriousness that was not a thought, not a word, but a sensation of such chaotic magnitude, Evie felt as if she were flying and falling at once. She gasped and moaned as moisture gathered between her legs, further dampening her crotch, and her nipples hardened almost painfully.
Addo Nox Noctis... My queen.
He pulled and swallowed again, his body pressing down upon hers, his hardness the perfect match for her yielding, burning form. The heat within her intensified, swirling and pooling between her legs. Her back arched, and Roman's grip on her wrists tightened.
Again, the king took of her, drawing and swallowing her blood with languid determination that was becoming like a gradual torture. Each second brought more of Evie's nerve endings to life, each pull against the giving veins in her body driving her ever closer to some kind of perfect insanity.
_No more...._ The notion floated through her mind, released in desperation. _I can't take any more_ , she thought. He was eating her alive, his power licking at her skin, his lips caressing her throat, his vampirism taking the blood from her very soul as if he would never, ever get enough.
Laughter rolled through her mind, imminently cruel. It was Roman's voice, devoid of mercy, devoid of restraint. The laugh mocked her, tempted her, and teased her as if to say, "You can take so much more than this my love, and take it you will." He was going to take her to the brink of death and bring her back again. He was going to take her very last drop.
As he took another swallow of her blood and the ache in her body became unbearable, a noise that was half frustrated growl, half need-filled scream bubbled up in her throat, threatening to break free. "Roman!" she cried, not even knowing why she was saying his name or what she was asking him for.
It didn't matter though, because whatever her need was, his must have been ten-fold. He answered her cry with a growl of his own, pulling his fangs from her throat and rising above her. She hated to have them removed from her; the feeling was like being torn away from pleasure itself.
_I can fix that_ , he told her, not bothering to say it aloud. They were connected now, deep down where it counted.
What he did speak out loud was a magic word. There was a flash of light, a brush of warm wind across Evie's face, and when it passed, her skin prickled at the feeling of fresh air against her nakedness.
She gasped and looked down, but whatever magic Roman had used had taken his clothes as well – and that was where her gaze stopped.
Holy fuck.
All coherent thought but those two words fled from Evie's mind. Her lips parted, her breath hitched, and her eyes decided to do what they wanted – trailing across the ridges and slopes of what she was certain was the most perfect body ever formed. The sight of him before her filled her with unbearable yearning.
It also terrified her.
Her eyes widened when they slid downward to find the rock-hard evidence of what she had done to him so far. A tremor of trepidation rushed through her. He was huge. _He's going to kill me._
Roman's response was another wicked smile, which turned him into a veritable incubus above her, a triumphant demon of seduction who had captured his victim and was surely about to rip her asunder.
_Yes_ , he told her. _I am_.
Evie lay beneath him, her wrists now free, but her body unable to move as it was trapped between the layer upon layer of hot, aching need he'd laid upon her and the somewhat frozen fear of what she knew he was about to do to her. Fangs in the throat were one thing. This was another.
_You'll take them both,_ his wicked voice told her.
Promised.
And then he was moving again, and Evie cried out as his hands were suddenly around her waist and she was turning, blurring in the air of the cavern as he switched their positions with vampire speed.
She released a shaky breath and chanced a glance down. He was holding her above him, her opening positioned directly over his broad, turgid cock.
Oh God....
If he released her, she would impale herself. Her eyes flew back up to his to find that they were once more burning, fully aflame. His fangs were bared and his features were hard. There was no escape from this.
His hands nearly spanned the whole of her small waist. They tightened their grips and slowly, so slowly that it was maddening, Roman lowered her over him. Evie closed her eyes and could do nothing to suppress the moan that escaped her when she felt the tip of his member part her moist, ready lips.
He waited there, allowing Evie to feel the intrusion in a way that she never could have imagined. She was violated – blessedly, beautifully violated – but not enough. It wasn't enough!
Again he moved, lowering her a touch more. Evie's head rolled back, exposing her throat.
Careful, little one. You're tempting the beast.
Evie had no words to come back with. The very idea that she was unknowingly teasing him was laughable. She would have given almost anything in that moment to have him drop her, to just take her all the way.
Once more, his deep, wicked chuckle echoed through her mind. Evie bared her teeth. She lowered her head and glared down at him, expecting to find him grinning evilly up at her. But the look on his face was one of slight bewilderment.
_You're stunning_ , he told her.
Evie's brow furrowed. What the hell was he talking about? _Roman!_
And then his expression changed. It became intense and serious, and Evie found herself holding her breath.
All at once, he lowered her the rest of the way and pressed into her hot, wet tightness, sinking all the way to the hilt. Evie's head flew back, her hair fanned out around her, and she cried out to the recesses of the cavern. It hurt so wonderfully good. So perfectly agonizing.
So full....
But he gave her no time to get used to it before he was once more switching their positions, turning with her in the clover until she was under him again. She felt the soft green beneath her and in the next intake of breath, Roman was shoving his hand through her hair and yanking back her head.
She knew it was coming a millisecond before it came. Roman's long, sharp fangs impaled her once more, sinking to their limits. Again, Evie cried out. The feeling of being so deeply taken, so fully claimed by such a man was indescribable.
She sensed a dangerous peak drawing nearer, so intensely pleasurable, she knew it would feel like an explosion, all encompassing and all destructive. But it was mounting within her, ever closer, both promising and threatening at once.
Going to kill me....
_Yes,_ Roman said again, and she could feel his mental voice claim her just as surely as his body was doing so. It was laced with power, spoken with magic, and it curled around her, binding tight like strong silk ropes. _I am._ He made the promise and sealed it with his soul. _Every chance I get._
He moved then, releasing her hair to brace his hands against the ground at either side of her head. His muscles rippled and flexed as he lifted his body, never breaking the seal he'd formed over her neck. He pulled and swallowed at her throat as he eased out of her tightness below ever so slightly, and then shoved back in. Evie shuddered with the impact, feeling him deeper than she ever would have thought possible.
Again he pulled away, and again he drove forward, claiming her with a thrust that took her one step closer to the edge. Once more, he extracted his savage fangs from her tender throat and Evie trembled under assailing sensations as he grazed those teeth along the flesh of her neck to her collarbone.
Her hands clutched at his chest, unconsciously marveling at the broad ridges beneath her fingertips, and when Roman's teeth rose over the crest of her breast to stop at the barrier of her aching nipple, Evie dug her fingernails into his muscle, desperate to find relief.
Roman's mouth closed over the nipple, and Evie's eyes flew open as the tip of one of his dangerous fangs pricked threateningly at the tender flesh. He sucked, and she rose to meet him as rivulets of lightning arced from her breast to her sex, wringing a cry of pleasure from her throat.
His tongue expertly brushed over the sensitive bud before he again rose with vampire speed and moved up her body to sink his long, sharp fangs into her throat a third and final time.
The dichotomy was too much. Evie bucked beneath him, and as if he'd known she would fight, Roman's hands once more found her wrists and pressed them into the grass beneath them.
Close... so close.
The madness was rising, the ridge ever closer as Roman pulled out and drove in – over and over, every long, thick inch of him claiming her as his to the point of delirium. He drank deeper, pulling against her with abandon. Evie's head tossed to the side, she had nowhere to go. The ache grew and grew, and her body quaked beneath the Vampire King, consumed by a passion it could not endure.
And then, like an answered prayer, Roman drove in one final time, pressing deep and setting off the convulsions of insane bliss that had been hovering and teasing, just out of reach until now. She could feel his release like an eruption of lava within her, scorching her to the core and magnifying her own climax as it finally broke free. The waves rolled over Evie, claiming her in a suffocating sea of pleasure as her final drop was claimed by the Vampire King.
She felt herself die in that moment. It was nothing like she would have imagined. It was like "sloughing off her mortal coil" in favor of the new, better one underneath. There was no weakness, no pain, no fear.
She screamed into the air of the cavern as the last of her volcanic orgasm ripped through her, her beautiful new vampire voice going hoarse with the effort.
Above her, the Vampire King rose like a god and claimed her lips with his own, stealing the last of her cries and swallowing them in a kiss that threatened to drive Evie right back toward that ledge of need.
Her climax laid waste to her, wringing every last ounce of resistance from her new immortal body, and infusing it with a sense of calm she had never known. That peace drew a shuddering sigh from her throat and forced her eyelids closed as Roman released her wrists and slowly, tenderly, brushed his hands along her arms to settle them in around her waist.
Roman broke the kiss and drew her gaze to his. His eyes had gone black once more, and Evie saw stars in their endless darkness. She got lost in them, floating in that mesmerizing outer space.
His gaze lingered on hers for several long moments, and then dropped to her mouth. Evie felt her lips twitch. She ran her tongue over the tips of her teeth – and her eyes widened.
Fangs. She had _fangs_.
They were new and small and very sharp.
Above her, Roman smiled. It was a warm smile, welcoming and proud. Evie hesitated only a moment more before she returned the smile, revealing to him what he had given her.
For a moment, Roman looked stunned. His smile faltered and his expression became bewildered. _Evie,_ came his whispered awe. _My God.... You're perfect._
Evie's smile broadened. As far as compliments went, the Vampire King knew how to dish out the best. She ran her tongue over her teeth again and experienced a new kind of thrill. Quite unexpectedly, she felt the sudden, quick urge to pull Roman back down and sink those new fangs into his strong neck; it was an automatic notion and one that gave her a bit of a charge.
But of course, she didn't. Maybe later.
And then Roman's eyes darkened. The aura around him intensified, going from blatant awe to blatant hunger in record time.
_Every chance I get_ , he repeated to her, allowing the deep, dark promise he had made earlier to register. Evie pressed her palms into his chest with the intent to put space between them, but she didn't get far. Roman was still lodged deep within her, and when he moved, the sensation forced Evie to go still, her breath hitching, her body once more tingling with the beginnings of vampire yearning.
_God help me_ , she thought as, before her eyes, the vampire king's gaze shifted from black to burning red once more. It was going to be a very long night.
Epilogue
Three months later....
"On a chess board, the queen is always more powerful than the king," said Lalura as she slowly walked alongside Roman. "Her powers will continue to grow."
"They are already," he said, smiling. "She threw my clothes at me this morning," he chuckled. "Telekinetically."
Lalura nodded. "She is already a strong seer. Soon, she will have all of your abilities and more, fortunately for her. Otherwise that orb up there," she stopped, lifted her cane, and pointed at the sun shining bright in the sky, "might have posed a problem."
They walked in silence through the budding spring garden for a while, Lalura's arm woven through Roman's. It was a warm day with a gentle breeze. Lalura Chantelle was in a quiet mood, as she was every time they walked through his gardens. He knew they reminded her of someone. Someone she'd lost long ago.
Every once in a while, the old witch stopped and bent with great care to brush her fingertips across the new petals of a flower or take in its scent.
"Have you told the Thirteen about my vision?" she asked, most likely already knowing the answer.
"I have."
"I assumed so," she said, confirming his guess. "It's been a while, but I figured you needed time." They moved on and were silent for several minutes more before she spoke up again. "And what will you do about your law now?" she asked.
"It's been remanded," he told her.
Lalura stopped and slowly turned to face him, her small hunched form bending back to meet his piercing gaze. "Offspring can now turn a mortal into a vampire if they so wish?" she asked, again probably already knowing what his answer would be. There wasn't much that went on in the supernatural world without her knowledge.
"Yes."
She lifted a brow. "And you trust your people to choose wisely, do you?"
Roman took a deep breath and considered that. "I must," he said softly. "I believe that for the most part, Offspring are good."
"What will you do when another goes rogue? Or takes someone he or she isn't meant to be with?"
"I will have to deal with each case on an individual basis," he stated. He'd given this a lot of thought and in the end, it wasn't fair to ask his people to go through eternity without a mate when he had just chosen to do the opposite. There would be repercussions. But he would deal with them.
To their left, there was a small scuffling sound. Roman smiled, turning to face the path that led into the rest of the mansion's gardens. He'd felt her coming. It was like a warmth in his blood, a comfort that couldn't be named. He felt whole when she was near. Complete. It was astounding to him that for three thousand years, he hadn't even known he was broken.
She came around the corner like a dream, dressed in a white sundress, her long, thick hair loose and shimmering in the sunshine. The world slowed for him, turning each second into a year, and he took the extra time to memorize every detail.
_My queen_ , he thought helplessly, stunned by how much his heart ached and raced at the same time.
She smiled at him, and stole his breath. _My king_ , she said, her beautiful voice brushing through his mind and body like a lullaby.
He watched her draw near, each step the very image of grace and perfection. And he realized something. He would never get used to this. Not in another three months, not in three hundred years.
Not in three thousand.
He loved her a little more every day. And if the way she smiled at him was any indication, Evelynne D'Angelo felt the same.
*****
Ramses turned to face the door when the Hunter entered. The young man bowed slightly and said, "My Lord, there is a young woman here to see you."
Ramses' gaze narrowed. "Oh?"
The Hunter nodded. "She somehow found the headquarters on her own, My Lord. We don't know how, and she knows exactly who we are. But she claims she has information that will lead you to the Vampire King."
Ramses blinked. Then he straightened. "Show her in," he said softly.
The Hunter turned and exited the room, leaving Ramses alone once more. He looked down at the phone in his hand. He had been looking at pictures on it; footage of Dannai Caige and her husband, Lucas. Lucas was a werewolf.
It gave Ramses much food for thought.
He looked up again, clicking the phone off and pocketing it as the sound of heels neared his doorway.
"Lord Ramses," the woman said as her female form filled the doorway. She crossed her arms over her ample chest and leaned against the doorjamb, her eyes roaming over his body with obvious interest – and lust.
Ramses knew at once that she wasn't human. She was beautiful, tall and lithe, and her body gave off an all-too sensual feel. There was a gleam in her dark blue eyes that was entirely unnatural.
He waited.
"I've brought a gift," she said. She lifted off of the doorjamb and uncrossed her arms. She waved her hand and a single CD in its clear case appeared on the round metal table in the room beside Ramses.
Ramses glanced at it. She was either a witch, a warlock or a vampire. He was narrowing it down.
"What is it?" he asked, always one to cut to the chase.
"The Vampire King has taken a queen," she said, and something nasty flickered across her lovely porcelain features. "This will help you find the both of them."
Ramses watched her for a moment, considering her carefully. His keen gaze picked up the jealousy in her eyes as easily as a print in snow.
"Why would you do this?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"The new queen took something that should have been mine," she stated simply. "Something very dear to me."
Ramses' lips twitched, threatening a smile. "I see."
The woman's gaze narrowed. "Don't waste the information," she said. "It wasn't easy to come by." She turned to leave, but before she disappeared, Ramses sent out a pulse of his own power, drawing her up short.
She froze and he heard her inhale sharply. Slowly, she turned in place, her expression a lot less certain than it had been a moment before. She was no longer all that sure who it was that she was dealing with.
"I want your name," he told her. It wasn't a request. It was plainly a command.
The woman swallowed hard. Her throat had gone dry. But she nodded once and said, "Ophelia."
Ramses absorbed the name. "Thank you," he said.
Ophelia waited several beats. And then she turned and left him alone once more.
The End.
###
((Book two in The Kings series, The Phantom King, is now available!))
The Phantom King, by Heather Killough-Walden
Prologue
The metal of the gun slipped in Steven's wet grip. It wasn't supposed to do that. He was never supposed to be in this state, sweating, terrified, without a firm handle on the situation – or his gun.
But when the back window shattered, exploding inward in an eruption of tinkling, foreboding sound, Steven didn't rise from where he crouched between the couch and the overturned coffee table. He didn't stand and face his enemy. Not this time.
He was learning. The lesson was hard and fast and unreal, but Steven's mind was that of a trained cop, and despite the impossible nature of what he was facing, it knew what to do: Absorb the information and assimilate.
If he stood up, he was a dead man. If he faced this opponent, he wouldn't live to see the sunrise. His only hope was to get out of the house and as far away as possible, as _quickly_ as possible. Which was to say... there really was no hope at all.
Steven closed his eyes and swallowed hard when he heard footsteps slowly cross the kitchen tiles. Glass popped and crunched beneath a set of boots, and a trickle of sweat threatened Steven's eye. His breaths were harsh in the sudden, threatening silence. He tried to still it in his lungs. _He'll hear me_ , he thought.
"You're a plucky little human," his attacker said, a faint accent and the sound of genuine amusement lacing his words. "I'll give you that."
Steven very carefully wiped the sweat from his brow and cut his gaze to the living room door. It was twenty feet away. Twenty feet between him and possible freedom.
"You're in my way, detective," the voice said. He was nearer now, boots casually closing the distance between them. "Have you any idea how many little shits like you have tried to get in my way during my lifetime?"
Steven considered his options. He had eleven bullets left in his clip. But the first four had been fired point-blank into his attacker's chest and had no effect. None whatsoever.
"Thousands," the voice said. He laughed, the sound ominous and low. It raised the hairs on Steven's arms and turned his stomach to lead. " _Thousands_."
Steven tried to ignore the voice. What else did he have? His phone was on the kitchen counter. _Worthless_. The house was set back from the road and a good half an acre from the nearest neighbor. No one was planning on visiting. He was alone.
"She's going to come home and find you in a puddle of blood on the living room floor, detective," his enemy told him as he came flush with the threshold of the living room. "And in her distress, she'll be weak."
Steven's heart hammered, his gaze narrowed, and his gut twisted. The voice laughed, sending pain down Steven's jaw as his teeth clenched hard enough to crack a molar. "And she'll be mine."
All reason, all logic, and everything Steven had ever learned came together in one split decision then and there.
He wasn't going to make it out of this alive.
The best he could hope for was to give Siobhan a chance to do what he couldn't do. _Escape_.
Steven rose from behind the couch and turned just as the demon did. They faced each other head to head, eye to eye. The demon's red gaze flicked to the gun in Steven's hand, and recognition passed before his beautiful but oh-so-wrong features. He knew what Steven was going to do. The detective had learned his lesson the first time.
The demon acted in retaliation just as Steven raised his arm and pulled the trigger. The detective's tall form was enveloped in angry, red fire even as he unloaded all eleven of his bullets into his opponent's face.
Outside on the lawn, a large ginger cat watched the house with big, yellow eyes. His tail twitched as a window exploded and flames licked out to kiss the falling temperatures of night.
The cat made a strange _brrreow_ -like sound and cocked his head slightly to one side just before he raised his chin to watch a stream of red smoke lift from the chimney of the now-burning house and disappear into the night.
A second later, as sirens wailed to life in the far distance and the house crackled to bright, burning life, the ginger cat turned and bolted, disappearing as well.
For a thrilling journey into the Big Bad Wolf series that spurred the creation of The Kings, check out the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation, Books One through Four by Heather Killough-Walden, available as eBooks:
Enjoy Heather Killough-Walden's critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling Big Bad Wolf series, now combined in one tome of sexual tension, romantic suspense and dark paranormal bliss....
"I was strictly a vampire girl until I came across this pack of big bad Alphas -- Killough-Walden has converted me! Sexy, daring, and action-packed from start to finish. Warning: if you have a faint heart, do not read this." - Dianna Hardy, paranormal romance author of The Witching Pen.
"Heather Killough-Walden happens to write books so brilliant, I'm a fan! (I was the minute I started reading Hell Bent.) There aren't many I'd give my crown to, but this lady is totally worthy of my adoration!" – Poppet Author, paranormal romance author of Dusan.
"Hold on tight as these big bad wolves take you on a paranormal romance ride you won't soon forget!" - Christine M. Butler, paranormal romance author of Moonlit Dreams
1. The Heat, Book One:
Lily St. Claire is a simple Southern girl who has no idea what she is in for when she decides to move back to her home town in Louisiana after a decade of being away. But between the two very different alpha werewolves who instantly begin fighting to claim her as their mate and the serial killer who has her in his sites, she's about to find out.
2. The Strip, Book Two: (warning, contains graphic violence)
Green-eyed Malcolm Cole is a cursed werewolf, an alpha in the most powerful sense who has given up hope for any kind of happiness or peace in his life.
Until he catches wind of Claire.
Claire St.James, Charlie among friends, is an amazing young woman with an incredibly special gift. Cole recognizes this at once and swears on the spot to claim Charlie as his mate.
Of course, he isn't the only one with such plans. Charlie is too precious to let go without a fight, and one of the most powerful alphas in the world has already staked a claim, whether Charlie - or Cole - like it or not.
3. The Spell, Book Three:
Dannai, aka the Healer, has begun dreaming of werewolves. She'd always been able to hide the fact that she was a dormant, using her magic to shield her promising scent from the alphas she's been forced to work with. But now that they've invaded her dreams, her world has been turned upside down. For, though every dormant dreams of her intended mate - Dannai is dreaming of two wolves, not one. And neither one of them is good news. One is a notorious killer. The other is Lucas Caige.
Lucas Caige is a man with a haunting past. A warlock took his brother from him fifty years ago and he's spent his life outrunning that dark magic. But fate has a way of throwing sand in your gears, and just when Caige thought he could forever leave behind the magic that brought pain to his life, his path crosses that of the Healer. Dannai unwittingly casts her spell over him the moment he lays eyes on her. She's stunning, she's kind, and everything about her wreaks havoc on his senses. She's also magic incarnate.
But if Dannai thinks that's going to stop him from doing everything in his power to make her his mate, the little witch has another thing coming.
4. The Hunt, Book Four:
Byron Caige has been a prisoner for the last fifty years of his supernaturally long life. Just when he gives up hope of ever knowing freedom again, he is unwittingly rescued by the very same woman who only wants to see him dead. Katherine Dare – Kat – is smart, fast, strong and beautiful – but unfortunately she's a Hunter, and she's convinced that Byron murdered her father twenty years ago.
She's also Byron's dormant.
As war breaks out amongst the otherworldly of Earth and threatens the existence of entire races, Kat is faced with a terrible decision. Should she give up her cause and believe Caige when he professes his innocence? Or should she fight him and possibly avenge her father's taken life – even while she forfeits her own?
Thank you for reading!
| {
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Condition: Seen very little wear so Mint condition.
Case/Dial: Stainless Steel case 44mm (plus crown). Black dial. Date. Waterproof to 300m. Sapphire Crystal front and back.
Movement: Panerai in house Automatic 3 day movement.
Bracelet/Strap: Panerai Brown Leather and Black Rubber Straps and Panerai buckle.
Box/Papers: Panerai Box, booklets and Panerai Papers (Dated June 2017), strap tool etc.
Reference numbers: Model number PAM 01312 SN S25xx/3500.
Other Information: A nice saving on the rrp of £6400 for this popular model and one of a Limited Edition of 3500 globally. Under full Panerai International warranty to June 2019. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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У́лица Михаи́ла Ала́дьина — одна из улиц исторического района Белый город в центральной части Астрахани, проходит с севера на юг параллельно Коммунистической улице и улице Шелгунова. Начинается от улицы Свердлова, пересекает Эспланадную и улицу Молодой Гвардии, далее проходит вдоль Морского сада до Советской, пересекает улицу Ленина и заканчивается у улицы Бабушкина.
История
В 1837 году официально утверждено уже существовавшее название Малая Демидовская или Мало-Демидовская, в 1924 году была переименована в честь участника Гражданской войны, астраханца Михаила Фёдоровича Аладьина.
Примечания
Улицы Астрахани | {
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Ізабе́лла Скору́пко (), уроджена Ізабелла Дорота Скорупко (; 4 червня 1970, Білосток, Польща) — польська та шведська акторка, модель і співачка.
Біографія
Ізабелла народилась у сім'ї Леха та Магделени Скорупко 4 червня 1970 року в Білостоці, Польща. Коли їй був один рік, батьки розлучились, і дівчинка залишилась з матір'ю. 1978 року вони переїхали до передмістя Стокгольма, Швеція, де Ізабелла вивчала шведську, англійську та французьку мови.
Кар'єра
Наприкінці 1980-х Скорупко подорожувала Європою, працюючи моделлю та з'явившись на обкладинці «Vogue». 1987 року вперше зіграла у фільмі, «Ніхто не може любити як ми» (). На початку 1990-х почала займатись музикою, у 1991 році видала свій єдиний альбом «IZA», який у Швеції став золотим.
1995 року зіграла подругу Джеймса Бонда (Пірс Броснан) Наталю Симонову у фільмі «Золоте око».
2011 року заспівала разом зі шведським співаком Петером Єбаком композицію «Jag Har Dig Nu», та знялась у відеокліпі для неї.
Особисте життя
25 грудня 1996 року Ізабелла вийшла заміж за польського хокеїста Маріуша Черкавського. 15 вересня 1997 року у пари народилась донька Юлія; 1998 року пара розійшлась. 30 січня 2003 року Ізабелла вийшла за американця Джеффрі Реймонда, 24 липня того ж року народився син Якоб.
Фільмографія
Дискографія
Альбоми
IZA (1991) Швеція #11
Сингли
Джерела
Посилання
Уродженці Білостока
Польські акторки
Польські моделі
Польські співачки
Поляки Швеції
Польські емігранти до Швеції | {
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{"url":"https:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/questions\/152147\/psi-operator-on-phi-gamma-modules","text":"# Psi operator on Phi-Gamma modules\n\nThis is a question about the base-rings appearing in the the theory of $(\\varphi, \\Gamma)$-modules in $p$-adic Hodge theory.\n\nLet $p$ be prime, $n \\ge 1$, and let $$\\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n} = \\left\\{ \\sum_{k \\in \\mathbf{Z}} a_k T^k : a_k \\in \\mathbf{Z}_p, v_p(a_k) + \\frac{k}{(p-1)p^{n-1}} \\ge 0\\, \\forall{k} \\text{ and \\to \\infty as k \\to -\\infty}\\right\\}.$$\n\n(This ring also goes by the name of $\\mathscr{O}_{\\mathscr{E}}^{\\dagger, n}$ in some works). There is a Frobenius map $\\varphi: \\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n} \\to \\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n+1}$ given by $T \\mapsto (1 + T)^p - 1$.\n\nThere is also a map $\\psi: \\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n+1} \\to \\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n}[1\/T]$, satisfying $\\psi \\circ \\varphi = 1$ and $$(\\varphi \\circ \\psi)(f) = \\frac{1}{p} \\sum_{\\zeta: \\zeta^p = 1} f( \\zeta(1 + T) - 1).$$\n\nDoes the map $\\psi$ send $\\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n+1}$ to $\\mathbf{A}_{\\mathbf{Q}_p}^{\\dagger, n}$?\n\nThere is a sentence in the proof of Lemma V.1.4 of the paper \"Theorie d'Iwasawa des representations p-adiques d'un corps local\" by Cherbonnier and Colmez (JAMS 12(1), 1999) implying that this is the case, but the proof is only very briefly sketched, and I can't see how to make it work. On the other hand, Colmez's massive paper \"Repr\u00e9sentations de $\\operatorname{GL}_2(\\mathbf{Q}_p)$ et $(\\varphi, \\Gamma)$-modules\" (in Asterisque 330, 2010) seems to avoid using this fact at points where it would seem (to me!) natural to do so, e.g. Lemma V.1.1, leading me to suspect that maybe it's not actually true. What's the correct statement here?\n\nIt seems to me that the statement follows from some formulas appearing in other papers of Colmez. Lemma I.9 (page 224) of \"La s\u00e9rie principale unitaire de $GL_2(Q_p)$\" has some very precise estimates for the coefficients of $\\psi(T^k)$ with $k<0$. It says that if $k<0$, then $\\psi(T^k)= \\sum_{i=k}^{\\lfloor k\/p \\rfloor} b_{k,i} T^i$ with: $$v_p(b_{k,i}) \\geq \\frac{k-pi}{p-1}-1.$$ Note also that $v_p(b_{k,i}) \\geq 0$. If you use this, then it seems to me that you can prove that $a_k T^k \\in A^{\\dagger,n+1}_{Q_p}$ implies $\\psi(a_k T^k) \\in A^{\\dagger,n}_{Q_p}$. Don't forget to use the fact that all the $v_p(\\cdot)$'s are integers: in particular I'm not sure that the claim would be true if you were to look at rings \"with coefficients in $E\/Q_p$\" if $E$ is ramified - which is maybe why Colmez avoids it?\nEDIT: even if the above works, I'd personally try a more direct proof along the following line: $$A^{\\dagger,n+1}_{Q_p} = Z_p[[T]] \\{ \\frac{p}{T^{p^n(p-1)}} \\} = Z_p[[T]] \\{ \\frac{p}{\\phi(T)^{p^{n-1}(p-1)}} \\},$$ and your claim then becomes clear.\n\u2022 Thanks! The bound Colmez gives deals with all the coefficients other than the boundary case $i = \\lfloor k\/p \\rfloor$, and that case you can bash out by hand. As you suggest, nailing this case does indeed need the fact that $v_p$ takes values in $\\mathbf{Z}$ (otherwise $c\/T$ is a counterexample for suitably chosen $c$). \u2013\u00a0David Loeffler Dec 18 '13 at 11:30","date":"2020-05-31 23:28:35","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9604519009590149, \"perplexity\": 107.77462522058966}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-24\/segments\/1590347413786.46\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200531213917-20200601003917-00032.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: node string is not printing output correctly I have a rather simple incomplete program involving nodes.
I haven't gotten too far, but I'm having an issue.
I've created a node and it's a string type.
But when running the program, instead of printing the defined string, the output is the node name, followed by "@" and a bunch of letters and digits.
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Node {
public static void main (String[] args) {
Node x = new Node("ABCDEFG",null);
System.out.print(x);
}//void main
private String data;
private Node next;
public Node(String d, Node nx) {
data = d;
next = nx;
}
public String getData() {return data;}
public Node getNext() {return next;}
public void setData(String d) {data = d;}
public void setNext(Node n) {next = n;}
}// Node class
However the output is not shown as defined at the top, but looks like this:
Node@6d06d69c
Any possible solutions?
A: Node@6d06d69c is the representation of the object x which is of type Node. To print the actual string value you are passing in constructor, you either need to call getData() method or override toString() in Node class to return data .
A: First and foremost, you need to understand toString in java.
The toString method for class Object returns a string consisting of the name of the class of which the object is an instance, the at-sign character `@', and the unsigned hexadecimal representation of the hash code of the object.
So make sure you print what you intend to print, you have to @Override the toString() automatically implicitly inherited from the Object.
Here is a demo for this in your case:
public class NodeToString {
static class Node {
int val;
Node next;
public Node(int theVal, Node theNext) {
this.val = theVal;
this.next = theNext;
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return String.format("{value: %d, hasNext: %s}", this.val, this.next != null);
}
}
public static void main(String... args) {
Node head = new Node(1, null);
System.out.println(head);
}
}
And the output:
{value: 1, hasNext: false}
| {
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SNMMI Comments on CMS Announcements for PET Scans
The Society of Nuclear Medicine & Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) has released its statement on last week's announcements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regarding a national coverage analysis notice on Alzheimer's Disease treatment and the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS).
First, CMS is initiating a national coverage determination (NCD) analysis for Monoclonal Antibodies Directed Against Amyloid for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease. For the next 30 days, the agency will accept comments about Alzheimer's Disease therapy using monoclonal antibodies directed against brain amyloid.
They are particularly interested in comments that include scientific evidence and address the following questions:
Which health outcomes are important, and what degree of improvement in them is meaningful for patients receiving treatment?
What characteristics of patients with Alzheimer's disease are important to optimizing the likelihood of positive health outcomes from treatment?
What issues of equity and inclusion must be accounted for in the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's disease?
What health care providers should be included as part of the patient's treatment team? Should medical specialists be included in the care team of patients receiving treatment? If so, which specialists should be included in the care?
In what setting(s) should treatment and care be given?
SNMMI is working with its Brain Imaging Council to provide comments, including the importance of covering beta amyloid PET scans. At this point in time, beta amyloid PET is the only FDA-approved diagnostic to identify amyloid plaque.
Second, on July 13, 2021, CMS published its CY 2022 MPFS Proposed Rule, including a significant change for nuclear medicine.
CMS proposes to remove the "exclusionary language" from NCD 220.6 Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scans. This will leave non-oncologic PET indications (unless noted by NCD 220.6.1-220.6.20) to the discretion of local Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs).
CMS stated, "We believe that extending local contractor discretion for non-oncologic indications of PET provides an immediate avenue to potential coverage in appropriate candidates and provides a framework that better serves the needs of the Medicare program and its beneficiaries." New FDA-approved non-oncologic radiopharmaceuticals will be covered under MAC discretion.
The SNMMI supports CMS's coverage decision, which results from years of work by SNMMI and its industry partners. However, in this proposal, the national non-coverage determination for beta amyloid PET (NCD 220.6.20) remains. SNMMI and its partners are working to resolve this coverage discrepancy.
In addition, the proposed rule proposes to cut the conversion factor to $33.58 in CY 2022, as compared to $34.89 in CY 2021; this follows the expiration of the 3.75% payment increase, a 0.00% conversion factor update, and a budget neutrality adjustment. SNMMI stated it will work with the medical community to prevent cuts to physician reimbursement.
In additional news, CMS proposes to delay implementation of the payment penalty phase of the Appropriate Use Criteria program to the later of Jan. 1, 2023, or the Jan. 1 that follows the end of the public health emergency. Currently, the penalty phase is set to begin Jan. 1, 2022. The SNMMI believes this will be beneficial for referring physicians who needed the extra time to implement because of COVID-19.
Imeka, INmune Bio Partner to use White Matter Biomarker in Alzheimer's Clinical Studies
Imeka announced a partnership with INmune Bio to use its...
SNMMI '21: New PET Tracer Detects Hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease Years Before Symptoms Emerge
New research indicates that a novel positron emission tomography...
Alzheimer's Drug Gets FDA Accelerated Approval
The US FDA approved Aduhelm (aducanumab) for the treatment of...
SNMMI Comments on CMS Announcements for PET Scans. Appl Radiol.
By News Release| July 21, 2021 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,707 |
<img src="https://avatars2.githubusercontent.com/u/2810941?v=3&s=96" alt="Google Cloud Platform logo" title="Google Cloud Platform" align="right" height="96" width="96"/>
# Google Cloud IoT Core NodeJS MQTT example
This sample app publishes data to Cloud Pub/Sub using the MQTT bridge provided
as part of Google Cloud IoT Core.
Note that before you can run this sample, you must register a device as
described in the parent README.
# Setup
Run the following command to install the library dependencies for NodeJS:
npm install
# Running the sample
The following command summarizes the sample usage:
Usage: cloudiot_mqtt_example_nodejs [options]
Example Google Cloud IoT Core MQTT device connection code.
Options:
--projectId The Project ID to use. Defaults to the value of the GCLOUD_PROJECT or GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
environment variables.
--cloudRegion GCP cloud region.
--registryId Cloud IoT registry ID.
--deviceId Cloud IoT device ID.
--privateKeyFile Path to private key file.
--algorithm Encryption algorithm to generate the JWT.
--numMessages Number of messages to publish.
--tokenExpMins Minutes to JWT token expiration.
--mqttBridgeHostname MQTT bridge hostname.
--mqttBridgePort MQTT bridge port.
--messageType Message type to publish.
--help Show help
For example, if your project ID is `blue-jet-123`, your service account
credentials are stored in your home folder in creds.json and you have generated
your credentials using the shell script provided in the parent folder, you can
run the sample as:
node cloudiot_mqtt_example_nodejs.js \
--projectId=blue-jet-123 \
--cloudRegion=us-central1 \
--registryId=my-registry \
--deviceId=my-node-device \
--privateKeyFile=../rsa_private.pem \
--algorithm=RS256
# Reading the messages written by the sample client
1. Create a subscription to your topic.
gcloud beta pubsub subscriptions create \
projects/your-project-id/subscriptions/my-subscription \
--topic device-events
2. Read messages published to the topic
gcloud beta pubsub subscriptions pull --auto-ack \
projects/my-iot-project/subscriptions/my-subscription
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 5,798 |
Crazycraft • View topic - Hey!
Hey! Haven't been on the forums for some time now and I wanted to just check in. How's the server coming?
It's online and running. It's whitelisted. I think that blake is setting up some kind of web form so that people can whitelist themselves/others.
What's the IP? Am I whitelisted? | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,128 |
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<h1 id="fare-pratica-con-i-dati-e-regressione">Fare pratica con i dati e regressione</h1>
<p><img src="/media/spurCorr.png" alt="" />
Originally posted <a href="http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations">here</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<h1 id="regressione-lineare">Regressione lineare</h1>
<p>Al <a href="/Regression_2019.nb.html">link</a> è possibile trovare delle note sulla regressione.</p>
<p>Ricordiamo che per applicare la regressione lineare dobbiamo essere sicuri che le ipotesi siano soddisfatte. In particolare dovremo assicurarci che i residui seguano una distribuzione normale centrata in 0 e siano indipendenti.</p>
<p>Alcune delle funzioni già viste possono aiutarci in questo compito.</p>
<p>Definire e richiamare un modello lineare in R è molto semplice. Basta infatti utilizzare la funzione <code>lm()</code>, dove va specificata la <em>variabile dipendente</em> e il <em>predittore</em> ed i dati da usare per definire il modello.</p>
<p>Sebbene i modelli di <em>regressione multipla</em> siano concettualmente e praticamente più complessi, R li supporta usando la stessa funzione e la stessa notazione. In tal caso, invece che indicare un predittore, se ne indicano più usando il simbolo <code>+</code> per elencarli.</p>
<h3 id="mtcars">Mtcars</h3>
<p>Vediamo alcuni esempi usando il dataset <code>mtcars</code>.</p>
<p>Supponiamo di voler investigare se il consumo di carburante e il numero di cavalli seguono una relazione lineare.</p>
<p>Un ottimo metodo per intuire se la relazione possa essere in qualche modo lineare è quello di disegnare la variabile dipendente in funzione del predittore.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="chroma"><code class="language-r" data-lang="r">plot<span class="p">(</span>mpg <span class="o">~</span> hp<span class="p">,</span> data <span class="o">=</span> mtcars<span class="p">)</span></code></pre></div>
<p>Secondo i risultati della nostra analisi preliminare sembra plausibile che la relazione sia lineare. Continuiamo la nostra investigazione definendo il modello con la funzione <code>lm()</code> e visualizzando il risultato usando la ben nota funzione <code>summary()</code>.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="chroma"><code class="language-r" data-lang="r">mtcars_reg <span class="o"><-</span> lm<span class="p">(</span>mpg <span class="o">~</span> hp<span class="p">,</span> data <span class="o">=</span> mtcars<span class="p">)</span>
<span class="kp">summary</span><span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg<span class="p">)</span></code></pre></div>
<p>Si può accedere ai vari elementi elencati da <code>summary()</code> usando la notazione <code>$</code>.</p>
<p>Tra le informazioni che fornisce summary, è presente anche il valore <strong>R-squared</strong> (R quadro), che è la <strong>proporzione di varianza della variabile dipendente che viene spiegata dal predittore</strong>. Tale valore è compreso tra 0 e 1. Valori vicino a 1 indicano un buon modello, mentre valori bassi possono indicare o che il modello non spieghi completamente/correttamente i dati, o che la varianza dei residui è molto alta.</p>
<p>Una volta definito il modello, è importante visualizzare i risultati per valutarne la bontà e per capire il comportamento dei residui. In questo modo è infatti possibile verificare <strong>quantitativamente</strong> (non formalmente) se i residui soddisfano le ipotesi di indipendenza (non si devono osservare dei pattern) e che la distribuzione dei quantili sia confrontabile con quella di una normale.</p>
<p>I seguenti comandi permettono di visualizzare la retta di regressione, i quantili e di confrontarli con la distribuzione in quantili di una normale.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="chroma"><code class="language-r" data-lang="r">par<span class="p">(</span>mfrow <span class="o">=</span> <span class="kt">c</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="m">3</span><span class="p">,</span><span class="m">1</span><span class="p">),</span> mar <span class="o">=</span> <span class="kt">c</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="m">2</span><span class="p">,</span><span class="m">2</span><span class="p">,</span><span class="m">1</span><span class="p">,</span><span class="m">1</span><span class="p">))</span>
<span class="c1"># Retta di regressione</span>
plot<span class="p">(</span>mpg <span class="o">~</span> hp<span class="p">,</span> data <span class="o">=</span> mtcars<span class="p">)</span>
abline<span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg<span class="o">$</span>coefficients<span class="p">,</span> col <span class="o">=</span> <span class="s">"red"</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="c1"># Pattern nei residui</span>
plot<span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg<span class="o">$</span>residuals<span class="p">,</span> main <span class="o">=</span> <span class="s">"Residui"</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="c1"># Distribuzione in quantili </span>
qqnorm<span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg<span class="o">$</span>residuals<span class="p">)</span>
qqline<span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg<span class="o">$</span>residuals<span class="p">)</span></code></pre></div>
<h4 id="esercizio-a">Esercizio A</h4>
<p>In modo analogo a quanto fato sopra, si investighi la relazione tra consumo e peso delle auto in esame.</p>
<h4 id="esercizio-b">Esercizio B</h4>
<p>Si discuta un modello lineare per le variabili <strong>x</strong> e <strong>y</strong> di <strong>Esercizo 1</strong>.</p>
<h2 id="regressione-multipla">Regressione multipla</h2>
<p>Come anticipato, se volessimo considerare una regressione multipla e per esempio considerare come predittori sia la potenza (cavalli) che il peso, possiamo implementare il modello in modo simile in R.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre class="chroma"><code class="language-r" data-lang="r">mtcars_reg_hp_wt <span class="o"><-</span> lm<span class="p">(</span>mpg <span class="o">~</span> hp <span class="o">+</span> wt<span class="p">,</span> data <span class="o">=</span> mtcars<span class="p">)</span>
<span class="kp">summary</span><span class="p">(</span>mtcars_reg_hp_wt<span class="p">)</span></code></pre></div>
<p>Se volessimo che il modello considerasse tutte le variabili (eccetto mpg), si può usare la notazione <code>lm(mpg ~ ., data = mtcars)</code> senza esplicitamente indicare tutti i nomi delle colonne.</p>
<h1 id="esercitazione-3">Esercitazione 3</h1>
<p>Si consideri il dataset <code>crabs</code> contenuto nel pacchetto MASS.</p>
<ol>
<li>Si verifichi che il dataset sia stato letto bene. Si usi l’help per comprendere il significato delle variabili.</li>
<li>Si visualizzi una tabella che riassume il numero di esemplari per genere e per colore. E’ il dataset equilibrato rispetto queste variabili categoriche?</li>
<li>Si visualizzi usando un solo boxplot la variabile BD al variare del sesso e del colore.</li>
<li>Si calcoli la retta di regressione lineare tra le variabili FL e CL (predittore). Si calcoli il summary del modello e si commenti.</li>
<li>Si visualizzi la retta di regressione rispetto ai dati, la distribuzione dei residui e i loro quantili. Si commentino i risultati.</li>
<li>Si determini se la lunghezza del carapace è statisticamente differente tra le due specie.</li>
</ol>
<h1 id="esercizi">Esercizi</h1>
<h2 id="esercizio-1">Esercizio 1</h2>
<p>Si importi il <a href="http://college.cengage.com/mathematics/brase/understandable_statistics/7e/students/datasets/slr/excel/slr07.xls">dataset</a> (<a href="http://college.cengage.com/mathematics/brase/understandable_statistics/7e/students/datasets/slr/frames/frame.html">descrizione</a>). Si trovi un modo opportuno per importarlo in R e si analizzi la relazione tra le due variabili usando la regressione lineare. Si analizzino i risultati e si visualizzino i residui.</p>
<h2 id="esercizio-2">Esercizio 2</h2>
<p>Si trovi un modo adeguato per importare i dati relativi al <a href="http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArfEDsV3bBwCdGhJcHAwanc2aFdZeXl1WTVZQnJjb1E&output=xlsx">reddito nazionale lordo pro capite</a> e alla <a href="http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AkBd6lyS3EmpdDBKd2V5VmxkYlJuUHAtOURzUkZzNEE&output=csv">percentuale di strade asfaltate</a> in R. Dopo aver analizzato e preparato i dataset, si usino i dati per investigare le due variabili rispetto ad un paese del G7, un paese in via di sviluppo ed un paese del terzo mondo a scelta, nel periodo dal 1990 al 2009.
Si analizzino i dati e si visualizzino. Inoltre si usi la regressione lineare per analizzare la relazione tra le variabili. Si commentino e discutano i risultati.</p>
<h5 id="soluzione-es2-soles2-r"><a href="/SolEs2.R">Soluzione Es2</a></h5>
<h2 id="a-name-l6ex3-a-esercizio-3"><a name="L6Ex3"></a>Esercizio 3</h2>
<p>Usando il dataset ottenuto nell’<a href="../lezione5_2019#L5Ex3">Esercizio 3 della lezione 5</a>, si investighi usando la regressione lineare la relazione tra prodotto interno lordo e aspettativa di vita per ognuno dei continenti. Si usi la funzione <code>predict()</code> per valutare il modello su dati diversi da quelli usati per definirlo. In particolare, si valuti il modello ottenuto per l’America sui dati europei e viceversa. Si visualizzino e si discutano i risultati ottenuti, dandone anche un interpretazione.</p>
<h2 id="a-name-l6ex4-a-esercizio-4"><a name="L6Ex4"></a>Esercizio 4</h2>
<p>Si considerino i modelli ottenuto nell’<a href="./#L6Ex3">Esercizio 3</a>. Si valuti separatamente il modello ottenuto per l’America e quello l’Europa usando i dati dei paesi <em>Canada</em>, <em>Italy</em>, <em>Argentina</em> e <em>Sierra Leone</em> contentuti nel dataset originale. Si valutino i valori di R quadro ottenuti e si discutano i risultati.</p>
<p><em>Suggerimento</em> si usi la formulazione equivalente di R quadro:
<a href="https://www.codecogs.com/eqnedit.php?latex=R^2&space;=&space;1&space;-&space;\frac{SS_{res}}{SS_{tot}},&space;\,&space;\text{&space;dove&space;}&space;SS_{res}&space;=&space;\sum_i&space;(y_i&space;-&space;\hat{y}_i)^2&space;\text{&space;e&space;}&space;SS_{tot}&space;=&space;\sum_i&space;(y_i&space;-&space;\bar{y})^2" target="_blank"><img src="https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?R^2&space;=&space;1&space;-&space;\frac{SS_{res}}{SS_{tot}},&space;\,&space;\text{&space;dove&space;}&space;SS_{res}&space;=&space;\sum_i&space;(y_i&space;-&space;\hat{y}_i)^2&space;\text{&space;e&space;}&space;SS_{tot}&space;=&space;\sum_i&space;(y_i&space;-&space;\bar{y})^2" title="R^2 = 1 - \frac{SS_{res}}{SS_{tot}}, \, \text{ dove } SS_{res} = \sum_i (y_i - \hat{y}_i)^2 \text{ e } SS_{tot} = \sum_i (y_i - \bar{y})^2" /></a></p>
<!-- #### [Soluzioni](/SvolgimentoEsL5.R) -->
<p> © 2017-2020 Federico Reali</p>
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| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,922 |
Electra Heart ist das zweite Studioalbum der walisischen Künstlerin Marina Diamandis, bekannt unter ihrem Künstlernamen Marina and the Diamonds. Das Album erreichte in Großbritannien, Irland und Schottland Platz 1 der Albumcharts. Damit ist es ihr erstes Nummer-1-Album.
Hintergrund
Während ihrer Tour im Jahr 2010 gab Diamandis bekannt, dass sie mit den Arbeiten an ihrem zweiten Studioalbum begonnen habe. Der Song Living Dead war der erste neue Song, den sie für das Album schrieb und aufnahm. Im August 2011 veröffentlichte sie auf ihrem YouTube-Kanal ein Video mit dem Namen Part 1: Fear and Loathing. Das Video wurde von Caspar Balslev gedreht. Zwei Wochen später, am 22. August 2011 folgte ein ebenfalls von Casper Balslev gedrehtes Video mit dem Namen Part 2: Radioactive. Ein weiteres Video, Part 3: The Archetypes folgte am 15. Dezember 2011. Außerdem veröffentlichte sie am 20. November 2011 auf ihrem Kanal eine Demoversion des Songs Starring Role sowie am 27. Februar 2012 den Song Homewrecker. Außerdem wurden schon lange vor der Veröffentlichung des Albums gegen ihren Willen im Internet Demoversionen der Songs Living Dead, Sex Yeah sowie Power & Control hochgeladen.
Am 1. März 2012 verkündete sie über Twitter und Facebook die Songliste des Albums sowie dessen Cover. Am 5. März gab sie schließlich die vier Bonustracks der Deluxeversion bekannt.
Kurz vor Erscheinen des Albums veröffentlichte sie auf Wunsch ihrer Fans auf ihrer Homepage digital eine Mini-EP, die Primadonna Exclusive Acoustic EP, welche die Songs Primadonna, Starring Role, Lies und Homewrecker als Akustikversion enthält.
Am 10. Juli 2012 erschien das Album mit einer leicht veränderten Songliste auch in Amerika. So befindet sich auf der Standardversion der Song Sex Yeah, einer der vier Bonussongs der europäischen Version, sowie Radioactive und ein neuer Song mit dem Namen How to Be a Heartbreaker. Die Songs Living Dead, Lonely Hearts Club sowie Buy the Stars befinden sich nicht mehr auf dem Album.
Konzept und Einfluss
Während eines Interviews erklärte Diamandis, dass das Album wie eine Erzählung sei, welche Ähnlichkeiten mit einem Americana-Film der 1970er Jahre habe. Das ganze Album ist rund um den Titelcharakter Electra Heart aufgebaut, welche aber laut der Sängerin kein Alter Ego sei, sondern eher eine Methode, um Teile des American Dreams mit Inhalten der griechischen Tragödie bildlich darzustellen. Die Songs des Albums werden in verschiedene Archetypen unterteilt, die Primadonna, der Homewrecker (deutsch Ehebrecher), das Teen Idle (Wortspiel mit Teenie-Idol und dem Adjektiv idle, zu Deutsch etwa fauler Jugendlicher) sowie die Su-Barbie-A (stilisierte Form von Suburbia, zu Deutsch etwa Vorstadt-Barbie). Diese vier Typen repräsentieren Diamandis' eigene Ansichten über die Facetten der weiblichen Persönlichkeit. Die Idee, die Songs des Albums rund um den Charakter Electra Heart und den vier Archetypen aufzubauen, kam ihr während der Zeit, als sie nach Veröffentlichung von The Family Jewels in den USA auf Tournee war. Als Inspirationen für das Album gab sie Künstlerinnen wie Madonna und Marilyn Monroe an, aber auch Marie-Antoinette.
Promotion
Electra Heart wurde durch eine elfteilige Serie Videos begleitet. Diese wurden im Zeitraum zwischen August 2011 und August 2013 veröffentlicht. Das erste Video zum Albumsong Fear & Loathing wurde am 8. August 2011 veröffentlicht. Das letzte Video, welches zu dem bisher unveröffentlichten, zum Album gleichnamigen Song Electra Heart gehört, wurde genau zwei Jahre später veröffentlicht. Mit diesem Video wurde die Albumära abgeschlossen. Die weiteren Teile sind:
Anmerkungen
Bei E.V.O.L handelt es sich um ein unveröffentlichtes Lied aus den Aufnahmesessions des Albums. Es wurde zudem als Gratisdownload am Tag der Veröffentlichung des Videos bereitgestellt.
Titelliste
Standard-Edition
Bubblegum Bitch (Marina Diamandis, Rick Nowels) – 2:34
Primadonna (Diamandis, Julie Frost, Lukasz Gottwald, Henry Walter) – 3:41
Lies (Diamandis, Gottwald, Walter, Wesley Pentz) – 3:46
Homewrecker (Diamandis, Nowels) – 3:22
Starring Role (Diamandis, Greg Kurstin) – 3:27
The State of Dreaming (Diamandis, Nowels, Devrim Karaoğlu) – 3:36
Power & Control (Diamandis, Steve Angello) – 3:46
Living Dead (Diamandis, Kurstin) – 4:04
Teen Idle (Diamandis) – 4:14
Valley of the Dolls (Diamandis, Nowels, Karaoğlu) – 4:13
Hypocrates (Diamandis, Nowels) – 4:01
Fear and Loathing (Diamandis) – 6:07
Deluxe-Edition
Die Deluxe-Edition enthält vier weitere Songs sowie die Videos zu Radioactive und Primadonna.
13. Radioactive (Diamandis, Clyde Narain, Fabian Lenssen, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen) – 3:47
14. Sex Yeah (Diamandis, Kurstin) – 3:46
15. Lonely Hearts Club (Diamandis, Ryan McMahon, Ryan Rabin) – 3:01
16. Buy the Stars (Diamandis) – 4:47
17. Radioactive [Video] – 3:48
18. Primadonna [Video] – 3:47
Außerdem ist es möglich, mit der CD online weiteres Bonusmaterial freizuschalten. Es sind enthalten:
Lies (Acoustic) [Video] – 4:07
Primadonna (Benny Benassi Remix) – 3:55
Primadonna (Kat Krazy Remix) – 3:39
US-Standardversion
Bubblegum Bitch (Marina Diamandis, Rick Nowels) – 2:34
Primadonna (Diamandis, Julie Frost, Lukasz Gottwald, Henry Walter) – 3:41
Lies (Diamandis, Gottwald, Walter, Wesley Pentz) – 3:46
Homewrecker (Diamandis, Nowels) – 3:22
Starring Role (Diamandis, Greg Kurstin) – 3:27
The State of Dreaming (Diamandis, Nowels, Devrim Karaoğlu) – 3:36
Power & Control (Diamandis, Steve Angello) – 3:46
Sex Yeah (Diamandis, Kurstin) – 3:46
Teen Idle (Diamandis) – 4:14
Valley of the Dolls (Diamandis, Nowels, Karaoğlu) – 4:13
Hypocrates (Diamandis, Nowels) – 4:01
How to Be a Heartbreaker (Diamandis, Gottwald, Benjamin Levin, Ammar Malik, Walter, Daniel Omelio) – 3:50
Fear and Loathing (Diamandis) – 6:07
Radioactive (Diamandis, Clyde Narain, Fabian Lenssen, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen) – 3:47
US-Deluxeversion
Auf der US-amerikanischen Deluxeversion befinden sich Remixe von Primadonna und Power & Control sowie die Musikvideos zu Primadonna und Radioactive.
15. Primadonna (Burns Remix) – 4:29
16. Power & Control (Michael Woods Remix) – 6:38
17. Primadonna [Video] – 3:47
18. Radioactive [Video] – 3:48
Chartplatzierungen
Singles
Als erstes wurde der Song Radioactive, produziert von Stargate, DJ Chuckie und Lenssen als Promo-Single am 30. September 2011 in Großbritannien digital veröffentlicht. Die Single enthält neben der Radioversion sechs weitere Remixe des Songs. In Großbritannien erreichte der Song Platz 25 der Charts. Das dazugehörige Video, welches von Caspar Balslev gedreht wurde, feierte seine Premiere am 22. August 2011 auf dem offiziellen YouTube-Kanal von Diamandis. Die deutsche Veröffentlichung erfolgte am 7. Oktober 2011, der Song konnte sich allerdings nicht in den Charts platzieren. Radioactive ist nur auf der Deluxe-Version des Albums zu finden.
Als erste offizielle Single wurde am 16. April 2012 Primadonna, produziert von Dr. Luke und Cirkut, im Vereinigten Königreich veröffentlicht. Die Radiopremiere erfolgte am 12. März 2012. Er erreichte Platz 11 der Charts, was die bisher beste Singleplatzierung der Künstlerin ist. Die deutsche Veröffentlichung erfolgte am 18. Mai 2012. Der Regisseur des Videos, welches in Kopenhagen gedreht wurde, war wieder Caspar Balslev. Die Premiere des Videos fand am selben Tag statt wie die Radiopremiere. Auf ihrem YouTube-Kanal wurde am 19. März 2012 eine Akustik-Version des Songs hochgeladen.
Am 2. Mai 2012 wurde bekannt gegeben, dass der Song Power & Control die zweite Single werden wird, welche am 23. Juli in Großbritannien erscheinen soll. Das Video, erneut von Casper Balslev gedreht, feierte seine Premiere am 31. Mai 2012.
Am 3. Juli 2012 wurde der Song How to Be a Heartbreaker, welcher sich vorerst nur auf der US-amerikanischen Version des Albums befand, als dritte Single in Großbritannien sowie als zweite Single in den USA bekannt gegeben. Die Single wurde am 7. Dezember 2012 veröffentlicht.
Einzelnachweise
Weblinks
Offizielle Website
Album (Pop)
Album 2012
Nummer-eins-Album | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,258 |
{"url":"https:\/\/hinterm-ziel.de\/index.php\/2021\/10\/21\/is-any-input-available\/?replytocom=186","text":"The featured image of this post is by rawpixel.com \u2013 de.freepik.com\n\nThe SoftwareSerial class has the available() method, which returns the number of characters that have been already received but not yet read. This is very similar to what the standard Serial.available() method offers. There is an interesting difference, though. A call to SoftwareSerial.available() is significantly slower than a call to Serial.available(). We will look for the deeper reason of this strange behavior and I will show you three ways how to fix it.\n\nEDIT: The problem will vanish with Arduino version 1.8.17\n\n## The observation\n\nWhile I was working on implementing a serial library that uses a single line for input and output, I noticed that a call to SoftwareSerial.available() uses a lot of time (from an MCU perspective). I measured the time and compared it to the standard method by using the following sketch:\n\n#include <SoftwareSerial.h>\n\nSoftwareSerial SoftSerial(8,9);\n\nvoid setup()\n{\nSoftSerial.begin(19200);\nSerial.begin(19200);\nDDRC = 0x03;\n}\n\nvoid loop() {\nPORTC = 0x01;\nSerial.available();\nPORTC = 0;\nPORTC = 0x02;\nSoftSerial.available();\nPORTC = 0;\ndelay(100);\n}\n\n\nConnecting now a logic analyzer to the port pins PC0 and PC1 revealed the following: A call to the SoftwareSerial method is ten times slower than a call to the standard method!\n\n## The reason\n\nOf course, this leads to the question whether this is unavoidable. The good thing is that you can inspect the entire source code and try to find out what is behind it. The implementation of the standard method can be found in HardwareSerial.cpp in the Arduino core directory:\n\nint HardwareSerial::available(void)\n{\nreturn ((unsigned int)(SERIAL_RX_BUFFER_SIZE +\n_rx_buffer_tail)) % SERIAL_RX_BUFFER_SIZE;\n}\n\nThe implementation of the available method in the SoftwareSerial library looks very similar:\n\nint SoftwareSerial::available()\n{\nif (!isListening())\nreturn 0;\n\n}\n\n\nThe main difference appears to be the additional if-statement with a call to the isListening() method. The body of this method contains just a single comparison and cannot be responsible for a tenfold slow-down, though. So, the remaining difference is the type cast to unsigned int present in the standard method and missing in the SoftwareSerial method. Could that make such a huge difference?\n\nIt does indeed. When one looks into the generated assembly code, one sees that the modulo operation in the HardwareSerial class leads to the following assembly code (the left operand of the modulo operation is already in r24:r25 and the right operand is the compile time constant 64):\n\n andi r24, 0x3F ; 63\neor r25, r25\n\nThis is pretty clever and works similarly for all cases when the left operand is an unsigned integer and the right operand is a positive power of two. In contrast to that, the code generated for the SoftwareSerial class looks as follows:\n\n ldi r22, 0x40 ; 64\nldi r23, 0x00 ; 0\ncall 0xdae ; 0xdae <__divmodhi4>\n\nSo, here again, the left operand is already in register pair r24:r25. Then the number 64 is loaded into the register pair r22:r23 and the modulo subroutine is called (note, that AVRs do not have any hardware division instructions). The reason that the simple masking operation is not enough is that by the C++ type-conversion rules, all summands are converted to int, resulting in a signed value, where the above optimization would not yield the correct result if we had a negative number. Doing integer division in software is costly and for this reason the 15 \u00b5s is not a surprise. However, the call to the general integer modulo function is obviously not necessary at all, since the left operand can never become negative.\n\n## A potential problem\n\nCan this behavior lead to problems? Most of the time, one will probably never notice that the call to SoftwareSerial.available() consumes more time than necessary. However, when timing becomes tight, then one may run into problems.\n\nOne problematic scenario could look as follows. The program receives bytes with 57600 bps. This implies that a bit takes 17.36 \u00b5s. The interrupt routine for receiving bytes is written in a way such that it waits into the stop bit before it returns, implying that less than 17.36 \u00b5s per received byte are available. If the interrupt routine returns too late, then the program will probably not be able to read one byte for each received byte. In other words, after some time, the receive buffer will probably be overrun. In order to demonstrate this, I have written the following sketch:\n\n#include <SoftwareSerial.h>\n\nSoftwareSerial mySerial = SoftwareSerial(8, 9);\n\nboolean available;\nunsigned long sum = 0;\n\nvoid setup()\n{\npinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);\ndigitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);\nDDRC |= 0x03;\nmySerial.begin(57600);\n\nwhile (!mySerial.overflow()) {\nPORTC = 0x01;\navailable = mySerial.available();\nPORTC = 0x00;\nif (available) {\nPORTC = 0x02;\nPORTC = 0x00;\n}\n}\ndigitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);\n}\n\nvoid loop() { }\n\n\nOn the host side, a Python script generates the bytes to be received using a FT232R interface for sending them to the Arduino board (using the pyserial module):\n\n#!\/usr\/bin\/env python3\nimport serial\n\nserialport = '\/dev\/cu.usbserial-1410'\n\nwhile (1):\nser = serial.Serial(serialport, 57600, stopbits=1)\nwhile (1):\nser.write(b'1');\n\nWhen setting the compile time constant _SS_MAX_RX_BUFF to 8 in order to force an early failure, the logic analyzer connected to the Arduino the same way as described above gave this picture after 11 bytes were received:\n\nIt is interesting to see that the execution times of the available and the read methods are stretched because of the execution of the interrupt routines. In any case, it is easy to see that after 11 bytes have been received, we have a buffer overrun because only 3 bytes have been read so far.\n\nIf we reduce the communication speed to 38400 bps, we have the same problems a few bytes later. With 19200 bps, no buffer overrun happens in our setup. Similarly, if we use 1.5 stop bits, there is no problem even for 57600 bps.\n\n## Three ways to fix the problem\n\nI have submitted a pull request for fixing the problem (October, 18 2021). So hopefully, this issue will go away soon. Until then, I have three possible ways for you to fix it.\n\n1. Instead of checking whether new input is available, you can call the read() method (which you would do anyway). If the return value is -1, then you know that no new byte has been sent. Note that the return value of the read method is an integer (a signed two-byte value), though!\n2. You can directly modify the available method in the SoftwareSerial class (provided you find the place in your installation, where the SoftwareSerial library is stored).\n3. You can define a new class MySoftwareSerial (perhaps in a new library), which inherits everything from the SoftwareSerial class, but overrides the available method.\n\nWith any of the proposed fixes, we can receive at 57600 bps. With 115200 bps, we run into a buffer overrun very soon nevertheless.\n\n## Summary\n\nThe available method of the standard SoftwareSerial library uses much more time than necessary, which might lead to buffer overrun problems when communicating with 38400 bps or faster. Apparently nobody has noticed this since the library has been adapted as the standard library a couple of years ago. Hopefully, the issue will be solved soon by incorporating my pull request. Until then, you can use one of the three proposed fixes above.\n\nEDIT: The pull request has been accepted, so the problem should not be present any longer in Arduino version 1.8.17 and later.\n\nCategories: Hack, Insight, Library\n\n1. The key thing that caused the slowdown was the fact that the value in the parenthesis ( the one that\u2019s getting casted to unsigned int) would otherwise be an int. X % Y where Y is a power of 2 simplifies to X & (Y-1) when X is unsigned. The same is not true when it is signed;.\n\nIt doesn\u2019t help nearly as much as what you found, but you can save another 8 bytes by casting that to a uint8_t instead of uint16_t. A few lines before than in read() you can save 6 bytes by casting the calculated position in the ring buffer before the % _RX_BUFFER_MA\n\n\u2022 Hi Spence,\n\ncongrats for being the one who posted the first comment ever to my blog ;-).\n\nYou are right! There are probably hundreds of places where the Arduino core could be streamlined to be more efficient, time- and space-wise. Currently, the IDE 2.0 seems to be of higher priority, but then we wait now for almost a year for a semi-final version. I have no idea what is going on.\n\n### 1 Pingback\n\nThis site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.","date":"2022-07-04 11:58:00","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.21100614964962006, \"perplexity\": 1531.1709840203898}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-27\/segments\/1656104375714.75\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220704111005-20220704141005-00037.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
\label{intro}
Pre-main sequence (PMS) stars can be classified according to their
spectral energy distribution (SED) in the
infrared \citep{Lada1987}: The youngest PMS stars still surrounded by
both a contracting envelope and a circumstellar disk are classified as
Class~I objects. Class~II objects are PMS stars surrounded by
circumstellar disks, whose envelope is partially or completely
dissipated. Class~III sources are PMS stars whose disks have been
dissipated or at least evolved into debris disks. The intermediate
phases of stars with pre-transition disks (with an intermediate gap
separating inner and outer disks, \citealp{EspaillatCDH2007}) and
transition disks (with cleared inner regions,
\citealp{MuzerolleAMH2010}) have been more recently added to this
evolutionary scenario. The evolution and dissipation of circumstellar
disks involve several physical processes, such as gas accretion onto
the central star driven by viscosity and mediated by the magnetic
field \citep[e.g.][]{Koenigl1991}, photoevaporation
\citep[e.g.][]{StorzerHollenbach1999}, dust aggregation and settling
\citep[e.g. ][]{TestiBRA2014}, and environmental feedback
\citep[e.g.][]{GuarcelloDWA2016arXiv}, with timescales which roughly
range from few thousands to about $10^7$ years
\citep{HaischLL2001,HernandezHMG2007,Mamajek2009}. \par
The disk inner region ($\leq0.1\,$AU) is very important for the
accretion process, the magnetic coupling between disk and central
star, and the evolution of the entire disk and the star itself. This
region is however very difficult to analyze, even in the systems close
to our Sun and even with infrared and radio interferometry. The
analysis of the SEDs of disk-bearing stars has achieved many successes
in this direction, such as the discovery of the inner disk wall and
pre-transitional gaps, but the physical parameters derived from SED
fitting are model-dependent and likely affected by the strong intrinsic
variability of these sources in the optical and infrared. An
unique insight on the very innermost region of circumstellar disks can be
provided by studying the simultaneous variability in optical, infrared
and even X-rays, which are intimately connected with the morphology and
properties of the circumstellar environment. \par
Optical variability of PMS stars has been the subject of several
studies
\citep[e.g.][]{Joy1945,AlencarTGM2010,Morales-CalderonSHG2011,WolkRA2013,CodySBM2014AJ},
and originally it was one of the criteria used by \citet{Joy1945} to
identify the newly discovered class of T~Tauri stars.
\citet{HerbstHGW1994AJ} presented the first classification of
variability of young stars based on their light curves.
Type~I\footnote{The \emph{type} of the light curves must not be
confused with the \emph{class} used to classify YSOs} light
curves are periodic and often sinusoidal, resulting from the
rotational modulation of cold photospheric spots. Type~II light curves
are less periodic and interpreted as the result of variable veiling
continuum and rotational modulation of accretion hot spot. Type~III light curves
vary irregularly because of variable extinction. A more detailed
classification of light curves of disk-bearing stars has been recently
proposed by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}, as part of the CSI~2264 project that
will be described below. They classify ``burster'' light curves as
those characterized by rapid (0.1-1 day) and symmetric increments of
flux (the symmetric shape of the burst means that its rising part is
not impulsive and it is similar to the decaying phase, which distinguishes
them from flares); ``dipper'' light curves showing transient fading
events (dips); ``periodic'' and ``quasi-periodic'' light curves
resulting from rotational modulation; ``stochastic'' light curves
which, even if not dominated by bursts or dips, are nevertheless
characterized by brightness changes over a variety of timescales;
``long-time variables'' with monotonic light variations (either
brightening of fading) over timescales of days and weeks. \par
The different types of optical and infrared light curves of
stars with disks reflect the different morphology of the inner disks
and probe the geometry of the accretion process. Following the
classification of \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}, ``dipper'' stars are AA~Tau
analogs. AA~Tau is a well studied variable star with disk
characterized by recurrent occultation of the central star by warps
in the circumstellar disk
\citep{BouvierCAC1999,BouvierGAD2003,MenardBDM2003,BouvierABD2007,GrossoBMF2007}
located close to the co-rotation radius
\citep{RucinskiMKP2008,AlencarTGM2010,CodyHillenbrand2010}. These
warps in the inner disks are in general due to misalignment between
the rotation and magnetic axes, and they are located at the base of steady
accretion streams, which are stable over several stellar rotation periods
\citep{AlencarTGM2010}. \citet{AlencarTGM2010} have also shown that
AA~Tau like variability is common in stars with inner disks; in their
study of the optical and infrared variability of the stars in
NGC~2264, they have found that nearly 40\% of the stars with inner
disks are characterized by AA~Tau like variability. \par
Also, accretion contributes to variable optical and infrared extinction
\citep[e.g., ][]{McGinnisAGS2015}. The accretion streams are dust-free, but small amounts of dust can be trapped at the base of the
streams and survive until the temperature is higher than the
sublimation temperature. As suggested by \citet{StaufferCMR2015} the
dust particles trapped in the accretion streams can be responsible for
small dips in the optical light curves. Another way accretion may
contribute to optical variability is by the emergence of the optical
emission from accretion hot spots on stellar surface
\citep{StaufferCBA2014}. In fact, the accreting material funneled by
the magnetic field falls onto the stellar surface with a velocity of
several hundreds of km per second. This energy is released at the
accretion shock as soft X-ray, UV, and optical radiation. \par
Is it possible to observe variability in X-rays due to the accretion
process and variable circumstellar extinction? PMS stars are very
bright X-ray sources \citep{FeigelsonDecampli1981}, with their X-ray
emission exceeding that of main sequence stars with the same mass by
three or four orders of magnitude \citep[e.g.][]{Montmerle1996}. The
main component of this X-ray emission is the
quiescent\footnote{Or at least apparently quiescent, since the
``quiescent'' coronal emission can be actually the result of a
superposition of small flares, e.g. \citet{CaramazzaFMR2007AA}} emission
from a scaled up version of the Solar corona with plasma at
$10-30\,$MK, powered and confined by a dynamo-generated stellar
magnetic field \citep[e.g.][]{FeigelsonKriss1981}. However, the lack
of an evident main sequence-like rotation-activity relation in PMS
stars, together with the large and so far unexplained scatter of X-ray
brightness, indicate that the emission mechanism might be more
complicated than this. Intense flaring activity produced by magnetic
reconnection is observed in PMS stars
\citep[e.g.][]{FlaccomioDMS2003}, and they can be so powerful as to
require non solar geometry for the stellar magnetic field
\citep{JardineCDG2006}. Sometimes flares in PMS stars are modeled with
very large loops that may even reach the surface of the inner disks
\citep{FavataFRM2005ApJs}. Accretion also contributes to the emission of
soft X-rays \citep[e.g.][]{KastnerHSC2002}, produced in the accretion
shocks and observed in a few Class~II stars, such as TW~Hya and
BP~Tau, using detailed spectroscopic analysis
\citep{KastnerHSC2002,StelzerSchmitt2004,SchmittRNF2005,ArgiroffiFBD2011,CurranASO2011}.
However, this X-ray emission has been unambiguously identified only in
the nearest stars with disks, primarily because it is difficult to
distinguish from the coronal soft X-ray emission.
Additionally, a significant part of this emission is likely absorbed by
accreting and circumstellar material itself
\citep{ArgiroffiFBD2011,BonitoOAM2014ApJ}. \par
X-ray emission from PMS stars is strongly variable over a large
range of timescales and amplitudes. The most evident source of X-ray
variability is undoubtedly flares. The rise phase is
much shorter than the decline phase (which can last several hours),
and the peak flux can be $\sim$100 times the quiescent flux
\citep{FavataFRM2005ApJs}. There are, however, other sources of X-ray
variability. Stellar coronae are not homogeneous, and their X-ray
emission can be modulated by stellar rotation
\citep{FlaccomioMSF2005ApJ}. This has been observed in the {\em Chandra} Orion Ultradeep
Project \citep[COUP,][]{GetmanFBG2005}: a $\sim$13 day long
continuous {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I observation of the Orion Nebula Cluster.
Also accretion spots are not uniformly distributed over the
stellar surface, resulting in a rotational modulation of soft
X-ray emission. This, however, has only been observed in the T~Tauri
star V4046 Sgr \citep{ArgiroffiMMH2012ApJ}. Variable absorption of
the coronal emission by circumstellar and accreting material can be
another source of X-ray variability \citep[e.g.][]{FlaccomioMFA2010}.
\par
Simultaneous optical, infrared, and X-ray variability in stars
with disks can be the consequence of unsteady accretion, variable
extinction, and rotational modulation \citep{FlaccomioMS2012}.
\citet{StassunBF2007ApJ} find no convincing evidence for coherent optical
and X-ray flux variability in the PMS stars in Orion. No
evidence of coherent X-ray and infrared variability in PMS stars is
found by \citet{FlahertyMWR2014ApJ} in their study of the PMS stars in
IC~348, concluding that X-rays are not an important source of heating
for the circumstellar material. A different result has been obtained
by \citet{FlaccomioMFA2010} in their study of the PMS stars in
NGC~2264. They find a significant correlation between optical and
X-ray flux variability using two $30\,$ksec {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I
observations (separated by 16 days) and simultaneous CoRoT data. This
correlation is observed only in Class~II sources, and it is not
observed in the hard X-ray band. This is interpreted as a
consequence of variable absorption of both photospheric and coronal
emission. \par
\begin{figure}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{field.ps}
\caption{DSS-2 image of the central region of NGC~2264, with marked the field observed with {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I.}
\label{field_img}
\end{figure}
In this paper, we analyze new simultaneous X-ray and optical
observations of NGC~2264, obtained as a part of the CSI~2264 project,
to search for connections between optical and X-ray variability in PMS
stars with disks observed in the quiescent emission. We show the
effectiveness of time-resolved X-ray spectral analysis in stars with
disks using the optical light curves as template to isolate interesting
features such as accretion bursts and optical dips. NGC~2264, the
object of this study, and the CSI~2264 project are described in Sect.
\ref{2264_sec}. In Sect.~\ref{data_sec}, we describe the CoRoT and
{\em Chandra} data sets analyzed and the selection of the targets; in
Sect.~\ref{correl_II_sec}, we present evidence for coherent optical and X-ray flux
variability. In Sect.~\ref{II_var}, we present a
detailed analysis of the variability of the X-ray properties during
dips and bursts observed in the CoRoT light curves. Results are
summarized and discussed in Sect.~\ref{conclusions}.
\section{NGC~2264 and the CSI~2264 project}
\label{2264_sec}
The study of the variability of young
stars offers the possibility of probing the very inner circumstellar region ($\leq0.1\,$AU) and
the morphology of stellar coronae and photospheres. This is one of the main
motivations of the Coordinated Synoptic Investigation of NGC~2264
\citep[\emph{CSI~2264},][]{CodySBM2014AJ,StaufferCBA2014}. This project
is a unique and unprecedented cooperative project involving
simultaneous observations of NGC~2264 with 15 ground and space
telescopes, covering the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to
mid-infrared. The entire list of the observations which are part of
the CSI~2264 project can be found in \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}. The main
optical photometric dataset is obtained from observations with the
Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits satellite
\citep[\emph{CoRoT},][]{BaglinABD2006ESASP} from December 1$^{st}$ 2011 to
January 3$^{rd}$ 2012, using the second CCD designed for exoplanets
studies. CoRoT observed an area of $1.3 \times 1.3$ square degrees
centered on NGC~2264 with a cadence of 512$\,$sec, or 32$\,$sec for
the brighter sources.
NGC~2264 is the only young cluster \citep[1-5
Myrs,][]{RebullMSH2002,Dahm2008} falling in one of the CoRoT eyes
(i.e., the two regions with a $10^{\circ}$ diameter close to the
galactic center and anti-center observed with CoRoT), making it a
unique target for monitoring the variability of young stars using this
telescope. This cluster is relatively nearby
\citep[$760\,$pc,][]{ParkSBK2000}, and part of the local spiral arm.
It is characterized by non-uniform extinction across the field, with
both richly populated low-extinction regions containing in total about
two thousand sources, and highly embedded regions where the star
formation process is still ongoing, as evidenced by the presence of
stars with thick disks, molecular outflows and Herbig-Haro objects
\citep{TeixeiraLML2012}. The median extinction of known cluster
members is quite low \citep[A$_V\sim$0.45$^m$,][]{RebullMSH2002}. The
cluster population is well defined, and it includes a few early type
stars, such as the O7V star S~Monocerotis \citep{SchwartzTOG1985} and
about a dozen B type stars. NGC~2264 is the only cluster within one
kpc of the Sun, besides the Orion Nebula Cluster, with such a
large mass spectrum. Fig.~\ref{field_img} shows a DSS-2 image of the
central region of NGC~2264. The field of view of the
{\em Chandra} observations analyzed here is indicated. The actual CoRoT field,
$1.3^{\circ} \times 1.3^{\circ}$ wide, is larger than the field shown
in Fig.~\ref{field_img}.
\section{Data analysis and targets selection}
\label{data_sec}
\subsection{CoRoT light curves}
\label{corot_sec}
CoRoT photometry is available only for stars falling in pre-selected
pixel masks. For this reason, the list of targets has been carefully
pre-compiled before the observations, and it includes 1617 known
candidate members of NGC~2264 and 2129 field stars falling in the area
of the cluster \citep{CodySBM2014AJ}. The membership criteria used for
targets selection are described in \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and they are
based on: 1) Optical photometry compatible with the cluster in
color-magnitude diagrams as defined by \citet{FlaccomioMS2006}; 2)
strong H$\alpha$ emission
\citep{RebullMSH2002,LammBMH2004,SungBCK2008}; 3) X-ray detection
\citep{RamirezRSH2004,FlaccomioMS2006}; 4) radial velocity compatible
with NGC~2264 \citep{FureszHSR2006}; 5) presence of a circumstellar
disk \citep{SungSB2009,CodySBM2014AJ}. Only targets with $11^m>R>17^m$
have been observed. \par
Light curves are produced after correction from gain and zero offset,
jitter, electromagnetic interference, and background subtraction,
following the standard CoRoT data reduction pipeline
\citep{SamadiFCD2006}. Data from hot pixels and outliers are flagged
and removed from the light curves. While most of the light curves
refer to the full CoRoT band, for a subset of stars three light curves
are provided, referring to ``red'', ``green'', and ``blue'' bands.
However, since these bands are not calibrated, in this work we only use
the sum of the three bands, i.e. the white light curves. CoRoT light
curves are not in an absolute magnitude scale since the photometric
zero point of the CoRoT data varies between runs. A photometric zero
point of 26.74$^m$ specific for the CSI~2264 CoRoT observations has
been obtained by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} after comparing the mean CoRoT
flux of selected stars with their available $R$-band photometry
\citep[from ][]{RebullMSH2002,LammBMH2004,SungBCK2008}. Flaccomio et
al. (in preparation) obtained a slightly smaller zero point (26.6$^m$), which is the value adopted in this paper.
\par
A number of systematics are not corrected by the standard pipeline
and affect CoRoT light curves. The most important systematic,
affecting about 10\% of the observed light curves, consists of abrupt
jumps in flux which are due to rapid changes in detector temperature. In
this paper, we do not attempt any correction for this effect and we
reject when necessary CoRoT data that are affected by such jumps.
We use only CoRoT data which are not flagged as suspicious
data points. \par
\subsection{X-ray data}
\label{xray_sec}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=19cm]{fluxcomparison_classes_tdcl3.ps}
\includegraphics[width=19cm]{fluxcomparison_classes_disk.ps}
\caption{Comparison between the optical and X-rays flux variability, calculated using in Eq. \ref{var_eq}, shown
separately for the stars with transition disks and class~III objects
(upper panels) and stars with inner disks, both passive and accreting
(lower panels). Note the different $y$-axis scaling for the top and
bottom rows. X-ray photons are selected in the broad band
($0.5-8\,$keV; left panels), soft band ($0.5-1.5\,$keV; central
panels), and hard band ($1.5-8\,$keV; right panels). In each panel, the
null-hypothesis probabilities of no correlation resulting from the
Spearman ($\rho$) and Kendall ($\tau$) rank correlation test are
shown. Each point corresponds to the variability observed between two consecutive
given {\em Chandra} frames for each source. The total number of stars and
points used in each plot is also indicated.}
\label{fluxcompclass_plot}
\end{figure*}
In this paper, we use the data obtained from four {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I observations
taken from December 3$^{rd}$ to December 11$^{th}$ 2011 (P.I.\ G.\
Micela) during the CoRoT run. Table \ref{obsid_table} shows the log of
these observations. The total nominal exposure is $300\,$ksec, and all
the observations are pointed at
$\alpha_{J2000}$=06:40:58.70,$\,\delta_{J2000}$=+09:34:14, with almost
coincident roll angles. In order to make astrometry compatible with 2MASS, each image has been reprojected by matching bright 2MASS
sources detected in X-rays and correcting for the observed offsets both in RA and DEC. \par
\begin{table}
\caption{{\em Chandra}/ACIS-I observations log.}
\label{obsid_table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
\hline\hline
Obs.ID & Exposure (ksec) & Date \\
\hline
14368 & 74.44 & Dec. 3$^{rd}$ 2011\\
13610 & 92.54 & Dec. 5$^{th}$ 2011\\
13611 & 60.23 & Dec. 7$^{th}$ 2011\\
14369 & 66.16 & Dec. 11$^{th}$ 2011\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
A detailed analysis of the {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I
\citep{WeisskopfBCG2002,GarmireBFN2003} observations available for
NGC~2264, including source detection, photon extraction and spectral
fitting, is presented in Flaccomio et al.\ (in preparation). Briefly, all events have been fully reprocessed using the CIAO task
\emph{chandra-repro}. Sources were detected using the wavelet-based
algorithm PWDetect \citep{DamianiMMS1997}, adopting a significance
threshold of 4.4, roughly resulting in 10 expected spurious detections.
Event extraction, source repositioning, and validation were performed
with the IDL software $ACIS$ $Extract$ \citep[AE, ][]{BroosTFG2010}.
AE is capable of: i) defining the extraction region around each source,
accounting for crowding and the shape of the PSF at different off-axis
angles; ii) extracting both source and background events, the latter
in a suitable region around the source; iii) compiling photometry,
calculating light curves, and providing source statistics. After pruning
candidate spurious detections, a total of 694 X-ray sources were
validated. X-ray spectra were fitted using \emph{Xspec} v.12.8.1
\citep{Arnaud1996}. Observed spectra were rebinned in photon energy
in order to have a signal-to-noise ratio larger than one in each bin.
\subsection{Targets selection}
\label{sample_sec}
The main objective of this paper is to analyze the simultaneous
optical and X-rays variability of stars with disks in NGC~2264.\par
We adopt the selection of stars with disks presented in
\citet{SungSB2009} and \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}, which is based on the slope of the SEDs in the
IRAC and MIPS $24.0\,\mu$m bands and suitable color-color diagrams
where the typical loci populated by disk-bearing stars can be defined.
Among the 95 candidate stars with disks observed with CoRoT and
falling in the ACIS-I field, 86 are detected in X-rays. We also
define a subsample of 79 stars with disks (75 detected in X-rays)
which are actively accreting. These stars are selected using two
criteria: H$\alpha$ equivalent width (EW) larger than 10$\,$\AA{}
\citep{RebullMSH2002} or using the $r^{\prime}-i^{\prime}$ vs.
$r^{\prime}-$H$\alpha$ color-color diagram from the INT (Isaac Newton
Telescope, 2.5$\,$m) Photometric H$\alpha$ Survey
\citep[IPHAS;][]{DrewGIS2008}. In this color-color diagram, in fact, it is
possible to select candidate accreting stars as those with red
$r^{\prime}-$H$\alpha$ color, and derive from this color an estimate
of the H$\alpha$ EW \citep{BarentsenVDG2011}. Disk-bearing sources
without signatures of accretion are identified as stars with passive disks
(15 stars, 10 detected in X-rays). We also selected 10 candidate stars
with transition disks (all detected in X-rays) as those showing
excesses only at $8.0\,\mu$m and 24$\,\mu$m. The infrared excesses in
each infrared band is calculated using the $Q_{VIJA}$ color indices
similar to those defined in \citet{GuarcelloMDP2009,GuarcelloDWD2013ApJ}.
These color indices compare the $V-I$ and $J-A$ colors, with $A$ being
$K$ or one of the Spitzer bands. Since these indices
increase as $J-A$ becomes more red, and they are independent from
extinction, they can be used to separate the
extinguished stellar population from that with intrinsic red colors,
and to calculate the excess in each infrared band. We refer to
\citet{Damiani2006} and \citet{GuarcelloMDP2009} for a detailed
description of these color indices and their use. \par
\begin{figure}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9cm]{fluxcomparison_variabclasses.ps}
\caption{Comparison between the flux variability in optical
and X-rays as in Fig.~\ref{fluxcompclass_plot}, for disk-bearing stars
whose optical variability has been classified by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}.
``Burster'', ``unclassified'', ``not variable'', ``quasi-periodic'',
``long term variable'', and ``multi-periodic'' stars are marked with
filled dots (red for the ``bursters'' and black for the remainder),
while ``stochastic'' stars are marked with green $\times$ symbols and
``dipper'' stars with blue squares. In the upper left corner of each
panel we show the probabilities derived from the correlation tests
using both the entire sample and the dippers+stochastic stars (the
latter inside brackets).}
\label{fluxcodyclass_plot}
\end{figure}
We also adopt the classification of the CoRoT light curves provided
by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}: ``Bursters'' (13\% of the stars with disks in NGC~2264
observed with CoRoT); sources with variable extinction (``dippers'',
21.5\%, about half of which are periodic); stars with light curves
showing stochastic behavior (13\%, named ``stochastic''); non-variable
stars (19\%); stars with periodic or quasi-periodic
variability (21\%); long-term variables (1\%); eclipsing binaries
(1\%); and sources with unclassified variability (11\%). Since the
classification of the ``stochastic'' stars may vary according to different
time windows, we reviewed the behavior of these sources in the
period simultaneous with the four ACIS-I observations. Sometimes we
consider stars as ``dippers'' or ``bursters'' depending on the
dominant phenomenon occurring during the {\em Chandra} observations. \par
\section{Coherent optical and X-ray flux variability}
\label{correl_II_sec}
In this section we analyze the simultaneous flux variability in
optical and X-rays. Coherent flux variability is expected to occur
when: i) The star is affected by variable extinction due to
circumstellar material simultaneously obscuring both stellar
photosphere and coronal active regions; or ii) photospheric
spots, accretion hot spots, and coronal active regions simultaneously emerging
during stellar rotation. \par
\subsection{Existing studies}
\label{back_sec}
A search for coherent optical and X-ray flux variability in T~Tauri
stars has been attempted only in a very few cases, given the paucity of
existing simultaneous optical and X-ray observations of young
clusters. \citet{StassunBFF2006} studied $BVRI$ data of the Orion
Nebula taken with the WIYN 0.9$\,$m telescope at the Kitt Peak
National Observatory (KPNO) and the 1.5$\,$m Cassini telescope in
Loiano, Italy, simultaneous with the COUP observations. These optical
data have been taken with a cadence of one data point per hour, not
comparable to the excellent time resolution of the CoRoT data. These
authors find evidence of coherent optical and X-ray flux variability
in about 5\% of the analyzed T~Tauri stars. This
result has been interpreted in terms of rotational modulated emission
from accretion spots, and the lack of correlation in most of the
observed stars as evidence that X-ray emission arises mainly from
the stellar corona rather than from the accretion spots distributed
over the stellar surface. \par
\citet{FlaccomioMFA2010} search for correlations between optical and
X-ray flux variability in the young stars in NGC~2264 by comparing the
variation of the X-ray fluxes observed in two $\sim$30$\,$ksec
{\em Chandra} ACIS-I observations (Obs.~IDs: 9768 and 9769; P.I.\ G. Micela)
with that of the CoRoT ``white'' fluxes from simultaneous
observations. They find evidence of correlated flux variability in a sample of 24 low-mass T~Tauri stars with disks, and only in the
soft 0.5-1.5$\,$keV X-ray band. This is interpreted as evidence that
the correlation is a result of time-variable absorption by the surrounding
circumstellar material. These authors also suggest that the obscuring
material is dust-depleted, as expected from accretion streams covering
part of the stellar corona and photosphere. \par
\subsection{Coherent optical and X-ray flux variability in stars with disks of NGC~2264}
\label{corr_class}
The starting point for our search of coherent optical and X-ray
flux variability in the NGC~2264 T~Tauri stars is the result
obtained by \citet{FlaccomioMFA2010}. We first replicate their
approach to verify whether our new data confirm their finding. To this
aim, we select all the X-ray sources observed with CoRoT with more
than 10 counts detected in at least two {\em Chandra} observations,
discarding known massive and intermediate-mass stars (i.e., rejecting
stars more massive than 2$\,$M$_{\odot}$). Hereafter, we will call
{\em Chandra} {\em frames} the time intervals corresponding to the {\em Chandra}
observations listed in Table \ref{obsid_table}, i.e., where both CoRoT
and X-ray data are available. For each selected source, we calculate
the mean X-ray photon flux and CoRoT white-band flux observed in each
{\em Chandra} frame where no flares are detected\footnote{Flares are
automatically detected using the approach defined in
\citet{CaramazzaFMR2007AA}, i.e., dividing the X-ray light curve in
blocks of almost constant count rate (Maximum Likelihood Blocks) and
classifying these intervals according to the measured count-rates and
its time derivative. A detailed analysis of the flares observed in
NGC~2264 will be presented in Flaccomio et al.\ 2016 (in preparation)}.
We then calculate the flux variability among two {\em Chandra} frames $n$
and $m$ as:
\begin{equation}
\Delta_{flux}=\frac{F_n-F_m}{F_n+F_m}
\label{var_eq}
\end{equation}
where $F_n$ is the optical or the X-ray photon flux detected during
the $n^{th}$ {\em Chandra} frame. \par
The result of this approach is shown in Fig.\
\ref{fluxcompclass_plot}, where each point compares the value of
$\Delta_{flux}$ calculated for a given source in two consecutive {\em Chandra}
frames. Error bars are propagated from the uncertainties on X-ray and
optical fluxes, the former computed with Poissonian statistics, the
latter from the RMS of the optical light curve observed during the
given {\em Chandra} frames. We use X-ray data in different energy bands
(broad in the left panel, soft in the central, and hard in the right).
In Fig.~\ref{fluxcompclass_plot} we consider separately the sample of
stars with an inner disk, both passive or accreting, and that of stars
with a transition disk and class~III objects\footnote{The
classification of class~III objects and the analysis of their
variability is the subject of a companion paper.} (whose variability
is expected to be similar, \citealt{CodySBM2014AJ}). \par
The amplitude of the observed variability is different in these two samples of stars.
We observe a smaller amplitude of optical variability in
stars without close circumstellar material than in those with inner
disks, with the difference of a factor between two and four.
Conversely, the range of variability in X-rays is similar in the two
cases. This is due to the fact that rotational
modulation of photospheric spots and active regions, typical of the
inner-disk-free sample, results in smaller amplitude modulation than, for
instance, variable extinction \citep{VenutiBIS2015AA}.
In each panel, we also show the results of correlation tests, which in general
indicate that there is no obvious correlation between broad band X-ray and optical measures for stars with disks, though some of the extreme points (obtained from 17 stars) drive a statistically significant correlation in the X-ray broad energy band in the stars
with inner disks. This is not observed in
the stars without close circumstellar material. \par
Using the classification of optical light curves provided by
\citet{CodySBM2014AJ}, we can obtain deeper insight into the different
mechanisms responsible for coherent optical and X-ray flux
variability. In Fig.~\ref{fluxcodyclass_plot}, we investigate correlations between
optical and X-ray flux variability for those stars with
circumstellar disks whose light curves are classified by
\citet{CodySBM2014AJ}. The X-rays count-rates are indicated separately
for the the broad band (upper
panel), soft band (central panel), and hard band (bottom panel). It is evident that the stars with
large amplitude optical variability, dominating any possible
correlation, are ``dipper'' or ``stochastic'' stars. The results of
the correlation tests are shown for the entire sample and for the
``stochastic''+``dippers'' sample (values inside the brackets),
and they indicate that a correlation between optical and X-ray flux
variability is possible only in stars with disks and variable
extinction. This is reinforced by the fact that the ``stochastic''
stars with large variability in optical in Fig.\
\ref{fluxcodyclass_plot} have optical dips during the {\em Chandra}
frames. \par
\section{Variability of the X-ray properties during optical dips and bursts}
\label{II_var}
\subsection{Time resolved analysis of stellar X-ray properties}
\label{xvar_sec}
The unique data set analyzed in this work allows us to study in detail
how the X-ray properties of disk-bearing stars vary during events
observed in optical, specifically dips due to variable extinction and bursts
due to accretion. Among the 86 stars with disks observed both with
CoRoT and Chandra, 51 are bright enough in X-rays to allow a
reliable analysis of their variability. Among them, 24 show
well-defined flux dips in the CoRoT data, and 20 show accretion burst
signatures, with some stars showing both properties. \par
To this aim, we divide each {\em Chandra} time frame into smaller {\em time
intervals}, defined in order to isolate interesting features in the
CoRoT light curves such as dips and bursts. For each time interval, we then calculate
the mean CoRoT flux and extract the X-ray photons detected during the time interval to calculate the corresponding X-ray photon flux F$_X$ (in
units of photons$\,$cm$^{-2}\,$s$^{-1}$), the hydrogen column density
N$_H$ (in units of $10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$), the temperature of the
emitting plasma kT (in keV), and the 10\%, 25\%, and 50\% photon
energy quantiles (E$_{10\%}$, E$_{25\%}$, E$_{50\%}$, respectively, in
keV). \citet{Flaccomioinprep1} demonstrate that E$_{10\%}$ and
E$_{25\%}$ are well-correlated with the hydrogen column density obtained
fitting the observed X-ray spectra of NGC~2264 low mass members with
1T or 2T thermal plasma models, so they are useful probes for the
X-ray absorption affecting the stars. Some of the time intervals are
narrow with few photons observed, but despite the small signal-to-noise
ratio, such small time intervals are necessary to isolate those features that we want to
analyze. \par
The X-ray properties in each time interval are calculated fitting the
observed X-ray spectra with 1T and 2T APEC ionization-equilibrium
plasma isothermal model \citep{SmithBLR2001}, assuming the sub-solar
elements abundance defined by \citet{MaggioFFM2007}, and affected by
photoelectric absorption from both interstellar and circumstellar
material treated using the TBABS model \citep{WilmsAM2000}. Best-fit
models are chosen with the C-statistic and the quality of the fit is
tested using the Xspec tool \emph{goodness}. The limit for acceptable
fits in this paper is set to null-hypothesis probability of a good fit
(P$_{\%}$) equal to 5\%. The significance of the parameters obtained
with the spectral fit is tested by the analysis of the confidence
contours in the C-stat space with the Xspec tool \emph{steppar}. \par
\subsection{Disks properties}
\label{sed_sec}
We analyzed the SEDs of some stars
using the on-line SED fitting tool presented by
\citet{RobitailleWIW2007}\footnote{Now available at
https://sedfitter.readthedocs.org/en/stable/}. With this tool it is
possible to compare the observed SEDs with a set of YSO
models covering an extensive parameter space, 20000 models, each at 10
different inclination angles, for a total of 200000 distinct SEDs. For
the fit, we constrain the source distances to that of NGC~2264
($760\,$pc) and explore a wide range of possible extinctions (from
$A_V$=$0.1^m$ to $A_V$=$100^m$). The best-fit models are those that
satisfy the condition: $\chi^2-\chi_{best}^2\leq 3$, where
$\chi_{best}^2$ is the reduced chi-square of the best-fit model (as
suggested by \citealp{RobitailleWIW2007}). Accretion rates and
H$\alpha$ EW of the stars discussed in this section are taken from \citet{DahmSimon2005} and
\citet{VenutiBFA2014AA}, and shown in Table \ref{accret_table}. \par
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616872585.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0616872585.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon456_oplotted.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-456. The upper
left panel shows part of the CoRoT light curve. The {\em Chandra}
frames are the unshaded intervals (the shaded intervals are
those not observed with {\em Chandra}). The dotted vertical lines
delimit the time intervals we defined; the black dots mark the
observed X-ray photon fluxes in the broad band (circled if, during the
given time interval, the source flared in X-rays). The numbers above the
light curve indicate the Chandra Obs.ID of the given {\em Chandra}
frame (top number), the number of detected X-ray photons (middle
number) and the label (bottom number) of the given time interval. The
upper right panels show the variability of selected X-ray properties (in
this case the hydrogen column density N$_H$ in units of
$10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$; and the plasma temperature kT, in keV) vs.\ the
median CoRoT fluxes observed in the time intervals indicated by the
labels. Empty circles mark intervals with not acceptable X-ray spectral fit.
The bottom panel shows contour levels in the C-stat space enclosing solutions within
68\% (solid contour), 90\% (dashed contour), and 99\% (dotted contour)
statistical confidence from the X-ray spectral fit of Mon-456 during
the intervals \#2+\#3+\#4 (red contours) and \#5+\#6 (black contours).
The cross indicate the values obtained
from the best fit in the latter case.}
\label{variab_mon456}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0400007528.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0400007528.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon1167_int3.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon1167_int8.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-1167. Panel
format and content are as in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}. The
contours are shown for the X-ray spectral fit of the spectrum observed
during the intervals \#3 (black contours, bottom left panel) and \#8
(black contours, bottom right panel). In both panels, the contours from
the X-ray spectral fit in the intervals
\#1+\#2+\#4+\#6+\#7+\#9+\#10+\#12 are shown in red.}
\label{variab_mon1167}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10.0cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616919737.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8.0cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0616919737.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon412_int6_cstat.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-412. Panel
format and content generally follows Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
In this case, are shown the hydrogen column density N$_H$ in units of
$10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$, the plasma temperature kT and the 10\% and 25\%
photon energy quantiles in keV, and contour levels in the C-stat
space. The contours are from the X-ray spectral fit
of the spectrum observed during the interval \#6.}
\label{variab_mon412}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616943877.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0616943877.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-717. Panel
format and content generally follows Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
In this case, the 10\% and 25\% photon energy quantiles in
keV are shown.}
\label{variab_mon717}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223985987.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223985987.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon119_int4_6_cstat.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-119, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
The contours are from the X-ray spectral fit
of the spectrum observed during the interval \#4+\#6 (black) and
\#1+\#2+\#3+\#5+\#7+\#8+\#9 (red).}
\label{variab_mon119}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0603402479.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0603402479.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-619, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.}
\label{variab_mon619}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616895873.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon491_oplotted.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-491, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
The contours are from the
X-ray spectral fit of the spectrum observed during the interval \#4
(black) and \#2+\#3+\#5 (red).}
\label{variab_mon491}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223980264.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223980264.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon774_int5.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon774_int7_8.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-774, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
The contours are from the X-ray spectral fit
of the spectrum observed during the interval \#5 (left bottom panel)
and \#7+\#8 (right bottom panel). The vertical dashed lines in the top
panel mark the 68\% confidence range for the N$_H$ obtained fitting
the average spectrum.}
\label{variab_mon774}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0605424384.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0605424384.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon1076_oplotted.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-1076, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
The
contours are from the X-ray spectral fit of the spectrum observed
during the interval \#2+\#4 (black contours) and \#5+\#6 (red
contours).}
\label{variab_mon1076}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[!t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0603396401.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0603396401.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon808_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{mon808_em.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon808_average.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray variability of Mon-808, with panel
format and content generally following Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}.
There are two differences with respect to prior figures: i) the upper right
panels show the variability of kT and E$_{10\%}$ in units of keV, and ii)
the dots in the upper left panel show the X-ray photon flux in the
0.5-0.8$\,$keV energy band. The central panels show the X-ray spectra
observed in the time intervals (dots) with the best fit 1T thermal
plasma model (black line), together with the 2T model (red line) when
needed. The bottom left panel shows the normalization of the soft
component obtained fitting the X-ray spectrum observed in the time
intervals with 2T thermal plasma model, with plasma temperatures fixed
at kT$_{soft}$=0.3$\,$keV and kT$_{hard}$=1.6$\,$keV and N$_H$ fixed
at the value obtained from the optical extinction
(0.009$\times$10$^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$). The bottom right panel shows the
average X-ray spectrum (dots). The dashed red line shows the best fit
1T thermal plasma model, while the blue line is the 2T model.}
\label{variab_mon808}
\end{figure*}
\begin{table}
\caption{H$\alpha$ EW from \citet{DahmSimon2005} and $\dot{M}_{acc}$ from \citet{VenutiBFA2014AA} of the stars discussed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips} and \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst}.}
\label{accret_table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cccc}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{c}{Mon-ID} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{H$\alpha$ EW} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{H$\alpha$ shape} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{$\dot{M}_{acc}$} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{c}{ } &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\AA{}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{M$_{\odot}$/yr} \\
\hline
456 & 13.1 & asymmetric & \\
1167 & 23.4 & & 4.6$\times$10$^{-9}$ \\
412 & 30.7 & asymmetric & $\sim$10$^{-7}$ \\
717 & 24.5 & & 2.8$\times$10$^{-8}$ \\
619 & 94.3 & & 4$\times$10$^{-8}$ \\
491 & 67.2 & & 3$\times$10$^{-8}$ \\
774 & 14.3 & & \\
1076 & 2.6 & & \\
808 & 50.2 & asymmetric & 1.7$\times$10$^{-8}$ \\
370 & 113.2 & & \\
326 & 27.9 & & 1.7$\times$10$^{-9}$ \\
474 & 104.7 & & \\
357 & 8 & & \\
945 & 66.3 & asymmetric & \\
771 & 28.9 & & \\
765 & 18.2 & & \\
103 & 6.4 & & \\
378 & 8.5 & & \\
\hline\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\subsection{Optical dips with increasing X-ray absorption}
\label{N$_H$_vs_dips}
In this section, we analyze the variability of those stars with
disks with increasing X-ray absorption during the optical dips, i.e.,
where optical extinction and X-ray absorption may increase
simultaneously. For each of these stars, we show the CoRoT light
curve, with indicated the {\em Chandra} frames and the time intervals we
defined, together with the variability of some of the following X-ray
quantities: N$_H$ in units of $10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$, kT, E$_{10\%}$ and
E$_{25\%}$ in keV. The X-ray spectra observed during the time
intervals together with the best fit models are shown in
Appendix \ref{spectra_app}; Appendix \ref{all_LC} contains the
entire CoRoT light curves of all the stars analyzed in this paper.
Each star is labeled with both the CoRoT ID and the Mon- ID. \par
$ $\par {\bf Mon-456:} Mon-456 (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}) is an
interesting case of simultaneous optical and X-ray variability. This
class~II K4 star, with a rotation period of 5.05 days, is moderately
accreting and it is classified as a ``quasi periodic dipper'' by
\citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and as a ``AA~Tau like'' star by
\citet{McGinnisAGS2015} according to both their 2008 and 2011 data.
The latter authors also observe increasing reddening of the CoRoT
light curve during the dips, typical of AA~Tau \citep{BouvierGAD2003},
and that several flux dips appear in the light curve during each
rotation period, suggesting the presence of various secondary
accretion streams. Large optical dips are observed during three {\em
Chandra} frames (left panel in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}):
\begin{itemize}
\item A deep optical dip is observed in part during the time interval \#1.
\item The intervals \#2 and \#4 are dominated by X-ray flares.
\item The time intervals \#5 and \#6 are characterized by two optical dips
with similar X-ray properties (right panels in Fig.
\ref{variab_mon456}).
\item Time interval \#3 has a rising optical light curve.
\end{itemize}
The time variability of N$_H$ (shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}) and
the time resolved X-ray spectra (Fig.~\ref{xspectra_mon456}) suggest a
larger N$_H$ during the dips in \#5 and \#6 than in the other time
intervals, but in each dip the X-ray absorption is not well
constrained. In order to better constrain the X-ray absorption during
the dips, we fit the average X-ray spectrum over the summed
time interval \#5+\#6 and compare the results with that obtained
from time intervals \#2+\#3+\#4. From the latter spectrum, we obtain
N$_H$=$0_0^{+0.11}\times 10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$ (P$_\%$=0.68), while for
the former N$_H$=$0.46_{-0.27}^{+0.32}\times 10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$
(P$_\%$=0.85), suggesting a larger hydrogen column density during the optical dips. The $>$2$\sigma$ significance of this
difference is confirmed by the contours in the C-stat space shown in
Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}. \par
There is no evidence for larger N$_H$ during the dip in \#1,
and the X-ray spectral fit of the spectrum observed in
\#1+\#5+\#6 results in a poorly constrained fit (P$_\%$=0.002).
However, some evidence for the X-ray spectrum getting harder during
this dip (i.e. increasing E$_{10\%}$) is presented in the Appendix \ref{e10lc_app}.
$ $\par
{\bf Mon-1167:} Fig.~\ref{variab_mon1167} shows the optical and X-ray
variability of the M3 disk-bearing star Mon-1167, classified as a
``quasi-periodic stochastic'' by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and as an
aperiodic extinction dominated star during 2008 and an ``AA~Tau
analog'' during 2011 by \citet{McGinnisAGS2015}. This star is
moderately accreting and its light curve is characterized by:
\begin{itemize}
\item Small optical dips in the time intervals \#5, \#8, and \#11, together
with a large optical dip observed only partially during the time interval
\#3.
\item The optical emission rises during \#1 and \#2, then steeply falls in \#10.
\item No peculiar features are observed in \#4, \#6, \#7, \#9, \#12.
\end{itemize}
During the dips, the CoRoT flux declines by the 5.5\% (\#3), 1.9\%
(\#5), 2.1\% (\#8), and 1.3\% (\#11). The obtained N$_H$ is significantly different from zero only during \#3 and
\#8, although in \#8 the error bar is large and marginally compatible
with the value observed in \#7 (right bottom panels in Fig.
\ref{variab_mon1167}). \par
The C-stat contours from the spectral fits in the time intervals \#3
and \#8 support the evidence of a larger N$_H$ during \#3, while
a possible solution with N$_H$=0 within 68\% confidence is possible
during the time interval \#8.
$ $\par
{\bf Mon-412:} Fig.~\ref{variab_mon412} shows the optical and X-ray
variability of the accreting M1 class~II object Mon-412, classified as
a ``burster'' by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and \citet{StaufferCBA2014}. CoRoT
light curve (upper left panel) is characterized by accretion bursts
and dips\footnote{It must be noted that
the CoRoT light curve of Mon-412 may have been contaminated by a
nearby disk-free cluster member more than one magnitude fainter in $I$
band and falling in the CoRoT mask.}:
\begin{itemize}
\item Small optical burst-like features are observed in \#1, \#2, \#3, \#8.
\item Prominent optical burst-like features are observed in part during \#4 and \#9.
\item In \#5, \#6, and \#7 the optical light curve shows a sequence of dip-like and/or burst-like features, with the CoRoT flux being 3.5\% lower in \#6 than in \#5 and \#7.
\end{itemize}
It is not clear from the CoRoT light curve alone whether the
variability observed in the third {\em Chandra} frame is due to two
optical bursts in \#5 and \#7 or to an optical dip in \#6. Some hint
is provided by the variability of the X-ray properties (shown in the
right panels). During the time interval \#6, in fact, N$_H$ varies
from 0 to 1.2$^{0.38}_{0.24}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$ together with E$_{10\%}$,
E$_{25\%}$, and E$_{50\%}$ (the latter not shown in Fig.
\ref{variab_mon412}) reaching the highest values observed in this
star. However, as shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon412}, the 68\%
statistical confidence region in the C-stat space for the interval \#6
also allows solutions at low N$_H$. We conclude then that there are
hints of a larger X-ray absorption during \#6, but this is not
significantly supported by the time resolved X-ray spectral analysis.
$ $\par
{\bf Mon-717:} Mon-717 shows a large optical dip (see Fig.
\ref{variab_mon717}), longer than the third {\em Chandra} frame and with
the CoRoT flux decaying by 25.3\% (corresponding to an increase\footnote{Ignoring the size of the obscuring feature
with respect to the stellar disk.} of
$A_V$ by 0.38$^m$) and a FWHM of 0.6 days. This star is a
Class~II M0.5 star that is moderately accreting. The source is faint in
X-rays, with only 10 photons detected during the dip and 20 in the
previous {\em Chandra} frame. The X-ray emission is, however, harder during
the dip than in the other frames, as suggested by the variability of
the photon energy quantiles (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon717}), suggesting
that not only the optical emission but also the X-ray emission is more
absorbed during the third {\em Chandra} frame.
$ $\par {\bf Mon-119:} The optical and X-ray variability of Mon-119
(spectral type K6, \citealp{DahmSimon2005}), classified as a
``stochastic'' star by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and as a star whose
variability is mostly driven by variable accretion by
\citet{StaufferCRH2016AJ}, is shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon119}. The
CoRoT light curve shows several features:
\begin{itemize}
\item The optical emission rises by a factor 1.12 during \#1, followed by a more quiescent phase (\#2).
\item An intense optical burst occurred between the first and second {\em Chandra}
frames, whose final part is observed in the time interval \#3 (with
only 19 X-ray photons detected).
\item Two optical dips are observed in the time intervals \#4 and \#6 separated by a quiescent phase (\#5).
\item The optical emission is higher during the third {\em Chandra} frame
with at least two evident bursts (intervals \#7 and \#9), separated by
a more quiescent phase (\#8).
\item The fourth {\em Chandra} frame (\#10) is dominated by an intense X-ray and optical flare.
\end{itemize}
In the two dips (\#4 and \#6), the CoRoT flux decreases by 8.9\% and
15.7\% with respect to the optical emission observed during the time
interval \#5. As shown in the top right panels in Fig.
\ref{variab_mon119}, excluding the flare, N$_H$ is always compatible
with zero in all the time intervals except in the second {\em Chandra} frame
(\#4, and \#6). In order to verify whether a significantly larger
N$_H$ is observed during these two optical dips, we fit the 1T thermal
plasma model to the average X-ray spectrum summing the
time intervals \#4+\#6. The average value of N$_H$ suggested by the
best fit model is
N${_H\,\#4+\#6}$=$0.21^{+0.23}_{-0.16}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$, which is
significantly larger than zero (and larger than the absorption observed in
the remainder intervals) within a 68\% confidence range. This is confirmed
by the contours in the C-stat space (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon119}).
$ $\par
{\bf Mon-619:} Mon-619 is a K8.5V star actively accreting from its
disk, and both \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and \citet{McGinnisAGS2015}
classified this star as an aperiodic extinction dominated star. The
CoRoT light curve of Mon-619 in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon619},
shows:
\begin{itemize}
\item A large optical dip that dominates the second {\em Chandra} frame (\#2).
\item Two smaller optical dips or an accretion burst occurring during a large dip during \#1.
\item No evident features are observed in \#3 and \#4, even if there
are several spikes that may be the consequence of unsteady accretion.
\item A steep decline of the optical emission during \#5.
\end{itemize}
In the dip observed in the second {\em Chandra} frame the optical flux
decreases by 10.4\%, corresponding to the extinction increasing by
0.14$^m$. We observe the largest values of
E$_{10\%}$ and E$_{25\%}$ during the large dip in the second {\em Chandra}
frame, suggesting a larger X-ray absorption during the optical dip.
Fig.~\ref{variab_mon619} also shows that the time variability of
both the CoRoT and X-ray flux is coherent and correlated, as expected
in AA~Tau like stars. The X-ray spectrum of Mon-619 is one of the hardest observed in our
sample (Fig.~\ref{xspectra_mon619}), with a median photon energy of
3.26$\,$keV, (the typical value in ours sample is 1.3$\,$keV). Given the
low X-ray counts, the spectral fits are not well constrained and
thus not discussed.
$ $\par {\bf Mon-491:} Mon-491 is a K3V star actively accreting from
its disk, and it has been classified by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} as a long
term variable and by \citet{StaufferCRH2016AJ} as a star with variable
accretion. The CoRoT light curve of Mon-491 (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon491})
shows:
\begin{itemize}
\item A rising phase in optical during \#1 and \#2.
\item A very steep optical decline with the CoRoT flux decreasing by about the
20\% during the second {\em Chandra} frame (\#4), after a phase with a
more constant optical flux (\#3), which may be due to variable
extinction.
\item The optical emission remains almost constant during \#5 and \#6 and then declines during \#7.
\end{itemize}
Even if the light curve of Mon-491 does not show dips during the
{\em Chandra} frames, we want to verify whether during the decline of
optical emission observed in \#4, there is evidence for increasing
X-ray absorption. We compare the X-ray properties of Mon-491 during
the intervals where the optical light curve does not decline (i.e.,
\#2+\#3+\#5) with those observed during \#4. N$_H$ is smaller during
the former time intervals than during \#4 at $\sim$96\% confidence:
N$_H$$_{\#4}=2.14^{+1.07}_{-0.45}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$ while
N$_H$$_{\#2+\#3+\#5}=0.98^{+0.46}_{-0.42}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$.
The significance of this difference is confirmed by the contours in
the C-stat space shown in Fig.~\ref {variab_mon491}. \par
$ $\par {\bf Mon-774:} The CoRoT light curve of Mon-774 (spectral type
K2.5, classified as ``stochastic'' by \citealt{CodySBM2014AJ} with an
AA~Tau phase observed during 2008 and analyzed in detail by
\citealt{McGinnisAGS2015}), shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon774}, is
characterized by:
\begin{itemize}
\item A sequence of optical high and low phases in \#1, \#2, and \#3
\item Two large optical dips, one dominating the third {\em Chandra} frame (time
intervals \#7 and \#8), and one between the first and second {\em Chandra}
frames.
\item An optical dip observed during \#10 after a higher phase in \#9.
\item A small optical dip observed in \#5 during the decline phase from \#4 to \#6.
\end{itemize}
The CoRoT flux variation during the dip in \#7 is about 16.8\%,
corresponding to an increase of optical extinction $\Delta A_V=0.2^m$,
while the dip observed between the first and second {\em Chandra} frames
is less deep, with a 6.4\% CoRoT flux variation ($\Delta A_V=0.09^m$).
The variability of the X-ray properties is shown in the right panels
of Fig.~\ref{variab_mon774}. N$_H$ is larger than zero in three time intervals. In the
interval \#10, the best fit predicts a N$_H$ larger than zero but the
C-stat contours, not shown here, admit solutions with N$_H$=0 within
68\% confidence level, so it will not be discussed further. \par
In the interval \#8 N$_H$ is only slightly larger than zero at
68\% confidence. Interval \#8 is actually part of the large dip which
dominates \#7, so the two intervals must be considered together. However, the
X-ray spectral fit of the spectrum observed during \#7+\#8 does not
result in a well-constrained estimate of N$_H$, with solutions ranging
from 0 to about 0.3$\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$ within 68\% confidence.
\par
The small dip isolated in the time interval \#5 is more interesting in
this respect. The N$_H$ obtained using 2T
thermal plasma model\footnote{Using a 1T model, the fit is not
statistically acceptable}
(1.07$^{+0.19}_{-0.19}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$) is significantly
different than zero and larger than the value
obtained from the average spectrum
(0.54$^{+0.25}_{-0.24}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$) at 68\% confidence level, as proved by the C-stat contours shown in Fig.
\ref{variab_mon774}.
$ $\par {\bf Mon-1076:} The CoRoT light curve of the non-accreting
star Mon-1076 (spectral type M1), listed as a star with periodic flux
dips in \citet{StaufferCMR2015}, is shown in Fig.\
\ref{variab_mon1076}:
\begin{itemize}
\item During the second {\em Chandra} frame, the CoRoT light curve is
dominated by a large dip (time intervals \#2, \#3, and \#4), with a
10.6\% CoRoT flux variation (corresponding to an increase of optical
extinction by $\Delta$A$_V$=0.15$^m$, see Table \ref{dips_table}).
\item An optical and X-ray flare is isolated in the interval \#3.
\item Almost constant optical emission is observed during \#1, \#5, and \#6 (in the latter case probably with some variability).
\end{itemize}
The variability of the X-ray properties, shown in the right panels in
Fig.~\ref{variab_mon1076}, suggests a larger N$_H$ observed at the
beginning of the optical dip, compared with the remaining intervals.
The significance of this difference is confirmed in the bottom panel
in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon1076}, which compares the confidence regions in
the C-stat space obtained from the fit of the X-ray spectrum observed
in the intervals \#2+\#4 (during the dip) and \#5+\#6 (after the dip).
The X-ray absorption in the former interval is larger than that
observed in the latter within a 68\% confidence.
\subsection{Variability of the X-ray properties during the optical bursts}
\label{N$_H$_vs_burst}
In this section, we analyze the time-resolved X-ray properties during
the optical bursts. We look for evidence of: i) A soft
component in the X-ray spectrum (below 1$\,$keV) which may result from
the emission of accreting gas in the accretion shock, and ii)
increasing X-ray absorption due to the gas in the accretion streams.
Hereafter, we classify the X-ray spectra with ``an intense soft X-ray
spectral component'' as those whose observed X-ray emission below
1$\,$keV is significantly larger than the flux predicted by the best
fit 1T thermal plasma model fitting the observed time resolved X-ray spectra as explained in Sect. \ref{xvar_sec}. With few exceptions, we restrict this definition to cases where the spectral fit using 1T thermal plasma
model is statistically unacceptable, accounting for the fact that
stellar coronae are not isothermal and 2T models may be always
required when there are enough X-ray photons detected. \par
To analyze the simultaneous optical and X-ray variability of stars
with optical bursts, we use an approach similar to that adopted for
the stars with dips. For each star, we show a set of panels including the CoRoT light curve
observed during the {\em Chandra} frames, with superimposed the variability of the soft
X-ray flux; the observed time resolved X-ray spectra; and the variability of
the following X-ray properties: The plasma temperature; the E$_{10\%}$
and E$_{25\%}$ photon energy quantiles; and the median photon energy
E$_{50\%}$, for stars with soft X-ray emission during the optical
bursts, or the hydrogen column density N$_H$ for stars with
increasing X-ray absorption during the optical bursts. Together with
the time resolved X-ray spectra, we show the best
fit thermal plasma model, 1T or 2T if the fit using 1T thermal models
is statistically unacceptable. \par
The criterion adopted to search for a soft component (i.e., the
acceptance level for 1T models) depends on plasma
properties and on the number of photons collected. Since we aim to
monitor the presence of a soft component irrespective of the
photon statistics, for each star, we also analyze the variability of the normalization of the soft component over the defined time intervals. To attempt highlighting only the variation of the normalization of the soft component and thus the variability of the cold plasma emission measure, for this test we fit the time resolved X-ray spectra with 2T thermal plasma models with fixed N$_H$ (set equal to the value derived from the known optical extinction), kT$_{soft}$=0.3$\,$keV (typical of the soft emission from accretion spots), kT$_{hard}$=1.6$\,$keV (the typical coronal temperature of NGC~2264 members). We do not set the plasma temperatures and/or the absorption in our search of intense soft X-ray spectral component during the optical bursts to avoid that underestimating the X-ray absorption would affect our results. \par
$ $\par {\bf Mon-808:} Mon-808 is an accreting disk bearing
star with spectral type K4 \citep{DahmSimon2005} classified as a
``burster'' by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and as a ``burst-dominated light
curve'' by \citet{StaufferCBA2014}. Its CoRoT light curve during the
{\em Chandra} frames (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}) shows:
\begin{itemize}
\item Large optical bursts in the time intervals \#1 and \#2.
\item Small optical bursts in the time intervals \#3 and \#8.
\item A bright optical and X-ray flare dominating the time intervals
\#4 and \#5 (the latter dominated by the decaying phase of the X-ray
flare).
\item Micro bursts may be present in \#6 and \#7, with a
decline of the optical emission by about 3\% observed in the latter.
\end{itemize}
In some of the time resolved X-ray spectra shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}, the
soft X-ray emission below 0.8$\,$keV is larger than the
prediction of the 1T fitting model, specifically in \#1, \#2, and
\#3. The bottom panel shows how the normalization of the soft
component of the best fit 2T thermal plasma model (with fixed N$_H$
and kT) varies in the time intervals. The associated errors are too
large to allow us any meaningful comparison. \par
Table \ref{mon808_2T_tab} shows the results of the time-resolved
spectral analysis, specifically the predicted plasma temperatures, and the
null-hypothesis probabilities resulting from the best-fit 1T and 2T
APEC models. In particular, in the time intervals \#1 and \#2 the use
of 1T plasma models results in unacceptable fits, while the quality
of the fit improves significantly using 2T plasma models. In the time
intervals \#3 and \#8, the 1T fit is acceptable (in the former likely
because of the low X-ray counts), but the fitting thermal plasma
model does not reproduce the observed soft X-ray emission (below
0.7$\,$keV in the former and 0.9$\,$keV in the latter), which are
instead well-fitted with the 2T thermal plasma model. These are the
time intervals where we search for soft X-ray emission due to accretion. \par
Since we want to constrain the soft temperature as well as possible,
we fit the average X-ray spectrum
over the time intervals where an intense soft X-ray spectral
component is observed using 2T thermal plasma model. An acceptable fit is obtained from the average
spectrum observed in \#1+\#2+\#8, with a soft temperature
kT$_1=0.15_{-0.04}^{+0.06}\,$keV (P$_\%=91\%$), which corresponds to
$1.7_{-0.04}^{+0.07}\,$MK\footnote{We obtain the same soft component
temperature (kT$_1=0.14_{-0.05}^{+0.04}\,$keV) from the average
\#1+\#2 X-ray spectrum, but with a less constrained X-ray spectral fit
(P$_\%=8\%$)}. In the approximation of strong shock scenario, the
pre-shock velocity can be calculated from the post-shock plasma
temperature as:
\begin{equation}
v_{pre}^2=\frac{16 k T_{post}}{3 \mu m_H}
\label{vel_eq}
\end{equation}
where $v_{pre}$ is the pre-shock gas velocity, $T_{post}$ the
post-shock temperature, and $\mu$ the mean molecular weight (0.61 in
our case). Adopting the computed soft temperature as $T_{post}$, this
calculation results in a pre-shock velocity of the accreting gas of
$352_{-48}^{+68}\,$km/s. Adopting a stellar mass of 1.2$\,$M$_{\odot}$
and radius of 1.7$\,$R$_{\odot}$ obtained interpolating the
\citet{SiessDF2000AAP} pre-main sequence isochrones with the values of
$L_{bol}$ and $T_{\rm eff}$ for Mon-808 (the former from a bolometric
correction on the dereddened $I$ magnitude and the latter from the
known spectral type), and an age of 4.5$\,$Myr, and with the
hypothesis of negligible energy loss during the accretion, this
pre-shock velocity corresponds to a free-fall from a distance of
$3.2_{-0.6}^{+1.7}\,$R$_{\odot}$, corresponding to $1.9_{-0.4}^{+1.0}$
stellar radii\footnote{It must be noted that these radii are
calculated from the center of the system.}. The fact that the pre-shock
velocity we obtain is significantly smaller than the free-fall
velocity from infinity (519$\,$km/s) suggests that the free-fall
radius (R$_{\rm ff}$) is sufficiently well constrained. Its lower limit is
comparable with the disk inner radius (1.4 stellar radii) which can be
predicted by SED analysis (see Sect.\ \ref{xvar_sec}). Since the light
curve of Mon-808 is not periodic, its rotation period is unknown, and
thus we can not calculate the co-rotation radius as $\left( GM_{star}
\right)^{1/3} \times \left( P_{star}/2\pi \right)^{2/3}$. However,
bearing in mind that this calculation is strongly uncertain, we note
that the free-fall radius is smaller than the typical
co-rotation radii of disk-bearing stars (5-10$\,$R$_{star}$,
\citealp{HartmannCGD1998,ShuNSL2000}). \par
The presence of a significant soft X-ray spectral component below
0.9$\,$keV in Mon-808 is also evident in the average spectrum, shown
in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}. Together with the observed spectrum (with
flares removed), we show the best fit 1T thermal plasma model, which
results in a poor fit (P$_\%$$\sim$0), and the best fit 2T model,
which results in an acceptable fit (P$_\%$=55$\%$) with the two plasma
temperatures kT$_1=0.37_{-0.04}^{+0.03}\,$keV and
kT$_2=2.6_{-0.2}^{+0.3}\,$keV. \par
\begin{table}
\caption{Predicted plasma temperatures for Mon-808 from the time-resolved X-ray spectral fits. The results from the 2T model are shown when the best fit with the 1T model is poorly constrained.}
\label{mon808_2T_tab}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|r|r|r|r|r|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Interval} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{kT1} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{kT2} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(1T)} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(2T)} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\#} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} \\
\hline
1 & $0.16_{-0.12}^{+0.13}$ & $1.2_{-0.03}^{+0.4}$ & 2.1 & 98.8 \\
2 & $0.12_{-0.03}^{+0.08}$ & $4.6_{-3.50}$ & 0.3 & 50.0 \\
3 & $0.87_{-0.07}^{+0.10}$ & & 23.3 & \\
4 & $3.37_{-0.40}^{+0.54}$ & & 54.8 & \\
5 & $0.42_{-0.12}^{+0.11}$ & $2.6_{-0.51}^{+1.39}$ & 0.7 & 26.8 \\
6 & $0.97_{-0.09}^{+0.07}$ & & 22.2 & \\
7 & $1.00_{-0.09}^{+0.08}$ & & 81.1 & \\
8 & $0.94_{-0.16}^{+0.06}$ & & 55.4 & \\
\hline\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223979728.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223979728.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon370_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{mon370_em.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon370_average.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray properties of Mon-370 with the panel format and content as in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}.}
\label{variab_mon370}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223980258.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223980258.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon326_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{mon326_em.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray properties of Mon-326 with the panel format and content as in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}.}
\label{variab_mon326}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0603396438.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0603396438.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon474_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{mon474_em.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray properties of Mon-474 with the panel format and content as in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}.}
\label{variab_mon474}
\end{figure*}
$ $ \par{\bf Mon-370:} The K5 star Mon-370 is among the
strongest accretors in NGC~2264, with a H$\alpha$ EW roughly
corresponding to the 71\% quantile of the H$\alpha$ EW distribution of
all the accretors in our sample. The CoRoT light curve of this star
(Fig.~\ref{variab_mon370}) shows:
\begin{itemize}
\item A superposition of intense optical bursts in \#4.
\item In \#5, we isolate the begin of the rising phase of a burst occurring between the second and third {\em Chandra} frame.
\item An X-ray and optical flare during \#6.
\item A decline of optical emission by 9.1\% between \#9 and \#10.
\item Myriad small peaks during all the other intervals.
\end{itemize}
We can speculate that the light curve of this star is affected by
myriad small bursts caused by an intense and chaotic accretion
process, with several short-lived accretion streams hitting the stellar
surface at various positions. The X-ray spectra observed in most of
the time intervals (shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon370}) confirm this
scenario, showing an intense soft X-ray spectral component (typically for
energies $\leq0.8\,$keV, sometimes $\leq1\,$keV). The most evident
soft X-ray spectral component is observed in the time interval \#4,
characterized by the most intense optical burst and the lowest
E$_{10\%}$ observed in this star. A smaller but evident soft X-ray
spectral component is also present in the time intervals \#7 and \#10,
all characterized by several small bursts. The X-ray spectral fit with
1T thermal plasma model is not well-constrained in most of the cases
(fourth column in Table \ref{mon370_2T_tab}): In the time intervals
\#1, \#2, \#4, \#7 and \#10 P$_\%$ is below the 5\% threshold. In some
cases, this is likely due to the fact that we have enough X-ray
photons to resolve different thermal components in the coronal
emission (e.g., \#2); in other cases by the presence of an evident soft
X-ray spectral component (e.g. \#4). An intense soft X-ray spectral
component is also evident in the average spectrum, as shown in the bottom
right panel in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon370}. \par
The bottom left panel in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon370} shows the time
variability of the normalization of the soft component using 2T model
with fixed N$_H$ and kT. The time interval with the largest
normalization of the soft component is \#5, where we isolate the
rising part of a burst, followed by \#6 dominated by a X-ray flare.
The normalization observed in \#4 and \#7 are instead compatible with
those observed in the remainder intervals. \par
\begin{table}
\caption{Predicted plasma temperatures for Mon-370 from the time-resolved X-ray spectral fits. The results from the 2T model are shown when the best fit with the 1T model is poorly constrained.}
\label{mon370_2T_tab}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\#} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{kT1} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{kT2} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(1T)} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(2T)} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{v$_{pre}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{R$_{ff}^*$} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{ } &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{km/s} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{R$_{star}$} \\
\hline
1 & $0.07_{-0.05}^{+0.17}$ & $0.90_{-0.22}^{+1.65}$ & 4.6 & 48.4 & $242_{-113}^{+207}$ & $4.5_{-3.2}^{+11.2}$\\
2 & $0.22_{-0.15}^{+0.11}$ & $1.93_{-0.60}^{+1.81}$ & 0.0 & 7.8 & $429_{-187}^{+97 }$ & $1.4_{-0.5}^{+3.1}$ \\
3 & $1.19_{-0.06}^{+0.05}$ & & 8.7 & & & \\
4 & $0.15_{-0.06}^{+0.06}$ & $1.42_{-0.44}^{+0.45}$ & 0.0 & 25.4 & $355_{-80 }^{+65 }$ & $2.1_{-0.6}^{+1.4}$ \\
5 & $1.06_{-0.14}^{+0.11}$ & & 12.7 & & & \\
6 & $2.59_{-0.28}^{+0.41}$ & & 7.8 & & & \\
7 & $0.14_{-0.06}^{+0.08}$ & $2.45_{-0.89}^{+2.29}$ & 0.0 & 92.4 & $342_{-83 }^{+87 }$ & $2.2_{-0.8}^{+1.7}$ \\
8 & $0.94_{-0.11}^{+0.06}$ & & 76.8 & & & \\
9 & $0.23_{-0.05}^{+0.22}$ & & 16.2 & & & \\
10& $0.20_{-0.11}^{+0.17}$ & $2.61_{-1.08}^{+3.74}$ & 0.13 & 97.8 & $409_{-134}^{+148}$ & $1.6_{-0.8}^{+1.9}$ \\
\hline
\multicolumn{7}{l}{$^*$ R$_{\rm ff}$ is calculated assuming M$_{star}=1.13\,$M$_{\odot}$, R$_{star}=1.64\,$R$_{\odot}$,} \\
\multicolumn{7}{l}{and age=4$\,$Myrs} \\
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
As for Mon-808, we fit the X-ray spectra of these time intervals with
two temperatures plasma models, which better reproduce the
observed spectra, primarily in the time intervals \#4 and \#7, but also
in \#2 and \#10 (see Fig.~\ref{variab_mon370} and Table
\ref{mon370_2T_tab}). The temperatures predicted by the best-fit models
are shown in Table \ref{mon370_2T_tab}, together with the pre-shock
velocity calculated using Eq.\ \ref{vel_eq} and the corresponding
free-fall launching distance from the central star, in units of
stellar radii. In the time intervals \#2, \#4, \#7, and \#10, the
pre-shock velocity ranges from 242$\,$km/s to 557$\,$km/s, sometimes
being compatible with the free-fall velocity from infinity
(512$\,$km/s). In order to better constrain these parameters, we fit
the average X-ray spectrum observed summing these four time intervals,
obtaining a good fit with a 2T thermal plasma model
(P$_\%\sim$100$\%$) with kT$_1$=$0.16_{-0.04}^{+0.08}\,$keV and
kT$_2$=$1.86_{-0.29}^{+0.55}\,$keV. The soft temperature corresponds
to a pre-shock velocity of $366_{-49}^{+83}\,$km/s from a free-fall
radius of $2.0^{+2.3}_{-0.4}\,$R$_{star}$. The X-ray spectral fit of
the average spectrum observed in the entire {\em Chandra} observation
results in similar temperatures (kT$_1=0.19_{-0.03}^{+0.02}\,$keV and
kT$_2=1.95_{-0.18}^{+0.18}\,$keV). Bearing in mind that this
calculation is approximate, the free-fall velocity is
smaller than the value from infinity, the upper limit of R$_{\rm ff}$ is
well below both the inner radius of the dusty disk predicted by the
SED analysis (8.9 stellar radii), and the co-rotation radius
calculated adopting the rotation period of 11.84 days (Venuti et al.\
in preparation), is equal to 13.8$\,$R$_{star}$.\par
$ $\par {\bf Mon-119:} Marginal evidence for an intense soft
X-ray spectral component during the optical bursts is also observed in
Mon-119 (see Fig.~\ref{variab_mon119}). This star has been discussed
in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips}. We focus here on the optical bursts
during the time intervals \#3, \#7, and \#9. In particular, as shown
in the right panels of Fig.~\ref{variab_mon119}, during \#3 and \#9
both the plasma temperature and the 10\% and 25\% energy quantiles
suggest that the corresponding X-ray spectra are dominated by soft photons (see the spectra shown in Fig.~\ref{xspectra_mon119} and also in
the variability of E$_{10\%}$ shown in the Appendix \ref{e10lc_app}).
However, given the few X-ray photons detected, the two spectra are well
fitted by 1T thermal plasma models (P$_\%=84\%$ and 93\%,
respectively), as well as the average spectrum summing these two
time intervals (P$_{\%}$=58\%). \par
$ $\par {\bf Mon-326:} The M0 star Mon-326, whose variability
is shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon326}, is described as a star whose light
curve is dominated by accretion hot spots in \citet{StaufferCBA2014}.
It is not a strong accretor and in fact its CoRoT light curve does not
show many prominent bursts, except a 0.3 day long burst observed at
the beginning of the first {\em Chandra} frame (time interval \#1). In the first time interval, an
intense soft X-ray spectral component is evident (for
kT$\leq0.7\,$keV), and the normalization of the soft component of the best fit 2T model is
larger than in the other intervals (bottom panel). \par
The fit with a 2T plasma model of the X-ray spectrum observed in
the first time interval (shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon326}) better
reproduces the observed soft X-ray emission below 0.7$\,$keV, with the
null-hypothesis probability increasing from almost zero to 34\%. In
\#1, the soft temperature obtained from the best fit 2T model is
kT$_{soft}=0.15^{+0.10}_{-0.08}\,$keV. Using Eq. \ref{vel_eq}, this
temperature corresponds to a pre-shock velocity of
$355^{+102}_{-113}\,$km/s, compatible with the free-fall velocity from
infinity (395$\,$km/s). \par
$ $ \par{\bf Mon-474:} Fig.~\ref{variab_mon474} shows the
variability of Mon-474, the only G type star \citep{DahmSimon2005}
analyzed in this section, which is actively accreting from its disk.
This star was listed as a star with accretion bursts in
\citet{StaufferCBA2014}. The CoRoT light curve during the {\em
Chandra} observations (but also in the remainder) is dominated by
several small bursts:
\begin{itemize}
\item \#4 is dominated by an intense optical burst with the optical emission increasing by 3.8\%.
\item In \#5, we isolate a transition from the large optical burst observed in \#4 and a sequence of small bursts.
\item The intervals \#1, \#2, \#3, \#6, \#7, \#10, \#11 are dominated by several small optical bursts.
\item \#8 and \#9 are dominated by a bright optical and X-ray flare.
\end{itemize}
The time resolved X-ray spectra (central panels of Fig.\
\ref{variab_mon474}) show an intense soft X-ray spectral component below
1$\,$keV in the time intervals \#1 and \#6. It may also be present even if less evident
during the interval \#7. No evident soft X-ray spectral
component is observed during \#3 and \#11. The X-ray spectra observed
in some of these intervals such as \#6 and \#7 are not well-fit
with 1T thermal plasma models, and they also show soft X-ray photon
energy quantiles. Table \ref{mon474_2T_tab} shows the plasma temperatures
predicted by the best fit 1T or 2T (when the former is poorly
constrained) plasma model and the associated null-hypothesis
probabilities. \par
Repeating for Mon-474 the calculation made for Mon-808,
adopting a stellar mass of 1.9$\,$M$_{\odot}$ and a radius of
4.04$\,$R$_{\odot}$, we obtain a pre-shock velocity of the accreting
material of $744^{+85}_{-334}\,$km/s in the time interval \#1 and
$458^{+84}_{-92}\,$km/s in the time interval \#6, both compatible with
the free fall velocity from infinite distance from the star
(423$\,$km/s). \par
\begin{table}
\caption{Predicted plasma temperatures for Mon-474 from the time resolved X-ray spectral fits. The results from the 2T model are shown when the best fit with the 1T model is poorly constrained.}
\label{mon474_2T_tab}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|r|r|r|r|r|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Interval} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{T1} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{T2} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(1T)} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P(2T)} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{ } &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} \\
\hline
1 & $0.66^{+0.16}_{-0.35}$ & $2.65^{+1.54}_{-0.65} $& 1.9 & 88.0 \\
2 & $2.01^{+0.27}_{-0.26}$ & & 63.7 & \\
3 & $0.87^{+0.24}_{-0.19}$ & $23.1^{}_{-19.98} $ & 1.7 & 79.4 \\
4 & $1.80^{+0.28}_{-0.19}$ & & 76.5 & \\
5 & $1.80^{+0.26}_{-0.25}$ & & 98.7 & \\
6 & $0.25^{+0.10}_{-0.09}$ & $2.16^{+0.69}_{-0.45}$ & 0.5 & 26.9 \\
7 & $0.78^{+0.21}_{-0.38}$ & $2.27^{+1.15}_{-0.45}$ & 3.5 & 64.2 \\
8 & $5.05^{+1.68}_{-1.04}$ & & 83.6 & \\
9 & $2.01^{+0.25}_{-0.18}$ & & 11.0 & \\
10 & $3.06^{+0.54}_{-0.44}$ & & 13.2 & \\
11 & $0.54^{+0.09}_{-0.15}$ & $6.73^{}_{-3.76} $ & 0.0 & 8.4 \\
\hline\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.5cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616919781.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0616919781.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon357_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon357_average.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray properties of Mon-357 with the panels format and content as in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon808}.}
\label{variab_mon357}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223977953.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223977953.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon945_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=5.5cm]{mon945_int3.ps}
\includegraphics[width=5.5cm]{mon945_int5.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray
properties of Mon-945 with the panel format and content as in
Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}. Contour levels in the C-stat space
corresponding to the 68\%, 90\%, and 99\% statistical confidence
regions from the fit of the X-ray spectrum of Mon-945 observed during
the intervals \#3 (bottom left panel, black contours) and \#5 (bottom
right panel, black contours) are also shown. In both panels the red
contours are obtained from the average spectrum observed in
\#1+\#2+\#8+\#9+\#10. The cross marks the values obtained from the
best fit.}
\label{variab_mon945}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223985261.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223985261.ps}
\includegraphics[width=18cm]{mon771_all.ps}
\includegraphics[width=6cm]{mon771_oplotted.ps}
\includegraphics[width=7cm]{mon771_average.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray
properties of Mon-771 with the panel format and content as in
Fig.~\ref{variab_mon456}. Contour levels in the C-stat space
corresponding to the 68\%, 90\%, and 99\% statistical confidence
regions from the fit of the X-ray spectrum of Mon-771 observed during
the time interval \#6 (black contours) are compared to that obtained
from the average spectrum observed during the remainder intervals
(excluding the flare, red contours). The cross marks the values
obtained from the best fit.}
\label{variab_mon771}
\end{figure*}
$ $ \par{\bf Mon-357:} The variability of the K5 star Mon-357
is shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon357}. Even though it has a small H$\alpha$ EW,
this star has a CoRoT light curve dominated by several bursts-like
features of various intensity:
\begin{itemize}
\item A bright optical and X-ray flare is observed during the time interval \#1.
\item Large optical bursts are observed during \#5, \#6, \#7, and \#9.
\item Small optical bursts are observed during \#2 and \#10.
\item No interesting features are observed during \#3, \#4, and \#8.
\end{itemize}
The variability of the X-ray properties (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon357})
suggests that the X-ray spectrum becomes softer and the X-ray emitting
plasma colder with increasing CoRoT flux (ignoring the flare). The
Spearman's rank correlation test is significant for kT (correlation
coefficient $\rho=-0.72$ and the two-side significance of its
deviation from zero $P(\rho)=0.03$), E$_{25\%}$ ($\rho=-0.78$,
$P(\rho)=0.01$), and E$_{50\%}$ ($\rho=-0.70$, $P(\rho)=0.04$), while
it is not significant for E$_{10\%}$. This suggest that the observed variability
is dominated by accretion. Intense soft X-ray spectral
components in the time-resolved X-ray spectra are observed in some
intervals. In \#7, when the CoRoT
light curve is dominated by a superposition of small bursts, it is
necessary to adopt a 2T thermal plasma model to obtain a good fit
(P$_{\%}$=3.3\% with 1T model, 93.2\% with 2T model). No useful
information is provided by the time variability of the normalization
of the soft component of the best fit 2T model (not shown) because of
the associated large errors. \par
The X-ray spectrum during \#7 shows a peak of soft X-ray emission at
about 0.7$\,$keV. The soft temperature predicted by the best fit 2T
thermal plasma model is well constrained, equal to
$0.06^{+0.01}_{-0.02}\,$keV. Since {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I is not sensitive
to such soft emission, we do not calculate the pre-shock velocity
from this plasma temperature. However, it must be noted that a similar
value for the temperature of the soft component is also obtained from
the average spectrum among those intervals with large bursts:
\#5+\#7+\#9+\#10 (P$_{\%}$=0.10), suggesting that the
soft part of the X-ray spectrum of Mon-357 is dominated by emission
from the accretion spots. \par
In Fig.~\ref{variab_mon357} we show the average X-ray spectrum of
Mon-357 with the best fit 1T (P$_{\%}=$0\%) and 2T (P$_{\%}=$88\%)
thermal models. The presence of an intense soft X-ray spectral
component is evident.
$ $ \par
The search for increasing X-ray absorption during the optical bursts
has been less prolific. This is, however, not surprising given that
this effect can be observed only if the accretion streams obscure the coronal
active regions when the accretion hot spots are clearly visible, which is
strongly dependent on the geometry of the accretion and the
distribution of the active regions in the stellar corona. In only two
cases (Mon-945 and Mon-771), described below, there is evidence for
such a correlation.\par
$ $ \par{\bf Mon-945: }Mon-945 is a K4 accreting star, with evidence
for a larger veiling when the star is optically brighter, which
supports the classification as ``burster'' by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ} and
\citet{StaufferCBA2014}. The CoRoT light curve during the {\em Chandra}
observations is dominated by a large number of bursts (Fig.
\ref{variab_mon945}):
\begin{itemize}
\item Optical bursts are observed in \#2, \#5, \#8, \#9, and \#10.
\item \#1 and \#7 show dip-like optical features, more prominent in the former interval.
\item \#3, \#4, and \#6 are dominated by optical and X-ray flares.
\end{itemize}
The bottom panels of Fig.~\ref{variab_mon945} show the X-ray spectra
observed during the time intervals, where there is no evidence of
intense soft X-ray spectral components. However, of particular
interest is the burst/flare observed during time interval \#3. The identification of this event by our
automatic routines as an X-ray flare is uncertain given that the rising part is not observed by
{\em Chandra}, as it lies between the first and second {\em Chandra} frames,
and we observe only the decaying phase at the beginning of the second
{\em Chandra} frame (the time interval \#3). Additionally, in \#3 we observe
the highest value of X-ray absorption
(N$_H$=$0.91_{-0.36}^{+0.14}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$) and a low
plasma temperature (kT=$0.93^{+0.09}_{-0.16}\,$keV), similar to that
observed in other intervals. These properties are more compatible with
an accretion burst rather than a X-ray flare, with increasing X-ray
absorption due to the accreting gas falling into the line of sight.
This is the only time interval where the N$_H$ obtained from spectral
fit is significantly larger than zero, together with that observed in \#5
(N$_H$=$0.47^{+0.30}_{-0.14}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$) during which
the CoRoT light curve shows several bursts. Fig.~\ref{variab_mon945}
also shows the contours in the C-stat space obtained for Mon-945 during the
time intervals \#3 and \#5, supporting the evidence for larger N$_H$.
$ $ \par {\bf Mon-771: }The moderately accreting K4 star
Mon-771 has not been classified as a ``burster'' by
\citet{CodySBM2014AJ}. However, its CoRoT light curve during the
{\em Chandra} observations (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon771}) is characterized by
several small bursts:
\begin{itemize}
\item During \#1, the optical emission declines by 5.5\%, with a subsequent slow rising phase longer than the whole {\em Chandra} observation.
\item An intense optical burst is observed during \#6.
\item Small optical bursts are observed during \#2 and \#4.
\item The small interval \#8 is dominated by the rising part of an optical and X-ray flare.
\item No interesting features are observed during \#3, \#5 and \#7.
\end{itemize}
The time-resolved X-ray spectra are well fit by 1T thermal
plasma models except in \#1, \#2, and \#4. In \#1, an intense soft
X-ray spectral component between 0.7$\,$keV and $1\,$keV may be present.
The fit with a 2T thermal plasma model predicting
N$_H$=$0.21^{+0.59}_{-0.21}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$,
kT$_1$=$0.31^{+0.67}_{-0.16}\,$keV, and
kT$_2$=$2.59^{+3.05}_{-0.89}\,$keV is acceptable (P$_{\%}$=$31.5\%$).
Repeating the calculation for the pre-shock velocity, we obtain a
value compatible with the free-fall velocity from infinity. Similar
results are obtained for \#4, where the spectral fit using 2T thermal
plasma model is good (P$_{\%}$=$66.9\%$) and it predicts
N$_H$=$0.0^{+0.22}_{-0.0}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$,
kT$_1$=$0.68^{+0.20}_{-0.33}\,$keV, and
kT$_2$=$2.69^{+4.63}_{-1.34}\,$keV. The spectral fit for the time
interval \#2 is poorly constrained even using 2T thermal plasma models
(P$_{\%}=0.3\%$).\par
Some evidence of intense soft X-ray spectral component is
shown in the average spectrum (Fig.~\ref{variab_mon771}). The fit of
the X-ray spectrum with 1T thermal plasma model is poorly constrained
(P$_{\%}=0.0$), while an acceptable fit is obtained with 2T thermal
model (P$_{\%}=13\%$). This predicts a soft temperature of
kT$_2$=$0.86^{+0.09}_{-0.02}\,$keV, which is more likely a cool
coronal component.
The variability of the X-ray properties during the defined time
intervals is shown in the upper right panels of Fig.
\ref{variab_mon771}. They suggest that the X-ray absorption is higher
in the time interval \#6, dominated by an intense burst. The C-stat
contour levels shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon771} confirm this
conclusion. The N$_H$ obtained during the time interval \#6 is the
only one different than zero at $>$90\% confidence level, and it is
significantly larger than the X-ray absorption obtained from the
average spectrum observed in the remanding intervals
(N$_H$=$0.0^{+0.02}_{-0.0}\times10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$, excluding \#8
dominated by a flare). \par
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223978921.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223978921.ps}
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0223980447.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0223980447.ps}
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{enermed_vs_lightcurve_paper_0616872605.ps}
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{lightcurve_correlations_0616872605.ps}
\caption{Time variability of the optical flux and X-ray properties of stars with disks with periodic variability as shown in Fig.~\ref{variab_mon412}, with the difference that the X-ray quantities shown in the left panels are: N$_H$ (in units of $10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}$), kT (in keV), F$_X$ (in erg$\,$cm$^{-2}\,$s$^{-1}$), and E$_{50\%}$ in keV.}
\label{periodic_disk}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Stars with disks with periodic and quasi-periodic variability}
\label{disk_periodic}
Periodic optical and X-ray variability can be observed in stars with
disks. The emission from accretion hot spots, stellar occultation by
circumstellar material, optical darkening due to photospheric dark
spots, and enhanced X-ray emission due to coronal active regions can be
modulated by stellar rotation. In the sample of NGC~2264 stars with disks
observed with CoRoT and {\em Chandra}, six stars show
periodic behavior in the CoRoT light curve, and three among them, discussed below, have coherent
optical vs.\ X-ray flux variability (Fig.~\ref{periodic_disk}). \par
$ $ \par {\bf Mon-765: } Mon-765 is a moderately accreting K1 star.
The CoRoT light curve (top left panel in Fig.~\ref{periodic_disk})
shows periodic variability with a period of $\sim$$2.7\,$days. The
variability of the X-ray properties is shown in the upper right
panels. The plasma temperature does not show significant variability
with the exception of the interval \#2. The variability of the X-ray
and CoRoT fluxes is anticorrelated, as confirmed by a Spearman rank
correlation test ($\rho$=-0.82, P($\rho$)=0.02). Rather than
rotational modulation of accretion hot spots or stellar occultation,
this behavior is more likely due to rotational modulation of spatially
coincident photospheric dark spots and coronal active regions. \par
$ $ \par {\bf Mon-103: } The hypothesis made for Mon-765 holds also
for Mon-103, a non-accreting K6 star whose variability are assumed to be
due to cold spots by \citet{StaufferCRH2016AJ}. This star has an evacuated
inner disk as suggested by its near-infrared colors. The CoRoT light curve of Mon-103 is very regular (central left panel in Fig.\
\ref{periodic_disk}) and a statistically significant anticorrelation
between the optical flux variability and both the X-ray flux and
median photon energy variability (respectively, $\rho$=-0.89,
P($\rho$)=0.006 and $\rho$=-0.78, P($\rho$)=0.04, in both cases
removing the first three time intervals dominated by flares). \par
$ $ \par {\bf Mon-378: } Mon-378 is a K5.5 star with a different
behavior than Mon-765 and Mon-103. As reported by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ},
the light curve of this star is likely periodic with superimposed
fading episodes likely due to increasing circumstellar extinction.
This star has been listed as a star with periodic flux dips in
\citet{StaufferCMR2015}. The CoRoT light curve during the four
{\em Chandra} frames (bottom left panel of Fig.~\ref{periodic_disk}) is
observed in a decaying phase, which is part of its ``periodic''
behavior. We do not observe evidence of increasing X-ray absorption during the decline of optical emission, since during all the defined time intervals the X-ray spectral fit admit solutions at low N$_H$ within 68\% confidence. However the lower right panels show that the optical flux variability is correlated with the X-ray flux variability ($\rho$=0.94, P($\rho$)=0.004). This behavior is compatible with the scenario of recurrent occultation of the central star by circumstellar material.
\subsection{Summary of observed simultaneous events}
\label{suca}
The total of stars with disks with good detection with CoRoT and $Chandra$ analyzed in this paper (i.e. Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips}, \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst}, \ref{disk_periodic} and Appendix \ref{others_app}) is 51:
\begin{itemize}
\item A total of 24 stars are analyzed as ``dippers'', i.e. they show dips in their CoRoT light curves occurring during the $Chandra$ observations. Among them, in the 7 stars discussed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips} X-ray absorption increases during the optical dips.
\item 20 stars are analyzed as ``bursters'', i.e. their CoRoT light curves show rapid bursts occurring during the $Chandra$ observations. Among them, 5 stars show an intense soft X-ray spectral component typically below 1$\,$keV during the optical bursts, while 2 stars show increasing X-ray absorption during the bursts (Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst}). It must be noted that 9 stars are analyzed both as ``bursters'' and ``dippers''.
\item 6 stars have periodic CoRoT light curves.
\item 8 stars are not analyzed because: i) they do not show any dominant phenomenon, or ii) X-ray detected photons are too few, or iii) their CoRoT mask is contaminated by nearby bright sources.
\end{itemize}
It is important to understand whether the observed variations of N$_H$ in the time intervals can be due to statistical fluctuations rather that real variability. To this aim, we compare the occurrence of time intervals, including flares but excluding intervals with poor X-ray spectral fits, where N$_H$ is larger (within at least 1$\,\sigma$ significance) than the average absorption estimated by spectral fitting to the average spectrum of each star. In the 7 stars discussed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips} we define in total 60 time intervals, and the X-ray absorption is significantly larger than the individual average value in 13 intervals (21.6\% of the cases), and only in two cases (3.3\% of the cases) the CoRoT light curves do not decline or show dips during the intervals. In the other stars analyzed as ``dippers'' N$_H$ is larger than the individual average value in 4 time intervals over 103 defined (3.9\%), in 2 of which the optical emission declines. Considering together the stars analyzed as ``bursters'', those with periodic variability and those not analyzed, N$_H$ is larger than the individual average value in 17 time intervals over 145 defined (11.7\%), but only in 5 cases (3.4\%) the CoRoT light curves clearly do not decline or show dips. In these stars N$_H$ is observed to be variable compared to the individual average value in half of the time intervals with respect the stars analyzed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips}. Considering that stars with bursts and those not analyzed because of few detected X-ray photons can show intrinsically variable X-ray absorption, this strongly suggests that observed variability of X-ray absorption in these stars is not dominated by statistical fluctuations. \par
It is more easy to verify that the observed soft X-ray spectral components below 1$\,$keV in the 5 stars analyzed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst} is not due to statistical fluctuations. Such spectral component is in fact observed in 13 time intervals over 43 defined for these stars (occurrence of 30.2\%). Considering all the other stars analyzed in this paper, we observe 5 possible soft X-ray spectral components below 1$\,$keV (in three cases in stars analyzed as bursters) over 283 time intervals (1.7\% of the cases). \par
\section{Discussion \& Conclusions}
\label{conclusions}
In this paper, we analyze the simultaneous variability in optical (from
CoRoT) and X-rays (from {\em Chandra}/ACIS-I) of stars with disks in
NGC~2264, focusing on two samples of stars, those with dips in their
CoRoT light curve due to variable extinction, and those with optical
bursts due to accretion. \par
\subsection{The N$_H$/A$_V$ ratio during the optical dips}
\label{N$_H$avratio_sec}
The hypothesis that stars with
disks can be affected by variable extinction due to circumstellar
material was first introduced by
\citet{Joy1945} and \citet{HerbstHGW1994AJ}. If circumstellar material is part of
large warps at or inside the co-rotation radius in the disk, then the
occultation occurs recurrently over several periods, and the dips are
deep. These systems are called ``AA~Tau like'' from the star which has
been the precursor of this class \citep{BouvierCAC1999}. The CSI~2264
project has also revealed that much shorter and irregular optical dips
can be observed in disk-bearing stars. \citet{StaufferCMR2015}
demonstrate that the most likely explanation for narrow and aperiodic
dips is the occultation of the central star by dust trapped in
unsteady accretion streams, while larger dips are more likely due to
disk warps. \par
\begin{figure}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.0cm]{dips_classification.ps}
\caption{N$_H$ vs. A$_V$ observed in the optical dips listed in Table \ref{dips_table}. The lines delimit the three loci populated by dips caused by dust-rich material, gas-rich, and with an intermediate gas to dust ratio. The labels indicate the stellar Mon-ID.}
\label{dips_class_fig}
\end{figure}
However, in those cases where simultaneous increase of
optical extinction and X-ray absorption is observed, discussed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips}, we can attempt to
understand the nature of the obscuring material discriminating between
dust-free (likely associated with accretion columns) and dust-rich
(likely associated with disk warps) material. Two approaches can be
adopted.
One method developed by \citet{StaufferCMR2015} consists in
calculating the ratio between the FWHM of the observed dips and the stellar rotation
period. The distribution of this ratio is, in fact, observed to be
bimodal. Short dips (FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star} \leq 0.25$, where
FWHM$_{dip}$ is the FWHM of the observed dip and P$_{star}$ the
stellar rotation period) are due to occultation by accreting material.
Long dips (FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star} > 0.25$) are instead due to occultation by disk
warps. We can adopt the rotation periods of NGC~2264 members calculated by
Venuti et al.\ (in preparation) from CoRoT light curves, and calculate
the FWHM of the observed dips fitting the dip profile with a Gaussian
function. \par
It is also possible to infer the nature of the obscuring material by
calculating the N$_H$/A$_V$ ratio during the dip. Warps are in fact located
in the inner part of the circumstellar disk, near the co-rotation
radius. If the co-rotation radius is larger than the dust sublimation radius,
the N$_H$/A$_V$ ratio should be that typical of dust-rich
circumstellar disks, assumed to be $1.8-1.9\times
10^{21}$cm$^{-2}$mag$^{-1}$ \citep{BursteinHeiles1978,BohlinSD1978}.
The N$_H$/A$_V$ ratio is expected to be larger in dust-depleted
accreting material, since only the small $\sim$$\mu$m dust particles
can be dragged in the gas streams, sublimating as soon as the
temperature reaches $1000\,$K-1500$\,$K. \par
\begin{figure}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.0cm]{dips_analysis.ps}
\caption{log(N$_H$/A$_V$) vs.\ the ratio between the FWHM of the observed dips over the stellar rotation period. The labels indicate the stellar Mon-ID.}
\label{dips_fig}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6.0cm]{dips_nh_fwhm.ps}
\includegraphics[width=6.0cm]{dips_nh_Eratio.ps}
\includegraphics[width=6.0cm]{dips_Av_Eratio.ps}
\caption{Optical and X-ray properties of the dips where we observe
an increasing X-ray absorption,
described in Table \ref{dips_table}. Left panel: N$_H$ vs.\ FWHM of
the dips. Central panel: $\Delta$N$_H$ due the dips vs.\ the ratio
between the 10\% photon energy quantile E$_{10\%}$ observed during the
dip and that in the average X-ray spectrum. Right panel: $\Delta$A$_V$
increment observed during the dip vs.\ the E$_{10\% \,dip}/$E$_{10\%
\, average}$ ratio. In all three panels, different symbols are used
to mark dips with different N$_H$/A$_{V}$ ratio and the labels show
the stellar Mon-IDs.}
\label{dips_plot_fig}
\end{figure*}
We can infer the A$_V$ necessary to reproduce the observed decline of
CoRoT flux from the optical flux absorbed during the dip, calculated
as the difference between the CoRoT flux observed at the top and at the bottom of the
dips, adopting a photometric zero point of
26.6$^m$ to convert the CoRoT fluxes into $R$ magnitudes, valid for
all members brighter than $R\leq14^m$ (Flaccomio et al.\ in
preparation), and the extinction law in $R$ band from
\citet{MunariCarraro1996}. We then compare it with the difference
$\Delta$N$_H$$_{dip}$ between the average X-ray spectrum (N$_H$$_{aver}$)
and N$_H$ observed during the dip, obtaining N$_H$/A$_V$. \par
In this calculation, we make some assumptions. We assume that both
the photosphere and the coronal active regions are obscured by the
same structure, or structures with the same composition. We ignore
the size of the obscuring structure with respect to the star. We
assume that the disk's composition and column density is homogeneous.
We also ignore that the inner disk is irradiated by energetic UV and X-ray
radiation from the central star and it may photoevaporate
\citep[i.e.][]{ClarkeGS2001,PascucciSAA2011}. This process reduces the
amount of gas and likely also the amount of small dust particles in
the disk, affecting the N$_H$/Av ratio of the warps. \par
This calculation is performed over the seven optical dips discussed in
Sect.\ \ref{N$_H$_vs_dips} where optical extinction and X-ray
absorption are observed to increase simultaneously. The physical
properties of these dips are summarized in Table \ref{dips_table}. In
this table, each row corresponds to an observed dip, each star is
identified using the ``Mon-'' name defined by \citet{CodySBM2014AJ}, and
we also indicate the time interval containing the observed dip. The
CoRoT flux variability during the dip is calculated as
$(1-(F_{low}/F_{up}))\times100$, where $F_{low}$ and $F_{up}$ are the
CoRoT fluxes observed at the bottom and the top of the dip,
respectively. Similarly, the variation of the soft X-ray photon flux
$\Delta$F$_{X,soft}$ is calculated as
$(1-(F_{X,pre}/F_{X,dip}))\times100$, where $F_{X,pre}$ is the X-ray
soft photon flux observed during the time interval before the dip and
$F_{X,dip}$ during the dip. P$_{star}$, A$_V$, $\Delta$N$_H$$_{dip}$,
N$_H$$_{aver}$, and the FWHM$_{dip}$ are obtained as previously
explained. In Table \ref{dips_table}, the X-ray properties of the dips
observed in Mon-119 are the same since N$_H$ is obtained combining the
X-ray spectra observed in the two dips.
\begin{table*}
\caption{Properties of the analyzed optical dips.}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Star} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Interval} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$\Delta$F$_{CoRoT}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$\Delta$Av} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$\Delta$N$_H$$_{dip}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{N$_H$$_{aver}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{N$_H$/Av} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{FWHM$_{dip}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{P$_{star}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$\Delta$F$_{X,soft}$} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{MON-name} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{ } &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{mag} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$10^{22}$cm$^{-2}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$10^{22}$cm$^{-2}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{$10^{22}\,$cm$^{-2}\,$m$^{-1}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{days} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{days} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{ } &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\%} \\
\hline
119 & 4 & 8.9 & 0.12 & $0.21^{+0.23}_{-0.16}$ & $0^{+0.03}$ & 1.75 & 0.2 & 3.3 & 0.06 & 36.4\\
119 & 6 & 15.7& 0.22 & $0.21^{+0.23}_{-0.16}$ & $0^{+0.03}$ & 0.95 & 0.4 & 3.3 & 0.12 & -45.2\\
412 & 6 & 3.5 & 0.05 & $1.16^{+0.42}_{-0.19}$ & $0.04^{+0.08}$ & 23.2 & 0.2 & 6.8 & 0.03 & 13.7\\
456 & 6 & 15.2& 0.21 & $0.51^{+0.23}_{-0.18}$ & $0^{+0.03}$ & 2.4 & 0.3 & 5.1 & 0.06 & 3.7\\
774 & 5 & 5.7 & 0.08 & $0.53^{+0.22}_{-0.22}$ & $0.54^{+0.25}_{-0.24}$& 7.57 & 0.2 & 3.5 & 0.06 & 5.9\\
1076& 2 & 10.65&0.15 & $1.67^{+0.49}_{-0.51}$ & $0^{+0.01} $ & 11.4 & 2.7 & & & -7.1\\
1167& 3 & 5.5 & 0.07 & $0.79^{+0.22}_{-0.24}$ & $0^{+0.06}$ & 10.7 & 0.5 & 8.8 & 0.05 & 41.3\\
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{l}{} \\
\end{tabular}
\label{dips_table}
\end{table*}
\begin{figure}[]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=9.0cm]{norm_ratio_vs_ktsoft.ps}
\includegraphics[width=9.0cm]{norm_ratio_vs_ktsoft_noburst.ps}
\caption{Ratio between the normalization of the soft and hard
components of the best fit 2T thermal plasma model vs.\ the correspondent soft temperature
of the X-ray spectra of the non accreting stars (class~III and class~II objects with passive disks)
and that observed in stars with optical bursts in the time intervals with bursts (upper panel) and in those
with no bursts (bottom panel).}
\label{em_vs_kt_plot}
\end{figure}
A rough distinction between dips caused by dust-rich and gas-rich
material can be done selecting the dips with N$_H$/A$_{V}\leq
10^{21}\,$cm$^{-2}\,$mag$^{-1}$ and N$_H$/A$_{V}\geq
10^{23}\,$cm$^{-2}\,$mag$^{-1}$, respectively. This classification is
shown in Fig.~\ref{dips_class_fig}, where dips due to material with
different gas-to-dust ratios are marked with different symbols. The two points corresponding to Mon-119 show the values measured during the time intervals \#4 and \#6, containing two dips. \par
Only in one dip (Mon-119, interval \#6) is it the case that the absorbing material may be
dust-rich compared to the other dips (but gas-rich compared with the
typical interstellar material).
In 3/7 dips the absorbing material is likely dust-depleted, as expected
in accreting material, while the remaining 3/7 have intermediate
composition. This is confirmed by the distribution of N$_H$/A$_V$ vs.
FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}$, shown in Fig.~\ref{dips_fig}. Symbols mark
dips with different gas-to-dust ratios as in Fig.~\ref{dips_class_fig}.
All the dips studied in this paper have
FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}\leq0.2$, as expected from occultation by narrow
accreting columns. In Fig.\
\ref{dips_fig}, the anticorrelation between N$_H$/A$_V$ and
FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}$ is not statistically significant, according to a
Spearman rank correlation test. However, it is interesting to note that
the dips due to the most and least
dusty obscuring material (i.e., the highest and lowest N$_H$/A$_V$
ratio), correspond to the largest and smallest FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}$
ratio, respectively, in agreement with the hypothesis that dips with
larger FWHM$_{dip}$/P$_{star}$ are expected to be produced by
dust-rich obscuring material. \par
The lack of dips due to dust-rich material is very likely a
selection effect, since we are studying dips occurring in timescales
comparable with the {\em Chandra} frames, missing those with larger
FWHM$_{dip}$ which are expected to be produced by disk warps. Additionally,
stars occulted by large disk warps are typically faint both in optical
and X-rays, so it is not possible to calculate N$_H$ (as in Mon-619
and Mon-717). We are also not very sensitive to small variations of
N$_H$. Taking all these effects together, we conclude that our results
are clearly biased toward narrow dips due to the accretion stream.
\par
\subsection{Global properties of the observed dips}
\label{glob_dip_sec}
In the 7 dips analyzed in Sect.\ \ref{N$_H$avratio_sec} the fraction
of absorbed CoRoT flux ranges from 3.5\% (corresponding to an increase
of optical extinction by 0.05$^m$) to 15.7\% (A$_V$ increasing by
$0.22^m$), with a mean value of 9.3\% (the largest CoRoT flux
variation observed in the 33 stars with variable extinction is 58.1\%,
corresponding to A$_V$ increasing by $1.13^m$). The FWHM of these
seven dips ranges from 0.2 to 2.7 days; six dips are
very narrow, with a FWHM ranging from 0.2 days to 0.5 days. \par
More details on the connections between the optical and X-ray variability during these seven dips
are shown in Fig.~\ref{dips_plot_fig}. As shown in the
left panel, $\Delta$N$_{H\,dip}$ varies over a factor $\sim$6 while
the FWHM$_{dip}$ does not change significantly. The only
exception is the dip observed in Mon-1076 which has both the
largest FWHM$_{dip}$ and $\Delta$N$_{H\,dip}$ of the sample. This may
suggest that the FWHM$_{dip}$ is related to the extent of the
obscuring material with respect to the stellar disk, and a larger
extension does not necessarily imply a larger hydrogen column density.
As expected, there is a correlation between $\Delta$N$_H$ and 10\%
photon energy quantiles observed during the dip (not shown here). A
weak correlation is still observed when comparing the 10\% photon
energy quantile observed during the dip (E$_{10\% dip}$) with that
observed in the average spectrum (E$_{10\% average}$). A different
result is obtained comparing the extinction increment $\Delta$A$_V$
with the E$_{10\% dip}/$E$_{10\% average}$ ratio: The increment of
optical extinction is larger in those dips with small variations of the
10\% photon energy quantile with respect to the average X-ray
spectrum. The anticorrelation is significant based on a Spearman
rank correlation test.
The direct observation of increasing X-ray absorption during the
optical dips is important for two reasons. First, X-rays have an
important role in regulating disks evolution. Disk photoevaporation,
which is one of the main mechanisms responsible for the dissipation of
circumstellar disks \citep{HollenbachYJ2000,AlexanderCP2006MNRAS} can be
induced by incident X-ray photons, which ionize the gas, raising the
disk temperature up to $\sim$$10^4\,$K within 1$\,$AU from the central
star \citep{ErcolanoDRC2008ApJ}. The resulting high thermal pressure
launches a photoevaporation wind, which results in significant
mass loss from the disk. Additionally, the more X-ray photons
absorbed by the circumstellar disk, the larger the ionization fraction
in the disk, and the more efficient the coupling between disk and stellar
magnetic field, enhancing magneto-rotational instabilities
\citep{BalbusHawley1991}, and thus enhancing the radial transport of gas across
the disk. In this context, it is of particular importance to observe
directly that stellar X-rays can be efficiently absorbed by the
circumstellar material in the inner disk. To date, the only evidence of
interaction between energetic particles and protoplanetary disks is the observation
of fluorescent emission lines \citep{TsujimotoFGM2005ApJS}. Second, optical
and X-ray flux variability is observed to be correlated only in
stars with inner disks and/or actively accreting stars (Sect.\
\ref{corr_class} in this paper and \citealt{FlaccomioMFA2010}). This
correlation is interpreted as due to simultaneous occultation of
the stellar photosphere and corona by the circumstellar material. Our
study supports this hypothesis and provides further evidence of
increasing X-ray absorption during the occultation of the central star
by circumstellar material. \par
\subsection{Accretion properties in the stars with optical bursts}
\label{glob_burst_sec}
In Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst}, we analyze the stars showing
evidence of increasing soft X-ray emission during the optical bursts.
In Fig.~\ref{em_vs_kt_plot}, we investigate whether such a correlation exists
during all the optical bursts and in the X-ray spectra of all the
accretors, even when optical bursts are not observed. To this aim, we fit the X-ray spectra of all the not accreting stars (class~III
objects and the class~II objects with passive disks, see Sect.\
\ref{sample_sec}), and the time-resolved X-ray spectra observed in
accreting stars during the optical bursts and in intervals not
containing bursts, using 2T thermal plasma models. We calculate, then, the
ratio between the normalization of the soft and the hard components
(Norm.$_{soft}$/Norm.$_{hard}$) for each spectrum. The result is shown in Fig.
\ref{em_vs_kt_plot}, where accreting and non-accreting stars are
marked with different symbols, and only the results from statistically
significant fits are shown. Even though in Fig.~\ref{em_vs_kt_plot} we
plot the soft temperatures down to $\sim$0$\,$keV, recall
that {\em Chandra} is not sensitive to very soft X-ray
emission, and thus values of kT$_{soft}$ below $\sim$0.1$\,$keV must
not be fully trusted. The first result is that in both panels,
Norm.$_{soft}$/Norm.$_{hard}$ is typically larger in accreting
stars than in non-accreting stars.
A K-S test in both cases indicates that this difference
is significant. While in the bottom panel all the time resolved spectra
with Norm.$_{soft}$/Norm.$_{hard}$$\geq$500 have
kT$\leq$1$\,$keV, which can not be fully trusted, only
a small fraction of the time-revolved spectra during the bursts (top panel) have
kT$\leq$1$\,$keV.
This provides evidence for a larger emission measure of cold
plasma in accreting stars than in star with no accretion, and confirms the importance of the time-
resolved spectral analysis using the optical light curves as a template to isolate
the time intervals with optical bursts occurring. \par
Our study also shed some light on the geometry of accretion in the analyzed stars.
It is generally accepted that gas accretion from the inner region of
circumstellar disks is driven by stellar magnetic field.
Several magnetohydrodynamic models
\citep[e.g.][]{KulkarniRomanova2008,RomanovaUKL2013} show that a
stellar dipolar magnetic field inclined with respect to the rotation
axis produces two stable accretion streams from the inner region of
the disk, near the truncation radius, that impact the stellar surface
at near free-fall velocity. This is the ``stable accretion'' scenario,
in which the emission from the hot spots (from optical to soft X-rays)
is modulated by stellar rotation in a stable and periodic pattern
\citep{McKinneyTB2012,CemeljicSC2013}. \par
Other existing models \citep[i.e.,
][]{RomanovaUKL2012,KurosawaRomanova2013} show that accretion can also
occur in an unstable regime, when Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities
occurring at the disk-magnetosphere boundary result in short-lived
accretion streams falling on the stellar surface \citep[see
also][]{ColomboOPA2016arXiv}. In this case, the optical light curve is
dominated by random, short accretion bursts such as those analyzed
in Sect.\ \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst} and by \citet{StaufferCBA2014}, whose
typical duration is of a few hours, smaller than the rotation periods
of stars and thus not compatible with stable accretion streams. \par
In some of the stars analyzed in Sect. \ref{N$_H$_vs_burst}, i.e. those with an intense soft X-ray spectral component observed during bursts, we can measure the
temperature of the plasma responsible for the emission of soft X-rays
(kT$_{soft}$) during the bursts, which we assume to be associated with
the hot accretion spots. Table \ref{bursts_tab} shows the values
of kT$_{soft}$ and the properties of the accretion streams obtained in
these bursts, the resulting values of the pre-shock velocity and
free-fall radius, together with the free-fall velocity from infinity
and the known H$\alpha$ equivalent width. The free-fall radius is
omitted in those stars where the pre-shock velocity is not constrained
(i.e., when it is compatible with the free-fall velocity from
infinity).
\begin{table}
\caption{Accretion properties of the stars with soft X-ray emission during the optical bursts.}
\label{bursts_tab}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Star} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Interval} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{kT$_{soft}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{v$_{presh}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{R$_{FF}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{v$_{\infty}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{EW$_{H\alpha}$}\\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Mon-} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\#} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{keV} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{km/s} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{R$_{star}$} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{km/s} &
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\AA} \\
\hline
326 & 1 & $0.15_{-0.08}^{+0.10}$ & $355_{-113}^{+103}$ & & 394 & 27.9 \\
357 & 7 & $0.06_{-0.02}^{+0.01}$ & & & & \\
370 &2,4,7,10 & $0.16_{-0.04}^{+0.08}$ & $366_{-49 }^{+83} $ & $2.0_{-0.4}^{+2.3}$ & 512 & 113.2\\
474 & 1 & $0.66_{-0.35}^{+0.16}$ & $744_{-234}^{+85 }$ & & 423 & 104.7\\
474 & 6 & $0.25_{-0.09}^{+0.10}$ & $458_{-92 }^{+84 }$ & & 423 & 104.7\\
808 & 1,2,8 & $0.15_{-0.04}^{+0.06}$ & $351_{-47 }^{+69 }$ & $1.9_{-0.4}^{+2.0}$ & 519 & 50.2 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{7}{l}{Typically the co-rotation radius R$_{cor}$ is 5-10$\,$R$_{star}$ in T~Tauri stars.} \\
\multicolumn{7}{l}{In Mon-326 R$_{cor}$ is 12.3$\,$R$_{star}$} \\
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
In three cases, the soft temperature is about 0.15$\,$keV (Mon-326,
Mon-370, and Mon-808), with the highest soft temperatures observed in
Mon-474 and the lowest in Mon-357. The calculated pre-shock velocities
vary over a wide range, although being well constrained only in two
stars, Mon-370 and Mon-808. In these two cases, v$_{presh}$ is quite
similar (about 350-360$\,$km/s). In Mon-370 and Mon-808, also the
corresponding free-fall radii are reasonably well constrained, being
smaller than the typical co-rotation radii of T~Tauri stars (usually
ranging between 5 and 10$\,$R$_{star}$,
\citealp{HartmannCGD1998,ShuNSL2000}). Considering that we can safely
ignore the energy loss during accretion, and thus that our
estimate of the free-fall radii is not seriously overestimated, this
is compatible with the hypothesis that the small accretion bursts
observed in these stars and the resulting soft X-ray emission are
likely due to unstable accretion rather than stable
accretion streams from the co-rotation radius. \par
\begin{acknowledgements}
We thank the referee for his/hers comments and suggestions that helped us improving our manuscript. M. G. G., E. F., and G. M. acknowledge the grant PRIN-INAF 2012 (P.I. E. Flaccomio). This research has made use of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the CoRoT satellite. This research also made an extensive use of Xspec software and the NASA's Astrophysics Data System and Vizier databases, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.
\end{acknowledgements}
\newpage
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\bf Bibliografia}
\bibliographystyle{aa}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 8,760 |
Эмиль-Поль Шерриг (; род. 3 февраля 1947, Унтеремс, Швейцария) — швейцарский прелат и ватиканский дипломат. Титулярный архиепископ Воли с 4 мая 1996. Апостольский нунций в Бурунди с 4 мая 1996 по 8 июля 2000. Апостольский нунций на Багамских Островах, Гайане, Гренаде, Доминике, Сент-Люсии, Сент-Винсенте и Гренадинах, Тринидаде и Тобаго и Ямайке, а также апостольский делегат на Антильских островах с 8 июля 2000 по 22 мая 2004. Апостольский нунций в Антигуа и Барбуде, на Барбадосе и Суринаме с 20 января 2001 по 22 мая 2004. Апостольский нунций в Сент-Китсе и Невисе с 1 июня 2001 по 22 мая 2004. Апостольский нунций в Корее с 22 мая 2004 по 26 января 2008. Апостольский нунций в Монголии с 17 июня 2004 по 26 января 2008. Апостольский нунций в Дании, Апостольский нунций в Исландии, Норвегии, Финляндии и Швеции с 26 января 2008 по 5 января 2012. Апостольский нунций в Аргентине с 5 января 2012 по 13 сентября 2017. Апостольский нунций в Италии и Сан-Марино с 13 сентября 2017.
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Католические архиепископы
Апостольские нунции в Антигуа и Барбуде
Апостольские делегаты на Антильских островах
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Апостольские нунции в Сент-Люсии
Апостольские нунции в Сент-Винсенте и Гренадинах
Апостольские нунции в Сент-Китсе и Невисе
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Апостольские нунции на Ямайке | {
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Tommy Green lived with his parents in the East End of London. He was now twelve years old and had with the other boys in the neighbourhood stood and watched the dogfights in the skies above. After the onset of Autumn and night bombing there were no aircraft to be watched, but there were plenty of bomb sites for them to explore.
Tommy was though a little different to the other kids. His birth had been a difficult one for his mother – back then there was no National Health Service and for people such as his mother birthing took place at home with the assistance of grandmothers and friends and neighbours. Almost certainly he had been starved of oxygen as a result of the struggle his mother had when delivering him and as a result his brain was affected. Tommy just hadn't developed at the same rate as other kids of his age. Although he was now twelve he could hardly read or write, but he had a very open and friendly nature and was thus accepted by the neighbouring kids rather being picked on for being different as might have happened.
While Christmas 1939 had been fairly normal, this year he knew it was likely to be very different. Tommy still believed in Father Christmas and his parents hadn't wanted to risk upsetting him by telling him he didn't exist. Of course other kids had told him that, but Tommy simply didn't believe them – after all he had come last Christmas hadn't he? He was though afraid that Father Christmas would not come this year because it would be unsafe for him to do so. Not only was there the blackout which he had managed to get through last year, but now there were aeroplanes and bombs and anti-aircraft guns firing. What if Santa's sleigh was hit by one of their shells? Or perhaps he might be blinded by the glare of the searchlights and lose his way? It was a very troubled Tommy who went to bed that Christmas Eve.
Normally when the air raid sirens went off Tommy's parents would rush with him to the nearby community shelter. The sirens had been heard almost every night but that evening they didn't sound. Perhaps thought Tommy's parents and many others, the Germans had decided to have an unofficial truce for Christmas. But sometime in the evening Tommy woke hearing a noise outside. He wondered if it was Father Christmas and just had to take a peek, especially as he could see through the blackout blind covering his window the glow of a nearby searchlight. He got out of bed and went to lift the blind a little to peek out, but let go of the cord and it flew up to reveal the whole window. That would not have been so bad were it not that Tommy always slept with a little night light so now light was visible outside. He couldn't reach the cord to pull the blind back down and panicked when he hear a knocking at the front door and a voice yelling. He heard his father stumbling to open the door and then angry voices, after which he heard his father coming upstairs and into his room.
"What do you think you're doing Tommy? You know you're not supposed to touch the blind. Now we're showing light to any German pilot who may be up there."
"I'm sorry Daddy. I heard a noise and thought it was Father Christmas, so I just had so look. I'm sorry" said Tommy who was crying already.
"You'll be even more sorry when I've finished with you lad"
said his father who with no more ado picked Tommy up, sat down on the edge of the bed and laid Tommy across his knees. Tommy felt the back of his nightshirt being lifted up. He knew what was about to happen.
Tommy woke up in an unfamiliar bed. When he looked round he was in a large room in which were many other beds and walking up and down were ladies in strange dresses. One of them looked over and seeing he was awake came across.
"You had us worried Tommy you've been to sleep for a long time – so long you've almost missed Christmas Day. How are you feeling now? How is your arm?"
Tommy looked down at his arm which he saw was in plaster from the shoulder down to the wrist.
"You're in hospital. A bomb fell on your house. Fortunately the ARP men soon found you and you only seem to have a very badly broken arm and a bruised backside."
The nurse had been expecting the question and hoped that her response seemed truthful.
"They'll be along shortly. You should have another nap before they get here."
Slowly realisation dawned on him. His parents were dead and he would never see them again. What's more it was all his fault for letting the blind shoot up and show the light at which the bomb had been aimed. Tommy rolled over, buried his face into his pillow and sobbed his heart out until finally he was cried out and dropped off into an uneasy sleep again.
And then from his left he heard a sound that was rather like a cow mooing. He rolled over again and there standing on crutches by his bed was his mother with one of her legs in plaster and alongside her in a wheelchair was his father with both of his hands bandaged while another bandage covered the top of his head and the side of his face. His father once again made a mooing noise and in his bandaged hands he held the stuffed black and white cow that Tommy had always slept with for as long as he could remember ever since his father had won it at a fair. The cow, 'Daisy', was now more black and greyish brown than its original black and white and one ear was missing, but Tommy could recognise her and his Mum & Dad.
He pushed himself up in bed and a big smile it up his previously tear stained face.
"I thought I'd deaded you" he said.
"No son, it'll take more than a German bomb to kill off me an' your Mum."
"But it was all my fault for showing the light."
"Don't be silly Tommy. It were just coincidence – and….. I'm sorry for spanking you as hard as I did. That were wrong, but I were angry and I shouldn't have spanked you when I were angry. Does it still hurt?" added his Dad in a whisper.
"Not now you're here" replied Tommy and a few tears started to roll down his cheeks again. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,089 |
Q: Returning result set from another stored procedure Technical Environment: ASP.NET and SQL Server
I have a requirement to create a stored procedure which will call another stored procedure and return the output of other stored procedure.
For example storedprocedure1 should call storedprocedure2 and return that output.
Issue: how can get the result set from SQL Server using OUTPUT variable and loop through through the result set in asp.net? I know what to do in the asp.net but I am looking from SQL Server.
What I have written:
alter procedure storedprocedure1
@Hearing Varchar(50) output
AS
SET NOCOUNT ON;
declare @xid varchar(50);
DECLARE db_cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT WANTEDCOLUMN
FROM [X]
OPEN db_cursor
FETCH NEXT FROM db_cursor INTO @xid //loop through each xid
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
EXEC @HearingCursor = storedprocedure2 @xid;
END
CLOSE db_cursor
DEALLOCATE db_cursor;
What I want:
I need to loop through the result set and perform operations based on each value in asp.net. I cannot use cursor as output parameter in SQL Server as there is no matching parameter in asp.net.
A: Unless there are some requirements you are not including in your question, there's no reason to create another stored procedure just so you can use an output variable. Just fill a dataset with the results of the original stored procedure. Something like:
string sql = "EXEC sp_MyProcedure";
string connstr = @"data source=MySQLServer;initial catalog=MyDatabase;integrated security=true";
SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(sql, connstr);
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
da.Fill(ds);
return ds;
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 647 |
Media captionAngela Little: "She was always very very frightened"
The report shows that some of the most vulnerable patients, including frail and elderly people, are enduring harrowing ordeals when they leave hospital.
And that poor planning, co-ordination and communication between hospital staff and between health and social care services are failing patients, compromising their safety and dignity.
One patient, a woman in her late 90s, died in her granddaughter's arms shortly after being sent home from hospital in an ambulance, without a proper examination.
And a hospital transferred a distressed elderly woman to a nursing home in "a dishevelled state" with a tube (cannula) still in her arm.
One complaint to the ombudsman was from a family whose mother had been left in her home with no food, drink or bedding, unable to care for herself or get to the toilet.
Another was from a daughter whose frail mother, Pam, spent months in and out of hospital before her death.
Pam, born Alma Waller, was 80 when she died. In the months leading up to her death in 2012, she was sent home from hospital several times.
She lived alone and had Parkinson's disease and dementia. She was frail and unstable on her feet.
After initially being admitted to hospital following a fall, she was discharged and readmitted three times over a three-month period.
Her daughter, Angela Little, from Stevenage, says she still has nightmares about the poor care her mum received.
"She was an infirm old lady and the hospital still sent her home. The ambulance driver had to carry her in because she was so weak.
"I drove from my house, which is 40 minutes away, and I found this little old lady hunched in a chair shaking. She was absolutely terrified."
Angela says her mother had contemplated ending her own life because she was so distraught.
Pam was admitted to another hospital where she stayed until her death three weeks later.
Angela says: "I still can't believe what happened. Things need to change."
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) Julie Mellor said: "Health and social care leaders must work harder to uncover why 10 years of guidance to prevent unsafe discharge is not being followed, causing misery and distress for patients, families and carers."
The body that produces guidelines - the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - said its recommendations were clear and should be followed.
The Department of Health said the failings were unacceptable and it would ensure "lessons are learnt".
The PHSO investigated 221 complaints - an increase of over a third in the previous year. Over half of these were upheld or partly upheld.
A spokesman from NHS Improvement said patients should never be discharged from hospital without the appropriate safeguards in place.
But he said neither should patients remain stuck in hospital.
"Rather than frail elderly people staying in hospital longer than they need to, it is better to get patients home as quickly as possible and to assess them in their own homes rather than in a hospital - but this must be done with the right help and support in place."
Phil McCarvill from the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS providers and commissioners, said: "The experiences of the people in this report were unacceptable and we know that everyone in the NHS will take the findings seriously."
Ruth Isden, from charity Age UK, said: "It really is a mess and it's absolutely tragic for the older people and their families who're caught in the middle."
The charity Independent Age said: "The individual cases highlighted by this report are tragic in their own right, but they are also a sign of a health service under severe strain."
The Royal College of Nursing said it was hard for staff to consistently provide high quality, safe patient care without the right resources. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,056 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec::Intro}
Supernova remnants (i.e. remnants of Supernova explosions) are
commonly considered to be Cosmic particle accelerators. In this review
paper I will summarise experimental evidence, gathered through
$\gamma$-ray observations mainly in the VHE regime supporting this
notion (please note, that in the following $\gamma$-ray will be used
to stand for VHE $\gamma$-rays). Typically, SNRs were detected through
radio observations~\citep{Green}. Recent advances in the understanding
of these objects has been made through X-ray observations with
instruments such as ASCA, BeppoSax, XMM-Newton and Chandra and through
$\gamma$-ray observations with instruments such as HEGRA (High Energy
Gamma Ray Astronomy), and H.E.S.S.\ (High energy stereoscopic
system). Based on morphological properties, SNRs can be classified
into three broad categories: {\emph{shell-like}}, {\emph{plerionic}}
(also called Pulsar Wind Nebulae or Crab-like) connected to a Pulsar
and {\emph{composite}} (in which both, a shell and a Plerion are
present), the later often showing markedly different radio and X-ray
morphologies. For an excellent detailed review on plerionic SNRs, see
e.g.~\citet{GaenslerReview}.
SNRs are thought to be responsible for the acceleration of Cosmic rays
up to energies around the ``knee'' ($\sim 10^{15}$~eV) at which the
spectrum of Cosmic rays significantly hardens from $\sim 2.7$ to $\sim
3.2$. This statement is backed by experimental facts, as well as by
theoretical considerations. {\emph{Experimental evidence}} is lent
mainly by ({\bf 1}) X-ray observations of young shell-type SNRs such
as SN\,1006~\citep{SN1006ASCA}, and Cas~A~\citep{BeppoSaxCasA}, in
which sites dominated by hard non-thermal {\emph{X-ray synchrotron}}
emission were found, indicating an electron population extending up to
$\sim100$~TeV, far beyond thermal energies. ({\bf 2}) {\emph{Very high
energy (VHE) $\gamma$-ray}} observations ($> 100$~GeV) revealed sites
of non-thermal particle populations~\citep{HESSRXJ1713,
HESSRXJ1713_II, HESSRXJ1713_III}. Through theoretical considerations
is has been known for a long time that Supernova explosions release
just about the right amount of energy into their surrounding to
account for the energy budget of the Cosmic rays (assuming that they
convert $\sim 10\%$ of their energy into kinetic energy of the Cosmic
rays)~\citep{Ginzburg}. Furthermore well-established theoretical
models exists explaining how particles can be accelerated in Supernova
shock waves to energies approaching the {\emph{knee}}. In shell-type
SNRs particles are accelerated in the expanding shock waves through
diffusive shock (also called first order Fermi)
acceleration~\citep{Bell, BlandfordOstriker, Drury, Blandford, Jones,
MalkovDrury}. In plerionic SNRs particles are accelerated to
non-thermal energies in the termination shock between the relativistic
outflow of electrons from the pulsar surface and the outer
nebula. Predictions on the $\gamma$-ray visibility of SNRs (later
confirmed by H.E.S.S.\ $\gamma$-ray observations although there is
still an experimental ambiguity in the underlying particle population
resonsible for the $\gamma$-ray emission) were given
by~\citet{DrurySNRs}.
Since charged particles below the knee at $10^{15}$~eV are deflected
in ubiquitous magnetic fields on their way from the origin to us, we
have to turn to neutral messengers to reveal the acceleration sites
(the gyroradius of 1~TeV cosmic rays in a magnetic field of
$\mu$G-scale is of the order of 0.1~pc, much smaller than the
thickness of the Galaxy of 200--300~pc). Since neutrino detectors have
not yet proved to be sensitive enough to detect neutrinos from
astrophysical sources (apart from the Sun and the direct Supernova
explosion SN~1987A), observations in the radio, X-rays and
$\gamma$-ray wavebands are so far our best access to non-thermal
acceleration processes in SNRs. $\gamma$-rays (and neutrinos) are
produced in hadronic interactions with subsequent pionic decay and can
reveal the acceleration sites since they travel un-deflected from
their origin. However, $\gamma$-rays not only reveal the sites of
hadronic acceleration; they also act as a tracer for energetic
electrons that produce $\gamma$-rays via IC scattering off background
photon fields (such as star-light or the Cosmic microwave background
(CMBR)). An ambiguity or duality therefore exists in the responsible
radiating particle population in most cases when detecting
$\gamma$-rays from astrophysical objects.
In spite of this ambiguity the detection of $\gamma$-rays above $\sim$
1~GeV from SNRs gives us direct access to particle acceleration
processes and the advantage of $\gamma$-rays in comparison to other
wavebands is that these are not affected by dust obscuration, which is
particularly important for the population of SNRs located within the
Galactic plane. A large volumne of the Galaxy can thus be probed for
$\gamma$-ray emission from SNRs by observations through the Galactic
disk. If SNRs are indeed sites of particle acceleration, $\gamma$-ray
emission is expected and one of the puzzling aspects of previous
$\gamma$-ray observations of SNRs was the rather low level of emission
compared to model predictions~\citep{Buckley, HillasReview}.
The history of soft $\gamma$-ray (or hard X-ray) detection of SNRs
started with the detection of the Crab Nebula in 1964 with a
scintillation counter detector flown on a balloon launched from
Palestine, Texas~\citep{XraysCrab1964}. Today hard X-rays up to
100~keV have been detected from various SNRs both young shell-types
such as Cas~A~\citep{BeppoSaxCasA, BeppoSaxCasAII} and
SN~1006~\citep{RXTESN1006, BeppoSaxSN1006} and plerionic-types such as
the Vela-X PWN~\citep{BeppoSaxVelaPWN} and
MSH~15-5{\emph2}~\citep{ASCAMSH, RXTEMSH, BeppoSaxMSH1552,
IntegralMSH}. Thin X-ray filaments in young shell-type SNRs detected
with high-angular resolution instruments such as XMM-Newton and
Chandra point to regions with high-magnetic fields (up to 0.5 mG) in
which electrons rapidly lose energy through synchrotron
emission~\citep{ASCARXJ1713, ASCAVelaJr, ChandraSN1006, XMM1713}. In
higher energies $\gamma$-rays COMPTEL detected the radioactive
$^{44}$Ti-line at 1.157~MeV from the two shell-type SNRs
Cas~A~\citep{ComptelCasA} and RX\,J0852.0--4622 (Vela
Junior)~\citep{ComptelVelaJr}. However, it should be noted, that
higher sensitivity INTEGRAL observations provided a confirmation for
this detection for Cas~A, but could not detect this $^{44}$Ti-line in
RX\,J0852.0--4622. Therefore, these claims are still somewhat
controversial.
EGRET at energies above 100~MeV did not detect prominent young
shell-type SNRs such as Tycho, Kepler, Cas~A or SN~1006, noticed
however several intriguing spatial coincidences of unidentified
sources in the Galactic plane with individual prominent radio SNRs,
such as W\,28, and $\gamma$-Cygni~\citep{Dermer, Esposito,
Romero}. The combination of source confusion especially in the
Galactic plane, caused by the rather poor angular resolution of the
EGRET instrument and the ambiguity in existing counterparts prevented
individual identifications. However, a statistical assessment shows a
4-5$\sigma$ effect when trying to correlate the population of EGRET
unidentified sources with the population of radio
SNRs~\citep{Dermer}. Also plerionic SNRs have not been unambiguously
identified with EGRET sources, although again intriguing associations
of EGRET unidentified sources with prominent plerions such as
PSR\,B1706--44, and the Kookaburra complex
exist~\citep{EGRETPWN}. From a population point-of-view PWN are one of
the best candidates to account for low-latitude slowly varying
unidentified EGRET sources as proposed by
\citet{RobertsEGRET}. Lately, using VHE $\gamma$-ray source positions
in the Kookaburra region~\citep{HESSKooka} the re-analysis of EGRET
data provided strong evidence of correlation of the PWN detected in
this region with the confused unidentified EGRET source
3EG\,J1420--6038~\citep{ReimerKookaburra}. This new approach might
prove a useful template for connection future GLAST and VHE
$\gamma$-ray detections. All these possible associations of source
classes with unidentified EGRET sources will hopefully be tested
following the launch of the upcoming GLAST satellite in late 2007.
The history of VHE $\gamma$-ray (E$> 100~$GeV) detections of SNRs
started again with the detection of the Crab Nebula, the first object
to be reported in this waveband by the Whipple
collaboration~\citep{WhippleCrab}. Various claims of detections of
shell-type SNRs have been made before the advent of the H.E.S.S.\
telescope system. Cas~A was detected by HEGRA in a very deep ($\sim
200$ hours) exposure~\citep{HegraCasA}. Detections of
SN\,1006~\citep{Cangaroo_SN1006} and
RX\,J1713.7--3946~\citep{Cangaroo_RXJ1713} have been reported by the
CANGAROO collaboration. With the advent of the H.E.S.S.\ telescope
system, for the first time a number of Galactic SNRs, both shell-type
and plerionic in nature could be established. In the following I will
describe these populations of cosmic accelerators along with prospects
for Supernova remnant observations with the upcoming GLAST
satellite. The outline of this paper is as follows:
Section~\ref{sec::HESS_shell} provides a description of advances made
through the VHE $\gamma$-ray detections of shell-type Supernova
remnants, Section~\ref{sec::HESS_pwn} provides the corresponding
description for Pulsar Wind Nebulae. Section~\ref{sec::HESS_new}
describes Supernova remnants found in $\gamma$-rays and later
identified as Supernova remnants, while Section~\ref{sec::glast}
summarises prospects for Supernova remnant observations with the
upcoming GLAST satellite.
\section{Gamma-ray observations of shell-type SNRs}
\label{sec::HESS_shell}
By means of data taken with the H.E.S.S.\ telescope system during the
first few years of operation for the first time in VHE $\gamma$-ray
astronomy resolved images of shell-type SNRs above 100~GeV could be
taken. In particular the SNRs RX\,J1713.7--3946 and RX\,J0852.0--4622,
with diameters of $\sim 1^{\circ}$ and $\sim 2^{\circ}$ respectively
could be resolved with unprecedented detail in this energy band. On
the other hand, SN\,1006, one of the SNRs most expected to emit
$\gamma$-rays in the energy band (due to the strong non-thermal X-ray
emission from the rims) was not detected in deep H.E.S.S.\
observations~\citep{HESSSN1006}. The upper limit derived by this
observations turned out to be an order of magnitude below the
previously reported CANGAROO detection. A reanalysis of the CANGAROO
data along with newer data from the CANGAROO-III detector is
consistent with the H.E.S.S.\ upper
limits~\citep{Cangaroo_SN1006_II}. Therefore in the following the
H.E.S.S.\ upper limits will be used in the discussion of $\gamma$-ray
emission from SN\,1006. Since several papers on both
RX\,J1713.7--3946~\citep{HESSRXJ1713, HESSRXJ1713_II, HESSRXJ1713_III}
and RX\,J0852.0--4622~\citep{HESSRXJ0852, HESSRXJ0852_II} have been
published by the H.E.S.S.\ collaboration, the main focus of this
review will lie on similarities and differences between the two
objects with the addition of comparisons to SN\,1006 as the most
prominent non-detected SNR where appropriate.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figure1Combined}
\caption{Acceptance-corrected smoothed excess maps of the
$3.5^{\circ}\ \times 3.5^{\circ}$ fov surrounding the two
prominent H.E.S.S.\ Supernova remnants RX\,J1713.7--3946 (2004 and
2005 data)~\citep{HESSRXJ1713_III} and RX\,J0852.0--4622 (2005
dataset)~\citep{MarianneBarcelona, HESSRXJ0852_II} and non-detected
SN\,1006 (2004 dataset with VLA radio contours in
white)~\citep{HESSSN1006}. The sky-regions shown are of similar
size, indicating the large extent (2$^{\circ}$ diameter) of
RX\,J0852.0--4622. }
\label{fig::shell_morphology}
\end{figure*}
Figure~\ref{fig::shell_morphology} shows $\gamma$-ray excess maps for
RX\,J1713.7--3946, RX\,J0852.0--4622, and SN\,1006. Both $\gamma$-ray
emitting objects show a shell-like structure with a surprising
resemblance of their respective X-ray morphology (the correlation
coefficients between $\gamma$-ray and X-ray counts are $\sim
60\%-80\%$). For both objects the X-ray emission is completely
dominated by non-thermal X-ray emission without traces of line
emission, exhibiting small filamentary structures that are interpreted
as zones where the magnetic field is high ($\sim 50\mu$G) such that
electrons rapidly lose energy through synchrotron emission in these
areas~\citep{XMM1713, Chandra1713, AschenbachVelaJr, XMMVelaJr}. Both
objects appear rather faint in radio with typical fluxes below or in
the several tenth of Jansky-regime for the whole shell, certainly
lower than what would be expected from equipartition
arguments~\citep{Lazendic}. The distance to both objects is somewhat
uncertain, for RX\,J1713.7--3946 it seems that a distance of $\sim
1$kpc is preferred from the column density inferred from X-ray
data. This distance would make RX\,J1713.7--3946 most likely the
remnant of the historical Supernova event of AD393. For
RX\,J0852.0--4622 distance estimates range from as close as the Vela
pulsar ($\sim 250$pc) to as far as the Vela Molecular Ridge ($\sim
1$kpc). The age ranges from $\sim 500$ years in the close case to
$\sim 5000$ years in the far case. Morphologically their $\gamma$-ray
emission, in particular the width of the shells is rather
different. The apparent width of the shell for RX\,J1713.7--3946
comprises 45\% of the radius of the SNR, while the for
RX\,J0852.0--4622 it approximates to 20\% of the radius. There is no
apparent correlation between the dense molecular material surrounding
RX\,J1713.7--3946 as measured by the NANTEN telescope and the VHE
$\gamma$-ray emission as measured by H.E.S.S., but in fact, assuming a
typical energy of $1\times 10^{50}$ ergs in accelerated protons, the
density needed to explain the $\gamma$-ray flux through hadronic
interactions is only 1~cm$^{-3}$.
SN\,1006 is somewhat distinct in its multi-frequency picture in that
its surface brightness is higher in radio ($\sim 100$
Jy)~\citep{RadioSN1006, RadioSN1006_II} showing a pronounced
shell-like structure. The X-ray emission, especially in the shell is
dominated by non-thermal emission up to $\sim 10$keV. SN\,1006 was not
detected in a deep (1000~ksec) INTEGRAL exposure above
20~keV~\citep{IntegralSN1006} and was also not detected in sensitive
H.E.S.S.\ observations~\citep{HESSSN1006}. The density surrounding the
source was estimated from X-ray as well as optical observations and
values as low as n$= 0.05$ cm$^{-3}$ have been invoked to explain the
apparent absence of $\gamma$-ray emission in a hadronic scenario. From
the H.E.S.S.\ non-detection assuming a leptonic $\gamma$-ray emission
scenario on the CMBR a lower limit on the post-shock magnetic field of
$B > 25\mu$G can be derived~\citep{HESSSN1006}. Higher values of the
magnetic field in excess of 40$\mu$G have been derived from X-ray
observation and application of diffusive shock acceleration scenarios,
so the lower limit on the magnetic field is not in contradiction to
these values.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{Figure2}
\caption{Spectral energy distribution for the Supernova remnants
RX\,J1713.7--3946 (light red), RX\,J0852.0--4622 (pink), SN\,1006
(blue). Also shown is a hadronic model (dotted green) and a
time-dependent leptonic one-zone model (dashed grey: IC emission,
solid grey: synchrotron emission). The parameters for this model
are: B-Field: 9$\mu$G, age: 1.7 kYears, Electron photon index: 2.1,
Electron Cutoff: 80 TeV.}
\label{fig::shell_spectra}
\end{figure*}
Comparing the energy spectra of the two $\gamma$-ray detected SNRs,
strong similarities can be made out. The spectral energy distribution
(SED) for the three shell-type SNRs discussed here is shown in
Figure~\ref{fig::shell_spectra} along with model spectra, showing
typical leptonic and hadronic $\gamma$-ray emission models. As can be
seen from this plot RX\,J1713.7--3946 and RX\,J0852.0--4622 show a
remarkably similar $\gamma$-ray energy spectrum with a rather flat
$E^{-2}$-type distribution at lower energies with a deviation from
this power-law at higher energies. The flat spectrum at lower energies
has advocated claims that the $\gamma$-rays might be generated by
pionic decays rather than Inverse Compton
scattering~\citep{HESSRXJ1713_II, HESSRXJ1713_III}. However,
\citet{PorterMoskalenko} claim that the data can be well fitted in
terms of a leptonic model when applying an unbroken electron spectrum
along with the Galactic radiation fields. Therefore, at the moment,
no strong conclusions can be drawn from the spectral shape on the
particle population responsible for the $\gamma$-ray emission. The
upcoming GLAST satellite, measuring in the energy range between 30~MeV
and 300~GeV might be able to distinguish between hadronic and leptonic
$\gamma$-ray production mechanisms. Also interesting to note is that
the H.E.S.S.\ $\gamma$-ray upper limit for SN\,1006 is more than an
order of magnitude below these $\gamma$-ray detections and therefore
starts to be rather constraining for the values of the magnetic field
(in a leptonic scenario) or the ambient matter density (in a hadronic
scenario).
These first unambiguous detections of individual shell-type SNRs
allowed for important advances in the understanding $\gamma$-ray
emission from these objects. However, the open question remains what
differentiates non-detected SNRs such as SN\,1006 from prominent
$\gamma$-ray emitters such as RX\,J1713.7--3946.
\section{Gamma-ray observations of Pulsar Wind Nebulae}
\label{sec::HESS_pwn}
Pulsar wind nebulae (PWN) or Plerions are objects powered by a
relativistic particle outflow (electrons and positrons) from a central
source -- a pulsar. This pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star
generated in the Supernova event. The wind of relativistic particles
flows freely out until the outflow pressure is balanced by that of the
surrounding medium. At that point a standing termination shock is
formed at which particles are accelerated~\citep{KennelCoroniti,
AhaAtoKif97}. The existence of electrons accelerated to energies
$>100$~TeV in such PWN has been established by X-ray observations of
synchrotron emission, e.g. in the Crab nebula~\citep{ChandraCrab}. VHE
$\gamma$-rays are generated in PWN from the high-energy electrons by
non-thermal bremsstrahlung or inverse Compton (IC) scattering on
photon target fields, such as the cosmic microwave background (CMBR)
or star-light.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figure3}
\caption{Acceptance-corrected smoothed excess maps of
MSH--15--5\emph{2} (top left)~\citep{HESSMSH}, the Kookaburra region
showing the $\gamma$-ray emission coincident with the two
non-thermal wings of the Kookaburra (top
right)~\citep{HESSKookaburra}, HESS\,J1825--137 (bottom
left)~\citep{HESS1825, HESS1825_II} and Vela~X (bottom
right)~\citep{HESSVelaX}. Also shown are the energetic pulsars that
are thought to power the PWNe.}
\label{fig::pwn_morphology}
\end{figure*}
Apart from the Crab Nebula, no individual PWNe have been unambiguously
associated with EGRET sources, although several unidentified EGRET
sources are located in close proximity to prominent PWN, such as in
the Kookaburra region, or MSH--15--5\emph{2}. PWN are however one
candidate for the population of slowly varying low-latitude
unidentified sources. GLAST will shed more light on this population
and possibly establish PWN as emitters in the MeV to GeV range. In VHE
$\gamma$-rays PWN make up the majority of the identified Galactic
sources detected so far~\citep{FunkBarcelona, YvesBarcelona}. Apart
from the Crab Nebula (the brightest steady VHE $\gamma$-ray source)
several prominent PWN were identified in VHE $\gamma$-rays in the last
two years. These detections include
MSH--15--5\emph{2}~\citep{HESSMSH}, Vela~X~\citep{HESSVelaX}, the two
sources in the Kookaburra region~\citep{HESSKookaburra} and lately
HESS\,J1825--137~\citep{HESS1825, HESS1825_II}. VHE $\gamma$-ray
emission from PWN comes in various disguises as shown in
Figure~\ref{fig::pwn_morphology}: These include a) point-like emission
such as from the Crab Nebula~\citep{HESSCrab} and from the composite
SNR G\,0.9+0.1, where the $\gamma$-ray emission was shown to originate
from the central PWN~\citep{HESSG0.9}, b) emission tracing the X-ray
contours around a central pulsar such as in MSH--15-5\emph{2} or c)
asymmetrically extending to one side and tracing the X-ray contours
such as in Vela~X and finally d) the emerging new class of offset PWN
exemplified by HESS\,J1825--137 where the $\gamma$-ray emission shows
a similar morphology to the X-ray emission but on a much larger
scale~\citep{HESS1825_II}. Calculating the efficiency of the energetic
pulsars powering the PWN that is necessary to account for the VHE
$\gamma$-ray luminosity, values between 0.02\% (Crab Nebula) and 7.5\%
(HESS\,J1825--137) of the spin-down luminosity are found. The
broadband SEDs of the VHE $\gamma$-ray PWN can typically be well
described by leptonic models, although claims have been made for a
hadronic component at the high-energy end of the
spectrum~\citep{HornsHadronicPWN}. Vela~X is the first VHE
$\gamma$-ray source in which the peak in the Inverse Compton energy
flux has been detected within the H.E.S.S.\ energy
range~\citep{HESSVelaX}. Figure~\ref{fig::pwn_spectra} shows, that
while the ranges of $\gamma$-ray fluxes for the detected PWN is rather
small, the differences in the X-ray energy fluxes span a large
range. This might be alluded to largely different magnetic fields, to
different angular scales on which the X-ray emission has been measured
or simply to the fact, that different populations of electrons are
responsible for the X-ray and the $\gamma$-ray emission.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{Figure4}
\caption{Spectral energy distribution for the PWNe in the Kookaburra
region (K3 and Rabbit) (red), MSH--15-5{\emph2} (turquoise), Vela~X
(blue), and HESS\,J1825--137 (grey). The similar energy flux for the
$\gamma$-ray emission in comparison to the vastly different energy
flux for the X-ray emission is apparent.}
\label{fig::pwn_spectra}
\end{figure*}
The most prominent example of the new class of {\emph{offset PWN}} is
HESS\,J1825--137. This object can serve as a template for a whole new
class of $\gamma$-ray PWN in which a) the $\gamma$-ray emission is
shifted away from the pulsar, possibly due to dense material on one
side that prevents an isotropic expansion of the PWN and b) the size
of the VHE $\gamma$-ray PWN is on a much larger scale ($\sim
1^{\circ}$) than the X-ray PWN ($\sim 1'$)~\citep{XMM1825}.
Concerning the offset morphology, asymmetric reverse shock
interactions were first proposed to explain the offset morphology of
the Vela~X PWN based on hydro-dynamical simulations
by~\citet{Blondin}. The different sizes for the $\gamma$-ray and X-ray
PWNe can be explained by the difference in the synchrotron cooling
lifetimes of the (higher energy) X-ray emitting and the (lower energy)
IC-$\gamma$-ray emitting electrons. The $\gamma$-ray sources that can
be explained in this framework are typically extended, their emission
region overlaps with energetic pulsars (energetic enough to explain
the $\gamma$-ray flux by their spindown power) and very importantly
also show evidence for an X-ray PWN. So far only Vela~X and
HESS\,J1825--137 match this picture, several other unidentified VHE
$\gamma$-ray sources have been proposed to be offset PWN, but all
these cases lack the detection of an X-ray PWN.
\section{New Supernova remnants found in VHE $\gamma$-rays}
\label{sec::HESS_new}
Originally Supernova remnants have been detected by means of radio
observation sensitive to synchrotron emission in magnetic
fields. Radio observations are particularly suited to detect Supernova
remnants in the inner Galaxy since they are insensitive to the
prevailing dust emission within the Galactic plane. The same holds for
hard X-ray emission and is particularly true for $\gamma$-rays. A
survey of the Galaxy in the $\gamma$-ray regime proved to be a good
means to detect new $\gamma$-ray SNRs, that are inconspicuous in other
wavebands. H.E.S.S.\ observations of the inner part of the Galactic
plane revealed $\sim 20$ new $\gamma$-ray sources~\citep{HESSScan,
HESSScanII, FunkBarcelona}. While some could be identified at other
wavebands, such as the Supernova remnants described in the previous
sections or the microquasar LS\,5039~\citep{HESSLS5039,
HESSLS5039_II}, most objects were left unidentified following their
detection. A programme of detailed MWL studies using existing radio
and X-ray facilities is underway to establish positional counterparts
of the $\gamma$-ray sources.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.99\textwidth]{Figure5}
\caption{Comparison of radio, and X-ray data of
HESS\,J1813--178. {\bf Left:} XMM-Newton counts map above 4.5~keV of
the region surrounding HESS\,J1813--178 (colour contours) smoothed
with a Gaussian kernel of width 0.002$^{\circ}$. The extended tail
towards the north-east is visible in this figure. Overlaid is the
20~cm shell-like emission (white contours) as detected by the
VLA~\citep{Brogan1813}. Also shown are the positional contours of
the best fit position of HESS\,J1813--178 (dashed circles correspond
to the 1, 2, and 3$\sigma$ positional confidence contours) as given
in~\citet{HESSScanII}. {\bf Right:} Slice through the emission in
radio and X-rays as plotted on the left hand side. The box in which
the slices were determined is also given in the left panel (white
box). The X-ray slice shows the compact core with the slice towards
the north-east, whereas the radio slice shows the shell-like
structure of the emission.}
\label{fig::new_1813}
\end{figure*}
A particularly interesting object found in the survey of the Galactic
plane is HESS\,J1813--178. At first flagged
unidentified~\citep{HESSScan}, it was quickly found to be positionally
coincident with: a) A previously unpublished archival faint radio
(VLA) source (20 cm) showing a shell-like
morphology~\citep{Brogan1813} b) a previously unpublished archival
bright X-ray ASCA source (2--10 keV)~\citep{Brogan1813}, and c) a hard
X-ray INTEGRAL source 10--100 keV~\citep{Ubertini1813}. H.E.S.S., ASCA
as well as INTEGRAL lacked the spatial resolution to resolve the
object. The VLA radio source showed a shell-like morphology,
suggesting that the VHE $\gamma$-ray emission originates in the shell
of a Supernova Remnant. However, in a 30~ksec XMM-Newton X-ray
observation non-thermal synchrotron emission was found not from a
shell, but rather from an object embedded within the shell with a
faint tail towards the north-east (see Figure~\ref{fig::new_1813})
resembling in its shape a PWN~\citep{Funk1813}. This detection reveals
that HESS\,J1813--178 is connected to a composite SNR similar to
e.g. the $\gamma$-ray source G0.9+0.1~\citep{HESSG0.9}. In
HESS\,J1813--178 for the first time, an SNR initially detected in VHE
$\gamma$-rays and subsequently confirmed with superior angular
resolution radio and X-ray data. This detection shows, that
$\gamma$-ray observations especially in the Galactic plane are well
suited to detect SNR, that are otherwise hard to detect due to
obscuration and dust absorption. Other objects tentatively connected
to shell-type or composite SNRs are
HESS\,J1640--465~\citep{HESSScanII, Funk1640}, and
HESS\,J1834--087~\citep{HESSScanII, FunkBarcelona}.
\section{Summary and Prospects for GLAST}
\label{sec::glast}
The upcoming GLAST satellite, in its energy range between 30~MeV and
300~GeV the successor to EGRET will provide a unique tool for studying
Supernova remnants. Especially in crowded regions in the Galactic
plane dominated by diffuse emission, the improved angular resolution
of the instrument in comparison to EGRET will be important for
disentangling source confusion and identification of counterparts. As
obvious from Figure~\ref{fig::shell_spectra}, GLAST will provide
spectral measurements in an energy regime in which differences between
hadronic and leptonic production $\gamma$-ray production mechanisms
are significant. Thus GLAST might finally disentangle whether the
$\gamma$-ray emission detected by H.E.S.S.\ is in fact the first
direct evidence of accelerated hadrons in shell-type SNRs, a question
that directly relates to the origin of cosmic rays. GLAST will provide
a highly even sky-coverage on long timescales and therefore population
studies of SNRs will be possible. Since EGRET is thought to have just
not been sensitive enough to single out individual PWNe and enable us
to conclude about their population, it is expected that these objects
will appear as a source classin the GLAST sky. Population studies of
SNRs provides information not only on individual objects but on
spatial-statistical aspects that can be used to understand the
transition of source populations through the regime of GeV-cutoffs as
already evident in numerous EGRET sources. Already now SNRs are an
established source class in VHE $\gamma$-ray astronomy. Observations
in this wavebands provide an important tool to understand the
acceleration processes within these Galactic accelerators.
\section{Acknowledgements}
The author would like to acknowledge the support of their host
institutions, and additionally support from the German Ministry for
Education and Research (BMBF) and from the Department of energy (DOE).
The author would like to thank the whole H.E.S.S.\ collaboration for
their support, COSPAR for the financial support, the unknown
referee(s) for their valuable comments, and finally the organisers of
the session E1.4 J.Vink and P.~O. Slane for the invitation to the
conference.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 3,668 |
\section{Introduction}
Recently, the intercalation of alkali metal into polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to synthesize the new electronic materials has been an intriguing topic in condensed matter physics and material science fields.
In 2010, potassium-doped picene (C$_{22}$H$_{14}$) was found to have a superconducting phase with the transition temperature (T$_c$) of 18 Kelvin.\cite{Mitsuhashi2010} Since then, other aromatic hydrocarbons, such as phenanthrene, coronene, dibenzopentacene, chrysene, pentacene, tetracene and anthracene
were adopted to synthesize the samples for exploring the superconductivity. \cite{Kubozono2016}
These molecular solids are all condensed aromatic compounds with some common features.
In a molecule the benzene rings are fused together along a zigzag or straight line, and
in the crystal the molecules are arranged in a herringbone pattern to form a molecular layer;
the interstitial space in molecular layer is large enough to accommodate the metal dopant.
The detailed atomic structure of metal-doped aromatics is the key factor to understand the electronic and magnetic properties, but it is difficult to be determined in experiments because of their degradation in air and the low sample quality. \cite{Wang2012, Artioli2014, Kubozono2016, Mitsuhashi2010, Kubozono2011, Xue2012}
The theoretical simulation is one of the important research approaches for exploring the structural and electronic properties of these new metal-doped aromatic hydrocarbons, and lots of significant results have been obtained. \cite{Kosugi2011, DeAndres2011a, DeAndres2011, Kubozono2011, Giovannetti2011, Huang2012, Ruff2013, Naghavi2013a, Naghavi2014, Yan2013, Yan2014, Yan2016a,Yan2016, Wang2017c}
For example, the dopants are intercalated in the intralayer space instead of interlayer space in molecular crystal;
the electrons are transferred from the doped metal to molecule and the charge is delocalized over the the whole organic crystal by the $\pi$ molecular orbitals;
the energy band group from the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) or LUMO + 1 plays an important role in electronic behaviour around Fermi energy.
These electronic properties are the vital prerequisites for us to understand the mechanism of step-like magnetization transition possibly related to superconductivity in metal-doped aromatic hydrocarbons.
$p$-terphenyl crystal is another aromatic hydrocarbon different from picene and phenanthrene crystals, in which the phenyl rings of molecule are connected by single C-C bond rather than fused together. Recently, potassium-doped $p$-terphenyl (PTP) was reported to have a surprising superconducting phases with the transition temperatures up to 120 Kalvin. \cite{Wang2017a}
Soon after that, the measured photoemission spectra of K-doped terphenyl showed that a low energy gap can persist to 120 K which most likely originated from electron pairing.\cite{Li2017}
The temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility measured for K-doped terphenyl and quaterphenyl displayed the step-like transition at about 125 K.\cite{Liu2017}
The discoveries have great scientific significance because the transition temperature of 123 Kalvin is so high.
But, due to the low quality samples of K-doped terphenyl, the detailed crystal structures and the stoichiometric compositions are not clear in experiment.
A recent theoretical work reported by Prof. Zhong proposes that K$_x$PTP at $x$ = 2.5 is most stable.\cite{Zhong2018}
Different from Zhong's conclusion, we emphasize that K$_2$PTP is the most typical product for K-doped terphenyl compounds.
We have performed the structural and electronic properties calculations of K-doped terphenyl.
Our results demonstrate that the stoichiometry ratio of K and molecule in K-doped PTP compounds is 2:1, which accords with the bipolaron occurrence based on the Raman spectra analysis in experiment.\cite{Wang2017a}
The K$_2$-F phase of K$_2$PTP with P2$_1$2$_1$2$_1$ group symmetry is found to be the most appropriate configuration,
the ground state of which is semiconducting with a energy band gap of 0.3 eV.
Besides, it is noteworthy that the K$_2$-F phase is similar to Cs$_2$phenanthrene in molecular layer arrangement and crystalline symmetry, measured in a recent experiment.\cite{Romero2017}
\section{Computational details}
In our calculations, the plane wave basis sets and pseudopotential method were used. The generalized gradient approximation
(GGA) with Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) formula was adopted for the exchange-correlation potentials. \cite{PhysRevLett.77.3865}
The projector augmented-wave (PAW) pseudopotential for C, H and K elements are from the subfolder C$\_s$, H$\_s$ and K$\_{sv}$ in the pseudopotential package potpaw$\_$PBE.52 supplied by Vienna Ab initio simulation package (VASP) website. \cite{PhysRevB.47.558}
A mesh of $4\times 4\times 4$ k-points was used for the relaxation of the lattice parameters and the internal atomic positions, and $8\times 8\times 6$ k-point mesh was used for the DOS calculations.
The plane wave basis cutoff is 500 eV, and the convergence thresholds of the total energy, force on atom and pressure on cell are 10$^{-5}$ eV, 0.005 eV/\AA ~and 0.1 KBar respectively.
The van der Waals (vdW) interaction is included in our calculations,
and the van de Waals functional we used is the vdW-DF2 scheme, proposed by Langreth and Lundqvist {\it et al}.
\cite{PhysRevLett.92.246401}
\section{Results and Analysis}
PTP crystalizes in the space group P2$_1$/a.
In pristine crystal, the PTP molecules form a herringbone structure in a molecular layer, and the molecule layers are stacked along the $c$ axis direction.
In order to inspect the applicability of the C and H pseudopotentials
and the parameters selected in our calculations,
we first simulated the crystal structure of pristine $p$-terphenyl.
The optimized lattice parameters ($a = 8.106$ \AA, $b = 5.613$ \AA, $c =13.613$ \AA ~and $\beta =92.02 ^{\circ}$) have a good agreement with the experimental ones ($a = 7.945 $ \AA, $b = 5.581 $ \AA, $c = 13.628 $ \AA ~and $\beta = 92.73 ^{\circ}$).
The consistency is a reliable basis for further exploring the structure of K-doped PTP.
\subsection{Analysis of K dopant positions in K$_x$PTP}
In a molecular layer, the molecule arrangement with a herringbone pattern leaves large interstitial spaces among molecules. One space is enclosed by four neighbor molecules and named as a hole in this paper, shown in Fig. \ref{structure-1}.
The metal atoms can be inserted into these holes and interact with the molecules to stabilize the doped molecular crystal.
More specifically, the K atom positions in the hole can sit above the carbon ring or close to the single C-C bond between two rings of terphenyl molecule.
The length of an interstitial hole is about 14 \AA, and the K-K bond length in bulk potassium metal is 4.54 \AA, so the maximum number of K atoms aligned in a line along the hole is three. Or else, the repulsion between K atoms will decrease the stability of K$_x$terphenyl system.
Under such constraint, the doping schemes become simple.
One unit cell of pristine terphenyl has two holes averagely.
Usually, K atoms are uniformly distributed in each of two holes. Another case is that one of two hole is filled by K atom and the other is empty, which is mentioned in Ref. \citenum{Zhong2018}.
The interlayer space between two adjacent molecular layers is another possible region to accommodate the dopants.
However, previous studies have proved that dopants do not favor the interlayer positions,\cite{Kosugi2011, Yan2016}
because the metal dopants are repelled by the H atoms at the end of PTP molecules.
Hence, in what follows, K atoms are placed in the intralayer holes with various configurations to build the initial structures, then the atom positions and lattice parameters are relaxed to reach the optimized ones.
This procedure is widely adopted in previous works to explore the structures of metal intercalated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.\cite{Kosugi2011,DeAndres2011a,DeAndres2011,Yan2013}
In addition, the arrangement pattern of molecular layers can affect the interaction between two adjacent layers in K-doped terphenyl compounds. Inspired by the structures of K$_2$picene and K$_2$pentacene reported in experiment,\cite{Romero2017} we build two structural phases of K$_2$PTP with P2$_1$2$_1$2$_1$ and P2$_1$/c group symmetry to examine the influence of interlayer alignment on the system stability.
\subsection{Crystal structure of K$_x$PTP with K dopants in intralayer interstitial space}
Although the K metal and pristine PTP are mixed in the stoichiometry ratio of 3:1 in experiment,
the ratio of K-doped terphenyl is not known because of the KH generation in experiment.\cite{Zhong2018, Romero2017}
In fact, the real chemical composition and the exact structure of K-doped aromatic hydrocarbons are always the bottleneck problem in the research field.
In order to explore the stable structure and the reasonable ratio of K atom and terphenyl molecule, several $x$ values are adopted to perform the calculations of K$_x$PTP compounds.
\subsubsection{K$_1$PTP}
The initial structure of K$_x$PTP is based on the pristine PTP structure, which unit cell contains two holes.
Two K atoms are inserted into the two holes with various initial positions to form the crystal cell of K$_1$PTP, and
after full relaxation three optimized structures are obtained, named as K$_1$-A, K$_1$-B and K$_1$-C shown in Fig.\ref{structure-1}.
The lattice parameters for three structural phases of K$_1$PTP, K$_1$-A, K$_1$-B and K$_1$-C, are listed in Table \ref{opti-latt}.
Among three K$_1$PTP phases, K$_1$-A has the lowest energy, which is 0.18 eV and 0.70 eV lower than the total energies of K$_1$-B and K$_1$-C.
Therefore, for K$_1$PTP, K$_1$-A is the most stable structure with two K atoms in the same hole,
which configuration is similar to the La-doped phenanthrene reported in previous works. \cite{Naghavi2013,Yan2013}
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fig1-K1.eps}
\caption{
The crystal structures of three structural phases for K$_1$PTP. The side views along $b$ axis (top panel) and the front views along $c$ axis (bottom panel) are shown in (a), (b) and (c) for the unit cells of K$_1$-A, K$_1$-B and K$_1$-C, respectively. Their unit cells are all composed of two molecules and two K atoms. Large spheres represent K atoms. One interstitial space accommodating K atoms is named as a hole.
} \label{structure-1}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{K$_2$PTP}
By adding two K atoms into the unit cell of the K$_1$PTP phases and doing the full relaxations,
two structural phases of K$_2$PTP are obtained, shown in Fig. \ref{structure-2}(a) and (b).
Four K atoms in K$_2$-A phase are all near the single C-C bonds, but in K$_2$-B phase there are two K dopants close to phenyl rings at the end of PTP molecule.
The K$_2$-A energy per unit cell is 0.04 eV lower than the K$_2$-B energy,
thus the K$_2$-A phase is more reasonable than K$_2$-B.
The structural character of K$_2$-A is that four K atoms in a cell happen to fill in four sites near the single C-C bonds.
We also examine the K doping effect on the length of single C-C bond between two phenyl rings of PTP molecule,
the single C-C bond length in K-doped PTP crystal is reduced from 1.495 \AA~ in pristine crystal to 1.438 \AA.
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.50cm]{fig2-K2.eps}
\caption{
Crystal structures of K2-A and K$_2$-B phases for K$_2$PHA and K$_{1.5}$-A phase for K$_{1.5}$PHA. (a), K$_2$-A phase; (b), K$_2$-B phase; (c), K$_{1.5}$-A phase . Large spheres represent K atoms.} \label{structure-2}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\begin{table}
\caption{The lattice parameters for various phases of K$_x$PHA with x= 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3.}
\label{opti-latt}
\begin{tabular}{lllllll}
\hline
phases & a & b & c &$\alpha$ &$\beta$ & $\gamma$ \\
\hline
K$_1$-A & 7.76 & 6.48 & 13.22 & 89.3 & 90.9 & 88.8 \\
K$_1$-B & 7.33 & 6.82 & 13.40 & 90.0 & 85.7 & 90.0 \\
K$_1$-C & 8.49 & 6.03 & 12.97 & 90.0 & 92.5 & 90.0 \\
& & & & & & \\
K$_2$-A & 9.09 & 6.31 & 12.65 & 90.0 & 93.7 & 90.0 \\
K$_2$-B & 7.39 & 7.14 & 13.57 & 90.0 & 83.5 & 90.0 \\
K$_2$-C & 9.13 & 6.17 & 13.40 & 83.3 & 91.1 & 94.8 \\
K$_2$-D & 10.15 & 10.75 & 13.90 & 90.0 & 97.3 & 90.0 \\
K$_2$-E & 9.00 & 6.33 & 25.41 & 90.0 & 92.7 & 90.0 \\
K$_2$-F & 9.19 & 6.37 & 24.36 & 90.0 & 90 & 90.0 \\
K$_{1.5}$-A & 8.60 & 6.37 & 12.85 & 90.6 & 92.3 & 90.9 \\
& & & & & & \\
K$_3$-A & 7.44 & 7.48 & 14.42 & 90.0 & 76.7 & 90.0 \\
K$_3$-B & 7.07 & 7.09 & 18.88 & 90.0 & 77.6 & 90.0 \\
K$_{2.5}$-A & 7.26 & 7.28 & 14.44 & 89.9 & 76.8 & 90.1 \\
K$_{2.5}$-B & 9.06 & 6.28 & 14.61 & 83.2 & 106.5 & 99.3 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\subsubsection{K$_3$PTP}
For K$_3$PTP, we present two optimized configurations, marked as K$_3$-A and K$_3$-B phases shown in Fig. \ref{structure-3}(a) and (b).
The optimized lattice parameters for these two structural phases are listed in Table \ref{opti-latt}.
In the unit cell of K$_3$-A phase, six K atoms are uniformly distributed in the intralayer region. Because the repulsion among K atoms, the K atoms are close to phenyl rings, instead of single C-C bonds.
K$_3$-B structure is derived from K$_2$-A by adding two K atoms in interlayer region in the elongated cell.
It is noted that the energy of K$_3$-B is 0.50 eV higher per unit cell with respect to that of K$_3$-A, which confirms the previous conclusion once again that metal dopants do not favor the interlayer space in aromatic molecular solid. \cite{Kosugi2011, Yan2016}
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.50cm]{fig3-K3.eps}
\caption{
Crystal structures of K$_3$-A and K$_3$-B phases for K$_3$PTP and K$_{2.5}$-A phase for K$_{2.5}$-APHA. (a), K$_3$-A phase with all six K atoms in the intralayer space. (b), K$_3$-B phase with four K atoms in the intralayer space and two in the interlayer space. (c), K$_{2.5}$-A phase . Large spheres represent K atoms.} \label{structure-3}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{K$_{1.5}$PTP and K$_{2.5}$PTP}
For K-doped PTP, the K dopant concentration may deviate from the integer ratio of K atom to molecule, such as 2 : 1 and 3 : 1.
We present the structures of K$_{1.5}$PTP and K$_{2.5}$PTP in Fig. \ref{structure-2}(c) and Fig. \ref{structure-3}(c), marked as K$_{1.5}$-A and K$_{2.5}$-A.
The optimized lattice parameters for these two structural phases are listed in Table \ref{opti-latt}.
The lattice parameters of the K$_{1.5}$-A unit cell are close to the ones of K$_2$-A, so K$_{1.5}$-A can be considered as the K$_2$-A phase with a K atom defect.
Likewise, K$_{2.5}$-A phase can be regarded as the K$_3$-A phase with a K atom defect due to its similar lattice parameters to the K$_3$-A phase.
In a brief summary, several K$_x$PTP structural phases are built by inserting K dopant into the intralayer interstitial space.
When one hole accommodates one or two K atoms in K$_1$TPT, K$_2$TPT and K$_{1.5}$TPT structures, K atoms are relaxed to the sites near the single C-C bonds, which coordinate is about $\frac{1}{3}c$ or $\frac{2}{3}c$.
Since the four single C-C bonds are around the site instead of carbon rings,
the specific site in the intralayer interstitial space has the maximum room. The K atoms at the sites would have the minimum repulsion from C and H atoms of terphenyl molecule.
When three K atoms are placed into one hole in K$_3$TPT and K$_{2.5}$TPT structures, K atoms sit at both ends and midpoint of the hole, namely close to carbon rings of terphenyl molecule, which results from the repulsion between K atoms.
Therefore, the site near the single C-C bond is the most favorable site for K dopant in the molecular layer.
\subsection{Crystal structure of K$_{x}$PTP with two rows of K atoms filling in one intralayer interstitial space}
There exists another kind of K atom distribution in the intralayer space, i.e. one hole is filled by two rows of K atoms while the neighbor hole keeps empty for the two holes in a unit cell. On the base of the pristine terphenyl cell, we place four K atoms into one of two holes to form the K$_2$PTP unit cell, and the structural phase is named as K$_2$-C.
Cs-doped phenanthrene compounds were synthesized and the detailed structures were determined in recent experiment.\cite{Takabayashi2017} Inspired by the Cs$_2$phenanthrene structure with P2$_1$/a group symmetry, we imitate the structure and build the K$_2$-D phase of K-doped terphenyl, which unit cell contains four molecules and eight K atoms.
A recent theoretical work points out that the interstitial hole can accommodate five K atoms to form a kind of K$_{2.5}$PTP structure.\cite{Zhong2018}
According to the structure in Fig. 2 (e) in Ref. \citenum{Zhong2018}, we rebuild the K$_{2.5}$PTP structure and call it K$_{2.5}$-B phase.
K$_2$-C, K$_2$-D and K$_{2.5}$-B structures are displayed in Fig. \ref{structure-tworowK}. The upper and middle panels are the side views along $b$ and $c$ axes, and the bottom panel shows the K atom positions in the interstitial hole in the molecular layer.
As shown in Fig. \ref{structure-tworowK}(a) bottom panel, for the up and down molecules in the K$_2$-C cell, four K atoms are close to the single C-C bonds; for the front and back molecules, the K atoms are close to the carbon rings.
In Fig. \ref{structure-tworowK}(b) bottom panel, for the K$_2$-D unit cell, all four K atoms locate at the sites near the single C-C bonds but some of molecules have an obvious shift in $c$ axis direction.
In K$_{2.5}$-B phase, upper row of K atoms are close to single C-C bonds of two upper molecules, and bottom row of K atoms are close to three carbon rings of two bottom molecules, see Fig. \ref{structure-tworowK}(c) bottom panel.
When a interstitial hole is filled with two rows of K atoms, some of them are pushed to the sites near carbon ring because of the repulsion among these K atoms, leading to the system energy going up with respect to K$_2$-A phase. Thus, the two rows of K atom in a hole is not a energy favorable configuration.
Among above four K$_2$PTP phases, i.e. K$_2$-A, K$_2$-B, K$_2$-C, and K$_2$-D, the energy of K$_2$-A is lower than other three phase energies. Here, we regard the K$_2$-A phase as the typical structure for all K-doped terphenyl compounds, in which all low energy sites are just fully occupied and K dopants have the most uniform distribution in molecular layer.
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fig4-K2CD.eps}
\caption{
Three structural phases of K$_2$PTP and K$_{2.5}$PTP with one intralayer hole accommodating two rows of K atoms. (a), K$_2$-C phase,
(b), K$_2$-D phase,
(c), K$_{2.5}$-B phase.
The upper and middle panels is the side views along $b$ and $c$ axes, and the bottom panel is to show the K atom positions in the interstitial hole in the molecular layer. } \label{structure-tworowK}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Crystal structure of K$_{2}$PTP with the unit cell consisting of two molecular layers }
In previous theoretical calculations, the unit cell of metal-doped polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is limited to one molecular layer for the reason of computational time economization. So the different arrangement of molecular layers has rarely been involved in the theoretical works reported before. But for K-doped picene and pentacene in experiment, the measured unit cells of K$_2$picene and K$_2$pentacene are all composed of two layers of molecules, which demonstrates that the interlayer stacking pattern is of importance for this class of materials.
According to the space group symmetry and molecular orientation of K$_2$picene and K$_2$pentacene in experiment,
we build two kinds of structural phases for K-doped terphenyl, named as K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F, whose unit cells include two molecular layers.
It should be emphasized that for the two structures, their atomic configuration of molecular layer is similar to that of the K$_2$-A phase. Specifically, the K positions are all in the low energy sites near single C-C bonds.
Our aim is to consider the influence of stacking pattern of molecular layers on the total energy of K$_2$PTP.
We hope to keep the intralayer atomic configuration of K$_2$-A phase and only change the interlayer arrangement to build the new structure.
The expectation is achieved by K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F structures.
Fig. \ref{structure-p21c-p212121}(a) and (b) show the atomic structures of K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F with P2$_1$/c and P2$_1$2$_1$2$_1$ group symmetry, respectively.
By comparing K$_2$-A, K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F phases, we find that their symmetry operations are all related to screw operation: screw around $b$ then translate along $a$ for K$_2$-A, screw around $b$ then translate along $c$ for K$_2$-E and screw around each of three crystal axes for K$_2$-F.
Different interface configuration between two adjacent molecular layers is related to their symmetry operations, and result in the difference of interlayer interaction.
We should pay special attention to K$_2$-F phase. The molecular orientation in adjacent two layers is obviously deflected from one to another, which leads to a more close packing of molecular layers than K$_2$-E and K$_2$-A. The volume of K$_2$-F unit cell decrease 1.2\%-1.5\% with respect to K$_2$-E and K$_2$-A phases in our calculations. Meanwhile, the energy per unit cell of K$_2$-F phase is 0.237 eV and 0.226 eV lower than the energies of K$_2$-E and K$_2$-A.
So far, as a stable structure of K$_x$PTP, K$_2$-F structure is derived after considering various factors, including the intralayer K dopant position, occupation number and interlayer arrangement.
The crystal structure data of K$_2$-F phase is given in the Supplemental Material\cite{suppl} in cif format.
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fig5-K2EF.eps}
\caption{
Two structural phases of K$_2$PTP with the unit cells containing two molecular layers. (a), The side views of K$_2$-E phase with P2$_1$/c group symmetry along $b$ axis (upper) and $a$ axis (lower). (b), The side views of K$_2$-E phase with P2$_1$2$_1$2$_1$ group symmetry along $b$ axis (upper) and $a$ axis (lower). The molecular orientations in two phases are distinct. } \label{structure-p21c-p212121}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Formation energy of K$_x$PTP with $x$ = 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3}
The alkali metal K is mixed with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon $p$-terphenyl to synthesize the new K$_x$PTP compounds.
The appropriate stoichiometry ratio and the stability of various structural phases for K$_x$PTP compounds can be reflected by their formation energies, and the formula of formation energy are shown as follows.
\begin{eqnarray}
\begin{aligned}
E_{\rm f} =E_{\rm K_xPTP}-E_{\rm PTP}-n \cdot E_{\rm K}
\end{aligned}
\end{eqnarray}
where $E_{\rm K_xPTP}$, $E_{\rm PTP}$, and $E_{\rm K}$ are the energies of K$_x$PTP, pristine PTP, and one K atom in bulk metal, respectively.
The calculated formation energies for various structural phases are displayed in Fig. \ref{formation-4}.
For the sake of contrast, the formation energy values of K$_2$-D, K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F phases are divided by 2 because their unit cells are twice of the unit cell of other structural phases.
From Fig. \ref{formation-4}(a) we can see that the formation energy increases with $x$ from 1 to 2.5, and then decreases at $x$ = 3.
K$_{2.5}$-B and K$_2$-F have the maximum energy of -1.86 eV and second maximum energy of -1.72 eV (minus sign is energy release).
We focus on the low energy structural phases at the special doping levels, i.e. K$_1$-A, K$_{1.5}$-A, K$_2$-F, K$_{2.5}$-B and K$_3$-A phases.
When the structural phases change from K$_1$-A to K$_{1.5}$-A, K$_2$-F, K$_{2.5}$-B and K$_3$-A, the formation energies do not change uniformly with the doping level increasing. The values below are how much the formation energy is increased when one more K atom is added into K$_x$PTP unit cell.
\begin{eqnarray}
E_{\rm f}(K_{1.5}-A)-E_{\rm f}(K_1-A)-E_{\rm K} = -0.13 ~eV, \label{eq.2} \\
E_{\rm f}(K_2-F)-E_{\rm f}(K_{1.5}-A)-1 \cdot E_{\rm K} = -0.58 ~eV, \label{eq.3} \\
E_{\rm f}(K_{2.5}-B)-E_{\rm f}(K_2-F)-1 \cdot E_{\rm K} = -0.14 ~eV, \label{eq.4} \\
E_{\rm f}(K_3-A)-E_{\rm f}(K_{2.5}-B)-1 \cdot E_{\rm K} = +0.50 ~eV, \label{eq.5}
\end{eqnarray}
The value of +0.5 eV in expression (\ref{eq.5}) means that the K doping level of $x$ = 3 is difficult to be achieved in K$_x$PTP,
because the process of adding K atoms into the K$_{2.5}$-B unit cell to form the K$_3$-A phase will lift a large energy.
Meanwhile, the generation of K$_2$-F phase is most easy from K$_{1.5}$-A phase due to the energy decline of -0.58 eV in expression (\ref{eq.3}).
The average formation energy per K dopant is another important quantity to reflect the stability of doped compounds,
which is derived by dividing the total formation energy by the number of K atoms, shown in Fig. \ref{formation-4}(b). The maximum value of -0.51 eV belongs to K$_1$-A phase and the second maximum energy of -0.43 eV belongs to K$_2$-F.
For K$_2$-A and K$_2$-E phases, the values are both -0.40 eV.
The average formation energy per K atom is -0.37 eV for K$_{2.5}$-B phase, and the value is -0.23 eV for K$_3$PTP phases.
For K$_2$-A, K$_2$-E, K$_2$-F and K$_1$-A phases, they share one structural feature in common that one intralayer hole contains two K atoms siting in C-C single bond positions. The average formation energies for four phases have the larger values than other phases, which provide hard evidence that the dopant site close to C-C single bond is preferred in energy.
Among these structural phases, K$_2$-F should be emphasized because it is a typical structural phase, which relates to its large formation energy, low energy site of K dopant, and appropriate dopant occupation number.
\begin{figure}.
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.50cm]{fig6-form.eps}
\caption{
(a), The formation energies of various structural phases for K$_x$PTP, the values is the half of formation energies for K$_2$-D, K$_2$-E and K$_2$-F because their unit cells are twice the unit cells of other phases. (b), The average formation energy per K atom for various structural phases. } \label{formation-4}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Electronic structure of K$_x$PTP with K$_2$-F phase}
The band structure of K$_2$-F phase for K-doped terphenyl is displayed in Fig. \ref{K2A-band}(a), and the reciprocal Brillouin zone is shown in Fig. \ref{K2A-band}(b).
At first, there is a energy gap of $\sim$0.3 eV at the Fermi energy, indicating that the K$_2$-F phase is a semiconductor. The feature is similar to the semiconducting K$_2$picene with a gap of 0.1 eV. \cite{Kosugi2011, Kusakabe2012}
Four bands below Fermi energy, which arise from the LUMO orbitals of four molecules in one unit cell, are all filled by electrons from eight K atoms. Consequently, a energy gap near Fermi energy is opened
to lead to a semiconducting state.
Also, there exists another large energy gap in the scope of -2.4 $\sim$ -0.4 eV, which is relevant to the energy interval between the highest occupied orbital (HUMO) and LUMO.
Secondly, on a whole, these bands are flat and have small dispersion in energy. This is because the interactions among molecules are weak in molecular crystal. In Fig. \ref{K2A-band}(b), the crystal cell is marked by dash line. $a$ and $b$ direction correspond to $\Gamma$-X and $\Gamma$-P in reciprocal space and the $c$ axis relates to $\Gamma$-Z and X-M direction. The bands along $\Gamma$-Z and X-M are more flat than the bands along $\Gamma$-X and $\Gamma$-P, which reflect that the interaction between two molecular layer is more weaker than the interaction in molecular layer.
Thirdly, Fig. \ref{K2A-band}(c) and (d) display the energy bands and the Brillouin zone of K$_2$-A unit cell.
We compare the band structures of K$_2$-A and K$_2$-F phases and find that they have a nearly identical distribution,
including the band shape and the interval among bands.
The similarity of band structure demonstrate that the electronic properties of K-doped terphenyl are determined primarily by the atomic configuration of molecular layer and the interlayer stacking pattern has a small influence on them.
Therefore, the band structure of K$_2$-A and K$_2$-F are representative for K-doped terphenyl compounds.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.50cm]{fig7-band.eps}
\caption{
(a) and (b), Energy band structure of K$_2$PTP with K$_2$-F phase and the Brillouin Zone with high symmetry points, and the unit cell is also plotted with the dashed line box. (c) and (d), Energy band structure of K$_2$PTP with K$_2$-A phase and the Brillouin Zone with high symmetry points. Fermi level is set to zero.} \label{K2A-band}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
The total density of states (DOS) of K-doped PTP with several structural phases are shown in Fig. \ref{K1-K2-A-dos3}.
We first inspect the DOS of K$_2$-F phase in Fig. \ref{K1-K2-A-dos3}(a), the peaks centered at -2.5 eV and -0.3 eV are related to HOMO and LUMO of PTP molecule.
With the ratio of 2:1 between K and molecule, the states from LUMO orbitals are just fully filled by the electrons donated by K atoms.
The energy gap of 0.3 eV above the Fermi energy is associated to the occupied bands from LUMO states and the empty bands from LUMO+1 states.
As expected, the DOS peaks distribution of K$_2$-A phase in Fig. \ref{K1-K2-A-dos3}(b) is very similar to that of K$_2$-F phase because their intralayer atomic configuration are alike.
When the ratio of K and molecule is less or greater than 2 : 1, the Fermi energy of K$_2$PTP will be lowered or raised with respect to the energy of K$_2$PTP.
For K$_{1}$-A and K$_{1.5}$-A phase, the electronic states from molecule LUMO orbitals are half-filled and the systems are metallic, as shown in Fig. \ref{K1-K2-A-dos3}(c) and (d), where the DOS values at Fermi energy are 9.5 and 7.3 states/eV per unit cell for K$_{1}$-A and K$_{1.5}$-A phases.
For K$_{2.5}$-B phase, the fermi energy is located in the energy scope of LUMO+1 states and the states from LUMO orbitals are fully filled. The DOS value at Fermi level is 10.1 states/eV per unit cell, see Fig. \ref{K1-K2-A-dos3}(e).
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fig8-dos.eps}
\caption{
Total DOS of K$_2$-F, K$_2$-A, K$_1$-A, K$_{1.5}$-A and K$_{2.5}$-B phases. Fermi level is set to zero and is marked by the vertical dash line.} \label{K1-K2-A-dos3}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusions and Discussions}
In summary, we have investigated the effect of various factors on the crystal structure of K-doped terphenyl, including the stoichiometry ratio of dopant and molecule, the K doping position, the number of dopants in one intralayer interstitial hole and the interlayer stacking pattern.
The results indicate that the sites near the single C-C bond in the interstitial hole are the most favorable positions in energy.
Two K atoms in such a hole is found to be the optimized occupation, while the situation of two rows of K atoms in one hole is not energetically favorable.
The interlayer arrangement with P2$_1$2$_1$2$_1$ group symmetry can effectively enhance the stability of the system.
Consequently, the K$_2$PTP with K$_2$-F phase is deduced to be the most appropriate structure.
Besides, the electronic structure calculations show K$_2$-F phase is a semiconductor with a small energy gap of 0.3 eV.
In spite of the preferred K$_2$-F phase, there exist several structural phases of K$_x$PTP at $x$ = 2, which have the small energy differences to K$_2$-F phase. Therefore, such meta-stable phases have the some possibility to occur in samples at certain temperatures.
When the nominal ratio of K and molecule is less than or equal to 1:1, K$_1$-A phase is more favorable.
When the ratio is greater than 2 : 1 in experiment, K$_{2.5}$-B phase can be generated.
The synthesis of K$_3$PTP phase is difficult because it will decompose to K$_2$-F phase and K bulk metal in viewpoint of formation energy.
The existence of multiple structures for K-doped $p$-terphenyl is supported by our calculations, which is in agreement with the reported experiments about alkali-metal-doped aromatic hydrocarbons.
The superconducting fraction ratio is about 0.1\% in K-doped terphenyl samples, so the superconducting phase may be a certain structural phases among many possible structures.
As for which structure accounting for superconductivity, it is difficult to identify it.
We compare K$_x$PTP with K-doped condensed aromatics, such as picene, phenanthrene. The obvious distinction is that K positions in K$_x$PTP are close to the single C-C bonds instead of the phenyl rings.
The formation energy of K$_2$-F phase is -0.43 eV per K dopant, greater than the value of about -0.32 eV and 0.33 eV in K$_2$phenanthrene and K$_2$picene, \cite{Yan2016} which indicate that the synthesis of K-doped PTP is more easy than K-doped picene and phenanthrene.
The transition temperatures of superconductivity in K-doped picene, phenanthrene and other condensed aromatic compounds are in the range of 5 Kelvin $\sim$ 18 Kelvin, much less than 43 Kelvin or greater in K-doped PTP.
This position difference of K dopant may be the vital information for explain such high temperature in K-doped PTP.
The above calculations and data analysis are based on the assumption that the $p$-terphenyl molecule keeps intact in the synthesis process of K$_x$PTP. But in fact, when the terphenyl and K metal are mixed and heated in experiment, the potassium hydride (KH) will be generated alongside of the $p$-terphenyl molecule damage. The existence of KH in samples can be deduced from the XRD spectra, and (011), (112), (314) peaks in Fig. 1 (b) in Ref. \citenum{Liu2017} are the typical XRD diffraction peaks of KH. To protect the molecule not being destroyed in the process of K$_x$PTP synthesis, KH may be the better reactant than K metal, as done in Ref \citenum{Romero2017}.
\begin{acknowledgments}
We thank Zhong-Yi Lu, Xiao-Jia Chen, Guo-Hua Zhong and Hai-Qing Lin for valuable discussions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants
Nos. 11474004, 11404383, 11674087, 11704024.
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,658 |
{"url":"https:\/\/cob.silverchair.com\/jeb\/article\/213\/12\/1991\/9899\/Evidence-for-within-individual-energy-reallocation","text":"Recent studies have shown that the metabolic cost of avian egg production involves a 16\u201327% increase in metabolic rate (MR) above non-reproductive basal or resting values (BMR and RMR, respectively). To determine how the metabolic cost of egg production interacted with the costs of other essential processes (such as cold acclimation and active heat production), we measured the MR of non-breeding and egg-producing zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) while (a) warm-acclimated (to 19\u201321\u00b0C) and measured within their thermoneutral zone (at 35\u00b0C), (b) cold-acclimated (to 7\u00b0C) and measured at thermoneutrality (at 35\u00b0C, i.e. not actively producing heat), and (c) cold-acclimated and measured below thermoneutrality (at 7\u00b0C) (i.e. during active heat production). The metabolic cost of egg production was small (24% above BMR) compared with the additive costs of cold acclimation and active heat production (224% above BMR). Exposure to low ambient temperatures was accompanied by an increase in seed consumption (by 72%) and a decrease in locomotor activity (by 72%) compared with warm-acclimated, non-breeding values. By contrast, egg production in heat-producing females was associated with an 11% decrease in MR and a 22% decrease in seed consumption compared with non-breeding thermoregulating values. Our data suggest that while the increase in MR associated with egg production is small in relation to the birds' capacity to increase MR in response to other energetically demanding processes, the addition of egg production to these metabolically costly activities may be enough to necessitate the use of energy-saving strategies, such as internal energy reallocation, to cope with the additional energetic demands.\n\nEgg production in birds is a complex process that has measurable energetic costs. Indeed, in passerine birds the physiological changes associated with egg formation (Williams, 1998; Johnson, 2000) have been shown to result in a 16\u201327% increase in metabolic rate (MR) above that of non-breeding females [house sparrows, Passer domesticus, 16% above non-breeding basal metabolic rate (BMR) (Chappell et al., 1999); great tits, Parus major, 27% over wintering BMR (Nilsson and Raberg, 2001); European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, 22% over pre-reproductive BMR (V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2002; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2003); zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, 22% above non-breeding resting metabolic rate (RMR) (V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b)]. This metabolic investment in egg production is comparable with the changes in MR associated with other reproductive activities. For example, in comparison with non-breeding values, incubating zebra finches exhibit a 20% increase in RMR (Vleck, 1981), while the RMR of chick-rearing individuals is 13% higher (V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b). However, it is unclear whether the changes in MR associated with reproduction are substantial in the context of the birds' ability and capacity to upregulate metabolism, i.e. how the metabolic costs of reproduction (egg production, incubation and chick rearing) interact with those of other, potentially energetically demanding, physiological processes that occur throughout a bird's lifetime.\n\nReproduction in seasonally breeding birds is generally timed such that the period of chick rearing coincides with favorable environmental conditions [i.e. warmer weather, increased food availability and quality (Williams, 1998)] so that nestlings have ample nutrients and resources for their rapid growth and development. However, the egg-laying period necessarily precedes the period of chick rearing. Consequently, free-living birds are often faced with the energetically demanding task of producing, laying and incubating eggs while being simultaneously exposed to relatively colder temperatures and more unstable weather conditions earlier in the breeding season (Perrins, 1970). This means that early breeding individuals may face conflicting demands due to the simultaneous need for energy to fuel reproduction and cold acclimatization. In cold-acclimated or acclimatized birds, energy expenditure related to life in the cold can be divided into two components. First, there are the costs associated with cold acclimation itself, i.e. changes in thermoregulatory physiology and maintenance of tissues involved in heat production or fueling heat production. In several cases, although this may not be true for large species, this results in a mean increase in BMR up to 50% due to elevated physiological maintenance costs (reviewed in Swanson, 2009). To the best of our knowledge, the highest reported increase in BMR in response to cold challenge was 85% in siskins Carduelis spinus (Gelineo, 1964). Second, there is the cost of active heat production, which is apparent when the animals face substantial heat loss that is not fully compensated by other physiological heat sources such as digestion (Biebach, 1984; Meienberger and Dauberschmidt, 1992; Chappell et al., 1997; Bech and Praesteng, 2004) or locomotor activity (Webster and Weathers, 1990; Bruinzeel and Piersma, 1998). In a resting state, the cost of active heat production corresponds to the increase in MR measured at ambient temperatures below thermoneutrality and is proportional to body heat loss (Blaxter, 1989). One way individuals can modulate heat loss in response to varying environmental conditions is to adjust their thermal conductance, i.e. the heat flow between an individual and its surroundings. This is done by (1) raising the feathers to trap and hold air, thereby increasing the thickness of the insulative barrier above the skin, (2) reducing peripheral blood flow; thus, decreasing exposure of warm blood to cold ambient temperatures, and (3) minimizing evaporative heat loss (Johansen and Bech, 1984; Kadoya et al., 1985; Schmidt-Nielsen, 1990; Alexander, 1999; McNab, 2002; Jofr\u00e9 and Caviedes-Vidal, 2003).\n\nThe first goal of this study was to determine how the metabolic cost of egg production compares with the investment in other essential and metabolically demanding activities associated with life in the cold, namely cold acclimation and active heat production. A second objective was to determine whether the energetic costs of cold acclimation, active heat production and egg production were additive when these activities occurred simultaneously. Our third goal was to assess the magnitude of inter-individual variation in MR and behavioral modification associated with these energetically demanding activities. We also considered potential differences in wet thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C between reproductive stages and thermal treatments to determine whether they could explain part of the variation in the measured energy expenditure associated with cold acclimation, active heat production and egg production. Working in a controlled laboratory environment, we measured and compared the MRs and thermal conductances of female zebra finches in a variety of thermal and reproductive states.\n\nAnimals and husbandry\n\nZebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata Vieillot 1817, with previous breeding experience (i.e. produced at least one previous clutch) were randomly chosen from our breeding colony housed in the Simon Fraser University Animal Care Facility, Burnaby, BC, Canada. All birds were housed in cages (61 cm \u00d7 46 cm \u00d7 41 cm), exposed to a constant light schedule of 14 h:10 h L:D (lights on at 09:00 h) and ambient temperatures ranging from 19 to 21\u00b0C, and provided with a mixed-seed diet (Panicum and white millet, 50:50; approximately 12.0% protein, 4.7% lipid; Just for Birds, Surrey, BC, Canada), water, grit and cuttlefish bone (calcium) ad libitum. All experiments and animal husbandry were carried out under a Simon Fraser University Animal Care Committee permit (no. 692B-94) following guidelines of the Canadian Committee on Animal Care.\n\nAcclimation protocol and non-breeding MR measurements\n\nThe male and female zebra finches that were chosen for this study were divided into two study groups: a warm-acclimated (19\u201321\u00b0C) group and a cold-acclimated (7\u00b0C) group. Females in the warm-acclimated group (N=10; initially housed as N=5 per cage) were weighed (\u00b10.1 g) and randomly assigned to same-sex pairs (N=2 birds per cage) in \u2018warm\u2019 ambient conditions (i.e. temperature 19\u201321\u00b0C) for a minimum of seven days. Males in the warm-acclimated group (N=10) were group housed in same-sex cages (N=5 birds per cage) under the same environmental conditions as the warm-acclimated females. By contrast, birds in the cold-acclimated group (N=12 females and 12 males) were weighed (\u00b10.1 g) and transferred to same-sex group cages (N=6 birds per cage) within a Conviron E15 plant growth chamber (Controlled Environments, Winnipeg, MB, Canada). The temperature within the chamber at the beginning of the acclimation period was 14\u00b0C, and was decreased slowly over four weeks (i.e. one week at 14\u00b0C, one week at 10\u00b0C, then two weeks at 7\u00b0C). The acclimation period was based on the time it took for all birds to return to and maintain their pre-acclimation body mass at each temperature. Following the four-week acclimation period, cold-acclimated females were randomly assigned to same-sex pairs (N=2 birds per cage) for a minimum of seven days. All warm- and cold-acclimated, same-sex female pairs were visually but not acoustically isolated from the opposite sex. The MR (see protocol below) of each female was measured twice, once while the females were in same-sex, non-breeding pairs (NBr sample), and again while the females were paired with males and actively laying eggs (LAY sample). MR measurements began on the seventh night following same-sex pairing and continued nightly until all females were measured.\n\nBreeding protocol and laying MR measurements\n\nFollowing measurement of non-breeding MR, all females were randomly paired with males acclimated to the same thermal conditions. One warm-acclimated female died prior to pairing for breeding. Therefore, all data from this female were excluded from the analyses. Males and females were weighed (\u00b10.1 g) at the time of pairing and housed in cages equipped with an external nest box (15 cm \u00d7 14.5 cm \u00d7 20 cm). Breeding pairs were provided with 6 g of an egg-food supplement [20.3% protein, 6.6% lipid (see Williams, 1996)] daily between pairing and clutch completion. This food supplement was always completely consumed by the next day. Nest boxes were checked daily between 09:00 h and 11:00 h. The MR (see protocol below) of each egg-laying female was measured during the night following the laying of the second egg. Female zebra finches in our captive breeding colony lay a mean of 6 eggs while housed at 21\u00b0C and 5.5 eggs while housed at 7\u00b0C (Salvante et al., 2007). Therefore, the MR measurement coincided with albumen and shell formation of the third egg and the rapid yolk development period of the remainder of the clutch. Clutches were considered complete if no new eggs were laid over three days. At this time each pair was returned to same-sex cages.\n\nLocomotor activity and seed consumption\n\nThe locomotor activity of all same-sex and breeding pairs was monitored using a micro-switch system connected to a cage perch as described by Williams and Ternan (Williams and Ternan, 1999). This system does not discriminate potential differences in locomotor activity between members of a pair, but previous work by Williams and Ternan (Williams and Ternan, 1999) involving direct observations of activity showed that, at 19\u201321\u00b0C, activity does not differ between sexes throughout the breeding period from non-breeding to the end of egg laying. Therefore, we assumed that, locomotor activity did not differ between members of same-sex and breeding pairs when exposed to either of our acclimation temperatures. Locomotor activity data for one warm-acclimated, non-breeding, same-sex pair and two warm-acclimated breeding pairs were lost due to switch failure.\n\nTo obtain a gross estimate of energy intake by cold-acclimated birds, seed consumption was measured by providing all pairs with 30.0 g of the mixed-seed diet daily in open Ziploc\u2122 (Brantford, ON, Canada) containers (946 ml) placed on the cage floor. This method avoided any spillage and allowed for the measurement of daily seed consumption by same-sex and breeding pairs by weighing the remaining seeds in the container after 24 h (\u00b10.1 g). Birds were able to feed ad libitum as 30.0 g of seed was always in excess of their daily intake. Williams and Ternan showed that, at 19\u201321\u00b0C, females consistently ate slightly more food (4.5%) than males, regardless of their breeding status, and that this effect did not change across the laying sequence, from non-breeding to the end of egg laying (Williams and Ternan, 1999). Therefore, we assumed that measuring food intake per pair was a good indicator of female food intake at both of our acclimation temperatures. Seed consumption for cold-acclimated, same-sex and breeding pairs were compared with published data for warm-acclimated zebra finch pairs that were maintained in the same facility, under the same conditions as the warm-acclimated pairs in this study (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b).\n\nMeasurement of MR\n\nBMR is defined as the energy consumed by a resting, non-growing, post-absorptive animal during the inactive phase of the circadian cycle at a temperature within the thermoneutral range (Commission for thermal physiology of the International Union of Physiological Sciences, 2001), and can be applied to the MR of the non-breeding females in this study. However, birds were also measured during egg production, and we considered these laying females to be in an \u2018active physiological state\u2019 (V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2002; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b). To avoid any confusion in terminology, we therefore refer to \u2018non-breeding MR\u2019 (which is in fact BMR) and \u2018laying MR\u2019 in the following text.\n\nAll MR measurements were completed using a flow-through respirometry system (Sable Systems International; Las Vegas, NV, USA) as follows. At 21:00 h, three hours prior to the beginning of measurement, the food was removed from the cages of females undergoing metabolic measurement that night. At 23:00 h, warm-acclimated females were taken from their cages, their body masses were measured (\u00b10.1 g), and they were placed randomly in one of four metabolic chambers (1.5 l stainless steel coffee canisters, Great Canadian Superstore, Coquitlam, BC, Canada) for one hour prior to the beginning of measurements. All chambers continuously received approximately 500 ml min\u22121 of dry CO2-free air (using Drierite\u2122 and ascarite\u2122 as scrubbers; Sigma-Aldrich, Oakville, ON, Canada; mean flow 518.37\u00b10.99 ml min\u22121; Sierra Instruments 810C-NR-2 mass flow valve, Sierra Instruments, Monterey, CA, USA; Sable Systems MF-8 Airflow Manifold and 2-channel mass flow controller version 1.0) and were maintained at 35\u00b0C, which is within the thermoneutral zone for this species (lower critical temperature=33\u00b0C) (Marschall and Prinzinger, 1991; Meijer et al., 1996). Our respirometry system consisted of four metabolic chambers placed into a temperature-control cabinet (Sable Systems PTC-1 Peltier effect temperature-controlled portable cabinet), which was programmed to maintain the ambient temperature at 35\u00b0C throughout the night using a Peltier controller (Sable Systems PELT-3). Each chamber was connected to a divided air line with a valve multiplexer (Sable Systems TR-TM4), which allowed us to sample air coming from either an open, ambient baseline air line (scrubbed for water and CO2) or from one metabolic chamber at a time. The air then passed through a mass flow valve (Sierra Instruments) for proper air flow reading [standard temperature and pressure (STP) corrected] and through CO2 and oxygen analyzers (model CA-1 and FC-1 Sable Systems, respectively; air was scrubbed to remove water before entering the CO2 analyzer and scrubbed to remove water and CO2 before entering the O2 analyzer). Measurements were always started at 00:00 h. The measurement sequence was as follows: baseline air was recorded for 10 min, then the out-flowing air from the first chamber for 33 min and then the second chamber for 33 min, then baseline air again for 10 min, followed by the out-flowing air from the third chamber for 33 min and then the fourth chamber for 33 min, and finally ending with baseline air for 10 min. This sequence was repeated three times throughout the night giving 99 min of recording per chamber spanning 8 h. After measurement the birds were weighed for a second time and released back into their cages (approximately 30 min to one hour before the lights were turned on), and their food was returned. The mean of first and second body masses was used in subsequent analyses. The oxygen consumption () of each bird was calculated using eqn 4a from Withers (Withers, 1977) integrated in the Datacan software program (Sable Systems):\n$V.O2=V.E(FIO2\u2212FEO2\u2032)1\u2212FIO2+RQ(FIO2\u2212FEO2\u2032),$\n(1)\nwhere is the rate of oxygen consumption corrected to STP, is the rate of airflow out of the chamber, FIO2 is the fractional concentration of O2 entering the chamber, F\u2032EO2 is the fractional concentration of O2 exiting the chamber after CO2 has been removed, and RQ is the respiratory quotient, which was fixed at 0.8. A running mean representing 10 minutes of recording was passed through the data for each bird, with the lowest mean taken as non-breeding or laying MR. This value was always found during the second or third rounds of measurement (i.e. during the last 5 h of the night). Preliminary analysis showed that our sequential respirometry protocol did not generate a time effect (sensuHayes et al., 1992) on metabolic variables.\n\nMRs of cold-acclimated females were measured using the same protocol as described above with the following exceptions. Firstly, females were placed randomly in one of two metabolic chambers (1.5 l) for one hour prior to the beginning of measurements. The temperature was maintained at 7\u00b0C for the first part of the night, and then increased to and maintained at 35\u00b0C for the remainder of the measurement period by placing the metabolic chambers into the pre-programmed temperature-control cabinet. The measurement sequence was as follows: starting at 00:00 h, baseline air was recorded for 2 h and 40 min, then the out-flowing air from the first chamber for 45 min, baseline air again for 15 min, and then the out-flowing air from the second chamber for 45 min, all at 7\u00b0C. Following the first set of measurements, the temperature was increased to 35\u00b0C, which took approximately 40 min. Once 35\u00b0C was maintained, birds were allowed to adjust to the new temperature for approximately 55 min. Baseline air was recorded while the temperature was increased to 35\u00b0C and during the adjustment period. The measurement sequence was then repeated (i.e. baseline during the adjustment period, chamber 1 for 45 min, baseline for 15 min, chamber 2 for 45 min) and, finally, baseline air was recorded for the last 15 min. This measurement protocol was designed such that the air recordings from the test chambers occurred during the last 5.5 h of the night, and is therefore comparable with the protocol for warm-acclimated females (described above), wherein air recordings occurred in the last 5 h of the night during the second and third rounds of MR measurement. at each temperature (i.e. 7\u00b0C and 35\u00b0C) was calculated using the protocol described above.\n\nMeasurement of thermal conductance\n\nTo determine whether thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C changed in response to cold acclimation, egg production or a combination of the two, we randomly chose 44 female and 12 male zebra finches with previous breeding experience (i.e. produced at least one previous clutch) from our breeding colony. The male and female zebra finches were divided into two temperature-acclimation groups: a warm-acclimated (19\u201321\u00b0C) group (N=24 females, N=6 males) and a cold-acclimated (7\u00b0C) group (N=20 females, N=6 males). Warm- and cold-acclimation followed the same protocol as described above. Following the acclimation period, the MR of each female was measured only once, either while the females were in same-sex, non-breeding pairs (N=18 warm-acclimated NBr, N=14 cold-acclimated NBr) or while the females were paired with males and actively laying eggs, following the breeding protocol described above (N=6 warm-acclimated LAY, N=6 cold-acclimated LAY).\n\nTable 1.\n\nComparisons between experimental treatment groups for analysis of metabolic costs\n\nMRs of warm- and cold-acclimated females for measurement of thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C were measured using the same protocol as warm-acclimated females described above with the following exceptions. Ambient temperature during MR measurement was maintained at 7\u00b0C for the entire night. Additionally, following MR measurement, the body temperature of each female was measured by inserting a copper constantan thermocouple probe (3 mm diameter; attached to a Sable Systems TC-1000 Thermometer NIST traceable and set to fast response) into the female's cloaca within 30 s of removing the female from the metabolic chamber. We calculated wet thermal conductance (C, ml O2h\u22121 \u00b0C\u22121) of each bird at 7\u00b0C using the following equation: C=\/(TbTa), where is the rate of oxygen consumption (ml O2h\u22121), Tb is body temperature (\u00b0C) and Ta is ambient temperature (in this case, 7\u00b0C) (McNab, 1980; Aschoff, 1981). Our measurements of thermal conductance reflect overall heat loss at 7\u00b0C, including heat lost by evaporation of water [i.e. wet thermal conductance (Schleucher and Withers, 2001)]. Evaporative heat loss represents a small component of total heat loss and remains relatively constant below thermoneutrality (Schleucher and Withers, 2001).\n\nData analysis\n\nThe metabolic costs of the various activities (e.g. egg production, cold acclimation, heat production) and combinations of these activities (e.g. egg production, cold acclimation and heat production) were measured by performing the comparisons in Table 1. Because daily energy budgets are dependent on the amount of energy taken in and expended, similar comparisons were made to determine how daily seed consumption and locomotor activity were affected by egg production and thermoregulation (Table 2).\n\nAll statistical analyses were performed using either SAS (version 9; SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA) or JMP (version 7.0.2; SAS Institute). All data were tested for normality [Shapiro-Wilk test (Zar, 1996)], and all non-normal variables were log10-transformed prior to analysis (although some non-transformed values were used for graphical purposes). We compared MRs, locomotor activity and seed consumption (1) within the acclimation groups, between different reproductive stages (e.g. non-breeding vs laying) or (2) within and between the warm- or cold-acclimation group, between different reproductive stages measured at different temperatures (e.g. non-breeding MR measured at 35\u00b0C vs laying MR measured at 7\u00b0C). To perform these analyses, we used mixed model, repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) or analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) (with female body mass as a covariate) with stage (i.e. reproductive stage or \u2018reproductive stage\u2013measurement temperature\u2019) as a fixed, repeated factor and individual female as a random factor [PROC MIXED (SAS Institute)]. Comparisons between acclimation groups (i.e. warm vs cold) were examined using t-tests or ANCOVA (with female body mass as a covariate). Comparisons of thermal conductance among thermal-reproductive stage groups were performed using ANCOVA with female body mass as a covariate.\n\nIn the main study, MRs of all females were measured twice, first as non-breeders and then again during egg laying. However, females in the thermal conductance study were only measured once, either as non-breeders or during egg laying. Therefore, to test whether the decrease in MR observed in cold-acclimated females between the non-breeding and egg-laying periods (see Results below) can be attributed to an order effect, we used an ANCOVA (with female body mass as a covariate) to compare MR measured at 7\u00b0C of the cold-acclimated, egg-laying females from the two studies.\n\nAll tests were two-tailed, and the overall significance level was P<0.05. As one of the main goals of this study was to assess the extent of individual variation in MR and behavioral energy reallocation to fuel the energy demands associated with thermoregulation and egg production, all data are visually displayed in reaction norm-style graphs with lines joining repeated measures from individuals across thermal-reproductive stages (reviewed in Williams, 2008).\n\nTable 2.\n\nComparisons between experimental treatment groups for analysis of locomotor activity and seed consumption\n\nTable 3.\n\nBody mass and metabolic rate of zebra finches in different thermal-reproductive stages\n\nRMR\n\nMRs were positively related to body mass (F1,22.5=23.54, P<0.0001). Therefore, female body mass was included as a covariate in all analyses, and the percentage change in MR between comparison groups was calculated using least squares mean MR controlling for body mass at the stages being compared. MR exhibited marked inter-individual variation within the six thermal-reproductive stages (ranging from 1.4-fold variation among warm-acclimated laying females measured at 35\u00b0C to 2.5-fold variation among cold-acclimated non-breeding females measured at 35\u00b0C; Table 3; Fig. 1) and varied significantly between the six different thermal-reproductive stages (F5,47.9=86.53, P<0.0001; Table 1; Fig. 1).\n\nTaken individually, the physiological processes of egg production, cold acclimation and active heat production were all associated with an increase in mass-corrected MR. Egg production and cold acclimation resulted in a 24% and 96% increase in mass-corrected MR, respectively, above that of warm-acclimated, non-breeding females (i.e. BMR) (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1). Similarly, active heat production alone induced a 65% and 68% increase in mass-corrected MR over cold-acclimated, non-breeding and cold-acclimated, egg-laying values, respectively (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1).\n\nWhen combined, cold acclimation and active heat production by non-breeding females resulted in a 224% increase in mass-corrected MR above warm-acclimated, non-breeding MR (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1). This is comparable with the predicted increase in mass-corrected MR of 212% to 224% (based on laying and non-breeding females, respectively) if the metabolic costs of cold acclimation and heat production were additive [i.e. (cold acclimation + active heat production) \/ BMR \u00d7 100%]. We were not able to detect any significant change in mass-corrected MR associated with egg production in cold-acclimated females that were not actively producing heat (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1). Furthermore, egg production during active heat production was actually associated with an 11% decrease in mass-corrected MR compared with cold-acclimated, non-breeding values measured at 7\u00b0C (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1). As a result, the combination of cold-acclimation, active heat production and egg formation induced a 189% increase in mass-corrected MR above non-breeding, warm-acclimated values (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 1), well below the predicted 237% to 248% increase (based on laying and non-breeding females, respectively) if the metabolic costs of all three activities were additive.\n\nLocomotor activity and seed consumption\n\nLocomotor activity was not related to female or pair body mass (P>0.05) but did differ between stages (F3,6.2=14.32, P<0.005). Egg production was associated with a 64% decrease in locomotor activity compared with warm-acclimated, non-breeding values (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2A). A similar 72% decrease in hopping was observed by female pairs that were cold acclimated and actively producing heat (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2A). In contrast to the warm-acclimated birds, egg production by females that were actively producing heat was not associated with any change in locomotor activity compared with cold-acclimated, non-breeding values (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2A). However, the combination of egg production, cold acclimation and heat production was associated with an 81% decrease in locomotor activity compared with warm-acclimated, non-breeding female pairs (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2A). Variation among pairs in locomotor activity decreased from 9.9-fold variation in warm-acclimated, non-breeding female pairs to 3.7-fold and 4.3-fold variation in cold-acclimated, non-breeding, female pairs and cold-acclimated breeding pairs, respectively (Table 4; Fig. 2A).\n\nFig. 1.\n\nMetabolic rate (MR, ml O2 h\u22121) for warm- and cold-acclimated females as non-breeders and during egg production. MR measured at 7\u00b0C represents values for actively heat-producing birds. Thin lines join repeated measures from individual females, and gray circles represent least square means MR controlling for female body mass at each stage. Female body mass at each stage was included as a covariate. Thick lines underneath P-values indicate the experimental groups being compared statistically. NBr, non-breeding; LAY, egg laying.\n\nFig. 1.\n\nMetabolic rate (MR, ml O2 h\u22121) for warm- and cold-acclimated females as non-breeders and during egg production. MR measured at 7\u00b0C represents values for actively heat-producing birds. Thin lines join repeated measures from individual females, and gray circles represent least square means MR controlling for female body mass at each stage. Female body mass at each stage was included as a covariate. Thick lines underneath P-values indicate the experimental groups being compared statistically. NBr, non-breeding; LAY, egg laying.\n\nFig. 2.\n\n(A) Locomotor activity (hops pair\u22121 day\u22121), (B) seed consumption (g pair\u22121 day\u22121) and (C) wet thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C (ml O2 h\u22121 \u00b0C\u22121) of warm- and cold-acclimated zebra finches as non-breeders and during egg production [warm-acclimated seed consumption data from V\u00e9zina et al. (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b)]. For locomotor activity and seed consumption, thin lines join repeated measures from individual females, and gray circles represent stage means. Locomotor activity and seed consumption were log10-transformed for statistical analysis. For thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C, gray circles represent least square means controlling for female body mass. Female body mass at each stage was included as a covariate for statistical analysis of thermal conductance. Thick lines underneath P-values indicate the experimental groups being compared statistically. NBr, non-breeding; LAY, egg laying.\n\nFig. 2.\n\n(A) Locomotor activity (hops pair\u22121 day\u22121), (B) seed consumption (g pair\u22121 day\u22121) and (C) wet thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C (ml O2 h\u22121 \u00b0C\u22121) of warm- and cold-acclimated zebra finches as non-breeders and during egg production [warm-acclimated seed consumption data from V\u00e9zina et al. (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b)]. For locomotor activity and seed consumption, thin lines join repeated measures from individual females, and gray circles represent stage means. Locomotor activity and seed consumption were log10-transformed for statistical analysis. For thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C, gray circles represent least square means controlling for female body mass. Female body mass at each stage was included as a covariate for statistical analysis of thermal conductance. Thick lines underneath P-values indicate the experimental groups being compared statistically. NBr, non-breeding; LAY, egg laying.\n\nSeed consumption, our indicator of daily raw energy intake, was not related to female or pair body mass at the various stages (P>0.05) but did differ between stages (F3,18.3=64.01, P<0.0001). Gross energy intake of warm-acclimated birds was not affected by egg production, and neither was variation between pairs in energy intake [2.6-fold variation among non-breeding female pairs compared with 2.9-fold variation among breeding pairs; Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2B; data from V\u00e9zina et al. (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b)]. By contrast, cold acclimation and active heat production induced a 71% increase in seed consumption in non-breeding birds (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2B), with very little variation (only 1.2-fold) between female pairs. Interestingly, while cold-acclimated, egg-laying birds involved in active heat production exhibited marked variation (over 4-fold) in gross energy intake, mean seed consumption decreased by 22% compared with cold-acclimated, non-breeding values (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2B). Despite this decrease in gross energy intake, the combination of egg production, cold acclimation and active heat production still induced a 33% increase in seed intake above warm-acclimated, non-breeding values (Tables 2 and 4; Fig. 2B).\n\nThermal conductance\n\nBody temperature following MR measurements did not differ among the different thermal-reproductive stages (F3,39=1.06, P>0.3) but thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C varied among the stages (F3,39=6.04, P<0.002) and was positively related to female body mass (F1,39=30.46, P<0.0001). Therefore, female body mass was included as a covariate in all analyses. Warm-acclimated, non-breeding females exhibited 9\u201313% higher thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C than warm-acclimated, egg-laying females (t=21.8, d.f.=38, P<0.04), cold-acclimated, non-breeding females (t=3.67, d.f.=38, P<0.001), and cold-acclimated, egg-laying females (t=2.92, d.f.=38, P<0.006) (Table 4; Fig. 2C). By contrast, females from all three of these thermal-reproductive stages did not differ from each other in their thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C (all P>0.5; Table 4). Thermal conductance exhibited little variation among females within thermal-reproductive stages (ranging from 1.1-fold variation in warm-acclimated laying females to 1.6-fold variation in cold-acclimated laying females; Table 4; Fig. 2C).\n\nIn this study we have shown that the metabolic cost of egg production in passerine birds [16\u201327% above BMR or RMR (Chappell et al., 1999; Nilsson and Raberg, 2001; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2002; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2003; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b) (this study)] is relatively small compared with the additive costs of cold acclimation and active heat production (224% above BMR). Birds exposed to low ambient temperatures dealt with this increase in energy expenditure by increasing food intake (seed consumption) by 72% and decreasing locomotor activity by 72% compared with warm-acclimated, non-breeding birds. By contrast, egg production in cold-acclimated, heat-producing females was associated with an 11% decrease in MR and a 22% decrease in seed consumption but with no change in body temperature compared with non-breeding, thermoregulating values. This suggests that while the increase in MR associated with egg production is relatively small in relation to the birds' capacity to increase MR in response to other energetically demanding processes, the addition of the costs of egg production on top of these metabolically costly activities may be enough to necessitate the use of energy-saving strategies, such as internal energy reallocation, to cope with the additional or combined energetic demands.\n\nTable 4.\n\nLocomotor activity, seed consumption and thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C of zebra finches in different thermal-reproductive stages\n\nThere is marked variation across avian species in the reported metabolic costs associated with acclimatization or acclimation to cold ambient temperatures. For example, cold-acclimated (5\u00b0C) house finches, Carpodacus mexicanus, exhibited a 15% increase in BMR above that of warm-acclimated (25\u00b0C) birds (O'Connor et al., 2000), while cold-acclimation (to 8\u00b0C) in great tits (Parus major) induced a 21% increase in MR above warm-acclimated (to 22\u00b0C) BMR (Caro and Visser, 2009). Similarly, winter-acclimatized American goldfinches (Carduelis tristis) demonstrated 23% and 46% higher BMR than spring- and summer-acclimatized birds (Liknes et al., 2002). By contrast, Carleton and del Rio found no measurable metabolic cost of cold-acclimation in house sparrows, Passer domesticus, as warm-acclimated (to 22\u00b0C) and cold-acclimated (to 5\u00b0C) birds had comparable MRs (measured at 5\u00b0C and 22\u00b0C) (Carleton and del Rio, 2005). However, Arens and Cooper reported a 64% increase in BMR of winter-acclimatized house sparrows compared with summer-acclimatized birds (Arens and Cooper, 2005). In fact, across species the effects of cold acclimation or acclimatization on BMR range from having no effect to increasing BMR by 85% (Gelineo, 1964; Swanson, 2009; McKechnie, 2008), and are affected by differences between seasons (Swanson and Olmstead, 1999) and populations (Broggi et al., 2004). Therefore, the 96% increase in MR (measured at 35\u00b0C) associated with cold acclimation in this study was higher than previously reported metabolic costs of cold acclimation in other passerine species. Because of their relatively high body heat conductance, species from warm climates are characterized by a small temperature range of thermoneutrality and relatively high lower critical temperature (Scholander et al., 1950; Schmidt-Nielsen, 1990). Consequently, for a desert species such as the zebra finch, acclimation to 7\u00b0C represents a greater cold challenge than for temperate species because of the greater relative difference between the acclimation temperature and the lower limit of thermoneutrality [i.e. 26\u00b0C difference in zebra finches vs 15\u201318\u00b0C in house sparrows and house finches (Hudson and Kimsey, 1966; Weathers, 1981; Dawson et al., 1985; Marschall and Prinzinger, 1991)].\n\nThe metabolic cost of egg production in this study (24% above BMR) is comparable with previous studies on free-living and captive passerine birds, which reported 16\u201327% increases in MR above values for non-breeding females (Chappell et al., 1999; Nilsson and Raberg, 2001; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2002; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2003, V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b). However, the metabolic cost of egg production was small when compared with the additive metabolic costs of cold acclimation and active heat production alone (224% above BMR). Interestingly, we could not detect any additional increase in metabolism in association with the egg formation process in cold-acclimated females when MR was measured at thermoneutrality. Indeed, all but four cold-acclimated birds had MRs that were either stable or decreased between the non-breeding and laying stages (Fig. 1). Furthermore, the mean MR of these same cold-acclimated females decreased by 11% when egg production coincided with active heat production. As the body temperature of these females did not differ from that of warm-acclimated, egg-laying females, the 11% decrease was not caused by facultative hypothermia. Furthermore, the decrease in mass-corrected MR during egg production in cold-acclimated females was also not due to the fact that females had previous experience with the respirometry system as non-breeders. Indeed, mass-corrected, egg-laying MR of cold-acclimated females measured at 7\u00b0C during the thermal conductance study (102.31\u00b14.75 ml O2 h\u22121) did not differ from that of cold-acclimated females from the main study (P>0.7). Furthermore, warm-acclimated, egg-laying females also had previous experience with respirometry as non-breeders and exhibited a 24% increase in mass-corrected MR (Table 3; Fig. 1).\n\nIn our study, if the metabolic costs of cold acclimation, active heat production and egg formation were additive, the predicted increase in MR was 3.5 times the BMR. However, female zebra finches faced with this combination of thermal and reproductive challenges only increased MR by 224% above BMR, the equivalent of 2.9 times the BMR. This suggests that the addition of the energetic demands associated with egg production (Chappell et al., 1999; Nilsson and Raberg, 2001; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2002; V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2003, V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005b) may result in downregulation of non-reproductive functions and thus energy reallocation within an individual, potentially at the expense of somatic maintenance (Deerenberg et al., 1997; Deerenberg et al., 1998; Wiersma and Verhulst, 2005). Within individuals energy reallocation can take several forms. MR in resting animals reflects the energy consumption of all metabolically active tissues. Because RMR is often positively correlated with the masses of organs such as the liver, pectoral muscle and gut (O'Connor, 1995; Chappell et al., 1999; V\u00e9zina et al., 2006a), individuals could modulate MR by changing the size of major metabolically active internal organs (Swanson, 2009; McKechnie, 2008). Metabolic intensity, the energy consumed per unit tissue mass, can also vary reversibly, and birds may change metabolic intensity to reallocate energy between demanding systems. For example, red knots (Calidris canutus) forced to generate larger digestive tracts by diet manipulations responded by decreasing BMR (Piersma et al., 2004), suggesting a reduction in the tissue's metabolic intensity. Similarly, free-living European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were found to downregulate liver metabolic intensity during egg production and chick rearing (V\u00e9zina and Williams, 2005a). In this study, physiological downregulation of non-reproductive function and reallocation of this energy towards thermoregulation and egg production could ultimately lead to undetectable metabolic changes or even decreases in MR in cold-acclimated, egg-laying birds when comparing cold-acclimated, non-breeding and laying MR within-individuals, regardless of the measurement temperature. Future experimental work is needed to address the questions of whether downregulation of non-reproductive functions occurs when egg production, cold acclimation and heat production are combined, which non-reproductive functions are affected, and to what extent are these functions downregulated to meet the combined energy requirements of these three processes.\n\nRespirometry is an indirect way of measuring total heat production [i.e. indirect calorimetry (Blaxter, 1989)]. This means that egg production generates heat, as shown by a 24% increase in MR in warm-acclimated birds, and this heat increment of egg production can probably substitute for part of the thermostatic costs involved at 7\u00b0C. It has been shown that the heat increment of feeding, i.e. the increase in MR following consumption of a meal [also referred to as specific dynamic action or diet-induced thermogenesis (Ricklefs, 1974) (reviewed in Jobling, 1983; Aoyagi et al., 1990)] can substitute for thermoregulatory heat production in birds exposed to low ambient temperatures (Biebach, 1984; Meienberger and Dauberschmidt, 1992; Chappell et al., 1997). Previous studies have reported that a large proportion of the increase in MR following ingestion of a meal is due to the assimilation of food, primarily the accelerated rates of protein synthesis (Aoyagi et al., 1990; Brown and Cameron, 1991a; Brown and Cameron, 1991b). Thus, the marked increase in protein synthesis associated with egg development may be the main heat source resulting from egg production. The most likely contributors to the heat increment of egg production are the oviductal production of egg albumen (Yu et al., 1971; Yu and Marquardt, 1973) (reviewed in Williams, 1998) and the physiological activity of the shell gland (reviewed in Williams, 1998), as V\u00e9zina et al. found no detectable effects of the hepatic production of the egg yolk precursors (vitellogenin and yolk-targeted very-low density lipoprotein) on RMR in zebra finches (V\u00e9zina et al., 2003). While laying females could exploit this metabolic by-product of egg development to compensate for a portion of the costs of active heat production at low temperatures, the maximal amount of heat generated by egg production (corresponding to a of 8.77 ml O2h\u22121; Table 3) only represents 20% of the energy needed for active heat production (i.e. a mean of 43.81 ml O2h\u22121; Table 3). Therefore, in this specific experiment, the compensatory effect of the heat increment of egg production did not fully match the thermoregulatory needs at 7\u00b0C. We observed an 11% decrease in MR from the non-breeding to the egg-laying stage in cold-acclimated, heat-producing females. As there was no difference in thermal conductance at 7\u00b0C between these two reproductive stages, the observed decline in MR reflects a reduction in total heat production. We suspect this observation may have resulted from the over-compensatory effect of downregulating non-reproductive functions to fuel the added costs of egg formation in the cold environment. V\u00e9zina and colleagues found a similar over-compensation effect in zebra finches, wherein some egg-laying females were able to decrease their daily energy expenditure (DEE) compared with the non-breeding state, despite an increase in MR during egg production (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b).\n\nThe cold-acclimated females in this study faced obvious increases in energetic costs. One could predict that the combination of these energetically challenging processes would affect egg production if different physiological systems have to compete for energy, and this is exactly what we found. Compared with their own warm-acclimated (to 21\u00b0C) reproductive values, female zebra finches did not maintain reproductive output when egg laying coincided with cold acclimation and heat production at 7\u00b0C. Cold-acclimated females took approximately 0.5 days longer to initiate egg laying and ultimately laid a mean of 0.4 fewer eggs at a slower rate (0.90 eggs day\u22121 compared with 0.95 eggs day\u22121 while warm acclimated). Furthermore, cold-acclimated females \u2018skipped\u2019 more days in between eggs, when no egg was laid (0.7 skipped days compared with 0.5 skipped days while warm-acclimated) (Salvante et al., 2007). Therefore, exposure to the combined metabolic costs of egg production, cold acclimation and active heat production appeared to compromise the processes involved in egg formation. Consequently, there may be downregulation of multiple physiological systems, reproductive and non-reproductive, to fuel the substantial, combined energetic demands associated with egg production and thermoregulation. Furthermore, the metabolic costs of the downregulated processes involved in egg production by cold-acclimated, heat-producing females may be lower than the MR associated with egg production in more favorable energetic conditions (i.e. 8.77 ml O2h\u22121 in warm-acclimated females). Consequently, this potentially smaller increase in MR associated with egg production in the cold may be masked by the substantial decrease in MR associated with down-regulation of reproductive and non-reproductive functions.\n\nDaily locomotor activity of warm-acclimated zebra finches decreased by 64% from the non-breeding to egg-producing stage, confirming previous findings that warm-acclimated laying zebra finches decrease activity by 61% with no associated change in food intake (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b). V\u00e9zina et al. also showed, using the doubly labeled water technique, that DEE in these birds did not change between the non-breeding and egg-producing stages (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b). Taken together, these findings suggest that the 61\u201364% decrease in locomotor activity of warm-acclimated, egg-producing birds along with the observed decrease in thermal conductance may conserve sufficient energy on a daily basis to meet the energy demands of egg production in favorable thermal conditions. Consequently, warm-acclimated zebra finches do not need to increase energy intake when producing eggs.\n\nCompared with warm-acclimated, non-breeding birds, cold-acclimated, non-breeding zebra finches decreased both daily locomotor activity (by 72%) and wet thermal conductance, suggesting that these birds employ energy-saving behavioral modification as a first strategy to reallocate the energy needed to fuel expensive metabolic processes. Cold-acclimated individuals also increased energy intake by consuming more seed per day (71% as non-breeders and 33% during egg production) than warm-acclimated, non-breeding birds, suggesting that birds increase energy intake to fuel the additional energy requirements of cold acclimation and active heat production. Similarly, cold-acclimated (15\u00b0C) hoopoe larks, Alaemon alaudipes, were fed 3-times more food than larks maintained at thermoneutrality (36\u00b0C), suggesting that these cold-acclimated birds also increased energy intake (Williams and Tieleman, 2000). Therefore, while zebra finches are capable of increasing food intake above levels generally observed in favorable conditions, they only do so in certain circumstances. In warm environments, behavioral energy reallocation by individuals allows them to minimize large variations in DEE (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b; Williams et al., 2009). Under cold challenge, however, reducing locomotor activity to its minimum is not sufficient, and the birds must also increase their energy intake.\n\nAn interesting finding regarding daily food intake in cold-acclimated birds is that females experiencing the combined costs of cold acclimation, active heat production and egg production exhibited a mean daily food intake that was 22% lower than when at the non-breeding stage. This suggests a reduced overall DEE despite the additional energetic demands associated with egg production and could be the result of a metabolic downregulation of reproductive and non-reproductive physiological systems as discussed above. Alternatively, changes in digestive assimilation efficiency in response to increased energy demands could also explain the general decline in seed consumption by cold-acclimated females during egg production. Cold-acclimated (to \u22129\u00b0C), force-exercised house wrens, Troglodytes aedon, assimilated 2.3 times more energy per day than warm-acclimated, non-exercised birds by modulating food intake and increasing their energy assimilation quotient [i.e. 1 \u2013 (energy excreted \/ energy ingested)]. This was done by increasing the length of their small intestines by 21%, resulting in a larger small intestine volume and absorptive surface area (Dykstra and Karasov, 1992). A larger gut in cold-acclimated birds is consistent with findings of Williams and Tieleman (Williams and Tieleman, 2000) and Cavieres and Sabat (Cavieres and Sabat, 2008) and would explain part of the increase in MR reported in both groups of cold-acclimated birds above that of warm-acclimated birds. It is possible that our cold-acclimated, egg-laying females may have increased digestive assimilation efficiency above cold-acclimated, non-breeding levels via further changes in digestive tract morphology, retention time in the digestive tract or an increase in the rate of nutrient absorption, which could have led to an assimilation of comparable amounts of energy from less seed without necessarily increasing MR as the measurements were taken in the post-absorptive state.\n\nThe combination of the energetic requirements of cold acclimation, heat production and egg formation was associated with the most marked variation among birds in daily seed consumption (over 4-fold), with some birds decreasing seed consumption to levels comparable with warm-acclimated, non-breeding females, and others maintaining a high level of gross energy intake that was comparable with their elevated levels as cold-acclimated non-breeders (see Fig. 2B). By contrast, this combination of energetically demanding activities was also associated with the lowest mean value and smallest range (i.e. max.\u2013min.) in locomotor activity between pairs (Table 4). These data suggest that while all of the cold-acclimated, heat-producing, egg-laying females used behaviorally based energy reallocation (sensuWilliams and Ternan, 1999) to meet their elevated energy demands, these same females varied in the extent to which they altered gross energy intake. This plasticity is consistent with previous findings of individually variable energy management strategies used by females to meet the energetic demands of reproduction (V\u00e9zina et al., 2006b), which have been found to be repeatable among individuals between breeding attempts (Williams et al., 2009).\n\nThis study was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Operating Grant to T.D.W., a Post-Graduate Scholarship from the Fonds qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois de la recherche sur les natures et les technologies to F.V., Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Post-Graduate Scholarships to F.V. and K.G.S., and Grants-in-Aid of Research from the American Ornithologists' Union, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and Sigma Xi to K.G.S. 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H.\n(\n1996\n).\nBiostatistical Analysis\n.\nLondon, UK\n:\nPrentice Hall\n.","date":"2023-03-22 19:31:26","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 1, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.4461340010166168, \"perplexity\": 11417.130017599336}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2023-14\/segments\/1679296944452.74\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20230322180852-20230322210852-00083.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Chad Ocho Cinco Signs a Deal to Play for VH1 in a New Summer Series, 'The Tournament'
The 10-episode, one-hour series is set to premiere in July.
[via press release from VH1]
The 10 Episode One-Hour Series is Set to Premiere in July 2010
SANTA MONICA, Calif., March 11 -- Cincinnati Bengals star wide receiver Chad Ocho Cinco (formerly Chad Johnson) is using his off-season to pursue happiness off the field in his new VH1 reality show "The Tournament" (working title). The series is a mix of Ocho Cinco's on-field charisma blended with the drama of the dating pool played out in a bracket-style dating tournament. The 10 episode, one-hour series is set to premiere in July 2010.
One of the NFL's brightest stars, 32-year-old Ocho Cinco has been selected to the Pro Bowl six times and named an All-Pro three times. He legally changed his surname from Johnson to Ocho Cinco prior to the 2008 regular season to reflect the number 85 on his Bengals uniform. In the 2009 season, Ocho Cinco caught 72 passes for 1,047 yards and nine touchdowns. An avid user of social networks, Ocho Cinco has close to one million followers on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook.
"The Tournament" will start with Ocho Cinco finding his "first 85" by traveling all over the country meeting women that may be interested in dating him. Then, during the first episode, he will narrow the playing field down to the sweet sixteen - four women from each of the four regions of the country � Northern, Western, Southern and Central Divisions. The sixteen chosen women will be invited to join Ocho Cinco for the rest of the tournament-style dating competition.
Once the competition begins, Ocho Cinco will follow a tournament bracket where each of the ladies will have an opportunity to spend quality time with him while also facing off against one another in double-dates. The winner of each dating face-off will receive a game ball from Ocho Cinco and move on to the next round of the tournament, while the loser goes home. Ultimately the sweet sixteen will be narrowed down to eight and then the final four. In the end, the championship date between the two remaining women will result in Ocho Cinco awarding his chosen love the coveted Championship Ring. Hopefully, she turns out to be his greatest catch this season!
"Chad Ocho Cinco is one of the most electrifying individuals in sports today. His bigger than life personality on and off the field and his notorious skills as a social networker, connecting daily with his fans, makes him a perfect fit for VH1," said Jeff Olde, Executive Vice President, Original Programming and Production, VH1. "This show will not only give viewers a look inside his professional life, but also reveal his softer more romantic side when playing a very different kind of game."
VH1's "The Tournament" is executive produced by Bob Horowitz and Lewis Fenton (for JUMA Entertainment) and Mark Cronin and Cris Abrego (for 51 Minds Entertainment, LLC. an Endemol Company). Ben Samek and Matt Odgers also executive produce for the series and the company. Jeff Olde, Jill Holmes, and Kristen Kelly oversee the series for VH1.
About JUMA Entertainment
JUMA Entertainment was created in 2005 when Bob Horowitz, then head of IMG's U.S. television arm, left the global sports and entertainment management firm to form his media company. With offices on both coasts, JUMA Entertainment has quickly emerged as an industry leader in cross-platform show creation, media consulting and program packaging, as well as in the staging and televising of made-for-TV events. Its current roster of projects and credits (past) include: "The Superstars" (ABC), "The Singing Bee" (CMT), "Tattoo Highway" (A&E), "Double Exposure" (BRAVO), "Omarosa's Ultimate Merger" (TV One), "Fashion Rocks" (CBS), "Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials" (CBS), "Deer Valley Celebrity Skifest" (CBS), and "Battle of the Network Reality Stars" (BRAVO).
About 51 Minds Entertainment
The founders, Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin, formed this influential production company after joining forces to create the pop culture reality show, The Surreal Life. Widely credited for creating the celebreality genre of reality programming, 51 Minds has amused and shocked viewers with its enormously popular television series. With such hits as Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, My Fair Brady, Gotti's Way, Real Chance of Love, and For the Love of Ray J, 51 Minds helped catapult VH1 to ratings success and still holds the record for the most watched programs on that channel. In April of 2008, the company was acquired by Endemol USA. Through this partnership, 51 Minds continues to run as a dynamic independent production company and has carried on producing hilarious and paramount shows within the 51 Minds' brand.
About VH1
VH1 connects viewers to the music, artists and pop culture that matter to them most with TV series, specials, live events, exclusive online content and public affairs initiatives. VH1 is available in 95 million households in the U.S. VH1 also has an array of digital channels and services including VH1Classic, VH1 Soul, VH1 Mobile, VH1Games and extensive broadband video on VH1.com. Connect with VH1 at VH1.com.
[march 2010]
· OCHOCINCO: THE ULTIMATE CATCH (VH1) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 8,137 |
\section{Introduction}
We consider a simple auction environment: the auctioneer has certain amount of divisible good to be distributed among a number of $n$ agents. Since the good is divisible, without loss of generality, we can always assume that it is of one unit. Each agent $i\in [n]$ has a valuation function $v_i(\cdot)$ for the good (willingness-to-pay) and a budget $B_i$ to indicate the maximum amount of money she/he is able to pay to the auctioneer (ability-to-pay). We always assume that the valuation $v_i(\cdot)$ is private information for agent $i$ and we shall study both public budget model where the budgets are public knowledge to the auctioneer and private budget model where budget $B_i$ is also private information for agent $i$. Upon receiving the bids, the auction allocates $x_i\geq 0$ unit of the good to agent $i$ and charge her/him $p_i\geq 0$ amount of money. Then the utility of agent $i$ is $v_i(x_i) -p_i$ if $p_i\leq B_i$; otherwise her/his utility is $-\infty$ since she/he does not have enough money to pay. We call an auction \emph{truthful} or \emph{incentive compatible} if it is always a dominant strategy for every bidder $i$ to submit her/his true private information. We say a randomized auction is \emph{universally truthful} if it is a probabilistic distribution over deterministic truthful auctions. The auction is budget feasible if we always have $p_i\leq B_i$ for a truth-telling agent $i$.
If there is no budget constraint, the remarkable VCG auction~\cite{Vickrey1961,Clarke1971,Groves1973} is a truthful auction to achieve optimal social welfare. However, budget constraints for agents are very common in real life. For high value items such as spectrum, this is due to the ability-to-pay: an agent who values the item very high may not have enough money to pay it; even for relatively low value items such as key words auction for search engine, budget is also the first thing to concern for advertisers, since the volume for the auction could be very large, and a budget is used for risk control. The existence of budget brings in a huge challenge to the design of auctions and even theoretical impossibility results especially when social warfare is the objective. In particular, no truthful auction can approximate social welfare by a better factor than the number of agents even with publicly known budget constraints and linear valuation functions. The main reason is that we cannot truthfully allocate a significant amount of good to agents with very high values but small budgets.
To give a more realistic benchmark for social welfare, a new notion called \emph{liquid welfare} was proposed by Dobzinski and Leme~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14} as an alternative quantifiable measure for social efficiency. It is defined to be
$$\overline{W}(\mathbf{x}) = \sum_i \min\{v_i(x_i), B_i\}.$$
Basically, each agent's utility is capped by her/his budget. Therefore, an agent with high value but small budget cannot contribute much to liquid welfare. This is a reasonable measure as argued in the paper~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14}: ``efficiency should be measured only with respect to the funds available to the bidder at the time of the auction, and not the additional liquidity he might gain after receiving the goods in the auction''. This is also the maximum amount of revenue an omniscient seller would be able to extract from a certain instance. More justification for this measure can be found in the paper~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14}.
With respect to this optimal liquid welfare objective, their paper gave two truthful auctions both with approximation ratio of $2$ in the public budget model with linear (additive) valuation functions and proved a lower bound of $\frac{4}{3}$ in this same setting. They explicitly asked whether one can have a truthful auction that provides an approximation ratio better than $2$ in this simple setting.
For the more challenging private budget model, they provided an $O(\log n)$ approximation truthful auction for linear and decreasing marginal (concave) valuations, and an $O(\log^2 n)$ approximation auction for sub-additive valuations. The main open question is whether a constant approximation exists or not. This was not known even for simple linear valuation functions.
\subsection{Our Results and Techniques}
In this paper, we answer both of their open questions affirmatively. For the public budget setting and linear valuations, we design a new truthful auction with an approximation ratio of $\varphi=\frac{\sqrt{5}+1}{2}\approx 1.618$, where $\varphi$ is the golden ratio (i.e. the positive solution for the equation $t^2=t+1$). For the private budget setting, we design the first constant approximation auction with an approximation ratio of $34$. More importantly, our auction works for all valuation functions, not necessary linear, concave or sub-additive. This is a rather surprising result and this generality makes the auction applicable in many different scenarios.
Our design techniques are also new. For the $2$ approximation auction proposed in~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14}, the rough idea is to use a uniform market clearing price to sell the item to agents. Their ratio of $2$ is tight for their mechanism even for two agents. The bad case happens when one agent has very high value but limited budget while the other agent has a relatively lower value but enough budget. In the optimal allocation, the first agent gets very little share of the good, but this cannot be archived by a uniform pricing scheme. The high level idea of our mechanism is that an agent can pay certain uniform price per unit but only use up certain fraction of her/his budget. In order to use up more of her/his budget, she/he needs to pay higher price per unit. By this mechanism, an agent with high value but limited budget will still use up all her/his budget but get less share of the good.
Our above mechanism crucially uses the fact that the auctioneer knows the budget for each agent. For the private budget setting, we go back to the uniform pricing scheme.
However, we do not know how to compute a good global uniform price truthfully in private budget setting.
To overcome this, we make use of random sampling, one of the most powerful techniques in truthful mechanism design~\cite{Goldberg2006,BeiCGL12,GravinL13}. We randomly divide the agents into two groups, compute the optimal liquid welfare for one group and use this as a guide to charge agents in the other group.
In order to make this random sampling auction work, the contribution in an optimal solution from different groups should be relatively balanced. In particular, if most of the contribution is from one single agent, random sampling does not work. Therefore, random sampling is usually combined with a Vickrey auction~\cite{BeiCGL12,ChenGL13} which works well in this unbalanced case. We also combine a Vickrey auction here for the modified valuation $\min\{v_i(1), B_i\}$. This Vickrey auction was also mentioned in~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14} and was claimed to be truthful there. However, we notice that there is a subtle issue due to budget constraint and tie-breaking which makes the auction not truthful. To overcome this, we modify the Vickrey auction in which the winner (with highest value) need to pay a bit higher than the second highest value. In the case that the two highest values of the agents are very close to each other, the auction simply refuse to sell the item. We also design another version of modified Vickrey auction which works well when the two highest values are very close to each other. We think that this observation of untruthfulness and these modifications of Vickrey auction are of independent interest.
\subsection{Related Work}
Due to its practical relevance, many theoretical investigations have been devoted to analyzing auctions for budget constrained agents, especially in direction of optimal auction design which tries to maximize the revenue for the auctioneer~\cite{BorgsCIMS05,ChawlaMM11,FeldmanFLS12,DevanurHH13}.
For social efficiency, a number of previous works focus on the solution concept of Pareto Efficiency, which exist for the public budget model but not for private budget model~\cite{DobzinskiLN12,FiatLSS11}.
Similar alternative quantifiable measures for efficiency for budget constrained agents were also studied in~\cite{DevanurHH13,SyrgkanisT13} but for different solution concepts.
Another related topic is to study budget feasible mechanism design for reversal auction where the budget constrained buyer is the auctioneer rather than a bidder. This model was first proposed and studied by Singer~\cite{Singer10}. Since then, several improvements have been obtained~\cite{ChenGL11,DobzinskiPS11,BeiCGL12}.
\section{Public Budgets}
In this section, we consider the setting that agents' budgets are public information to the auctioneer, and the valuation function for each agent is linear. To simplify the notations, in this section we will use $v_i$ to denote value per unit for agent $i$ and thus $v_i(x_i) = v_i x_i$. Without loss of generality, we assume that there are $n$ agents with values $v_1 \geq \ldots \geq v_n$ and corresponding budgets $B_1, \ldots, B_n$. Let $\varphi = \frac{\sqrt{5}+1}{2}$ which is the golden ratio (i.e. the positive solution for the equation $t^2=t+1$).
For public budget and linear valuations model, it becomes a single dimensional parameter mechanism design problem with parameter $\mathbf{v} = (v_1, v_2, \ldots, v_n)$, thus an auction can be characterized by allocation rule $\mathbf{x} : \mathbb{R}^n_+ \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^n_+$ and payment rule $\mathbf{p}: \mathbb{R}^n_+ \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^n_+$ that maps $\mathbf{v}$ to a vector of allocations $\mathbf{x}(\mathbf{v})$ and a vector of payments $\mathbf{p}(\mathbf{v})$. We present the Myerson's Lemma \cite{myerson1981optimal}, which is a powerful tool in these settings.
\begin{lemma}
\label{lemmyerson}
A deterministic mechanism, with allocation and payment rule $\mathbf{x}$,$\mathbf{p}$
respectively, is truthful if and only if for each bidder $i$ and each $v_{-i}$, the following
conditions hold:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Monotone Allocation: $x_i(v_i, v_{-i})\leq x_i(v'_i, v_{-i})$ for all $v'_i \geq v_i$;
\item The payments are such that: $p_i(v_i, v_{-i})= v_i \cdot x_i(v_i,v_{-i})- \int_0^{v_i}x_i(u, v_{-i})du$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{lemma}
Our new auction for public budget model is presented in Auction~\ref{GSUPA}. Here we assume that $v_{n+1} = 0$ if occurs.
\IncMargin{1em}
\begin{algorithm}[h]
\SetKwInOut{Input}{input}\SetKwInOut{Output}{output}
\Input{$n $ agents with valuations $v_1\geq \ldots \geq v_n$ and corresponding budgets $B_1, \ldots, B_n$}
\Output{An allocation $(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ and corresponding payments $(p_1, \ldots, p_n)$}
\BlankLine
\Begin{
Let $k\in [n]$ be the maximum integer s.t. $\frac{1}{\varphi} \sum_{j=1}^k B_j \leq v_k$\;
\If{$\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j\geq v_{k+1}$}{
\For{$i = 1$ \emph{\KwTo} $k$}{
$\hat{v}_i \leftarrow \frac{v_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}$\;
$x_i \leftarrow \frac{B_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\}$\;
}
\For{$i = k+1$ \emph{\KwTo} $n$}{
$x_i \leftarrow 0$\;
}
}
\Else
{
\For{$i = 1$ \emph{\KwTo} $k$}{
$\hat{v}_i \leftarrow \frac{ v_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}$\;
$x_i \leftarrow \frac{B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\}$\;
}
$x_{k+1} \leftarrow \frac{1}{\varphi} - \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{ B_i}{\varphi^2 v_{k+1}}$\;
\For{$i = k+2$ \emph{\KwTo} $n$}{
$x_i \leftarrow 0$\;
}
}
\For{$i=1$ \emph{\KwTo} $n$}{
$p_i \leftarrow v_i \cdot x_i(v_i,v_{-i})- \int_0^{v_i}x_i(u, v_{-i})du$;\quad\quad\quad// Myerson's Payment Rule\
}
}
\caption{Auction for Public Budgets}\label{GSUPA}
\end{algorithm}
\DecMargin{1em}
Firstly, we verify that this is indeed a well-defined auction, namely the total amount of good it allocates does not exceed one unit.
If $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j\geq v_{k+1}$,
\[\sum_{i=1}^n x_i = \sum_{i=1}^k x_i = \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\}
\leq \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j} = 1.\]
If $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j< v_{k+1}$,
\begin{align*}
\sum_{i=1}^n x_i = \sum_{i=1}^{k} x_i + x_{k+1} &= \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{ B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\} + \frac{1}{\varphi} - \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{B_i}{\varphi^2 v_{k+1}} \\& \leq \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{ B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}} + 1 - \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}} = 1.
\end{align*}
\begin{theorem}
\label{thmpubmain}
For public budget model and linear valuations, Auction~\ref{GSUPA} is a truthful, budget feasible mechanism
with approximation ratio of at most $\varphi$ for liquid welfare.
\end{theorem}
These properties shall be proved in the following two subsections. The following notations are used in the whole section. Let $k$ be as defined in Auction \ref{GSUPA}, $p_0 = \max\{\sum_{i=1}^kB_i, \varphi v_{k+1}\}$, and $k_1$ be the maximum integer s.t. $v_{k_1} \geq p_0$. For agent $i \in [n]$ let $\hat{v}_i = \frac{v_i}{p_0}$, which is as defined in Auction \ref{GSUPA}.
We call instances with $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j\geq v_{k+1}$ of case I and instances with $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j< v_{k+1}$ of case II. In most of our analysis, we distinguish these two cases and prove them separately. We have the following facts by the rule of our auction:
\begin{itemize}
\item In case I, $v_1\geq \cdots \geq v_{k_1} \geq p_0 \geq v_{k_1+1} \geq \cdots \geq v_{k} \geq \frac{p_0}{\varphi} \geq v_{k+1} \geq \cdots \geq v_{n}$;
\item In case II, $v_1\geq \cdots \geq v_{k_1} \geq p_0 \geq v_{k_1+1} \geq \cdots \geq v_{k+1} = \frac{p_0}{\varphi} \geq v_{k+2} \geq \cdots \geq v_{n}$.
\end{itemize}
Thus $\hat{v}_i\geq 1$ for $i=1,2,\ldots, k_1$ and $\hat{v}_i\in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1)$ for $i=k_1+1, k_1+2,\ldots, k$.
\subsection{Truthfulness and Budget Feasibility}
By Myerson's Lemma, we only need to verify that the allocation function in our auction is monotone as our payment is already determined by Myerson's integration.
\begin{lemma}(Monotonicity)
\label{lemmono}
The allocation function in Auction~\ref{GSUPA} is monotone, i.e., $v_i \rightarrow x_i(v_i, v_{-i})$ is non-decreasing.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
For case I, only the first $k$ agents get non-zero unit of the item, thus we only need to prove that for these agents, one's share is non-decreasing if one increases her/his bid. This is obvious since allocation $x_i = \frac{B_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\} = \frac{B_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}\min\{\frac{v_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j},1\} $ of agent $i$ is a monotone non-decreasing function in $v_i$.
Now we assume that we are in case II where only the first $k+1$ agents get non-zero unit of the item.
By the same argument as above, the first $k$ agents get no less unit of the item if she/he increases her/his bid. We prove that this also holds for the $(k+1)$-th agent.
For agent $k+1$, as she/he continues to increase her/his value and keep the $(k+1)$-th place, her/his allocation will increase, since it is $x_{k+1} = \frac{1}{\varphi} - \sum_{j=1}^k \frac{B_j}{\varphi^2 v_{k+1}}$. We consider the following two cases when $v_{k+1}$ increases further:
\begin{itemize}
\item $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^{k+1}B_j \leq v_k$. In this case, the value of $v_{k+1}$ first reaches $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^{k+1}B_j$ when increasing and her/his allocation is updated to
$\frac{B_{k+1}}{\sum_{j=1}^{k+1}B_j}\min\{\hat{v}_{k+1}, 1\} = \frac{1}{\varphi} \cdot \frac{B_{k+1}}{\sum_{j=1}^{k+1}B_j} = \frac{1}{\varphi} - \frac{1}{\varphi^2} \sum_{j=1}^k \frac{B_j}{v_{k+1}}$.
After that, this becomes an instance of case I and the allocation continues to increase as $v_{k+1}$ increases.
\item $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^{k+1}B_j > v_k$. In this case, the value of $v_{k+1}$ first reaches $v_k$ when increasing, and displace player $k$ to be the $k$th highest value. Then one of the following things will happen:
\begin{itemize}
\item If $\frac{1}{\varphi}(\sum_{j=1}^{k-1}B_j + B_{k+1}) > v_k$, since $\frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^{k-1}B_j < \frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{j=1}^k B_j < v_k$, it is still an instance of case II and this agent $k+1$ is still the last agent in the winner set. The only difference is that the agent $k$ is not longer in the winner set and therefore the allocation $x_{k+1}$ gets updated to $\frac{1}{\varphi}-\frac{1}{\varphi^2}\sum_{j=1}^{k-1}\frac{B_j}{v_k} \geq \frac{1}{\varphi} - \frac{1}{\varphi^2}\sum_{j=1}^k\frac{B_j}{v_k}$.
\item If $\frac{1}{\varphi} (\sum_{j=1}^{k-1}B_j + B_{k+1}) \leq v_k$, then it is still an instance of case II but with agent $k$ as the last agent in the winner set. Agent $k+1$ become the second-to-last agent in the winner set and the allocation $x_{k+1}$ gets updated to $\frac{ B_{k+1}}{\varphi v_k}\min\{\hat{v}_{k+1},1\} \geq \frac{ B_{k+1}}{\varphi^2v_k}\geq \frac{1}{\varphi} - \frac{1}{\varphi^2} \sum_{j=1}^k \frac{B_j}{v_k}$.
\end{itemize}
In both cases, the allocation is non-decreasing.
\end{itemize}
This concludes the proof of truthfulness of our auction.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}(Budget feasibility)
The payments defined in Auction~\ref{GSUPA} do not exceed the budgets.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
For agents $i > k$ in case I and agents $i > k+1$ in case II, this is trivial since they do not get any good and pay nothing. For first $k$ agents in both case I and case II, their allocation do not change when they increase their valuations beyond $v_i \geq p_0$. In other words, their allocation is a constant when $v_i \geq p_0$. Thus, their payments are bounded by $p_0 x_i = p_0 \frac{B_i}{p_0}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\} \leq B_i$.
The only remaining case is the $(k+1)$-th agent in case II. The payment is bounded by $v_{k+1}x_{k+1} = v_{k+1}( \frac{1}{\varphi} - \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{ B_i}{\varphi^2 v_{k+1}}) \leq \frac{1}{\varphi} B_{k+1}$, where the inequality derives from the definition of $k$. This completes the proof.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Approximation Ratio Analysis}
Before we prove the approximation ratio, we obtain some bounds for the optimal liquid welfare. We refer to the optimal liquid welfare as $OPT = \max_{\mathbf{x}}\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})$. If we know all the information, the optimal can be computed by a simple greedy.
\begin{lemma}(\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/DobzinskiL14})
\label{lemeasy}
The optimal liquid welfare $OPT$ occurs at $\bar{x}^\ast_i = \min(\frac{B_i}{v_i}, [1- \sum_{j<i} \bar{x}^\ast_j]^+)$, where $[x]^+=\max(0,x)$.
\end{lemma}
From this, it is easy to verify that the following expression for any $j\in [n-1]$ gives upper bounds for $OPT$, which holds even if $1-\sum_{i=1}^j \frac{B_i}{v_i}<0$:
\begin{equation}\label{bounds:OPT}
OPT\leq \sum_{i=1}^j B_i + v_{j+1}(1-\sum_{i=1}^j \frac{B_i}{v_{i}}).
\end{equation}
We propose our analysis of approximation ratio by the following lemma:
\begin{lemma}
\label{thmratio}
The liquid welfare achieved by Auction~\ref{GSUPA} is at least $\frac{1}{\varphi }\cdot OPT$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
We prove for case I first. For $i \leq k_1$, since $v_i \ge p_0$, we have $v_i x_i = \frac{B_i v_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j} \geq B_i$. For $k_1 < i \leq k$ we have $v_i x_i = \frac{B_i v_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j} \min\{\hat{v}_i, 1\} \geq \hat{v}^2_i B_i$ as $\hat{v}_i\in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1)$ for $k_1 < i \leq k$. Thus
$$
\overline{W}(\mathbf{x}) = \sum_{i=1}^{k_1} B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i \hat{v}^2_i.
$$
For optimal liquid welfare, we shall prove that
$$OPT\leq \sum_{i=1}^{k}B_i + (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i})\frac{1}{\varphi} p_0 = \varphi \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i (\varphi - \frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i}).
$$
The equality part is by substituting $p_0=\sum_{i=1}^kB_i$, $\hat{v}_i = \frac{v_i}{\sum_{j=1}^k B_j}$ and direct calculation. We prove the inequality by a case analysis in the following.
\begin{itemize}
\item $\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i} \leq \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i} \leq 1$. We use the bound (\ref{bounds:OPT}) for $OPT$ with $j=k$ and the fact that $v_{k+1}\leq \frac{1}{\varphi} p_0 $:
\begin{align*}
OPT \leq \sum_{i=1}^k B_i + v_{k+1}(1-\sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i})
&\leq \sum_{i=1}^k B_i + v_{k+1}(1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i}) \\
& \leq \sum_{i=1}^{k}B_i + (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i})\frac{1}{\varphi} p_0
\end{align*}
\item $\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i} \leq 1< \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i}$. Then in the optimal solution, first $k$ agents are not fully occupied(which means in the optimal solution, agent $k$'s budget is not used up). Thus nothing is allocated for agents $i \geq k+1$. In this case, we have $OPT \leq \sum_{i = 1}^k B_i \leq \sum_{i = 1}^k B_i + (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i})\frac{1}{\varphi} p_0$ as the last term is non-negative.
\item $1<\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i} \leq \sum_{i=1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i}$. We use the bound (\ref{bounds:OPT}) for $OPT$ with $j=k-1$:
\begin{align*}
OPT \leq \sum_{i=1}^{k-1} B_i + (1-\sum_{i=1}^{k-1} \frac{B_i}{v_i})v_k&= \sum_{i=1}^{k} B_i + (1-\sum_{i=1}^{k} \frac{B_i}{v_i})v_k \\&\leq \sum_{i=1}^{k} B_i + (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^{k} \frac{B_i}{v_i})v_k \\& \leq \sum_{i=1}^{k} B_i + (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^{k} \frac{B_i}{v_i})\frac{1}{\varphi} p_0.
\end{align*}
The last inequality uses the fact that $(1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^{k} \frac{B_i}{v_i})<0$ and $v_k\geq \frac{1}{\varphi} p_0$.
\end{itemize}
To bound the liquid welfare of our auction, we need to give a good bound for $\hat{v}^2_i$ for agents $i\in [k_1+1, k]$. Noticing that for these agents, $\hat{v}_i \in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1]$, we shall prove that $\hat{v}^2_i \geq \frac{1}{\varphi} (\varphi-\frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i})$.
To prove this, consider the following function
$$f(t) = \frac{\varphi - \frac{1}{\varphi t}}{t^2}, t\in [\frac{1}{\varphi} ,1].$$
The derivative of $f(t)$ is
$$f'(t) = -2\frac{\varphi }{t^3}+3\frac{1}{\varphi t^4} = \frac{1}{t^4}[\frac{3}{\varphi} - 2\varphi t] \leq 0 \ \mbox{ when } \ t\in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1].$$
So $f(t)$ is monotone decreasing in interval $[\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1]$, and $f_{\max} = f(\frac{1}{\varphi}) = \varphi $.
By the property of $f$ and the fact that $\hat{v}_i\in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1)$ for $i=k_1+1, k_1+2,\ldots, k$, it is obvious that $\forall i \in [k_1+1, k]$, $ \hat{v}^2_i\geq \frac{1}{\varphi} (\varphi-\frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i})$. Thus
\begin{align*}
\overline{W}(\mathbf{x}) \geq \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i\hat{v}_i^2
&\geq \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i \frac{1}{\varphi}(\varphi - \frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i})\\
&=\frac{1}{\varphi}(\varphi \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i (\varphi - \frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i})) \\
&\geq \frac{1}{\varphi} OPT.
\end{align*}
This completes the proof for instances of case I and now we prove for instances of case II. For $i \leq k_1$ since $v_i \geq \varphi v_{k+1}$ we have
$v_i x_i = v_i\frac{ B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\}\geq B_i$.
For $k_1 < i \leq k$ we have
$v_i x_i = v_i\frac{ B_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}\min\{\hat{v}_i,1\} = \frac{\hat{v}_i B_i }{\varphi v_{k+1}} \hat{v}_i\varphi v_{k+1} = \hat{v}^2_i B_i<B_i$.
For $i = k+1$ we have
$$v_{k+1}x_{k+1} = v_{k+1}( \frac{1}{\varphi} - \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{ B_i}{\varphi^2 v_{k+1}}) \leq \frac{1}{\varphi^2} B_{k+1}<B_{k+1}.$$
where the first inequality derives from the definition of $k$.
Thus, we can bound the liquid welfare as follows
\begin{align*}
\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})&= \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i\hat{v}^2_i+ v_{k+1}x_{k+1}\\
&= \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i+ \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i\hat{v}^2_i + \frac{1}{\varphi} v_{k+1} - \frac{1}{\varphi^2} \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i - \frac{1}{\varphi^2}\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i \\
&= (1-\frac{1}{\varphi^2}) \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \frac{1}{\varphi} v_{k+1} + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i (\hat{v_i}^2 - \frac{1}{\varphi^2}).
\end{align*}
For optimal liquid welfare, we use our bound (\ref{bounds:OPT}) with $j=k$ to get
$$OPT \leq \sum_{i=1}^{k}B_i+ (1-\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k \frac{B_i}{v_i})v_{k+1} = \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + v_{k+1} + \sum_{i = k_1+1}^k B_i(1-\frac{1}{\varphi\hat{v}_i}),
$$
where the equality part is by substituting $\hat{v}_i = \frac{ v_i}{\varphi v_{k+1}}$ and direct calculation.
To bound the liquid welfare of our auction, we need to give a good bound for $\hat{v}^2_i$ for agents $i\in [k_1+1, k]$. Noticing that for these agents, $\hat{v}_i \in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1]$, we shall prove that $\hat{v}^2_i - \frac{1}{\varphi^2} \geq \frac{1}{\varphi}(1-\frac{1}{\phi \hat{v}_i})$.
To prove this, consider the following function
$$g(t) = (t^2-\frac{1}{\varphi^2})/(1-\frac{1}{\varphi t})= (t+\frac{1}{\varphi})t, t\in[\frac{1}{\varphi},1].$$
It is clear that $g$ is monotone increasing on $t$ in the interval $[\frac{1}{\varphi},1]$, so $g_{\min} = g(\frac{1}{\varphi}) = 2\frac{1}{\varphi^2} > \frac{1}{\varphi}$.
By the property of $g$ and the fact that $\hat{v}_i\in [\frac{1}{\varphi}, 1)$ for $i=k_1+1, k_1+2,\ldots, k$, it is obvious that $\forall i \in [k_1+1, k]$, $ \hat{v}^2_i - \frac{1}{\varphi^2} \geq \frac{1}{\varphi}(1-\frac{1}{\phi \hat{v}_i})$. Thus
\begin{align*}
\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})&= (1-\frac{1}{\varphi^2})\sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \frac{1}{\varphi} v_{k+1} + \sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i (\hat{v}^2_i-\frac{1}{\varphi^2}) \\
&> \frac{1}{\varphi} \sum_{i=1}^{k_1}B_i + \frac{1}{\varphi} v_{k+1} + \frac{1}{\varphi}\sum_{i=k_1+1}^k B_i (1-\frac{1}{\varphi \hat{v}_i}) \\
& \geq \frac{1}{\varphi} OPT.
\end{align*}
This completes the proof for approximation ratio.
\end{proof}
To conclude this section, here we provide the following example showing that the analysis of our auction is tight.
\begin{exam}(Tightness)
Consider two agents with profiles $v_1 = 1$, $B_1 = \epsilon$ and $v_2 = \frac{1}{\varphi}$, $B_2 = 1-\epsilon$ where $\epsilon \in (0,1)$. It is easy to verify that $OPT = \epsilon + (1-\epsilon)\frac{1}{\varphi}$. For Auction \ref{GSUPA}, $\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})= B_1 + B_2\frac{1}{\varphi^2} = \epsilon + (1-\epsilon)\frac{1}{\varphi^2}$. When $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$, $\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})= \frac{1}{\varphi} OPT$
\end{exam}
\subsection{Robustness of the Auction}
Our auction is rather robust in terms of the setting. We do not have any requirement about the valuation functions. Technically, in the presentation we still use the assumption
that the valuation function is monotone. In most of the cases, this is true or without loss of generality since the agent can
simply discard certain amount of the good. Even if this is not the case, we can also easily modify the auction to be compatible with possible non-monotone valuation functions. The only place we need to modify is that when the current auction assigns the total unit of the good to an agent, it assigns the most valuable fraction to her/him and discard the remaining.
For the simplicity of the presentation, we assume that the good is divisible. Our auction is also good if the items are not continuously divisible. For example, the mechanism works for the multi-unit auction even if each unit of the good is not divisible.
Another issue has not been discussed is the computational complexity of the auction as we mainly focus on the approximation ratio caused by the truthfulness and budget feasibility constrain. The computational complexity depends on how to represent the input valuation functions. If these are linear valuations and each can be simply represented by a single number, our auction is indeed efficient. If the valuation functions are given as generic value oracles, then it is even intractable to computable the most profitable fraction for an agent given a fixed price. So, a reasonable assumption is that valuation functions are given by demand oracles or in some concise representation. Then the main problematic step is to compute the optimal solution for an off line instance. This could be at least NP-hard even for some concise representations. For example, we can easily encode knapsack problem here. Then, another robustness of the auction is that it still works well when we replace the optimal solution with some constant approximation.
Therefore, as long as we can design an polynomial time algorithm with constant approximation ratio for the off line optimization problem, we can design an auction, which is truthful, budget feasible, of constant approximation and polynomial time computable.
\section{Private Budget}
In this section, we deal with the setting that agents' budgets are private information that the
auctioneer must design a mechanism which incentives agents to report their true values and budgets. We also study the general case that
the valuation function $v_i(\cdot)$ for each agent $i$ could be any monotone non-decreasing function.
For a subset of agents $Q \subseteq [n]$, let $OPT(Q)$ denote the optimal liquid welfare for agents in group $Q$. Formally $OPT(Q) = \max_{x} \sum_{i\in Q} \min\{v_i(x_i), B_i\}$. In particular, let $OPT = OPT([n])$ which is our objective in this setting.
Our new auction for private budget model is presented in Auction~\ref{RS}, where the parameters
$\gamma>1, 0<\beta<\frac{1}{2}$ and $0\leq \mu \leq 1$ shall be specified later.
Basically, it is a combination of the following three basic auctions:
\begin{itemize}
\item With probability of $\frac{\mu}{3}$, we run the first modified Vickrey auction. Agent $i_1$ with highest $\bar{v}_i=\min\{v_i(1), B_i\}$ gets the total unit of the good and needs to pay $p_{i_1} = \gamma\bar{v}_{i_2}>\bar{v}_{i_2}$ , which is strictly higher than the second highest $\bar{v}_i$. If agent $i_1$ is not willing to pay ($v_{i_1}<\gamma\bar{v}_{i_2}$) or does not have enough budget to pay ($B_{i_1}<\gamma\bar{v}_{i_2}$), we simply refuse to sell the item to any one.
\item With probability of $\frac{2\mu}{3}$, we run the second modified Vickrey auction. Agents are randomly divided into two groups $S$ and $T$. We only sell the total unit of the good to the first agent (with a prior fixed order) in group $S$ who is willing and able to pay the price $\frac{\max_{i\in T} \bar{v}_i}{\gamma}$. If there is no such agent in group $S$, we simply refuse to sell the item to any one.
\item With the remaining probability of $1-\mu$, we run a random sampling auction. Agents are randomly divided into two groups $S$ and $T$. We sell half of the good to agents in group $S$ with fixed price $\beta OPT(T)$ per unit. More precisely,
for each agent in group $S$ with a prior fixed order, we simply offer a price $\beta OPT(T)$ per unit and let the agent get the most profitable fraction of the good within the availability of the good and budget of the agent. This is precisely captured by the expression
\[x_i \leftarrow \argmax \limits_{x\leq \min\{ x_S, \frac{B_i}{\beta OPT(T)}\} } \{v_i(x)-\beta OPT(T) x\}.\]
If there are multiple $x$ that achieve the maximum, we choose the largest one.
We do the same thing for agents in $T$ but with price $\beta OPT(S)$.
\end{itemize}
We call the combination of the first two auctions the modified Vickrey auction and the third part as the random sampling auction.
\IncMargin{1em}
\begin{algorithm}[h]
\SetKwInOut{Input}{input}\SetKwInOut{Output}{output}
\Input{$n $ agents with values $v_1, \ldots, v_n$ and budgets $B_1, \ldots, B_n$}
\Output{An allocation $(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ and corresponding payments $(p_1, \ldots, p_n)$\;}
\BlankLine
\Begin{
\For{$i = 1$ \emph{\KwTo} $n$}{
$x_i \leftarrow 0$, $p_i \leftarrow 0$, $\bar{v}_i \leftarrow \min\{v_i(1), B_i\}$\;
}
}
With probability of $\frac{\mu}{3}$
\Begin{
$i_1 \leftarrow \arg \max_i \bar{v}_i $, $i_2 \leftarrow \arg \max_{i\ne i_1} \bar{v}_i$\;
\If{$\bar{v}_{i_1} \geq \gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$}{
$x_{i_1} \leftarrow 1$, $p_{i_1} \leftarrow \gamma\bar{v}_{i_2}$
}
}
With probability of $\frac{2\mu}{3}$
\Begin
{
Randomly divide all agents with equal probability into set $S$ and $T$\;
$\bar{v}_T \leftarrow \max_{i\in T} \bar{v}_i$\;
\ForAll{$i \in S$}{
\If{$\bar{v}_i \geq \frac{\bar{v}_T}{\gamma}$ }
{
$x_i \leftarrow 1, p_i \leftarrow \frac{\bar{v}_T}{\gamma}$\;
Halt
}
}
}
With probability of $1-\mu$
\Begin{
Randomly divide all agents with equal probability into set $S$ and $T$,
$x_S \leftarrow \frac{1}{2}$,
$x_T \leftarrow \frac{1}{2}$\;
\ForAll{$i \in S$}{
$x_i \leftarrow \argmax \limits_{x\leq \min\{ x_S, \frac{B_i}{\beta OPT(T)}\} } \{v_i(x)-\beta OPT(T) x\}$\;
$p_i \leftarrow \beta OPT(T) x_i$\;
$x_S \leftarrow x_S - x_i$
}
\ForAll{$i \in T$}{
$x_i \leftarrow \argmax \limits_{x\leq \min\{ x_T, \frac{B_i}{\beta OPT(S)}\} } \{v_i(x)-\beta OPT(S) x \}$\;
$p_i \leftarrow \beta OPT(S) x_i$\;
$x_T \leftarrow x_T - x_i$
}
}
\caption{Random Sampling Auction for Private Budgets}\label{RS}
\end{algorithm}
\DecMargin{1em}
\begin{theorem}
\label{thmprimain}
Choosing $\beta =\frac{3}{10}, \gamma=\sqrt{\frac{10}{9}}$ and $\mu=\frac{5}{7}$, Auction~\ref{RS} is a truthful, budget feasible mechanism which guarantees liquid welfare of at least $\frac{1}{34}OPT$.
\end{theorem}
\subsection{Truthfulness and Budget Feasibility}
Before we prove that our auction is truthful, we first point out that the ordinarily Vickrey auction (i.e. $\gamma=1$) on $\bar{v}_i=\min \{v_i(1), B_i\}$ is not truthful. Here is an example in which the valuation function is additive (thus we use $v_i$ to denote price per unit to illustrate): two agents with profiles $(v_1,B_1)=(v_2,B_2)=(2,1)$. If both of the agents bid truthfully, whatever the tie-breaking rule the Vickrey auction uses (even if we allow randomness), at least for one of the agents, the probability she/he gets the total unit of good is strictly less than $1$. For symmetry, we assume that the probability agent $1$ gets the total unit of good is strictly less than $1$. When agent $1$ does get some fraction of the good, she/he needs to pay $1$ per unit according to the Vickrey's rule. As a result, the expected utility of agent $1$ is strictly less than $2-1=1$. However, if agent $1$ bids $(v'_1,B'_1)=(2,1.5)$, she/he will get the total unit of the good for sure based on Vickrey auction and the payment is still $1$, which does not exceed the budget. Therefore, her/his utility become $1$, which is strictly better than bidding truthfully.
This is the reason why we need to modify the Vickrey auction. In the following, we prove that Auction~\ref{RS} in which our modification is applied, is universally truthful.
\begin{lemma}
Auction~\ref{RS} is universally truthful.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
The auction is a probabilistic combination of three auctions. For the second and third auctions, it also uses random bits to do the partition of $(S,T)$. We only need to prove that all of them are truthful when these partitions are fixed.
For the first modified Vickrey auction on value $\bar{v}_i=\min \{v_i(1), B_i\}$, two cases may happen:
\begin{itemize}
\item $\bar{v}_{i_1} \geq \gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$. In this case, for any agent $j$ other than $i_1$, $\bar{v}_j \leq \bar{v}_{i_1}< \bar{v}_{i_1}\gamma $. If $j$ wants to change her/his bid to become the winner, she/he needs to pay $\bar{v}_{i_1}\gamma$, which is strictly greater than either her/his true budget or true value. This leads to not enough budget or negative utility. For $i_1$, she/he does not have the incentive to change value or budget, since the payment is decided by $i_2$, which is no larger than her/his value and also within her/his budget.
\item $\bar{v}_{i_1} < \gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$. In this case, no one is the winner. For any agent $j$ other than $i_1$, it is the same argument as before. For $i_1$, if she/he wants to change her/his bid to become the winner, then she/he needs to pay $\gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$, which is strictly greater than either her/his true budget or true value. This leads to not enough budget or negative utility.
\end{itemize}
Now we prove for the second modified Vickrey auction. For any agent in $T$, she/he does not get any fraction of the good regardingless of her/his bid. So, they do not have incentive to lie. For any agent in $S$,
she/he cannot change the price per unit or her/his position in the order by changing her/his bid. When an agent in $S$ has chance to get the good, it is simply a take-it-or-leave-it offer
with fixed price. So, they do not have incentive to lie.
For the random sampling auction part, each agent cannot change her/his price per unit or position by changing her/his bid, and given a fixed price and position, a agent has already got the most profitable fraction of the good. Therefore, agents do not have incentive to change their bids.
Thus, all the three auctions above are truthful. This concludes the proof for universally truthfulness.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}
Auction~\ref{RS} is budget feasible.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
For the first modified Vickrey auction, if no one wins, everyone's payment is zero; if $i_1$ wins, then she/he pays $\gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}\leq \bar{v}_{i_1}= \min \{v_{i_1}(1), B_{i_1}\}\leq B_{i_1}$.
For the second modified Vickrey auction, if no one wins, everyone's payment is zero; if $i^\ast$ wins, then she/he pays $\gamma \frac{\bar{v}_T}{\gamma}\leq \bar{v}_{i^\ast}= \min \{v_{i^\ast}(1), B_{i^\ast}\} \leq B_{i^\ast}$.
For random sampling auction and agent $i\in S$,
$p_i = x_i \cdot \beta OPT(T) \leq \min\{ x_S, \frac{B_i}{\beta OPT(T)}\} \cdot \beta OPT(T) \leq \frac{B_i}{\beta OPT(T)} \cdot \beta OPT(T) =B_i. $
Same thing also holds for agents in $T$.
This concludes the proof for budget feasibility.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Approximation Ratio Analysis}
We first prove the following lemma, which bounds the liquid welfare of the auction by its revenue. This is useful in our analysis.
\begin{lemma}
\label{l1}
Liquid welfare produced by any truthful and budget feasible mechanism is at least the revenue of the auctioneer.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
For an allocation $\mathbf{x} = (x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n)$ and payment $\mathbf{p} = (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)$ given by such a mechanism, we have $v_i (x_i) \geq p_i$ by truthfulness and $B_i \geq p_i$ by budget feasibility. So the liquid welfare $\overline{W}(x) = \sum_i \min\{v_i (x_i), B_i\} \geq \sum_i p_i$.
\end{proof}
Based on Lemma~\ref{l1}, we prove that the modified Vickrey auction part performs well when $\max_i \bar{v}_i$ is large.
\begin{lemma}\label{bound_vickrey}
Let $\gamma=\sqrt{\frac{10}{9}}$. Then the modified Vickrey auction part get expect liquid welfare of $\frac{3\mu}{10} \max_i \bar{v}_i$.
\end{lemma}
We note that by choosing $\gamma$ arbitrarily close to $1$, we can get liquid welfare arbitrarily close to $\frac{\mu}{3} \max_i \bar{v}_i$.
We choose the above value for the notational simplicity of the presentation.
\begin{proof}
If the highest two $\bar{v}_i$ are not relatively close to each other, namely $\bar{v}_{i_1} \geq \gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$ ($i_1, i_2$ are as defined in Auction~\ref{RS}). Then the first modified Vickrey auction successes and gets expect liquid welfare of $\frac{\mu}{3} \max_i \bar{v}_i >\frac{3\mu}{10} \max_i \bar{v}_i$.
If the highest two $\bar{v}_i$ are relatively close to each other, namely $\bar{v}_{i_1} < \gamma \bar{v}_{i_2}$. Then in the second modified Vickrey auction, with probability $\frac{1}{2}$ these two agents $i_1, i_2$ are put into different groups. When this event occurs, the second modified Vickrey successes and gains a revenue of at least $\frac{\max_i \bar{v}_i}{\gamma^2}$. According to Lemma~\ref{l1}, liquid welfare extract by the second modified auction is greater than this revenue, thus contributes at least $\frac{\max_i \bar{v}_i}{\gamma^2}$ liquid welfare. Therefore, the expect liquid welfare in this case is at least $\frac{2\mu}{3} \frac{1}{2} \frac{\max_i \bar{v}_i}{\gamma^2} =\frac{3\mu}{10} \max_i \bar{v}_i$.
\end{proof}
If $\max_i \bar{v}_i$ is already a significant fraction of the optimal solution, we are already done. In the following, we shall prove that the random sampling auction performs well when $\max_i \bar{v}_i$ is small.
We first give some definitions. Let $\bar{v}_i(x)=\min\{v_i(x), B_i\}$ be the capped valuation for agent $i$.
Then, for any allocation $\mathbf{x}=(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ , we have $\overline{W}(\mathbf{x})=\sum_i \bar{v}_i(x_i)$. The following notion plays an important role in our analysis. We define
\[D_i(p) = \argmax_{x\leq 1} \{\bar{v}_i(x)-x p \}. \]
If there are multiple $x$ that achieve the maximum, we choose the largest one. It is very crucial that we use $\bar{v}_i(x)$ rather than $v_i(x)$ in the definition of $D_i(p)$. By this definition, we can directly see that for any $p>0$ and $x<D_i(p)$, we have $D_i(p)\leq \frac{B_i}{p}$ and $v_i(x)< B_i$. This $D_i(p)$ also gives a lower bound of agent $i$'s demand if there are enough availability of the good. Formally, we have the following lemma.
\begin{lemma}\label{lemma:demand}
Let $p > 0$ and $D_i(p) \leq X$. Then
\[\argmax \limits_{x\leq \min\{ X, \frac{B_i}{p}\} } \{v(x)-xp \} \ge D_i(p) .\]
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
The left hand side of the inequality is agent $i$'s most profitable fraction given price $p$ per unit and the total availability of good of $X$. For $x<D_i(p) \leq \min( X, \frac{B_i}{p}) $, we have
\[ v(x)-xp = \bar{v}_i(x)-x p \leq \bar{v}_i(D_i(p))-D_i(p) p \leq v_i(D_i(p))-D_i(p) p.\]
The first equality uses the fact that $v_i(x)< B_i$ for $x<D_i(p)$; the first inequality uses the definition of $D_i(p)$; and the last inequality uses the fact that $\bar{v}_i(x)\leq v_i(x)$ for any $x$.
Since we always break ties in favor of larger $x$, the maximum of $v(x)-xp$ in the LHS is archived by $x\ge D_i(p)$. This completes the proof.
\end{proof}
Let $W(p) = \sum_i \bar{v}_i(D_i(p))$. The intuition for this notion is that with fixed price $p$, $W(p)$ gives the maximum liquid welfare from all agents. We present the following lemma giving an lower bound for this notion using $OPT$ and fixed price $p$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lw}
For any $p\geq 0$, $W(p) \geq OPT-p$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Let $(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ be an instance of optimal allocation. By the definition of $D_i(p)$, we have
$\bar{v}_i(D_i(p))-D_i(p) p \ge \bar{v}_i(x_i)-x_i p$ ,
and thus $\bar{v}_i(D_i(p)) \ge \bar{v}_i(x_i)-x_i p$.
Sum up these inequalities for all $i\in [n]$, we get
\[ \sum_i \bar{v}_i(D_i(p)) \ge \sum_i (\bar{v}_i(x_i)-x_i p) =OPT -p \sum_i x_i \ge OPT-p.\]
\end{proof}
The following facts on relationship between $OPT(S)$, $OPT(S)$ and $OPT$, are obvious.
\begin{lemma}
\label{l2}
Let $(S,T)$ be a partition of $[n]$. Then
$OPT(S)\leq OPT$, $OPT(T)\leq OPT$ and $OPT(S)+OPT(T)\geq OPT$.
\end{lemma}
By choosing $p=\beta OPT$ in Lemma \ref{lw}, we get that
\[W(\beta OPT) = \sum_i \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) \geq OPT-\beta OPT=(1-\beta) OPT.\]
This is a constant fraction of $OPT$. Since $OPT(S), OPT(T)\leq OPT$, the fraction of good demanded by agent $i$ in the random sampling auction is at least $D_i(\beta OPT)$ by Lemma \ref{lemma:demand} providing that there are enough fraction of the good remains.
This is a good approximation of the optimal liquid welfare when each of $\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))$ is small. Let $W = W(\beta OPT)$, $W_S=\sum_{i\in S} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))$ and $W_T=\sum_{i\in T} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))$.
We first prove that both sets $S$ and $T$ get significant amount of demands at fixed price $\beta OPT$ with high probability in this case.
\begin{lemma}\label{lemma:bound}
If $\max_{i\in [n]} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) \leq \alpha \cdot OPT $, then
$$Pr(W_S, W_T \ge \frac{\beta}{2} OPT ) \geq 1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2}.$$
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Let $I_i$ to the random indicator variable for the event $i\in S$. Then $W_S = \sum_{i\in S}\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))= \sum_{i\in [n]} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) I_i$, ${\mathrm{E}}(W_S)=\frac{1}{2} W$ and
\begin{align*}
\begin{split}
{\mathrm{Var}}(W_S) = \sum_{i\in S} {\mathrm{Var}}( \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) I_i) &= \sum_{i\in S} ({\mathrm{E}}((\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) I_i)^2) - {\mathrm{E}}(\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) I_i)^2)\\
&= \sum_{i\in S} \frac{1}{4} (\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)))^2 \\
&\leq \frac{W}{\alpha OPT}\cdot \frac{1}{4} \cdot(\alpha OPT)^2 \\
&= \frac{1}{4} \alpha W OPT,
\end{split}
\end{align*}
where the inequality uses the fact that $\max_{i\in V} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) \leq \alpha OPT$.
By Chebyshev's Inequality, we have:
\begin{align*}
Pr(\frac{\beta}{2} OPT \leq W_S \leq W-\frac{\beta}{2} OPT) & = Pr( |W_S - {\mathrm{E}}(W_S) | \leq \frac{W-\beta OPT}{2}) \\
&\geq 1- \frac{{\mathrm{Var}}(W_S)}{(\frac{W-\beta OPT}{2})^2} \\
&\geq 1-\frac{\alpha W OPT}{(W-\beta OPT)^2}\\
&\geq 1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2},
\end{align*}
where the last inequality uses the fact that $W\ge (1-\beta)OPT$.
Since $W_S+W_T=W$, the event of $(\frac{\beta}{2} OPT \leq W_S \leq W-\frac{\beta}{2} OPT)$ is the same as the event of $(W_S, W_T \ge \frac{\beta}{2} opt)$. This completes the proof.
\end{proof}
The following lemma gives a bound of liquid welfare for the random sampling auction part.
\begin{lemma}\label{bound_sampling}
If $\max_i \bar{v}_i =\alpha \cdot OPT$, then the random sampling auction part gets at least expected liquid welfare of $(1-\mu) (1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2}) (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Since $\max_{i\in [n]} \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) \leq \max_i \bar{v}_i =\alpha \cdot OPT$, by Lemma \ref{lemma:bound} we know that $Pr(W_S, W_T \ge \frac{\beta}{2} OPT ) \geq 1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta) }{(1-2\beta)^2}$ . We only bound the liquid welfare when this good event $(W_S, W_T \ge \frac{\beta}{2} OPT) $ occurs, which occurs with probability $(1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2})$.
Not only $ \bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))$ is bounded from above, $D_i(\beta OPT)$ is also bounded from above. From the definition of $D_i(\cdot)$, we know that $\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT)) - \beta OPT D_i(\beta OPT)\geq 0$. Therefore,
\[D_i(\beta OPT) \leq \frac{\bar{v}_i(D_i(\beta OPT))}{\beta OPT} \leq \frac{\alpha}{\beta}.\]
We first consider liquid welfare obtained by agents in $T$.
If every agent $i \in T$ gets at least $v_i(D_i(\beta OPT))$ fraction of good, then the total liquid welfare of our auction is at least $W_T\geq \frac{\beta}{2} opt $. Otherwise, due to Lemma \ref{lemma:demand}, it must be the case that there is not enough good remains. Since $D_i(\beta OPT) \leq \frac{\alpha}{\beta}$, we know that at least $\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta}$ fraction of the good is sold. This extracts a revenue of $(\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT(S)$ and thus also liquid welfare of this amount by Lemma \ref{l1}. Put these two cases together, the liquid welfare for group $T$ in our auction is at least $\min\{\frac{\beta}{2} OPT , (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT(S) \} = (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT(S)$. By similar argument, the liquid welfare from agents in group $S$ is at least
$(\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT(T)$.
To sum up, the total expected liquid welfare is at least
\[ (1-\mu) (1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2}) (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta ( OPT(S)+ OPT(T)) \geq (1-\mu) (1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2}) (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta OPT.\]
\end{proof}
Finally, we estimate the approximation ratio of Auction~\ref{RS}.
\begin{lemma}
\label{thmRS}
Choosing $\beta=\frac{3}{10}, \gamma=\sqrt{\frac{10}{9}}$ and $\mu=\frac{5}{7}$, the approximation ratio of Auction~\ref{RS} is at most $34$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Assume that $\max_i \bar{v}_i =\alpha \cdot OPT$. By Lemma \ref{bound_vickrey} and Lemma \ref{bound_sampling}, the total expected liquid welfare is at least
\[\left(\frac{3\mu}{10} \alpha + (1-\mu) (1-\frac{\alpha (1-\beta)}{(1-2 \beta )^2}) (\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\alpha}{\beta})\beta\right)OPT.\]
Substitute $\beta$, $\mu$ with the above specified value and simplify, the above expression is $(\frac{5}{4}\alpha^2 -\frac{29}{112}\alpha + \frac{3}{70})OPT$. One can easily check that the minimum of this expression is greater than $\frac{1}{34}OPT$, thus our auction has an approximation ratio of at most $34$.
\end{proof}
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Q: How to install the package scikit-geometry? I am trying to compute a class of Minkowski sums for some mathematical work, but there are too many to do by hand in a reasonable amount of time. I found this documentation for a package called scikit-geometry, but when I write import skgeom as sg as in the examples in the documentation, VSCode can't find the module.
The documentation says nothing about installation methods, and since I assume I need to install the package, I tried using similar methods as other scikit packages; e.g. python -m pip install -U scikit-geometry in the command line; but none of them work. In the case of the command line, I get:
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement scikit-geometry (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distruction found for scikit-geometry
I'm a complete beginner to anything past basic implementation of algorithms (as I am a pure mathematician by training), so I'm not sure where to go from here. I would like to be able to use the package, but I do not know enough computer science to specifically describe the issue I am having-- I hope that this post is detailed enough.
A: If you use conda try this :
conda install -c conda-forge scikit-geometry
If this does not work, install CGAL 5.0 and try it again:
python -m pip install -e . -v
I found this introduction to Scikit Geometry right here : https://wolfv.medium.com/introducing-scikit-geometry-ae1dccaad5fd
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A drive-by favorite with exceptional curb appeal, this 6-bedroom East Kenilworth home boasts a perfect floor plan for today's family. Formal living room, dining room (both with custom fireplaces) along with an expansive family room with bookcases and fireplace, high-end eat-in kitchen with butler's pantry, mud room with custom cubbies, his and her offices/library and attached 3 car garage. Lux master suite with separate baths along with 3 additional bedrooms all with ensuite baths. 2nd-floor laundry. Sun-filled 3rd floor with bonus room, 2 bedrooms, and bath. Lower level ESPN-like rec room, work out room, golf simulator, putting green, cedar closet and spectacular wine room. Built in outdoor kitchen, patio, fire pit, and professionally landscaped yard. Walk to award winning schools -- Sears (JK-8) and New Trier High School along with the Metra and the lake! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,381 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/non-radial-null-geodesics-in-eddington-finkelstein-coordinates.910767\/","text":"# Non-radial null geodesics in Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates\n\n## Homework Statement\n\nMy end goal is to plot null geodesics around a black hole with realistic representations within the horizon (r<2GM, with c=1) using Mathematica. I've done this for outside the horizon using normal Schwarzschild coordinates and gained equation (1) below, and then used this with equation (3) and converted to u=1\/r to find equation (4) in which I can plot u as a function of \u03a6. I then used NDSolve to solve this with varying impact parameters (D) but I know once it crosses the horizon I cannot justify the plot as being meaningful. I'm therefore converting to Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates using equation (5) to go from t -> v so the geodesic can cross the horizon fine. This gained the new metric equation (6). I can't find any help on how to do this properly for any geodesics that aren't radial so I've tried doing it myself a few different ways but all along the same logic as I did before. Every way I've tried it I get the same equation as (1) but with a different constant (Which I set as I plot so is meaningless to changing how the geodesic behaves at the horizon).\n\n## Homework Equations\n\n\\begin{array}\n.Basic \\ Schwarzschild \\ metric \\ in \\ Lagrange \\ form: \\\\\nL = -\\dot{t}^2 + \\dot{r}^2 + r^2(\\dot{\\theta}^2+Sin^2{\\theta}\\dot{\\phi}^2)\\\\\nRelavent \\ Equations:\\\\\n\\dot{r}^2 = E^2 - \\frac{l^2}{r^2}(1-\\frac{2GM}{r}) \\ (1)\\\\\nwhere,\\ E = \\dot{t}(1-\\frac{2GM}{r}) \\ (2)\\\\ and\\ l = \\dot{\\phi}r^2 \\ (3)\\\\\n(\\frac{du}{d\\phi})^2 = 2Mu^3 - u^2 + 1\/D^2\\ (4)\\\\\nwhere, \\ D=\\frac{l}{E} \\\\\nt = v -r -2GMln|\\frac{r}{2GM}-1| \\ (5)\\\\\nL = -(1-\\frac{2GM}{r})\\dot{v}^2 + 2\\dot{v}\\dot{r} + r^2\\dot{\\phi}^2\\ (6) \\\\\nNote:\\ \\theta = \\frac{\\pi}{2} \\ so \\ \\dot{\\theta}=0 \\ and \\ Sin^2{\\theta}=1\n\\end{array}\n\n## The Attempt at a Solution\n\nAttempted method 1:\nI tried subbing back in for v and v(dot) so I could use equation (2) so I can use the same conserved quantities but everything just cancels back down to equation (1) like I had before.\nAttempted method 2:\nFinding a conserved quantity for v(dot) and calling the relevant constant say E' which once running all the maths through gains the same equation as (1) but with E' where E would be.\n\n## Answers and Replies\n\nRelated Advanced Physics Homework Help News on Phys.org\nPeroK\nHomework Helper\nGold Member\n\n## The Attempt at a Solution\n\nAttempted method 1:\nI tried subbing back in for v and v(dot) so I could use equation (2) so I can use the same conserved quantities but everything just cancels back down to equation (1) like I had before.\nAttempted method 2:\nFinding a conserved quantity for v(dot) and calling the relevant constant say E' which once running all the maths through gains the same equation as (1) but with E' where E would be.\nUsing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates, you still have a coordinate singularity at $r = 2GM$. Using the Killing vectors for $\\nu$ and $\\phi$ and the condition $\\mathbf{u} \\cdot \\mathbf{u} = 0$ you should get the same geodesic equation for light rays as in normal Schwarzschild coordinates:\n\n$E^2 = (\\frac{dr}{d\\lambda})^2 + \\frac{L^2}{r^2}(1 - \\frac{2GM}{r})$\n\nYou could use the relationship for $E$ to transform this into an equation for $\\frac{d\\nu}{d\\lambda}$, but you still have the singular term in the potential. So, in terms of general light geodescics, you may be no further forward.\n\nTo get rid of the remaining coordinate singularity, you could try Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates. Although, I'm not familiar with those myself.","date":"2020-02-26 17:18:57","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9266126751899719, \"perplexity\": 1016.5143543907501}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-10\/segments\/1581875146414.42\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200226150200-20200226180200-00207.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
# Table of Contents
* Title
* Title Page
* Dedication
* Copyright Page
* Epigraphs
* Chapter 1
* Chapter 2
* Chapter 3
* Chapter 4
* Chapter 5
* Chapter 6
* Chapter 7
* Chapter 8
* Chapter 9
* Chapter 10
* Chapter 11
* Chapter 12
* Afterword
* THE LAST WORD
Because cowards get
cancer too...
# Because cowards get
cancer too...
John Diamond
To Nigella
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 9781409021148
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15 16 17 18 19 20
Copyright © John Diamond 1998
John Diamond has asserted his right to be identified as Author of this Work.
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in 1998 in Great Britain by Vermilion,
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is available from the British Library
'There are journeys none of us wish to take. But sometimes we must. John Diamond is the exquisite cartographer of a savage landscape. C, which will become a classic, is not only about the cruelty of cancer. It is about life as it is, arbitrary, brutal and glorious. Read it with gratitude.'
_Josephine Hart_
'Funny, honest and inspirational.'
_GQ Active_
'His many admirers will buy this book because the "old", wry Diamond speaks in every taut phrase. Anyone unfamiliar with the story should buy it because they will be gripped as if by a thriller, by a narrative which also teaches much about medicine and mortality.'
_Bel Mooney, The Times_
In 20 years' time, if – touch wood, please God, all of that malarkey – I am still around, how will I feel about a bad back? I mean, a _really_ bad back – the sort of ricked back I had a few years ago when I thought a kidney had burst and I couldn't move for a couple of days, and announced that things couldn't possibly get worse than this, and that this was the greatest medical indignity a man could suffer.
Or a cold – how will I feel about one of those colds when you can't breathe, or think, or write or imagine what it was like before the onset of the cold? Will I still feel about those everyday reasons for giving up as I did before 27 March 1997?
That was the date I was diagnosed as having cancer. In statistical terms that's no big deal: some hundreds of thousands of Britons get the same diagnosis every year. In fact many of them get a rather scarier diagnosis than I did, for although my odds changed over the year, at first I was given a 92 per cent chance of a full cure. Mine was just a small local cancer, they said, and one that could be scared off with a little radiotherapy. It wasn't, as it turned out, but it didn't matter for nobody receives a diagnosis of even the least invasive cancer with anything but fear and dread.
Over the next year or so the illness took over my life. How could it not? For all that the counsellors beseech cancer patients to carry on as before, it's impossible. Impossible because of the constraints imposed by the illness and the often worse constraints imposed by the cure. Impossible because, however good the prognosis sounds, it can only ever be equivocal and even the best-augured cancers can turn into fatal ones. Tell anyone that you have cancer and what they'll hear is that you're about to die. Why would they not? It's what you heard when you got the diagnosis, after all.
As I write, the odds on my being cured of my own cancer have dropped but I am assured still that I am curable. So let's say I get myself cured, that I go to the hospital one day and they say 'That's it, Mr Diamond. We've checked every one of your cells and not one of them's a cancerous one.' Is that it? Do I go back to being the man I was before, felled by the slightest backache, raging at the first cold of the winter? Or am I a new man with a new perspective, ever conscious that a cold is not cancer, that a bad back is not cancer, that any illness is bearable which doesn't carry the threat of death?
I don't know, nor will I for – fingers crossed, _deo volente, inshallah –_ 20 years, but my suspicion is that once you've had that diagnosis it stays with you for good. Like a lapsed religion it may not be at the front of your mind all the time but it is yawning away there at the back, just waiting for those moments when it needs to come forward and remind you that you are part of that community which touched death and touches it still, the community which has seen a doctor look at his boots and say 'I'm sorry, but...'
I am, as absolute laymen go, fairly well versed in the language of medicine. As a general journalist coming from a family which includes a retired biochemist and a sometime clinical pharmacologist I have found myself apparently able to write the odd piece about medicine, to present science shows on TV, to write a sceptical medical column in a newspaper. Even before I got the bad news I understood the difference between chemotherapy and radiotherapy and had some basic idea of what a CT scanner did and why it did it.
And yet when the news came through I had no idea where to. turn. I had some vague notion that there were groups of cancer sufferers who would meet to share stories and give each other solace, and organisations which handed out carefully composed information sheets in Hindi and Greek. I knew that I could sit at a computer screen and sift through a million pages of high-level science and learn the most intimate details of the mating habits of the squamous cell carcinoma.
But none of these would tell me quickly what I needed to know, which was how would cancer affect me – what was it like to be a person with cancer, to deal with the pain and the fear and the anger?
I'm still not sure I do know, nor that I ever will: as in most things I suspect that there is a lot which, at the moment of death, will become apparent and that only then will I say 'So that's what it's like to live with cancer for all those years.'
Meanwhile I have an inkling of an idea about what cancer is, and what it does physically and mentally and about how it's cured. I know more than I once did about what people say to you when you tell them you have cancer, and what they think, and the many mad ways they believe you can be cured. And for some while now I have written about some of these things in my weekly _Times_ column, and readers have written to me and said they wished I'd been writing before they heard their own diagnosis, or that of their spouse or their child or their parent or their friend.
This isn't a collection of those columns, although there are a few of them reproduced here, but rather an attempt to write the book I was looking for the night I got the bad news. It isn't a medical textbook, although I've tried to explain something of the science of cancer and its cures, nor is it a book of worthily positive thoughts, although I pass on, for what they're worth, some of the positive thoughts which have occurred to me over the past year or so. If you or yours have received a cancerous diagnosis it probably won't help you get through the nights of fear or the long days of treatment. Or not help you except to tell you that the one thing I learned is that my reaction to the diagnosis and the treatment was nothing like I expected it to be.
There are some other things this book isn't. It isn't a book about a battle against cancer because I despise the set of warlike metaphors that so many apply to cancer. My antipathy to the language of battles and fights has nothing to do with pacifism and everything to do with a hatred for the sort of morality which says that only those who fight hard against their cancer survive it or deserve to survive it – the corollary being that those who lose the fight deserved to do so.
It isn't a book of last gasp cures for cancer. Don't get me wrong: if you find that homoeopathy or the Bach Flower Remedies get you through the long nights then I'm genuinely happy for you. It may even be that if I get too near the edge I might join you at that well of alternative solace. Meanwhile, though, I know that the many advances which have been made against cancer in the past 30 years, and the reason why twice as many sufferers live for five years after diagnosis as was the case 60 years ago, is because the medical orthodoxy, for all its arrogance and self-serving smugness, knows more about the reasons we get cancer and the ways of stopping cancer spreading than the most knowledgeable naturopath.
This book is about my cancer and is, I hope, part of my cure. Or if not that, then part of my reconciliation with the fact that whatever happens I will live with cancer for the rest of my life, and with the understanding that this doesn't mean there aren't still a few good times to come.
I wrote the book as the cancer and its treatment were continuing, although the time-lag varies from chapter to chapter, from event to event. I've tried to even out the effect of this as much as I can, but the fact remains that there are times when I was in some pain while writing about happiness and other times when I was leading an almost normal life and writing about events which scare me still to think of them.
There are people I want to thank. You will, I hope, indulge me to the extent of the single page I need in order to do this. Without some of them I wouldn't be here at all; without others there would have been times when being here wouldn't have been worth the effort.
At the Marsden I want to grasp everyone – cleaners, professors of surgery, the rather distracted Chelsea women who volunteer to work in the outpatients tea shop – with a firm hand and look damply into their eyes. The Marsden really is how hospitals should be run: intelligently, flexibly, always engendering hope. In particular, I want to thank all the nurses on Weston Ward who suffered without demur my temper tantrums, the BBC's cameras and finding themselves unexpectedly the subject of newspaper columns. The doctors who are named in the following chapters already know about my gratitude, but let me offer it again and in particular to Peter Rhŷs Evans, Michael Henk, Nicholas Breach, Cyril Fisher, Snehal Patel, Daniel Archer, Sarah Howells, Peter Williamson, Con Irving and Aina Grieg, Karen Golden, men and women who claim they are just doing their job when they appear, calm and unruffled, like Mills and Boon doctors, on a Sunday evening to explain what's going on, or take calls in the small hours to come and sort my throat out. Many thanks also to my GP, Dr Terence Mulligan.
My friends were, and continue to be, remarkable. In particular Michael Bywater, Ruthie Rogers, Josephine Hart, Chaim Tannenbaum, Roy Greenslade, Gill Morgan, Nick Wapshott, Charles Elton, Lucy Heller, Christine Walker, Alan Yentob, Philippa Walker, Victor Sebestyen and Brian King have given support and succour, asked all the right questions and stopped me believing that being a honking, dribbling fool is necessarily much worse than what I was before the big operation. But I should also rectify an omission from the original text: the most useful of the reference books over the past couple of years has been Dr Robert Buckman's _What You Really Need to Know About Cancer_ (Pan Books). Subsequently, Rob has become a cherished friend who I feel I've known for 20 years longer than I have.
At home Cheryl Robinson was no end of help with the children. Lisa Grillo arrived from Italy just before my last operation and has helped make the unbearable less so. Kate Mellor has cheerfully kept my affairs in order since before I knew my affairs needed to be put in order: I owe them all a particular debt of thanks. As I do to my beloved parents, who really shouldn't have had to go through this sort of thing at this stage, and Nigella's family who were supportive above and beyond the call of in-lawly duty.
I should mention my children, Cosima and Bruno, who are two-thirds of my reason for living and, finally, and most of all, Nigella whom I love beyond measure and who kept me alive as much as did any medicine.
John Diamond, London 1998 and 1999
# Chapter 1
In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities, hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take on life. Consider, by the time you hit 40, your tattered heart has already thumped out a billion and a half beats: what can the chances be of any organ doing anything a billion and a half times and never making a mistake? Your 30 trillion or so cells have each replicated themselves a few thousand times: how could it possibly not be that a few of these cells would band together in that state of cytological anarchy which leads to cancer and death?
Consider anything the body does over and over, asleep and awake, consider the peril it invites every time it gets into a car, breathes a lungful – 150 million times a year, not counting the hours of panicky hyperventilation – of sour and sickly city air, eats something too fatty or not fatty enough, and you are considering impending death.
As it happens it was always the heart attack I was expecting and not just because as a sometime smoking, unexercised and overweight man of fortyish I was drumming my fingers only barely subconsciously while I waited for the smack in the chest to come along; I'd imagined death as something which would give me just enough time to be terrified but not long enough to do anything about it.
But as it turns out it was cancer which got me. Or is, as I write, getting me.
Accidents happen but illness creeps up on you. Only in retrospect do you realise that you'd been ill all along. Of course as a hypochondriac I'd always known that I'd been ill all along, but I'd assumed a symptomless illness which ground me down not with its various discomforts but with its very existence. A hypochondriac friend once told me of a hypochondriac friend of his who told his doctor that he had a fatal disease. 'Really?' said the doctor, 'that's terrible. What are the symptoms?'
'That's the worst thing about it,' said the friend of the friend in absolute seriousness. 'There are none.'
When my friend told me the story we both laughed because we knew we were meant to laugh, but it wasn't genuine laughter. It's impossible to laugh and empathise at the same time.
But just as being paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, so being a hypochondriac doesn't mean you're not about to die.
A year or so ago I had a series of random colds, aches, agues and minor swellings which were sufficiently real to warrant a blood test. It was what we in Britain with our essentially medieval approach to medical taxonomy call glandular fever and what they call in the US, where the blood test is the first rather than the weary last resort of the general practitioner, mononucleosis.
The hypochondriac's temporary nirvana is a clinical diagnosis confirmed by blood test of a non-fatal illness which allows him to moan a bit and smile wanly when asked how he is. From that point of view glandular fever is the perfect illness. I walked home from the surgery a happy man.
Three months later a gland in my neck was still up. I went back to the surgery. 'Well, that's glandular fever for you,' Dr Mulligan said, or words to that effect, this being some time before I'd started taking obsessive notes about the progress of my illness. 'It comes, it hangs around for a long while, it goes.'
A month later I went back again. The diagnosis was the same: glandular fever had become persistent glandular fever. A visit later it was chronic glandular fever, and the visit after that it was about to be whatever the seven month version of the disease is called, when Dr Mulligan remembered something.
'You're on BUPA, aren't you?'
Three years before my father had had the first of a series of heart attacks. The National Health Service did him proud: the ambulance turned up quickly the emergency team did all the right things, the medical staff looked after him well. At the end of his two weeks in hospital he was told that he needed a routine angiogram to determine the extent of the injury to his heart and that he'd be given it in six months' time. The six months became nine months, a year, eighteen months, two years. It became apparent that the NHS had devised a cheaper and more accurate test than the angiogram: if you lived, your heart hadn't been harmed too much; if you died, it had. Medieval witch-hunters used the same principles when they devised the ducking stool.
On the day when Dad paid for his own angiogram I joined BUPA.
I still like to think that had I not had health insurance the NHS would have given me the same tests I received privately, and with the same promptness, but then again I still like to think that Tottenham will win the double next year.
What a BUPA card shown to a London GP gets you is a referral to Harley Street. Harley Street is where all the private doctors are when they're not being public doctors elsewhere.
London has always had streets which are connected in fact and the public imagination with various occupations. Clerkenwell is for watchmakers, Fleet Street for journalists, Hackney Road for cabinetmakers. Except that none of the connections really works any more. All of the national newspapers moved out of Fleet Street in the early 90s, the quartz movement saw the Clerkenwell watch trade off the decade before and Hackney Road seems nowadays to be a street of pubs and Indian grocers.
But Harley Street is still the street of a thousand doctors and has been since the middle of the last century. Almost every one of the tall eighteenth-century houses along Harley and Wimpole Streets and the streets connecting them is the medical equivalent of a brothel: each room is the consulting room of a different specialist and sometimes two or three or more specialists may share the same room, each taking it on different days of the week. On the ground floor is the largest room in the house which serves as the waiting room, its dining table strewn with copies of the various London estate agents' magazines, the sofas strewn with the Arab families and gloomy Russians who seem to make up much of the passing trade.
The rooms look much the same as I imagine they did around 1845 when the doctors started moving in. Some Harley Street doctors are there because they're sufficiently skilful or experienced to have built up a private practice, others because they have the particular diplomatic skills needed to deal with rich, ill people with rich people's special illnesses.
In either case, though, there is some slight and very British embarrassment about the nature of the work they do. God forbid that a Harley Street consulting room should look like a doctor's office; they are laid out as old-fashioned drawing rooms or studies: a leather-topped oak desk, a couple of button-back chairs, some anodyne reproduction oil paintings of the _Fighting Téméraire's_ sister ship or the Monarch of the Glen's princeling cousin. And there in the corner, hiding away, will be a tray full of stainless-steel specula or a discreet X-ray light box or a tasteful little ultrasound machine, as often as not stored behind walnut doors in the way they store TV sets in the Home Counties.
A week after Dr Mulligan had passed me over to private medicine I went with my wife to the rooms of Mr Hinton, a dapper Liverpudlian ear, nose and throat man whose business card placed him as a consultant at half a dozen private and public hospitals and who kept rooms at the same address as Dr Mulligan's first choice of specialist.
While Dr Mulligan could refer to the thick wodge of notes which had followed me around the NHS since birth, Hinton knew nothing about me other than what was contained in the brief letter of referral. I told him the story again from scratch – the aches and pains, the glands, the blood test, the lump. And as I told it in full for the first time, I started to worry. As a medical part-work delivered to my own doctor in instalments it had seemed like no more than a catalogue of vague and differentiated symptoms; as a single story it became something else, something with greater narrative possibilities than a mere swollen gland.
I tossed Hinton a couple of possibilities by way of a diagnosis: Hodgkin's Disease, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a few other major, life-threatening diseases taken from the _Hypochondriac's Vade-Mecum_ and offered by way of a good luck charm in the knowledge that the true diagnosis is never the one that the hypochondriac suggests to the doctor. It can't be, because the phrase 'That's remarkable! I trained as a doctor for seven years and yet with no training at all you arrived at the correct, and yet unlikely, diagnosis' exists only in the hypochondriac's imagination.
Hinton didn't dismiss anything I'd suggested out of hand. How could he? They'd come from the section of the _Penguin Book of Symptoms_ which dealt with lumps in the neck and throat. I had a lump in my neck, _ergo_ it could be any of those things.
Hinton felt and prodded and stroked. He sprayed my left nostril with a local antiseptic and passed a fibre optic tube into my nose and down into my throat, following its passage on a tiny TV monitor.
(You want to know the difference between a Harley Street surgery and any other surgery in the developed world? Much later, when I started writing about this, I bought a copy of a 2,000-page American work called _Mosby's Medical, Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary_ and a picture book of the thousands of tiny invasive events which can wreck a body. One of the first things I looked up was 'endoscopy' – the procedure which Hinton had undertaken and which would be undertaken again by two more doctors. It shows a photograph of an American doctor looking down a tube connected to a patient's nostril. The American is robed in the full kit: theatre gown, cap and mask. In his discreet Harley Street rooms, Hinton did the job accoutred in a dark blue pinstriped suit.)
We talked for a while about the possibilities and he said that the lump didn't feel like anything nasty, but you could never tell. His guess was a branchial cyst – a cyst caused by a blockage in the vestigial remnant of the gills we had when we still slithered in the Thames mud. It's not a common lump as lumps go, he said, but then again it wasn't going to make the stop press column of the _Lancet._
He wrote me out three chitties: one to the London Imaging Centre, one to a blood testing lab and one to St George's Hospital.
At the Imaging Centre they'd give a CT scan; at the lab they'd give me a blood test and at the hospital a cytologist he worked with would prick the lump to see what came out. The blood test and the aspiration I could deal with: as far as I knew, though, the scan could only mean he thought cancer was an option.
It was the first time the word had been mentioned in connection with my neck by somebody who knew what he was talking about.
Even then I wasn't worried too much. I was, after all, in the hands of men with medical degrees and white lab coats. Looking back on my hypochondriasis I realise that I've never been one of those fantasists who wants to be opened up and inspected on a regular basis or even the sort who lives with particular imagined diseases. My hypochondria never demanded more of the medical establishment than that they acknowledge the possibilities of illness from time to time and laugh fondly at my hypochondriacal imagination.
Even on those occasions when my wolf-crying has landed me in hospital – a panic attack in a Soho restaurant, a heart attack while I was filming a TV show on a Yorkshire mountain and which turned out to be constipation – I've found myself laughing alongside the put-upon doctors as if the hypochondria was itself an isolated ailment which we could both inspect together.
I imagined this would be the same.
It was the same, as it turned out. The blood test, at a pay-as-you-bleed medical knocking shop staffed by cool, leggy nurse-receptionists in Calvin Klein lab coats and where the number of credit card stickers exceeded the number of notices referring to medical practice by about three to one, took a matter of minutes.
At the London Imaging Centre the receptionists were less leggy and their white coats were covered in green cardies, but the credit card stickers were still there. They asked for £700 up front and seemed fazed when I said that BUPA would be paying for this. Couldn't I pay them the money and collect it from BUPA later?
I don't know why this so offended me: I know, after all, that charging for medical procedures is how the London Imaging Centre pays the bills. I suppose I'd expected something a little more diplomatic – a white-coated flunky who would murmur quietly 'And how will sir be... ahem...' or an invoice posted a couple of days later in a crisp white envelope.
Eventually we agreed that it was unlikely that BUPA would go bust before the bill went in, and I signed something to the effect that if BUPA wouldn't pay then I would.
I was given a hospital gown and a cubicle to change into it, and taken into a room full of a single large white machine with a hole in it.
I'd run my hands over a CT – computed tomography – scan machine before, in the days when they were still CAT – computerised axial tomography – scan machines. The machine is, essentially, a spinning X-ray machine which allows a computer to work out what a cross-section of any part of the body might look like and whether that cross-section might contain anything extraneous by way of lumps, bumps or – who are we kidding here? – tumours.
It was one of the machines that appeared from time to time on _Tomorrow's World,_ the BBC wonders-of-science programme which I'd once presented for a while. The great thing about the CT scan is that it looks just like prime-time viewers think the medicine of the future ought to look: white, clean, non-invasive. Press a button and five minutes later you have an instant picture of just what's wrong with the patient. Just like in _Star Trek._
For five minutes read half an hour, lying stock-still with your head stuck in the machine's cavity; for non-invasive read a syringe full of gunk which heats up the bloodstream and leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. And for instant read when they've got somebody round to interpret the results.
And for reassuring – which all of this was meant to be – imagine the hypochondriac claustrophobe lying with his head enclosed in white enamelled metal, seriously considering cancer for the first time.
Except that I didn't seriously consider it because cancer still didn't come within the remit of my hypochondria in any proper way. Any consideration I could give it was at a sort of existential arm's length. I imagined myself in a week or two's time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with cancer – who'd been through all the tests and then at the very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it sounded even more heroic than the real thing, a sort of _Death of Chatterton_ except that Chatterton gets up off the _chaise-longue_ to write about it after the painting's been varnished.
Perhaps I was the wrong sort of hypochondriac – the sort who only over-worried about illnesses which could, by some stretch of the imagination, be reasonably feared. Certainly, I now realised, I wasn't the sort who searched through medical books looking for illnesses of which to accuse my body. And as I came to think of it, I realised that still my only real fear was the heart attack, which given my smoking and stress records, was reasonable. Then again, given those records, so was cancer, and still it didn't frighten me.
A couple of days later the blood and scan results came through. Both were negative. There was one test left: the swelling was to be aspirated, which is to say that a cytologist – a cell specialist – would stick a needle into my lumpy neck and divine from the result what the contents might be. Hinton wanted a colleague at St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London to do the job and so I had to wait a week or so until she came back from holiday.
And still I wasn't worried in any real sense. Not as worried, at least, as my wife. Nigella's mother had died of cancer when she was 48 and Nigella 25; 30 months before our trip to Harley Street her beloved younger sister Thomasina had died of a breast cancer which had been shoved into what seemed to be safe remission a year or so before it flourished again. Nigella herself had annual check-ups at the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital in Chelsea: she was accustomed – if that's the word – to the diagnosis.
It meant that when we turned up at the bright cytology lab at St George's Hospital I was in a calm, 50:50 sort of state while Nigella was holding the arm of a potential cancer patient. Another potential cancer patient.
Here, at least, we'd know immediately what the answer was. Hinton had told us that – more or less, give or take – if the centre of the lump was fluid-filled it was almost certainly not cancerous. What we had to hope for was that Hinton's friend got her lab coat wet. Which she did. The needle went in, a stream of yellow matter squirted out. I was cancer free: a man with a branchial cyst which, when I could get round to it, I should have removed.
The problem was that having it removed would have meant a general anaesthetic and I have an irrational fear of general anaesthetics. And not so very irrational, come to that: people, middle-aged male people especially, go under the anaesthetic and don't come round again. I forgot about the lump.
Or rather I forgot about it as much as I could. I did a TV series in the summer and autumn of 1996 which involved rather a lot of camouflage work on my neck by the make-up artists at Granada. And then one week in February 1997 I sat down in a BBC radio studio and apologised to the engineer who was about to set up my mike: I was, I said, a bit on the raspy side. It was OK, he said; they were used to it. And I realised that I'd been making the same apology for croakiness for the whole of a 12-week series.
In March I went to New York for a few days. The trip was nominally a work event – I was meant to be writing a piece on the New York press but it didn't much matter whether it got written or not, and the truth was that the reason I'd gone was because I'll always take the opportunity to spend a couple of days in New York by way of a rushed health cure.
This time the cure didn't work. I spent my time there feeling miserable and lethargic. An Internet correspondent who knew about these things had warned me that while a branchial cyst wasn't of itself dangerous, it could become, as he'd put it, 'a focus of infection' and this was precisely what it seemed to be doing. I was coughing, hoarse, unable to eat anything chocolaty or sugary because those substances seemed to burn the back of my throat. I determined that as soon as I got back to London I'd book in for the cyst to be removed.
I got home on the Wednesday and, used to the NHS's way of doing things, assumed I'd have couple of weeks at least before the operation. This was BUPA, though, land of I-need-it-now, and I had an appointment with Mr Mady the next day and was booked in for surgery on the following Monday.
I'm still not quite sure why I finished up with Mr Mady. As far as I could gather at the time, in the months that I'd been putting off the anaesthetic, career paths in South London had changed in some subtle way and I had become somebody else's fee. Given that I had no way of knowing whether Mady or Hinton were any good, and given that the amount of surgery we were talking about here didn't seem to demand a Christiaan Barnard, it was all pretty academic.
Mr Mady had his rooms not far from Mr Hinton's. He was a pleasant enough bloke, as keen to talk about his daughter's gymkhana prospects as he was about my lump. He prodded it, looked down my throat, agreed that it was a branchial cyst and that whipping it out was a matter of an hour's work. Why did I want to go to St George's Hospital? he asked. The truth was because I didn't really trust private hospitals if anything went wrong. Private hospitals are wonderful places if you're slightly ill and need a reasonable hotel with nurses in attendance, but they tend to come second best _in extremis._ The problem with NHS hospitals was always that they started with emergency procedures as the core service and then built outwards. It was bad news if you needed a hip replaced or a varicose vein drawn out, but made sense when your heart suddenly failed under a general anaesthetic.
And so, next Monday I found myself with Nigella in Tooting again, where it turned out there wasn't a bed for me in ENT after all, and did I mind a bed in a ward on the other side of the hospital?
I sat in the day room with my lap-top on an old table and I wrote my _Times_ column. It had to be written and I didn't imagine I'd much feel like writing it over the next couple of days; in any case this was as reasonable a subject for the column as any. The column appears in the paper's Saturday magazine, its jaunty title, 'Something for the Weekend', being a remnant of its origins as a column in the main paper which was meant to have been entitled 'Sex Life' until my wife took Simon Jenkins, the then editor, out to lunch and explained that she wasn't prepared to have her husband writing a column called 'Sex Life' in the country's paper of record.
'Sex Life' appeared as 'Private Life' and addressed such libidinous questions as whether the receptionists in salesmen's hotels knew whether the pay-per-view video you'd chosen was one of the clean ones or _Hollywood Vixens._ You know the sort of column. By the time it moved to the magazine it had become a general domestic column – a weekly meditation on life as man, consumer, father, husband. You know that sort of column, too.
This is what I wrote in the hospital:
I'm sitting in a day room in St George's Hospital in Tooting.
I'd intended starting this on a more impressive note of pathos: 'I'm lying in a bed in St George's Hospital waiting for the pill which will allow me to deal less anxiously with the fact that tomorrow a man will come and knock me out and carve slices out of my neck which he'll inspect for malignancy' but some conceited traffic accident victim or selfishly relapsing cancer patient sneaked in and took the bed, _my_ bed, and so for some hours I've been shuffled from one day room to another, and now it's no longer even day.
At least it's given me a chance to study the hospital's collection of discreet _mementoes mori._ It's not just the leaflets from the local council posted around the place telling you, so tastefully, how to register a death, or the instructions on how to get hold of an emergency priest or a rabbi when the moment comes. It's everywhere. The reception area is piled with old glossy magazines, each one especially selected to remind you of what the worst-case scenario is about hospitals – and, while you're here, the only-case scenario about life generally. 'When You've Got To Go...' a piece on weekend breaks in _Country Life_ is headlined, and 'Dead Reckoning' an article on graveyard photography in _Amateur Photographer._ The headlines leap out of pieces on the mundanities of travel and cooking and wine: A GRAVE SITUATION, NO HOPE OF RETURN, HEAVEN CAN'T WAIT.
News update: they've just told me that there is a bed after all. True, it's so far from the hospital's Ear Nose and Throat sector that they might have to reschedule the operation, but it's a bed. On a public ward. And I feel so crass doing the 'What the hell do I pay BUPA all that money for if I can't have a room to myself' shtick in front of a row of patients who have probably been hanging around for months on waiting lists hoping to get a bed in the NHS lottery. But anger overcame crassness and so I've just had one of those Californian arguments with the woman in charge of beds, the sort where I say I realise that it's not your fault, but you must understand that I'm very angry and there's nobody else around to shout at, and where she says that she appreciates my anger, and she is hearing my shouting, but there's nothing really that she can do.
And just before she goes, she smiles in that nursish way and says she's sure everything will be all right. It's easy for her to say: she'll be sleeping in her own bed tonight. That's what everyone says. I phone up friends and say 'look, you remember that lump on my neck? Well they're cutting it out and the doctor says he wants to take a look around, just to see what's in there, rather like a police diver uses the phrase just before he goes over the edge of the dinghy into the murky and body-ridden lake. And my friends say 'Hey, don't worry. It'll be fine. I know if 11 be fine' which is what we all say when we're not quite sure what the right thing to say is.
It would be reassuring if my friends were surgeons, or nurses, or even pharmacists, but they're journalists and radio producers and magazine editors, and what they don't know about surgery would fill two or three large medical libraries. _How_ do they know it will be fine, that the lump is just one of those lumps you get from time to time? Not even the surgeon knows that.
I can't even put it down to my normal hypochondria. Hypochondria normally comes in two varieties. The chronic version which turns every twinge into a cardiac event, every spot into a melanoma, every cold into pneumonia, is the worst because of the not knowing. By comparison, the acute version, in which a doctor with a real medical degree tells you that you do have some actual minor illness and that you can look ill when you tell people about it in the pub, is, in its way, rather cheering. But this is beyond those conditions. Nobody can tell me that the fear of being put under for an hour or so while they cut your neck open is an irrational one.
The pill is taking hold. I shall go to bed now. A public bed in a public ward, but one with clean sheets and surrounded by nurses who accept that men who are about to go under the knife get angry. And frightened. Because while BUPA covers most contingencies, it doesn't cover fear.
In truth it was a manipulative sort of column. Everyone I'd spoken to who wore a white coat said this wasn't about cancer at all. Every test had come back negative. Any fear I had of the lump turning out to be malignant was an entirely manufactured one: hinting that I was afraid of cancer made for a better column than saying I didn't fancy a sore neck for a few days.
At this point I'd had cancer for something over a year.
They cut me the next morning, they stitched me up, they came round that afternoon to tell me how well things had gone. The cyst, the registrar said in that way they have of suggesting you've conspired together to do something clever, was the size of a Clementine. It was a woody old thing, full of liquid, and looked benign to the point of saintliness. I slept, I woke, Nigella took me home.
Two days later I picked up a message on my answer machine. Would I phone Mr Mady as soon as possible. My first thought – but not my second – was that this was some sort of procedural problem, that BUPA weren't paying up or that I hadn't signed something at St George's. I phoned Mr Mady's secretary at St George's who wasn't sure where he was that day. I left it. Nigella didn't. Her first thought was different from mine. She phoned every hospital for which Mady worked and left a series of numbers at which she could be reached.
That night I was watching _EastEnders_ and waiting for Nigella to come and join me. Ten minutes in she sat down next to me, put a cup of tea down, took my hands in hers and said:
'Mr Mady phoned. He says they've found some cancer cells.'
Well, of course they had.
# Chapter 2
In its own microscopic way, becoming cancerous is about the most glamorous and successful thing a cell can do.
When sperm meets ovum and life starts, the new cells are the great generalists. As the cells start to divide and re-divide each cell is the same. And then as our bodies, our skeletons, our organs take on shape, the cells start specialising and become, as they say in the trade, differentiated. They know what they are meant to be because only the relevant genetic information is revealed to them. Like the aristocracy; they have no choice, only hereditary duties.
With a couple of exceptions an ordinary, non-cancerous cell is a plodding drone of a thing: specialised in its job of being a liver cell or a brain cell or a skin cell, it beavers away for its genetically allotted span, reproduces itself by splitting into mother and daughter cells, dies. And the cells know when to die because in every one of them are structures called telomeres. A telomere works like one of those old-fashioned calendars they once used in movies to indicate the passage of time. You pulled the pages off one by one and when you got to the last page, that was it: end of the year. Similarly with telomeres: at each cell division, a piece is pulled off the telomere until finally the telomere is just a stub and the cell will divide no further.
This tedious life and death destiny isn't enough for the cancerous cell. The cancerous cell wants to go places, do things that its parents never had the chance to do. A cancer cell is the one that never grows up. The metaphor isn't a casual one: the cancer cell bears all the nastier traits of reckless youth. It defies order, goes where it likes and above all believes itself to be immortal. Indeed, in practical terms the cancer cell would live for ever were it not that doing so does away with the host upon which it needs to live. Cancer cells somehow lose track of what they are meant to be, so when they divide, instead of taking on a sensible function, they become wildly healthy but completely useless and undifferentiated tissue. Which wouldn't be so bad, except they don't know when to stop dividing. The telomeres don't get shorter with each division. The calendar remains forever at New Year's Day.
It's as if these cells, previously healthy productive conformist members of the corporeal society, suddenly – and let us change metaphors here – become members of some wacko religious cult. They become obsessed with immortality and at the same time cease to be of use.
And so the first cancer cell divides and divides and eventually becomes a tumour: a rapidly growing clump of cells doing the wrong job in the wrong place. Again, no problem were the cells happy to stay where they are until-the lump becomes visible to the surgical eye – as do the cells in a benign tumour. It can take a cancer cell three years, doubling and doubling in size, to grow to a size where it's noticeable. At this stage the single cell will have become a billion cells. It doesn't take much longer before the cancer becomes fatal – which means that in most cases cancer remains undetectable for 75 per cent of its lifespan.
By the time it's detected, though, it may well be the case that the cancer has started spreading the good word around the body, first locally to nearby lymph glands, and then wandering off around the lymphatic system or along the arterial byways to share the secret of eternal cellular life with other cells in other parts of the body. It invades organs, setting up home there, growing, lumping together, compromising the organ (although rarely actually destroying it) and diverting the body's energies to its own cause.
Up to a point, at least.
Over the next months I would pick up and try to avoid using any number of jaunty epithets from the cancer set, prime amongst which would be 'Cancer is a word, not a sentence.' The corollary of this is that cancer isn't a particularly specific diagnosis. 'It is,' one doctor wrote to me later, 'rather as if every viral disease from smallpox and AIDS down to German measles was given the same diagnostic title.'
My cancer was, said Mr Mady on the phone that night, a squamous cell carcinoma, an indolent cancer, a cancer which – as if this would sugar the pill – surprised him as much as it did me.
Not knowing about the 57 varieties, all I heard was that I had cancer. Mady didn't mention the natural corollary – that I was going to die soon – but I supplied that for myself. For the one thing that everyone knows about cancer is that it kills. There is no curing the cancer patient: the most that can be hoped for is a temporary remission while the appeal court argues about the precise date of execution.
Had you told me a couple of months earlier that one evening just as I was watching _EastEnders_ I would get the news that I had terminal cancer I would have been able to predict my reaction quite precisely. I would have told you that I would move to the corner of the room, sit down on the floor and start screaming hysterically. Something like that, anyway. I've always assumed that one gets accustomed to one's own mortality at the sort of age where death as a probability approaches, but I've never been able to imagine what that accustomed state must feel like.
In the event the terror lasted five minutes, and I have to admit that even after the first couple of minutes I realised that most of it was manufactured. I searched within myself for the authentic voice of dread which I knew must be there, but it wasn't. I wasn't terrified at all: faced with death I was, rather, sad, angry, irritated, apologetic. Sad because it meant that I wouldn't get much more of the plot as it affected three-year-old Cosima and 10-month-old Bruno, angry that it should happen like this and too young, irritated with the frustration of not knowing how to respond, and apologetic towards Nigella who'd had to face enough young cancer announcements already.
Once it became apparent that I wasn't going to scream, I didn't know what to say. What do you say? 'Oh dear'? 'Ooops'? What? I moaned a couple of times, hoping that the moan would encourage the terror to come out of its hiding. I looked at Nigella, and at _EastEnders,_ still taking in bits of the plot. I said 'I've got cancer' out loud as if this might explain everything, something. I apologised to Nigella. And that was about as much as I could do. It wasn't as if there were any symptoms to deal with, any evidence of an illness apart from the bandages on my neck. I didn't feel as if I were dying or even as if I were particularly ill.
I could pretend that this serene response represents some heroic act of self-containment on my part, that this was a brave response or a stoical response. It wasn't. It was as involuntary a response as the scream would have been. If it turned out that I was more accepting of death than I'd expected then it was through no fault of mine. Indeed, this may not be the definitive response. It may be that I do recover and that the cancer goes away and that I start screaming neurotically as I once did before I was ill. Or it may be that I buck the odds and die and that when the real final news comes I respond as I expected I would when the first news came. The rule is – and the liberating thing about life-threatening diseases is that they allow one to make up definitive rules about them on the fly – that any response to the news of one's own imminent death is a legitimate one.
At around 8.30 we phoned Mady for an update.
He explained again: this was a squamous cell carcinoma. It was indolent. Translation: squamous cell carcinoma – a cancer of the scaly cells which make up the skin's surface and certain bodily linings such as that of the cervix or the lung or, indeed, the mouth. Indolent: too damned lazy to kill me immediately. There was, Mady said, a high chance of a cure. Surely, I said, he meant it could be put into remission. The other thing we all know about cancer victims is that they are like AA members. Just as an alcoholic is always an alcoholic however long it is since he took his last swig, so a cancer patient always has the killer cells lurking. But no: he meant cured. With the right treatment there was every likelihood that there would be no difference between me and somebody who'd never had cancer.
His opinion was that this was, as it were, a cancer of the cyst. I'd had the correctly diagnosed branchial cyst for so long that it had become cancerous. In fact, he said, the biopsy had found only a few cancerous cells in the cyst and there was no sign of any real tumour. There were a few more in the lymph gland they'd taken out with the cyst, but that was only because the two structures were touching.
He had spoken already to a colleague of his, a Dr Henk, who wanted to see us as soon as possible.
It was late. There was nothing to say. I was still worried that I was feeling the wrong things, that I wasn't depressed or terrified or any of the things I imagined a death sentence would make me feel. The kids were in bed and Nigella and I had no real way to fill the limbo-ish time between now and the next day when I would discover – I hoped – what my legitimate reaction should be to all this.
I logged on to the Internet and in a desultory sort of way tried to find out something about what was happening. It turns out that the real function of the Internet, the one which doesn't involve downloading pictures of Korean hookers, is as a resource for the cancerous. The place is littered with sites for the diseased, for their doctors, for their carers. There are sites for people who think prayer cures cancer and sites for those who think acupuncture will do it. There are jolly sites written in the purposeful layman's language of the charitable trust, and furrowed-brow, let's-face-it sites where people get together to wish each other luck. Underpinning them all is the real information – the hundreds of thousands of scientific papers produced around the world over the decades and which sit on the Net waiting to be researched.
I was playing with a whole new vocabulary, though – 'squamous', 'carcinoma', 'prickle-cell' – and one with which I wasn't at ease. In part because both my father and younger brother had been scientists I had a very slightly better than lay command of science writing and indeed, over the years I'd done a little semi-medical writing – consumer pieces on the pharmaceutical industry, columns on the politics of vivisection, sneering pieces about alternative medicine, that sort of thing – but I couldn't make the facts I was dragging off the Net work for me. I had no way to gauge the relative importance of the words I was reading. Was a paper on neck cancers published in Antwerp in 1992 more or less relevant than one on throat cancers published in Chicago in 1987? Was a trial involving 3,000 patients on chemotherapy as important as one involving 200 patients on radiotherapy?
I wasn't ready for this yet. I wandered back downstairs and found a bottle of Bombay gin. It was the first time I'd poured a drink at home for just the two of us in an age but that night we got drunk and hunted out a video which would distract us both.
You would not believe the number of references to death, dying, hell, cancer, serious illness and eternity in _Groundhog Day._ Minute by minute, scene by scene, Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell pranced in front of the snowy Punxsutawney skyline rubbing my predicament in my face in the same way the magazines at the hospital had done a few days before. To the dying all thing are morbid, and I was still dying.
I drank, I took a sleeping pill, I slept.
There was some good news, though. Mr Mady had fixed us an appointment with his oncological partner, Dr Henk. More, he'd fixed it for the next day, which was Good Friday. The bad news, as I read it, was that if an oncologist was willing to come in on Good Friday things must be rather more urgent than I'd been led to believe.
According to Mr Mady, Dr Henk and he worked together all the time. Michael Henk was a radiologist who specialised in irradiating the head and neck and whose main practice was at the Royal Marsden Hospital, a cancer hospital with branches in Fulham and Surrey and a world-wide reputation for clinical and surgical practice and research. Dr Henk is, according to everyone who knows about these things, the best. What he doesn't know about irradiating cancers of the neck is hardly worth knowing: he is one of those doctors of whom one says They've sent me to Henk at the Marsden' and watches other doctors nod approvingly.
Next morning we went back to St George's, both of us conscious that with a third visit we were getting too familiar with the place, and met Henk in a small office on the ENT ward. Henk is a middle-aged man with his face set in the tight-lipped and lop-sided smile of one who spends his life leavening good news with bad. We introduced ourselves, shook hands, sat down. Henk looked at his shoes and said 'I'm sorry.'
That's all. 'I'm sorry.' Pause. Tight smile. Look at shoes. Nigella looks at me. I look at Henk. The pause is for ever.
When the man who knows more about neck cancer than anyone in the oncological universe says of the neck cancer which a few hours ago was cheerily pronounced curable 'I'm sorry,' the stomach sinks. I closed my eyes for a moment. Somehow here, surrounded by the piles of sterile wrapped bandages and sutures, the stainless steel hospital impedimenta, the toing and froing nurses, the terminal diagnosis scared me in a way it didn't when I received it at home.
Except that it wasn't a terminal diagnosis. Such is the potency of the word 'cancer' that it can never be delivered without sorrow – even by a doctor who knows the cure rate of this sort of cancer is up there in the 90 per cent area.
Henk explained the cancer in much the same terms as Mady had: a slow-moving, indolent cancer of the neck. Probably.
Probably? Probably is not a word I expect from Mr Neck Cancer. In any case, what sort of probably? Probably cancer? (There is part of me still waiting for the comedy doctor to run on to tell us that there was a mix-up with the biopsies.) Probably slow-moving? Probably of the neck?
The thing is, Henk tells us, that he doesn't really believe in what I'd come to think of as cancer of the cyst. Yes, there are those who believe that a benign cyst can develop cancer but he is not among their credulous number. He conjured an almost medieval picture of disputative oncologists crowded round a preserved cytological relict arguing the toss about the mythical status of the cancer attached to it.
As far as he's concerned the cancer they found in my cyst and the lymph gland they removed with it, is a secondary cancer, the offshoot of a nearby primary. What they will do, he says, is to go back down my throat with an endoscope and a scalpel, have a look around, take a few bits of tissue out to test for cancer, take it from there. The chances are, he says, that radiotherapy will deal with it.
I booked myself in for the next Tuesday, went home and left an e-mail for Bywater.
Michael Bywater is one of only two columnists to whom I've ever sent a fan letter, the other being Alan Coren who will turn up later in this book. I'm not saying that there aren't those to whom I've meant to send fan letters, to whom I've actually written fan letters and not got around to sending them. It's just that Bywater and Coren are the only columnists who have received fan letters, albeit they may not have recognised them as such given the jealousy of their columnar skills which lay barely concealed under my words of fandom.
Bywater is one of those people who is always just about to become incredibly famous. All over London in gatherings of those to whom these things mean anything, people are saying 'Why have they never given Bywater his own chat show/comedy series/incisive post-modernist culture slot on Channel 4?' They will one day, or ought to, but meanwhile Bywater makes a living as a jobbing newspaper columnist majoring in urban existential angst, and with minor credits in art criticism, computer and medical writing. In a life almost exactly as long as mine he has been an opera director, tabloid hack, executive jet pilot and some odd things involving whips and PVC which I've never enquired about too closely. If I didn't like the man so much I'd hate him with a bitter jealousy.
I first met Bywater in 1980 when a dancer who was lodging with my then wife and me kept on telling us that his previous landlord, some sort of journalist called Michael, was more entertaining, forgiving and generally sympathetic than we were. I saw this paragon's name on the guest list of some press junket or another and introduced myself. Our lodger was right: he was entertaining.
Bywater knows about most things, but one of the few things he's actually got a certificate in to demonstrate his knowledge is medicine. He trained in it at Cambridge on the assumption that he would follow his father into the business and although he got diverted from the job by the Footlights mob, he's kept up with most of the reading.
I e-mailed Bywater with the diagnosis and asked for his take on it. Nigella did the sensible and less modern thing: she phoned him and told him to get round here.
Bywater turned up and went into immediate upbeat mode. Yes it was cancer, but only in a superficial sort of way. 'The great thing, of course, is that you can have all the sympathy of a real cancer.' We poured some gin, and then some more. Bywater said he'd go through the Internet with me and show me how to speak the language of cancer. He pressed a button on my computer: a page from the American Cancer Society flashed on to the screen. Bywater studied it.
'Blah de blah de blah – yes look here: 92 per cent. Not a problem.'
We went through some more pages. The way Bywater explained it, the statistics were such that my cancer had actually extended my life. The principle was that yes, 92 per cent of men with my particular cancer lived for ten years after diagnosis: that included all those men with dickey hearts who keeled over when they got the diagnosis, and all those men who fell under buses in those ten years and all those men who were 75 when they contracted the disease. Here I was, young (as Bywater saw it, but then he was born within days of me) fit, middle class.
I relaxed slightly and poured the last of the bottle of gin.
'You know what I really resent?' I said. 'What I really resent is that I bought these wonderful cigars in the duty free shop at JFK, and I'll never be able to smoke another one of them.'
'Rubbish,' said Bywater. 'Look, they're probably going to give you radiotherapy, right? Radiotherapy doesn't piss around: it kills off all the cancer cells, including any you got after the original diagnosis.'
'You sure?'
'Positive.'
Nigella came back ten minutes later. She had left me in the hands of a man I'd promised her knew about cancer. She came back to find us both pissed and giggling with nine inches of cigar sticking out of our mouths.
If the statistics are right – and although my personal 92 per cent turned out not to be, there's no reason why the rest aren't – then Joe Besser is personally responsible for my cancer. The last I heard of Joe he was working in the jewellery business in Hatton Garden, but that was 25 years ago. When I knew Joe properly we were both 13-year-olds at the same Jewish youth club in Hackney.
It was Joe who as we were walking along Clarence Road in Hackney in 1965 said 'I've decided. I'm going to start smoking. It'll help me pull. Do it for a few years, pull women, give it up when I'm 18.' We bought a packet of ten Consulate ('Cool as a Mountain Stream') between us, and we smoked.
This is, I suppose, as good a place as any to explain me and Hackney by way of provenance. I'll make it brief.
I grew up in Hackney in what is usually described as London's East End. I lived there until I was 16 and when I left college I went back there to live and teach. I was still living half a mile from where I'd been born when, at 39, and a year after I split from my first wife, I moved to West London.
In the 50s Hackney was still one of London's Jewish areas: the junior school I went to closed early on winter Fridays because 60 per cent of the pupils would have left early anyway. I wouldn't have left early: although I occasionally took school lunches from the Kosher School Meals Service which existed then and may, for all I know, exist still, I was a secular Jew from a secular Jewish household, which is to say that my parents' politics had effectively superceded the faith of their forebears. Not so very fore, either: while my mother's father, a Stepney barber, had never, so far as I know, practised Judaism, my father's father was a big cheese in the Liberal synagogue.
My parents' vaunted secularism didn't have a lot of effect. True, I wasn't bar-mitzvah'd and am lost at any sort of religious service, but I am in all other essentials Jewish by osmosis if not by practice. In Hackney in the 50s the local vicar was Jewish by osmosis.
We lived on the Webb Estate, a council estate in Lower Clapton. There was a time when I used to describe myself as the product of a Hackney council estate and, leaving the description unqualified, let it offer testimony to my working-class roots. In fact it's been a while since anyone in my family did manual labour. My great-grandfather owned a chain of Yiddish theatres in the East End albeit that he pissed them away with whiskey. His son, Alf, my grandfather, ran away from home to join the Communist Party and became a book-keeper for the import-export agency which served Soviet Russia as a covert embassy before Britain recognised that state's legitimacy. The agency got raided by the police and Grandpa found himself on what the family always described as 'a black list' although until I wrote the word just now it didn't occur to me how difficult it would be to blacklist book-keepers.
Whatever: eventually Dr Simpson of the eponymous Piccadilly clothing store gave him a job and by the time my grandfather died he was a director of the company. My maternal grandparents were no hornier-handed: Grandpa Hiller was a barber who owned and ran various East End barber shops and who in the 30s started making his own unguents which he sold under the name Rosilla, after his daughter – my aunt – Rose Hiller.
It wasn't as if my parents were _déclassé_ throwbacks either. Mum got a scholarship to St Martin's School of Art just after the war and became a clothes designer, and Dad, who dropped out of a degree course at around the same time, was a senior research biochemist who wrote textbooks on the subject and finished up running the biochemistry department at the Royal College of Surgeons.
We were unlikely council estate tenants, but the fact remained that I and both my brothers were born on council estates and lived on them until we were teenagers. It was in part because for all my parents' professional status neither of them earned a lot, and in part because my father's political puritanism didn't quite approve of individual home ownership. Happily he eventually managed to square his conscience and his bank manager and in 1969 we all moved out to suburban Woodford Green where both of them still live.
So: there's me and Joe Besser with our ten Consulate trying to pull. It worked for Joe, but then Joe didn't need the outside agency of cigarettes. I was different. The reason that 30 and some years later I can still remember so precisely the conversation we had that night in Clarence Road is because there is some unreconstructed part of me which still believes what Joe told me then. I don't think that in any literal way smoking helps me pull, but I still believe that I look cooler, more assured, more _me_ with a cigarette in my hand – and never mind that I know they stink, I know they kill.
It took me a while to get up to nicotinic speed from the ten a week smoked behind the youth club, but by the time I was earning a living I was on a pack a day. By the time, in my mid-30s, that I took an hour to get my breath back after playing ten minutes of an office football match and decided to quit, I was on two packs a day.
Not that I ever did stop smoking properly. Instead I switched to Nicorette – the nicotine chewing gum. I became addicted to it instead and by the day of diagnosis had been chewing the gum for something over ten years.
I can't tell you that the smoking was definitely responsible for my cancer. I can tell you that 90 per cent of all such cancers occur in smokers. I've had dozens of letters from armchair libertarians telling me that I shouldn't blame the cigarettes because their old auntie died of cancer and she never smoked so much as a Christmas cheroot. Maybe, but they really shouldn't confuse their impotent libertarian argument with the epidemiological one. By all means campaign for some phantom 'right' to smoke, but don't believe that right derives from corrupting the statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I did, with the immune system.
I woke up the next morning hungover, numb, entirely unready for the biopsy, and with a column to write. The problem was the column I'd written the week before and which was based on the assumption that it was a one-off. I decided that I'd have to confess all:
The me you meet here isn't the real me. He looks much the same as the real me, has the same number of wives and children, combines wit and witlessness in roughly the same proportions, has lived much the same life in many of the same places, but you will understand that if each week I were to deliver to you my life unpasteurised and absolutely as I experience it then that life would be unliveable.
There are, I know, domestic columnists around whose relationship with their partners, their parents, their cleaners and other walk-on characters is so mature – or possibly immature – that they can report every detail of it unfiltered for public inspection and be on speaking terms with their subjects at the end of the exercise. Not me. The me you see here is a sort of parallel me, cravenly picking and choosing the details which will best make the point, changing names or job titles out of a sense of propriety or social cowardice, baring a virtual soul and taking risks only where no risk really exists. Until last week.
Six months or so ago I wrote about the lump in my neck. I started the piece with a disingenuous reference to an illness which might or might not turn out to be something nasty, and finished it with a smug punchline which, looking back at it now, sneered at anyone who might have been worrying for 800 words worth of affected angst whether they were watching a man whose head was about to clunk insensate on to the keyboard.
And then last week I tried the trick again. I'm not quite sure what I wrote because I dispatched the words only a couple of days ago, and because I really did write it in the hospital ward I don't have the piece to hand. But I seem to remember leaving my readers with unanswered questions in the full expectation that at the end of some inconsequential column or another this week I'd note that, by the way, and thanks for asking, but I came round from the operation and everything was fine. I was frightened, sure, but the fear I wrote about was, I now know, the ersatz version which one knows will pass with its cause.
At 8 p.m. on the night I am writing this the consultant phoned up with the bad news and what do you know? I had cancer all along. And have it still. The hubris-hating gods, it seems, read _The Times_ too.
So here's my problem. Well, not my real problem, which is that I have cancer and may expire before the date printed on the packet, but my columnar problem.
Cancer is a word of such immense potency that one has to be careful how one uses it in a column. I know the disease is nothing special: people die of it all the time and many more live with, and through, cancer, and I may well be one of the latter. I won't know for certain until they've scanned me next week and carved some random bits out of my throat for inspection, one of the many crass jokes of cancer being that in the early stages the diagnosis is more physically painful than the disease itself.
The question is this: is it appropriate to write about one's own cancer in a jaunty weekend column? Of course there's no guarantee that I'll be able to keep up the jauntiness, especially as the various alternative treatments have the side-effect, says my doctor, of 'making you feel a bit miserable'.
So can I keep the jauntiness up under radiotherapy or, worse, if they tell me I've got only another few dozen columns left in me? Should I keep it up?
I am suddenly very conscious of how I look sitting here. Normally any smugness or bravado or megalomania I exhibit in this space and in my parallel persona doesn't worry me too much: claiming a regular dozen square inches in the country's foremost paper – the paper, after all, the gods read – doesn't make much sense if you're not prepared to be those things.
This is a personal column: I can't just pretend that the event which is currently informing everything I think or do doesn't exist. But if the cancer turns out to be curable don't I risk sounding smugger than ever? And if it doesn't – well, what sort of maudlin is that?
Normally I try to address any qualms I have about what I'm about to write before I sit down to write it. This time, I'm sorry, I can't. There you are: the truth, at last.
# Chapter 3
On the way back from the meeting with Dr Henk we stopped off at Sainsbury's to pick up some more gin. One of the things Henk had told us was that spirits were 'probably not a good idea' during radiotherapy, i.e. banned, but that the odd half of lager might be permissible. I've never been a boozer but there was something depressing about being one of those men reduced to sipping a medically approved glass of beer each day, even if it was a glass more than I'd normally drink. I was starting my radiotherapy course the next week and I felt the boozing time slipping away.
I returned to St George's a couple of days later for the biopsy. It was a one-day job: into a day bed in the morning, quick general anaesthetic, up and out in the afternoon. The hospital was getting depressingly familiar: we knew its most mundane workings: the coins the car park ticket machine would accept, the opening times of the hospital shop, the short cut from car park to ward. I knew now not to bother asking for a private room or trying the radio switches above the beds which had been installed before the hospital had run out of the money to buy the radio system to go with them when it sold the building at Hyde Park Corner to a hotel company and moved to run-down Tooting a few years before. We had become part of the hospital's daily operation, as it had of ours.
I'd even lost my fear of the operation or, more specifically, of the anaesthetic which preceded it. My unified theory of hypochondriac hubris had taken over: why would I die under anaesthetic when I had all that cancer to wake to?
The cancer to which I woke wasn't, it turned out, that much different from the one I had when I went under. Dr Mady had removed a dozen tiny slices of throat and tongue including the tonsular stub (and who could have guessed there was a legitimate adjective to be formed from the word 'tonsil') left over from my tonsillectomy 40 years earlier. It hurt like hell and revealed nothing by way of more cancer.
That they'd missed the primary site by millimetres is, this far on, neither here nor there. The primary site was well hidden and wouldn't be discovered for another three months.
Already, though, I was beginning to look and, more importantly, _sound_ like a patient of some sort, as I'd demonstrate on the _News Quiz_ three days after the biopsy.
For me, Radio 4's 20-something-year-old Saturday lunchtime _News Quiz_ and my impending appearance on it was a bigger deal than it should have been but that was because it was so securely tied up with my own professional insecurities.
I'd fluked my way into journalism 18 years before all of this. Apart from a week-long sub-editing course in Scarborough I'd taken 16 years ago, the only professional training I've ever had was as an English teacher in the days when you could still get into teachers' training college with five O levels. I'd taught drama and English in a girls' comprehensive school in East London for four years until I inherited a new uncle, a husband for my recently divorced Aunt Miriam. Seymour Friedlander was a Brooklyn lad who'd come over here some time in the 50s, and his job, as far as I could work out, was to make money in as gentle and discreet a way as possible. 'So whaddya wanna do for a living, then?' he asked me one Sunday when we'd run out of bonding small-talk.
I had my living. I was a teacher.
'No, seriously: what do you want to do?'
Fair point. Well, I said, I'd spent most of my time at college running the student newsletter and magazine: journalism, publishing, something like that, might do the trick.
He told me to phone his friend Sylvester Stein who ran a magazine company in the West End. In fact what Stein ran was a newsletter company – the sort of outfit which runs those ads reading 'Yes! You Really CAN Make Your Fortune In Property! RN of Wythenshawe made £2 million in just one day turning his back garden into a National Car Park... get the insider's facts in the _Property Letter'_ and on the back of them sold high-priced subscriptions to cheaply printed words of insider wisdom.
I met Stein, who turned out to be an affable South African who'd left his home country in the 50s just this side of being arrested for membership of the South African Communist Party. Over the years Stein's politics had drifted far enough from its roots to allow him to publish half a dozen essence-of-capitalism newsletters and a glossy jogging magazine – he was the fastest over-60s sprinter in the land – and to run various associated businesses. On the basis of a 20-minute interview during which I showed him some illustrations I'd done for a science book my father was planning to write and let him skim articles which had been wisely rejected by the magazines to which I'd submitted them, Stein appointed me Assistant Managing Director.
I started work two months later. On Friday I'd been Head of Drama at Dalston Mount School for Girls; on Monday I was Assistant Managing Director of Stonehart Publications. On Tuesday, when it became apparent there was absolutely no work for an assistant managing director to do, I became a researcher – _the_ researcher – on the _Property Letter._ Three months later when the editor left to go and work for the Socialist Workers Party (the company had a tradition of appointing young lefties to run its capitalist guides on the basis, I always thought, that those of us who distrusted evil landlords would suggest nastier things for them to do than genuine supporters of landlordism who'd have to show them in the best light) I took over. Two months after that Bob Troop, the managing editor of the series of newsletters, had to go away for three weeks: he asked me if I'd look after the property column he wrote each week in the _Sunday Times._
I wrote three pieces for the paper about interesting things suburban couples were doing with their semis and when Bob returned to take back his column I wrote to half a dozen sections at the paper asking for work. I was, I said, the _Sunday Times'_ Deputy Property Editor – I was absolutely nothing of the sort – but what I really fancied writing about, I told them, was motorbikes or dance or education. A couple of months later I was working regularly on the _Sunday Times_ magazine. And that, my children, is how you get into journalism.
Even then I held two particular journalistic ambitions: one was to appear on _Call My Bluff,_ the wordy panel game on BBC 2, the other to be a panellist on Radio 4's _News Quiz._ And some 18 years later, and within weeks of each other, I'd received invitations to do both. It shouldn't have mattered quite as much as it did: by then I had two BBC radio shows of my very own and a CV which listed a dozen other TV and radio series. But these two were somehow special.
In fact I'd been up to Birmingham to do my two editions of _Call My Bluff_ a few weeks before diagnosis; the _News Quiz_ was booked in three days after the biopsy. I should have made my excuses – they were reasonable excuses, after all – but couldn't bring myself to do so. I had cancer, for God's sake: they owed me this.
It was a mistake.
The _News Quiz_ demands spontaneity, speed, a knowledge of what's been in the news that week. Here I was, retarded by the anaesthetic, my throat so cut about that I sounded like a failed auditionee for the Charles Laughton role in the remake of _The Hunchback of Notre Dame,_ my knowledge of what had happened that week anywhere but in the St George's operating theatre nil.
We four panellists hung around in the BBC green room with the producer and the presenter, Simon Hoggart, while we waited to go on stage. I didn't know whether to say anything to them. Although I was eventually to make something of a fetish out of talking about my cancer, the first _Times_ piece had yet to appear and I wasn't sure of the propriety of telling four people who were about to go on stage and be funny for their living that the fifth of us had cancer.
Especially given that one of those four was Alan Coren who has done for hypochondria in print what Evel Knievel had done for mopeding. Coren was, as I say, the only man apart from Bywater to whom I'd sent a fan letter and the letter concerned part of the same fantasy as appearing on the _News Quiz._ About five years earlier he'd come up to me at a party at the American Ambassador's house and said 'Aren't you John Diamond?' and I'd written to him the next day to say that when I was 16 my idea of the event after which I'd be able to say 'OK God: you can take me now' was Alan Coren coming up to me at a sprauncey party and saying 'Aren't you John Diamond?' and that it was given to few of us to have our fantasies fulfilled quite so precisely.
Two minutes before we were due to go on I tapped Alan on the shoulder. 'Bad news, I'm afraid,' which suggested, I suppose, that I had some bad news for him. 'It turns out I have cancer.'
Alan is a man who once wrote a piece to mark the day when he decided that such was his risk of a heart attack (in real terms, minimal) that he couldn't take a bath with the door locked any more.
He was immediately and extravagantly sympathetic and at the same time immediately and extravagantly startled, for the hypochondriacal world is divided among two distinct species. There are those statistically minded types who rally at the news of another's illness because they think it means there's less chance of their being part of the same statistic, on the same basis as the man who takes the miniature toy bomb with him when he flies on the basis that, hey! What are the chances of there being _two_ bombs on a plane? The other half of us treat every mention of a possibly fatal illness as a _memento mori,_ a reminder that the gods have got our number and that we should never be under any illusions about for whom the bell tolls.
Alan is one of those, I'd guess, although then was not a good time to pursue the matter.
I went on stage to do the show I'd been waiting all my professional life to do, my own private, triumphal Palladium show. As I struggled to get the failing jokes past my scarred epiglottis I sounded like the bastard child of Jack Ashley and Janet Street-Porter.
Everyone was very sweet in the pub afterwards and said they could never have guessed that I'd had my throat scalpelled a couple of days before, but I knew I had to get my hubris sorted out. Did I accept the next _News Quiz_ equivalent on the basis that if I turned it down because they'd always ask me again then the laws of hubris dictated I wouldn't be around when they asked me again, or did I turn it down because I'd be kept alive to suffer the indignity of not being asked again?
Either way round the prognosis remained the same. I had cancer and they had to find a way of getting rid of it.
There are only three interventions which can get rid of existing cancer cells: surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and I phrase all that with some care – 'interventions', 'existing cancer cells' – for reasons other than those of literary clarity. That is to say that if you are a homoeopath, reflexologist, iridologist or otherwise a scatterer of pixie dust among the deserving middle classes, you have just a couple of chapters or so before you need to start composing your outraged letters to my publisher explaining why orthodox medicine has got it all wrong and why a medical regime which came to its Albanian inventor in a dream in 1937 has to be a better bet.
The principles of all three procedures are pretty easily understood. Surgery, which involves cutting, by scalpel or laser, the cancerous cells out of the body in lumps, wasn't an option for me, because there didn't seem to be anything to cut. Surgeons are pretty accurate with a scalpel but nobody's hands are steady enough to cut out tissue by the individual cell – even assuming those cells are apparent.
When Mady and then Henk had given me the original diagnosis it had sounded to my uneducated ear at best an educated guess and at worst, well, an uneducated guess. By looking at the few cancerous cells they'd so far found, how could they know so much about the extent of the cancer, the distance it had travelled and would travel, the likelihood of it not being a primary and of the primary not being immediately fatal?
In fact the explanation was one of those banal, bubble-popping explanations which Holmes gives Watson all the time.
They had found some cancer cells in the cyst and the attached lymph gland. While some oncologists believe in cancers which originate in cysts, the vast majority believe that you'll never find a cancerous cyst without finding – or missing – a primary close by.
But they also knew that mine was a slow-moving cancer. It was almost certain that it had started very near to the secondaries. Even so, mine was an occult primary: they knew it had to be somewhere but there was no way of finding out just where it was.
Chemotherapy was out, too.
Nowadays we use the term almost exclusively to describe cancer treatments, but in fact it means no more than the treatment of disease with a chemical agent. In cancerous terms though, chemotherapy means using one or more of a couple of score of chemicals to attack the cancer more or less specifically. Most often the chemicals tinker with the cancer cells' DNA or RNA and thus reduce the ability of these cells to reproduce. As often as not the chemicals interfere with the legitimate activities of healthy cells too, which is why their side-effects can be so nasty. If surgery and radiotherapy failed then the broad, blunt axe of chemotherapy might turn out to be appropriate, but it would mean that I was no longer a man with a 92 per cent chance of recovery, and at that point, in April 1997, nobody was suggesting that this was anything but a little local cancer which could be polished off in a matter of weeks.
No: I was down for radiotherapy.
Radiotherapy is one of those cures which manages to combine the images of everything which is best and worst about modern medicine. On the one hand it is so obviously modern, involving vast sleek machines which are controlled by computer. On the other hand it equally obviously has its roots in an earlier medical age when the newly harnessed electromagnetic and radioactive forces were applied apparently randomly to recalcitrant illnesses. To hear radiotherapy described in crude terms is like hearing about top-hatted Edwardian physicians giving electric shocks to lepers.
In fact radiotherapy is both crude and refined: crude in terms of what it is, refined in terms of the precision with which it's applied. Simply put, the therapee is strapped down to a bench and has beams of radiation fired at his cancer cells. Or, rather, at where his cancer cells are believed to be. If the radiation could be so finely tuned that it hit only the cancer cells this would be a perfect treatment indeed. As it is, the radiation is fired in the general area of where the radiologists think the cancer probably is. And the cancer isn't just a homogeneous lump but clusters of cells within and around and next to healthy cells.
Thus the healthy cells get zapped too. Indeed one of the principles of radiotherapy is that the go-getting, fast multiplying cancer cells are rather more susceptible to irradiation than are normal non-cancerous cells. A burst of radiation will damage both cells but the healthy cells will recover.
Well, up to a point anyway. For it was with radiotherapy that I would first discover the principle of gradual disclosure which almost all doctors practise.
The principle is simple and at first glance makes a certain sort of sense. In the case of complicated, possibly fatal and emotionally charged illness, never tell the patient more than he, is likely to find out for himself, and only ever give the best-case scenario. Thus when we first talked about radiotherapy we were talking about a simple procedure with very few side-effects. When we were discussing occult sites for my primary tumour we were considering a place which almost certainly would not exist after the radiotherapy. When, some months along the line, the subject of surgery came up it was an in-and-out snip-snip sort of surgery.
But the radiotherapy turned out to have a mass of side-effects, it didn't kill the primary and it would lead to eight hours of major surgery.
Meanwhile I had news to break.
I told my parents on the second night. Nigella and I had talked about holding back from telling them for a while on the grounds that we didn't yet know the full ramifications, but there seemed little point in waiting given that even when we knew the full story we knew it wouldn't start with the words 'speaking as somebody without cancer..'
In any case Dad would understand. He might even be able to help. He had, after all, once been a cancer researcher himself once. The first thing I ever knew about cancer was that Dad had once done some research on it for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and discovered you could get cancer from eating burnt toast or peanut butter. Or possibly it was burnt toast _and_ peanut butter: at the time it didn't matter. The burnt toast and peanut butter line was just one of those things we repeated as we took another long toke on a Capstan Full Strength to demonstrate that cancer was an arbitrary sort of hunter down of men and that as there was nothing much you could do to avoid it you might as well smoke 40 a day and take that job in the asbestos factory.
Except that in Dad's day – which wasn't so very long ago – cancer really was a killer. It still is, of course, but in those days a cure was rather more a matter of luck than it is now. Cures involved dreadful toxic chemicals but without the relief of modern anti-emetics and analgesics. There was chemotherapy, but it wasn't focused in a way that some chemotherapeutic regimes now are. And there was radiotherapy but no way of focusing the radiation on precise parts of the body.
What Dad heard, then, was much the same as I'd heard when I first had the conversation with Mady. His son was going to die.
In fact whatever I was doing by way of repression, Mum and Dad turned out to be able to do tenfold. Or at least that's what they were doing in my direction. For all I knew, at home they were having full and frank discussions about my neck but when they saw me for the first couple of weeks we didn't have a single conversation which didn't have them minimising the threat, the difficulty of the cure, the length of time it would take for me to get better. It was understandable enough, of course. What was happening seemed unlikely enough to me: how much more unlikely would it seem to those two who, inasmuch as they considered the matter at all, had assumed absolutely, and for so long, that they would predecease me.
And in return for their self-protectingly minimising the illness, I would maximise it, scaring them even more than was necessary. Conversations between us became bizarre with them taking about what sounded like a nasty cold and me insisting that death was hours away.
It wasn't until some weeks later when Dad had just told me, again, that some piece of bad medical news was in fact good medical news because it brought a cure closer, that I could bring myself to explain the problem I had with their non-acknowledgement of what was going on. I couldn't really blame them: we are as emotionally as close a family as any I know in all but one respect which is that we don't have the resources to talk about our emotions.
But eventually some two months in I would be able to tell Dad that his denial wasn't helping any. To my surprise he took it on the chin and accepted my point. It was just, he said, that he was scared for me and didn't want to show it. From then on neither of them tried to minimise what was happening, which made it much easier to me to avoid overstating the possibilities.
If at first my parents didn't want to show their fear, there were others who were only too willing.
I've written a column on enough newspapers now to feel genuinely paranoid about the job. Each week for a decade on the _Sunday Times_ or the _Daily Mirror_ or _The Times_ I would send in 800 or 1,000 words of opinion. Of my opinion. In some papers the opinion had been political, in _The Times_ it was my opinion about me, about the people I met, the events in which I participated. And I was conscious that interesting as I may have found my thoughts, there was no reason why anyone else should understand why they were taking up space in their paper.
Every broadsheet paper in Britain nowadays has at least one domestic columnist, somebody who sits in the bath and writes a piece which starts 'I was sitting in the bath the other day...' Some of the columns are no more than extracts from a personal diary, others attempt to move from the specific to the general and make a greater point about modern life as it is lived. I've always tried to do the latter but even so I still have the sneaking feeling that mine is the most self-indulgent of professions. Worse, I'd always suspected that my editor, Nick Wapshott and later Gill Morgan, would eventually wake up and come to the same conclusion.
There is only one trick open to the insecure columnist: write a piece which will attract a few letters. It suggests that whatever the editor thinks, at least there are some readers out there who take you seriously enough to write in about you. And the usual editorial line is that letters of complaint are just as worthwhile as letters of praise. The last time I'd tried the trick was when I was perched on a precarious column at the _Daily Mirror_ where a fellow columnist, a shrivelled old has-been of a hack, was daily feeding Robert Maxwell invented stories of my failings. I wrote a piece complaining that the BBC were replacing one Radio 2 presenter with another and asking readers to write to me if they disapproved of this. Thousands wrote in: my office desk was piled with the evidence of my high readership. I got sacked two months later, but that's beside the point.
I'd never tried the same trick at _The Times,_ in part because as far as I knew there was no rival columnist poisoning the well for me and in part because I enjoyed writing the column enough to want to carry it on on my terms rather than those of a prodded public.
I'd rung Nick Wapshott at the office on the day of my first consultation with Dr Henk and told him what was happening. Would he mind, I asked, if I wrote about the cancer? I'm not sure why I asked him: except for a period when I'd forgotten what it was I was paid to write about and started sending in strange political pieces, I'd not been required to clear my subjects in advance with Nick for some years. Nick was unhappy about the cancer, happy that I should write about it, and thought there was a chance that the writing might help.
In fact the therapeutic benefits of devoting the column to the cancer hadn't occurred to me: I write about what is happening in my life each week and nothing was more happening in my life than this.
For all sorts of technical reasons I submit my copy to _The Times_ ten days or so before it appears on the streets. The piece which I'd cleared with Nick – and the one which appears at the end of the second chapter of this book – had been written when I'd just got the news. I'd since written two more. I'd more or less forgotten about that first column.
I was outside the house on the Monday morning after the column appeared doing something internal to the car. It was up on ramps with the bonnet open, I was clad in oil-stained T-shirt and jeans. A motorcycle courier turned up with a thick package for me. I signed for it and took it back to the car where, at its ramped angle, I ripped open the package. It was a collection of hundreds of letters from readers. To have been at the office on Monday morning they must have been posted on the day the column appeared.
I was stunned. If I'd expected any reader response at all it was a couple of anonymous letters telling me that I wasn't the first bastard to get cancer and to stop making a fuss. After all, if my previous columns about my children and my friends and my navel were self-indulgent, then what was one about my illness?
Instead, though, here were letters from fellow sufferers, from the husbands and wives and parents of those with cancer, from those who had once had cancer and been cured, who'd had loved ones who'd died of cancer. There were home-made get well soon cards (who would have guessed that _Times_ readers cut out crepe paper and sticky-backed plastic to make get well soon cards for columnists they'd never met?) and pictures of young children for whom correspondents said they'd forced themselves to get better. Readers wrote about columns I'd written two or three or five years ago which they still remembered and which I thought just disappeared into the local recycling plant each Monday.
I sat in the car and read them, and for the first time since the diagnosis, I wept.
# Chapter 4
Bravery isn't what it was. I'd always taken the term to describe the actions of those who had put their own safety or comfort at risk in order to do something on behalf of specific others, or for the common good. Recently though, and with the help of the tabloid press, brave has changed to mean something else. It has become a synonym for poignant suffering and usually suffering considerately undertaken in front of the photographer's lens. The five-year-old leukaemia victim is always 'brave little Linda', the mother who goes on bringing up her children after her husband has died is 'Brave widow Mary', although if the husband has died in the pursuit of some noble cause or another – thumping a mugger, climbing a mountain – she might become 'courageous widow Mary' as if the nature of the husband's death quantifies her own bravery.
The bodyguard whose face was smashed up in the Princess of Wales' car crash returned to Britain and the headlines universally referred to him as 'Brave ex-paratrooper Trevor Rees Jones'. At the time nobody on the press had any idea whether he had borne his injuries with fortitude or wept like a baby every day. But he had suffered and thus he was brave, and never mind that the press reports any number of faces smashed in car accidents without ascribing bravery to their owners. What made poor Rees Jones braver than the other victims? That he was guarding a princess who was killed in the crash? That he was riding in a car driven by a drunk? That his story made the front pages rather than the bottom of page 16?
What is it not to be brave, though? Which is the cowardly five-year-old leukaemic? The one who scrawls a crayoned message saying she can't go on like this, and tops herself? Is the widow who decides that talking to the press isn't necessarily the best thing for the kids less brave than the one with a story to tell?
About a quarter of my original correspondents took what I presumed at first to be the same sort of line. I was brave, they said. I was brave to suffer my illness so publicly, brave to break the taboo on talking about cancer. Some of them suggested, in that tabloid way, that merely having cancer attested to my bravery.
Others used the traditional bellicose metaphors: cancer was a battle against an evil foe and one which could only be won by the brave. Defeating cancer was an active rather than a passive affair. I had to think myself better, pray myself better. The whole battlefield vocabulary suggested that the cure for cancer had a moral basis – that brave and good people defeat cancer and that cowardly and undeserving people allow it to kill them. But this is the infantile Victorian language of the good dying young and death transformed into a matter of not being lost but having gone before.
I've seen two people die of cancer in my time: my father's sister, Millicent, who died of stomach and breast cancer when she was 49 in 1983, and, a decade later, Nigella's sister, Thomasina, who died of breast cancer when she was 32. Millicent had a young family, everything to live for and bore her cancer stoically and with remarkable humour. Thomasina was the woman for whom the word spirited was coined. If anyone 'deserved' to defeat cancer it was these two.
I am not brave. Indeed, when I say I am the world's least brave person it isn't false modesty speaking: I know me and you almost certainly don't, and I can't think of a single moderately brave thing I've done in my life. If I could have got through those first post-diagnosis months more successfully by sucking my thumb, or crying or lashing out about me I would probably have done so. It just so happened that sucking, crying or lashing weren't my natural reactions to the diagnosis.
But at the Marsden I quickly understood the temptation to describe as brave that which in reality is something else.
The Marsden – The Royal Marsden Hospital Trust – was Dr Henk's base hospital and the hospital to which my cancerous cells were being transferred. William Marsden was a nineteenth-century doctor and surgeon who founded the Royal Free Hospital, the first London hospital which was not merely free but which, more importantly, demanded no letter from a hospital governor for admittance. The Brompton Cancer Hospital, his second project, started as an outpatients' hospital where, almost uniquely in an age when all illness was the sole province of either physician or surgeon, patients could be treated by both.
The technical terms for the various forms of cancer – carcinoma, sarcoma, melanoma – come from the ancient Greeks, who had some limited understanding of pathology of the disease. It wasn't until 1775, however, that the London surgeon Percivall Pott first described an occupational malignancy – the cancer of the scrotum and elsewhere common in the young boys sent up chimneys by sweeps. It was, although he didn't describe it as such, the same squamous cell carcinoma that I had, and was almost invariably fatal – the qualifier 'almost' covering the few boys who had their cancer cut out, without anaesthetic, who lived through the operation and the inevitable subsequent infection and in whom the cancer didn't recur.
Marsden had better luck. Using new surgical methods he started cutting out cancers and on occasion curing patients. The hospital took his name and, a century or so later, was subsumed into the National Health Service as an oncological centre of excellence. Indeed one can tell just how good a hospital it is: Virginia Bottomley as Minister of Health tried to close it down, and she seemed interested only in closing down the very best medical institutions.
Like many of the best hospitals in British cities, it is a mixture of the ancient and the modern. The hospital sits on the Fulham Road, a couple of hundred yards in one direction from the shops of the King's Road in Chelsea, and in the other from the concentration of Terence Conranism at South Kensington. If cancer were chic then this would be the chic-est hospital in town. The main block is a rather gloomy Victorian mansion, all sweeping staircases and lugubrious portraits of dead benefactors and ramps nailed over the level changes unsuitable for wheelchairs and trolleys. On to this has been tacked a series of more modern buildings in bright brick and straight out of the pattern book of cheery hospitals. Happily for the patients most of the wards seem to be in the new parts of the hospital: it's only in areas like the histopathology department that staff work with the paint falling off the walls.
I'd expected the Marsden to be a depressing place. After all, everyone there has a potentially fatal disease, and while the waiting rooms at St George's were full of men with broken toes contemplating a football season on the injury list, the waiting rooms at the Marsden were full of people contemplating something rather longer term. Or, I suppose, and depending how you look at these things, shorter term
As I queued in the outpatients department for my first appointment with Henk I saw that the woman in front of me had three appointment cards taped together like a jet-setting business traveller with her bundle of visa'd passports. As I waited I worked out from the number of appointment spaces on my own card that she must have been here getting on for 100 times. She was approaching middle age, well turned out, hair bobbed, clothes Marks and Spencer trendy. But after 100 visits to deal with her recalcitrant condition she looked no less apparently cheerful than any other queuing Briton. No less cheerful, indeed, than the dozens of outpatients waiting their turn in the reception area, every one of whom had cancer or was a relative or friend of someone with cancer. The waiting room should have had the atmosphere of a modern death row without the blues harps and the tin cups, and there's no doubt that for all that these people have learned the cancer ward's new rubric – 'Cancer is a word, not a sentence' – some of them would die of their illness, and soon. You'd never know it, though, even if the place does have more than a normal hospital's share of outpatients with bits of their face missing, or the obvious reactions to chemo- or radiotherapy.
I've never been one for going gentle into that good night, and I don't know whether the Marsden's cheerfulness says something about the average Briton's craven acceptance of everything that's thrown at him, as if an early and painful death is something which, like bad service at a restaurant, shouldn't be complained about too loudly in case anybody sees you making a fuss. I'd prefer to believe the cheerfulness is down to the hospital itself. The Marsden is the most cheerful hospital I've ever been in, and it's not the relentless spit-in-the-face-of-adversity cheeriness either, but a genuine mixture of realistic hope on one hand and efficient expertise on the other.
A couple of days later, and back for some radiotherapeutic preparation, I found myself next to a woman, capped to hide her baldness, hollow-eyed, dressed in clothes which probably fitted snugly a month or two before and which now gaped and sagged. She'd fallen down some stairs at the office, she said, and went to the doctor when the resultant bump at the base of her spine wouldn't go away. It turned out to be some sort of spinal cancer: she'd had chemo and had lost a couple of internal organs and would be travelling in each day from 30 miles away for treatment.
We swapped details about what we'd heard about radiotherapy and in five minutes I'd forgotten that I was talking to somebody who probably wouldn't live to the end of the year. She smiled, she joked, she told stories of medical indignities and deprivations in the way that others talk about the office photocopier breaking down.
I kept on wanting to say, in that newspaperish way, 'My, but you're being so brave' but I didn't. I'd become wary of the word 'brave'. The new, tabloid, brave is an involuntary state but true brave is what you are when you have options, and at the Marsden there are no options. Everyone here could see someone in a worse state than themselves, and with a worse prognosis. And we all knew that given any sort of option at all we wouldn't be there.
If I'd become ill because I'd chosen to take my daughter's illness to save her from it, that might have been brave. But I had no choice. I had cancer and this was how I was reacting to it.
As for my supposed bravery in writing about my cancer, this was way off the mark. I write for a living: I earn the mortgage money translating what I see and hear and feel into words on the printed page. And while I've never been convinced about the service I thus provide to the public, I know, as does every third-rate psychotherapist, that writing things down helps. Who, given the opportunity and the diagnosis, _wouldn't_ want to write about it?
(Lots of people, as it turns out: I've since come across any number of journalists and writers who suffered cancer and worse and were never so tasteless as to bring the matter up in print. Some of these regret that they couldn't do so, others can't understand why I would want to and a third group seem to feel that whatever my motives for wanting to I should suppress them in the name of British good taste.)
As for breaking the taboo, well the simple fact is that I didn't know there was a taboo about mentioning cancer. This probably has something to do with the Jewish thing for I come from a culture where all illnesses – colds, flu, bowel complaints, cancers – are discussed interminably and without any reserve.
But the letters told me otherwise. Now I came to think of it, of course, I realised that cancer was a disease more beset with euphemisms than any other. These days we understand the word 'tumour' to be synonymous with cancer: in fact it simply means a swelling and was introduced into the medical vocabulary by doctors who couldn't bring themselves to use the word 'cancer' in front of the punters. These were the doctors about whom my correspondents wrote. There were letters from people whose parents had died of cancer without the word ever being mentioned to them, people who'd had malignant tumours cut out by surgeons who would only ever talk about 'a bit of a lump', people who were now on heavy-duty chemotherapy but whose relatives would only ever talk about them being 'ill'.
Which is not to say that I wasn't having problems talking about my own cancer.
It is not a matter of taboo but of simple etiquette. You get to a certain age, you assume you've got a handle on most of social intercourse's more likely eventualities. After a few false starts you've learned how to do sending the meal back, dropping the girlfriend, getting through the job interview, making the marriage proposal: you think you've got it taped. And then one day some new circumstance pitches up and you realise that you're not, after all, living the life you thought you were living, and that there are some quite basic exchanges you don't know how to do.
And so in the days between diagnosis and the first column appearing, a friend would phone up and ask, as is the way of these things, how I am. Sometimes I would forget how I was: I'd say, as one does, 'Fine, and you?' and then have to backtrack, because of course I wasn't fine. So I'd say 'Actually, I say that, I say I'm fine, but, well, I've got cancer.'
What else can you say? You can't build up to it slowly – 'I'm ill. No, not a cold: really ill. No: worse than flu. No, no: better than AIDS but worse than flu. OK: two syllables...' – or drop it casually into the conversation – 'Things? Things are so-so, you know? I got the new computer, and somebody smashed the car window and nicked the stereo, and I've got throat cancer, and we thought of going to see the new Tarantino, but...'
And then there's the question of making the announcement appropriate to the person you're talking to. I didn't want to make too big a deal of it – 'Look, perhaps you should sit down for a moment, because there's something I have to say...' but then again I didn't want to minimise the situation – 'Nah! Just a little thing, you know? Six weeks, all over, don't even think about it' – because it didn't feel minimal. And then there were people who weren't close or who were on the periphery of my professional life and who would need to have the information, but from whom I couldn't expect the same sort of reaction as I could from proper friends. I tried telling this group merely that I wasn't too well at the moment but as often as not they'd push: when would I be better? when could I get back to them with the figures? couldn't they just send a bike round for the copy?... and I'd have to tell them what sort of not-too-well I was and they would get terribly upset because on the one hand they were sure they'd said something inappropriate to such an unmentionable illness and on the other hand they felt that I'd somehow suckered them into their inappropriate response by not telling them straight off what the deal was.
So I'd just say I'd got cancer. In any case for the first few days I said it as often as I could, because I still didn't quite believe it. Nigella and I would sit in the consultant's office surrounded by chatty leaflets on nausea in chemotherapy and say to each other 'What are we doing here?' But even if I got used to the idea I never found a truly satisfactory way of announcing it to others.
By the second week I decided that the best way was to come straight out with it.
'John? It's Charlie. How are things?'
Oh you know things. I've got cancer.
'You're joking.'
No: I'm serious. I've got cancer. They told me last week.
'Jesus. I mean... Jesus. So what is it?'
Throat. It was that lump I had.
'Yes, I remember it. So... you know... how... when does... do...'
They reckon they can cure me. It'll mean six weeks' radiotherapy but there's a pretty high cure rate.
At which point the conversation goes one of five ways. The first is when they confuse radiotherapy with chemotherapy and start commiserating with the sickness I'll feel. That's easily dealt with.
The second is when they think that my report of the high cure rate lets them off the sympathetic hook.
'Oh, that's OK then. You gave me a bit of a scare. Whew! Look, about that book you were going to sort out for me...'
I'd always feel short-changed after one of those conversations, as if the cancer was being taken away from me. Yes, it was one of the safer cancers but it wasn't a cold, for Christ's sake. (There was an element of hubris at work here too, of course. If I started telling everyone that I'd certainly be cured then I almost certainly wouldn't be.) I'd explain that this was real cancer, just like the cancer that killed people, and that it might kill me. They would apologise for their oafishness at mentioning the book and start asking sympathetic questions about my real cancer, and then I'd feel guilty at making them feel guilty and would say no, look, about the book... and so we'd go on, round in circles.
The third line was the 'you'll get better – I know you will' one which I'd encountered before the first operation and about which I'd written in that first column. It was bad enough when it was just a matter of recovering from a cyst but when they were giving their judgement on throat cancer I started to get angry.
'John – it will be fine. I know it will.'
How do you know?
'Because I know _you._ You won't let it defeat you.'
You know me? What, you know that I'm immortal? That I'm not susceptible to cancer like other people?
'No, just that, well...'
It was unfair of me, I know. People say things because they don't know what to say, and they turn their wishes – that they don't want me to be ill, to be frightened, to die – into statements of fact. I would tell other friends how irritating I found the you'11-get-better set and they'd say 'Yes, but you ought to indulge their fear', which seemed an odd demand to make of me: I had cancer and yet I had to indulge others in their fear of it.
Eventually, though, and over the months to come, I learned to indulge and they learned that wishing the cancer away wasn't a recognised cure for the disease. Or, at least some of them learned it, because there was a fourth group who were the most irritating of all.
'John, Charlie told me the news. It's terrible.'
Well yes, it's pretty–
'I can't tell you how dreadful I felt when I heard. I had to take a Valium, of course, because you know what I'm like, and that was the afternoon gone. I couldn't write a thing.'
How dreadful for–
'I know. I know. It ruined the day and then I went to Fiona's party in the evening and everyone asked why I was looking so miserable and I told them, and they couldn't believe it, and I'm afraid it threw a bit of a pall over the whole party, because it turns out that Eddie's father had the same sort of thing a few years ago and he got glum telling us about it...'
Of all my friends, the set who wanted a go at vicarious cancer and who insisted on telling me how painful my cancer was for them were the ones who, over the months, I fell out of touch with.
The fifth group, which is to say the rest, were, well, remarkable. I determined pretty early on in all of this that I wouldn't fall sucker to the ill-wind fallacy. I have met people who have told me that they are in some way better people for their brush with cancerous death and that looking back on it they were glad they'd been hit. And I have to admit that when I discovered that my reaction to the original news wasn't the hysterical one I would have imagined for myself I began to see a positive side to the experience. But for all that, and for all the other paradoxical benefits that cancer has brought, I cling to the belief that anything which stops you kissing your children goodnight or telling them a story – and both eventualities would happen soon – has to be, on balance, a bad thing.
But having said that, there is something moving in discovering that you have friends who say 'If there's anything I can do...' and who really mean 'anything'.
Dr Henk talked me through the radiotherapy. He wanted to get it started as soon as possible. He made this urgency sound a matter of convenience – "The sooner we start, the sooner it's over, you know?' – rather than one of medical expediency. He had seen me for the first time on Good Friday: the therapy was to start on the first day of Passover just three weeks or so later.
Henk still had no precise idea where the primary site of the cancer was, but knew that it was almost certainly close to the cells they'd already removed. I'd had a second series of the tests that Hinton had ordered back in 1996 and no abnormal mass had shown up on either the X-ray or the scan. I'd always understood that the magical CT scan hunted out cancer however small it was: it turned out that nothing smaller than a centimetre or so shows up on a scan, and that even a reasonably sized tumour may not always be apparent.
As he explained them to me the chances were, then, that the primary site was a small one. In fact around a third of primaries in my sort of situation were never detected but were wiped out by radiotherapy. He hoped mine was one of them. As, of course, did I.
He wanted to irradiate the left side of my neck from just below my ear to level with my chin and the left side of my throat. If I'd been in America, he said, he would have treated both sides of my throat as a matter of course but then Americans were neurotic about such things and in his experience there was no point in having radiotherapy's side-effects on both sides of my head unless it was absolutely necessary.
Ah yes: the side-effects.
What could he tell me? There'd be a bit of soreness to the skin – the sort of thing you get if you stay out in the sun for too long, but it would be temporary. And there would be a sore throat, of course, but that would be temporary too. And I'd lose my saliva glands on that side of my face.
Temporarily?'
'No; for good, I'm afraid.'
Well nothing too bad. But then I'd forgotten about the principle of gradual disclosure. A couple of days later a registrar said in passing that of course I knew, didn't I, that I'd lose a bit of hair round the radiotherapy site.
'How much hair?'
'Oh, you know. Just a bit at the collar-line.'
And as he said collar-line his hand traced a line along the back of my head just about the ears.
'Permanently?'
'No, no. Temporarily. If 11 come back in four months. Just like your beard. Probably.'
And then the next day Henk asked me if I'd booked in for my dental treatment yet. My dental treatment?
It turns out that one of the side-effects of radiotherapy is the damage it wreaks on the smaller blood vessels and their ability to carry oxygen around the place. It means, for instance, that a tooth pulled from an irradiated jaw will take a lot longer to heal than normal, and may not heal at all. The vessels don't start collapsing until some weeks after the radiation and so, Henk said, it was usual practice to get rid of any teeth that looked as if they might give problems in the future.
'This isn't temporary, then?'
'No. Permanent.'
I was given a date with Sarah Howells, the Marsden's dentist, who pulled out a tooth from my lower left jaw and, bless her, laughed at all my jokes. This is what it had come to: as the hypochondria had slipped away in the face of real illness I had turned into a man who could lose a tooth under a local anaesthetic and joke about it as it was happening.
Howells gave me a tube of fluoride gel. I was about to lose half my saliva glands for good. Saliva has a number of functions, one being to help get food down the gullet and the other to neutralise the acidifying effect of that food just like they say in the chewing gum ads. With half my saliva gone that neutralising effect would be reduced and I'd need to rub the fluoride gel into my gums every night.
'For how long?'
'Oh, you know. For the rest of your life.'
There were three stages to the radiotherapy itself.
The first was to get my mask made up. Radiotherapeutic success is based on giving the area as much radiation as the healthy cells can stand and on making sure that the beams are fired into exactly the same area every time. I would be having the standard treatment: 30 daily doses of radiation over a period of six weeks. There are a few ways of making sure the rays hit the spot every time: some involve marking the skin itself but mine involved having a Perspex mask of my face made. The mask would hold my head down to the bench under the radiation gun which would be lined up with a series of marks made on the mask by the radiotherapists.
In the basement of the Marsden I lay down on a table in the mask room while two radiotherapists covered my face first with dental putty and then with two stone of plaster of Paris leaving holes only for my nostrils. It was almost a relief to discover that the cancer hadn't got rid of all my neuroses: I was still sufficiently claustrophobic to balk at the idea of having my eyes and mouth covered with setting plaster. We argued the toss and I persuaded them that if I wasn't being irradiated in the eyes or mouth there was no need for them to take an impression of them.
The resulting mask was a cumbersome see-through version of the black latex hoods they sell in the more recherché sex shops with that same gaping mouth hole and sightless eyes. All it needed was a couple of hooks to take a chain or two.
Next came simulation.
The body is a three-dimensional object and the radiation not only has to hit certain points on the mask but penetrate to a specific depth. In the run of things it wouldn't much matter if it went a millimetre or so deeper than Henk had specified in his guess of the widest area to which the cancer might have spread: the healthy cells would, after all, recover. The trick was avoiding the spinal column, for if that got irradiated then a few months after the last session I would find that I had lapsed into a state of paralysis. Permanently.
The simulation room was down the corridor from the mask room and consisted of a machine very much like the one which would irradiate me, except that this was set up to record the rays that were emitted. For two sessions of 45 minutes I would lie with the mask over my face, unable to move my head, while the radiographers pressed buttons and took measurements and shouted numbers to each other. It was rather like being measured for a very expensive suit with the advantage that here they didn't make worrying observations about the size of my stomach and backside.
Then again, in a week's time the radiotherapy would start and my stomach and backside would shrink to almost nothing. And still I had no real idea of what my chances were, of whether this was a routine method of bringing minor-league cancer patients like me back on to the path of health and longevity or whether it was a fingers-crossed, you-never-know-your-luck punt at trying to save my life. That week I devoted my column to the unknown, unknowable statistics:
I'd intended setting my swollen jaw and gritting my remaining teeth and laying off the cancer this week and returning to the usual, and in particular to the giggling authoress who announced so proudly on the radio that she couldn't ever make a word processor work as if this confession conferred upon her a finer intellectual sensibility than admitting she couldn't tie her shoelaces or open a can of soup.
Had I stuck to my resolution I would probably have gone on to ask at which point it was that it stopped being the vulnerable peasant classes who cowered before technological advance and became the enlightened chatterers who were forever boasting that they couldn't set the video recorder or wire a plug.
And I would have probably meandered to the end of the thesis with the conclusion that, properly dissected, bourgeois technophobia is as much a part of the class war as anything involving Molotov cocktails and badly printed pamphlets, and that what it represents is a resentment of the democratising influence of technology. After all, if the masses can do clever things with cheap computers then computers must be demonstrated to be on a par with...
Well, you take my point. But the resolve faded and that's as far as I could get. Hypochondria took over.
One of the benefits of a proper illness to neurotics like me is that it shows us the error of our little hypochondriacal ways. Once doctors' eyes would glaze over and they'd start doodling on those little pads that the Prozac people give away as we listed the vague and ambivalent symptoms of our vague and ambivalent illnesses. 'Well,' we would start, 'it's not so much a pain exactly as a sort of...'
Since the diagnosis, though, the doctors rush round the moment their bleeper sounds to canvass us for new symptoms. And when we deliver them, they repay us with details of the real illnesses they may represent. Two months ago if I'd mentioned the dull pain in my arm I'd have got a brief, bored lecture on what happens to arms when they get to my age. Now I get a professional wince, a sucking of teeth and talk of a bone scan.
For the first couple of weeks the big illness with its big symptoms and its radical cure put all the other niggling crypto-symptoms into perspective.
Now, I'm not so sure. The problem with illness is that nothing is certain. I started off with a definite diagnosis – cancer – and nothing more than that. Gradually the diagnosis was refined to curable cancer. And then it was broadened out again: curable cancer, provided it's the cancer we think it is and that the bit we cut out contained its primary source.
And all the time there are the qualifiers: the probablys and the possiblys and the weasel statistics which are wonderfully accurate if you're a whole population and meaningless if you're just a single bloke lying under a lump of fizzing Cobalt 90 while the radiographers run for cover behind their lead screens.
And every extra symptom – real, imagined, pre-dating my cancer or newly arrived – changes the odds, and changes them to a number that is unknowable. It is the state that we live in all the time, however unconsciously. But in these circumstances it's difficult not to try and calculate the incalculable odds, and impossible not to want to. 'You'll have to be a bit of a stoic, I'm afraid,' said the nurse as she totted up the side-effects which would accumulate over the course of the radiotherapy. Well, I'm sorry, but if I was a stoic then I wouldn't bother with the radiotherapy at all.
What I need now is a doctor who will tell me that he's run my body through an electronic mincer and can tell me without any doubt that there are this many cancer cells remaining, that they will be killed off on precisely this day, that there are no rogue cancer sites in my toes or my ears or my kidneys, and that Blue Boy will win the 4.30 at Kempton Park.
What I get instead is the same ambivalence I used to offer the doctors in my days as a healthy hypochondriac. How could they possibly offer me anything else?
Meanwhile, I lie here under a few hundred thousand pounds' worth of impossibly complicated machinery while confident and competent women who aren't ashamed of knowing the reason for the constancy of Planck's constant murmur numbers to each other, and I contemplate the crass smugness of the woman on the radio who thinks the smart thing is to believe that technology is for the proles.
# Chapter 5
It was when radiotherapy began at the end of April that I started to get ill.
Of course I was already ill, but it wasn't any sort of illness you could put your finger on. I could see now how doctors, never mind patients, could miss cancer until it was too late, until the primary had spawned local secondaries and then set off on the trek to the distant, fatal sites around the body. Had my secondaries not decided to display themselves as a cyst I'd probably still know nothing about my own cancer. Apart from the healing scar around my neck where they'd taken out the lump, I looked healthy enough and in fact I'd even lost some of the usual zombie pallor that I manage to keep even after two weeks in the Caribbean. Most of the time I felt as healthy as I ever did, which isn't, I grant you, saying a whole lot. Indeed, my only symptom when radiotherapy started was hardly one of cancer. It was simply that still, five minutes after I ate anything I'd cough and a small pellet of food which had been hiding in some new crevice in my throat would jump into my mouth. And combined with this, I was still getting the same strange burning reaction in my mouth whenever I ate sugary and, particularly, chocolatey food.
But these weren't symptoms of cancer. At least the doctors at the Marsden, where they knew more about cancer than anywhere else, didn't have them pegged as symptoms of cancer. (This is, as I'm sure you've gathered by now, what we in the narrative trade call dramatic irony. But even so you'll have to wait a couple of months – say a chapter or two – before a surgeon says 'Funny that – you're the third person I've seen recently with throat cancer who complained of that sensation when they eat chocolate.' Funny indeed.)
As things stood, the prognosis was simple and optimistic. They'd found a secondary and six weeks' worth of radiotherapy should, they guessed, clean up the nearby primary. End of story. When radiotherapy finished I'd start on weekly checks for any recurrence, then move to monthly, six-monthly and eventually annual checks. And after five years I'd become a name in an archive somewhere and we could all forget I'd ever had cancer.
Radiotherapy was simple, too. In the basement of the Marsden were two modern, white rooms the size of small barns. Set in the middle of each room was a vast, white Varian radiotherapy console – a slab of a machine with, at one end of it, a head capable of directing consistently finely tuned beams of radiating ions at any part of a patient lying on the bench beneath it. It looks like a very modern, very streamlined version of the machinery a contemporary Frankenstein might use to direct the lightning bolt at his monster.
Being irradiated is, of course, what we spend a lot of our lives avoiding. The radiation which is emitted by these machines isn't so very different from that emitting from the world of machines which have exclamatory yellow labels reading DANGER! RADIATION! DO NOT COME NEAR! HONEST: YOU'LL DIE! WE'RE NOT JOKING, JUST _GO AWAY,_ OK? It is the same sort of radiation which saw off – and is seeing off still – many of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and which kept us all awake for so many nights after the irradiation of Chernobyl.
And what is the one thing we all know about this radiation? Of course: that it gives us cancer. So presumably there is a difference between the radiation that gives us cancer and that which cures us of it, right? No: it's precisely the same stuff. Nor are we talking some homoeopathic interaction between disease and cure: radiation cures in just the same way that it kills, by knocking out cells. It all sounds unlikely and indeed it was when I mentioned in the _Times_ column that I was about to start radiotherapy that I began to get the first few letters from that chapter of the anti-medical lobby which specialises in the simplistic connection between what looks a possibility and what is certain.
The small number of anti-medicalist correspondents split first into two groups and then into three more. The first two appeared, as it were, as the benign and the malignant. Benign letters came from those who wished me well but thought that before I went any further I might want to read the enclosed copy of _God's Black and White Salvation Diet_ in which slim, self-published pamphlet the German theosophist Hugo-Mannfried Gottmeyer tells how the prophet Elisha had come to him in a vision in 1956 and revealed to him the secret of cytological integrity which lay in eating two bags of liquorice allsorts a day.
The malignant were the ones who told me that as a journalist with a public platform it was my bounden duty to stop operating as a propagandising dupe for the evil medical establishment, to tell my doctors that I wasn't fooled by their fake radiography statistics when everyone knows that radiation kills, and to put my faith in the Bessarabian radish, the desiccated root of which has been used for centuries by Tartar nomads to cure athlete's foot, tennis elbow and cancer, as detailed in their book _Why Your Doctor Hates You And Wants You To Die,_ review copy enclosed.
Each group, the demanders and the gentle nudgers, broke down into a further three groups: the religious; those who were well-versed in the lore and practice of alternative medicine; and those who admitted to knowing nothing about science but who knew that homoeopathy had worked when their husband had cancer in 1987.
It was this last group to which I had the most difficulty responding. They were usually the kindest and most flattering of correspondents, and I wished sometimes that I could have written back to them and said that yes, I would try their regimes and report back. The problem was that they tended so often to subvert their own claims. I must have had dozens of letters from readers whose alternative therapies worked in all but one respect: they didn't cure the cancer. People would write to tell me that when their spouse had a cancer similar to mine they swore by a food combining diet which had worked wonders all the way to the day, a year later, when said spouse died.
Alternatively they would write to tell me that they had used alternative medicine in conjunction with radiotherapy or chemotherapy and here they were, ten years later, able to tell the tale. Invariably my correspondent would put the cure down to the arbitrarily chosen and applied alternative regime rather than the carefully controlled orthodox regime, but I could never bring myself to write back and ask why, precisely, they thought it was the odd diet which had saved them rather than the radiotherapy.
The most difficult of all to deal with were the religious letters. The first came in the first bundle I received after I outed myself as a Person Of Cancer. 'We are praying for you,' it said, and nothing else. No return address, no signature, no indication of whether I was being prayed for by the quietly murmuring congregation at Westminster Abbey or the Hallelujah-be-praised! set at the Save-A-Soul Mission 'n' Takeaway Grill, Letchworth.
In the next post were a few more letters: one from a family who'd lit a candle for me at Liverpool Cathedral, another from a woman who enclosed a copy of the prayer she had said for me the night before, a third sending a pro forma to tell me that I'd been mentioned in heavenly dispatches from Walsingham. And with every postbag came more prayerful letters. They weren't, for the most part, from religious nutters, but from people for whom religion was as much part of their life as food or TV. Some didn't even go that far but just wrote to remind me that given that nobody knew what was out there, what could the harm be in sending up the odd prayer?
I've always suspected that if there is anything to prayer then it's not something you can start up when times get bad. I don't know how the scheme would work, but what if it's only available to those who kept up their spiritual subscription through the good times? Who knows what the hubristic risks are of drawing on an empty account? Always assuming that a modern Judaeo-Christian upper-case G God has adopted the hubristic notions of the ancient lower-case g Greek gods.
A very few urged me to take to praying myself and one told me sternly that I had no chance of recovery unless I called Doctor Jesus to my bedside. Most, though, showed a greater generosity of spirit: they understood that I might not be a believer myself (some even recalled my occasional references to my own secular Judaism in the column) but that didn't matter because a prayer's recipient need be no more conscious of the deed than is a beer mug of accepting a pint of best.
Some people would send aids to help me pray. I have a rosary made of white plastic, a cross made of olive-wood taken from the Mount of Olives in Israel. Somebody, of less formal religious bent, sent me some wax with instructions on how to make a juju image of my cancer and squish it away.
I even received a letter from that sweetest of men, the Chief Rabbi, to tell me that prayers were being said in the highest quarters. Well, the second highest anyway. My grandfather would have _kvelled, kvelling_ being the Yiddish word which most precisely describes the emotion of a grandfather on discovering that his cancerous grandson is being prayed for by the Chief Rabbi. There is almost certainly another Yiddish word which describes the act of hypothesising on the possible emotions of dead grandfathers, but it's not one I've yet come across.
This being prayed for was an odd feeling and each time I got a prayerful letter I'd run through the same set of internal responses. First was my customary wonder at the kindness of strangers, second was gratitude. And then came guilt: should an agnostic be accepting prayers? Should a Jewish agnostic be accepting prayers from Christians? Should a Jewish agnostic be accepting prayers from Jews, come to that?
And then came confusion. We are all, inevitably, subverted by our own prejudices, and like every agnostic my fear is that _in extremis_ I'd find myself babbling to God or down on my own knees praying to any passing deity to be granted a few more years. But I found ways, eventually, of dealing with the religious, of reconciling my agnosticism with the gratitude I felt for their prayers.
The group about which I felt no ambivalence at all was that of the committed alternativists who had researched their subject and sent me bundles of photocopied papers taken from obscure journals. They knew that orthodox medicine is a con, that unless I took control of my illness and handed it over to the naturopaths or the iridologists or whoever, then I was surely doomed.
This group all believed in the same collection of myths, prime among which was that for all its efforts orthodox medicine has not found any cure for any cancer. Four months after my diagnosis I was sitting in a barbershop in Soho where one of those day-time audience discussion shows was playing on the TV. A woman who'd spent a small fortune on plastic surgery was defending her obsession against a member of the audience outraged at her profligate narcissism. 'Just think: you could have spent that money on cancer research,' she said, rather missing the point.
'It's a known fact,' said the surgery junkie, primly, 'that not a single life has been saved by cancer research.'
I still have the slight mark in my head where the scissors clipped me as I jumped in the barber's chair. Not a voice in the studio was raised to argue against this 'known fact', despite it being completely untrue. And yet I continue to get the letters: radiotherapy, says one correspondent, kills as many people as it cures. The death rate for most cancers, say half a dozen others, is the same now as it was in 1960/during the War/in Queen Victoria's day. If the death rate does seem to have improved then it has nothing to do with the efforts of the medical orthodoxy and everything to do with skewed statistical reporting.
The truth is that more people are cured of cancer now than ever before and more who aren't cured are helped to live longer, and often to live those extra years in some comfort.
Here's Sherwin B. Nuland, the US surgeon, teacher and writer, in _How_ We _Die_ 1:
In the year I was born, 1930, only one in five people diagnosed with cancer survived five years. By the 1940s the figure was one in four. The effect of modern biomedicine's research capacity began to make itself felt in the 1960s, when the proportion of survivors reached one in three. At the present time 40 per cent of all cancer patients are alive five years after diagnosis; making proper statistical allowances for those who die of some unrelated cause, such as heart disease or stroke, 50 per cent survive at least that long.
1. Sherwin B. Nuland, _How We Die,_ Vintage, 1998.
I have tried passing on that fact to some of my correspondents but invariably they skirt it. The truth is, they say, that the incidence of cancer has doubled, trebled in the past _n_ years. Which is true enough, but doesn't have a lot to do with cure statistics or the efficacy of doctors. Cancer is more common now than it once was, but as much as anything else that's because having learned to cure or hold off so many other causes of death we live long enough to get cancer. Or they say that the only reason people live for that arbitrary five years is because detection methods are better nowadays and we're picking up cancers sufficiently early to allow people that five-year gap between detection and death. Which again would make sense were it not for the statistics which show that the number of people living longer than five years after detection is increasing too.
Invariably those who argue against orthodox medicine are waving the flag for one form of alternative medicine or another. Or, as is often the case, for more than one form of alternative medicine, for one of the striking things about alternative medicine is that if an adherent believes in one technique they'll almost certainly believe in every other technique.
Five chapters in, then, let me tell you that where I stand on alternative medicine is roughly where the Pope stands on getting drunk on the communion wine and pulling a couple of nuns.
I have, I will grant you, the journalist's luxury of self-opinionation. I know that when doctors write books on cancer they have to tread carefully when it comes to alternativism lest they offend the sensibilities of those who are happy to commune with their reflexologist once a week. I need make no such concession although to be fair to myself I'm not quite the snarling sceptic I affect to be in print. And certainly however scathing I am about the alternativists it's not because I feel the medical or pharmaceutical establishment is either so pure or so unjustly put-upon that it needs my protection.
And it's not as if I haven't tried the alternatives myself.
When I was 30 I went to my doctor complaining of the sort of non-specific symptoms you get, I now understand, when you sustain each 22-hour working, playing day with two packs of cigarettes and irregular portions of junk food. Being 30 and still nominally immortal, I was convinced there was some subtler biochemical reason for my general panicky, fluey symptoms, and that I was suffering from a specific illness. Like so many who walk hopefully into their GPs' surgeries I knew that if enough tests were carried out on me a single unified diagnosis could be made, a single pill prescribed and I would feel healthy and whole again, as was my right.
What I got instead were sleeping pills.
And then I came across a book which described my symptoms perfectly and in miraculous detail. In fact the book listed so many symptoms that I'd imagine 98 per cent of the population was covered by its thesis which, briefly described, was that civilised though we are, we have spent most of our time on Earth living in caves and eating nuts, grains and berries. Our bodies simply haven't yet had a chance to adapt to hunting and gathering in Salisbury's.
The result, said the book, is that most of us are allergic to more foods than we can imagine including, such is the perversity of human physiology, some foods which our Neanderthal forefathers ate happily.
I was converted. I was a multiple allergic. I didn't need a pill: I needed a change of diet. I needed to eat as cavemen had eaten on rice cakes and peanut butter and eggs and honey.
For a few days the regime worked. Most such introspective regimes do: we all feel the better for a little guiltless self-concern. And when at the end of a couple of weeks I found I'd lapsed back into my tired and unhappy ways I blamed not the regime but my implementation of it. My problem wasn't that I was not, after all, an allergee, but that I hadn't yet discovered which foods triggered my allergies.
At the back of the book was a list of associations and societies to help the allergically challenged, one of which gave me the name of a man in West London who'd be able to help.
I'd decided to suspend my scepticism for the duration of whatever treatment he would propose, but it wasn't necessary: this man was a real scientist with a real biochemistry degree and a real white coat. For half an hour he listened to my symptoms and took long notes, and at the end of it he told me that I was almost certainly allergic to – well, _something._
Using the old methods of sub-lingual and subcutaneous tests, he said, it could take weeks to find out the source of my allergies. But he had a new method, a method by which I could be tested for a reaction to scores of possible allergens in a single afternoon. The allergens were here in his consulting room. Lining the wall were shelves full of hundreds of little glass bottles with labels reading 'chocolate' and 'house dust mite' and 'clementine' and 'peanut butter'.
As I must know, he said, the muscles and the nerves use electricity to do their job. One of the things allergens do, he went on, is to disrupt the efficient flow of power along the body's own national grid.
'Let me,' he said, 'demonstrate.'
He made me hold out my right arm at right angles to my body.
'You can lock that arm in position, right?'
I could. He put both of his hands at my outstretched wrist and pushed downwards.
'See? I can't break the lock.'
He reached up and chose a handful of little bottles from his allergen collection. I would hold one in my left hand, he would push down on my outstretched right hand. Most of the time my arm stayed locked at the shoulder; once in a while he would be able to break the lock and my arm would be pushed down.
'You see – the allergens are interfering with the flow of electricity.'
By the end of the afternoon he was able to give me a list of the foods to which I was allergic – broccoli, tangerines, sprouts – and threw in, gratuitously I thought, a diagnosis of a Candida infestation of my gut for luck.
I kept my disbelief in suspension for a while after the treatment finished, but eventually realised that I stood more chance of getting my life back if I gave up late nights and cigarettes than if I gave up Brussels sprouts and tangerines. In fact I didn't think about the allergist again until some years later when I was explaining his theories to an overworking, overplaying friend who'd been feeling panicky-fluey and who thought it might be an allergy. I told her about my man in Bayswater and my sprouts allergy.
'But how can you be sure his theory was wrong?' she said, looking worryingly hopeful. 'It may be that allergens really do interfere with electrical flow. What's this guy's number?'
I made a half-hearted attempt to stop her in her gullible tracks, but I couldn't find an absolute reason why the allergist must have been wrong.
Until it occurred to me.
The bottles containing the electricity-disrupting allergens were plastic. Plastic is an insulator: electricity cannot pass through it. Not even alternative electricity.
This anecdote is, in itself, not a complete critique of alternative medicine, although I'd hold it to be a pretty substantial critique of the nature of the relationship between client and practitioner and between the two of them and the laws of physical science. My general complaint is simpler: almost every alternative diagnostic and treatment system which has ever been held up to scientific scrutiny has failed to stand up. Yes, I grant you: there have been one or two trials of homoeopathy which have suggested that there might be some effect at work here – but the trials have suggested no more than that and there have been many more which have completely failed to find any effect at all. These, oddly enough, are not the sort of odds the alternativists allow when they study the trials of orthodox medicine. A single trial in favour of one alternative regime or another out of 100 against is always enough to support it; a single trial against out of 100 in favour is always enough to damn an orthodox treatment.
Perhaps this is, as many of my correspondents tell me, a failure of science rather than of the alternatives to orthodox medicine and that science is not the right tool to determine the efficacy of iridology or aromatherapy or whatever. But this is to believe that the word 'science' describes something other than a series of usually pretty simple techniques for determining what is. A baby crawling around the floor for the first time is performing a series of scientific experiments by which she learns that floors are solid things which don't let you fall through them. Later she might learn that there are special sorts of floor which do let you fall through – woodwormy floors or paper floors – but even then there is a consistency: a floor does not behave one way when it is being studied and another when it's on its own.
And as for babies and floors, so for scientists and alternative medicine. All science has ever done with the alternative methods is to say 'Here are 100 people who are ill; here are 100 homoeopaths who say they can cure them: let's see if they get better.' All right: it's slightly more complicated than that, but the basic principle is there.
What's more, there is no reason why most alternatives should work: many of them actually conflict with what we know about the world – and by 'we' I don't just mean scientists but also those babies who have worked out the consistency of the nature of physical things. And more than that, I have objections to the way most alternative regimes came about. For while orthodox medicine has evolved gradually over the years on the basis of observation and experimentation – and yes, I know that evolution has included long and recent periods of believing the unbelievable, the untrue and the downright harmful – most alternative regimes appeared, fully formed, in the heads of their creators. They were guesses or hunches converted overnight into fixed principles and...
But see? You've gone and got me started now.
The bottom line, as far as I can see, is this. Homoeopathy has been going since the mid-nineteenth century, naturopathy for some hundreds of years in various forms; reflexology is based on principles and charts which pre-date most orthodox medical principles. Much the same goes for herbalism, iridology, acupuncture and any of the medical systems emanating from the traditions of the mystic East.
One of the principles which is common to most of these systems is that they have hardly changed from the day of their inception; indeed many of their adherents take pride in the immutability of their principles.
And yet until the early part of this century the percentage of cancer victims cured of their illness had remained more or less the same since the year dot. Enter nasty orthodox medicine, self-serving, arrogant, ignorant of lines of energy and pressure points, focused on the symptom rather than the whole person, and what do you know? Suddenly people start recovering from cancer.
For all this, though, I can see the temptation of going the alternative route. At the Marsden I'd more or less given up any personal control of my illness. Here I was diagnosed as having a cancer which had originated no one knew where, a cancer which had a chance of killing me, and I was allowing people I'd never met to prod me and poke me and slice me up and subject me to dangerous rays following principles I didn't quite understand.
How much better it would be if I could do something for myself, something based on some simple and obvious principle – that energy lines connect different parts of the body, that you are what you eat, that biochemical equilibrium can be reached by scourging the toxins from your skin – which would allow me to take control of my cancer. How wonderful it would be to decide for myself which of the dozens of equally valid remedies from around the world was most suitable for my personality, my cancer, my birth sign.
I couldn't do it, though. I went for radiotherapy instead.
My porno-mask and the results of my simulation had been sent down to the Varian suite. The notes showed a map of the cross-section of my head and neck with, on the left-hand side of my neck, an irregular round-edged shape some few inches long marked as the mass of the tumour. In reality the shape represented no more than the furthest extent of where Henk thought a primary site might be and the area at which the radiation would be fired for the next six weeks.
Life for those six weeks became the nearest I've had to a daily routine since I gave up going into an office in the early 80s. And quite quickly the Varian suite became as mundane as any office and I found myself considering how the exciting and the terrifying can become transformed equally by familiarity into the banal and the boring. At 14, when puberty hadn't yet kicked in completely with its full complement of benisons, I ached to reach an age where I needed to shave daily; by 18 I'd happily have had the beard removed by electrolysis for the chance of an extra ten minutes' kip each morning. Whatever the circumstance, ordinariness inevitably reasserts itself and there is no human activity which can't have the wind knocked out of it by being converted into a routine.
This was my new routine:
At 3.30 each day I'd drive the couple of miles or so to the hospital.
At 4.05 I'd announce my arrival by sticking my appointment card into the upper of the two clips on the wall of the radiotherapy suite's waiting room, the one for the slightly less clever of the two radiology machines.
From 4.06 to 4.10 I'd flip through the property pages of one of the copies of _Country Life_ left lying about the waiting room and live the brief metropolitan daydream of the pound-for-pound conversion of a medium-sized city home into a mansion standing in 25 acres of somewhere cold and inaccessible.
At 4.10 a radiologist would call my name and I'd stroll into the barn-sized room with its irradiating machine in the middle of it. One of the three radiologists would offer a cheery 'How are you then?' and I'd say 'Well, since you ask, I've got cancer' and it is a tribute to their saintliness that even those radiologists who'd heard this tired gag six or seven times never smacked me in my irradiated teeth.
At 4.13 I'd strip to the waist and bemoan my lost weight, of which more later. Suffice to say, for the time being, that on the day of my diagnosis I weighed something like 14½ stone and as I write some six months later I've dropped to just under 10 stone although this first course of radiotherapy cost me no more than two or three stone. As far as I was concerned, the weight loss had nothing to do with the cancer eating away at my corporation but was because the various biopsies and lump removals meant that for much of the month preceding the radiotherapy I'd not been able to eat. I was wrong: it was to do with the cancer.
At 4.15 I'd lie down on the machine's bench and the radiographer would clamp my mask over my face and upper chest, pressing the back of my head on to a padded metal plate. Had you told me a month earlier that I would spend 15 minutes a day thus constrained I'd have told you about my small claustrophobia problem and tried not to vomit in your lap at the thought. But even claustrophobia becomes routine.
I'd be millimetrically aligned under the green laser beam set into the ceiling and a button would be pressed. I'd count the warning beeper's 53 beeps (46 if the small machine was being serviced and I was laid out on the big one next door), the nine seconds' silence, the 29 seconds' buzzing while the machine irradiated away to itself. The warning beeps are to give the radiologists time to get out of the room and behind the lead screening. They know, as do the alternativists, that radiation is dangerous stuff reserved for atom bomb victims and cancer patients.
The radiologists would return, realign the machine, press the button, 53 beeps, nine seconds' silence, 29 seconds' buzzing, and then twice more again.
I was, I thought, being cured.
# Chapter 6
I once had two or three sessions, but no more than that, with a rather up-market hypnotherapist – a man with a winter tan and a professionally sincere smile and cuff-linked shirt-sleeves, who laid me on a leather couch and smooth-talked me to semi-sleep. Nominally the idea was to cure me of smoking but he was one of those holistic types who deal with the whole psyche and he said that while he was in there he might as well roll up his sleeves and tweak a few other dangerous neuroses.
Hypnotherapy turned out to be a jokey collusion between therapist and therapee in which he would pretend to put me under the influence and I would pretend to have transcended to a sort of lumber room of the psyche wherein were all sorts of old thoughts and fears and childhood events lying about on the floor waiting for me to inspect them. Three or four times a session I'd pick up one of these items and wave it around for the therapist to look at, although the reason I stopped was because he kept on goading me to try and find some event or other which would induce a useful bit of screaming and a panic attack.
After he'd brought me round we'd talk about what we'd found in the room, both of us pretending that we'd discovered a place that I had no idea existed. In fact, as he must have known, it was a place I knew full well was there, and I knew most of its contents too. It was like the loft of my house: not a space I'd ever think to list in an inventory of rooms and containing all sorts of useless junk, but a room, nonetheless, which never came as a surprise to me.
One of the things at which I clutched and of which we were both terribly proud was the discovery of the first time I thought of myself as overweight. Not fat, you understand, because heavy as I've been I've never had the fat boy's take on life or worn the fat boy's clothes or walked his waddling walk. I was, rather, a boy and then a man destined to spend his life asking the shop assistant if they had it in L, and while they were there they might as well bring the XL too, just in case.
Anyway, I recalled that the first time I had a real sense of this I must have been eight or nine, and sitting on a low wall in my grandmother's garden in Hackney. It was summer and I was in bathing trunks. And to please the hypnotherapist I allowed myself to discover the memory of my mother pointing at the tiny roll of puppy fat at the bend in my stomach, and myself looking down at it and knowing it shouldn't be there.
All of which sounds a terribly _Mommy Dearest_ sort of moment, but wasn't at all. Indeed, if it had been more than a passing fond comment on Mum's part I might not have been 14½ stone on the day I was diagnosed cancerous. I might have been my actuarially ideal weight of 12 stone – less than I weighed, in fact, when the hospital started worrying about my weight loss.
Losing weight was one of the phenomena which entered my cancer joke book pretty quickly. 'Hey – have you lost weight?' acquaintances who didn't know the deal would say.
'A bit actually, yes,' I'd say proudly, as if I'd been working hard at it, and then:
'Cancer. It's a great diet,' and wait for the reaction. In truth, once I'd found a more sensitive way of sharing the news it exited my joke book just as quickly as it had arrived.
Not that I'd found a way of dealing with the explanation which worked every time. Our social life had, by this time, shrunk somewhat – in part because we were both tired and in part because our priorities had changed and suddenly turning up to celebrate the publishing of a book we wouldn't read by an author we barely knew seemed a less than positive way to fill an evening. We'd stopped giving dinner parties more or less, and rarely went to them, but there was one we'd accepted before radiotherapy started and which was suddenly upon us, and we thought it was about time we got out.
Imagine: you turn up at a dinner party with a dozen people and there in the middle of the long side of the table is a bloke you've never met before, and he's not eating. It's not that he's not eating in the way that humourless vegetarians don't eat, or in the manner of those stick-thin women who say "That was _delicious_ and I'm so _full'_ in the hope that if they gush enough you won't notice they sucked briefly on a couple of beans and hid a shitake mushroom under their fork.
No: he's not eating as if this simply isn't an eating occasion, as if nobody told him that food would be served. There is a plate, but it is empty, and cutlery too, but it is untouched.
Well, you'd say something, wouldn't you?
'Can I pass you anything?' said a woman as if she wasn't sure whether I'd noticed the food piled up along the table. 'What would you like?' said another, hesitantly, as if I might be subject to delusions and expect to be fed off gold plate.
'Nothing, thanks.' I grinned as if not eating were one of the usual options at dinner parties. What could I say? Egocentrically, it hadn't occurred to me that people wouldn't know, and you can't just smile and say 'No, nothing for me: I've got cancer', can you? It is both too much of an explanation and not enough of one. It stops conversations, begs questions to which the asker really doesn't want to hear the answer, demands a too carefully crafted response.
And so I did the worst, and rudest, thing of all. Eventually somebody said 'I wish I could lose weight that way' and I said, truculently, 'You would do if you had cancer too', except that I compounded the rudeness by muttering it so that some of the table heard nothing and the rest thought they'd picked up on some sort of tasteless joke.
It screwed up the dinner party for the best part of an hour and induced a lot of piercing glowers from Nigella on the other side of the table, and I sat in silence thinking of a couple of dozen ways in which I could have handled it better.
It was the radiotherapy that did it. The principle of gradual disclosure had prepared me for those things which the radiation would almost certainly do to me – no saliva, sore throat, the odd missing tuft of hair – but not for many of the things it only _might_ do. In fact the saliva stayed and the throat was never that sore, albeit that it still hurt pretty badly after the biopsy, but nobody thought to tell me about the effect on my taste-buds. At least now that I come to think of it they may have mentioned that I'd lose the use of my taste-buds, but they said nothing about the devastation that eventuality would wreak on my emotional and corporeal equilibrium.
There is, I remember from the days when I thought the metaphysical poets had greater insights into the teenage mind even than Jethro Tull or the Doors, a sermon written by John Donne wearing his deanery hat in which he praises God for all his works and in particular for that work which causes the raddled nose of the tertiary syphilitic to drop off. That way, said Donne, the dying wretch avoids smelling his own putrefying flesh.
And that, I think, is the last time God attached a pure thought to a nasty disease. Once He'd done syphilis He determined that the side-effect of any given illness would be nastier than the illness itself and that the metaphorical ingrowing toenail would never numb the metaphorical foot to make the metaphorical hike more pleasurable. And as for illness, so for the treatment of illness, for surely there can be no intrinsic reason why the side-effects of any given medical regime should be even nastier than the complaint it treats, why a barium meal shouldn't taste like a steak dinner or why a tourniquet shouldn't lead to a pleasant tingling sensation rather than to gangrene. Specifically, in my case, why can't the side-effect of radiotherapy be to make therapees ravenously hungry and super-sensitive to mother nature's bounteous tastes in a way that would actually speed recovery? Would it be too much to ask that just once physics and human biology co-operate in some fortuitous way that made us slightly giggly, light-headed creatures rather than mild depressives? No wonder the alternative quacks get away with their fairy dust treatments: you die just as quickly as with the real thing but you feel better about it.
Two weeks into the treatment, with my throat buzzing with radioactivity, I felt for the first time as if I had cancer. People would say, in that reverential chapel-of-rest voice, 'How _are_ you?' and assume the list of symptoms I'd reel off were those of cancer. They weren't: they were the symptoms of being cured of cancer, of the surgical excavations in my throat and of the radiotherapy. And, as the nature-never-compensates thesis dictates, the curative symptoms were the last ones I needed.
In the bathroom and beside my bed the evidence of disease was piling up. There were the industrial strength, prescription-only painkillers to cope with the pain from the biopsy: the giant bottle of co-dydramol, the economy-sized box of co-codamol, the blister sheets of Voltarol. There was the anti-emetic to counter the nausea that the radiotherapy had started to induce, and the fluoride gel to spread over my gums, and the sleeping pills to help me forget about all the other pills I was taking.
But worse than the pain, worse than having to take the indigestion-stirring, constipating cures for the pain, was the loss of the sense of taste.
In truth, I was surprised the loss was as depressing as it turned out to be. I've always prided myself in a sly sort of way of being the king of the Spam fritter, the man whom the avocado revolution entirely passed by in the 70s and who managed to get all the way through the late 80s without eating a sun-dried tomato. If you'd asked my pre-cancerous self which of its senses it could most afford to lose it would almost certainly have gone for taste. If you'd asked the wife of my pre-cancerous self – a woman who is, _inter alia,_ the food writer at _Vogue,_ wrote a restaurant column for a dozen years, and can turn any three ingredients into a sublime feast – she'd have told you that I was a food-philistine, a man who'd never miss his taste-buds because, as far as she was aware, he'd never had any.
Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad if my complete complement of taste-buds had been entirely pulverised by the rays, but a few held on, still twitching slightly in their agony, and making sure that the very slight memory of taste which filtered through was, uniformly and regardless of what I tried to eat, nauseating. Worse: I still had a memory of what tastes had been like so recently, and a sense of smell, and thus was surprised, and depressed, anew every time I ate something to discover that it tasted of rancid wallpaper paste.
Each day I would find myself remembering a taste – peanut butter, banana bread, cornflakes in cold milk – and recalling it so vividly that I became convinced that this taste would still be accessible to me. And so I'd lather a slice of bread with peanut butter, or fill a bowl with cornflakes, or ask Nigella to run up some banana bread, and I'd take a deep breath, close my eyes, fill my mouth in the absolute conviction that this time I'd have found something that transcended my new disability, something on which I could subsist until the buds returned in a month or four. And each time I'd find myself spitting out another mouthful of inedible poison. Eventually even the rancid wallpaper taste disappeared as everything – water included – took on the taste of battery acid.
It was depressing and at the same time infuriating, and I started reacting to the regular rediscovery of my crocked mouth with a rage which I'd been told would accompany the original diagnosis ('some patients find they are _angry_ with their cancer' was the sort of thing the books said) but hadn't. I hurled the food, thumped the table, stormed out of the room, shouted at Nigella, avoided the children lest I take it out on them. And then ten minutes later I'd be back, remorseful, apologetic like some cheesy drunk promising never to touch another drop. I didn't react this way every time, but I did it often enough to scare myself and worry Nigella.
By the fourth week of radiotherapy I was on a diet which consisted entirely of Ready-Brek – a sort of cowardly porridge – and poached egg on toast. I was losing weight fast.
Although I wasn't to hit my lowest weight for another few months, I was already running out of wardrobe. Luckily I was at the Marsden every day – a hospital within 500 yards of some dozens of clothes shops in Fulham and Chelsea. Early on in the illness I'd discovered that as a cancer patient I had an advantage over other men. I was meeting Bywater at a Soho club for lunch and passed a shop selling £400 leather jackets for a knock-down £299.I bought one. I was, I thought, entitled. I had cancer, for Christ's sake. What sort of world was this where a man with cancer couldn't buy himself a leather jacket? I arrived home that afternoon wearing the jacket and with one of the standard stories prepared – I'd spilled something on the jacket I'd been wearing; it had suddenly turned cold; the jacket was only £199, or £99. But it wasn't necessary. Nigella thought I was entitled too. From where she was standing, bless her, if a leather jacket cheered me up then never mind the American Express bill that hadn't yet been paid.
The principle extended to my new wardrobe. It was bad enough, we decided, that I had cancer without having to have cancer _and_ be dressed in clothes two sizes too big. And, what the hell, we could pay the Amex bill next month.
And so once or twice a week I'd rise from the radiotherapy bench and dress and we'd walk down to one of the shops along the road and cheer me up with a new suit or a new pair of trousers or a new sweater in my new size. Sometimes we didn't even wait for a radiotherapy day in Fulham; one Sunday I did so much damage in Selfridge's various departments that the Visa people phoned the cash desk after my card had been swiped to check whether it was really me because I was spending at the rate usually seen only in those who have stolen a credit card and are getting the best use out of it before the loss is reported.
Eventually I realised there was a subtler reason behind all this spending which involved another appeal to the hubris gods. After all, if I could get into deep enough money trouble they'd have to keep me alive so that I could suffer those consequences. Alternatively when the gods looked down they would see a humble, if astonishingly well dressed, man unwilling to make the assumption that he'd put back any of the weight he'd lost, which is to say unwilling to assume that he'd get better. Impressed by this humility, they would allow him to get better, not least so that he could rue his expensive new wardrobe full of tiny and unwearable clothes.
But if the weight loss was doing wonders for my wardrobe it was worrying the medical team. Or, rather, my growing medical team, for I had acquired, in addition to my surgeon and doctor and radiotherapist and radiologist and dentist, a dietitian.
The job of the modern dietitian is pretty easy and consists, for the most part, in telling people to stop eating anything enjoyable and start eating bean sprouts. Cancer dietitians, though, live in a nutritional dystopia where everything which medical science has spent the last 25 years proving is bad, is deemed good.
Remember how things were in the pre-cholesterol era? How your mother would look at your plate at the end of a meal and say 'But you've left the best bit!' with 'best' meaning 'most wholesome', and how the best bit always turned out to be precisely the thing – bacon rind, the fatty stump of a chop, the thick cream at the top of a glass of milk – which doctors later discovered you should never eat? Those are precisely the bits the nutritionist would recommend. After a session with her Nigella would comb the supermarket shelves for anything that was four parts lard, or half sugar, and that could be whizzed up into a semi-solid paste and swallowed before the crippled taste-buds noticed it was there.
Indeed, there were whole areas of the disease and the treatment which Nigella had taken over from me and from the doctors. It was Nigella who made the calls to fix the various appointments, Nigella who spent time talking to editors and producers, cancelling shows and rearranging deadlines, Nigella who cooked special meals I fancied on some whim or another and who commiserated when I could only eat a mouthful, Nigella who got up for the children and who coped when a few months into all of this our nanny resigned, Nigella who lay with me at night and talked about what was happening and made some of the fear and the frustration go away.
It was Nigella too who reassured me about my professional life.
For the first few weeks of treatment nothing much had changed with my work. The _Times_ column had become a cancer column, although at this point not exclusively so, and I had no real problem keeping up with my other regular gigs writing about the media for the _Evening Standard_ and reviewing TV for the _New Statesman._ Radio, though, was becoming a problem.
I had two regular programmes on BBC radio: _After Hours,_ a late night live, two-hour talk show on Radio 5 Live which involved me guiding four or five professional gabblers through a single subject each week, and _Fourth Column_ on Radio 4 which had me presenting four columnar wits to the microphone every Friday night. I loved doing both shows and was proud, in my insecure 'Look, Ma – top of the world' way to have the jobs. Dr Henk had made it clear at our first meeting that as far as he was concerned radiotherapy rendered all broadcasting an impossibility: my voice would be too croaky, my throat too painful and I'd be too tired. On that basis I dropped _After Hours_ almost immediately radiotherapy started: even I understood that two hours' live chat was probably beyond me.
_Fourth Column_ was a different matter. While _After Hours_ was long, unscripted and live, and demanded that, _in extremis,_ I could be called upon to keep the talk going under my own steam, _Fourth Column_ was short, scripted and recorded. Indeed, although it was nominally my programme and appeared under my name in the _Radio Times,_ I usually had no more than five or six minutes of script to write and read each week. I told Brian King, its long-standing producer, what the problem was and said that I'd like to try and keep the job going on the understanding that there might come a time when my voice just couldn't cope and somebody else would have to step in. It was a suggestion which I didn't expect King to agree to for a moment; why, after all, should the BBC's output suffer for my throat? To my amazement, and delight, he agreed to the proposal as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
To my greater amazement he kept me going through the whole of the next two series, even though at one point the radiotherapy gave me the rasping voice of a bottle-a-day alcoholic combined with a new lisp brought on by the collapse of one of my lingual nerves under the combined pressure of the biopsy and the radiation.
Generally speaking, though, I decided to turn down most other broadcasting until after the radiotherapy was over and my throat had healed. The one exception was just after the May 1st election when _Newsnight_ phoned up and asked me to come on and talk to Jeremy Paxman about the recently disgraced ex-MP Neil Hamilton who was appearing that night with his wife Christine on _Have I Got News For You._ It was the sort of ten-minute punditry that is bread and butter for freelance mouths like mine and for some reason I decided that I needed to prove to myself that I could still talk to a camera.
As it happened that day I'd acquired a new pharmaceutical toy: a large plastic syringe full of local anaesthetic gel. The radiotherapy had, understandably enough, caused one side of my mouth to break out in giant ulcers which not only further affected my ability to eat but also meant I had to be careful with my speech. The gel lasted for minutes before it was washed away by my saliva and so I was leaving its application until just before the camera went on me.
I'd met Jeremy Paxman just a few times at various Notting Hill parties and although there was no reason why he should have known about my cancer, I assumed without much thinking about it that because most of the West London media lot seemed to know about it so would he. I was slipped into my pundit's chair while the previous item was running, two minutes before I was due to give the word on Hamilton. Paxman was flipping through his script and looked up to say hello. He saw me apparently injecting something into my gums.
'What's that for? Broadcast nerves?' he said, and laughed.
I gave the stupidest answer, all things considered.
'Er, no. Throat cancer.'
'Seriously?'
'Well, yes. I'm sorry, I thought they'd–'
At which point the green light went and we were on air. Say what you like about Paxman, but the man's a professional. Looking back at a tape of the interview there are only two moments where the pauses are long enough to suggest that his interviewee has just announced he's got cancer.
I gave up TV for a while after that and decided that I simply wouldn't do it again until the radiotherapy was over, my voice had returned,' the swelling around my operation scar had disappeared and I'd been given the all clear which I would certainly get given the 92 per cent cure rate of my sort of cancer.
# Chapter 7
If the statistics were anything to go by then the final radiotherapy session should have marked my last officially cancerous day. It felt more like my first. Towards the end of the treatment I'd had problems: the back of my neck was so badly burned by the third of the four daily bursts of radiation that Henk had ordered that pass of the ray gun to be discontinued a week or so before the final session. But even reducing my dose didn't help my general feelings of wretchedness and, like a prisoner who makes a jail-break when his sentence is almost over, I found that which had been bearable suddenly all seemed too much. I seriously considered not turning up for treatment on the last few days. If 30 sessions of radiotherapy can fix me, I told one of the radiotherapists, then so can 27 or 28. But no: the deal is that such is the power of radiation that they give the minimum necessary to treat the cancer. Any more and there's a chance that the cure will be nastier than the illness – or even induce further cancers; any less and it simply might not be enough to do the job.
And so I staggered along, tired, thin, dispirited, with no real sense that anything was coming to an end.
I seemed to have lost that trick I'd developed early on of affecting to be cool about cancer. What's more, although I'd started the treatment by congratulating myself on my well-balanced – hah! – take on my illness, I now began to feel that it really had been no more than a trick, which is to say that I'd been tricked along with everyone else.
From the start I'd worked out that I had a choice: either I could do the standard 'I'd love to but' – catch in throat – 'I've got cancer' routine which wouldn't make me feel much better and would, I thought, give everyone else a good excuse for ignoring me, or I could be relaxed about it. Relaxation, I realised, was the only choice and not least because even were I not relaxed there was no way in which I could communicate my agitation on a full-time basis.
When people ask how you are you can say 'scared' but you can't _be_ scared, you can't _do_ scaredness for more than a moment or two. I imagine that conscripts in fox-holes waiting for mortars to drop manage to keep scaredness going for hours at a time – shivering, crying, moaning, whatever it is that the truly and continuously scared do in the hope that their scaredness will leak away from them. But I had no sense of how to be scared in any but an abstract and internal way; perhaps if I'd developed such a sense I wouldn't have been feeling so low now.
And so when readers and friends wrote to me to say how clever (or brave or sensible) it was to face my cancer with a wry smile playing about my boyish lips I affected not to know what they were talking about. When they told me that I didn't understand how courageous I was to come into the open with the details of my cancer, my eyes would go wide and I'd tell them that it hadn't occurred to me that I had any alternative. During the early part of the summer we turned up at any number of parties where people I knew only vaguely would walk across the room, lay a hand on my shoulder, look deeply into my eyes and say 'You are so...' and then add one or other from the limited menu of fortitudinous adjectives.
It was, as far as I was concerned, all bollocks. Writing about my cancer wasn't brave. Not writing about it, now that _would_ have been brave. Writing the old domestic pieces about babies and Sainsbury's and being on the sharp end of feminism, and not mentioning that all these things needed to be viewed against the backdrop of the slipping chances of my being around to draw the benefits of my Spend and Save card, might have taken some courage.
What I was doing instead was looking for a way to make my cancer acceptable, to be the man who'd discovered chic cancer. I wasn't doing this for the greater good of cancer patients everywhere, for all that cancer patients everywhere wrote to thank me for the favour. I was doing it as a form of very public denial therapy. By writing about the cancer each week (and subsequently by writing this book and sitting in front of the BBC's documentary cameras) I was trying to change the problem from one of pain and physical constraint and possibly impending death into one of best journalistic practice. Faced with a new symptom, a new oncological possibility, I'd found a way of thinking of it not in terms of how it would affect my life, my psyche, my family, but of how best to share it with the readers, of how to make a momentary thought a greater philosophical reflection. And in doing so I wasn't, of course, unconscious of the times when I was putting a jaunty spin on something depressing, of the times when I was feigning bravery or indifference.
But in those last few days of radiotherapy I seemed to have lost that trick. The columns I wrote in those weeks had become either maudlin or mawkish, self-pitying or depressive. I'd had enough of all this. I couldn't be clever about it any more; I couldn't pretend cancer in the right hands was a chic and temporary accessory, not least because the cancer which was meant to have disappeared on the last day of radiotherapy, felt as if it were still around.
And, of course, as long as I believed the cancer was still in me I also believed that I was bucking the statistics – that I wasn't going to be one of the 92 per cent who was cured but one of the 8 per cent who died.
What was remarkable was the extent to which that possible death remained an unspoken fear. Hardly any of the thousands who had written and would write to me about my presumed courage under cytological fire actually came clean with the details of what they thought I was being courageous about. If they were at all specific it was to say that I was brave to suffer the pain, or the depression, or the therapy. What they meant, and what I was repressing by turning the illness into a literary exercise, was that I was brave not to break down, having been told that I might soon die.
The maudlin moment passed, after a fashion. At the end of the month we had our postponed annual midsummer's party of 400 people crammed into our back garden, and that night, slim and in a shiny new suit, I felt entitled to look forward to next year's party and the one after that. But still, I didn't feel what you'd call _better._
In fact I had only one symptom and that was the one which I'd had since the first day: I was still coughing up food. Indeed, as the radiotherapy had roughened my throat the single symptom had got worse and part of the reason I was eating so little was that every meal set me off on a painful coughing jag. Attached to the pain from the coughing was an earache – a pain which since childhood I've found more depressing than any other.
I'd told Dr Henk about the coughing and the earache at our weekly meetings, and when we met in his little cubicle a couple of days after our last session I told him about it again. It felt, I said, as if I had a lesion right at the base of my tongue, or some sort of extra flap which food was hiding behind.
Henk looked through my notes and granted that in fact I'd mentioned the problem fairly regularly, as if to suggest that he understood that I wasn't inventing the symptom. Perhaps, he said, a surgeon should take a look at it, and for 'look' read 'knife'.
Even if Henk was now the doctor with primary charge of my illness, my surgeon was still nominally Mr Mady of Harley Street and St George's. But although Henk visited St George's to dispense radiotherapeutic wisdom, Mady wasn't a Marsden surgeon. I could, I suppose, have gone back to St George's, but the thought filled me with gloom. Most thoughts at the time filled me with gloom, it's true, but the trek through the South London suburbs was a particularly dispiriting prospect.
Nigella pressed the issue with Henk: was there not somebody at the Marsden who could do the job? Yes: the Marsden had its own head and neck surgeon, a man who specialised not just in head and neck but in cancers of the head and neck. Peter Rhŷs Evans was, like Henk, _sui generis,_ he was the _ne plus ultra,_ he was the man. Getting him to be my man, though, was a diplomatic exercise on a par with settling the Northern Ireland problem. Rhŷs Evans couldn't take me on without my being referred to him by a doctor. Henk couldn't refer me because I'd come to him in the first place courtesy of Mady. Mady could refer me, I imagine, but given that we didn't want to continue with him for entirely selfish reasons I wasn't going to ask him to. In the end I had to go back to my own GP, Dr Mulligan, and get him to write a letter asking Rhŷs Evans to see me as if it was Mulligan's own idea.
When Nigella and I turned up at Rhŷs Evans' Harley Street rooms (on the first floor this time: the lower the grander, I'd been told) he really did look the part of the Head and Neck Man Whose Name Is Spoken With Awe. The wall of his secretary's office was plastered with certificates from Paris and New York and South Africa as well as London: here was a man who had travelled the globe to study head and neck tumours in all their worldly variety, who had been accorded the freedom of those cities where they take head and neck cancer seriously, been granted fellowships of the most prestigious Royal Colleges of Neck and International Societies of Head.
He was also, it turned out, one of the most charming of surgeons, a stocky and dapper man who looked ten years younger than his 48 years, the son of an expatriate Welsh ENT man and one who kept an aging Jaguar sports car with his initials on the number plate – the plate a present from a grateful patient – parked outside the shop.
Again I told my story from scratch while Rhŷs Evans sat behind his leather-topped not-a-doctor's desk and took longhand notes. The glandular fever, the swelling, the scan and the bloodtest and the aspiration, the cystectomy, the surprise diagnosis, the biopsy and so all the way through to a precise description of the single coughing symptom. Again, as with Mr Hinton those few months ago, the act of cataloguing the events gave them an increased meaning – doubly so since with Hinton I was still, as far as we were all concerned, cancer-free.
Rhŷs Evans walked me across to the other side of the not-a-doctor's-consulting-room and sat me in what looked like an old-fashioned barber's chair but which turned out to be the ENT chair which had been passed down from one ENT man to another over the decades since the first ENT man had taken the rooms in the 20s.
For the dozenth time I watched as a doctor warmed the nickel-plated tongue depressor on the little gas burner, for the dozenth time I opened my mouth to let a doctor look for a cancer in it, for the dozenth time I 'aahhhed' to demonstrate whether a tumour was clinging to my vocal cords. For the third time I gagged as a local anaesthetic was sprayed on the back of my throat and down one nostril, and then watched the TV monitor as the nasoendoscope was passed into my gullet.
It showed, said Rhŷs Evans, nothing at all. Certainly it didn't show whatever it was that was causing the food to return whence it came. Rhŷs Evans sent me back to the Marsden for more tests: another CT scan, some more blood tests, an X-ray, something called a barium swallow which was, I imagined, slightly less than a barium meal and possibly more than a barium snack.
A few days later I was having lunch with Georgina Henry and Roger Alton, respectively the deputy and features editors of the _Guardian,_ who were grilling me about my health. Half way through the soup course Alton asked the bottom-line question: did I still have cancer? Before I could shrug my shoulders my mobile rang: it was Nigella. Rhŷs Evans had phoned. The scan seemed to show some slight swelling around the site of the defunct tonsils. The good news was that there seemed to be no enlargement of the lymph glands.
I clicked the phone off. Yes, Roger. It looked as if I still had cancer.
Well, perhaps it was a bit of an exaggeration, and obviously I was back on my ten-cool-ways-to-have-cancer routine, but certainly something was still not right. Rhŷs Evans wanted me to have another biopsy as soon as the post-radiation swelling in my throat had subsided. Nobody was saying it, but everyone was proceeding as if there was still work for them to do.
A week later Nigella and I took a cab to the Lister Hospital, a private hotel with attached operating facilities by the Thames at Chelsea. As we moved through the West London traffic we tried to divine what the biopsy would show. There was, after all, no obvious sign of a cancer, no bleeding or ulceration or swelling. As the traffic jammed in the King's Road I idly poked a finger into my mouth and towards the area at the back of my throat where the food seemed to be getting trapped.
'Christ! I can feel a lump,' I said to Nigella.
'What sort of lump?' she asked, sounding as panicky as I suddenly felt.
'A sort of... hold on. No: it's a bit of gum.'
I had, for some inexplicable reason, started chewing the occasional nicotine chewing gum again. At first it was squares of gum which were left over from my pre-cancerous days and which I'd found hibernating in odd drawers or jacket pockets, but a couple of days before I'd actually bought a pack of the things. I remembered Keith Castle, the first successful British heart transplant patient, who even that close to death couldn't bring himself to give up smoking. Perhaps if he'd had gum to chew he'd be alive still. Perhaps, like me, he'd find that little bits of gum detached themselves and got stuck in balls around the mouth and throat.
I prodded again.
'No... hold on. Shit. It is a lump.'
It was, too: a small thickening of the skin at the very base of my tongue, rather as if the thing had become calloused from too much talking.
The panic of this new discovery aside, the Lister with its pretend-grand institutional fittings and its air-hostess nurses' uniforms was, if anything, slightly more depressing than St George's, but Nigella and I lay on my hospital bed and watched afternoon TV and forgot, for a moment, why we were there. Halfway through _Quincy_ an air-hostess nurse came in to take my blood pressure and I wondered why private hospitals go for the modern look with their nurses. If I were paying out my own money, rather than BUPA's, I'd want to see nurses dressed in precisely the reassuring old-fashioned starched creations that the NHS has dropped.
'Do you want your girlfriend to stay?' she said.
'My wife,' I said.
'Oh, right. It's just that you looked so happy together that I thought, you know...' Who knows: this might be a piece of standard private-medicine flummery, but it cheered me up no end.
As _Perry Mason_ started Rhŷs Evans came to see me. How was I? Were there any changes? Any new symptoms?
Nothing really, I told him. Just this slight hardness right at the back of my mouth near where my tongue is. Rhŷs Evans gave it a surgical prod and shrugged. He'd have a look in a minute.
They wheeled me down to the surgery and Nigella stayed to watch the end of _Perry Mason._ I was home that night with a new bottle of painkillers to numb the effects of having more slivers of throat removed.
My diary for that week in the middle of July shows a period in limbo: a poker evening, a drink with an editor, a couple of work meetings, some lunches, two parties. I'd started back at _After Hours_ again, and managed to cram a couple of editions in. Abnormal as my life felt at the time, it turned out to be my last week of normality. In the diary the usual gallivanting continues into the next week, the only difference being that the meetings and the parties and the drinks all have cancelling lines struck through them. Above them, in tiny letters to fit the reduced space, are entries naming new names, new characters in my about-to-be-new life: Jemima Harrison, Olivia Lichtenstein, Nicholas Breach, Stephanie Kingham.
We met Peter Rhŷs Evans again in his rooms. The hardness at the base of my tongue had indeed been cancer. Now I had a specific cancer: not just cancer of the neck and head, but cancer of the tongue, a particular sort of cancer with particular characteristics. As far as he could tell it was about an inch or so in diameter and he would have to cut it out. At the same time he would have to work on my neck. We knew that the cancer in the cyst and that in the lymph node next to it were secondaries: he needed to know how far along my lymphatic system the cancer had travelled. He intended taking out the dozen or so lymph glands on both sides of my neck in the hope that there would be two pairs free of any cancer, showing the furthest extent of the disease. If all the glands on either side were cancerous he'd know, he implied, that the probability was that the cancer had spread beyond my neck.
How did I feel? Neutral, I suppose. Nothing Rhŷs Evans said came as much of a surprise. I knew I had cancer and I knew in my waters that the cancer hadn't been chased off by the radiotherapy. Overwhelming sympathy and anxiety aside, Nigella felt a mixture of self-recrimination and anger. Just before the radiotherapy had started we'd mentioned the coughing and the earache to Henk's registrar. He'd said that if we liked the hospital could arrange a proper endoscopy – the sort which involved a general anaesthetic. The only trouble was, he said, that we'd have to postpone radiotherapy for a week. I wanted to get the therapy over with as soon as possible; Nigella didn't push the point. Now she felt that had she done so they might have found the tumour a couple of months earlier. It's unlikely that the two months would have made a difference to the spread of a cancer which must have been around for years, but it would almost certainly have made a difference to the original treatment.
Rhŷs Evans is an optimist with an optimist's infectious good cheer and so we left him with the sustaining thought that at last the doctors had found something they could doctor rather than that I was about to undergo a big-deal operation. But there was that principle of gradual disclosure at work again. It turned out that my secondaries are pretty often the result of tongue cancers and that the earache was a common symptom. Nobody, of course, had mentioned this before.
Bywater came round that night and went into upbeat mode again. This was _great_ news, he said. They had found the primary, they would cut it out, in a year's time I would have forgotten I ever had cancer. Perhaps he should have been a doctor, after all. As with the other doctors there was no mention of the fact that it had been equally great news when they _hadn't_ been able to find a primary site because that meant it was so small that it could be zapped by the radiotherapy.
But I felt pretty sanguine about the whole thing. I imagined a fairly routine operation to cut a bit out of me, stitch me up and kick me out on to the street again.
I phoned up Jemima Harrison and told her the news. Harrison was a journalist then working as an assistant producer in the BBC documentaries department under Olivia Lichtenstein, the editor of the _Inside Story_ series. I'd met Harrison on, of all uncool places, the Internet some weeks before. She had been charged to work up some programme ideas for the department and we were discussing a number together, including one for a series about cancer. Lichtenstein had known Nigella from one or other of their previous incarnations and our daughters went to the same Saturday morning ballet classes.
I'd told Harrison that it looked as if my own cancer story wasn't yet over. She talked to Lichtenstein and they decided to start work on the cancer programme/series/whatever there and then without a formal proposal or really any idea what sort of televisual event we were talking about. Instead of being about cancer generally it would be about my cancer – which wasn't quite what I had in mind. I had seen myself presenting the sort of thing the _Radio Times_ lists as 'A Major New Series on Disease Which Affects One Briton in Three' full of carefully scripted walking-talking pieces to camera and clever graphics showing cancer cells invading major organs; they seemed to see a frowning man in pyjamas candidly voicing his fears to a close-up lens. We could, I thought, argue the toss when this was all over – whenever that would now be. Meanwhile it meant the that next time we met Rhŷs Evans it was with the cameras running.
This time, and with a couple of days to go, he took us through the operation. It would, he said, take around six hours. He would dissect my neck, sending the glands down to the histopathology labs as he removed them to be tested for evidence of cancer. Then he'd start work on my tongue, cutting along the centre to get to the tumour and removing both the cancer itself and a cuff of healthy tissue around it by way of a safety zone. There were, he said, some imponderables. For instance I would certainly wake up with some sort of breathing tube poking down my nose into my windpipe and a feeding tube poking down my nose into my stomach, but depending on the amount of damage they did to my throat I might also have a tracheostomy – a plastic pipe pushed through a hole made in my neck and into my windpipe so that I could breathe – and a second pipe inserted directly through my abdomen and into my stomach through which I could be fed.
Suddenly the single operation to cut out the cancer had become five operations – the cancer removal, two neck dissections, a tracheostomy and a gastrectomy.
But there was more. Rhŷs Evans wasn't sure how much of my tongue he'd have to remove. If it was just so much and in just such a place he could simply sew up the hole; if it was so much and in a different place, well, it would be a job for the plastic surgeon, Nicholas Breach, who would be there helping at the operation anyway. Given the word, Breach would cut a wedge of my forearm out and sew it into the gap where part of my tongue had been removed. He'd then take some skin from my thigh to cover the hole in my forearm.
Seven ops in one. Whoopee.
I was scared again. Well of course I was: with the prospect of so much carnage being wreaked on so much of your body so would you have been. But I'd got used to not being properly scared; I'd become comfortable with my phoney stoicism. The problem was that with the camera running it seemed inappropriate to ask the scaredy-cat questions I really wanted to ask: have you done this before? When did you last lose a patient doing it? What are the chances of me needing all the optional extras? Will I live? Instead I asked stoical, practical questions: with a lump missing from my tongue would I be able to talk again, to broadcast, to sing? How long would recovery take? What were the chances of finding a tongue so rotten with cancer that the whole thing had to come out?
Rhŷs Evans' answers were, as is his way, optimistic ones. In my head, though, I heard: you will lose your tongue, you will never talk, you will recover after a long and painful convalescence and then, guess what? You'll die, because the whole thing was a waste of time.
I asked him what my chances were now that they so obviously weren't 92 per cent. This is the point, I know, at which professional statisticians will start grumbling. Yes, I understand that the original 92 per cent was still an accurate figure: the number of men who turn up at surgeries with my vague symptoms and live for five years afterwards is 92 in 100. But I was now a member of a different constituency: men of 44 with tongue cancer and local secondaries. It seemed reasonable to ask for some new statistics.
After rather less dissembling than I'd expected he settled on around 66 per cent or so – a two in three chance of being cured. It was meant to be reassuring, but for historical reasons I knew it couldn't possibly reassure.
Three and some years earlier we'd turned up to the hospital for the ultrasound test on the foetus who would become Cosima. The technician had a Wendyhouse approach to her job, and as she moved the probe around Nigella's distended stomach she'd look at the monitor and say 'Oooh! There's its little legs, and look! There's its little hands, and there's its little heart going pitter-patter...' and at the end of this we said so everything's OK then, right? And she said well actually no: there seem to be some little cysts on its little brain which are sometimes the precursor of a nasty chromosomal abnormality which has the baby dying of asphyxiation as it's being born.
In a state of shock we went up to the foetal medicine department where a doctor talked to us about a foetal blood test with a one in 100 chance of inducing a miscarriage balanced against the 1 in 250 chance that the cysts indicated something nasty.
As odds went they were reasonable ones and had I been standing in the bookie's thinking about putting money on a healthy baby there would have been no problem. But under the circumstances the odds were meaningless. In these situations all odds are the same odds, or rather evens. Either the worst will happen or it won't: the baby will die or it won't. The odds always feel like 50:50.
And as it was then so it was for me now. Either they'd cure me or they wouldn't. Everything was 50:50. When the official odds were 92 per cent they were really 50:50, and if the operation didn't work and the official odds dropped to 20 per cent or 10 per cent or worse, they'd still be 50:50.
The next day, _sans_ cameras, we went for our last visit before the operation. Mr Breach, the consultant plastic surgeon, and, of course, the pre-eminent man in his etc. etc. etc., is a tall and rather old-fashioned sort of surgeon – rather like the pinstriped and jocular card from _Doctor in the House._ He keeps rooms in Portland Place, just along from the BBC and a few hundred yards away from the main medical drag in Harley Street, and wanted to see me for – well, I'm not quite sure what for. At the time I imagined that this was just one of the things that happened before big operations: you had a pleasant chat with the people who were going to be up to their elbows in your gore the next day.
If the Harley Street rooms were free of medical associations, Breach's Portland Place office was free of any associations at all. The featureless room could have been that of any professional, the entirely clear desk waiting for an accountant or a quantity surveyor to pop in with a calculator or a pile of bricks.
Breach went over the procedure again. From somewhere he found a piece of paper and a pen and started drawing diagrams of a face. As we knew, once the lower jaw had been split in two...
Hold on. What lower jaw split in two? We knew nothing about this.
Oh. He thought Mr Rhŷs Evans had explained. The easiest way of getting to the very base of the tongue, given that no surgeon can get the whole of his scalpel-clutching fist into a patient's throat, is to saw along the bottom jaw from the point of the chin to just in front of the throat, prise the two halves apart and then work on the exposed tongue that way. He smiled and held his hands up in front of his face.
'It's just like opening a book.'
He mimed pulling the covers of a book apart and beamed again as if this analogy made it acceptable. It was quite a normal procedure, really. It would sew up neatly because he would cut the chin...
So far the news of the operation had been a smooth progression from the fact of its necessity through to the finer points of its procedure. It was frightening, sure, but it was somehow something I could understand, something I could imagine happening to me. As I'd understood it until now it was merely a question of cutting a nasty piece of me out and throwing it away. This, though, was something different. This was nightmare, bad horror movie, joke.
Was Breach sure this was the way Rhŷs Evans was going in? No: not absolutely certain, but it was the most likely way. As he was saying, the main incision would be...
Just a moment. There were questions I needed to ask. Would I?... was he?... did he think?... Damn! I couldn't think of a reasonable question. And then one mad one came to me. I have a cleft chin. It is the only part of me of which I've ever been proud. I may be overweight, and have short legs, and less hair than I once did, but Kirk Douglas and I have cleft chins. As far as I could tell, somebody was about to cut straight through the cleft. Would I still have my cleft chin at the end of the exercise?
In the scheme of things, and especially the disarrayed scheme in which I currently found myself, the future of my chin was of the smallest consequence. And yet here I was pleading for it to be saved.
Oddly, Breach seemed to understand. Or at least he didn't actually laugh out loud at my wretched vanity. I imagine plastic surgeons are used to such vanities. Never mind how he would split my lower jaw in two and pin it back together with lumps of titanium: this was how he'd make the cut which would hide the scar around my chin. He made a little zigzag shape on the diagram of the face. This was what his knife would do to my chin in 36 hours' time.
The next day I packed a grip with a pair of pyjamas, a wash-bag, an Apple Powerbook and the Alan Coren omnibus edition and Nigella and I drove to Fulham. I was booked in a day early to give them time to run the standard tests of my blood and my heart and my general condition, all of which felt pretty low. In Weston Ward in the newest of the hospital's blocks I had private room F – a Trusthouse Forte roadhouse of a room, with its almost bright walls and its framed art poster advertising some art poster artist's exhibition. High up on the wall was a small TV set and below it a wood-effect wardrobe. Sliding doors opened on to a balcony which ran along the whole of one side of the ward, along which promenaded pyjama'd men and women slowly pushing drip stands, talking to family and visitors, seemingly unaware – this being the head and neck ward – of their missing ears or cheeks or eyes or noses. Some had cream-coloured plastic tubes jutting forward from their throats: the tracheostomy I'd been promised.
The room had two beds: a narrow but fully adjustable hospital bed for me, and an even narrower put-u-up for Nigella, one of the bonuses of a private room being that she was allowed to stay with me. My bed was surrounded by pipes and vacuum jars and emergency buttons. It was a bed for an ill person, a person who'd lost control of his own destiny and was in thrall to the doctors and nurses who knew how to suck the fluids into the vacuum jars and deliver the emergency oxygen and do whatever it was 1 wouldn't be able to do for myself after the operation.
There seemed no particular reason to get into my pyjamas, and so we lay on the bed watching television while a procession of nurses and technicians came and took samples of my blood and measured its pressure and did all those other little tasks which made me feel like a condemned man being made healthy for the gibbet.
Mr Patel, a handsome and rather shy young Indian registrar, came in and took us through the operation again. This time we got the six hours described in precise detail. Patel explained under precisely what circumstances they would or wouldn't open my jaw like a book, give me a tracheostomy, do any of the work which, in my mind at least, counted as a worst-case scenario.
'I think it's better if you understand what's happening before you start,' he said. 'It's easier to go through something when you know what it is you're going through.'
He was right: as Patel described the operation it became a matter of mechanics and hydraulics, of car maintenance rather than life saving. It's funny, though, how fashions change. It's not so long ago that most hospital doctors would have said that the best way to calm an anxious patient was to tell them as little as possible. Somebody told that their jaw will be prised open like a book can only worry; somebody told merely that a lump will be removed will go into the theatre in a state of tranquillity.
Until, of course, they wake up and feel the metal pins holding their jaw together and find they can't open their mouth to scream.
Either way, though, the fact is that it's impossible for the intact body to conceive of this sort of operation as anything but a mime. Like a child imagining death as eternity spent conscious in a wooden box, I could only think of the operation in its most mechanical terms.
At some point Mr Rhŷs Evans came to visit and I said that he hadn't actually mentioned the trick with the split jaw when we last spoke, and he said really? he was sure he had, although the cameras being on him as he described the operation hadn't helped. In any case, he said, he didn't know yet whether that was the way he'd go in. Somehow he managed to make me feel good about all the things that nobody yet knew – the way the surgery would be carried out, the number and nature of the tubes I'd have in me afterwards, the chances I had of living through all of this.
I asked whether I was needed for anything else that day and Rhŷs Evans looked around the medical team which had come with him into the room, and they all said that no, they'd taken all the bits of me they needed to take for the time being. We'd already agreed that once the fluid samples had been taken and the tests run, I could go off until bedtime, but I asked whether there was any real reason why I had to be back that night given that I wasn't needed to play my part in the drama until midday tomorrow. Knowing about hospital bureaucracy I already knew the answer, but again Rhŷs Evans looked around. Was there any particular reason why I had to be back until the next morning? Nobody could think of one. To my amazement I was let out. As long as I was back by 8 a.m. I had a temporary reprieve.
Nigella and I went home and decided to book a table somewhere congenial for what would, in any circumstance, be our last proper dinner for a while. Ruthie Rogers, a good friend and so often a solace in so many ways, gave us a table at her River Cafe, and we ate well, and laughed, and drank just enough, and afterwards we walked along the Thames in the dark, arm in arm. We came to a brightly lit school hall of some sort where, on the other side of the glass, a couple of dozen men and women of every age were involved in some sort of ballroom dancing lesson. I can't tell you why we both found watching these happy people bumping into each other so incredibly moving, but we stood by the river and smiled at each other.
We walked back chattering about everything except the operation. It wasn't a question of repressing, or blocking or avoiding, just that with so little time left for us to be normal together, we wanted to make the most of it.
We drove home and lay together in our bed for what was to be the last time as the couple we had been for eight years.
Tomorrow I would become somebody else.
# Chapter 8
I had fallen among nurses.
There are various versions of what happened when I came round. Nigella's is that she turned up and found me dozing, clutching a clipboard on which were scrawled the words 'Absolutely fucking wonderful. And you?', which heavy irony was apparently aimed at some poor nurse who'd seen I'd come to and asked how I was feeling.
Bywater's slightly more surreal version is that he found a scribbled note which he swears preceded any other and which read, simply, 'Nebbish', the Yiddish word to describe a person to whom wretched things are always happening. I like Bywater's version better, describing, as it does, a man who rises to the majesty of Yiddish _in_ post-operative _extremis,_ but given that Nigella arrived so soon after I came round in what I still think of as Intensive Care but which hospitals, just to rub it in, now call the High Dependency Unit, she probably has it right.
In fact I had slept through the night and woke for the first time at five the next morning, and my true first scribble said 'Where's Nigella'. Nigella had been sent home the night before on the basis that she had some rough nights in front of her and could probably use all the sleep she could get.
Certainly when she turned up I remember writing a second note which read – 'chillingly', Nigella now says – 'Can you see a tongue in there'. She looked, and then passed me her powder-compact mirror so that I could look myself.
There was a tongue. There was more than a tongue. As a nine-month-pregnant mother is with child, so my mouth was with tongue. It was filled with livid pink tongue from roof to floor and covering the teeth from side to side. Bloated tongue was all there was.
I looked more carefully, bringing the mirror towards my face because I couldn't move the tongue any further forward. Or backward. Big as my tongue was, it was completely immobile. It was also, I noticed, slightly more swollen on one side than the other, and along a diagonal line from front right to back left there was a valley which dipped down to the invisible sutures where the two halves had been sewn back together. It was also pointed at the front, like the tongue of some unknown reptile.
Thinking back I realised there would have to be a tongue in there: the last thing I did before we left for home the day before was sign the standard form consenting to the operation on which I'd scribbled a rider specifying that they'd have to wake me up if it became apparent that a total glossectomy – a full removal of the tongue – was needed. Rhŷs Evans had considered it entirely unlikely: it would only be necessary if the cancer had spread to the jaw and gums and, as importantly, to the veins and arteries which would communicate it to other, more distant, parts of the body. My feeling was that if things had gone that far then for the first time in all of this I might have a choice – between living for _n_ months or years with a tongue or living for slightly longer without one. It might well have been that I'd have gone for a short life but a gabby one.
But if a tongue was there – or part of one, at least – what was missing?
I looked down at my forearm. It was complete. Both of them were. No plastic surgery. Which might mean – I held up the mirror again: my chin was swollen almost beyond recognition, but it was whole, and at the tip of it was the distended remembrance of a cleft. Small mercies indeed, but I'd stopped being surprised by the events I now found merciful. So far I knew this: I'd had enough tongue removed to cause the remnant to swell up like a toy balloon, but not so much had been taken that I needed plastic surgery. They'd gone in through my mouth rather than through my chin and – and I was alive.
All of which probably makes me sound rather more alive than I felt.
I remember that one of my last thoughts had been that all else aside, the thing which would scare me most on waking was being too dazed to know why I was dazed, why I was in pain, why I was in this strange bed connected by tubes to God knows what equipment. In fact I realised where I was and why as quickly as one does on waking in a strange hotel room after a night on the booze. It seemed reasonable, for instance, that I had to write a note to the nurse rather than talk to her. As for the pain, well there was none to speak of. There was discomfort, certainly, because like some groggy Gulliver I was pinioned to the bed by a dozen tubes, but no pain. At the time I think I believed this was a matter of luck rather than the morphine that one of the tubes was, I later learned, pumping into me.
The tubes were all over me. Two were poked into holes in either side of my neck, draining fluid away from where the lymph glands had been removed; one entered my windpipe via my nostril so that I could get some air past the tongue which was filling the whole of my oral cavity; one entered my stomach via my other nostril and would eventually be connected to the bottles from which dripped my foul liquid meals. There was a tube sending antibiotics into my arm and another one sending glucose into the other arm and a third feeding an arm with morphine. There was also a tube connected to a catheter shoved up my urethra and carrying away my urine. (Here's a tip for the gents in the audience. If anyone ever asks if he can poke a catheter up your urethra and leave it there for a few days, tell him no. They will say it doesn't hurt and express surprise when, on pulling it out a few days later, they have to scrape you off the ceiling. Avoid.) Finally I had a line connected at one end to a plastic ring around my finger and at the other to the familiar beeping machine which monitored various cardiovascular attributes.
There were other tubes draped around me waiting for their turn: Oxygen lines, suction tubes, tracheostomy tube.
And this was what life was like after the low-key, no plastic surgery version of the operation. I couldn't imagine what it would be like if on top of the partial glossectomy I was also dealing with a forearm transplant. (Some months later Bywater, who'd been so gung-ho about the usefulness of every promised aspect of the operation, told me that this was a good one to avoid and let slip that he knew somebody who'd been split up the chin and that he was in desperately serious pain for a couple of weeks afterwards.) In fact I learned subsequently that the choice was wider than that between split-chin and down-the-throat. Depending on my surgeon, on his skill, and on what he found when he opened my mouth up, there were any number of ways of getting to the tumour. They could have made a hole in the side of my face and gone in that way, or come from just above my throat and through the bottom of my jaw. Both those methods would have involved dealing harshly with a major lingual nerve and effectively paralysing one side of the remainder of my tongue for good. As it was, I'd lost a large lump of tongue, but the rest of it still had its full complement of nerves.
I woke, I dozed off, I woke, I dozed off.
Although I had been booked to go into surgery at midday, I finished up being trollied into the lift down to the basement operating theatre an hour or so late: Rhŷs Evans had a couple of quick procedures to knock off before mine and one of them took slightly longer than expected. By this time, though, I was pre-med-ed up to my eyeballs and didn't much mind either way.
The BBC had got permission from the hospital for its cameras to follow me from my room to the door of the ante-room to the theatre where I'd be given the anaesthetic. For all the right televisual reasons Olivia Lichtenstein had filled rather too many of my last pre-operative minutes with penetrating 'How do you feel' questions, and actually arriving at the theatre had been something of a relief. But then the whole affair felt like a scene from a TV play: with my head pinioned on to the trolley I would only see people – anaesthetists, nurses, wives – when they poked their heads into my field of vision. In the last moments before the anaesthetist got to me I was more concerned with the camera shot than I was with what was about to happen to me.
Until now all my medical dealings had been with doctors. Now I was bed-bound I saw my doctors only when they did their morning and evening rounds but the nurses were around all the time. On the High Dependency Unit I had a side ward – mainly in deference to the cameras, lest they catch a glimpse of another patient – and a collection of smiling uniformed men and women who slipped in and out to change drips, note the readings of the various bits of machinery and generally make sure I was still alive. A day after I came round I was given my slippers and dressing gown and sent for a walk around the main ward supported between Nigella and one of the nurses on the basis that the less time I was highly dependent the better.
The nurse suggested I walk to the end of the corridor and back. Instead I shuffled to the end of the corridor, past the hospital's hairdressing salon, across the landing above the gloomy painting of sometime benefactor Mrs Burdett-Coutts and the leather sofa on which I'd occasionally see crying families just given the worst news, past the entrance of my home ward, and back to the unit again. This was generally judged by the nurses to be the long-distance walk of a superman, of a man so nearly recovered from the major surgery of a few hours ago as to be miraculous. I was sure they said that to all the tubed-up boys just out of theatre, but I felt immensely proud of myself.
My trip round the rest of the ward gave the me the first real sign of what the deal was here. It was the quietest hospital ward I'd ever seen either as patient or visitor. In a permanent twilight everyone was either recovering from recent surgery or in some relapsing state which called for intensive care. In one bed was an Arab woman, rendered un-Semitically whey-faced, and unconscious for all the time I was on the ward, obviously sinking fast and surrounded by female relatives moaning slightly; across from her was a man, alone and unvisited, recovering silently from some major piece of surgery which had left him as heavily tubed and bandaged as me. Patients would be slipped in and out of the ward under cover of dark, but all of them _looked_ like patients: bandaged and be-tubed, yes, but also with faces drawn, staring eyes lacklustre, cheeks sunken. These were people in real trouble, and for the first time I felt as if I were in trouble too.
On the second day Mr Rhŷs Evans appeared, surrounded by his corps of registrars and housemen and women, to give me details of how much trouble I was in.
It could have been worse.
The tumour and the surrounding tissue turned out to be the size of a golfball, which meant we'd moved on to a whole new lump metaphor scale. When they took the lump out of my neck and still thought it was benign, they told me it was the size of a Clementine. But now my lumps were malignant we'd moved away from the fruit lump scale – grape, kumquat, Clementine, melon – and over to the more worrying sporting lump scale on which men were felled by lumps the size of rugby balls. How everyone could have missed an extraneous lump that big was beyond me, but this wasn't a time to start complaining. Even, of course, if I'd been in any position to complain.
The good news was found in my lymph glands. As each gland was popped out of my neck during the operation, it was rushed down to Dr Cyril Fisher (a man I'd not yet met but who was to become one of my favourite Marsdenites) in the histopathology department. Fisher and his team would immediately freeze the gland, slice off some microscopically thin slivers in a microtome, douse each sliver in a stain which would show its constituent parts more readily, shove it under a microscope, determine whether it was cancerous or not and send the glad word back up to the theatre.
All the glands on the left side of my neck – which is to say the ones which had been irradiated over the previous six weeks – were entirely cancer free. There were a couple which had a few cancerous cells on the right-hand side, but there was a buffer zone of cancer-free glands at the top and bottom of the chain of glands. This meant that although the cancer had spread locally it hadn't spread to any distant sites. Or, at least, if it had it wasn't via the usual lymphatic route.
Not all the news was good, though. Rhŷs Evans and his team hadn't been able to take out as much of a cuff of healthy tissue around the tumour as they had wished. He spoke equivocally, and I couldn't quite be sure whether I was right in my suspicion that this meant there was an area where there was no cuff at all. This would be doubly worrying: worrying on the first count because everything at the moment was worrying, and on the second because leaving a big margin is the only way a surgeon can be fairly certain of having excised the whole of a tumour.
Either way this meant that once I was sufficiently recovered from my operation I had to have a second six-weeks' worth of radiotherapy, this time to the right-hand side of my neck and to most of my tongue, in order to mop up any stray cancer cells which the knife might have missed.
I groaned. Those last days of the first radiotherapy sessions were still close enough for me to be able to smell the depression and the frustration. I wasn't sure that I could face another lot.
Like there was a choice.
On the third day they told me again about the body's miraculous recuperative powers and talked about moving me back to Weston Ward. Bywater popped in on the way to the Chelsea arts club and looked at the dials on the bits of machinery.
'Olympian,' he said, as if sarcastically. 'Look at that heart rate. Look at that blood pressure.'
I beamed to myself. I knew it was Bywater's magnificent overstatement – he has a way of conferring compliments by offering them as insults – but the truth was that with my lungs cleared of Marlborough fumes and my frame free of a few stone I was probably in a better condition to undergo eight hours of surgery than I had been for years. My heart was strolling at a reasonable 60-odd beats a minute, my blood was calm in my slack veins. Sick as I was, I was also, and possibly for the first time in my life, healthy.
I beamed because mat was the only immediate way I could communicate, and even then the bruising in my mouth meant it was a fairly crooked beam. The most immediate cause of my dumbness was the tube passing down my windpipe and stopping my vocal cords from moving. Until the tube was removed I'd have no idea of how impaired my speech would be. Certainly the pre-operative impression given by Rhŷs Evans and Breach was that I'd have, as it were, the conversational equivalent of a slight limp for a while. A few days before the operation I'd had a call from Stephanie Kingham, a speech therapist who had worked at the Marsden and was now in private practice. She'd been reading the column and listening to me on radio and said that she'd known that there was some problem with my tongue: to her professional ear it had sounded 'tethered'.
We'd talked about what sort of therapy I'd need and how impaired my speech was likely to be, and although the degree of impairment would obviously be dependent on the amount of tongue they took out and the route they used to get at it, she seemed to think there was no reason why I shouldn't be broadcasting again three months later in November, when I was booked to present the last series of _Fourth Column_ and another series of _The People's Parliament_ on Channel 4. And now even though I couldn't utter a word, the fact that there had been no need for plastic surgery suggested that this would, indeed, be a temporary state of affairs.
I was wrong – again – as it happened, but meanwhile I had a clipboard and pen. A couple of days later I had something better than that: Douglas Adams had used his status as Britain's Greatest Comic Science Fiction Writer to borrow an Apple Powerbook for me from the makers, which allowed me to play Stephen Hawking by typing my irritable thoughts on to the screen and having them read out in a robotic voice on the computer's speaker. It seems to work for Hawking, but whenever I typed anything the person to whom I was cyber-talking would always wander over and watch the screen and read... the... words... out... loud... in... a... bright... and... infuriating... monotone... as... I... typed... them.
On the fourth day I returned to Room F at the Weston Ward. They came and told me in the morning that I'd be going back, and so Nigella and I collected up my things, hooked up the tubed accessories to a mobile hatstand-on-wheels affair, and started to walk the few yards down the corridor to the ward. It wasn't until some days later that I learned that I was the first person in recent memory to walk out of the High Dependency Unit and that everyone else left in a wheelchair. Or, of course, in a box.
The news should have made me cheerful, but my mood had swung and all I could think of was the irony. It's taken me all these years to discover that I have the constitution of an ox, and here I am maybe about to die.
But mood swings go both ways. I had my own bed in my own room; it was summer and the sun was shining; every afternoon there was _Columbo_ on the TV suspended above the bed, every night and morning there was Nigella looking beautiful and breathing gently in the put-u-up on the other side of the small room. If God wasn't exactly in his heaven then He had surely popped out for only a short while.
In my hypochondriacal days, just a lifetime or so ago at the start of the year, the prospect of a bed in hospital seemed to me to be an ideal one. I remember there used to be a sitcom on the box called _Only When I Laugh_ which had as its premise the idea that a pair of malingerers had conspired to stay in adjoining hospital beds for long enough to construct a couple of seasons of sitcoms around them. There seemed to be nothing odd about an illness – who can remember what it was or whether it was ever specified? – chronic enough to keep them in hospital but benign enough to allow them to take an active part in each week's plot. More, there seemed nothing odd about them _wanting_ to stay in hospital for as long as possible, in a bed made up for them daily, with piles of books at one side, a TV at eye level, friendly nurses on call 24 hours a day.
And from my hypochondriacal point of view there was the added advantage of having qualified medical people right on hand to thump my chest, or inject the adrenalin, or explain that the pain was only indigestion.
But that wasn't how it felt now. Rather than comforted, I felt dislocated. This was the time I wanted to be at home, in our bed, with the kids in the next room. This bed was uncomfortable with its slippery plastic mattress cover below the sheets and the pillows which wouldn't settle properly.
And then there was the food. I wouldn't be able to eat in the normal way, I knew, for some weeks although I wasn't quite sure at the time what form my not being able to eat would eventually take. Instead the feeding tube which entered my stomach through my nostril was hooked up to something called _Jevity –_ a name coined by somebody with a shaky grasp on etymology and who thought 'longevity' had its true root at the arse-end of the word. Jevity comes in half-litre bottles, is beige in the way that old ladies' knickers in Fenwick's are beige, and is 500 malodorous calories' worth of assorted fats, fibres, proteins, triglycerides, vitamins and other life-sustaining oddments. The half-litre took two hours to be pumped into me by a little blue electric pump that was forever tripping over its own whirring innards and becoming blocked and sending out a shrill beep to alert the nurses and to wake me up. I needed 2,000 calories a day, or four bottles of Jevity, to give me the energy to get over the operation; it meant some eight hours a day hooked up to the pump. One day, I was told brightly by a nurse, my stomach would be strong enough to receive Jevity pumped in at twice the speed. It seemed a pretty miserable goal to aim for.
And so I spent the days in a state of enforced surliness with the pump whirring food down my nose, the tubes draining off all my excess fluids and keeping the morphine topped up. Jemima would come in with a tiny video camera and take footage of me looking irritable, Bywater would come in and tell me about his love life, Ruthie came in a couple of times with some videos and a pair of beautiful blue crumpled linen trousers. I tapped out a couple of snarling columns on the lap-top complaining about my situation and readers started sending me _nil desperandum_ letters care of the hospital. I scribbled messages to everyone who'd read them complaining about everything: the painkillers not turning up on time, the painkillers turning up too early, the suction tube not working properly... and what I was really complaining about was being in hospital.
The problem with major surgery – any surgery – is that there is no real way of anyone telling you how it will be when you come round. I'd had conversations with various of the medical people and although nobody goes into any great detail about the tubes and the bed, I had some idea of the wreckage that my physical form would suffer – that I'd be cut, and bandaged, and scarred. And I'd guessed that I'd feel pretty miserable, although misery wasn't really the term to describe the mixture of drug-dampened pain, irritation and physical constraint. But nobody can tell you how it feels to be that post-operative person, the person who is lying there waiting for the new chapter to start and with no idea of how that chapter will read. I knew that everything that had been done to me would have a permanent effect, but I couldn't say what that effect – on my constitution, my looks, my voice, my career, my persona – would be. I lay there and contemplated the new me and was frustrated by the shallowness of contemplation which was possible.
By the third day back on the ward my tubage had lessened somewhat. They'd taken the drains out of my swollen neck and now I could walk to the lavatory I didn't need the catheter. The regular morphine had been replaced by an occasional fix, but most of the pain relief came from an assortment of lesser analgesics. Above all, the breathing tube which had been flattening my vocal tubes was taken out and I could talk.
'Talk', I say. I could honk is what I could do. I could splutter. I could dribble. Occasionally I could get somebody to understand a word. But with much of the back of my tongue missing and the rest of it swollen where the Y-shaped slash had been stitched together, I couldn't talk. Each morning I would make up a solution of disinfectant mouthwash and scrub around my mouth with a piece of foam on a stick, using my fingers to lift my flaccid and unmuscled tongue out of the way to get at the floor of my mouth.
Again, I might have guessed that the immediate effect of the operation would have been that my speech would be impaired; the other side-effects were entirely unguessable. I hadn't considered, for instance, saliva. Although I should by now have been short at least one saliva gland following the radiotherapy, the others were making up for the loss and I was producing litres of the stuff. Pre-operatively that would have been no problem: we swallow the saliva that is extraneous to that which we need for eating and general lubrication. But before we can swallow we have to get the liquid to the back of the throat, a fairly basic glottal manoeuvre undertaken by the muscly tongue. Not mine, though. I had no way of getting the saliva to my throat. It would gather in pools at the front of my mouth and at the sides and leak out when I opened my mouth. Worse, it wasn't the thin liquid that constitutes most of the world's saliva deposits, but, thanks to the radiotherapy and the operation, a thick and glutinous jelly. I would have washed out my mouth with cold water, if I'd been able to swallow and if I'd been allowed water to drink. The only way of getting rid of it was to stick the suction tube at the side of my bed into the maw and poke around until it was all cleaned out and the jar of evil-looking gloop into which the tube ran was a little fuller.
All of which might have been a little easier if I could have slept, for when I thought of hospital beds it was sleeping that I really imagined: life as a single extended lie-in with nobody to kick you in the shins and ask you to make a cup of tea. But every time I got near sleep my bloated tongue would loll back into my throat and I'd come back to woozy wakefulness, gagging. Despite the sleeping pills and the morphine I didn't get more than an hour's sleep for most of the time I was in hospital.
That time had started off as 'Ten days to two weeks' in Rhŷs Evans' estimation, and then fixed itself at two weeks in his conversation as if the ten-day option had never been there, and on the day before I went under he mentioned in passing that, of course, after two or three weeks in hospital... The way things were going it was a matter of time before they were talking in months.
By the fifth day – the second on Weston Ward after three on the High Dependency Unit – I couldn't face the thought of the nine days – at least – which were to come. I was going stir crazy. I wasn't sleeping, couldn't talk, couldn't think. I would lie there watching 3 a.m. turn into 4 and into 5 and then 6, listening to the small night-time noises of the ward outside, of the Fulham Road and the dawn-waking pigeons, to the whirr of my feeding pump, and I would seethe. And as I seethed the plastic sheeting beneath me would crackle in the heat.
At five in the morning of that fifth day I lost it. I hadn't had any painkillers that night, not least because I was taking them on an as-needed basis and I hadn't remembered to ask for any. When the nurse popped her head round to check on me I exploded. Why had I not been given any painkillers? What was going on? Didn't they have any bloody pillows that didn't have that sweat-making plastic covering? The nurse got it full force and left to get me some pain relief. Nigella, lying on the floor like a stereotypical Indian wife, sprang up from the doze which was as much as she ever managed in hospital.
I screamed, literally, and started thumping the walls with my fist. I couldn't stay here any longer. I was going. Now.
In my mad rage I started getting dressed, pulling out tubes as I went. Nigella rushed to get a nurse and tell her that her husband, still hooked up to a few tubes, still eating and breathing postoperatively, was crashing around his room, trying to leave the hospital.
The nurse strode into my room. She was an older woman, unflappable, with the look of one who had seen more idiots try to discharge themselves than I'd had hot dinners. Not that I'd had many of those recently. Fine: if I wanted to discharge myself, that was up to me and, as I knew, there was nothing they could do about it. On the other hand, I could wait a couple of hours for the consultant to turn up on his early morning rounds, and talk with him about my problem.
Mad as I was I understood that it would be madder not to wait.
I lay on the bed watching the breakfast news and with my seethe burbling away in the background, while Nigella, still unsure whether this was a temporary rage or the start of some more permanent flippery, humoured me gently.
At 8 a.m. Mr Breach turned up: Rhŷs Evans was away that week and Breach was taking the ward rounds. I assumed that he'd been primed before he got to my room: certainly he approached me with the smiling equanimity of one who knows the conversation may go in any direction. More, with his team around him there was some hint that I was presenting a particular clinical problem – post-operative cancer patient goes berserk and starts beating walls – from which they could all learn.
We went through the usual morning routine: check swelling, look at vital signs, talk about pain control – and then Breach asked what the problem seemed to be in a way which implied the words 'old boy' at the end of the sentence without actually saying them. I told him. About the lack of sleep, and the crackling bed, and the feeling of dislocation. And then, because put like this my list of complaints seemed absurdly short for all the madness I was attaching to it, I told him again.
Breach shrugged and turned to the nurse in attendance. What exactly was the hospital doing for me that couldn't be done at home? I was breathing on my own and the two drains had been taken out of my neck a couple of days earlier. All my pain relief now came in tablet form and I was due to get my last antibiotic drip that afternoon. The only tube that had to stay in was the one running down my nostril and into my stomach carrying the Jevity. Would it be possible, Breach asked, for me to borrow a pump from the hospital and take it and a few dozen bottles of Jevity and go home?
There was a very brief silence while everyone considered this as if it were some sort of physics problem which they knew they should be able to answer but still couldn't quite compute. The nurse gave the answer, and a very Marsden answer it was too in its patient-centredness: no – there was absolutely no reason at all why what was being done for me here couldn't be done at home provided the district nurse was given due warning.
That afternoon I went home, almost to die within the fortnight.
# Chapter 9
Just as there are those who still believe that notwithstanding the disappearance of the Berlin Wall, the flotation of the rouble and the departure of most of the staff of _Marxism Today_ to the leader offices of the national broadsheet press, Marx was as right now as ever he was in 1848 or 1917 or 1968, so in our post-Freudian age Nigella is one of the last of the unreconstructed Freudians. I believe that Freud's heart was in the right place and that he cobbled together some reasonable theories out of some dodgy observations, which is more than can be said for Jung or Adler, but Nigella is a Freudian like the Pope is a Catholic. OK: bad analogy for it's not that she treats Freud as a religious figure but that within certain marginal aspects of the human condition – all human emotions and interaction, for instance – she believes that his theories explain most things.
Not long ago she offered me a personal Freudian theory which she assumed I wouldn't agree with. There was some level, she said, at which my partially missing tongue was the equivalent of my being castrated. Perhaps it wasn't an absolute equivalent, but I certainly saw her point.
As the swelling of the tongue started to go down it became apparent that this wasn't, after all, the glottal equivalent of a broken leg: it needed more than bed rest and my keeping my weight off it to get back to its old form. If, indeed, there was any chance of it getting back to its old form.
Those of us not employed in any of the anatomical professions think of the tongue as the flap which extends from the top of the throat to the front of the teeth or, if we stick the flap Out, a little further still. But the great mass of the tongue is behind and beneath that flap, the muscular stanchion which roots it to the throat, and it was mainly from this that the tumorous golf ball had been snatched. The tongue is muscle: it is infinitely movable along its length. To say 'tea' you need to be able to touch the tip of the tongue to the front of the roof of the mouth; to say 'cocoa' you need to be able to do the same at the back of the mouth. The sounds of the language require us to poke the tongue forwards, bend it in the middle, flick it up, use it to scrape the back of the teeth.
I could do none of these things. My tongue had been dragged back to cover the golf ball-sized hole and I couldn't get its tip to touch my teeth at the front. It wouldn't move up, or down or sideways; indeed the only voluntary movement I could see in the mirror was a slight twitch at the back of the tongue – perfect for the East London glottal stop which I'd spent a lifetime trying to get rid of, but pretty useless for much else.
To say I lived by my voice would be overstating the case, but not by much. Certainly in the most literal sense between a third and a half of my working week involved throwing my voice around one sort of broadcasting studio or another, and another third involved my phoning people up to ask them questions the answers to which I could quote in a paper or magazine. If nothing else, I understood that my living for the next few months would have to be made from writing about my own thoughts rather than asking others for theirs.
But it wasn't the professional problem which left me feeling impotent. We all have self-images which may be based on a fallacious reading of how we present ourselves to others but which are, nevertheless, the way we believe ourselves to be. Like a page 3 girl who believes that she is described entirely by her breasts so I believe my personality to be almost entirely manifest in what I say and the way that I say it, that people respond to me not because I am good or kind or have a face which encourages response, but because of the words I speak. There is part of me which believes, for instance, that I have never taken a woman to bed but that I talked her there, that I have never got a job but that I talked my way into it.
The fact is that I _am_ talking: talking is what I do. Fair enough, I'm not Oscar Wilde or Moss Hart but to have a riposte or a description or a question sitting there on my lips waiting to be shot into the conversational melee and not being able to shoot it was emasculating. And though there may be plenty who say that my old verbal incontinence was a bad thing, that it made me facile and unthinking, I enjoyed being the person I was pre-operatively and I found now that there were times when not only did I not enjoy the condition I found myself in, but that I didn't enjoy being the person I now was. Pre-operatively I was profligate with words, throwing away jokes and cracks and little sarcasms to fill up the spaces between thoughts. Now no word was wasted. I used the words I needed to use but there was a second busy dialogue playing – but only to me – in the background.
I realised what was happening when one day Nigella said something with which I agreed and to which I meant to respond 'Absolutely!' But the word which came out was 'Yes'. It was a footling thing, I knew, but the John Diamond who says 'yes' is a different person from the one who says 'absolutely'.
Worse, I found myself having depressed and depressing thoughts about who this made me. I found myself forced to entertain the thought from time to time: would the people I love love me, know me, have taken trouble with me, if this is I how I was when they first met me? Would my friends, friends in whom I've never had a doubt, have become my friends if when we first met I'd been a wounded, honking mute unable to respond to the simplest question without dribbling? Would I be with Nigella, come to that? Would I have the kids?
I knew I had entered the twitchy land of Jimmy Stewart in _It's a Wonderful Life,_ but I also knew that the answer to most of those questions was almost certainly 'no'. It had to be: I didn't have any friends who were honking dribblers and I was the only honking dribbler among my friends' friends. Perhaps it should be otherwise: perhaps we should all have gone out and clutched the halt and the lame to our urbane bosoms and discovered that underneath the superficial fact of their deafness or dumbness they were born-again Woody Aliens – but we didn't. And so, I deduced, it must follow mat I was not now the person my friends befriended, my wife married.
It was, I understood, an equation born in late-night depression, for once one starts totting up the what-ifs in a middle-aged life one can get badly, if temporarily, hurt. But the fact remained: I was not me any more. That my friends seemed to be willing to do almost anything for me was, I believed in those mad moments, almost worse: they were responding to who I was before the operation rather than who I had become after it. I believed then that in a month or two the various therapies would be over and that I would be the chattering classes' Mr Facile all over again, but meanwhile this is what disease does to us. It wrecks our faces and our voices and any talents we may have lying around, and then it makes us separately depressed so that we're unable to deal with the wreckage.
And so, back in the comfort of my own home, I started moping. I was still in pain but without the hospital's timetabled regime I found that I was skipping painkillers because I couldn't remember when I'd taken the last lot. For much of the time I was still attached to the Jevity pump which I'd sped up slightly but which still took the best part of six hours of the day away from me.
I started behaving like a crotchety invalid – snapping at Nigella and the children, throwing the occasional wild-eyed wobbler. Nigella got the brunt of it and, worse, suffered uncomplainingly. She had been the one who had got up at 6 a.m. every morning we shared a room in hospital so that she would be at home when the children woke, but, hey, I was the one with cancer and never mind that the physical and mental toll it took on Nigella was vast: how could she complain?
I would go into long rages: I'd imagine myself suddenly able to drink a cup of coffee or eat a soft cheese sandwich and when I found I couldn't – why did I think I could? – hurling the coffee or the sandwich across the room. The Gestalt merchants would have said this was just the sort of anger therapy I needed, but it was lousy therapy for Nigella and the children.
Worse, though, was the depression. Every apparent step forward, every signpost on the way to possible recovery seemed to induce in me a massive despondency. The ending of the first radiotherapy sessions had; so had the operation which was due to cut out my cancer. I wouldn't see anybody either personally or – as in the phrase so beloved of doctors 'It might help if you _saw_ somebody?' – professionally, thus making sure that Nigella continued to get the brunt of my misery. A week or so after I got back I unilaterally declined any further treatment at all: I didn't care what effect it had on my illness, I said, I just couldn't bear the state I was in.
And I couldn't. Somehow it seemed worse at home. In hospital being disabled seemed a reasonable state of affairs: at home it turned me into a disabled person, unable to eat or drink or speak properly.
And even worse still: I was clinging to my illness. Apart from Nigella and the children, it was the only constant, the only thing I really understood. My writing about it changed: I was writing to protect something of which I was jealous, something which was starting to describe me in the way that my speaking had described me in the old days.
My relationship with my cancer had changed for another reason too.
When I first started writing about the illness I was, as far as I'd known, a voice alone. I'd never denied that I was writing for entirely selfish reasons and that the writing had been the perfect therapy. I had known, although not well, Martyn Harris who had written in the _Telegraph_ about his own terminal cancer a couple of years earlier and thus I knew enough to counter those readers who wrote to tell me that I was the first to break the taboo. But suddenly cancer seemed to be everywhere. _The Sunday Times_ devoted a whole issue of its colour magazine to it; Michael Korda's tale of his prostate cancer, _Man to Man,_ was all over the place, and, most difficultly, Ruth Picardie was writing about her cancer in the _Observer_ magazine.
I say most difficultly because Ruth, the mother of two-year-old twins, was dying of her illness. It made me feel a fraud. Here was I swinging between jokiness and self-pity each week over a cancer which only had a small chance of carrying me off, and here was a real sufferer who could write about her chemotherapy, her grieving family, her imminent death with a good humour which I felt, in my current bad humour, made my own jocularity look forced.
What is most telling of my feelings at the time is not that I felt fraudulent but that I saw Ruth as a rival in some mad way. I was the journalist with cancer, for God's sake, and here she was, waltzing on to the page with her own terminal disease and showing me up. Worse: here she was _making me cry._ I confessed this to a couple of friends who were mutual to Ruth and myself and they told me I was mad, which is comforting in hindsight even if it wasn't at the time.
But still I had the feeling that I had become part of some sort of bandwagon. Not long after Ruth started writing her epistles from her deathbed I received an e-mail from Roy Greenslade, a close friend who had been my editor years ago when I was on the _Mirror_ and who was now the most astute of the newspaper media commentators. He was writing a piece for the _Guardian_ on Ruth and me: could I answer some questions? The piece appeared the next week as a summation of all the praise the readers had been writing to me for months now. I found it impossible to deal with, not least because I didn't feel like the person Greenslade was writing about.
The children seemed to take it all in relatively good part. It was easy enough for Bruno: at just over a year old if he knew what I was saying it had nothing to do with whether I said it in purest BBC or in my current voice. For Cosima, at getting on for four, it was rather different. She'd been in to see me in hospital a couple of times and had been generally feted by the nurses and although she realised I was in some discomfort she had no actual reason to believe that there was any danger involved. Come to that, she wasn't really capable of understanding what those dangers might really mean even if we'd thought it proper to explain them to her. She understood that I'd hurt my neck and that this had affected my speech. And in fact she had no problem with not being able to understand me as well as she once had: when she missed a word she simply said 'what?' even if the word she missed was in the middle of some telling off or another.
But occasionally my illness seemed to inform some nascent hypochondria she was developing. She would announce, with no apparent reason, that she had a bad throat, or a sore neck, or that her doll did. It was understandable enough: not so long ago she'd been the centre of attention at home, but first came her brother to share that attention and then for some reason which had something to do with his throat, her father was getting all the notice.
I was still sleeping badly. I'd doze and then just as the doze would be transformed into proper sleep, I'd come round with a jolt. What was happening, it seemed, was that in that transformation my already post-operatively slack muscles would slacken even further: my tongue would loll back, my epiglottis close off, and I would be conscious of not taking in as much air. Part of the problem was, according to Rhŷs Evans, that like a fifth of the population I had a so-called 'infantile' epiglottis: a tightly bunched little thing which choked off part of the airway at the best of times. The nights became a tedious round of dozing and waking, never sleeping. But at least I was dozing and waking in my own bed, with Nigella next to me.
And then a week or so after I came home I woke from not quite sleeping at 2 a.m., unable to breathe. That was OK: I'd woken like this before. Normally a cough would clear the gunge from around my tongue, break the seal, and I'd breathe again. Not this time though. I coughed and coughed, and weak little coughs they were with my lungs blocked off. And so I screamed to Nigella.
'I can't breathe.'
I'd like to be able to tell you that in my moment of need my crippled tongue came good. It didn't. What I screamed out was
'Ny Naunt Reive.'
Nigella leapt out of bed not knowing what to do. I was squatting on the floor at the end of the bed, one hand beating the wall, the other clutched to my throat. She offered a glass of water, a steadying hand.
'Het a Hnblnse!' I screamed. And again. This time Nigella understood; she rang for an ambulance.
'I'm dying,' I said, which, oddly, was an arrangement of sounds my mouth could deal with. It came out as 'I'm dying.'
I certainly believed I was dying and up to a point I was. Until now, close though my encounters with death had been in my own mind, they had something of an abstract quality. Having cancer and its accompanying statistical chance of death isn't the same as being on one's deathbed. Over these past months I had been conscious some of the time that I might die soon, and there are chapters of what you've read so far where I could accurately convey my state of mind only by adding the words 'and the thing is, I might die!' to the end of every sentence and having it printed in a 16-point Hysterical typeface. But for most of the time I felt as conscious as I was before the diagnosis of being on a track which would end at a terminus. The track just felt shorter.
But this was different. This was panic, yes, but the panic was somehow a separate thing from the experience itself. It was like eating breakfast while listening to the radio: you can do either without concentrating on the other. I'm sure Nigella saw it differently, but in my head I felt as if I was concentrating on the experience rather than the panic.
I'd like to be able to tell you that I saw the great light before me, the smiling, beautiful people readying the blissful room to receive me, but I didn't. On the other hand just before I passed out, my feelings of tragic poignancy – a mixture of already missing Nigella and the children and feeling stupid at having cancer but dying of this – were replaced by those of a warm calm. It was, I imagined, the sort of thing which drowning victims are meant to feel just after they've gone down for the third time.
The next thing I knew I was coming round with a mask over my face and some new tubes attached to me in the resuscitation room at the Charing Cross Hospital down the road in Fulham. They had wanted to give me a tracheotomy there and then; Nigella, mindful that portions of my neck and throat had just been rearranged by the country's top head and neck man, made the registrar get in touch with the Marsden, who got word to Rhŷs Evans who instructed that all other things being equal his people should be allowed to cut a new breathing hole in my throat.
Meanwhile I was breathing an oxygen-helium mixture and the gunky blockage had been cleared. There was some worry about the EEG reading: apparently when I'd reached the hospital my oxygen-starved heart was under such a strain there was a suspicion I was having a heart attack. But by the time Rhŷs Evans had been contacted and the Charing Cross people had agreed I could be taken by the Marsden I seemed to be OK.
That night we slept, but barely, on separate trolleys in the resuscitation room and at 9 a.m. the next day an ambulance, complete with flashing light and siren, rushed us round to the Marsden at the other end of the borough. I was put into a ward full of old men for a while and then transferred back into Room F, an old lag being welcomed back to his old cell.
In an hour the porter dropped in to move me down to the theatre for a rather more leisurely tracheotomy than the emergency job I might otherwise have had, and I realised that it held no fear for me at all. Just a year or so earlier I'd allowed the then unsuspected cancer to progress who-knows-how-much further because I was terrified of the idea of a general anaesthetic; here I was now, about to go under for the fifth time (cyst, biopsy, endoscopy, operation, tracheotomy) and thinking nothing of it. But then my reactions to so many things had changed over the months.
Take the pill, for instance.
The episode with the allergist all those years earlier took place while I was waiting for a referral to the stressed-out bastards department of Bart's Hospital. Not long after my 30th birthday I was lying in bed with my then wife, Anne-Marie, a woman who'd been a dance teacher in a school down the road from the one in which I taught drama. At 2 a.m. I woke Annie up screaming in panic: I was, I told her, having (a) a nervous breakdown and (b) a heart attack. I had no chest pain whatsoever, but I was convinced that my heart was giving out. It was the start of my subsequent fear of a heart attack.
This was in the days when family doctors would still come out at 2 a.m. Our man turned up, explained what a panic attack was and gave me a Valium to calm me. Until that moment I'd never had the slightest glimpse of what mental instability might look like, and the new possibilities terrified me. The next morning I turned up at his surgery and he offered me three choices. I could start on a course of sedatives in the hope that everything would go away; I could sign up with a psychiatric social worker; or I could be referred to the shrinks at Bart's. The first sounded dangerous: even then the dangers of Valium addiction were occasioning long articles in the Sunday papers. Psychiatric social work sounded a little low-rent – rather the thing I imagined they might offer teenage single mothers who'd threatened to jump off the top floor.
And so I was referred to Bart's where six months later I was put on the schedule of a psychotherapist. By this time I was working at London Weekend Television, a company with a culture so testosteronish that to have mentioned that I needed time off for therapy would have been to have asked for my cards. And so I agreed with the therapist that I'd be therapied at 8 a.m. each Friday morning.
I tried my hardest to be a good psychotherapeutic patient, but I couldn't do it. She'd turn up ten minutes late and ask me how I felt about her being ten minutes late and I'd say it's OK. She'd say wasn't I angry at her? And I'd say that, well, I imagined the bus didn't turn up: it happens. Eventually I understood that I was meant to get angry, but by the time realisation came she was the one who sat and glowered each week. Or I'd dig deep into my psyche and find something which sounded as if it might be useful about my potty training or my feelings for my brothers, except that I'd get carried away with the part I was playing of therapee and start to elaborate the stories beyond their possible outcome, and she'd glower at me some more.
Eventually I was handed over to the hospital's stress management unit, which was much more the thing, and after six months of that I was sent out into the world to find a therapist of my own.
My years in therapy finished when, a couple of years later, my man persuaded me that we had gone as far together as we were likely to and that what I should really do by way of a therapeutic coda was to turn up at a men's group he was running. This met on the top floor of a villa in Finsbury Park in North London which was given over entirely to various forms of therapy. As I climbed to the attic each week I could hear the rebirthers screaming on the ground floor, the Gestalt clients grunting as they beat their bean-bag mothers with plastic baseball bats on the first floor, the yogis om-ing on the floor above that.
On the top floor a dozen of us sat round in a softly lit beige room and talked about the experience of being a man.
I can't remember what happened on the first week, but on the second a chap asked us for our input with a problem he was having. As regulars knew, he said, he had a pretty full week of therapeutic activity. On Monday he had his intermediate sexuality class and on Tuesday he was doing group therapy. Wednesday was this, his men's group, and Thursday was his long-standing personal therapy session. And on Fridays he was heavily involved with the Gestalt group. The thing was, he said, his therapist had advised that he could usefully take part in a new self-awareness group which he was starting on Saturday afternoons. What did we all think?
We all thought that this sounded like an excellent way to spend a Saturday afternoon: what, after all, could be more useful than another couple of hours of worried introspection? It occurred to me that these weren't people in need of therapy but hobbyists who did therapy like other men went fishing or built model aeroplanes. The only difference was that this was rather more expensive.
But I thought it was unfair of me to drop the group on the basis of this single fatuousness. I went back the next week. This time another member wanted our input. This man was so big that when he waddled over and sat on a beige three-seat sofa there was no room for anybody else on it. He must have weighed well over 20 stone and how he got up to that attic room without suffering cardiac arrest I have no idea.
His problem was that he just could not get laid. He'd tried every way known of meeting girls, but none of them would sleep with him. What did we all think?
We all gave our ideas. Perhaps he wasn't being as honest with them as he might be; perhaps he could use the assertiveness training group which met on Mondays; perhaps a bright new tie would help. This went on for two hours and at no time during that period did anyone – me included – say that the problem might have anything to do with him weighing the same as his car. That was the last meeting I attended.
(In fact I wrote about the meetings a few years later in my _Times_ column, and six weeks later got a pained letter from the group's leader and my ex-therapist. As I read the letter two things were apparent: (a) that most of the people who'd been in the group that night were still meeting together, their problems still unsettled and (b) that my column had been the subject of their meeting for the weeks in between its appearance and their drafting this letter.)
Whatever. I won't pretend that the few years of therapy weren't useful, not least because they staunched the panic attacks fairly soon after they started. But once I'd had the first attack and was aware that this temporary terror could strike at any time I started carrying around a few temazepam – a sedative generally used as a sleeping pill, and a Valium relative. Eventually the pills became the sort of psychopharmacological equivalent of a lucky rabbit's foot and a couple of chipped and flaking pills would sit in a little silver pill case for years without ever running the risk of being swallowed. Nonetheless, I always carried them with me and I had been known to turn round and drive home if, a mile down the road, I patted my trouser pockets and realised that the small lump wasn't there.
I'd been carrying the pill, and its successors, for, I guess, 14 years when Mady phoned that night. But now as I went down to the theatre again I was as pill-less as I had been for three or four months. Talismans seemed, nowadays, to be impotent in the face of real life. And in any case, here I was dealing with real life, unreal as it seemed.
There were times, I admit, when these sorts of personal and internal change tempted me to believe that the cancer was in some way a good thing. Readers would write and suggest that my apparent ability to face up to things wasn't just a silver lining to a nasty black cloud but that there was no cloud at all. There was. For whatever minor psychological benefits I may have been garnering from all this there was nothing of any use happening for Nigella or the children.
I came round from the operation with a plastic pipe poking out of my neck just above the top of my breastbone. The tube was below my vocal cords and so there was no way of getting puff from my lungs to them. I was dumb again.
The trachy – it turns out that we trachy-wearers call them this – was a four-inch arc of plastic tubing which fitted into the hole in my throat and down into my windpipe and was stopped from falling all the way in by a flange on the outer side which was held tight to my neck by a length of white cloth tape. According to the big trachy poster on the inside of the little procedures room off Weston Ward where trachies were changed and cleaned and generally played with, there were ten different tubes to choose from: mine was a cuffed, unfenestrated model. The cuff was a little balloon around the tube which could be pumped up to make a proper seal in my windpipe, and the lack of fenestration meant there wasn't a window in either the main tube or its inner tube.
All of which is rather more than you need to know about trachy tubes other than that they hurt like hell at first and need a lot of looking after in rather the way I imagine false teeth need looking after.
But it wasn't the pain or the hygiene regime which worried me but the fact of the trachy itself. I'd been warned that I might come round from the operation with tracheotomy and gastrectomy tubes already in place: that I hadn't done so meant a lot to me. I was ahead of the odds. But finding myself back on par again was somehow worse than having been given the tube during the operation. I had failed in some way.
# Chapter 10
As if to make up for the illicit time off I'd been allowed at the end of my last visit I was kept in hospital for four nights. Most of the nurses were, for the best reasons, sorry enough to see me back: while there were a couple whose raised eyebrows suggested that they'd told me this was just what happens when naughty little boys go home early, most of them had rightly seen my early departure as a reflection on their skills as much as on my fortitude.
Just before I left this time round they swapped my tube for one which allowed me to speak – a term which I use, you understand, in its very loosest sense. A little plastic valve fitted over the end of the tube and blocked off the airway when I was breathing out, allowing the air to pass through my vocal cords. The tube clicked and gasped with the valve on and any listener had to be particularly well motivated to understand anything I might try and say. Over the tube I wore a Buchanan Bib – a cross between a cravat and a string vest, soaked in water to humidify the tube and opaque to protect the sensibilities of a public which doesn't like to see its fellows walking around with gaping holes in their necks.
The nurses loaded me with the gear I'd need as a trachy-man – brushes, sponge pads, spare tapes – and sent me home.
Nigella was looking after the kids and would be coining to pick me up at 6 p.m. but I was ready earlier: I decided to hail a cab on the Fulham Road just as if I were an ordinary person. Happily there was one which had just set down outside the hospital as I left.
'Where to?' he said.
I tried to give my address but even with my new valve it came out as a series of honks and clicks. No matter: I was realistic. I'd written down the address against just such an eventuality. I started patting my pockets, looking for the note I'd made, honking and dribbling my unintelligible glossectomee's version of 'Hold on' and 'I know I've got it here somewhere'. The cabby looked upset and uncomfortable: I don't know what association he made with my lack of voice but he obviously thought it connected with the pantomime I was going through as I searched for the piece of paper. Eventually I found it and showed it to him and we started off in silence.
The meter read eight pounds when we got home: I handed over a ten-pound note.
'No,' he said, and started to put the cab into gear.
I honked and waved the tenner at him.
'No. I don't want it.'
He looked at me miserably. This was his act of charity. I threw the money down next to his seat. He picked it up, came round and pushed it into one of the carrier bags I was holding.
'No,' he said again, and drove off, angry with my ungraciousness.
Here I was, hale apart from the small portion between my nose and my neck, earning a living, cabbing it to a reasonable home in a reasonable part of town. And what did he see? I really don't know. A man coming home from the cancer ward to die? A mute who, by that definition alone, must need the money?
There had been some depressing moments in those months but none quite so depressing as standing on the pavement watching the cabby drive away without my money, pitying me for an illness I didn't have.
The two carrier bags into which the cabby had tried to stuff my money were marked PATIENT'S PROPERTY in a rather dodgy Wormwood Scrubs sort of way, and contained my latest collection of cancer victim takeaway gear.
It had now been some five months since I'd been diagnosed as having cancer and slightly longer since I had the first operation and was sent home with a grimace and a bottle of painkillers. In the interim I seemed to have collected a small pharmacy and as I threw my latest collection on top of the pile, I took stock.
So far BUPA had bought me:
Four boxes co-proxamol (paracetamol and codeine painkillers);
Four boxes co-codamol (ditto, more or less);
Two large cartons co-codamol dispersible (or soluble to you and me, for the period just after the operation when I couldn't swallow pills);
Two bottles Voltarol (heavy-duty painkiller usually given to mothers post _partum;_ big advantage is that can be taken at the same time as the paracetamol preparations without overdosing. By working out timings and interactions carefully it's possible to take three different painkillers, each marked 'To be taken every six hours' every two hours. It's what we in the suffering business call 'pain management');
Three boxes dispersible Voltarol, raspberry flavoured. Why raspberry? Why not?
One bottle diclofenac. The generic name for Volterol.
One bottle Zantac. Was a treatment for stomach ulcers until they discovered stomach ulcers are caused by a bug. Now used to mollify potential stomach problems caused by Volterol;
Three bottles temazepam. Sedative masquerading as sleeping pill. Bottles almost full. To my amazement haven't felt the need for sedatives and in their sleeping pill guise they don't work against my wakeful epiglottis. Who'd have thought I'd ever have the need to write a sentence which included the words 'my wakeful epiglottis'?
One bottle temazepam elixir. Drinkable sleeping pills;
One bottle lactulose. Laxative for those living on the mmmmm! so-tasty Jevity diet;
Six assorted tracheotomy tubes, plus assorted inner tubes, introduction tubes, blanking plugs and other accessories for the fashionable tracheostomee about town;
Two tubes of KY jelly for sliding tracheotomy tube into the hole in my throat;
Three tracheotomy brushes for cleaning what the nurses delicately call 'secretions' from the tube. Said secretions vary from light covering of phlegm to chunks of hard, brown nastiness cementing the tube to the hairs on my chest. Who'd be a nurse?
One bottle Hydrex. Dangerous pink disinfectant in which tracheotomy brushes are stored;
One bottle cyclizine hydrochloride. Anti-emetic to stop sickness during radiotherapy;
Two bottles metoclopramide. As above, but effective.
One bottle metoclopramide hydrochloride solution. As above but for non-pill-swallowers.
One box co-danthramer capsules. Laxative to overcome constipation caused by morphine.
One bottle amitriptyline hydrochloride. Normally prescribed as an antidepressant, but also has painkilling function. Stopped using it when discovered also has a beating over head with sock full of sand and feel like a zombie for half the day function.
Two large boxes Lyofoam. Sponge pads which sit between the flange of the tracheotomy and the neck to soak up secretions. Have two boxes because accidentally prescribed Lyofoam Red instead of Lyofoam Green. Lyofoam Red lacks hole for tracheotomy. We trachy-types know these things.
100 six-inch-long cotton buds in sterile wraps. Used for removing secretions from between tracheotomy and chest. Twelve disposable forceps. Used for picking the chunkier secretions off.
Two bottles Corsodyl Mint for swabbing round mouth and tongue in act of oral hygiene, now that I live a life where men in white coats regularly ask questions like 'So how's our oral hygiene at the moment?'
Two packs 50 octagonal sponge pads on sticks for sluicing Corsodyl around mouth.
Sundry Buchanan bibs and the like from a company in Leeds which specialises in accoutrements for laryngectomees and tracheyostomees.
100 swabs for holding my tongue with. For the life of me I can't remember why I had to do this.
Four syringes of Instillagel antiseptic lignocaine. The ulcer-numbing gel which I used to such effect on _Newsnight._ Eight plastic syringes, various. These were left over from the period just after my first homecoming when I had to inject antibiotics and dispersible painkillers into my feeding tube. Four antibiotics, various. All now empty and so only in my pharmacy in spirit.
Six orange rubber and glass atomiser sprays for keeping my tracheotomy moist now that the trachea wasn't being bathed in the warm and humid air which comes, oral hygiene permitting, from my mouth.
Six Durogesic 25. The morphine equivalent of the nicotine patch: stick them to somewhere non-hairy and watch them leak morphia into the body for three days. Yowza!
Six Durogesic 50. As above, but double strength.
One box assorted tapes, wipes, syringes, plasters, dressings, creams, lotions, disposable scissors, forceps. Donated to the Diamond surgical archive from time to time and not yet catalogued.
In fact the amount of this rubbish I needed at any one time was rarely in proportion to my condition. Not long after the operation when, by most standards, I was at my illest I needed very few drugs and no hardware. A couple of weeks later, when the swelling was going down and the scar tissue was forming, I was much nearer to good health but stuck on a rota of four different painkillers a day. The tracheostomy brought with it a whole new set of apparatus and lotions and required me to demonstrate an attention to routine which I just couldn't muster.
But the greatest quantities of traffic from the Marsden pharmacy were stored in the kitchen rather than in the bathroom.
I had watched my weight fall gradually from the start of the radiotherapy. At first, as I say, I assumed the loss was entirely due to my eating less; in fact it had much more to do with the tumour. People with cancer lose weight. But now with the golf ball removed I was nominally tumour free and I needed to start putting some weight on – both because I needed some substance in order for the operative wounds to heal and also to prove to myself that there wasn't some undiscovered tumour still eating away at me.
But my weight was dropping. Each week Nigella would report to my new dietitian, Sam White, on what I'd eaten recently and Sam would explain that it wasn't quite enough.
By now I'd stopped hooking myself up to the Jevity bottle, had the tube removed from my nose and was back on my old radiotherapy diet of Build-Up and Ready-Brek. The difference this time was that not only had I lost my sense of taste, but that my throat wouldn't allow anything but liquids to pass. It meant I had to swallow at least 2,000 liquid calories a day, which translated as either eight Build-Ups or half that many Scandishakes, another powdered nutrient which came from the hospital pharmacy rather than from Boots' shelves. Whatever: they were, at best, simply maintaining my weight.
I had transcended the stage I hit during the first radiotherapy course where I became a person stuck at his proper weight: I had become a thin person. When I told people that I was not quite myself I meant it almost literally: in the mirror I was somebody else. Precisely, I was a little old man whom I imagined to be called Albert or Norman or George.
Certainly I was little, or at least littler than I ever have been in my adult life. This wasn't ordinary weight loss – the few pounds you can't face hanging over the top of your bathing trunks, or the wobbly stone that lingers _post partum,_ but real missing weight, whole chunks of corporation, enough spare body to make another small person. By my reckoning, I had lost a leg and a half's worth of me.
And it was an old leg and a half's worth, at that: a leg and a half's worth from the days when my thigh still had its familiar triangular cross-section and my calf bulged over the top of my sock. Now I looked in the mirror and saw a different man looking back, a stranger whose stick legs dropped away from his tiny rump, whose wiry arms were only muscle and bone and ropey vein, a man with very little belly to speak of. I had the new age body that I always associated with the sort of men who dress in draw-string trousers, run primal scream therapy sessions in North London and tell you that they've never felt healthier since they went fruitarian in '87. I couldn't tell the time because the now oversize metal bracelet on my watch allowed the face to swing round to the wrong side of my wrist and Nigella had to buy me a second, smaller, wedding ring to stop the original one, which had once been tight, from falling off.
It meant that for the first time in my life I could share jeans with my partner. Ever since I was a teenager I've thought there was something ineffably cool about men sharing clothes with their partners. I mean, not tights or stilettos, of course, but as a child of tubbiness I always envied those men who would bound out of the college halls of residence in the morning in their girlfriends' Levis.
But wearing Nigella's hipsters was the full extent of my new youthfulness. My new little old manliness had nothing to do with age or even with deterioration, but with my own bodily frailty and the state of my bedroom and bathroom and office, all of which were littered with the little-old-man impedimenta of my new medical routines. The things I had to do each day with orange rubber bulbs, and special stiff brushes dripping pungent pink cleaning fluids were the sort of things that little old men have to do. Three times a day I pottered around the bathroom squeezing bulbs, and cleaning tubes and sluicing parts of my body out and taking pills against pain and swelling and infection.
And as so many of my correspondents were keen to remind me, however sympathetically, hardly any of my squeezing and sluicing or the symptoms which occasioned them had anything to do with the cancer. They were all the product of the cure for cancer ('cure' being a word which all too often they put in quotation marks so as to show how hollow they thought the concept to be). This was iatrogenic illness: illness caused by doctors.
They were right. Iatrogenic illness was just what it was. And there were times when I had to remind myself that it was the iatrogenic illness which was saving my life. The more mealy-mouthed alternativist always suggested there was no difference between a patient suffering the honest iatrogenic illness caused by excising a tumour and, say, the patient who is felled by one of the nasty bugs that inhabit certain hospitals, or the patient who suffers at the hands of an incompetent doctor. Angry as I got with the fact of my cancer and the symptoms of its cure, I never doubted that the alternative to those symptoms was early death.
Nonetheless, in one of those moments of anger and not long after I made a list of the contents of my new medicine cabinet, I wrote a note in my diary listing my current symptoms. Almost a month after the main operation it read:
1. Frozen right shoulder where neck dissection sliced through nerves and muscle. Left hand now extends six inches further above my head than right.
2. Shooting pains in neck and jaw as post-operative numbness wears off and scar tissue starts to build up.
3. Constant bad earache as result of referred pain from scar at back of tongue.
4. Missing saliva glands on left-hand side of throat and part of tongue. (The next lot of radiotherapy would deal with most of the rest of the saliva glands.)
5. Small bald patch at back of head just below larger, natural bald patch.
6. Temporary – I hoped – loss of taste-buds accompanied by burning sensation on tongue when eating food with any taste at all.
7. Slight limp. I'm still not quite sure what caused this but I realised not long after I left the Marsden that I couldn't lift my right foot properly. Worried that the radiotherapy might have hit my spinal column by mistake I was sent off to the National Neurological Hospital in Bloomsbury when a genial man spent an afternoon giving me electric shocks. The best guess of all parties was that I was leant on fairly heavily while under the anaesthetic and that this caused a nerve to be trapped.
8. Oedema around neck and chin. On the one hand all the lymph nodes in the area had been taken away on the other there was now a series of scars which, between them, connected me ear to ear. It would be some months before the various fluids which were hanging around in my new dewlaps would find an escape route.
9. Missing beard on right-hand side of face, the result of radiotherapy.
10. Overproduction of mucus.
11. Overproduction of saliva.
12. Various ulcers around the original radiotherapy site.
13. Sore back. For the most part this was because I'd lost all the fatty padding from around the area, leaving the vertebrae unprotected, and had yet to find a new sleeping position.
14. Impossibly sore throat.
15. Toothache. When I was booked for my second lot of radiotherapy Sarah Howells took out another tooth directly above the one I'd lost on the first round. Apart from the soreness of the toothless gum, the gum below the adjoining healthy teeth had dropped back very slightly leaving me horribly susceptible to pain from hot or cold foods.
16. A rackety and painful night-time cough caused by the mucus and extra saliva slithering down the wrong hole and into my bruised windpipe.
17. At any given time, and depending on the nature of my diet that week, either chronic constipation or chronic diarrhoea.
18. Missing lump of tongue.
I wasn't sure whether the missing tongue counted as iatrogenic: it had, after all, contained the tumour. But as far as some of my correspondents were concerned, even allowing the tumour to be removed showed a dangerous willingness on my part to subjugate myself to medical orthodoxy. Just before the big operation I'd been at a party where a weasel-faced man with a ponytail made a point of bumping into me so that he could tell me that he didn't know why I was making so much fuss about the cancer.
'It is,' he said, not bothering to stretch further than necessary for his cliché, 'all in the mind.' Well not _all,_ perhaps, and he was willing to grant that when the oafs who call themselves doctors looked down their so-called microscopes they might have seen something which they called, in that cynical and arbitrary way doctors have, cancer, but that was, he said, to miss his point.
The thing was that whatever I chose to call my dis-ease (he split the syllables and hardened the first's' because he is the first to have worked out the subtle etymology of the word 'disease') whether I was cured or not was a matter for me to decide. If I got my head right, got my energy levels sorted out, fought the disease in my soul, then I'd kick it. He didn't actually use the words 'vibes' or 'chakra' but it was a pretty close thing.
There was also something about some medical regime practised in Vietnam which was absolutely guaranteed to deal with all nasty western diseases, and stupidly I went for that and asked him why it is that all the best medical systems from the mystic East and deepest Africa come from countries where the average lifespan is that of a World War I pilot with a death wish. (In fact I've since checked: the average male in Vietnam lives only ten fewer years than his British equivalent and I imagine that as he lies dying in middle age he thanks his god that he doesn't have to suffer all that dangerous and imprecise western medicine.)
Ponytail ker-chawed and pointed out that longevity is not a valid measure of national healthiness, and I said that oddly enough it was one which had always worked for me, and we sort of left it at that which was probably just as well because had I tackled him on the question of whose responsibility my cancer is I'd have got angry and he'd have told me about stress levels and I'd have kicked him hard in the chakras, knocking several of his energy meridians severely out of kilter.
'It seems,' I wrote in _The Times_ that week, 'that there is a small space where new age philosophy meets sharp-heeled Thatcherism and it is in the idea that we are all entirely responsible for our individual physical states. In a way, of course, that's true enough: my choice to smoke for all those years, to live in the centre of our smokiest city, to eat full English breakfasts in bad provincial hotels must certainly have taken its toll on heart and artery and bronchial tube.
'And yes, if I still smoked and carried on doing so through the treatment I would accept that I may bear the responsibility for the cure not working. It's the idea of taking spiritual responsibility for a disease once it's been diagnosed which annoys me. For it leads to the idea of the survivor as personal hero – that only those who want to survive enough get through to the end, and the implied corollary that those who die are somehow lacking in moral fibre and the will to live.
'I'll accept that some can grit their teeth and get through the treatments more happily than others, and even that there are various calming regimes which make the treatment slightly more bearable. In terms of responsibility, though, as far as I'm concerned I will be cured only if the surgeons have cut out the right bits of my neck and the radiologists and radiographers have chosen the right bits of my throat to point their machine at.'
In fact, by now the radiologists had found a new place to point their machines at. I'd been back to the Marsden for a new mask to be made up and a new set of interior images to be created on the simulator, and the radiographers in both departments greeted me with a small, tight-lipped, sorry-to-see-you-back smile. Until the final few depressing days of the last 30 sessions I'd usually come into the room with a smile and a joke, and the radiographers usually returned the favour. This time, though, it was different. I would give my own tight-lipped smile each day, strip off my top and heave my shrunken body on to the bench, without a joke or even much of a greeting. Occasionally I'd have a radiotherapist who hadn't been around during my last sessions and who insisted on instructing me in the way of the irradiating wave. I wanted to tell them that I'd now been smacked on the neck with irradiation 40 or 50 or whatever times, thanks all the same, but it was too much effort, and so I would just glower at them.
True, last time all my tongue was still there and it was easier to joke, but this time we all seemed to understand that the odds had changed.
Changing odds must be the unchanging condition at the Marsden. For so long now one of the thoughts which had sustained me was that however terrible a state some of the people I saw at the hospital looked to be in, somebody here, somebody who knew about cancer reckoned it worth their while trying to find the right treatment. The prematurely and artificially bald man who could only move to the radiotherapy room by clinging to his wife's shoulders and moving in tiny, painfully slow steps: somebody thought it worth giving him radiotherapy. The wan, stick-thin woman glimpsed in one of the day wards on the ground floor: somebody who knew what they were talking about had decided that it was worth carrying on shooting her body full of toxic, but possibly life-saving, drugs. It must be, I reasoned, that these peope have a chance of living. The sustaining corollary, of course, was that if they had a chance in their state, then my chances as a patient able to drive himself round to the hospital, must be somewhat better.
But as we swapped painful smiles on my first day back in the radiotherapy suite and one of the radiologists said 'Sorry to see you back. I didn't expect you to be one of the returners', I understood how often the staff here must see somebody turn up for their first treatment unscarred, full of life and substance, and return again and again, each time less vital, less hopeful, each time the odds slightly lower.
One day at breakfast Cosima turned to me and smiled. 'You're going to die, Daddy' It struck me as the most appallingly tasteless prediction I could imagine and I flew into one of the rages that were becoming too common. Cosima was three and a half, had no idea what death means or what my illness was. It turned out that she'd overheard her nanny telling a friend on the phone that on the night of my near-death experience she thought I was going to die.
I went and found Cosima and apologised to her. She said, 'I can't remember a time when you could speak properly', and I knew how she felt.
Meanwhile I had started speech therapy.
In the head and neck game, speech therapy means rather more than just teaching people how to speak again, and in particular it's concerned with teaching them how to eat. I was swallowing no better now than I had been in hospital. My own saliva was still collecting in pools at the front of my mouth and every so often I'd have to find a paper tissue and blow my mouth as others blow their nose. In my office and bedroom the waste baskets overflowed with soggy tissues. I could drink, yes, but whenever I drank anything it was impossible to get rid of the last mouthful. Indeed, the only way of getting anything down my throat was by using the next mouthful to push it down. In practice this meant that everything had to be eaten in one quick series of gulps and swallows lest I lose the momentum.
Not long after this, for instance, I had my very first postoperative outing and went with Bywater to the Groucho Club in Soho. I'd not had anything to drink for a few months now – and I mean drink as in _drink –_ but I thought that a small whiskey diluted heavily with water shouldn't hurt my crippled tongue too much.
We sat in the upstairs bar and I took a sip of whiskey and rolled it round my mouth while I decided what to do next. Bywater asked a question. I answered. Of course I answered: if there was nothing else I knew how to do then I was an expert at sitting in the Groucho and swapping _bans mots._ As I answered the question, the mouthful of whiskey fell down my jacket front. Why would it not? I couldn't get it to the back of my throat without taking another mouthful and then the second mouthful would be left there. In the end I had three whiskeys by dint of putting each of them down my throat in one go and rushing to the lavatories to spit out the last, unswallowable, mouthful.
At home I had, at least, the advantage of not having to run to do my spitting in private, although I tried to keep the more dramatic hawking for when Cosima wasn't around.
Now that I was trying to get past the liquid stage, eating had become a pretty disgusting spectacle. I would take a swallow or a bite of something and, half the time, immediately start coughing. Bits of food would fly out of my mouth and nose. Sometimes the food would stay away from the sensitive areas at the back of my throat and I'd manage to get a bowl of muesli or crème caramel down my throat. Except, of course, for the last mouthful, which would stay there, unswallowed, for as long as I left it. I would wander over to the kitchen sink and spit out the last chunk of food, and then spit again to get out the particles dotted around my mouth, then take a swig of warm water – if it was too cold it hurt my teeth – and try and collect the lost food before taking a third swig.
It was the food's stagnancy which I found the most monstrous of all, I think. I would eat something, and brush my teeth, and then four hours later find myself hurled into a 20-minute coughing fit as some crumb or another decided eventually to dislodge itself from the crevice in which it had been hiding and sit on some scar tissue. My unmoving tongue meant that the only way I could clear debris from the roof of my mouth was with a finger or a brush; if I forgot who I now was for a couple of hours it would pile up in there in little layers like geological samples.
(I know: gross. What were you expecting when you bought a book on cancer?)
I was, understandably enough, not on everyone's dinner party list. But I was making some small progress. My biggest and most cheering postbag since the start of the cancer columns came when I wrote that I'd forced myself to stand over the sink and swallow a pear, chunk by chunk.
I was standing at the sink, about to spit a mouthful of baby pear down the waste-disposal, when I thought: no. I shall swallow this pear. I have not eaten a fruit in its true fruitful form since June – the vestigial lemon 'n'. lime in the lemon 'n' lime Build-Up drinks on which I've subsisted for the past couple of months not counting – and I shall eat this one.
I almost did, too.
And as I almost got it all down my throat I thought, in one of those tearful moments of mad joy I have from time to time nowadays, how easy it's all been.
I'll start with the pear, because that's the quick bit, and then I'll go on to the easy life because I haven't decided yet whether or not that's one of the written thoughts which goes off for publication.
As you will know, constant reader, they took the back of my tongue out in June, leaving me unable to talk in any meaningful way for a while, although the exact definition of the term 'a while' is still in some dispute. What I wasn't expecting was the effect the new compact tongue – combined, it has to be said, with a second six-week stint of throat-burning radiotherapy – would have on my eating. Who knew the part the tongue played in this sort of thing?
Before I was forced to think about it I'd assumed you put the food in your mouth, chewed it about a bit, swallowed, moved on to the peas. It turns out that unless you have a fully functioning tongue shovelling the stuff back towards the gullet as it passes through the scything teeth, the food just stays there at the front of your mouth, or worse, starts leaking back in the direction of the plate.
Hence the liquidity of my diet these few months past. But it's been two weeks since the radiotherapy stopped and they're talking about taking the tracheotomy tube out of my throat some time soon, and I thought I'd try something solid. Last night I started with a pint of Murphy's which occupies that pleasant intermediate state between liquid and solid and was the first alcohol I've touched since May. And then I tried some venison stew of which I managed that part of a single mouthful which didn't fall into the glass of Murphy's as I was trying to swig it down. That the rest of the stew finished up on the floor was through no fault of my tongue and entirely down to one of the rages I go into from time to time when not being me gets a little too much to bear.
And so tonight I tried a small, soft pear.
Same thing: chew, chew, dribble. The pear was about to go the way of the stew when I thought damn this thing, and made it go down my throat. It wasn't exactly Robert the Bruce, but I jumped a little and ran to tell everyone that I'd eaten a pear.
Which is when I realised that if I was going to eat and talk again I'd have to make myself do this time after time, day after day, and the extent to which I've lived a life where, thus far, I've been able to avoid doing most of the things I didn't want to do. Or, rather, wanted to have done but didn't want to do at that moment.
I didn't work at school and true, I didn't achieve what you'd call academic success, but I managed to find a good college where they appreciated certain sorts of academic failure. I didn't work overhard in the job I trained for, but managed to fluke my way into journalism at just the point where I could avoid a traditional tedious training full of shorthand and typing. I screwed up a first marriage through indolence, although not that alone, and lucked myself into a second one with the right wife who had the secret of manufacturing perfect kids. Who could have my luck?
And then all this happened – and even then I've not been in a position to decide between the easy and the hard hauls: hard as the illness has been it has been one without choices.
But here I stand at the sink with strands of pear juice running down my chin, and I know I have to force myself to do this every day until I can do it as easily as you can do it, and for some reason it makes me unreasonably happy.
At the Marsden the main speech therapist charged with helping me though this was away for a couple of weeks and I was given over to a New Zealander on temporary attachment to the hospital. She sat me down and took me through a questionnaire. Was I drinking this, eating that, swallowing the other? What happened if I drank the other or ate this?
I told her about the coughing and my inability to polish off the last mouthful of anything and she gave me a blank smile. Her worry was that if I was so unable to control my food some of it would go down the wrong hole and...
And what? I'd drown? I thought not. Everything which was going down the wrong way seemed to find its way back up again quite happily. Even so, she said, she was banning thin liquids. Thin liquids included water, tea, coffee, beer. True, I'd not had a beer for a while, but I was looking forward to one some day and meanwhile I certainly wasn't giving up water. Nor would she if her saliva had the consistency of sump oil. She gave me another blank little smile.
Eventually she fixed me up with a video swallow. In a dank little room in the basement of the Marsden I took a swig of something that would show up on an X-ray and then swallowed it while the X-ray machine glowed and a video camera recorded the swig's progress down my throat. The consultant overseeing the swallow looked pleased enough: there was a tiny amount of fluid going over the edge and into the windpipe but, as he said, 'There's probably more leakage in my own throat. It looks fine.'
The speech therapist disagreed. Even a tiny amount like this could be dangerous. There was no question of her balancing the minute chance of my doing any serious harm against the immense relief the water brought: her ban stayed. So I ignored it. The alternativists who wrote to me at _The Times_ were always telling me that alternative medicine was about seizing control of one's illness. Well, this was me seizing control of mine. I decided that I'd go to Stephanie Kingham, the ex-Marsden therapist who had phoned me just before the operation, to learn how to speak again.
# Chapter 11
Friends would tell me differently, but as far as I was concerned, my voice was not improving. And just as my missing taste-buds had continued to surprise me every time I put food in my mouth and found as if for the first time that it had no taste, so was I continually surprised by what came out of my mouth when I opened it to speak. In the milliseconds before I spoke I would hear the words in my head, sounding quite normal, very John Diamond, and I'd open my mouth to say them and what would come out would be somebody doing that honking impression of Charles Laughton in a bubbly, underwater version of _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ rendered doubly liquid when, as often as not, the reservoir of saliva which had gathered at the front would start to leak out by the thought's third word. I was forever speaking through the corner of my handkerchief like a dandy in a bad Reformation comedy.
And so I would start to ask people for things in shops, because that is what I am used to doing, and I'd get two words into the sentence before I'd realise that neither of us was going to get to the other end of it unscathed. Or there was the Saturday when out on a credit-card sabotaging mission I turned into a street opposite Selfridge's which was being wilfully blocked by a BT cable-laying van, and when the man wouldn't move it I started having a row with him, just as if I was somebody who could have loud rows in the street. Which, it turns out, one can't when the only thing the person you're trying to have a row with says is 'Sorry? What? No I can't understand...' and then, when he gets bored with your honking, impenetrable voice, tells you to piss off.
It wasn't much different with those who had attuned themselves to my honking: each had a different way of not understanding me. Some would just look blankly, running over the sounds in their head hoping they could unscramble them in retrospect and then when I was halfway through the next sentence say 'No, sorry, didn't get it.' Others would nod enthusiastically whatever I'd say in the apparent belief that if they got two out of every three words they'd have a vague idea what I was on about. Occasionally I'd slip them a series of meaningless honks and add 'don't you?' at the end, and they'd answer with an even bigger nod. Which would have been a fine gag except that its implications depressed me more than it made a point to whoever I was talking to.
The only two people to understand me regardless, or, at least, to have found a way of saying 'what?' in the way one says it when one doesn't catch something in the course of normal conversation, were Nigella and Cheryl, who came in to help Nigella from time to time and who, over the months, became something of a life-saver, filling in when nannies resigned, when we suddenly needed, the two of us, to get away from the house and the children for a couple of hours, when the mess had exploded about us and we needed setting to rights.
But just as I forgot what my new voice was like there was a transitional point when I realised I'd forgotten what the old one sounded like too. One midweek day I switched the car radio on halfway through that lunchtime slot when Radio 4 goes all jocular, and there was a quartet of standard issue Radio 4 panellists solving droll crossword clues for a chuckling Broadcasting House theatre audience.
I'd missed the introductions, but I could work out who a couple of the panellists were, given how often their voices turn up on the sort of shows where you have to solve crossword clues, or know what Clem Atlee so famously said to Bessie Braddock on Derby Day in 1948, or for two points per ingredient, guess the contents of this fascinating medieval recipe for quince syllabub, but I couldn't put a name to the others – even though one seemed vaguely familiar. His was a deepish voice, southern, with a very slight cynical lisp and a...
Hold on, though. It was me. It was a programme I'd recorded in a pre-operative era when I still had all of a tongue and could rent it out for lisping and cynical purposes.
Coming unexpectedly upon my pre-cancerous self like that was like looking from the cold station platform into a brightly lit and crowded train and seeing the twin brother I'd forgotten I had idly turning the page of his paper. Twin, but not identically so, because the other odd thing was the potency of my sense of the me listening being a different me from the me on the radio. I heard a different voice but my experience in that split second of realisation was of a whole different life. And strangely I was most conscious of _his_ lack of realisation of the difference between the two lives. He was the one who didn't realise what a boon an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and children and friends for granted – in short who didn't know he was living. And a man, at that, who had the appalling possibilities of life pegged so terribly wrongly. For the John Diamond on the radio the worst was the mundane death or madness which had threatened him all those years ago in the guise of a panic attack. What little imagination he had!
But if the man on the radio was unimaginative and ignorant, at least his _doppelgänger_ listening in the car had become quite the metaphysician and knew all of those things now. I was still unwilling to acknowledge that I was better for knowing them because the knowledge cut both ways and carried, as far as I was concerned, many more cons than it did pros. What's more, the real question was whether I'd acquired that knowledge too late to be of much use.
But some of this was going to change – in vocal terms, at least. I had Stephanie the speech therapist, a wonderful woman with the voice of one who does the continuity announcements for some heavenly radio station, and who would teach me how to speak again.
She had her main practice in Dorking, but once or twice a week while Peter Rhŷs Evans was in a surgery somewhere sawing bones she would take over his rooms in Harley Street.
For all that I was still refusing to see silver linings, there was something rather attractive about getting a second chance at one of the basic psycho-social skills, not least because there was part of me which felt like a be-stumped Douglas Bader saying to the prosthetics people: 'Look, as long as you're popping down to the leg stores anyway you might as well make me 6'3'". In the same way I wanted to tell Stephanie that while we were rebuilding the rubble of my voice in the hope that I could start broadcasting again in the autumn, I'd quite like this time round to be Alvar Liddell or Brian Perkins rather than the bloke with the North London lisp.
Nigella, who'd done Chomsky to a crisp at Oxford, thought the whole idea of studying one's own voice in order to recreate it for a second time was fascinating, and I too might have been fascinated had this been a theoretical rather than an abstruse practical problem.
The procedure looked simple enough. I would turn up at Harley Street once a week, usually with Nigella, and the three of us would sit around and talk for ten minutes or so, apparently just for the sake of it. And then Stephanie would make me repeat something I'd said in conversation and we'd all inspect the quality of my sibilants or the colour of my fricatives. I'd repeat some lists of meaningless sentences tuned to build up skills in particular parts of the tongue, chat some more, do some more repetitions. At the end of the hour my tongue and throat hurt in the way my biceps might have hurt if I'd done an hour's weight training.
It all took so _long._ From where I was sitting I was making no progress at all because every time I opened my mouth I gave myself the same implicit goal – to sound like me – and every time I failed. Worse, the therapy itself was terribly hard work, all that tah-tah-taying in front of the mirror and building up the discrete little muscles that I'd never been aware of before. It might have been easier if I were starting from scratch, like my son Bruno, but like a man taking driving lessons who has already been driving unlicensed through the back streets for years I already had too many bad habits to be broken. I knew, for instance, how to speak fast, but fast was the last thing Stephanie wanted me to speak. And so she would force me to slow everything down, to sound like a badly acted Eliza Doolittle in the first post-elocution conversation scene in _Pygmalion._ It was bad enough having a wonky voice but having a wonky voice and sounding like a stupid person was intolerable.
At the end of October I faxed Grizzie Burgess, my broadcast agent, and told her the reason I was faxing her was because if I phoned she wouldn't understand a word I was saying and for that reason alone she should get in touch with _People's Parliament_ and _Fourth Column_ and tell them that I wasn't a broadcaster again yet.
This was depressing news for all sorts of reasons – because _Fourth Column_ was being dropped in the latest round of Radio 4 remakes and I would have liked to have done the last series, because dropping out of contracted work is never a good idea.
Worst of all, though, it made me reconsider the possibilities of my new life.
One afternoon Jemima Harrison was recording some meandering thought or another of mine for the TV.
'It's amazing how far you've come,' she said, 'Listen.'
And she played me back 30 seconds of my speech before I made her stop.
I knew that when we started the recordings after the operation I was all but incomprehensible and that if that footage was ever to be used it would have to be with subtitles. And I knew that in the past couple of weeks I had less often to repeat myself to make myself understood to friends who were tuned into my honk. But this was the first time I'd heard my voice since it stopped being my voice.
Do you remember how it was the first time you ever heard your own voice coming out of a tape recorder? How horrified you were that what sounded inside your head like a perfectly reasonable voice turned out to have been the trebly, breathy sound which came out of the loudspeaker? Well what I heard was that times ten. Until then I hadn't let myself realise that my voice was not just that of a man with a crippled throat but of one who was obviously insufficient elsewhere. I sounded, literally, disabled.
Fine: the world is full of disabled people who just get on with their lives more or less cheerfully, more or less resentfully, and I'm not going to tell you that they are less sensitive to their situation than I was at that moment to mine. But as I heard my voice I felt embarrassed to have been throwing it around the place unhindered for all this time. What could I have been thinking of? Of course that thought is, itself, embarrassing, but that's the sort of paradox which comes of writing this stuff down.
The other thing I knew in that moment was not only that there was no chance of my broadcasting again for a few months, but that there never had been such a chance. I knew how far my voice had progressed from the unintelligible honk I had when they took the breathing tube out to the point where I could make myself understood much of the time, and I knew how unlikely it was that anyone's voice could have progressed much further from that point in that time. True, I'd had the tracheotomy and was in the middle of the second radiotherapy course but those would only have set me back a few weeks at most and I was certainly more than a few weeks short of a broadcasting voice.
A couple of days later I put this to Rhŷs Evans, who nodded blandly and talked about the value of having the goal as opposed to that of achieving it, and I suppose I would have been more angry with the cheat which had been perpetrated if I had tried harder and spent more time tah-tah-taying at home.
Meanwhile the old routine had cranked up again: radiotherapy once a day, Rhŷs Evans once a week to have my throat felt, my scars inspected, my mouth prodded; Henk for much the same but from a radiological point of view.
At the start of the radiotherapy Henk talked about my cancer in a way which suggested that the labs still held remnants of it on file.
'Could I see it, then?' I said.
'See what?' said Henk.
'The slides with the sections of my cancer on them. Can I see them?'
Henk looked like a man demonstrating the dictionary definition of being bemused. He blinked, he scratched his head, he started to talk and then stopped and then started again. He had, he said, been doing this for 25 years and in that time nobody had ever asked him if they could see their cancer.
I found this remarkable. I understood, of course, that I had made something of a fetish of my own cancer; it was part of the same process which led me to write about it so often, in that by rendering the cancer an objective spectacle I could distance myself from it. I remembered that on the first night Bywater had come round and led me through the Internet coverage of cancer I had downloaded a blown-up photograph of a squamous cell cancer of the neck which I'd found on some cancer site or another, and for some days used it as the background picture on my computer's desk top. And I knew that when, at the end of my first course of radiotherapy and when I still thought it would be my only course of radiotherapy, I asked to take the mask home with me, I'd got some odd looks. Even now I found that much of the time I'd go out with my tracheotomy exposed – an affectation which could be justified by those disabled lobbyists who believe the public should be exposed to the reality of disfigurement, but which I couldn't justify since letting air unfiltered by the trachy-cover into my lungs wasn't a good idea. Most of the time it was simply a case of forgetting and it wasn't until I'd notice a shopkeeper was talking to my neck that I'd realise that I was uncovered.
I could understand that most patients didn't try to think of their tumour as computer art or their mask as a decorative artefact, but I was surprised that not one of the thousands of patients Henk had dealt with wanted to confront their cancer physically.
In any other hospital, I am sure, I would have been given the standard flannel. It is not hospital policy... it's impossible to get them out of store... I've lost the key to the store-room. Henk simply said 'I'll see what I can do' and went off to make a phone call.
Five minutes later Nigella and I were in the bowels of the hospital in one of the histopathology labs overseen by Cyril Fisher. I'd forgotten how nostalgic a hospital lab would be, and how many childhood memories I had of being taken to meet Dad at one or other of labs he ran. There was the same warm-acrid smell, the same jumble of tubes and wires and warning messages scrawled in felt-tip pen, the same whirrings coming from centrifuge and microtome and stirrer. I'm sure this lab was a technological miracle compared to the ones in which Dad had worked, but it looked and felt and smelled just the same to me. And there was for just a moment the childhood-inspired feeling that if these people in their white coats were looking after my cancer then I was in safe hands. There are those for whom the white coat, the test-tube, the smell of formaldehyde represent the unknown and the terrifying: for me they still have a comforting homeliness.
Cyril Fisher was a chirpy man, smiling, shortish, lab-coated and, as far as I can tell, like everyone here, the best in his field. He sat below a series of lengthy shelves fat with bound editions of cancer journals stretching back for years and in front of him was a four-way microscope, which is to say one with four sets of eyepieces focused on a single slide. He seemed to think it entirely reasonable that I should want to see the excrescence which was trying to kill me. Or if not reasonable then not the whim of a mad fetishist.
Fisher had slides going all the way back to the original cyst and the biopsy performed at St George's which determined how much more than a cyst it was. We each sat at a set of eyepieces and he slipped a slide under the lens. All I could see was a pink smudge. I tried adjusting the focus and eventually got a rather sharper version of the picture which had once been on my computer desktop. It was a sheet of lilac-stained tissue with a number of light circular markings. These were the benign cells, the cells which, left to their own devices, would get on with the job God or evolution had given them to do. Dotted around the place, though, were black dots: cancer cells. There were, as I'd been told at the time, very few of them and those that were there weren't clumped together in tumorous form.
But that was a slide from the cysts. Fisher found a section of the lump taken from my tongue: it was all cancer.
I don't know how I'd expected to feel at this confrontation – relief? anger? desolation? I was conscious of everyone in the room waiting for some sort of reaction from me, but I felt no difference between seeing my own cancer and seeing that of somebody else. It was out of me now: by that definition alone these weren't the killer cells even if there were some killer cells still around.
A couple of weeks later, and for the benefit of the cameras we went back, this time to have a look at the tumour proper. This did faze me slightly, and not because of its existence but because of its condition. Crowded together, the isolated cells of the first slide became a greyish lump of rubbery matter. Or, rather, a number of lumps of matter, because it had been carved out of my mouth slice by slice. This, I think, was the image I found difficult – of a man with his hand in my mouth, scraping bits off my tongue with a scalpel. Had Fisher presented me with a single golf ball of the stuff, removed as if in one go like a mouthful of melon scooped from the whole, I would have found it rather easier.
As we left the lab we came across the remains of the department's museum of jocular cancers: thick glass bottles full of formaldehyde in which were suspended cancerous testicles the size of small melons, organs horribly distended by their tumours, lone tumours, removed from their host organs. It was the last of my cancer fetishism: from here on in, I decided, I was going to be as wary of staring the truth in the face as all the other patients Henk had seen in his 25 years.
Except that buried under the fetishism was a genuine interest in what was happening to me, an interest aside from the emotional and practical problem of facing my own death. For it was at this time that I started really scaring myself.
As well as writing the column in _The Times,_ I'd taken on another in the _Sunday Telegraph._ The _Telegraph_ column appeared in that paper's _Rx_ magazine which was devoted to those eternal Sunday subjects, health and fitness. My column was a Fleet Street first: my job each week was to rubbish one or other aspect of alternative medicine. Although the column attracted a ton of mail from those who thought it unfair that I be allowed to take my stand unchallenged by true believers in homoeopathy and reflexology and the rest, I was unperturbed. One of the reasons, after all, that I was keen to make my point was because of the number of papers and magazines running alternative medicine pages without ever the suggestion that these practices provided anything other than reasonable and proven remedies.
The column meant I had to get to know my enemy and I started hoarding books on both alternative and orthodox medicine. Both scared me.
Although few of the alternative books were about cancer specifically, many of them had chapters devoted to it. Almost invariably the prognoses they gave were gloomier than those given in the populist mainstream books I'd been reading so far, and, as far as I could see, this was for two reasons.
The first is that although you can finish up in court for making unproved claims for any cure – which is why the adverts for ginseng and garlic tablets never speak in any but the most general terms – there are only two named diseases for which it's specifically illegal to claim an unsubstantiated cure; one is tuberculosis, the other cancer.
The second is that while alternative medicine can, for all sorts of reasons, be rather good at dealing with chronic and irritating conditions which are clinically defined and affect the quality of life without affecting life itself, it's lousy at dealing with diseases whose coming and going can be checked with blood test or microscope. Aside from straight bacterial and viral infections, the most common group of such diseases, and the one which induces the most anxiety, is cancer.
But if alternative medicine was up to any sort of job at all then it should be able to make some sort of dent in fatality statistics associated with cancer. Even so, whatever else the authors of the alternative handbooks claimed for their curative regimes, a cure for cancer was beyond almost all of them. Most of the books I came across made great claims about using, say, naturopathic remedies to hold cancer at bay and many of them suggested treatments for the individual symptoms of cancer. Many others, more usefully, proposed ways that cancer sufferers' quality of life might be improved as the length of that life shortened.
There were even some authors who argued that cancer wasn't cancer at all but an imbalance of this or a dissonance of that, and that only by readjusting these vital balances could a cure be wrought. The nearest any of the books came to claiming an all-out cure were those which recommended particular anti-cancer diets.
(I remain as sceptical of these diets as I do of most of the other remedies. My scepticism is tempered only slightly by a conversation I had with one of the radiographers. I was waiting my turn for zapping one day and mentioned the ludicrousness of one diet I'd been reading about. She agreed, and said that when she started at the hospital there used to be a nutter who, having refused radiotherapy on his own behalf, would come down and rail against those sitting in the radiotherapy waiting room, telling them they should abandon evil radiation and take up his magical diet.
'Criminal,' I said. 'You kicked him out, of course?'
'Well yes,' she said. 'We kicked him out regularly. The only thing was he did survive for years and the cancer did disappear.'
Which only goes to prove – well, nothing very much at all really, but I thought I'd pass it on in the name of fair dealing.)
So here we had all these regimes claiming the earth for their healing powers but unable to claim very much at all for their power against cancer. Meanwhile here was the medical orthodoxy claiming that over the decades it has made progress in treating certain cancers. It gives the angry alternativists a choice: either they can say that their practices work in some situations but not in others, such as cancer, or they can deny what appears to me to be the undeniable and say that in fact conventional medicine has made no more progress than alternative medicine. Some go further: they say that in fact it's the alternative practices which hold the secret of any available cure.
It's a personal thing, I realise, but I find it quite remarkable that anyone can publish a book which says avoid radiotherapy and shun the surgeon's knife; stick instead to the juice of the Bibbly Bobbly tree taken twice daily.
Having said all of which, it was those denying alternativists who would get me scared. What if they were right? What if the truth was that no life had ever been saved by radiotherapy and that there was every chance that my cancer would be made worse by being irradiated? What if the truth as pronounced by a couple of books was that the main effect of cancer surgery was to release stray cancer cells into the body, allowing them to set up home elsewhere?
What if the truth was that which I'd assumed to be the case from the start but which I'd been denying ever since I'd been given the 92 per cent chance of cure back in April: that cancer invariably did kill and that all we were arguing about was whether I'd be dead in six months or five years?
I turned to the medical books for solace, and got none. Those aimed at the general public were positive enough and if you read them very quickly through half-closed eyes you could bring yourself to believe that cancer was like pneumonia: pretty nasty while you had it, but unlikely to kill you in the long run.
It was the ones aimed at doctors, the ones which didn't feel the need to pull punches, that got me. While Rhŷs Evans had given me a two to one chance of a cure, a book baldly titled _Cancer and its Management 2_ told me that clear-up statistics on tongue cancer depended very much on where the tumour was discovered and that a tongue-tip cancer stood a much better chance of being licked than one like mine at the back of the tongue.
2. Second edn Robert Souhama and Jeffrey Tobias, Blackwell Science, 1997.
I would order the books over the Internet or sneak them from piles of review copies when I went into one or other of the papers I worked for, and carry them up to my room like a kid with snaffled _Playboys._ I'd run through the indexes looking for the key words which would be attached, I knew, to the terrifying paragraphs: 'Tongue, cancer of the', 'radiotherapy', 'surgery', 'mortality'. And that night I would lie in bed certain that whatever treatment I was under would fail. I knew, for instance, that when Rhŷs Evans said he would have liked to have been able to cut a bit more healthy tissue from around the tumour in my tongue, what he meant was that he'd had to leave some possibly tumorous tissue in there. And I knew, as I lay wakeful in the dark, that the chances of the radiotherapy picking up _every_ remaining cancerous cell were zero. I might be conned for a couple of years, but some day one of those cells would reappear at the centre of a new tumour in a new place.
This certainly wasn't the positive attitude that everyone was telling me was needed to get through the illness. But then again I didn't feel as if it were a negative attitude, either. The symptoms got me down from time to time – the honking voice and all the coughing and spluttering, the continual pain at the base of my throat, my inability to eat much more than the odd slice of solids to supplement my milky diet – but I seemed to be suffering rather less generalised existential angst than I did when long-term existence was a more promising prospect.
In any case, I'd come to the conclusion that whenever somebody told me how much good a positive attitude would do me, what they meant was how much easier a positive attitude would make it for them. Positivism meant we could all carry on as before, that they didn't have to think before they spoke and then get embarrassed about saying things that I hadn't even noticed bore some metaphorical relationship to what I was going through (not long before a woman had reddened and apologised almost on her knees for using the word cancer in the sentence 'I think he was Leo but he may have been Cancer'). As long as I was positive it meant they didn't have to cope with the nasty thoughts.
As it happened, I suppose I was being positive. True, I would never be able to do that thing of grinning and shouting 'I'm fighting and I'm gonna _win'_ because that wasn't really the relationship I had with the cancer. Nor could I pretend I didn't have the illness. On the other hand I wasn't whining too much, and I seemed to have subsumed the cancer into a day-to-day life which also included the day-to-day things which the noncancerous enjoyed. With the manifest disease reduced to a loss of voice, a liquid diet and a painful throat, Nigella was probably suffering my cancer more than I was.
And then the cancer stopped.
# Chapter 12
I say the cancer stopped: what I mean is that they stopped treating me for cancer. Whoopee? Not so as you'd notice, no.
The original, EasfEnder-interrupting diagnosis had been passed on at the end of March; in April I'd started radiotherapy to the left side of my neck; at the end of June they'd started looking for the primary tumour; at the end of July I'd had the tumour removed; at its end they'd started radiotherapy on the right side of my neck and my tongue. Five months a cancer patient, cancer victim, cancer sufferer, cancer what have you.
And here we were in June sitting in Peter Rhŷs Evans' rooms again. He'd looked in my throat, felt around my tongue, stood behind me and examined my neck and chin and could find no sign of anything nasty. He'd grilled me on my current state of health: my weight was stable if not exactly climbing, the various pains were, we'd agreed some time ago, the result of surgery rather than of cancer, my voice was coming on, and I could waggle my attenuated tongue around in a way which suggested that the muscle tone might be returning.
In clinical terms, at least, I was cancer free and at the end of October Rhŷs Evans, who normally finished off each session by making a booking for the next week, said, 'Well, I don't think I need see you for a month.'
It was the sentence I'd been waiting to hear ever since I so pointedly didn't hear it after the first lot of radiation back in May. I should have whooped with delight. Instead I felt the first scratchings of panic. If Rhŷs Evans and the Marsden weren't going to look after me, who was?
In fact there was still the odd excuse to go back to the Fulham Road. There was the tracheostomy, for instance. I am not a squeamish man, and I'm sure I'd have been entirely capable of taking the pipe out of my throat, hosing it down and replacing it a couple of times a week, but I'd made a point of always looking somewhere else when One of the nurses suggested that this was what most trachy-owners did. In fact I'd never even seen the hole in my throat because the flange at the end of the tube covered it up. And so each Tuesday and Friday I'd sit in the room in Weston Ward and Mercel or Caroline or Fran or Gloria would pull out the old tube and put a new one in. In fact very soon afterwards the job would be given over to my local district nurse, a very un-Sister George-like woman called Liz who would scrub up in the kitchen a couple of times a week before sitting me down at the kitchen table, pulling out the tube and studying the trapped secretions for signs of what they might say about my throat or lungs.
But as long as I was seeing one Marsden person I had access to them all. Any dropped hint of remission, of pain, of something slightly dodgy would get me instant referral to the sanctuary of a Rhŷs Evans or a Breach or a Henk.
There was, for instance, Dr Williams' Pain Clinic.
Isn't that a wonderful title? Say it with me: Dr Williams' Pain Clinic. He has it on a little notice on his door – DR WILLIAMS PAIN CLINIC: PLEASE KNOCK – and one day I saw a scribbled sign on a wall: This Way To Dr Williams' Pain Clinic. I mentioned Dr Williams' Pain Clinic in _The Times_ one week and got letters from all over the country asking for directions. It's understandable: in a certain mood the four words – Doctor, Williams, Pain, Clinic – contain everything the soul craves: succour, excitement, restitution and, um, Williams. I saw the proprietor of the pain clinic as stick-thin, madly grinning, tufts of straggly grey hair at the temples, a stained and misbuttoned waistcoat, and a wire connected to mains electricity in each hand. What I got was a slick young anaesthetist which, all things considered, was probably the better deal.
Rhŷs Evans had been suggesting I turn up at the pain clinic for weeks now, and had even booked me an appointment which I'd cancelled. I'm not sure why. Certainly I was in pain much of the time, and equally certainly the various patent mixtures of paracetamol and codeine weren't dealing with that pain. On the other hand I'd tried, however subconsciously, to avoid all those services which were too obviously for the terminal patients I would see hobbling about the hospital, blank-faced and patently in receipt of something intravenous and mind-numbing, and Dr Williams' Pain Clinic sounded just like that.
'It sounds like a dodgy German porn movie,' I said to Dr Williams when I eventually turned up. Unfortunately the sentiment demanded more of my post-operative elocutionary skills than I was able to give, and by the time I'd repeated it for the third time it had lost most of its edge.
'Yes,' said Dr Williams, catching on. 'I've tried to think of a different title, but nothing else works, you know?'
To say that Williams lived for pain is probably overstating the case, but as an anaesthetist he seemed to devote much of his time to relieving pain. Palliative care usually seems to be about letting people teeter towards the abyss in something like comfort, but Williams seemed as concerned with patients who would, or might, be cured but whose pain needed tending pending that cure.
The great thing about Williams was that he believed in aggressive pain relief with none of this mimsy be-brave-and-leave-it-for-as-long-as-possible-and-then-try-some-deep-breathing rubbish. Pills are what you need for pain: lots of pills. We went through Williams' repertoire of analgesia together. We talked about the various forms of mid-level relief like a couple of Dutch hippies discussing brands of dope, and we worked out a way where I could take pain relief every hour or two without my kidneys packing up.
He tempted me with the morphine equivalent of a nicotine patch, and I said, 'Weellll... I don't know, how about I leave that one until I get better?' Again, this was a pride thing. Morphine was, as far as I was concerned, what you took when you had surrendered control to others and although, unlike the alternativists, I had no problem with this when it was necessary, I felt ambivalent about taking the drug as an advanced version of Disprin. At our first meeting I turned it down like a brave Scout; at the second I took home three boxes of the patches; at the third I complained it wasn't strong enough.
By the fourth, though, I'd stopped using it. In its patch form, Williams insisted, the risk of addiction was minimal but given that the standard analgesics seemed to be able to do the job I didn't see much reason for chancing my arm with a major opiate.
As it turned out Rhŷs Evans saw me before the month was up, in order to determine that it was time for the tracheotomy to come out. For the past couple of weeks I'd worn a red plastic button to close off the tracheotomy during the day and only opened the tube at night. The deal was that if I slept through the night twice with the button in place I'd be released from the tube. In fact I only made one and a half nights; on the second night I slept badly, took the button out for a minute and went back to sleep before remembering to replace it. It was enough, though: I was going to get my neck back.
More panic: the last time I'd breathed entirely through my own set of tubes I'd almost died. Even though I knew that most of the swelling which had caused my throat to close had gone down, I was worried. There was, said Rhŷs Evans, no need: the hole in my throat would take a while to close, during which time it would become apparent whether there would be any problems.
In fact the tube was taken out at midday and by 6 p.m. the hole, which had been some centimetre or more in diameter, had closed up; if I pinched my nostrils and closed my mouth I couldn't take a breath through my neck. That night I found myself dozing and waking as I had before the tube went in. The throat wasn't as swollen inside, but four months after the operation there was still enough oedema inside to match the one I could see dragging my chin down.
Sometimes the lack of oxygen caused me to jerk into wakefulness via oddly compact nightmares: tiny little single-act dreams with no plot line and just the one terrifying event to remind me that I was doing something dangerous. Like trying to breathe. After almost a week of more or less no sleep I broke into my Rhŷs fast again: he suggested an oxygen cylinder by the bed just to keep my levels up. It meant I got a few good nights' sleep and for a while stopped feeling like somebody the army are softening up for work as a grass in Belfast. The bad news was that while losing the tracheotomy was a major step towards looking like a normal person, and eventually talking and eating like one, sleeping with an oxygen tank beside the bed and a set of plastic cannulae connecting it to my nose was profoundly depressing. Only severely ill people sleep with oxygen at hand, or dying ones, and I liked to think that I was moving away from that estate.
But I never will.
True, there was that feeling of everything winding down. See me in the street and – unless I've not shaved for a couple of weeks, giving me half a beard on one side of my face but none on the other – you'd never know that a few months ago I was strapped down with tubes while they decided where my cancer was. Most of the time I can make myself understood and I'm pretty sure that once the dark pain at the back of my throat has gone I'll be able to eat.
In theory, at least, and given a following wind, there's every chance that by the time this appears in the bookshops it will all be over. There will be the odd symptom there to remind me of what happened for most of '97: the voice will never be quite the same and, perfectly cut though they are, there will always be scars about my neck.
That could be true of dozens of illnesses and I have scars elsewhere on my body resulting from events I can't even remember. But the cancer scars are different. A broken leg is a broken leg, a case of pleurisy merely that. They are not predictors of broken legs or pleural infections yet to come. Even if I steel myself to imagine the best – that in five years I am still cancer free – I can't imagine that the virtual-viral form of cancer which infects the mind will be cured. In every possible way I will be reminded of what I was this year, and of what I will still be.
I can't imagine that even were I rather more well balanced than I am I will in two or ten or twenty years' time be able to run my tongue in its limited orbit round my mouth and feel an ordinary ulcer without my stomach clenching. Every sore throat from now on, however obviously connected to a cold or a night's drinking, will bring with it the possibility of cancer. How could it be otherwise? I have proved myself prone to cancer and, specifically, to cancer in and around the mouth. Having been let down by my treacherous immune system once, how can I ever trust it again?
What I don't know, is how that distrust will affect our life together, me and my body. Will it be like the relationship between the momentarily unfaithful husband accepted back into the home on condition of fidelity but with the crime always there as the ironic subtext to every conversation, argument, bout of love-making? Or will it simply replace the distrust I always had of my body, the certainty that it was never quite up to the job? Will I still have the fear of imminent death but not the panic attacks to go with it?
And if – when – it happens again will I have to go through the same mental processes for a second time or will the short cuts around my psyche which I've established this time hang around so that I can cut straight to the chase next time? My guess is that the first time you can accept the possibility of a cure and arrange your sense of terror to fit in with the medical optimism. A second time and you're there on your own.
Either way, it doesn't feel like a death sentence because I can only see it now in terms of the death sentence which hangs over all of us all of the time. Teenage suicides tend to be reductionist on this point: what is the point of living at all if all the time we are hurtling towards certain death? Religious fundamentalists take the same line with the caveat that the certain death is a good thing and the pointless life a test which precedes it. And rational people tend to be agnostics or religious in a lukewarm way because atheism or fundamentalism don't fudge those questions about our purpose which can only ever be fudged.
I fudge still and despite all, but what I now know is that thinking your reprieve from the death sentence has been cut from 78 or so years to 44 or so isn't the end I'd imagined it to be. For some reason, even in the lowest moments when I believed the doctors were stringing me along, when I could feel the travelling cancer gripping organs the precise location of which I wasn't quite sure ("Darling – where's the duodenum again?'), there were things to live for, to cram into the last years or months or days.
None of this, of course, is to say that it won't change. It may be that in a while, when I press the 'save as' button on the word processor and bundle these last thoughts off to the publisher (and that's 'last' as in 'get it all done in 70,000 words' rather than 'these be the last thoughts of the late John Diamond') I shall revert to the gibbering wreck I was, or slash my wrists or just one of them, or phone up the doctor and ask to go on to Valium for a year or two.
But meanwhile here I am on the page now in the present tense rather than the past. Slowly, slowly, things become dissociated from my cancer and become part of me. The week before last, for instance, I tripped over and broke – I thought – my big toe. I took it to casualty and for the first few minutes felt a certain proprietoriality about the place. At this time of the year with the medical school term just starting the chances are, after all, that I'd spent more time in hospitals than some of the housemen here. But gradually I relaxed. I wasn't a cancer patient with special rights, just another schlemiel who'd broken his toe.
It cuts both ways, though. Yesterday I opened the medicine cabinet and a large bottle of antioxidant vitamins (which I will surely start taking some day soon given their prophylactic action against cancer) dropped from a shelf and hit the wash-basin; the front half of the basin fell off and landed on my other big toe. I should, by rights, have taken the resultant cut to the hospital to be stitched. But I'd had enough of hospitals, I knew them too well. I dressed the wound myself, and rather well too, I thought.
Not long after Nigella and I started going out together in 1989 we found ourselves at one in the morning walking through Smithfield Market at the edge of the City. The market hadn't started up yet and the only real lights on in the area came from St Bartholomew's Hospital just across the road. We strolled over there, my arm around her shoulder, and into the hospital. I imagine that now we'd be stopped by some sort of security guard, but then we were free to wander around and confess to each other how secure we felt surrounded by the crazed tiles and the disinfectant smell and the signs pointing to the various medical sanctuaries.
Not now. Here is where I feel safe. I am sitting in my office at home. Nigella is out briefly, but will be back soon. On the floor below as I type I can hear Cosima shouting at the TV screen and Bruno giggling, and the sounds and smells are better than any hospital.
In an hour or so I will go down and make myself supper. Occasionally I force down a proper supper: half a plateful of steak pudding and peas, a third of a bowl of rice. There is the odd pear during the day, and the occasional surprise bowl of cereal. The amount of solid food I am taking has grown and will grow, I hope, further still. But because a small meal is still a mammoth task for me, I need my real calories and so tonight supper will be, as it has been most nights since they took the food tube away, a Scandishake diluted by half a pint of cream and topped up with half a bottle of liquid glucose. It will take 90 seconds to prepare and half that time to drink it, and when the last drop has left the glass I will spend half a minute trying to suck it into my throat and then another half-minute swilling the remainder out of my mouth with tap water and spitting the last mouthful into the sink. It's not pretty, but it's prettier than most of the alternatives.
If the drink hits my throat in just the wrong way then I shall break into a hacking cough which might last up to five minutes and involve a lot more swilling and spitting, although if either of the children come into the kitchen I'll take my coughing into the bathroom.
Sometimes I worry about the children. Obviously I worry about them as potential semi-orphans (or fully so: there is rather more cancer in Nigella's family than in mine) but more often it's about whether cancer will still be around when they're my age and whether my grandchildren – known to me or otherwise – will look bemusedly on as their mother or father hacks postoperative mucus into the kitchen sink. Originally I'd intended somewhere in this book to make a punt at the future of cancer research, but I won't. I think I'd prefer to leave it up to the newspaper health correspondents who can talk only in terms of major breakthroughs, and the anti-science nutters who see evil in any possible cure.
In any case, the more I read about it the more I realise that the cure for cancer is as likely to come, if it comes at all, from some research fluke refined by unflukey science. There are times when I am sanguine, when I believe that if I can hold out for two or three years there will be new procedures around to keep me going for the next two or three. And there are times when I believe that all the research I've seen so far is based on the principle that when one door opens two more close and that great leaps in cancer-fighting science represent no more than tiny steps along a lengthy and convoluted path.
All of which leaves me – well, where?
I am still on the books of the Marsden as a cancer patient and shall be for years to come although there is no sign of cancer in me as far as anyone is aware, and even if it's my hunch that the cancer will return and probably sooner rather than later.
I have learned a lot about myself in nine months, and a lot about those around me. Much of that knowledge is useful, liberating even. Equally much of it is banal stuff which I should have known anyway had I bothered to think about it. But the bad has outweighed the good a millionfold. While I have spent the bad times in bed with a book, Nigella has spent them running the house and the children and worrying about a sick husband. The children have passed through nine of their most formative months watching their father get progressively thinner, coughing his guts up, woozy from painkillers, scarred, tired, irritable.
It shouldn't be like this. That I can face the fact that it is like this is, I suppose, something. But what a bloody meagre something it is.
# AFTERWORD
I'd left these last few pages blank until the very last moment so that, with the bulk of the book ready for the printers, I could nip in to sign off with a solid prognosis, a line to draw under the months, and chapters, of equivocation and weasel statistics. This was where I intended writing either that I was looking forward to being my old self once more or that, sad to relate, I'd been back to the hospital where the microscope had shown the worst.
Unfortunately I'm as equivocal as ever, and with no particularly good reason.
It is, as I write this, almost a year to the day since Nigella interrupted _EastEnders_ to tell me I had cancer. Last week, during one of those particularly bleak moments I still come across from time to time, Nigella asked me to promise that however bleak the moments got I wouldn't commit suicide. On the assumption that we weren't talking about picking one's own time of death following a terminal diagnosis, I promised readily enough. But I don't think that had anyone told me this time last year what the year ahead held, and then asked me to make the same promise, I would have been quite so ready with reassurance. It's only when taken operation by operation and disappointment by disappointment that it's been bearable.
How am I? Who knows? Nine months or so after the operation I'm back on an almost entirely liquid diet – the radiotherapy put paid to any solids I was managing – and although my weight is increasing minutely, I still weigh rather less than I should. I have a voice, of sorts, and although it is one which causes strangers TO. SPEAK. TO. ME. LIKE. T-H-I-S. as if I were a mentally retarded deaf mute, it means I can buy a stamp and join in ordinary conversations. The journalists' conversations I used to like so much – where the trick was to say as much as possible before the next person – are still beyond me. I'D leap in with some gabbled _bon mot_ and the badinage will crash to a halt while I repeat slowly something which usually doesn't bear repetition. Although I still have to talk with a handkerchief at the ready and there are days when I have to write things down for shopkeepers because I can't be bothered repeating them, everyone tells me that my voice is coming on apace. Last week I even started using the phone again.
As for broadcasting, it turns out that although the medical experts were gaily telling me there was every chance of my getting back in front of a microphone last November, nobody much expected me to be able to wield a microphone in time for last year's contracted shows. Their optimism was to encourage my own: they thought it would be useful for me to have something to aim for.
The other week, concerned, they took a series of biopsies from my mouth: to our joint relief, all turned out to be clear. I see Peter Rhŷs Evans once a month and I haven't seen Michael Henk or been into the Marsden for two or three months now. When people ask me if I still have cancer, and they do, I feel as if I ought to say that I haven't because the truth is that there is no cancer anyone can find. But when it comes to saying the words, I can't do it. I hedge, and fudge, and bluster. 'Who knows?' I say, and 'Ask me again in five years.'
I still feel ill. In part it's the obvious physical deformities – the scars and the talking problems. I'm also in pain for much of the time. I still wear a morphine patch and take handfuls of painkillers to deal with the pain in my throat and its associated earache, and my tongue and oedemic neck and chin are still sore. I have to sleep upright because with my saliva glands gone I still have mucus problems. I have no real sense of taste and retain a propensity for long coughing jags that keep me out of cinemas and the theatre.
But most worrying of all is the tiredness. Nobody has told me to worry about tiredness, but I know it to be a symptom of recurrent cancer. True, I'm getting almost no sleep and I suppose that even now I'm getting over the operation and the subsequent radiotherapy. But there are times when waves of extreme torpor overcome me such that I nod off at the strangest times including, to my distress, while I was waiting for the lights to change the other day.
In short I'm by no means convinced that the worst is over.
But for all that I'm happy enough most of the time. I've been offered both drugs and counselling to deal with the sadness and anger I still feel from time to time, but after some purely nominal thought I've turned both down. After all, it's not as if anger and depression aren't perfectly valid responses to what's been going on. My family is wonderful and, fearful that I might not be with the kids as long as I'd intended, I spend rather more time with them than I have been recently. Long-suffering Nigella has taken to disappearing with them for long periods at weekends so that I could rest but thankful as I was at the time I now rather regret that missed time and I'd prefer to be tired with them than rested without. I've also been writing more than ever before. There was a brief period when some of that extra writing was concerned with the debate which briefly took over the media columns of the press about whether columnists should write about their cancer, but most of my extra writing has had nothing to do with cancer at all.
A couple of nights ago I was sitting with Nigella in bed.
'What are you smiling at?' she said.
I didn't realise that I was, but what I was thinking about was Nigella and the children. I was holding a soft toy which Bruno had brought into the bed when Cosima had fetched him in that morning.
'It's such a strange time, isn't it?' I said.
'How so strange?'
'Oh you know. Strange in that I've never felt more love for you than I have in the past year, that I've never appreciated you as much, nor the children. In a way I feel guilty that it should have taken this to do it, I suppose. But it is strange, isn't it.'
For the first time, I found myself talking like this without resenting that it had taken the cancer to teach me the basics, without resenting that there was part of me capable of talking like a 50s women's magazine article without blushing.
I still don't believe that there is any sense in which the cancer has been a good thing but, well, it is strange, isn't it?
# THE LAST WORD
Just after David Bowie started appearing on stage with that ludicrous early-70s haircut, or Boy George posed for the first of a thousand over-made-up publicity stills, or any punk did any of the affectedly spontaneous things that punks were wont to do during that sour period of British pop, they all confessed much the same thing to any passing journalist who'd stop to listen. They didn't understand, they said, what all the fuss was about. After all, they had been walking round the playground of (insert local high school) dressed like this for years now because that was the sort of individualistic, go-my-own-way guys they were. And if the media wanted to make something of the haircut or the makeup or the dried-on vomit, well that was up to the media.
Oh yeah, I used to think. So why was it that we never saw any of these Boy George manques queuing up for school dinners in their turquoise eye shadow and Boots No 7 blusher? Why did we never see any of the Boy Toms and Bill Zowies who didn't make it to the top but were, nonetheless, doing their own thing in playgrounds round the country? There was, we knew, a bandwagon, and they were jumpers-on it.
Except that this is now the position I find myself in.
When I started writing about my cancer it was as a columnist in a national newspaper. When I say I had no idea how long I'd be writing about it for that's just what I mean. It was entirely possible that my editor at _The Times_ might have restricted my mentioning the cancer to once a month on grounds of taste or circulation. It seemed at the time (but not now: boy, not now) that this might be something seen off with six weeks of radiotherapy and thus make too small a wave in my personal pond to rate much of a mention on the page. Conversely it might have been that I only had six weeks of writing left in me, for although it seemed apparent that whatever the eventual outcome I would live for at least another year or so, there was no saying what sort of writing I'd be capable of at any point along that line.
By the time this book first appeared in hardback, things had changed. I'd written 40 or 50 columns about my illness, made a film for the BBC about it, turned up on any number of TV and radio shows to promote the book and the film. Journalists who specialised in writing while their lower lip trembled came round and wrote pieces in the tabloid press about my pale fragility or, as the whim took them, my dark inner strength.
Meanwhile something had developed which was described by those in the business of describing such things as 'the confessional writing industry'. Ruth Picardie had, as I noted in the book, written about her own terminal cancer and there were at least three books on the shelves aside from mine from media-industry cancer patients. The result was any number of articles in the national press asking where cancer sufferers got off describing their condition on the printed page and others suggesting that whatever we wrote couldn't be the whole truth which must be too terrifying to confine to print. I turned up on television a couple of times to shout at people who insisted that writing about illness was a new trend and Nigella went on the radio to look scornfully in the direction of a poor journalistic sap who'd been double-dared by her magazine editor into writing something nasty about the cancer patients.
It was, I suppose, as grist to the mill, but each word of the 'confessional industry' description offended. 'Industry' suggested smoking chimneys with identical products plopping off the end of a line, 'confessional' that in writing about my cancer I was admitting to something of which I should be ashamed.
More: the complaint made journalistic nonsense. If I'd gone to my editor and said that I'd learned that cancer affected a third of the population and might soon affect half of it, and that on this basis I wanted to find your typical cancer patient and report on his progress over the year, nobody would have regarded it as other than a long-term newspaper series. Certainly nobody would have suggested that it was impossible for a journalist to get at the truth of such an emotionally charged story and thus that he should leave it alone altogether? After all, journalists write about such emotionally charged subjects as rape and murder all the time and nobody suggests these lie. But because the subject of my progress report was me it counted not as reporting but as confession.
But as I complained about this traducement of my writing I knew I sounded just like the boy who had cut his hair en brosse on top, left it long at the back, drawn a zig-zag across his gaunt face and was claiming to have been a Spider from Mars since junior school. It was true: there were a lot of us about the place suddenly.
And I have to admit that realisation altered the way I wrote for a while. I started writing apologetic pieces which had as their subtext the supposition that the readers must be bored with the story by now, glib tracts which relied on a sort of 'Take my oncologist – I wouldn't say he was fat but . . . ', vaudeville patter.
But men the illness itself altered and I found myself writing something like the truth again.
By July 1998 I was putting on weight, albeit by downing three drinks each day which Nigella would concoct to be as calorific as possible. I was still unable to eat solids for the simple reason that as long as my tongue was effectively atrophied I had no way to get the food to the back of my mouth and into my throat. But still I thought – or pretended I thought – that I continued on the road to recovery. I would turn up at the speech therapist's once a week and go through my exercises, and occasionally I'd make some minor breakthrough – a phone conversation which didn't require too many repetitions or a party conversation where a joke got a laugh.
But somehow I never really believed it.
I'd started developing some new pains in my mouth. Most of these were fly-by-night twinges, remnants of the old hypochondria, but one of them stayed with me and was obviously something substantial. Whenever I drank anything I would get the sharpest pain at the back of what remained of my tongue. Nigella and I took the pain off to Peter Rhŷs Evans for inspection and eventually he reported that it was a sinus which was trapping liquid. The first time he told us this, the sinus was a benign thing, an accidental cul-de-sac which had formed in among the scar tissue, but gradually over the next couple of weeks it became something more intrusive. It was, of course, the cancer returning. Or, as likely, it was the cancer-never-gone and that the margin of safety of the removed tumour had, as had been hinted, been too small for safety after all.
Before the operation in 1997 I'd been handed the standard it's-not-our-fault-guv disclaimer to sign on which was detailed the nature of the procedure I was to undergo. I wrote in above the description the rider that however bad the tumour appeared to be they should not perform a total glossectomy – which is to say remove the whole of my tongue. Looking back on it now this seems a futile sort of gesture. If the only cure was removing my whole tongue then what point was there leaving it there? I wrote at the time that there would have been serious competition between living without a tongue and dying with one, but looking back now, I'm not so sure. Then again, at the time I still had no idea how long this road could run or how far down it I was prepared to go.
Preparing for the big operation I assumed that this was as much as a man could take and that on top of the crippled voice, the radiotherapy, the radical diet, this would be the worst. The truth is that when I inserted that rider it wasn't because I didn't want them to remove the tongue but that I couldn't conceive of a state of tonguelessness and that denying it on the consent form was my acknowledgement of that.
Now here we were again in Rhŷs Evans' Harley Street rooms listening to details of the next operation which was, of course, to remove the rest of my tongue.
When I wrote in Chapter 9 about the original operation I pointed out that the waggly little thing we refer to as the tongue is only that organ's visible tip. On the plastic cut-away model of the face and throat on Rhŷs Evans' desk, the dull pink tongue descended way into the back of the throat and, at the front, down into the lower jaw, filling the space of the chin. This time plastic surgery would be needed: a lump of muscle in my back would be cut out and used to replace the tongue. For a while I thought this meant the recreation of a new tongue, of something which would have some of the function of the old one. But no: the flap would be no more than a platform, filling in the empty space in my lower jaw.
Worse: along with the tongue the surgical team would be relieving me of my epiglottis (the flap which stops food and drink going down the wrong way) and the mass of sub-lingual folds above the vocal chords. It meant that the only protection I had against food and drink descending into my lungs would be my vocal chords; organs not really prepared for that job. It meant that while I may one day be able to learn to take minimal sustenance through my mouth, the chances are that I'd do most of my eating from the day of the operation through a tube they'd insert into my stomach.
The conversation with Rhŷs Evans was an odd one. It reminded me of the sorts of conversation I used to have with teachers after I'd received a D for a test paper for which I was blithely expecting an A and in which they pointed out that academic traits which I'd always assumed they rather liked were in fact proving the educational death of me. Rhŷs Evans spoke of those symptoms which he'd suspected all along might lead to this moment, but they were symptoms which until now I thought indicated recovery. I'd thought I was getting some movement back into my tongue and indeed every time he'd inspected it he'd refer to this developing skill approvingly. But now it seemed that this was nowhere near the movement one would expect of a recovering tongue and to his expert eye showed that the blood wasn't getting to the tongue properly. There was the pain which, until now, we'd always discussed as a by-product of the operation rather than of the cancer; now I learned that this was just what cancer pain felt like.
The only slightly optimistic note came from Rhŷs Evans' suggestion that the effect on my voice might not be too bad, and that with luck and given the poor recovery of my tongue, I might eventually be able to speak as well without a tongue as I was currently doing with three-quarters of one. Optimistic as this briefly sounded, it meant, apart from anything else, that I'd never broadcast again. In fact I'd done quite a bit of radio in the past couple of months: I'd had a piece in the last edition of Fourth Column and did a dozen or so radio interviews and a couple of TV programmes to promote the hardback edition of the book. But all of them were done as a man with a dodgy voice: there was never any suggestion that I could appear on radio or TV except as a man talking about the problems of his corrupted voice.
We all sat quietly for a few moments while I took in the offer of this new operation. I couldn't think properly. This was worse, somehow, than even the original diagnosis. I felt the oppressive weight of the interminable surgical process suddenly, slicing me inch-by-inch, suckering me into ever more drastic remedies, ever more unbearable disabilities.
'What happens', I said, 'if I don't have the operation?' Rhys Evans described the slow growth of the tumour as it descended towards my larynx, stopping me speaking and eventually stopping me breathing.
Nigella and I walked out into Harley Street reeling, and sat in the car.
When I was 11 I got a Hackney scholarship to the City of London school. I'd been a bright child in junior school and used to being at the top of the class without working very hard for it. At the City of London I was in a class full of bright children and, worse, bright children who worked hard. At the end of the first year I came near the bottom of the class, a position I had no resources to deal with. As I travelled home with my school report I tried to work out something to say to my parents which would take the shock of my failure away in an instant, something which would cancel it out. I got home, knocked on the door and when mum answered it I said, without preamble 'I want to leave the school. It's not right for me.' Somehow – wrongly – I imagined that my parents would take me at my word and ignore the damning report as symptomatic of the school's failure rather than mine.
I felt the same sort of blind panic now. Sitting in the car I needed a quick and radical solution to this: a solution to the prognosis, the threat of the surgery, the prospect of the tongueless, voiceless, foodless life. I told Nigella I was seriously thinking of not having the operation. And then seizing on the quick solution I asked her if she'd help me commit suicide. She wouldn't – not because, as the complete athiest, she had any moral argument with suicide itself, but for a list of other reasons which included wanting me to hang around as long as possible and not wanting to have to tell the children one day when they asked that she'd helped the father they couldn't remember kill himself.
The thought went away for a while; we drove home.
I had the operation a couple of days later in August '98. This time there was no question of my not accepting all the help I could get and I started on antidepressants a couple of days before the operation in the hope that they'd kick in just as the morphine was wearing off. The routine was much the same as it had been the last time: a few days in the High Dependency Unit, a few more days with tubes poking from me back in my room. This time I seemed more able to cope with the hospital routine and lasted in hospital for the full fortnight so that when I came home I was relatively normal, as far as the children were concerned, always remembering that these were children who were getting used to their father's cumulative disablement.
I had a tracheotomy again and now I had a tube poking out of my stomach through which I would feed three times a day. I brought home two carrier bags full of drugs, sprays, wipes, swabs and so on, and a schedule for taking the various pain killers, anti-emetics, food supplements, indigestion remedies and so on which would cover me for the next few weeks. I also wore a small battery-operated pump which would inject a regular flow of dimorphine into me to keep the pain down. I had scars at the left-hand side of my neck where they reached through to get the tongue, and for about a foot along my back where they'd taken the muscle and its attached vein. Looking at myself in the mirror I realised that if I'd had all three operations at the same time my head would have fallen off: I now had a series of scars almost entirely encircling my neck.
I had no voice to speak of because my new tongue was still bloated and full of stitches, but within weeks it became apparent that while Nigella and the children could understand almost everything I said, nobody else was ever likely to be able to.
But strangely I felt convinced that the worst was over and that I was cancer-free. I also felt deeply depressed. I would lie in bed calculating how best to do away with myself. I knew, for instance, that I had a bottle of sleeping pills somewhere which I could crush up and pump into my stomach: one afternoon I went as far as to count them and look up lethal dosages in one of my medical books. It seemed, in those days, such a reasonable thing to do – to let it all just slip away from me. Indeed it's possible that the only reason I didn't do it then was because I'd promised Nigella that if I was going to digress from the stated regime I'd consult with her first, and I knew the reasons she'd have for not killing myself were reasonable ones.
And so here I was: my tongue gone, unable to speak or eat and no real chance of doing either for as long as I lived. It wasn't quite as miserable as it sounds. The antidepressant started to do its job and I started to have a shot at living a little. In September, for instance, Nigella held a party to launch her first book which was, ironically enough, about food. I'd intended turning up briefly, smiling a forced smile, and slipping away, but I found myself the last to leave. In part it was because I was so proud of Nigella's success, and in part because I was having a genuinely good time. It turned out that I could be almost as jokey with a pad and pencil as I was with my old voice, and even better, I was able to drink again. I'd hardly touched a drop recently because of the soreness of my mouth and throat, but here I was pumping the stuff into my stomach tube with a large plastic syringe, and far from finding it gross, friends lined up to watch. The Maître d' of the swish hotel bar in which the party was held even went so far as to show me how to get champagne into the syringe without filling it full of bubbles.
And so it went until the end of the year. Sure, there was the odd problem with the hole in my neck which was strangely unwilling to heal, and the voice I had seemed to be raspier than usual, but there were some wonderfully good times with the children and Nigella during which, tongue or no, I'd never felt happier. In December Peter Rhŷs Evans took one of his regular looks down my throat and pronounced himself mystified by the un-healed hole. Would I, he asked, pop in for a scan sometime? We fixed the date for sometime in the New Year and both Nigella and I pretended that we believed this was a routine event when both of us knew it might well not be. On this basis we decided that we should take the kids away for a holiday: we hadn't had one for two years or more and if I needed even more surgery then this would be our only opportunity for a while.
We spent the end of 1998 and the start of 1999 in Disney World and had a wonderful time. Transporting a week's worth of liquid food took some doing and there were a couple of days when I stayed in bed, knackered, while Nigella and the kids went off to the Magic Kingdom, but that and my inability to do the junk food which is so much a part of theme park life aside, we could hardly have enjoyed it more.
A couple of days after we returned I went for the scan. There was, indeed, some suggestion of returning cancer around my larynx. If a biopsy proved this to be the case then we were, apparently, talking about a total laryngectomy. My voice box would be removed as the surgeons chased the cancer down my gullet and the result would be almost no voice at all, a tracheostomy for life but – the upside – the possibility that I might be able to swallow liquids again.
I went in for the biopsy and the next day turned up for the results. I'd prepared my _Times_ readers for a week or so off while I had the operation I was sure I'd need. In the event I did write a column the next week:
I know what I said last week and that I wasn't meant to be here today: as we speak I should be back on the ward with the surgeons chasing the cancer further down my neck. But as soon as we arrived at the outpatients clinic we knew it was all up. Normally, and despite BUPA's hefty chequebook, we conduct our clinical meetings in an ordinary white cubicle in the general outpatient's clinic; this time the receptionist gave us a tight smile and said Mr Rhŷs Evans had asked for us to be shown over to one of the chain-hotel designed consulting rooms in the Marsden's private wing. You do not ask for your patients to be taken to the comfy chairs if you're about to tell them that after all the shadow on the scan was a packet of Woodbines left on the machine by one of the cleaners.
When Rhys Evans arrived it was with the unspoken hint of worse news still. The list of clinical possibilities thus far have all been either surgical or radiological and I've known for some time that if a medical doctor ever turned up to a consultation then we were no longer talking about cure but about remission. Accompanying my surgeon were two men I'd not met before: a consultant medical oncologist and his registrar. Standing behind them, looking embarrassed, was a tallish man in hood and gown with a scythe over his shoulder.
Statistics tell us that anyone whose job is treating those diagnosed as having cancer will, in around 60% of cases, eventually have to dole out the worst possible news, and you'd suppose that after some years of doing it most doctors would find a way somewhere between the mawkish and the unnecessarily brusque which would serve them comfortably in the majority of cases. I suppose it's testimony to Peter Rhŷs Evans that he gave us the news white-faced, nervous, with eyes downcast, much as he must have given the news the first time he ever had to, as if it were something both unsayable and already said.
And the news is this:
The cancer is in too many places around my throat and neck to warrant any more surgery. I could ask for a second opinion, I suppose, but quite honestly it's bad enough having one expert telling you how soon you're going to die without bringing in a second to rub it in. If I leave the cancer to take its natural course I have about six months left. If I have chemotherapy, and assuming the chemotherapy works in my case and that it's not so arduous as to be unbearable, then I might double or treble that time and there's a small but significant chance of my doing even better than that given that the cancers are tiny and I feel healthier than I ever have.
I'll take the chemotherapy, of course. Why would I not?
I'd imagined that I'd feel terrified when I got the news, but what I felt most of all was sad. Sad for Nigella, for the children, for my parents. As if, of course, sad were a word up to this particular job. I realised that the reason I don't seem to be going through the standard denial-anger-bargaining with God-acceptance schtick is because that's what I've been doing for the past 20 months or so. As soon as I heard the first diagnosis I heard a death sentence being passed and I suppose I never thought of the various operations and procedures as much more than temporary reprieves. Living with cancer must always mean living with the threat of death even, I imagine, if you manage to increase the distance between you and the diagnosis to the five years which counts as a cure.
Meanwhile I have some affairs to get in what passes for order. We haven't told the children yet and won't for a while at least and so if you come across them – and some of you, I know, do – please don't say anything. I'll carry on working for as long as I can and given that one of the side-effects of the chemotherapy is fatigue, I'm sure you'll understand if I don't answer all your mail individually from now on. And we're planning a big party for March to celebrate Nigella and my ten years of being together. Its strange, isn't it, how in the middle of all this madness there are some things worth celebrating?
And so this is how you find me. Not quite waiting to die, because although I've accepted that I will, and sooner rather than later, the same rules apply to the foreshortened life as to the one of normal length: just as no well-balanced 45 year old says 'Why bother going to the movies? I'll be dead in 30 years' so I find that my imminent death doesn't stop me wanting to know what happens at the end of bad detective thrillers or wanting to spend time with Nigella and the children. Those things are still worth doing.
As I write this we have all just returned from buying a basket for the spaniel we are due to collect in a couple of days time. A friend e-mailed me when she heard this to tell me about how it's a denial of what's happening and what's about to happen. It isn't at all: I know what's happening. But a dog is a happy thing, and it will be happy for me for whatever time I've got left and as happy as things can be for the family when I've gone.
London, March 1999
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7 ideal candidates to replace Maurizio Sarri if he gets sack at Chelsea, including ex-Blues boss, club legends or raid on PL rivals
Chelsea FC Manchester United FC
Magnus Eriksen
Maurizio Sarri is surely a man on borrowed time after Chelsea's humiliating 6-0 defeat to Manchester City in the Premier League on Sunday.
Roman Abramovich is not known for being a patient man, and previous Blues managers have been sacked for less than this, with the loss at the Etihad Stadium representing the club's biggest in the Premier League era.
MORE: The big change Maurizio Sarri is requesting if he stays at Chelsea
The Telegraph claim Sarri has around two weeks to save himself at Chelsea, with the Europa League likely to be crucial to his chances of staying on at Stamford Bridge.
Still, if we are nearing the end of the Italian tactician's short reign in west London, who could be an ideal replacement for him?
We've picked out seven top candidates who could come in and sort things out before then also inevitably being sacked after a dip in form after, who knows, a year? And then the whole wretched cycle can start again.
Should Chelsea sack Maurizio Sarri?
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Great news for Liverpool as key duo back on the bench against Manchester United
For now, what do we think of these options, Chelsea fans?
1) Carlo Ancelotti
If Jose Mourinho can have two stabs at the Chelsea job, surely Carlo Ancelotti deserves another go by now?
The Napoli manager has done a decent job after inheriting Sarri's job in Naples, and tends to win big trophies pretty much everywhere he goes.
In his remarkable career, Ancelotti has three Champions League titles under his belt, plus league titles in Italy, France, Germany, oh, and England of course.
Ancelotti was sacked by Chelsea just a year after winning the double, which was probably a tad premature, so CFC fans would surely welcome him back to sort things out now?
2) Zinedine Zidane
Zinedine Zidane won the Champions League three times as Real Madrid manager
A man who's going to be linked with a whole host of big jobs after his immense success at Real Madrid, perhaps Zinedine Zidane could be the man for Chelsea.
The French tactician won three Champions League finals in a row in less than three full seasons at the Bernabeu, and also picked up a La Liga title in that time.
One of the greatest players of all time is now looking like fast becoming a leading coach as well, even if some doubts remain about whether he could replicate his Real Madrid success elsewhere.
Admittedly, this Chelsea team looks like a far bigger challenge after a pretty dire couple of seasons, and with doubts over the future of Eden Hazard.
Then again, could a move to hire Zidane be precisely what's needed to help the London giants keep the Belgian?
"Everyone knows the respect I have for Zidane as a player, but also as a manager. He was my idol," Hazard told HLN, as quoted by the Telegraph in 2017.
At the time that looked a worrying statement amid links with Real Madrid, but with Zidane stepping down last summer, this could be a huge opportunity for Chelsea to kill two birds with one stone.
More Stories Carlo Ancelotti Diego Simeone Frank Lampard gianfranco zola Massimiliano Allegri Mauricio Pochettino Maurizio Sarri Zinedine Zidane
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Confirmed Real Madrid squad vs Sevilla: Bale snubbed, mixed news on injured duo | {
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How Israel became the most advanced country in agriculture
In the early 19th century, the first settlers who decided to settle in the lands of
faced a great challenge: how to farm in sweltering heat and minimal rainfall. The land was catastrophically barren, but the desire to make this area habitable was much stronger. Ways have been found to develop
without water and fertile soil. How did
manage to become the capital of
technologies in this area? We will find out in this video about the innovative technology channel. The scarcity of water has been and continues to be a problem that humanity has. faced throughout history, but if before a relatively small part of the world's population suffered from a lack of water, in the last century this problem has reached a global scale.
The terrifying trend was confirmed by an official study of the global water crisis. At the beginning of the last century, only 14 percent of the world's population, which is more than 200 million people, lived in areas with some degree of water scarcity. By the 1980s, this proportion had risen to 42 and in the 2000s had risen to 58 percent 3.8 billion people suffered from water scarcity more than a billion of them lived in areas experiencing severe water scarcity mainly in south and east asia north africa and the middle east for
half of whose territory is occupied by deserts the problem of water extraction has also been serious at all times for a long time the main source of fresh water was lake kinneret in 1952 the new state began to build a system national water supply system a network of pipes canals and reservoirs for the supply of water from natural reservoirs and lake kinared in particular simultaneously the construction of hundreds of wells for the Extraction of water from underground aquifers began in the
, however, despite significant successes in the fight for fresh water, it was still not enough to meet the agricultural needs of the state in the midst of a rapidly expanding population and a booming industry. facing a new challenge over the years the
's average rainfall has decreased and water resources have been depleted facing new challenges the
i government decided to turn its attention to the mediterranean sea as a new main source of water for
today fifty percent of
's total water consumption is desalinated sea water however the
also uses other unique technologies for the sustainable development of
has made great progress in the so called recycled water technology it is about of reusing water for irrigation of agricultural land by recycling wastewater since the 2000s the
has invested over $750 million in centralized water treatment this added 37 billion gallons per year to the
's total water production there are currently 67 large wastewater treatment plants in
10 of which treat more than 56 percent percent of the
's wastewater collection in the sam Once the largest water treatment company is the lynchpin of the wastewater treatment plant, the United Nations-named model plant treats 97 million gallons of water Tel Aviv urban waste per day.
The water from the sewage system undergoes secondary and tertiary biological treatment and is then transported through a pipeline to irrigate 60% of the agricultural land in the negev desert without exaggeration
can be considered the world leader in the treatment of wastewater in comparison in the united states only 10 percent of the water is recycled while in
this proportion reaches al
90 percent this is what gilad erdan the former minister of strategic affairs and public diplomacy of
and now ambassador of
in the united states today nearly 90 percent of our wastewater is recycled, that is about four times more than in any other
in the world, this is a remarkable achievement and benefits not only
i companies help to save water around the world from africa to california to india another technology without which
would never have turned deserts into gardens f flourishing is drip irrigation instead of flooding fields with large amounts of water and fertilizer
i hydraulic engineer sim hablas in 1956 proposed a way to deliver moisture and fertilizer literally drop by drop directly to the roots of plants this technology was completely born accidentally noticing that one tree was more lush than the others in the backyard explosion dug into the ground near the tree trunk and discovered that water was dripping from the damaged pipe and falling directly to the roots, it took blas and his team years in taking the idea to its logical conclusion, but ultimately, the drip system helped restart
and 109 other countries around the world, from sugarcane fields in the Philippines to tea plantations in tanzania, the technology
i drip irrigation is not only flexible stabilized polyethylene hoses with drippers that equalize the flow of water throughout the entire pipeline, the system includes devices for water purification and filtration, accessories for distributing water throughout the field, as well as equipment for dissolving and dosing fertilizers and, of course, automatic with drip irrigation, water flows to all plants evenly and in it the leaves and stems of the plants do not get wet, there is no danger of spreading fungal infections and the surface of the soil between the rows of plants remains dry, which prevents the growth of weeds, says the
i company netafim founded by blast who developed this irrigation method. that the technology saves 25 to 75 percent of pumped water compared to classical irrigation, so fewer fertilizers and pesticides are used in the water, as a result, not only are yields increased, but they are also less exposed to chemical contamination of aquifers.
The system works in such a way that half the water used for irrigation produces twice the yield at the same time as the coefficient of useful water er use the ratio between the water absorbed by a plant and that used for irrigation with drip irrigation is of approximately 95 with irrigation by surface 45 and with irrigation by aspersion 75 a significant part of
is located in one of the driest regions of the planet but it is not only the lack of moisture that threatens
in this region the soil in
it also cannot be called absolutely suitable for
on such soil the root system of plants does not develop strong enough as a result of which the plant receives less nutrients and gives a lower yield this problem is combated in
with the help of useful fungi there are many species in nature and
of them form mutually beneficial relationships with plants the so called mycorrhizal fungi exp effectively walk the root system of plants with the help of mycelium a network of long microscopic filaments called hyphae, the surface area of the mycelium can be up to a hundred times that of the plant root in this second The root system waves it absorbs moisture and valuable nutrients that would not normally be available to the plant for
i farmers.
This is the perfect solution to increase yields in an environmentally friendly and absolutely safe way with dynamic population growth in regions with insufficient water supply. the battle for humidity seems to be a new reality that we will have to face in the next decades that is why the technology used in
and exported to other countries could save millions of people in the driest places on earth a supply system of recycled water seawater desalination technologies drip irrigation all of this works perfectly in one
and allows
to not worry about water and food shortages despite climate change and a growing population will other countries be able to adapt all these technologies as effectively as
did in its unequal battle with In the desert, will these technologies help stop global migration when water scarcity in certain regions? ns becomes threatening, only time will tell what you think about this, share your opinion in the comments under the foreign video | {
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Cindy Crawford gets fashiongoth & grungy for the first issue of BULLETT. I don't know how I feel about this. I feel like she's got too much of a glamorous, traditionally beautiful look to pull off today's weird/edgy/grungy style. It's too close to the "after" on RuPaul's Drag U for me. What do you think?
I scored a free copy of Bullett off a friend who's interning there, and the rest of the magazine is really good. Full of BEVEL and Zana Bayne harnesses, and they even wrote a story about Sofia Ajram, who's work I've been stalking across social networks for four years now. I am curious to see more from them. | {
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Erra-Liiva ist ein Dorf (estnisch küla) in der Landgemeinde Sonda (Sonda vald). Es liegt im Kreis Ida-Viru (Ost-Wierland) im Nordosten Estlands.
Beschreibung
Das Dorf hat 72 Einwohner (Stand 1. Januar 2009). Es liegt östlich der Stadt Kiviõli.
Schatzfund von Erra-Liiva
1939 wurde in der Erde von Erra-Liiva ein Münzschatz gefunden. Er besteht aus 176 arabischen, zwei byzantinischen und einer indischen Münze. Sie wurden wahrscheinlich Ende des 10. Jahrhunderts dort vergraben. Bei dem Schatz lag auch ein spiralförmiges Halsband aus Silber.
Weblinks
Beschreibung des Ortes (estnisch)
Schatzfund von Erra-Liiva (estnisch)
Einzelnachweise
Ort in Estland
Sonda
Geographie (Lüganuse) | {
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\section{Introduction}
Colloidal particles absorb strongly at fluid-fluid interfaces because the attachment energy is much greater than the thermal energy.~\cite{Binks2001}
Particle properties such as weight,~\cite{Chan1981} roughness,~\cite{Adams2008} and shape anisotropy~\cite{Loudet2005} can deform the interface around the adsorbed particle. Recent studies have shown that external electric~\cite{Aubry2008b} or magnetic fields~\cite{Gary2014a, Gary2014b} can also cause particles to deform the interface.
When interface deformations of individual particles overlap, the fluid-fluid surface area varies, leading to capillary interactions between the particles.~\cite{Madivala2009,Park2011,Lewandowski2010,Aubry2008a}
The shape of the interface deformations around individual particles characterises the capillary interaction modes that occur between the particles.
The modes can be represented analytically
as different terms in a multipolar expansion of the interface height around the particle:~\cite{Stamou2000}
particle weight triggers the monopolar mode~\cite{Kralchevsky1994}, external torques switch on the dipolar mode,~\cite{Gary2014a} and particle surface roughness and shape anisotropy activate the quadrupolar mode.~\cite{Botto2012}
The arrangement of many particles adsorbed at a fluid-fluid interface depends on both the dominant capillary interaction mode and how strongly an individual particle deforms the interface. The dipolar and quadrupolar modes are anisotropic, which allows the possibility of directed assembly. Varying both the dominant mode and/or the magnitude of the interface deformations can profoundly change the assembly behaviour of particles at interfaces. For example, Yunker et al.~\cite{yunker_suppression_2011} showed that switching spherical particles to ellipsoidal particles induces quadrupolar capillary interactions between the particles that inhibit the coffee-ring effect. However, these interactions depend only on particle properties and are therefore difficult to control on-the-fly assembly.
A desirable next step is to control the capillary strength or dominant capillary mode dynamically, allowing far greater control of the particle assembly process. Recently, Vandewalle et al.~\cite{Vandewalle2013} used heavy spherical particles with a magnetic dipole to tune the interplay between capillary attraction and magnetic repulsion. Applying an alternating magnetic field even causes the particles to swim across the interface, creating so-called magneto-capillary swimmers.
Recently, Davies et al.~\cite{Gary2014a,Gary2014b} showed that the dipolar mode is a promising route to
dynamically-controlled anisotropic assembly at an interface. They \revisedtext{simulated} ellipsoidal particles with a dipole moment parallel to the particle's long-axis and applied an external magnetic field normal to the interface. The dipole-field interaction causes the particles to tilt with respect to the interface, which deforms the interface, and the degree of deformation can be controlled by the dipole-field strength. They further demonstrated that one can switch off the capillary interactions altogether by causing the particles to flip into a vertical orientation with respect to the interface in which no interface deformations exist.
It is highly desirable to create ordered chains or crystals of particles at interfaces for materials science purposes. The structures created using both the dipolar mode and the quadrupolar mode tend to form open-chains with little long-range order.~\cite{Loudet2005, Gary2014b} Xie et al.~\cite{Xie2015} recently showed how to create tunable dipolar capillary interactions using spherical magnetic Janus particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces.
In this paper, we simulate the interaction between many such Janus-capillary particles at an interface, and find that we can create highly-ordered chains of particles. Additionally, we develop a theoretical model based on the superposition approximation describing capillary interactions between two particles, and measure the capillary forces between them, finding the results in good agreement with our theoretical model.
This paper is organised as follows: Section~\ref{sec:methods} briefly describes our simulation methods before we present our results in Section~\ref{sec:results}, and Section~\ref{sec:conclusions} concludes the article.
\section{Simulation method}
\label{sec:methods}
We use the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to simulate the motion of each fluid.
The LBM is a local mesoscopic algorithm, allowing for efficient parallel implementations, and has demonstrated itself as a powerful tool for numerical simulations of fluid flows.~\cite{Succi2001}
It has been extended to allow the simulation of, for example, multiphase/multicomponent
fluids~\cite{Shan1993,Shan1994,LKLSNJWVH16} and suspensions of particles of arbitrary shape and wettability.~\cite{ladd-verberg2001, Jansen2011, Gunther2013a}
We implement the pseudopotential multicomponent LBM method of Shan and Chen~\cite{Shan1993} with a D3Q19 lattice~\cite{Qian1992} and review some relevant details in the following.
Two fluid components are modelled by the following evolution equation of each distribution function discretized in space and time according to the lattice Boltzmann equation:
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{eq:LBG}
f_i^c(\vec{x} + \vec{c}_i \Delta t , t + \Delta t)=f_i^c(\vec{x},t)+\Omega_i^c(\vec{x},t)
\mbox{,}
\end{eqnarray}
where $i=1,...,19$, $f_i^c(\vec{x},t)$ are the single-particle distribution functions for fluid component $c=1$ or $2$,
$\vec{c}_i$ is the discrete velocity in the $i$th direction, and
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:BGK_collision_operator}
\Omega_i^c(\vec{x},t) = -\frac{f_i^c(\vec{x},t)- f_i^\mathrm{eq}(\rho^c(\vec{x},t), \vec{u}^c(\vec{x},t))}{\left( \tau^c / \Delta t \right)}
\end{equation}
is the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) collision operator.~\cite{Bhatnagar1954} $\tau^c$ is the relaxation time for component $c$.
The macroscopic densities and velocities are defined as
$ \rho^c(\vec{x},t) = \rho_0 \sum_if^c_i(\vec{x},t)$, where $\rho_0$ is a reference density, and $\vec{u}^c(\vec{x},t) = \sum_i f^c_i(\vec{x},t) \vec{c}_i/\rho^c(\vec{x},t)$, respectively.
Here, $f_i^\mathrm{eq}(\rho^c(\vec{x},t),\vec{u}^c(\vec{x},t))$ is a third-order equilibrium distribution function.~\cite{Chen1992}
When sufficient lattice symmetry is guaranteed, the Navier-Stokes equations can be recovered from \eqnref{LBG} on appropriate length and time scales~\cite{Succi2001}.
For convenience we choose the lattice constant $\Delta x$, the timestep $ \Delta t$, the unit mass $\rho_0 $ and the relaxation time $\tau^c$ to be unity, which leads
to a kinematic viscosity $\nu^c$ $=$ $\frac{1}{6}$ in lattice units.
For fluids to interact, we introduce a mean-field interaction force between fluid components $c$ and $c'$ following the Shan-Chen approach.~\cite{Shan1993}
The Shan-Chen LB method is a diffuse interface method, resulting in an interface width of $\approx 5\Delta x$.
The particle is discretized on the fluid lattice and coupled to the fluid species by means of
a modified bounce-back boundary condition as pioneered by Ladd and Aidun.~\cite{ladd-verberg2001, AIDUN1998, HFRRWL14}
For a detailed description of the method including the extension to particles suspended in multicompoent flows,
we refer the reader to the relevant literature.~\cite{Jansen2011, Gunther2013a, Frijters2012, Cappelli2015, KFGKH13}
We perform simulations of two particles and multiple particles.
For simulations between two particles, we place two particles along the $x$ axis separated by a distance $L_{AB}$.
We fix the position and orientation of the particles and let the system equilibrate.
We then measure the lateral forces on the particles as a function of tilt angle and bond angle, respectively.
For simulations of multiple particles, we randomly distribute particles at the fluid-fluid interface,
and let the system equilibrate. \revisedtext{We note that there is no thermal coupling with the fluid and
no fluctuating hydrodynamics involved in our simulation method.}
We then apply a magnetic field and analyse the results after the system reaches a steady-state.
\section{Results and Discussion}
\label{sec:results}
\subsection{Pair interactions}
\label{sec:pair}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\begin{subfigure}{.5\textwidth}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\fill[white,opacity=0.4] (-3,-3) rectangle (3.0,0.0);
\fill[white,opacity=0.4] (-3,0) rectangle (3.0,3.0);
\draw[ultra thick,green] (0.5,0.6) to [out=330,in=180] (3,0.0);
\draw[ultra thick,green] (-0.5,-0.6) to [out=150,in=360](-3,0.0);
\filldraw[fill=blue!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(0,0) -- (-0.5,-0.72) arc (235:415:0.87) -- (0,0);
\filldraw[fill=red!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(0,0) -- (0.5,0.72) arc (55:235:0.87) -- (0,0);
\draw[dashed] (-3,0) to (3,0);
\draw[ultra thick, black,arrows=->] (0.5,2.0) to (-0.5,2.0);
\node at (0.5,1.5) [fontscale=3] {$\mathbf{H}$};
\draw[thick,black] ([shift=(0:0.5cm)]-0.5,0.6) arc (90:155:0.5cm);
\node[black] at (-0.4,0.6) [fontscale=1] {$\phi$};
\draw[ultra thick, black,arrows=->] (0,0) to (-0.94,0.65);
\node at (-1.2,0.75) [fontscale=2] {$\mathbf{m}$};
\draw[ultra thick, black] (-0.5,-0.72) -- (0.5,0.72);
\draw[thick, black, dashed] (0.7,0.0) -- (0.7,0.5);
\node at (0.52,0.25) [fontscale=1] {$\zeta$};
\draw[dashed] (0,-1.75) to (0,1.75);
\draw[thick, black,arrows=->] (2,-2) to (2,-1.0);
\node at (2.2,-1.75) [fontscale=2] {y};
\draw[thick, black,arrows=->] (2,-2) to (1.0,-2);
\node at (1.75,-2.2) [fontscale=2] {x};
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Side view}
\label{fig:geo}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{.5\textwidth}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\fill[white,opacity=0.4] (-4,-3) rectangle (4.0,0.0);
\fill[white,opacity=0.4] (-4,0) rectangle (4.0,3.0);
\filldraw[fill=blue!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(-2.0,0) -- (-2.5,-0.72) arc (235:415:0.8766) -- (-2.0,0);
\filldraw[fill=red!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(-2,0) -- (-1.5,0.72) arc (55:235:0.8766) -- (-2.0,0);
\filldraw[fill=red!60!white, draw=red!60!white]
(-2.6222,0.617465) -- (-2.5,-0.72) arc (-90:19:1.08) -- (-2.6222,0.617465);
\filldraw[fill=blue!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(2.0,0) -- (1.5,-0.72) arc (235:415:0.87) -- (2.0,0);
\filldraw[fill=red!60!white, draw=green!50!black]
(2,0) -- (2.5,0.72) arc (55:235:0.87) -- (2.0,0);
\filldraw[fill=red!60!white, draw=red!60!white]
(1.3778,0.617465) -- (1.5,-0.72) arc (-90:19:1.08) -- (1.3778,0.617465);
\draw[dashed] (-3,0) to (3,0);
\draw[red,thick,dashed] (-4,-2.5) rectangle (4,2.5);
\draw[ultra thick, dashed, black,arrows=->] (-2.0,0) to (-2.94,0.65);
\draw[ultra thick, dashed, black,arrows=->] (2,0) to (1.06,0.65);
\node at (-3.1,0.85) [fontscale=2] {$O'$};
\node at (-1.8,-0.2) [fontscale=2] {$O$};
\draw[ultra thick, black,arrows=->] (-2.0,-0.5) -- (2.0,-0.5);
\draw[ultra thick, black,arrows=->] (0.0,-0.5) -- (-2.0,-0.5);
\draw[dashed] (-2.0,-2) to (-2.0,2);
\draw[dashed] (2,-2) to (2,2);
\node at (-2.61,0.2) [fontscale=0.4] {$\varphi_{\text{\textscale{.5}{A}}}$};
\draw[thick,black] (-2.45,0) arc (170:140:0.5cm);
\node at (1.4,0.2) [fontscale=0.4] {$\varphi_{\text{\textscale{.5}{B}}}$};
\draw[thick,black] (1.55,0) arc (170:140:0.5cm);
\node at (0.0,-1.0) [fontscale=2] {$L_{AB}$};
\draw[thick, black,arrows=->] (3.1,-2) to (3.1,-1.0);
\node at (3.3,-1.75) [fontscale=2] {z};
\draw[thick, black,arrows=->] (3.1,-2) to (2.1,-2);
\node at (2.75,-2.2) [fontscale=2] {x};
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Planar view}
\label{fig:geo}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{ a) Side view of a single particle and b) planar view of both particles.
The Janus particle consists of an apolar and a polar hemisphere. The particle's magnetic
dipole moment $\mathbf{m}$ is orthogonal to the Janus boundary, and the
external magnetic field, $\mathbf{H}$, is directed parallel to the interface.
The tilt angle $\phi$ is defined as the angle between the particle's dipole moment and the undeformed interface normal.
The bold green line represents the deformed interface and $\zeta$ is the maximal interface height at the contact line.
The bond angle $\varphi=\varphi_A=\varphi_B$ is defined as the angle between the projection of orientation of magnetic dipole
on the undeformed interface (arrow $OO'$) and center-to-center vector of particles. $L_{AB}$ is pair separation.
}
\label{fig:janus-geo}
\end{figure}
In order to gain insight into the behaviour of large numbers of magnetic Janus particles adsorbed at an interface interacting via capillary interactions, we first consider the interaction of two spherical Janus particles. Each particle comprises an apolar and a polar hemisphere of opposite wettability, with three-phase contact
angles $\theta_a = 90^{\circ} +\beta$ and $\theta_p = 90^{\circ} -\beta$,
respectively, where $\beta$ represents the amphiphilicity of the particle. Each particle has a magnetic moment $\mathbf{m}$ directed perpendicular to the Janus boundary, as illustrated in~\figref{janus-geo}a.
When a magnetic field directed parallel to the interface $\mathbf{H}$ is applied the particles experience a torque $\boldsymbol{\tau}=\mathbf{m} \times \mathbf{H}$ that causes them to rotate. The surface tension of the interface resists this rotation, and the particles tilt with respect to the interface. The tilt angle $\phi$ is defined as the angle between the particle dipole-moment $\mathbf{m}$ and the undeformed-interface normal.
As the particle tilts, it deforms the interface around it in a dipolar fashion:~\cite{Xie2015} the interface is depressed on one side and elevated on the other, and the magnitude of these deformations are equal. The maximal deformation height of the interface, $\zeta$, occurs at the surface of the particle.
The tilt angle therefore depends on the dipole-field strength $B_m=|\mathbf{m}| |\mathbf{H}|$. For the purposes of our investigations, we assume that the external field strength is much greater than the magnitude of the dipole-moment, $H \gg m$, such that the external field strength is the dominant contribution the dipole-field strength $B_m \approx H$ and we therefore neglect any magnetic dipole-dipole interactions between the particles.
Capillary interactions arise when the interface deformations caused by the tilting of one particle overlap with the interface deformations caused by the tilting of another particle. Like deformations attract, and unlike deformations repel.
To investigate the capillary interactions between two particles quantitatively, we define two bond angles $\varphi_A,~\varphi_B$ as the angle between the projection of orientation of the magnetic dipole on the undeformed interface and the centre-centre vector of particles, as shown in~\figref{janus-geo}b. In this part of the paper, we study the interaction between two Janus particles with equal bond angles $\varphi=\varphi_A=\varphi_B$.
\figref{janus-geo-sim} shows how the interface deforms around two tilting Janus
particles. In this representative system, the particles have equal tilt angles
$\phi=90^{\circ}$ and bond angles $\varphi = 0^{\circ}$. The
yellow colour represents elevated regions, and the black colour represents
depressed regions of the interface. In this configuration, the particles repel
each other due to the unlike arrangement of their capillary charges. At a point
equidistant between the two particles, the interface deformation is zero.
\begin{figure}[!t]
\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{upup-paraview-new.png}
\caption{Snapshots of two tilted Janus particles adsorbed at a fluid-fluid
interface obtained from our simulations. The particles have amphiphilicities
$\beta=39^{\circ}$, tilt angles $\phi = 90^{\circ}$, bond angles $\varphi_A =
\varphi_B = 0^{\circ}$, and a centre-centre separation $L_{AB}/R = 3$. The
colours show the relative height of the interface. The interface is depressed
on one side of the particle (black), raised on the other side (yellow) and flat
at a point equidistant between the two particles. The interface deformations of
each particle are dipolar, causing dipolar capillary interactions between the
particles.}
\captionsetup[figure]{slc=off}
\label{fig:janus-geo-sim}
\end{figure}
We have derived an expression for the interaction energy between two Janus
particles interacting via capillary interactions of the kind described
above. In this model, we assume that (i) the leading order deformation
mode is dipolar (ii) the superposition approximation is valid (iii)
interface deformations are small.~\cite{Stamou2000} The dipolar
interaction energy for two Janus particles $\Delta E$ using cylindrical coordinates is
\begin{align}
&\Delta E= 2 \pi\zeta^2\gamma_{12} R^2 L_{AB}^{-2} \nonumber \\
&+ \frac{8\zeta R^2 \gamma_{12} \sin \beta} {L_{AB}} \left(\tan^{-1}\frac{L_{AB}+R}{L_{AB}-R}-\frac{\pi}{4}\right) \mbox{,} \label{eq:energy}
\end{align}
where $\gamma_{12}$ is the fluid-fluid interface tension, $R$ is the particle
radius (both particles have the same radii), and $L_{AB}$ is the centre-centre
separation of the particles. To reiterate, $\beta$ is the amphiphilicity of the
particles and $\zeta$ is the height of the maximal interface deformation caused
by the particles.
The lateral capillary force $\Delta F = \frac{\partial (\Delta E)}{\partial
L_{AB}}$ is therefore
\begin{align}
&\Delta F = -4 \pi \zeta^2 \gamma_{12} R^2 L_{AB}^{-3} \nonumber \\
&- \frac{8\zeta R^2 \gamma_{12} \sin\beta} {L_{AB}^2} \left( \frac{L_{AB}R}{R^2+L_{AB}^2} + \tan^{-1}\frac{L_{AB}+R}{L_{AB}-R} - \frac{\pi}{4}\right) \mbox{.} \label{eq:force-upup-n}
\end{align}
For a detailed derivation, we refer the reader to Appendix A.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= 0.5\textwidth]{force-theta-d60.pdf}
\caption{Lateral capillary force as a function of tilt angle for particles with amphiphilicities $\beta = 14^{\circ}$ (red) and $\beta = 21^{\circ}$ (green)
The particles have equal bond angles $\varphi_{A}=\varphi_{B}=0$. The solid line represents values from our theoretical model (\eqnref{force-upup-n}), and the symbols are simulation data.
The theoretical analysis agrees well with our simulation results in the limit of small interface deformations.
}
\label{fig:f-tilt}
\end{figure}
The maximal interface height $\zeta$ in~\eqnref{force-upup-n} depends on the tilt angle $\phi$.
In the case of a single Janus particle, the height of the contact line increases linearly for
small tilt angles, and then reaches a constant value for large tilt angles,
as we reported in our previous work.~\cite{Xie2015}
\revisedtext{Interestingly, a hyperbolic tangent $\zeta = \tanh(\phi)$ approximates the variation of the contact line height $\zeta$ with tilt angle $\phi$ well.~\cite{Xie2015} }
Therefore, \eqnref{force-upup-n} can be written as a function of the tilt angle.
Assuming that the interface height $\zeta(\phi) \propto \tanh \phi$,~\cite{Xie2015}
We compare the theoretical lateral capillary force \eqnref{force-upup-n} (solid lines) to the measured lateral capillary force from our simulations (circles) in~\figref{f-tilt} for two different particle amphiphilicities $\beta = 14^{\circ}$ and $\beta = 21^{\circ}$.
We place two particles of radius $R=14$ a distance $L_{AB} = 60$ apart along the $x$-axis with total system size $S = 1536 \times 384 \times 512$. We fix the bond angle $\varphi=0^{\circ}$ between the particles and measure the lateral force on the particles as the tilt angle varies.
~\figref{f-tilt} shows that the lateral capillary force increases as the amphiphilicity increases from $\beta=14^{\circ}$ to $\beta=21^{\circ}$ for a given tilt angle. For a given amphiphilicity, the capillary force increases with tilt angle up to tilt angles $\phi \approx 30^{\circ}$. This is because the interface area increases for small tilt angles,~\cite{Xie2015} which increases the interaction energy. As the tilt angle increases further $\phi > 30^{\circ}$, the capillary force tends to a nearly constant value, due to the fact that the maximal contact line height (and therefore the deformed interface area) also tends to a constant value.~\cite{Xie2015}
When comparing our theoretical model (solid lines) with simulation data (circles), we see that our model captures the qualitative features of the capillary interaction well, and quantitatively agrees with the numerical results for small tilt angles $\phi<25^{\circ}$ and small amphiphilicities $\beta=14^\circ$. The quantitative deviations at large tilt angles in the $\beta=21^\circ$ case are due to the breakdown of various assumptions in the theoretical model, namely the assumption of small interface slopes, and of finite-size effects in our simulations. The important predictions of our model are that the capillary force between particles can be tuned by increasing the particle amphiphilicity and/or the particle tilt angle. Since the external field strength controls the tilt angle, this allows the tuning of capillary interactions using an external field.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= 0.5\textwidth]{force-bond-d40.pdf}
\caption{Lateral capillary force as a function of bond angles of particles
with amphiphilicity $\beta = 21^{\circ}$(red), $\beta = 30^{\circ}$(green) and $\beta = 39^{\circ}$(blue).
The particles have tilt angle $90^{\circ}$. The capillary force is repulsive for small bond angles,
and becomes attractive for large bond angles. There is maximal attractive force between two particles for bond angles $\varphi=90^{\circ}$.
}
\label{fig:f-bond}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*} [bht]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{m{0.20cm}m{3.0cm}m{3.0cm}m{3.0cm}m{3.0cm}m{3.0cm}}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.18\textwidth]{n8-init.png}
\subcaption{}
\label{fig:n8-0}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.18\textwidth]{n8-2.png}
\subcaption{}
\label{fig:n8-1}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.18\textwidth]{n8-3.png}
\subcaption{}
\label{fig:n8-2}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.18\textwidth]{n8-4.png}
\subcaption{}
\label{fig:n8-3}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.18\textwidth]{n8-final.png}
\subcaption{}
\label{fig:n8-4}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Snapshots of the assembly process of $8$ Janus particles adsorbed at a
fluid-fluid interface. (a) The particles are initially placed randomly distributed at the
interface. (b) The parallel external field is switched on, causing capillary
interactions between the particles, leading them to assemble into two separate
chains. Particles arrange side-by-side with bond angles $\varphi = 90^{\circ}$
within a chain. (c), (d) The two chains move relative to one another in the
direction shown by the arrows. (e) The separate chains merge into one chain
such that each particle has a bond angle $\varphi=90^{\circ}$ with its
neighbouring particles.
}
\label{fig:n8}
\end{figure*}
\revisedtext{In order to understand the self-assembled structures of many-particles, it is required to consider the minimum energy orientation between two particles for a given tilt angle and separation.}
In the current case of equal bond angles $\varphi_A =\varphi_B= \varphi$,
minimising the total interaction energy with respect to the bond angle
using our theoretical model Eq.$\,$(A10) indicates that the interaction energy
decreases as the bond angle increases from $\varphi=0^{\circ}$ to
$\varphi=90^{\circ}$ (as shown in Fig.$\,8$ in Appendix A).
This theoretical
analysis predicts that bond angles $\varphi_A=\varphi_B=90^{\circ}$ minimise
the interaction energy, and that there is no energy barrier stopping the
particles arranging into this configuration.
In order to test the predictions of our model, we performed simulations of two particles of radius $R=10$ separated by a distance $L_{AB}=40$ along the x-axis with total system size $S = 512 \times 96 \times 512$. We fix the tilt angles $\phi=90^{\circ}$ and measured the lateral force on the particles as the bond angle varies.
\figref{f-bond} shows that the capillary force is repulsive for bond angles $\varphi<50^{\circ}$
and attractive for bond angles $\varphi>50^{\circ}$. There is maximal attractive force between two particles for
$\varphi_A =\varphi_B=90^{\circ}$. The simulation results show that for these parameters, two Janus particles with equal bond angles $\varphi_A = \varphi_B = \varphi=90^{\circ}$ minimises the interaction energy, agreeing with our theoretical predictions.
Moreover, the lateral force decreases monotonically with increasing bond angle indicating that there is no energy barrier stopping the particles achieving the minimum energy state. Therefore, two Janus particles of the kind investigated in this paper interacting as capillary dipoles should rearrange into a configuration with $\varphi=90^{\circ}$ bond angle.
\subsection{Multiple particles}
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{m{0.15cm}m{3.4cm}m{3.4cm}m{3.4cm}m{3.4cm}m{3.4cm}}
\rotatebox{90}{\hspace{1.5cm} $z$ $\longrightarrow$ }
&\includegraphics[width= 0.2\textwidth]{same-n80-mt0.png}
\subcaption{$\bar{B}=0.0, Q=0.01$}
\label{fig:same_80_mt0}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.2\textwidth]{same-n80-mt2.png}
\subcaption{$\bar{B}=0.13, Q=0.50$}
\label{fig:same_80_mt2}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.2\textwidth]{same-n80-mt45e-1.png}
\subcaption{$\bar{B}=0.30, Q=1.50$}
\label{fig:same_80_mt5}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.2\textwidth]{same-n80-mt10.png}
\subcaption{$\bar{B}=0.65, Q=1.47$}
\label{fig:same_80_mt10}
&\includegraphics[width= 0.2\textwidth]{same-n80-mt20.png}
\subcaption{$\bar{B}=1.31, Q=1.48$}
\label{fig:same_80_mt20} \\ [-0.9cm]
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{
Snapshots of self-assembled structures of a system with constant
surface fraction $\Phi= 0.38$ but varying dipole-field strength $\bar{B} =
B_m/\pi R^2\gamma_{12}$. (a) No external field applied. The particles distribute
randomly on the interface. (b) A small applied external field $\bar{B}=0.13$
shows the beginnings of chain formation but little global order. (c) Increase
the dipole-field strength to $\bar{B}=0.30$ creates a highly ordered lattice
structure. (d) As the field strength increases to $\bar{B}=0.65$, the
interparticle distance within a chain decreases and the chains act as a
composite unit. Competing interactions with other chains causes chain bending
and curving. (e) For $\bar{B}=1.31$ the chains exhibit less curvature due to
the introduction of more defects in the system. The order parameter $Q$ is computed using Eq.~\ref{eq:order}.}
\label{fig:self_b}
\end{figure*}
In this section we study the arrangement and many-body dynamics of multiple Janus particles adsorbed at a flat fluid-fluid interface. We start by simulating 8 Janus particles each of radius $R=10$ adsorbed at an interface of area $A=256^2$.
\figref{n8} shows simulation snapshots of the assembly process for this system. The particles start off randomly distributed with no external field applied~(\figref{n8-0}). Once the external field is turned on, the particles arrange into two separate chains~(\figref{n8-1}). Within each chain, the particles arrange side--side with bond angles $\varphi=90^{\circ}$, in agreement with our pair-interaction analysis. Between the chains, the particles in one chain arrange with particles in the other chain such that their bond angles are $\varphi = 0^{\circ}$.
Once arranged into individual chains, the chains act as a composite unit and move relative to one another. First, they move in opposite directions, as indicated by the arrows in~\figref{n8-1}. Once there is no end-end overlap of the chains, they begin to move towards one another (\figref{n8-2} and~\figref{n8-3}) before finally assembling into a single chain in which all particles are arranged side--side with bond angles $\varphi=90^{\circ}$ [Movie S1]. We need to reiterate that this assembly process occurs purely due to capillary interactions.
These results agree with our pair interaction analysis and suggest that short-range many-body effects are perhaps less relevant than in other capillary-interaction systems,
in which many-body structures do not correspond with the predicted structures from pair-wise interactions alone.\revisedtext{~\cite{Gary2015,supp} }
To investigate the assembly process further, we increase the number of particles on the interface. We define a surface fraction $\Phi= \frac{\pi N R^2}{A}$, where $N$ is the total number of particles and $A$ is the
interface area before particles are placed at the interface.
\figref{self_b} shows the structure of particle monolayers with surface fraction $\Phi = 0.38$ that form as we vary the dipole-field strength $B_m$. Initially, the particles are distributed randomly on the interface with no external field applied~(\figref{same_80_mt0}). We then apply an external magnetic field directed parallel to the interface that switches on capillary interactions, as described previously, and we then allow the system to reach a steady state.
For a dipole-field strength of $\bar{B}=B_m/\pi R^2\gamma_{12}=0.13$~(\figref{same_80_mt2}), we see some
ordering, but no formation of distinct chains in which particles are aligned
side-side. As we increase the dipole-field strength to
$\bar{B}=0.30$~(\figref{same_80_mt5}), the particles arrange into well-defined
chains. For this dipole-field strength, the chains exhibit little bending or
curvature. Within the chains, particles arrange with bond angles $\varphi =
90^{\circ}$, and particles arrange with particles in other chains with bond
angle $\varphi=0^{\circ}$, similar to the arrangements that we observed with 8
particles in~\figref{n8}. \revisedtext{Due to the periodic boundary conditions of our simulations,
we observe coexistence of hexagonal and rectangular particular arrangements with neighbouring particles in other chains.}
One can clearly observe a high degree of order for
this field strength. We also notice that the particles within the chains
maintain a clear separation between one another. Increasing the field strength
further to $\bar{B}=0.65$ ~(\figref{same_80_mt10}) and
$\bar{B}=1.31$~(\figref{same_80_mt20}) reduces the inter-particle distance between
particles within a particular chain, and the chains show a larger degree of
bending and curvature.
We suggest that the reason we observe a highly ordered lattice structure for
dipole-field strength $\bar{B}=0.30$~(\figref{same_80_mt5}) is due to the
strength of capillary interactions for this dipole-field strength; particles
are able to leave their chain and join other chains easily if it is
energetically favourable [Movie S2]. In contrast, for higher dipole-field
strengths $\bar{B}=0.65$ ~(\figref{same_80_mt10}) the capillary interactions between
the particles are stronger, as evidenced by their smaller inter-particle
separations within chains. Particles are more strongly bound to their initial
chains, and chains essentially become self-contained. These chains interact
with other chains as a composite unit, leading to the bending and the curving
of the chains, but particles are not easily able to leave one chain and attach
to another [Movie S3]. As the dipole-field strength increases yet further to
$\bar{B}=1.31$~(\figref{same_80_mt20}), the chains exhibit less bending and curvature
due to the introduction of more ``defects'' in the structure. Those appear due to the fact that
there is more available interface area because of the smaller inter-particle
separations.
Our results suggest that for intermediate dipole-field strengths there is a ``sweet-spot'' capillary interaction magnitude that allows the rearrangement of the particles into energetically favourable structures. For field strengths of this magnitude, it may be possible to create thermodynamically stable monolayers, as opposed to the meta-stable monolayers one usually observes in monolayers of particles interacting via capillary interactions~\cite{Gunther2013}.
\begin{figure}[b]
\includegraphics[width= 0.5\textwidth]{n80-Q-order.pdf}
\caption{Order parameter $Q$ for a surface fraction $\Phi= 0.38$ as the
dipole-field strength $\bar{B} = B_m/\pi R^2\gamma_{12}$ varies. The order
parameter $Q$ increases to $1.5$ for dipole-field strength $\bar{B} = 0.30$,
indicating that the particles form straight chains.
}
\label{fig:order}
\end{figure}
In order to characterize the straightness and order of the chains, we introduce a pair-orientation order parameter $Q$, defined as
\begin{equation}
Q = \frac{\sum_{k=1}^N \sum_{j=1}^{M_k} \frac{3\cos(2\psi_k^j)}{2}}{\sum_{k=1}^N M_k}
\label{eq:order}
\end{equation}
where $N$ is the number of chains, $M_k$ is the number of particle pairs in chain $k$, and $\psi$ is the angle between the center-to-center vector of the particle pair $j$ and the $z$ axis. The centre-to-centre vector of the pair $j$ is the vector connecting centres of two adjacent particles $j$ and $j+1$.
The order parameter $Q$ takes values $1.5$ for chains whose pair vectors are parallel or $-1.5$ for chains whose pair vectors are perpendicular to the $z$ axis, respectively.
\figref{order} shows the value of the order parameter $Q$ as the dipole-field strength $\bar{B}$ increases. We see that the order parameter increases monotonically before reaching its maximum value $Q=1.5$ at a dipole-field strength $\bar{B}\approx 0.3$. As the dipole-field strength increases further, the order parameter slightly decreases before reaching a constant value $Q \approx 1.47$ for dipole-field strengths $\bar{B} > 0.4$. For these order parameter values, the particles within chains should be parallel with one another, which agrees with our observations in~\figref{self_b}. Further, the maximum $Q$ value we observe in~\figref{order} at dipole-field strength $\bar{B}=0.30$ reconciles with our results in~\figref{self_b}.
\figref{order} suggests that the transition to a highly-ordered state is a smooth, second-order phase transition, rather than a first-order transition as observed with non-Janus ellipsoidal particles,~\cite{Gary2014a,Gary2014b} due to the absence of any energy barrier separating particular particle configurations.
\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusions}
We studied capillary interactions between magnetic spherical Janus particles both theoretically and numerically. Capillary interactions between magnetic spherical Janus particles are induced by applying a magnetic field parallel to the interface, which causes the particles to tilt and to deform the interface. We derived an analytical model for the interaction between two such particles using the superposition and small interface deformation approximations. Our model predicts that the strength of capillary interactions should rapidly increase for small particle tilt angles before reaching a constant value. It also predicts that a bond angle $\varphi = 90^{\circ}$ corresponding to the side--side configuration between two particles minimises the interaction energy between the particles, and that there is no energy barrier prohibiting the particles from achieving this configuration.
We carried out lattice Boltzmann simulations of two Janus particles adsorbed at a fluid-fluid interface that confirmed our theoretical predictions. We then investigated the dynamics and steady-state behaviour of monolayers of Janus particles. Our simulations revealed interesting dynamical behaviour, namely that particles like to arrange in long, straight chains in the side--side configuration. However, if there are many particles on the interface, steric interactions lead to these chains bending and an increase in the number of defects in the monolayer.
Interestingly, we find that for intermediate dipole-field strengths a highly-ordered crystal-like arrangement of Janus particles is possible. This is because, for intermediate dipole-field strengths, the capillary interactions are weak, allowing particles to leave one chain and join another easily if it is energetically favourable to do so. In contrast, for high dipole-field strengths, capillary interactions are strong and particles are tightly bound to the chain that they initially join, leading to meta-stable structures.
Our results have implications for the directed self-assembly of particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces and the creation of ordered lattice structures of particle monolayers.
\begin{acknowledgments}
Q. Xie and J. Harting acknowledge financial support from NWO/STW (STW project
13291). We thank the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart and the J\"ulich Supercomputing Centre for the allocation of computing time.
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,304 |
var FetchIndex = require('../../../lib/commands/yokozuna/fetchindex');
var RpbYokozunaIndexGetResp = require('../../../lib/protobuf/riakprotobuf').getProtoFor('RpbYokozunaIndexGetResp');
var RpbYokozunaIndex = require('../../../lib/protobuf/riakprotobuf').getProtoFor('RpbYokozunaIndex');
var RpbErrorResp = require('../../../lib/protobuf/riakprotobuf').getProtoFor('RpbErrorResp');
var assert = require('assert');
describe('FetchIndex', function() {
describe('Build', function() {
it('should build a RpbYokozunaIndexGetReq correctly', function(done) {
var fetch = new FetchIndex.Builder()
.withIndexName('indexName')
.withCallback(function(){})
.build();
var protobuf = fetch.constructPbRequest();
assert.equal(protobuf.getName().toString('utf8'), 'indexName');
done();
});
it('should take a RpbYokozunaIndexGetResp and call the users callback with the response', function(done) {
var resp = new RpbYokozunaIndexGetResp();
for (var i =0; i < 3; i++) {
var index = new RpbYokozunaIndex();
index.name = new Buffer('myIndex_' + i);
index.schema = new Buffer('mySchema_' + i);
index.n_val = i;
resp.index.push(index);
}
var callback = function(err, response) {
assert.equal(response.length, 3);
assert.equal(response[1].indexName, 'myIndex_1');
assert.equal(response[1].schemaName, 'mySchema_1');
assert.equal(response[1].nVal, 1);
done();
};
var fetch = new FetchIndex.Builder()
.withIndexName('indexName')
.withCallback(callback)
.build();
fetch.onSuccess(resp);
});
it ('should take a RpbErrorResp and call the users callback with the error message', function(done) {
var rpbErrorResp = new RpbErrorResp();
rpbErrorResp.setErrmsg(new Buffer('this is an error'));
var callback = function(err, response) {
if (err) {
assert.equal(err,'this is an error');
done();
}
};
var fetch = new FetchIndex.Builder()
.withIndexName('indexName')
.withCallback(callback)
.build();
fetch.onRiakError(rpbErrorResp);
});
});
}); | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 9,020 |
\section{Introduction}
In the last two decades, investigations revealed that the
fundamental Planck scale in model universes with compactified Large
Extra Dimensions (LEDs) might be as small as a TeV [1]. This is a
promising feature with hope to observe TeV-scale black holes in
experiments such as the LHC. Possible production and detection of
TeV-scale black holes in colliders such as the LHC provide a
suitable basis to test our comprehending of black hole physics at
Planck scale and quantum gravity proposal. TeV scale black holes
thermodynamics in the presence of quantum gravity effects encoded in
the generalized uncertainty principle admitting a minimal measurable
length and also in loop quantum gravity-based modified dispersion
relations has been studied extensively in recent years (see for
instance [2-10]). It has been shown that the leading order
correction to the standard Bekenstein-Hawking entropy-area relation
is generally a logarithmic correction term. For extra-dimensional
gravity at TeV-scale, this leading order correction term leads to a
significant change in the possibility of formation and detection of
TeV black hole in the laboratories such as the LHC. Recently and in
the context of doubly special relativity it has been argued that a
particle's momentum cannot be arbitrary imprecise leading to the
nontrivial assumption of existence of maximal particle's momentum of
the order of the Planck momentum [11]. Existence of a maximal
particle's momentum has significant effects on the formulation of
the TeV black hole thermodynamics and changes significantly the
results of studies based on just the existence of a minimal
measurable length. Our goal here is to see what is the mutual
effects of the existence of a maximal momentum and a minimal length
on the thermodynamics of a TeV-scale black hole and how these
natural cutoffs affect the possible production of black holes in
experiments such as the LHC. Especially we focus on the role played
by the maximal momentum in this setup. With this motivation, we
consider a generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) that admits the
existence of both a minimal observable length and a maximal momentum
in a model universe with large extra dimensions. Then we study TeV
scale black hole thermodynamics in this setup. Especially the final
stage of evaporation of these black holes through Hawking radiation
is treated with details and possible relation between spacetime
dimensionality and final stage thermodynamical quantities is
explored. Finally the role played by maximal momentum on the
detectability of TeV black hole at the LHC is discussed.
\section{Minimal Length and TeV-Scale Black Hole Thermodynamics}
All approaches to quantum gravity proposal support the idea that
there is a fundamental length scale of the order of the Planck
length, which cannot be probed in a finite time. For example, in
string theory, we cannot probe distances smaller than the string
length. This minimal observable length can be realized by the
generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) as a generalization of the
standard Heisenberg uncertainty relation in the presence of
gravitational effects. Hence, the standard uncertainty principle is
replaced by the GUP that reflects quantum nature of gravity at very
short distances phenomenologically and can be formulated by a
generalized uncertainty relation as follows
\begin{equation}
\Delta x_i\geq\frac{1}{2\Delta p_i}+\alpha^{2} L_{p}^{2}\frac{\Delta
p_i}{2},
\end{equation}
where the fundamental Planck length is defined as $L_p=
G_d^{\frac{1}{d-2}}$, and $G_d$ is gravitational constant in
$d$-dimensional spacetime which in the ADD scenario takes the form
$G_d = G_4R^{d-4}$, that $R$ is the size of extra dimension(s). In
this paper natural units are used so that $\hbar=c=k_B=1$. In the
standard limit, $\Delta x\gg L_p$, one recovers the standard
uncertainty relation, $\Delta x\Delta p\geq\frac{1}{2}$. It should
be noted that the correction term in GUP formula (2.1) becomes
noticeable when momentum and distances scales are nearby the Planck
scale. In this section we use relation (2.1) to study thermodynamics
of a TeV scale Schwarzschild black hole. Our main goal here is to
see the relation between specetime dimensionality and possible
explanation of the logarithmic prefactor in black hole entropy
relation. In this manner, we deduce numerical results for
logarithmic prefactor in terms of spacetime dimensionality.
Based on the relation (2.1), a simple calculation gives
\begin{equation}
\Delta p_i\simeq\frac{\Delta x_i}{\alpha^2
L_p^2}\left(1-\sqrt{1-\frac{\alpha^2 L_p^2}{\Delta x_i^{2}}}\right).
\end{equation}
By a heuristic approach relying on Heisenberg uncertainty relation,
one deduces the following equation for Hawking temperature of black
holes [12]
\begin{equation}
T=\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\Delta p_i,
\end{equation}
which we have set the constant of proportionality equal to
$\frac{(d-3)}{2\pi}$ as a calibration factor in a $d$-dimensional
model (see [13] for instance). So, the modified black hole
temperature based on the GUP (2.1) becomes
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{\Delta x_i}{\alpha^2
L_p^2}\bigg)\left[1-\sqrt{1-\frac{\alpha^2 L_p^2}{\Delta
x_i^{2}}}\right].
\end{equation}
In the vicinity of the black hole surface there is an inherent
uncertainty in the position of any particle of about the
Schwarzschild radius, $r_s$. So, we can set
\begin{equation}
\Delta x_i\approx r_s=\omega_dL_pm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}.
\end{equation}
In this relation, $m$ and $\omega_d$ (the dimensionless area
coefficient) are given by
\begin{equation}
\omega_d=\left(\frac{8\pi^{\frac{3-d}{2}}\Gamma\left(\frac{d-1}{2}\right)}
{d-2}\right)^{\frac{1}{d-3}}\quad,\quad m=\frac{M}{M_p}
\end{equation}
where the fundamental Planck mass is defined as
$M_p=G_d^{-\frac{1}{d-2}}=\frac{1}{L_p}$. Substituting equation
(2.5) into equation (2.4), we find
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{\omega_d
m^{\frac{1}{d-3}}}{\alpha^2 L_p}\bigg)\left[1-\sqrt
{1-\frac{\alpha^2}{\omega_d^{2}m^{\frac{2}{d-3}}}}\right].
\end{equation}
To calculate an analytic form of black hole entropy, let us acquire
a Taylor expansion of equation (2.7) around $\alpha=0$,
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{\omega_d
m^{\frac{1}{d-3}}}{\alpha^2
L_p}\bigg)\left[1-\left(1-\frac{\alpha^2}{2\omega_d^{2}m^{\frac{2}{d-3}}}-
\frac{\alpha^4}{8\omega_d^{4}m^{\frac{4}{d-3}}}+O(\alpha^6)\right)\right],
\end{equation}
which can be rewritten as follows
\begin{equation}
T\approx\bigg(\frac{d-3}{16\pi
L_p}\bigg)\left[\frac{4}{\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}}+\frac{\alpha^2}{\omega_d^3m^{\frac{3}{d-3}}}\right]\,,
\end{equation}
where we have saved only terms up to the second order of $\alpha$.
Now, the related entropy can be derived by the first law of black
hole thermodynamics, that is, $dS=\frac{dM}{T}$ as,
\begin{equation}
S=\int_{M_{min}}^MdM\bigg(\frac{16\pi
L_p}{d-3}\bigg)\left[\frac{4}{\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}}+\frac{\alpha^2}{\omega_d^3m^{\frac{3}{d-3}}}\right]^{-1},
\end{equation}
or
\begin{equation}
S=\int_{M_{min}}^Mdm\frac{16\pi
}{d-3}\left[\frac{4}{\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}}+\frac{\alpha^2}{\omega_d^3m^{\frac{3}{d-3}}}\right]^{-1},
\end{equation}
where we have adopted the physical selection that the entropy
vanishes at $M_{min}$ where the black hole mass is minimized. With
this selection, there is no black hole radiation for masses less
than $M_{min}$. Note that black hole temperature is indeterminate
for $M<M_{min}$, where
\begin{equation}
M_{min}=\left(\frac{\alpha}{\omega_d}\right)^{d-3}M_p.
\end{equation}
Thus, Hawking evaporation process has to be stopped when the black
hole mass reaches a Planck size remnant mass. In this situation,
temperature of black hole has a maximum extremal value. We note that
detailed thermodynamics of Planck size remnant is not well-known
yet. In fact, the real thermodynamics of such an extreme system can
be even out of the realm of standard thermodynamics. It seems that
application of non-standard thermodynamics may be more reasonable at
this scale (see for instance [14] and references therein).
Black hole entropy with some arbitrary numbers of spacetime
dimensions with $\alpha=1$ can be calculated as follows
\begin{equation}
d=4\rightarrow\quad
S=16\pi\left[\frac{1}{4}M^2-\frac{1}{64}\ln(16M^2+1)-\frac{1}{16}+\frac{1}{64}\ln(5)\right],
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
d=5\rightarrow\quad
S=8\pi\left[\frac{\sqrt{6}M^\frac{3}{2}}{9\sqrt{\pi}}-\frac{1\sqrt{6\pi
M}}{32}+\frac{3\pi\arctan(\frac{4\sqrt{6M}}{3\sqrt{\pi}})}{128}+\frac{\sqrt{144}\pi}{192}+\frac{3\pi}{64}-\frac{3\pi\arctan(2)}{128}\right]
\end{equation}
$$d=6\rightarrow\quad
S=\frac{16\pi}{3}\bigg[\frac{3}{32}(\frac{12M^4}{\pi})^\frac{1}{3}-\frac{1}{32}(18\pi
M^2)^\frac{1}{3}+\frac{\pi}{64}\ln\bigg((144M^2)^\frac{1}{3}+(\pi^2)^\frac{1}{3}\bigg)$$
\begin{equation}
-\frac{\pi}{16}-\frac{\pi}{64}\ln\bigg((125\pi^2)^\frac{1}{3}\bigg)\bigg]
\end{equation}
$$d=7\rightarrow
S=4\pi\bigg[\frac{2M}{5}(\frac{M}{5\pi^2})^\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{24}(5M^3\pi^2)^\frac{1}{4}+\frac{\pi}{128}(125M\pi^2)^\frac{1}{4}-
\frac{5\pi^2}{512}\arctan(\frac{16M}{5\pi^2})^\frac{1}{4}$$
\begin{equation}
-\frac{\pi^2}{16}+\frac{5\pi^2}{192}-\frac{5\pi^2}{256}+\frac{5\pi^2}{512}\arctan(2)\bigg]
\end{equation}
and so on. From a loop quantum gravity viewpoint, the leading order
correction term to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black hole has
logarithmic nature [15]. Here we see that the logarithmic term is
present just for even number of spacetime dimensionality (see also
[16]).
The heat capacity of the black hole can also be achieved utilizing
the following standard formula
\begin{equation}
C=\frac{dM}{dT}.
\end{equation}
With $\alpha=1$, we find
\begin{equation}
C=(-16m\pi)\left[\frac{4}{\omega_dm^\frac{1}{d-3}}+\frac{3}{\omega_d^3m^\frac{3}{d-3}}\right]^{-1}
\end{equation}
Therefore, we were able to calculate some important thermodynamical
quantities attributed to TeV black holes in a model universe with
large extra dimensions where quantum gravity effects are taken into
account through a generalized uncertainty principle that admits just
a minimal measurable length. The physics of TeV scale black hole
evaporation in the presence of quantum gravity effects, especially
existence of a minimal measurable length, powerfully support the
idea that the final stage of these black holes evaporation is a
stable, Planck-size remnant. These remnants may be a reliable
candidate for dark matter.
Figures 1, 2 and 3 demonstrate some features of TeV black hole
thermodynamics versus mass. In the minimal length GUP framework,
evaporation of black hole stops once it reaches the stable
Planck-size remnant and its entropy and the heat capacity in this
stage are vanishing, but its temperature reaches a maximal value.
So, evaporation of TeV scale black hole ends once black hole mass
reaches a Planck-size remnant mass. The existence of this remnant
has been considered as a possible solution to the information loss
problem in black hole evaporation. It has been suggested also that
these remnants may be a possible candidates for dark matter
[7,16,17].
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz1.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-300} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{8cm} \caption{\scriptsize{Temperature of black hole versus
its mass in different spacetime dimensions. Mass is in the units of
the Planck mass. }}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz2.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-260} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{7cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Entropy of black hole versus its
mass in different spacetime dimensions. }}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz3.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-290} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{7cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Heat Capacity of black hole
versus its mass in different spacetime dimensions.}}
\end{figure}
\newpage
In which follows we firstly present a discussion on the issue of
maximal momentum and then we reconsider the issue of TeV black hole
thermodynamics in a model universe with large extra dimensions and
in the presence of the quantum gravity effect through a GUP that
admits both a minimal observable length and a maximal particle's
momentum. We focus mainly on the role played by the maximal momentum
and we comment on the production of TeV scale black hole at the LHC
in the presence of these quantum gravity effects. We also compare
our results with those results that are obtained by excluding the
possibility of having a natural cutoff on particle's momentum.
\section{A GUP with minimal length and Maximal momentum}
In the context of the Doubly Special Relativity (DSR), one can show
that a test particles' momentum cannot be arbitrarily imprecise. In
fact there is an upper bound for momentum fluctuations [11]. As a
nontrivial assumption, this may lead to a maximal measurable
momentum for a test particle [18]. In this framework, the GUP that
predicts both a minimal observable length and a maximal momentum can
be written as follows [18]
\begin{equation}
\Delta x\Delta p\geq\frac{1}{2}\left[1+(\frac{\alpha}{\sqrt{\langle
p^2\rangle}}+4\alpha^2)\Delta p^2+4\alpha^2\langle
p\rangle^2-2\alpha\sqrt{\langle p^2\rangle}\right].
\end{equation}
Since $(\Delta p)^2=\langle p^2\rangle-\langle p\rangle^2$, by
setting $\langle p\rangle=0$ for simplicity, we find
\begin{equation}
\Delta x\Delta p\geq\frac{1}{2}\left[1-\alpha(\Delta
p)+4\alpha^2(\Delta p)^2\right].
\end{equation}
This GUP that contains both minimal length and maximal momentum is
the primary input of our forthcoming arguments. Before treating our
main problem, first we show how maximal momentum arises in this
setup. The absolute minimal measurable length in our setup is given
by $\Delta x_{min}(\langle p\rangle=0)\equiv\Delta
x_0=\frac{3\alpha}{2} $. Due to duality of position and momentum
operators, it is reasonable to assume $\Delta x_{min}\propto\Delta
p_{max}$. Now, saturating the inequality in relation (3.2), we find
\begin{equation}
2(\Delta x\Delta p)=\bigg(1-\alpha(\Delta p)+4\alpha^2(\Delta
p)^2\bigg).
\end{equation}
This results in
\begin{equation}
(\Delta p)^2-\frac{(2\Delta x+\alpha)}{4\alpha^2}\Delta
p+\frac{1}{4\alpha^2}=0.
\end{equation}
So we find
\begin{equation}
(\Delta p_{max})^2-\frac{(2\Delta x_{min}+\alpha)}{4\alpha^2}\Delta
p_{max}+\frac{1}{4\alpha^2}=0.
\end{equation}
Now using the value of $\Delta x_{min}$, we find
\begin{equation}
(\Delta p_{max})^2-\frac{1}{\alpha}\Delta
p_{max}+\frac{1}{4\alpha^2}=0.
\end{equation}
The solution of this equation is
\begin{equation}
\Delta p_{max} =\frac{1}{2\alpha}.
\end{equation}
so, there is an upper bound on particle's momentum uncertainty. As a
nontrivial assumption, we assume that this maximal uncertainty in
particle's momentum is indeed the maximal measurable momentum. This
is of the order of Planck momentum.
\section{TeV-Scale Black Hole Thermodynamics with Natural Cutoffs}
Now we focus on the TeV-scale black hole thermodynamics in the
presence of both a minimal measurable length and a maximal momentum
as phenomenological, natural cutoffs. By assuming a model universe
with $d$ dimensions and based on the relation (3.2), by a simple
calculation we find
\begin{equation}
\Delta p_i\simeq\frac{(\Delta
x_i+\gamma)}{4\alpha^2}\left[1-\sqrt{1-\frac{4\alpha^2}{(\Delta
x_i+\gamma)^{2}}}\right],
\end{equation}
where $\gamma\equiv\frac{\alpha}{2}$. Since
$T=\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\Delta p_i$, we find
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{\Delta
x_i+\gamma}{4\alpha^2}\bigg)\left[1-\sqrt{1-\frac{4\alpha^2}{(\Delta
x_i+\gamma)^{2}}}\right]
\end{equation}
Once again, we assume that in the vicinity of the black hole horizon
surface, the inherent uncertainty in the position of any particle is
of the order of Schwarzschild black hole radius, $ r_s$. So we have
$\Delta x_i\approx r_s=\omega_dL_pm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}$. Using this
result we find
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{(\omega_d
m^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)}{4\alpha_0^2 L_p}\bigg)\left[1-\sqrt
{1-\frac{4\alpha_0^2}{(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)^2}}\right]
\end{equation}
where $\alpha=\alpha_{0}L_{p}$ and $B\equiv\frac{\alpha_0}{2}$. To
obtain an analytic form for black hole entropy, we expand (4.3) in a
Taylor series about $\alpha=0$. This gives the following result up
to ${\cal{O}}(\alpha^{2})$
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{2\pi}\bigg)\bigg(\frac{(\omega_d
m^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)}{4\alpha_0^2
L_p}\bigg)\left[1-\bigg(1-\frac{4\alpha_0^2}{2(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)^2}-
\frac{(4\alpha_0^2)^2}{8(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)^4}\bigg)\right]\,,
\end{equation}
which can be rewritten as
\begin{equation}
T=\bigg(\frac{d-3}{16\pi
L_p}\bigg)\left[\frac{4}{(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)}+\frac{A}{(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)^3}\right].
\end{equation}
where we have set $A\equiv4\alpha_0^2$. This result gives the
modified black hole temperature based on GUP (3.2). To compute
entropy of TeV black hole in this setup, we use the first law of
classical black hole thermodynamics $ds=\frac{dM}{T}$ but now with
modified temperature. We find
\begin{equation}
S=\int_{M_{min}}^Mdm\bigg(\frac{16\pi }{d-3}\bigg)
\left[\frac{4}{(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)}+\frac{A}{(\omega_dm^{\frac{1}{d-3}}+B)^3}\right]^{-1},
\end{equation}
In the same way as the previous section, we adopt the physical
selection that the evaporation process terminates when the mass of
the radiating black hole reaches a Planck-size remnant of mass
$M_{min}$. In this phase the entropy of black hole vanishes while
its temperature reaches a maximum, finite value. In which follows we
present the entropy of TeV black hole for some spacetime dimensions
for $\alpha=1$
\begin{equation}
d=4\rightarrow\quad
S=16\pi\left[{\frac{1}{4}}M^2+{\frac{1}{8}}M-{\frac{1}{16}}\ln(16M^2+8M+5)-\frac{1}{8}+{\frac{1}{16}}\ln(13)\right]
\end{equation}
$$d=5\rightarrow\quad
S=8\pi\bigg[{\frac{\sqrt{6}M^\frac{3}{2}}{9\sqrt{\pi}}}
+{\frac{1}{8}}M-{\frac{1}{8}}\sqrt{6\pi M} +{\frac{3}{64}}\pi
ln(32M+8\sqrt{6\pi M}+15\pi)$$
$$+{\frac{3}{16}}\pi\arctan\big(\frac{(64\sqrt{M}+8\sqrt{6\pi})\sqrt{6}}{96\sqrt{\pi}}\big)
-\frac{\pi\sqrt{144}}{192}$$
\begin{equation}
+\frac{9\pi}{64}-{\frac{3\pi}{64}}ln(39\pi)
-{\frac{3\pi}{16}}\arctan(\frac{3}{2}) \bigg]
\end{equation}
$$d=6\rightarrow\quad \quad \quad
S=\frac{16\pi}{3}\Bigg[\frac{3}{32}(\frac{12M^4}{\pi})^\frac{1}{3}+\frac{M}{8}-\frac{1}{8}(18\pi
M^2)^\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{8}(12\pi^2 M)^\frac{1}{3}$$
$$+\frac{3\pi}{16}ln\bigg((\frac{144M^2}{\pi^2})^\frac{1}{3}+(\frac{96M}{\pi})^\frac{1}{3}+5\bigg)-
\frac{\pi}{2}\arctan(\frac{(8M)^\frac{1}{3}+(\frac{2\pi}{3})^\frac{1}{3}
}{2\sqrt{2}})$$
\begin{equation}
-\frac{3}{8}+\frac{\pi}{6}-\frac{3\pi}{6}ln(13)+\frac{\pi}{2}\arctan(\frac{(108)^\frac{1}{3}}{2\sqrt{2}})\Bigg]
\end{equation}
$$d=7\rightarrow\quad\quad\quad
S=4\pi\Bigg[\frac{2}{25}(\frac{125M^5}{\pi^2})^\frac{1}{4}+\frac{M}{8}-\frac{1}{6}(5\pi^2M^3)^\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{16}\sqrt{5\pi^2M}
$$ $$+\frac{3}{32}(125\pi^6M)^\frac{1}{4}-\frac{55\pi^2}{256}ln\bigg(\frac{16\sqrt{5M}}{\pi}+8(\frac{125M}{\pi^2})^\frac{1}{4}+25\bigg)-\frac{71\pi^2}{384}
$$
\begin{equation}
-\frac{5\pi^2}{64}\arctan\bigg(\frac{4(\frac{125M}{\pi^2})^\frac{1}{4}+5}{10}\bigg)+\frac{55\pi^2}{256}ln(65)+\frac{5\pi^2}{64}\arctan(\frac{1}{2})\Bigg]
\end{equation}
and so on.
The heat capacity of black hole can be computed by using the
relation $C=\frac{dM}{dT_H}$
\begin{equation}
\alpha=1\rightarrow
C=\frac{-16\pi}{\omega_d}m^\frac{d-4}{d-3}\left[\frac{4}{(\omega_dm^\frac{1}{d-3}+\frac{1}{2})^2}+\frac{12}{(\omega_dm^\frac{1}{d-3}+\frac{1}{2})^4}\right]^{-1}
\end{equation}
Hence we were able to compute some important thermodynamical
properties of black holes by utilizing a new version of GUP
admitting both a minimal length and a maximal momentum. The main
ingredient of this analysis is the existence of a stable,
Planck-size remnant. Figures 4, 5 and 6 show the temperature,
entropy and heat capacity of the black hole versus its mass in the
presence of both minimal length and maximal momentum. Similar to the
previous section, the evaporation process of black hole ends up in a
stable, Planck-size remnant with vanishing entropy and heat capacity
but its temperature reaches a maximal value. We focus on the role
played by the natural cutoff on momentum in the next section.
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz4.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-260} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{7cm} \caption{\scriptsize{Temperature of black hole versus
its mass in the presence of both minimal length and maximal momentum
in different spacetime dimensions. Mass is in the unit of the Planck
mass. }}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz5.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-290} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{7.5cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Entropy of black hole versus
its mass in the presence of both minimal length and maximal momentum
in different spacetime dimensions. }}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz6.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-250} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{6cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Heat Capacity of black hole
versus its mass in the presence of both minimal length and maximal
momentum in different spacetime dimensions.}}
\end{figure}
\newpage
\section{Discussion and Results}
The final stage of a TeV scale black hole evaporation in the
presence of quantum gravity effect encoded in the existence of a
minimal measurable length is a stable remnant. In this phase the
entropy and heat capacity are zero, but the temperature reaches a
maximal value that depends explicitly on the spacetime
dimensionality. This temperature increases when the dimensionality
of spacetime increases. When we incorporate also the Doubly Special
Relativity motivated maximal momentum as a natural cutoff on a test
particle's momentum, the overall behavior of thermodynamical
quantities are the same as the case with just a minimal length, but
now the maximum value of temperature in final stage of evaporation
is less than the case with just a minimal length cutoff. This is
physically reasonable since existence of high momentum cutoff
suppresses the contribution of highly excited states that were not
forbidden in ordinary situation. The black hole remnant in a model
universe with large extra dimensions is hotter than its
4-dimensional counterpart. On the other hand, by increasing the
number of extra dimensions, the minimum mass of black hole remnant
increases. This means that possibility of creation and detection of
black holes in the LHC or any high energy physics laboratory
decreases by increasing the number of spacetime dimensions. This is
because the minimum energy for creation of black hole in extra
dimensions increases.
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz7.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-260} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{6cm} \caption{\scriptsize{Temperature of black hole versus
its mass in different spacetime dimensions. Mass is in the unit of
the Planck mass (solid lines for minimal length GUP and dashed-lines
for minimal length and maximal momentum GUP).}}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz8.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-280} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{7cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Entropy of black hole versus its
mass in different spacetime dimensions (solid lines for minimal
length GUP and dashed-lines for minimal length and maximal momentum
GUP). }}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\begin{center}
\special{psfile=noz9.eps angle=0 hscale=40 vscale=40 hoffset=110
voffset=-250} \vspace{1cm}
\end{center}
\vspace{6cm} \caption{\scriptsize{ Heat Capacity of black hole
versus its mass in different spacetime dimensions (solid lines for
minimal length GUP and dashed-lines for minimal length and maximal
momentum GUP).}}
\end{figure}
In figures 7, 8 and 9 we compare thermodynamical quantities of the
black hole computed once with just a minimal length and in the other
case with both minimal length and maximal momentum to highlight the
role played by natural cutoff on particle's momentum. Figure 7 shows
that the temperature of black hole decreases by considering the
maximal momentum. Figure 8 shows that by increasing the number of
spacetime dimensionality, the minimum mass increases. Also this
figure shows that as a result of natural cutoff on momentum, entropy
of the black hole increases relative to the case that this cutoff is
ignored. As figure 9 shows, the heat capacity of black hole
increases in magnitude when we consider the effect of momentum
natural cutoff. In summary, when we consider both minimal length and
maximal momentum, $M_{min}$ is smaller than the case that we
consider just the minimal length. This means that possibility of
creation and detection of black holes at the LHC increases in this
situation. We note that all previous studies in this direction were
neglected the possible existence of a natural cutoff on a test
particle's momentum. Here we considered this phenomenological aspect
of quantum gravity and we have shown that it leads to more probable
creation and detection of TeV scale black holes at the LHC.Tables
$1$ and $2$ summarize our results for $\alpha=1$ and
$\alpha=\frac{2}{\pi}$.
\begin{table}
\caption{{\small GUP-corrected maximum temperature and minimum mass
of black hole for $\alpha=1$ in scenarios with large extra
dimensions. Mass is in units of the Planck mass and temperature is
in units of the Planck energy (supposing $M_p=1$\,TeV).}}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c||c|c|c|}
\hline& $M_{min}^{{\tiny \alpha=1}}(TeV)$ & $T_{max}^{{\tiny
\alpha=1}}(TeV)(min)$ & $T_{max}^{{\tiny
\alpha=1}}(TeV)(minmax)$\\
\hline$d=4$ & $0.5$ & $0.1$ & $0.08$ \\
\hline$d=5$ & $1.18$ & $0.2$ & $0.15$ \\
\hline$d=6$ & $2.09$ & $0.3$ & $0.23$ \\
\hline$d=7$ & $3.08$ & $0.4$ & $0.31$ \\
\hline$d=8$ & $3.94$ & $0.5$ & $0.38$\\
\hline$d=9$ & $4.51$ & $0.6$ & $0.46$ \\
\hline$d=10$ & $4.72$ & $0.7$ & $0.54$ \\
\hline$d=11$ & $4.56$ & $0.8$ & $0.61$\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
min: GUP with just a minimal length\\
minmax: GUP with both minimal length and maximal momentum
\end{table}
\begin{table}
\caption{{\small GUP-corrected maximum temperature and minimum mass
of black hole for $\alpha=\frac{2}{\pi}$ in scenarios with large
extra dimensions. Mass is in units of the Planck mass and
temperature is in units of the Planck energy (supposing
$M_p=1$\,TeV).}}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c||c|c|c|}
\hline& $M_{min}^{{\tiny \alpha=\frac{2}{\pi}}}(TeV)$ &
$T_{max}^{{\tiny \alpha=\frac{2}{\pi}}}(TeV)(min)$ &
$T_{max}^{{\tiny
\alpha=\frac{2}{\pi}}}(TeV)(minmax)$\\
\hline$d=4$ & $0.32$ & $0.16$ & $0.12$ \\
\hline$d=5$ & $0.48$ & $0.31$ & $0.25$ \\
\hline$d=6$ & $0.54$ & $0.47$ & $0.37$ \\
\hline$d=7$ & $0.51$ & $0.62$ & $0.5$ \\
\hline$d=8$ & $0.41$ & $0.78$ & $0.62$\\
\hline$d=9$ & $0.3$ & $0.94$ & $0.74$ \\
\hline$d=10$ & $0.2$ & $1.09$ & $0.87$ \\
\hline$d=11$ & $0.12$ & $1.25$ & $0.99$\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
\newpage
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,450 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/math-primitives.743653\/","text":"# Math Primitives\n\n1. Mar 16, 2014\n\n### Jhenrique\n\nWhen we took the integral of a function f, the result is: $$\\int f(x)dx = F(x) + C$$ But, F(x) + C can be rewritten like: $$F(x) + C = \\mathcal{F}(x)$$ So, my first ask is: which is the name given for $F(x)$ and for $\\mathcal{F}(x)$ ? I can't call both of primitive of f, because it's confuse. I already heard the term \"family of antiderivative\", I think that this term is the name of $\\mathcal{F}(x)$, thus, maybe, primitive is better for $F(x)$. What do you think?\n\n---\n\nSecond question: by FTC: $$\\int_{x_0}^{x}f(x)dx = F(x) - F(x_0)$$ implies that: $$F(x) = \\int_{x_0}^{x}f(x)dx + F(x_0)$$ This result, F(x), represents the $F(x)$ or the $\\mathcal{F}(x)$ of the my 1st question?\n\n---\n\nOBS: if you affirm that F(x) of the 2nd question is equal to $\\mathcal{F}(x)$ this implies that $\\int_{x_0}^{x}f(x)dx = F(x)$ and $F(x_0)=C$ .\n\nLast edited: Mar 16, 2014\n2. Mar 16, 2014\n\n### Staff: Mentor\n\nWhat's the point? Is there some purpose in writing F(x) + C as $\\mathcal{F}(x)$?\nF is an antiderivative of f. I've also seen it called a primitive.\nF is any antiderivative of f (or any primitive of f).\n\n3. Mar 17, 2014\n\n### Jhenrique\n\nThere is a importnat difference between $F(x)$ and $\\mathcal{F}(x)$, the 1st is a particular solution for $\\int f(x) dx$ and the 2nd is general solution. By be different solutions, maybe they have different names. How I already heard a lot times the term \"antiderivative\" and \"family of antiderivative\", I asked if those terms are the names for $F(x)$ and for $\\mathcal{F}(x)$ ...\n\nEDIT: YEAH! An teacher confirmed my hypothesis above.\n\nLast edited: Mar 17, 2014\n4. Mar 17, 2014\n\n### Staff: Mentor\n\nI disagree. The expression F(x) + C doesn't represent a particular antiderivative unless C is somehow specified to be a particular value. In that sense (i.e., C being an unspecified arbitrary value) F(x) + C represents the entire family of antiderivatives. Again, I still don't see the point of writing both F(x) + C and $\\mathcal{F}(x)$. IMO it's much ado about a minor point.\nI still disagree.\nFor example, consider $\\int x^2 dx$.\nOne antiderivative is (1\/3)x3 + 7.\nAll antiderivatives have the form (1\/3)x3 + C.","date":"2017-11-20 20:13:49","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7700175046920776, \"perplexity\": 1230.7102307303142}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-47\/segments\/1510934806124.52\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20171120183849-20171120203849-00292.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
package com.codercocoon.springcoreDIByAnnotation;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
/**
* This class simulates generating some parameters for the examples : code and
* description.
*
* @author contact@codercocoon.com
*
*/
@Component
public class ExampleParams {
/**
* This method simulates generating some code.
*
* @return a string of the code generated.
*/
public String generateCode() {
return "Some code generated !";
}
/**
* This method simulates generating a description.
*
* @return a string of the description generated.
*/
public String generateDescription() {
return "Description generated !";
}
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,910 |
Today... Partly sunny, with a high near 71. North wind 11 to 13 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph.
Tonight... Partly cloudy, with a low around 51. Northwest wind 5 to 7 mph.
Tuesday... Mostly sunny, with a high near 80. Light and variable wind becoming southwest 5 to 7 mph in the afternoon.
Tuesday Night... A slight chance of showers before 2am. Increasing clouds, with a low around 58. South wind 6 to 8 mph becoming west after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 20%.
Wednesday... Mostly sunny, with a high near 73. Northwest wind 7 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 28 mph.
Thursday Night... A chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 55. Chance of precipitation is 40%.
Friday... A chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 71. Chance of precipitation is 40%. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,701 |
By Denis Flierl G+ Dec 21 2012 - 10:48am
2014 Mazda6 gets high in NY's Time Square
The all-new 2014 Mazda Mazda6 is pulling off a first-ever for the Japanese automaker and will do it in New York's famed Time Square.
The all-new 2014 Mazda Mazda6 has made its debut around the globe, but its never reached the height's that it's about to reach. Mazda has announced that the 2014 Mazda6 will be the first-ever to have a billboard advertisement in New York's famed Times Square. The new Mazda6 will get plenty of attention as it will be seen by more than 117 million people. The world will be watching as the 16,000-plus square-foot billboard can be seen as the ball drops on New Year's Eve.
The 2014 Mazda6 will be a significant feature of the celebratory festivities at One Times Square. Mazda will show a combination of running and still images of the all-new vehicle that started on December 19, 2012, and running until March 31, 2013. Mazda will certainly get there money's worth as it will be prominently displayed above Time Square. What better way to introduce the all-new 2014 model than to display it high above the biggest U.S. city.
"The all-new 2014 Mazda6 is the most technologically advanced vehicle we have ever sold," said Russell Wager, vice president of marketing, MNAO. "To introduce this vehicle to the U.S. in the biggest possible way, we chose the most notable and iconic city in the world. And to have the unique opportunity to access the tallest LED billboard in Times Square is the perfect way to tell the Mazda story."
Mazda is counting on big things from the new Mazda6
Mazda is counting on the Mazda6 Time Square advertising to propel the company to new sales heights. The new Mazda6 (known as the Atenza in Japan), is the flagship model of a whole new generation of vehicles that Mazda will be bringing to production in the future. Mazda is hoping the new ad will help improve their brand image around the world.
In a recent speech, Takashi Yamanouchi said "Let's all work together to promote the new Mazda6, to make it a model that gains the support of customers all over the world and leads the Mazda brand to new level." Mazda is hoping the new Times Square ad will get the world's attention on Mazda and it's newest product.
The first-ever SKYACTIV-D-diesel in the U.S.
The new 2014 Mazda6 will feature a fuel-efficient SKYACTIV-G 2.5 direct injection gasoline engine. But the big news is, the first-ever SKYACTIV-D-diesel equipped version will be available in the U.S. during the second half of the year in the new mid-size sedan. The new SKYACTIV-D 2.2-liter clean diesel engine will achieve a low compression ratio of 14:1, and Mazda has not released performance estimes yet.
The Mazda6 was introduced first in Europe and Japan and the U.S. will see the all-new Mazda6 in early 2013. The all-new 2014 Mazda6 will go on sale January 2, and will be priced from approximately $21,000 U.S.
GR wrote on December 21, 2012 - 1:55pm Permalink
"The new SKYACTIV-D 2.2-liter clean diesel engine will achieve a low compression ratio of 14:1, and is estimated to produce 184 horsepower and 185 lb-ft of torque." That's the hp and torque for the 2.5L gas engine, not the 2.2L diesel engine. The diesel has 147hp and 173hp versions, with the latter producing 310 lb-ft of torque.
Anonymous wrote on December 22, 2012 - 10:30am Permalink
Good catch - 185 lb-ft would be a joke for a diesel that size. I wonder if this car needs urea injection as the Passat and the Touareg diesel versions?
Denis Flierl wrote on December 22, 2012 - 12:02pm Permalink
You are exactly right! Thanks for catching the mistake. Thanks for reading!
Anonymous wrote on December 27, 2012 - 9:46am Permalink
Do you know if this car will have urea treatment of the exhaust?
Denis Flierl wrote on December 27, 2012 - 2:00pm Permalink
Great question! Mazda solves the cold-start inefficiency problem by recycling exhaust gases to quickly heat the combustion chambers. The engine's low NOx emissions mean it would not need expensive urea after-treatment to be 50-state legal in the U.S. Thanks for reading! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 6,421 |
\section{Introduction}
One of the crucial signatures for the discovery of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) was the measurement of strangeness enhancement due to the ease of producing more strangeness particles from gluon interactions or an annihilation of a light quark anti-quark pair. Since that time the study of strangeness has evolved significantly. For instance, now that it is understood that the Quantum Chromodynamic (QCD) phase transition is a cross-over \cite{Aoki:2006we}, contrasting observables of light versus strange hadrons can provide insight into properties of this transition. Connected to the same QCD phase diagram but in the baryon rich regime, the interactions of strange hadrons are a necessary input to the QCD equation of state and can put constraints on the mass radius relationship of neutron stars.
The natural next step is then studying the charm quark, which may not be thermalized with the rest of the QGP and can provide orthogonal information about its properties. In fact, charm quarks appear to be a particularly interesting probe in small systems \cite{Sirunyan:2018toe} and may provide key information to determine the limits of size of the QGP. However, one should caution that it is important to use realistic medium in theoretical descriptions, otherwise the results may be misleading.
In this theory summary of Strangeness in Quark Matter 2019, I provide an overview of the latest breakthroughs in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and nuclear astrophysics that give insight into strange and charm quarks.
\section{QCD Phase Diagram: from Heavy-Ion Collisions to Neutron stars}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c c}
\includegraphics[width=0.45\linewidth]{isentropes.pdf} & \includegraphics[width=0.55\linewidth]{NSM.png}
\end{tabular}
\caption{QCD phase diagram from Lattice QCD (left) with BSQ conserved charges from \cite{Noronha-Hostler:2019ayj}. On the right is the estimated range in the QCD that neutron star mergers may reach using ideal relativistic hydrodynamic calculations coupled to GR \cite{Most:2018eaw}.}\label{fig:phases}
\end{figure}
Over the last few years significant advancements have been made to the QCD phase diagram. The left side of Fig.\ \ref{fig:phases} demonstrates the most recent reconstruction of the QCD equation of state based on Lattice QCD results for an equation of state with three conserved charges: baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge where one finds that the assumption of strangeness neutrality pushes experiments to larger baryon chemical potentials \cite{Noronha-Hostler:2019ayj}. This implies that relativistic heavy ion collisions may possibly be closer to nuclear astrophysics than originally expected. In nuclear astrophysics it is possible to reach quite high temperatures in neutron star mergers (see Fig.\ \ref{fig:phases} on the right) and gravitational waves may provide hints if deconfined matter is at the core of neutron stars \cite{Most:2018eaw}.
At $\mu_B=0$ the phase transition is a cross-over \cite{Aoki:2006we} and it is anticipated that at larger baryon densities a critical point may be discovered followed by a first-order phase transition line that may be reached in neutron star mergers or proto-neutron stars. One of the primary signals of such a critical point is the kurtosis of net-proton fluctuations \cite{Stephanov:2011pb,Critelli:2017oub}. However, caveats exist once one considers finite size effects, centrality binning, and detector efficiencies \cite{Sombun:2017bxi,Nouhou:2019nhe}.
One of the crucial questions in nuclear astrophysics is: what is the state of matter at the core of a neutron star? Is it deconfined matter, just protons/neutrons, or strange baryons (and their non-trivial interactions)? A possible signal for deconfiment would be the measurement of mass twins, which are stars that have the same mass but vastly different radii \cite{Alford:2013aca,Benic:2014jia,Montana:2018bkb}. Additionally, it is important to properly understand repulsive versus attractive hyperon interactions since the addition of hyperons can affect the mass radius relationship \cite{Chatterjee:2015pua,Vidana:2018bdi,Ribes:2019kno}. `
Unlike in most studies of phase transitions in fields like condensed matter, in nuclear physics the system may be far from equilibrium and transport coefficients play a significant role in the search for a critical point/first order phase transition. Shear and bulk viscosity need to be calculated at finite baryon densities \cite{Moreau:2019vhw}. In heavy-ions where BSQ conserved charges are relevant, this also then leads to three diffusion transport coefficients for each conserved charges, which have been thus far been calculated in kinetic theory or non-conformal holographic models \cite{Bhadury:2019xdf,Rougemont:2015ona,Rougemont:2017tlu,Greif:2017byw,Denicol:2018wdp,Martinez:2019bsn}. Unlike in heavy-ions, in neutron star mergers the transport coefficients stem from weak interactions \cite{Alford:2019kdw,Alford:2017rxf}, which must eventually be incorporated into relativistic hydrodynamic calculations coupled to general relativity \cite{Bemfica:2019cop} (specifically bulk viscosity).
\subsection{Freeze-out}
While each event in heavy-ion collisions (or single neutron star merger\footnote{I am currently unaware of an equivalent measurement to freeze-out in neutron star mergers but hypothesize that nuclei abundances would be a potential candidate.}) passes through the phase diagram in a unique manner depending on its initial conditions (expanding and cooling over time), one can measure the point of chemical freeze-out using identified particle yields \cite{Bellini:2018khg,BelliniSQM19} and fluctuations \cite{Critelli:2017oub,Borsanyi:2014ewa,Alba:2014eba,Noronha-Hostler:2016rpd}.
There is a tension between yields of light and strange particles in hadronic yield comparisons with thermal fits \cite{BelliniSQM19}. Fluctuations of conserved charges \cite{Bellwied:2018tkc,Bluhm:2018aei} demonstrate a preference for a flavor hierarchy i.e. strange hadrons freezing out at a higher temperature than light hadrons. Additionally, transport models reveal a similar conclusion \cite{Bugaev:2018klr}. To explore this further, STAR has measured cross-correlations between conserved charges using certain identified hadrons \cite{Adam:2019xmk}. However, it may be that there are alternative proxies for BSQ conserved charges that would be a better for direct comparisons to Lattice QCD \cite{Bellwied:2019pxh}.
Following chemical freeze-out, one expects that kinetic freeze-out is achieved (although at very low beam energies the two appear to converge to the same temperature \cite{Adamczyk:2017iwn}). Recently, HADES used virtual photons to estimate temperatures reached at very low beam energies \cite{Adamczewski-Musch:2019byl} and found that the temperatures may be somewhat higher than originally expected.
One challenge to the thermalization picture comes from the recently measured light nuclei that appear to follow yields calculated from thermal fits. Questions remain in terms of interpreting these results and their implications \cite{Oliinychenko:2018ugs,Cai:2019jtk}.
\subsection{Hadron spectrum}
Understanding both the total number of possible hadrons and their interactions are fundamental to both the understanding of the hadron gas phase in heavy ion collisions and the composition of the core of neutron stars. Recently, partial pressures were used to constrain the particle spectrum \cite{alba:2017mqu} and it was found that even resonances with the most experimental uncertainty are needed to reproduce Lattice QCD results. However, the inclusion of in-medium effects of the HRG could also reproduce these partial pressures \cite{Aarts:2018glk}. Additionally, significant progress has been made in understanding hyperon interactions in Lattice QCD \cite{Hiyama:2019kpw}, which may have wide reaching effects.
\section{Heavy Flavor and Hard Probes}
Because of the large mass of the heavy quarks, charm quarks should likely have much longer thermalization times \cite{Moore:2004tg}. To understand the degree of thermalization of the charm quarks, the effect of charm conservation was studied \cite{Zhao:2019fth} and predicts a very large differences in the $D_s/D_0$ ratio, if charm is conserved.
Since the very first event-by-event heavy flavor \cite{Nahrgang:2014vza} and hard probe calculations \cite{Noronha-Hostler:2016eow} many new observables have been proposed that correlate the soft and hard/heavy sectors \cite{Betz:2016ayq,Prado:2016szr}. For instance, it was first suggested in \cite{Jia:2012ez} that the event plane angle of higher order harmonics or hard probes would be less and less correlated with the soft event plane angle. This was further confirmed in \cite{Betz:2016ayq,Prado:2016szr,Katz:2019fkc}. Then in \cite{Plumari:2019yhg} a new correlation function was proposed in order to study the interplay with the soft and heavy flavor sectors, which also found that the higher harmonics are less correlated with the soft sector.
One important caveat in most heavy flavor studies is that the hydrodynamic background can play a significant role if not tuned properly to the soft sector. In \cite{Cao:2018ews} it was found that multiple heavy flavor models may appear to all simultaneously match both $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$, however, once identical backgrounds were taken for all models wide variations were seen comparing to the same observables. In \cite{Katz:2019fkc} two different choices in initial conditions were compared to experimental data and $v_2\{4\}/v_2\{2\}(p_T)$ of D mesons appeared to be the best choice to distinguish between the two initial condition models.
Heavy flavor studies are sensitive to coalescence and fragmentation \cite{Minissale:2019gbf}. Additionally, understanding the origin of the heavy flavor transport coefficients in a strongly coupled \cite{Hambrock:2018olg} versus weakly coupled approach is important to understanding the properties of the QGP.
While the soft gluon approximation is well motivated, it was found that its effect on suppression is negligible \cite{Blagojevic:2019qum}. Finally, taking the ratio of the $R_{AA}$ in different collision sizes, may give insight into the path length dependence \cite{Djordjevic:2018ita}.
\section{Small Systems}
One of the newest frontiers of high-energy nuclear physics is the understanding on the limits of the smallest droplet of the Quark Gluon Plasma. Relativistic hydrodynamic models reproduce collective flow observables reasonably well, however, other signatures of the Quark Gluon Plasma are not as well understood. Even for collective flow, significant questions remain about the nature of the initial conditions \cite{Bzdak:2013zma} and the approach to hydrodynamics \cite{Strickland:2017kux,Kurkela:2018wud,Kurkela:2019set,Heinz:2019dbd}. Alternative approaches are also being explored using PYTHIA+URQMD \cite{Bierlich:2017vhg} and fluctuations derived from QCD interactions \cite{Giacalone:2019kgg}.
One fundamental question in small systems is if quarks of different flavors have sufficient time to reach thermalization. Recently, the ALICE collaboration published a paper \cite{ALICE:2017jyt} where they found an enhancement of strangeness in small systems that could not be explained by existing models. Using effective kinetic theory, in \cite{Kurkela:2018xxd} they estimated that the minimum multiplicity to live long enough to reach thermalization would be $dN/d\eta\gtrsim 100$. However, if one considers a core-corona model, it appears that there is still a significant contribution from the core down to $dN/d\eta\gtrsim 10$ \cite{Kanakubo:2019ogh,Kanakubo:2018vkl}.
It was originally thought that the chiral magnetic effect (CME) should only appear in large systems, however, in \cite{Khachatryan:2016got} it was found to have a significant signal in pPb collisions. Interestingly, enough it appears that when one fully incorporates electromagnetic fields in PHSD that one can obtain a splitting of charge in pPb \cite{Oliva:2019kin}. Further developments in magnetohydrodynamics have also been made \cite{Inghirami:2018ziv} that will also be relevant to future CME studies.
While collective flow and strangeness enhancement have been measured in small systems, the suppression of hard probes and heavy flavor has not (i.e. $R_{pPb}\sim1$). In \cite{Katz:2019qwv} an intermediate system size scan for D mesons was proposed to see the progression of $R_{AA}\rightarrow 1$ with shrinking system size and to make centrality comparisons of $v_2$, which has a non-trivial relationship with system size due to the increase in eccentricity with decreasing system size. This is an especially interest proposal considering that D mesons appear to be sensitive to out-of-equilibrium dynamics \cite{Xu:2017pna}. For the effect of quarkonium in small systems see \cite{FerreiroSQM19}.
\section{Outlook}
The study of strange and charm quarks has branched off into many new and unexpected directions that probe the fundamental theory of strongly interactions. For instance, D mesons may be used to further study far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic behavior in small systems because of the unique information they can provide in contrast to light flow observables. For the QCD equation of state, one expects that new collaborations will spring up between heavy-ion physicists and nuclear astrophysicists who are willing to work together to better map out the QCD phase diagram at finite baryon densities. This could lead to full BSQ hydrodynamic calculations in heavy-ion collisions and the possibility of viscous fluid calculations coupled to GR in neutron star mergers. Further developments into magnetohydrodynamics and vorticity are also needed to better understand effects especially important at low beam energies. Of course, much needed context for these theoretical calculations will be provided by the Beam Energy Scan II and NICER data that are expected to appear soon.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
J.N.H. acknowledges the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and support from the US-DOE Nuclear Science Grant No. DE-SC0019175.
\bibliographystyle{h-physrev}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
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{"url":"https:\/\/todaes.acm.org\/","text":"Latest Articles\n\n## Energy-Efficient and Quality-Assured Approximate Computing Framework Using a Co-Training Method\n\nApproximate computing is a promising design paradigm that introduces a new... (more)\n\n## Efficient Cache Reconfiguration Using Machine Learning in NoC-Based Many-Core CMPs\n\nDynamic cache reconfiguration (DCR) is an effective technique to optimize energy consumption in many-core architectures. While early work on DCR has... (more)\n\n## Cut Optimization for Redundant Via Insertion in Self-Aligned Double Patterning\n\nRedundant via (RV) insertion helps prevent via defects and hence leads to yield enhancement. However, RV insertion in self-aligned double patterning... (more)\n\n## Impact of Electrostatic Coupling on Monolithic 3D-enabled Network on Chip\n\nMonolithic-3D-integration (M3D) improves the performance and energy efficiency of 3D ICs over conventional through-silicon-vias-based counterparts.... (more)\n\n## JAMS-SG:\u00a0A Framework for Jitter-Aware Message Scheduling for Time-Triggered Automotive Networks\n\nTime-triggered automotive networks use time-triggered protocols (FlexRay, TTEthernet, etc.) for periodic message transmissions that often originate from safety and time-critical applications. One of the major challenges with time-triggered transmissions is jitter, which is the unpredictable delay-induced deviation from the actual periodicity of a... (more)\n\n## Smart-Hop Arbitration Request Propagation:\u00a0Avoiding Quadratic Arbitration Complexity and False Negatives in SMART NoCs\n\nSMART-based NoC designs achieve ultra-low latencies by enabling flits to traverse multiple hops within a single clock cycle. Notwithstanding the clear performance benefits, SMART-based NoCs suffer from several shortcomings: each router must arbitrate among a quadratic number of requests, which leads to high costs; each router independently makes... (more)\n\n## IP Protection and Supply Chain Security through Logic Obfuscation:\u00a0A Systematic Overview\n\nThe globalization of the semiconductor supply chain introduces ever-increasing security and privacy risks. Two major concerns are IP theft through... (more)\n\nReal-time and embedded systems are shifting from single-core to multi-core processors, on which the software must be parallelized to fully utilize the... (more)\n\n## Optimization of Threshold Logic Networks with Node Merging and Wire Replacement\n\nIn this article, we present an optimization method for threshold logic networks (TLNs) based on observability don\u2019t-care-based node merging.... (more)\n\n## Two-sided Net Untangling with Internal Detours for Single-layer Bus Routing\n\nIt is known that one-sided net untangling can be used to untangle the twisted nets inside a bus for single-layer bus routing. However, limited space... (more)\n\n## Runtime Stress Estimation for Three-dimensional IC Reliability Management Using Artificial Neural Network\n\nHeat dissipation and the related thermal-mechanical stress problems are the major obstacles in the... (more)\n\n##### NEWS\n\nACM TODAES new page limit policy:\u00a0Manuscripts must be formatted in the ACM Transactions format; a 35-page limit applies to the final paper. Rare exceptions are possible if recommended by the reviewers and approved by the Editorial Board.\n\nORCID\u00a0is a community-based effort to create a global registry of unique researcher identifiers for the purpose of ensuring proper attribution of works to their creators. When you submit a manuscript for review, you will be presented with the opportunity to register for your\u00a0ORCID.\n\nWelcome ACM Associate Editors\n\n##### Forthcoming Articles\nAnalog\/RF Post-silicon Tuning via Bayesian Optimization\n\nTunable analog\/RF circuit has emerged as a promising technique to address the significant performance uncertainties caused by process variations. To optimize these tunable circuits after fabrication, most existing post-silicon programming methods are developed by using real-valued performance metrics. However, when measuring a performance of interest on silicon, it is often substantially more expensive to obtain a real-valued measurement than a binary testing outcome (i.e., pass or fail). In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Process Classification model to capture the binary performance metrics of tunable analog\/RF circuits. Based on these models, post-silicon programming is cast into an optimization problem that can be solved by a novel Bayesian optimization algorithm. Moreover, measurement noises are further incorporated into our proposed post-silicon programming in order to produce a robust circuit. Two circuit examples demonstrate that the proposed approach can efficiently program tunable circuits with binary performance metrics while other conventional methods are not applicable\n\nHarnessing the Granularity of Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array Architectures for optimizing Droplet Routing in Biochips\n\nIn this paper, we consider the problem of droplet routing for Microelectrode-Dot-Array (MEDA) biochips. MEDA biochips today provide a host of useful features for droplet movement by making it possible to manoeuvre droplets at a much finer granularity and with significantly increased flexibility. More precisely, MEDA biochips support more degrees of freedom in navigation and volumetric manipulation such as diagonal movement, droplet reshaping, and fractional-level split-and-merge. This helps improving routing of droplets on microfluidic grids -- in particular, when the space available on the grid is limited or blocked by obstacles. In this work, we discuss how these improved capabilities can be utilized in the realization of the desired routes on those biochips. To this end, we introduce a routing method that utilizes satisfiability solvers and guarantees the generation of optimal solutions. This significantly improves the state of the art, since previously proposed solutions either (1) relied on heuristics and, hence, were not able to guarantee the optimum or (2) only considered a subset of the MEDA features. The solution proposed in this work includes a formulation of all MEDA features which, as illustrated by examples, allows for the determination of routing solutions with smaller completion times. Experimental evaluations confirm these findings.\n\nSearch-Space Decomposition for System-Level Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems\n\nThe development of large-scale many-core platforms and the rising complexity of embedded applications have led to a significant increase in the number of implementation possibilities for a single application. Furthermore, rising demands on safe, energy-efficient, or real-time capable application execution make the problem of determining feasible implementations that are optimal with respect to such design objectives even more of a challenge. State-of-the-art Design Space Exploration (DSE) techniques demonstrably suffer from the vast and sparse search spaces posed by modern embedded systems, emphasizing the need for novel design methodologies in this field. Based on the idea of reducing problem complexity by a suitable decomposition of the system specification, the work at hand proposes a portfolio of dynamic decomposition mechanisms that automatically decompose any system specification based on a short pre-exploration of the complete system. We present a two-phase approach consisting of a set of novel data extraction and representation techniques combined with a selection of filtering operations that extract a decomposed system specification based on information gathered during pre-exploration. The proposed decomposition procedure can seamlessly be integrated in any DSE flow, constituting a flexible extension for existing DSEs. We illustrate the efficiency of the proposed decomposition portfolio applied to state-of-the-art DSE for many-core systems as well as networked embedded systems from the automotive domain. Experimental results show significant increases in optimization quality of up to 87% within constant DSE time compared to existing approaches.\n\nLBNoC-Design of low-latency router architecture with Lookahead Bypass for Network-on-chip using FPGA\n\nAn FPGA based NoC using a low latency router with a look-ahead bypass(LBNoC) has been designed. The proposed design targets the optimized area with improved network performance. The techniques such as single cycle router bypass, parallel Virtual Channel and Switch Allocation, combined virtual cut through and wormhole switching have been employed in the design of the LBNoC router. The LBNoC router is parameterizable with the network topology, traffic patterns, routing algorithms, buffer depth, buffer width, number of VCs, I\/O ports being configurable. A table based routing algorithm has been employed to support the design of custom topologies. The input buffer modules of the NoC router have been mapped on the FPGA BRAM hard blocks to utilize resources efficiently. The LBNoC architecture consumes 4.5% and 27.1% fewer hardware resources than the ProNoC and CONNECT NoC architectures. The average packet latency of the LBNoC NoC architecture is 30% and 15% lesser than the CONNECT and ProNoC architectures. The LBNoC architecture is 1.15\u00d7 and 1.18\u00d7 faster than the ProNoC and CONNECT NoC frameworks.\n\nHardware Trojan Mitigation in Pipelined MPSoCs\n\nMultiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) has become necessary due to the the billions of transistors available to the designer, the need for fast design turnaround times and the power wall. Thus, present embedded systems are designed with MPSoCs, and one possible way MPSoCs can be realized is through Pipelined MPSoC (PMPSoC) architectures, which are used in applications from video surveillance to cryptosystems. Hardware Trojans (HTs) on PMPSoCs are a significant concern due to the damage caused by their stealth. An adversary could use HTs to extract secret information (data leakage), to modify functionality\/data (functional modification), or make PMPSoCs deny service. In this paper, we present PMPGuard, a mechanism that, (1) detects the presence of hardware Trojans in Third Party Intellectual Property (3PIP) cores of PMPSoCs, by continuous monitoring and testing, and (2) recovers the system by switching the infected processor core with another one. We designed, implemented, and tested the system on a commercial cycle accurate multiprocessor simulation environment. Compared to the state of the art system level techniques that use Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) and therefore incurs at least 3\u00d7 area and power overheads, our proposed system incurs about 2\u00d7 area and 1.5\u00d7 power overheads, without any adverse impact on throughput.\n\nMaking Aging Useful by Recycling Aging-Induced Clock Skew\n\nDevice aging, which causes significant loss on circuit performance and lifetime, has been a primary factor in reliability degradation of nanoscale designs. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of aging-induced clock skews (i.e., make them useful for aging tolerance) by manipulating and recycling these time-varying skews to compensate for the performance degradation of logic networks. The goal is to assign achievable\/reasonable aging-induced clock skews in a circuit, such that its effective performance degradation due to aging can be tolerated, that is, the lifespan can be maximized. On average, 25.04% aging tolerance can be achieved with insignificant design overhead. Moreover, we employ Vth assignment on clock buffers to further tolerate the aging-induced degradation of logic networks. When Vth assignment is applied on top of aforementioned aging manipulation, the average aging tolerance can be enhanced to 35.96%.\n\nHidden in Plaintext: An Obfuscation-based Countermeasure against FPGA Bitstream Tampering Attacks\n\nField Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become an attractive choice for diverse applications due to their reconfigurability and unique security features. However, designs mapped to FPGAs are prone to malicious modifications or tampering of critical functions. Besides, targeted modifications have demonstrably compromised FPGA implementations of various cryptographic primitives. Existing security measures based on encryption and authentication can be bypassed using their side-channel vulnerabilities to execute bitstream tampering attacks. Furthermore, numerous resource-constrained applications are now equipped with low-end FPGAs, which may not support power-hungry cryptographic solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel obfuscation-based approach to achieve strong resistance against both random and targeted pre-configuration tampering of critical functions in an FPGA design. Our solution first identifies the unique structural and functional features that separate the critical function from the rest of the design using a machine learning guided framework. The selected features are eliminated by applying appropriate obfuscation techniques, many of which take advantage of \"FPGA dark silicon\" - unused lookup table resources, to mask the critical functions. Furthermore, following the same obfuscation principle, a redundancy-based technique is proposed to thwart targeted, rule-based, and random tampering. We have developed a complete methodology and custom software toolflow that integrates with commercial tools. By applying the masking technique on a design containing AES, we show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in hiding the critical S-Box function. We implement the redundancy integrated solution in various cryptographic designs to analyze the overhead. In order to protect 16.2% critical component of a design, the proposed approach incurs an average area overhead of only 2.4% over similar redundancy-based approaches, while achieving strong security.\n\nSecurity-Aware Routing and Scheduling for Control Applications on Ethernet TSN Networks\n\nToday, it is common knowledge, in the cyber-physical systems domain, that the tight interaction between the cyber and physical elements provides the possibility of substantially improving the performance of these systems that is otherwise impossible. On the downside, however, this tight interaction with cyber elements makes it easier for an adversary to compromise the safety of the system. This becomes particularly important since such systems typically comprise several critical physical components, e.g., adaptive cruise control or engine control that allow deep intervention in the driving of a vehicle. As a result, it is important to ensure not only the reliability of such systems, e.g., in terms of schedulability and stability of control plants, but also resilience to adversarial attacks. In this article, we propose a security-aware methodology for routing and scheduling for control applications in Ethernet networks. The goal is to maximize the resilience of control applications within these networked control systems to malicious interference, while guaranteeing the stability of all control plants, despite the stringent resource constraints in such cyber-physical systems. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that careful optimization of available resources can significantly improve the resilience of these networked control systems to attacks.\n\nHierarchical Ensemble Reduction and Learning for Resource-Constrained Computing\n\nGeneric tree ensembles (such as Random Forest, RF) rely on a substantial amount of individual models to attain desirable performance. The cost of maintaining a large ensemble could become prohibitive in applications where computing resources are stringent. In this work, a hierarchical ensemble reduction and learning framework is proposed. Experiments show our method consistently outperforms RF in terms of both accuracy and retained ensemble size. In other words, ensemble reduction is achieved with enhancement in accuracy rather than degradation. The method can be executed efficiently, up to >590X time reduction than a recent ensemble reduction work. We also developed Boolean logic encoding techniques to directly tackle multiclass problems. Moreover, our framework bridges the gap between software-based ensemble methods and hardware computing in the IoT era. We developed a novel conversion paradigm that supports the automatic deployment of >500 trees on a chip. Our proposed method reduces power consumption and overall area utilization by >21.5% and >62%, respectively, comparing with RF. The hierarchical approach provides rich opportunities to balance between the computation (training and response time), the hardware resource (memory and energy), and accuracy.\n\nAn Implication-Based Test Scheme for Both Diagnosis and Concurrent Error Detection Applications\n\nThis paper describes a diagnosis-aware hybrid concurrent error detection (DAH-CED) scheme that can facilitate both off-line and on-line test applications. By using the proposed scheme, not only the probability of detecting errors (on-line) but also the diagnosability of the target circuit (off-line) can be significantly enhanced. The proposed scheme combines the implication-based method with the parity check method. In particular, novel algorithms are developed to identify specific implications for enhancing the diagnosability for the modeled faults proactively. Furthermore, a reduction algorithm is also presented to minimize the number of the employed implications, while no loss on probability of detecting errors and diagnosability is also guaranteed. To the best of our knowledge, this issue is not addressed in the literature. In order to validate the proposed scheme, not only stuck-at faults but also transition faults are considered to simulate the timing-related errors. The experimental results on nine ITC?99 benchmark circuits show that the diagnosability for stuck-at (transition) faults is enhanced by 6.88% (7.78%) by applying the proposed scheme. As for the probability of detecting errors, 97.73% (97.10%) is achieved for errors caused by stuck-at (transition) faults. Moreover, only 3.11% of implications are needed.\n\nLithography Hotspot Detection with FFT-Based Feature Extraction and Imbalanced Learning Rate\n\nWith the increasing gap between transistor feature size and lithography manufacturing capability, the detection of lithography hotspots becomes a key stage of physical verification flow to enhance manufacturing yield. Although machine learning approaches are distinguished for their high detection efficiency, they still suffer from problems such as large scale layout and class imbalance. In this paper, we develop a hotspot detection model based on machine learning with high performance. In the proposed model, we firstly apply an FFT-based feature extraction method, which can compress large scale layout to a multi-dimensional representation with much smaller size while preserves the discriminative layout pattern information, to improve the detection efficiency. Secondly, addressing the class imbalance problem, we propose a new technique called Imbalanced Learning Rate (ILR) and embed it into the CNN model to further reduce false alarms without accuracy decay. Compared with the results of current state-of-the-art approaches on ICCAD 2012 Contest benchmarks, our proposed model can achieve better solutions in many evaluation metrics, including the official metrics.\n\nBio-chemical Assay Locking to Thwart Bio-IP Theft\n\nMicrofluidic technologies are now entering a phase of rapid commercialization and deployment. One indicator of this is the recent FDA approval of the Baebies SEEKER, a digital microfluidic platform for medical diagnostics [4]. The chemicals, materials, and biochemical protocols required to realize a modern microfluidic system are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, making the task of designing such a system impractical for a single organization. It is expected that the manufacture of microfluidic systems will begin to adopt a horizontal supply chain, where the holders of intellectual property (IP) that dictate a biochip?s functionality send their designs to a third-party foundry for fabrication [1]. Such an approach mirrors the manufacturing model established by the semiconductor industry. An undesirable side-effect of this manufacturing model is the potential for untrusted third-parties, who in the course of performing their intended duties, also steal IP or alter designs to modify the functionality of the end product. It is critical that designers of microfluidic systems prevent IP theft not only to prevent financial losses, but also to preserve the trust of end users. Grey market devices fabricated with lower quality may not perform to the same standard as authentic devices, which may lead to faulty operation. Given that microfluidic systems are commonly employed in mission-critical applications, this would lead to a severe erosion in trust.\n\nArchitectural Design of Flow-based Microfluidic Biochips for Multi-Target Dilution of Biochemical Fluids\n\nMicrofluidic technologies enable replacement of time consuming and complex steps of biochemical laboratory protocols with a tiny chip. Sample preparation (i. e., dilution or mixing of fluids) is one of the primary tasks of any bioprotocol. In real-life applications where several assays need to be executed for different diagnostic purposes, the same sample fluid is often required with different target concentration factors (CFs). Although several multi-target dilution algorithms have been developed for digital microfluidic ({\\em DMF}) biochips, they are not efficient for implementation with continuous-flow based microfluidic ({\\em CMF}) chips, which are preferred in the laboratories. In this paper, we present a multi-target dilution algorithm ({\\em MTDA}) for {\\em CMF} biochips, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first-of-its-kind. We design a flow-based rotary mixer with a suitable number of segments depending on the target-$CF$ profile, error-tolerance, and optimization criteria. In order to schedule several intermediate fluid-mixing tasks, we develop a multi-target scheduling algorithm ({\\em MTSA}) aiming to minimize the usage of storage units, while producing dilutions with multiple $CF$s. Furthermore, we propose a storage architecture for efficiently loading (storing) of intermediate fluids from (to) the storage units.\n\nMemristive Crossbar Mapping for Neuromorphic Computing Systems on 3D IC\n\nIn recent years, neuromorphic computing systems based on memristive crossbar have provided a promising solution to enable acceleration of neural networks. However, most of the neural networks used in realistic applications are often sparse. If such sparse neural network is directly implemented on a single memristive crossbar, it would result in inefficient hardware realizations. In this work, we propose E3D-FNC, an enhanced 3D floorplanning framework for neuromorphic computing systems, in which the neuron clustering and the layer assignment are considered interactively. First, in each iteration, hierarchical clustering partitions neurons into a set of clusters under the guidance of the proposed distance metric. The optimal number of clusters is determined by L-method. Then matrix re-ordering is proposed to re-arrange the columns of the weight matrix in each cluster. As a result, the transformed connection matrix can be easily mapped into a set of crossbars with high utilizations. Next, since the clustering results will inversely affect the floorplan, we perform the floorplanning of neurons and crossbars again. All the proposed methodologies are embedded in an iterative framework to improve the quality of NCS design. Finally, a 3D floorplan of neuromorphic computing systems is generated. Experimental results show that E3D-FNC can achieve highly hardware-efficient designs, compared to state-of-the-art.","date":"2019-11-14 01:41:05","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.3837655484676361, \"perplexity\": 2644.590077721441}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-47\/segments\/1573496667767.6\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20191114002636-20191114030636-00262.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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<artifactId>heroku-http-finagle</artifactId>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.heroku.api</groupId>
<artifactId>heroku-api</artifactId>
<version>${project.parent.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.scala-lang</groupId>
<artifactId>scala-library</artifactId>
<version>${scala.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.twitter</groupId>
<artifactId>finagle-core_2.13</artifactId>
<version>${finagle.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.twitter</groupId>
<artifactId>finagle-http_2.13</artifactId>
<version>${finagle.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.twitter</groupId>
<artifactId>util-core_2.13</artifactId>
<version>${twitter.util.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.twitter</groupId>
<artifactId>util-codec_2.13</artifactId>
<version>${twitter.util.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.netty</groupId>
<artifactId>netty-all</artifactId>
<version>${netty.version}</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<!-- Override jackson-databind version of finagle -->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
<version>${jackson.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
<repositories>
<repository>
<id>twittercom</id>
<name>twitter.com</name>
<url>http://maven.twttr.com/</url>
</repository>
</repositories>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>net.alchim31.maven</groupId>
<artifactId>scala-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>scala-compile-first</id>
<phase>process-resources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>add-source</goal>
<goal>compile</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>scala-test-compile</id>
<phase>process-test-resources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>testCompile</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<scalaVersion>${scala.version}</scalaVersion>
</configuration>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.scala-lang</groupId>
<artifactId>scala-library</artifactId>
<version>${scala.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.scala-lang</groupId>
<artifactId>scala-compiler</artifactId>
<version>${scala.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</plugin>
</plugins>
<extensions>
<extension>
<groupId>org.springframework.build.aws</groupId>
<artifactId>org.springframework.build.aws.maven</artifactId>
<version>3.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</extension>
</extensions>
</build>
</project>
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
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she paces decisively around her home speaking into a microphone about subjects both scholastic and revealing—the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister's struggle with addiction—her tone even and remote.
it's hard to discern how well you know her. She provides these facts off-handedly and there's a sense that she's leaving out as much, if not more, than she includes. There's a naturalism to this approach that makes "Les Goddesses" appealing in a way that tell-all memoirs are not. Memoirs so often beg the question, Why would you want to tell me all this? For Davey, the clear answer is that sharing, in a calibrated and restrained way, is productive. She enjoys reading most when paired with writing.
In a world obsessed with IS IT TRUE? HOW TRUE?, Davey's video seems to provide a sort of indirect answer: Who cares as long as it's important for you? Who cares as long as it makes sense of the world? | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,048 |
Георгий (Юрий) Васильевич Коренев () — советский учёный, конструктор, изобретатель, создатель первых в СССР систем управления радиоуправляемых беспилотных бомбардировщиков и БПЛА (1937), автор нового научного направления Целенаправленная механика и механика человека (; ; ; ), создатель теоретических основ управления городским транспортом без водителя (; ), разработчик практического применения тензорного исчисления при решении различных задач механики сложных механических и живых систем ( — ).
Кавалер ордена Ленина (1933), лауреат Сталинской премии (1953).
Профессор кафедры теоретической механики Московского физико-технического института; создатель заочной физико-математической школы при МФТИ для одаренных детей в СССР (; ).
Биография
Родился а в губернском городе Владимир-на-Клязьме. Георгий, по-домашнему Юрий, был младшим ребёнком в семье фотографов Василия Ивановича Коренева, крестьянина села Успенское Вяземского уезда Смоленской губернии, и Марии Петровны Кореневой (урожд. Соколовой), купеческой дочери из города Елец Орловской губернии. Родители Георгия Васильевича познакомились в Ельце, куда Василий Иванович, покинув родное село, отправился обучаться азам фотодела. Приобретя навыки работы фотографа в лучшем ателье города «Анели» И. Ф. Клименко, в 1889 году он получил разрешение Орловского губернатора на открытие в городе собственного ателье.
Мой отец происходит из крестьян, но он ещё в молодости оторвался от земли и ушёл в город. Там обучился фотографии и к моменту моего рождения имел свою собственную фотографию в г. Владимире, где пользовался трудом наёмных мастеров
Накануне Первой мировой войны Кореневы переехали в Москву, где к тому времени уже жил и получал экономическое образование в недавно открытом Московском обществе распространения коммерческого образования (МОРКО) старший брат Георгия Васильевича.
Позднее он [отец] имел деревянный дом в Москве и лавку. После Октябрьской революции отец служил в органах советской власти. Сначала он служил в Замоскворецком райсовете. Затем был арестован ВЧК (кажется в 1918 г.), но вскоре освобождён с полной реабилитацией. После освобождения из ВЧК отец служил в организованном тогда Госконтроле, был линейным инспектором на Московско-Казанской ж.д. на участке Пенза-Рузаевка-Саранск. В 1920 г. он умер во время ревизии на линии на ст. Лунино от сыпного тифа, и там же похоронен.
Мать Георгия Васильевича, Мария Петровна, дожила до 1932 года.
С 1906 года Коренев жил в Петербурге, с 1914 — в Москве. Среднее образование получил в Московском коммерческом училище имени Цесаревича Алексея.
С 1920 года учился в Пензенском техникуме путей сообщения Сызрано-Вяземской железной дороги, где увлёкся авиацией и планеризмом: был членом президиума технического кружка (одного из первых планерных кружков в стране), секретарём студенческого комитета.
В 1922 году добровольно вступил в Красную Армию, в 1923 году окончил Высшую аэрофотограмметрическую школу Военно-воздушного флота по классу штурмана, защитив дипломный проект на тему «Аэронавигационное и аэрометеорологическое оборудование Центрального аэродрома» и был оставлен при школе инструктором. Вот как вспоминает об этом периоде легендарный чкаловский штурман А. В. Беляков:
«Из числа аэронавигаторов второго и третьего выпусков нашей школы на преподавательской работе осталось несколько слушателей, увлеченных научной работой, в том числе Г. В. Коренев и Г. С. Френкель. Позже они были переведены в НИИ ВВС. Коренев был знатоком аэронавигационной техники, неумолимым в требованиях к авиаприборостроителям. Будущий доктор физико-математических наук, он разработал проблему измерения воздушной скорости полета, проанализировал закономерность этого процесса в зависимости от плотности воздуха. С появлением автопилотов Коренев с жаром включился в работу по совершенствованию этих приборов».
В качестве инструктора Коренев работал в Высшей школе спецслужб ВВС РККА с 1923 по 1926 год. В 1925 году он закончил при школе лётные курсы и сдал экзамен на звание лётчика-наблюдателя. Будучи военнослужащим, в 1926 году был переведен на должность старшего лётчика-наблюдателя в Отдельный разведывательный отряд в г. Егорьевске.
В 1926 г. был направлен для дальнейшего прохождения военной службы в московский Научно-испытательный институт ВВС РККА (НИИ ВВС). С 1926 по 1928 год он работает на должности старшего инженера, затем на должности инженера высшей категории. В 1930 г. был переведен в отдел особых работ на должность заместителя начальника отдела. В НИИ ВВС Коренев занимался пилотажно-навигационным оборудованием самолетов, включая приборы для полёта и посадки без визуального контроля окружающей обстановки. О работе НИИ ВВС того периода и важности этих задач подробно рассказано в книге лётчика-испытателя НИИ ВВС И. Ф. Петрова, будущего директора ЦАГИ, а позже ректора МФТИ. Можно с уверенностью сказать, что И. Ф. Петров уже в те годы был знаком с Кореневым.
Помимо подготовки к выполнению боевых задач, НИИ ВВС участвовал в организации рекордных авиационных перелётов. В своей автобиографии Г. В. Коренев указывает на денежную премию и благодарность в приказе Начальника ВВС РККА за отличное состояние вверенного ему подразделения и за подготовку перелета самолёта «Страна Советов» в Америку, благодарность в приказе Начальника ВВС РККА за подготовку первого перелета в Пекин.
В 1923 году поступил на физико-математический факультет 1-го МГУ и окончил его в 1929 по специальности «Прикладная математика», обучаясь без отрыва от основной трудовой деятельности в области авиации. В числе его преподавателей были профессор Н. Н. Бухгольц (теоретическая механика) и академик Н. Н. Лузин (математика). По воспоминаниям коллег, Коренев на всю жизнь сохранил глубочайшую благодарность и уважение к этим учёным.
По совместительству с основной службой в НИИ ВВС в 1929-31 гг. Коренев вел преподавательскую работу в Военно-Воздушной Академии им. Н. Е. Жуковского и в Московском Энергетическом Институте (на кафедре у профессора Н. Н. Бухгольца). В эти годы, и даже ранее, проявился талант Коренева, как автора учебников и методических пособий для пилотов . Также в период работы в НИИ ВВС им были сделаны три изобретения, связанные с приборами навигации.
На рубеже 1920-30-х годов в авиации возникла насущная проблема в автоматическом пилотировании самолёта. Работы по созданию автопилотов были поручены НИИ ВВС, где Коренев занимался ими в качестве зам. начальника аэронавигационного отдела 4, начальником которого был выдающийся авиационный штурман Б. В. Стерлигов. Позже работы по автопилотам Коренев продолжил в качестве заместителя начальника отдела 13, специально для этого созданного Отдела особых работ. Работы начались с изучения импортного немецкого автопилота, затем приступили к созданию автопилота собственной конструкции для бомбардировщика ТБ-1 (). Наряду с этим, летом 1930 года Коренев поступил в аспирантуру МГУ по кафедре математики и механики под научное руководство профессора Н. Н. Бухгольца. Однако вскоре аспирантуру пришлось оставить — Коренева ждало новое назначение, на этот раз в Ленинград.
Работа в ОСКОНБЮРО
Параллельно с НИИ ВВС работы по созданию автопилотов велись в Ленинграде, в конструкторском бюро Р. Г. Ниренберга. Поскольку успех не сопутствовал Ниренбергу, Начальник ВВС Я. И. Алкснис в 1930 году поручил Г. В. Кореневу наблюдение за работой конструкторского бюро в Ленинграде и проведением испытаний его автопилотов. Постепенно Коренев стал руководителем этих работ.
В это время по поручению Начальника вооружений РККА М. Н. Тухачевского в Ленинграде была создана новая организация, Особое конструкторское бюро № 21 при Всесоюзном объединении точной индустрии, кратко — Осконбюро ВОТИ. Там разрабатывалось множество новых технических систем для армии — стабилизатор танкового прицела, планирующие торпеды, летающие мины (прообраз противокорабельных ракет), управляемый по радио самолёт-снаряд. В эту организацию была передана и работа по автопилоту, а Коренев в 1932 году был прикомандирован к КБ-21 в качестве руководителя «ударной авиационной группы», оставаясь в штате НИИ ВВС. Летом 1932 г. он на 3 месяца был командирован в Европу в составе комиссии Реввоенсовета для знакомства с авиационной промышленностью Германии, Швейцарии, Италии. Из материалов личного дела известно, что Коренев хорошо владел немецким и французским языками, а с итальянского мог переводить со словарем. Одной из целей командировки были переговоры с фирмой «Сименс» о покупке у неё управляемого по радио самолёта, однако германское правительство не разрешило фирме Сименс эту сделку .
Проведя анализ неудач автопилота системы Ниренберга, который был полностью пневматическим, Коренев стал проектировать электро-пневматический, получивший наименование АВП-2. Он выполнял 16 навигационных команд, которые передавались по радиоканалу с земли либо с летящего следом самолёта. В качестве радиолинии использовался прибор «Дедал», разработанный в Остехбюро (Особое техническое бюро по военным изобретениям, начальник В. И. Бекаури) . Пристальное внимание к работам и их поддержку оказывал лично Начальник вооружений РККА М. Н. Тухачевскй, известный своим интересом к техническим новшествам в армии.
В производственной характеристике Коренева начальник Осконбюро А. И. Архаров пишет «Руководя группой, сам является автором почти всех принципиальных схем и ряда конструкций телемеханического самолета. Благодаря упорству и настойчивости, несмотря на неблагоприятные условия работы, обеспечил быстрое проведение научно-исследовательской, проектной и испытательной работы телемеханического самолета. Проводил сам летные испытания, налетав за 1933 г. свыше 100 часов. Работал, не считаясь со временем, иногда круглые сутки, заражая своей энергией, упорством и трудоспособностью своих подчиненных».
К октябрю 1933 г. работы были закончены, самолёты с автопилотом АВП-2 прошли необходимые испытания, проведена приёмка работ правительственной комиссией. Под управлением автопилота самолет совершал движение, включая маневрирование, необходимое для бомбардировщика того времени. Оставалось отработать только полностью автоматический взлет и посадку. Вот как описывает Коренев достижения их группы в этой области «следует ещё упомянуть работу по взлёту и приземлению самолёта ТБ-1 без вмешательства лётчика. В 1936 г. Эта задача была в принципе разрешена: самолёт ТБ-1 взлетал и приземлялся без того, чтобы лётчик касался рулей, стабилизатора или сектора газа; однако расчёт на посадку производился лётчиком, после чего включали автопилот, и лётчик бросал управление машиной». Учитывая новизну этих задач, а также их важность для обороны страны, ряд сотрудников Осконбюро в ноябре 1933 г. были удостоены государственных наград. В частности, Г. В. Коренев был награжден Орденом Ленина за номером 614. Также Орден Ленина получили коллеги Коренева по разработке автопилота А. С. Немов (управляющий ВОТИ), А. И. Архаров (начальник Осконбюро) и М. В. Соколов (инженер-бортмеханик по автопилоту). Приказ о награждении был опубликован в правительственной газете «Правда» от 16.11.1933 г. Несколько позже приказом Наркома тяжёлой промышленности СССР Серго Орджоникидзе Г. В. Коренев был премирован легковым автомобилем ГАЗ системы «Форд». Для продолжения работ на аэродроме в Ям-Едрово на Валдае была создана опытная эскадрилья самолётов ТБ-1, оснащенных автопилотом АВП-2 и управляемых по радио. Историк Юрий Николаев в своей книге «Валдай. Описание района. Том 1» вышедшей тиражом всего 20 экземпляров так описывает авиабазу «В марте 1933 года на аэродроме "Едрово" недалеко от села была размещена 2-я тяжелая бомбардировочная авиационная бригада, на вооружении которой стоял советский тяжелый бомбардировщик ТБ-3, известный также как АНТ-б.»
Как пишет в своей работе историк создания автопилотов в авиации Ю. Е. Кузьмина «Успех этой работы был обеспечен тем, что отдельные части системы проектировались не изолировано, а были подчинены решению комплексной задачи. При создании системы управления для беспилотного самолета принципиально и конструктивно был решен ряд вопросов, к работе над которыми впоследствии приступили лишь десятки лет спустя». В 1934 году Г. В. Коренев окончательно уходит из НИИ ВВС и продолжает работу в Осконбюро в качестве главного инженера и заместителя начальника КБ-21. Работы по взлёту и приземлению самолёта ТБ-1 без вмешательства лётчика были продолжены. Через много лет, в конце 1970-х годов, конструкторы системы посадки крылатого космического корабля «Буран» разыскали Г. В. Коренева и консультировались у него по вопросам автономной посадки на аэродром, что как мы знаем, было успешно реализовано 15.11.1988 г.
Работа Коренева над управляемым по радиоканалу самолётом была самым ярким моментом в его трудовой биографии 1931—1937 годов, но далеко не единственным. Будучи заместителем начальника, главным инженером, начальником экспедиционного (лётного) отдела, он принимал участие в большинстве разрабатываемых Осконбюро тем. В частности, под его руководством началась разработка системы борьбы с надводными кораблями путём применения самолётов-снарядов, сбрасываемых с самолёта-носителя и наводимых при помощи инфракрасного луча. Эта работа проделывалась с 1934 г. по 1937 г. Кореневым, как главным конструктором, и его сотрудниками с привлечением кооперированных предприятий. В качестве самолёта-носителя был применён бомбардировщик ТБ-3. В 1936 г. в торпедном варианте (без луча, который задержался разработкой в Центральной Радиолаборатории в Ленинграде) система удачно прошла комплексные испытания в присутствии специальной комиссии Реввоенсовета. По результатам испытаний Правительством было принято решение о запуске в 1937 г. опытной серии. В дальнейшем этот опыт разработки системы и проведения комплексных испытаний был использован при работе Коренева в КБ-1 над первой отечественной противокорабельной ракетой «Комета» (1947 г. — 1953 г.).
Также в Осконбюро под руководством Коренева разрабатывались планирующие зажигательные снаряды для действия по портовым сооружениям и базам, которые над целью автономно (по команде программного устройства) переходили в полет по свертывающейся спирали, разбрасывая бомбы по площади. Был в разработке проект по управляемым по радио самолётам-снарядам, подвешиваемым к самолёту-носителю (телемеханизация самолёта-звена В. С. Вахмистрова).
Общее количество сотрудников Осконбюро превысило 400 человек. К этому моменту Коренев имел воинское звание «Военинженер 1 ранга», что соответствует современному званию «Полковник». Успехи в работе Осконбюро, существенное расширение тематики, привели к решению руководства отрасли перенести часть работ в Москву, в НИИ-12. Распоряжением № 6 по Главному Управлению Точной Индустрии НКОП от 26 января 1937 г. Г. В. Коренев был назначен директором НИАГ № 12 (НИИ-12) с одновременным исполнением им обязанностей главного инженера КБ-21 (Осконбюро).
В сентябре 1937 года Осконбюро (КБ-21) было расформировано. Тематика по автопилотам с оборудованием и кадрами, а также опытный завод КБ переданы в НИИ-12. На базе оборудования и кадров части КБ-21 по телемеханике организован Телемеханический институт (НИИ-20), ему переданы бывшие помещения Осконбюро по адресу ул. Красной связи-17а в Ленинграде. Закончился яркий и во многом героический этап работы Особого конструкторского бюро № 21, а его Главному инженеру предстоял совершенно иной этап, круто изменивший его судьбу на ближайшие 10 лет.
Арест и работа в шараге
Расстрел Тухачевского и его соратников положил начало массовым репрессиям в РККА и на предприятиях оборонной промышленности. Объективные трудности и проблемы по работе с новейшей техникой стали поводом для обвинений во вредительства и руководства КБ-1.Коренев был арестован 10 сентября 1937 г. в Ленинграде. Ему было предъявлено обвинение в участии «в контрреволюционной троцкистско-диверсионной и шпионской организации в оборонной промышленности» с целью ослабления обороноспособности СССР (ст.58-6, 58-8, 58-9, 58-11). При аресте изъяты Орден Ленина № 614 с орденской книжкой и автомобиль ГАЗ (,
) — премия за разработку и испытание первого управляемого по радио самолёта на базе ТБ-1. На момент ареста на иждивении Коренева находились жена с одиннадцатимесячной дочерью Лидией ().
Через год пребывания в Ленинградской тюрьме ГУГБ на Шпалерной ул., 25, в сентябре 1938 г., Коренев был этапирован в Москву.
Обвинительное заключение по делу Коренева от 14 сентября 1939 г. было стандартным. Помимо создания контрреволюционной троцкистко-вредительской группы с целью ослабления обороноспособности СССР и антисоветской агитации, ему вменялись в вину «вредительские» акты: намеренная задержка на год сдачи РККА телемеханической торпеды путём «усложнения технических условий радио-телемеханической линии»; срыв сдачи на вооружение самолёта-бомбы ТБ-3, управляемого по радио с самолёта «Р-6»; срыв выполнения заказа на телемеханические истребители «И-16» и сдачи серийных телемеханических самолётов «ТБ-1» образца 1936 г. Подобные обвинения в то же самое время были предъявлены и другим заключённым специалистам.
В конце мая 1940 г. в здании Военной коллегии Верховного суда СССР на ул. 25-го Октября, 23, без вызова обвиняемых и свидетелей в суд начались судебные процессы над заключенными специалистами. Председательствовал на этих процессах В. В. Ульрих. Приговор Туполеву был вынесен 28 мая, Кореневу — 29 мая. Коренев обвинён в преступлениях, предусмотренных статьями 58-7, 58-10, 58-11 и приговорён к лишению свободы на десять лет с поражением в избирательных правах на пять лет и с конфискацией лично ему принадлежащего имущества. Срок лишения свободы к моменту суда составлял почти три года и включался в общий срок заключения по приговору.
В сентябре 1940 года совместным приказом наркома внутренних дел и авиационной промышленности от 24 сентября 1940 г. за № 001198/504 на заводе № 156 было организовано ЦКБ-29 НКВД (Центральное Конструкторское Бюро № 29 НКВД). Бюро возглавил майор госбезопасности В. А. Кравченко, его заместителем стал старший лейтенант госбезопасности Г. Я. Кутепов.
Первым местом расположения ЦКБ-29 стал подмосковный посёлок Болшево. Здесь Коренев работал с его прежними коллегами по НИИ ВВС и Осконбюро, с другими учёными и конструкторами. Туда были привезены В. М. Петляков и В. М. Мясищев. Несколько позже в Болшево был доставлен и А. Н. Туполев, сразу назначенный руководителем авиационной группы. Ему было поручено составить списки необходимых для работы специалистов-авиационщиков. Сведения о работе конструкторов в этот период основаны на воспоминаниях заключённого А. П. Алимова, находящихся в фонде Научно-мемориального музея Н. М. Жуковского, и изложенных в книге М. С. Саукке «Неизвестный Туполев» воспоминаний С. М. Егера. По обоим источникам, в Болшево группа А. Н. Туполева, в которую входил и Коренев, работала над созданием четырёхмоторного пикирующего бомбардировщика («ПБ», позже — АНТ-57). Коренев занимался проблемами прочности и аэродинамики.
На протяжении всех десяти лет Коренев вёл научную-теоретическую и конструкторскую работу. Неполный перечень его работ, выполненных в заключении:
Проект и теория управления по радио планирующим снарядом (1938 г.);
Теория бомбометания с пикирования (1940 г. — совместно с Ю. Б. Румером);
Исследование движения самолёта в вертикальной плоскости (1941 г.);
О работе автомата управления курсом типа прибора Обри (1941 г.);
Проект управляемого снаряда для самолёта Дб-3 (1942 г.);
Проект самолёта-снаряда с турбореактивным двигателем (1939—1941 г.);
Главы к монографии по газовой динамике (1943—1944 г.).
Работа в КБ-1
В 1947 году Г. В. Коренев был освобожден из заключения. Судимость с него не была снята, однако он сразу был привлечен к работе в только что образованном Специальном Бюро-1 (СБ-1) в качестве вольнонаёмного, но поражённого в гражданских правах).По устным воспоминаниям Коренева распоряжение на его привлечение к работе было отдано лично Л. П. Берия.
Проект «Комета»
После окончания Второй мировой войны в правительстве СССР было принято решение о создании нового вида оружия — реактивного противокорабельного самолёта-снаряда, запускаемого с самолёта-ракетоносца при значительном удалении последнего от цели (крупного корабля противника). Для этого в сентябре 1947 года в Москве было создано Специальное Бюро-1 (СБ-1), штат которого был укомплектован как вольнонаёмными сотрудниками, так сотрудниками с различным типом ограничения свободы — заключенными из шарашек, лицами, только что освободившимися из этих мест, а также интернированными немецкими инженерами. Проект по созданию противокорабельной крылатой ракеты, её системе управления, а также по сопряжению оборудования ракеты и ракетоносца получил название «Комета». Причиной привлечения Коренева к работам по проекту «Комета» послужило то, что среди многих работ, выполнявшихся им в заключении, были и такие:
проект и теория управления по радио планирующим снарядом (1938)
проект управляемого снаряда для самолета ДБ-3 (1942)
проект самолета-снаряда с турбореактивным двигателем. (1939—1941)
Из шарашки в СБ-1 были переданы и некоторые выполненные Кореневым чертежи, хранившиеся в IV Спецотделе МВД, отвечавшем за документооборот в технической сфере.Вот как сам Георгий Васильевич рассказывает о «специфике» работы в шараге и судьбе проектов в своём письме на имя Г.М. Маленкова в 1953 г. :
«…система управляемого самолёта-снаряда, в комплексе с самолётом-носителем ДБ-3 (Ильюшин), разработанная мною в 1941-1943 гг., вначале совместно с С.П. Королёвым (ныне главный конструктор ракет дальнего действия) и Л.С. Терменом, и с конца 1941 г. самостоятельно. Проект имеется в IV Спецотделе МВД СССР. Стапели, штампы, приспособления, чертежи и весь задел были уничтожены Г.Я. Кутеповым при возвращении завода № 288 из Омска в Москву в 1943 г ..."
Руководителями СБ-1 были назначены опытный инженер и учёный П. Н. Куксенко (начальник СБ-1 и одновременно его главный конструктор) и молодой выпускник Ленинградской военной академии связи С. Л. Берия (заместитель главного конструктора). Также среди руководителей среднего звена было немало бывших сотрудников НКВД, имевших опыт общения с инженерами и учёными по совместной работе в ЦКБ-29 и подобным организациям.
В 1950 году СБ-1 было переименовано в конструкторское бюро КБ-1. Работы по созданию противокорабельной ракетной системы «Комета» были успешно завершены, система прошла государственные испытания, и с 1952 года начался её серийный выпуск. Ряд работников КБ-1 и ОКБ Микояна, также участвовавшего в разработке «Кометы», получили Сталинские (Государственные) премии. Коренев за вклад в разработку системы «Комета» был удостоен в 1953 году Сталинской премии. В 1962 году его диплом лауреата был заменён на диплом № 6018 лауреата Государственной премии СССР с формулировкой «За выполнение специального задания Правительства».
Одним из руководителей КБ-1 был С. Л. Берия, сын Л. П. Берии. В таких условиях Кореневу было сложно отстаивать свои авторские права на разработки, начатые еще в ЦКБ-29 и продолженные затем в КБ-1. После смерти Сталина Л. П. Берия был низложен, а С. Л. Берия отправлен в ссылку. В этих условиях Коренев отстоял свои авторские права
Проект «Беркут»
В 1950 году КБ-1 получило задание — разработку системы противовоздушной обороны Москвы от массированной атаки бомбардировщиков противника, несущих ядерные заряды. Коренев, будучи начальником теоретического отдела в КБ-1, был занят разработкой и численной реализацией алгоритмов наведения зенитной ракеты на цель. В частности, в источнике он упоминает своё авторство в разработке особой формы метода параллельного сближения с целью и общем параметрическом методе наведения, частный случай которого применён в осуществленной системе «Беркут».
Работа в МФТИ
Коренев поступил на работу в Московский физико-техническй институт на кафедру теоретической механики (заведующий профессор Ф. Р. Гантмахер) в 1954 году после завершения своей работы в КБ-1 (ныне предприятие Алмаз (научно-производственное объединение)). Читал лекционные курсы и вел семинары по теоретической механике, аналитической механике, тензорному исчислению. Опыт своей работы в предыдущих организациях обобщил в рукописях «Лекции по теории управления снарядами» , и «Лекции по прикладной динамике твердого тела» , на основании которых в 1957 году защитил диссертацию на соискание учёной степени кандидата физико-математических наук.
С конца 1950-х годов Коренев начал применять разработанные им уникальные методы управления движением последовательно к общественному транспорту, манипуляторам, системам человек-машина, и, наконец, к исследованию движений человека. В своих исследованиях активно применял тензорное исчисление, считая его наиболее адекватным инструментом как для теоретических исследований, так и для реализации вычислительных процедур на компьютерах. Факультативный курс Г. В. Коренева «Тензорное исчисление» был невероятно популярен среди студентов, читался свыше 20 лет, издан в МФТИ по записям слушателей тремя изданиями .
В 1966 году защитил диссертацию на соискание степени доктора физико-математических наук «О механических моделях приспособляемости систем управления движением» . В 1960—1970-е годы выпустил на эту тему 5 монографий , а также перевел и отредактировал две весьма важные на тот момент книги зарубежных авторов: А. С. Локк. «Управление снарядами» (которое стало чрезвычайно популярным в научных кругах и вышло двумя изданиями ) и А.Дж. Мак-Коннел. Введение в тензорный анализ (с приложениями к геометрии, механике и физике). Данные переводы, по воспоминаниям Г. В. Коренева, позволили его семье поправить их материальное положение, вызванное конфискацией имущества при аресте и последующим 10-летним сроком отбывания в заключении «от звонка до звонка».
Создание Заочной физико-технической школы при МФТИ
С работой Коренева в МФТИ связано создание Заочной физико-технической школы (ЗФТШ) при МФТИ. В 1966 году предложил идею заочной школы, разработал концепцию и в короткий срок реализовал её силами молодых преподавателей и аспирантов МФТИ. В этом он нашел поддержку ректора МФТИ О. М. Белоцерковского и комсомольской организации института.
К созданию ЗФТШ Г. В. Коренев подошёл как конструктор, разработав ее схему, связи, цели, оценив необходимые ресурсы. Под его руководством рабочая группа, куда входили Т. А. Чугунова, Т. С. Пиголкина, А. Г. Асланян, Ю. И. Колесов, А. Е. Умнов и ряд других молодых сотрудников МФТИ, разработала методические материалы и логистику общения со школьниками, живущими в близких и далеких населенных пунктах большой страны . Вот как вспоминала Т. А. Чугунова о роли Г. В. Коренева в организации ЗФТШ. «Авторитет Г. В. Коренева среди преподавателей и студентов МФТИ помог ему создать тогда еще не большие, но очень увлеченные и работоспособные коллективы преподавателей и студентов для работы со школьниками. Первые самые трудные пять лет он был активным помощником во всех направлениях работы ЗФТШ».
В течение нескольких лет после образования ЗФТШ Коренев был её главным идеологом и методистом, не занимая там официального поста. Постановлением бюро ЦК ВЛКСМ № Б-36/2 от 17.05.1972 г. Школе была присуждена премия Ленинского комсомола с формулировкой «За большую работу по пропаганде научно-технических знаний среди школьников». Школа является для МФТИ одним из важных инструментов привлечения абитуриентов. За десятилетия своего существования ЗФТШ выпустила свыше 90 тысяч школьников для Физтеха и других университетов страны, а более 400 студентов, аспирантов и выпускников МФТИ работают ежегодно преподавателями.
За работу по создании ЗФТШ Коренев награжден Знаком «Отличник народного просвещения», почетной грамотой Министерства просвещения СССР и ЦК профсоюза, почетной грамотой ЦК ВЛКСМ.
Награды
орден Ленина (1933; № 614) — [наградить] одного из организаторов, инициаторов и авторов по конструированию и выпуску автопилота к телемеханического самолета
Сталинская премия (1953) — за создание уникальных образцов ракетной техники в составе коллектива КБ-1;
знак «Отличник народного просвещения» — за создание ЗФТШ;
Почётные грамоты Министерства просвещения СССР и ЦК профсоюза, ЦК ВЛКСМ — за создание ЗФТШ.
Научное наследие
С 1964 года Кореневым разрабатывалась теория, названная им «Целенаправленная механика».
Избранные труды
Коренев Г. В. Введение в механику управляемого тела. — М.: Наука, 1964. — 568 с.
Korenev G. V. The mechanics of guided bodies. — London: Iliffe Books Ltd., 1967. — 551 p.
Коренев Г. В. Цель и приспособляемость движения. — М.: Наука, 1974. — 528 с.
Коренев Г. В. Введение в механику человека. — М.: Наука, 1977.
Коренев Г. В. Целенаправленная механика управляемых манипуляторов, 1979.
Коренев Г. В. Очерки механики целенаправленного движения. — 1980.
Коренев Г. В. Тензорное исчисление. — М.: Изд-во МФТИ, 2000. — 240 с. — ISBN 5-89155-047-4
Коренев Г. В. Классическая Механика в Тензорном Изложении. — М.: Изд-во МФТИ, 2020. — 324 с. — ISBN 978-5-7417-0739-5
Комментарии
Примечания
Литература
Ссылки
Выпускники вузов Тамбова
Механики СССР
Математики по алфавиту
Конструкторы по алфавиту
Конструкторы России
Конструкторы СССР
Преподаватели кафедры теоретической механики Московского физико-технического института | {
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Kenya Investment Case
To surmount the challenges many local governments face in financing community health, we work to provide the evidence and support needed to shift budgets and priorities. To that end, we work closely with governments and key partners to build investment cases that demonstrate the intrinsic value and savings community health creates.
Developing an investment case for community health in Kenya
In 2017, Kenya's Ministry of Health and Living Goods partnered to make the case for community health in Kenya. Using the UNICEF Costing Tool and the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) to estimate the benefits and costs of scaling up community health in Kenya, the study defined ROI as the difference between the economic benefit and cost of scaling up community health between 2017 and 2026. The study also used key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and stakeholder engagement meetings to assess the benefits of community health. Emerging data was instrumental in contextualizing the costs and benefits of community health in different settings—that is, rural/urban and county/national—identifying enabling and constraining factors for community health in Kenya, and documenting value not otherwise apparent from quantitative data.
The Return on Investment (ROI)
The joint study on community health in Kenya estimates a 1:9.4 economic return on investment in terms of lives saved and increased economic productivity for every shilling invested in community health.
Short-term benefits (five-year period)
With a focus on increased adoption of preventive health care, community health can help detect and address illness before more expensive and advanced interventions are required. For instance, averting advanced-stage HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB) is expected to save an estimated US$107.8 Million (KES10.8 Billion) over five years.
Long-term benefits (10-year period)
Increased productivity: Estimates indicate that deploying community health nationwide could increase productivity in Kenya by US$24.5 billion (KES2.4 trillion) over a 10-year period from 2017-2026. It is expected these savings will exist through reduced hospital visits and shorter periods of illness, due to increased use of preventive health care measures, decreased maternal and child ailments, and averted cases of stunting.
Insurance against future health crises: This refers to the value of community health in avoiding the high cost of global health crises, including pandemic preparedness and rapid response. The total economic value of a fully scaled community health system in preventing health crises in Kenya is as high as US$330 million (KES33 billion) in the long-term.
Employment: This refers to the overall multiplier increase in employment as a result of government investment in community health. The total economic value is as high as US$2.5 billion (KES 250 billion) over 10 years.
Indirect benefits: impact of community health on the wider health system
Indirect benefits of health care interventions refer to gains that go beyond the immediate outcomes of community health interventions that positively influence the wider health care system. Investment in community health in Kenya is poised to generate several indirect benefits, among them:
Improved data on community health and other health indicators since community health workers (CHWs) collect demographic and other data at the household level.
Enhanced opportunities to provide a first-line crisis response for outbreaks such as cholera as well as for addressing emerging illnesses such as non-communicable diseases.
Improved linkages providing an interface between communities and health facilities to ease referrals and delivery of health messages conveniently at the household level.
Broad-based benefits
Investing in community health will generate many broad-based benefits including:
Increased data on indicators not necessarily linked to health such as economic development and sanitation.
Youth and women empowerment, especially notable at the community level through the selection of CHWs.
Community empowerment, especially among low-income populations.
Explore the findings:
The Investment Case for Community Health in Kenya
Our Approach to Innovative Finance
Results-Based Financing | {
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Q: Parametrize EJB3 Remote URL I'm migrating an JavaEE5 application to JavaEE6. In that migration proccess, we have changed some architecturals parts, and now we have logic in a server, and presentation in another, and the comunication is via IIOP RMI Remote interface.
To do that, i have to define in my glassfish-web.xml the JNDI of EJB
<ejb-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>ejb/Informe</ejb-ref-name>
<jndi-name>corbaname:iiop:srvtest:3701#java:global/mycrud/mycrud-dss-ejb/InformeBean!com.myorg.ejb.InformeRemote</jndi-name>
</ejb-ref>
But when I deploy on production enviroment I have to rewrite to
<ejb-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>ejb/Informe</ejb-ref-name>
<jndi-name>corbaname:iiop:srvproduction:3701#java:global/mycrud/mycrud-dss-ejb/InformeBean!com.myorg.ejb.InformeRemote</jndi-name>
</ejb-ref>
My point is that I have 3 enviroments:
*
*development
*testing
*production
And in any of them I have diferent servers names to access JNDI remote interfaces, and that are hardcoded in my descriptor. So I have to deal with maven, or ant to build differents ear or war, depending of the enviroment.
So my question is there any better way to deal with that?
A: It's the same case as when using other target-specific configuration files, such as persistence configuration or application property files: You maintain different versions of the configuration file for your different target environments and then build a version for a specific one.
For Maven, you'll find a tutorial here.
| {
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Q: Image color changes when captured and saved from camera opencv Original image Captuerd Image I have to capture and save a depth image from a camera. The depth image is color encoded. Here's what I am doing
Mat outColor = cv::Mat(height, width, CV_32FC3);
for (int h = 0; h < outGray.rows; h++)
{
for (int w = 0; w < outGray.cols; w++)
{
outColor.at<cv::Vec3f>(h, w)[0] = point[j].x *255;
outColor.at<cv::Vec3f>(h, w)[1] = point[j].y *255;
outColor.at<cv::Vec3f>(h, w)[2] = point[j].z *255;
j++;
}
}
imwrite("E:/softwares/1.8.0.71/bin/depthImageColor.png", outColor);
But the color has changed in the saved image. It doesnt look same as wot is shown in the camera interface. Can someone help me with this?
| {
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This elevated cabin has a magnificent view down the length of White Iron Lake. The furniture is arranged so as to take maximum advantage of the vista as you dine. Then you can turn in for a comfortable night's rest in in one of the two bedrooms (each with a double bed). Good cross ventilation in both rooms makes a night's sleep in the north woods a pleasure.
This cabin, like all of the others, is equipped with a full sized refrigerator, a gas range with oven, a microwave oven, and a 6-person oak dining table. Of course, all necessary cooking eating utensils are provided, along with a coffee maker, cups & glasses, plates, bowls, and serving tableware.
Outside of your cabin, you will enjoy your balcony deck. Because of its west-facing orientation, having dinner cooked-up on its Weber Kettle Bar-B-Que can be a treat at sundown. In the morning, you have the best viewing position on the entire resort for watching an occasional floatplane load-up with some paddlers heading for a Canadian adventure. | {
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Q: Android - Build failed with an exception while running react-native run-android I am trying to setup remote push notifications in react-native and I am using the react-native-fcm package for fulling that.I followed the guide in setting up the required things from the github page of the package .I keep running in to the following error and I am not sure what is missing or if I am doing something wrong .
Error :
:app:processDebugResources
C:\Users\test\Desktop\App_Dev\pushNotifyDev\android\app\build\intermediates\manifests\full\debug\AndroidManifest.xml:58:31-47:
AAPT: No resource found that matches the given name (at 'resource' with value '@mipmap/ic_notif').
C:\Users\test\Desktop\App_Dev\pushNotifyDev\android\app\build\intermediates\manifests\full\debug\AndroidManifest.xml:56: error: Error: No resource found that matches the given name (at 'resource' with value '@mipmap/ic_notif').
:app:processDebugResources FAILED
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:processDebugResources'.
> com.android.ide.common.process.ProcessException: Failed to execute aapt
* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
BUILD FAILED
Total time: 16.121 secs
Could not install the app on the device, read the error above for details.
Make sure you have an Android emulator running or a device connected and have
set up your Android development environment:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html
Here is my AndroidManifest.xml file
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.pushnotifydev"
android:versionCode="1"
android:versionName="1.0">
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW"/>
<uses-sdk
android:minSdkVersion="16"
android:targetSdkVersion="22" />
<application
android:name=".MainApplication"
android:allowBackup="true"
android:label="@string/app_name"
android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
android:theme="@style/AppTheme">
<meta-data android:name="com.google.firebase.messaging.default_notification_icon" android:resource="@mipmap/ic_notif"/>
<service android:name="com.evollu.react.fcm.MessagingService" android:enabled="true" android:exported="true">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="com.google.firebase.MESSAGING_EVENT"/>
</intent-filter>
</service>
<service android:name="com.evollu.react.fcm.InstanceIdService" android:exported="false">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="com.google.firebase.INSTANCE_ID_EVENT"/>
</intent-filter>
</service>
<activity
android:name=".MainActivity"
android:label="@string/app_name"
android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|orientation|screenSize"
android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>
<activity android:name="com.facebook.react.devsupport.DevSettingsActivity" />
</application>
</manifest>
I am using the following
React-native -0.53
Android Studio -3.0.1
Any help in debugging this would greatly be appreciated.
Thanks
| {
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{"url":"https:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/2195270\/integration-by-substitution-for-an-integral-with-a-gradient","text":"Integration by substitution for an integral with a gradient\n\nLet\n\n\u2022 $\\lambda$ denote the Lebesgue measure on $\\mathbb R^2$\n\u2022 $\\tilde\\Delta,\\Delta\\subseteq\\mathbb R^2$ be nonempty and compact\n\u2022 $F:\\tilde\\Delta\\to\\Delta$ with $$F(\\tilde x)=A\\tilde x+b\\;\\;\\;\\text{for all }\\tilde x\\in\\tilde\\Delta\\tag1$$ for some invertible $A\\in\\mathbb R^{d\\times d}$ and $b\\in\\mathbb R^d$\n\nIf $v\\in L^1(\\Delta)$, we obtain $$\\int_\\Delta v\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda=\\int_{\\tilde\\Delta}\\left(v\\circ F'\\right)\\left|\\det F'\\right|\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda\\tag2$$ (where $F'=A$, but that's not important in the sequel) via integration by substitution. Now, if $v$ admits a weak gradient $\\nabla v\\in L^1(\\Delta,\\mathbb R^d)$, I want to express $$\\int_\\Delta\\nabla v\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda\\tag3$$ in the same way in terms of an integral over $\\tilde\\Delta$.\n\nHow do we need to apply integration by substitution for $(3)$?\n\nI was quite sure that the solution is $$\\int_\\Delta\\nabla v\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda=\\int_{\\tilde\\Delta}\\left(\\nabla v\\circ F\\right)\\left|\\det F'\\right|\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda\\tag4\\;.$$ However, I've read (for example, in Remark 5.45 of a lecture note) that we have $$\\int_\\Delta\\nabla v\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda=\\int_{\\tilde\\Delta}\\nabla\\left(v\\circ F\\right)\\left|\\det F'\\right|\\:{\\rm d}\\lambda\\tag5$$ instead.\n\nThe crucial point is that in $(4)$ we take the weak gradient of $v$ and evaluate it at $F(\\tilde x)$ whereas we take the weak gradient of $v\\circ F$ (which has to be calculated by the chain rule) and evaluate it at $\\tilde x$ in $(5)$.\n\nActually, $(5)$ doesn't make sense to me. The function we're considering in the integration by substitution rule should be $x\\mapsto\\nabla v(x)$. I guess there is something I'm missing which prevents us from using the conventional integration by substitution rule and hence $(5)$ is the result of some modified rule for integrands involving the gradient.","date":"2019-08-26 09:56:11","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9901171922683716, \"perplexity\": 85.61184854551936}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-35\/segments\/1566027331485.43\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190826085356-20190826111356-00323.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: what is the function of Current Source in a circuit? The voltage across current source is due to current itself or due to the circuit within which it is present.
A: To understand this better take the fluid mechanics analogy.Consider a pipe to be a conductor and the pressure across it to be the voltage difference and water flow to be current.Now consider a situation where there is water flowing from through the pipe,it is a matter of fact that if water is flowing there has to be some pressure difference between the ends of the pipe.The more the pressure difference faster the water flows in other words more water flows.As it is obvious that water and pressure are two different entities they are independent of each other in normal cases.But when it comes to flow one cannot exist without the other(as mentioned before),but yeah we can have water stagnant in the pipe without pressure,and so referring to your question the stagnant water is nothing but electrons moving in random directions.Now to answer your question,imagine what if if you'd place ur finger in the way of flowing water or any obstruction of that sort, there's an additional pressure created which adds to the already existing pressure. In electrical analogy I'm talking about the resistance,so bigger the obstacle greater is the pressure difference. So when you talk of a conductor it a pipe with stagnant water and as current is rate at which charges flow it is obvious that there has to be some pressure difference between the ends the end of the conductor which may be due to the power supply or external circuit and so current is due the voltage.Hope you can figure out the other points regarding this using same analogy. Hope this answers our question.
| {
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\section{Results}
BiTeI is a trigonal, noncentrosymmetric material adopting the $P3m1$ space group (156). The primitive unit cell contains a single Bi, Te, and I atom configured in layers of triangular networks along the c-axis (Fig.~\ref{fig:structure}(a)), resulting in a $C_{3v}$ rotational symmetry about the $c$-axis. The Te-Bi-I network forms a trigonal prism surrounding the Bi atoms, which are separated by a van der Waals gap. In this undisordered structure the equilibrium Bi-Te bond length is \SI{3.07}{\AA} and the Bi-I bond length is \SI{3.30}{\AA}. In its crystalline form, it is a trivial insulator with a bandgap of 0.36 eV \cite{Lee_et_al:2011}. To understand how topology is influenced by the local chemical environment we generated disordered structures as follows: We pull a random number from a uniform distribution between \SI{-0.15}{\AA} and \SI{0.15}{\AA} and add it to each Wyckoff position in the unit cell for each direction. This generated a disordered structure with an average atomic displacement $d_{av}$=\SI{0.62}{\AA} per unit cell, similar in value to the change in interatomic spacing in amorphous \bise{} \cite{corbae_et_al:2019}. From this disordered structure, we created interpolated snapshots between the undisordered and fully disordered crystal with $d_{av}$=\SI{0.62}{\AA} to track the electronic and topological properties with increasing disorder. The final structure is in the $P1$ space group after the $C_{3v}$ and remaining symmetry elements are removed by the structural disorder.
\begin{figure*}[!ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{bitei_theory_fig2_v5.png}
\caption{\textbf{Bulk electronic bandstructure}. (a) Bulk bandstructure in the $H-A-L$ direction without SOC. The structural disorder affects the CFS pushing the bands near the Fermi level closer and reducing the energy gap. Darker colors represnt more disordered structures. (b) The bandstructure with SOC for $d_{av}$=\SI{0.00}{\AA}, $d_{av}$=\SI{0.28}{\AA}, and $d_{av}$=\SI{0.45}{\AA}, respectively. There is a large Rashba splitting of the bands and a band inversion at the $A$ point due to the crystal field and SOI. The Bi weight in green moves frm the CB to VB and vice versa for Te in orange. (c) The Bi/Te $p_z$ orbital weight at $A$ as a function of average atomic displacement. With increasing displacement the Bi and Te weight of the VB (CB) switch around \SI{0.4}{\AA} implying a band inversion. (d) Energy level splitting diagram for disordered BiTeI after the TPT. The three splittings represent chemical bonding, the crystal field, and SOC. By breaking the $C_{3v}$ symmetry the $p_{x,y}$ orbitals are no longer degenerate.}
\label{fig:bandstructure}
\end{figure*}
Fig.~\ref{fig:structure}(b) shows the normal distributions for Bi-Te and Bi-I bond lengths for our disordered structures. We see that with increasing disorder, the distribution of Bi-Te bond lengths develops a larger standard deviation while the mean bond length becomes larger. The smaller Bi-Te bonds shift to a value of \SI{2.9}{\AA} -- this Bi-Te bond plays an important role in the TPT as discussed later. Additionally, the distribution of Bi-I bond lengths spread out with large deviation and peak around \SI{3.5}{\AA} with lower deviation.
The shortening of the Bi-Te bonds and the lengthening of the Bi-I bonds has important implications on the charge density. Fig.~\ref{fig:structure}(c) plots the charge density of the bands at the Fermi level near the $A$ point in the BZ involved in the TPT for the undisordered crystal. On the same plot, we also show the charge density for the bands projected onto the (001) plane which clearly shows the $C_{3v}$ symmetry and the charge sitting on the Te and I atoms. As we disorder the BiTeI structure, Fig.~\ref{fig:structure}(d-e), the charge density moves from being centered on the Te and I ions to the Bi-Te bond. This is important because, as we will describe later, the TPT band inversion occurs between the Bi and Te $p$ orbitals near the Fermi level. Furthermore, the charge density is redistributed in the $y$-direction due to the increased $p_y$ orbital presence at the Fermi level. This increase is attributed to the shortening of the Bi-Te bonds, which happens primarily in the $y$-direction. The $y$-direction is not specific, rather the important part is the shortening of the Bi-Te bond and the subsequent charge redistribution. In summary, in our disordered BiTeI structure, the Bi-Te bond gets shorter causing a charge redistribution along the Bi-Te bond, resulting in a broken 3-fold rotation symmetry and a new crystal-field environment for the states near the Fermi level.
Next, we examine the influence of the structural changes on the electronic and topological properties of disordered BiTeI. Full DFT calculation details are given in the supplemental materials \cite{supp_bitei}. The calculated electronic structure is shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:bandstructure} with and without SOC included to disentangle how crystal-field effects and SOC change with atomic displacement. Due to the lack of a center of inversion, we examine the states along the high-symmetry plane, $H-A-L$, to track topological band inversion. Fig.~\ref{fig:bandstructure}(a) shows the calculated electronic bandstructure for increasing values of $d_{av}$ without SOC. We find that for increasing $d_{av}$, the resulting changes in the CFS at $A$ reduces the band gap and pushes the bands at the Fermi level closer together. This large crystal-field enhancement is a result of the lifting of the degeneracy between the $p_x$ and $p_y$ orbitals upon displacement when the three-fold rotational symmetry is broken. This causes an increased $p_y$ orbital contribution near the Fermi level which is seen in the partial charge density. The orbital overlap produces large splitting pushing the states near the Fermi level closer together seen in Fig. \ref{fig:structure}(e) and Fig. \ref{fig:bandstructure}(a).
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{bitei_theory_fig3_v7.png}
\caption{\textbf{Calculated surface state spectrum for disordered BiTeI}. (a) The momentum dependent local density of states shows a topological Dirac cone around the surface $\Gamma$ point. (b) The Fermi surface of the topological surface state. The Dirac cone is disordered due to the structural disorder. Arrows correspond to the spin texture of the Fermi surface. Brighter colors represent a higher local density of states.}
\label{fig:topology}
\end{figure}
To understand the role of SOC on the electronic structure, Fig.~\ref{fig:bandstructure}(b) plots the bandstructure for $d_{av}=\SI{0.0}{\AA}$, $d_{av}=\SI{0.3}{\AA}$, and $d_{av}=\SI{0.5}{\AA}$, respectively, with SOC included. SOC breaks the spin degeneracy giving rise to splitting at positions in the Brillouin zone away from high-symmetry points and causes a large Rashba spin-splitting in the bulk bands near the Fermi level in all structures \cite{rashba}. Importantly, by incorporating SOC we observe a reduction of the bandgap, and, with increasing $d_{av}$, a band inversion occurs at the $A$ point. This band inversion produces the TPT in disordered BiTeI. The origin of the band inversion can be understood by considering the $p$-orbital projections of Bi, Te, and I onto the bandstructure. Initially the Te (orange) and I (blue) weight is concentrated in the valence band (VB) and the Bi weight (green) in the conduction band (CB). At the TPT the bands touch at the $A$ point, leading to a Weyl semimetal phase \cite{PhysRevB.90.155316}. After the transition the Bi weight is in the VB and the Te weight is in the CB, which is quantitatively shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:bandstructure}(c). The Bi and Te $p_z$ orbital weight, the wavefunction projected onto corresponding spherical harmonic, switch at $d_{av}\sim\SI{0.4}{\AA}$ with the Bi weight decreasing in the CB and the Te weight increasing (vice versa for the VB). Importantly, the average atomic displacement of \SI{0.4}{\AA} is observed in amorphous TI systems and so is a physically reasonable amount of disorder that could be induced in amorphous materials \cite{corbae_et_al:2019}. Additionally, the peak in the distribution of coordination numbers in the disordered structures moves from six to five exactly at the TPT, producing a new crystal field. The origin of the TPT can be traced back to the changing crystal field with disorder.
The bulk electronic structure results are summarized in Fig.~\ref{fig:bandstructure}(d). We find the states at the Fermi level, namely Bi-$p$ in the CB and Te/I-$p$ in the VB, dominate the TPT. As previously studies have shown, in crystalline BiTeI the in-plane $C_{3v}$ rotational symmetry results in degenerate $p_{x,y}$ orbitals split in energy from the $p_z$ orbital due to the semi-ionic polar trigonal prismatic coordination of the Bi \cite{Ishizaka2011v2}. This results in Bi-$p_z$ and Te-$p_z$ states at the edge of the CB and VB respectively \cite{Zhang2009}, separated by a calculated band gap of \SI{0.38}{eV}.
Introducing disorder causes the average bond lengths to change, notably shortening the Bi-Te bond length results in greater orbital overlap between the Bi-$p_z$ and Te-$p_z$ states, pushing the bands near the Fermi level closer together and reducing the bandgap. This disorder-induced reduction in bandgap is then sufficient, once SOC is included, to cause a band inversion of the two opposite polarity bands, resulting in a TPT to a topological insulating state.
The bulk electronic band inversion at the $A$ point should manifest itself as a topological surface state with a nontrivial topological invariant. Since the TPT is that of an ordinary insulator to a TI in a noncentrosymmetric crystal upon structural disorder, we calculate the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological invariant for six TR-invariant planes in the BZ \cite{PhysRevB.83.235401}. By tracking the evolution of the hybrid Wannier charge centers across these planes in the BZ we construct the topological index set \cite{supp_bitei}. After the TPT $\mathbb{Z}_2=1;\left(001\right)$ indicating the system is a strong TI. The strong topological index arising from the bulk electronic structure should manifest itself on the surface due to bulk-boundary correspondence. Fig.~\ref{fig:topology}(a) presents the surface state calculations performed on a slab of structurally disordered BiTeI after the TPT. The presence of a Dirac cone at the surface $\Gamma$ confirms the nontrivial bulk $\mathbb{Z}_2$ invariant, indicating with structural disorder we have produced a TI. The Dirac cone sits mid gap and passes through the top of the Rashba split VB as $\Gamma \rightarrow M$ before connecting to the VB at $M$. This unique surface spectrum allows for the interplay of bulk Rashba split bands with the topological surface state. In topological insulator, the surface spin-momentum locking with $H \propto \sigma \times \bm{k}$. The topological surface state's Fermi surface is shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:topology}(b). The annular structure is disordered in momentum space due to the structural disorder in real space. The spin texture is shown with arrows on the topological Fermi surface, confirming the spin-momentum locking. Increasing structural disorder produces a TPT leading to a strong TI with a spin-polarized Dirac cone.
The band inversion at the $A$ point of two Rashba split bands leads to the emergence of a Weyl semimetal topological phase when the bands touch \cite{PhysRevB.90.155316}. Calculating the Chern number for the $k_x=0$ plane gives $C=1$ meaning an intermediate Weyl phase in the structurally disordered BiTeI. Two Weyl nodes, which are sources/sinks of Berry curvature, are observed in the Berry curvature for the $k_x$ plane \cite{supp_bitei}.
The local structure and effect of disorder play a key role in the TPT. We generated several sets of disordered interpolations via our random displacement process, different from the set presented in the main text.
In the other sets of randomly disordered interpolations the bonds lengths develop different distributions leading to different local chemical environments and orbital overlaps. In one set of disordered interpolations the shortening of the Bi-Te bond causes a reduction in the band gap, but the crystal field splitting isn't enough to cause a band inversion, but larger amounts of disorder could potentially drive it past a TPT. The shortening of the Bi-Te bond and the corresponding charge redistribution was not present in another set of disordered interpolations, owing to the different local environments from nearest and next-nearest neighbor atoms seen in the radial distribution function \cite{supp_bitei}.
In fact, in these structures the CFS pushes the states near the Fermi level farther apart in energy resulting in a very large Rashba splitting in the bulk bands. In these non-topological structures $E_R = \SI{0.4}{eV}$ and the momentum offset $k_o=\SI{0.17}{\AA^{-1}}$ \cite{supp_bitei}, larger than any previously reported in literature \cite{Ishizaka2011}. These results demonstrate that structural disorder can generate both TPTs and colossal Rashba splitting in SOC materials making it a new tuning parameter for quantum properties in small gap semiconductors with large SOC.
Studying the influence of random structural disorder in SOC systems has implications for topological materials. From our results, we find that crystal-field engineering can be carried out with structural disorder as a new tuning parameter for topological phases. This leads us to a systematic prescription for inducing TPT in material as follows: (i) identify the orbital character of the states near the Fermi level, (ii) add random atomic disorder to break the degeneracy of the states and distort along the corresponding orbital direction to reduce the gap, (iii) close the gap and cause a band inversion. By incorporating tight-binding models and topological markers \cite{PhysRevResearch.2.013229,PhysRevLett.123.196401,adolfoquentin}, we can potentially discover many disordered and amorphous topological materials candidates. The topological phase in BiTeI could be realized in amorphous thin films grown via physical vapor deposition. Amorphous \bise{} showed an interatomic displacement of $\sim\SI{0.4}{\AA}$ when it was grown as a thin film \cite{corbae_et_al:2019}. Short range ordering coupled with the atomic displacement in disordered or amorphous BiTeI could perhaps show a topological phase in experiment.
In conclusion, we have found that by randomly introducing structural disorder a TPT from a normal insulator to topological insulator is achieved. Disordered BiTeI shows a bulk band inversion at the $A$ point in the BZ which manifests itself as a spin-polarized topological Dirac cone with a strong topological invariant. The physical mechanism for this is broken crystalline symmetries which produce a unique crystal-field environment that pushes the states near the Fermi level closer together. Our work is an effort to understand topological matter from a local bonding perspective and this study has implications for topological states that cannot be classified using crystalline symmetry indicators. Our results suggests a potential route to discover topological states in disordered and amorphous materials by identifying the local mechanisms (orbital inversions, etc.) which produce a TPT in the presence of disorder. Small-gap systems with strong SOC and well defined local environments, are exciting systems to study the interplay of structural disorder, symmetry breaking, and topology.
This work was primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division under Contract No. DE-AC02-05-CH11231 (High-Coherence Multilayer Superconducting Structures for Large Scale Qubit Integration and Photonic Transduction program (QISLBNL). Work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division under Contract No. DE-AC02-05- CH11231 within the Nonequilibrium Magnetic Materials Program (MSMAG). P. C. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1752814.
| {
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Продюсерский тег (аудио-тег, войс-тег) — элемент музыки, вставленный, обычно в начале песни, продюсером, короткий звук или фраза, предназначенная для обозначения создателя инструментала. Продюсерские теги наиболее распространенны в хип-хопе. Их популярность резко возросла в конце 2000-х и начале 2010-х годов с появлением поджанра трэп. Тег обычно включает в себя короткую запоминающуюся фразу, примером может послужить отметка продюсера Young Chop «Young Chop on the beat», произнесённая его племянником.
Тегом может послужить не только фраза, но и звук, например, инструментал Фаррелла Уильямса начинается с чётырех счетов или синтезаторное крещендо Lex Luger. Наиболее известные продюсерские теги имеют DJ Khaled, Metro Boomin, Mike WiLL Made-It, Harry Fraud, Tay Keith, Take a Daytrip, Murda Beatz, Ronny J и другие.
История
Продюсерские теги появились в 1990-х годах, когда хип-хоп музыка начала привлекать к себе значительное внимание. Их популяризировали диджеи, такие как Kool DJ Red Alert. Неясно, кто был первым продюсером, который использовал тег. Первоначально он использовался как форма защиты от кражи инструментала. Лукас Гаррисон из DJBooth писал: «Когда вы отправляете бит, вы практически не контролируете, что с ним происходит. Кто-то вполне может использовать его, не отдавая вам должного, или, что ещё хуже, назвать себя собственником. Добавление броского небольшого фрагмента в начале похоже на водяной знак гарантирует, что бит твой».
Однако со временем тег превратился в способ создать «бренд» продюсера, его начали использовать как слоган. Продюсеры пришли к выводу, что чем лучше запоминается их фраза, тем больше вероятность, что она произведёт положительное впечатление на слушателя. Тег также стал способом сделать продюсера важным участником песни, раньше они часто были неизвестны широкой публике. Теги стали чрезвычайно популярными, когда в конце 2000-х и начале 2010-х годов стали популярны такие поджанры, как трэп и мамбл-рэп, и в конечном итоге стали важным элементом песни. Одним из самых известных продюсеров, который начал включать короткие запоминающиеся фразы в свои биты, является Metro Boomin, ставший известным благодаря фразам «Metro Boomin want some more, nigga», произнесённой Янг Тагом, и «If Young Metro don't trust you, I'm gon' shoot you», записанной Фьючером.
Примечания
Хип-хоп
Музыкальные термины
Теория музыки | {
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SUNROLAN 20133hei39 Women's Leather Casual Summer Breathable Slip-On Backless Slipper Mule Loafer Flats Shoes Hollow Out by SUNROLAN at Helix Alumni. Hurry! Limited time offer. Offer valid only while supplies last. This loafer flat features a round toe silhouette, open back design, and slight heel. Finished with a lightly padded insole and easy slip on style.
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Details of case: R (on the application of Privacy International) (Appellant) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal and others (Respondents) [2019] UKSC 22 15 May 2019 The judgment What two questions was the Supreme Court asked to answer? Whether section 67(8) of RIPA 2000 "ousts" the supervisory jurisdiction of the High Court to quash a judgment of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal for error of law? Whether, and, if so, in accordance with what principles, Parliament may by statute "oust"…
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\section{Introduction}
With an increasing number of
LIGO-Virgo~\cite{TheLIGOScientific:2014jea,TheVirgo:2014hva} gravitational wave
(GW) observations, we can leverage the collective set of measurements to study
the properties of the astrophysical objects that generate
GWs~\cite{LIGOScientific:2020kqk,LIGOScientific:2021psn} and the validity of
general relativity
(GR)~\cite{Isi:2019asy,LIGOScientific:2020tif,LIGOScientific:2021sio}. Two broad
and complementary approaches exist for drawing inferences from sets of
detections. The first relies on the posterior distribution for some model and
its continuous parameters whose range of possible values encapsulates the
different physics we would like to study. The second phrases a question of
interest in the language of model selection between two discrete hypotheses to
compute Bayes factors (BFs). The latter approach is common in the context of
testing GR where one introduces a parametrized deviation of the signal as
predicted by
GR~\cite{LiEtAl:2012a,LiEtAl:2012b,AgathosEtAl:2014,Sampson:2013lpa,Sampson:2013jpa,PhysRevD.90.064009},
but further examples relate to higher-order modes of the
radiation~\cite{Chatziioannou:2019dsz}, GW memory~\cite{Hubner:2019sly}, the
neutron star equation of
state~\cite{DelPozzo:2013ala,Chatziioannou:2015uea,LIGOScientific:2019eut,Ghosh:2021eqv,Isi:2017equ,Callister:2017ocg},
gravitational lensing~\cite{Liu:2020par,Lo:2021nae}, the association between GWs
and potential electromagnetic counterparts~\cite{Ashton:2020kyr}, GW
ringdowns~\cite{Ota:2021ypb}, and the signal detection problem in
general~\cite{Veitch:2008wd,Veitch:2009hd,Cornish:2014kda,Isi:2018vst,Ashton:2019wvo,Pratten:2020ruz,Cornish:2020dwh}.
Although posteriors and BFs are mathematically related, in practice approaches
focusing on one or the other can come to seemingly different, and even
contradictory, conclusions. For example, Ref.~\cite{Bustillo:2020buq} considers
the case of testing the no-hair theorem with GW ringdowns and shows that BFs can
favor the incorrect conclusion even in cases where the posterior has minimal
support for it. The alternative of working directly with the posterior and
hierachical inference has been introduced in the context of tests of
GR~\cite{Isi:2019asy,LIGOScientific:2020tif,LIGOScientific:2021sio} after the
limitations of using BFs to combine information from multiple events were
pointed out in~\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}. Specifically, multipyling BFs
corresponds to assuming that a GR deviation will manifest independently and
distributed according to the underlying prior in each observation
\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}. In this paper, we further this line of argument to
highlight issues with the use of BFs in the context of nested models and show
that the hierarchical modeling of population distributions offers a more
flexible and reliable alternative.
BFs, or marginalized-likelihood ratios, provide a succinct way to compare the likelihood of two models in light of some data.
The BF comparing a hypothesis $\mathcal{H}_0$ to another $\mathcal{H}_1$ for some data $d$ is given by
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{B}^{0}_{1} \equiv \frac{P(d\mid \mathcal{H}_0)}{P(d\mid \mathcal{H}_1)} = \frac{\int p(d \mid \theta_0, \mathcal{H}_0)\, p(\theta_0|\mathcal{H}_0) \,\mathrm{d} \theta_0}{\int p(d \mid \theta_1, \mathcal{H}_1)\, p(\theta_1|\mathcal{H}_1) \,\mathrm{d} \theta_1}\, ,
\end{equation}
where the likelihoods are marginalized over some (potentially different) sets of parameters $\theta_{0/1}$ for the $\mathcal{H}_{0/1}$ hypotheses respectively.
The definition of the hypotheses encompasses the choice of parameter priors $p(\theta\mid \mathcal{H})$, as well as any other assumptions built into the functional form of the likelihoods $p(d\mid \theta, \mathcal{H})$.
A larger value of $\mathcal{B}^0_1$ (or, equivalently, its natural logarithm, $\ln \mathcal{B}^0_1$) indicates a preference for $\mathcal{H}_0$ over $\mathcal{H}_1$.
When enhanced with prior weights for each hypothesis, $P(\mathcal{H}_{0/1})$, this returns the betting odds in favor of one model over the other, conditional on the observed data---namely,
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{O}^{0}_{1} \equiv \frac{P(\mathcal{H}_0)P(d\mid \mathcal{H}_0)}{P(\mathcal{H}_1)P(d\mid \mathcal{H}_1)} = \frac{P(\mathcal{H}_0)}{P(\mathcal{H}_1)} \mathcal{B}^0_1\, .
\end{equation}
To avoid expressing an \emph{a priori} preference for either model, it is common to set $P(\mathcal{H}_0)=P(\mathcal{H}_1)$, and so $\mathcal{O}^0_1 = \mathcal{B}^0_1$.
BFs reduce the complicated problem of selecting between two models of reality to
a single number---a feature which lies at the core of its appeal, but also of
its shortcomings. Like other scalar statistics, interpreting this one number is
usually far from straightforward, leading to somewhat \emph{ad hoc} scales such
as~\cite{Kass:1995loi}. This difficulty is worsened by the fact that BFs
necessarily are affected by \emph{all} aspects of a model, including those
corresponding to less interesting regions of the parameter space like regions of
the prior space for which the likelihood offers no support. Consequently, BFs
can vary wildly with different choices of prior bounds, which are often set
arbitrarily. Since priors can rarely be set from first principles, calibrating
BFs tends to require large scale injection
campaigns~\cite{Isi:2018vst}---although this is only possible when the
injections themselves can be designed in a principled way (i.e., when we
actually know how to simulate expected astrophysical distributions). Even when
the model is specified correctly and we can take BFs at face value, the result
offers no insight as to why exactly one model is to be preferred.
All these drawbacks compound when one attempts to combine multiple observations
by multiplying BFs computed with a fixed prior, which enhances the sensitivity
to prior choices. Moreover, naive BF computations from collections of events
impose strong, generally unrealistic assumptions~\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}.
Multiplying BFs obtained from individual events results in a collective BF that
assumes the targeted effect (say, a deviation from GR) manifests independently
for each observation. On the other hand, generating a collective BF from the
product of likelihoods from multiple measurements presumes that the effect
manifests identically for all observations. Neither of these are valid
assumptions in general~\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}. In general the degree to which
a targeted effect appears independently versus identically in each observation
is something that should be leared from the data; this insight leads directly to
hierarchical modeling \cite{James:1961,Lindley:1972,Efron:1977,Rubin:1981}.
Rather than assuming a fixed and known distribution (e.g., all events are the
same, or all the events are different), a hierarchical analysis works by
inferring the underlying distribution of the parameter whose values encode the
targeted hypotheses. For example, in the context of tests of GR, a parameter $x$
may represent the magnitude of a GR violation, so that the GR (non-GR)
hypothesis implies $x=0$ ($x\neq0$); likewise, when searching for GW memory,
this could be the amplitude of the effect in question. Once this parameter is
identified, we can use hierarchical inference to characterize its values across
the observed events---using the collection of measurements holistically to infer
the distribution of $x$. The challenge here lies in choosing a suitable
parametrization for this underlying distribution.
We can circumvent this through a moment expansion: as a first approximation, we
will only be interested in recovering the mean and standard deviation of the
unknown distribution, so we can parametrize it as a Gaussian, whose mean and
standard deviation ($\mu$, $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$) we are to measure from the
data~\cite{Isi:2019asy}; the null hypothesis will often be constructed so that
it is recovered for $\mu=\sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0$. This approach allows us to study the
population of measurements without assuming the targeted effect manifests either
identically or distinctly for all events, learning more about the population
distribution, which now plays the role of a prior, with each new observation.
In this paper, we compare the BF and hierarchical approaches directly in the context of multiple GW observations, and argue that BFs are unreliable in any context in which the prior does not adapt to the observations at hand.
We show that in such context, BFs do not have the right scaling with the number of events, even in simple situations, due to their inherently strong dependence on the (fixed) priors in regions of no likelihood support.
We show that hierarchical posteriors do not suffer from such limitations as they rely on ``priors'' that are inferred from the data, and have a weaker dependence on hyperparameter assumptions.
We begin in Sec.~\ref{sec:single} by reviewing some basic properties of BFs obtained from single observations and their interplay with Occam penalties.
Then, in Sec.~\ref{sec:toy-model}, we study the scaling of BFs when combining multiple observations under two example distributions for the true parameters under consideration; we show that this approach can often lead to the incorrect conclusion.
We also consider the same scenarios under the hierarchical approach, showing that it does not suffer from the same drawbacks.
In Sec.~\ref{sec:fencepost}, we consider a final model that cannot be obtained as a special case of the distribution assumed by the hierarchical analysis, showing that the hierarchical approach yields the correct result even then.
We conclude in Sec.~\ref{sec:conclusion}.
\section{Single event: Occam penalty vs goodness-of-fit}
\label{sec:single}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{savagedickey.pdf}
\caption{Bayes factor computation as a Savage-Dickey density ratio. The BF ($\mathcal{B}$) comparing a model in which some parameter $x$ takes the value $x = 0$ to one in which $x\neq 0$ is given by the ratio of the posterior to the prior evaluated at $x = 0$. The main panel shows the case of a normal posterior truncated by a broad prior (half-width $\Delta = 10$, in blue) and a narrow prior ($\Delta = 1$, in orange). The inset shows the scaling of $\mathcal{B}$ as a function of $\Delta$ (solid curve); for broad priors, $\mathcal{B} \propto \Delta$ (dashed line). In this toy example, we assume the posterior peaks always at $x=0$.
}
\label{fig:eyecandy}
\end{figure}
Before tackling the problem of multiple observations, we first review the behavior of BFs computed from a single event.
A typical situation that is simple to understand analytically is that of nested models, i.e., two models constructed so that one can be recovered as a special case of the other.
Parametrized tests of GR, for example, typically involve nested hypotheses wherein the non-GR model is characterized by all the usual GR signal parameters plus one or more additional variables $x_{\rm nGR}$ that quantify the deviation from GR~\cite{Blanchet:1994ez,Blanchet:1994ex,Arun:2006hn,Arun:2006yw,Yunes:2009ke,Mishra:2010tp,Li:2011cg,Li:2011vx,Agathos:2013upa}.
These parametrizations are usually constructed so that GR is recovered when the deviation parameters vanish.
Then, to determine whether GR is favored, the data are analyzed with some broad (typically flat) prior on the deviations in order to compute BFs comparing $x_{\rm nGR} =0$ to $x_{\rm nGR} \neq 0$.
In that spirit, consider some real-valued parameter $x$ and two related hypotheses $\mathcal{H}_{x=0}$ and $\mathcal{H}_{x\neq0}$, respectively defined to imply $x=0$ and $x\neq0$, with some prior over $x$ and any other relevant parameters.
Since $x=0$ is a special case of the model in which $x$ is allowed to vary over a broad range including the origin, we say the hypotheses are nested.%
\footnote{Here we are identifying $\mathcal{H}_{x\neq0}$ with the model in which $x$ is allowed to vary freely; this is legitimate because the point $x=0$ is a set of measure zero, so it does not need to be explicitly excised from the arbitrary-$x$ model.}
In that case, the BF comparing the two is given exactly by the Savage-Dickey ratio~\cite{Dickey:1971,Verdinelli:1995},
\begin{equation} \label{eq:sd}
\mathcal{B}^{x=0}_{x\neq 0} = \frac{p(x=0 \mid d)}{p(x=0)}\, ,
\end{equation}
where $p(x=0 \mid d)$ is the marginal posterior and $p(x=0 )$ is the prior, both evaluated at $x=0$.
In other words, the BF in favor of $x=0$ is simply the ratio of the posterior to the prior evaluated at the origin.
We can elucidate the role of the prior in Eq.~\eqref{eq:sd} by considering a specific functional form.
For simplicity, assume the marginal posterior is given by a standard normal distribution, truncated symmetrically around the origin by some uniform prior of half-width $\Delta$ (i.e., flat in $-\Delta < x < \Delta$).
Then, the BF can be computed analytically to yield
\begin{equation} \label{eq:bf_simple}
\mathcal{B}^{x=0}_{x\neq 0} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}}\frac{2\Delta}{\Phi(\Delta) - \Phi(-\Delta)} = \sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi}} \frac{\Delta}{\mathrm{erf}(\Delta/\sqrt{2})}\, ,
\end{equation}
in terms of the standard cumulative distribution function $\Phi(x) \equiv \left(1 + \mathrm{erf}(x/\sqrt{2})\right)/2$ and the error function $\mathrm{erf}(x) \equiv (2/\sqrt{\pi}) \int_0^x \exp(-y^2) \,\mathrm{d} y$.
Since $\mathrm{erf}(\Delta/\sqrt{2}) \to 1$ for large $\Delta$, the BF can be made to favor $x = 0$ with arbitrarily-high confidence by sufficiently broadening the prior---in fact, $\mathcal{B}^{x=0}_{x\neq 0} \propto \Delta$ in the large $\Delta$ limit.
We illustrate this in Fig.~\ref{fig:eyecandy}.
The dependence on the prior range is a general feature not specific to our
example: the same data can produce arbitrary odds in favor of a specific value
of a parameter ($x=0$ here) relative to a model with increasing prior volume
(proxied by $\Delta$). This is related to the concept of the Occam penalty in
Bayesian inference: BFs do not only favor the model that fits the data best, but
also the one that is simplest---where simplicity is defined as a model's ability
to fit the data without having to significantly constrain its parameters
relative to their a priori allowed values. The interplay between goodness of fit
and Occam penalty creates the possibility of a BF that strongly favors the
incorrect conclusion. In the context of testing GR, if the theory is indeed
violated, then some observation can give $p(x=0\mid d) \ll 1$ in
Eq.~\eqref{eq:sd}; yet, this can always be countered with a wide enough prior
that makes the Occam penalty $1/p(x=0)$ so large that goodness of fit cannot
overcome it. This is the expected manifestation of the Occam penalty in BFs;
the failure is symptomatic of a mismatch between the implemented prior and the
observer's expectation.
Since we generally have little a priori information about the nature of possible
beyond-GR effects, and these effects are not strongly constrained by the
likelihood of an individual measurement, a natural inclination is to make the
prior much wider than the likelihood. However, the argument above shows that a
broad prior prevents us from detecting small deviations from GR, which is an
important regime for tests of GR~\cite{Perkins:2022fhr}---either because GR is
close to correct or because of selection effects that disfavor the detection of
signals with morphology far from GR. The same tension arises in other contexts
where BFs are used without a principled prior. In the next section, we show that
this behavior is not unique to single-event analyses but carries over to
combined constraints.
\section{Combining events under a broad prior}
\label{sec:toy-model}
We now turn to collections of measurements and show that the ``combined''
multiplicative BF does not have the correct scaling in the regime of interest,
with support accumulating in favor of the null hypothesis even when this
conclusion is incorrect. Combining BFs from multiple events will only lead to
the right conclusion when the deviation (e.g., the deviation from GR) is large
enough to be apparent in individual posteriors, negating the need for combining
observations in the first place. We then show that the hierarchical approach is
not susceptible to this issue.
Again, consider a single parameter, ${x}$, that stands in for the magnitude of the GR deviation or any other effect of interest, and let ${x} = 0$ be our null hypothesis (e.g., GR is correct).
We conduct experiments to measure ${x}$, and assume additive Gaussian noise so that the observed value $x_\mathrm{obs}$ is normally distributed
about the true value ${x}$ with standard deviation (measurement noise)
$\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:toy-likelihood}
p\left( x_\mathrm{obs} \mid {x} \right) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2}} \exp\left( - \frac{\left( x_\mathrm{obs} - {x} \right)^2}{2 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \right).
\end{equation}
In the previous section, we considered a simplified case of this model, in which we had a single measurement with $x_\mathrm{obs}=0$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}=1$.
We consider two ``populations'' for the true values of ${x}$ under repeated measurements, i.e., the true magnitude of the GR deviation for each observed GW event.
In the first the true value of ${x}$ is fixed to some value ${x}_0$ for each measurement so that the population distribution is a Dirac delta,
\begin{equation} \label{eq:munotzero}
p_1\left( {x} \right) = \delta\left( {x} - {x}_0 \right).
\end{equation}
In the second, the value of ${x}$ is randomly distributed with mean zero and
standard deviation $\sigma_0$ for each measurement, so that the population
distribution is
\begin{equation} \label{eq:sigmanotzero}
p_2\left( {x} \right) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_0^2}} \exp\left( - \frac{{x}^2}{2 \sigma_0^2} \right).
\end{equation}
In the language of tests of gravity, the two models recover GR (our null hypothesis) when ${x}_0 = 0$ or $\sigma_0 = 0$, respectively.
In the second model, the \emph{mean} deviation from GR vanishes, but the actual variation in a given measurement fluctuates. In both cases the deviation parameter ${x}$ is
assumed independent and identically distributed (iid) for each measurement, so there
is some prior choice such that multiplying BFs for repeated
measurements is optimal~\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}.\footnote{The optimal prior is
the actual population from which the true parameters controlling the
measurements are iid draws.}
However, that prior is unknown in realistic situations because the true distribution of GR deviations is not known a priori.
Rather, in all cases we assume a measurement is analyzed with a flat prior on $-\Delta < {x} < \Delta$, following common practice.
\subsection{Bayes factors}
With that prior, the BF between the null and generalized hypotheses (for concreteness, ``GR'' and ``non-GR'') for a given
observation $x_\mathrm{obs}$ is a generalization of Eq.~\eqref{eq:bf_simple}
\begin{multline}
\label{eq:sd-bf-toy}
\mathcal{B}^\mathrm{GR}_\mathrm{nGR} = \frac{2 \Delta}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \left( \Phi\left( \frac{\Delta - x_\mathrm{obs}}{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}} \right) - \Phi\left( \frac{-\Delta - x_\mathrm{obs}}{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}} \right) \right)} \\ \times \exp\left( - \frac{x_\mathrm{obs}^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \right).
\end{multline}
When the prior is very broad, $\Delta \gg x_\mathrm{obs}$, and the Gaussian posterior on ${x}$ is not meaningfully truncated by the prior, then the BF simplifies to
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:bf-approx-toy}
\mathcal{B}^\mathrm{GR}_\mathrm{nGR} \simeq \frac{2 \Delta}{\sqrt{2 \pi \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2}} \exp\left( - \frac{x_\mathrm{obs}^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \right),
\end{equation}
corresponding to the $\mathcal{B}^{x=0}_{x\neq0} \propto \Delta$ limit discussed in the previous section.
Ensuring $\Delta \gg x_\mathrm{obs}$ is a common analysis choice because this prior
permits the true value of ${x}$ to correspond to the observed value
$x_\mathrm{obs}$ which is the value of ${x}$ that maximizes the likelihood in each
observation.
A broad prior is also desired when combining multiple observations in order to accommodate the expected scatter in the individual likelihoods.
If we choose to combine observations by adding log BFs\footnote{In this paper,
all logarithms are natural logarithms.} (equivalently, multiplying BFs), it is
sufficient to compute the expected value of an individual log BF under the true
deviations; the expected total log BF will then be the expected individual log
BF times the number of events. The expected value of the log of Eq.\
\eqref{eq:sd-bf-toy} is not expressible in closed form, but can be
straightforwardly computed numerically. In the limit that $\Delta \gg x_\mathrm{obs}$,
the expected log BFs under our two populations of GR deviations become
\begin{align}
\label{eq:approx-ex-bf-1}
\left. \left \langle \ln \mathcal{B}^\mathrm{GR}_\mathrm{nGR} \right\rangle \right|_{{x}_0} &\simeq \ln \frac{2 \Delta}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2}} - \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + {x}_0^2}{2 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \nonumber\\
&\simeq \ln \frac{\Delta}{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}} - 0.23 - \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2+{x}_0^2}{2 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2},
\end{align}
and
\begin{align}
\label{eq:approx-ex-bf-2}
\left. \left \langle \ln \mathcal{B}^\mathrm{GR}_\mathrm{nGR} \right\rangle \right|_{\sigma_0} &\simeq \ln \frac{2 \Delta}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2}} - \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_0^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2} \nonumber \\
&\simeq \ln \frac{\Delta}{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}} - 0.23 - \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2+\sigma_0^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2}.
\end{align}
From the above, we can see that, whenever the GR deviation is nonzero but small
enough to be undetectable in a single observation ($0 < {x}_0, \sigma_0 \ll
\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$), then for $\Delta \gtrsim 2 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ the expected log BF
is positive, and evidence accumulates \emph{in favor} of GR even though there is
a deviation. For deviations that are marginally detectable in a single
observation ${x}_0, \sigma_0 \simeq \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, choosing a wide,
uninformative prior $\Delta \gtrsim 3.5 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ (which, recall, is necessary
to ensure that all observations $x_\mathrm{obs}$ in a modest-sized catalog of
observations are within the prior range) will result in evidence that
accumulates \emph{against} modifications to GR.
An exact calculation of the expected log BF without the assumption
that $\Delta \gg x_\mathrm{obs}$ appears in Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-BF-parameter-scan}.
Interestingly, any value of $\Delta$ will
accumulate evidence for GR when ${x}_0 = 0$ or $\sigma_0 = 0$; but if
${x}_0 > 0$ or $\sigma_0 > 0$, so that the GR model is incorrect, prior
choices that encompass deviation parameter values comparable to those observed,
i.e., $\Delta \simeq \mathrm{few} \times \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, accumulate evidence for the
incorrect GR model unless the deviation parameter is comparable to or larger
than the observational uncertainty. In this regime, either the BF
fails to select the correct theory (non-GR) on average (with more and more
certainty as the number of observations grows); or the deviation is so large
that it is marginally detectable (i.e., ``${\sim} 1\sigma$'') with a single
observation. Multipliying BFs in this situation is counter-productive,
and the best constraint is achieved with a single measurement.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{BF_delta_sigma}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{BF_sigma_sigma}
\caption{\label{fig:toy-BF-parameter-scan} The expected log BF in
favor of GR from the toy model discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:toy-model} (color) as a function of the prior width $\Delta$ (ordinate) and the true
deviation parameter ${x}_0$ (abscissa left) or the scatter in the zero-mean
deviation parameter $\sigma_0$ (abscissa right). Both quantities are shown relative to
the measurement uncertainty on the deviation parameter $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$. For any
non-zero value of the deviation parameter or its scatter, there is a prior
width that results in incorrectly accumulating evidence \emph{for} GR (above dashed line); moreover, for reasonable prior widths of a few times the
measurement uncertainty (so that observed values of the deviation parameter
lie within the prior range and the prior is therefore broad and uninformative)
the deviation parameter must be large enough to be marginally detectable in a
single measurement (${x}_0, \sigma_0 \sim \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$) before evidence
against the incorrect GR model accumulates on average over many stacked
measurements. Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-BF-slice} demonstrates this effect for $\Delta = 5 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$.}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.9\columnwidth]{BF-Delta-5.pdf}\qquad
\includegraphics[width=0.9\columnwidth]{BF-Delta-5-variable.pdf}
\caption{\label{fig:toy-BF-slice} The expected log BF for the GR
model when $\Delta = 5 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ (a broad, uninformative prior) versus the
fixed value of the deviation parameter (${x}_0$, left) or scatter in the
zero-mean deviation parameters ($\sigma_0$, right). For this choice of prior
width, the average log BF favors the incorrect GR model until the
deviation parameter is ${x}_0, \sigma_0 \gtrsim 1.3 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, marginally
detectable in a single measurement. Shading shows the expected variation in the log BF ($\pm1\sigma$).}
\end{figure*}
Even when the log BF is expected to take the correct sign on average, the result will vary for any given set of detections.
In the regime where $\Delta \gg x_\mathrm{obs}$, we can quantify this through the variance associated with the means in Eqs.~\eqref{eq:approx-ex-bf-1} and \eqref{eq:approx-ex-bf-2}.
For the former, this is just
\begin{equation}
\left.\mathrm{var}\left(\ln \mathcal{B}^{\rm GR}_{\rm nGR}\right) \right|_{{x}_0} \simeq \left(\frac{{x}_0}{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}}\right)^2 + \frac{1}{2}\, ,
\end{equation}
while for the latter we have
\begin{equation}
\left.\mathrm{var}\left(\ln \mathcal{B}^{\rm GR}_{\rm nGR}\right) \right|_{\sigma_0} \simeq \frac{\left(\sigma_0^2 + \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2\right)^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^4}\, .
\end{equation}
These scalings are illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-BF-slice} for $\Delta = 5 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$.
On the left hand side, the variance asymptotes to $1/2$ for decreasing $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ and fixed intrinsic scatter $\sigma_0$; on the right hand side, the BF variance keeps increasing as we make the individual measurements more precise (decreasing $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$) because for narrower posteriors the value at $x=0$ varies more drastically from event to event.
In the case where GR is correct (${x}_0=\sigma_0=0$), the scatter in the single-event log BF is large enough that it is not extremely uncommon for moderately large catalogs to yield evidence for the wrong hypothesis, even when the null hypothesis is correct (Fig.~\ref{fig:bf_spread}).
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\columnwidth]{bf_grisright_delta_2.0}
\caption{Log BF for a growing catalog of $N$ observations in the case where the null hypothesis (GR) is correct, and where $\Delta = 2\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, for 200 simulations (represented by each thin gray trace). On average, the log BF favors the right hypothesis (blue line), but there is enough variance in this quantity that some of the individual catalogs favor the wrong hypothesis, even for a moderately high number of detections (traces below the dashed line).}
\label{fig:bf_spread}
\end{figure}
The qualitative behavior here can be understood in the context of
\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo}. The flat prior on $x$ implicitly assumes that
each observation has a true $x$ parameter that is independent of other
observations and uniformly distributed on $\left( -\Delta, \Delta \right)$. If
one chooses $\Delta$ large enough to include all event likelihoods and not truncate them, then the flat prior for
the true parameter implicitly demands that most of the true deviation parameters
are comparable to $\Delta$. If, instead, the deviation parameters are
considerably smaller than the observational uncertainty $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$---which is
the regime where stacking multiple events \emph{should} be the most
beneficial---then the assumption is so badly violated that pooling observations
prefers the incorrect model where the deviation parameters are zero to the
even-less-correct model where the deviation parameters are iid uniform on
$\left( -\Delta, \Delta \right)$.
The solution to this problem is to allow the assumed population to adapt its
properties to the stacked set of observations, for example by allowing its
location and scale to fit the set, as suggested in~\cite{Isi:2019asy}. This
effectively constructs a model that better represents our beliefs about the
combined data set.
\subsection{Hierarchical treatment}
We now revisit the two experiments above using a hierarchical model for the distribution of GR deviations, instead of computing BFs with a uniform prior.
Assuming we are only interested in the first two moments of the distribution, we parametrize the true deviations as drawn from a Gaussian such that ${x} \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu, \sigma_\mathrm{pop})$~\cite{Isi:2019asy}.
The goal will be to infer the $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ hyperparameters from the collection of measurements, and to quantify agreement with the null hypothesis $\mu=\sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0$ based on the corresponding 2D posterior.
The two non-GR models we considered above are encompassed within this parametrization when $(\mu={x}_0,\, \sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0)$ and $(\mu=0,\, \sigma_\mathrm{pop}=\sigma_0)$.\footnote{The next section examines a non-GR model that is not fully encompassed in the Gaussian hierarchical model.}
As before, we assume that the observed value $x_\mathrm{obs}$ in an individual event is normally distributed around the true value per Eq.~\eqref{eq:toy-likelihood}, and we take the true values themselves to be distributed normally given $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$.
In that case, the likelihood for a given observation becomes (see Appendix~\ref{app:hier})
\begin{equation} \label{eq:hier-like}
p(x_\mathrm{obs} \mid \mu, \sigma_\mathrm{pop}, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma_\mathrm{tot}^2}} \exp \left(-\frac{\left(x_\mathrm{obs} - \mu\right)^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{tot}^2}\right) ,
\end{equation}
where $\sigma_\mathrm{tot}^2 \equiv \sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2$ is the total variance arising from the combination of statistical uncertainty and the intrinsic population scatter.
Unlike in Eq.~\eqref{eq:toy-likelihood}, the true value ${x}$ for the individual measurement does not appear in this likelihood because we have marginalized over it and replaced it with the hyperparameters $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_ngr1_qgr}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_ngr2_qgr}
\caption{\label{fig:toy-qgr} The GR quantile $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ (color) obtained in a hierarchical analysis of data in which there is a fixed deviation for all events (${x}_0$, ordinate left) or a scatter across events ($\sigma_0$, ordinate right), as a function of the number of events ($N$, abscissa).
The reported value of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ is the median over 50 simulated catalogs with $N$-events.
Low values of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ indicate that the null hypothesis ($\mu=\sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0$) is disfavored; for reference, the dashed line marks the point at which GR is disfavored at $1\sigma$, i.e., $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR} = \exp(-1/2) \approx 0.61$.
Unlike in Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-BF-parameter-scan}, given enough $N$ we always detect the deviation, even when ${x}_0,\sigma_0 < \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$.
}
\end{figure*}
Consider the same two true distributions for $x$ above, which depart from GR as given by Eqs.~\eqref{eq:munotzero} and \eqref{eq:sigmanotzero}.
We simulate catalogs of detections following these distributions and analyze them hierarchically with the likelihood of Eq.~\eqref{eq:hier-like}, and Gaussian priors on $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ (with zero mean and standard deviation equal to $\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, restricting to positive values for $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$).
Although other choices are possible, it is natural to tie the scale of the hyperprior to the measurement uncertainty because this is the only scale built into the problem a priori.
Furthermore, this choice is guaranteed to be sufficiently broad in the small-deviation regime (${x}_0,\sigma_0 < \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$) in which we are interested, and smooth enough to accommodate larger deviations if needed.
We quantify agreement with the null hypothesis through the marginal posteriors for $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$, as well as the credible level at which GR is recovered in the 2D posterior for those two quantities (the 2D quantile, $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ in~\cite{LIGOScientific:2020tif}), defined as
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR} \equiv \int_{p < p(0, 0)} p(\mu, \sigma_\mathrm{pop} \mid x_\mathrm{obs}, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}) \,\mathrm{d} \mu \,\mathrm{d} \sigma_\mathrm{pop} \, ,
\end{equation}
where the shorthand ``$p < p(0, 0)$'' stands in for values of $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ such that $p(\mu, \sigma_\mathrm{pop} \mid x_\mathrm{obs}, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}) < p(\mu=0, \sigma_\mathrm{pop} = 0 \mid x_\mathrm{obs}, \sigma_\mathrm{obs})$.
Given this definition, a value of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR} = 1$ means that the posterior peaks at the origin $\mu=\sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0$, while $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR} = 0$ means that the posterior offers no support for that point (i.e., a higher value of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ implies better agreement with GR).
In all cases, we simulate each catalog of $N$ observations 50 times and report medians over the ensemble.
Unlike with BFs, there are no values of ${x}_0$ or $\sigma_0$ for which the hierarchical analysis converges to the wrong answer given enough observations.
This is apparent from Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-qgr}, which shows the value of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ as a function of the deviation magnitude (${x}_0/\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ or $\sigma_0/\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$) and the number of observations: even for deviations small relative to the individual-measurement uncertainty, $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ approaches zero for large $N$---indicating that the posterior offers little support for $\mu = \sigma_\mathrm{pop}=0$, in tension with GR.
For small catalogs ($N \leq 10$), the value of $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ is more strongly influenced by the prior, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the magnitude of the deviation.
Besides indicating that the data are inconsistent with the null hypothesis, the hierarchical analysis provides descriptive information about the nature of the deviation.
With enough observations, the measurements of $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ converge to the ${x}_0$ and $\sigma_0$ values respectively for the two models with increasing precision for larger $N$.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-musigma-1d}, we show this behavior explicitly for two example magnitudes of the GR deviation.
As expected, we can detect larger deviations with fewer detections, and need more observations to notice a nonzero scatter than a nonzero mean.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_ngr1_mu_1d}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_ngr2_sigma_1d}
\caption{\label{fig:toy-musigma-1d} Recovered population mean ($\mu$, left) and standard deviation ($\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$, right) as a function of catalog size ($N$, abscissa), for our two toy models: a fixed deviation ${x}_0$ for all events (left) and a deviation scatter $\sigma_0$ across events (right).
In each case, we show two values for the true deviation: ${x}_0, \sigma_0 = 0.1\, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ (blue) and ${x}_0, \sigma_0 = 0.8\, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ (red).
The measurement is represented by posterior median (solid lines) surrounded by 68\% and 90\% highest-density credible bands (shading); we also show the true value (dotted lines) and the null expectation (dashed gray line).
Smaller deviations require more observations to be detected---for example, we only need $N \gtrsim 3$ events to notice $\mu > 0$ at $1\sigma$ (68\% credibility) if ${x}_0=0.8\,\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, but $N\gtrsim 100$ if ${x}_0 = 0.1\, \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$.
}
\end{figure*}
Prior choices play a lesser role in the hierarchical approach than in BF computations.
The hierarchical analysis takes as input the likelihoods for individual events, so the prior used to initially analyze the data is largely irrelevant as long as it offers the likelihood ample support (e.g., $\Delta \gg \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ in the notation of the previous section).
The choice of prior is, instead, transferred to the $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ hyperparameters; however, any reasonably smooth choice will work assuming we have a enough events for the hierarchical measurement to be informative.
If observations are not sufficiently numerous, the result will be influenced by the $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ prior.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_scaling_varmu}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_scaling_varsigma}
\caption{\label{fig:hier-scaling} Scaling of the uncertainty in the recovered hyperparameters $\mu$ (left) and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2$ (right) as a function of catalog size $N$, computed for a case in which the true values are $\mu=0$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}=\sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$.
A solid line marks the median of the posterior variance computed over 50 simulated catalogs for any given $N$, while surrounding bands enclose the corresponding 68\% highest-density interval.
For low $N$, the variances $\var\left(\mu/\sigma_\mathrm{obs}\right)$ and $\var\left(\sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2/\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2\right)$ are dominated by the hyperprior; as $N$ increases, the data become more informative and the variances approach the analytic prediction of Eqs.~\eqref{eq:hier-varmu} and \eqref{eq:hier-varsigma} (red dashed lines).
Dotted vertical lines mark the expected number of observations needed for the likelihood of Eq.~\eqref{eq:hier-like} to become narrower than the prior, as dictated by Eqs.~\eqref{eq:hier-thresh-mu} and \eqref{eq:hier-thresh-sigma} with $\sigma_\mathrm{prior} = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, but rounded up to the closest integer.
}
\end{figure*}
In the case of our idealized examples, we can analytically predict the number of detections needed for the hierarchical measurement to be informative.
As we show in Appendix \ref{app:hier}, the variance of the marginalized hierarchical likelihood is expected to scale as
\begin{equation} \label{eq:hier-varmu}
\var\left({\mu}\right) = \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_0^2}{N}
\end{equation}
for the inferred population mean and
\begin{equation} \label{eq:hier-varsigma}
\var\left({\sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2}\right) = \frac{2}{N} \left(\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_0^2\right)^2
\end{equation}
for the inferred population variance, assuming the true population variance is $\sigma_0^2$ and irrespective of the true mean.
As a rule of thumb, the hierarchical measurement will become informative once the characteristic width of the likelihood of Eq.~\eqref{eq:hier-like} becomes smaller than the scale imposed by the prior.
With hyperpriors of scale $\sigma_\mathrm{prior}$, this implies that the $\mu$ measurement should start becoming informative (in the sense that we obtain a hyperposterior narrower than the prior) once we accumulate
\begin{equation} \label{eq:hier-thresh-mu}
N \gtrsim \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2}{\sigma_\mathrm{prior}^2} = \left(\frac{\sigma_\mathrm{tot}}{\sigma_\mathrm{prior}}\right)^2
\end{equation}
measurements; meanwhile, for $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$, the equivalent requirement is
\begin{equation} \label{eq:hier-thresh-sigma}
N \gtrsim \frac{\left(\sigma_\mathrm{obs}^2 + \sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2\right)^2}{\sigma_\mathrm{prior}^4}
= \left(\frac{\sigma_\mathrm{tot}}{\sigma_\mathrm{prior}}\right)^4,
\end{equation}
as we show in Appendix \ref{app:hier}.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_fencepost_mu}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{hier_fencepost_sigma}
\caption{\label{fig:hier-fencepost-musigma} As in Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-musigma-1d}, except the true population follows the fencepost model of Sec.~\ref{sec:fencepost}, by which the true deviation is ${x} = \pm \sigma_\mathrm{obs} / 2$ with equal probability for either sign. Even though this distribution cannot be expressed as the limit of a Gaussian, the hierarchical analysis infers the correct values of $\mu = 0$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop} = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$.
}
\end{figure*}
We demonstrate these scalings in Fig.~\ref{fig:hier-scaling}, where we show the variance in the inferred population mean and variance from simulated populations of measurements with $\sigma_0 = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$ and no mean, and setting $\sigma_\mathrm{prior} = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ for concreteness.
For increasing number of measurements $N$, the posterior converges to the true values ($\mu=0, \sigma_\mathrm{pop} = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$).
For small catalogs, i.e., for $N$ comparable or smaller than the thresholds above, the average uncertainty in these measurements is broad but smaller than expected simply from Eqs.~\eqref{eq:hier-varmu} and \eqref{eq:hier-varsigma} because it is dominated by the prior.
As the number of detections increases, the posterior variance becomes well described by Eqs.~\eqref{eq:hier-varmu} and \eqref{eq:hier-varsigma}, meaning that the data become informative and the likelihood dominates over the prior.
Alternately, we may ask how many measurements would be required to establish a
non-vanishing population mean or variance. This requires $\var\left( \mu
\right) \lesssim x_0^2$ or $\var \left( \sigma_\mathrm{pop}^2 \right) \lesssim
\sigma_0^4$. The former would imply
\begin{equation}
N \gtrsim \left( \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{tot}}{x_0} \right)^2
\end{equation}
and the latter
\begin{equation}
N \gtrsim 2 \left( \frac{\sigma_\mathrm{tot}}{\sigma_0} \right)^4.
\end{equation}
\section{Fencepost model}
\label{sec:fencepost}
In the examples above, the simulated populations could be perfectly reproduced as special cases of the hierarchical population model---that is, there existed a choice of $\mu$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop}$ for which the hierarchical model reduced exactly to the true distribution we simulated.
Of course, we do not necessarily expect this to be the case in reality: a deviation from GR could manifest as a nontrivial function of the source parameters and the coupling constants in the theory; similarly, for other effects such as memory, it is not realistic to expect the true population of parameters to be fully described by a simple Gaussian if the null hypothesis is incorrect.
In light of that, one might worry that the hierarchical method only outperformed BFs in the above examples because the hierarchical model was able to match the true population exactly, and that this gain would fail to materialize in realistic situations.
Yet, as we show in this section, this is not the case: the hierarchical method is more robust than products of BFs even when the underlying population cannot be fit exactly by a Gaussian.
Consider a situation in which the true deviation parameter is either ${x}=\pm {x}_0$ for some ${x}_0$ and with equal probability for both signs.
The true distribution in this ``fencepost'' model is simply the sum of two delta functions,
\begin{equation}
p_3\left({x}\right) = \frac{1}{2}\left[ \delta\left({x} - {x}_0\right) + \delta\left({x} + {x}_0\right) \right] ,
\end{equation}
and, therefore, has zero mean and standard deviation $\sigma_0 = |{x}_0|$.
This population cannot be described as a limiting case of a Gaussian distribution; nevertheless, we can always analyze it hierarchically with the Gaussian likelihood of Eq.~\eqref{eq:hier-like}, and expect to recover the correct values for the population mean and spread (namely, $\mu = 0$ and $\sigma_\mathrm{pop} = |{x}_0|$) given enough detections~\cite{Isi:2019asy}.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:hier-fencepost-musigma}, we show this explicitly for simulated measurements in which ${x}_0 = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$.
On the other hand, when presented with the fencepost model, BF computations suffer from the same problems already identified above: with a broad prior relative to the measurement uncertainty ($\Delta > \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$), the combined BF for multiple observations will necessarily converge to the wrong answer (i.e., favor of the null hypothesis) unless ${x}_0 \gtrsim \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$, in which case the deviation is detectable in individual observations.
Similarly to Fig.~\ref{fig:toy-BF-parameter-scan}, in Fig.~\ref{fig:fencepost-lnZ} we show the scaling of the expected BF accumulated from fencepost-model observations, as a function of $x_0$ and $\Delta$.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:fencepost-expt}, we compare the hierarchical and Bayes-factor results for a progressively-higher number of simulated measurements from a fencepost population with ${x}_0 = \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$.
As the number of measurements increases, the hierarchical model disfavors the null hypothesis more strongly, with $\mathcal{Q}_\mathrm{GR}$ vanishing rapidly for increasing $N$.
On the other hand, a BF computed with $\Delta = 5\sigma_\mathrm{obs}$ grows exponentially in favor of the null hypothesis, yielding a spectacularly incorrect result.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{fencepost_mean_lnZ.pdf}
\caption{\label{fig:fencepost-lnZ} Average log BF in favor of GR accumulated for each observation in the ``fencepost'' model described in Sec.~\ref{sec:fencepost} as a function of the prior width $\Delta$ and the location of the true deviations at $\pm {x}_0$. The black lines indicate the parameter values chosen for the numerical experiment illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:fencepost-expt}.}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{fencepost-hier.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{fencepost-bf.pdf}
\caption{\label{fig:fencepost-expt} Accumulation of credibility (left) or log
BF (right) for GR versus catalog size $N$ in numerical experiments
corresponding to the parameter choices indicated by the black lines in Fig.~\ref{fig:fencepost-lnZ}. The solid line gives the median over 100 catalog
realizations at each catalog size $N$ while the band shows the range of the
16th to 84th percentile values. The credibility of GR (left) is the fraction
of posterior mass for $\mu$ and $\sigma$ in our hierarchical model that lies
at a lower posterior density than the GR values $\mu = \sigma = 0$ when the
model is fit to a catalog of observations whose true and observed deviations
are drawn from the ``fencepost'' model described in Sec.~\ref{sec:fencepost} with ${x} = \pm \sigma_\mathrm{obs}/2$. The log Bayes
factor (right) is the sum of the log BFs for each observation in the
catalog using a flat prior on the true deviation $-\Delta < {x} < \Delta$
with $\Delta = 5 \sigma_\mathrm{obs}$. The hierarchical model correctly finds
that there is little credibility for GR once the catalog size is a few
hundred; the accumulated BF, on the other hand, becomes very
confident in the incorrect GR model even at small catalog sizes.}
\end{figure*}
\section{Conclusions}
\label{sec:conclusion}
Although conceptually appealing in idealized situations, the use of BFs to
aggregate information from multiple observations presents difficulties in
practice. Their apparent simplicity in reducing a complex model selection
problem to a single number hides an opaque dependence strict and unrealistic
population assumptions. Unless priors (aka, the ``population'') adapt to the
observations at hand, BFs are difficult to interpret---a problem that is
compounded when multiplying such BFs from a catalog of observations. Even when
priors are adequate, the result on its own provides no insight as to \emph{why}
a model is to be preferred over another. This and related problems have been
widely discussed in the statistics literature \cite[e.g.,][and references
therein]{Lotfi2022}, but not extensively in the context of GWs and testing GR.
In this paper, we have examined BFs and hierarchical posteriors as two commonly-used alternatives to derive information from collections of GW detections in order to decide between two models, e.g., the presence or absence of beyond-GR effects in the detected waveforms.
We furthered arguments in~\cite{Zimmerman:2019wzo,Isi:2019asy} to show that, without a principled way to set priors, BFs are an unreliable tool for this task.
We demonstrated this with three examples in which the value of some parameter $x$ encoding the effect in question (e.g., a deviation from GR) follows different distributions deviating from the null hypothesis.
We have found that, when the truth does not conform to the null model, the usual approach of multiplying single-event BF converges to the incorrect answer for an increasing number of observations, except in a regime where the targeted effect is discernible in individual observations (thus negating the need for combining events in the first place).
On the other hand, hierarchical modeling of the underlying population leads to identification of the appropriate priors (aka, the ``population model") and converges to the correct answer. We established this in the context of nested models for which GR can be recovered as a special case of the beyond-GR model (i.e., $x_0 = 0$); however, the issue of sensitivity to the prior width will still be present in non-nested models \cite[e.g.,][]{Laghi2021} where it will require a different solution.
In principle, BFs could be computed after the hierarchical population
inference~\cite{Lotfi2022} or between different population
models~\cite{LIGOScientific:2020kqk}, but we here show that they are unreliable
without this step. Even then, it is not possible to evade the core problem of
prior dependence when computing BFs, no matter how many levels of inference are
applied: the BF computation based on the highest level of inference in a
hierarchical model will still depend on the choice of priors on that level,
reducing the problem once again to the choice of a prior distribution that is
difficult to establish in a principled way. This issue is devistatingly acute
for the approach that multiplies Bayes factors with a simple, fixed prior
because each observation contributes an additional prior factor.
\begin{acknowledgments}
We are grateful to Tyson Littenberg for insightful feedback on this manuscript.
During part of this work, M.I.\ was supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship
grant No.\ HST-HF2-51410.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope
Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities
for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555.
The Flatiron Institute is a division of the Simons Foundation, supported through the generosity of Marilyn and Jim Simons. We thank Gregorio Carullo for comments on non-nested models.
This paper carries LIGO document number LIGO-P2200099{}.
Software: {\tt matplotlib}~\cite{Hunter:2007}, {\tt julia}~\cite{bezanson2012julia}, {\tt Turing.jl} \cite{ge2018t}, {\tt Plots.jl} \cite{tom_breloff_2022_6365416}.
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 3,502 |
The Clarksville Commerce Center site is located at 899 Burlington Drive, Clarksville, VA, 23927. The site is 87 acres and is privately owned. A 33-page site study is available for the property. A property re-use plan has been prepared for a 400,000 s.f. building, expandable to 650,000. The majority of the site is pre-graded. Water and sewer utilities are provided by the Town of Clarksville. A waste treatment lagoon exists on the property. Electric power is provided by Dominion. Natural gas service can be extended to the property. The property has rail service from the Buckingham Branch Virginia Southern Division which connects to Norfolk Southern. The Buckingham Branch re-constructed a sidetrack into the site in 2016. The site is located 1 mile from U.S. 15 and 31 miles from I-85 Exit 12. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,737 |
package com.github.sammcdonalds.booksstore.crud;
import com.github.sammcdonalds.booksstore.domain.Genre;
import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.Query;
import org.springframework.data.repository.PagingAndSortingRepository;
import org.springframework.data.repository.query.Param;
import java.util.List;
public interface GenreRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Genre, Integer> {
@Query("select g from Genre g where g.name like %:name%")
List<Genre> findByName(@Param("name") String name);
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,090 |
Ensuring the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage.
RMEF Joins Fight against Threat to Use of Traditional Ammunition
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is one of 33 national sportsmen's conservation organizations that sent a letter (see below) to the Department of the Interior in response to a petition from several anti-hunting organizations, including the Humane Society of the United States, seeking to ban the use of traditional ammunition on much of the nation's public lands.
The Honorable Sally Jewell
Secretary of the Interior
RE: HSUS Petition to Ban the Use of Lead Ammunition
Dear Secretary Jewell:
The undersigned national sportsmen's conservation, natural resource professional organizations and association for the hunting and shooting sports industry write to you in regard to a petition filed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) along with 16 other organizations and individuals requesting that the Department of the Interior (DOI) promulgate a rule to ban the use of traditional ammunition made with lead components and require that only alternative ammunition made with metals be permitted for use on lands managed by the National Park Service (NPS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).
Before addressing the merits - or lack thereof - of the petition, it is important to note that the principal petitioner, HSUS, is an avowed anti-hunting organization (as are a number of the co-petitioners), and one of its primary goals is to shut down all hunting. HSUS has said "We are going to use the ballot box and the democratic process to stop all hunting in the United States. We will take it species by species until all hunting is stopped in California. Then we will take it state by state." HSUS has led numerous state and national initiatives in furtherance of achieving that goal, and this petition is simply another tactic unto that end. The petitioners suggest that hunting is acceptable as long as hunters use alternative ammunition, but the undersigned organizations reject this specious representation and encourage you to do likewise.
The issue at hand is not whether lead, when ingested in a sufficient quantity and metabolized by an animal can be injurious to that particular animal, but, instead, what is the population-based impact to a species at a local or regional level. Indeed, state fish and wildlife agencies have applied that very test in determining if, and when, special regulations regarding traditional ammunition are needed to address population-level impacts and taken management action as appropriate.
One of the seven tenets of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is that the best science available will be used as a basis for informed decision making in wildlife management rather than by opinion or conjecture, or as in this case, false inference. The body of scientific literature on the use of traditional ammunition does not support the petitioners' underlying conclusion that the past and continued use of traditional ammunition has resulted in negative wildlife population level effects. The 50-page petition is littered with pseudo-scientific statements that attempt, but fail, to link potential lead toxicity, from any number of possible sources, to federal statutory obligations to protect wildlife. In addition, this false line of reasoning is also true of the petitioners' claim regarding the threat to public health. There has never been a single documented case in the United States of a hunter having elevated blood lead levels, let alone blood lead poisoning, caused by consuming game harvested with traditional ammunition.
The signatories also note that if such a ban was instituted, additional petitions for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands and other federal holdings (e.g., National Forests) would likely follow. We also contend that additional bans, regarding traditional ammunition, will be sought for recreational target shooting on a broad suite of federal land holdings, including those noted in this letter. This is a traditional and historic use allowed on millions of acres of public lands. Alternative ammunition is more expensive for hunters - and there are not alternatives available for about half the hunting calibers. But, for target shooters, who consume far more ammunition in pursuit of their sport, the cost would be prohibitively expensive. The cost would effectively close public lands to shooters.
The importance of recreational shooting to the American System of Conservation Funding (see attachment) cannot be overstated. Approximately seventy percent of ammunition sold in the United States is for non-hunting purposes, much of it for target shooting. And traditional ammunition accounts for ninety five percent of all ammunition sold.
In addition, the signatories support the following principles that are relevant to this petition as agreed upon by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies in a resolution adopted September 29, 2010:
Future regulation of lead ammunition and lead fishing tackle is best addressed by the individual states, rather than federal agencies.
Decisions related to future regulation of lead ammunition and lead fishing tackle should be based on the best available science related to wildlife population health.
State agencies should focus regulation efforts where population-level impacts to wildlife are substantiated.
State fish and wildlife agencies should lead efforts to develop the best science, and AFWA should provide this information to members for their use in bringing hunters, anglers and various interests together to determine the need for and nature of any needed management approaches to use of lead ammunition and lead fishing tackle.
In conclusion, there are no adverse wildlife population impacts or public health concerns on NPS and FWS lands that require such an unwarranted, national intervention as this petition seeks. It is quite simply an attempt to drive hunters, and subsequently recreational target shooters, off of Federal public lands. It is unnecessary, has no basis in sound science and should be rejected by the Department.
Archery Trade Association
Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies
Boone and Crockett Club
Bowhunting Preservation Alliance
Catch-A-Dream Foundation
Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation
Conservation Force
Dallas Safari Club
Delta Waterfowl Foundation
International Hunter Education Association-USA
Masters of Foxhounds Association
Mule Deer Foundation
National Shooting Sports Foundation
National Trappers Association
National Wild Turkey Federation
Pope and Young Club
Public Lands Foundation
Quality Deer Management Association
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
Ruffed Grouse Society
Safari Club International
Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
Tread Lightly!
U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance
Whitetails Unlimited
Wild Sheep Foundation
Wildlife Forever
Wildlife Management Institute
Wildlife Mississippi
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 12:47 PM 1 comment:
Making a $45,000 Difference for Conservation
One person can make a difference. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation members, volunteers, donors, sponsors, partners, staffers and other supporters make a difference for elk and elk country every day. And when it comes to furthering RMEF's mission of ensuring the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage, one person can make a $45,000 difference!
Here's the deal. Our friends at Nationwide Insurance came up with the idea of a voting competition for its outdoor lovers to choose the conservation effort he or she is most passionate about. The winner receives $45,000. We think we represent a pretty good case. Here's our pitch:
Celebrating its 30th year of ensuring the future of elk, elk country and our hunting heritage, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation conducted nearly 9,000 projects to date, enhancing or protecting more than 6.4 million acres of habitat. Along the way, RMEF also opened or secured public access to 713,000 acres for hunters and others to enjoy. In addition, RMEF helped restore elk to their native range in six states and helped protect winter and summer ranges, migration corridors, calving grounds and other crucial areas for wildlife.
The competition begins on Monday, July 21, and runs through October 13. You can vote one time each day. You can also check the daily standings to see how RMEF stacks up against the competition.
Go HERE and click on the RMEF logo to cast your vote for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and, as always, thank you for your continuing support!
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 8:16 AM No comments:
Support the Conservation Easement Incentive Act
To RMEF Members,
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation considers the Conservation Easement Incentive Act (H.R. 2807) of vital importance for conservation, elk and elk country. It is scheduled to come to the House floor for a vote this week as part of a larger charities package.
First passed in 2006, the easement tax incentive has since led to the conservation of roughly one million acres per year by the nation's 1,700 community-based land trusts including RMEF.
Through a limited tax deduction, landowners are able to place their most prized assets – historical sites, forests, family farms and ranches – in protected easements to ensure a legacy of natural abundance, enjoyment and agricultural production for future generations.
Land placed in easements can be farmed, grazed, hunted or used for recreation and the conservation of natural resources. It can also be passed on to heirs or sold but the land is kept safe from future development.
Valuable open spaces or farmland can be protected by an easement for a fraction of the cost of buying it, making easements by far the most cost-effective approach to land conservation. For example, federal acquisition of land costs taxpayers roughly $12,000 an acre compared to just $400 an acre for an easement.
The enhanced incentive expired last year, and conservation easement enrollments are expected to plunge by at least 300,000 acres per year, or roughly one-third.
This program expired several times since its first passage. This vote provides the opportunity to make it permanent. You can reach your representative by calling the House switchboard at 202-225-3121.
View a text of the bill here.
Making the enhanced incentive permanent is about ensuring a legacy. Please call your representatives to ask them to support this worthy legislation. Thank you for your consideration.
RMEF President/CEO
Celebrating a Conservation Victory in Oregon Elk Country
The sun shone down brightly, perhaps in a sense of approval, on a small gathering in northeast Oregon. The day was July 10, 2014. The occasion was a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Habitat Partner Tour in celebration of the organization's premiere project of 2013. RMEF took part in a team effort to permanently protect and open access to 13,082 acres in the Headwaters of the John Day River. The transaction also secured access to tens of thousands of acres of nearby public land.
Some 50 to 60 people representing the RMEF, U.S. Forest Service, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Walmart (funder), volunteers and local supporters came together as project partners to recognize the major conservation accomplishment. They looked back on all the hard work it took to bring the project to a successful conclusion. They looked ahead to a future of unencumbered public access for hunters, hikers, anglers and others. All the while, they paused in the present to look around and soak in the majesty and beauty of some of Oregon's finest elk country.
But this is no narrow victory. Elk are certainly not the only winners here. The Headwaters are vitally important because tributaries provide life-giving cold water inputs to the John Day River for salmon, steelhead, bull trout, redband and cutthroat trout. Four federally listed birds and four federally listed mammal species also live on the land as do mule deer, black bears, pronghorn, mountain goats, grouse, quail and a host of other wildlife.
This is a win-win. And on this day, protecting and securing access to thousands and thousands of acres of crucial wildlife habitat is most definitely a victory worth celebrating!
RMEF staffers Bob Springer, Blake Henning, Grant Parker, Jennifer Doherty and Bill Richardson
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 3:38 PM 1 comment:
In Search of Public Access
"No trespassing." The lettering on the sign appeared to stare as intently at me as I stared at it. There it was hanging on the same stretch of barbed wire fencing I'd crossed many times into what was my favorite closest-to-home hunting spot in western Montana. I wasn't angry. I was mostly stunned. And then reality set in. I was no longer welcome on a tract of land where my son took his first doe at age 12 and where I shot a 5x6 whitetail buck. Its antlers (see below) still grace my office wall. In my particular case, a regional timber company that historically allows hunters, hikers, huckleberry pickers and others to enjoy their land started selling off large chunks of it as a way to better cope with a declining timber market. Bottom line: I was now permanently on the outside looking in.
Unfortunately, this scenario is being played out time and time again involving too many hunters around the nation. In fact, a lack of public access is reported to be the number one cause why hunters stop hunting. Many simply can no longer find a place to hunt so they give it up or, worse yet, decide it's no longer worth it to pass on their hunting heritage to the next generation. And that decision has much more than just individual consequences. Fewer hunters mean the purchase of fewer guns, ammunition, bows, arrows and hunting licenses and fees which translates into less revenue generated specifically to fund land and wildlife conservation which is not good for habitat or the critters that rely on it.
The mission of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage. Since 1984, RMEF protected or enhanced more than 6.4 million acres of habitat. If you do the math, that's more than 588 acres per day, every day over its 30-year existence. A key part of that mission is an emphasis on public access. To date, RMEF opened or secured more than 713,000 acres for hunters. Again, if you do the math, that's 65 acres opened or secured per day, every day since 1984.
In this "what have you done for me lately" world, RMEF remains active and vigilant. Staffers work with state agencies, federal agencies, landowners and other partner organizations and groups in seeking access to private land and through private land to landlocked public land. Below are five recent projects highlighting RMEF's emphasis on public access:
The Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) accepted a $50,000 grant from RMEF for expanding its Access Yes! program that will enroll approximately 40,000 acres of land to provide access to private land for sportsmen and women. IDFG is in a one year time frame between the expiration of a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for access and applying for a second USDA grant.
"RMEF is stepping up and helping out so we don't have to terminate a number of agreements with landowners during this fall hunting season," said Virgil Moore, IDFG Director. "We truly appreciate RMEF's efforts to maintain recreational access for the citizens of Idaho."
RMEF teamed up with a group of conservation partners to acquire more than 4,000 acres of what was formerly private forestland in Washington and placed it into public ownership. It will now be managed and opened to public access with an emphasis on forest health and public recreation.
"This transaction was seven years in the making and involved a great deal of cooperation," said Blake Henning, RMEF vice president of Lands and Conservation. "The lands acquired from Weyerhaeuser are now permanently protected and transferred to public management thanks to support from the Stemilt Partnership, a group of 25 conservation-minded partners."
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) accepted a $45,000 grant from RMEF to secure access for hunting and fishing through its Access Yes program. Every dollar provides access to 4.2 acres of land so the grant opens the door to approximately 189,000 acres for sportsmen and women.
"RMEF is an outstanding partner and supports a variety of wildlife related projects in Wyoming," said Scott Talbott, WGFD director. "Sportsmen will see many acres become available to them with this amazing RMEF donation."
RMEF headed up a group effort to permanently protect and open access to more than 13,000 acres in the Headwaters of the John Day River in northeast Oregon. The transaction also secured access to tens of thousands of surrounding National Forest System lands.
"This is a victory for hunter-conservationists, anglers, hikers and anyone who wants public access to more than 13,000 acres of what was previously inaccessible private land in the heart of Oregon's elk country," said David Allen, RMEF president and CEO.
RMEF improved access to nearly 18,000 acres of National Forest land in central Montana after acquiring a 40-acre tract with a common 30-foot border with public land. RMEF purchased the property for $190,000 and sold it to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks for $50,000, in effect donating the remaining balance.
"This strikes at the heart of what RMEF is all about," said David Allen, RMEF president and CEO. "We are committed to opening more land for hunting and other year-round recreational public access and now the gate is open for hunters to more easily access thousands of acres of elk country previously almost impossible to reach."
My little slice of western Montana hunting heaven may now be off limits but there are continuing efforts to maintain and improve what we have as a whole. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sportsmen and women seeking to ensure and strengthen their hunting tradition for now and for generations to come.
Mark Holyoak
RMEF Director of Communication
Go to www.rmef.org for more information.
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 12:14 PM No comments:
Habitat Council Celebrates Momentum, Views Successful Project, Plans to Do More
Yvonne & RMEF co-Founder Charlie Decker, Habitat Council
co-chairs Nanch & Howard Holland, Vicki and RMEF co-Founder
Bob Munson (left to right)
It was a record-setting weekend to remember for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Eighty-seven members of RMEF's Habitat Council (HC) –the most ever for such a gathering– came together June 19-21, 2014, in Vancouver, Washington, for the annual summer retreat and meeting. Some made the cross country trek from as far away as Connecticut, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In all, HC attendees represented 18 different states.
But this was not any sort of formal, stuffy meeting. When the HC comes together, laughter, smiles, handshakes and hugs abound. In reality, it is a gathering of "family." Members are bound together through friendship, common bonds and shared belief in family, country, God and RMEF's mission to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage.
On board the Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler
A caravan of ten RMEF-marked passenger vans transported the group across the Oregon-Washington border to Cascade Locks, Oregon, for a dinner cruise on the Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler. In addition to the on-board meal, HC members walked the three decks of the paddle-wheeler to take in breathtaking 360 degree views of the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area. They also watched Native Americans continue their centuries old tradition of fishing for salmon from along the many riverside platforms.
The following morning, the convoy headed south to Portland for a tour of Danner, a sponsor-partner and friend of the RMEF. Participants witnessed the hustle and bustle and yet controlled precision of a state-of-the-art facility that cranks out American-made boots for hunters, hikers and others to enjoy. There are approximately 253 steps to make one single boot and the factory churns out about 1,200 boots per day. Then it was off to the nearby "candy" store. That is, a Danner store where racks and racks of boots of all styles, shapes and sizes, plus other Danner hats and apparel, were available for purchase.
The business portion of the weekend took place on Friday afternoon. It included State of the RMEF and mission update reports as well as an overview of the following day's field trip.
"We are the strongest that we've ever been in our 30 years," said Lee Swanson, chairman of the RMEF Board of Directors. "If I were a corporate stockholder I would say 'I want to buy more stock in this company' because the RMEF is that good."
The main focus of the meeting shifted to an HC strategic plan review followed by a brainstorming breakout session.
"You are the investors. You put your assets forward expecting a return," said Nancy Holland, HC co-chair. "Our goal with our strategic plan is to harness the passion you have and push that out and grow the levels of members within the Habitat Council up the donation chain."
"Eighty-eight percent of you in the room have donated in the last 36 months. That says a lot about the passion and drive and quality of everyone here today. Forty percent of you already made gifts in the first five months this year." added Holland. "We have a tremendous trend started. It means what we're doing is working. It means people really like the mission of this organization. They are committed to this organization."
The breakout session allowed individual members to chime in on action items designed to move the HC and its strategic plan forward. That was followed by individual presentations and a group discussion.
"My vision is to elevate the business model of the organization. My other focus is to increase the development area including a larger Habitat Council, more activities and recognition of those who have supported the RMEF," said Swanson. "This organization should grow proportionately with the rest of what we do. My view is it's going to grow."
The highlight of the weekend was Saturday's project field tour designed to give HC members a first-hand look at wildlife habitat management on land conserved by RMEF and PacifiCorp in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens. With input from RMEF, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Forest Service, PacifiCorp manages more than 13,000 acres of forestland.
"We purposely look for land to create high nutrition forage for elk," said Kirk Naylor, PacifiCorp principal scientist of Wildlife and Forestry, and also an RMEF life member. "If you don't have significant forage for elk in the summer, they are not going to survive the winter and produce calves in the spring."
The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, though devastating in many respects, was also extremely beneficial for elk and other wildlife. The blast created an abundant amount of forage. However, as time passed and the forest canopy above shielded sunlight from the forest floor below, that forage disappeared and gave way to ferns and other plant life not palatable by elk.
"Today 80 to 90 percent of forage is not favorable for elk. Minimum nutritional levels are not being met for most elk," added Naylor.
PacifiCorp acquired land below Mt. St. Helens to connect habitat, assist big game migration corridors and thwart the threat of nearby development. Naylor also oversaw thinning projects and the implementation of a series of clearcuts and subsequent planting and seeding specifically designed to improve feed.
Clearcuts (left) provide plentiful forage for wildlife but thick forest canopy provides little feed on forest floor
"We supply grass seed at 20 pounds per acre. Where possible, we mow and fertilize meadows and our transmission right-of-ways to provide permanent forage for elk," said Naylor. "We plant trees but also prune trees to allow light to the understory. There is no light to the understory after eight or nine years in typical forest plantation. Pruning allows light to the understory for 15-16 years and that allows more forage production. Pruning, unfortunately, has also increased the amount of bear damage to trees because they have access to the tree trunk and they like it to get to the cadmium by stripping off the bark. While this impacts our tree production, the program is designed for enhancing all wildlife habitat while also retaining a sustainable forest."
We spotted several elk on the PacifiCorp land
The RMEF-PacifiCorp relationship is a solid and successful one. PacifiCorp is a gold benefactor of the RMEF, thanks to about $560,000 in contributions. The two groups teamed up to conserve nearly 1,000 acres of habitat in 2011 and more than 2,000 acres more in 2012.
"The future of elk in this area is good but not what it's been in the past. What we're doing is extremely important to maintain all our species—not just big game," added Naylor.
Following lunch, a number of vans headed toward much cooler temperatures underground at the popular Ape Caves in the Mt. St. Helens National Monument. Measuring 13,045 feet or more than two miles in length, the caves make up the longest lava tube in the continental United States. It formed about 2,000 years ago when lava poured down the southern flank of Mt. St. Helens in streams. As lava flowed, the outer edges of the lava stream cooled forming a hardened crust which insulated the molten lava beneath allowing it to remain hot in a "lava tube" as it flowed for months during the eruption. The lower cave, as pictured, is approximately .75 miles long and took us about 45 minutes to cover from one end to the other.
At the farewell dinner that evening, friends shared goodbyes and made plans to meet again at upcoming RMEF events scattered across the nation later in the year (see below). They also shared the satisfaction that together they are making a significant difference for elk and elk country.
"This is not a distinct or separate group of the RMEF. This is the RMEF. The difference is we choose to provide charitable giving to the organization in addition to the other roles we fill," said Holland.
And that, for the Habitat Council and other members of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, is what donating to further the organization's mission is all about.
To learn more about RMEF's donation programs, go here.
Below is a list of 2014 Habitat Partner Receptions/Stewardship/Cultivation/Rendezvous Events:
January 6-8 Cultivation Event Duck Hunt in NC
January 11 Habitat Partner Reception in Evansville, IN
January 17-18 Texas State Workshop
January 22-24 Cultivation Event in South Carolina
January 23 Habitat Partner Reception in Thermopolis, WY
January 24 Habitat Partner Reception in Kentucky
January 24-25 Wyoming State Winter Workshop in Thermopolis, WY
February 14 Habitat Partner Reception in Columbus, OH
February 19 Habitat Partner Reception in Rancho Mirage, CA
February 21-22 RMEF Board Meeting in Phoenix, AZ
February 22-24 Habitat Council Meeting & Retreat in Phoenix, AZ
Feb 28 – Mar 2 Habitat Partner in Reception in Rochester, NY
March 1 Habitat Partner Reception and BGB in Pittsburg, PA
March 21 Founders Breakfast in Sioux Falls, SD
March 17-20 4th Annual Southern Strutters Turkey Hunt in FL
March 27 Habitat Partner Reception in Grandville, MI
March 28 Habitat Partner Reception in Denver, CO
April 2 Habitat Partner Reception in San Antonio, TX
April 2-6 Stewardship Event Texas Turkey Hunt in San Antonio, TX
April 10 Habitat Partner Reception in Catskill Mountains, VT
April 11 Habitat Partner Reception in Alamo, CA
April 25 Habitat Partner Reception in Hood River, OR
May 5-9 Stewardship Event Montana Volunteer Turkey Hunt in MT
June 19-22 Habitat Council Meeting & Retreat in Vancouver, WA
June 19-21 Country Jam VIP Event Reception in Grand Junction, CO
June 28 Habitat Partner Reception in Cross Plains, WI
July 10 Project Celebration/Tour of Headwaters of the John Day River in Prairie City, OR
July 11 HP Reception in Atlanta, GA
July 11-13 Oregon Rendezvous in OR
July 24-26 RMEF Founders Tour in Troy & Missoula, MT
August 9-10 Habitat Partner Tour & Reception in Boise, ID
August 15-17 Washington Rendezvous in WA
August 16-17 Cultivation Fishing Trip in VT
August 15 Habitat Partner Reception in Branson, MO
September 6 Habitat Partner Reception in WV
September 6-7 Bugle Days in WI
September 12-14 Habitat Partner Reception in PA
October 9-11 Step Up Event in Sunday River, ME
October 22-26 PBR World Finals in Las Vegas, NV
November 17 Stewardship/Cultivation Event – Whitetail Hunt in IL
December 4-7 Elk Camp in Las Vegas, NV
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 2:46 PM No comments:
Numbers Don't Lie, RMEF Charges On
Numbers and statistics can be fickle. You can twist and manipulate them in numerous ways to tell numerous stories. Just ask a baseball player. He can have a great batting average but a lousy slugging percentage. He can have a great on-base percentage but the team may have a losing winning percentage. A pitcher may have a stellar earned run average and a solid walk to strikeout ratio but still have a winless record.
One glance at the latest Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation project history summary shows one simple fact—numbers don't lie! Dating back to RMEF's humble beginnings on May 14, 1984, through June 30, 2014, here's a numerical look at some of RMEF's cumulative accomplishments:
6,473,344 acres of habitat enhanced or protected
713,176 acres opened or secured for public access
8,795 conservation and hunting heritage outreach projects
203,703 members (as of December 31, 2013)
504 RMEF chapters
10,000+ RMEF volunteers
$918,611,443 = total value of RMEF efforts
What's the bottom line? RMEF continues to charge forward in its quest to accelerate a mission of ensuring the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage. Join us as we work together to make a difference for elk and elk country!
Posted by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation at 11:02 AM No comments:
RMEF Says "No" to Buffer Zone around Yellowstone Park
An Oregon congressman recently called on the Interior Department to create a buffer zone around Yellowstone National Park to reduce wolf hunting in bordering states. RMEF President and CEO David Allen issued the letter below as a response.
Representative Peter DeFazio
2134 Rayburn Office Building
Congressman DeFazio,
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation disagrees with your recent call for creating a buffer zone of additional land surrounding Yellowstone National Park (YNP) to provide increased protection for gray wolves. Your request is unfounded by any science and contradicts what the entire wolf reintroduction and ESA listing represent.
You referenced these wolves as "Yellowstone wolves" as if they are a unique species due some special amnesty rather than be managed by the ruling state wildlife agencies as is the case for all other wildlife. The reality is there is no special class of wolves from YNP or any other national park.
At issue is how wildlife is managed in this country. Our belief is based on more than 100 years of the most successful wildlife management model in the world that our state agencies are to manage wildlife within their respective borders. That includes management of gray wolves along with other predators.
You point out a decline in the population of "Yellowstone wolves" as a reason to establish a buffer zone. There are sound scientific reasons for declines in wolf numbers in Yellowstone Park. One is the fact that their prey base (primarily elk) has declined significantly. Wolves leave Yellowstone Park in search for food, and the elk population has decreased dramatically in the Northern Yellowstone herd from 19,000-plus in 1995 to nearly 4,000 today—an 80 percent reduction! Another reason, as highlighted in a recent study, is wolves kill one another when an area has a population too high in relation to a sustaining prey base and adequate habitat.
Yellowstone Park officials themselves concur that the hunting of wolves just outside the park is not a contributing factor to declining wolf numbers in the park. Both Montana and Wyoming have strict management quotas for wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Montana limited its 2013 combined hunting/trapping sub-quota (unit 316) to four wolves near Gardiner. Wyoming biologists indicate its harvest units and quotas near the park to be strategically small by design to provide the proper agreed upon management. Once again, this is an example of how the states are the appropriate authority to manage their wildlife.
Additionally, you ignore the fact that the gray wolf reintroduction in the Northern Rocky Mountains not only met minimum recovery goals nearly 15 years ago, but since surpassed that benchmark by 500 percent! Those original recovery goals were established and agreed to by all parties including those that continue to oppose management of wolves today. Since then, no party has presented any new science that disputes the original recovery goals established prior to the 1995 reintroduction.
The reintroduction never included a strategy to create a special population of gray wolves designated as "Yellowstone wolves" or for any other specific region of the United States. The reintroduction was classified as "non-essential and experimental" from the beginning.
The continuing drumbeat of individuals and organizations to halt any form of state based management of wolves shows a total disregard for the state based management system, the originally agreed upon recovery goals and the 10th Amendment which delegates such matters to the states.
Thank you for your consideration.
M. David Allen
cc: Interior Secretary Sally Jewell
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR)
Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR)
Rep. Earl Blumenauer D-OR)
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR)
Senator Jon Tester (D-MT)
Senator John Walsh (D-MT)
Rep. Steve Daines (R-MT)
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY)
Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Senator James Risch (R-ID)
Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID)
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID)
Roy Elicker (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife director)
Virgin Moore (Idaho Fish and Game director)
Jeff Hagener (Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks director)
Scott Talbott (Wyoming Game and Fish Department director)
RMEF family:
Happy Independence Day! Many of us will celebrate the birth of our great nation by gazing into a darkened sky to revel in the colorful explosions of firework displays at gatherings from sea to shining sea.
Do me a favor. Take the next three minutes to watch this rendition of America the Beautiful by Daryle Singletary, a good friend of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
View video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZp38GptzOw
Let's honor America and the outdoor lifestyle and freedoms we enjoy by recognizing the sacrifices of the many to get us to where we are today. Let's also protect our way of life for all those who follow us.
On behalf of the RMEF, enjoy this special American holiday. Be safe. God bless the USA!
(Here's the answer to the question that many will ask: Yes, you can obtain your own version of America the Beautiful here.)
RMEF Links
RMEF Website
RMEF on Facebook
RMEF on Twitter
RMEF on YouTube
Founded in 1984 by four hunters, RMEF is a leading conservation organization that protected or enhanced habitat on more than 7.1 million acres, secured public access to more than one million acres, and is a strong voice for hunters in access, wildlife management and conservation policy issues.
RMEF TWITTER FEED
Tweets by @RMEF
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RMEF Says "No" to Buffer Zone around Yellowstone P... | {
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July 5 community calendar
Published 2:52 pm Wednesday, July 5, 2017
— Tai Chi for seniors (60 and older), 10 a.m. at James B. Allen Generations Center, 32 Meadow St. Classes are free. Call 744-3235 for more information.
— Clark County High School Class of 1948 meeting, 11:30 a.m., at JK's at Forest Grove.
— Winchester Kiwanis Club meeting, noon at Taste of China. Clark County Sheriff Berl Perdue is the guest speaker.
— Kentucky Picture Show, 2 p.m. at Clark County Public Library.
FRIDAY, JULY 7
— Write Local meeting, 10 a.m. at Clark County Public Library.
— Winchester Clark County Farmers' Market, 8 a.m. to noon on Depot Street.
— Free yoga, 9 to 10 a.m. on the lawn at Clark County Public Library. Mats and instruction provided by the OM place.
— Fifth annual Freedom from Fractures bone health workshop, 10 a.m., at the James B. Allen Generations Center, 32 Meadow St. For adults older than 45 for education about bone health and fracture prevention. For more information, call Diana Sims at 744-3235. Free.
— Winchester GTE/Sylvania/Osram/UAW retirees meeting at Michaels in Irvine, 11:30 a.m. All Winchester Sylvania retirees and former employees are welcome.
— Clark County Writers Club meeting, 6:30 p.m. at Clark County Public Library.
— Winchester-Clark County Chamber of Commerce breakfast, 8 to 9:30 a.m. at Sekisui S-Lec America, 1200 Rolling Hills Lane.
— Tai Chi for seniors (60 and older), 10 a.m. at James B. Allen Generations Center, 32 Meadow St. Classes are free.
— Winchester Kiwanis Club meeting, noon at Taste of China.
— "Fix a Cat Campaign" meeting, 6:30 p.m. at Clark County Public Library. Learn about the TNR (trap-neuter-return) Program and basic facts about homeless cats. For more information, contact Dianna Reed at homelesscats.13@gmail.com
— Ribbon cutting and official branch re-opening, noon at Kentucky Bank Bypass Road branch.
— Moonlight Movie Nights showing of "SING," 7 p.m. at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, 2020 Rolling Hills Lane.
— NAMI Winchester-Clark County (National Alliance on Mental Illness) support/educational meeting, 7 p.m., McCready Hall, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 2410 Lexington Road. Anyone (including family members and friends) affected by mental illness is invited to attend meetings. For more information, call 749-3702.
— Moonlight Movie Nights showing of "Beauty & The Beast" 7 p.m. at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, 2020 Rolling Hills Lane.
Stay hydrated in the summer heat
By Jennifer Howard In talking with members of our local AARP chapter last week, I was quickly reminded that while... read more | {
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Robert de Ros
Home » Schools » Biographies » The 25 Barons of Magna Carta » Robert de Ros
Robert de Ros (c. 1182-1226/7), kinsman through marriage of Eustace de Vesci, and the son of Everard de Ros and Roese, née Trussebut, was a Yorkshire lord, the owner of extensive estates centring on Helmsley in the North Riding of Yorkshire and Wark-on-Tweed in Northumberland. He was married, at an unknown date, to Isabella, an illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scotland, and widow of Robert III de Brus.
In the early 1200s Robert is found co-operating actively with King John, witnessing a number of his charters, chiefly at locations in northern England, and in 1203 assisting in the king's defence of Normandy, where by descent from his mother he held the hereditary office of bailiff and constable of Bonneville-sur-Touques in the lower part of the duchy. In 1205, however, a year of rising political tension, there are signs that his relations with the king were worsening, and John ordered the seizure of his lands and, apparently shortly afterwards, had his son taken hostage. Robert, a little later, recovered his lands, but an indication that he might have been interested in leaving England is given by his acquisition of a licence to pledge his lands for crusading. It is not known, however, if he ever actually did embark for the East.
In 1212 Robert seems to have entered a monastery, and on 15 May that year John handed over custody of his lands to one Philip de Ulcot. His monastic profession, however, cannot have lasted for long, for on 30 January 1213 John appointed him sheriff of Cumberland, and later in the same year he was one of the witnesses to John's surrender of his kingdom to the pope. In 1215, as relations between the king and the baronial opposition worsened, John seems to have tried to keep Robert on his side, ordering one of his counsellors to try to secure the election of Robert's aunt as abbess of Barking. By April, however, Robert was firmly on the baronial side, attending the baronial muster at Stamford and, after June, being nominated to the committee of twenty-five.
When war between the king and his opponents broke out towards the end of the year, Robert was active on the baronial side, forfeiting his lands as a result and suffering the capture of his son at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. After Louis returned to France, Robert submitted to the new government and recovered most, although not all, of his lands. He witnessed the third and definitive reissue of Magna Carta on 11 February 1225. Sometime before 1226 he retired to a monastery and he died either in that year or early in 1227. At some stage he was received into the ranks of the Templars and on his death he was buried in the Temple Church in London, where a few years earlier William Marshal, the one-time Regent had been buried. An effigy in that church sometimes associated with him dates from at least a generation later.
Robert is an enigmatic individual who had close ties with Eustace de Vesci but did not openly join the rebellion until just before Runnymede. He probably felt a conflict between his sense of loyalty to his fellow Northerners and his obligation of obedience to the king.
Lord Woolf
790 years ago, John,the King of England was having a little local difficulty with his barons. His attempts to defend his extensive dominions across the Channel, including Normandy and a considerable portion of western France, had been a disaster... | {
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I'm Debbie, most people call me Little Debbie for my energy and smile. I wear a lot of hats, all based on my many passions. My hats include mother, wife, author, book seller, community volunteer, and sometimes actress. I love helping others, and do a lot of community volunteering. Currently my project is helping to build a Children's Museum in Sioux City, my hometown. We are getting ready to break ground! I'm also the Network Chair for SCBWI-IA representing the Sioux City area. So if you are interested in joining us, please get in touch.
I've loved to write ever since I can remember! Telling stories was one of my favorite forms of entertainment. Reading was the other. Tetris was a close third.
Growing up, I always had my nose in a book. When I didn't have a book, I was making up stories. Who needs TV and computers when you can escape into your imagination?
I started writing as soon as I could hold a pencil. As a child, I had notebooks full of stories and plays. I even made my friends come home with me after school to act in my plays. None of them ever made it to Broadway.
I studied Mass Communications in college so I could use my writing in a career. I've worked in TV, radio, newspaper, online and even advertising. But as soon as I had children, I wanted to be home. It didn't take long for me to get "antsy." I started a local Shakespeare Company when my son was 6 months old. Granted, he did nap alot, which gave me extra free time. I also continued to do some freelance writing.
After a few years, I began writing picture books for my children. I joined SCBWI to learn about the market and realized it would take me from my family, so I put it on hold. Now that my children are older, I have jumped back on the path of following my dream: to share my stories with anyone who wants to listen.
My book "It's Almost Time" was published in 2011 by Kane Miller.
Let me know if I can answer any questions! And thank you for visiting my blog. | {
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Q: How to send many request using node.js How to send many requests using node.js?
I wrote this script, but.. console return has error:
ERROR: connect ECONNREFUSED
My code
const request = require('request');
const headers = {
"Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8",
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br",
"Accept-Language": "pl-PL,pl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4",
"Cache-Control": "max-age=0",
"Connection": "keep-alive",
"Cookie": "intro=1; PHPSESSID=cv2tniglt2v0fouov6jrjmblo6; chash=3373872b06; hs3=337; user_id=8464919; mchar_id=1107988; _gat=1; _ga=GA1.2.1270081288.1509529196; _gid=GA1.2.637535937.1509529196",
"Host": "www.margonem.pl",
"Referer": "https://www.margonem.pl/?task=profile&id=3727144",
"Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": 1,
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36 OPR/48.0.2685.52"
};
const options = {
url: "https://www.margonem.pl/?task=profile&id=3727144",
method: 'GET',
headers: headers
};
setInterval(() => {
request.get(options, function (error, response, body) {
console.log(error);
});
});
Who help me, and replace this script to send many request?
I want tamp more views u know what i mean
A: What you currently do is a Denial-Of-Service (DOS) Attack. If you would do that from multiple clients it would even be a DDOS Attack.
Give the server time to process your responses e.g. by doing only one connection at a time by e.g. firing your next request in the success or error callback of the call.
| {
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\section{Introduction}
The possibility that black holes tunnel into long-living remnants at end of their evaporation \cite{J.H.MacGibbon1987,Giddings1992a,haggard_black_2015, haggard_quantum-gravity_2015,bianchi_white_2018,Rovelli2018f} is receiving increasing attention \cite{Adler2001,Nozari2008,Inomata2021,DiGennaro2021,Green2021,EslamPanah2020,chen_black_2003,Chen2004}. Here we study the emission that we expect from such remnants.
When the horizon of a black hole approaches the end of the evaporation, it enters a Planckian regime, because the surrounding curvature reaches the Planck scale. A number of recent results from non-perturbative quantum gravity as well as from classical general relativity have revived the old idea \cite{J.H.MacGibbon1987,Giddings1992a} that the end of the evaporation could leave long living Planck scale remnants. These results are: \mbox{~{\bf\textit{(i)}} \emph{Classical}} general relativity provides a surprisingly natural model for such remnants: white holes with a small horizon and very large interior \cite{haggard_black_2015}. These are exact solutions of Einstein's equations.
\mbox{
{\bf\textit{(ii)}} \emph{Classical}} general relativity also allows the existence of spacetimes where such white holes are in the future of the parent black hole, after a quantum tunnelling transition localised in space and time \cite{haggard_black_2015} (the black to white tunnelling transition is itself an old idea \cite{narlikar_high_1974, hajicek_singularity_2001, ambrus_quantum_2005, olmedo_black_2017}).
\mbox{
{\bf\textit{ (iii)}}
Non } perturbative calculations in Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) show that the tunnelling transition is permitted, and increasingly probable towards the end of the evaporation \cite{christodoulou_planck-star_2016, christodoulou_characteristic_2018,DAmbrosio2021,soltani2021}. ~{\bf\textit{(iv)}} Planck scale white holes can be stabilised against instability by quantum gravity \cite{rovelli_small_2018}. ~{\bf\textit{ (v) }} A number of objections that made the idea unconvincing a few decades ago \cite{banks_are_1992, giddings_dynamics_1992, banks_black_1993, giddings_constraints_1994, banks_lectures_1995} have now been shown not to apply to this scenario \cite{bianchi_white_2018} (on this, more below).
Thanks to these results, long living remnant are becoming more plausible outcomes for the end of the evaporation than the idea that black holes could magically pop out of existence: a scenario not supported by any quantum gravity theory, and hard to harmonize with the persistence of the large volume inside evaporated black holes \cite{Christodoulou2015, de_lorenzo_improved_2016}.
Here we point out that conservation of information implies that, before dissipating, long-living remnants must radiate in the low frequency spectrum. We study the characteristics of the radiation and of the diffused background produced by a population of remnants, and we briefly discuss the quantum field theoretical picture of the remnant-radiation coupling.
A population of small long-living black hole remnants produced by primordial black holes \cite{Carr1974a} either born in the early universe or before a big-bounce, is a possible component of dark matter \cite{Rovelli2018f}, a possibility raising increasing interest \cite{chen_black_2003,Chen2004,Green2021,Inomata2021,DiGennaro2021,EslamPanah2020}. As cold dark matter candidates, Planck size white holes stabilized by quantum gravity are nearly perfect: they are predicted by current fundamental theory without any additional physical hypothesis, they interact almost only gravitationally, and they behave like a rarefied dust of micro-gram size grains. But such a dark matter component is particularly hard to detect. Perhaps the background low frequency emission we point out here could help in this regard. In this paper, however, we only study the physics of the emission by a population of these objects, and do not address any question concerning cosmology: we defer to the future the study of their possible role in the evolution of the universe (for post big bang black holes see \cite{derome_improved_2003} for a preliminary investigation).
The reason remnants must emit is conservation of information, or unitarity with respect to asymptotic time evolution.
If a black hole ends up tunneling into a white hole, its horizon is not an event horizon. The interior of the hole is causally connected with future null infinity, the von Neumann entanglement entropy across it can remain high when the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy decreases with the evaporation. There is no contradiction, because causality prevents the hole to be an ergodic system, hence von Neumann entanglement entropy across it can be higher than the thermodynamic entropy \cite{Rovelli2017e,Rovelli2019a}. Information has no reason to start exit at Page time and remains entirely in the (vast) hole's interior when the horizon tunnels from black to white.
But eventually information has to come out, before the final dissipation of the white hole, and the smallness of the white hole horizon's area and energy implies that this can only happen slowly \cite{preskill_black_1992}. Bringing out a large amount of information involving only little energy is what gives rise to the low energy radiation that we model here.
\section{The model}
The hypothesis of the model we study are the following. A black hole of initial mass $m$ evaporates via Hawking evaporation, leaving a remnant of Planckian mass which contains an amount of information sufficient to purify its Hawking radiation, namely of order
\begin{equation}
S\sim \frac{A}4= 4\pi m^2
\label{S}
\end{equation}
in natural units $\hbar=G=c=k=1$. Here $A$ is the area of the horizon {\em at the formation}. This information can be emitted in the form of radiation. Since the radiation is emitted radially, we model it as a uniform one-dimensional gas of photons in thermal equilibrium, emitted by the surface of the remnant during the lifetime $\tau$, following \cite{Marolf2017}. Assuming for simplicity a steady emission, at the end of the remnant lifetime the radiation covers a length $L=\tau$.
The energy $E$ available for this gas is only that of the mass of the remnant, which is of the order of the Planck mass, namely unit in natural units.
\begin{equation}
E\sim 1,
\end{equation}
while its total entropy, needed to purify the Hawking radiation is \eqref{S}, uniformly distributed over a length $L$.
A standard derivation, which for completeness we report in the appendix, shows that the entropy $S$ and energy $E$ of a one dimensional photon gas of temperature $T$ in a space of length $L$ are \cite{schwabl_statistical_2006,skobelev_entropy_2013}
\begin{equation}
S=\frac{2\pi}{3}LT, \ \ \ \ E=\frac16 L T^2.
\end{equation}
Rearranging these two relations we find
\begin{equation}
L= \frac{3 \text{S}^2}{8 \pi ^2 \text{E}}=6m^4,\ \ \ \ T= \frac{4 \pi
\text{E}}{\text{S}}=\frac1{m^2}
\end{equation}
The life-time of a white hole would be equal to time required for the photons to travel a distant $L$. We therefore have
\begin{equation}
\tau_W\sim 6 m^4
\label{tauB}
\end{equation}
which matches previous estimates of the time needed to release the information in the remnant
\cite{preskill_black_1992,Marolf2017,rovelli_small_2018,bianchi_white_2018}.
The estimate of the temperature shows that the temperature of the white hole remnant to be much lower than that of the initial Hawking temperature of the parent black hole, which is $\sim 1/m$.
We can compute the total number of photons emitted from the white hole remnant. To this end we assume the system under study resembles a black body radiation where the frequency of the emitted photons follows a Planckian distribution. The peak frequency of a Planckian distribution of photons is at
\begin{equation}
\nu= \alpha \;T = \frac{\alpha}{m^2}
\label{nu}
\end{equation}
where $\alpha\sim 2.82$. We have reported the steps of deriving $\alpha$ in the appendix for completeness. In natural units the relation between the energy $\epsilon$ of a single photon and its frequency $\nu$ is of course $\epsilon =\nu$, hence we can derive the total number of photons emitted by the remnant of a black hole of initial mass $m$ to be
\begin{equation}
N_{\gamma}=\frac{E}{\epsilon} = \frac{m^2}{\alpha}.
\label{number of photons emitted}
\end{equation}
The energy emitted by a single remnant and the number of photons emitted are not uniformly distributed in space, but those emitted by a uniform gas of remnant of the same mass and age are. Therefore we can estimate the average energy density and photon number by dividing the total values by the volume of the region covered by the emission, which is $V\sim L^3$. We obtain the average energy density per unit remnant
\begin{equation}
\rho_o=\frac{E}{\frac43\pi L^3}=\frac{1}{288\pi } m^{-12}
\end{equation}
and the average photon density per remnant
\begin{equation}
n_\gamma=\frac{N_\gamma}{\frac43\pi L^3}=\frac{1}{ 288\pi c}m^{-10},
\end{equation}
at the end of the process. Let's consider a uniform distribution of remnants, and let $\Omega$ be their number density. The total energy emitted at the end of the process must be equal to their total initial mass. Since they have unit mass (in natural units), this is equal to their total number. Hence, the energy density of the radiation $\rho_{tot}$ at the end of the process is equal to the initial number density of remnants.
\begin{equation}
\rho_{tot}=\Omega
\end{equation}
and the total photons density is
\begin{equation}
n=\Omega n_\gamma=\frac{\Omega}{ 288\pi \alpha} m^{-10},
\end{equation}
\subsection{\label{sec:level2-1} Linear emission}
Consider a population of black holes formed at a time $t=0$, with mass $m$ and uniformly distributed in space. Assume that they all evaporate around time $\tau_B\sim m^3$ as predicted by Hawking radiation theory, and survive as white hole remnants for a time $\tau_W$ as in \eqref{tauB}. Between times $\tau_B$ and $\tau_B+\tau_W$, they emit a steady radiation as described above. Assuming $m\gg1$, we approximate $\tau_B+\tau_W\sim \tau_W$. What is the radiation observed by an observer at time $t$? For $t<\tau_B$ there is none. For $\tau_B<t<\tau_B+\tau_W$ the observer will receive only the radiation emitted by the remnants within a distance $r<(t-\tau_B)$ because radiation emitted by more distant remnants has not had the time to reach the observer. Radiation emitted at a distance $r$ is diluted by distance by a factor $1/r^2$ but the number of emitters at this distance is proportional to $r^2$, hence the radiation received is proportional to $r<(t-\tau_B)$. For the same reason, if $t>\tau_B+\tau_W$ the radiation received remains constant in time. That is, the radiation density changes in time as
\begin{equation}
\rho(t)\left\{\begin{array}{lll}
= 0& {\rm for} & t<m^3, \\
= \big(\frac{t-\tau_B}{\tau_W-\tau_B}\big) \Omega & {\rm for} & m^3<t<6m^4, \\
=\Omega & {\rm for} & t>6m^4.
\end{array}\right.
\label{array linear emission}
\end{equation}
In other words, the process is a steady (linear in time) transformation of dust into radiation, on a $m^4$ timescale.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[width=0.8\columnwidth]{Fig1}
\caption{Background white hole radiation as a function of time. The solid black line represents a classical linear emission while the dashed red line represents a quantum emission.}
\end{figure}
\subsection{\label{sec:level2-2} Quantum description of the emission}
Since the energy in a white hole is related to the area of its horizon, a continuous energy emission as the one described above implies a continuously decreases of the white hole horizon area, below the Planck area. According to LQG, however, any physical area is quantized, with the minimum non-zero eigenvalue (the "area gap") of the order of the Planck area $A_{Pl}$ \cite{Rovelli1993c,Rovelli1994a}. We are thus led to consider a more refined description of the process, in which a remnant with near-Planckian mass and area can make a single quantum leap into radiation, in analogy with conventional nuclear radioactivity, where a steady emission of a macroscopic bulk of material is realised by individual quantized emissions governed by a probability distribution \cite{martin_nuclear_2019}.
More precisely, an area gap of the order of the Planck area implies that the energy of the lowest non-vanishing energy states of the remnants is Planckian. Therefore in first order perturbation theory the only allowed transition with the emission of radiation (which necessarilly has energy) is emission of the entire Planck energy of the remnant.
Let us see what could the correspond vertex describing the transition be, in the language of quantum field theory. The essential point is that (black and) white holes have many internal degrees of freedom that reflect their internal structure. A white hole parented by an old black hole evaporated from a initial mass $m$ has an interior capable of holding information compatible with \eqref{S} even if the area of its horizon is small. A vertex coupling such remnant to a single or a few photons is therefore forbidden by conservation of information (unitarity), because a few photons do not have enough degrees of freedom to match the large number of quantum numbers describing the white hole interior. Few photons cannot carry the entire information that can be stored in the remnant. Hence the only possible transition is a transition $remnant \to \gamma_1...\gamma_n $ to {\em a large number} of low energy photons: \\[1em]
\centerline{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\includegraphics[width=0.6\columnwidth]{vertex1}}
\\[1em]
This conclusion is interesting in view of an old objection to the remnant scenario, because of which this scenario was abandoned in the Nineties. The objection is that the large number of remnant internal states would make them too easy to produce in particle physics experiments. Here we see clearly why that conclusion was to quick. The effective vertex responsible for a remnant production would be
\\[1em]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.6\columnwidth]{vertex2.jpeg}}
\\[1em]
\noindent in order to create a long living Planck size remnant. The number of photons emitted by a single remnant is given in \eqref{number of photons emitted}. If the number of photons is small, these can be high energy, but the remnant produced correspond to a remnant whose parent is a black hole of Planckian size, which is short lived. The process would not be distinguishable by the standard possibility of collapse predicted by conventional quantum gravity. To produce an actual long living remnant, on the other hand, we need $m$ to be large, and hence we would need to focus {\em a large number of low energy photons}.
For instance to produce a remnant similar to the one left over from a primordial black hole formed at reheating (see below) the number of low energy photons to focus would be staggering:
\begin{equation}
5*10^{38}<N_{\gamma}<5*10^{48}.
\end{equation}
Creating such remnant in the lab is clearly unlikely due to the huge number of photons required for the process to happen. Therefore not being able to create remnants by the present experimental settings is not a reason to reject the theory of black holes turning into Planck size white hole remnants at the end of their life time cycle.\\
If the probability of transition is constant in time, the total energy density $\rho_{rem}$ of a population of remnants will decay exponentially, starting at $t=\tau_B$ as
\begin{equation}
\rho_{rem}(t)=\Omega\ e^{-\lambda(t-\tau_{B})}.
\label{energy density of the quantum emission}
\end{equation}
If the lifetime of the white hole is of order $\tau_{W}$, we expect the decay constant to be
\begin{equation}
\lambda\sim(\tau_{W}-\tau_{B})^{-1},
\label{decay constant}
\end{equation}
The changes in the radiation density as a function of time is then
\begin{equation}
\rho(t)\left\{\begin{array}{lll}
= 0& {\rm for} & t<m^3, \\
= \bigg(1-e^{-\frac{t-\tau_{B}}{\tau_{W}-\tau_{B}}}\bigg)\Omega & {\rm for} & t>m^3.
\end{array}\right.
\label{array quantum emission}
\end{equation}
In Fig. {1} we have plotted the energy density change of the linear emission \eqref{array linear emission} as a black solid line and the quantum emission \eqref{array quantum emission} as a dashed red line. The two converge in the two limits $\tau_{B}<t\ll\tau_{W}$ and $t\gg\tau_{W}$.
The the energy density $\rho_{rad}$ of the radiation emitted by a population of remnants with current energy density $\rho_{rem}$ generated by parents black holes with mass $m$ formed at a time $t$ in the past is then easily obtained, using also \eqref{array quantum emission}, as
\begin{equation}
\rho_{rad}=\sinh\!\left(\frac{1-tm^{-3}}{1-6m}\right) \rho_{rem}
\label{rr}
\end{equation}
Using \eqref{nu} we can write the mass in terms of the frequency of the radiation, and give the energy density in radiation as
\begin{equation}
\rho_{rad}=\sinh\!\left(\frac{1- t\, (\nu/\alpha)^{3/2}}{1-6\sqrt{\alpha/\nu}}\right) \rho_{rem}.
\end{equation}\\
\section{Dimensionfull estimates for primordial holes}
In the cosmological standard model, primordial black holes may have formed at reheating. To get a sense of the characteristic of the diffuse radiation remnants may emit, we estimate its parameter in this simplest case. We use here a rough model, that neglects the effect of expansion.
For these black holes, we can approximate $t$ in the above formulas with the Hubble time $t=t_H$. Notice that this allows us to deduce the density of an otherwise dark population of remnants just from the observation of the emitted radiation.
(In other cosmological scenarios,
in particular in bouncing models
\cite{ashtekar_loop_2015,brandenberger_bouncing_2017,ijjas_bouncing_2018},
$t$ can be larger.)
Restoring physical units, and denoting the Plank mass, energy, frequency and time as $m_{Pl}$, $E_{Pl}$, $\nu_{Pl}$, $t_{Pl}$ we have that a population of primordial black holes of mass $m$ and number density per unit co-moving volume $\Omega$ gives rise to remnants producing a radiation with density
\begin{equation}
\rho=\Omega E_{Pl}\bigg(1-e^{\frac{-t_H/t_{Pl}\,(m/m_{Pl})^{-3}}{1-6m/m_{Pl}}}\bigg)
\end{equation}
and frequency given by \eqref{nu}, namely
\begin{equation}
\nu=\alpha \left(\frac{m}{m_{Pl}}\right)^{\!\!-2}\nu_{Pl}.
\end{equation}
If we are in the era where this radiation forms, we must have $\tau_B<t_H<\tau_W$. This gives
\begin{equation}
(m/m_{Pl})^3<t_H/T_{Pl}<6(m/m_{Pl})^4.
\end{equation}
Since $\tau_H\sim 10^{61}t_{Pl}$ this gives the approximate mass range $10^{15}m_{Pl}<m<10^{20}m_{Pl}$.
The model is thus entirely determined by a single parameter or order of unity, that can be taken to be
\begin{equation}
x=\log_{10}(m/m_{Pl})\in[15,20].
\end{equation}
And the relevant quantities are
\begin{eqnarray}
m &=& 10^{x-5}gr, \\
\nu &=& 10^{-2x+32}Hz\\
\rho_{rad} &=&\sinh\bigg(\frac{10^{61}-10^{3x}}{10^{4x}-10^{3x}}\bigg) \rho_{rem}
\end{eqnarray}
This is a mass range
\begin{equation}
10^{10}gr<m<10^{15}gr,
\end{equation}
and a frequency range
\begin{equation}
10^{14}Hz>\nu>10^{4}Hz.
\end{equation}
The ratio of the radiation density to the total density or remnants and radiation, as a function of $x$, is shown in Figure 2.
Notice that remnants originating from parent black holes in the mass range of $10^{10} gr<m<2*10^{10} gr$ have emitted most of their photons while remnants originating from more massive black holes, $4*10^{10}<m<10^{15}$ have emitted close to zero. This is because of the long lifetime of white hole remnants which is in the order of $\tau_{W}=6m^4$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[width=.7\columnwidth]{Fig2}
\caption{Ratio of radiation to total mass as function of the single parameter of the model $x$.}
\end{figure}
In conclusion, a diffused radiation at frequency $\nu$ and density $\rho_{rad}$ can witness a cold dark component formed by white hole remnants, descending from primordial black holes of mass
\begin{equation}
m=10^x m_{Pl}
\end{equation}
and with density
\begin{equation}
\rho_{rem}=\sinh^{-1}\!\!\left(\frac{1- 10^{61}*10^{-3x}}{1-6*10^{-x}}
\right) \rho_{rad}
\end{equation}
where $x$ can be measured directly from the frequency of the diffused radiation:
\begin{equation}
x=-\frac12\ \log_{10}\frac{\nu}{\alpha \nu_Pl}
\end{equation}
Strong constraints on the fraction of dark matter formed after the big bang have been studied in \cite{barrau_closer_2021}.
In other cosmological scenarios such as big bounce or matter bounce scenarios white hole remnants might account for an important portion of dark matter. In this scenario, the energy density of dark matter can be written as a function of two parameters: the time $t$ since the black hole formation and their mass $m$ (which can still be deduced from the frequency), using equation \eqref{rr}.\\
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 8,693 |
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
namespace _03Problem
{
class Problem
{
static void Main()
{
int[] readRowCol = Console.ReadLine().Split(' ').Select(int.Parse).ToArray();
int rows = readRowCol[0];
int cols = readRowCol[1];
var matrix = new long[rows, cols];
Array.Clear(matrix,0,matrix.Length);
for (int row = matrix.GetLength(0); row <= 0; row--)
{
for (int col = matrix.GetLength(1); col <= 0; col--)
{
matrix[row, col] += 3;
}
}
//for (int row = 0; row < matrix.GetLength(0); row++)
//{
// for (int col = 0; col < matrix.GetLength(1); col++) //print matrix
// {
// Console.Write("{0} ", matrix[row, col]);
// }
//
// Console.WriteLine();
//}
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,879 |
More than a video about a school, what we see here is the daily routine of people who are confident that education underpins the changes the world truly needs. It was produced to celebrate Escola Waldorf Acalanto's ten-year anniversary, a school located in Holambra, 130km from São Paulo. The video shows how local community, two parents and teachers united to create an institution that bestows on us not only its history, but also a great lesson. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,711 |
Produced by Henry Flower, Adrian Mastronardi, Ramon Pajares
Box and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
Libraries.)
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
* Italics are denoted by underscores as in _italics_.
* Small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS.
* Letter spaced Greek text is enclosed in tildes as in ~καὶ τὰ
λοιπά~.
* Footnotes have been renumbered and placed at the end of the
paragraph that includes their anchor.
* Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected, after
comparison with a later edition of this work. Greek text has
also been corrected after checking with this later edition and
with Perseus, when the reference was found.
* Original spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been kept,
but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant
usage was found.
* Nevertheless, inconsistent rendition of proper nouns (Acrisios
and Akrisios, Mycênæ and Mykênæ, Athos and Athôs, Dædalus and
Dædalos) have been kept, noting that this edition does not follow
completely the rules for transcription of Greek names announced
in the Preface, pp. xv-xvi.
* In most cross-references, target pages do not correspond with
pages in this edition.
[Illustration: GEORGE GROTE.]
HISTORY OF GREECE.
I. Legendary Greece.
II. Grecian History to the Reign of
Peisistratus at Athens.
BY
GEORGE GROTE, ESQ.
VOL. I.
REPRINTED FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
329 AND 331 PEARL STREET.
1880.
PART I.—LEGENDARY GREECE
Ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
Ἡμίθεοι προτἐρῃ γενέῃ.—HESIOD
PART II.—HISTORICAL GREECE.
... Πόλιες μερόπων ἀνθρώπων.—HOMER
PREFACE.
The first idea of this History was conceived many years ago, at a time
when ancient Hellas was known to the English public chiefly through
the pages of Mitford; and my purpose in writing it was to rectify
the erroneous statements as to matter of fact which that History
contained, as well as to present the general phenomena of the Grecian
world under what I thought a juster and more comprehensive point of
view. My leisure, however, was not at that time equal to the execution
of any large literary undertaking; nor is it until within the last
three or four years that I have been able to devote to the work that
continuous and exclusive labor, without which, though much may be done
to illustrate detached points, no entire or complicated subject can
ever be set forth in a manner worthy to meet the public eye.
Meanwhile the state of the English literary world, in reference to
ancient Hellas, has been materially changed in more ways than one. If
my early friend Dr. Thirlwall's History of Greece had appeared a few
years sooner, I should probably never have conceived the design of the
present work at all; I should certainly not have been prompted to the
task by any deficiencies, such as those which I felt and regretted in
Mitford. The comparison of the two authors affords, indeed, a striking
proof of the progress of sound and enlarged views respecting the
ancient world during the present generation. Having studied of course
the same evidences as Dr. Thirwall, I am better enabled than others
to bear testimony to the learning, the sagacity, and the candor which
pervade his excellent work: and it is the more incumbent on me to give
expression to this sentiment, since the particular points on which I
shall have occasion to advert to it will, unavoidably, be points of
dissent oftener than of coincidence.
The liberal spirit of criticism, in which Dr. Thirwall stands so much
distinguished from Mitford, is his own: there are other features of
superiority which belong to him conjointly with his age. For during
the generation since Mitford's work, philological studies have been
prosecuted in Germany with remarkable success: the stock of facts and
documents, comparatively scanty, handed down from the ancient world,
has been combined and illustrated in a thousand different ways: and
if our witnesses cannot be multiplied, we at least have numerous
interpreters to catch, repeat, amplify, and explain their broken
and half-inaudible depositions. Some of the best writers in this
department—Boeckh, Niebuhr, O. Müller—have been translated into our
language; so that the English public has been enabled to form some
idea of the new lights thrown upon many subjects of antiquity by the
inestimable aid of German erudition. The poets, historians, orators,
and philosophers of Greece, have thus been all rendered both more
intelligible and more instructive than they were to a student in the
last century; and the general picture of the Grecian world may now be
conceived with a degree of fidelity, which, considering our imperfect
materials, it is curious to contemplate.
It is that general picture which an historian of Greece is required
first to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his
readers;—a picture not merely such as to delight the imagination by
brilliancy of coloring and depth of sentiment, but also suggestive
and improving to the reason. Not omitting the points of resemblance
as well as of contrast with the better-known forms of modern society,
he will especially study to exhibit the spontaneous movement of
Grecian intellect, sometimes aided but never borrowed from without,
and lighting up a small portion of a world otherwise clouded and
stationary. He will develop the action of that social system, which,
while insuring to the mass of freemen a degree of protection elsewhere
unknown, acted as a stimulus to the creative impulses of genius, and
left the superior minds sufficiently unshackled to soar above religious
and political routine, to overshoot their own age, and to become the
teachers of posterity.
To set forth the history of a people by whom the first spark was set to
the dormant intellectual capacities of our nature,—Hellenic phenomena,
as illustrative of the Hellenic mind and character,—is the task
which I propose to myself in the present work; not without a painful
consciousness how much the deed falls short of the will, and a yet
more painful conviction, that full success is rendered impossible by
an obstacle which no human ability can now remedy,—the insufficiency
of original evidence. For, in spite of the valuable expositions of
so many able commentators, our stock of information respecting the
ancient world still remains lamentably inadequate to the demands of an
enlightened curiosity. We possess only what has drifted ashore from the
wreck of a stranded vessel; and though this includes some of the most
precious articles amongst its once abundant cargo, yet if any man will
cast his eyes over the citations in Diogenes Laërtius, Athenæus, or
Plutarch, or the list of names in Vossius de Historicis Græcis, he will
see with grief and surprise how much larger is the proportion which,
through the enslavement of the Greeks themselves, the decline of the
Roman Empire, the change of religion, and the irruption of barbarian
conquerors, has been irrecoverably submerged. We are thus reduced to
judge of he whole Hellenic world, eminently multiform as it was, from
a few compositions; excellent, indeed, in themselves, but bearing too
exclusively the stamp of Athens. Of Thucydides and Aristotle, indeed,
both as inquirers into matter of fact, and as free from narrow local
feeling, it is impossible to speak too highly; but, unfortunately,
that work of the latter which would have given us the most copious
information regarding Grecian political life—his collection and
comparison of one hundred and fifty distinct town constitutions—has
not been preserved: and the brevity of Thucydides often gives us but
a single word where a sentence would not have been too much, and
sentences which we should be glad to see expanded into paragraphs.
Such insufficiency of original and trustworthy materials, as
compared with those resources which are thought hardly sufficient
for the historian of any modern kingdom, is neither to be concealed
nor extenuated, however much we may lament it. I advert to the
point here on more grounds than one. For it not only limits the
amount of information which an historian of Greece can give to his
readers,—compelling him to leave much of his picture an absolute
blank,—but it also greatly spoils the execution of the remainder. The
question of credibility is perpetually obtruding itself, and requiring
a decision, which, whether favorable or unfavorable, always introduces
more or less of controversy; and gives to those outlines, which the
interest of the picture requires to be straight and vigorous, a faint
and faltering character. Expressions of qualified and hesitating
affirmation are repeated until the reader is sickened; while the writer
himself, to whom this restraint is more painful still, is frequently
tempted to break loose from the unseen spell by which a conscientious
criticism binds him down,—to screw up the possible and probable
into certainty, to suppress counterbalancing considerations, and to
substitute a pleasing romance in place of half-known and perplexing
realities. Desiring, in the present work, to set forth all which can be
ascertained, together with such conjectures and inferences as can be
reasonably deduced from it, but nothing more,—I notice, at the outset,
that faulty state of the original evidence which renders discussions of
credibility, and hesitation in the language of the judge, unavoidable.
Such discussions, though the reader may be assured that they will
become less frequent as we advance into times better known, are
tiresome enough, even with the comparatively late period which I adopt
as the historical beginning; much more intolerable would they have
proved, had I thought it my duty to start from the primitive terminus
of Deukaliôn or Inachus, or from the unburied Pelasgi and Leleges,
and to subject the heroic ages to a similar scrutiny. I really know
nothing so disheartening or unrequited as the elaborate balancing of
what is called evidence,—the comparison of infinitesimal probabilities
and conjectures all uncertified,—in regard to these shadowy times and
persons.
The law respecting sufficiency of evidence ought to be the same for
ancient times as for modern; and the reader will find in this History
an application, to the former, of criteria analogous to those which
have been long recognized in the latter. Approaching, though with a
certain measure of indulgence, to this standard, I begin the real
history of Greece with the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B. C. To
such as are accustomed to the habits once universal, and still not
uncommon, in investigating the ancient world, I may appear to be
striking off one thousand years from the scroll of history; but to
those whose canon of evidence is derived from Mr. Hallam, M. Sismondi,
or any other eminent historian of modern events, I am well assured that
I shall appear lax and credulous rather than exigent or sceptical. For
the truth is, that historical records, properly so called, do not begin
until long after this date: nor will any man, who candidly considers
the extreme paucity of attested facts for two centuries after 776 B.
C., be astonished to learn that the state of Greece in 900, 1000, 1100,
1200, 1300, 1400 B. C., etc.,—or any earlier century which it may
please chronologists to include in their computed genealogies,—cannot
be described to him upon anything like decent evidence. I shall hope,
when I come to the lives of Socrates and Plato, to illustrate one of
the most valuable of their principles,—that conscious and confessed
ignorance is a better state of mind, than the fancy, without the
reality, of knowledge. Meanwhile, I begin by making that confession,
in reference to the real world of Greece anterior to the Olympiads;
meaning the disclaimer to apply to anything like a general history,—not
to exclude rigorously every individual event.
The times which I thus set apart from the region of history are
discernible only through a different atmosphere,—that of epic poetry
and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my
judgment, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by
themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks,
and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how
much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If
the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask
me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in
the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed
to him on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art: "The curtain is
the picture." What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited
history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could
conceive or relish of their past time: the curtain conceals nothing
behind, and cannot, by any ingenuity, be withdrawn. I undertake only to
show it as it stands,—not to efface, still less to repaint it.
Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public are
destined to elucidate this age of historical faith, as distinguished
from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the
human mind,—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of
nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit
in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety
of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one
story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew and
partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the
room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations.
The legendary age of the Greeks receives its principal charm and
dignity from the Homeric poems: to these, therefore, and to the other
poems included in the ancient epic, an entire chapter is devoted,
the length of which must be justified by the names of the Iliad and
Odyssey. I have thought it my duty to take some notice of the Wolfian
controversy as it now stands in Germany, and have even hazarded some
speculations respecting the structure of the Iliad. The society and
manners of the heroic age, considered as known in a general way from
Homer's descriptions and allusions, are also described and criticized.
I next pass to the historical age, beginning at 776 B. C.; prefixing
some remarks upon the geographical features of Greece. I try to make
out, amidst obscure and scanty indications, what the state of Greece
was at this period; and I indulge some cautious conjectures, founded
upon the earliest verifiable facts, respecting the steps immediately
antecedent by which that condition was brought about. In the present
volumes, I have only been able to include the history of Sparta and the
Peloponnesian Dorians, down to the age of Peisistratus and Crœsus. I
had hoped to have comprised in them the entire history of Greece down
to this last-mentioned period, but I find the space insufficient.
The history of Greece falls most naturally into six compartments, of
which the first may be looked at as a period of preparation for the
five following, which exhaust the free life of collective Hellas.
I. Period from 776 B. C. to 560 B. C., the accession of Peisistratus at
Athens and of Crœsus in Lydia.
II. From the accession of Peisistratus and Crœsus to the repulse of
Xerxes from Greece.
III. From the repulse of Xerxes to the close of the Peloponnesian war
and overthrow of Athens.
IV. From the close of the Peloponnesian war to the battle of Leuktra.
V. From the battle of Leuktra to that of Chæroneia.
VI. From the battle of Chæroneia to the end of the generation of
Alexander.
The five periods, from Peisistratus down to the death of Alexander and
of his generation, present the acts of an historical drama capable
of being recounted in perspicuous succession, and connected by a
sensible thread of unity. I shall interweave in their proper places
the important but outlying adventures of the Sicilian and Italian
Greeks,—introducing such occasional notices of Grecian political
constitutions, philosophy, poetry, and oratory, as are requisite to
exhibit the many-sided activity of this people during their short but
brilliant career.
After the generation of Alexander, the political action of Greece
becomes cramped and degraded,—no longer interesting to the reader, or
operative on the destinies of the future world. We may, indeed, name
one or two incidents, especially the revolutions of Agis and Kleomenês
at Sparta, which are both instructive and affecting; but as a whole,
the period, between 300 B. C. and the absorption of Greece by the
Romans, is of no interest in itself, and is only so far of value as
it helps us to understand the preceding centuries. The dignity and
value of the Greeks from that time forward belong to them only as
individual philosophers, preceptors, astronomers, and mathematicians,
literary men and critics, medical practitioners, etc. In all these
respective capacities, especially in the great schools of philosophical
speculation they still constitute the light of the Roman world; though,
as communities, they have lost their own orbit, and have become
satellites of more powerful neighbors.
I propose to bring down the history of the Grecian communities to
the year 300 B. C., or the close of the generation which takes its
name from Alexander the Great, and I hope to accomplish this in eight
volumes altogether. For the next two or three volumes I have already
large preparations made, and I shall publish my third (perhaps my
fourth) in the course of the ensuing winter.
There are great disadvantages in the publication of one portion of
a history apart from the remainder; for neither the earlier nor the
later phenomena can be fully comprehended without the light which each
mutually casts upon the other. But the practice has become habitual,
and is indeed more than justified by the well-known inadmissibility
of "long hopes" into the short span of human life. Yet I cannot but
fear that my first two volumes will suffer in the estimation of many
readers by coming out alone,—and that men who value the Greeks for
their philosophy, their politics, and their oratory, may treat the
early legends as not worth attention. And it must be confessed that the
sentimental attributes of the Greek mind—its religious and poetical
vein—here appear in disproportionate relief, as compared with its
more vigorous and masculine capacities,—with those powers of acting,
organizing, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed in the
forthcoming volumes. I venture, however, to forewarn the reader, that
there will occur numerous circumstances in the after political life of
the Greeks, which he will not comprehend unless he be initiated into
the course of their legendary associations. He will not understand
the frantic terror of the Athenian public during the Peloponnesian
war, on the occasion of the mutilation of the statues called Hermæ,
unless he enters into the way in which they connected their stability
and security with the domiciliation of the gods in the soil: nor will
he adequately appreciate the habit of the Spartan king on military
expeditions,—when he offered his daily public sacrifices on behalf of
his army and his country,—"always to perform this morning service
immediately before sunrise, in order that he might be beforehand in
obtaining the favor of the gods,"[1] if he be not familiar with the
Homeric conception of Zeus going to rest at night and awaking to rise
at early dawn from the side of the "white-armed Hêrê." The occasion
will, indeed, often occur for remarking how these legends illustrate
and vivify the political phenomena of the succeeding times, and I have
only now to urge the necessity of considering them as the beginning of
a series,—not as an entire work.
[1] Xenophon, Repub. Lacedæmon. cap. xiii. 3. Ἀεὶ δὲ, ὅταν
θύηται, ἄρχεται μὲν τούτου τοῦ ἔργου ἔτι κνεφαῖος, προλαμβάνειν
βουλόμενος τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ εὔνοιαν.
LONDON, March 5, 1846.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF VOLUMES I. AND II.
In preparing a Second Edition of the first two volumes of my History,
I have profited by the remarks and corrections of various critics,
contained in Reviews, both English and foreign. I have suppressed, or
rectified, some positions which had been pointed out as erroneous,
or as advanced upon inadequate evidence. I have strengthened my
argument in some cases where it appeared to have been imperfectly
understood,—adding some new notes, partly for the purpose of enlarged
illustration, partly to defend certain opinions which had been called
in question. The greater number of these alterations have been made in
Chapters XVI. and XXI. of Part I., and in Chapter VI. of Part II.
I trust that these three Chapters, more full of speculation, and
therefore more open to criticism than any of the others, will thus
appear in a more complete and satisfactory form. But I must at the same
time add that they remain for the most part unchanged in substance, and
that I have seen no sufficient reason to modify my main conclusions
even respecting the structure of the Iliad, controverted though they
have been by some of my most esteemed critics.
In regard to the character and peculiarity of Grecian legend, as
broadly distinguished throughout these volumes from Grecian history,
I desire to notice two valuable publications with which I have
only become acquainted since the date of my first edition. One of
these is, A Short Essay on Primæval History, by John Kenrick, M. A.
(London, 1846, published just at the same time as these volumes,)
which illustrates with much acute reflection the general features
of legend, not only in Greece but throughout the ancient world,—see
especially pages 65, 84, 92, _et seq._ The other work is, Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official, by Colonel Sleeman,—first made
known to me through an excellent notice of my History in the Edinburgh
Review for October 1846. The description given by Colonel Sleeman, of
the state of mind now actually prevalent among the native population of
Hindostan, presents a vivid comparison, helping the modern reader to
understand and appreciate the legendary era of Greece. I have embodied
in the notes of this Second Edition two or three passages from Colonel
Sleeman's instructive work: but the whole of it richly deserves perusal.
Having now finished six volumes of this History, without attaining
a lower point than the peace of Nikias, in the tenth year of the
Peloponnesian war,—I find myself compelled to retract the expectation
held out in the preface to my First Edition, that the entire work might
be completed in eight volumes. Experience proves to me how impossible
it is to measure beforehand the space which historical subjects will
require. All I can now promise is, that the remainder of the work shall
be executed with as much regard to brevity as is consistent with the
paramount duty of rendering it fit for public acceptance.
London, April 3, 1849.
NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, AND HEROES.
Following the example of Dr. Thirlwall and other excellent scholars, I
call the Greek deities by their real Greek names, and not by the Latin
equivalents used among the Romans. For the assistance of those readers
to whom the Greek names may be less familiar, I here annex a table of
the one and the other.
_Greek._ _Latin._
Zeus, Jupiter.
Poseidôn, Neptune.
Arês, Mars.
Dionysus, Bacchus.
Hermês, Mercury.
Hêlios, Sol.
Hêphæstus, Vulcan.
Hadês, Pluto.
Hêrê, Juno.
Athênê, Minerva.
Artemis, Diana.
Aphroditê, Venus.
Eôs, Aurora.
Hestia, Vesta.
Lêtô, Latona.
Dêmêtêr, Ceres.
Hêraklês, Hercules.
Asklêpius, Æsculapius.
A few words are here necessary respecting the orthography of Greek
names adopted in the above table and generally throughout this history.
I have approximated as nearly as I dared to the Greek letters in
preference to the Latin; and on this point I venture upon an innovation
which I should have little doubt of vindicating before the reason of
any candid English student. For the ordinary practice of substituting,
in a Greek name, the English C in place of the Greek K, is, indeed, so
obviously incorrect, that it admits of no rational justification. Our
own K, precisely and in every point, coincides with the Greek K: we
have thus the means of reproducing the Greek name to the eye as well
as to the ear, yet we gratuitously take the wrong letter in preference
to the right. And the precedent of the Latins is here against us
rather than in our favor, for their C really coincided in sound with
the Greek K, whereas our C entirely departs from it, and becomes an S,
before _e_, _i_, _æ_, _œ_, and _y_. Though our C has so far deviated in
sound from the Latin C, yet there is some warrant for our continuing
to use it in writing Latin names,—because we thus reproduce the name
to the eye, though not to the ear. But this is not the case when we
employ our C to designate the Greek K, for we depart here not less
from the visible than from the audible original; while we mar the
unrivalled euphony of the Greek language by that multiplied sibilation
which constitutes the least inviting feature in our own. Among German
philologists, the K is now universally employed in writing Greek names,
and I have adopted it pretty largely in this work, making exception for
such names as the English reader has been so accustomed to hear with
the C, that they may be considered as being almost Anglicised. I have,
farther, marked the long _e_ and the long _o_ (η, ω,) by a circumflex
(Hêrê) when they occur in the last syllable or in the penultimate of a
name.
CONTENTS
VOL. I.
PART I.
LEGENDARY GREECE.
CHAPTER I.
LEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS.
Opening of the mythical world.—How the mythes are to be
told.—Allegory rarely admissible.—Zeus—foremost in Grecian
conception.—The gods—how conceived: human type enlarged.—Past
history of the gods fitted on to present conceptions.—Chaos.—Gæa
and Uranos.—Uranos disabled.—Kronos and the Titans.—Kronos
overreached.—Birth and safety of Zeus and his brethren.—Other
deities.—Ambitious schemes of Zeus.—Victory of Zeus and
his brethren over Kronos and the Titans.—Typhôeus.—Dynasty
of Zeus.—His offspring.—General distribution of the divine
race.—Hesiodic theogony—its authority.—Points of difference
between Homer and Hesiod.—Homeric Zeus.—Amplified theogony of
Zens.—Hesiodic mythes traceable to Krête and Delphi.—Orphic
theogony.—Zeus and Phanês.—Zagreus.—Comparison of Hesiod and
Orpheus.—Influence of foreign religions upon Greece—Especially
in regard to the worship of Dêmêtêr and Dionysos.—Purification
for homicide unknown to Homer.—New and peculiar religious
rites.—Circulated by voluntary teachers and promising special
blessings.—Epimenidês, Sibylla, Bakis.—Principal mysteries
of Greece.—Ecstatic rites introduced from Asia 700-500 B.
C.—Connected with the worship of Dionysos.—Thracian and Egyptian
influence upon Greece.—Encouragement to mystic legends.—Melampus
the earliest name as teacher of the Dionysiac rites.—Orphic
sect, a variety of the Dionysiac mystics.—Contrast of the
mysteries with the Homeric Hymns.—Hymn to Dionysos.—Alteration
of the primitive Grecian idea of Dionysos.—Asiatic frenzy
grafted on the joviality of the Grecian Dionysia.—Eleusinian
mysteries.—Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr.—Temple of Eleusis, built
by order of Dêmêtêr for her residence.—Dêmêtêr prescribes the
mystic ritual of Eleusis.—Homeric Hymn a sacred Eleusinian
record, explanatory of the details of divine service.—Importance
of the mysteries to the town of Eleusis.—Strong hold of the
legend upon Eleusinian feelings.—Different legends respecting
Dêmêtêr elsewhere.—Expansion of the legends.—Hellenic importance
of Dêmêtêr.—Legends of Apollo.—Delian Apollo.—Pythian
Apollo.—Foundation legends of the Delphian oracle.—They served
the purpose of historical explanation.—Extended worship of
Apollo.—Multifarious local legends respecting Apollo.—Festivals
and Agônes.—State of mind and circumstances out of which
Grecian mythes arose.—Discrepancies in the legends little
noticed.—Aphroditê.—Athênê.—Artemis.—Poseidôn.—Stories
of temporary servitude imposed on
gods.—Hêrê.—Hêphæstos.—Hestia.—Hermês.—Hermês inventor of the
lyre.—Bargain between Hermês and Apollo.—Expository value of the
Hymn.—Zeus.—Mythes arising out of the religious ceremonies.—Small
part of the animal sacrificed.—Promêtheus had outwitted
Zeus.—Gods, heroes, and men, appear together in the mythes.
_pages_ 1-64
CHAPTER II.
LEGENDS RELATING TO HEROES AND MEN.
Races of men as they appear in the Hesiodic "Works and Days."—The
Golden.—The Silver.—The Brazen.—The Heroic.—The Iron.—Different
both from the Theogony and from Homer.—Explanation of this
difference.—Ethical vein of sentiment.—Intersected by the
mythical.—The "Works and Days," earliest didactic poem.—First
Introduction of dæmons.—Changes in the idea of dæmons.—Employed
in attacks on the pagan faith.—Functions of the Hesiodic
dæmons.—Personal feeling which pervades the "Works and
Days."—Probable age of the poem. 64-73
CHAPTER III.
LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS.
Iapetids in Hesiod.—Promêtheus and Epimêtheus.—Counter-manœuvring
of Promêtheus and Zeus.—Pandôra.—Pandôra in the
Theogony.—General feeling of the poet.—Man wretched, but
Zeus not to blame.—Mischiefs arising from women.—Punishment
of Promêtheus.—The Promêtheus of Æschylus.—Locality in which
Promêtheus was confined. 73-80
CHAPTER IV.
HEROIC LEGENDS.—GENEALOGY OF ARGUS.
Structure and purposes of Grecian genealogies.—To connect the
Grecian community with their common god.—Lower members of
the genealogy historical—higher members non-historical.—The
non-historical portion equally believed, and most valued by the
Greeks.—Number of such genealogies—pervading every fraction
of Greeks.—Argeian genealogy.—Inachus.—Phorôneus.—Argos
Panoptês.—Iô.—Romance of Iô historicized by Persians and
Phœnicians.—Legendary abductions of heroines adapted to
the feelings prevalent during the Persian war.—Danaos and
the Danaïdes.—Acrisios and Prœtos.—The Prœtides cured of
frenzy by Melampus.—Acrisios, Danaê, and Zeus.—Perseus and
the Gorgons.—Foundation of Mycênæ—commencement of Perseid
dynasty.—Amphitryôn, Alkmênê, Sthenelos.—Zeus and Alkmênê.—Birth
of Hêraklês.—Homeric legend of his birth: its expository
value.—The Hêrakleids expelled.—Their recovery of Peloponnêsus
and establishment in Argos, Sparta, and Messênia. 80-95
CHAPTER V.
DEUKALION, HELLEN, AND SONS OF HELLEN.
Deukaliôn, son of Promêtheus.—Phthiôtis: his permanent
seat.—General deluge.—Salvation of Deukaliôn and Pyrrha.—Belief
in this deluge throughout Greece.—Hellên and Amphiktyôn.—Sons
of Hellên: Dôrus, Xuthus, Æolus.—Amphiktyonic assembly.—Common
solemnities and games.—Division of Hellas: Æolians, Dôrians,
Iônians.—Large extent of Dôris implied in this genealogy.—This
form of the legend harmonizes with the great establishments of
the historical Dôrians.—Achæus—purpose which his name serves in
the legend.—Genealogical diversities. 96-105
CHAPTER VI.
THE ÆOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
Legends of Greece, originally isolated, afterwards
thrown into series.—_Æolus._—His seven sons and five
daughters.—1. _First Æolid line_—Salmôneus, Tyrô.—Pelias
and Nêleus.—Pêrô, Bias, and Melampus.—Periklymenos.—Nestor
and his exploits.—Nêleids down to Kodrus.—_Second Æolid
line_—Krêtheus.—Admêtus and Alcêstis.—Pêleus and the wife
of Acastus.—Pelias and Jasôn.—Jasôn and Mêdea.—Mêdea at
Corinth.—_Third Æolid line_—Sisyphus.—Corinthian genealogy
of Eumêlus.—Coalescence of different legends about Mêdea and
Sisyphus.—Bellerophôn.—_Fourth Æolid line_—Athamas.—Phryxus
and Hellê.—Inô and Palæmôn—Isthmian games.—Local root of the
legend of Athamas.—Traces of ancient human sacrifices.—Athamas
in the district near Orchomenos.—Eteoklês—festival of the
Charitêsia.—Foundation and greatness of Orchomenos.—Overthrow by
Hêraklês and the Thebans.—Trophônius and Agamêdês.—Ascalaphos and
Ialmenos.—Discrepancies in the Orchomenian genealogy.—Probable
inferences as to the ante-historical Orchomenos.—Its early wealth
and industry.—Emissaries of the lake Kôpaïs.—Old Amphiktyony at
Kalauria.—Orchomenos and Thebês.—Alcyonê and Kêyx.—Canacê.—The
Alôids.—Calycê.—Elis and Ætôlia.—Eleian genealogy.—Augeas.—The
Molionid brothers.—Variations in the Eleian genealogy.—Ætôlian
genealogy.—Œneus, Meleager, Tydeus.—Legend of Meleager in
Homer.—How altered by the poets after Homer.—Althæa and the
burning brand.—Grand Kalydônian boar-hunt.—Atalanta.—Relics of
the boar long preserved at Tegea.—Atalanta vanquished in the race
by stratagem.—Deianeira.—Death of Hêraklês.—Tydeus.—Old age of
Œneus.—Discrepant genealogies. 105-153
CHAPTER VII.
THE PELOPIDS.
Misfortunes and celebrity of the Pelopids.—Pelops—eponym of
Peloponnêsus.—Deduction of the sceptre of Pelops.—Kingly
attributes of the family.—Homeric Pelops.—Lydia, Pisa, etc.,
post-Homeric additions.—Tantalus.—Niobê.—Pelops and Œnomaus,
king of Pisa.—Chariot victory of Pelops—his principality at
Pisa.—Atreus, Thyestês, Chrysippus.—Family horrors among the
Pelopids.—Agamemnôn and Menelaus.—Orestês.—The goddess Hêrê and
Mykênæ.—Legendary importance of Mykênæ.—Its decline coincident
with the rise of Argos and Sparta.—Agamemnôn and Orestês
transferred to Sparta. 153-167
CHAPTER VIII.
LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.
Lelex—autochthonous in Lacônia.—Tyndareus and Lêda.—Offspring
of Lêda.—1. Castôr, Timandra, Klytæmnêstra, 2. Pollux,
Helen.—Castôr and Pollux.—Legend of the Attic Dekeleia.—Idas and
Lynkeus.—Great functions and power of the Dioskuri.—Messênian
genealogy.—Periêrês—Idas and Marpêssa. 168-173
CHAPTER IX.
ARCADIAN GENEALOGY.
Pelasgus.—Lykaôn and his fifty sons.—Legend of Lykaôn—ferocity
punished by the gods.—Deep religious faith of Pausanias.—His view
of past and present world.—Kallistô and Arkas.—Azan, Apheidas,
Elatus.—Aleus, Augê, Telephus.—Ancæus.—Echemus.—Echemus
kills Hyllus.—Hêrakleids repelled from Peloponnêsus.—Korônis and
Asklêpius.—Extended worship of Asklêpius—numerous legends.—Machaôn
and Podaleirius.—Numerous Asklêpiads, or descendants from
Asklêpius.—Temples of Asklêpius—sick persons healed there. 173-183
CHAPTER X
ÆAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS.—ÆGINA, SALAMIS, AND PHTHIA.
Æakus—son of Zeus and Ægina.—Offspring of Æakus—Pêleus,
Telamôn, Phôkus.—Prayers of Æakus—procure relief for
Greece—Phôkus killed by Pêleus and Telamôn.—Telamôn, banished,
goes to Salamis.—Pêleus—goes to Phthia—his marriage with
Thetis.—Neoptolemus.—Ajax, his son Philæus the eponymous hero of
a dême in Attica.—Teukrus banished, settles in Cyprus.—Diffusion
of the Æakid genealogy. 184-190
CHAPTER XI.
ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES.
Erechtheus—autochthonous.—Attic legends—originally from
different roots—each dême had its own.—Little noticed by
the old epic poets.—Kekrops.—Kranaus—Pandiôn.—Daughters of
Pandiôn—Proknê, Philomêla.—Legend of Têreus.—Daughters
of Erechtheus—Prokris.—Kreüsa.—Oreithyia, the wife of
Boreas.—Prayers of the Athenians to Boreas—his gracious
help in their danger.—Erechtheus and Eumolpus.—Voluntary
self-sacrifice of the three daughters of Erechtheus.—Kreüsa
and Iôn.—Sons of Pandiôn—Ægeus, etc.—Thêseus.—His legendary
character refined.—Plutarch—his way of handling the matter
of legend.—Legend of the Amazons.—Its antiquity and
prevalence.—Glorious achievements of the Amazons.—Their
ubiquity.—Universally received as a portion of the Greek
past.—Amazons produced as present by the historians of
Alexander.—Conflict of faith and reason in the historical critics.
191-217
CHAPTER XII.
KRETAN LEGENDS.—MINOS AND HIS FAMILY.
Minôs and Rhadamanthus, sons of Zeus.—Europê.—Pasiphaê
and the Minôtaur.—Scylla and Nisus.—Death of Androgeos,
and anger of Minôs against Athens.—Athenian victims for
the Minôtaur.—Self-devotion of Thêseus—he kills the
Minôtaur.—Athenian commemorative ceremonies.—Family of
Minôs.—Minôs and Dædalus—flight of the latter to Sicily.—Minôs
goes to retake him, but is killed.—Semi-Krêtan settlements
elsewhere—connected with this voyage of Minôs.—Sufferings of the
Krêtans afterwards from the wrath of Minôs.—Portrait of Minôs—how
varied.—Affinity between Krête and Asia Minor. 218-230
CHAPTER XIII.
ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.
Ship Argô in the Odyssey.—In Hesiod and Eumêlus.—Jasôn and
his heroic companions.—Lêmnos.—Adventures at Kyzikus, in
Bithynia, etc.—Hêraklês and Hylas.—Phineus.—Dangers of the
Symplêgades.—Arrival at Kolchis.—Conditions imposed by Æêtês
as the price of the golden fleece.—Perfidy of Æêtês—flight of
the Argonauts and Mêdea with the fleece.—Pursuit of Æêtês—the
Argonauts saved by Mêdea.—Return of the Argonauts—circuitous and
perilous.—Numerous and wide-spread monuments referring to the
voyage.—Argonautic legend generally.—Fabulous geography—gradually
modified as real geographical knowledge increased.—Transposition
of epical localities.—How and when the Argonautic voyage
became attached to Kolchis.—Æêtês and Circê.—Return of the
Argonauts—different versions.—Continued faith in the voyage—basis
of truth determined by Strabo. 231-256
CHAPTER XIV.
LEGENDS OF THEBES.
Abundant legends of Thêbes.—Amphiôn and Zethus, Homeric founders
of Kadmus and Bœôtus—both distinct legends.—Thêbes.—How Thêbes
was founded by Kadmus.—Five primitive families at Thêbes called
Sparti.—The four daughters of Kadmus: 1. Inô; 2. Semelê; 3.
Autonoê and her son Actæôn; 4. Agavê and her son Pentheus.—He
resists the god Dionysus—his miserable end.—Labdakus, Antiopê,
Amphiôn, and Zêthus.—Laius—Œdipus—Legendary celebrity of Œdipus
and his family.—The Sphinx.—Eteoklês and Polynikês.—Old epic
poems on the sieges of Thêbes. 256-269
SIEGES OF THEBES.
Curse pronounced by the devoted Oedipus upon his sons.—Novelties
introduced by Sophoklês.—Death of Oedipus—quarrel of Eteoklês and
Polynikês for the sceptre.—Polynikês retires to Argos—aid given
to him by Adrastus.—Amphiaräus and Eriphylê.—Seven chiefs of the
army against Thêbes.—Defeat of the Thêbans in the field—heroic
devotion of Menœkus.—Single combat of Eteoklês and Polynikês,
in which both perish.—Repulse and destruction of the Argeian
chiefs—all except Adrastus—Amphiaräus is swallowed up in the
earth.—Kreôn, king of Thêbes, forbids the burial of Polynikês
and the other fallen Argeian chiefs.—Devotion and death of
Antigonê.—The Athenians interfere to procure the interment of
the fallen chiefs.—Second siege of Thêbes by Adrastus with
the Epigoni, or sons of those slain in the first.—Victory
of the Epigoni—capture of Thêbes.—Worship of Adrastus at
Sikyôn—how abrogated by Kleisthenês.—Alkmæôn—his matricide and
punishment.—Fatal necklace of Eriphylê. 269-284
CHAPTER XV.
LEGEND OF TROY.
Great extent and variety of the tale of Troy.—Dardanus,
son of Zeus.—Ilus, founder of Ilium.—Walls of Ilium
built by Poseidôn.—Capture of Ilium by Hêraklês.—Priam
and his offspring.—Paris—his judgment on the three
goddesses.—Carries off Helen from Sparta.—Expedition of
the Greeks to recover her.—Heroes from all parts of Greece
combined under Agamemnôn.—Achilles and Odysseus.—The Grecian
host mistakes Teuthrania for Troy—Telephus.—Detention
of the Greeks at Aulis—Agamemnon and Iphigeneia.—First
success of the Greeks on landing near Troy.—Brisêis
awarded to Achilles.—Palamêdês—his genius, and treacherous
death.—Epic chronology—historicized.—Period of the
Homeric Iliad.—Hectôr killed by Achilles.—New allies of
Troy—Penthesileia.—Memnôn—killed by Achilles.—Death of
Achilles.—Funeral games celebrated in honor of him.—Quarrel
about his panoply.—Odysseus prevails and Ajax kills
himself.—Philoktêtês and Neoptolemus.—Capture of the
Palladium.—The wooden horse.—Destruction of Troy.—Distribution of
the captives among the victors.—Helen restored to Menelaus—lives
in dignity at Sparta—passes to a happy immortality.—Blindness
and cure of the poet Stesichorus—alteration of the legend about
Helen.—Egyptian tale about Helen—tendency to historicize.—Return
of the Greeks from Troy.—Their sufferings—anger of the
gods.—Wanderings of the heroes in all directions.—Memorials of
them throughout the Grecian world.—Odysseus—his final adventures
and death.—Æneas and his descendants.—Different stories about
Æneas.—Æneadæ at Skêpsis.—Ubiquity of Æneas.—Antenôr.—Tale of
Troy—its magnitude and discrepancies.—Trojan war—essentially
legendary—its importance as an item in Grecian national
faith.—Basis of history for it—possible, and nothing
more.—Historicizing innovations—Dio Chrysostom.—Historical
Ilium.—Generally received and visited as the town of
Priam.—Respect shown to it by Alexander.—Successors of
Alexander—foundation of Alexandreia Trôas.—The Romans—treat Ilium
with marked respect.—Mythical legitimacy of Ilium—first called
in question by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis and Hestiæa.—Supposed Old
Ilium, or real Troy, distinguished from New Ilium.—Strabo alone
believes in Old Ilium as the real Troy—other authors continue in
the old faith—the moderns follow Strabo.—The mythical faith not
shaken by topographical impossibilities.—Historical Trôas and
the Teukrians.—Æolic Greeks in the Trôad—the whole territory
gradually Æolized.—Old date, and long prevalence of the worship
of Apollo Sminthius.—Asiatic customs and religion—blended with
Hellenic.—Sibylline prophecies.—Settlements from Milêtus,
Mitylênê, and Athens. 284-340
CHAPTER XVI.
GRECIAN MYTHES, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT, AND INTERPRETED BY THE GREEKS
THEMSELVES.
The mythes formed the entire mental stock of the early
Greeks.—State of mind out of which they arose.—Tendency to
universal personification.—Absence of positive knowledge—supplied
by personifying faith.—Multitude and variety of quasi-human
personages.—What we read as poetical fancies, were to the Greeks
serious realities.—The gods and heroes—their chief agency cast
back into the past, and embodied in the mythes.—Marked and
manifold types of the Homeric gods.—Stimulus which they afforded
to the mythopœic faculty.—Easy faith in popular and plausible
stories.—Poets—receive their matter from the divine inspiration
of the Muse.—Meaning of the word _mythe_—original—altered.—Matter
of actual history—uninteresting to early Greeks.—Mythical
faith and religious point of view—paramount in the Homeric
age.—Gradual development of the scientific point of view—its
opposition to the religious.—Mythopœic age—anterior to this
dissent.—Expansive force of Grecian intellect.—Transition
towards positive and present fact.—The poet becomes the organ
of present time instead of past.—Iambic, elegiac, and lyric
poets.—Influence of the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce,
B. C. 660.—Progress—historical, geographical, social—from that
period to B. C. 500.—Altered standard of judgment, ethical
and intellectual.—Commencement of physical science—Thalês,
Xenophanês, Pythagoras.—Impersonal nature conceived as an
object of study.—Opposition between scientific method and the
religious feeling of the multitude.—How dealt with by different
philosophers.—Socratês.—Hippocratês.—Anaxagoras.—Contrasted
with Grecian religious belief.—Treatment of Socratês by
the Athenians.—Scission between the superior men and the
multitude—important in reference to the mythes.—The mythes
accommodated to a new tone of feeling and judgment.—The
poets and logographers.—Pindar.—Tragic poets.—Æschylus and
Sophoklês.—Tendencies of Æschylus in regard to the old
legends.—He maintains undiminished the grandeur of the
mythical world.—Euripidês—accused of vulgarizing the mythical
heroes, and of introducing exaggerated pathos, refinement,
and rhetoric.—The logographers—Pherekydês, etc.—Hekatæus—the
mythes rationalized.—The historians—Herodotus.—Earnest piety
of Herodotus—his mystic reserve.—His views of the mythical
world.—His deference for Egypt and Egyptian statements.—His
general faith in the mythical heroes and eponyms—yet combined
with scepticism as to matters of fact—His remarks upon the
miraculous foundation of the oracle at Dôdôna.—His remarks
upon Melampus and his prophetic powers.—His remarks upon
the Thessalian legend of Tempê.—Allegorical interpretation
of the mythes—more and more esteemed and applied.—Divine
legends allegorized.—Heroic legends historicized.—Limits
to this interpreting process.—Distinction between gods and
dæmons—altered and widened by Empedoclês.—Admission of dæmons as
partially evil beings—effect of such admission.—Semi-historical
interpretation—utmost which it can accomplish.—Some positive
certificate indispensable as a constituent of historical
proof—mere popular faith insufficient.—Mistake of ascribing to an
unrecording age the historical sense of modern times.—Matter of
tradition uncertified from the beginning.—Fictitious matter of
tradition does not imply fraud or imposture.—Plausible fiction
often generated and accredited by the mere force of strong and
common sentiment, even in times of instruction.—Allegorical
theory of the mythes—traced by some up to an ancient priestly
caste.—Real import of the mythes supposed to be preserved in
the religious mysteries.—Supposed ancient meaning is really
a modern interpretation.—Triple theology of the pagan world.
Treatment and use of the mythes according to Plato.—His views
as to the necessity and use of fiction.—He deals with the
mythes as expressions of feeling and imagination—sustained
by religious faith, and not by any positive basis.—Grecian
antiquity essentially a religious conception.—Application of
chronological calculation divests it of this character.—Mythical
genealogies all of one class, and all on a level in respect
to evidence.—Grecian and Egyptian genealogies.—Value of
each is purely subjective, having especial reference to
the faith of the people.—Gods and men undistinguishable in
Grecian antiquity.—General recapitulation.—General public
of Greece—familiar with their local mythes, careless of
recent history.—Religious festivals—their commemorative
influence.—Variety and universality of mythical relics.—The
mythes in their bearing on Grecian art.—Tendency of works of art
to intensify the mythical faith. 340-461
CHAPTER XVII.
THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.
Μῦθος—_Sage_—an universal manifestation of the human
mind.—Analogy of the Germans and Celts with the
Greeks.—Differences between them.—Grecian poetry
matchless.—Grecian progress self-operated.—German progress
brought about by violent influences from without.—Operation of
the Roman civilization and of Christianity upon the primitive
German mythes.—Alteration in the mythical genealogies—Odin and
the other gods degraded into men.—Grecian Paganism—what would
have been the case, if it had been supplanted by Christianity
in 500 B. C.—Saxo Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson contrasted
with Pherekydês and Hellanikus.—Mythopœic tendencies in modern
Europe still subsisting, but forced into a new channel: 1.
Saintly ideal; 2. Chivalrous ideal.—Legends of the Saints—their
analogy with the Homeric theology.—Chivalrous ideal—Romances
of Charlemagne and Arthur.—Accepted as realities of the
fore-time.—Teutonic and Scandinavian epic—its analogy with the
Grecian.—Heroic character and self-expanding subject common to
both.—Points of distinction between the two—epic of the Middle
Ages neither stood so completely alone, nor was so closely
interwoven with religion, as the Grecian.—History of England—how
conceived down to the seventeenth century—began with Brute the
Trojan.—Earnest and tenacious faith manifested in the defence of
this early history.—Judgment of Milton.—Standard of historical
evidence—raised in regard to England—not raised in regard to
Greece.—Milton's way of dealing with the British fabulous history
objectionable.—Two ways open of dealing with the Grecian mythes:
1, to omit them; or, 2, to recount them as mythes.—Reasons for
preferring the latter.—Triple partition of past time by Varro.
461-489
HISTORY OF GREECE.
PART I.
LEGENDARY GREECE.
CHAPTER I.
LEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS.
The mythical world of the Greeks opens with the gods, anterior as well
as superior to man: it gradually descends, first to heroes, and next
to the human race. Along with the gods are found various monstrous
natures, ultra-human and extra-human, who cannot with propriety be
called gods, but who partake with gods and men in the attributes
of free-will, conscious agency, and susceptibility of pleasure and
pain,—such as the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Grææ, the Sirens, Scylla
and Charybdis, Echidna, Sphinx, Chimæra, Chrysaor, Pegasus, the
Cyclôpes, the Centaurs, etc. The first acts of what may be termed
the great mythical cycle describe the proceedings of these gigantic
agents—the crash and collision of certain terrific and overboiling
forces, which are ultimately reduced to obedience, or chained up, or
extinguished, under the more orderly government of Zeus, who supplants
his less capable predecessors, and acquires precedence and supremacy
over gods and men—subject, however to certain social restraints from
the chief gods and goddesses around him, as well as to the custom of
occasionally convoking and consulting the divine agora.
I recount these events briefly, but literally, treating them simply
as mythes springing from the same creative imagination, addressing
themselves to analogous tastes and feelings, and depending upon the
same authority, as the legends of Thebes and Troy. It is the inspired
voice of the Muse which reveals and authenticates both, and from which
Homer and Hesiod alike derive their knowledge—the one, of the heroic,
the other, of the divine, foretime. I maintain, moreover, fully, the
character of these great divine agents as Persons, which is the light
in which they presented themselves to the Homeric or Hesiodic audience.
Uranos, Nyx, Hypnos and Oneiros (Heaven, Night, Sleep and Dream), are
Persons, just as much as Zeus and Apollo. To resolve them into mere
allegories, is unsafe and unprofitable: we then depart from the point
of view of the original hearers, without acquiring any consistent or
philosophical point of view of our own.[2] For although some of the
attributes and actions ascribed to these persons are often explicable
by allegory the whole series and system of them never are so: the
theorist who adopts this course of explanation finds that, after one
or two simple and obvious steps, the path is no longer open, and he
is forced to clear a way for himself by gratuitous refinements and
conjectures. The allegorical persons and attributes are always found
mingled with other persons and attributes not allegorical; but the
two classes cannot be severed without breaking up the whole march of
the mythical events, nor can any explanation which drives us to such
a necessity be considered as admissible. To suppose indeed that these
legends could be all traced by means of allegory into a coherent
body of physical doctrine, would be inconsistent with all reasonable
presumptions respecting the age or society in which they arose. Where
the allegorical mark is clearly set upon any particular character,
or attribute, or event, to that extent we may recognize it; but we
can rarely venture to divine further, still less to alter the legends
themselves on the faith of any such surmises. The theogony of the
Greeks contains some cosmogonic ideas; but it cannot be considered
as a system of cosmogony, or translated into a string of elementary,
planetary, or physical changes.
[2] It is sufficient, here, to state this position briefly: more
will be said respecting the allegorizing interpretation in a
future chapter.
In the order of legendary chronology, Zeus comes after Kronos and
Uranos; but in the order of Grecian conception, Zeus is the prominent
person, and Kronos and Uranos are inferior and introductory precursors,
set up in order to be overthrown and to serve as mementos of the
prowess of their conqueror. To Homer and Hesiod, as well as to the
Greeks universally, Zeus is the great and predominant god, "the father
of gods and men," whose power none of the other gods can hope to
resist, or even deliberately think of questioning. All the other gods
have their specific potency and peculiar sphere of action and duty,
with which Zeus does not usually interfere; but it is he who maintains
the lineaments of a providential superintendence, as well over the
phænomena of Olympus as over those of earth. Zeus and his brothers
Poseidôn and Hadês have made a division of power: he has reserved the
æther and the atmosphere to himself—Poseidôn has obtained the sea—and
Hadês the under-world or infernal regions; while earth, and the events
which pass upon earth, are common to all of them, together with free
access to Olympus.[3]
[3] See Iliad, viii. 405, 463; xv. 20, 130, 185. Hesiod, Theog.
885.
This unquestioned supremacy is the general representation of
Zeus: at the same time the conspiracy of Hêrê, Poseidôn, and
Athênê against him, suppressed by the unexpected apparition of
Briareus as his ally, is among the exceptions. (Iliad, i. 400.)
Zeus is at one time vanquished by Titan, but rescued by Hermês.
(Apollodôr. i. 6, 3).
Zeus, then, with his brethren and colleagues, constitute the present
gods, whom Homer and Hesiod recognize as in full dignity and
efficiency. The inmates of this divine world are conceived upon the
model, but not upon the scale, of the human. They are actuated by the
full play and variety of those appetites, sympathies, passions and
affections, which divide the soul of man; invested with a far larger
and indeterminate measure of power, and an exemption as well from
death as (with some rare exceptions) from suffering and infirmity.
The rich and diverse types thus conceived, full of energetic movement
and contrast, each in his own province, and soaring confessedly above
the limits of experience, were of all themes the most suitable for
adventure and narrative, and operated with irresistible force upon the
Grecian fancy. All nature was then conceived as moving and working
through a number of personal agents, amongst whom the gods of Olympus
were the most conspicuous; the reverential belief in Zeus and Apollo
being only one branch of this omnipresent personifying faith. The
attributes of all these agents had a tendency to expand themselves into
illustrative legends—especially those of the gods, who were constantly
invoked in the public worship. Out of this same mental source sprang
both the divine and heroic mythes—the former being often the more
extravagant and abnormous in their incidents, in proportion as the
general type of the gods was more vast and awful than that of the
heroes.
As the gods have houses and wives like men, so the present dynasty
of gods must have a past to repose upon;[4] and the curious and
imaginative Greek, whenever he does not find a recorded past ready
to his hand, is uneasy until he has created one. Thus the Hesiodic
theogony explains, with a certain degree of system and coherence, first
the antecedent circumstances under which Zeus acquired the divine
empire, next the number of his colleagues and descendants.
[4] Arist. Polit. i. 1. ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ εἴδη ἑαυτοῖς ἀφομοιοῦσιν
ἄνθρωποι, οὕτως καὶ τοὺς βίους, τῶν θεῶν.
First in order of time (we are told by Hesiod) came Chaos; next Gæa,
the broad, firm, and flat Earth, with deep and dark Tartarus at her
base. Erôs (Love), the subduer of gods as well as men, came immediately
afterwards.[5]
[5] Hesiod, Theog. 116. Apollodôrus begins with Uranos and Gæa
(i. 1.); he does not recognize Erôs, Nyx, or Erebos.
From Chaos sprung Erebos and Nyx; from these latter Æthêr and Hêmera.
Gæa also gave birth to Uranos, equal in breadth to herself, in order to
serve both as an overarching vault to her, and as a residence for the
immortal gods; she further produced the mountains, habitations of the
divine nymphs, and Pontus, the barren and billowy sea.
Then Gæa intermarried with Uranos, and from this union came a numerous
offspring—twelve Titans and Titanides, three Cyclôpes, and three
Hekatoncheires or beings with a hundred hands each. The Titans were
Oceanus, Kœos, Krios, Hyperiôn, Iapetos, and Kronos: the Titanides,
Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnêmosynê, Phœbê, and Têthys. The Cyclôpes were
Brontês, Steropês, and Argês,—formidable persons, equally distinguished
for strength and for manual craft, so that they made the thunder
which afterwards formed the irresistible artillery of Zeus.[6] The
Hekatoncheires were Kottos, Briareus, and Gygês, of prodigious bodily
force.
[6] Hesiod, Theog. 140, 156. Apollod. _ut sup._
Uranos contemplated this powerful brood with fear and horror; as fast
as any of them were born, he concealed them in cavities of the earth,
and would not permit them to come out. Gæa could find no room for them,
and groaned under the pressure: she produced iron, made a sickle,
and implored her sons to avenge both her and themselves against the
oppressive treatment of their father. But none of them, except Kronos,
had courage to undertake the deed: he, the youngest and the most
daring, was armed with the sickle and placed in suitable ambush by the
contrivance of Gæa. Presently night arrived, and Uranos descended to
the embraces of Gæa: Kronos then emerged from his concealment, cut off
the genitals of his father, and cast the bleeding member behind him
far away into the sea.[7] Much of the blood was spilt upon the earth,
and Gæa in consequence gave birth to the irresistible Erinnys, the
vast and muscular Gigantes, and the Melian nymphs. Out of the genitals
themselves, as they swam and foamed upon the sea, emerged the goddess
Aphroditê, deriving her name from the foam out of which she had sprung.
She first landed at Kythêra, and then went to Cyprus: the island felt
her benign influence, and the green herb started up under her soft and
delicate tread. Erôs immediately joined her, and partook with her the
function of suggesting and directing the amorous impulses both of gods
and men.[8]
[7] Hesiod, Theog. 160, 182. Apollod. i. 1, 4.
[8] Hesiod, Theog. 192. This legend respecting the birth of
Aphroditê seems to have been derived partly from her name (ἀφρὸς,
_foam_), partly from the surname Urania, Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία, under
which she was so very extensively worshipped, especially both in
Cyprus and Cythêra, seemingly originated in both islands by the
Phœnicians. Herodot. i. 105. Compare the instructive section in
Boeckh's Metrologie, c. iv. § 4.
Uranos being thus dethroned and disabled, Kronos and the Titans
acquired their liberty and became predominant: the Cyclôpes and the
Hekatoncheires had been cast by Uranos into Tartarus, and were still
allowed to remain there.
Each of the Titans had a numerous offspring: Oceanus, especially,
marrying his sister Têthys, begat three thousand daughters, the Oceanic
nymphs, and as many sons: the rivers and springs passed for his
offspring. Hyperiôn and his sister Theia had for their children Hêlios,
Selênê, and Eôs; Kœos with Phœbê begat Lêtô and Asteria; the children
of Krios were Astræos, Pallas, and Persês,—from Astræos and Eôs sprang
the winds Zephyrus, Boreas, and Notus. Iapetos, marrying the Oceanic
nymph Clymenê, counted as his progeny the celebrated Promêtheus,
Epimêtheus, Menœtius, and Atlas. But the offspring of Kronos were the
most powerful and transcendent of all. He married his sister Rhea, and
had by her three daughters—Hestia, Dêmêtêr, and Hêrê—and three sons,
Hadês, Poseidôn, and Zeus, the latter at once the youngest and the
greatest.
But Kronos foreboded to himself destruction from one of his own
children, and accordingly, as soon as any of them were born, he
immediately swallowed them and retained them in his own belly. In this
manner had the first five been treated, and Rhea was on the point of
being delivered of Zeus. Grieved and indignant at the loss of her
children, she applied for counsel to her father and mother, Uranos and
Gæa, who aided her to conceal the birth of Zeus. They conveyed her by
night to Lyktus in Crête, hid the new-born child in a woody cavern
on Mount Ida, and gave to Kronos, in place of it, a stone wrapped in
swaddling clothes, which he greedily swallowed, believing it to be
his child. Thus was the safety of Zeus ensured.[9] As he grew up his
vast powers fully developed themselves: at the suggestion of Gæa, he
induced Kronos by stratagem to vomit up, first the stone which had
been given to him,—next, the five children whom he had previously
devoured. Hestia, Dêmêtêr, Hêrê, Poseidôn and Hadês, were thus allowed
to grow up along with Zeus; and the stone to which the latter owed
his preservation was placed near the temple of Delphi, where it ever
afterwards stood, as a conspicuous and venerable memorial to the
religious Greek.[10]
[9] Hesiod, Theog. 452, 487. Apollod. i. 1, 6.
[10] Hesiod, Theog. 498.—
Τὸν μὲν Ζεὺς στήριξε κατὰ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης
Πυθοῖ ἐν ἠγαθέῃ, γυάλοις ὑπὸ Παρνησοῖο,
Σῆμ᾽ ἔμεν ἐξοπίσω, θαῦμα θνητοῖσι βροτοῖσι.
We have not yet exhausted the catalogue of beings generated during this
early period, anterior to the birth of Zeus. Nyx, alone and without
any partner, gave birth to a numerous progeny: Thanatos, Hypnos and
Oneiros; Mômus and Oïzys (Grief); Klôthô, Lachesis and Atropos, the
three Fates; the retributive and equalizing Nemesis; Apatê and Philotês
(Deceit and amorous Propensity), Gêras (Old Age) and Eris (Contention).
From Eris proceeded an abundant offspring, all mischievous and
maleficent: Ponos (Suffering), Lêthê, Limos (Famine), Phonos and Machê
(Slaughter and Battle), Dysnomia and Atê (Lawlessness and reckless
Impulse), and Horkos, the ever watchful sanctioner of oaths, as well as
the inexorable punisher of voluntary perjury.[11]
[11] Hesiod, Theog. 212-232.
Gæa, too, intermarrying with Pontus, gave birth to Nereus, the just
and righteous old man of the sea; to Thaumas, Phorkys and Kêtô. From
Nereus, and Doris daughter of Oceanus, proceeded the fifty Nereids
or Sea-nymphs. Thaumus also married Elektra daughter of Oceanus, and
had by her Iris and the two Harpies, Allô and Okypetê,—winged and
swift as the winds. From Phorkys and Kêtô sprung the Dragon of the
Hesperides, and the monstrous Grææ and Gorgons: the blood of Medusa,
one of the Gorgons, when killed by Perseus, produced Chrysaor and the
horse Pegasus: Chrysaor and Kallirrhoê gave birth to Geryôn as well
as to Echidna,—a creature half-nymph and half-serpent, unlike both to
gods and to men. Other monsters arose from the union of Echidna with
Typhaôn,—Orthros, the two-headed dog of Geryôn; Cerberus, the dog
of Hadês, with fifty heads, and the Lernæan Hydra. From the latter
proceeded the Chimæra, the Sphinx of Thêbes, and the Nemean lion.[12]
[12] Hesiod, Theog. 240-320. Apollodôr. i. 2, 6, 7.
A powerful and important progeny, also, was that of Styx, daughter
of Oceanus, by Pallas; she had Zêlos and Nikê (Imperiousness and
Victory), and Kratos and Bia (Strength and Force). The hearty and early
coöperation of Styx and her four sons with Zeus was one of the main
causes which enabled him to achieve his victory over the Titans.
Zeus had grown up not less distinguished for mental capacity than for
bodily force. He and his brothers now determined to wrest the power
from the hands of Kronos and the Titans, and a long and desperate
struggle commenced, in which all the gods and all the goddesses took
part. Zeus convoked them to Olympus, and promised to all who would aid
him against Kronos, that their functions and privileges should remain
undisturbed. The first who responded to the call, came with her four
sons, and embraced his cause, was Styx. Zeus took them all four as his
constant attendants, and conferred upon Styx the majestic distinction
of being the Horkos, or oath-sanctioner of the Gods,—what Horkos was to
men, Styx was to the Gods.[13]
[13] Hesiod, Theog. 385-403.
Still further to strengthen himself, Zeus released the other Uranids
who had been imprisoned in Tartarus by their father,—the Cyclôpes and
the Centimanes,—and prevailed upon them to take part with him against
the Titans. The former supplied him with thunder and lightning, and the
latter brought into the fight their boundless muscular strength.[14]
Ten full years did the combat continue; Zeus and the Kronids occupying
Olympus, and the Titans being established on the more southerly
mountain-chain of Othrys. All nature was convulsed, and the distant
Oceanus, though he took no part in the struggle, felt the boiling,
the noise, and the shock, not less than Gæa and Pontus. The thunder
of Zeus, combined with the crags and mountains torn up and hurled by
the Centimanes, at length prevailed, and the Titans were defeated and
thrust down into Tartarus. Iapetos, Kronos, and the remaining Titans
(Oceanus excepted) were imprisoned, perpetually and irrevocably, in
that subterranean dungeon, a wall of brass being built around them by
Poseidôn, and the three Centimanes being planted as guards. Of the two
sons of Iapetos, Menœtius was made to share this prison, while Atlas
was condemned to stand for ever at the extreme west, and to bear upon
his shoulders the solid vault of heaven.[15]
[14] Hesiod, Theog. 140, 624, 657. Apollodôr. i. 2, 4.
[15] The battle with the Titans, Hesiod, Theog. 627-735. Hesiod
mentions nothing about the Gigantes and the Gigantomachia:
Apollodôrus, on the other hand, gives this latter in some detail,
but despatches the Titans in a few words (i. 2, 4; i. 6, 1). The
Gigantes seem to be only a second edition of the Titans,—a sort
of duplication to which the legendary poets were often inclined.
Thus were the Titans subdued, and the Kronids with Zeus at their head
placed in possession of power. They were not, however, yet quite
secure; for Gæa, intermarrying with Tartarus, gave birth to a new and
still more formidable monster called Typhôeus, of such tremendous
properties and promise, that, had he been allowed to grow into full
development, nothing could have prevented him from vanquishing all
rivals and becoming supreme. But Zeus foresaw the danger, smote him at
once with a thunderbolt from Olympus, and burnt him up: he was cast
along with the rest into Tartarus, and no further enemy remained to
question the sovereignty of the Kronids.[16]
[16] Hesiod, Theog. 820-869. Apollod. i. 6, 3. He makes Typhôn
very nearly victorious over Zeus. Typhôeus, according to Hesiod,
is father of the irregular, violent, and mischievous winds:
Notus, Boreas, Argestês and Zephyrus, are of divine origin (870).
With Zeus begins a new dynasty and a different order of beings. Zeus,
Poseidôn, and Hadês agree upon the distribution before noticed, of
functions and localities: Zeus retaining the Æthêr and the atmosphere,
together with the general presiding function; Poseidôn obtaining
the sea, and administering subterranean forces generally; and Hadês
ruling the under-world or region in which the half-animated shadows of
departed men reside.
It has been already stated, that in Zeus, his brothers and his sisters,
and his and their divine progeny, we find the _present_ Gods; that
is, those, for the most part, whom the Homeric and Hesiodic Greeks
recognized and worshipped. The wives of Zeus were numerous as well as
his offspring. First he married Mêtis, the wisest and most sagacious of
the goddesses; but Gæa and Uranos forewarned him that if he permitted
himself to have children by her, they would be stronger than himself
and dethrone him. Accordingly when Mêtis was on the point of being
delivered of Athênê, he swallowed her up, and her wisdom and sagacity
thus became permanently identified with his own being.[17] His head
was subsequently cut open, in order to make way for the exit and
birth of the goddess Athênê.[18] By Themis, Zeus begat the Hôræ, by
Eurynomê, the three Charities or Graces; by Mnêmosynê, the Muses; by
Lêtô (Latona), Apollo and Artemis; and by Dêmêtêr, Persephonê. Last of
all he took for his wife Hêrê, who maintained permanently the dignity
of queen of the Gods; by her he had Hêbê, Arês, and Eileithyia. Hermês
also was born to him by Maia, the daughter of Atlas: Hêphæstos was born
to Hêrê, according to some accounts, by Zeus; according to others, by
her own unaided generative force.[19] He was born lame, and Hêrê was
ashamed of him: she wished to secrete him away, but he made his escape
into the sea, and found shelter under the maternal care of the Nereids
Thetis and Eurynome.[20] Our enumeration of the divine race, under the
presidency of Zeus, will thus give us,[21]—
[17] Hesiod, Theog. 885-900.
[18] Apollod. i. 3, 6.
[19] Hesiod, Theog. 900-944.
[20] Homer, Iliad, xviii. 397.
[21] See Burckhardt, Homer, und Hesiod. Mythologie, sect. 102.
(Leipz. 1844).
1. The twelve great gods and goddesses of Olympus,—Zeus, Poseidôn,
Apollo, Arês, Hêphæstos, Hermês, Hêrê, Athênê, Artemis, Aphroditê,
Hestia, Dêmêtêr.
2. An indefinite number of other deities, not included among the
Olympic, seemingly because the number _twelve_ was complete without
them, but some of them not inferior in power and dignity to many of
the twelve:—Hadês, Hêlios, Hekatê, Dionysos, Lêtô, Diônê, Persephonê,
Selênê, Themis, Eôs, Harmonia, the Charities, the Muses, the
Eileithyiæ, the Mœræ, the Oceanids and the Nereids, Proteus, Eidothea,
the Nymphs, Leukothea, Phorkys, Æolus, Nemesis, etc.
3. Deities who perform special services to the greater gods:—Iris,
Hêbê, the Horæ, etc.
4. Deities whose personality is more faintly and unsteadily
conceived:—Atê, the Litæ, Eris, Thanatos, Hypnos, Kratos, Bia, Ossa,
etc.[22] The same name is here employed sometimes to designate
the person, sometimes the attribute or event not personified,—an
unconscious transition of ideas, which, when consciously performed, is
called Allegory.
[22] Λιμὸς—_Hunger_—is a person, in Hesiod, Opp. Di. 299.
5. Monsters, offspring of the Gods:—the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Grææ,
Pegasus, Chrysaor, Echidna, Chimæra, the Dragon of the Hesperides,
Cerberus, Orthros, Geryôn, the Lernæan Hydra, the Nemean lion, Scylla
and Charybdis, the Centaurs, the Sphinx, Xanthos and Balios the
immortal horses, etc.
From the gods we slide down insensibly, first to heroes, and then to
men; but before we proceed to this new mixture, it is necessary to
say a few words on the theogony generally. I have given it briefly as
it stands in the Hesiodic Theogonia, because that poem—in spite of
great incoherence and confusion, arising seemingly from diversity of
authorship as well as diversity of age—presents an ancient and genuine
attempt to cast the divine foretime into a systematic sequence. Homer
and Hesiod were the grand authorities in the pagan world respecting
theogony; but in the Iliad and Odyssey nothing is found except passing
allusions and implications, and even in the Hymns (which were commonly
believed in antiquity to be the productions of the same author as the
Iliad and the Odyssey) there are only isolated, unconnected narratives.
Accordingly men habitually took their information respecting their
theogonic antiquities from the Hesiodic poem, where it was ready laid
out before them; and the legends consecrated in that work acquired
both an extent of circulation and a firm hold on the national faith,
such as independent legends could seldom or never rival. Moreover the
scrupulous and sceptical Pagans, as well as the open assailants of
Paganism in later times, derived their subjects of attack from the same
source; so that it has been absolutely necessary to recount in their
naked simplicity the Hesiodic stories, in order to know what it was
that Plato deprecated and Xenophanês denounced. The strange proceedings
ascribed to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus, have been more frequently alluded
to, in the way of ridicule or condemnation, than any other portion of
the mythical world.
But though the Hesiodic theogony passed as orthodox among the later
Pagans,[23] because it stood before them as the only system anciently
set forth and easily accessible, it was evidently not the only system
received at the date of the poem itself. Homer knows nothing of Uranos,
in the sense of an arch-God anterior to Kronos. Uranos and Gæa, like
Oceanus, Têthys and Nyx, are with him great and venerable Gods, but
neither the one nor the other present the character of predecessors of
Kronos and Zeus.[24] The Cyclôpes, whom Hesiod ranks as sons of Uranos
and fabricators of thunder, are in Homer neither one nor the other;
they are not noticed in the Iliad at all, and in the Odyssey they are
gross gigantic shepherds and cannibals, having nothing in common with
the Hesiodic Cyclops except the one round central eye.[25] Of the
three Centimanes enumerated by Hesiod, Briareus only is mentioned in
Homer, and to all appearance, not as the son of Uranos, but as the son
of Poseidôn; not as aiding Zeus in his combat against the Titans, but
as rescuing him at a critical moment from a conspiracy formed against
him by Hêrê, Poseidôn and Athênê.[26] Not only is the Hesiodic Uranos
(with the Uranids) omitted in Homer, but the relations between Zeus
and Kronos are also presented in a very different light. No mention is
made of Kronos swallowing his young children: on the contrary, Zeus
is the eldest of the three brothers instead of the youngest, and the
children of Kronos live with him and Rhea: there the stolen intercourse
between Zeus and Hêrê first takes place without the knowledge of their
parents.[27] When Zeus puts Kronos down into Tartarus, Rhea consigns
her daughter Hêrê to the care of Oceanus: no notice do we find of any
terrific battle with the Titans as accompanying that event. Kronos,
Iapetos, and the remaining Titans are down in Tartarus, in the lowest
depths under the earth, far removed from the genial rays of Hêlios; but
they are still powerful and venerable, and Hypnos makes Hêrê swear an
oath in their name, as the most inviolable that he can think of.[28]
[23] See Göttling, Præfat. ad Hesiod. p. 23.
[24] Iliad, xiv. 249; xix. 259. Odyss. v. 184. Oceanus and Têthys
seem to be presented in the Iliad as the primitive Father and
Mother of the Gods:—
Ὠκεανόν τε θεῶν γένεσιν, καὶ μητέρα Τηθύν. (xiv. 201).
[25] Odyss. ix. 87.
[26] Iliad, i. 401.
[27] Iliad, xiv. 203-295; xv. 204.
[28] Iliad, viii. 482; xiv. 274-279. In the Hesiodic Opp. et Di.,
Kronos is represented as ruling in the Islands of the Blest in
the neighborhood of Oceanus (v. 168).
In Homer, then, we find nothing beyond the simple fact that Zeus thrust
his father Kronos together with the remaining Titans into Tartarus;
an event to which he affords us a tolerable parallel in certain
occurrences even under the presidency of Zeus himself. For the other
gods make more than one rebellious attempt against Zeus, and are only
put down, partly by his unparalleled strength, partly by the presence
of his ally the Centimane Briareus. Kronos, like Laërtes or Pêleus,
has become old, and has been supplanted by a force vastly superior to
his own. The Homeric epic treats Zeus as present, and, like all the
interesting heroic characters, a father must be assigned to him: that
father has once been the chief of the Titans, but has been superseded
and put down into Tartarus along with the latter, so soon as Zeus and
the superior breed of the Olympic gods acquired their full development.
That antithesis between Zeus and Kronos—between the Olympic gods and
the Titans—which Homer has thus briefly brought to view, Hesiod has
amplified into a theogony, with many things new, and some things
contradictory to his predecessor; while Eumêlus or Arktinus in the
poem called Titanomachia (now lost) also adopted it as their special
subject.[29] As Stasinus, Arktinus, Leschês, and others, enlarged the
Legend of Troy by composing poems relating to a supposed time anterior
to the commencement, or subsequent to the termination of the Iliad,—as
other poets recounted adventures of Odysseus subsequent to his landing
in Ithaka,—so Hesiod enlarged and systematized, at the same time that
he corrupted, the skeleton theogony which we find briefly indicated
in Homer. There is violence and rudeness in the Homeric gods, but the
great genius of Grecian epic is no way accountable for the stories
of Uranos and Kronos,—the standing reproach against Pagan legendary
narrative.
[29] See the few fragments of the Titanomachia, in Düntzer, Epic.
Græc. Fragm. p. 2; and Hyne, ad Apollodôr. I. 2. Perhaps there
was more than one poem on the subject, though it seems that
Athenæus had only read one (viii. p. 277).
In the Titanomachia, the generations anterior to Zeus were still
further lengthened by making Uranos the son of Æthêr (Fr. 4.
Düntzer). Ægæon was also represented as son of Pontus and Gæa,
and as having fought in the ranks of the Titans; in the Iliad he
(the same who is called Briareus) is the fast ally of Zeus.
A _Titanographia_ was ascribed to Musæus (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod.
iii. 1178; compare Lactant. de Fals. Rel. i. 21).
How far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself is impossible
to determine.[30] They bring us down to a cast of fancy more coarse
and indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resembling some of
the Holy Chapters (ἱεροὶ λόγοι) of the more recent mysteries, such
(for example) as the tale of Dionysos Zagreus. There is evidence
in the Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with local
legends current both at Krête and at Delphi; for he mentions both the
mountain-cave in Krête wherein the new-born Zeus was hidden, and the
stone near the Delphian temple—the identical stone which Kronos had
swallowed—"placed by Zeus himself as a sign and wonder to mortal men."
Both these two monuments, which the poet expressly refers to, and
had probably seen, imply a whole train of accessory and explanatory
local legends—current probably among the priests of Krête and Delphi,
between which places, in ancient times, there was an intimate religious
connection. And we may trace further in the poem,—that which would
be the natural feeling of Krêtan worshippers of Zeus,—an effort to
make out that Zeus was justified in his aggression on Kronos, by the
conduct of Kronos himself both towards his father and towards his
children: the treatment of Kronos by Zeus appears in Hesiod as the
retribution foretold and threatened by the mutilated Uranos against the
son who had outraged him. In fact the relations of Uranos and Gæa are
in almost all their particulars a mere copy and duplication of those
between Kronos and Rhea, differing only in the mode whereby the final
catastrophe is brought about. Now castration was a practice thoroughly
abhorrent both to the feelings and to the customs of Greece;[31] but
it was seen with melancholy frequency in the domestic life as well as
in the religious worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it
even became the special qualification of a priest of the Great Mother
Cybelê,[32] as well as of the Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the
sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination
familiar with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected
with and partially resembled the Krêtan.[33] And this deduction becomes
the more probable when we connect it with the first genesis of iron,
which Hesiod mentions to have been produced for the express purpose of
fabricating the fatal sickle; for metallurgy finds a place in the early
legends both of the Trojan and of the Krêtan Ida, and the three Idæan
Dactyls, the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one
and sometimes to the other.[34]
[30] That the Hesiodic Theogony is referable to an age
considerably later than the Homeric poems, appears now to be the
generally admitted opinion; and the reasons for believing so are,
in my opinion, satisfactory. Whether the Theogony is composed by
the same author as the Works and Days is a disputed point. The
Bœotian literati in the days of Pausanias decidedly denied the
identity, and ascribed to their Hesiod only the Works and Days:
Pausanias himself concurs with them (ix. 31. 4; ix. 35. 1), and
Völcker (Mithologie des Japetisch. Geschlechts, p. 14) maintains
the same opinion, as well as Göttling (Præf. ad Hesiod. xxi.): K.
O. Müller (History of Grecian Literature, ch. 8. § 4) thinks that
there is not sufficient evidence to form a decisive opinion.
Under the name of Hesiod (in that vague language which is usual
in antiquity respecting authorship, but which modern critics
have not much mended by speaking of the Hesiodic school, sect,
or family) passed many different poems, belonging to three
classes quite distinct from each other, but all disparate from
the Homeric epic:—1. The poems of legend cast into historical and
genealogical series, such as the Eoiai, the Catalogue of Women,
etc. 2. The poems of a didactic or ethical tendency, such as
the Works and Days, the Precepts of Cheirôn, the Art of Augural
Prophecy, etc. 3. Separate and short mythical compositions,
such as the Shield of Hêraklês, the Marriage of Keyx (which,
however, was of disputed authenticity, Athenæ. ii. p. 49), the
Epithalamium of Pêleus and Thetis, etc. (See Marktscheffel,
Præfat. ad Fragment. Hesiod. p. 89).
The Theogony belongs chiefly to the first of these classes, but
it has also a dash of the second in the legend of Promêtheus,
etc.: moreover in the portion which respects Hekatê, it has both
a mystic character and a distinct bearing upon present life and
customs, which we may also trace in the allusions to Krête and
Delphi. There seems reason to place it in the same age with the
Works and Days, perhaps in the half century preceding 700 B.
C., and little, if at all, anterior to Archilochus. The poem
is evidently conceived upon one scheme, yet the parts are so
disorderly and incoherent, that it is difficult to say how much
is interpolation. Hermann has well dissected the exordium; see
the preface to Gaisford's Hesiod (Poetæ Minor. p. 63).
K. O. Müller tells us (_ut sup._ p. 90), "The Titans, according
to the notions of Hesiod, represent a system of things in which
elementary beings, natural powers, and notions of order and
regularity are united to form a whole. The Cyclôpes denote the
transient disturbances of this order of nature by storms, and the
Hekatoncheires, or hundred-handed Giants, signify the fearful
power of the greater revolutions of nature." The poem affords
little presumption that any such ideas were present to the mind
of its author, as, I think, will be seen if we read 140-155,
630-745.
The Titans, the Cyclôpes, and the Hekatoncheires, can no more
be construed into physical phænomena than Chrysaor, Pegasus,
Echidna, the Grææ, or the Gorgons. Zeus, like Hêraklês, or Jasôn,
or Perseus, if his adventures are to be described, must have
enemies, worthy of himself and his vast type, and whom it is
some credit for him to overthrow. Those who contend with him or
assist him must be conceived on a scale fit to be drawn on the
same imposing canvas: the dwarfish proportions of man will not
satisfy the sentiment of the poet or his audience respecting the
grandeur and glory of the gods. To obtain creations of adequate
sublimity for such an object, the poet may occasionally borrow
analogies from the striking accidents of physical nature, and
when such an allusion manifests itself clearly, the critic does
well to point it out. But it seems to me a mistake to treat
these approximations to physical phænomena as forming the _main
scheme_ of the poet,—to look for them everywhere, and to presume
them where there is little or no indication.
[31] The strongest evidences of this feeling are exhibited in
Herodotus, iii. 48; viii. 105. See an example of this mutilation
inflicted upon a youth named Adamas by the Thracian king Kotys,
in Aristot. Polit. v. 8, 12, and the tale about the Corinthian
Periander, Herod. iii. 48.
It is an instance of the habit, so frequent among the Attic
tragedians, of ascribing Asiatic or Phrygian manners to the
Trojans, when Sophoclês in his lost play Troilus (ap. Jul.
Poll. x. 165) introduced one of the characters of his drama as
having been castrated by order of Hecuba, Σκαλμῇ γὰρ ὄρχεις
βασιλὶς ἐκτέμνουσ᾽ ἐμούς,—probably the Παιδαγωγὸς, or guardian
and companion of the youthful Troilus. See Welcker, Griechisch.
Tragöd. vol. i. p. 125.
[32] Herodot. viii. 105, εὐνοῦχοι. Lucian, De Deâ Syriâ, c. 50.
Strabo, xiv. pp. 640-641.
[33] Diodôr. v. 64. Strabo, x. p. 460. Hoeckh, in his learned
work Krêta (vol. i. books 1 and 2), has collected all the
information attainable respecting the early influences of Phrygia
and Asia Minor upon Krête: nothing seems ascertainable except the
general fact; all the particular evidences are lamentably vague.
The worship of the Diktæan Zeus seemed to have originally
belonged to the Eteokrêtes, who were not Hellens, and were more
akin to the Asiatic population than to the Hellenic. Strabo, x.
p. 478. Hoeckh, Krêta, vol. i. p. 139.
[34] Hesiod, Theogon. 161,
Αἶψα δὲ ποιήσασα γένος πολιοῦ ἀδάμαντος,
Τεῦξε μέγα δρέπανον, etc.
See the extract from the old poem _Phorônis_ ap. Schol. Apoll.
Rhod. 1129; and Strabo, x. p. 472.
As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of gods by prefixing the
dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theogony lengthened
it still further.[35] First came Chronos, or Time, as a person, after
him Æthêr and Chaos, out of whom Chronos produced the vast mundane egg.
Hence emerged in process of time the first-born god Phanês, or Mêtis,
or Hêrikapæos, a person of double sex, who first generated the Kosmos,
or mundane system, and who carried within him the seed of the gods.
He gave birth to Nyx, by whom he begat Uranos and Gæa; as well as to
Hêlios and Selêne.[36]
[35] See the scanty fragments of the Orphic theogony in Hermann's
edition of the Orphica, pp. 448, 504, which it is difficult to
understand and piece together, even with the aid of Lobeck's
elaborate examination (Aglaophamus, p. 470, etc.). The passages
are chiefly preserved by Proclus and the later Platonists,
who seem to entangle them almost inextricably with their own
philosophical ideas.
The first few lines of the Orphic Argonautica contain a brief
summary of the chief points of the theogony.
[36] See Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 472-476, 490-500, Μῆτιν σπέρμα
φέροντα θεῶν κλυτὸν Ἠρικεπαῖον; again, Θῆλυς καὶ γενέτωρ κρατερὸς
θεὸς Ἠρικέπαιος. Compare Lactant. iv. 8, 4: Suidas, v. Φάνης:
Athenagoras, xx. 296: Diodôr. i. 27.
This egg figures, as might be expected, in the cosmogony set
forth by the Birds, Aristophan. Av. 695. Nyx gives birth to an
egg, out of which steps the golden Erôs, from Erôs and Chaos
spring the race of birds.
From Uranos and Gæa sprang the three Mœræ, or Fates, the three
Centimanes and the three Cyclôpes: these latter were cast by Uranos
into Tartarus, under the foreboding that they would rob him of his
dominion. In revenge for this maltreatment of her sons, Gæa produced of
herself the fourteen Titans, seven male and seven female: the former
were Kœos, Krios, Phorkys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperiôn and Iapetos;
the latter were Themis, Têthys, Mnêmosynê, Theia, Diônê, Phœbê and
Rhea.[37] They received the name of Titans because they avenged upon
Uranos the expulsion of their elder brothers. Six of the Titans, headed
by Kronos the most powerful of them all, conspiring against Uranos,
castrated and dethroned him: Oceanus alone stood aloof and took no part
in the aggression. Kronos assumed the government and fixed his seat
on Olympos; while Oceanus remained apart, master of his own divine
stream.[38] The reign of Kronos was a period of tranquillity and
happiness, as well as of extraordinary longevity and vigor.
[37] Lobeck, Ag. p. 504. Athenagor. xv. p. 64.
[38] Lobeck, Ag. p. 507. Plato, Timæus, p. 41. In the Διονύσου
τρόφοι of Æschylus, the old attendants of the god Dionysos were
said to have been cut up and boiled in a caldron, and rendered
again young, by Medeia. Pherecydês and Simonidês said that Jasôn
himself had been so dealt with. Schol. Aristoph. Equit. 1321.
Kronos and Rhea gave birth to Zeus and his brothers and sisters. The
concealment and escape of the infant Zeus, and the swallowing of the
stone by Kronos, are given in the Orphic Theogony substantially in
the same manner as by Hesiod, only in a style less simple and more
mysticized. Zeus is concealed in the cave of Nyx, the seat of Phanês
himself, along with Eidê and Adrasteia, who nurse and preserve him,
while the armed dance and sonorous instruments of the Kurêtes prevent
his infant cries from reaching the ears of Kronos. When grown up, he
lays a snare for his father, intoxicates him with honey, and having
surprised him in the depth of sleep, enchains and castrates him.[39]
Thus exalted to the supreme mastery, he swallowed and absorbed into
himself Mêtis, or Phanês, with all the preëxisting elements of things,
and then generated all things anew out of his own being and conformably
to his own divine ideas.[40] So scanty are the remains of this system,
that we find it difficult to trace individually the gods and goddesses
sprung from Zeus beyond Apollo, Dionysos, and Persephonê,—the latter
being confounded with Artemis and Hekatê.
[39] Lobeck, p. 514. Porphyry, de Antro Nympharum, c. 16. φησὶ
γὰρ παρ᾽ Ὀρφεῖ ἡ Νὺξ, τῷ Διῒ ὑποτιθεμένη τὸν διὰ τοῦ μέλιτος
δόλον,
Εὖτ᾽ ἂν δή μιν ἴδηαι ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ὑψικόμοισι
Ἔργοισιν μεθύοντα μελισσάων ἐριβόμβων,
Αὔτικά μιν δῆσον.
Ὃ καὶ πάσχει ὁ Κρόνος καὶ δεθεὶς ἐκτέμνεται, ὡς Οὐρανός.
Compare Timæus ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 983.
[40] The Cataposis of Phanês by Zeus one of the most memorable
points of the Orphic Theogony. Lobeck, p. 519.; also Fragm. vi.
p. 456 of Hermann's Orphica.
From this absorption and subsequent reproduction of all things by
Zeus, flowed the magnificent string of Orphic predicates about
him,—
Ζεὺς ἀρχὴ, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται,—
an allusion to which is traceable even in Plato, de Legg. iv. p.
715. Plutarch, de Defectu Oracul. T. ix. p. 379. c. 48. Diodôrus
(i. 11) is the most ancient writer remaining to us who mentions
the name of Phanês, in a line cited as proceeding from Orpheus;
wherein, however, Phanês is identified with Dionysos. Compare
Macrobius, Saturnal. i. 18.
But there is one new personage, begotten by Zeus, who stands
preëminently marked in the Orphic Theogony, and whose adventures
constitute one of its peculiar features. Zagreus, "the horned child,"
is the son of Zeus by his own daughter Persephonê: he is the favorite
of his father, a child of magnificent promise, and predestined, if he
grow up, to succeed to supreme dominion as well as to the handling
of the thunderbolt. He is seated, whilst an infant, on the throne
beside Zeus, guarded by Apollo and the Kurêtes. But the jealous Hêrê
intercepts his career and incites the Titans against him, who, having
first smeared their faces with plaster, approach him on the throne,
tempt his childish fancy with playthings, and kill him with a sword
while he is contemplating his face in a mirror. They then cut up his
body and boil it in a caldron, leaving only the heart, which is picked
up by Athênê and carried to Zeus, who in his wrath strikes down the
Titans with thunder into Tartarus; whilst Apollo is directed to collect
the remains of Zagreus and bury them at the foot of Mount Parnassus.
The heart is given to Semelê, and Zagreus is born again from her under
the form of Dionysos.[41]
[41] About the tale of Zagreus, see Lobeck, p. 552, _sqq._ Nonnus
in his Dionysiaca has given many details about it:—
Ζαγρέα γειναμένη κέροεν βρέφος, etc. (vi. 264).
Clemens Alexandrin. Admonit. ad Gent. p. 11, 12, Sylb. The story
was treated both by Callimachus and by Euphoriôn, Etymolog. Magn.
v. Ζαγρεὺς, Schol. Lycophr. 208. In the old epic poem Alkmæônis
or Epigoni, Zagreus is a surname of Hadês. See Fragm. 4, p. 7,
ed. Düntzer. Respecting the Orphic Theogony generally, Brandis
(Handbuch der Geschichte der Griechisch-Römisch. Philosophie,
c. xvii., xviii.), K. O. Müller (Prolegg. Mythol. pp. 379-396),
and Zoega (Abhandlungen, v. pp. 211-263) may be consulted with
much advantage. Brandis regards this Theogony as _considerably
older_ than the first Ionic philosophy, which is a higher
antiquity than appears probable: some of the ideas which it
contains, such, for example, as that of the Orphic egg, indicate
a departure from the string of purely personal generations
which both Homer and Hesiod exclusively recount, and a resort
to something like physical analogies. On the whole, we cannot
reasonably claim for it more than half a century above the age of
Onomakritus. The Theogony of Pherekydês of Syros seems to have
borne some analogy to the Orphic. See Diogen. Laërt. i. 119,
Sturz. Fragment. Pherekyd. § 5-6, Brandis, Handbuch, _ut sup._ c.
xxii. Pherekydês partially deviated from the mythical track or
personal successions set forth by Hesiod. ἐπεὶ οἵ γε ~μεμιγμένοι~
αὐτῶν καὶ ~τῷ μὴ μυθικῶς~ ἅπαντα λέγειν, οἷον Φερεκύδης καὶ
ἑτεροί τινες, etc. (Aristot. Metaphys. N. p. 301, ed. Brandis).
Porphyrias, de Antro Nymphar. c. 31, καὶ τοῦ Συρίου Φερεκύδου
μυχοὺς καὶ βόθρους καὶ ἄντρα καὶ θύρας καὶ πύλας λέγοντος, καὶ
διὰ τούτων αἰνιττομένου τὰς τῶν ψυχῶν γενέσεις καὶ ἀπογενέσεις,
etc. Eudêmus the Peripatetic, pupil of Aristotle, had drawn up
an account of the Orphic Theogony as well as of the doctrines of
Pherekydês, Akusilaus and others, which was still in the hands of
the Platonists of the fourth century, though it is now lost. The
extracts which we find seem all to countenance the belief that
the Hesiodic Theogony formed the basis upon which they worked.
See about Akusilaus, Plato, Sympos. p. 178. Clem. Alex. Strom. p.
629.
Such is the tissue of violent fancies comprehended under the title of
the Orphic Theogony, and read as such, it appears, by Plato, Isokratês
and Aristotle. It will be seen that it is based upon the Hesiodic
Theogony, but according to the general expansive tendency of Grecian
legend, much new matter is added: Zeus has in Homer one predecessor, in
Hesiod two, and in Orpheus four.
The Hesiodic Theogony, though later in date than the Iliad and Odyssey,
was coeval with the earliest period of what may be called Grecian
history, and certainly of an age earlier than 700 B. C. It appears to
have been widely circulated in Greece, and being at once ancient and
short, the general public consulted it as their principal source of
information respecting divine antiquity. The Orphic Theogony belongs to
a later date, and contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, enlarged and
mystically disguised: its vein of invention was less popular, adapted
more to the contemplation of a sect specially prepared than to the
taste of a casual audience, and it appears accordingly to have obtained
currency chiefly among purely speculative men.[42] Among the majority
of these latter, however, it acquired greater veneration, and above all
was supposed to be of greater antiquity, than the Hesiodic. The belief
in its superior antiquity (disallowed by Herodotus, and seemingly also
by Aristotle[43]), as well as the respect for its contents, increased
during the Alexandrine age and through the declining centuries of
Paganism, reaching its maximum among the New-Platonists of the third
and fourth century after Christ: both the Christian assailants, as
well as the defenders, of paganism, treated it as the most ancient and
venerable summary of the Grecian faith. Orpheus is celebrated by Pindar
as the harper and companion of the Argonautic maritime heroes: Orpheus
and Musæus, as well as Pamphôs and Olên, the great supposed authors
of theogonic, mystical, oracular, and prophetic verses and hymns,
were generally considered by literary Greeks as older than either
Hesiod or Homer:[44] and such was also the common opinion of modern
scholars until a period comparatively recent. It has now been shown,
on sufficient ground, that the compositions which passed under these
names emanate for the most part from poets of the Alexandrine age, and
subsequent to the Christian æra; and that even the earliest among them,
which served as the stock on which the later additions were engrafted,
belong to a period far more recent than Hesiod; probably to the century
preceding Onomakritus (B. C. 610-510). It seems, however, certain,
that both Orpheus and Musæus were names of established reputation at
the time when Onomakritus flourished; and it is distinctly stated by
Pausanias that the latter was himself the author of the most remarkable
and characteristic mythe of the Orphic Theogony—the discerption of
Zagreus by the Titans, and his resurrection as Dionysos.[45]
[42] The Orphic Theogony is never cited in the ample Scholia on
Homer, though Hesiod is often alluded to. (See Lobeck, Aglaoph.
p. 540). Nor can it have been present to the minds of Xenophanês
and Herakleitus, as representing any widely diffused Grecian
belief: the former, who so severely condemned Homer and Hesiod,
would have found Orpheus much more deserving of his censure: and
the latter could hardly have omitted Orpheus from his memorable
denunciation:—Πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει· Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε
καὶ Πυθαγόρην, αὖτις δὲ Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον. Diog. Laër.
ix. 1. Isokratês treats Orpheus as the most censurable of all
the poets. See Busiris, p. 229; ii. p. 309, Bekk. The Theogony
of Orpheus, as conceived by Apollônius Rhodius (i. 504) in the
third century B. C., and by Nigidius in the first century B.
C. (Servius ad Virgil. Eclog. iv. 10), seems to have been on a
more contracted scale than that which is given in the text. But
neither of them notice the tale of Zagreus, which we know to be
as old as Onomakritus.
[43] This opinion of Herodotus is implied in the remarkable
passage about Homer and Hesiod, ii. 53, though he never once
names Orpheus—only alluding once to "Orphic ceremonies," ii. 81.
He speaks more than once of the prophecies of Musæus. Aristotle
denied the past existence and reality of Orpheus. See Cicero de
Nat. Deor. i. 38.
[44] Pindar Pyth. iv. 177. Plato seems to consider Orpheus as
more ancient than Homer. Compare Theætêt. p. 179; Cratylus, p.
402; De Republ. ii. p. 364. The order in which Aristophanês (and
Hippias of Elis, ap. Clem. Alex. Str. vi. p. 624) mentions them
indicates the same view, Ranæ, 1030. It is unnecessary to cite
the later chronologers, among whom the belief in the antiquity
of Orpheus was universal; he was commonly described as son of
the Muse Calliopê. Androtiôn seems to have denied that he was
a Thracian, regarding the Thracians as incurably stupid and
illiterate. Androtiôn, Fragm. 36, ed. Didot. Ephorus treated
him as having been a pupil of the Idæan Dactyls of Phrygia (see
Diodôr. v. 64), and as having learnt from them his τελετὰς and
μυστήρια, which he was the first to introduce into Greece. The
earliest mention which we find of Orpheus, is that of the poet
Ibycus (about B. C. 530), ὀνομάκλυτον Ὀρφῆν. Ibyci Fragm. 9, p.
341, ed. Schneidewin.
[45] Pausan. viii. 37, 3. Τιτᾶνας δὲ πρῶτον ἐς ποίησιν ἐσήγαγεν
Ὅμηρος, θεοὺς εἶναι σφᾶς ὑπὸ τῷ καλουμένῳ Ταρτάρῳ· καὶ ἔστιν
ἐν Ἡρᾶς ὅρκῳ τὰ ἔπη· παρὰ δὲ Ὁμήρου Ὀνομάκριτος, παραλαβὼν τῶν
Τιτάνων τὸ ὄνομα, Διονύσῳ τε συνέθηκεν ὄργια, καὶ εἶναι τοὺς
Τιτᾶνας τῷ Διονύσῳ τῶν παθημάτων ἐποίησεν αὐτουργούς. Both
the date, the character and the function of Onomakritus are
distinctly marked by Herodotus, vii. 6.
The names of Orpheus and Musæus (as well as that of Pythagoras,[46]
looking at one side of his character) represent facts of importance
in the history of the Grecian mind—the gradual influx of Thracian,
Phrygian, and Egyptian, religious ceremonies and feelings, and the
increasing diffusion of special mysteries,[47] schemes for religious
purification, and orgies (I venture to anglicize the Greek word,
which contains in its original meaning no implication of the ideas
of excess to which it was afterwards diverted) in honor of some
particular god—distinct both from the public solemnities and from the
gentile solemnities of primitive Greece,—celebrated apart from the
citizens generally, and approachable only through a certain course of
preparation and initiation—sometimes even forbidden to be talked of in
the presence of the uninitiated, under the severest threats of divine
judgment. Occasionally such voluntary combinations assumed the form
of permanent brotherhoods, bound together by periodical solemnities
as well as by vows of an ascetic character: thus the Orphic life (as
it was called) or regulation of the Orphic brotherhood, among other
injunctions partly arbitrary and partly abstinent, forbade animal food
universally, and on certain occasions, the use of woollen clothing.[48]
The great religious and political fraternity of the Pythagoreans,
which acted so powerfully on the condition of the Italian cities, was
one of the many manifestations of this general tendency, which stands
in striking contrast with the simple, open-hearted, and demonstrative
worship of the Homeric Greeks.
[46] Herodotus believed in the derivation both of the Orphic and
Pythagorean regulations from Egypt—ὁμολογέουσι δὲ ταῦτα τοῖσι
Ὀρφικοῖσι καλεομένοισι καὶ Βακχικοῖσι, ἐοῦσι δὲ Αἰγυπτίοισι
(ii. 81). He knows the names of those Greeks who have borrowed
from Egypt the doctrine of the metempsychosis, but he will not
mention them (ii. 123): he can hardly allude to any one but
the Pythagoreans, many of whom he probably knew in Italy. See
the curious extract from Xenophanês respecting the doctrine of
Pythagoras, Diogen. Laërt. viii. 37; and the quotation from the
Silli of Timôn, Πυθαγόραν δὲ γοήτος ἀποκλίναντ᾽ ἐπὶ δόξαν, etc.
Compare Porphyr. in Vit. Pythag. c. 41.
[47] Aristophan. Ran. 1030.—
Ὀρφεὺς μὲν γὰρ τελετάς θ᾽ ἡμῖν κατέδειξε, φόνων τ᾽ ἀπέχεσθαι·
Μουσαῖος τ᾽, ἐξακέσεις τε νόσων καὶ χρησμούς· Ἡσίοδος δὲ,
Γῆς ἐργασίας, καρπῶν ὥρας, ἀρότους· ὁ δὲ θεῖος Ὅμηρος
Ἀπὸ τοῦ τιμὴν καὶ κλέος ἔσχεν, πλὴν τοῦθ᾽, ὅτι χρήστ᾽ ἐδίδασκεν,
Ἀρετὰς, τάξεις, ὁπλίσεις ἀνδρῶν; etc.
The same general contrast is to be found in Plato, Protagoras,
p. 316; the opinion of Pausanias, ix. 30, 4. The poems of Musæus
seem to have borne considerable analogy to the Melampodia
ascribed to Hesiod (see Clemen. Alex. Str. vi. p. 628); and
healing charms are ascribed to Orpheus as well as to Musæus. See
Eurip. Alcestis, 986.
[48] Herod. ii. 81; Euripid. Hippol. 957, and the curious
fragment of the lost Κρῆτες of Euripidês. Ὀρφικοὶ βίοι, Plato,
Legg. vii. 782.
Festivals at seed-time and harvest—at the vintage and at the opening
of the new wine—were doubtless coeval with the earliest habits of the
Greeks; the latter being a period of unusual joviality. Yet in the
Homeric poems, Dionysos and Dêmêtêr, the patrons of the vineyard and
the cornfield, are seldom mentioned, and decidedly occupy little place
in the imagination of the poet as compared with the other gods: nor are
they of any conspicuous importance even in the Hesiodic Theogony. But
during the interval between Hesiod and Onomakritus, the revolution in
the religious mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities
in the front rank. According to the Orphic doctrine, Zagreus, son of
Persephonê, is destined to be the successor of Zeus, and although the
violence of the Titans intercepts this lot, yet even when he rises
again from his discerption under the name of Dionysos, he is the
colleague and coëqual of his divine father.
This remarkable change, occurring as it did during the sixth and a
part of the seventh century before the Christian æra, may be traced
to the influence of communication with Egypt (which only became
fully open to the Greeks about B. C. 660), as well as with Thrace,
Phrygia, and Lydia. From hence new religious ideas and feelings were
introduced, which chiefly attached themselves to the characters of
Dionysos and Dêmêtêr. The Greeks identified these two deities with the
great Egyptian Osiris and Isis, so that what was borrowed from the
Egyptian worship of the two latter naturally fell to their equivalents
in the Grecian system.[49] Moreover the worship of Dionysos (under
what name cannot be certainly made out) was indigenous in Thrace,[50]
as that of the Great Mother was in Phyrgia, and in Lydia—together
with those violent ecstasies and manifestations of temporary frenzy,
and that clashing of noisy instruments, which we find afterwards
characterizing it in Greece. The great masters of the pipe—as well as
the dythyramb,[51] and indeed the whole musical system appropriated to
the worship of Dionysos, which contrasted so pointedly with the quiet
solemnity of the Pæan addressed to Apollo—were all originally Phrygian.
[49] Herodot. ii. 42, 59, 144.
[50] Herodot. v. 7, vii. 111; Euripid. Hecub. 1249, and Rhêsus,
969, and the Prologue to the Bacchæ; Strabo, x. p. 470; Schol.
ad Aristophan. Aves, 874; Eustath. ad Dionys. Perieg. 1069;
Harpocrat. v. Σάβοι; Photius, Εὐοῖ Σαβοῖ. The "Lydiaca" of Th.
Menke (Berlin, 1843) traces the early connection between the
religion of Dionysos and that of Cybelê, c. 6, 7. Hoeckh's Krêta
(vol. i. p. 128-134) is instructive respecting the Phrygian
religion.
[51] Aristotle, Polit. viii. 7, 9. Πᾶσα γὰρ Βάκχεια καὶ πᾶσα ἡ
τοιαύτη κίνησις μάλιστα τῶν ὀργάνων ἐστὶν ἐν τοῖς αὐλοῖς· τῶν δ᾽
ἁρμονίων ἐν τοῖς Φρυγιστὶ μέλεσι λαμβάνει ταῦτα τὸ πρέπον, οἷον ὁ
διθύραμβος δοκεῖ ὁμολογουμένως εἶναι Φρύγιον. Eurip. Bacch. 58.—
Αἴρεσθε τἀπιχώρι᾽ ἐν πόλει Φρυγῶν
Τύμπανα, Ῥέας τε μητρὸς ἐμὰ θ᾽ εὑρήματα, etc.
Plutarch, Εἰ. in Delph. c. 9; Philochor. Fr. 21, ed. Didot,
p. 389. The complete and intimate manner in which Euripidês
identifies the Bacchic rites of Dionysos with the Phrygian
ceremonies in honor of the Great Mother, is very remarkable. The
fine description given by Lucretius (ii. 600-640) of the Phrygian
worship is much enfeebled by his unsatisfactory allegorizing.
From all these various countries, novelties, unknown to the Homeric
men, found their way into the Grecian worship: and there is one amongst
them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the
generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions
many persons guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled
either to go into exile or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he
never once describes any of them to have either received or required
purification for the crime.[52] Now in the time subsequent to Homer,
purification for homicide comes to be considered as indispensable:
the guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of man or the
worship of the gods until he has received it, and special ceremonies
are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us
that the ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and
among the Greeks:[53] we know that it formed no part of the early
religion of the latter, and we may perhaps reasonably suspect that
they borrowed it from the former. The oldest instance known to us of
expiation for homicide was contained in the epic poem of the Milesian
Arktinus,[54] wherein Achillês is purified by Odysseus for the
murder of Thersitês: several others occurred in the later or Hesiodic
epic—Hêraklês, Pêleus, Bellerophôn, Alkmæôn, Amphiktyôn, Pœmander,
Triopas,—from whence they probably passed through the hands of the
logographers to Apollodôrus, Diodôrus, and others.[55] The purification
of the murderer was originally operated, not by the hands of any priest
or specially sanctified man, but by those of a chief or king, who goes
through the appropriate ceremonies in the manner recounted by Herodotus
in his pathetic narrative respecting Crœsus and Adrastus.
[52] Schol. ad Iliad, xi. 690—οὐ διὰ τὰ καθάρσια Ἰφίτου πορθεῖται
ἡ Πύλος, ἐπεί τοι Ὀδυσσεὺς μείζων Νέστορος, καὶ παρ᾽ Ὁμήρῳ οὐκ
οἴδαμεν φονέα καθαιρόμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ἀντιτίνοντα ἢ φυγαδευόμενον.
The examples are numerous, and are found both in the Iliad and
the Odyssey. Iliad, ii. 665 (_Tlêpolemos_); xiii. 697 (_Medôn_);
xiii. 574 (_Epeigeus_); xxiii. 89 (_Patroclos_); Odyss. xv.
224 (_Theoclymenos_); xiv. 380 (an _Ætôlian_). Nor does the
interesting mythe respecting the functions of Atê and the Litæ
harmonize with the subsequent doctrine about the necessity of
purification. (Iliad, ix. 498).
[53] Herodot. i. 35—ἔστι δὲ παραπλησίη ἡ κάθαρσις τοῖσι Λυδοῖσι
καὶ τοῖσι Ἕλλησι. One remarkable proof, amongst many, of the deep
hold which this idea took of the greatest minds in Greece, that
serious mischief would fall upon the community if family quarrels
or homicide remained without religious expiation, is to be found
in the objections which Aristotle urges against the community of
women proposed in the Platonic Republic. It could not be known
what individuals stood in the relation of father, son or brother:
if, therefore, wrong or murder of kindred should take place, the
appropriate religious atonements (αἱ νομιζόμεναι λύσεις) could
not be applied, and the crime would go unexpiated. (Aristot.
Polit. ii. 1, 14. Compare Thucyd. i. 125-128).
[54] See the Fragm. of the Æthiopis of Arktinus, in Düntzer's
Collection, p. 16.
[55] The references for this are collected in Lobeck's
Aglaophamos. Epimetr. ii. ad Orphica, p. 968.
The idea of a special taint of crime, and of the necessity as well
as the sufficiency of prescribed religious ceremonies as a means of
removing it, appears thus to have got footing in Grecian practice
subsequent to the time of Homer. The peculiar rites or orgies,
composed or put together by Onomakritus, Methapus,[56] and other men
of more than the ordinary piety, were founded upon a similar mode
of thinking, and adapted to the same mental exigencies. They were
voluntary religious manifestations, superinduced upon the old public
sacrifices of the king or chiefs on behalf of the whole society, and
of the father on his own family hearth—they marked out the details of
divine service proper to appease or gratify the god to whom they were
addressed, and to procure for the believers who went through them his
blessings and protection here or hereafter—the exact performance of
the divine service in all its specialty was held necessary, and thus
the priests or Hierophants, who alone were familiar with the ritual,
acquired a commanding position.[57] Generally speaking, these peculiar
orgies obtained their admission and their influence at periods of
distress, disease, public calamity and danger, or religious terror
and despondency, which appear to have been but too frequent in their
occurrence.
[56] Pausanias (iv. 1, 5)—μετεκόσμησε γὰρ καὶ Μέθαπος τῆς
τελετῆς (the Eleusinian Orgies, carried by Kaukon from Eleusis
into Messênia), ἔστιν ἅ. Ὁ δὲ Μέθαπος γένος μὲν ἦν Ἀθηναῖος,
τελετῆς τε καὶ ~ὀργίων παντοίων συνθέτης~. Again, viii. 37,
3, Onomakritus Διονύσῳ ~συνέθηκεν~ ὄργια, etc. This is another
expression designating the same idea as the Rhêsus of Euripidês,
944.—
Μυστηρίων τε τῶν ἀποῤῥήτων φάνας
Ἔδειξεν Ὀρφεύς.
[57] Têlinês, the ancestor of the Syracusan despot Gelô,
acquired great political power as possessing τὰ ἱρὰ τῶν χθονίων
θεῶν (Herodot. vii. 153); he and his family became hereditary
Hierophants of these ceremonies. How Têlinês acquired the ἱρὰ
Herodotus cannot say—ὅθεν δὲ ἀυτὰ ἔλαβε, ἢ αὐτὸς ἐκτήσατο, τοῦτο
οὐκ ἔχω εἶπαι. Probably there was a traditional legend, not
inferior in sanctity to that of Eleusis, tracing them to the gift
of Dêmêtêr herself.
The minds of men were prone to the belief that what they were suffering
arose from the displeasure of some of the gods, and as they found
that the ordinary sacrifices and worship were insufficient for their
protection, so they grasped at new suggestions proposed to them with
the view of regaining the divine favor.[58] Such suggestions were more
usually copied, either in whole or in part, from the religious rites
of some foreign locality, or from some other portion of the Hellenic
world; and in this manner many new sects or voluntary religious
fraternities, promising to relieve the troubled conscience and to
reconcile the sick or suffering with the offended gods, acquired
permanent establishment as well as considerable influence. They were
generally under the superintendence of hereditary families of priests,
who imparted the rites of confirmation and purification to communicants
generally; no one who went through the prescribed ceremonies being
excluded. In many cases, such ceremonies fell into the hands of
jugglers, who volunteered their services to wealthy men, and degraded
their profession as well by obtrusive venality as by extravagant
promises:[59] sometimes the price was lowered to bring them within
reach of the poor and even of slaves. But the wide diffusion, and the
number of voluntary communicants of these solemnities, proves how much
they fell in with the feeling of the time and how much respect they
enjoyed—a respect, which the more conspicuous establishments, such
as Eleusis and Samothrace, maintained for several centuries. And the
visit of the Kretan Epimenidês to Athens—in the time of Solôn, and at a
season of the most serious disquietude and dread of having offended the
gods—illustrates the tranquillizing effect of new orgies[60] and rites
of absolution, when enjoined by a man standing high in the favor of
the gods and reputed to be the son of a nymph. The supposed Erythræan
Sibyl, and the earliest collection of Sibylline prophecies,[61]
afterwards so much multiplied and interpolated, and referred (according
to Grecian custom) to an age even earlier than Homer, appear to belong
to a date not long posterior to Epimenidês. Other oracular verses, such
as those of Bakis, were treasured up in Athens and other cities: the
sixth century before the Christian æra was fertile in these kinds of
religious manifestations.
[58] See Josephus cont. Apiôn. ii. c. 35; Hesych. Θεοὶ ξένιοι;
Strabo, x. p. 471; Plutarch, Περὶ Δεισιδαιμον. c. iii. p. 166; c.
vii. p. 167.
[59] Plato, Republ. ii. p. 364; Demosthen. de Coronâ, c. 79,
p. 313. The δεισιδαίμων of Theophrastus cannot be comfortable
without receiving the Orphic communion monthly from the
Orpheotelestæ (Theophr. Char. xvi.). Compare Plutarch, Περὶ τοῦ
μὴ χρᾶν ἔμμετρα, etc., c. 25, p. 400. The comic writer Phrynichus
indicates the existence of these rites of religious excitement,
at Athens, during the Peloponnesian war. See the short fragment
of his Κρόνος, ap. Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 989—
Ἀνὴρ χορεύει, καὶ τὰ τοῦ καλῶς·
Βούλει Διοπείθη μεταδράμω καὶ τύμπανα;
Diopeithês was a χρησμόλογος, or collector and deliverer of
prophecies, which he sung (or rather, perhaps, recited) with
solemnity and emphasis, in public. ὥστε ποιοῦντες χρησμοὺς αὐτοὶ
Διδόασ᾽ ᾄδειν Διοπείθει τῷ παραμαινομένῷ. (Ameipsias ap. Schol.
Aristophan. _ut sup._, which illustrates Thucyd. ii. 21).
[60] Plutarch, Solôn, c. 12; Diogen. Laërt. i. 110.
[61] See Klausen, "Æneas und die Penaten:" his chapter on the
connection between the Grecian and Roman Sibylline collections
is among the most ingenious of his learned book. Book ii. pp.
210-240; see Steph. Byz. v. Γέργις.
To the same age belong the χρησμοὶ and καθαρμοὶ of Abaris and his
marvellous journey through the air upon an arrow (Herodot. iv.
36).
Epimenidês also composed καθαρμοὶ in epic verse; his Κουρήτων
and Κορυβάντων γένεσις, and his four thousand verses respecting
Minôs and Rhadamanthys, if they had been preserved, would let us
fully into the ideas of a religious mystic of that age respecting
the antiquities of Greece. (Strabo, x. p. 474; Diogen. Laërt. i.
10). Among the poems ascribed to Hesiod were comprised not only
the Melampodia, but also ἔπη μαντικὰ and ἐξηγήσεις ἐπὶ τέρασιν.
Pausan. ix. 31, 4.
Amongst the special rites and orgies of the character just described,
those which enjoyed the greatest Pan-Hellenic reputation were attached
to the Idæan Zeus in Krête, to Dêmêtêr at Eleusis, to the Kabeiri in
Samothrace, and to Dionysos at Delphi and Thebes.[62] That they were
all to a great degree analogous, is shown by the way in which they
unconsciously run together and become confused in the minds of various
authors: the ancient inquirers themselves were unable to distinguish
one from the other, and we must be content to submit to the like
ignorance. But we see enough to satisfy us of the general fact, that
during the century and a half which elapsed between the opening of
Egypt to the Greeks and the commencement of their struggle with the
Persian kings, the old religion was largely adulterated by importations
from Egypt, Asia Minor,[63] and Thrace. The rites grew to be more
furious and ecstatic, exhibiting the utmost excitement, bodily as well
as mental: the legends became at once more coarse, more tragical, and
less pathetic. The manifestations of this frenzy were strongest among
the women, whose religious susceptibilities were often found extremely
unmanageable,[64] and who had everywhere congregative occasional
ceremonies of their own, apart from the men—indeed, in the case of the
colonists, especially of the Asiatic colonists, the women had been
originally women of the country, and as such retained to a great degree
their non-Hellenic manners and feelings.[65] The god Dionysos,[66]
whom the legends described as clothed in feminine attire, and leading
a troop of frenzied women, inspired a temporary ecstasy, and those who
resisted the inspiration, being supposed to disobey his will, were
punished either by particular judgments or by mental terrors; while
those who gave full loose to the feeling, in the appropriate season and
with the received solemnities, satisfied his exigencies, and believed
themselves to have procured immunity from such disquietudes for the
future.[67] Crowds of women, clothed with fawn-skins and bearing the
sanctified thyrsus, flocked to the solitudes of Parnassus, or Kithærôn,
or Taygetus, during the consecrated triennial period, passed the
night there with torches, and abandoned themselves to demonstrations
of frantic excitement, with dancing and clamorous invocation of the
god: they were said to tear animals limb from limb, to devour the raw
flesh, and to cut themselves without feeling the wound.[68] The men
yielded to a similar impulse by noisy revels in the streets, sounding
the cymbals and tambourine, and carrying the image of the god in
procession.[69] It deserves to be remarked, that the Athenian women
never practised these periodical mountain excursions, so common among
the rest of the Greeks: they had their feminine solemnities of the
Thesmophoria,[70] mournful in their character and accompanied with
fasting, and their separate congregations at the temples of Aphroditê,
but without any extreme or unseemly demonstrations. The state festival
of the Dionysia, in the city of Athens, was celebrated with dramatic
entertainments, and the once rich harvest of Athenian tragedy and
comedy was thrown up under its auspices. The ceremonies of the Kurêtes
in Krête, originally armed dances in honor of the Idæan Zeus, seem also
to have borrowed from Asia so much of fury, of self-infliction, and
of mysticism, that they became at last inextricably confounded with
the Phrygian Korybantes or worshippers of the Great Mother; though it
appears that Grecian reserve always stopped short of the irreparable
self-mutilation of Atys.
[62] Among other illustrations of this general resemblance, may
be counted an epitaph of Kallimachus upon an aged priestess,
who passed from the service of Dêmêtêr to that of the Kabeiri,
then to that of Cybelê, having the superintendence of many young
women. Kallimachus, Epigram. 42. p. 308, ed. Ernest.
[63] Plutarch, (Defect. Oracul. c. 10, p. 415) treats these
countries as the original seat of the worship of Dæmons (wholly
or partially bad, and intermediate between gods and men), and
their religious ceremonies as of a corresponding character: the
Greeks were borrowers from them, according to him, both of the
doctrine and of the ceremonies.
[64] Strabo, vii. p. 297. Ἅπαντες γὰρ τῆς δεισιδαιμονίας ἀρχηγοὺς
οἴονται τὰς γυναῖκας· αὐταὶ δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἄνδρας προκαλοῦνται ἐς
τὰς ἐπὶ πλέον θεραπείας τῶν θεῶν, καὶ ἑορτὰς, καὶ ποτνιασμούς.
Plato (De Legg. x. pp. 909, 910) takes great pains to restrain
this tendency on the part of sick or suffering persons,
especially women, to introduce new sacred rites into his city.
[65] Herodot. i. 146. The wives of the Ionic original settlers at
Miletos were Karian women, whose husbands they slew.
The violences of the Karian worship are attested by what
Herodotus says of the Karian residents in Egypt, at the festival
of Isis at Busiris. The Egyptians at this festival manifested
their feeling by beating themselves, the Karians by cutting their
faces with knives (ii. 61). The Καρικὴ μοῦσα became proverbial
for funeral wailings (Plato, Legg. vii. p. 800): the unmeasured
effusions and demonstrations of sorrow for the departed, some
times accompanied by cutting and mutilation self-inflicted by the
mourner was a distinguishing feature in Asiatics and Egyptians
as compared with Greeks. Plutarch, Consolat. ad Apollôn. c. 22,
p. 123. Mournful feeling was, in fact, a sort of desecration of
the genuine and primitive Grecian festival, which was a season
of cheerful harmony and social enjoyment, wherein the god was
believed to sympathize (εὐφροσύνη). See Xenophanes ap. Aristot.
Rhetor. ii. 25; Xenophan. Fragm. 1. ed. Schneidewin; Theognis,
776; Plutarch, De Superstit. p. 169. The unfavorable comments
of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in so far as they refer to the
festivals of Greece, apply to the foreign corruptions, not to the
native character, of Grecian worship.
[66] The Lydian Hêraklês was conceived and worshipped as a man in
female attire: this idea occurs often in the Asiatic religions.
Mencke, Lydiaca, c. 8, p. 22. Διόνυσος ἄῤῥην καὶ θῆλυς. Aristid.
Or. iv. p. 28; Æschyl. Fragm. Edoni, ap. Aristoph. Thesmoph. 135.
Ποδαπὸς ὁ γύννις; τίς πάτρα; τίς ἡ στολή;
[67] Melampos cures the women (whom Dionysos has struck mad for
their resistance to his rites), παραλαβὼν τοὺς δυνατωτάτους τῶν
νεανίων μετ᾽ ἀλαλαγμοῦ καί τινος ἐνθέου χορείας. Apollodôr. ii.
2, 7. Compare Eurip. Bacch. 861.
Plato (Legg. vii. p. 790) gives a similar theory of the
healing effect of the Korybantic rites, which cured vague and
inexplicable terrors of the mind by means of dancing and music
conjoined with religious ceremonies—αἱ τὰ τῶν Κορυβάντων ἰάματα
τελοῦσαι (the practitioners were women), αἱ τῶν ἐκφρόνων Βακχείων
ἰάσεις—ἡ τῶν ἔξωθεν κρατεῖ κίνησις προσφερομένη τὴν ἐντὸς φοβερὰν
οὖσαν καὶ μανικὴν κίνησιν—ὀρχουμένους δὲ καὶ αὐλουμένους μετὰ
θεῶν, οἷς ἂν καλλιερήσαντες ἕκαστοι θύωσιν, κατειργάσατο ἀντὶ
μανικῶν ἡμῖν διαθέσεων ἕξεις ἔμφρονας ἔχειν.
[68] Described in the Bacchæ of Euripidês (140, 735, 1135,
etc.). Ovid, Trist. iv. i. 41. "Utque suum Bacchis non sentit
saucia vulnus, Cum furit Edonis exululata jugis." In a fragment
of the poet Alkman, a Lydian by birth, the Bacchanal nymphs are
represented as milking the lioness, and making cheese of the
milk, during their mountain excursions and festivals. (Alkman.
Fragm. 14. Schn. Compare Aristid. Orat. iv. p. 29). Clemens
Alexand. Admonit. ad Gent. p. 9, Sylb.; Lucian, Dionysos, c. 3,
T. iii. p. 77, Hemsterh.
[69] See the tale of Skylês in Herod. iv. 79, and Athenæus, x. p.
445. Herodotus mentions that the Scythians abhorred the Bacchic
ceremonies, accounting the frenzy which belonged to them to be
disgraceful and monstrous.
[70] Plutarch, De Isid. et Osir. c. 69, p. 378; Schol. ad
Aristoph. Thesmoph. There were however Bacchic ceremonies
practised to a certain extent by the Athenian women. (Aristoph.
Lysist. 388).
The influence of the Thracian religion upon that of the Greeks cannot
be traced in detail, but the ceremonies contained in it were of a
violent and fierce character, like the Phrygian, and acted upon Hellas
in the same general direction as the latter. And the like may be said
of the Egyptian religion, which was in this case the more operative,
inasmuch as all the intellectual Greeks were naturally attracted to go
and visit the wonders on the banks of the Nile; the powerful effect
produced upon them is attested by many evidences, but especially by
the interesting narrative of Herodotus. Now the Egyptian ceremonies
were at once more licentious, and more profuse in the outpouring both
of joy and sorrow, than the Greek;[71] but a still greater difference
sprang from the extraordinary power, separate mode of life, minute
observances, and elaborate organization, of the priesthood. The
ceremonies of Egypt were multitudinous, but the legends concerning them
were framed by the priests, and as a general rule, seemingly, known
to the priests alone: at least they were not intended to be publicly
talked of, even by pious men. They were "holy stories," which it was
sacrilege publicly to mention, and which from this very prohibition
only took firmer hold of the minds of the Greek visitors who heard
them. And thus the element of secrecy and mystic silence—foreign to
Homer, and only faintly glanced at in Hesiod—if it was not originally
derived from Egypt, at least received from thence its greatest
stimulus and diffusion. The character of the legends themselves was
naturally affected by this change from publicity to secrecy: the
secrets when revealed would be such as to justify by their own tenor
the interdict on public divulgation: instead of being adapted, like
the Homeric mythe, to the universal sympathies and hearty interest of
a crowd of hearers, they would derive their impressiveness from the
tragical, mournful, extravagant, or terror-striking character of the
incidents.[72] Such a tendency, which appears explicable and probable
even on general grounds, was in this particular case rendered still
more certain by the coarse taste of the Egyptian priests. That any
recondite doctrine, religious or philosophical, was attached to the
mysteries or contained in the holy stories, has never been shown,
and is to the last degree improbable though the affirmative has been
asserted by many learned men.
[71] "Ægyptiaca numina fere plangoribus gaudent, Græca plerumque
choreis, barbara autem strepitu cymbalistarum et tympanistarum
et choraularum." (Apuleius, De Genio Socratis, v. ii. p. 149,
Oudend).
[72] The legend of Dionysos and Prosymnos, as it stands in
Clemens, could never have found place in an epic poem (Admonit.
ad Gent. p. 22, Sylb.). Compare page 11 of the same work,
where however he so confounds together Phrygian, Bacchic, and
Eleusinian mysteries, that one cannot distinguish them apart.
Demêtrius Phalêreus says about the legends belonging to
these ceremonies—Διὸ καὶ τὰ μυστήρια λέγεται ἐν ἀλληγορίαις
~πρὸς ἔκπληξιν καὶ φρίκην~, ὥσπερ ἐν σκότῳ καὶ νυκτί. (De
Interpretatione, c. 101).
Herodotus seems to have believed that the worship and ceremonies of
Dionysos generally were derived by the Greeks from Egypt, brought
over by Kadmus and taught by him to Melampus: and the latter appears
in the Hesiodic Catalogue as having cured the daughters of Prœtus of
the mental distemper with which they had been smitten by Dionysos for
rejecting his ritual. He cured them by introducing the Bacchic dance
and fanatical excitement: this mythical incident is the most ancient
mention of the Dionysiac solemnities presented in the same character
as they bear in Euripidês. It is the general tendency of Herodotus
to apply the theory of derivation from Egypt far too extensively to
Grecian institutions: the orgies of Dionysos were not originally
borrowed from thence, though they may have been much modified by
connection with Egypt as well as with Asia. The remarkable mythe
composed by Onomakritus respecting the dismemberment of Zagreus was
founded upon an Egyptian tale very similar respecting the body of
Osiris, who was supposed to be identical with Dionysos:[73] nor was it
unsuitable to the reckless fury of the Bacchanals during their state of
temporary excitement, which found a still more awful expression in the
mythe of Pentheus,—torn in pieces by his own mother Agavê at the head
of her companions in the ceremony, as an intruder upon the feminine
rites as well as a scoffer at the god.[74] A passage in the Iliad (the
authenticity of which has been contested, but even as an interpolation
it must be old)[75] also recounts how Lykurgus was struck blind by Zeus
for having chased away with a whip "the nurses of the mad Dionysos,"
and frightened the god himself into the sea to take refuge in the arms
of Thetis: and the fact, that Dionysos is so frequently represented in
his mythes as encountering opposition and punishing the refractory,
seems to indicate that his worship under its ecstatic form was a late
phænomenon and introduced not without difficulty. The mythical Thracian
Orpheus was attached as Eponymos to a new sect, who seem to have
celebrated the ceremonies of Dionysos with peculiar care, minuteness
and fervor, besides observing various rules in respect to food and
clothing. It was the opinion of Herodotus, that these rules, as well as
the Pythagorean, were borrowed from Egypt. But whether this be the fact
or not, the Orphic brotherhood is itself both an evidence, and a cause,
of the increased importance of the worship of Dionysos, which indeed is
attested by the great dramatic poets of Athens.
[73] See the curious treatise of Plutarch, De Isid. et Osirid.
c. 11-14. p. 356, and his elaborate attempt to allegorize the
legend. He seems to have conceived that the Thracian Orpheus had
first introduced into Greece the mysteries both of Dêmêtêr and
Dionysos, copying them from those of Isis and Osiris in Egypt.
See Fragm. 84, from one of his lost works, tom, v. p. 891, ed.
Wyttenb.
[74] Æschylus had dramatized the story of Pentheus as well as
that of Lykurgus: one of his tetralogies was the Lykurgeia
(Dindorf, Æsch. Fragm. 115). A short allusion to the story of
Pentheus appears in Eumenid. 25. Compare Sophocl. Antigon. 985,
and the Scholia.
[75] Iliad, vi. 130. See the remarks of Mr. Payne Knight _ad loc._
The Homeric Hymns present to us, however, the religious ideas and
legends of the Greeks at an earlier period, when the enthusiastic and
mystic tendencies had not yet acquired their full development. Though
not referable to the same age or to the same author as either the
Iliad or the Odyssey, they do to a certain extent continue the same
stream of feeling, and the same mythical tone and coloring, as these
poems—manifesting but little evidence of Egyptian, Asiatic, or Thracian
adulterations. The difference is striking between the god Dionysos
as he appears in the Homeric hymn and in the Bacchæ of Euripidês.
The hymnographer describes him as standing on the sea-shore, in the
guise of a beautiful and richly-clothed youth, when Tyrrhenian pirates
suddenly approach: they seize and bind him and drag him on board
their vessel. But the bonds which they employ burst spontaneously,
and leave the god free. The steersman, perceiving this with affright,
points out to his companions that they have unwittingly laid hands
on a god,—perhaps Zeus himself, or Apollo, or Poseidôn. He conjures
them to desist, and to replace Dionysos respectfully on the shore,
lest in his wrath he should visit the ship with wind and hurricane:
but the crew deride his scruples, and Dionysos is carried prisoner
out to sea with the ship under full sail. Miraculous circumstances
soon attest both his presence and his power. Sweet-scented wine is
seen to flow spontaneously about the ship, the sail and mast appear
adorned with vine and ivy-leaves, and the oar-pegs with garlands. The
terrified crew now too late entreat the helmsman to steer his course
for the shore, and crowd round him for protection on the poop. But
their destruction is at hand: Dionysos assumes the form of a lion—a
bear is seen standing near him—this bear rushes with a loud roar upon
the captain, while the crew leap overboard in their agony of fright,
and are changed into dolphins. There remains none but the discreet
and pious steersman, to whom Dionysos addresses words of affectionate
encouragement, revealing his name, parentage and dignity.[76]
[76] See Homer, Hymn 5, Διόνυσος ἢ Λῆσται.—The satirical drama
of Euripidês, the Cyclôps, extends and alters this old legend.
Dionysos is carried away by the Tyrrhenian pirates, and Silênus
at the head of the Bacchanals goes everywhere in search of him
(Eur. Cyc. 112). The pirates are instigated against him by the
hatred of Hêrê, which appears frequently as a cause of mischief
to Dionysos (Bacchæ, 286). Hêrê in her anger had driven him mad
when a child, and he had wandered in this state over Egypt and
Syria; at length he came to Cybela in Phrygia, was purified
(καθαρθεὶς) by Rhea, and received from her female attire
(Apollodôr. iii. 5, 1, with Heyne's note). This seems to have
been the legend adopted to explain the old verse of the Iliad, as
well as the maddening attributes of the god generally.
There was a standing antipathy between the priestesses and the
religious establishments of Hêrê and Dionysos (Plutarch, Περὶ
τῶν ἐν Πλαταίαις Δαιδάλων, c. 2, tom. v. p. 755, ed. Wytt).
Plutarch ridicules the legendary reason commonly assigned for
this, and provides a symbolical explanation which he thinks very
satisfactory.
This hymn, perhaps produced at the Naxian festival of Dionysos,
and earlier than the time when the dithyrambic chorus became the
established mode of singing the praise and glory of that god, is
conceived in a spirit totally different from that of the Bacchic
Telatæ, or special rites which the Bacchæ of Euripidês so abundantly
extol,—rites introduced from Asia by Dionysos himself at the head of a
thiasus or troop of enthusiastic women,—inflaming with temporary frenzy
the minds of the women of Thebes,—not communicable except to those
who approach as pious communicants,—and followed by the most tragical
results to all those who fight against the god.[77] The Bacchic Teletæ,
and the Bacchic feminine frenzy, were importations from abroad,
as Euripidês represents them, engrafted upon the joviality of the
primitive Greek Dionysia; they were borrowed, in all probability, from
more than one source and introduced through more than one channel, the
Orphic life or brotherhood being one of the varieties. Strabo ascribes
to this latter a Thracian original, considering Orpheus, Musæus, and
Eumolpus as having been all Thracians.[78] It is curious to observe
how, in the Bacchæ of Euripidês, the two distinct and even conflicting
ideas of Dionysos come alternately forward; sometimes the old Grecian
idea of the jolly and exhilarating god of wine—but more frequently
the recent and imported idea of the terrific and irresistible god
who unseats the reason, and whose _œstrus_ can only be appeased by a
willing, though temporary obedience. In the fanatical impulse which
inspired the votaries of the Asiatic Rhea or Cybelê, or of the Thracian
Kotys, there was nothing of spontaneous joy; it was a sacred madness,
during which the soul appeared to be surrendered to a stimulus from
without, and accompanied by preternatural strength and temporary sense
of power,[79]—altogether distinct from the unrestrained hilarity of the
original Dionysia, as we see them in the rural demes of Attica, or in
the gay city of Tarentum. There was indeed a side on which the two bore
some analogy, inasmuch as, according to the religious point of view of
the Greeks, even the spontaneous joy of the vintage feast was conferred
by the favor and enlivened by the companionship of Dionysos. It was
upon this analogy that the framers of the Bacchic orgies proceeded
but they did not the less disfigure the genuine character of the old
Grecian Dionysia.
[77] Eurip. Bacch. 325, 464, etc.
[78] Strabo, x. p. 471. Compare Aristid. Or. iv. p. 28.
[79] In the lost _Xantriæ_ of Æschylus, in which seems to
have been included the tale of Pentheus, the goddess Λύσσα
was introduced, stimulating the Bacchæ, and creating in them
spasmodic excitement from head to foot: ἐκ ποδῶν δ᾽ ἄνω Ὑπέρχεται
σπαραγμὸς εἰς ἄκρον κάρα, etc. (Fragm. 155, Dindorf). His tragedy
called _Edoni_ also gave a terrific representation of the
Bacchanals and their fury, exaggerated by the maddening music:
Πίμπλησι μέλος, Μανίας ἐπαγωγὸν ὁμοκλάν (Fr. 54).
Such also is the reigning sentiment throughout the greater
part of the Bacchæ of Euripidês; it is brought out still more
impressively in the mournful Atys of Catullus:—
"Dea magna, Dea Cybele, Dindymi Dea, Domina,
Procul a meâ tuus sit furor omnis, hera, domo:
Alios age incitatos: alios age rabidos!"
We have only to compare this fearful influence with the
description of Dikæopolis and his exuberant joviality in the
festival of the rural Dionysia (Aristoph. Acharn. 1051 _seq._;
see also Plato. Legg. i. p. 637), to see how completely the
foreign innovations recolored the old Grecian Dionysos,—Διόνυσος
πολυγηθὴς,—who appears also in the scene of Dionysos and Ariadnê
in the Symposion of Xenophôn, c. 9. The simplicity of the ancient
Dionysiac processions is dwelt upon by Plutarch, De Cupidine
Divitiarum, p. 527; and the original dithyramb addressed by
Archilochus to Dionysos is an effusion of drunken hilarity
(Archiloch. Frag. 69, Schneid.).
Dionysos is in the conception of Pindar the Paredros or companion in
worship of Dêmêtêr:[80] the worship and religious estimate of the
latter has by that time undergone as great a change as that of the
former, if we take our comparison with the brief description of Homer
and Hesiod: she has acquired[81] much of the awful and soul-disturbing
attributes of the Phrygian Cybelê. In Homer, Dêmêtêr is the goddess
of the corn-field, who becomes attached to the mortal man Jasiôn;
an unhappy passion, since Zeus, jealous of the connection between
goddesses and men, puts him to death. In the Hesiodic Theogony, Dêmêtêr
is the mother of Persephonê by Zeus, who permits Hadês to carry off
the latter as his wife: moreover Dêmêtêr has, besides, by Jasiôn a son
called Plutos, born in Krête. Even from Homer to Hesiod, the legend
of Dêmêtêr, has been expanded and her dignity exalted; according
to the usual tendency of Greek legend, the expansion goes on still
further. Through Jasiôn, Dêmêtêr becomes connected with the mysteries
of Samothrace; through Persephonê, with those of Eleusis. The former
connection it is difficult to follow out in detail, but the latter is
explained and traced to its origin in the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr.
[80] Pindar, Isthm. vi. 3. χαλκοκρότου πάρεδρον Δημήτερος,—the
epithet marks the approximation of Dêmêtêr to the Mother of the
Gods. ᾗ κροτάλων τυπάνων τ᾽ ἰαχὴ, σύν τε βρόμος αὐλῶν Εὔαδεν
(Homer. Hymn, xiii.),—the Mother of the Gods was worshipped by
Pindar himself along with Pan; she had in his time her temple and
ceremonies at Thêbes (Pyth. iii. 78; Fragm. Dithyr. 5, and the
Scholia _ad l._) as well as, probably, at Athens (Pausan. i. 3,
3).
Dionysos and Dêmêtêr are also brought together in the chorus of
Sophoklês, Antigonê, 1072. μέδεις δὲ παγκοίνοις Ἐλευσινίας Δηοῦς
ἐν κόλποις; and in Kallimachus, Hymn. Cerer. 70. Bacchus or
Dionysos are in the Attic tragedians constantly confounded with
the Dêmêtrian Iacchos, originally so different,—a personification
of the mystic word shouted by the Eleusinian communicants. See
Strabo, x. p. 468.
[81] Euripidês in his Chorus in the Helena (1320 _seq._) assigns
to Dêmêtêr all the attributes of Rhea, and blends the two
completely into one.
Though we find different statements respecting the date as well as
the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, yet the popular belief of
the Athenians, and the story which found favor at Eleusis, ascribed
them to the presence and dictation of the goddess Dêmêtêr herself;
just as the Bacchic rites are, according to the Bacchæ of Euripidês,
first communicated and enforced on the Greeks by the personal visit of
Dionysos to Thêbes, the metropolis of the Bacchic ceremonies.[82] In
the Eleusinian legend, preserved by the author of the Homeric Hymn,
she comes voluntarily and identifies herself with Eleusis; her past
abode in Krête being briefly indicated.[83] Her visit to Eleusis is
connected with the deep sorrow caused by the loss of her daughter
Persephonê, who had been seized by Hadês, while gathering flowers in
a meadow along with the Oceanic Nymphs, and carried off to become his
wife in the under-world. In vain did the reluctant Persephonê shriek
and invoke the aid of her father Zeus: he had consented to give her to
Hadês, and her cries were heard only by Hekatê and Hêlios. Dêmêtêr was
inconsolable at the disappearance of her daughter, but knew not where
to look for her: she wandered for nine days and nights with torches in
search of the lost maiden without success. At length Hêlios, the "spy
of gods and men," revealed to her, in reply to her urgent prayer, the
rape of Persephonê, and the permission given to Hadês by Zeus. Dêmêtêr
was smitten with anger and despair: she renounced Zeus and the society
of Olympus, abstained from nectar and ambrosia, and wandered on earth
in grief and fasting until her form could no longer be known. In this
condition she came to Eleusis, then governed by the prince Keleos.
Sitting down by a well at the wayside in the guise of an old woman, she
was found by the daughters of Keleos, who came hither with their pails
of brass for water. In reply to their questions, she told them that she
had been brought by pirates from Krête to Thorikos, and had made her
escape; she then solicited from them succor and employment as a servant
or as a nurse. The damsels prevailed upon their mother Metaneira
to receive her, and to entrust her with the nursing of the young
Dêmophoôn, their late-born brother, the only son of Keleos. Dêmêtêr was
received into the house of Metaneira, her dignified form still borne
down by grief: she sat long silent and could not be induced either to
smile or to taste food, until the maid-servant Iambê, by jests and
playfulness, succeeded in amusing and rendering her cheerful. She would
not taste wine, but requested a peculiar mixture of barley-meal with
water and the herb mint.[84]
[82] Sophocl. Antigon. Βακχᾶν μητρόπολιν Θήβαν.
[83] Homer, Hymn. Cerer. 123. The Hymn to Dêmêtêr has been
translated, accompanied with valuable illustrative notes, by J.
H. Voss (Heidelb. 1826).
[84] Homer, Hymn. Cerer. 202-210.
The child Dêmophoôn, nursed by Dêmêtêr, throve and grew up like a
god, to the delight and astonishment of his parents: she gave him no
food, but anointed him daily with ambrosia, and plunged him at night
in the fire like a torch, where he remained unburnt. She would have
rendered him immortal, had she not been prevented by the indiscreet
curiosity and alarm of Metaneira, who secretly looked in at night, and
shrieked with horror at the sight of her child in the fire.[85] The
indignant goddess, setting the infant on the ground, now revealed her
true character to Metaneira: her wan and aged look disappeared, and she
stood confest in the genuine majesty of her divine shape, diffusing
a dazzling brightness which illuminated the whole house. "Foolish
mother," she said, "thy want of faith has robbed thy son of immortal
life. I am the exalted Dêmêtêr, the charm and comfort both of gods and
men: I was preparing for thy son exemption from death and old age; now
it cannot be but he must taste of both. Yet shall he be ever honored,
since he has sat upon my knee and slept in my arms. Let the people
of Eleusis erect for me a temple and altar on yonder hill above the
fountain; I will myself prescribe to them the orgies which they must
religiously perform in order to propitiate my favor."[86]
[85] This story was also told with reference to the Egyptian
goddess Isis in her wanderings. See Plutarch, De Isid. et Osirid.
c. 16, p. 357.
[86] Homer, Hymn. Cerer. 274.—
Ὄργια δ᾽ αὐτὴ ἐγὼν ὑποθήσομαι, ὡς ἂν ἔπειτα
Εὐαγέως ἕρδοντες ἐμὸν νόον ἱλάσκησθε.
The same story is told in regard to the infant Achilles. His
mother Thetis was taking similar measures to render him immortal,
when his father Pêleus interfered and prevented the consummation.
Thetis immediately left him in great wrath (Apollôn. Rhod. iv.
866).
The terrified Metaneira was incapable even of lifting up her child
from the ground; her daughters entered at her cries, and began to
embrace and tend their infant brother, but he sorrowed and could not
be pacified for the loss of his divine nurse. All night they strove to
appease the goddess.[87]
[87] Homer, Hymn. 290.—
τοῦ δ᾽ οὐ μειλίσσετο θυμὸς,
Χειρότεραι γὰρ δή μιν ἔχον τρόφοι ἠδὲ τιθῆναι.
Strictly executing the injunctions of Dêmêtêr, Keleos convoked the
people of Eleusis and erected the temple on the spot which she had
pointed out. It was speedily completed, and Dêmêtêr took up her abode
in it,—apart from the remaining gods, still pining with grief for the
loss of her daughter, and withholding her beneficent aid from mortals.
And thus she remained a whole year,—a desperate and terrible year:[88]
in vain did the oxen draw the plough, and in vain was the barley-seed
cast into the furrow,—Dêmêtêr suffered it not to emerge from the earth.
The human race would have been starved, and the gods would have been
deprived of their honors and sacrifice, had not Zeus found means to
conciliate her. But this was a hard task; for Dêmêtêr resisted the
entreaties of Iris and of all the other goddesses and gods whom Zeus
successively sent to her. She would be satisfied with nothing less than
the recovery of her daughter. At length Zeus sent Hermês to Hadês, to
bring Persephonê away: Persephonê joyfully obeyed, but Hadês prevailed
upon her before she departed to swallow a grain of pomegranate, which
rendered it impossible for her to remain the whole year away from
him.[89]
[88] Homer, H. Cer. 305.—
Αἰνότατον δ᾽ ἐνιαυτὸν ἐπὶ χθόνα πουλυβότειραν
Ποίησ᾽ ἀνθρώποις, ἰδὲ κύντατον.
[89] Hymn, v. 375.
With transport did Dêmêtêr receive back her lost daughter, and the
faithful Hekatê sympathized in the delight felt by both at the
reunion.[90] It was now an easier undertaking to reconcile her with
the gods. Her mother Rhea, sent down expressly by Zeus, descended from
Olympus on the fertile Rharan plain, then smitten with barrenness like
the rest of the earth: she succeeded in appeasing the indignation of
Dêmêtêr, who consented again to put forth her relieving hand. The
buried seed came up in abundance, and the earth was covered with fruit
and flowers. She would have wished to retain Persephonê constantly
with her, but this was impossible; and she was obliged to consent that
her daughter should go down for one-third of each year to the house of
Hadês, departing from her every spring at the time when the seed is
sown. She then revisited Olympus, again to dwell with the gods; but
before her departure, she communicated to the daughters of Keleos, and
to Keleos himself, together with Triptolemus, Dioklês and Eumolpus, the
divine service and the solemnities which she required to be observed in
her honor.[91] And thus began the venerable mysteries of Eleusis, at
her special command: the lesser mysteries, celebrated in February, in
honor of Persephonê; the greater, in August, to the honor of Dêmêtêr
herself. Both are jointly patronesses of the holy city and temple.
[90] Hymn, v. 443.
[91] Hymn, v. 475.—
Ἡ δὲ κιοῦσα θεμιστοπόλοις βασιλεῦσι
Δεῖξεν, Τριπτολέμῳ τε, Διοκλέϊ τε πληξίππῳ,
Εὐμόλπου τε βίῃ, Κελέῳ θ᾽ ἡγήτορι λαῶν,
Δρησμοσύνην ἱερῶν· καὶ ἐπέφραδεν ὄργια παισὶν
Πρεσβυτέρῃς Κελέοιο, etc.
Such is a brief sketch of the temple legend of Eleusis, set forth at
length in the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr. It is interesting not less as a
picture of the Mater Dolorosa (in the mouth of an Athenian, Dêmêtêr and
Persephonê were always the Mother and Daughter, by excellence), first
an agonized sufferer, and then finally glorified,—the weal and woe of
man being dependent upon her kindly feeling,—than as an illustration
of the nature and growth of Grecian legend generally. Though we now
read this Hymn as pleasing poetry, to the Eleusinians, for whom it
was composed, it was genuine and sacred history. They believed in the
visit of Dêmêtêr to Eleusis, and in the mysteries as a revelation from
her, as implicitly as they believed in her existence and power as a
goddess. The Eleusinian psalmist shares this belief in common with his
countrymen, and embodies it in a continuous narrative, in which the
great goddesses of the place, as well as the great heroic families,
figure in inseparable conjunction. Keleos is the son of the Eponymous
hero Eleusis, and his daughters, with the old epic simplicity, carry
their basins to the well for water. Eumolpus, Triptolemus, Dioklês,
heroic ancestors of the privileged families who continued throughout
the historical times of Athens to fulfil their special hereditary
functions in the Eleusinian solemnities, are among the immediate
recipients of inspiration from the goddess; but chiefly does she favor
Metaneira and her infant son Dêmophoôn, for the latter of whom her
greatest boon is destined, and intercepted only by the weak faith of
the mother. Moreover, every incident in the Hymn has a local coloring
and a special reference. The well, overshadowed by an olive-tree near
which Dêmêtêr had rested, the stream Kallichorus and the temple-hill,
were familiar and interesting places in the eyes of every Eleusinian;
the peculiar posset prepared from barley-meal with mint was always
tasted by the Mysts (or communicants) after a prescribed fast, as an
article in the ceremony,—while it was also the custom, at a particular
spot in the processional march, to permit the free interchange of
personal jokes and taunts upon individuals for the general amusement.
And these two customs are connected in the Hymn with the incidents,
that Dêmêtêr herself had chosen the posset as the first interruption of
her long and melancholy fast, and that her sorrowful thoughts had been
partially diverted by the coarse playfulness of the servant-maid Iambê.
In the enlarged representation of the Eleusinian ceremonies, which
became established after the incorporation of Eleusis with Athens, the
part of Iambê herself was enacted by a woman, or man in woman's attire,
of suitable wit and imagination, who was posted on the bridge over
the Kephissos, and addressed to the passers-by in the procession,[92]
especially the great men of Athens, saucy jeers, probably not less
piercing than those of Aristophanês on the stage. The torch-bearing
Hekatê received a portion of the worship in the nocturnal ceremonies
of the Eleusinia: this too is traced, in the Hymn, to her kind and
affectionate sympathy with the great goddesses.
[92] Aristophanês, Vesp. 1363. Hesych. v. Γεφυρίς. Suidas,
v. Γεφυρίζων. Compare about the details of the ceremony,
Clemens Alexandr. Admon. ad Gent. p. 13. A similar license of
unrestrained jocularity appears in the rites of Dêmêtêr in Sicily
(Diodôr. v. 4; see also Pausan. vii. 27, 4), and in the worship
of Damia and Auxesia at Ægina (Herodot. v. 83).
Though all these incidents were sincerely believed by the Eleusinians
as a true history of the past, and as having been the real initiatory
cause of their own solemnities, it is not the less certain that they
are simply mythes or legends, and not to be treated as history,
either actual or exaggerated. They do not take their start from
realities of the past, but from realities of the present, combined
with retrospective feeling and fancy, which fills up the blank of
the aforetime in a manner at once plausible and impressive. What
proportion of fact there may be in the legend, or whether there be
any at all, it is impossible to ascertain and useless to inquire;
for the story did not acquire belief from its approximation to real
fact, but from its perfect harmony with Eleusinian faith and feeling,
and from the absence of any standard of historical credibility. The
little town of Eleusis derived all its importance from the solemnity
of the Dêmêtria, and the Hymn which we have been considering (probably
at least as old as 600 B. C.) represents the town as it stood before
its absorption into the larger unity of Athens, which seems to have
produced an alteration of its legends and an increase of dignity in
its great festival. In the faith of an Eleusinian, the religious as
well as the patriotic antiquities of his native town were connected
with this capital solemnity. The divine legend of the sufferings of
Dêmêtêr and her visit to Eleusis was to him that which the heroic
legend of Adrastus and the Siege of Thêbes was to a Sikyonian, or
that of Erechtheus and Athênê to an Athenian grouping together in the
same scene and story the goddess and the heroic fathers of the town.
If our information were fuller, we should probably find abundance of
other legends respecting the Dêmêtria: the Gephyræi of Athens, to whom
belonged the celebrated Harmodios and Aristogeitôn, and who possessed
special Orgies of Dêmêtêr the Sorrowful, to which no man foreign to
their Gens was ever admitted,[93] would doubtless have told stories
not only different but contradictory; and even in other Eleusinian
mythes we discover Eumolpus as king of Eleusis, son of Poseidôn, and
a Thracian, completely different from the character which he bears in
the Hymn before us.[94] Neither discrepancies nor want of evidence, in
reference to alleged antiquities, shocked the faith of a non-historical
public. What they wanted was a picture of the past, impressive to their
feelings and plausible to their imagination; and it is important to
the reader to remember, while he reads either the divine legends which
we are now illustrating or the heroic legends to which we shall soon
approach, that he is dealing with a past which never was present,—a
region essentially mythical, neither approachable by the critic nor
mensurable by the chronologer.
[93] Herodot. v. 61.
[94] Pausan. i. 38, 3; Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4. Heyne in his
Note admits several persons named Eumolpus. Compare Isokratês,
Panegyr. p. 55. Philochorus the Attic antiquary could not have
received the legend of the Eleusinian Hymn, from the different
account which he gave respecting the rape of Persephonê (Philoch.
Fragm. 46, ed. Didot), and also respecting Keleos (Fr. 28,
_ibid._).
The tale respecting the visit of Dêmêtêr, which was told by the
ancient Gens, called the Phytalids,[95] in reference to another temple
of Dêmêtêr between Athens and Eleusis, and also by the Megarians in
reference to a Dêmêtrion near their city, acquired under the auspices
of Athens still further extension. The goddess was reported to have
first communicated to Triptolemus at Eleusis the art of sowing corn,
which by his intervention was disseminated all over the earth. And thus
the Athenians took credit to themselves for having been the medium of
communication from the gods to man of all the inestimable blessings
of agriculture, which they affirmed to have been first exhibited on
the fertile Rharian plain near Eleusis. Such pretensions are not to
be found in the old Homeric hymn. The festival of the Thesmophoria,
celebrated in honor of Dêmêtêr Thesmophoros at Athens, was altogether
different from the Eleusinia, in this material respect, as well as
others, that all males were excluded, and women only were allowed to
partake in it: the surname Thesmophoros gave occasion to new legends
in which the goddess was glorified as the first authoress of laws and
legal sanctions to mankind.[96] This festival, for women apart and
alone, was also celebrated at Paros, at Ephesus, and in many other
parts of Greece.[97]
[95] Phytalus, the Eponym or godfather of this gens, had received
Dêmêtêr as a guest in his house, when she first presented mankind
with the fruit of the fig-tree. (Pausan. i. 37, 2.)
[96] Kallimach. Hymn. Cerer. 19. Sophoklês, Triptolemos, Frag. 1.
Cicero, Legg. ii. 14, and the note of Servius ad Virgil. Æn. iv.
58.
[97] Herodot. vi. 16, 134. ἕρκος Θεσμοφόρου Δήμητρος—τὸ ἐς ἔρσενα
γόνον ἄῤῥητα ἱερά.
Altogether, Dêmêtêr and Dionysos, as the Grecian counterparts of the
Egyptian Isis and Osiris, seem to have been the great recipients of the
new sacred rites borrowed from Egypt, before the worship of Isis in
her own name was introduced into Greece: their solemnities became more
frequently recluse and mysterious than those of the other deities. The
importance of Dêmêtêr to the collective nationality of Greece may be
gathered from the fact that her temple was erected at Thermopylæ, the
spot where the Amphiktyonic assemblies were held, close by the temple
of the Eponymous hero Amphiktyôn himself, and under the surname of the
Amphiktyonic Dêmêtêr.[98]
[98] Herodot. vii. 200.
We now pass to another and not less important celestial
personage—Apollo.
The legends of Dêlos and Delphi, embodied in the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo, indicate, if not a greater dignity, at least a more widely
diffused worship of that god than even of Dêmêtêr. The Hymn is, in
point of fact, an aggregate of two separate compositions, one emanating
from an Ionic bard at Dêlos, the other from Delphi. The first details
the birth, the second the mature divine efficiency, of Apollo; but
both alike present the unaffected charm as well as the characteristic
peculiarities of Grecian mythical narrative. The hymnographer sings,
and his hearers accept in perfect good faith, a history of the past;
but it is a past, imagined partly as an introductory explanation to
the present, partly as a means of glorifying the god. The island
of Dêlos was the accredited birth-place of Apollo, and is also the
place in which he chiefly delights, where the great and brilliant
Ionic festival is periodically convened in his honor. Yet it is a
rock narrow, barren, and uninviting: how came so glorious a privilege
to be awarded to it? This the poet takes upon himself to explain.
Lêtô, pregnant with Apollo, and persecuted by the jealous Hêrê, could
find no spot wherein to give birth to her offspring. In vain did she
address herself to numerous places in Greece, the Asiatic coast and the
intermediate islands; all were terrified at the wrath of Hêrê, and
refused to harbor her. As a last resort, she approached the rejected
and repulsive island of Dêlos, and promised that, if shelter were
granted to her in her forlorn condition, the island should become the
chosen resort of Apollo as well as the site of his temple with its
rich accompanying solemnities.[99] Dêlos joyfully consented, but not
without many apprehensions that the potent Apollo would despise her
unworthiness, and not without exacting a formal oath from Lêtô,—who
was then admitted to the desired protection, and duly accomplished her
long and painful labor. Though Diônê, Rhea, Themis and Amphitritê came
to soothe and succor her, yet Hêrê kept away the goddess presiding
over childbirth, Eileithyia, and thus cruelly prolonged her pangs. At
length Eileithyia came, and Apollo was born. Hardly had Apollo tasted,
from the hands of Themis, the immortal food, nectar and ambrosia,
when he burst at once his infant bands, and displayed himself in full
divine form and strength, claiming his characteristic attributes
of the bow and the harp, and his privileged function of announcing
beforehand to mankind the designs of Zeus. The promise made by Lêtô to
Dêlos was faithfully performed: amidst the numberless other temples
and groves which men provided for him, he ever preferred that island
as his permanent residence, and there the Ionians with their wives
and children, and all their "bravery," congregated periodically from
their different cities to glorify him. Dance and song and athletic
contests adorned the solemnity, and the countless ships, wealth, and
grace of the multitudinous Ionians had the air of an assembly of gods.
The Delian maidens, servants of Apollo, sang hymns to the glory of
the god, as well as of Artemis and Lêtô, intermingled with adventures
of foregone men and women, to the delight of the listening crowd. The
blind itinerant bard of Chios (composer of this the Homeric hymn,
and confounded in antiquity with the author of the Iliad) had found
honor and acceptance at this festival, and commends himself, in a
touching farewell strain, to the remembrance and sympathy of the Delian
maidens.[100]
[99] According to another legend, Lêtô was said to have been
conveyed from the Hyperboreans to Dêlos in twelve days, in
the form of a she-wolf, to escape the jealous eye of Hêrê. In
connection with this legend, it was affirmed that the she-wolves
always brought forth their young only during these twelve days in
the year (Aristot. Hist. Animal. vii. 35).
[100] Hom. Hymn. Apoll. i. 179.
But Dêlos was not an oracular spot: Apollo did not manifest himself
there as revealer of the futurities of Zeus. A place must be found
where this beneficent function, without which mankind would perish
under the innumerable doubts and perplexities of life, may be exercised
and rendered available. Apollo himself descends from Olympus to
make choice of a suitable site: the hymnographer knows a thousand
other adventures of the god which he might sing, but he prefers this
memorable incident, the charter and patent of consecration for the
Delphian temple. Many different places did Apollo inspect; he surveyed
the country of the Magnêtes and the Perrhæbians, came to Iôlkos,
and passed over from thence to Eubœa and the plain of Lelanton. But
even this fertile spot did not please him: he crossed the Euripus to
Bœotia, passed by Teumêssus and Mykalêssus, and the then inaccessible
and unoccupied forest on which the city of Thêbes afterwards stood.
He next proceeded to Onchêstos, but the grove of Poseidôn was already
established there; next across the Kêphissus to Okalea, Haliartus,
and the agreeable plain and much-frequented fountain of Delphusa, or
Tilphusa. Pleased with the place, Apollo prepared to establish his
oracle there, but Tilphusa was proud of the beauty of her own site,
and did not choose that her glory should be eclipsed by that of the
god.[101] She alarmed him with the apprehension that the chariots
which contended in her plain, and the horses and mules which watered
at her fountain would disturb the solemnity of his oracle; and she
thus induced him to proceed onward to the southern side of Parnassus,
overhanging the harbor of Krissa. Here he established his oracle, in
the mountainous site not frequented by chariots and horses, and near to
a fountain, which however was guarded by a vast and terrific serpent,
once the nurse of the monster Typhaôn. This serpent Apollo slew with an
arrow, and suffered its body to rot in the sun: hence the name of the
place, Pythô,[102] and the surname of the Pythian Apollo. The plan of
his temple being marked out, it was built by Trophônios and Agamêdês,
aided by a crowd of forward auxiliaries from the neighborhood. He now
discovered with indignation, however, that Tilphusa had cheated him,
and went back with swift step to resent it. "Thou shalt not thus,"
he said, "succeed in thy fraud and retain thy beautiful water; the
glory of the place shall be mine, and not thine alone." Thus saying,
he tumbled down a crag upon the fountain, and obstructed her limpid
current: establishing an altar for himself in a grove hard by near
another spring, where men still worship him as Apollo Tilphusios,
because of his severe vengeance upon the once beautiful Tilphusa.[103]
[101] Hom. Hymn. Apoll. 262.
[102] Hom. Hymn. 363—πύθεσθαι, _to rot_.
[103] Hom. Hymn. Apoll. 381.
Apollo next stood in need of chosen ministers to take care of his
temple and sacrifice, and to pronounce his responses at Pythô.
Descrying a ship, "containing many and good men," bound on traffic from
the Minoian Knossus in Krête, to Pylus in Peloponnêsus, he resolved
to make use of the ship and her crew for his purpose. Assuming the
shape of a vast dolphin, he splashed about and shook the vessel so
as to strike the mariners with terror, while he sent a strong wind,
which impelled her along the coast of Peloponnêsus into the Corinthian
Gulf, and finally to the harbor of Krissa, where she ran aground.
The affrighted crew did not dare to disembark: but Apollo was seen
standing on the shore in the guise of a vigorous youth, and inquired
who they were, and what was their business. The leader of the Krêtans
recounted in reply their miraculous and compulsory voyage, when Apollo
revealed himself as the author and contriver of it, announcing to them
the honorable function and the dignified post to which he destined
them.[104] They followed him by his orders to the rocky Pythô on
Parnassus, singing the solemn Io-Paian such as it is sung in Krête,
while the god himself marched at their head, with his fine form and
lofty step, playing on the harp. He showed them the temple and site
of the oracle, and directed them to worship him as Apollo Delphinios,
because they had first seen him in the shape of a dolphin. "But how,"
they inquired, "are we to live in a spot where there is neither corn,
nor vine, nor pasturage?" "Ye silly mortals," answered the god, "who
look only for toil and privation, know that an easier lot is yours. Ye
shall live by the cattle whom crowds of pious visitors will bring to
the temple: ye shall need only the knife to be constantly ready for
sacrifice.[105] Your duty will be to guard my temple, and to officiate
as ministers at my feasts: but if ye be guilty of wrong or insolence,
either by word or deed, ye shall become the slaves of other men, and
shall remain so forever. Take heed of the word and the warning."
[104] Hom. Hymn. Apoll. 475 _sqq._
[105] Homer. Hymn. Apoll. 535.—
Δεξιτέρῃ μάλ᾽ ἕκαστος ἔχων ἐν χειρὶ μάχαιραν
Σφάζειν αἰεὶ μῆλα· τὰ δ᾽ ἄφθονα πάντα πάρεσται,
Ὅσσα ἐμοίγ᾽ ἀγάγωσι περίκλυτα φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων.
Such are the legends of Dêlos and Delphi, according to the Homeric Hymn
to Apollo. The specific functions of the god, and the chief localities
of his worship, together with the surnames attached to them, are
thus historically explained, being connected with his past acts and
adventures. Though these are to us only interesting poetry, yet to
those who heard them sung they possessed all the requisites of history,
and were fully believed as such, not because they were partially
founded in reality, but because they ran in complete harmony with the
feelings; and, so long as that condition was fulfilled, it was not
the fashion of the time to canvass truth or falsehood. The narrative
is purely personal, without any discernible symbolized doctrine or
allegory, to serve as a supposed ulterior purpose: the particular deeds
ascribed to Apollo grow out of the general preconceptions as to his
attributes, combined with the present realities of his worship. It is
neither history nor allegory, but simple mythe or legend.
The worship of Apollo is among the most ancient, capital, and strongly
marked facts of the Grecian world, and widely diffused over every
branch of the race. It is older than the Iliad or Odyssey, in the
latter of which both Pythô and Dêlos are noted, though Dêlos is not
named in the former. But the ancient Apollo is different in more
respects than one from the Apollo of later times. He is in an especial
manner the god of the Trojans, unfriendly to the Greeks, and especially
to Achilles; he has, moreover, only two primary attributes, his bow and
his prophetic powers, without any distinct connection either with the
harp, or with medicine, or with the sun, all which in later times he
came to comprehend. He is not only, as Apollo Karneius, the chief god
of the Doric race, but also (under the surname of Patrôus) the great
protecting divinity of the gentile tie among the Ionians:[106] he is
moreover the guide and stimulus to Grecian colonization, scarcely any
colony being ever sent out without encouragement and direction from the
oracle at Delphi: Apollo Archêgetês is one of his great surnames.[107]
His temple lends sanctity to the meetings of the Amphiktyonic assembly,
and he is always in filial subordination and harmony with his father
Zeus: Delphi and Olympia are never found in conflict. In the Iliad,
the warm and earnest patrons of the Greeks are Hêrê, Athênê, and
Poseidôn: here too Zeus and Apollo are seen in harmony, for Zeus is
decidedly well-inclined to the Trojans, and reluctantly sacrifices
them to the importunity of the two great goddesses.[108] The worship
of the Sminthian Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and the
neighboring territory, dates before the earliest periods of Æolic
colonization:[109] hence the zealous patronage of Troy ascribed to him
in the Iliad. Altogether, however, the distribution and partialities
of the gods in that poem are different from what they become in later
times,—a difference which our means of information do not enable us
satisfactorily to explain. Besides the Delphian temple, Apollo had
numerous temples throughout Greece, and oracles at Abæ in Phôkis, on
the Mount Ptôon, and at Tegyra in Bœotia, where he was said to have
been born,[110] at Branchidæ near Milêtus, at Klarus in Asia Minor, and
at Patara in Lykia. He was not the only oracular god: Zeus at Dodona
and at Olympia gave responses also: the gods or heroes Trophônius,
Amphiaraus, Amphilochus, Mopsus, etc., each at his own sanctuary and
in his own prescribed manner, rendered the same service.
[106] Harpocration v. Ἀπόλλων πατρῶος and Ἑρκεῖος Ζεύς. Apollo
Delphinios also belongs to the Ionic Greeks generally. Strabo,
iv. 179.
[107] Thucydid. vi. 3; Kallimach. Hymn. Apoll. 56.—
Φοῖβος γὰρ ἀεὶ πολίεσσι φιληδεῖ
Κτιζομέναις, αὐτὸς δὲ θεμείλια Φοῖβος ὑφαίνει.
[108] Iliad, iv. 30-46.
[109] Iliad, i. 38, 451; Stephan. Byz. Ἵλιον, Τένεδος. See also
Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, b. i. p. 69. The worship of
Apollo Sminthios and the festival of the Sminthia at Alexandria
Troas lasted down to the time of Menander the rhêtôr, at the
close of the third century after Christ.
[110] Plutarch. Defect. Oracul. c. 5, p. 412; c. 8, p. 414;
Steph. Byz. v. Τεγύρα. The temple of the Ptôan Apollo had
acquired celebrity before the days of the poet Asius. Pausan. ix.
23, 3.
The two legends of Delphi and Dêlos, above noticed, form of course
a very insignificant fraction of the narratives which once existed
respecting the great and venerated Apollo. They serve only as
specimens, and as very early specimens,[111] to illustrate what
these divine mythes were, and what was the turn of Grecian faith and
imagination. The constantly recurring festivals of the gods caused
an incessant demand for new mythes respecting them, or at least for
varieties and reproductions of the old mythes. Even during the third
century of the Christian æra, in the time of the rhêtôr Menander,
when the old forms of Paganism were waning and when the stock of
mythes in existence was extremely abundant, we see this demand in
great force; but it was incomparably more operative in those earlier
times when the creative vein of the Grecian mind yet retained its
pristine and unfaded richness. Each god had many different surnames,
temples, groves, and solemnities; with each of which was connected
more or less of mythical narrative, originally hatched in the prolific
and spontaneous fancy of a believing neighborhood, to be afterwards
expanded, adorned and diffused by the song of the poet. The earliest
subject of competition[112] at the great Pythian festival was the
singing of a hymn in honor of Apollo: other _agones_ were subsequently
added, but the ode or hymn constituted the fundamental attribute of
the solemnity: the Pythia at Sikyôn and elsewhere were probably framed
on a similar footing. So too at the ancient and celebrated Charitêsia,
or festival of the Charites, at Orchomenos, the rivalry of the poets
in their various modes of composition both began and continued as the
predominant feature:[113] and the inestimable treasures yet remaining
to us of Attic tragedy and comedy, are gleanings from the once numerous
dramas exhibited at the solemnity of the Dionysia. The Ephesians gave
considerable rewards for the best hymns in honor of Artemis, to be sung
at her temple.[114] And the early lyric poets of Greece, though their
works have not descended to us, devoted their genius largely to similar
productions, as may be seen by the titles and fragments yet remaining.
[111] The legend which Ephorus followed about the establishment
of the Delphian temple was something radically different from
the Homeric Hymn (Ephori Fragm. 70, ed. Didot): his narrative
went far to politicize and rationalize the story. The progeny of
Apollo was very numerous, and of the most diverse attributes; he
was father of the Korybantes (Pherekydes, Fragm. 6, ed. Didot),
as well as of Asklêpios and Aristæus (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii.
500; Apollodôr. iii. 10, 3).
[112] Strabo, ix. p. 421. Menander the Rhetor (Ap. Walz. Coll.
Rhett. t. ix. p. 136) gives an elaborate classification of hymns
to the gods, distinguishing them into nine classes,—κλητικοὶ,
ἀποπεμπτικοὶ, φυσικοὶ, μυθικοὶ, γενεαλογικοὶ, πεπλασμένοι,
εὐκτικοὶ, ἀπευκτικοὶ, μικτοί:—the second class had reference to
the temporary absences or departure of a god to some distant
place, which were often admitted in the ancient religion. Sappho
and Alkman in their _kletic_ hymns invoked the gods from many
different places,—τὴν μὲν γὰρ Ἄρτεμιν ἐκ μυρίων μὲν ὄρεων,
μυρίων δὲ πόλεων, ἔτι δὲ ποτάμων, ἀνακαλεῖ,—also Aphroditê and
Apollo, etc. All these songs were full of adventures and details
respecting the gods,—in other words of legendary matter.
[113] Pindar, Olymp. xiv.; Boeckh, Staatshaushaltung der Athener,
Appendix, § xx. p. 357.
[114] Alexander Ætolus, apud Macrobium, Saturn. v. 22.
Both the Christian and the Mahomedan religions have begun during the
historical age, have been propagated from one common centre, and have
been erected upon the ruins of a different pre-existing faith. With
none of these particulars did Grecian Paganism correspond. It took rise
in an age of imagination and feeling simply, without the restraints,
as well as without the aid, of writing or records, of history or
philosophy: it was, as a general rule, the spontaneous product of many
separate tribes and localities, imitation and propagation operating
as subordinate causes; it was moreover a primordial faith, as far as
our means of information enable us to discover. These considerations
explain to us two facts in the history of the early Pagan mind: first,
the divine mythes, the matter of their religion, constituted also
the matter of their earliest history; next, these mythes harmonized
with each other only in their general types, but differed incurably
in respect of particular incidents. The poet who sung a new adventure
of Apollo, the trace of which he might have heard in some remote
locality, would take care that it should be agreeable to the general
conceptions which his hearers entertained respecting the god. He would
not ascribe the cestus or amorous influences to Athênê, nor armed
interference and the ægis to Aphroditê; but, provided he maintained
this general keeping, he might indulge his fancy without restraint in
the particular events of the story.[115] The feelings and faith of
his hearers went along with him, and there were no critical scruples
to hold them back: to scrutinize the alleged proceedings of the gods
was repulsive, and to disbelieve them impious. And thus these divine
mythes, though they had their root simply in religious feelings, and
though they presented great discrepancies of fact, served nevertheless
as primitive matter of history to an early Greek: they were the only
narratives, at once publicly accredited and interesting, which he
possessed. To them were aggregated the heroic mythes (to which we shall
proceed presently),—indeed the two are inseparably blended, gods,
heroes and men almost always appearing in the same picture,—analogous
both in their structure and their genesis, and differing chiefly in the
circumstance that they sprang from the type of a hero instead of from
that of a god.
[115] The birth of Apollo and Artemis from Zeus and Lêtô is among
the oldest and most generally admitted facts in the Grecian
divine legends. Yet Æschylus did not scruple to describe Artemis
publicly as daughter of Dêmêtêr (Herodot. ii. 156; Pausan. viii.
37, 3). Herodotus thinks that he copied this innovation from the
Egyptians, who affirmed that Apollo and Artemis were the sons of
Dionysos and Isis.
The number and discrepancies of the mythes respecting each god
are attested by the fruitless attempts of learned Greeks to
escape the necessity of rejecting any of them by multiplying
homonymous personages,—three persons named Zeus; five named
Athênê; six named Apollo, etc. (Cicero. de Natur. Deor. iii. 21:
Clemen. Alexand. Admon. ad Gent. p. 17).
We are not to be astonished if we find Aphroditê, in the Iliad, born
from Zeus and Dionê,—and in the Theogony of Hesiod, generated from the
foam on the sea after the mutilation of Uranos; nor if in the Odyssey
she appears as the wife of Hêphæstos, while in the Theogony the latter
is married to Aglaia, and Aphroditê is described as mother of three
children by Arês.[116] The Homeric hymn to Aphroditê details the legend
of Aphroditê and Anchisês, which is presupposed in the Iliad as the
parentage of Æneas: but the author of the hymn, probably sung at one
of the festivals of Aphroditê in Cyprus, represents the goddess as
ashamed of her passion for a mortal, and as enjoining Anchisês under
severe menaces not to reveal who the mother of Æneas was;[117] while
in the Iliad she has no scruple in publicly owning him, and he passes
everywhere as her acknowledged son. Aphroditê is described in the hymn
as herself cold and unimpressible, but ever active and irresistible
in inspiring amorous feelings to gods, to men, and to animals. Three
goddesses are recorded as memorable exceptions to her universal
empire,—Athênê, Artemis, and Hestia or Vesta. Aphroditê was one of the
most important of all the goddesses in the mythical world; for the
number of interesting, pathetic and tragical adventures deducible from
misplaced or unhappy passion was of course very great; and in most
of these cases the intervention of Aphroditê was usually prefixed,
with some legend to explain why she manifested herself. Her range of
action grows wider in the later epic and lyric and tragic poets than in
Homer.[118]
[116] Hesiod, Theogon. 188, 934, 945; Homer, Iliad, v. 371;
Odyss. viii. 268.
[117] Homer, Hymn. Vener. 248, 286; Homer, Iliad, v. 320, 386.
[118] A large proportion of the Hesiodic epic related to the
exploits and adventures of the heroic women,—the Catalogue of
Women and the Eoiai embodied a string of such narratives. Hesiod
and Stesichorus explained the conduct of Helen and Klytæmnêstra
by the anger of Aphroditê, caused by the neglect of their
father Tyndareus to sacrifice to her (Hesiod, Fragm. 59, ed.
Düntzer; Stesichor. Fragm. 9, ed. Schneidewin): the irresistible
ascendency of Aphroditê is set forth in the Hippolytus of
Euripidês not less forcibly than that of Dionysos in the Bacchæ.
The character of Daphnis the herdsman, well-known from the first
Idyll of Theocritus, and illustrating the destroying force of
Aphroditê, appears to have been first introduced into Greek
poetry by Stesichorus (see Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, vol.
i. pp. 526-529). Compare a striking piece among the Fragmenta
Incerta of Sophoklês (Fr. 63, Brunck) and Euripid. Troad. 946,
995, 1048. Even in the Opp. et Di. of Hesiod, Aphroditê is
conceived rather as a disturbing and injurious influence (v. 65).
Adonis owes his renown to the Alexandrine poets and their
contemporary sovereigns (see Bion's Idyll and the Adoniazusæ of
Theocritus). The favorites of Aphroditê, even as counted up by
the diligence of Clemens Alexandrinus, are however very few in
number. (Admonitio ad Gent. p. 12, Sylb.)
Athênê, the man-goddess,[119] born from the head of Zeus, without
a mother and without feminine sympathies, is the antithesis
partly of Aphroditê, partly of the effeminate or womanized god
Dionysos—the latter is an importation from Asia, but Athênê is a Greek
conception—the type of composed, majestic and unrelenting force. It
appears however as if this goddess had been conceived in a different
manner in different parts of Greece. For we find ascribed to her, in
some of the legends, attributes of industry and home-keeping; she is
represented as the companion of Hêphæstos, patronizing handicraft, and
expert at the loom and the spindle: the Athenian potters worshipped
her along with Promêtheus. Such traits of character do not square with
the formidable ægis and the massive and crushing spear which Homer and
most of the mythes assign to her. There probably were at first at least
two different types of Athênê, and their coalescence has partially
obliterated the less marked of the two.[120] Athênê is the constant
and watchful protectress of Hêraklês: she is also locally identified
with the soil and people of Athens, even in the Iliad: Erechtheus, the
Athenian, is born of the earth, but Athênê brings him up, nourishes
him, and lodges him in her own temple, where the Athenians annually
worship him with sacrifice and solemnities.[121] It was altogether
impossible to make Erechtheus son of Athênê,—the type of the goddess
forbade it; but the Athenian mythe-creators, though they found this
barrier impassable, strove to approach to it as near as they could,
and the description which they give of the birth of Erichthonios, at
once un-Homeric and unseemly, presents something like the phantom of
maternity.[122]
[119] Ἀνδροθέᾳ δῶρον ... Ἀθάνᾳ Simmias Rhodius; Πέλεκυς, ap.
Hephæstion. c. 9. p. 54, Gaisford.
[120] Apollodôr. ap. Schol. ad Sophokl. Œdip. vol. 57; Pausan.
i. 24, 3; ix. 26, 3; Diodôr. v. 73; Plato, Legg. xi. p. 920. In
the Opp. et Di. of Hesiod, the carpenter is the servant of Athênê
(429): see also Phereklos the τέκτων in the Iliad, v. 61: compare
viii. 385; Odyss. viii. 493; and the Homeric Hymn, to Aphroditê,
v. 12. The learned article of O. Müller (in the Encyclopædia of
Ersch and Gruber, since republished among his Kleine Deutsche
Schriften, p. 134 _seq._), _Pallas Athênê_, brings together all
that can be known about this goddess.
[121] Iliad, ii. 546; viii. 362.
[122] Apollodôr. iii. 4, 6. Compare the vague language of Plato,
Kritias, c. iv., and Ovid, Metamorph. ii. 757.
The huntress Artemis, in Arcadia and in Greece proper generally,
exhibits a well-defined type with which the legends respecting her
are tolerably consistent. But the Ephesian as well as the Tauric
Artemis partakes more of the Asiatic character, and has borrowed the
attributes of the Lydian Great Mother as well as of an indigenous
Tauric Virgin:[123] this Ephesian Artemis passed to the colonies of
Phokæa and Milêtus.[124] The Homeric Artemis shares with her brother
Apollo in the dexterous use of the far-striking bow, and sudden death
is described by the poet as inflicted by her gentle arrow. The jealousy
of the gods at the withholding of honors and sacrifices, or at the
presumption of mortals in contending with them,—a point of character so
frequently recurring in the types of the Grecian gods,—manifests itself
in the legends of Artemis: the memorable Kalydônian boar is sent by her
as a visitation upon Œneus, because he had omitted to sacrifice to her,
while he did honor to other gods.[125] The Arcadian heroine Atalanta is
however a reproduction of Artemis, with little or no difference, and
the goddess is sometimes confounded even with her attendant nymphs.
[123] Herodot. iv. 103; Strabo, xii. p. 534; xiii. p. 650. About
the Ephesian Artemis, see Guhl, Ephesiaca (Berlin, 1843), p.
79 _sqq._; Aristoph. Nub. 590; Autokrates in Tympanistis apud
Ælian. Hist. Animal. xii. 9; and Spanheim ad Kallimach. Hymn.
Dian. 36. The dances in honor of Artemis sometimes appear to
have approached to the frenzied style of Bacchanal movement. See
the words of Timotheus ap. Plutarch. de Audiend. Poet. p. 22, c.
4, and περὶ Δεισιδ. c. 10, p. 170, also Aristoph. Lysist. 1314.
They seem to have been often celebrated in the solitudes of the
mountains, which were the favorite resort of Artemis (Kallimach.
Hymn. Dian. 19), and these ὀρειβάσιαι were always causes
predisposing to fanatical excitement.
[124] Strabo, iv. p. 179.
[125] Iliad, ix. 529.
The mighty Poseidôn, the earth-shaker and the ruler of the sea, is
second only to Zeus in power, but has no share in those imperial and
superintending capacities which the Father of gods and men exhibits.
He numbers a numerous heroic progeny, usually men of great corporeal
strength, and many of them belonging to the Æolic race: the great
Neleid family of Pylus trace their origin up to him; and he is also
the father of Polyphêmus the Cyclôps, whose well-earned suffering
he cruelly revenges upon Odysseus. The island of Kalaureia is his
Dêlos,[126] and there was held in it an old local Amphiktyony, for the
purpose of rendering to him joint honor and sacrifice: the isthmus of
Corinth, Helikê in Achaia, and Onchêstos in Bœotia, are also residences
which he much affects, and where he is solemnly worshipped. But the
abode which he originally and specially selected for himself was the
Acropolis of Athens, where by a blow of his trident he produced a
well of water in the rock: Athênê came afterwards and claimed the
spot for herself, planting in token of possession the olive-tree
which stood in the sacred grove of Pandrosos: and the decision either
of the autochthonous Cecrops, or of Erechtheus, awarded to her the
preference, much to the displeasure of Poseidôn. Either on this
account, or on account of the death of his son Eumolpus, slain in
assisting the Eleusinians against Erechtheus, the Attic mythes ascribed
to Poseidôn great enmity against the Erechtheid family, which he is
asserted to have ultimately overthrown: Theseus, whose glorious reign
and deeds succeeded to that family, is said to have been really his
son.[127] In several other places,—in Ægina, Argos and Naxos,—Poseidôn
had disputed the privileges of patron-god with Zeus, Hêrê and Dionysos:
he was worsted in all, but bore his defeat patiently.[128] Poseidôn
endured a long slavery, in common with Apollo, gods as they were,[129]
under Laomedôn, king of Troy, at the command and condemnation of Zeus:
the two gods rebuilt the walls of the city, which had been destroyed
by Hêraklês. When their time was expired, the insolent Laomedôn
withheld from them the stipulated reward, and even accompanied its
refusal with appalling threats; and the subsequent animosity of the
god against Troy was greatly determined by the sentiment of this
injustice.[130] Such periods of servitude, inflicted upon individual
gods, are among the most remarkable of all the incidents in the divine
legends. We find Apollo on another occasion condemned to serve Admêtus,
king of Pheræ, as a punishment for having killed the Cyclôpes, and
Hêraklês also is sold as a slave to Omphalê. Even the fierce Arês,
overpowered and imprisoned for a long time by the two Alôids,[131] is
ultimately liberated only by extraneous aid. Such narratives attest
the discursive range of Grecian fancy in reference to the gods, as
well as the perfect commingling of things and persons, divine and
human, in their conceptions of the past. The god who serves is for
the time degraded: but the supreme god who commands the servitude is
in the like proportion exalted, whilst the idea of some sort of order
and government among these superhuman beings was never lost sight of.
Nevertheless the mythes respecting the servitude of the gods became
obnoxious afterwards, along with many others, to severe criticism on
the part of philosophers.
[126] Strabo, viii. p. 374. According to the old poem called
Eumolpia, ascribed to Musæus, the oracle of Delphi originally
belonged to Poseidôn and Gæa, jointly: from Gæa it passed to
Themis, and from her to Apollo, to whom Poseidôn also made over
his share as a compensation for the surrender of Kalaureia to
him. (Pausan. x. 5, 3).
[127] Apollodôr. iii. 14, 1; iii. 15, 3, 5.
[128] Plutarch, Sympos. viii. 6, p. 741.
[129] Iliad, ii. 716, 766; Euripid. Alkêstis, 2. See Panyasis,
Fragm. 12, p. 24, ed. Düntzer.
[130] Iliad, vii. 452; xxi. 459.
[131] Iliad, v. 386.
The proud, jealous, and bitter Hêrê,—the goddess of the once-wealthy
Mykênæ, the _fax et focus_ of the Trojan war, and the ever-present
protectress of Jasôn in the Argonautic expedition,[132]—occupies an
indispensable station in the mythical world. As the daughter of Kronos
and wife of Zeus, she fills a throne from whence he cannot dislodge
her, and which gives her a right perpetually to grumble and to thwart
him.[133] Her unmeasured jealousy of the female favorites of Zeus, and
her antipathy against his sons, especially against Hêraklês, has been
the suggesting cause of innumerable mythes: the general type of her
character stands here clearly marked, as furnishing both stimulus and
guide to the mythopœic fancy. The "Sacred Wedding," or marriage of Zeus
and Hêrê, was familiar to epithalamic poets long before it became a
theme for the spiritualizing ingenuity of critics.
[132] Iliad, iv. 51; Odyss. xii. 72.
[133] Iliad, i. 544; iv. 29-38; viii. 408.
Hêphæstos is the son of Hêrê without a father, and stands to her in
the same relation as Athênê to Zeus: her pride and want of sympathy
are manifested by her casting him out at once in consequence of his
deformity.[134] He is the god of fire, and especially of fire in its
practical applications to handicraft, and is indispensable as the
right-hand and instrument of the gods. His skill and his deformity
appear alternately as the source of mythical stories: wherever
exquisite and effective fabrication is intended to be designated,
Hêphæstos is announced as the maker, although in this function the
type of his character is reproduced in Dædalos. In the Attic legends
he appears intimately united both with Promêtheus and with Athênê, in
conjunction with whom he was worshipped at Kolônus near Athens. Lemnos
was the favorite residence of Hêphæstos; and if we possessed more
knowledge of this island and its town Hêphæstias, we should doubtless
find abundant legends detailing his adventures and interventions.
[134] Iliad, xviii. 306.
The chaste, still, and home-keeping Hestia, goddess of the family
hearth, is far less fruitful in mythical narratives, in spite of her
very superior dignity, than the knavish, smooth-tongued, keen, and
acquisitive Hermês. His function of messenger of the gods brings him
perpetually on the stage, and affords ample scope for portraying the
features of his character. The Homeric hymn to Hermês describes the
scene and circumstances of his birth, and the almost instantaneous
manifestation, even in infancy, of his peculiar attributes; it explains
the friendly footing on which he stood with Apollo,—the interchange of
gifts and functions between them,—and lastly, the inviolate security
of all the wealth and offerings in the Delphian temple, exposed as
they were to thieves without any visible protection. Such was the
innate cleverness and talent of Hermês, that on the day he was born
he invented the lyre, stringing the seven chords on the shell of a
tortoise:[135] and he also stole the cattle of Apollo in Pieria,
dragging them backwards to his cave in Arcadia, so that their track
could not be detected. To the remonstrances of his mother Maia, who
points out to him the danger of offending Apollo, Hermês replies, that
he aspires to rival the dignity and functions of Apollo among the
immortals, and that if his father Zeus refuses to grant them to him,
he will employ his powers of thieving in breaking open the sanctuary
at Delphi, and in carrying away the gold and the vestments, the
precious tripods and vessels.[136] Presently Apollo discovers the loss
of his cattle, and after some trouble finds his way to the Kyllênian
cavern, where he sees Hermês asleep in his cradle. The child denies
the theft with effrontery, and even treats the surmise as a ridiculous
impossibility: he persists in such denial even before Zeus, who however
detects him at once, and compels him to reveal the place where the
cattle are concealed. But the lyre was as yet unknown to Apollo, who
has heard nothing except the voice of the Muses and the sound of the
pipe. So powerfully is he fascinated by hearing the tones of the lyre
from Hermês, and so eager to become possessed of it, that he is willing
at once to pardon the past theft, and even to conciliate besides the
friendship of Hermês.[137] Accordingly a bargain is struck between the
two gods and sanctioned by Zeus. Hermês surrenders to Apollo the lyre,
inventing for his own use the syrinx or panspipe, and receiving from
Apollo in exchange the golden rod of wealth, with empire over flocks
and herds as well as over horses and oxen and the wild animals of the
woods. He presses to obtain the gift of prophecy, but Apollo is under
a special vow not to impart that privilege to any god whatever: he
instructs Hermês however how to draw information, to a certain extent,
from the Mœræ or Fates themselves; and assigns to him, over and above,
the function of messenger of the gods to Hadês.
[135] Homer. Hymn. Mercur. 18.—
Ἤῳος γεγονὼς, μέσῳ ἥματι ἐγκιθάριζεν,
Ἑσπέριος βοῦς κλέψεν ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, etc.
[136] Homer. Hymn. Merc. 177.—
Εἰμὶ γὰρ ἐς Πύθωνα, μέγαν δόμον ἀντιτορήσων,
Ἔνθεν ἅλις τρίποδας περικαλλέας, ἠδὲ λέβητας
Πορθήσω καὶ χρυσὸν, etc.
[137] Homer. Hymn. Merc. 442-454.
Although Apollo has acquired the lyre, the particular object of his
wishes, he is still under apprehension that Hermês will steal it away
from him again, together with his bow, and he exacts a formal oath by
Styx as security. Hermês promises solemnly that he will steal none of
the acquisitions, nor ever invade the sanctuary of Apollo; while the
latter on his part pledges himself to recognize Hermês as his chosen
friend and companion, amongst all the other sons of Zeus, human or
divine.[138]
[138] Homer. Hymn. Merc. 504-520.—
Καὶ τὸ μὲν Ἑρμῆς
Λητοΐδην ἐφίλησε διαμπερὲς, ὡς ἔτι καὶ νῦν, etc.
· · · · ·
Καὶ τότε Μαίαδος υἱὸς ὑποσχόμενος κατένευσε
Μή ποτ᾽ ἀποκλέψειν, ὅσ᾽ Ἑκήβολος ἐκτεάτισται,
Μηδέ ποτ᾽ ἐμπελάσειν πυκίνῳ δόμῳ· αὐτὰρ Ἀπόλλων
Λητοΐδης κατένευσεν ἐπ᾽ ἀρθμῷ καὶ φιλότητι
Μή τινα φίλτερον ἄλλον ἐν ἀθανάτοισιν ἔσεσθαι
Μήτε θεὸν, μήτ᾽ ἄνδρα Διὸς γόνον, etc.
So came to pass, under the sanction of Zeus, the marked favor shown
by Apollo to Hermês. But Hermês (concludes the hymnographer, with
frankness unusual in speaking of a god) "does very little good: he
avails himself of the darkness of night to cheat without measure the
tribes of mortal men."[139]
[139] Homer. Hymn. Merc. 574.—
Παῦρα μὲν οὖν ὀνίνησι, τὸ δ᾽ ἄκριτον ἠπεροπεύει
Νύκτα δι᾽ ὀρφναίην φῦλα θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
Here the general types of Hermês and Apollo, coupled with the present
fact that no thief ever approached the rich and seemingly accessible
treasures of Delphi, engender a string of expository incidents cast
into a quasi-historical form and detailing how it happened that Hermês
had bound himself by especial convention to respect the Delphian
temple. The types of Apollo seem to have been different in different
times and parts of Greece: in some places he was worshipped as Apollo
Nomios,[140] or the patron of pasture and cattle; and this attribute,
which elsewhere passed over to his son Aristæus, is by our hymnographer
voluntarily surrendered to Hermês, combined with the golden rod of
fruitfulness. On the other hand, the lyre did not originally belong to
the Far-striking King, nor is he at all an inventor: the hymn explains
both its first invention and how it came into his possession. And the
value of the incidents is thus partly expository, partly illustrative,
as expanding in detail the general preconceived character of the
Kyllênian god.
[140] Kallimach. Hymn. Apoll. 47.
To Zeus more amours are ascribed than to any of the other
gods,—probably because the Grecian kings and chieftains were especially
anxious to trace their lineage to the highest and most glorious
of all,—each of these amours having its representative progeny on
earth.[141] Such subjects were among the most promising and agreeable
for the interest of mythical narrative, and Zeus as a lover thus became
the father of a great many legends, branching out into innumerable
interferences, for which his sons, all of them distinguished
individuals, and many of them persecuted by Hêrê, furnished the
occasion. But besides this, the commanding functions of the supreme
god, judicial and administrative, extending both over gods and men, was
a potent stimulus to the mythopœic activity. Zeus has to watch over
his own dignity,—the first of all considerations with a god: moreover
as Horkios, Xenios, Ktêsios, Meilichios, (a small proportion of his
thousand surnames,) he guaranteed oaths and punished perjurers, he
enforced the observance of hospitality, he guarded the family hoard
and the crop realized for the year, and he granted expiation to the
repentant criminal.[142] All these different functions created a
demand for mythes, as the means of translating a dim, but serious,
presentiment into distinct form, both self-explaining and communicable
to others. In enforcing the sanctity of the oath or of the tie of
hospitality, the most powerful of all arguments would be a collection
of legends respecting the judgments of Zeus Horkios or Xenios; the more
impressive and terrific such legends were, the greater would be their
interest, and the less would any one dare to disbelieve them. They
constituted the natural outpourings of a strong and common sentiment,
probably without any deliberate ethical intention: the preconceptions
of the divine agency, expanded into legend, form a product analogous to
the idea of the divine features and symmetry embodied in the bronze or
the marble statue.
[141] Kallimach. Hymn. Jov. 79. Ἐκ δὲ Διὸς βασιλῆες, etc.
[142] See Herodot. i. 44. Xenoph. Anabas. vii. 8, 4. Plutarch,
Thêseus, c. 12.
But it was not alone the general type and attributes of the gods which
contributed to put in action the mythopœic propensities. The rites and
solemnities forming the worship of each god, as well as the details
of his temple and its locality, were a fertile source of mythes,
respecting his exploits and sufferings, which to the people who heard
them served the purpose of past history. The exegetes, or local guide
and interpreter, belonging to each temple, preserved and recounted to
curious strangers these traditional narratives, which lent a certain
dignity even to the minutiæ of divine service. Out of a stock of
materials thus ample, the poets extracted individual collections, such
as the "Causes" (Αἴτια) of Kallimachus, now lost, and such as the Fasti
of Ovid are for the Roman religious antiquities.[143]
[143] Ovid, Fasti, iv. 211, about the festivals of Apollo:—
"Priscique imitamina facti
Æra Deæ comites raucaque terga movent."
And Lactantius, v. 19, 15. "Ipsos ritus ex rebus gestis (deorum)
vel ex casibus vel etiam ex mortibus, natos:" to the same purpose
Augustin. De Civ. D. vii. 18; Diodôr. iii. 56. Plutarch's
Quæstiones Græcæ et Romaicæ are full of similar tales, professing
to account for existing customs, many of them religious and
liturgic. See Lobeck, Orphica, p. 675.
It was the practice to offer to the gods in sacrifice the bones of the
victim only, inclosed in fat: how did this practice arise? The author
of the Hesiodic Theogony has a story which explains it: Promêtheus
tricked Zeus into an imprudent choice, at the period when the gods and
mortal men first came to an arrangement about privileges and duties
(in Mekônê). Promêtheus, the tutelary representative of man, divided
a large steer into two portions: on the one side he placed the flesh
and guts, folded up in the omentum and covered over with the skin: on
the other, he put the bones enveloped in fat. He then invited Zeus to
determine which of the two portions the gods would prefer to receive
from mankind. Zeus "with both hands" decided for and took the white
fat, but was highly incensed on finding that he had got nothing at the
bottom except the bones.[144] Nevertheless the choice of the gods was
now irrevocably made: they were not entitled to any portion of the
sacrificed animal beyond the bones and the white fat; and the standing
practice is thus plausibly explained.[145] I select this as one amongst
a thousand instances to illustrate the genesis of legend out of
religious practices. In the belief of the people, the event narrated in
the legend was the real producing cause of the practice: but when we
come to apply a sound criticism, we are compelled to treat the event as
existing only in its narrative legend, and the legend itself as having
been, in the greater number of cases, engendered by the practice,—thus
reversing the supposed order of production.
[144] Hesiod, Theog. 550.—
Φῆ ῥα δολοφρονέων· Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἄφθιτα μήδεα εἰδὼς
Γνῶ ῥ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἠγνοίησε δόλον· κακὰ δ᾽ ὄσσετο θυμῷ
Θνητοῖς ἀνθρώποισι, τὰ καὶ τελέεσθαι ἔμελλεν.
Χερσὶ δ᾽ ὅγ᾽ ἀμφοτέρῃσιν ἀνείλετο λευκὸν ἄλειφαρ·
Χώσατο δὲ φρένας, ἀμφὶ χόλος δέ μιν ἵκετο θυμὸν,
Ὡς ἴδεν ὀστέα λευκὰ βοὸς δολίῃ ἐπὶ τέχνῃ.
In the second line of this citation, the poet tells us that Zeus
saw through the trick, and was imposed upon by his own consent,
foreknowing that after all the mischievous consequences of the
proceeding would be visited on man. But the last lines, and
indeed the whole drift of the legend, imply the contrary of this:
Zeus was really taken in, and was in consequence very angry. It
is curious to observe how the religious feelings of the poet
drive him to save in words the prescience of Zeus, though in
doing so he contradicts and nullifies the whole point of the
story.
[145] Hesiod, Theog. 557.—
Ἐκ τοῦ δ᾽ ἀθανάτοισιν ἐπὶ χθονὶ φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
Καίουσ᾽ ὀστέα λευκὰ θυηέντων ἐπὶ βωμῶν.
In dealing with Grecian mythes generally, it is convenient to
distribute them into such as belong to the Gods and such as belong
to the Heroes, according as the one or the other are the prominent
personages. The former class manifests, more palpably than the latter,
their real origin, as growing out of the faith and the feelings,
without any necessary basis, either of matter of fact or allegory:
moreover, they elucidate more directly the religion of the Greeks, so
important an item in their character as a people. But in point of fact,
most of the mythes present to us Gods, Heroes and Men, in juxtaposition
one with the other and the richness of Grecian mythical literature
arises from the infinite diversity of combinations thus opened out;
first by the three class-types, God, Hero, and Man; next by the strict
keeping with which each separate class and character is handled. We
shall now follow downward the stream of mythical time, which begins
with the Gods, to the Heroic legends, or those which principally
concern the Heroes and Heroines; for the latter were to the full as
important in legend as the former.
CHAPTER II.
LEGENDS RELATING TO HEROES AND MEN.
The Hesiodic theogony gives no account of anything like a creation of
man, nor does it seem that such an idea was much entertained in the
legendary vein of Grecian imagination; which commonly carried back
the present men by successive generations to some primitive ancestor,
himself sprung from the soil, or from a neighboring river or mountain,
or from a god, a nymph, etc. But the poet of the Hesiodic "Works and
Days" has given us a narrative conceived in a very different spirit
respecting the origin of the human race, more in harmony with the sober
and melancholy ethical tone which reigns through that poem.[146]
[146] Hesiod, as cited in the Etymologicon Magnum (probably
the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, as Marktscheffel considers
it, placing it Fragm. 133), gives the parentage of a certain
_Brotos_, who must probably be intended as the first of men:
Βρότος, ὡς μὲν Εὐήμερος ὁ Μεσσήνιος, ἀπὸ Βρότου τινὸς αὐτόχθονος·
ὁ δὲ Ἡσίοδος, ἀπὸ Βρότου τοῦ Αἴθερος καὶ Ἡμέρας.
First (he tells us) the Olympic gods made the golden race,—good,
perfect, and happy men, who lived from the spontaneous abundance of the
earth, in ease and tranquillity like the gods themselves: they suffered
neither disease nor old age, and their death was like a gentle sleep.
After death they became, by the award of Zeus, guardian terrestrial
dæmons, who watch unseen over the proceedings of mankind—with the regal
privilege of dispensing to them wealth, and taking account of good and
bad deeds.[147]
[147] Opp. Di. 120.—
Αὐτὰρ ἐπειδὴ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖα κάλυψεν
Τοὶ μὲν δαίμονές εἰσι Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ βουλὰς
Ἐσθλοὶ, ἐπιχθόνιοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων·
Οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα,
Ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι, πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ᾽ αἶαν
Πλουτόδοται· καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιληΐον ἔσχον.
Next, the gods made the silver race,—unlike and greatly inferior, both
in mind and body, to the golden. The men of this race were reckless and
mischievous towards each other, and disdainful of the immortal gods,
to whom they refused to offer either worship or sacrifice. Zeus in his
wrath buried them in the earth: but there they still enjoy a secondary
honor, as the Blest of the under-world.[148]
[148] Opp. Di. 140.—
Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖα κάλυψε,
Τοὶ μὲν ὑποχθόνιοι μάκαρες θνητοὶ καλέονται
Δεύτεροι, ἀλλ᾽ ἔμπης τιμὴ καὶ τοῖσιν ὀπηδεῖ.
Thirdly, Zeus made the brazen race, quite different from the silver.
They were made of hard ash-wood, pugnacious and terrible; they were
of immense strength and adamantine soul, nor did they raise or touch
bread. Their arms, their houses, and their implements were all of
brass: there was then no iron. This race, eternally fighting, perished
by each other's hands, died out, and descended without name or
privilege to Hadês.[149]
[149] The ash was the wood out of which spear-handles were made
(Iliad, xvi. 142): the Νύμφαι Μέλιαι are born along with the
Gigantes and the Erinnyes (Theogon. 187),—"gensque virûm truncis
et duro robore nata" (Virgil, Æneid, viii. 315),—_hearts of oak_.
Next, Zeus made a fourth race, far juster and better than the last
preceding. These were the Heroes or demigods, who fought at the sieges
of Troy and Thêbes. But this splendid stock also became extinct: some
perished in war, others were removed by Zeus to a happier state in the
islands of the Blest. There they dwell in peace and comfort, under
the government of Kronos, reaping thrice in the year the spontaneous
produce of the earth.[150]
[150] Opp. Di. 157.—
Ἀνδρῶν Ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
Ἡμίθεοι προτέρῃ γενέῃ κατ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν.
The fifth race, which succeeds to the Heroes, is of iron: it is the
race to which the poet himself belongs, and bitterly does he regret it.
He finds his contemporaries mischievous, dishonest, unjust, ungrateful,
given to perjury, careless both of the ties of consanguinity and of the
behests of the gods: Nemesis and Ædôs (Ethical Self-reproach) have left
earth and gone back to Olympus. How keenly does he wish that his lot
had been cast either earlier or later![151] This iron race is doomed to
continual guilt, care, and suffering, with a small infusion of good;
but the time will come when Zeus will put an end to it. The poet does
not venture to predict what sort of race will succeed.
[151] Opp. Di. 173.—
Μηκέτ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ὤφειλον ἐγὼ πέμπτοισι μετεῖναι
Ἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἢ πρόσθε θανεῖν, ἢ ἔπειτα γενέσθαι.
Νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρεον....
Such is the series of distinct races of men, which Hesiod, or the
author of the "Works and Days," enumerates as having existed down to
his own time. I give it as it stands, without placing much confidence
in the various explanations which critics have offered. It stands
out in more than one respect from the general tone and sentiment of
Grecian legend: moreover the sequence of races is neither natural nor
homogeneous,—the heroic race not having any metallic denomination,
and not occupying any legitimate place in immediate succession to the
brazen. Nor is the conception of the dæmons in harmony either with
Homer or with the Hesiodic theogony. In Homer, there is scarcely any
distinction between gods and dæmons, while the gods are stated to
go about and visit the cities of men in various disguises for the
purpose of inspecting good and evil proceedings.[152] But in the poem
now before us, the distinction between gods and dæmons is generic.
The latter are invisible tenants of earth, remnants of the once happy
golden race whom the Olympic gods first made: the remnants of the
second or silver race are not dæmons, nor are they tenants of earth,
but they still enjoy an honorable posthumous existence as the Blest of
the under-world. Nevertheless the Hesiodic dæmons are in no way authors
or abettors of evil: on the contrary, they form the unseen police of
the gods, for the purpose of repressing wicked behavior in the world.
[152] Odyss. xvii. 486.
We may trace, I think, in this quintuple succession of earthly races,
set forth by the author of the "Works and Days," the confluence of
two veins of sentiment, not consistent one with the other, yet both
coëxisting in the author's mind. The drift of his poem is thoroughly
didactic and ethical: though deeply penetrated with the injustice and
suffering which darken the face of human life, he nevertheless strives
to maintain, both in himself and in others, a conviction that on the
whole the just and laborious man will come off well,[153] and he
enforces in considerable detail the lessons of practical prudence and
virtue. This ethical sentiment, which dictates his appreciation of the
present, also guides his imagination as to the past. It is pleasing
to him to bridge over the chasm between the gods and degenerate man,
by the supposition of previous races,—the first altogether pure, the
second worse than the first, and the third still worse than the second;
and to show further how the first race passed by gentle death-sleep
into glorious immortality; how the second race was sufficiently wicked
to drive Zeus to bury them in the under-world, yet still leaving them
a certain measure of honor; while the third was so desperately violent
as to perish by its own animosities, without either name or honor of
any kind. The conception of the golden race passing after death into
good guardian dæmons, which some suppose to have been derived from a
comparison with oriental angels, presents itself to the poet partly as
approximating this race to the gods, partly as a means of constituting
a triple gradation of post-obituary existence, proportioned to the
character of each race whilst alive. The denominations of gold and
silver, given to the first two races, justify themselves, like those
given by Simonidês of Amorgos and by Phokylidês to the different
characters of women, derived from the dog, the bee, the mare, the ass,
and other animals; and the epithet of brazen is specially explained
by reference to the material which the pugnacious third race so
plentifully employed for their arms and other implements.
[153] There are some lines, in which he appears to believe that,
under the present wicked and treacherous rulers, it is not the
interest of any man to be just (Opp. Di. 270):—
Νῦν δὴ ἐγὼ μήτ᾽ αὐτὸς ἐν ἀνθρώποισι δίκαιος
Εἴην, μήτ᾽ ἐμὸς υἱός· ἐπεὶ κακόν ἐστι δίκαιον
Ἔμμεναι, εἰ μείζω γε δίκην ἀδικώτερος ἕξει·
Ἀλλὰ τόδ᾽ οὔπω ἔολπα τελεῖν Δία τερπικέραυνον.
On the whole, however, his conviction is to the contrary.
Plutarch rejects the above four lines, seemingly on no other
ground than because he thought them immoral and unworthy of
Hesiod (see Proclus _ad loc._). But they fall in perfectly with
the temper of the poem: and the rule of Plutarch is inadmissible,
in determining the critical question of what is genuine or
spurious.
So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing vein: we find the
revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an ethical
lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present.[154] But fourth
in the list comes "the divine race of Heroes:" and here a new vein
of thought is opened by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past
is broken up, in order to make way for these cherished beings of the
national faith. For though the author of the "Works and Days" was
himself of a didactic cast of thought, like Phokylidês, or Solôn,
or Theognis, yet he had present to his feelings, in common with his
countrymen, the picture of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in
the current mythes, and still more in Homer and those other epical
productions which were then the only existing literature and history.
It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch of the past,
either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these poems
ennobled; and even if he himself could have consented to such an
exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his hearers.
But the chiefs who figured before Thêbes and Troy could not be well
identified either with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race:
moreover it was essential that they should be placed in immediate
contiguity with the present race, because their descendants, real or
supposed, were the most prominent and conspicuous of existing men.
Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the fourth place in the
series, and to interrupt the descending ethical movement in order to
interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither
of which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet
himself unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the
heroic, but of the brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating
pugnacity which characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests
an aggregate of smaller and meaner vices and mischiefs. It will not
perish by suicidal extinction—but it is growing worse and worse, and is
gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will not vouchsafe to preserve
much longer such a race upon the earth.
[154] Aratus (Phænomen. 107) gives only three successive
races,—the golden, silver, and brazen; Ovid superadds to these
the iron race (Metamorph. i. 89-144): neither of them notice the
heroic race.
The observations both of Buttmann (Mythos der ältesten
Menschengeschlechter, t. ii. p. 12 of the Mythologus) and of
Völcker (Mythologie des Japetischen Geschlechts, § 6, pp.
250-279) on this series of distinct races, are ingenious, and
may be read with profit. Both recognize the disparate character
of the fourth link in the series, and each accounts for it in a
different manner. My own view comes nearer to that of Völcker,
with some considerable differences; amongst which one is, that
he rejects the verses respecting the dæmons, which seem to me
capital parts of the whole scheme.
We thus see that the series of races imagined by the poet of the
"Works and Days" is the product of two distinct and incongruous veins
of imagination,—the didactic or ethical blending with the primitive
mythical or epical. His poem is remarkable as the most ancient didactic
production of the Greeks, and as one of the first symptoms of a
new tone of sentiment finding its way into their literature, never
afterwards to become extinct. The tendency of the "Works and Days" is
anti-heroic: far from seeking to inspire admiration for adventurous
enterprise, the author inculcates the strictest justice, the most
unremitting labor and frugality, and a sober, not to say anxious,
estimate of all the minute specialties of the future. Prudence and
probity are his means,—practical comfort and happiness his end. But
he deeply feels, and keenly exposes, the manifold wickedness and
short-comings of his contemporaries, in reference to this capital
standard. He turns with displeasure from the present men, not because
they are too feeble to hurl either the spear of Achilles or some
vast boundary-stone, but because they are rapacious, knavish, and
unprincipled.
The dæmons first introduced into the religious atmosphere of the
Grecian world by the author of the "Works and Days," as generically
different from the gods, but as essentially good, and as forming the
intermediate agents and police between gods and men,—are deserving
of attention as the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent
many changes, and became of great importance, first as one of the
constituent elements of pagan faith, then as one of the helps to its
subversion. It will be recollected that the buried remnants of the
half-wicked silver race, though they are not recognized as dæmons,
are still considered as having a substantive existence, a name, and
dignity, in the under-world. The step was easy, to treat them as
dæmons also, but as dæmons of a defective and malignant character:
this step was made by Empedoclês and Xenocratês, and to a certain
extent countenanced by Plato.[155] There came thus to be admitted among
the pagan philosophers dæmons both good and bad, in every degree:
and these dæmons were found available as a means of explaining many
phænomena for which it was not convenient to admit the agency of the
gods. They served to relieve the gods from the odium of physical and
moral evils, as well as from the necessity of constantly meddling in
small affairs; and the objectionable ceremonies of the pagan world were
defended upon the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of
such malignant beings be appeased. They were most frequently noticed
as causes of evil, and thus the name (_dæmon_) came insensibly to
convey with it a bad sense,—the idea of an evil being as contrasted
with the goodness of a god. So it was found by the Christian writers
when they commenced their controversy with paganism. One branch of
their argument led them to identify the pagan gods with dæmons in the
evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the
word lent them a specious assistance. For they could easily show that
not only in Homer, but in the general language of early pagans, all
the gods generally were spoken of as dæmons—and therefore, verbally
speaking, Clemens and Tatian seemed to affirm nothing more against Zeus
or Apollo than was employed in the language of paganism itself. Yet the
audience of Homer or Sophoklês would have strenuously repudiated the
proposition, if it had been put to them in the sense which the word
_dæmon_ bore in the age and among the circle of these Christian writers.
[155] See this subject further mentioned—_infra_, chap. xvi. p.
565.
In the imagination of the author of the "Works and Days," the dæmons
occupy an important place, and are regarded as being of serious
practical efficiency. When he is remonstrating with the rulers around
him upon their gross injustice and corruption, he reminds them of the
vast number of these immortal servants of Zeus who are perpetually on
guard amidst mankind, and through whom the visitations of the gods will
descend even upon the most potent evil doers.[156] His supposition that
the dæmons were not gods, but departed men of the golden race, allowed
him to multiply their number indefinitely, without too much cheapening
the divine dignity.
[156] Opp. Di. 252. Τρὶς γὰρ μύριοί εἰσιν ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ,
etc.
As this poet has been so much enslaved by the current legends as
to introduce the Heroic race into a series to which it does not
legitimately belong, so he has under the same influence inserted in
another part of his poem the mythe of Pandora and Promêtheus,[157] as
a means of explaining the primary diffusion, and actual abundance,
of evil among mankind. Yet this mythe can in no way consist with his
quintuple scale of distinct races, and is in fact a totally distinct
theory to explain the same problem,—the transition of mankind from
a supposed state of antecedent happiness to one of present toil and
suffering. Such an inconsistency is not a sufficient reason for
questioning the genuineness of either passage; for the two stories,
though one contradicts the other, both harmonize with that central
purpose which governs the author's mind,—a querulous and didactic
appreciation of the present. That such was his purpose appears not only
from the whole tenor of his poem, but also from the remarkable fact
that his own personality, his own adventures and kindred, and his own
sufferings, figure in it conspicuously. And this introduction of self
imparts to it a peculiar interest. The father of Hesiod came over from
the Æolic Kymê, with the view of bettering his condition, and settled
at Askra in Bœotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. After his death his
two sons divided the family inheritance: but Hesiod bitterly complains
that his brother Persês cheated and went to law with him, and obtained
through corrupt judges an unjust decision. He farther reproaches his
brother with a preference for the suits and unprofitable bustle of the
agora, at a time when he ought to be laboring for his subsistence in
the field. Askra indeed was a miserable place, repulsive both in summer
and winter. Hesiod had never crossed the sea, except once from Aulis to
Eubœa, whither he went to attend the funeral games of Amphidamas, the
chief of Chalkis: he sung a hymn, and gained as prize a tripod, which
he consecrated to the muses in Helicon.[158]
[157] Opp. Di. 50-105.
[158] Opp. Di. 630-650, 27-45.
These particulars, scanty as they are, possess a peculiar value, as
the earliest authentic memorandum respecting the doing or suffering of
any actual Greek person. There is no external testimony at all worthy
of trust respecting the age of the "Works and Days:" Herodotus treats
Hesiod and Homer as belonging to the same age, four hundred years
before his own time; and there are other statements besides, some
placing Hesiod at an earlier date than Homer, some at a later. Looking
at the internal evidences, we may observe that the pervading sentiment,
tone and purpose of the poem is widely different from that of the Iliad
and Odyssey, and analogous to what we read respecting the compositions
of Archilochus and the Amorgian Simonidês. The author of the "Works
and Days" is indeed a preacher and not a satirist: but with this
distinction, we find in him the same predominance of the present and
the positive, the same disposition to turn the muse into an exponent of
his own personal wrongs, the same employment of Æsopic fable by way of
illustration, and the same unfavorable estimate of the female sex,[159]
all of which may be traced in the two poets above mentioned, placing
both of them in contrast with the Homeric epic. Such an internal
analogy, in the absence of good testimony, is the best guide which we
can follow in determining the date of the "Works and Days," which we
should accordingly place shortly after the year 700 B. C. The style
of the poem might indeed afford a proof that the ancient and uniform
hexameter, though well adapted to continuous legendary narrative or to
solemn hymns, was somewhat monotonous when called upon either to serve
a polemical purpose or to impress a striking moral lesson. When poets,
then the only existing composers, first began to apply their thoughts
to the cut and thrust of actual life, aggressive or didactic, the verse
would be seen to require a new, livelier and smarter metre; and out
of this want grew the elegiac and the iambic verse, both seemingly
contemporaneous, and both intended to supplant the primitive hexameter
for the short effusions then coming into vogue.
[159] Compare the fable (αἶνος) in the "Works and Days," v. 200,
with those in Archilochus, Fr. xxxviii. and xxxix., Gaisford,
respecting the fox and the ape; and the legend of Pandôra (v. 95
and v. 705) with the fragment of Simonidês of Amorgos respecting
women (Fr. viii. ed. Welcker, v. 95-115); also Phokylidês ap.
Stobæum Florileg. lxxi.
Isokratês assimilates the character of the "Works and Days" to
that of Theognis and Phokylidês (ad Nikokl. Or. ii. p. 23).
CHAPTER III.
LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS.
The sons of the Titan god Iapetus, as described in the Hesiodic
theogony, are Atlas, Menœtius, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus.[160] Of
these, Atlas alone is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and even he
not as the son of Iapetus: the latter himself is named in the Iliad as
existing in Tartarus along with Kronos. The Homeric Atlas "knows the
depths of the whole sea, and keeps by himself those tall pillars which
hold the heaven apart from the earth."[161]
[160] Hesiod, Theog. 510.
[161] Hom. Odyss. i. 120.—
Ἄτλαντος θυγατὴρ ὀλοόφρονος, ὅστε θαλάσσης
Πάσης βένθεα οἶδε, ἔχει δέ τε κίονας αὐτὸς
Μακρὰς, αἳ γαῖάν τε καὶ οὐρανὸν ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν.
As the Homeric theogony generally appears much expanded in Hesiod, so
also does the family of Iapetus, with their varied adventures. Atlas is
here described, not as the keeper of the intermediate pillars between
heaven and earth, but as himself condemned by Zeus to support the
heaven on his head and hands;[162] while the fierce Menœtius is thrust
down to Erebus as a punishment for his ungovernable insolence. But the
remaining two brothers, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus, are among the most
interesting creations of Grecian legend, and distinguished in more than
one respect from all the remainder.
[162] Hesiod, Theog. 516.—
Ἄτλας δ᾽ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχει κρατερῆς ὑπ᾽ ἀνάγκης
Ἑστηὼς, κεφαλῇ τε καὶ ἀκαμάτοισι χέρεσσι.
Hesiod stretches far beyond the simplicity of the Homeric
conception.
First, the main battle between Zeus and the Titan gods is a contest of
force purely and simply—mountains are hurled and thunder is launched,
and the victory remains to the strongest. But the competition between
Zeus and Promêtheus is one of craft and stratagem: the victory does
indeed remain to the former, but the honors of the fight belong to the
latter. Secondly, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus (the fore-thinker and the
after-thinker[163]) are characters stamped at the same mint and by
the same effort, the express contrast and antithesis of each other.
Thirdly, mankind are here expressly brought forward, not indeed as
active partners in the struggle, but as the grand and capital subjects
interested,—as gainers or sufferers by the result. Promêtheus appears
in the exalted character of champion of the human race, even against
the formidable superiority of Zeus.
[163] Pindar extends the family of Epimêtheus and gives him a
daughter, Πρόφασις (Pyth. v. 25), _Excuse_, the offspring of
After-thought.
In the primitive or Hesiodic legend, Promêtheus is not the creator
or moulder of man; it is only the later additions which invest him
with this character.[164] The race are supposed as existing, and
Promêtheus, a member of the dispossessed body of Titan gods, comes
forward as their representative and defender. The advantageous bargain
which he made with Zeus on their behalf, in respect to the partition of
the sacrificial animals, has been recounted in the preceding chapter.
Zeus felt that he had been outwitted, and was exceeding wroth. In his
displeasure he withheld from mankind the inestimable comfort of fire,
so that the race would have perished, had not Promêtheus stolen fire,
in defiance of the command of the Supreme Ruler, and brought it to men
in the hollow of a ferule.[165]
[164] Apollodôr. i. 7. 1. Nor is he such either in Æschylus, or
in the Platonic fable (Protag. c. 30), though this version became
at last the most popular. Some hardened lumps of clay, remnants
of that which had been employed by Promêtheus in moulding man,
were shown to Pausanias at Panopeus in Phokis (Paus. x. 4, 3).
The first Epigram of Erinna (Anthol. i. p. 58, ed. Branck) seems
to allude to Promêtheus as moulder of man. The expression of
Aristophanês (Aves, 689)—πλάσματα πηλοῦ—does not necessarily
refer to Promêtheus.
[165] Hesiod, Theog. 566; Opp. Di. 52.
Zeus was now doubly indignant, and determined to play off a still more
ruinous stratagem. Hêphæstos, by his direction, moulded the form of
a beautiful virgin; Athênê dressed her, Aphroditê and the Charities
bestowed upon her both ornament and fascination, while Hermês infused
into her the mind of a dog, a deceitful spirit, and treacherous
words.[166] The messenger of the gods conducted this "fascinating
mischief" to mankind, at a time when Promêtheus was not present.
Now Epimêtheus had received from his brother peremptory injunctions
not to accept from the hands of Zeus any present whatever; but the
beauty of Pandôra (so the newly-formed female was called) was not to
be resisted. She was received and admitted among men, and from that
moment their comfort and tranquillity was exchanged for suffering of
every kind.[167] The evils to which mankind are liable had been before
enclosed in a cask in their own keeping: Pandôra in her malice removed
the lid of the cask, and out flew these thousand evils and calamities,
to exercise forever their destroying force. Hope alone remained
imprisoned, and therefore without efficacy, as before—the inviolable
lid being replaced before she could escape. Before this incident
(says the legend) men had lived without disease or suffering; but now
both earth and sea are full of mischiefs, while maladies of every
description stalk abroad by day as well as by night,[168] without any
hope for man of relief to come.
[166] Theog. 580; Opp. Di. 50-85.
[167] Opp. Di. 81-90.
[168] Opp. Di. 93. Pandôra does not _bring with her_ the cask,
as the common version of this story would have us suppose: the
cask exists fast closed in the custody of Epimêtheus, or of man
himself, and Pandôra commits the fatal treachery of removing
the lid. The case is analogous to that of the closed bag of
unfavorable winds which Æolus gives into the hands of Odysseus,
and which the guilty companions of the latter force open, to the
entire ruin of his hopes (Odyss. x. 19-50). The idea of the two
casks on the threshold of Zeus, lying ready for dispensation—one
full of evils the other of benefits—is Homeric (Iliad, xxiv.
527):—
Δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει, etc.
Plutarch assimilates to this the πίθος opened by Pandôra,
Consolat. ad Apollôn. c. 7. p. 105. The explanation here given
of the Hesiodic passage relating to Hope, is drawn from an able
article in the Wiener Jahrbücher, vol. 109 (1845), p. 220,
Ritter; a review of Schömmann's translation of the Promêtheus of
Æschylus. The diseases and evils are inoperative so long as they
remain shut up in the cask: the same mischief-making influence
which lets them out to their calamitous work, takes care that
Hope shall still continue a powerless prisoner in the inside.
The Theogony gives the legend here recounted, with some
variations—leaving out the part of Epimêtheus altogether, as well as
the cask of evils. Pandôra is the ruin of man, simply as the mother
and representative of the female sex.[169] And the variations are
thus useful, as they enable us to distinguish the essential from the
accessory circumstances of the story.
[169] Theog. 590.—
Ἐκ τῆς γὰρ γένος ἐστὶ γυναικῶν θηλυτεράων,
Τῆς γὰρ ὀλώιόν ἐστι γένος· καὶ φῦλα γυναικῶν,
Πῆμα μέγα θνητοῖσι μετ᾽ ἀνδράσι ναιετάουσι, etc.
"Thus (says the poet, at the conclusion of his narrative) it is
not possible to escape from the purposes of Zeus."[170] His mythe,
connecting the calamitous condition of man with the malevolence of the
supreme god, shows, first, by what cause such an unfriendly feeling
was raised; next, by what instrumentality its deadly results were
brought about. The human race are not indeed the creation, but the
protected flock of Promêtheus, one of the elder or dispossessed Titan
gods: when Zeus acquires supremacy, mankind along with the rest become
subject to him, and are to make the best bargain they can respecting
worship and service to be yielded. By the stratagem of their advocate
Promêtheus, Zeus is cheated into such a partition of the victims as is
eminently unprofitable to him; whereby his wrath is so provoked, that
he tries to subtract from man the use of fire. Here however his scheme
is frustrated by the theft of Promêtheus: but his second attempt is
more successful, and he in his turn cheats the unthinking Epimêtheus
into the acceptance of a present (in spite of the peremptory interdict
of Promêtheus) by which the whole of man's happiness is wrecked. This
legend grows out of two feelings; partly as to the relations of the
gods with man, partly as to the relation of the female sex with the
male. The present gods are unkind towards man, but the old gods, with
whom man's lot was originally cast, were much kinder—and the ablest
among them stands forward as the indefatigable protector of the race.
Nevertheless, the mere excess of his craft proves the ultimate ruin of
the cause which he espouses. He cheats Zeus out of a fair share of the
sacrificial victim, so as both to provoke and justify a retaliation
which he cannot be always at hand to ward off: the retaliation is, in
his absence, consummated by a snare laid for Epimêtheus and voluntarily
accepted. And thus, though Hesiod ascribes the calamitous condition
of man to the malevolence of Zeus, his piety suggests two exculpatory
pleas for the latter: mankind have been the first to defraud Zeus of
his legitimate share of the sacrifice—and they have moreover been
consenting parties to their own ruin. Such are the feelings, as to
the relation between the gods and man, which have been one of the
generating elements of this legend. The other element, a conviction
of the vast mischief arising to man from women, whom yet they cannot
dispense with, is frequently and strongly set forth in several of the
Greek poets—by Simonidês of Amorgos and Phokylidês, not less than by
the notorious misogynist Euripidês.
[170] Opp. Di. 105.—
Οὕτως οὔτι πῆ ἐστὶ Διὸς νόον ἐξαλέασθαι.
But the miseries arising from woman, however great they might be,
did not reach Promêtheus himself. For him, the rash champion who
had ventured "to compete in sagacity"[171] with Zeus, a different
punishment was in store. Bound by heavy chains to a pillar, he remained
fast imprisoned for several generations: every day did an eagle prey
upon his liver, and every night did the liver grow afresh for the
next day's suffering. At length Zeus, eager to enhance the glory of
his favorite son Hêraclês, permitted the latter to kill the eagle and
rescue the captive.[172]
[171] Theog. 534. Οὕνεκ᾽ ἐρίζετο βουλὰς ὑπερμενέϊ Κρονίωνι.
[172] Theog. 521-532.
Such is the Promêthean mythe as it stands in the Hesiodic poems; its
earliest form, as far as we can trace. Upon it was founded the sublime
tragedy of Æschylus, "The Enchained Promêtheus," together with at
least one more tragedy, now lost, by the same author.[173] Æschylus
has made several important alterations; describing the human race, not
as having once enjoyed and subsequently lost a state of tranquillity
and enjoyment, but as originally feeble and wretched. He suppresses
both the first trick played off by Promêtheus upon Zeus respecting
the partition of the victim—and the final formation and sending of
Pandôra—which are the two most marked portions of the Hesiodic story;
while on the other hand he brings out prominently and enlarges upon
the theft of fire,[174] which in Hesiod is but slightly touched. If
he has thus relinquished the antique simplicity of the story, he has
rendered more than ample compensation by imparting to it a grandeur of
_idéal_, a large reach of thought combined with appeals to our earnest
and admiring sympathy, and a pregnancy of suggestion in regard to the
relations between the gods and man, which soar far above the Hesiodic
level—and which render his tragedy the most impressive, though not
the most artistically composed, of all Grecian dramatic productions.
Promêtheus there appears not only as the heroic champion and sufferer
in the cause and for the protection of the human race, but also as
the gifted teacher of all the arts, helps, and ornaments of life,
amongst which fire is only one:[175] all this against the will and in
defiance of the purpose of Zeus, who, on acquiring his empire, wished
to destroy the human race and to beget some new breed.[176] Moreover,
new relations between Promêtheus and Zeus are superadded by Æschylus.
At the commencement of the struggle between Zeus and the Titan gods,
Promêtheus had vainly attempted to prevail upon the latter to conduct
it with prudence; but when he found that they obstinately declined
all wise counsel, and that their ruin was inevitable, he abandoned
their cause and joined Zeus. To him and to his advice Zeus owed the
victory: yet the monstrous ingratitude and tyranny of the latter is
now manifested by nailing him to a rock, for no other crime than
because he frustrated the purpose of extinguishing the human race, and
furnished to them the means of living with tolerable comfort.[177] The
new ruler Zeus, insolent with his victory over the old gods, tramples
down all right, and sets at naught sympathy and obligation, as well
towards gods as towards man. Yet the prophetic Promêtheus, in the midst
of intense suffering, is consoled by the foreknowledge that the time
will come when Zeus must again send for him, release him, and invoke
his aid, as the sole means of averting from himself dangers otherwise
insurmountable. The security and means of continuance for mankind
have now been placed beyond the reach of Zeus—whom Promêtheus proudly
defies, glorying in his generous and successful championship,[178]
despite the terrible price which he is doomed to pay for it.
[173] Of the tragedy called Προμηθεὺς Λυόμενος some few fragments
yet remain: Προμηθεὺς Πύρφορος was a satyric drama, according to
Dindorf. Welcker recognizes a third tragedy, Προμηθεὺς Πύρφορος,
and a satyric drama, Προμηθεὺς Πυρκαεύς (Die Griechisch.
Tragödien, vol. i. p. 30). The story of Promêtheus had also been
handled by Sapphô in one of her lost songs (Servius ad Virgil.
Eclog. vi. 42).
[174] Apollodôrus too mentions only the theft of fire (i. 7. 1).
[175] Æsch. Prom. 442-506.—
Πᾶσαι τέχναι βροτοῖσιν ἐκ Προμηθέως.
[176] Æsch. Prom. 231.—
βροτῶν δὲ τῶν ταλαιπώρων λόγον
Οὐκ ἔσχεν οὐδέν᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ἀϊστώσας γένος
Τὸ πᾶν, ἔχρῃζεν ἄλλο φιτῦσαι νέον.
[177] Æsch. Prom. 198-222. 123.—
διὰ τὴν λίαν φιλότητα βροτῶν.
[178] Æsch. Prom. 169-770.
As the Æschylean Promêtheus, though retaining the old lineaments, has
acquired a new coloring, soul and character, so he has also become
identified with a special locality. In Hesiod, there is no indication
of the place in which he is imprisoned; but Æschylus places it in
Scythia,[179] and the general belief of the Greeks supposed it to be on
Mount Caucasus. So long and so firmly did this belief continue, that
the Roman general Pompey, when in command of an army in Kolchis, made
with his companion, the literary Greek Theophanês, a special march to
view the spot in Caucasus where Promêtheus had been transfixed.[180]
[179] Prometh. 2. See also the Fragments of the Promêtheus
Solutus, 177-179, ed. Dindorf, where Caucasus is specially named;
but v. 719 of the Promêtheus Vinctus seems to imply that Mount
Caucasus is a place different from that to which the suffering
prisoner is chained.
[180] Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 103.
CHAPTER IV.
HEROIC LEGENDS.—GENEALOGY OF ARGOS.
Having briefly enumerated the gods of Greece, with their chief
attributes as described in legend, we come to those genealogies which
connected them with historical men.
In the retrospective faith of a Greek, the ideas of worship and
ancestry coalesced. Every association of men, large or small, in whom
there existed a feeling of present union, traced back that union to
some common initial progenitor; that progenitor being either the common
god whom they worshipped, or some semi-divine person closely allied
to him. What the feelings of the community require is, a continuous
pedigree to connect them with this respected source of existence,
beyond which they do not think of looking back. A series of names,
placed in filiation or fraternity, together with a certain number of
family or personal adventures ascribed to some of the individuals
among them, constitute the ante-historical past through which the
Greek looks back to his gods. The names of this genealogy are, to a
great degree, gentile or local names familiar to the people,—rivers,
mountains, springs, lakes, villages, demes, etc.,—embodied as persons,
and introduced as acting or suffering. They are moreover called kings
or chiefs, but the existence of a body of subjects surrounding them
is tacitly implied rather than distinctly set forth; for their own
personal exploits or family proceedings constitute for the most part
the whole matter of narrative. And thus the genealogy was made to
satisfy at once the appetite of the Greeks for romantic adventure, and
their demand for an unbroken line of filiation between themselves and
the gods. The eponymous personage, from whom the community derive their
name, is sometimes the begotten son of the local god, sometimes an
indigenous man sprung from the earth, which is indeed itself divinized.
It will be seen from the mere description of these genealogies that
they included elements human and historical, as well as elements divine
and extra-historical. And if we could determine the time at which any
genealogy was first framed, we should be able to assure ourselves
that the men then represented as present, together with their fathers
and grandfathers, were real persons of flesh and blood. But this is
a point which can seldom be ascertained; moreover, even if it could
be ascertained, we must at once set it aside, if we wish to look at
the genealogy in the point of view of the Greeks. For to them, not
only all the members were alike real, but the gods and heroes at the
commencement were in a certain sense the most real; at least, they were
the most esteemed and indispensable of all. The value of the genealogy
consisted, not in its length, but in its continuity; not (according
to the feeling of modern aristocracy) in the power of setting out a
prolonged series of human fathers and grandfathers, but in the sense
of ancestral union with the primitive god. And the length of the
series is traceable rather to humility, inasmuch as the same person
who was gratified with the belief that he was descended from a god in
the fifteenth generation, would have accounted it criminal insolence
to affirm that a god was his father or grandfather. In presenting to
the reader those genealogies which constitute the supposed primitive
history of Hellas, I make no pretence to distinguish names real and
historical from fictitious creations; partly because I have no evidence
upon which to draw the line, and partly because by attempting it I
should altogether depart from the genuine Grecian point of view.
Nor is it possible to do more than exhibit a certain selection of
such as were most current and interesting; for the total number of
them which found place in Grecian faith exceeds computation. As a
general rule, every deme, every gens, every aggregate of men accustomed
to combined action, religious or political, had its own. The small
and unimportant demes into which Attica was divided had each its
ancestral god and heroes, just as much as the great Athens herself.
Even among the villages of Phokis, which Pausanias will hardly permit
himself to call towns, deductions of legendary antiquity were not
wanting. And it is important to bear in mind, when we are reading the
legendary genealogies of Argos, or Sparta, or Thêbes, that these are
merely samples amidst an extensive class, all perfectly analogous,
and all exhibiting the religious and patriotic retrospect of some
fraction of the Hellenic world. They are no more matter of historical
tradition than any of the thousand other legendary genealogies which
men delighted to recall to memory at the periodical festivals of their
gens, their deme, or their village.
With these few prefatory remarks, I proceed to notice the most
conspicuous of the Grecian heroic pedigrees, and first, that of Argos.
The earliest name in Argeian antiquity is that of Inachus, the son
of Oceanus and Têthys, who gave his name to the river flowing under
the walls of the town. According to the chronological computations of
those who regarded the mythical genealogies as substantive history,
and who allotted a given number of years to each generation, the reign
of Inachus was placed 1986 B. C., or about 1100 years prior to the
commencement of the recorded Olympiads.[181]
[181] Apollodôr. ii. 1. Mr. Fynes Clinton does not admit the
historical reality of Inachus; but he places Phorôneus seventeen
generations, or 570 years prior to the Trojan war, 978 years
earlier than the first recorded Olympiad. See Fasti Hellenici,
vol. iii. c. 1. p. 19.
The sons of Inachus were Phorôneus and Ægialeus; both of whom however
were sometimes represented as autochthonous men, the one in the
territory of Argos, the other in that of Sikyôn. Ægialeus gave his
name to the north-western region of the Peloponnêsus, on the southern
coast of the Corinthian Gulf.[182] The name of Phorôneus was of great
celebrity in the Argeian mythical genealogies, and furnished both the
title and the subject of the ancient poem called Phorônis, in which he
is styled "the father of mortal men."[183] He is said to have imparted
to mankind, who had before him lived altogether isolated, the first
notion and habits of social existence, and even the first knowledge of
fire: his dominion extended over the whole Peloponnêsus. His tomb at
Argos, and seemingly also the place called the Phorônic city, in which
he formed the first settlement of mankind, were still shown in the days
of Pausanias.[184] The offspring of Phorôneus, by the nymph Teledikê,
were Apis and Niobê. Apis, a harsh ruler, was put to death by Thelxiôn
and Telchin, having given to Peloponnêsus the name of Apia:[185] he
was succeeded by Argos, the son of his sister Niobê by the god Zeus.
From this sovereign Peloponnêsus was denominated Argos. By his wife
Evadnê, daughter of Strymôn,[186] he had four sons, Ekbasus, Peiras,
Epidaurus, and Kriasus. Ekbasus was succeeded by his son Agênôr,
and he again by his son Argos Panoptês,—a very powerful prince who
is said to have had eyes distributed over all his body, and to have
liberated Peloponnêsus from several monsters and wild animals which
infested it:[187] Akusilaus and Æschylus make this Argos an earth-born
person, while Pherekydês reports him as son of Arestôr. Iasus was the
son of Argos Panoptês by Ismênê, daughter of Asôpus. According to the
authors whom Apollodôrus and Pausanias prefer, the celebrated Iô was
his daughter: but the Hesiodic epic (as well as Akusilaus) represented
her as daughter of Peiras, while Æschylus and Kastor the chronologist
affirmed the primitive king Inachus to have been her father.[188] A
favorite theme, as well for the ancient genealogical poets as for the
Attic tragedians, were the adventures of Iô, of whom, while priestess
of Hêrê, at the ancient and renowned Hêræon between Mykênæ and Argos,
Zeus became amorous. When Hêrê discovered the intrigue and taxed him
with it, he denied the charge, and metamorphosed Iô into a white cow.
Hêrê, requiring that the cow should be surrendered to her, placed her
under the keeping of Argos Panoptês; but this guardian was slain by
Hermês, at the command of Zeus: and Hêrê then drove the cow Iô away
from her native land by means of the incessant stinging of a gad-fly,
which compelled her to wander without repose or sustenance over an
immeasurable extent of foreign regions. The wandering Iô gave her name
to the Ionian Gulf, traversed Epirus and Illyria, passed the chain
of Mount Hæmus and the lofty summits of Caucasus, and swam across
the Thracian or Cimmerian Bosporus (which also from her derived its
appellation) into Asia. She then went through Scythia, Cimmeria, and
many Asiatic regions, until she arrived in Egypt, where Zeus at length
bestowed upon her rest, restored her to her original form, and enabled
her to give birth to his black son Epaphos.[189]
[182] Pausan. ii. 5, 4.
[183] See Düntzer, Fragm. Epic. Græc. p. 57. The Argeian author
Akusilaus treated Phorôneus as the first of men, Fragm. 14.
Didot ap. Clem. Alex. Stromat i. p. 321. Φορωνῆες, a synonym for
Argeians; Theocrit. Idyll. xxv. 200.
[184] Apollodôr. ii. 1, 1; Pausan. ii. 15, 5; 19, 5; 20, 3.
[185] Apis in Æschylus is totally different: ἰατρόμαντις or
medical charmer, son of Apollo, who comes across the gulf from
Naupactus, purifies the territory of Argos from noxious monsters,
and gives to it the name of _Apia_ (Æschyl. Suppl. 265). Compare
Steph. Byz. v. Ἀπίη; Soph. Œdip. Colon. 1303. The name Ἀπία for
Peloponnêsus remains still a mystery, even after the attempt of
Buttmann (Lexilogus, s. 19) to throw light upon it.
Eusebius asserts that Niobê was the wife of Inachus and mother of
Phorôneus, and pointedly contradicts those who call her daughter
of Phorôneus—φασὶ δέ τινες Νιόβην Φορωνέως εἶναι θυγατέρα, ὅπερ
οὐκ ἀληθές (Chronic. p. 23, ed. Scalig.): his positive tone is
curious, upon such a matter.
Hellanikus in his Argolica stated that Phorôneus had three sons,
Pelasgus, Iasus and Agênôr, who at the death of their father
divided his possessions by lot. Pelasgus acquired the country
near the river Erasinus, and built the citadel of Larissa: Iasus
obtained the portion near to Elis. After their decease, the
younger brother Agênôr invaded and conquered the country, at the
head of a large body of horse. It was from these three persons
that Argos derived three epithets which are attached to it in the
Homeric poems—Ἄργος Πελασγικὸν, Ἴασον, Ἱππόβοτον (Hellanik. Fr.
38, ed. Didot; Phavorin. v. Ἄργος). This is a specimen of the way
in which legendary persons as well as legendary events were got
up to furnish an explanation of Homeric epithets: we may remark
as singular, that Hellanikus seems to apply Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος to a
portion of Peloponnêsus, while the Homeric Catalogue applies it
to Thessaly.
[186] Apollod. _l. c._ The mention of Strymôn seems connected
with Æschylus Suppl. 255.
[187] Akusil. Fragm. 17, ed. Didot; Æsch. Prometh. 568; Pherekyd.
Fragm. 22, ed. Didot; Hesiod. Ægimius. Fr. 2, p. 56, ed. Düntzer:
among the varieties of the story, one was that Argos was changed
into a peacock (Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 102). Macrobius (i. 19)
considers Argos as an allegorical expression of the starry
heaven; an idea which Panofska also upholds in one of the recent
Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy, 1837, p. 121 _seq._
[188] Apollod. ii. 1, 1; Pausan. ii. 16, 1; Æsch. Prom. v.
590-663.
[189] Æschyl. Prom. v. 790-850; Apollod. ii. 1. Æschylus in the
Supplices gives a different version of the wanderings of Iô from
that which appears in the Promêtheus: in the former drama he
carries her through Phrygia, Mysia, Lydia, Pamphylia and Cilicia
into Egypt (Supplic. 544-566): nothing is there said about
Promêtheus, or Caucasus or Scythia, etc.
The track set forth in the Supplices is thus geographically
intelligible, that in the Promêtheus (though the most noticed of
the two) defies all comprehension, even as a consistent fiction;
nor has the erudition of the commentators been successful in
clearing it up. See Schutz, Excurs. iv. ad Prometh. Vinct.
pp. 144-149; Welcker, Æschylische Trilogie, pp. 127-146, and
especially Völcker, Mythische Geographie der Griech. und Römer,
part i. pp. 3-13.
The Greek inhabitants at Tarsus in Cilicia traced their origin
to Argos: their story was, that Triptolemus had been sent forth
from that town in quest of the wandering Iô, that he had followed
her to Tyre, and then renounced the search in despair. He and
his companions then settled partly at Tarsus, partly at Antioch
(Strabo, xiv. 673; xv. 750). This is the story of Kadmos and
Eurôpê inverted, as happens so often with the Grecian mythes.
Homer calls Hermês Ἀργειφόντης; but this epithet hardly affords
sufficient proof that he was acquainted with the mythe of Iô,
as Völcker supposes: it cannot be traced higher than Hesiod.
According to some authors, whom Cicero copies, it was on account
of the murder of Argos that Hermês was obliged to leave Greece
and go into Egypt: then it was that he taught the Egyptians laws
and letters (De Natur. Deor. iii. 22).
Such is a general sketch of the adventures which the ancient poets,
epic, lyric, and tragic, and the logographers after them, connect
with the name of the Argeian Iô,—one of the numerous tales which the
fancy of the Greeks deduced from the amorous dispositions of Zeus and
the jealousy of Hêrê. That the scene should be laid in the Argeian
territory appears natural, when we recollect that both Argos and Mykênæ
were under the special guardianship of Hêrê, and that the Hêræon
between the two was one of the oldest and most celebrated temples
in which she was worshipped. It is useful to compare this amusing
fiction with the representation reported to us by Herodotus, and
derived by him as well from Phœnician as from Persian antiquarians,
of the circumstances which occasioned the transit of Iô from Argos
to Egypt,—an event recognized by all of them as historical matter of
fact. According to the Persians, a Phœnician vessel had arrived at
the port near Argos, freighted with goods intended for sale to the
inhabitants of the country. After the vessel had remained a few days,
and disposed of most of her cargo, several Argeian women, and among
them Iô the king's daughter, coming on board to purchase, were seized
and carried off by the crew, who sold Iô in Egypt.[190] The Phœnician
antiquarians, however, while they admitted the circumstance that Iô
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 Phœnicians described the abduction of Iô 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 Eurôpê from Phœnicia
by Grecian adventurers,—perhaps, as Herodotus supposed, by Krêtans:
next, the abduction of Mêdeia from Kolchis by Jasôn, 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 Agamemnôn and his followers.[191]
[190] The story in Parthênius (Narrat. 1) is built upon this
version of Iô's adventures.
[191] 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, respecting the cause which carried Iô from Argos
to Egypt, is the true one: Ephorus (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii.
168) repeats the abduction of Iô to Egypt, by the Phœnicians,
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 κακοήθεια (bad
feeling) of Herodotus, that the latter inserts so discreditable
a narrative respecting Iô, daughter of Inachus, "whom all Greeks
believe to have been divinized by foreigners, 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,
Iô, Iasus and Argos, as highest members of the Perseid genealogy.
He calls Herodotus φιλοβάρβαρος (Plutarch, De Malign. Herodoti,
c. xi. xii. xiv. pp. 856, 857).
The account thus given of the adventures of Iô, when contrasted with
the genuine legend, is interesting, as it tends to illustrate the
phænomenon which early Grecian history is constantly presenting to
us,—the way in which the epical furniture of an unknown past is recast
and newly so as to meet those changes which take place in the
retrospective feelings of the present. The religious and poetical
character of the old legend disappears: nothing remains except the
names of persons and places, and the voyage from Argos to Egypt: we
have in exchange a sober, quasi-historical narrative, the value of
which consists in its bearing on the grand contemporary conflicts
between Persia and Greece, which filled the imagination of Herodotus
and his readers.
To proceed with the genealogy of the kings of Argos, Iasus was
succeeded by Krotôpus, son of his brother Agênôr; Krotôpus by
Sthenelas, and he again by Gelanôr.[192] In the reign of the latter,
Danaos came with his fifty daughters from Egypt to Argos; and here we
find another of those romantic adventures which so agreeably decorate
the barrenness of the mythical genealogies. Danaos and Ægyptos were
two brothers descending from Epaphos, son of Iô: Ægyptos had fifty
sons, who were eager to marry the fifty daughters of Danaos, in spite
of the strongest repugnance of the latter. To escape such a necessity,
Danaos placed his fifty daughters on board of a penteconter (or vessel
with fifty oars) and sought refuge at Argos; touching in his voyage at
the island of Rhodes, where he erected a statue of Athênê at Lindos,
which was long exhibited as a memorial of his passage. Ægyptos and
his sons followed them to Argos and still pressed their suit, to which
Danaos found himself compelled to assent; but on the wedding night he
furnished each of his daughters with a dagger, and enjoined them to
murder their husbands during the hour of sleep. His orders were obeyed
by all, with the single exception of Hypermnêstra, who preserved her
husband Lynkeus, incurring displeasure and punishment from her father.
He afterwards, however, pardoned her; and when, by the voluntary
abdication of Gelanôr, he became king of Argos, Lynkeus was recognized
as his son-in-law and ultimately succeeded him. The remaining
daughters, having been purified by Athênê and Hermês, were given in
marriage to the victors in a gymnic contest publicly proclaimed. From
Danaos was derived the name of Danai, applied to the inhabitants of the
Argeian territory,[193] and to the Homeric Greeks generally.
[192] It would be an unprofitable fatigue to enumerate the
multiplied and irreconcilable discrepancies in regard to every
step of this old Argeian genealogy. Whoever desires to see
them brought together, may consult Schubart, Quæstiones in
Antiquitatem Heroicam, Marburg, 1832, capp. 1 and 2.
The remarks which Schubart makes (p. 35) upon Petit-Radel's
Chronological Tables will be assented to by those who follow
the unceasing string of contradictions, without any sufficient
reason to believe that any one of them is more worthy of trust
than the remainder, which he has cited:—"Videant alii, quomodo
genealogias heroicas, et chronologiæ rationes, in concordiam
redigant. Ipse abstineo, probe persuasus, stemmata vera,
historiæ fide comprobata, in systema chronologiæ redigi posse:
at ore per sæcula tradita, a poetis reficta, sæpe mutata, prout
fabula postulare videbatur, ab historiarum deinde conditoribus
restituta, scilicet, brevi, qualia prostant stemmata—chronologiæ
secundum annos distributæ vincula semper recusatura esse."
[193] Apollod. ii. 1. The Supplices of Æschylus is the commencing
drama of a trilogy on this subject of the Danaïdes,—Ἱκετίδες,
Αἰγύπτιοι, Δαναΐδες. Welcker, Griechisch. Tragödien, vol. i. p.
48: the two latter are lost. The old epic poem called Danaïs or
Danaïdes, which is mentioned in the Tabula Iliaca as containing
5000 verses, has perished, and is unfortunately very little
alluded to: see Düntzer, Epic. Græc. Fragm. p. 3; Welcker, Der
Episch. Kyklus, p. 35.
From the legend of the Danaïdes we pass to two barren names of kings,
Lynkeus and his son Abas. The two sons of Abas were Akrisios and
Prœtos, who, after much dissension, divided between them the Argeian
territory; Akrisios ruling at Argos, and Prœtos at Tiryns. The families
of both formed the theme of romantic stories. To pass over for the
present the legend of Bellerophôn, and the unrequited passion which
the wife of Prœtos conceived for him, we are told that the daughters
of Prœtos, beautiful, and solicited in marriage by suitors from all
Greece, were smitten with leprosy and driven mad, wandering in unseemly
guise throughout Peloponnêsus. The visitation had overtaken them,
according to Hesiod, because they refused to take part in the Bacchic
rites; according to Pherekydês and the Argeian Akusilaus,[194] because
they had treated scornfully the wooden statue and simple equipments of
Hêrê: the religious character of the old legend here displays itself in
a remarkable manner. Unable to cure his daughters, Prœtos invoked the
aid of the renowned Pylian prophet and leech, Melampus son of Amythaôn,
who undertook to remove the malady on condition of being rewarded
with the third part of the kingdom. Prœtos indignantly refused these
conditions: but the state of his daughters becoming aggravated and
intolerable, he was compelled again to apply to Melampus; who, on the
second request, raised his demands still higher, and required another
third of the kingdom for his brother Bias. These terms being acceded
to, he performed his part of the covenant. He appeased the wrath of
Hêrê by prayer and sacrifice; or, according to another account, he
approached the deranged women at the head of a troop of young men,
with shouting and ecstatic dance,—the ceremonies appropriate to the
Bacchic worship of Dionysos,—and in this manner effected their cure.
Melampus, a name celebrated in many different Grecian mythes, is the
legendary founder and progenitor of a great and long-continued family
of prophets. He and his brother Bias became kings of separate portions
of the Argeian territory: he is recognized as ruler there even in the
Odyssey, and the prophet Theoklymenos, his grandson, is protected and
carried to Ithaca by Telemachus.[195] Herodotus also alludes to the
cure of the women, and to the double kingdom of Melampus and Bias
in the Argeian land: he recognizes Melampus as the first person who
introduced to the knowledge of the Greeks the name and worship of
Dionysos, with its appropriate sacrifices and phallic processions. Here
again he historicizes various features of the old legend in a manner
not unworthy of notice.[196]
[194] Apollod. 1. c.; Pherekyd. ap. Schol. Hom. Odyss. xv. 225;
Hesiod, Fragm. Marktsch. Fr. 36, 37, 38. These Fragments belong
to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Apollodôrus seems to refer
to some other of the numerous Hesiodic poems. Diodôrus (iv. 68)
assigns the anger of Dionysos as the cause.
[195] Odyss. xv. 240-256.
[196] Herod. ix. 34; ii. 49: compare Pausan. ii. 18, 4. Instead
of the Prœtides, or daughters of Prœtos, it is the Argeian
women generally whom he represents Melampus as having cured,
and the Argeians generally who send to Pylus to invoke his aid:
the heroic personality which pervades the primitive story has
disappeared.
Kallimachus notices the Prœtid virgins as the parties suffering
from madness, but he treats Artemis as the healing influence
(Hymn. ad Dianam 235).
But Danaê, the daughter of Akrisios, with her son Perseus acquired
still greater celebrity than her cousins the Prœtides. An oracle had
apprized Akrisios that his daughter would give birth to a son by whose
hand he would himself be slain. To guard against this danger, he
imprisoned Danaê in a chamber of brass under ground. But the god Zeus
had become amorous of her, and found means to descend through the roof
in the form of a shower of gold: the consequence of his visits was the
birth of Perseus. When Akrisios discovered that his daughter had given
existence to a son, he enclosed both the mother and the child in a
coffer, which he cast into the sea.[197] The coffer was carried to the
isle of Seriphos, where Diktys, brother of the king Polydektês, fished
it up, and rescued both Danaê and Perseus. The exploits of Perseus,
when he grew up, against the three Phorkides or daughters of Phorkys,
and the three Gorgons, are among the most marvellous and imaginative
in all Grecian legend: they bear a stamp almost Oriental. I shall
not here repeat the details of those unparalleled hazards which the
special favor of Athênê enabled him to overcome, and which ended in his
bringing back from Libya the terrific head of the Gorgon Medusa, endued
with the property of turning every one who looked upon it into stone.
In his return, he rescued Andromeda, daughter of Kêpheus, who had been
exposed to be devoured by a sea-monster, and brought her back as his
wife. Akrisios trembled to see him after this victorious expedition,
and retired into Thessaly to avoid him; but Perseus followed him
thither, and having succeeded in calming his apprehensions, became
competitor in a gymnic contest where his grandfather was among the
spectators. By an incautious swing of his quoit, he unintentionally
struck Akrisios, and caused his death: the predictions of the oracle
were thus at last fulfilled. Stung with remorse at the catastrophe,
and unwilling to return to Argos, which had been the principality of
Akrisios, Perseus made an exchange with Megapenthês, son of Prœtos king
of Tiryns. Megapenthês became king of Argos, and Perseus of Tiryns:
moreover, the latter founded, within ten miles of Argos, the far-famed
city of Mykênæ. The massive walls of this city, like those of Tiryns,
of which remains are yet to be seen, were built for him by the Lykian
Cyclôpes.[198]
[197] The beautiful fragment of Simonidês (Fragm. vii. ed.
Gaisford. Poet. Min.), describing Danaê and the child thus
exposed, is familiar to every classical reader.
[198] Paus. ii. 15, 4; ii. 16, 5. Apollod. ii. 2. Pherekyd.
Fragm. 26, Dind.
We here reach the commencement of the Perseid dynasty of Mykênæ. It
should be noticed, however, that there were among the ancient legends
contradictory accounts of the foundation of this city. Both the Odyssey
and the Great Eoiai enumerated, among the heroines, Mykênê, the Eponyma
of the city; the former poem classifying her with Tyrô and Alkmênê, the
latter describing her as the daughter of Inachus and wife of Arestôr.
And Akusilaus mentioned an Eponymus Mykêneus, the son of Spartôn and
grandson of Phorôneus.[199]
[199] Odyss. ii. 120. Hesiod. Fragment. 154. Marktscheff.—Akusil.
Fragm. 16. Pausan. ii. 16, 4. Hekatæus derived the name of the
town from the μύκης of the sword of Perseus (Fragm. 360, Dind.).
The Schol. ad Eurip. Orest. 1247, mentions Mykêneus as son of
Spartôn, but grandson of Phêgeus the brother of Phorôneus.
The prophetic family of Melampus maintained itself in one of the
three parts of the divided Argeian kingdom for five generations, down
to Amphiaraos and his sons Alkmæôn and Amphilochos. The dynasty of
his brother Bias, and that of Megapenthês, son of Prœtos, continued
each for four generations: a list of barren names fills up the
interval.[200] The Perseids of Mykênæ boasted a descent long and
glorious, heroic as well as historical, continuing down to the last
sovereigns of Sparta.[201] The issue of Perseus was numerous: his son
Alkæos was father of Amphitryôn; another of his sons, Elektryôn, was
father of Alkmênê;[202] a third, Sthenelos, father of Eurystheus.
[200] Pausan. ii. 18, 4.
[201] Herodot. vi. 53.
[202] In the Hesiodic Shield of Hêraklês, Alkmênê is distinctly
mentioned as daughter of Elektryôn; the genealogical poet, Asios,
called her the daughter of Amphiaraos and Eriphyle (Asii Fragm.
4, ed. Markt. p. 412). The date of Asios cannot be precisely
fixed; but he may be probably assigned to an epoch between the
30th and 40th Olympiad.
Asios must have adopted a totally different legend respecting the
birth of Hêraklês and the circumstances preceding it, among which
the deaths of her father and brothers are highly influential. Nor
could he have accepted the received chronology of the sieges of
Thêbes and Troy.
After the death of Perseus, Alkæos and Amphitryôn dwelt at Tiryns.
The latter became engaged in a quarrel with Elektryôn respecting
cattle, and in a fit of passion killed him:[203] moreover the piratical
Taphians from the west coast of Akarnania invaded the country, and
slew the sons of Elektryôn, so that Alkmênê alone was left of that
family. She was engaged to wed Amphitryôn; but she bound him by oath
not to consummate the marriage until he had avenged upon the Têleboæ
the death of her brothers. Amphitryôn, compelled to flee the country
as the murderer of his uncle, took refuge in Thêbes, whither Alkmênê
accompanied him: Sthenelos was left in possession of Tiryns. The
Kadmeians of Thêbes, together with the Locrians and Phocians, supplied
Amphitryôn with troops, which he conducted against the Têleboæ and
the Taphians:[204] yet he could not have subdued them without the aid
of Komæthô, daughter of the Taphian king Pterelaus, who conceived a
passion for him, and cut off from her father's head the golden lock
to which Poseidôn had attached the gift of immortality.[205] Having
conquered and expelled his enemies, Amphitryôn returned to Thêbes,
impatient to consummate his marriage: but Zeus on the wedding-night
assumed his form and visited Alkmênê before him: he had determined to
produce from her a son superior to all his prior offspring,—"a specimen
of invincible force both to gods and men."[206] At the proper time,
Alkmênê was delivered of twin sons: Hêraklês the offspring of Zeus,—the
inferior and unhonored Iphiklês, offspring of Amphitryôn.[207]
[203] So runs the old legend in the Hesiodic Shield of Hêraklês
(12-82). Apollodôrus (or Pherekydês, whom he follows) softens
it down, and represents the death of Elektryôn as accidentally
caused by Amphitryôn. (Apollod. ii. 4, 6. Pherekydês, Fragm. 27,
Dind.)
[204] Hesiod, Scut. Herc. 24. Theocrit. Idyll. xxiv. 4. Teleboas,
the Eponym of these marauding people, was son of Poseidôn
(Anaximander ap. Athenæ. xi. p. 498).
[205] Apollod. ii. 4, 7. Compare the fable of Nisus at Megara,
_infra_, chap. xii. p. 302.
[206] Hesiod, Scut. Herc. 29. ὄφρα θεοῖσιν Ἀνδράσι τ᾽ ἀλφηστῇσιν
ἀρῆς ἀλκτῆρα φυτεύσῃ.
[207] Hesiod. Sc. H. 50-56.
When Alkmênê was on the point of being delivered at Thêbes, Zeus
publicly boasted among the assembled gods, at the instigation of the
mischief-making Atê, that there was on that day about to be born on
earth, from his breed, a son who should rule over all his neighbors.
Hêrê treated this as an empty boast, calling upon him to bind himself
by an irremissible oath that the prediction should be realized. Zeus
incautiously pledged his solemn word; upon which Hêrê darted swiftly
down from Olympus to the Achaic Argos, where the wife of Sthenelos
(son of Perseus, and therefore grandson of Zeus) was already seven
months gone with child. By the aid of the Eileithyiæ, the special
goddesses of parturition, she caused Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelos,
to be born before his time on that very day, while she retarded the
delivery of Alkmênê. Then returning to Olympus, she announced the
fact to Zeus: "The good man Eurystheus, son of the Perseid Sthenelos,
is this day born of thy loins: the sceptre of the Argeians worthily
belongs to him." Zeus was thunderstruck at the consummation which he
had improvidently bound himself to accomplish. He seized Atê his evil
counsellor by the hair, and hurled her forever away from Olympus: but
he had no power to avert the ascendency of Eurystheus and the servitude
of Hêraklês. "Many a pang did he suffer, when he saw his favorite son
going through his degrading toil in the tasks imposed upon him by
Eurystheus."[208]
[208] Homer, Iliad, xix. 90-133; also viii. 361.—
Τὴν αἰεὶ στενάχεσχ᾽, ὅθ᾽ ἑὸν φίλον υἱὸν ὁρῷτο
Ἔργον ἀεικὲς ἔχοντα, ὑπ᾽ Εὐρυσθῆος ἀέθλων.
The legend, of unquestionable antiquity, here transcribed from the
Iliad, is one of the most pregnant and characteristic in the Grecian
mythology. It explains, according to the religious ideas familiar to
the old epic poets, both the distinguishing attributes and the endless
toil and endurances of Hêraklês,—the most renowned and most ubiquitous
of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellênes,—a being
of irresistible force, and especially beloved by Zeus, yet condemned
constantly to labor for others and to obey the commands of a worthless
and cowardly persecutor. His recompense is reserved to the close of
his career, when his afflicting trials are brought to a close: he is
then admitted to the godhead and receives in marriage Hêbê.[209] The
twelve labors, as they are called, too notorious to be here detailed,
form a very small fraction of the exploits of this mighty being, which
filled the Hêrakleian epics of the ancient poets. He is found not
only in most parts of Hellas, but throughout all the other regions
then known to the Greeks, from Gadês to the river Thermôdôn in the
Euxine and to Scythia, overcoming all difficulties and vanquishing
all opponents. Distinguished families are everywhere to be traced
who bear his patronymic, and glory in the belief that they are his
descendants. Among Achæans, Kadmeians, and Dôrians, Hêraklês is
venerated: the latter especially treat him as their principal hero,—the
Patron Hero-God of the race: the Hêrakleids form among all Dôrians a
privileged gens, in which at Sparta the special lineage of the two
kings was included.
His character lends itself to mythes countless in number as well as
disparate in their character. The irresistible force remains constant,
but it is sometimes applied with reckless violence against friends as
well as enemies, sometimes devoted to the relief of the oppressed. The
comic writers often brought him out as a coarse and stupid glutton,
while the Athênian philosopher Prodikos, without at all distorting
the type, extracted from it the simple, impressive, and imperishable
apologue still known as the Choice of Hercules.
After the death and apotheosis of Hêraklês, his son Hyllos and his
other children were expelled and persecuted by Eurystheus: the fear of
his vengeance deterred both the Trachinian king Kêyx and the Thêbans
from harboring them, and the Athênians alone were generous enough to
brave the risk of offering them shelter. Eurystheus invaded Attica,
but perished in the attempt by the hand of Hyllos, or by that of
Iolaos, the old companion and nephew of Hêraklês.[210] The chivalrous
courage which the Athênians had on this occasion displayed in behalf
of oppressed innocence, was a favorite theme for subsequent eulogy by
Attic poets and orators.
[209] Hesiod, Theogon. 951, τελέσας στονόεντας ἀέθλους. Hom.
Odyss. xi. 620; Hesiod, Eœæ, Fragm. 24, Düntzer, p. 36,
πονηρότατον καὶ ἄριστον.
[210] Apollod. ii. 8, 1; Hecatæ. ap. Longin. c. 27; Diodôr. iv.
57.
All the sons of Eurystheus lost their lives in the battle along with
him, so that the Perseid family was now represented only by the
Hêrakleids, who collected an army and endeavored to recover the
possessions from which they had been expelled. The united forces of
Iônians, Achæans, and Arcadians, then inhabiting Peloponnêsus, met
the invaders at the isthmus, when Hyllos, the eldest of the sons of
Hêraklês, proposed that the contest should be determined by a single
combat between himself and any champion of the opposing army. It
was agreed, that if Hyllos were victorious, the Hêrakleids should
be restored to their possessions—if he were vanquished, that they
should forego all claim for the space of a hundred years, or fifty
years, or three generations,—for in the specification of the time,
accounts differ. Echemos, the hero of Tegea in Arcadia, accepted the
challenge, and Hyllos was slain in the encounter; in consequence of
which the Hêrakleids retired, and resided along with the Dôrians
under the protection of Ægimios, son of Dôrus.[211] As soon as the
stipulated period of truce had expired, they renewed their attempt upon
Peloponnêsus conjointly with the Dôrians, and with complete success:
the great Dôrian establishments of Argos, Sparta, and Messênia were
the result. The details of this victorious invasion will be hereafter
recounted.
[211] Herodot. ix. 26; Diodôr. iv. 58.
Sikyôn, Phlios, Epidauros, and Trœzen[212] all boasted of respected
eponyms and a genealogy of dignified length, not exempt from the usual
discrepancies—but all just as much entitled to a place on the tablet
of history as the more renowned Æolids or Hêrakleids. I omit them here
because I wish to impress upon the reader's mind the salient features
and character of the legendary world,—not to load his memory with a
full list of legendary names.
[212] Pausan. ii. 5, 5; 12, 5; 26, 3. His statements indicate how
much the predominance of a powerful neighbor like Argos tended to
alter the genealogies of these inferior towns.
CHAPTER V.
DEUKALION, HELLEN, AND SONS OF HELLEN.
In the Hesiodic Theogony, as well as in the "Works and Days," the
legend of Promêtheus and Epimêtheus presents an import religious,
ethical, and social, and in this sense it is carried forward by
Æschylus; but to neither of the characters is any genealogical function
assigned. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women brought both of them into the
stream of Grecian legendary lineage, representing Deukaliôn as the son
of Promêtheus and Pandôra, and seemingly his wife Pyrrha as daughter of
Epimêtheus.[213]
[213] Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1085. Other accounts of the
genealogy of Deukaliôn are given in the Schol. ad Homer. Odyss.
x. 2, on the authority both of Hesiod and Akusilaus.
Deukaliôn is important in Grecian mythical narrative under two points
of view. First, he is the person specially saved at the time of the
general deluge: next, he is the father of Hellên, the great eponym of
the Hellenic race; at least this was the more current story, though
there were other statements which made Hellên the son of Zeus.
The name of Deukaliôn is originally connected with the Lokrian towns
of Kynos and Opus, and with the race of the Leleges, but he appears
finally as settled in Thessaly, and ruling in the portion of that
country called Phthiôtis.[214] According to what seems to have been the
old legendary account, it is the deluge which transferred him from the
one to the other; but according to another statement, framed in more
historicizing times, he conducted a body of Kurêtes and Leleges into
Thessaly, and expelled the prior Pelasgian occupants.[215]
[214] Hesiodic Catalog. Fragm. xi.; Gaisf. lxx. Düntzer—
Ἤτοι γὰρ Λοκρὸς Λελέγων ἡγήσατο λαῶν,
Τούς ῥά ποτε Κρονίδης Ζεὺς ἄφθιτα μήδεα εἰδὼς,
Λεκτοὺς ἐκ γαίης λάας πόρε Δευκαλίωνι.
The reputed lineage of Deukaliôn continued in Phthia down to
the time of Dikæarchus, if we may judge from the old Phthiot
Pherekratês, whom he introduced in one of his dialogues as a
disputant, and whom he expressly announced as a descendant of
Deukaliôn (Cicero, Tuscul. Disp. i. 10).
[215] The latter account is given by Dionys. Halic. i. 17; the
former seems to have been given by Hellanikus, who affirmed that
the ark after the deluge stopped upon Mount Othrys, and not
upon Mount Parnassus (Schol. Pind. _ut. sup._) the former being
suitable for a settlement in Thessaly.
Pyrrha is the eponymous heroine of Pyrrhæa or Pyrrha, the ancient
name of a portion of Thessaly (Rhianus, Fragm. 18, p. 71, ed.
Düntzer).
Hellanikus had written a work, now lost, entitled Δευκαλιώνεια:
all the fragments of it which are cited have reference to places
in Thessaly, Lokris and Phokis. See Preller, ad Hellanitum, p.
12 (Dörpt. 1840). Probably Hellanikus is the main source of the
important position occupied by Deukaliôn in Grecian legend.
Thrasybulus and Akestodôrus represented Deukaliôn as having
founded the oracle of Dôdôna, immediately after the deluge (Etm.
Mag. v. Δωδωναῖος).
The enormous iniquity with which earth was contaminated—as Apollodôrus
says, by the then existing brazen race, or as others say, by the fifty
monstrous sons of Lykaôn—provoked Zeus to send a general deluge.[216]
An unremitting and terrible rain laid the whole of Greece under water,
except the highest mountain-tops, whereon a few stragglers found
refuge. Deukaliôn was saved in a chest or ark, which he had been
forewarned by his father Promêtheus to construct. After floating for
nine days on the water, he at length landed on the summit of Mount
Parnassus. Zeus having sent Hermês to him, promising to grant whatever
he asked, he prayed that men and companions might be sent to him in
his solitude: accordingly Zeus directed both him and Pyrrha to cast
stones over their heads: those cast by Pyrrha became women, those by
Deukaliôn men. And thus the "stony race of men" (if we may be allowed
to translate an etymology which the Greek language presents exactly,
and which has not been disdained by Hesiod, by Pindar, by Epicharmus,
and by Virgil) came to tenant the soil of Greece.[217] Deukaliôn on
landing from the ark sacrificed a grateful offering to Zeus Phyxios,
or the God of escape; he also erected altars in Thessaly to the twelve
great gods of Olympus.[218]
[216] Apollodôrus connects this deluge with the wickedness of the
brazen race in Hesiod, according to the practice general with
the logographers of stringing together a sequence out of legends
totally unconnected with each other (i. 7, 2).
[217] Hesiod, Fragm. 135. ed. Markts. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 322,
where the word λάας, proposed by Heyne as the reading of the
unintelligible text, appears to me preferable to any of the
other suggestions. Pindar, Olymp. ix. 47. Ἄτερ δ᾽ Εὐνᾶς ὁμόδαμον
Κτησάσθαν λίθινον γόνον· Λαοὶ δ᾽ ὠνόμασθεν. Virgil, Georgic i.
63. "Unde homines nati, durum genus." Epicharmus ap. Schol.
Pindar. Olymp. ix. 56. Hygin. f. 153. Philochorus retained the
etymology, though he gave a totally different fable, nowise
connected with Deukaliôn, to account for it; a curious proof how
pleasing it was to the fancy of the Greek (see Schol. ad Pind. 1.
c. 68).
[218] Apollod. i. 7, 2. Hellanic. Fragm. 15. Didot. Hellanikus
affirmed that the ark rested on Mount Othrys, not on Mount
Parnassus (Fragm. 16. Didot). Servius (ad Virgil. Eclog. vi. 41)
placed it on Mount Athôs—Hyginus (f. 153) on Mount Ætna.
The reality of this deluge was firmly believed throughout the
historical ages of Greece: the chronologers, reckoning up by
genealogies, assigned the exact date of it, and placed it at the
same time as the conflagration of the world by the rashness of
Phaëtôn, during the reign of Krotôpas king of Argus, the seventh from
Inachus.[219] The meteorological work of Aristotle admits and reasons
upon this deluge as an unquestionable fact, though he alters the
locality by placing it west of Mount Pindus, near Dôdôna and the river
Achelôus.[220] He at the same time treats it as a physical phenomenon,
the result of periodical cycles in the atmosphere, thus departing from
the religious character of the old legend, which described it as a
judgment inflicted by Zeus upon a wicked race. Statements founded upon
this event were in circulation throughout Greece even to a very late
date. The Megarians affirmed that Megaros, their hero, son of Zeus by
a local nymph, had found safety from the waters on the lofty summit
of their mountain Geraneia, which had not been completely submerged.
And in the magnificent temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens, a cavity
in the earth was shown, through which it was affirmed that the waters
of the deluge had retired. Even in the time of Pausanias, the priests
poured into this cavity holy offerings of meal and honey.[221] In this,
as in other parts of Greece, the idea of the Deukalionian deluge was
blended with the religious impressions of the people and commemorated
by their sacred ceremonies.
[219] Tatian adv. Græc. c. 60, adopted both by Clemens and
Eusebius. The Parian marble placed this deluge in the reign of
Kranaos at Athens, 752 years before the first recorded Olympiad,
and 1528 years before the Christian æra; Apollodôrus also places
it in the reign of Kranaos, and in that of Nyctimus in Arcadia
(iii. 8, 2; 14, 5).
The deluge and the _ekpyrosis_ or conflagration are connected
together also in Servius ad Virgil. Bucol. vi. 41: he refines
both of them into a "mutationem temporum."
[220] Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. Justin rationalizes the fable
by telling us that Deukaliôn was king of Thessaly, who provided
shelter and protection to the fugitives from the deluge (ii. 6,
11).
[221] Pausan. i. 18, 7; 40, 1. According to the Parian marble (s.
5), Deukaliôn had come to Athens after the deluge, and had there
himself founded the temple of the Olympian Zeus. The etymology
and allegorization of the names of Deukaliôn and Pyrrha, given by
Völcker in his ingenious Mythologie des Iapetischen Geschlechts
(Giessen, 1824), p. 343, appears to me not at all convincing.
The offspring of Deukaliôn and Pyrrha were two sons, Hellên and
Amphiktyôn, and a daughter, Prôtogeneia, whose son by Zeus was
Aëthlius: it was however maintained by many, that Hellên was the
son of Zeus and not of Deukaliôn. Hellên had by a nymph three sons,
Dôrus, Xuthus, and Æolus. He gave to those who had been before called
Greeks,[222] the name of Hellênes, and partitioned his territory
among his three children. Æolus reigned in Thessaly; Xuthus received
Peloponnêsus, and had by Creüsa as his sons, Achæus and Iôn; while
Dôrus occupied the country lying opposite to the Peloponnêsus, on
the northern side of the Corinthian Gulf. These three gave to the
inhabitants of their respective countries the names of Æolians, Achæans
and Iônians, and Dôrians.[223]
[222] Such is the statement of Apollodôrus (i. 7, 3); but I
cannot bring myself to believe that the name (Γραϊκοὶ) Greeks is
at all old in the legend, or that the passage of Hesiod, in which
Græcus and Latinus purport to be mentioned, is genuine.
See Hesiod, Theogon. 1013, and Catalog. Fragm. xxix. ed.
Göttling, with the note of Göttling; also Wachsmuth, Hellen.
Alterth. i. 1. p. 311, and Bernhardy, Griech. Literat. vol. i. p.
167.
[223] Apollod. i. 7, 4.
Such is the genealogy as we find it in Apollodôrus. In so far as
the names and filiation are concerned, many points in it are given
differently, or implicitly contradicted, by Euripidês and other
writers. Though as literal and personal history it deserves no notice,
its import is both intelligible and comprehensive. It expounds and
symbolizes the first fraternal aggregation of Hellênic men, together
with their territorial distribution and the institutions which they
collectively venerated.
There were two great holding-points in common for every section of
Greeks. One was the Amphiktyonic assembly, which met half-yearly,
alternately at Delphi and at Thermopylæ; originally and chiefly for
common religious purposes, but indirectly and occasionally embracing
political and social objects along with them. The other was, the public
festivals or games, of which the Olympic came first in importance;
next, the Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian,—institutions which combined
religious solemnities with recreative effusion and hearty sympathies,
in a manner so imposing and so unparalleled. Amphiktyôn represents
the first of these institutions, and Aëthlius the second. As the
Amphiktyonic assembly was always especially connected with Thermopylæ
and Thessaly, Amphiktyôn is made the son of the Thessalian Deukaliôn;
but as the Olympic festival was nowise locally connected with
Deukaliôn, Aëthlius is represented as having Zeus for his father, and
as touching Deukaliôn only through the maternal line. It will be seen
presently, that the only matter predicted respecting Aëthlius is, that
he settled in the territory of Elis, and begat Endymiôn: this brings
him into local contact with the Olympic games, and his function is then
ended.
Having thus got Hellas as an aggregate with its main cementing forces,
we march on to its subdivision into parts, through Æolus, Dôrus and
Xuthus, the three sons of Hellen;[224] a distribution which is far
from being exhaustive: nevertheless, the genealogists whom Apollodôrus
follows recognize no more than three sons.
[224] How literally and implicitly even the ablest Greeks
believed in eponymous persons, such as Hellên and Iôn, as the
real progenitors of the races called after him, may be seen by
this, that Aristotle gives this common descent as the definition
of γένος (Metaphysic. iv. p. 118, Brandis):—
Γένος λέγεται, τὸ μὲν ... τὸ δὲ, ἀφ᾽ οὗ ἂν ὦσι πρώτου κινήσαντος
εἰς τὸ εἶναι. Οὕτω γὰρ λέγονται οἱ μὲν, Ἕλληνες τὸ γένος, οἱ δὲ,
Ἴωνες· τῷ, οἱ μὲν ἀπὸ Ἕλληνος, οἱ δὲ ἀπὸ Ἴωνος, εἶναι πρώτου
γεννήσαντος.
The genealogy is essentially post-Homeric; for Homer knows Hellas and
the Hellênes only in connection with a portion of Achaia Phthiôtis.
But as it is recognized in the Hesiodic Catalogue[225]—composed
probably within the first century after the commencement of recorded
Olympiads, or before 676 B. C.—the peculiarities of it, dating from
so early a period, deserve much attention. We may remark, first,
that it seems to exhibit to us Dôrus and Æolus as the only pure and
genuine offspring of Hellên. For their brother Xuthus is not enrolled
as an eponymus; he neither founds nor names any people; it is only
his sons Achæus and Iôn, after his blood has been mingled with that
of the Erechtheid Kreüsa, who become eponyms and founders, each of
his own separate people. Next, as to the territorial distribution,
Xuthus receives Peloponnêsus from his father, and unites himself with
Attica (which the author of this genealogy seems to have conceived as
originally unconnected with Hellên) by his marriage with the daughter
of the indigenous hero, Erechtheus. The issue of this marriage, Achæus
and Iôn, present to us the population of Peloponnêsus and Attica
conjointly as related among themselves by the tie of brotherhood, but
as one degree more distant both from Dôrians and Æolians. Æolus reigns
over the regions about Thessaly, and called the people in those parts
Æolians; while Dôrus occupies "the country over against Peloponnêsus on
the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf," and calls the inhabitants
after himself, Dôrians.[226] It is at once evident that this
designation is in no way applicable to the confined district between
Parnassus and Œta, which alone is known by the name of Dôris, and its
inhabitants by that of Dôrians, in the historical ages. In the view of
the author of this genealogy, the Dôrians are the original occupants of
the large range of territory north of the Corinthian Gulf, comprising
Ætôlia, Phôkis, and the territory of the Ozolian Lokrians. And this
farther harmonizes with the other legend noticed by Apollodôrus,
when he states that Ætolus, son of Endymiôn, having been forced to
expatriate from Peloponnêsus, crossed into the Kurêtid territory,[227]
and was there hospitably received by Dôrus, Laodokus and Polypœtês,
sons of Apollo and Phthia. He slew his hosts, acquired the territory,
and gave to it the name of Ætôlia: his son Pleurôn married Xanthippê,
daughter of Dôrus; while his other son, Kalydôn, marries Æolia,
daughter of Amythaôn. Here again we have the name of Dôrus, or the
Dôrians, connected with the tract subsequently termed Ætôlia. That
Dôrus should in one place be called the son of Apollo and Phthia,
and in another place the son of Hellên by a nymph, will surprise no
one accustomed to the fluctuating personal nomenclature of these old
legends: moreover the name of Phthia is easy to reconcile with that of
Hellên, as both are identified with the same portion of Thessaly, even
from the days of the Iliad.
[225] Hesiod, Fragm. 8. p. 278, ed. Marktsch.—
Ἕλληνος δ᾽ ἐγένοντο θεμιστόπολοι βασιλῆες
Δῶρός τε, Ξοῦθός τε, καὶ Αἴολος ἱππιοχάρμης.
Αἰολίδαι δ᾽ ἐγένοντο θεμιστόπολοι βασιλῆες
Κρηθεὺς ἠδ᾽ Ἀθάμας καὶ Σίσυφος αἰολομήτης
Σαλμωνεύς τ᾽ ἄδικος καὶ ὑπέρθυμος Περιήρης.
[226] Apollod. i. 7, 3. Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ Νύμφης Ὀρσήϊδος (?),
Δῶρος, Ξοῦθος, Αἴολος. Αὐτὸς μὲν οὖν ἀφ᾽ αὑτοῦ τοὺς καλουμένους
Γραϊκοὺς προσηγόρευσεν Ἕλληνας, τοῖς δὲ παισὶν ἐμέρισε τὴν χώραν.
Καὶ Ξοῦθος μὲν λαβὼν τὴν Πελοπόννησον, ἐκ Κρεούσης τῆς Ἐρεχθέως
Ἀχαιὸν ἐγέννησε καὶ Ἴωνα, ἀφ᾽ ὧν Ἀχαιοὶ καὶ Ἴωνες καλοῦνται.
Δῶρος δὲ, ~τὴν πέραν χώραν Πελοποννήσου λαβὼν, τοὺς κατοίκους
ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ Δωριεῖς ἐκάλεσεν~. Αἴολος δὲ, βασιλεύων τῶν περὶ τὴν
Θετταλίαν τόπων, τοὺς ἐνοικοῦντας Αἰολεῖς προσηγόρευσε.
Strabo (viii. p. 383) and Conôn (Narr. 27), who evidently copy
from the same source, represent Dôrus as going to settle in the
territory property known as Dôris.
[227] Apollod. i. 7, 6. Αἰτωλὸς ... φυγὼν εἰς τὴν Κουρήτιδα
χώραν, κτείνας τοὺς ὑποδεξαμένους Φθίας καὶ Ἀπόλλωνος υἱοὺς,
Δῶρον καὶ Λαόδοκον καὶ Πολυποίτην, ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ τὴν χώραν Αἰτωλίαν
ἐκάλεσε. Again, i. 8, 1. Πλευρὼν (son of Ætôlus) γήμας Ξανθίππην
τὴν Δώρου, παῖδα ἐγέννησεν Ἀγήνορα.
This story, that the Dôrians were at one time the occupants, or
the chief occupants, of the range of territory between the river
Achelôus and the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, is at least
more suitable to the facts attested by historical evidence than the
legends given in Herodotus, who represents the Dôrians as originally
in the Phthiôtid; then as passing under Dôrus, the son of Hellên,
into the Histiæôtid, under the mountains of Ossa and Olympus; next,
as driven by the Kadmeians into the regions of Pindus; from thence
passing into the Dryopid territory, on Mount Œta; lastly, from thence
into Peloponnêsus.[228] The received story was, that the great
Dôrian establishments in Peloponnêsus were formed by invasion from
the north, and that the invaders crossed the gulf from Naupaktus,—a
statement which, however disputable with respect to Argos, seems highly
probable in regard both to Sparta and Messênia. That the name of
Dôrians comprehended far more than the inhabitants of the insignificant
tetrapolis of Dôris Proper, must be assumed, if we believe that they
conquered Sparta and Messênia: both the magnitude of the conquest
itself, and the passage of a large portion of them from Naupaktus,
harmonize with the legend as given by Apollodôrus, in which the Dôrians
are represented as the principal inhabitants of the northern shore of
the gulf. The statements which we find in Herodotus, respecting the
early migrations of the Dôrians, have been considered as possessing
greater historical value than those of the fabulist Apollodôrus. But
both are equally matter of legend, while the brief indications of the
latter seem to be most in harmony with the facts which we afterwards
find attested by history.
[228] Herod. i. 56.
It has already been mentioned that the genealogy which makes Æolus,
Xuthus and Dôrus sons of Hellên, is as old as the Hesiodic Catalogue;
probably also that which makes Hellên son of Deukaliôn. Aëthlius also
is an Hesiodic personage: whether Amphiktyôn be so or not, we have no
proof.[229] They could not have been introduced into the legendary
genealogy until after the Olympic games and the Amphiktyonic council
had acquired an established ascendancy and universal reverence
throughout Greece.
[229] Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 57. Τὸν δὲ Ἐνδυμίωνα Ἠσίοδος μὲν
Ἀεθλίου τοῦ Διὸς καὶ Καλύκης παῖδα λέγει.... Καὶ Πείσανδρος δὲ
τὰ αὐτά φησι, καὶ Ἀκουσίλαος, καὶ Φερεκύδης, καὶ Νίκανδρος ἐν
δευτέρῳ Αἰτωλικῶν, καὶ Θεόπομπος ἐν Ἐποποιΐαις.
Respecting the parentage of Hellên, the references to Hesiod are
very confused. Compare Schol. Homer. Odyss. x. 2, and Schol.
Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1086. See also Hellanic. Frag. 10. Didot.
Apollodôrus, and Pherekydês before him (Frag. 51. Didot),
called Protôgeneia daughter of Deukaliôn; Pindar (Olymp. ix.
64) designated her as daughter of Opus. One of the stratagems
mentioned by the Scholiast to get rid of this genealogical
discrepancy was, the supposition that Deukaliôn had two names
(διώνυμος); that he was also named Opus. (Schol. Pind. Olymp. ix.
85).
That the Deukalidæ or posterity of Deukaliôn reigned in Thessaly,
was mentioned both by Hesiod and Hekatæus, ap. Schol. Apollôn.
Rhod. iv. 265.
Respecting Dôrus the son of Hellên, we find neither legends nor
legendary genealogy; respecting Xuthus, very little beyond the tale
of Kreüsa and Iôn, which has its place more naturally among the
Attic fables. Achæus however, who is here represented as the son of
Xuthus, appears in other stories with very different parentage and
accompaniments. According to the statement which we find in Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, Achæus, Phthius and Pelasgus are sons of Poseidôn and
Larissa. They migrate from Peloponnêsus into Thessaly, and distribute
the Thessalian territory between them, giving their names to its
principal divisions: their descendants in the sixth generation were
driven out of that country by the invasion of Deukaliôn at the head
of the Kurêtes and the Leleges.[230] This was the story of those who
wanted to provide an eponymus for the Achæans in the southern districts
of Thessaly: Pausanias accomplishes the same object by different
means, representing Achæus, the son of Xuthus as having gone back
to Thessaly and occupied the portion of it to which his father was
entitled. Then, by way of explaining how it was that there were Achæans
at Sparta and at Argos, he tells us that Archander and Architelês, the
sons of Archæus, came back from Thessaly to Peloponnêsus, and married
two daughters of Danaus: they acquired great influence at Argos and
Sparta, and gave to the people the name of Achæans after their father
Achæus.[231]
[230] Dionys. H. A. R. i. 17.
[231] Pausan. vii. 1, 1-3. Herodotus also mentions (ii. 97)
Archander, son of Phthius and grandson of Achæus, who married the
daughter of Danaus. Larcher (Essai sur la Chronologie d'Hérodote,
ch. x. p. 321) tells us that this cannot be the Danaus who came
from Egypt, the father of the fifty daughters, who must have
lived two centuries earlier, as may be proved by chronological
arguments: this must be another Danaus, according to him.
Strabo seems to give a different story respecting the Achæans in
Peloponnêsus: he says that they were the original population of
the peninsula, that they came in from Phthia with Pelops, and
inhabited Laconia, which was from them called Argos Achaicum,
and that on the conquest of the Dôrians, they moved into Achaia
properly so called, expelling the Iônians therefrom (Strabo, viii
p. 365). This narrative is, I presume, borrowed from Ephorus.
Euripidês also deviates very materially from the Hesiodic genealogy
in respect to these eponymous persons. In the drama called Iôn, he
describes Iôn as son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but adopted by Xuthus:
according to him, the real sons of Xuthus and Kreüsa are Dôrus and
Achæus,[232]—eponyms of the Dôrians and Achæans in the interior of
Peloponnêsus. And it is a still more capital point of difference, that
he omits Hellên altogether—making Xuthus an Achæan by race, the son of
Æolus, who is the son of Zeus.[233] This is the more remarkable, as
in the fragments of two other dramas of Euripidês, the Melanippê and
the Æolus, we find Hellên mentioned both as father of Æolus and son of
Zeus.[234] To the general public even of the most instructed city of
Greece, fluctuations and discrepancies in these mythical genealogies
seem to have been neither surprising nor offensive.
[232] Eurip. Ion, 1590.
[233] Eurip. Ion, 64.
[234] See the Fragments of these two plays in Matthiae's edition;
compare Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. v. ii. p. 842. If we may
judge from the Fragments of the Latin Melanippê of Ennius (see
Fragm. 2, ed. Bothe), Hellên was introduced as one of the
characters of the piece.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ÆOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
If two of the sons of Hellên, Dôrus and Xuthus, present to us families
comparatively unnoticed in mythical narrative, the third son, Æolus,
richly makes up for the deficiency. From him we pass to his seven sons
and five daughters, amidst a great abundance of heroic and poetical
incident.
In dealing however with these extensive mythical families, it is
necessary to observe, that the legendary world of Greece, in the manner
in which it is presented to us, appears invested with a degree of
symmetry and coherence which did not originally belong to it. For the
old ballads and stories which were sung or recounted at the multiplied
festivals of Greece, each on its own special theme, have been lost: the
religious narratives, which the Exegêtês of every temple had present
to his memory, explanatory of the peculiar religious ceremonies and
local customs in his own town or Dême, have passed away: all these
primitive elements, originally distinct and unconnected, are removed
out of our sight, and we possess only an aggregate result, formed by
many confluent streams of fable, and connected together by the agency
of subsequent poets and logographers. Even the earliest agents in this
work of connecting and systematizing—the Hesiodic poets—have been
hardly at all preserved. Our information respecting Grecian mythology
is derived chiefly from the prose logographers who followed them, and
in whose works, since a continuous narrative was above all things
essential to them, the fabulous personages are woven into still more
comprehensive pedigrees, and the original isolation of the legends
still better disguised. Hekatæus, Pherekydês, Hellanikus, and Akusilaus
lived at a time when the idea of Hellas as one great whole, composed
of fraternal sections, was deeply rooted in the mind of every Greek;
and when the fancy of one or a few great families, branching out widely
from one common stem, was more popular and acceptable than that of a
distinct indigenous origin in each of the separate districts. These
logographers, indeed, have themselves been lost; but Apollodôrus and
the various scholiasts, our great immediate sources of information
respecting Grecian mythology, chiefly borrowed from them: so that the
legendary world of Greece is in fact known to us through them, combined
with the dramatic and Alexandrine poets, their Latin imitators, and the
still later class of scholiasts—except indeed such occasional glimpses
as we obtain from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the remaining Hesiodic
fragments, which exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity when
confronted with the narratives of the logographers.
Though Æolus (as has been already stated) is himself called the son
of Hellên along with Dôrus and Xuthus, yet the legends concerning the
Æolids, far from being dependent upon this genealogy, are not all even
coherent with it: moreover the name of Æolus in the legend is older
than that of Hellên, inasmuch as it occurs both in the Iliad and
Odyssey.[235] Odysseus sees in the under-world the beautiful Tyrô,
daughter of Salmôneus, and wife of Krêtheus, son of Æolus.
[235] Iliad, vi. 154. Σίσυφος Αἰολίδης, etc. Again Odyss. xi.
234.—
Ἔνθ᾽ ἤτοι πρώτην Τυρὼ ἴδον ~εὐπατέρειαν~,
Ἣ φάτο Σαλμωνῆος ἀμύμονος ἔκγονος εἶναι,
Φῆ δὲ Κρηθῆος γυνὴ ἔμμεναι ~Αἰολίδαο~.
Æolus is represented as having reigned in Thessaly: his seven sons were
Krêtheus, Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmôneus, Deiôn, Magnês and Periêrês: his
five daughters, Canacê, Alcyonê, Peisidikê, Calycê and Perimêdê. The
fables of this race seem to be distinguished by a constant introduction
of the god Poseidôn, as well as by an unusual prevalence of haughty and
presumptuous attributes among the Æolid heroes, leading them to affront
the gods by pretences of equality, and sometimes even by defiance. The
worship of Poseidôn must probably have been diffused and preëminent
among a people with whom these legends originated.
SECTION I.—SONS OF ÆOLUS.
Salmôneus is not described in the Odyssey as son of Æolus, but he is
so denominated both in the Hesiodic Catalogue, and by the subsequent
logographers. His daughter Tyrô became enamoured of the river
Enipeus, the most beautiful of all streams that traverse the earth:
she frequented the banks assiduously, and there the god Poseidôn
found means to indulge his passion for her, assuming the character
of the river god himself. The fruit of this alliance were the twin
brothers, Pelias and Nêleus: Tyrô afterwards was given in marriage
to her uncle Krêtheus, another son of Æolus, by whom she had Æsôn,
Pherês and Amythaôn—all names of celebrity in the heroic legends.[236]
The adventures of Tyrô formed the subject of an affecting drama of
Sophoklês, now lost. Her father had married a second wife, named
Sidêrô, whose cruel counsels induced him to punish and torture his
daughter on account of her intercourse with Poseidôn. She was shorn
of her magnificent hair, beaten and ill-used in various ways, and
confined in a loathsome dungeon. Unable to take care of her two
children, she had been compelled to expose them immediately on their
birth in a little boat on the river Enipeus; they were preserved by the
kindness of a herdsman, and when grown up to manhood, rescued their
mother, and revenged her wrongs by putting to death the iron-hearted
Sidêrô.[237] This pathetic tale respecting the long imprisonment of
Tyrô is substituted by Sophoklês in place of the Homeric legend, which
represented her to have become the wife of Krêtheus and mother of a
numerous offspring.[238]
[236] Homer, Odyss. xi. 234-257; xv. 226.
[237] Diodôrus, iv. 68. Sophoklês, Fragm. 1. Τυρώ. Σαφῶς Σιδηρὼ
καὶ φέρουσα τοὔνομα. The genius of Sophoklês is occasionally
seduced by this play upon the etymology of a name, even in the
most impressive scenes of his tragedies. See Ajax, 425. Compare
Hellanik. Fragm. p. 9, ed. Preller. There was a first and second
edition of the Tyrô—τῆς δευτέρας Τυροῦς. Schol. ad Aristoph.
Av. 276. See the few fragments of the lost drama in Dindorf's
Collection, p. 53. The plot was in many respects analogous to the
Antiopê of Euripidês.
[238] A third story, different both from Homer and from
Sophoklês, respecting Tyrô, is found in Hyginus (Fab. lx.): it
is of a tragical cast, and borrowed, like so many other tales in
that collection, from one of the lost Greek dramas.
Her father, the unjust Salmôneus, exhibited in his conduct the most
insolent impiety towards the gods. He assumed the name and title even
of Zeus, and caused to be offered to himself the sacrifices destined
for that god: he also imitated the thunder and lightning, by driving
about with brazen caldrons attached to his chariot and casting lighted
torches towards heaven. Such wickedness finally drew upon him the wrath
of Zeus, who smote him with a thunderbolt, and effaced from the earth
the city which he had founded, with all its inhabitants.[239]
[239] Apollod. i. 9, 7. Σαλμωνεύς τ᾽ ἄδικος καὶ ὑπέρθυμος
Περιήρης. Hesiod, Fragm. Catal. 8. Marktscheffel.
Where the city of Salmôneus was situated, the ancient
investigators were not agreed; whether in the Pisatid, or in
Elis, or in Thessaly (see Strabo, viii. p. 356). Euripidês in
his Æolus placed him on the banks of the Alpheius (Eurip. Fragm.
Æol. 1). A village and fountain in the Pisatid bore the name
of Salmônê; but the mention of the river Enipeus seems to mark
Thessaly as the original seat of the legend. But the _naïveté_ of
the tale preserved by Apollodôrus (Virgil in the Æneid, vi. 586,
has retouched it) marks its ancient date: the final circumstance
of that tale was, that the city and its inhabitants were
annihilated.
Ephorus makes Salmôneus king of the Epeians and of the Pisatæ
(Fragm. 15, ed. Didot).
The lost drama of Sophoklês, called Σαλμωνεὺς, was a δρᾶμα
σατυρικόν See Dindorf's Fragm. 483.
Pelias and Nêleus, "both stout vassals of the great Zeus," became
engaged in dissension respecting the kingdom of Iôlkos in Thessaly.
Pelias got possession of it, and dwelt there in plenty and prosperity;
but he had offended the goddess Hêrê by killing Sidêrô upon her altar,
and the effects of her wrath were manifested in his relations with his
nephew Jasôn.[240]
[240] Hom. Od. xi. 280. Apollod. i. 9, 9. κρατέρω θεραπόντε Διὸς,
etc.
Nêleus quitted Thessaly, went into Peloponnêsus, and there founded
the kingdom of Pylos. He purchased by immense marriage presents, the
privilege of wedding the beautiful Chlôris, daughter of Amphiôn, king
of Orchomenos, by whom he had twelve sons and but one daughter[241]—the
fair and captivating Pêrô, whom suitors from all the neighborhood
courted in marriage. But Nêleus, "the haughtiest of living men,"[242]
refused to entertain the pretensions of any of them: he would grant his
daughter only to that man who should bring to him the oxen of Iphiklos,
from Phylakê in Thessaly. These precious animals were carefully
guarded, as well by herdsmen as by a dog whom neither man nor animal
could approach. Nevertheless, Bias, the son of Amythaôn, nephew of
Nêleus, being desperately enamored of Pêrô, prevailed upon his brother
Melampus to undertake for his sake the perilous adventure, in spite of
the prophetic knowledge of the latter, which forewarned him that though
he would ultimately succeed, the prize must be purchased by severe
captivity and suffering. Melampus, in attempting to steal the oxen,
was seized and put in prison; from whence nothing but his prophetic
powers rescued him. Being acquainted with the language of worms, he
heard these animals communicating to each other, in the roof over his
head, that the beams were nearly eaten through and about to fall in.
He communicated this intelligence to his guards, and demanded to be
conveyed to another place of confinement, announcing that the roof
would presently fall in and bury them. The prediction was fulfilled,
and Phylakos, father of Iphiklos, full of wonder at this specimen of
prophetic power, immediately caused him to be released. He further
consulted him respecting the condition of his son Iphiklos, who was
childless; and promised him the possession of the oxen on condition of
his suggesting the means whereby offspring might be ensured. A vulture
having communicated to Melampus the requisite information, Podarkês,
the son of Iphiklos, was born shortly afterwards. In this manner
Melampus obtained possession of the oxen, and conveyed them to Pylos,
obtaining for his brother Bias the hand of Pêrô.[243] How this great
legendary character, by miraculously healing the deranged daughters of
Prœtos, procured both for himself and for Bias dominion in Argos, has
been recounted in a preceding chapter.
[241] Diodôr. iv. 68.
[242] Νηλέα τε μεγάθυμον, ἀγαυότατον ζωόντων (Hom. Odyss. xv.
228).
[243] Hom. Od. xi. 278; xv. 234. Apollod. i. 9, 12. The basis of
this curious romance is in the Odyssey, amplified by subsequent
poets. There are points however in the old Homeric legend, as
it is briefly sketched in the fifteenth book of the Odyssey,
which seem to have been subsequently left out or varied. Nêleus
seizes the property of Melampus during his absence; the latter,
returning with the oxen from Phylakê, revenges himself upon
Nêleus for the injury. Odyss. xv. 233.
Of the twelve sons of Nêleus, one at least, Periklymenos,—besides the
ever-memorable Nestôr,—was distinguished for his exploits as well as
for his miraculous gifts. Poseidôn, the divine father of the race, had
bestowed upon him the privilege of changing his form at pleasure into
that of any bird, beast, reptile, or insect.[244] He had occasion for
all these resources, and he employed them for a time with success in
defending his family against the terrible indignation of Hêraklês,
who, provoked by the refusal of Nêleus to perform for him the ceremony
of purification after his murder of Iphitus, attacked the Nêleids
at Pylos. Periklymenos by his extraordinary powers prolonged the
resistance, but the hour of his fate was at length brought upon him
by the intervention of Athênê, who pointed him out to Hêraklês while
he was perched as a bee upon the hero's chariot. He was killed, and
Hêraklês became completely victorious, overpowering Poseidôn, Hêrê,
Arês, and Hadês, and even wounding the three latter, who assisted in
the defence. Eleven of the sons of Nêleus perished by his hand, while
Nestôr, then a youth, was preserved only by his accidental absence at
Gerêna, away from his father's residence.[245]
[244] Hesiod, Catalog. ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 156; Ovid,
Metam. xii. p. 556; Eustath. ad Odyss. xi. p. 284. Poseidôn
carefully protects Antilochus son of Nestôr, in the Iliad, xiii.
554-563.
[245] Hesiod, Catalog. ap. Schol. Ven. ad Iliad. ii. 336; and
Steph. Byz. v. Γερηνία; Homer, Il. v. 392; xi. 693; Apollodôr.
ii. 7, 3; Hesiod, Scut. Herc. 360; Pindar, Ol. ix. 32.
According to the Homeric legend, Nêleus himself was not killed
by Hêraklês: subsequent poets or logographers, whom Apollodôrus
follows, seem to have thought it an injustice, that the offence
given by Nêleus himself should have been avenged upon his sons
and not upon himself; they therefore altered the legend upon this
point, and rejected the passage in the Iliad as spurious (see
Schol. Ven. ad Iliad. xi. 682).
The refusal of purification by Nêleus to Hêraklês is a genuine
legendary cause: the commentators, who were disposed to spread a
coating of history over these transactions, introduced another
cause,—Nêleus, as king of Pylos, had aided the Orchomenians in
their war against Hêraklês and the Thêbans (see Sch. Ven. ad
Iliad. xi. 689).
The neighborhood of Pylos was distinguished for its ancient
worship both of Poseidôn and of Hadês: there were abundant local
legends respecting them (see Strabo, viii. pp. 344, 345).
The proud house of the Nêleids was now reduced to Nestôr; but Nestôr
singly sufficed to sustain its eminence. He appears not only as the
defender and avenger of Pylos against the insolence and rapacity
of his Epeian neighbors in Elis, but also as aiding the Lapithæ in
their terrible combat against the Centaurs, and as companion of
Thêseus, Peirithöus, and the other great legendary heroes who preceded
the Trojan war. In extreme old age his once marvellous power of
handling his weapons has indeed passed away, but his activity remains
unimpaired, and his sagacity as well as his influence in counsel is
greater than ever. He not only assembles the various Grecian chiefs
for the armament against Troy, perambulating the districts of Hellas
along with Odysseus, but takes a vigorous part in the siege itself,
and is of preëminent service to Agamemnôn. And after the conclusion
of the siege, he is one of the few Grecian princes who returns to his
original dominions, and is found, in a strenuous and honored old age,
in the midst of his children and subjects,—sitting with the sceptre
of authority on the stone bench before his house at Pylos,—offering
sacrifice to Poseidôn, as his father Nêleus had done before him,—and
mourning only over the death of his favorite son Antilochus, who had
fallen, along with so many brave companions in arms, in the Trojan
war.[246]
[246] About Nestôr, Iliad, i. 260-275; ii. 370; xi. 670-770;
Odyss. iii. 5, 110, 409.
After Nestôr the line of the Nêleids numbers undistinguished
names,—Bôrus, Penthilus, and Andropompus,—three successive generations
down to Melanthus, who on the invasion of Peloponnêsus by the
Herakleids, quitted Pylos and retired to Athens, where he became king,
in a manner which I shall hereafter recount. His son Kodrus was the
last Athênian king; and Nêleus, one of the sons of Kodrus, is mentioned
as the principal conductor of what is called the Ionic emigration from
Athens to Asia Minor.[247] It is certain that during the historical
age, not merely the princely family of the Kodrids in Milêtus, Ephesus,
and other Ionic cities, but some of the greatest families even in
Athens itself, traced their heroic lineage through the Nêleids up to
Poseidôn: and the legends respecting Nestôr and Periklymenos would
find especial favor amidst Greeks with such feelings and belief. The
Kodrids at Ephesus, and probably some other Ionic towns, long retained
the title and honorary precedence of kings, even after they had lost
the substantial power belonging to the office. They stood in the same
relation, embodying both religious worship and supposed ancestry,
to the Nêleids and Poseidôn, as the chiefs of the Æolic colonies to
Agamemnôn and Orestês. The Athenian despot Peisistratus was named after
the son of Nestôr in the Odyssey; and we may safely presume that the
heroic worship of the Nêleids was as carefully cherished at the Ionic
Milêtus as at the Italian Metapontum.[248]
[247] Hellanik. Fragm. 10, ed. Didot; Pausan. vii. 2, 3; Herodot.
v. 65; Strabo, xiv. p. 633. Hellanikus, in giving the genealogy
from Nêleus to Melanthus, traces it through Periklymenos and not
through Nestôr: the words of Herodotus imply that _he_ must have
included Nestôr.
[248] Herodot. v. 67; Strabo, vi. p. 264; Mimnermus, Fragm. 9,
Schneidewin.
Having pursued the line of Salmôneus and Nêleus to the end of its
lengendary career, we may now turn back to that of another son of
Æolus, Krêtheus,—a line hardly less celebrated in respect of the heroic
names which it presents. Alkêstis, the most beautiful of the daughters
of Pelias,[249] was promised by her father in marriage to the man
that could bring him a lion and a boar tamed to the yoke and drawing
together. Admêtus, son of Pherês, the eponymus of Pheræ in Thessaly,
and thus grandson of Krêtheus, was enabled by the aid of Apollo to
fulfil this condition, and to win her;[250] for Apollo happened at that
time to be in his service as a slave (condemned to this penalty by Zeus
for having put to death the Cyclôpes), in which capacity he tended the
herds and horses with such success, as to equip Eumêlus (the son of
Admêtus) to the Trojan war with the finest horses in the Grecian army.
Though menial duties were imposed upon him, even to the drudgery of
grinding in the mill,[251] he yet carried away with him a grateful and
friendly sentiment towards his mortal master, whom he interfered to
rescue from the wrath of the goddess Artemis, when she was indignant at
the omission of her name in his wedding sacrifices. Admêtus was about
to perish by a premature death, when Apollo, by earnest solicitation
to the Fates, obtained for him the privilege that his life should be
prolonged, if he could find any person to die a voluntary death in his
place. His father and his mother both refused to make this sacrifice
for him, but the devoted attachment of his wife Alkêstis disposed her
to embrace with cheerfulness the condition of dying to preserve her
husband. She had already perished, when Hêraklês, the ancient guest and
friend of Admêtus, arrived during the first hour of lamentation; his
strength and daring enabled him to rescue the deceased Alkêstis even
from the grasp of Thanatos (Death), and to restore her alive to her
disconsolate husband.[252]
[249] Iliad, ii. 715.
[250] Apollodôr. i. 9, 15; Eustath. ad Iliad. ii. 711.
[251] Euripid. Alkêst. init. Welcker; Griechisch. Tragœd. (p.
344) on the lost play of Sophoklês called Admêtus or Alkêstis;
Hom. Iliad., ii. 766; Hygin. Fab. 50-51 (Sophoklês, Fr. Inc.
730; Dind. ap. Plutarch. Defect. Orac. p. 417). This tale of the
temporary servitude of particular gods, by order of Zeus as a
punishment for misbehavior, recurs not unfrequently among the
incidents of the mythical world. The poet Panyasis (ap. Clem.
Alexand. Adm. ad Gent. p. 23)—
Τλῆ μὲν Δημήτηρ, τλῆ δὲ κλυτὸς Ἀμφιγυήεις,
Τλῆ δὲ Ποσειδάων, τλῆ δ᾽ ἀργυρότοξος Ἀπολλὼν
Ἀνδρὶ παρὰ θνητῷ θητεύσεμεν εἰς ἐνιαυτόν·
Τλῆ δὲ καὶ ὀβριμόθυμος Ἄρης ὑπὸ πατρὸς ἀνάγκης.
The old legend followed out the fundamental idea with remarkable
consistency: Laômedôn, as the temporary master of Poseidôn and
Apollo, threatens to bind them hand and foot, to sell them in the
distant islands, and to cut off the ears of both, when they come
to ask for their stipulated wages (Iliad, xxi. 455). It was a
new turn given to the story by the Alexandrine poets, when they
introduced the motive of love, and made the servitude voluntary
on the part of Apollo (Kallimachus, Hymn. Apoll. 49; Tibullus,
Elegii. 3, 11-30).
[252] Eurip. Alkêstis, Arg.; Apollod. i. 9, 15. To bring this
beautiful legend more into the color of history, a new version
of it was subsequently framed: Hêraklês was eminently skilled in
medicine, and saved the life of Alkêstis when she was about to
perish from a desperate malady (Plutarch. Amator c. 17. vol. iv.
p. 53, Wytt.).
The son of Pelias, Akastus, had received and sheltered Pêleus when
obliged to fly his country in consequence of the involuntary murder of
Eurytiôn. Krêthêis, the wife of Akastus, becoming enamored of Pêleus,
made to him advances which he repudiated. Exasperated at his refusal,
and determined to procure his destruction, she persuaded her husband
that Pêleus had attempted her chastity: upon which Akastus conducted
Pêleus out upon a hunting excursion among the woody regions of Mount
Pêlion, contrived to steal from him the sword fabricated and given
by Hêphæstos, and then left him, alone and unarmed, to perish by the
hands of the Centaurs or by the wild beasts. By the friendly aid of the
Centaur Cheirôn, however, Pêleus was preserved, and his sword restored
to him: returning to the city, he avenged himself by putting to death
both Akastus and his perfidious wife.[253]
[253] The legend of Akastus and Pêleus was given in great detail
in the Catalogue of Hesiod (Catalog. Fragm. 20-21, Marktscheff.);
Schol. Pindar Nem. iv. 95. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 224; Apollod.
iii. 13, 2.
But amongst all the legends with which the name of Pelias is connected,
by far the most memorable is that of Jasôn and the Argonautic
expedition. Jasôn was son of Æsôn, grandson of Krêtheus, and thus
great-grandson of Æolus. Pelias, having consulted the oracle respecting
the security of his dominion at Iôlkos, had received in answer a
warning to beware of the man who should appear before him with only
one sandal. He was celebrating a festival in honor of Poseidôn, when
it so happened that Jasôn appeared before him with one of his feet
unsandaled: he had lost one sandal in wading through the swollen
current of the river Anauros. Pelias immediately understood that this
was the enemy against whom the oracle had forewarned him. As a means
of averting the danger, he imposed upon Jasôn the desperate task of
bringing back to Iôlkos the Golden Fleece,—the fleece of that ram
which had carried Phryxos from Achaia to Kolchis, and which Phryxos
had dedicated in the latter country as an offering to the god Arês.
The result of this injunction was the memorable expedition—of the ship
Argô and her crew called the Argonauts, composed of the bravest and
noblest youths of Greece—which cannot be conveniently included among
the legends of the Æolids, and is reserved for a separate chapter.
The voyage of the Argô was long protracted, and Pelias, persuaded
that neither the ship nor her crew would ever return, put to death
both the father and mother of Jasôn, together with their infant son.
Æsôn, the father, being permitted to choose the manner of his own
death, drank bull's blood while performing a sacrifice to the gods.
At length, however, Jasôn did return, bringing with him not only the
golden fleece, but also Mêdea, daughter of Æêtês, king of Kolchis,
as his wife,—a woman distinguished for magical skill and cunning, by
whose assistance alone the Argonauts had succeeded in their project.
Though determined to avenge himself upon Pelias, Jasôn knew he could
only succeed by stratagem: he remained with his companions at a short
distance from Iôlkos, while Mêdea, feigning herself a fugitive from
his ill-usage, entered the town alone, and procured access to the
daughters of Pelias. By exhibitions of her magical powers she soon
obtained unqualified ascendency over their minds. For example, she
selected from the flocks of Pelias a ram in the extremity of old age,
cut him up and boiled him in a caldron with herbs, and brought him
out in the shape of a young and vigorous lamb:[254] the daughters of
Pelias were made to believe that their old father could in like manner
be restored to youth. In this persuasion they cut him up with their
own hands and cast his limbs into the caldron, trusting that Mêdea
would produce upon him the same magical effect. Mêdea pretended that an
invocation to the moon was a necessary part of the ceremony: she went
up to the top of the house as if to pronounce it, and there lighting
the fire-signal concerted with the Argonauts, Jasôn and his companions
burst in and possessed themselves of the town. Satisfied with having
thus revenged himself, Jasôn yielded the principality of Iôlkos to
Akastus, son of Pelias, and retired with Mêdea to Corinth. Thus did
the goddess Hêrê gratify her ancient wrath against Pelias: she had
constantly watched over Jasôn, and had carried the "all-notorious" Argô
through its innumerable perils, in order that Jasôn might bring home
Mêdea to accomplish the ruin of his uncle.[255] The misguided daughters
of Pelias departed as voluntary exiles to Arcadia: Akastus his son
celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of his deceased father.[256]
[254] This incident was contained in one of the earliest
dramas of Euripidês, the Πελίαδες, now lost. Moses of Chorênê
(Progymnasm. ap. Maii ad Euseb. p. 43), who gives an extract
from the argument, says that the poet "extremos mentiendi fines
attingit."
The Ῥιζότομοι of Sophoklês seems also to have turned upon the
same catastrophe (see Fragm. 479, Dindorf.).
[255] The kindness of Hêrê towards Jasôn seems to be older in
the legend than her displeasure against Pelias; at least it is
specially noticed in the Odyssey, as the great cause of the
escape of the ship Argô: Ἀλλ᾽ Ἥρη παρέπεμψεν, ἐπεὶ φίλος ἦεν
Ἰήσων. (xii. 70). In the Hesiodic Theogony Pelias stands to
Jasôn in the same relation as Eurystheus to Hêraklês,—a severe
taskmaster as well as a wicked and insolent man,—ὑβριστὴς Πελίης
καὶ ἀτάσθαλος, ὀβριμόεργος. (Theog. 995). Apollônius Rhodius
keeps the wrath of Hêrê against Pelias in the foreground, i. 14;
iii. 1134; iv. 242; see also Hygin, f. 13.
There is great diversity in the stories given of the proximate
circumstances connected with the death of Pelias: Eurip. Mêd.
491; Apollodôr. i. 9, 27; Diodôr. iv. 50-52; Ovid, Metam. vii.
162, 203, 297, 347; Pausan. viii. 11, 2; Schol. ad Lycoph. 175.
In the legend of Akastus and Pêleus as recounted above, Akastus
was made to perish by the hand of Pêleus. I do not take upon me
to reconcile these contradictions.
Pausanias mentions that he could not find in any of the poets,
so far as he had read, the names of the daughters of Pelias, and
that the painter Mikôn had given to them names (ὀνόματα δ᾽ αὐταῖς
ποιητὴς μὲν ἔθετο οὐδεὶς, ὅσα γ᾽ ἐπελεξάμεθα ἡμεῖς, etc., Pausan.
viii. 11, 1). Yet their names are given in the authors whom
Diodôrus copied; and Alkêstis, at any rate, was most memorable.
Mikôn gave the names Asteropeia and Antinoê, altogether different
from those in Diodôrus. Both Diodôrus and Hyginus exonerate
Alkêstis from all share in the death of her father (Hygin. f. 24).
The old poem called the Νόστοι (see Argum. ad Eurip. Mêd.,
and Schol. Aristophan. Equit. 1321) recounted, that Mêdea had
boiled in a caldron the old Æsôn, father of Jasôn, with herbs
and incantations, and that she had brought him out young and
strong. Ovid copies this (Metam. vii. 162-203). It is singular
that Pherêkydês and Simonidês said that she had performed this
process upon Jasôn himself (Schol. Aristoph. _l. c._). Diogenes
(ap. Stobæ. Florileg. t. xxix. 92) rationalizes the story,
and converts Mêdea from an enchantress into an improving and
regenerating preceptress. The death of Æsôn, as described in the
text, is given from Diodôrus and Apollodôrus. Mêdea seems to have
been worshipped as a goddess in other places besides Corinth
(see Athenagor. Legat. pro Christ. 12; Macrobius, i. 12, p. 247,
Gronov.).
[256] These funeral games in honor of Pelias were among the most
renowned of the mythical incidents: they were celebrated in a
special poem by Stesichorus, and represented on the chest of
Kypselus at Olympia. Kastôr, Meleager, Amphiaraos, Jasôn, Pêleus,
Mopsos, etc. contended in them (Pausan. v. 17. 4; Stesichori
Fragm. 1. p. 54, ed. Klewe; Athên. iv. 172). How familiar
the details of them were to the mind of a literary Greek is
indirectly attested by Plutarch, Sympos. v. 2, vol. iii. p. 762,
Wytt.
Jasôn and Mêdea retired from Iôlkos to Corinth, where they resided ten
years: their children were—Medeius, whom the Centaur Cheirôn educated
in the regions of Mount Pêlion,[257]—and Mermerus and Pherôs, born at
Corinth. After they had resided there ten years in prosperity, Jasôn
set his affections on Glaukê, daughter of Kreôn[258] king of Corinth;
and as her father was willing to give her to him in marriage, he
determined to repudiate Mêdea, who received orders forthwith to leave
Corinth. Stung with this insult and bent upon revenge, Mêdea prepared
a poisoned robe, and sent it as a marriage present to Glaukê: it was
unthinkingly accepted and put on, and the body of the unfortunate bride
was burnt up and consumed. Kreôn, her father, who tried to tear from
her the burning garment, shared her fate and perished. The exulting
Mêdea escaped by means of a chariot with winged serpents furnished to
her by her grandfather Hêlios: she placed herself under the protection
of Ægêus at Athens, by whom she had a son named Mêdus. She left her
young children in the sacred enclosure of the Akræan Hêrê, relying on
the protection of the altar to ensure their safety; but the Corinthians
were so exasperated against her for the murder of Kreôn and Glaukê,
that they dragged the children away from the altar and put them to
death. The miserable Jasôn perished by a fragment of his own ship Argô,
which fell upon him while he was asleep under it,[259] being hauled on
shore, according to the habitual practice of the ancients.
[257] Hesiod, Theogon. 998.
[258] According to the Schol. ad Eurip. Mêd. 20, Jasôn marries
the daughter of Hippotês the son of Kreôn, who is the son
of Lykæthos. Lykæthos, after the departure of Bellerophôn
from Corinth, reigned twenty-seven years; then Kreôn reigned
thirty-five years; then came Hippotês.
[259] Apollodôr. i. 9, 27; Diodôr. iv. 54. The Mêdea of
Euripidês, which has fortunately been preserved to us, is
too well known to need express reference. He makes Mêdea the
destroyer of her own children, and borrows from this circumstance
the most pathetic touches of his exquisite drama. Parmeniskôs
accused him of having been bribed by the Corinthians to give
this turn to the legend; and we may regard the accusation as a
proof that the older and more current tale imputed the murder of
the children to the Corinthians (Schol. Eurip. Mêd. 275, where
Didymos gives the story out of the old poem of Kreophylos). See
also Ælian, V. H. v. 21; Pausan. ii. 3, 6.
The most significant fact in respect to the fable is, that the
Corinthians celebrated periodically a propitiatory sacrifice to
Hêrê Akræa and to Mermerus and Pherês, as an atonement for the
sin of having violated the sanctuary of the altar. The legend
grew out of this religious ceremony, and was so arranged as to
explain and account for it (see Eurip. Mêd. 1376, with the Schol.
Diodôr. iv. 55).
Mermerus and Pherês were the names given to the children of Mêdea
and Jasôn in the old Naupaktian Verses; in which, however, the
legend must have been recounted quite differently, since they
said that Jasôn and Mêdea had gone from Iôlkos, not to Corinth,
but to Corcyra; and that Mermerus had perished in hunting on the
opposite continent of Epirus. Kinæthôn again, another ancient
genealogical poet, called the children of Mêdea and Jasôn Eriôpis
and Mêdos (Pausan. ii. 3, 7). Diodôrus gives them different names
(iv. 34). Hesiod, in the Theogony, speaks only of Medeius as the
son of Jasôn.
Mêdea does not appear either in the Iliad or Odyssey: in the
former, we find Agamêdê, daughter of Augeas, "who knows all the
poisons (or medicines) which the earth nourishes" (Iliad, xi.
740); in the latter, we have Circê, sister of Æêtês, father of
Mêdea, and living in the Ææan island (Odyss. x. 70). Circê is
daughter of the god Hêlios, as Mêdea is his grand-daughter,—she
is herself a goddess. She is in many points the parallel of
Mêdea; she forewarns and preserves Odysseus throughout his
dangers, as Mêdea aids Jasôn: according to the Hesiodic story,
she has two children by Odysseus, Agrius and Latinus (Theogon.
1001).
Odysseus goes to Ephyrê to Ilos the son of Mermerus, to procure
poison for his arrows: Eustathius treats this Mermerus as the
son of Mêdea (see Odyss. i. 270, and Eust.). As Ephyrê is the
legendary name of Corinth, we may presume this to be a thread of
the same mythical tissue.
The first establishment at Ephyrê, or Corinth, had been founded by
Sisyphus, another of the sons of Æolus, brother of Salmôneus and
Krêtheus.[260] The Æolid Sisyphus was distinguished as an unexampled
master of cunning and deceit. He blocked up the road along the isthmus,
and killed the strangers who came along it by rolling down upon them
great stones from the mountains above. He was more than a match even
for the arch thief Autolycus, the son of Hermês, who derived from his
father the gift of changing the color and shape of stolen goods, so
that they could no longer be recognized: Sisyphus, by marking his sheep
under the foot, detected Autolycus when he stole them, and obliged
him to restore the plunder. His penetration discovered the amour of
Zeus with the nymph Ægina, daughter of the river-god Asôpus. Zeus had
carried her off to the island of Œnônê (which subsequently bore the
name of Ægina); upon which Asôpus, eager to recover her, inquired of
Sisyphus whither she was gone: the latter told him what had happened,
on condition that he should provide a spring of water on the summit of
the Acro-Corinthus. Zeus, indignant with Sisyphus for this revelation,
inflicted upon him in Hadês the punishment of perpetually heaving up a
hill a great and heavy stone, which, so soon as it attained the summit,
rolled back again in spite of all his efforts, with irresistible force
into the plain.[261]
[260] See Euripid. Æol.—Fragm. 1, Dindorf; Dikæarch. Vit. Græc.
p. 22.
[261] Respecting Sisyphus, see Apollodôr. i. 9, 3; iii. 12, 6.
Pausan. ii. 5, 1. Schol. ad Iliad. i. 180. Another legend about
the amour of Sisyphus with Tyrô, is in Hygin. fab. 60, and about
the manner in which he overreached even Hadês (Pherekydês ap.
Schol. Iliad. vi. 153). The stone rolled by Sisyphus in the
under-world appears in Odyss. xi. 592. The name of Sisyphus was
given during the historical age to men of craft and stratagem,
such as Derkyllidês (Xenoph. Hellenic. iii. 1, 8). He passed
for the real father of Odysseus, though Heyne (ad Apollodôr.
i. 9, 3) treats this as another Sisyphus, whereby he destroys
the suitableness of the predicate as regards Odysseus. The
duplication and triplication of synonymous personages is an
ordinary resource for the purpose of reducing the legends into a
seeming chronological sequence.
Even in the days of Eumêlus a religious mystery was observed
respecting the tombs of Sisyphus and Nêleus,—the latter had also
died at Corinth,—no one could say where they were buried (Pausan.
ii. 2, 2).
Sisyphus even overreached Persephonê, and made his escape from
the under-world (Theognis, 702).
In the application of the Æolid genealogy to Corinth, Sisyphus, the
son of Æolus, appears as the first name: but the old Corinthian poet
Eumêlus either found or framed an heroic genealogy for his native city
independent both of Æolus and Sisyphus. According to this genealogy,
Ephyrê, daughter of Oceanus and Têthys, was the primitive tenant of
the Corinthian territory, Asôpus of the Sikyônian: both were assigned
to the god Hêlios, in adjusting a dispute between him and Poseidôn,
by Briareus. Hêlios divided the territory between his two sons Æêtês
and Alôeus: to the former he assigned Corinth, to the latter Sikyôn.
Æêtês, obeying the admonition of an oracle, emigrated to Kolchis,
leaving his territory under the rule of Bunos, the son of Hermês,
with the stipulation that it should be restored whenever either he
or any of his descendants returned. After the death of Bunos, both
Corinth and Sikyôn were possessed by Epôpeus, son of Alôeus, a wicked
man. His son Marathôn left him in disgust and retired into Attica,
but returned after his death and succeeded to his territory, which he
in turn divided between his two sons Corinthos and Sikyôn, from whom
the names of the two districts were first derived. Corinthos died
without issue, and the Corinthians then invited Mêdea from Iôlkos as
the representative of Æêtês: she with her husband Jasôn thus obtained
the sovereignty of Corinth.[262] This legend of Eumêlus, one of the
earliest of the genealogical poets, so different from the story adopted
by Neophrôn or Euripidês, was followed certainly by Simonidês and
seemingly by Theopompus.[263] The incidents in it are imagined and
arranged with a view to the supremacy of Mêdea; the emigration of Æêtês
and the conditions under which he transferred his sceptre, being so
laid out as to confer upon Mêdea an hereditary title to the throne.
The Corinthians paid to Mêdea and to her children solemn worship,
either divine or heroic, in conjunction with Hêrê Akræa,[264] and this
was sufficient to give to Mêdea a prominent place in the genealogy
composed by a Corinthian poet, accustomed to blend together gods,
heroes and men in the antiquities of his native city. According to
the legend of Eumêlus, Jasôn became (through Mêdea) king of Corinth;
but she concealed the children of their marriage in the temple of
Hêrê, trusting that the goddess would render them immortal. Jasôn,
discovering her proceedings, left her and retired in disgust to Iôlkos;
Mêdea also, being disappointed in her scheme, quitted the place,
leaving the throne in the hands of Sisyphus, to whom, according to
the story of Theopompus, she had become attached.[265] Other legends
recounted, that Zeus had contracted a passion for Mêdea, but that she
had rejected his suit from fear of the displeasure of Hêrê; who, as
a recompense for such fidelity, rendered her children immortal:[266]
moreover Mêdea had erected, by special command of Hêrê, the celebrated
temple of Aphroditê at Corinth. The tenor of these fables manifests
their connection with the temple of Hêrê: and we may consider the
legend of Mêdea as having been originally quite independent of that of
Sisyphus, but fitted on to it, in seeming chronological sequence, so as
to satisfy the feelings of those Æolids of Corinth who passed for his
descendants.
[262] Pausan. ii. 1, 1; 3, 10. Schol. ad Pindar, Olymp. xiii. 74.
Schol. Lycoph. 174-1024. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 1212.
[263] Simonid. ap. Schol. ad Eurip. Mêd. 10-20; Theopompus,
Fragm. 340, Didot; though Welcker (Der Episch. Cycl. p. 29)
thinks that this does not belong to the historian Theopompus.
Epimenidês also followed the story of Eumêlus in making Æêtês a
Corinthian (Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. iii. 242).
[264] Περὶ δὲ τῆς εἰς Κόρινθον μετοικήσεως, Ἵππυς ἐκτίθεται καὶ
Ἑλλάνικος· ὅτι δὲ βεβασίλευκε τῆς Κορίνθου ἡ Μήδεια, Εὔμηλος
ἱστορεῖ καὶ Σιμωνίδης· Ὅτι δὲ καὶ ἀθάνατος ἦν ἡ Μήδεια, Μουσαῖος
ἐν τῷ περὶ Ἰσθμίων ἱστορεῖ, ἅμα καὶ περὶ τῶν τῆς Ἀκραίας Ἥρας
ἑορτῶν ἐκτιθείς. (Schol. Eurip. Mêd. 10). Compare also v. 1376
of the play itself, with the Scholia and Pausan. ii. 3, 6. Both
Alkman and Hesiod represented Mêdea as a goddess (Athenagoras,
Legatia pro Christianis, p. 54, ed. Oxon.).
[265] Pausan. ii. 3, 10; Schol. Pindar. Olymp. xiii. 74.
[266] Schol. Pindar. Olymp. xiii. 32-74; Plutarch, De Herodot.
Malign. p. 871.
Sisyphus had for his sons Glaukos and Ornytiôn. From Glaukos sprang
Bellerophôn, whose romantic adventures commence with the Iliad, and
are further expanded by subsequent poets: according to some accounts
he was really the son of Poseidôn, the prominent deity of the Æolid
family.[267] The youth and beauty of Bellerophôn rendered him the
object of a strong passion on the part of the Anteia, wife of Prœtos
king of Argos. Finding her advances rejected, she contracted a violent
hatred towards him, and endeavored by false accusations to prevail upon
her husband to kill him. Prœtos refused to commit the deed under his
own roof, but despatched him to his son-in-law the king of Lykia in
Asia Minor, putting into his hands a folded tablet full of destructive
symbols. Conformably to these suggestions, the most perilous
undertakings were imposed upon Bellerophôn. He was directed to attack
the monster Chimæra and to conquer the warlike Solymi as well as the
Amazons: as he returned victorious from these enterprises, an ambuscade
was laid for him by the bravest Lykian warriors, all of whom he slew.
At length the Lykian king recognized him "as the genuine son of a
god," and gave him his daughter in marriage together with half of his
kingdom. The grand-children of Bellerophôn, Glaukos and Sarpêdôn,—the
latter a son of his daughter Laodameia by Zeus,—combat as allies of
Troy against the host of Agamemnon.[268] Respecting the winged Pegasus,
Homer says nothing; but later poets assigned to Bellerophôn this
miraculous steed, whose parentage is given in the Hesiodic Theogony,
as the instrument both of his voyage and of his success.[269] Heroic
worship was paid at Corinth to Bellerophôn, and he seems to have
been a favorite theme of recollection not only among the Corinthians
themselves, but also among the numerous colonists whom they sent out to
other regions.[270]
[267] Pindar, Olymp. xiii. 98. and Schol. ad 1; Schol. ad Iliad,
vi. 155; this seems to be the sense of Iliad, vi. 191.
The lost drama called _Iobatês_ of Sophoklês, and the two by
Euripidês called _Sthenebœa_ and _Bellerophôn_, handled the
adventures of this hero. See the collection of the few fragments
remaining in Dindorf, Fragm. Sophok. 280; Fragm. Eurip. p.
87-108; and Hygin. fab. 67.
Welcker (Griechische Tragöd. ii. p. 777-800) has ingeniously put
together all that can be divined respecting the two plays of
Euripidês.
Völcker seeks to make out that Bellerophôn is identical with
Poseidôn Hippios,—a separate personification of one of the
attributes of the god Poseidôn. For this conjecture he gives some
plausible grounds (Mythologie des Japetisch. Geschlechts, p. 129
_seq._).
[268] Iliad, vi. 155-210.
[269] Hesiod, Theogon. 283.
[270] Pausan. ii. 2, 4. See Pindar, Olymp. xiii. 90, addressed
to Xenophôn the Corinthian, and the Adoniazusæ of the Syracusan
Theocritus, a poem in which common Syracusan life and feeling are
so graphically depicted, Idyll xv. 91.—
Συρακοσίαις ἐπιτάσσεις;
Ὡς δ᾽ εἰδῇς καὶ τοῦτο, Κορίνθιαι εἶμες ἄνωθεν
Ὡς καὶ ὁ Βελλερόφων· Πελοποννασιστὶ λαλεῦμες.
From Ornytiôn, the son of Sisyphus, we are conducted through a series
of three undistinguished family names,—Thoas, Damophôn, and the
brothers Propodas and Hyanthidas,—to the time of the Dôrian occupation
of Corinth[271], which will be hereafter recounted.
[271] Pausan. ii. 4, 3.
We now pass from Sisyphus and the Corinthian fables to another son of
Æolus, Athamas, whose family history is not less replete with mournful
and tragical incidents, abundantly diversified by the poets. Athamas,
we are told, was king of Orchomenos; his wife Nephelê was a goddess,
and he had by her two children, Phryxus and Hellê. After a certain
time he neglected Nephelê, and took to himself as a new wife Inô, the
daughter of Kadmus, by whom he had two sons, Learchus and Melikertês.
Inô, looking upon Phryxus with the hatred of a step-mother, laid a
snare for his life. She persuaded the women to roast the seed-wheat,
which, when sown in this condition, yielded no crop, so that famine
overspread the land. Athamas sent to Delphi to implore counsel and a
remedy: he received for answer, through the machinations of Inô with
the oracle, that the barrenness of the fields could not be alleviated
except by offering Phryxus as a sacrifice to Zeus. The distress of the
people compelled him to execute this injunction, and Phryxus was led as
a victim to the altar. But the power of his mother Nephelê snatched him
from destruction, and procured for him from Hermês a ram with a fleece
of gold, upon which he and his sister Hellê mounted and were carried
across the sea. The ram took the direction of the Euxine sea and
Kolchis: when they were crossing the Hellespont, Hellê fell off into
the narrow strait, which took its name from that incident. Upon this,
the ram, who was endued with speech, consoled the terrified Phryxus,
and ultimately carried him safe to Kolchis: Æêtês, king of Kolchis son
of the god Hêlios and brother of Circê, received Phryxus kindly, and
gave him his daughter Chalciopê in marriage. Phryxus sacrificed the ram
to Zeus Phyxios, and suspended the golden fleece in the sacred grove of
Arês.
Athamas—according to some both Athamas and Inô—were afterwards driven
mad by the anger of the goddess Hêrê; insomuch that the father shot
his own son Learchus, and would also have put to death his other son
Melikertês, if Inô had not snatched him away. She fled with the boy,
across the Megarian territory and Mount Geraneia, to the rock Moluris,
overhanging the Sarônic Gulf: Athamas pursued her, and in order to
escape him she leaped into the sea. She became a sea-goddess under the
title of Leukothea; while the body of Melikertês was cast ashore on the
neighboring territory of Schœnus, and buried by his uncle Sisyphus, who
was directed by the Nereïds to pay to him heroic honors under the name
of Palæmôn. The Isthmian games, one of the great periodical festivals
of Greece, were celebrated in honor of the god Poseidôn, in conjunction
with Palæmôn as a hero. Athamas abandoned his territory, and became the
first settler of a neighboring region called from him Athmantia, or the
Athamantian plain. [272]
[272] Eurip. Mêd. 1250, with the Scholia, according to which
story Inô killed both her children:—
Ἴνω μανεῖσαν ἐκ θεῶν, ὅθ᾽ ἡ Διὸς
Δάμαρ νιν ἐξέπεμψε δώματων ἄλῃ.
Compare Valckenaer, Diatribe in Eurip.; Apollodôr. i. 9, 1-2;
Schol. ad Pindar. Argum. ad Isthm. p. 180. The many varieties of
the fable of Athamas and his family may be seen in Hygin. fab.
1-5; Philostephanus ap. Schol. Iliad, vii. 86: it was a favorite
subject with the tragedians, and was handled by Æschylus,
Sophoklês and Euripidês in more than one drama (see Welcker,
Griechische Tragöd. vol. i. p. 312-332; vol. ii. p. 612). Heyne
says that the proper reading of the name is _Phrixus_, not
_Phryxus_,—incorrectly, I think: Φρύξος connects the name both
with the story of roasting the wheat (φρύγειν), and also with
the country Φρυγία, of which it was pretended that Phryxus was
the Eponymus. Inô, or Leukothea, was worshipped as a heroine at
Megara as well as at Corinth (Pausan. i. 42, 3): the celebrity
of the Isthmian games carried her worship, as well as that of
Palæmôn, throughout most parts of Greece (Cicero, De Nat. Deor.
iii. 16). She is the only personage of this family noticed
either in the Iliad or Odyssey: in the latter poem she is a
sea-goddess, who has once been a mortal, daughter of Kadmus; she
saves Odysseus from imminent danger at sea by presenting to him
her κρήδεμνον (Odyss. v. 433; see the refinements of Aristidês,
Orat. iii. p. 27). The voyage of Phryxus and Hellê to Kolchis was
related in the Hesiodic Eoiai: we find the names of the children
of Phryxus by the daughter of Æêtês quoted from that poem (Schol.
ad Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 1123) both Hesiod and Pherekydês mentioned
the golden fleece of the ram (Eratosthen. Catasterism. 19;
Pherekyd. Fragm. 53, Didot).
Hekatæus preserved the romance of the speaking ram (Schol. Apoll.
Rhod. i. 256) but Hellanikus dropped the story of Hellê having
fallen into the sea: according to him she died at Pactyê in the
Chersonesus (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 1144).
The poet Asius seems to have given the genealogy of Athamas by
Themistô much in the same manner as we find it in Apollodôrus
(Pausan. ix. 23, 3).
According to the ingenious refinements of Dionysius and
Palæphatus (Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. ii. 1144; Palæphat. de Incred.
c. 31) the ram of Phryxus was after all a man named Krios, a
faithful attendant who aided in his escape; others imagined a
ship with a ram's head at the bow.
The legend of Athamas connects itself with some sanguinary religious
rites and very peculiar family customs, which prevailed at Alos,
in Achaia Phthiôtis, down to a time[273] later than the historian
Herodotus, and of which some remnant existed at Orchomenos even in the
days of Plutarch. Athamas was worshipped at Alos as a hero, having
both a chapel and a consecrated grove, attached to the temple of Zeus
Laphystios. On the family of which he was the heroic progenitor, a
special curse and disability stood affixed. The eldest of the race was
forbidden to enter the prytaneion or government-house; and if he was
found within the doors of the building, the other citizens laid hold
of him on his going out, surrounded him with garlands, and led him in
solemn procession to be sacrificed as a victim at the altar of Zeus
Laphystios. The prohibition carried with it an exclusion from all the
public meetings and ceremonies, political as well as religious, and
from the sacred fire of the state: many of the individuals marked out
had therefore been bold enough to transgress it. Some had been seized
on quitting the building and actually sacrificed; others had fled the
country for a long time to avoid a similar fate.
[273] Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. c. 38. p. 299. Schol. Apoll. Rhod.
ii. 655.
The guides who conducted Xerxês and his army through southern Thessaly
detailed to him this existing practice, coupled with the local legend,
that Athamas, together with Inô, had sought to compass the death of
Phryxus, who however had escaped to Kolchis; that the Achæans had been
enjoined by an oracle to offer up Athamas himself as an expiatory
sacrifice to release the country from the anger of the gods; but that
Kytissoros, son of Phryxus, coming back from Kolchis, had intercepted
the sacrifice of Athamas,[274] whereby the anger of the gods remained
still unappeased, and an undying curse rested upon the family.[275]
[274] Of the Athamas of Sophoklês, turning upon this intended,
but not consummated sacrifice, little is known, except from a
passage of Aristophanês and the Scholia upon it (Nubes, 258).—
ἐπὶ τί στέφανον; οἴμοι, Σώκρατες,
ὥσπερ με τὸν Ἀθάμανθ᾽ ὅπως μὴ θύσετε.
Athamas was introduced in this drama with a garland on his head,
on the point of being sacrificed as an expiation for the death of
his son Phryxus, when Hêraklês interposes and rescues him.
[275] Herodot. vii. 197. Plato, Minôs, p. 315.
That such human sacrifices continued to a greater or less extent,
even down to a period later than Herodotus, among the family who
worshipped Athamas as their heroic ancestor, appears certain: mention
is also made of similar customs in parts of Arcadia, and of Thessaly,
in honor of Pêleus and Cheirôn.[276] But we may reasonably presume,
that in the period of greater humanity which Herodotus witnessed,
actual sacrifice had become very rare. The curse and the legend still
remained, but were not called into practical working, except during
periods of intense national suffering or apprehension, during which
the religious sensibilities were always greatly aggravated. We cannot
at all doubt, that during the alarm created by the presence of the
Persian king with his immense and ill-disciplined host, the minds of
the Thessalians must have been keenly alive to all that was terrific in
their national stories, and all that was expiatory in their religious
solemnities. Moreover, the mind of Xerxês himself was so awe-struck by
the tale, that he reverenced the dwelling-place consecrated to Athamas.
The guides who recounted to him the romantic legend, gave it as the
historical and generating cause of the existing rule and practice: a
critical inquirer is forced (as has been remarked before) to reverse
the order of precedence, and to treat the practice as having been the
suggesting cause of its own explanatory legend.
[276] Plato, Minôs, c. 5. Καὶ οἱ τοῦ Ἀθάμαντος ἔκγονοι, οἵας
θυσίας θύουσιν, Ἕλληνες ὄντες. As a testimony to the fact still
existing or believed to exist, this dialogue is quite sufficient,
though not the work of Plato.
Μόνιμος δ᾽ ἱστορεῖ, ἐν τῇ τῶν θαυμασίων συναγωγῇ, ἐν Πέλλῃ τῆς
Θετταλίας Ἀχαιὸν ἄνθρωπον Πηλεῖ καὶ Χείρωνι καταθύεσθαι. (Clemens
Alexand. Admon. ad Gent. p. 27, Sylb.) Respecting the sacrifices
at the temple of Zeus Lykæus in Arcadia, see Plato, Republ.
viii. p. 565. Pausanias (viii. p. 38, 5) seems to have shrunk,
when he was upon the spot, even from inquiring what they were—a
striking proof of the fearful idea which he had conceived of
them. Plutarch (De Defectu Oracul. c. 14) speaks of τὰς πάλαι
ποιουμένας ἀνθρωποθυσίας. The Schol. ad Lycophron. 229, gives a
story of children being sacrificed to Melikertês at Tenedos; and
Apollodôrus (ad Porphyr. de Abstinentiâ, ii. 55, see Apollod.
Fragm. 20, ed. Didot) said that the Lacedæmonians had sacrificed
a man to Arês—καὶ Λακεδαιμονίους φησὶν ὁ Ἀπολλόδωρος τῷ Ἄρει
θύειν ἄνθρωπον. About Salamis in Cyprus, see Lactantius, De Falsâ
Religione, i. c. 21. "Apud Cypri Salaminem, humanam hostiam Jovi
Teucrus immolavit, idque sacrificium posteris tradidit: quod est
nuper Hadriano imperante sublatum."
Respecting human sacrifices in historical Greece, consult a
good section in K. F. Hermann's Gottesdienstliche Alterthümer
der Griechen (sect. 27). Such sacrifices had been a portion of
primitive Grecian religion, but had gradually become obsolete
everywhere—except in one or two solitary cases, which were spoken
of with horror. Even in these cases, too, the reality of the
fact, in later times, is not beyond suspicion.
The family history of Athamas, and the worship of Zeus Laphystios, are
expressly connected by Herodotus with Alos in Achæa Phthiôtis—one of
the towns enumerated in the Iliad as under the command of Achilles. But
there was also a mountain called Laphystion, and a temple and worship
of Zeus Laphystios between Orchomenos and Korôneia, in the northern
portion of the territory known in the historical ages as Bœotia. Here
also the family story of Athamas is localized, and Athamas is presented
to us as king of the districts of Korôneia, Haliartus and Mount
Laphystion: he is thus interwoven with the Orchomenian genealogy.[277]
Andreus (we are told), son of the river Pêneios, was the first person
who settled in the region: from him it received the name Andrêis.
Athamas, coming subsequently to Andreus, received from him the
territory of Korôneia and Haliartus with Mount Laphystion: he gave
in marriage to Andreus, Euippê, daughter of his son Leucôn, and the
issue of this marriage was Eteoklês, said to be the son of the river
Kêphisos. Korônos and Haliartus, grandsons of the Corinthian Sisyphus,
were adopted by Athamas, as he had lost all his children: but when his
grandson Presbôn, son of Phryxus, returned to him from Kolchis, he
divided his territory in such manner that Korônos and Haliartus became
the founders of the towns which bore their names. Almôn, the son of
Sisyphus, also received from Eteoklês a portion of territory, where he
established the village Almônes.[278]
[277] Pausan. ix. 34, 4.
[278] Pausan. ix. 34, 5.
With Eteoklês began, according to a statement in one of the Hesiodic
poems, the worship of the Charites or Graces, so long and so
solemnly continued at Orchomenos in the periodical festival of the
Charitêsia, to which many neighboring towns and districts seem to
have contributed.[279] He also distributed the inhabitants into two
tribes—Eteokleia and Kêphisias. He died childless, and was succeeded
by Almos, who had only two daughters, Chrysê and Chrysogeneia. The son
of Chrysê by the god Arês was Phlegyas, the father and founder of the
warlike and predatory Phlegyæ, who despoiled every one within their
reach, and assaulted not only the pilgrims on their road to Delphi,
but even the treasures of the temple itself. The offended god punished
them by continued thunder, by earthquakes, and by pestilence, which
extinguished all this impious race, except a scanty remnant who fled
into Phokis.
[279] Ephorus, Fragm. 68, Marx.
Chrysogeneia, the other daughter of Almos, had for issue, by the god
Poseidôn, Minyas: the son of Minyas was Orchomenos. From these two was
derived the name both of Minyæ for the people, and of Orchomenos for
the town.[280] During the reign of Orchomenos, Hyêttus came to him from
Argos, having become an exile in consequence of the death of Molyros:
Orchomenos assigned to him a portion of land, where he founded the
village called Hyêttus.[281] Orchomenos, having no issue, was succeeded
by Klymenos, son of Presbôn, of the house of Athamas: Klymenos was
slain by some Thêbans during the festival of Poseidôn at Onchêstos; and
his eldest son, Erginus, to avenge his death, attacked the Thêbans with
his utmost force;—an attack, in which he was so successful, that the
latter were forced to submit, and to pay him an annual tribute.
[280] Pausan. ix. 36, 1-3. See also a legend, about the three
daughters of Minyas, which was treated by the Tanagræan poetess
Korinna, the contemporary of Pindar (Antonin. Liberalis, Narr.
x.).
[281] This exile of Hyêttus was recounted in the Eoiai. Hesiod,
Fragm. 148, Markt.
The Orchomenian power was now at its height: both Minyas and Orchomenos
had been princes of surpassing wealth, and the former had built
a spacious and durable edifice which he had filled with gold and
silver. But the success of Erginus against Thêbes was soon terminated
and reversed by the hand of the irresistible Hêraklês, who rejected
with disdain the claim of tribute, and even mutilated the envoys
sent to demand it: he not only emancipated Thêbes, but broke down
and impoverished Orchomenos.[282] Erginus in his old age married a
young wife, from which match sprang the illustrious heroes, or gods,
Trophônius and Agamêdês; though many (amongst whom is Pausanius
himself) believed Trophônius to be the son of Apollo.[283] Trophônius,
one of the most memorable persons in Grecian mythology, was worshipped
as a god in various places, but with especial sanctity as Zeus
Trophônius at Lebadeia: in his temple at this town, the prophetic
manifestations outlasted those of Delphi itself.[284] Trophônius and
Agamêdês, enjoying matchless renown as architects, built[285] the
temple of Delphi, the thalamus of Amphitryôn at Thêbes, as well as the
inaccessible vault of Hyrieus at Hyria, in which they are said to have
left one stone removable at pleasure, so as to reserve for themselves
a secret entrance. They entered so frequently, and stole so much gold
and silver, that Hyrieus, astonished at his losses, at length spread a
fine net, in which Agamêdês was inextricably caught: Trophônius cut off
his brother's head and carried it away, so that the body, which alone
remained, was insufficient to identify the thief. Like Amphiaraos, whom
he resembles in more than one respect, Trophônius was swallowed up by
the earth near Lebadeia.[286]
[282] Pausan. ix. 37, 2. Apollod. ii. 4, 11. Diodôr. iv. 10. The
two latter tell us that Erginus was slain. Klymenê is among the
wives and daughters of the heroes seen by Odysseus in Hadês: she
is termed by the Schol. daughter of Minyas (Odyss. xi. 325).
[283] Pausan. ix. 37, 1-3. Λέγεται δὲ ὁ Τροφώνιος Ἀπόλλωνος
εἶναι, καὶ οὐκ Ἐργίνου· καὶ ἐγώ τε πείθομαι, καὶ ὅστις παρὰ
Τροφώνιον ἦλθε δὴ μαντευσόμενος.
[284] Plutarch, De Defectu Oracul. c. 5, p. 411. Strabo, ix.
p. 414. The mention of the honeyed cakes, both in Aristophanês
(Nub. 508) and Pausanias (ix. 39, 5), indicates that the curious
preliminary ceremonies, for those who consulted the oracle
of Trophônius, remained the same after a lapse of 550 years.
Pausanias consulted it himself. There had been at one time an
oracle of Teiresias at Orchomenos: but it had become silent at an
early period (Plutarch. Defect. Oracul. c. 44, p. 434).
[285] Homer. Hymn. Apoll. 296. Pausan. ix. 11, 1.
[286] Pausan. ix. 37, 3. A similar story, but far more romantic
and amplified, is told by Herodotus (ii. 121), respecting the
treasury vault of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt. Charax (ap.
Schol. Aristoph. Nub. 508) gives the same tale, but places the
scene in the treasury-vault of Augeas, king of Elis, which he
says was built by Trophônius, to whom he assigns a totally
different genealogy. The romantic adventures of the tale rendered
it eminently fit to be interwoven at some point or another of
legendary history, in any country.
From Trophônius and Agamêdês the Orchomenian genealogy passes to
Ascalaphos and Ialmenos, the sons of Arês by Astyochê, who are named
in the Catalogue of the Iliad as leaders of the thirty ships from
Orchomenos against Troy. Azeus, the grandfather of Astyochê in the
Iliad, is introduced as the brother of Erginus[287] by Pausanias, who
does not carry the pedigree lower.
[287] Pausan. ix. 38, 6; 29, 1.
The genealogy here given out of Pausanias is deserving of the more
attention, because it seems to have been copied from the special
history of Orchomenos by the Corinthian Kallippus, who again borrowed
from the native Orchomenian poet, Chersias: the works of the latter
had never come into the hands of Pausanias. It illustrates forcibly
the principle upon which these mythical genealogies were framed, for
almost every personage in the series is an Eponymus. Andreus gave
his name to the country, Athamas to the Athamantian plain; Minyas,
Orchomenos, Korônus, Haliartus, Almos and Hyêttos, are each in like
manner connected with some name of people, tribe, town or village;
while Chrysê and Chrysogeneia have their origin in the reputed ancient
wealth of Orchomenos. Abundant discrepancies are found, however, in
respect to this old genealogy, if we look to other accounts. According
to one statement, Orchomenos was the son of Zeus by Isionê, daughter
of Danaus; Minyas was the son of Orchomenos (or rather of Poseidôn)
by Hermippê, daughter of Bœôtos; the sons of Minyas were Presbôn,
Orchomenos, Athamas and Diochthôndas.[288] Others represented Minyas as
son of Poseidôn by Kallirrhoê, an Oceanic nymph,[289] while Dionysius
called him son of Arês, and Aristodêmus, son of Aleas: lastly, there
were not wanting authors who termed both Minyas and Orchomenos sons
of Eteoklês.[290] Nor do we find in any one of these genealogies the
name of Amphiôn, the son of Iasus, who figures so prominently in the
Odyssey as king of Orchomenos, and whose beautiful daughter Chlôris is
married to Nêleus. Pausanias mentions him, but not as king, which is
the denomination given to him in Homer.[291]
[288] Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 230. Compare Schol. ad Lycophron.
873.
[289] Schol. Pindar, Olymp. xiv. 5.
[290] Schol. Pindar, Isthm. i. 79. Other discrepancies in Schol.
Vett. ad Iliad. ii. Catalog. 18.
[291] Odyss. xi. 283. Pausan. ix. 36, 3.
The discrepancies here cited are hardly necessary in order to prove
that these Orchomenian genealogies possess no historical value. Yet
some probable inferences appear deducible from the general tenor of the
legends, whether the facts and persons of which they are composed be
real or fictitious.
Throughout all the historical age, Orchomenos is a member of the
Bϙtian confederation. But the Bϙtians are said to have been
immigrants into the territory which bore their name from Thessaly; and
prior to the time of their immigration, Orchomenos and the surrounding
territory appear as possessed by the Minyæ, who are recognized in that
locality both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey,[292] and from whom
the constantly recurring Eponymus, King Minyas, is borrowed by the
genealogists. Poetical legend connects the Orchomenian Minyæ on the one
side, with Pylos and Tryphylia in Peloponnêsus; on the other side, with
Phthiôtis and the town of Iôlkos in Thessaly; also with Corinth,[293]
through Sisyphus and his sons. Pherekydês represented Nêleus, king
of Pylos, as having also been king of Orchomenos.[294] In the region
of Triphylia, near to or coincident with Pylos, a Minyeian river is
mentioned by Homer; and we find traces of residents called Minyæ even
in the historical times, though the account given by Herodotus of the
way in which they came thither is strange and unsatisfactory.[295]
[292] Iliad, ii. 5, 11. Odyss. xi. 283. Hesiod, Fragm. Eoiai,
27, Düntz. Ἴξεν δ᾽ Ὀρχόμενον Μινυήϊον. Pindar, Olymp. xiv. 4.
Παλαιγόνων Μινυᾶν ἐπίσκοποι. Herodot. i. 146. Pausanias calls
them Minyæ even in their dealings with Sylla (ix. 30, 1).
Buttmann, in his Dissertation (Über die Minyæ der Ältesten Zeit,
in the Mythologus, Diss. xxi. p. 218), doubts whether the name
Minyæ was ever a real name; but all the passages make against his
opinion.
[293] Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 1186. i. 230. Σκήψιος δὲ Δημήτρός
φησι τοὺς περὶ τὴν Ἰωλκὸν οἰκοῦντας Μινύας καλεῖσθαι; and i. 763.
Τὴν γὰρ Ἰωλκὸν οἱ Μίνυαι ᾤκουν, ὥς φησι Σιμωνίδης ἐν Συμμικτοῖς:
also Eustath. ad Iliad. ii. 512. Steph. Byz. v. Μινύα. Orchomenos
and Pylos run together in the mind of the poet of the Odyssey,
xi. 458.
[294] Pherekyd. Fragm. 56, Didot. We see by the 55th Fragment of
the same author, that he extended the genealogy of Phryxos to
Pheræ in Thessaly.
[295] Herodot. iv. 145. Strabo, viii. 337-347. Hom. Iliad, xi.
721. Pausan. v. 1, 7. ποταμὸν Μινυήϊον, near Elis.
Before the great changes which took place in the inhabitants of
Greece from the immigration of the Thesprôtians into Thessaly, of
the Bœôtians into Bœôtia, and of the Dôrians and Ætôlians into
Peloponnêsus, at a date which we have no means of determining, the
Minyæ and tribes fraternally connected with them seem to have occupied
a large portion of the surface of Greece, from Iôlkos in Thessaly to
Pylos in the Peloponnêsus. The wealth of Orchomenos is renowned even
in the Iliad;[296] and when we study its topography in detail, we are
furnished with a probable explanation both of its prosperity and its
decay. Orchomenos was situated on the northern bank of the lake Kôpaïs,
which receives not only the river Kêphisos from the valleys of Phôkis,
but also other rivers from Parnassus and Helicôn. The waters of the
lake find more than one subterranean egress—partly through natural
rifts and cavities in the limestone mountains, partly through a tunnel
pierced artificially more than a mile in length—into the plain on the
north-eastern side, from whence they flow into the Eubœan sea near
Larymna:[297] and it appears that, so long as these channels were
diligently watched and kept clear, a large portion of the lake was in
the condition of alluvial land, preëminently rich and fertile. But when
the channels came to be either neglected, or designedly choked up by an
enemy, the water accumulated to such a degree, as to occupy the soil
of more than one ancient town, to endanger the position of Kôpæ, and
to occasion the change of the site of Orchomenos itself from the plain
to the declivity of Mount Hyphanteion. An engineer, Kratês, began the
clearance of the obstructed water-courses in the reign of Alexander the
Great, and by his commission—the destroyer of Thêbes being anxious to
reëstablish the extinct prosperity of Orchomenos. He succeeded so far
as partially to drain and diminish the lake, whereby the site of more
than one ancient city was rendered visible: but the revival of Thêbes
by Kassander, after the decease of Alexander, arrested the progress of
the undertaking, and the lake soon regained its former dimensions, to
contract which no farther attempt was made.[298]
[296] Iliad, ix. 381.
[297] See the description of these channels or Katabothra in
Colonel Leake's Travels in Northern Greece, vol. ii. c. 15, p.
281-293, and still more elaborately in Fiedler, Reise durch alle
Theile des Königreichs Griechenlands, Leipzig, 1840. He traced
fifteen perpendicular shafts sunk for the purpose of admitting
air into the tunnel, the first separated from the last by about
5900 feet: they are now of course overgrown and stopped up (vol.
i. p. 115).
Forchhammer states the length of this tunnel as considerably
greater than what is here stated. He also gives a plan of the
Lake Kôpaïs with the surrounding region, which I have placed at
the end of the second volume of this History. See also _infra_,
vol. ii. ch. iii. p. 391.
[298] We owe this interesting fact to Strabo, who is however both
concise and unsatisfactory, viii. p. 406-407. It was affirmed
that there had been two ancient towns, named Eleusis and Athênæ,
originally founded by Cecrôps, situated on the lake, and thus
overflowed (Steph. Byz. v. Ἀθῆναι Diogen. Laërt. iv. 23. Pausan.
ix. 24, 2). For the plain or marsh near Orchomenos, see Plutarch,
Sylla, c. 20-22.
According to the Thêban legend,[299] Hêraklês, after his defeat of
Erginus had blocked up the exit of the waters, and converted the
Orchomenian plain into a lake. The spreading of these waters is thus
connected with the humiliation of the Minyæ; and there can be little
hesitation in ascribing to these ancient tenants of Orchomenos,
before it became bœotized, the enlargement and preservation of these
protective channels. Nor could such an object have been accomplished,
without combined action and acknowledged ascendency on the part of
that city over its neighbors, extending even to the sea at Larymna,
where the river Kôphisos discharges itself. Of its extended influence,
as well as of its maritime activity, we find a remarkable evidence in
the ancient and venerated Amphiktyony at Kalauria. The little island
so named, near the harbor of Trœzên, in Peloponnêsus, was sacred
to Poseidôn, and an asylum of inviolable sanctity. At the temple
of Poseidôn, in Kalauria, there had existed, from unknown date, a
periodical sacrifice, celebrated by seven cities in common—Hermionê,
Epidaurus, Ægina, Athens, Prasiæ, Nauplia, and the Minyeian Orchomenos.
This ancient religious combination dates from the time when Nauplia
was independent of Argos, and Prasiæ of Sparta: Argos and Sparta,
according to the usual practice in Greece, continued to fulfil the
obligation each on the part of its respective dependent.[300] Six
out of the seven states are at once sea-towns, and near enough to
Kalauria to account for their participation in this Amphiktyony. But
the junction of Orchomenos, from its comparative remoteness, becomes
inexplicable, except on the supposition that its territory reached the
sea, and that it enjoyed a considerable maritime traffic—a fact which
helps to elucidate both its legendary connection with Iôlkos, and its
partnership in what is called the Iônic emigration.[301] The mythical
genealogy, whereby Ptôos, Schœneus and Erythrios are enumerated among
the sons of Athamas, goes farther to confirm the idea that the towns
and localities on the south-east of the lake recognized a fraternal
origin with the Orchomenian Minyæ, not less than Korôneia and Haliartus
on the south-west.[302]
[299] Diodôr. iv. 18. Pausan. ix. 38, 5.
[300] Strabo, viii. p. 374. Ἦν δὲ καὶ Ἀμφικτυονία τις περὶ τὸ
ἱερὸν τοῦτο, ἕπτα πόλεων αἳ μετεῖχον τῆς θυσίας· ἦσαν δὲ Ἑρμιὼν,
Ἐπίδαυρος, Αἴγινα, Ἀθῆναι, Πρασιεῖς, Ναυπλιεῖς, Ὀρχόμενος ὁ
Μινύειος. Ὑπὲρ μὲν οὖν τῶν Ναυπλιέων Ἀργεῖοι, ὑπὲρ Πρασιέων δὲ
Λακεδαιμόνιοι, ξυνετέλουν.
[301] Pausan. ix. 17, 1; 26, 1.
[302] See Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 214. Pausan. ix.
23, 3; 24, 3. The genealogy is as old as the poet Asios.
The great power of Orchomenos was broken down, and the city reduced to
a secondary and half-dependent position by the Bœôtians of Thêbes; at
what time, and under what circumstances, history has not preserved. The
story, that the Thêban hero, Hêraklês, rescued his native city from
servitude and tribute to Orchomenos, since it comes from a Kadmeian
and not from an Orchomenian legend, and since the details of it were
favorite subjects of commemoration in the Thêbian temples,[303]
affords a presumption that Thêbes was really once dependent on
Orchomenos. Moreover the savage mutilations inflicted by the hero on
the tribute-seeking envoys, so faithfully portrayed in his surname
Rhinokoloustês, infuse into the mythe a portion of that bitter feeling
which so long prevailed between Thêbes and Orchomenos, and which led
the Thêbans, as soon as the battle of Leuctra had placed supremacy in
their hands, to destroy and depopulate their rival.[304] The ensuing
generation saw the same fate retorted upon Thêbes, combined with
the restoration of Orchomenos. The legendary grandeur of this city
continued, long after it had ceased to be distinguished for wealth
and power, imperishably recorded both in the minds of the nobler
citizens and in the compositions of the poets; the emphatic language of
Pausanias shows how much he found concerning it in the old epic.[305]
[303] Herod. i. 146. Pausan. vii. 2, 2.
[304] Theocrit. xvi. 104.—
Ὦ ᾿Ετεόκλειοι θύγατρες θεαὶ, αἱ Μινύειον
᾿Ορχόμενον φιλέοισαι, ἀπεχθόμενόν ποκα Θήβαις.
The scholiast gives a sense to these words much narrower than
they really bear. See Diodôr. xv. 79; Pausan. ix. 15. In the
oration which Isokratês places in the mouth of a Platæan,
complaining of the oppressions of Thêbes, the ancient servitude
and tribute to Orchomenos is cast in the teeth of the Thêbans
(Isokrat. Orat. Plataic. vol. iii. p. 32, Auger).
[305] Pausan. ix. 34, 5. See also the fourteenth Olympic Ode
of Pindar, addressed to the Orchomenian Asopikus. The learned
and instructive work of K. O. Müller, Orchomenos und die
Minyer, embodies everything which can be known respecting this
once-memorable city; indeed the contents of the work extends much
farther than its title promises.
SECTION II.—DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
With several of the daughters of Æolus memorable mythical pedigrees and
narratives are connected. Alcyonê married Kêyx, the son of Eôsphoros,
but both she and her husband displayed in a high degree the overweening
insolence common in the Æolic race. The wife called her husband Zeus,
while he addressed her as Hêrê, for which presumptuous act Zeus
punished them by changing both into birds.[306]
[306] Apollodôr. i. 7, 4. A. Kêyx,—king of Trachin,—the friend
of Hêraklês and protector of the Hêrakleids to the extent of
his power (Hesiod, Scut. Hercul. 355-473: Apollodôr. ii. 7, 5;
Hekatæ. Fragm. 353, Didot.).
Canacê had by the god Poseidôn several children, amongst whom were
Epôpeus and Alôeus.[307] Alôeus married Imphimêdea, who became
enamored of the god Poseidôn, and boasted of her intimacy with him.
She had by him two sons, Otos and Ephialtês, the huge and formidable
Alôids,—Titanic beings, nine fathoms in height and nine cubits in
breadth, even in their boyhood, before they had attained their full
strength. These Alôids defied and insulted the gods in Olympus; they
paid their court to Hêrê and Artemis, and they even seized and bound
Arês, confining him in a brazen chamber for thirteen months. No one
knew where he was, and the intolerable chain would have worn him to
death, had not Eribœa, the jealous stepmother of the Alôids, revealed
the place of his detention to Hermês, who carried him surreptitiously
away when at the last extremity; nor could Arês obtain any atonement
for such an indignity. Otos and Ephialtês even prepared to assault the
gods in heaven, piling up Ossa on Olympus and Pêlion on Ossa, in order
to reach them. And this they would have accomplished had they been
allowed to grow to their full maturity; but the arrows of Apollo put a
timely end to their short-lived career.[308]
[307] Canacê, daughter of Æolus, is a subject of deep tragical
interest both in Euripidês and Ovid. The eleventh Heroic Epistle
of the latter, founded mainly on the lost tragedy of the former
called Æolus, purports to be from Canacê to Macareus, and
contains a pathetic description of the ill-fated passion between
a brother and sister: see the fragments of the Æolus in Dindorf's
collection. In the tale of Kaunos and Byblis, both children of
Milêtos, the results of an incestuous passion are different but
hardly less melancholy (Parthenios, Narr. xi.).
Makar, the son of Æolus, is the primitive settler of the island
of <DW26>s (Hom. Hymn. Apoll. 37): moreover in the Odyssey, Æolus
son of Hippotês, the dispenser of the winds, has six sons and
six daughters, and marries the former to the latter (Odyss. x.
7). The two persons called Æolus are brought into connection
genealogically (see Schol. ad Odyss. _l. c._, and Diodôr. iv.
67), but it seems probable that Euripidês was the first to place
the names of Macareus and Canacê in that relation which confers
upon them their poetical celebrity. Sostratus (ap. Stobæum, t.
614, p. 404) can hardly be considered to have borrowed from any
older source than Euripidês. Welcker (Griech. Tragöd. vol. ii. p.
860) puts together all that can be known respecting the structure
of the lost drama of Euripidês.
[308] Iliad, v. 386; Odyss. xi. 306; Apollodôr. i. 7, 4. So
Typhôeus, in the Hesiodic Theogony, the last enemy of the gods,
is killed before he comes to maturity (Theog. 837). For the
different turns given to this ancient Homeric legend, see Heyne,
ad Apollodôr. l. c, and Hyginus, f. 28. The Alôids were noticed
in the Hesiodic poems (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 482). Odysseus
does not see _them_ in Hadês, as Heyne by mistake says; he sees
their mother Iphimêdea. Virgil (Æn. vi. 582) assigns to them a
place among the sufferers of punishment in Tartarus.
Eumêlus, the Corinthian poet, designated Alôeus as son of the god
Hêlios and brother of Æêtês, the father of Mêdea (Eumêl. Fragm.
2, Marktscheffel). The scene of their death was subsequently
laid in Naxos (Pindar, Pyth. iv. 88): their tombs were seen
at Anthêdôn in Bœôtia (Pausan. ix. 22, 4). The very curious
legend alluded to by Pausanias from Hegesinoos, the author of
an Atthis,—to the effect that Otos and Ephialtês were the first
to establish the worship of the Muses in Helicôn, and that they
founded Ascra along with Œoklos, the son of Poseidôn,—is one
which we have no means of tracing farther (Pausan. ix. 29, I).
The story of the Alôids, as Diodôrus gives it (v. 51, 52),
diverges on almost every point: it is evidently borrowed from
some Naxian archæologist, and the only information which we
collect from it is, that Otos and Ephialtês received heroic
honors at Naxos. The views of O. Müller (Orchomenos, p. 387)
appear to me unusually vague and fanciful.
Ephialtês takes part in the combat of the giants against the gods
(Apollodôr. t. 6, 2), where Heyne remarks, as in so many other
cases, "Ephialtês hic non confundendus cum altero Alôei filio;"
an observation just indeed, if we are supposed to be dealing
with personages and adventures historically real, but altogether
misleading in regard to these legendary characters; for here the
general conception of Ephialtês and his attributes is in both
cases the same; but the particular adventures ascribed to him
cannot be made to consist, as facts, one with the other.
The genealogy assigned to Calycê, another daughter of Æolus, conducts
us from Thessaly to Elis and Ætôlia. She married Aëthlius (the son
of Zeus by Prôtogeneia, daughter of Deukaliôn and sister of Hellên),
who conducted a colony out of Thessaly and settled in the territory
of Elis. He had for his son Endymiôn, respecting whom the Hesiodic
Catalogue and the Eoiai related several wonderful things. Zeus granted
him the privilege of determining the hour of his own death, and even
translated him into heaven, which he forfeited by daring to pay court
to Hêrê: his vision in this criminal attempt was cheated by a cloud,
and he was cast out into the under-world.[309] According to other
stories, his great beauty caused the goddess Sêlêne to become enamored
of him, and to visit him by night during his sleep:—the sleep of
Endymiôn became a proverbial expression for enviable, undisturbed, and
deathless repose.[310] Endymiôn had for issue (Pausanias gives us three
different accounts, and Apollodôrus a fourth, of the name of his wife)
Epeios, Ætôlus, Pæôn, and a daughter Eurykydê. He caused his three sons
to run a race on the stadium at Olympia, and Epeios, being victorious,
was rewarded by becoming his successor in the kingdom: it was after him
that the people were denominated Epeians.
[309] Hesiod, Akusilaus and Pherekydês, ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod.
iv, 57. Ἴν δ᾽ αὐτῷ θανάτου ταμίης. The Scholium is very full
of matter, and exhibits many of the diversities in the tale of
Endymiôn: see also Apollodôr i. 7, 5; Pausan. v. 1, 2; Conôn.
Narr. 14.
[310] Theocrit. iii. 49; xx. 35; where, however, Endymiôn is
connected with Latmos in Caria (see Schol. _ad loc._).
Both the story here mentioned, and still more, the etymological
signification of the names Aëthlius and Endymiôn, seem plainly to
indicate (as has before been remarked) that this genealogy was not
devised until after the Olympic games had become celebrated and
notorious throughout Greece.
Epeios had no male issue, and was succeeded by his nephew Eleios, son
of Euykydê by the god Poseidôn: the name of the people was then changed
from Epeians to Eleians. Ætôlus, the brother of Epeios, having slain
Apis, son of Phorôneus, was compelled to flee from the country: he
crossed the Corinthian gulf and settled in the territory then called
Kurêtis, but to which he gave the name of Ætôlia.[311]
[311] Pausan. v. 1. 3-6; Apollodôr. i. 7, 6.
The son of Eleios,—or, according to other accounts, of the god Hêlios,
of Poseidôn, or of Phorbas,[312]—is Augeas, whom we find mentioned
in the Iliad as king of the Epeians or Eleians. Nestôr gives a long
and circumstantial narrative of his own exploits at the head of his
Pylian countrymen against his neighbors the Epeians and their king
Augeas, whom he defeated with great loss, slaying Mulios, the king's
son-in-law, and acquiring a vast booty.[313] Augeas was rich in all
sorts of rural wealth, and possessed herds of cattle so numerous, that
the dung of the animals accumulated in the stable or cattle enclosures
beyond all power of endurance. Eurystheus, as an insult to Hêraklês,
imposed upon him the obligation of cleansing this stable: the hero,
disdaining to carry off the dung upon his shoulders, turned the
course of the river Alpheios through the building, and thus swept the
encumbrance away.[314] But Augeas, in spite of so signal a service,
refused to Hêraklês the promised reward, though his son Phyleus
protested against such treachery, and when he found that he could not
induce his father to keep faith, retired in sorrow and wrath to the
island of Dulichiôn.[315] To avenge the deceit practised upon him,
Hêraklês invaded Elis; but Augeas had powerful auxiliaries, especially
his nephews, the two Molionids (sons of Poseidôn by Molionê, the wife
of Aktôr), Eurytos and Kteatos. These two miraculous brothers, of
transcendent force, grew together,—having one body, but two heads and
four arms.[316] Such was their irresistible might, that Hêraklês was
defeated and repelled from Elis: but presently the Eleians sent the two
Molionid brothers as _Theôri_ (sacred envoys) to the Isthmian games,
and Hêraklês, placing himself in ambush at Kleônæ, surprised and killed
them as they passed through. For this murderous act the Eleians in
vain endeavored to obtain redress both at Corinth and at Argos; which
is assigned as the reason for the self-ordained exclusion, prevalent
throughout all the historical age, that no Eleian athlête would ever
present himself as a competitor at the Isthmian games.[317] The
Molionids being thus removed, Hêraklês again invaded Elis, and killed
Augeas along with his children,—all except Phyleus, whom he brought
over from Dulichiôn, and put in possession of his father's kingdom.
According to the more gentle narrative which Pausanias adopts, Augeas
was not killed, but pardoned at the request of Phyleus.[318] He was
worshipped as a hero[319] even down to the time of that author.
[312] Apollodôr. ii. 5, 5; Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 172. In all
probability, the old legend made Augeas the son of the god
Hêlios: Hêlios, Augeas and Agamêdê are a triple series parallel
to the Corinthian genealogy, Hêlios, Æêtês and Mêdia; not to
mention that the etymology of Augeas connects him with Hêlios.
Theocritus (xx. 55) designates him as the son of the god Hêlios,
through whose favor his cattle are made to prosper and multiply
with such astonishing success (xx. 117).
[313] Iliad, xi. 670-760; Pherekyd. Fragm. 57, Didot.
[314] Diodôr. iv. 13. Ὕβρεως ἕνεκεν Εὐρυσθεὺς προσέταξε καθᾶραι·
ὁ δὲ Ἡρακλῆς τὸ μὲν τοῖς ὤμοις ἐξενεγκεῖν αὐτὴν ἀπεδοκίμασεν,
ἐκκλίνων τὴν ἐκ τῆς ὕβρεως αἰσχύνην, etc. (Pausan. v. 1. 7;
Apollodôr. ii. 5, 5).
It may not be improper to remark that this fable indicates a
purely pastoral condition, or at least a singularly rude state
of agriculture; and the way in which Pausanias recounts it goes
even beyond the genuine story: ὡς καὶ τὰ πολλὰ τῆς χώρας αὐτῷ ἤδη
διατελεῖν ἀργὰ ὄντα ὑπὸ τῶν βοσκημάτων τῆς κόπρου. The slaves
of Odysseus however know what use to make of the dung heaped
before his outer fence (Odyss. xvii. 299); not so the purely
carnivorous and pastoral Cyclôps (Odyss. ix. 329). The stabling
into which the cattle go from their pasture, is called κόπρος in
Homer,—Ἐλθούσας ἐς κόπρον, ἐπὴν βοτανῆς κορέσωνται (Odyss. x.
411): compare Iliad, xviii. 575—Μυκηθμῷ δ᾽ ἀπὸ κόπρου ἐπεσσεύοντο
πέδονδε.
The Augeas of Theocritus has abundance of wheat-land and
vineyard, as well as cattle: he ploughs his land three or four
times, and digs his vineyard diligently (xx. 20-32).
[315] The wrath and retirement of Phyleus is mentioned in the
Iliad (ii. 633), but not the cause of it.
[316] These singular properties were ascribed to them both in
the Hesiodic poems and by Pherekydês (Schol. Ven. ad II. xi.
715-750, et ad II. xxiii. 638), but not in the Iliad. The poet
Ibykus (Fragm. 11, Schneid. ap. Athenæ. ii. 57) calls them ἅλικας
ἰσοκεφάλους, ἐνιγυίους, Ἀμφοτέρους γεγαῶτας ἐν ὠέῳ ἀργυρέῳ.
There were temples and divine honors to Zeus Moliôn (Lactantius.
de Falsâ Religione, i. 22).
[317] Pausan. v. 2, 4. The inscription cited by Pausanias
proves that this was the reason assigned by the Eleian athlêtes
themselves for the exclusion; but there were several different
stories.
[318] Apollodôr. ii. 7, 2. Diodôr. iv. 33. Pausan. v. 2, 2; 3,
2. It seems evident from these accounts that the genuine legend
represented Hêraklês as having been defeated by the Molionids:
the unskilful evasions both of Apollodôrus and Diodôrus betray
this. Pindar (Olymp. xi. 25-50) gives the story without any
flattery to Hêraklês.
[319] Pausan. v. 4, 1.
It was on occasion of this conquest of Elis, according to the old mythe
which Pindar has ennobled in a magnificent ode, that Hêraklês first
consecrated the ground of Olympia, and established the Olympic games.
Such at least was one of the many fables respecting the origin of that
memorable institution.[320]
[320] The Armenian copy of Eusebius gives a different genealogy
respecting Elis and Pisa: Aëthlius, Epeius, Endymiôn, Alexinus;
next Œnomaus and Pêlops, then Hêraklês. Some counted ten
generations, others _three_, between Hêraklês and Iphitus, who
renewed the discontinued Olympic games (see Armen. Euseb. copy c.
xxxii. p. 140).
Phyleus, after having restored order in Elis, retired again to
Dulichiôn, and left the kingdom to his brother Agasthenês, which again
brings us into the Homeric series. For Polyxenos, son of Agasthenês, is
one of the four commanders of the Epeian forty ships in the Iliad, in
conjunction with the two sons of Eurytos and Kteatos, and with Diôrês
son of Amarynceus. Megês, the son of Phyleus, commands the contingent
from Dulichiôn and the Echinades.[321] Polyxenos returns safe from
Troy, is succeeded by his son Amphimachos,—named after the Epeian chief
who had fallen before Troy,—and he again by another Eleios, in whose
time the Dôrians and the Hêrakleids invade Peloponnêsus.[322] These two
names, barren of actions or attributes, are probably introduced by the
genealogists whom Pausanias followed, to fill up the supposed interval
between the Trojan war and the Dôrian invasion.
[321] Iliad, ii. 615-630.
[322] Pausan. v. 3, 4.
We find the ordinary discrepancies in respect to the series and the
members of this genealogy. Thus some called Epeios son of Aëthlius,
others son of Endymiôn:[323] a third pedigree, which carries the
sanction of Aristotle and is followed by Conôn, designated Eleios,
the first settler of Elis, as son of Poseidôn and Eurypylê, daughter
of Endymiôn, and Epeios and Alexis as the two sons of Eleios.[324]
And Pindar himself, in his ode to Epharmostus the Locrian, introduces
with much emphasis another king of the Epeians named Opus, whose
daughter, pregnant by Zeus, was conveyed by that god to the old and
childless king Locrus: the child when born, adopted by Locrus and named
Opus, became the eponymous hero of the city so called in Locris.[325]
Moreover Hekatæus the Milesian not only affirmed (contrary both to the
Iliad and the Odyssey) that the Epeians and the Eleians were different
people, but also added that the Epeians had assisted Hêraklês in his
expedition against Augeas and Elis; a narrative very different from
that of Apollodôrus and Pausanias, and indicating besides that he must
have had before him a genealogy varying from theirs.[326]
[323] Schol. Pindar, Olymp. ix. 86.
[324] Schol. Ven. ad II. xi. 687; Conôn, Narrat. xv. ap. Scriptt.
Mythogr. West p. 130.
[325] Pindar, Olymp. ix. 62: Schol. _ibid._ 86. Ὀποῦντος ἠν
θυγάτηρ Ἠλείων βασιλέως, ἣν Ἀριστοτέλης Καμβύσην καλεῖ.
[326] Ἑκαταῖος δὲ ὁ Μιλήσιος ἑτέρους λέγει τῶν Ἠλείων τοὺς
Ἐπείους· τῷ γοῦν Ἡρακλεῖ συστρατεῦσαι τοὺς Ἐπείους καὶ συνανελεῖν
αὐτῷ τόν τε Αὐγέαν καὶ τὴν Ἦλιν (Hekat. ap. Strab. viii. p. 341).
It has already been mentioned that Ætôlus, son of Endymiôn, quitted
Peloponnêsus in consequence of having slain Apis.[327] The country
on the north of the Corinthian gulf, between the rivers Euênus and
Achelôus, received from him the name of Ætôlia instead of that of
Kurêtis: he acquired possession of it after having slain Dôrus,
Laodokus and Polypœtes, sons of Apollo and Phthia, by whom he had been
well received. He had by his wife Pronoê (the daughter of Phorbas) two
sons, Pleurôn and Kalydôn, and from them the two chief towns in Ætôlia
were named.[328] Pleurôn married Xanthippê, daughter of Dôrus, and
had for his son Agênôr, from whom sprang Portheus, or Porthaôn, and
Demonikê: Euênos and Thestius were children of the latter by the god
Arês.[329]
[327] Ephorus said that Ætôlus had been expelled by Salmôneus
king of the Epeians and Pisatæ (ap. Strabo. viii. p. 357):
he must have had before him a different story and different
genealogy from that which is given in the text.
[328] Apollodôr. i. 7, 6. Dôrus, son of Apollo and Phthia,
killed by Ætôlus, after having hospitably received him, is here
mentioned. Nothing at all is known of this; but the conjunction
of names is such as to render it probable that there was some
legend connected with them: possibly the assistance given by
Apollo to the Kurêtes against the Ætôlians, and the death of
Meleager by the hand of Apollo, related both in the Eoiai and the
Minyas (Pausan. x. 31, 2), may have been grounded upon it. The
story connects itself with what is stated by Apollodôrus about
Dôrus son of Hellên (see _supra_, p. 136).
[329] According to the ancient genealogical poet Asius, Thestius
was son of Agênôr the son of Pleurôn (Asii Fragm. 6, p. 413,
ed. Marktsch.). Compare the genealogy of Ætôlia and the general
remarks upon it, in Brandstäter, Geschichte des Ætol. Landes,
etc., Berlin, 1844, p. 23 _seq._
Portheus had three sons, Agrius, Melas and Œneus: among the offspring
of Thestius were Althæa and Lêda,[330]—names which bring us to a period
of interest in the legendary history. Lêda marries Tyndareus and
becomes mother of Helena and the Dioskuri: Althæa marries Œneus, and
has, among other children, Meleager and Deianeira; the latter being
begotten by the god Dionysus, and the former by Arês.[331] Tydeus also
is his son, the father of Diomêdês: warlike eminence goes hand in hand
with tragic calamity among the members of this memorable family.
[330] Respecting Lêda, see the statements of Ibykus, Pherekydês,
Hellanikus, etc. (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 146). The reference to
the Corinthiaca of Eumêlus is curious: it is a specimen of the
matters upon which these old genealogical poems dwelt.
[331] Apollodôr. i. 8, 1; Euripidês, Meleager, Frag. 1. The three
sons of Portheus are named in the Iliad (xiv. 116) as living at
Pleurôn and Kalydôn. The name Œneus doubtless brings Dionysus
into the legend.
We are fortunate enough to find the legend of Althæa and Meleager set
forth at considerable length in the Iliad, in the speech addressed by
Phœnix to appease the wrath of Achilles. Œneus, king of Kalydôn, in the
vintage sacrifices which he offered to the gods, omitted to include
Artemis: the misguided man either forgot her or cared not for her;[332]
and the goddess, provoked by such an insult, sent against the vineyards
of Œneus a wild boar, of vast size and strength, who tore up the trees
by the root and laid prostrate all their fruit. So terrible was this
boar, that nothing less than a numerous body of men could venture to
attack him: Meleager, the son of Œneus, however, having got together a
considerable number of companions, partly from the Kurêtes of Pleurôn,
at length slew him. But the anger of Artemis was not yet appeased, and
she raised a dispute among the combatants respecting the possession of
the boar's head and hide,—the trophies of victory. In this dispute,
Meleager slew the brother of his mother Althæa, prince of the Kurêtes
of Pleurôn: these Kurêtes attacked the Ætôlians of Kalydôn in order
to avenge their chief. So long as Meleager contended in the field
the Ætôlians had the superiority. But he presently refused to come
forth, indignant at the curses imprecated upon him by his mother: for
Althæa, wrung with sorrow for the death of her brother, flung herself
upon the ground in tears, beat the earth violently with her hands,
and implored Hadês and Persephonê to inflict death upon Meleager,—a
prayer which the unrelenting Erinnys in Erebus heard but too well.
So keenly did the hero resent this behavior of his mother, that he
kept aloof from the war; and the Kurêtes not only drove the Ætôlians
from the field, but assailed the walls and gates of Kalydôn, and were
on the point of overwhelming its dismayed inhabitants. There was no
hope of safety except in the arm of Meleager; but Meleager lay in his
chamber by the side of his beautiful wife Kleopatra, the daughter of
Idas, and heeded not the necessity. While the shouts of expected
victory were heard from the assailants at the gates, the ancient men
of Ætôlia and the priests of the gods earnestly besought Meleager to
come forth,[333] offering him his choice of the fattest land in the
plain of Kalydôn. His dearest friends, his father Œneus, his sisters,
and even his mother herself added their supplications, but he remained
inflexible. At length the Kurêtes penetrated into the town and began to
burn it: at this last moment, Kleopatra his wife addressed to him her
pathetic appeal, to avert from her and from his family the desperate
horrors impending over them all. Meleager could no longer resist: he
put on his armor, went forth from his chamber, and repelled the enemy.
But when the danger was over, his countrymen withheld from him the
splendid presents which they had promised, because he had rejected
their prayers, and had come forth only when his own haughty caprice
dictated.[334]
[332] Ἢ λάθετ᾽, ἢ οὐκ ἐνόησεν· ἀάσατο δὲ μέγα θυμῷ. (Iliad,
ix. 533). The destructive influence of Atê is mentioned
before, v. 502. The piety of Xenophôn reproduces this ancient
circumstance,—Οἴνεως δ᾽ ἐν γήρᾳ ἐπιλαθομένου τῆς θεοῦ, etc. (De
Venat. c. i.)
[333] These priests formed the Chorus in the Meleager of
Sophoklês (Schol. ad Iliad. _ib._ 575).
[334] Iliad, ix. 525-595.
Such is the legend of Meleager in the Iliad: a verse in the second book
mentions simply the death of Meleager, without farther details, as a
reason why Thoas appeared in command of the Ætôlians before Troy.[335]
Though the circumstance is indicated only indirectly, there seems
little doubt that Homer must have conceived the death of the hero as
brought about by the maternal curse: the unrelenting Erinnys executed
to the letter the invocations of Althæa, though she herself must have
been willing to retract them.
[335] Iliad, ii. 642.
Later poets both enlarged and altered the fable. The Hesiodic Eoiai,
as well as the old poem called the Minyas, represented Meleager as
having been slain by Apollo, who aided the Kurêtes in the war; and
the incident of the burning brand, though quite at variance with
Homer, is at least as old as the tragic poet Phrynichus, earlier than
Æschylus.[336] The Mœræ, or Fates, presenting themselves to Althæa
shortly after the birth of Meleager, predicted that the child would
die so soon as the brand then burning on the fire near at hand should
be consumed. Althæa snatched it from the flames and extinguished it,
preserving it with the utmost care, until she became incensed against
Meleager for the death of her brother. She then cast it into the fire,
and as soon as it was consumed the life of Meleager was brought to a
close.
[336] Pausan. x. 31. 2. The Πλευρώνιαι, a lost tragedy of
Phrynichus.
We know, from the sharp censure of Pliny, that Sophoklês heightened
the pathos of this subject by his account of the mournful death
of Meleager's sisters, who perished from excess of grief. They
were changed into the birds called Meleagrides, and their
never-ceasing tears ran together into amber.[337] But in the hands
of Euripidês—whether originally through him or not,[338] we cannot
tell—Atalanta became the prominent figure and motive of the piece,
while the party convened to hunt the Kalydônian boar was made to
comprise all the distinguished heroes from every quarter of Greece.
In fact, as Heyne justly remarks, this event is one of the four
aggregate dramas of Grecian heroic life,[339] along with the Argonautic
expedition, the siege of Thêbes, and the Trojan war. To accomplish
the destruction of the terrific animal which Artemis in her wrath had
sent forth, Meleager assembled not merely the choice youth among the
Kurêtes and Ætôlians (as we find in the Iliad), but an illustrious
troop, including Kastôr and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus, Pêleus and
Telamôn, Thêseus and Peirithous, Ankæus and Kêpheus, Jasôn, Amphiaraus,
Admêtus, Eurytiôn and others. Nestôr and Phœnix, who appear as old men
before the walls of Troy, exhibited their early prowess as auxiliaries
to the suffering Kalydônians.[340] Conspicuous amidst them all stood
the virgin Atalanta, daughter of the Arcadian Schœneus; beautiful
and matchless for swiftness of foot, but living in the forest as a
huntress and unacceptable to Aphroditê.[341] Several of the heroes were
slain by the boar, others escaped by various stratagems: at length
Atalanta first shot him in the back, next Amphiaraus in the eye, and,
lastly, Meleager killed him. Enamoured of the beauty of Atalanta,
Meleager made over to her the chief spoils of the animal, on the plea
that she had inflicted the first wound. But his uncles, the brothers
of Thestius, took them away from her, asserting their rights as next
of kin,[342] if Meleager declined to keep the prize for himself: the
latter, exasperated at this behavior, slew them. Althæa, in deep sorrow
for her brothers and wrath against her son, is impelled to produce the
fatal brand which she had so long treasured up, and consign it to the
flames.[343] The tragedy concludes with the voluntary death both of
Althæa and Kleopatra.
[337] Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 2, 11.
[338] There was a tragedy of Æschylus called Ἀταλάντη, of which
nothing remains (Bothe, Æschyli Fragm. ix. p. 18).
Of the more recent dramatic writers, several selected Atalanta as
their subject (See Brandstäter, Geschichte Ætoliens, p. 65).
[339] There was a poem of Stesichorus, Συόθηραι (Stesichor.
Fragm. 15. p. 72).
[340] The catalogue of these heroes is in Apollodôr. i. 8, 2;
Ovid, Metamor. viii. 300; Hygin. fab. 173. Euripidês, in his play
of Meleager, gave an enumeration and description of the heroes
(see Fragm. 6 of that play, ed. Matth.). Nestôr, in this picture
of Ovid, however, does not appear quite so invincible as in his
own speeches in the Iliad. The mythographers thought it necessary
to assign a reason why Hêraklês was _not_ present at the
Kalydônian adventure: he was just at that time in servitude with
Omphalê in Lydia (Apollod. ii. 6, 3). This seems to have been the
idea of Ephorus, and it is much in his style of interpretation
(see Ephor. Fragm. 9. ed. Didot.).
[341] Euripid. Meleag. Fragm. vi. Matt.—
Κύπριδος δὲ μίσημ᾽, Ἀρκὰς Ἀταλάντη, κύνας
Καὶ τόξ᾽ ἔχουσα, etc.
There was a drama "Meleager" both of Sophoklês and Euripidês: of
the former hardly any fragments remain,—a few more of the latter.
[342] Hyginus, fab. 229.
[343] Diodôr, iv. 34. Apollôdorus (i. 8; 2-4) gives first the
usual narrative, including Atalanta; next, the Homeric narrative
with some additional circumstances, but not including either
Atalanta or the fire-brand on which Meleager's life depended. He
prefaces the latter with the words οἱ δέ φασι, etc. Antoninus
Liberalis gives this second narrative only, without Atalanta,
from Nicander (Narrat. 2).
The Latin scenic poet, Attius, had devoted one of his tragedies
to this subject, taking the general story as given by Euripidês:
"Remanet gloria apud me: exuvias dignavi Atalantæ dare," seems
to be the speech of Meleager. (Attii Fragm. 8, ap. Poet. Scen.
Lat. ed. Bothe, p. 215). The readers of the Æneid will naturally
think of the swift and warlike virgin Camilla, as the parallel of
Atalanta.
Interesting as the Arcadian huntress, Atalanta, is in herself, she is
an intrusion, and not a very convenient intrusion, into the Homeric
story of the Kalydônian boar-hunt, wherein another female Kleopatra,
already occupied the foreground.[344] But the more recent version
became accredited throughout Greece, and was sustained by evidence
which few persons in those days felt any inclination to controvert.
For Atalanta carried away with her the spoils and head of the boar
into Arcadia; and there for successive centuries hung the identical
hide and the gigantic tusks of three feet in length, in the temple
of Athênê Alea at Tegea. Kallimachus mentions them as being there
preserved, in the third century before the Christian æra;[345] but the
extraordinary value set upon them is best proved by the fact that the
emperor Augustus took away the tusks from Tegea, along with the great
statue of Athênê Alea, and conveyed them to Rome, to be there preserved
among the public curiosities. Even a century and a half afterwards,
when Pausanias visited Greece, the skin worn out with age was shown
to him, while the robbery of the tusks had not been forgotten. Nor
were these relics of the boar the only memento preserved at Tegea of
the heroic enterprise. On the pediment of the temple of Athênê Alea,
unparalleled in Peloponnêsus for beauty and grandeur, the illustrious
statuary Skopas had executed one of his most finished reliefs,
representing the Kalydônian hunt. Atalanta and Meleager were placed in
the front rank of the assailants, and Ankæus, one of the Tegean heroes,
to whom the tusks of the boar had proved fatal,[346] was represented
as sinking under his death-wound into the arms of his brother Epochos.
And Pausanias observes, that the Tegeans, while they had manifested
the same honorable forwardness as other Arcadian communities in the
conquest of Troy, the repulse of Xerxês, and the battle of Dipæ against
Sparta—might fairly claim to themselves, through Ankæus and Atalanta,
that they alone amongst all Arcadians had participated in the glory of
the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[347] So entire and unsuspecting is the faith
both of the Tegeans and of Pausanias in the past historical reality
of this romantic adventure. Strabo indeed tries to transform the
romance into something which has the outward semblance of history, by
remarking that the quarrel respecting the boar's head and hide cannot
have been the real cause of war between the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians;
the true ground of dispute (he contends) was probably the possession
of a portion of territory.[348] His remarks on this head are analogous
to those of Thucydidês and other critics, when they ascribe the Trojan
war, not to the rape of Helen, but to views of conquest or political
apprehensions. But he treats the general fact of the battle between
the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians, mentioned in the Iliad, as something
unquestionably real and historical—recapitulating at the same time a
variety of discrepancies on the part of different authors, but not
giving any decision of his own respecting their truth or falsehood.
[344] The narrative of Apollodôrus reads awkwardly—Μελέαγρος
ἔχων γυναῖκα Κλεοπάτραν, βουλόμενος δὲ καὶ ἐξ Ἀταλάντης
τεκνοποιήσασθαι, etc. (i. 8, 2).
[345] Kallimachus, Hymn. ad Dian. 217.—
Οὔ μιν ἐπικλητοὶ Καλυδώνιοι ἀγρευτῆρες
Μέμφονται κάπροιο· τὰ γὰρ σημήϊα νίκης
Ἀρκαδίην εἰσῆλθεν, ἔχει δ᾽ ἔτι θηρὸς ὀδόντας.
[346] See Pherekyd. Frag. 81, ed. Didot.
[347] Pausan. viii. 45, 4; 46, 1-3; 47, 2. Lucian, adv. Indoctum,
c. 14. t. iii. p. 111, Reiz.
The officers placed in charge of the public curiosities or
wonders at Rome (οἱ ἐπὶ τοῖς θαύμασιν) affirmed that one of the
tusks had been accidentally broken in the voyage from Greece: the
other was kept in the temple of Bacchus in the Imperial Gardens.
It is numbered among the memorable exploits of Thêseus that he
vanquished and killed a formidable and gigantic sow, in the
territory of Krommyôn near Corinth. According to some critics,
this Krommyônian sow was the mother of the Kalydônian boar
(Strabo, viii. p. 380).
[348] Strabo, x. p. 466. Πολέμου δ᾽ ἐμπεσόντος τοῖς Θεστιάδαις
πρὸς Οἰνέα καὶ Μελέαγρον, ὁ μὲν Ποιητὴς, ἀμφὶ συὸς κεφαλῇ καὶ
δέρματι, κατὰ τὴν περὶ τοῦ κάπρου μυθολογίαν· ὡς δὲ τὸ εἰκὸς,
περὶ μέρους τῆς χώρας, etc. This remark is also similar to Mr.
Payne Knight's criticism on the true causes of the Trojan war,
which were (he tells us) of a political character, independent of
Helen and her abduction (Prolegom. ad Homer. c. 53).
In the same manner as Atalanta was intruded into the Kalydônian hunt,
so also she seems to have been introduced into the memorable funeral
games celebrated after the decease of Pelias at Iôlkos, in which she
had no place at the time when the works on the chest of Kypselus were
executed.[349] But her native and genuine locality is Arcadia; where
her race-course, near to the town of Methydrion, was shown even in
the days of Pausanias.[350] This race-course had been the scene of
destruction for more than one unsuccessful suitor. For Atalanta,
averse to marriage, had proclaimed that her hand should only be won
by the competitor who could surpass her in running: all who tried and
failed were condemned to die, and many were the persons to whom her
beauty and swiftness, alike unparalleled, had proved fatal. At length
Meilaniôn, who had vainly tried to win her affections by assiduous
services in her hunting excursions, ventured to enter the perilous
lists. Aware that he could not hope to outrun her except by stratagem,
he had obtained by the kindness of Aphroditê, three golden apples from
the garden of the Hesperides, which he successively let fall near
to her while engaged in the race. The maiden could not resist the
temptation of picking them up, and was thus overcome: she became the
wife of Meilaniôn and the mother of the Arcadian Parthenopæus, one of
the seven chiefs who perished in the siege of Thêbes.[351]
[349] Compare Apollodôr. iii. 9, 2, and Pausan. v. 17, 4. She is
made to _wrestle_ with Pêleus at these funeral games, which seems
foreign to her character.
[350] Pausan. viii. 35, 8.
[351] Respecting the varieties in this interesting story,
see Apollod. iii. 9, 2; Hygin. f. 185; Ovid, Metam. x.
560-700; Propert. i. 1, 20; Ælian, V. H. xiii. i. Μειλανίωνος
σωφρονέστερος. Aristophan. Lysistrat. 786 and Schol. In the
ancient representation on the chest of Kypselus (Paus. v. 19, 1),
Meilaniôn was exhibited standing near Atalanta, who was holding a
fawn: no match or competition in running was indicated.
There is great discrepancy in the naming and patronymic
description of the parties in the story. Three different persons
are announced as fathers of Atalanta, Schœneus, Jasus and
Mænalos; the successful lover in Ovid (and seemingly in Euripidês
also) is called Hippomenês, not Meilaniôn. In the Hesiodic poems
Atalanta was daughter of Schœneus; Hellanikus called her daughter
of Jasus. See Apollodôr. _l. c._; Kallimach. Hymn to Dian. 214,
with the note of Spanheim; Schol. Eurip. Phœniss. 150; Schol.
Theocr. Idyll. iii. 40; also the ample commentary of Bachet de
Meziriac, Sur les Epîtres d'Ovide, vol. i. p. 366. Servius (ad
Virg. Eclog. vi. 61; Æneid, iii. 113) calls Atalanta a native of
Scyros.
Both the ancient scholiasts (see Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 769) and
the modern commentators, Spanheim and Heyne, seek to escape this
difficulty by supposing two Atalantas,—an Arcadian and a Bœôtian:
assuming the principle of their conjecture to be admissible, they
ought to suppose at least three.
Certainly, if personages of the Grecian mythes are to be treated
as historically real, and their adventures as so many exaggerated
and miscolored facts, it will be necessary to repeat the process
of multiplying entities to an infinite extent. And this is one
among the many reasons for rejecting the fundamental supposition.
But when we consider these personages as purely legendary, so
that an historical basis can neither be affirmed nor denied
respecting them, we escape the necessity of such inconvenient
stratagems. The test of identity is then to be sought in the
attributes, not in the legal description,—in the predicates, not
in the subject. Atalanta, whether born of one father or another,
whether belonging to one place or another, is beautiful, cold,
repulsive, daring, swift of foot and skilful with the bow,—these
attributes constitute her identity. The Scholiast on Theocritus
(iii. 40), in vindicating his supposition that there were two
Atalantas, draws a distinction founded upon this very principle:
he says that the Bœôtian Atalanta was τοξοτὶς, and the Arcadian
Atalanta δρομαία. But this seems an over-refinement: both the
shooting and the running go to constitute an accomplished
huntress.
In respect to Parthenopæus, called by Euripidês and by so many
others the son of Atalanta, it is of some importance to add,
that Apollodôrus, Aristarchus, and Antimachus, the author of the
Thebaid, assigned to him a pedigree entirely different,—making
him an Argeian, the son of Talaos and Lysimachê, and brother of
Adrastus. (Apollodôr. i. 9, 13; Aristarch. ap. Schol. Soph. Œd.
Col. 1320; Antimachus ap. Schol. Æschyl. Sep. Theb. 532; and
Schol. Supplem. ad Eurip. Phœniss. t. viii. p. 461, ed. Matth.
Apollodôrus is in fact inconsistent with himself in another
passage).
We have yet another female in the family of Œneus, whose name the
legend has immortalized. His daughter Deianeira was sought in marriage
by the river Achelôus, who presented himself in various shapes,
first as a serpent and afterwards as a bull. From the importunity of
this hateful suitor she was rescued by the arrival of Hêraklês, who
encountered Achelôus, vanquished him and broke off one of his horns,
which Achelôus ransomed by surrendering to him the horn of Amaltheia,
endued with the miraculous property of supplying the possessor with
abundance of any food or drink which he desired. Hêraklês was rewarded
for his prowess by the possession of Deianeira, and he made over the
horn of Amaltheia as his marriage-present to Œneus.[352] Compelled
to leave the residence of Œneus in consequence of having in a fit of
anger struck the youthful attendant Eunomus, and involuntarily killed
him,[353] Hêraklês retired to Trachin, crossing the river Euênus at the
place where the Centaur Nessus was accustomed to carry over passengers
for hire. Nessus carried over Deianeira, but when he had arrived on
the other side, began to treat her with rudeness, upon which Hêraklês
slew him with an arrow tinged by the poison of the Lernæan hydra. The
dying Centaur advised Deianeira to preserve the poisoned blood which
flowed from his wound, telling her that it would operate as a philtre
to regain for her the affections of Hêraklês, in case she should ever
be threatened by a rival. Some time afterwards the hero saw and loved
the beautiful Iolê, daughter of Eurytos, king of Œchalia: he stormed
the town, killed Eurytos, and made Iolê his captive. The misguided
Deianeira now had recourse to her supposed philtre: she sent as a
present to Hêraklês a splendid tunic, imbued secretly with the poisoned
blood of the Centaur. Hêraklês adorned himself with the tunic on the
occasion of offering a solemn sacrifice to Zeus on the promontory of
Kênæon in Eubœa: but the fatal garment, when once put on, clung to him
indissolubly, burnt his skin and flesh, and occasioned an agony of pain
from which he was only relieved by death. Deianeira slew herself in
despair at this disastrous catastrophe.[354]
[352] Sophokl. Trachin. 7. The horn of Amaltheia was described by
Pherekydês (Apollod. ii. 7, 5); see also Strabo, x. p. 458 and
Diodôr. iv. 35, who cites an interpretation of the fables (οἱ
εἰκάζοντες ἐξ αὐτῶν τἀληθές) to the effect that it was symbolical
of an embankment of the unruly river by Hêraklês, and consequent
recovery of very fertile land.
[353] Hellanikus (ap. Athen. ix. p. 410) mentioning this
incident, in two different works, called the attendant by two
different names.
[354] The beautiful drama of the Trachiniæ has rendered this
story familiar: compare Apollod. ii. 7, 7. Hygin. f. 36. Diodôr.
iv. 36-37.
The capture of Œchalia (Οἰχαλίας ἅλωσις) was celebrated in a
very ancient epic poem by Kreophylos, of the Homeric and not of
the Hesiodic character: it passed with many as the work of Homer
himself. (See Düntzer, Fragm. Epic. Græcor. p. 8. Welcker, Der
Epische Cyclus, p. 229). The same subject was also treated in
the Hesiodic Catalogue, or in the Eoiai (see Hesiod, Fragm. 129,
ed. Marktsch.): the number of the children of Eurytos was there
enumerated.
This exploit seems constantly mentioned as the last performed by
Hêraklês, and as immediately preceding his death or apotheosis on
Mount Œta: but whether the legend of Deianeira and the poisoned
tunic be very old, we cannot tell.
The tale of the death of Iphitos, son of Eurytos, by Hêraklês, is
as ancient as the Odyssey (xxi. 19-40): but it is there stated,
that Eurytos dying left his memorable bow to his son Iphitos (the
bow is given afterwards by Iphitos to Odysseus, and is the weapon
so fatal to the suitors),—a statement not very consistent with
the story that Œchalia was taken and Eurytos slain by Hêraklês.
It is plain that these were distinct and contradictory legends.
Compare Soph. Trachin. 260-285 (where Iphitos dies before
Eurytos), not only with the passage just cited from the Odyssey,
but also with Pherekydês, Fragm. 34, Didot.
Hyginus (f. 33) differs altogether in the parentage of Deianeira:
he calls her daughter of Dexamenos: his account of her marriage
with Hêraklês is in every respect at variance with Apollodôrus.
In the latter, Mnêsimachê is the daughter of Dexamenos; Hêraklês
rescues her from the importunities of the Centaur Eurytiôn (ii.
5, 5).
We have not yet exhausted the eventful career of Œneus and his
family—ennobled among the Ætôlians especially, both by religious
worship and by poetical eulogy—and favorite themes not merely in some
of the Hesiodic poems, but also in other ancient epic productions,
the Alkmæênis and the Cyclic Thêbais.[355] By another marriage, Œneus
had for his son Tydeus, whose poetical celebrity is attested by the
many different accounts given both of the name and condition of his
mother. Tydeus, having slain his cousins, the sons of Melas, who were
conspiring against Œneus, was forced to become an exile, and took
refuge at Argos with Adrastus, whose daughter Deipylê he married. The
issue of this marriage was Diomêdês, whose brilliant exploits in the
siege of Troy were not less celebrated than those of his father at the
siege of Thêbes. After the departure of Tydeus, Œneus was deposed by
the sons of Agrios, and fell into extreme poverty and wretchedness,
from which he was only rescued by his grandson Diomêdês, after the
conquest of Troy.[356] The sufferings of this ancient warrior, and
the final restoration and revenge by Diomêdês, were the subject of a
lost tragedy of Euripidês, which even the ridicule of Aristophanês
demonstrates to have been eminently pathetic.[357]
[355] See the references in Apollod. i, 8, 4-5. Pindar, Isthm.
iv. 32. Μελέταν δὲ σοφισταῖς Διὸς ἕκατι πρόσβαλον σεβιζόμενοι Ἐν
μὲν Αἰτωλῶν θυσίαισι φαενναῖς Οἰνεΐδαι κρατεροὶ, etc.
[356] Hekat. Fragm. 341, Didot. In this story Œneus is connected
with the first discovery of the vine and the making of wine
(οἶνος): compare Hygin. f. 129, and Servius ad Virgil. Georgic.
i. 9.
[357] See Welcker (Griechisch. Tragöd. ii. p. 583) on the lost
tragedy called Œneus.
Though the genealogy just given of Œneus is in part Homeric, and
seems to have been followed generally by the mythographers, yet
we find another totally at variance with it in Hekatæus, which he
doubtless borrowed from some of the old poets: the simplicity of the
story annexed to it seems to attest its antiquity. Orestheus, son of
Deukaliôn, first passed into Ætôlia, and acquired the kingdom: he
was father of Phytios, who was father of Œneus. Ætôlus was son of
Œneus.[358]
[358] Timoklês, Comic. ap. Athenæ. vii. p. 223.—
Γέρων τις ἀτυχεῖ; κατέμαθεν τὸν Οἰνέα.
Ovid. Heroid. ix. 153.—
"Heu! devota domus! Solio sedet Agrios alto
Œnea desertum nuda senecta premit."
The account here given is in Hyginus (f. 175): but it is in many
points different both from Apollodôrus (i. 8, 6; Pausan. ii.
25) and Pherekydês (Fragm. 83, Didot). It seems to be borrowed
from the lost tragedy of Euripidês. Compare Schol. ad Aristoph.
Acharn. 417. Antonin. Liberal. c. 37. In the Iliad, Œneus is dead
before the Trojan war (ii. 641).
The account of Ephorus again is different (ap. Strabo. x. p.
462); he joins Alkmæôn with Diomêdês: but his narrative has the
air of a tissue of quasi-historical conjectures, intended to
explain the circumstance that the Ætôlian Diomêdês is king of
Argos during the Trojan war.
Pausanias and Apollodôrus affirm that Œneus was buried at Œnoê
between Argos and Mantineia, and they connect the name of this
place with him. But it seems more reasonable to consider him as
the eponymous hero of Œniadæ in Ætôlia.
The original migration of Ætolus from Elis to Ætôlia—and the
subsequent establishment in Elis of Oxylus, his descendant in the
tenth generation, along with the Dôrian invaders of Peloponnêsus—were
commemorated by two inscriptions, one in the agora of Elis, the other
in that of the Ætôlian chief town, Thermum, engraved upon the statues
of Ætôlus and Oxylus,[359] respectively.
[359] Ephor. Fragm. 29. Didot ap. Strab. x.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PELOPIDS.
Among the ancient legendary genealogies, there was none which figured
with greater splendor, or which attracted to itself a higher degree
of poetical interest and pathos, than that of the Pelopids—Tantalus,
Pelops, Atreus and Thyestês, Agamemnôn and Menelaus and Ægisthus, Helen
and Klytæmnêstra, Orestês and Elektra and Hermionê. Each of these
characters is a star of the first magnitude in the Grecian hemisphere:
each name suggests the idea of some interesting romance or some
harrowing tragedy: the curse which taints the family from the beginning
inflicts multiplied wounds at every successive generation. So, at
least, the story of the Pelopids presents itself, after it had been
successively expanded and decorated by epic, lyric and tragic poets. It
will be sufficient to touch briefly upon events with which every reader
of Grecian poetry is more or less familiar, and to offer some remarks
upon the way in which they were and modified by different
Grecian authors.
Pelops is the eponym or name-giver of the Peloponnêsus: to find an
eponym for every conspicuous local name was the invariable turn of
Grecian retrospective fancy. The name Peloponnêsus is not to be found
either in the Iliad or the Odyssey, nor any other denomination which
can be attached distinctly and specially to the entire peninsula. But
we meet with the name in one of the most ancient post-Homeric poems of
which any fragments have been preserved—the Cyprian Verses—a poem which
many (seemingly most persons) even of the contemporaries of Herodotus
ascribed to the author of the Iliad, though Herodotus contradicts the
opinion.[360] The attributes by which the Pelopid Agamemnôn and his
house are marked out and distinguished from the other heroes of the
Iliad, are precisely those which Grecian imagination would naturally
seek in an eponymus—superior wealth, power, splendor and regality.
Not only Agamemnôn himself, but his brother Menelaus, is "more of a
king" even than Nestôr or Diomêdês. The gods have not given to the
king of the "much-golden" Mykênæ greater courage, or strength, or
ability, than to various other chiefs; but they have conferred upon
him a marked superiority in riches, power and dignity, and have thus
singled him out as the appropriate leader of the forces.[361] He enjoys
this preëminence as belonging to a privileged family and as inheriting
the heaven-descended sceptre of Pelops, the transmission of which is
described by Homer in a very remarkable way. The sceptre was made "by
Hêphæstos, who presented it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Hermês, Hermês
to the charioteer Pelops; Pelops gave it to Atreus, the ruler of
men; Atreus at his death left it to Thyestês, the rich cattle-owner;
Thyestês in his turn left it to his nephew Agamemnôn to carry, that he
might hold dominion over many islands and over all Argos."[362]
[360] Hesiod. ii. 117. Fragment. Epicc. Græc. Düntzer, ix.
Κύπρια, 8.—
Αἶψα τε Λυγκεὺς
Ταΰγετον προσέβαινε ποσὶν ταχέεσσι πεποιθὼς,
Ἀκρότατον δ᾽ ἀναβὰς διεδέρκετο νῆσον ἅπασαν
Τανταλίδεω Πέλοπος.
Also the Homeric Hymn. Apoll. 419, 430, and Tyrtæus, Fragm. 1.—
(~Εὐνομία~)—Εὐρεῖαν Πέλοπος νῆσον ἀφικόμεθα.
The Schol. ad Iliad, ix. 246, intimates that the name
Πελοπόννησος occurred in one or more of the Hesiodic epics.
[361] Iliad, ix. 37. Compare ii. 580. Diomêdês addresses
Agamemnôn—
Σοὶ δὲ διάνδιχα δῶκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω·
Σκήπτρῳ μέν τοι δῶκε τετιμῆσθαι περὶ πάντων·
Ἀλκὴν δ᾽ οὔ τοι δῶκεν, ὅ,τε κράτος ἐστὶ μέγιστον.
A similar contrast is drawn by Nestôr (Il. i. 280) between
Agamemnôn and Achilles. Nestôr says to Agamemnôn (Il. ix. 69)—
Ἀτρείδη, σὺ μὲν ἄρχε· σὺ γὰρ ~βασιλεύτατός~ ἐσσι.
And this attribute attaches to Menelaus as well as to his
brother. For when Diomêdês is about to choose his companion
for the night expedition into the Trojan camp, Agamemnôn thus
addresses him (x. 232):
Τὸν μὲν δὴ ἕταρόν γ᾽ αἱρήσεαι, ὅν κ᾽ ἐθέλῃσθα
Φαινομένων τὸν ἄριστον, ἐπεὶ μεμάασί γε πολλοί·
Μηδὲ σύ γ᾽ αἰδόμενος σῇσι φρεσὶ, τὸν μὲν ἀρείω
Καλλείπειν, σὺ δὲ χείρον᾽ ὀπάσσεαι αἰδοῖ εἴκων
Ἐς γενεὴν ὁρόων, εἰ καὶ βασιλεύτερός ἐστιν.
Ὡς ἔφατ᾽, ἔδδεισε δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.
[362] Iliad, ii. 101.
We have here the unrivalled wealth and power of the "king of men,
Agamemnôn," traced up to his descent from Pelops, and accounted for,
in harmony with the recognized epical agencies, by the present of
the special sceptre of Zeus through the hands of Hermês; the latter
being the wealth-giving god, whose blessing is most efficacious
in furthering the process of acquisition, whether by theft or by
accelerated multiplication of flocks and herds.[363] The wealth and
princely character of the Atreids were proverbial among the ancient
epic poets. Paris not only carries away Hellen, but much property along
with her:[364] the house of Menelaus, when Têlemachus visits it in the
Odyssey, is so resplendent with gold and silver and rare ornament,[365]
as to strike the beholder with astonishment and admiration. The
attributes assigned to Tantalus, the father of Pelops, are in
conformity with the general idea of the family—superhuman abundance
and enjoyments, and intimate converse with the gods, to such a degree
that his head is turned, and he commits inexpiable sin. But though
Tantalus himself is mentioned, in one of the most suspicious passages
of the Odyssey (as suffering punishment in the under-world), he is
not announced, nor is any one else announced, as father of Pelops,
unless we are to construe the lines in the Iliad as implying that the
latter was son of Hermês. In the conception of the author of the Iliad,
the Pelopids are, if not of divine origin, at least a mortal breed
specially favored and ennobled by the gods—beginning with Pelops, and
localized at Mykênæ. No allusion is made to any connection of Pelops
either with Pisa or with Lydia.
[363] Iliad, xiv. 491. Hesiod. Theog. 444. Homer, Hymn. Mercur.
526-568, Ὄλβου καὶ πλούτου δώσω περικάλλεα ῥάβδον. Compare
Eustath. ad Iliad. xvi. 182.
[364] Iliad, iii. 72; vii. 363. In the Hesiodic Eoiai was the
following couplet (Fragm. 55. p. 43, Düntzer):—
Ἁλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδῃσιν,
Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδῃσι.
Again, Tyrtæus, Fragm. 9, 4.—
Οὐδ᾽ εἰ Τανταλίδεω Πέλοπος βασιλεύτερος εἴη, etc.
[365] Odyss. iv. 45-71.
The legend which connected Tantalus and Pelops with Mount Sipylus
may probably have grown out of the Æolic settlements at Magnêsia and
Kymê. Both the Lydian origin and the Pisatic sovereignty of Pelops
are adapted to times later than the Iliad, when the Olympic games had
acquired to themselves the general reverence of Greece, and had come to
serve as the religious and recreative centre of the Peloponnêsus—and
when the Lydian and Phrygian heroic names, Midas and Gygês, were the
types of wealth and luxury, as well as of chariot driving, in the
imagination of a Greek. The inconsiderable villages of the Pisatid
derived their whole importance from the vicinity of Olympia: they are
not deemed worthy of notice in the Catalogue of Homer. Nor could the
genealogy which connected the eponym of the entire peninsula with
Pisa have obtained currency in Greece unless it had been sustained
by preëstablished veneration for the locality of Olympia. But if the
sovereign of the humble Pisa was to be recognized as forerunner of the
thrice-wealthy princes of Mykênæ, it became necessary to assign some
explanatory cause of his riches. Hence the supposition of his being
an immigrant, son of a wealthy Lydian named Tantalus, who was the
offspring of Zeus and Ploutô. Lydian wealth and Lydian chariot-driving
rendered Pelops a fit person to occupy his place in the legend, both
as ruler of Pisa and progenitor of the Mykenæan Atreids. Even with the
admission of these two circumstances there is considerable difficulty,
for those who wish to read the legends as consecutive history, in
making the Pelopids pass smoothly and plausibly from Pisa to Mykênæ.
I shall briefly recount the legends of this great heroic family as they
came to stand in their full and ultimate growth, after the localization
of Pelops at Pisa had been tacked on as a preface to Homer's version of
the Pelopid genealogy.
Tantalus, residing near Mount Sipylus in Lydia, had two children,
Pelops and Niobê. He was a man of immense possessions and preëminent
happiness, above the lot of humanity: the gods communicated with him
freely, received him at their banquets, and accepted of his hospitality
in return. Intoxicated with such prosperity, Tantalus became guilty of
gross wickedness. He stole nectar and ambrosia from the table of the
gods, and revealed their secrets to mankind: he killed and served up to
them at a feast his own son Pelops. The gods were horror-struck when
they discovered the meal prepared for them: Zeus restored the mangled
youth to life, and as Dêmêtêr, then absorbed in grief for the loss
of her daughter Persephonê, had eaten a portion of the shoulder, he
supplied an ivory shoulder in place of it. Tantalus expiated his guilt
by exemplary punishment. He was placed in the under-world, with fruit
and water seemingly close to him, yet eluding his touch as often as
he tried to grasp them and leaving his hunger and thirst incessant and
unappeased.[366] Pindar, in a very remarkable passage, finds this old
legend revolting to his feelings: he rejects the tale of the flesh of
Pelops having been served up and eaten, as altogether unworthy of the
gods.[367]
[366] Diodôr. iv. 77. Hom. Odyss. xi. 582. Pindar gives a
different version of the punishment inflicted on Tantalus: a vast
stone was perpetually impending over his head, and threatening to
fall (Olymp. i. 56; Isthm. vii. 20).
[367] Pindar, Olymp. i. 45. Compare the sentiment of Iphigeneia
in Euripidês, Iph. Taur. 387.
Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, was married to Amphiôn, and had a
numerous and flourishing offspring of seven sons and seven daughters.
Though accepted as the intimate friend and companion of Lêtô, the
mother of Apollo and Artemas,[368] she was presumptuous enough to
triumph over that goddess, and to place herself on a footing of higher
dignity, on account of the superior number of her children. Apollo
and Artemas avenged this insult by killing all the sons and all the
daughters: Niobê, thus left a childless and disconsolate mother, wept
herself to death, and was turned into a rock, which the later Greeks
continued always to identify on Mount Sipylus.[369]
[368] Sapphô (Fragm. 82, Schneidewin)—
Λατὼ καὶ Νιόβα μάλα μὲν φίλαι ἦσαν ἑταῖραι.
Sapphô assigned to Niobê eighteen children (Aul. Gell. N. A. iv.
Δ. xx. 7); Hesiod gave twenty; Homer twelve (Apollod. iii. 5).
The Lydian historian Xanthus gave a totally different version
both of the genealogy and of the misfortunes of Niobê (Parthen.
Narr. 33).
[369] Ovid, Metam. vi. 164-311. Pausan. i. 21, 5; viii. 2, 3.
Some authors represented Pelops as not being a Lydian, but a king
of Paphlagônia; by others it was said that Tantalus, having become
detested from his impieties, had been expelled from Asia by Ilus the
king of Troy,—an incident which served the double purpose of explaining
the transit of Pelops to Greece, and of imparting to the siege of
Troy by Agamemnôn the character of retribution for wrongs done to his
ancestor.[370] When Pelops came over to Greece, he found Œnomaus,
son of the god Arês and Harpinna, in possession of the principality
of Pisa, immediately bordering on the district of Olympia. Œnomaus,
having been apprized by an oracle that death would overtake him if he
permitted his daughter Hippodameia to marry, refused to give her in
marriage except to some suitor who should beat him in a chariot-race
from Olympia to the isthmus of Corinth;[371] the ground here selected
for the legendary victory of Pelops deserves attention, inasmuch as
it is a line drawn from the assumed centre of Peloponnêsus to its
extremity, and thus comprises the whole territory with which Pelops
is connected as eponym. Any suitor overmatched in the race was doomed
to forfeit his life; and the fleetness of the Pisan horses, combined
with the skill of the charioteer Myrtilus, had already caused thirteen
unsuccessful competitors to perish by the lance of Œnomaus.[372] Pelops
entered the lists as a suitor: his prayers moved the god Poseidôn to
supply him with a golden chariot and winged horses; or according to
another story, he captivated the affections of Hippodameia herself,
who persuaded the charioteer Myrtilus to loosen the wheels of Œnomaus
before he started, so that the latter was overturned and perished in
the race. Having thus won the hand of Hippodameia, Pelops became Prince
of Pisa.[373] He put to death the charioteer Myrtilus, either from
indignation at his treachery to Œnomaus,[374] or from jealousy on the
score of Hippodameia: but Myrtilus was the son of Hermês, and though
Pelops erected a temple in the vain attempt to propitiate that god,
he left a curse upon his race which future calamities were destined
painfully to work out.[375]
[370] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 358, and Schol.; Ister. Fragment. 59,
Dindorf; Diodôr. iv. 74.
[371] Diodôr. iv. 74.
[372] Pausanias (vi. 21, 7) had read their names in the Hesiodic
Eoiai.
[373] Pindar, Olymp. i. 140. The chariot race of Pelops and
Œnomaus was represented on the chest of Kypselus at Olympia: the
horses of the former were given as having wings (Pausan. v. 17,
4). Pherekydês gave the same story (ap. Schol. ad Soph. Elect.
504).
[374] It is noted by Herodotus and others as a remarkable fact,
that no mules were ever bred in the Eleian territory: an Eleian
who wished to breed a mule sent his mare for the time out of
the region. The Eleians themselves ascribed this phænomenon to
a disability brought on the land by a curse from the lips of
Œnomaus (Herod. iv. 30; Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. p. 303).
[375] Paus. v. 1, 1; Sophok. Elektr. 508; Eurip. Orest. 985, with
Schol., Plato, Kratyl. p. 395.
Pelops had a numerous issue by Hippodameia: Pittheus, Trœzen and
Epidaurus, the eponyms of the two Argolic cities so called, are said
to have been among them: Atreus and Thyestês were also his sons, and
his daughter Nikippê married Sthenelus of Mykênæ, and became the
mother of Eurystheus.[376] We hear nothing of the principality of
Pisa afterwards: the Pisatid villages became absorbed into the larger
aggregate of Elis, after a vain struggle to maintain their separate
right of presidency over the Olympic festival. But the legend ran that
Pelops left his name to the whole peninsula: according to Thucydidês,
he was enabled to do this because of the great wealth which he had
brought with him from Lydia into a poor territory. The historian leaves
out all the romantic interest of the genuine legends—preserving only
this one circumstance, which, without being better attested than the
rest, carries with it, from its commonplace and prosaic character, a
pretended historical plausibility.[377]
[376] Apollod. ii. 4, 5. Pausan. ii. 30, 8; 26, 3; v. 8, 1.
Hesiod. ap. Schol. ad Iliad. xx. 116.
[377] Thucyd. i. 5.
Besides his numerous issue by Hippodameia, Pelops had an illegitimate
son named Chrysippus, of singular grace and beauty, towards whom he
displayed so much affection as to rouse the jealousy of Hippodameia
and her sons. Atreus and Thyestês conspired together to put Chrysippus
to death, for which they were banished by Pelops and retired to
Mykênæ,[378]—an event which brings us into the track of the Homeric
legend. For Thucydidês, having found in the death of Chrysippus a
suitable ground for the secession of Atreus from Pelops, conducts him
at once to Mykênæ, and shows a train of plausible circumstances to
account for his having mounted the throne. Eurystheus, king of Mykênæ,
was the maternal nephew of Atreus: when he engaged in any foreign
expedition, he naturally entrusted the regency to his uncle; the
people of Mykênæ thus became accustomed to be governed by him, and he
on his part made efforts to conciliate them, so that when Eurystheus
was defeated and slain in Attica, the Mykênæan people, apprehensive
of an invasion from the Hêrakleids, chose Atreus as at once the most
powerful and most acceptable person for his successor.[379] Such
was the tale which Thucydidês derived "from those who had learnt
ancient Peloponnêsian matters most clearly from their forefathers."
The introduction of so much sober and quasi-political history,
unfortunately unauthenticated, contrasts strikingly with the highly
poetical legends of Pelops and Atreus, which precede and follow it.
[378] We find two distinct legends respecting Chrysippus: his
abduction by Laius king of Thêbes, on which the lost drama
of Euripidês called Chrysippus turned (see Welcker, Griech.
Tragödien, ii. p. 536), and his death by the hands of his
half-brothers. Hyginus (f. 85) blends the two together.
[379] Thucyd. i. 9. λέγουσι δὲ οἱ τὰ Πελοποννησίων σαφέστατα
μνήμῃ παρὰ τῶν πρότερον δεδεγμένοι. According to Hellanikus,
Atreus the elder son returns to Pisa after the death of Pelops
with a great army, and makes himself master of his father's
principality (Hellanik. ap Schol. ad Iliad, ii. 105). Hellanikus
does not seem to have been so solicitous as Thucydidês to
bring the story into conformity with Homer. The circumstantial
genealogy given in Schol. ad Eurip. Orest. 5. makes Atreus and
Thyestês reside during their banishment at Makestus in Triphylia:
it is given without any special authority, but may perhaps come
from Hellanikus.
Atreus and Thyestês are known in the Iliad only as successive
possessors of the sceptre of Zeus, which Thyestês at his death
bequeathes to Agamemnôn. The family dissensions among this fated
race commence, in the Odyssey, with Agamemnôn the son of Atreus, and
Ægisthus the son of Thyestês. But subsequent poets dwelt upon an
implacable quarrel between the two fathers. The cause of the bitterness
was differently represented: some alleged that Thyestês had intrigued
with the Krêtan Aeropê, the wife of his brother; other narratives
mentioned that Thyestês procured for himself surreptitiously the
possession of a lamb with a golden fleece, which had been designedly
introduced among the flocks of Atreus by the anger of Hermês, as a
cause of enmity and ruin to the whole family.[380] Atreus, after a
violent burst of indignation, pretended to be reconciled, and invited
Thyestês to a banquet, in which he served up to him the limbs of his
own son, and the father ignorantly partook of the fatal meal. Even the
all-seeing Hêlios is said to have turned back his chariot to the east
in order that he might escape the shocking spectacle of this Thyestêan
banquet: yet the tale of Thyestêan revenge—the murder of Atreus
perpetrated by Ægisthus, the incestuous offspring of Thyestês by his
daughter Pelopia—is no less replete with horrors.[381]
[380] Æschyl. Agamem. 1204, 1253, 1608; Hygin. 86; Attii Fragm.
19. This was the story of the old poem entitled Alkmæônis;
seemingly also of Pherekydês, though the latter rejected the
story that Hermês had produced the golden lamb with the special
view of exciting discord between the two brothers, in order to
avenge the death of Myrtilus by Pelops (see Schol. ad Eurip.
Orest. 996).
A different legend, alluded to in Soph. Aj. 1295 (see Schol. _ad
loc._), recounted that Aeropê had been detected by her father
Katreus in unchaste commerce with a low-born person; he entrusted
her in his anger to Nauplius, with directions to throw her into
the sea: Nauplius however not only spared her life, but betrothed
her to Pleisthenês, father of Agamemnôn and son of Atreus.
The tragedy entitled _Atreus_ of the Latin poet Attius, seems to
have brought out, with painful fidelity, the harsh and savage
features of this family legend (see Aul. Gell. xiii. 2, and the
fragments of Attius now remaining, together with the tragedy
called Thyestês, of Seneca).
[381] Hygin. fab. 87-88.
Homeric legend is never thus revolting. Agamemnôn and Menelaus are
known to us chiefly with their Homeric attributes, which have not been
so darkly overlaid by subsequent poets as those of Atreus and Thyestês.
Agamemnôn and Menelaus are affectionate brothers: they marry two
sisters, the daughters of Tyndareus king of Sparta, Klytæmnêstra and
Helen; for Helen, the real offspring of Zeus, passes as the daughter of
Tyndareus.[382] The "king of men" reigns at Mykênæ; Menelaus succeeds
Tyndareus at Sparta. Of the rape of Helen, and the siege of Troy
consequent upon it, I shall speak elsewhere: I now touch only upon
the family legends of the Atreids. Menelaus, on his return from Troy
with the recovered Helen, is driven by storms far away to the distant
regions of Phœnicia and Egypt, and is exposed to a thousand dangers
and hardships before he again sets foot in Peloponnêsus. But at length
he reaches Sparta, resumes his kingdom, and passes the rest of his
days in uninterrupted happiness and splendor: being moreover husband
of the godlike Helen and son-in-law of Zeus, he is even spared the
pangs of death. When the fulness of his days is past he is transported
to the Elysian fields, there to dwell along with "the golden-haired
Rhadamanthus" in a delicious climate and in undisturbed repose.[383]
[382] So we must say, in conformity to the ideas of antiquity:
compare Homer, Iliad, xvi. 176 and Herodot. vi. 53.
[383] Hom. Odyss. iii. 280-300; iv. 83-560.
Far different is the fate of the king of men, Agamemnôn. During his
absence, the unwarlike Ægisthus, son of Thyestês, had seduced his
wife Klytæmnêstra, in spite of the special warning of the gods, who,
watchful over this privileged family, had sent their messenger Hermês
expressly to deter him from the attempt.[384] A venerable bard had been
left by Agamemnôn as the companion and monitor of his wife, and so long
as that guardian was at hand, Ægisthus pressed his suit in vain. But he
got rid of the bard by sending him to perish in a desert island, and
then won without difficulty the undefended Klytæmnêstra. Ignorant of
what had passed, Agamemnôn returned from Troy victorious and full of
hope to his native country; but he had scarcely landed when Ægisthus
invited him to a banquet, and there with the aid of the treacherous
Klytæmnêstra, in the very hall of festivity and congratulation,
slaughtered him and his companions "like oxen tied to the manger." His
concubine Kassandra, the prophetic daughter of Priam, perished along
with him by the hand of Klytæmnêstra herself.[385] The boy Orestês, the
only male offspring of Agamemnôn, was stolen away by his nurse, and
placed in safety at the residence of the Phokian Strophius.
[384] Odyss. i. 38; iii. 310.—ἀνάλκιδος Αἰγίσθοιο.
[385] Odyss. iii. 260-275; iv. 512-537; xi. 408. Deinias in his
Argolica, and other historians of that territory, fixed the
precise day of the murder of Agamemnôn,—the thirteenth of the
month Gamêliôn (Schol. ad Sophokl. Elektr. 275).
For seven years Ægisthus and Klytæmnêstra reigned in tranquillity at
Mykênæ on the throne of the murdered Agamemnôn. But in the eighth year
the retribution announced by the gods overtook them: Orestês, grown to
manhood, returned and avenged his father by killing Ægisthus, according
to Homer; subsequent poets add, his mother also. He recovered the
kingdom of Mykênæ, and succeeded Menelaus in that of Sparta. Hermionê,
the only daughter of Menelaus and Helen, was sent into the realm of the
Myrmidons in Thessaly, as the bride of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles,
according to the promise made by her father during the siege of
Troy.[386]
[386] Odyss. iii. 306; iv. 9
Here ends the Homeric legend of the Pelopids, the final act
of Orestês being cited as one of unexampled glory.[387] Later
poets made many additions: they dwelt upon his remorse and
hardly-earned pardon for the murder of his mother, and upon his
devoted friendship for Pylades; they wove many interesting tales,
too, respecting his sisters Iphigeneia and Elektra and his cousin
Hermionê,—names which have become naturalized in every climate
and incorporated with every form of poetry.
[387] Odyss. i. 299.
These poets did not at all scruple to depart from Homer, and to give
other genealogies of their own, with respect to the chief persons
of the Pelopid family. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Agamemnôn is son
of Atreus: in the Hesiodic Eoiai and in Stesichorus, he is son of
Pleisthenês the son of Atreus.[388] In Homer, he is specially marked
as reigning at Mykênæ; but Stesichorus, Simonidês and Pindar[389]
represented him as having both resided and perished at Sparta or at
Amyklæ. According to the ancient Cyprian Verses, Helen was represented
as the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis: in one of the Hesiodic poems
she was introduced as an Oceanic nymph, daughter of Oceanus and
Têthys.[390] The genealogical discrepancies, even as to the persons of
the principal heroes and heroines, are far too numerous to be cited,
nor is it necessary to advert to them, except as they bear upon the
unavailing attempt to convert such legendary parentage into a basis of
historical record or chronological calculation.
[388] Hesiod. Fragm. 60. p. 44, ed. Düntzer; Stesichor. Fragm.
44, Kleine. The Scholiast ad Soph. Elektr. 539, in reference to
another discrepancy between Homer and the Hesiodic poems about
the children of Helen, remarks that we ought not to divert our
attention from that which is moral and salutary to ourselves in
the poets (τὰ ἠθικὰ καὶ χρήσιμα ἡμῖν τοῖς ἐντυγχάνουσι), in order
to cavil at their genealogical contradictions.
Welcker in vain endeavors to show that Pleisthenês was originally
introduced as the father of Atreus, not as his son (Griech.
Tragöd. p. 678).
[389] Schol. ad Eurip. Orest. 46. Ὅμηρος ἐν Μυκήναις φησὶ τὰ
βασιλεῖα τοῦ Ἀγαμέμνονος· Στησίχορος δὲ καὶ Σιμωνίδης, ἐν
Λακεδαιμονίᾳ. Pindar, Pyth. xi. 31; Nem. viii. 21. Stêsichorus
had composed an Ὀρέστεια, copied in many points from a still more
ancient lyric Oresteia by Xanthus: compare Athen. xii. p. 513,
and Ælian, V. H. iv. 26.
[390] Hesiod, ap. Schol. ad Pindar, Nem. x. 150.
The Homeric poems probably represent that form of the legend,
respecting Agamemnôn and Orestês, which was current and popular among
the Æolic colonists. Orestês was the great heroic chief of the Æolic
emigration; he, or his sons, or his descendants, are supposed to have
conducted the Achæans to seek a new home, when they were no longer
able to make head against the invading Dôrians: the great families at
Tenedos and other Æolic cities even during the historical æra, gloried
in tracing back their pedigrees to this illustrious source.[391] The
legends connected with the heroic worship of these mythical ancestors
form the basis of the character and attributes of Agamemnôn and his
family, as depicted in Homer, in which Mykênæ appears as the first
place in Peloponnêsus, and Sparta only as the second: the former the
special residence of "the king of men;" the latter that of his younger
and inferior brother, yet still the seat of a member of the princely
Pelopids, and moreover the birth-place of the divine Helen. Sparta,
Argos and Mykênæ are all three designated in the Iliad by the goddess
Hêrê as her favorite cities;[392] yet the connection of Mykênæ with
Argos, though the two towns were only ten miles distant, is far less
intimate than the connection of Mykênæ with Sparta. When we reflect
upon the very peculiar manner in which Homer identifies Hêrê with the
Grecian host and its leader,—for she watches over the Greeks with the
active solicitude of a mother, and her antipathy against the Trojans
is implacable to a degree which Zeus cannot comprehend,[393]—and when
we combine this with the ancient and venerated Hêræon, or temple of
Hêrê, near Mykênæ, we may partly explain to ourselves the preëminence
conferred upon Mykênæ in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Hêræon was situated
between Argos and Mykênæ; in later times its priestesses were named and
its affairs administered by the Argeians: but as it was much nearer
to Mykênæ than to Argos, we may with probability conclude that it
originally belonged to the former, and that the increasing power of
the latter enabled them to usurp to themselves a religious privilege
which was always an object of envy and contention among the Grecian
communities. The Æolic colonists doubtless took out with them in their
emigration the divine and heroic legends, as well as the worship and
ceremonial rites, of the Hêræon; and in those legends the most exalted
rank would be assigned to the close-adjoining and administering city.
[391] See the ode of Pindar addressed to Aristagoras of Tenedos
(Nem. xi. 35; Strabo, xiii. p. 582). There were Penthilids at
Mitylênê, from Penthilus, son of Orestês (Aristot. Polit v. 8,
13, Schneid.).
[392] Iliad, iv. 52. Compare Euripid. Hêrakleid. 350
[393] Iliad, iv. 31. Zeus says to Hêrê,—
Δαιμονίη, τί νύ σε Πρίαμος, Πριάμοιό τε παῖδες
Τόσσα κακὰ ῥέζεσκον ὅτ᾽ ἀσπερχὲς μενεαίνεις
Ἰλίου ἐξαλάπαξαι ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον;
Εἰ δὲ σύ γ᾽, εἰσελθοῦσα πύλας καὶ τείχεα μακρὰ,
Ὠμὸν βεβρώθοις Πρίαμον Πριάμοιό τε παῖδας,
Ἄλλους τε Τρῶας, τότε κεν χόλον ἐξακέσαιο.
Again, xviii. 358,—
ἦ ῥά νυ σεῖο
Ἐξ αὐτῆς ἐγένοντο καρηκομόωντες Ἀχαιοί.
Mykênæ maintained its independence even down to the Persian invasion.
Eighty of its heavy-armed citizens, in the ranks of Leonidas at
Thermopylæ, and a number not inferior at Platæa, upheld the splendid
heroic celebrity of their city during a season of peril, when the more
powerful Argos disgraced itself by a treacherous neutrality. Very
shortly afterwards Mykênæ was enslaved and its inhabitants expelled by
the Argeians. Though this city so long maintained a separate existence,
its importance had latterly sunk to nothing, while that of the Dôrian
Argos was augmented very much, and that of the Dôrian Sparta still more.
The name of Mykênæ is imperishably enthroned in the Iliad and Odyssey;
but all the subsequent fluctuations of the legend tend to exalt
the glory of other cities at its expense. The recognition of the
Olympic games as the grand religious festival of Peloponnêsus gave
vogue to that genealogy which connected Pelops with Pisa or Elis and
withdrew him from Mykênæ. Moreover, in the poems of the great Athenian
tragedians, Mykênæ is constantly confounded and treated as one with
Argos. If any one of the citizens of the former, expelled at the time
of its final subjugation by the Argeians, had witnessed at Athens a
drama of Æschylus, Sophoklês, or Euripidês, or the recital of an ode
of Pindar, he would have heard with grief and indignation the city of
his oppressors made a partner in the heroic glories of his own.[394]
But the great political ascendency acquired by Sparta contributed still
farther to degrade Mykênæ, by disposing subsequent poets to treat the
chief of the Grecian armament against Troy as having been a Spartan.
It has been already mentioned that Stêsichorus, Simonidês and Pindar
adopted this version of the legend: we know that Zeus Agamemnôn, as
well as the hero Menelaus, was worshipped at the Dôrian Sparta,[395]
and the feeling of intimate identity, as well as of patriotic pride,
which had grown up in the minds of the Spartans connected with the
name of Agamemnôn, is forcibly evinced by the reply of the Spartan
Syagrus to Gelôn of Syracuse at the time of the Persian invasion of
Greece. Gelôn was solicited to lend his aid in the imminent danger of
Greece before the battle of Salamis: he offered to furnish an immense
auxiliary force, on condition that the supreme command should be
allotted to him. "Loudly indeed would the Pelopid Agamemnôn cry out
(exclaimed Syagrus in rejecting this application), if he were to learn
that the Spartans had been deprived of the headship by Gelôn and the
Syracusans."[396] Nearly a century before this event, in obedience to
the injunctions of the Delphian oracle, the Spartans had brought back
from Tegea to Sparta the bones of "the Lacônian Orestês," as Pindar
denominates him:[397] the recovery of these bones was announced to them
as the means of reversing a course of ill-fortune, and of procuring
victory in their war against Tegea.[398] The value which they set upon
this acquisition, and the decisive results ascribed to it, exhibit a
precise analogy with the recovery of the bones of Theseus from Skyros
by the Athenian Cimôn shortly after the Persian invasion.[399] The
remains sought were those of a hero properly belonging to their own
soil, but who had died in a foreign land, and of whose protection and
assistance they were for that reason deprived. And the superhuman
magnitude of the bones, which were contained in a coffin seven cubits
long, is well suited to the legendary grandeur of the son of Agamemnôn.
[394] See the preface of Dissen to the tenth Nem. of Pindar.
[395] Clemens Alexandr. Admonit. ad Gent. p. 24. Ἀγαμέμνονα γοῦν
τινα Δία ἐν Σπάρτῃ τιμᾶσθαι Στάφυλος ἱστορεῖ. See also Œnomaus
ap. Euseb. Præparat. Evangel. v. 28.
[396] Herodot. vii. 159. Ἦ κε μέγ᾽ οἰμώξειεν ὁ Πελοπίδης
Ἀγαμέμνων, πυθόμενος Σπαρτιήτας ἀπαραιρῆσθαι τὴν ἡγεμονίαν ὑπὸ
Γέλωνός τε καὶ τῶν Συρακουσίων: compare Homer, Iliad, vii. 125.
See what appears to be an imitation of the same passage in
Josephus, De Bello Judaico, iii. 8, 4. Ἦ μεγάλα γ᾽ ἂν στενάξειαν
οἱ πάτριοι νόμοι, etc.
[397] Pindar. Pyth. xi. 16.
[398] Herodot. i 68.
[399] Plutarch. Thêseus, c. 36, Cimôn, c. 8; Pausan. iii. 3, 6.
CHAPTER VIII.
LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.
The earliest names in Lacônian genealogy are, an autochthonous Lelex
and a Naiad nymph Kleochareia. From this pair sprung a son Eurôtas,
and from him a daughter Sparta, who became the wife of Lacedæmôn, son
of Zeus and Taygetê, daughter of Atlas. Amyklas, son of Lacedæmôn,
had two sons, Kynortas and Hyacinthus—the latter a beautiful youth,
the favorite of Apollo, by whose hand he was accidentally killed
while playing at quoits: the festival of the Hyacinthia, which the
Lacedæmônians generally, and the Amyklæans with special solemnity,
celebrated throughout the historical ages, was traced back to this
legend. Kynortas was succeeded by his son Periêrês, who married
Gorgophonê, daughter of Perseus, and had a numerous issue—Tyndareus,
Ikarius, Aphareus, Leukippus, and Hippokoon. Some authors gave the
genealogy differently, making Periêrês, son of Æolus, to be the father
of Kynortas, and Œbalus son of Kynortas, from whom sprung Tyndareus,
Ikarius and Hippokoon.[400]
[400] Compare Apollod. iii. 10, 4. Pausan. iii. 1, 4.
Both Tyndareus and Ikarius, expelled by their brother Hippokoon, were
forced to seek shelter at the residence of Thestius, king of Kalydôn,
whose daughter, Lêda, Tyndareus espoused. It is numbered among the
exploits of the omnipresent Hêraklês, that he slew Hippokoon and his
sons, and restored Tyndareus to his kingdom, thus creating for the
subsequent Hêrakleidan kings a mythical title to the throne. Tyndareus,
as well as his brothers, are persons of interest in legendary
narrative: he is the father of Kastôr, of Timandra, married to Echemus,
the hero of Tegea,[401] and of Klytæmnêstra, married to Agamemnôn.
Pollux and the ever-memorable Helen are the offspring of Lêda by Zeus.
Ikarius is the father of Penelopê, wife of Odysseus: the contrast
between her behavior and that of Klytæmnêstra and Helen became the more
striking in consequence of their being so nearly related. Aphareus is
the father of Idas and Lynkeus, while Leukippus has for his daughters,
Phœbê and Ilaëira. According to one of the Hesiodic poems, Kastôr and
Pollux were both sons of Zeus by Lêda, while Helen was neither daughter
of Zeus nor of Tyndareus, but of Oceanus and Têthys.[402]
[401] Hesiod. ap Schol. Pindar, Olymp. xi. 79.
[402] Hesiod. ap. Schol. Pindar, Nem. x. 150. Fragm. Hesiod.
Düntzer, 58. p. 44. Tyndareus was worshipped as a god at
Lacedæmôn (Varro ap. Serv. ad Virgil. Æneid. viii. 275).
The brothers Kastôr and (Polydeukês, or) Pollux are no less
celebrated for their fraternal affection than for their great bodily
accomplishments: Kastôr, the great charioteer and horse-master; Pollux,
the first of pugilists. They are enrolled both among the hunters of the
Kalydônian boar and among the heroes of the Argonautic expedition, in
which Pollux represses the insolence of Amykus, king of the Bebrykes,
on the coast of Asiatic Thrace—the latter, a gigantic pugilist, from
whom no rival has ever escaped, challenges Pollux, but is vanquished
and killed in the fight.[403]
[403] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 1-96. Apollod. i. 9, 20. Theocrit. xxii.
26-133. In the account of Apollônius and Apollôdorus, Amykus is
slain in the contest; in that of Theocritus he is only conquered
and forced to give in, with a promise to renounce for the future
his brutal conduct; there were several different narratives. See
Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 106.
The two brothers also undertook an expedition into Attica, for the
purpose of recovering their sister Helen, who had been carried off by
Thêseus in her early youth, and deposited by him at Aphidna, while
he accompanied Perithous to the under-world, in order to assist his
friend in carrying off Persephonê. The force of Kastôr and Pollux was
irresistible, and when they re-demanded their sister, the people of
Attica were anxious to restore her: but no one knew where Thêseus had
deposited his prize. The invaders, not believing in the sincerity of
this denial, proceeded to ravage the country, which would have been
utterly ruined, had not Dekelus, the eponymus of Dekeleia, been able to
indicate Aphidna as the place of concealment. The autochthonous Titakus
betrayed Aphidna to Kastôr and Pollux, and Helen was recovered: the
brothers in evacuating Attica, carried away into captivity Æthra,
the mother of Thêseus. In after-days, when Kastôr and Pollux, under
the title of the Dioskuri, had come to be worshipped as powerful
gods, and when the Athenians were greatly ashamed of this act of
Thêseus—the revelation made by Dekelus was considered as entitling him
to the lasting gratitude of his country, as well as to the favorable
remembrance of the Lacedæmônians, who maintained the Dekeleians in
the constant enjoyment of certain honorary privileges at Sparta,[404]
and even spared that dême in all their invasions of Attica. Nor is
it improbable that the existence of this legend had some weight in
determining the Lacedæmônians to select Dekelia as the place of their
occupation during the Peleponnêsian war.
[404] Diodôr. ix. 63. Herod. iv. 73. Δεκελέων δὲ τῶν τότε
ἐργασαμένων ἔργον χρήσιμον ἐς τὸν πάντα χρόνον, ὡς αὐτοὶ Ἀθηναῖοι
λέγουσι. According to other authors, it was Akadêmus who made the
revelation, and the spot called Akadêmia, near Athens, which the
Lacedæmônians spared in consideration of this service (Plutarch,
Thêseus, 31, 32, 33, where he gives several different versions of
this tale by Attic writers, framed with the view of exonerating
Thêseus). The recovery of Helen and the captivity of Æthra were
represented on the ancient chest of Kypselus, with the following
curious inscription:
Τυνδαρίδα Ἑλέναν φέρετον, Αἴθραν δ᾽ Ἀθέναθεν
Ἕλκετον.
Pausan. v. 19, 1.
The fatal combat between Kastôr and Polydeukês on the one side, and
Idas and Lynkeus on the other, for the possession of the daughters of
Leukippus, was celebrated by more than one ancient poet, and forms the
subject of one of the yet remaining Idylls of Theocritus. Leukippus
had formally betrothed his daughters to Idas and Lynkeus; but the
Tyndarids, becoming enamored of them, outbid their rivals in the value
of the customary nuptial gifts, persuaded the father to violate his
promise, and carried off Phoebê and Ilaëira as their brides. Idas and
Lynkeus pursued them and remonstrated against the injustice: according
to Theocritus, this was the cause of the combat. But there was another
tale, which seems the older, and which assigns a different cause to the
quarrel. The four had jointly made a predatory incursion into Arcadia,
and had driven off some cattle, but did not agree about the partition
of the booty—Idas carried off into Messênia a portion of it which the
Tyndarids claimed as their own. To revenge and reimburse themselves,
the Tyndarids invaded Messênia, placing themselves in ambush in the
hollow of an ancient oak. But Lynkeus, endued with preternatural powers
of vision, mounted to the top of Taygetus, from whence, as he could see
over the whole Peleponnêsus, he detected them in their chosen place
of concealment. Such was the narrative of the ancient Cyprian Verses.
Kastôr perished by the hand of Idas, Lynkeus by that of Pollux. Idas,
seizing a stone pillar from the tomb of his father Aphareus, hurled
it at Pollux, knocked him down and stunned him; but Zeus, interposing
at the critical moment for the protection of his son, killed Idas
with a thunderbolt. Zeus would have conferred upon Pollux the gift
of immortality, but the latter could not endure existence without
his brother: he entreated permission to share the gift with Kastôr,
and both were accordingly permitted to live, but only on every other
day.[405]
[405] Cypria Carm. Fragm. 8. p. 13, Düntzer. Lycophrôn, 538-566
with Schol. Apollod. iii. 11, 1. Pindar, Nem. x. 55-90.
ἑτερήμερον ἀθανασίαν: also Homer, Odyss. xi. 302, with the
Commentary of Nitzsch, vol. iii. p. 245.
The combat thus ends more favorably to the Tyndarids; but
probably the account least favorable to them is the oldest, since
their dignity went on continually increasing, until at last they
became great deities.
The Dioskuri, or sons of Zeus,—as the two Spartan heroes, Kastôr and
Pollux, were denominated,—were recognized in the historical days of
Greece as gods, and received divine honors. This is even noticed
in a passage of the Odyssey,[406] which is at any rate a very old
interpolation, as well as in one of the Homeric hymns. What is yet more
remarkable is, that they were invoked during storms at sea, as the
special and all-powerful protectors of the endangered mariner, although
their attributes and their celebrity seem to be of a character so
dissimilar. They were worshipped throughout most parts of Greece, but
with preëminent sanctity at Sparta.
[406] Odyss. xxi. 15. Diodôr. xv. 66.
Kastôr and Pollux being removed, the Spartan genealogy passes from
Tyndareus to Menelaus, and from him to Orestês.
Originally it appears that Messênê was a name for the western portion
of Lacônia, bordering on what was called Pylos: it is so represented
in the Odyssey, and Ephorus seems to have included it amongst the
possessions of Orestês and his descendants. Throughout the whole
duration of the Messênico-Dôrian kingdom, there never was any town
called Messênê: the town was first founded by Epameinondas, after the
battle of Leuctra. The heroic genealogy of Messênia starts from the
same name as that of Lacônia—from the autochthonous Lelex: his younger
son, Polykaôn, marries Messênê, daughter of the Argeian Triopas, and
settles the country. Pausanias tells us that the posterity of this pair
occupied the country for five generations; but he in vain searched the
ancient genealogical poems to find the names of their descendants.[407]
To them succeeded Periêrês, son of Æolus; and Aphareus and Leukippus,
according to Pausanias, were sons of Periêrês. Idas and Lynkeus are
the only heroes, distinguished for personal exploits and memorable
attributes, belonging to Messênia proper. They are the counterpart of
the Dioskuri, and were interesting persons in the old legendary poems.
Marpêssa was the daughter of Euênus, and wooed by Apollo: nevertheless
Idas[408] carried her off by the aid of a winged chariot which he
had received from Poseidôn, Euênus pursued them, and when he arrived
at the river Lykormas, he found himself unable to overtake them: his
grief caused him to throw himself into the river, which ever afterwards
bore his name. Idas brought Marpêssa safe to Messênia, and even when
Apollo there claimed her of him, he did not fear to risk a combat with
the god. But Zeus interfered as mediator, and permitted the maiden to
choose which of the two she preferred. She attached herself to Idas,
being apprehensive that Apollo would desert her in her old age: on the
death of her husband she slew herself. Both Idas and Lynkeus took part
in the Argonautic expedition and in the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[409]
[407] Pausan. iv. 2, 1.
[408] Iliad, ix. 553. Simonidês had handled this story in
detail (Schol. Ven. II. ix. p. 553). Bacchylidês (ap. Schol.
Pindar. Isthm. iv. 92) celebrated in one of his poems the
competition among many eager suitors for the hand of Marpêssa,
under circumstances similar to the competition for Hippodameia,
daughter of Œnomaus. Many unsuccessful suitors perished by the
hand of Euênus: their skulls were affixed to the wall of the
temple of Poseidôn.
[409] Apollod. i. 7, 9. Pausan. iv. 2, 5. Apollônius Rhodius
describes Idas as full of boast and self-confidence, heedless of
the necessity of divine aid. Probably this was the character of
the brothers in the old legend, as the enemies of the Dioskuri.
The wrath of the Dioskuri against Messênia was treated, even in
the historical times, as the grand cause of the subjection of the
Messênians by the Spartans: that wrath had been appeased at the
time when Epameinondas reconstituted Messênê (Pausan. iv. 27, 1).
Aphareus, after the death of his sons, founded the town of Arênê, and
made over most part of his dominions to his kinsman Nêleus, with whom
we pass into the Pylian genealogy.
CHAPTER IX.
ARCADIAN GENEALOGY.
The Arcadian divine or heroic pedigree begins with Pelasgus, whom both
Hesiod and Asius considered as an indigenous man, though Akusilaus the
Argeian represented him as brother of Argos and son of Zeus by Niobê,
daughter of Phorôneus: this logographer wished to establish a community
of origin between the Argeians and the Arcadians.
Lykaôn son of Pelasgus and king of Arcadia, had, by different wives,
fifty sons, the most savage, impious and wicked of mankind: Mænalus
was the eldest of them. Zeus, in order that he might himself become
a witness of their misdeeds, presented himself to them in disguise.
They killed a child and served it up to him for a meal; but the god
overturned the table and struck dead with thunder Lykaôn and all his
fifty sons, with the single exception of Nyktimus, the youngest, whom
he spared at the earnest intercession of the goddess Gæa (the Earth).
The town near which the table was overturned received the name of
Trapezus (Tabletown).
This singular legend (framed on the same etymological type as that of
the ants in Ægina, recounted elsewhere) seems ancient, and may probably
belong to the Hesiodic Catalogue. But Pausanias tells us a story in
many respects different, which was represented to him in Arcadia as
the primitive local account, and which becomes the more interesting,
as he tells us that he himself fully believes it. Both tales indeed go
to illustrate the same point—the ferocity of Lykaôn's character, as
well as the cruel rites which he practised. The latter was the first
who established the worship and solemn games of Zeus Lykæus: he offered
up a child to Zeus, and made libations with the blood upon the altar.
Immediately after having perpetrated this act, he was changed into a
wolf.[410]
[410] Apollodôr. iii. 8, 1. Hygin. fab. 176. Eratosthen.
Catasterism. 8. Pausan. viii. 2, 2-3. A different story
respecting the immolation of the child is in Nikolaus Damask.
Frag. p. 41, Orelli. Lykaôn is mentioned as the first founder
of the temple of Zeus Lykæus in Schol. Eurip. Orest. 1662;
but nothing is there said about the human sacrifice or its
consequences. In the historical times, the festival and
solemnities of the Lykæa do not seem to have been distinguished
materially from the other agônes of Greece (Pindar, Olymp. xiii.
104; Nem. x. 46): Xenias the Arcadian, one of the generals in the
army of Cyrus the younger, celebrated the solemnity with great
magnificence in the march through Asia Minor (Xen. Anab. i. 2,
10). But the fable of the human sacrifice, and the subsequent
transmutation of the person who had eaten human food into a wolf,
continued to be told in connection with them (Plato, de Republic.
viii. c. 15. p. 417). Compare Pliny, H. N. viii. 34. This passage
of Plato seems to afford distinct indication that the practice
of offering human victims at the altar of the Lykæan Zeus was
neither prevalent nor recent, but at most only traditional and
antiquated; and it therefore limits the sense or invalidates the
authority of the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue, Minos, c. 5.
"Of the truth of this narrative (observes Pausanias) I feel persuaded:
it has been repeated by the Arcadians from old times, and it carries
probability along with it. For the men of that day, from their justice
and piety, were guests and companions at table with the gods, who
manifested towards them approbation when they were good, and anger
if they behaved ill, in a palpable manner: indeed at that time there
were some, who having once been men, became gods, and who yet retain
their privileges as such—Aristæus, the Krêtan Britomartis, Hêraklês
son of Alkmêna, Amphiaraus the son of Oiklês, and Pollux and Kastôr
besides. We may therefore believe that Lykaôn became a wild beast, and
that Niobê, the daughter of Tantalus, became a stone. But in my time,
wickedness having enormously increased, so as to overrun the whole
earth and all the cities in it, there are no farther examples of men
exalted into gods, except by mere title and from adulation towards the
powerful: moreover the anger of the gods falls tardily upon the wicked,
and is reserved for them after their departure from hence."
Pausanias then proceeds to censure those who, by multiplying false
miracles in more recent times, tended to rob the old and genuine
miracles of their legitimate credit and esteem. The passage illustrates
forcibly the views which a religious and instructed pagan took of his
past time—how inseparably he blended together in it gods and men, and
how little he either recognized or expected to find in it the naked
phænomena and historical laws of connection which belonged to the world
before him. He treats the past as the province of legend, the present
as that of history; and in doing this he is more sceptical than the
persons with whom he conversed, who believed not only in the ancient,
but even in the recent and falsely reported miracles. It is true that
Pausanias does not always proceed consistently with this position: he
often rationalizes the stories of the past, as if he expected to find
historical threads of connection; and sometimes, though more rarely,
accepts the miracles of the present. But in the present instance he
draws a broad line of distinction between present and past, or rather
between what is recent and what is ancient: his criticism is, in the
main, analogous to that of Arrian in regard to the Amazons—denying
their existence during times of recorded history, but admitting it
during the early and unrecorded ages.
In the narrative of Pausanias, the sons of Lykaôn, instead of perishing
by thunder from Zeus, become the founders of the various towns in
Arcadia. And as that region was subdivided into a great number of small
and independent townships, each having its own eponym, so the Arcadian
heroic genealogy appears broken up and subdivided. Pallas, Orestheus,
Phigalus, Trapezeus, Mænalus, Mantinêus, and Tegeatês, are all numbered
among the sons of Lykaôn, and are all eponyms of various Arcadian
towns.[411]
[411] Paus. viii. 3. Hygin. fab. 177.
The legend respecting Kallistô and Arkas, the eponym of Arcadia
generally, seems to have been originally quite independent of and
distinct from that of Lykaôn. Eumêlus, indeed, and some other poets
made Kallistô daughter of Lykaôn; but neither Hesiod, nor Asius, nor
Pherekydês, acknowledged any relationship between them.[412] The
beautiful Kallistô, companion of Artemis in the chase, had bound
herself by a vow of chastity. Zeus, either by persuasion or by force,
obtained a violation of the vow, to the grievous displeasure both of
Hêrê and Artemis. The former changed Kallistô into a bear, the latter
when she was in that shape killed her with an arrow. Zeus gave to the
unfortunate Kallistô a place among the stars, as the constellation of
the Bear: he also preserved the child Arkas, of which she was pregnant
by him, and gave it to the Atlantid nymph Maia to bring up.[413]
[412] Apollod. iii. 8, 2.
[413] Pausan. viii. 3, 2. Apollod. iii. 8, 2. Hesiod. apud
Eratosthen. Catasterism. 1. Fragm. 182, Marktsch. Hygin. f. 177.
Arkas, when he became king, obtained from Triptolemus and communicated
to his people the first rudiments of agriculture; he also taught them
to make bread, to spin, and to weave. He had three sons—Azan, Apheidas,
and Elatus: the first was the eponym of Azania, the northern region
of Arcadia; the second was one of the heroes of Tegea; the third was
father of Ischys (rival of Apollo for the affections of Korônis), as
well as of Æpytus and Kyllên: the name of Æpytus among the heroes of
Arcadia is as old as the Catalogue in the Iliad.[414]
[414] Homer, Iliad, ii. 604. Pind. Olymp. vi. 44-63.
The tomb of Æpytus, mentioned in the Iliad, was shown to
Pausanias between Pheneus and Stymphalus (Pausan. viii. 16, 2).
Æpytus was a cognomen of Hermês (Pausan. viii. 47, 3).
The hero Arkas was worshipped at Mantineia, under the special
injunction of the Delphian oracle (Pausan. viii. 9, 2).
Aleus, son of Apheidas and king of Tegea, was the founder of the
celebrated temple and worship of Athênê Alea in that town. Lykurgus and
Kêpheus were his sons, Augê his daughter, who was seduced by Hêraklês,
and secretly bore to him a child: the father, discovering what had
happened, sent Augê to Nauplius to be sold into slavery: Teuthras,
king of Mysia in Asia Minor, purchased her and made her his wife: her
tomb was shown at Pergamus on the river Kaïkus even in the time of
Pausanias.[415]
[415] Pausan. viii. 4, 6. Apollod. iii. 9, 1. Diodôr. iv. 33.
A separate legend respecting Augê and the birth of Têlephus was
current at Tegea, attached to the temple, statue, and cognomen of
Eileithyia in the Tegeatic agora (Pausan. viii. 48, 5).
Hekatæus seems to have narrated in detail the adventures of Augê
(Pausan. viii. 4, 4; 47, 3. Hekatæ. Fragm. 345, Didot.).
Euripidês followed a different story about Augê and the birth of
Têlephus in his lost tragedy called Augê (See Strabo, xiii. p.
615). Respecting the Μυσοὶ of Æschylus, and the two lost dramas,
Ἀλεαδαὶ and Μυσοὶ of Sophoklês, little can be made out. (See
Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. p. 53, 408-414).
The child Têlephus, exposed on Mount Parthenius, was wonderfully
sustained by the milk of a doe: the herdsmen of Korythus brought him
up, and he was directed by the Delphian oracle to go and find his
parents in Mysia. Teuthras adopted him, and he succeeded to the throne:
in the first attempt of the army of Agamemnôn against Troy, on which
occasion they mistook their point and landed in Mysia, his valor
signally contributed to the repulse of the Greeks, though he was at
last vanquished and desperately wounded by the spear of Achilles—by
whom however he was afterwards healed, under the injunction of the
oracle, and became the guide of the Greeks in their renewed attack upon
the Trojans.[416]
[416] Têlephus and his exploits were much dwelt upon in the lost
old epic poem, the Cyprian Verses. See argument of that poem ap.
Düntzer, Ep. Fragm. p. 10. His exploits were also celebrated by
Pindar (Olymp. ix. 70-79); he is enumerated along with Hectôr,
Cycnus, Memnôn, the most distinguished opponents of Achilles
(Isthm. iv. 46). His birth, as well as his adventures, became
subjects with most of the great Attic tragedians.
From Lykurgus,[417] the son of Aleus and brother of Augê, we pass to
his son Ankæus, numbered among the Argonauts, finally killed in the
chase of the Kalydônian boar, and father of Agapenôr, who leads the
Arcadian contingent against Troy,—(the adventurers of his niece, the
Tegeatic huntress Atalanta, have already been touched upon),—then
to Echemus, son of Aëropus and grandson of the brother of Lykurgus,
Kêpheus. Echemus is the chief heroic ornament of Tegea. When Hyllus,
the son of Hêraklês, conducted the Hêrakleids on their first expedition
against Peloponnêsus, Echemus commanded the Tegean troops who assembled
along with the other Peloponnêsians at the isthmus of Corinth to repel
the invasion: it was agreed that the dispute should be determined
by single combat, and Echemus, as the champion of Peloponnêsus,
encountered and killed Hyllus. Pursuant to the stipulation by which
they had bound themselves, the Hêrakleids retired, and abstained for
three generations from pressing their claim upon Peloponnêsus. This
valorous exploit of their great martial hero was cited and appealed to
by the Tegeates before the battle of Platæa, as the principal evidence
of their claim to the second post in the combined army, next in point
of honor to that of the Lacedæmônians, and superior to that of the
Athenians: the latter replied to them by producing as counter-evidence
the splendid heroic deeds of Athens,—the protection of the Hêrakleids
against Eurystheus, the victory over the Kadmeians of Thêbes, and the
complete defeat of the Amazons in Attica.[418] Nor can there be any
doubt that these legendary glories were both recited by the speakers,
and heard by the listeners, with profound and undoubting faith, as well
as with heart-stirring admiration.
[417] There were other local genealogies of Tegea deduced from
Lykurgus: Bôtachus, eponym of the Dême Bôtachidæ at that place,
was his grandson (Nicolaus ap. Steph. Byz. v. Βωταχίδαι).
[418] Herodot. ix. 27. Echemus is described by Pindar (Ol. xi.
69) as gaining the prize of wrestling in the fabulous Olympic
games, on their first establishment by Hêraklês. He also found
a place in the Hesiodic Catalogue as husband of Timandra, the
sister of Helen and Klytæmnêstra (Hesiod, Fragm. 105, p. 318,
Marktscheff.).
One other person there is—Ischys, son of Elatus and grandson of
Arkas—in the fabulous genealogy of Arcadia whom it would be improper to
pass over, inasmuch as his name and adventures are connected with the
genesis of the memorable god or hero Æsculapius, or Asklêpius. Korônis,
daughter of Phlegyas, and resident near the lake Bœbëis in Thessaly,
was beloved by Apollo and became pregnant by him: unfaithful to the
god, she listened to the propositions of Ischys son of Elatus, and
consented to wed him: a raven brought to Apollo the fatal news, which
so incensed him that he changed the color of the bird from white, as it
previously had been, into black.[419] Artemis, to avenge the wounded
dignity of her brother, put Korônis to death; but Apollo preserved the
male child of which she was about to be delivered, and consigned it to
the Centaur Cheirôn to be brought up. The child was named Asklêpius or
Æsculapius, and acquired, partly from the teaching of the beneficent
leech Cheirôn, partly from inborn and superhuman aptitude, a knowledge
of the virtues of herbs and a mastery of medicine and surgery, such
as had never before been witnessed. He not only cured the sick, the
wounded, and the dying, but even restored the dead to life. Kapaneus,
Eriphylê, Hippolytus, Tyndareus and Glaukus were all affirmed by
different poets and logographers to have been endued by him with a new
life.[420] But Zeus now found himself under the necessity of taking
precautions lest mankind, thus unexpectedly protected against sickness
and death, should no longer stand in need of the immortal gods: he
smote Asklêpius with thunder and killed him. Apollo was so exasperated
by this slaughter of his highly-gifted son, that he killed the Cyclôpes
who had fabricated the thunder, and Zeus was about to condemn him to
Tartarus for doing so; but on the intercession of Latôna he relented,
and was satisfied with imposing upon him a temporary servitude in the
house of Admêtus at Pheræ.
[419] Apollodôr. iii. 10, 3; Hesiod, Fragm. 141-142,
Marktscheff.; Strab. ix. p. 442; Pherekydês, Fragm. 8; Akusilaus,
Fragm. 25, Didot.
Τῷ μὲν ἄρ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε κόραξ, ἱερῆς ἀπὸ δαιτὸς
Πυθὼ ἐς ἠγαθέην, καὶ ῥ᾽ ἔφρασεν ἔργ᾽ ἀΐδηλα
Φοίβῳ ἀκερσεκόμῃ, ὅτι Ἴσχυς γῆμε Κόρωνιν
Εἰλατίδης, Φλεγύαο διογνήτοιο θύγατρα. (Hesiod, Fr.)
The change of the color of the crow is noticed both in Ovid,
Metamorph. ii. 632, in Antonin. Liberal. c. 20, and in Servius ad
Virgil. Æneid. vii. 761, though the name "_Corvo_ custode ejus"
is there printed with a capital letter, as if it were a man named
_Corvus_.
[420] Schol. Eurip. Alkêst. 1; Diodôr. iv. 71; Apollodôr. iii.
10, 3; Pindar, Pyth. iii. 59; Sextus Empiric. adv. Grammatic. i.
12. p. 271. Stesichorus named Eriphylê—the Naupaktian verses,
Hippolytus—(compare Servius ad Virgil. Æneid. vii. 761);
Panyasis, Tyndareus; a proof of the popularity of this tale among
the poets. Pindar says that Æsculapius was "tempted by gold" to
raise a man from the dead, and Plato (Legg. iii. p. 408) copies
him: this seems intended to afford some color for the subsequent
punishment. "Mercede id captum (observes Boeckh. ad Pindar. _l.
c._) Æsculapium fecisse recentior est fictio; Pindari fortasse
ipsius, quem tragici secuti sunt: haud dubie a medicorum avaris
moribus profecta, qui Græcorum medicis nostrisque communes
sunt." The rapacity of the physicians (granting it to be ever
so well-founded, both then and now) appears to me less likely
to have operated upon the mind of Pindar, than the disposition
to extenuate the cruelty of Zeus, by imputing guilty and sordid
views to Asklêpius. Compare the citation from Dikæarchus,
_infrà_, p. 249, note 1.
Asklêpius was worshipped with very great solemnity at Trikka, at Kôs,
at Knidus, and in many different parts of Greece, but especially at
Epidaurus, so that more than one legend had grown up respecting the
details of his birth and adventures: in particular, his mother was
by some called Arsinoê. But a formal application had been made on
this subject (so the Epidaurians told Pausanias) to the oracle of
Delphi, and the god in reply acknowledged that Asklêpius was his son
by Korônis.[421] The tale above recounted seems to have been both the
oldest and the most current. It is adorned by Pindar in a noble ode,
wherein however he omits all mention of the raven as messenger—not
specifying who or what the spy was from whom Apollo learnt the
infidelity of Korônis. By many this was considered as an improvement in
respect of poetical effect, but it illustrates the mode in which the
characteristic details and simplicity of the old fables[422] came to be
exchanged for dignified generalities, adapted to the altered taste of
society.
[421] Pausan. ii. 26, where several distinct stories are
mentioned, each springing up at some one or other of the
sanctuaries of the god: quite enough to justify the idea of these
Æsculapii (Cicero, N. D. iii. 22).
Homer, Hymn ad Æsculap. 2. The tale briefly alluded to in the
Homeric Hymn. ad Apollin. 209. is evidently different: Ischys is
there the companion of Apollo, and Korônis is an Arcadian damsel.
Aristidês, the fervent worshipper of Asklêpius, adopted the story
of Korônis, and composed hymns on the γάμον Κορωνίδος καὶ γένεσιν
τοῦ θεοῦ (Orat. 23. p. 463, Dind.).
[422] See Pindar, Pyth. iii. The Scholiast puts a construction
upon Pindar's words which is at any rate far-fetched, if indeed
it be at all admissible: he supposes that Apollo knew the fact
from his own omniscience, without any informant, and he praises
Pindar for having thus transformed the old fable. But the words
οὐδ᾽ ἔλαθε σκόπον seem certainly to imply some informant: to
suppose that σκόπον means the god's own mind, is a strained
interpretation.
Machaôn and Podaleirius, the two sons of Asklêpius, command the
contingent from Trikka, in the north-west region of Thessaly, at
the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn.[423] They are the leeches of the
Grecian army, highly prized and consulted by all the wounded chiefs.
Their medical renown was further prolonged in the subsequent poem
of Arktinus, the Iliu-Persis, wherein the one was represented as
unrivalled in surgical operations, the other as sagacious in detecting
and appreciating morbid symptoms. It was Podaleirius who first noticed
the glaring eyes and disturbed deportment which preceded the suicide
of Ajax.[424]
[423] Iliad, ii. 730. The Messênians laid claim to the sons of
Asklêpius as their heroes, and tried to justify the pretension by
a forced construction of Homer (Pausan. iii. 4, 2).
[424] Arktinus, Epicc. Græc. Fragm. 2. p. 22, Düntzer. The
Ilias Minor mentioned the death of Machaôn by Eurypylus, son of
Têlephus (Fragm. 5. p. 19, Düntzer).
Galen appears uncertain whether Asklêpius (as well as Dionysus) was
originally a god, or whether he was first a man and then became
afterwards a god;[425] but Apollodôrus professed to fix the exact
date of his apotheosis.[426] Throughout all the historical ages the
descendants of Asklêpius were numerous and widely diffused. The many
families or gentes called Asklêpiads, who devoted themselves to the
study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the
temples of Asklêpius whither sick and suffering men came to obtain
relief—all recognized the god not merely as the object of their common
worship, but also as their actual progenitor. Like Solôn, who reckoned
Nêleus and Poseidôn as his ancestors, or the Milêsian Hekatæus, who
traced his origin through fifteen successive links to a god—like
the privileged gens at Pêlion in Thessaly,[427] who considered the
wise Centaur Cheirôn as their progenitor, and who inherited from him
their precious secrets respecting the medicinal herbs of which their
neighborhood was full,—Asklêpiads, even of the later times, numbered
and specified all the intermediate links which separated them from
their primitive divine parent. One of these genealogies has been
preserved to us, and we may be sure that there were many such, as
the Asklêpiads were found in many different places.[428] Among them
were enrolled highly instructed and accomplished men, such as the
great Hippocratês and the historian Ktêsias, who prided themselves on
the divine origin of themselves and their gens[429]—so much did the
legendary element pervade even the most philosophical and positive
minds of historical Greece. Nor can there be any doubt that their
means of medical observation must have been largely extended by
their vicinity to a temple so much frequented by the sick, who came
in confident hopes of divine relief, and who, whilst they offered
up sacrifice and prayer to Æsculapius, and slept in his temple in
order to be favored with healing suggestions in their dreams, might,
in case the god withheld his supernatural aid, consult his living
descendants.[430] The sick visitors at Kôs, or Trikka, or Epidaurus,
were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record
the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the
cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the
sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklêpiads.[431]
[425] Ἀσκληπιός γέ τοι καὶ Διόνυσος, εἴτ᾽ ἄνθρωποι πρότερον ἤστην
εἴτε καὶ ἀρχῆθεν θεοί (Galen, Protreptic. 9. t. 1. p. 22, Kühn.).
Pausanias considers him as θεὸς ἐξ ἀρχῆς (ii. 26, 7). In the
important temple at Smyrna he was worshipped as Ζεὺς Ἀσκληπιός
(Aristidês, Or. 6. p. 64; Or. 23. p. 456, Dind.).
[426] Apollodôr. ap. Clem. Alex. Strom. i. p. 381; see Heyne,
Fragment. Apollodôr. p. 410. According to Apollodôrus, the
apotheosis of Hêraklês and of Æsculapius took place at the same
time, thirty-eight years after Hêraklês began to reign at Argos.
[427] About Hekatæus, Herodot. ii. 143; about Solôn, Diogen.
Laërt. Vit. Platon. init.
A curious fragment, preserved from the lost works of Dikæarchus,
tells us of the descendants of the Centaur Cheirôn at the town of
Pêlion, or perhaps at the neighboring town of Dêmêtrias,—it is
not quite certain which, perhaps at both (see Dikæarch. Fragment.
ed. Fuhr, p. 408). Ταύτην δὲ τὴν δύναμιν ἓν τῶν πολιτῶν οἶδε
γένος, ὁ δὴ λέγεται Χείρωνος ἀπόγονον εἶναι· παραδίδωσι δὲ καὶ
δείκνυσι πατὴρ υἱῷ, καὶ οὕτως ἡ δύναμις φυλάσσεται, ὡς οὐδεὶς
ἄλλος οἶδε τῶν πολιτῶν· οὐχ ὅσιον δὲ τοὺς ἐπισταμένους τὰ φάρμακα
μισθοῦ τοῖς καμνοῦσι βοηθεῖν, ἀλλὰ προῖκα.
Plato, de Republ. iii. 4 (p. 391). Ἀχιλλεὺς ὑπὸ τῷ σοφωτάτῳ
Χείρωνι τεθραμμένος. Compare Xenophôn, De Venat. c. 1.
[428] See the genealogy at length in Le Clerc, Historie de
la Médecine, lib. ii. c. 2. p. 78, also p. 287; also Littré,
Introduction aux Œuvres Complètes d'Hippocrate, t. i. p. 35.
Hippocratês was the seventeenth from Æsculapius.
Theopompus the historian went at considerable length into the
pedigree of the Asklêpiads of Kôs and Knidus, tracing them up
to Podaleirius and his first settlement at Syrnus in Karia (see
Theopomp. Fragm. 111, Didot): Polyanthus of Kyrênê composed
a special treatise περὶ τῆς τῶν Ἀσκληπιαδῶν γενέσεως (Sextus
Empiric. adv. Grammat. i. 12. p. 271); see Stephan. Byz. v. Κῶς,
and especially Aristidês, Orat. vii. _Asclêpiadæ_. The Asklêpiads
were even reckoned among the Ἀρχηγέται of Rhodes, jointly with
the Hêrakleids (Aristidês, Or. 44, ad Rhod. p. 839, Dind.).
In the extensive sacred enclosure at Epidaurus stood the
statues of Asklêpius and his wife Epionê (Pausan. ii. 29, 1):
two daughters are coupled with him by Aristophanês, and he was
considered especially εὔπαις (Plutus, 654); Jaso, Panakeia and
Hygieia are named by Aristidês.
[429] Plato, Protagor. c. 6 (p. 311). Ἱπποκράτη τὸν Κῶον, τὸν
τῶν Ἀσκληπιαδῶν; also Phædr. c. 121. (p. 270). About Ktêsias,
Galen, Opp. t. v. p. 652, Basil.; and Bahrt, Fragm. Ktêsiæ, p. 20.
Aristotle (see Stahr. Aristotelia, i. p. 32) and Xenophôn, the
physician of the emperor Claudius, were both Asklêpiads (Tacit.
Annal. xii. 61). Plato, de Republ. iii. 405, calls them τοὺς
κομψοὺς Ἀσκληπιάδας.
Pausanias, a distinguished physician at Gela in Sicily, and
contemporary of the philosopher Empedoklês, was also an
Asklêpiad: see the verses of Empedoklês upon him, Diogen. Laërt.
viii. 61.
[430] Strabo, viii. p. 374; Aristophan. Vesp. 122; Plutus,
635-750; where the visit to the temple of Æsculapius is described
in great detail, though with a broad farcical coloring.
During the last illness of Alexander the Great, several of his
principal officers slept in the temple of Serapis, in the hope
that remedies would be suggested to them in their dreams (Arrian,
vii. 26).
Pausanias, in describing the various temples of Asklêpius which
he saw, announces as a fact quite notorious and well-understood,
"Here cures are wrought by the god" (ii. 36, 1; iii. 26, 7; vii.
27, 4): see Suidas, v. Ἀρίσταρχος. The Orations of Aristidês,
especially the 6th and 7th, _Asklêpius and the Asklêpiadæ_,
are the most striking manifestations of faith and thanksgiving
towards Æsculapius, as well as attestations of his extensive
working throughout the Grecian world; also Orat. 23 and 25, Ἱερῶν
Λόγος, 1 and 3; and Or. 45 (De Rhetoricâ, p. 22. Dind.), αἵ τ᾽ ἐν
Ἀσκληπιοῦ τῶν ἀεὶ διατριβόντων ἀγελαὶ, etc.
[431] Pausan. ii. 27, 3; 36, 1. Ταύταις ἐγγεγραμμένα ἐστὶ καὶ
ἀνδρῶν καὶ γυναικῶν ὀνόματα ἀκεσθέντων ὑπὸ τοῦ Ἀσκληπιοῦ, πρόσετι
δὲ καὶ νόσημα, ὅ,τι ἕκαστος ἐνόσησε, καὶ ὅπως ἰάθη,—the cures are
wrought by the god himself.
The genealogical descent of Hippocratês and the other Asklêpiads
from the god Asklêpius is not only analogous to that of Hekatæus and
Solôn from their respective ancestoral gods, but also to that of the
Lacedæmônian kings from Hêraklês, upon the basis of which the whole
supposed chronology of the ante-historical times has been built, from
Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus down to the chronologers of the present
century.[432] I shall revert to this hereafter.
[432] "Apollodôrus ætatem Herculis pro cardine chronologiæ
habuit" (Heyne, ad Apollodôr. Fragm. p. 410).
CHAPTER X.
ÆAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS.—ÆGINA, SALAMIS, AND PHTHIA.
The memorable heroic genealogy of the Æakids establishes a fabulous
connection between Ægina, Salamis, and Phthia, which we can only
recognize as a fact, without being able to trace its origin.
Æakus was the son of Zeus, born of Ægina, daughter of Asôpus, whom the
god had carried off and brought into the island to which he gave her
name: she was afterwards married to Aktôr, and had by him Menœtius,
father of Patroclus. As there were two rivers named Asôpus, one
between Phlius and Sikyôn, and another between Thêbes and Platæa—so
the Æginêtan heroic genealogy was connected both with that of Thêbes
and with that of Phlius: and this belief led to practical consequences
in the minds of those who accepted the legends as genuine history. For
when the Thêbans, in the 68th Olympiad, were hard-pressed in war by
Athens, they were directed by the Delphian oracle to ask assistance
of their next of kin: recollecting that Thêbê and Ægina had been
sisters, common daughters of Asôpus, they were induced to apply to the
Æginêtans as their next of kin, and the Æginêtans gave them aid, first
by sending to them their common heroes, the Æakids, next by actual
armed force.[433] Pindar dwells emphatically on the heroic brotherhood
between Thêbes, his native city, and Ægina.[434]
[433] Herodot. v. 81.
[434] Nem. iv. 22. Isthm. vii. 16.
Æakus was alone in Ægina: to relieve him from this solitude, Zeus
changed all the ants in the island into men, and thus provided him
with a numerous population, who, from their origin, were called
Myrmidons.[435] By his wife Endêis, daughter of Cheirôn, Æakus had for
his sons Pêleus and Telamôn: by the Nereid Psamathê, he had Phôkus. A
monstrous crime had then recently been committed by Pelops, in killing
the Arcadian prince, Stymphalus, under a simulation of friendship and
hospitality: for this the gods had smitten all Greece with famine
and barrenness. The oracles affirmed that nothing could relieve
Greece from this intolerable misery except the prayers of Æakus, the
most pious of mankind. Accordingly envoys from all quarters flocked
to Ægina, to prevail upon Æakus to put up prayers for them: on his
supplications the gods relented, and the suffering immediately ceased.
The grateful Greeks established in Ægina the temple and worship of Zeus
Panhellênius, one of the lasting monuments and institutions of the
island, on the spot where Æakus had offered up his prayer. The statues
of the envoys who had come to solicit him were yet to be seen in the
Æakeion, or sacred edifice of Æakus, in the time of Pausanias: and the
Athenian Isokratês, in his eulogy of Evagoras, the despot of Salamis in
Cyprus (who traced his descent through Teukrus to Æakus), enlarges upon
this signal miracle, recounted and believed by other Greeks as well as
by the Æginêtans, as a proof both of the great qualities and of the
divine favor and patronage displayed in the career of the Æakids.[436]
Æakus was also employed to aid Poseidôn and Apollo in building the
walls of Troy.[437]
[435] This tale, respecting the transformation of the ants into
men, is as old as the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. See Düntzer,
Fragm. Epicc. 21. p. 34; evidently an etymological tale from the
name Myrmidones. Pausanias throws aside both the etymology and
the details of the miracle: he says that Zeus raised men from the
earth, at the prayer of Æakus (ii. 29, 2): other authors retained
the etymology of Myrmidons from μύρμηκες, but gave a different
explanation (Kallimachus, Fragm. 114, Düntzer). Μυρμιδόνων ἐσσῆνα
(Strabo, viii. p. 375). Ἐσσὴν, ὁ οἰκιστής (Hygin. fab. 52).
According to the Thessalian legend, Myrmidôn was the son of
Zeus by Eurymedusa, daughter of Kletor; Zeus having assumed the
disguise of an ant (Clemens Alex. Admon. ad Gent. p. 25. Sylb.).
[436] Apollod. iii. 12, 6. Isokrat. Evagor. Encom. vol. ii. p.
278, Auger. Pausan. i. 45, 13; ii. 29, 6. Schol. Aristoph. Equit.
1253.
So in the 106th Psalm, respecting the Israelites and Phinees, v.
29, "They provoked the Lord to anger by their inventions, and the
plague was great among them;" "Then stood up Phinees and prayed,
and so the plague ceased;" "And that was counted unto him for
righteousness, among all posterities for evermore."
[437] Pindar, Olymp. viii. 41, with the Scholia. Didymus did not
find this story in any other poet older than Pindar.
Pêleus and Telamôn, the sons of Æakus, contracting a jealousy of
their bastard brother, Phôkus, in consequence of his eminent skill in
gymnastic contests, conspired to put him to death. Telamôn flung his
quoit at him while they were playing together, and Pêleus despatched
him by a blow with his hatchet in the back. They then concealed the
dead body in a wood, but Æakus, having discovered both the act and the
agents, banished the brothers from the island.[438] For both of them
eminent destinies were in store.
[438] Apollod. iii. 12, 6, who relates the tale somewhat
differently; but the old epic poem Alkmæônis gave the details
(ap. Schol. Eurip. Andromach. 685)—
Ἔνθα μὲν ἀντίθεος Τελαμὼν τροχοειδέϊ δίσκῳ
Πλῆξε κάρη· Πηλεὺς δὲ θοῶς ἀνὰ χεῖρα τανύσσας
Ἀξίνην ἐΰχαλκον ἐπεπλήγει μετὰ νῶτα.
While we notice the indifference to the moral quality of actions
implied in the old Hesiodic legend, when it imputes distinctly and
nakedly this proceeding to two of the most admired persons of the
heroic world—it is not less instructive to witness the change of
feeling which had taken place in the age of Pindar. That warm eulogist
of the great Æakid race hangs down his head with shame, and declines
to recount, though he is obliged darkly to glance at the cause which
forced the pious Æakus to banish his sons from Ægina. It appears that
Kallimachus, if we may judge by a short fragment, manifested the same
repugnance to mention it.[439]
[439] Pindar, Nem. v. 15, with Scholia, and Kallimach. Frag. 136.
Apollônius Rhodius represents the fratricide as inadvertent and
unintentional (i. 92); one instance amongst many of the tendency
to soften down and moralize the ancient tales.
Pindar, however, seems to forget this incident when he speaks
in other places of the general character of Pêleus (Olymp. ii.
75-86. Isthm. vii. 40).
Telamôn retired to Salamis, then ruled by Kychreus, the son of Poseidôn
and Salamis, who had recently rescued the island from the plague of
a terrible serpent. This animal, expelled from Salamis, retired to
Eleusis in Attica, where it was received and harbored by the goddess
Dêmêtêr in her sacred domicile.[440] Kychreus dying childless left his
dominion to Telamôn, who, marrying Peribœa, daughter of Alkathoos,
and grand-daughter of Pelops, had for his son the celebrated Ajax.
Telamôn took part both in the chase of the Kalydônian boar and in the
Argonautic expedition: he was also the intimate friend and companion of
Hêraklês, whom he accompanied in his enterprise against the Amazons,
and in the attack made with only six ships upon Laomedôn, king of Troy.
This last enterprise having proved completely successful, Telamôn was
rewarded by Hêraklês with the possession of the daughter of Laomedôn,
Hêsionê—who bore to him Teukros, the most distinguished archer amidst
the host of Agamemnôn, and the founder of Salamis in Cyprus.[441]
[440] Apollod. iii. 12, 7. Euphoriôn, Fragm. 5, Düntzer, p.
43, Epicc. Græc. There may have been a tutelary serpent in the
temple at Eleusis, as there was in that of Athênê Polias at
Athens (Herodot viii. 41. Photius, v. Οἰκοῦρον ὄφιν. Aristophan.
Lysistr. 759, with the Schol.).
[441] Apollod. iii. 12, 7. Hesiod. ap. Strab. ix. p. 393.
The libation and prayer of Hêraklês, prior to the birth of Ajax,
and his fixing the name of the yet unborn child, from an eagle
(αἰετὸς) which appeared in response to his words, was detailed in
the Hesiodic Eoia, and is celebrated by Pindar (Isthm. v. 30-54).
See also the Scholia.
Pêleus went to Phthia, where he married the daughter of Eurytiôn,
son of Aktôr, and received from him the third part of his dominions.
Taking part in the Kalydônian boar-hunt, he unintentionally killed his
father-in-law Eurytiôn, and was obliged to flee to Iôlkos, where he
received purification from Akastus, son of Pelias: the danger to which
he became exposed by the calumnious accusations of the enamoured wife
of Akastus has already been touched upon in a previous section. Pêleus
also was among the Argonauts; the most memorable event in his life
however was his marriage with the sea-goddess Thetis. Zeus and Poseidôn
had both conceived a violent passion for Thetis. But the former, having
been forewarned by Promêtheus that Thetis was destined to give birth to
a son more powerful than his father, compelled her, much against her
own will, to marry Pêleus; who, instructed by the intimations of the
wise Cheirôn, was enabled to seize her on the coast called Sêpias in
the southern region of Thessaly. She changed her form several times,
but Pêleus held her fast until she resumed her original appearance,
and she was then no longer able to resist. All the gods were present,
and brought splendid gifts to these memorable nuptials: Apollo sang
with his harp, Poseidôn gave to Pêleus the immortal horses Xanthos and
Balios, and Cheirôn presented a formidable spear, cut from an ash-tree
on Mount Pêlion. We shall have reason hereafter to recognize the value
of both these gifts in the exploits of Achilles.[442]
[442] Apollodôr. iii. 13, 5. Homer, Iliad, xviii. 434; xxiv. 62.
Pindar, Nem. iv. 50-68; Isthm. vii. 27-50. Herodot. vii. 192.
Catullus, Carm. 64. Epithal. Pel. et Thetidos, with the prefatory
remarks of Dœring.
The nuptials of Pêleus and Thetis were much celebrated in the
Hesiodic Catalogue, or perhaps in the Eoiai (Düntzer, Epic. Græc.
Frag. 36. p. 39), and Ægimius—see Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. iv.
869—where there is a curious attempt of Staphylus to rationalize
the marriage of Pêleus and Thetis.
There was a town, seemingly near Pharsalus in Thessaly, called
Thetideium. Thetis is said to have been carried by Pêleus to both
these places: probably it grew up round a temple and sanctuary of
this goddess (Pherekyd. Frag. 16, Didot; Hellank. ap. Steph. Byz.
Θεστιδεῖον).
The prominent part assigned to Thetis in the Iliad is well known,
and the post-Homeric poets of the Legend of Troy introduced her as
actively concurring first to promote the glory, finally to bewail the
death of her distinguished son.[443] Pêleus, having survived both his
son Achilles and his grandson Neoptolemus, is ultimately directed to
place himself on the very spot where he had originally seized Thetis,
and thither the goddess comes herself to fetch him away, in order
that he may exchange the desertion and decrepitude of age for a life
of immortality along with the Nêreids.[444] The spot was indicated to
Xerxês when he marched into Greece by the Iônians who accompanied him,
and his magi offered solemn sacrifices to her as well as to the other
Nêreids, as the presiding goddesses and mistresses of the coast.[445]
[443] See the arguments of the lost poems, the Cypria and the
Æthiopis, as given by Proclus, in Düntzer, Fragm. Epic. Gr. p.
11-16; also Schol. ad Iliad. xvi. 140; and the extract from the
lost Ψυχοστασία of Æschylus, ap. Plato. de Republic. ii. c. 21
(p. 382, St.).
[444] Eurip. Androm. 1242-1260; Pindar, Olymp. ii. 86.
[445] Herodot. vii. 198.
Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, too young to engage in the
commencement of the siege of Troy, comes on the stage after the death
of his father as the indispensable and prominent agent in the final
capture of the city. He returns victor from Troy, not to Phthia, but to
Epirus, bringing with him the captive Andromachê, widow of Hectôr, by
whom Molossus is born to him. He himself perishes in the full vigor of
life at Delphi by the machinations of Orestês, son of Agamemnôn. But
his son Molossus—like Fleance, the son of Banquo, in Macbeth—becomes
the father of the powerful race of Molossian kings, who played so
conspicuous a part during the declining vigor of the Grecian cities,
and to whom the title and parentage of Æakids was a source of peculiar
pride, identifying them by community of heroic origin with genuine and
undisputed Hellênes.[446]
[446] Plutarch, Pyrrh. 1; Justin, xi. 3; Eurip. Androm. 1253;
Arrian, Exp. Alexand. i. 11.
The glories of Ajax, the second grandson of Æakus, before Troy, are
surpassed only by those of Achilles. He perishes by his own hand,
the victim of an insupportable feeling of humiliation, because a
less worthy claimant is allowed to carry off from him the arms of
the departed Achilles. His son Philæus receives the citizenship of
Athens, and the gens or dême called Philaidæ traced up to him its name
and its origin: moreover the distinguished Athenians, Miltiadês and
Thucydidês, were regarded as members of this heroic progeny.[447]
[447] Pherekydês and Hellanikus ap. Marcellin. Vit. Thucydid.
init.; Pausan. ii. 29, 4; Plutarch, Solôn, 10. According to
Apollodôrus, however, Pherekydês said that Telamôn was only the
friend of Pêleus, not his brother,—not the son of Æakus (iii. 12,
7): this seems an inconsistency. There was however a warm dispute
between the Athenians and the Megarians respecting the title to
the hero Ajax, who was claimed by both (see Pausan. i. 42, 4;
Plutarch, _l. c._): the Megarians accused Peisistratus of having
interpolated a line into the Catalogue in the Iliad (Strabo, ix.
p. 394).
Teukrus escaped from the perils of the siege of Troy as well as from
those of the voyage homeward, and reached Salamis in safety. But
his father Telamôn, indignant at his having returned without Ajax,
refused to receive him, and compelled him to expatriate. He conducted
his followers to Cyprus, where he founded the city of Salamis: his
descendant Evagoras was recognized as a Teukrid and as an Æakid even in
the time of Isokratês.[448]
[448] Herodot. vii. 90; Isokrat. Enc. Evag. _ut sup._; Sophokl.
Ajax, 984-995; Vellei. Patercul. i. 1; Æschyl. Pers. 891, and
Schol. The return from Troy of Teukrus, his banishment by
Telamôn, and his settlement in Cyprus, formed the subject of the
Τεῦκρος of Sophoklês, and of a tragedy under a similar title by
Pacuvius (Cicero de Orat. i. 58; ii. 46); Sophokl. Ajax, 892;
Pacuvii Fragm. Teucr. 15.—
"Te repudio, nec recipio, natum abdico,
Facesse."
The legend of Teukros was connected in Attic archæology with the
peculiar functions and formalities of the judicature, ἐν Φρεαττοῖ
(Pausan. i. 28, 12; ii. 29, 7).
Such was the splendid heroic genealogy of the Æakids,—a family renowned
for military excellence. The Æakeion at Ægina, in which prayer and
sacrifice were offered to Æakus, remained in undiminished dignity down
to the time of Pausanias.[449] This genealogy connects together various
eminent gentes in Achaia Phthiôtis, in Ægina, in Salamis, in Cyprus,
and amongst the Epirotic Molossians. Whether we are entitled to infer
from it that the island of Ægina was originally peopled by Myrmidones
from Achaia Phthiôtis, as O. Müller imagines,[450] I will not pretend
to affirm. These mythical pedigrees seem to unite together special
clans or gentes, rather than the bulk of any community—just as we know
that the Athenians generally had no part in the Æakid genealogy, though
certain particular Athenian families laid claim to it. The intimate
friendship between Achilles and the Opuntian hero Patroclus—and the
community of name and frequent conjunction between the Locrian Ajax,
son of Oïleus, and Ajax, son of Telamôn—connect the Æakids with Opus
and the Opuntian Locrians, in a manner which we have no farther means
of explaining. Pindar too represents Menœtius, father of Patroclus, as
son of Aktôr and Ægina, and therefore maternal brother of Æakus.[451]
[449] Hesiod, Fragm. Düntz. Eoiai, 55, y. 43.—
Ἀλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδαισι,
Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδῃσι.
Polyb. v. 2.—
Αἰακίδας, πολέμῳ κεχαρηότας ἠΰτε δαιτί.
[450] See his Æginetica, p. 14, his earliest work.
[451] Pindar, Olymp. ix. 74. The hero Ajax, son of Oïleus, was
especially worshipped at Opus; solemn festivals and games were
celebrated in his honor.
CHAPTER XI.
ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES.
The most ancient name in Attic archæology, as far as our means of
information reach, is that of Erechtheus, who is mentioned both in
the Catalogue of the Iliad and in a brief allusion of the Odyssey.
Born of the Earth, he is brought up by the goddess Athênê, adopted
by her as her ward, and installed in her temple at Athens, where the
Athenians offer to him annual sacrifices. The Athenians are styled in
the Iliad, "the people of Erechtheus."[452] This is the most ancient
testimony concerning Erechtheus, exhibiting him as a divine or heroic,
certainly a superhuman person, and identifying him with the primitive
germination (if I may use a term, the Grecian equivalent of which would
have pleased an Athenian ear) of Attic man. And he was recognized in
this same character, even at the close of the fourth century before the
Christian æra, by the Butadæ, one of the most ancient and important
Gentes at Athens, who boasted of him as their original ancestor: the
genealogy of the great Athenian orator Lykurgus, a member of this
family, drawn up by his son Abrôn, and painted on a public tablet in
the Erechtheion, contained as its first and highest name, Erechtheus,
son of Hêphæstos and the Earth. In the Erechtheion, Erechtheus
was worshipped conjointly with Athênê: he was identified with the
god Poseidôn, and bore the denomination of Poseidôn Erechtheus:
one of the family of the Butadæ, chosen among themselves by lot,
enjoyed the privilege and performed the functions of his hereditary
priest.[453] Herodotus also assigns the same earth-born origin to
Erechtheus:[454] but Pindar, the old poem called the Danais, Euripidês
and Apollodôrus—all name Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth,
as the being who was thus adopted and made the temple-companion of
Athênê, while Apollodôrus in another place identifies Erichthonius
with Poseidôn.[455] The Homeric scholiast treated Erechtheus and
Erichthonius as the same person under two names:[456] and since, in
regard to such mythical persons, there exists no other test of identity
of the subject except perfect similarity of the attributes, this seems
the reasonable conclusion.
[452] Iliad, ii. 546. Odyss. vii. 81.—
Οἳ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ Ἀθήνας εἶχον ...
Δῆμον Ἐρεχθῆος μεγαλήτορος, ὅν ποτ᾽ Ἀθήνη
Θρέψε, Διὸς θυγάτηρ, τέκε δὲ ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα,
Κὰδ δ᾽ ἐν Ἀθήνῃσ᾽ εἷσεν ἑῷ ἐνὶ πίονι νηῷ,
Ἐνθάδε μιν ταύροισι καὶ ἀρνειοῖς ἱλάονται
Κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων, περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν.
[453] See the Life of Lykurgus, in Plutarch's (I call it by
that name, as it is always printed with his works) Lives of the
Ten Orators, tom. iv. p. 382-384, Wytt. Κατῆγον δὲ τὸ γένος ἀπὸ
τούτων καὶ Ἐρεχθέως τοῦ Γῆς καὶ Ἡφαίστου ... καὶ ἐστὶν αὐτὴ ἡ
καταγωγὴ τοῦ γένους τῶν ἱερασαμένων του Ποσειδῶνος, etc. Ὃς τὴν
ἱερωσύνην Ποσειδῶνος Ἐρεχθέως εἶχε (pp. 382, 383). Erechtheus
Πάρεδρος of Athênê—Aristidês, Panathenaic. p. 184, with the
Scholia of Frommel.
Butês, the eponymus of the Butadæ, is the first priest of
Poseidôn Erichthonius: Apollod. iii. 15, 1. So Kallias (Xenoph.
Sympos. viii. 40), ἱερεὺς θεῶν τῶν ἀπ᾽ Ἐρεχθέως.
[454] Herodot. viii. 55.
[455] Harpokration, v. Αὐτοχθών. Ὁ δὲ Πίνδαρος καὶ ὁ τὴν Δαναΐδα
πεποιηκὼς φασιν, Ἐριχθόνιον ἐξ Ἡφαίστου καὶ Γῆς φανῆναι.
Euripidês, Ion. 21. Apollod. iii. 14, 6; 15, 1. Compare Plato,
Timæus, c. 6.
[456] Schol. ad Iliad, ii. 546, where he cites also Kallimachus
for the story of Erichthonius. Etymologicon Magn. Ἐρεχθεύς.
Plato (Kritias, c. 4) employs vague and general language to
describe the agency of Hêphæstos and Athênê, which the old fable
in Apollodôrus (iii. 14, 6) details in coarser terms. See Ovid,
Metam. ii. 757.
We may presume, from the testimony of Homer, that the first and oldest
conception of Athens and its sacred acropolis places it under the
special protection, and represents it as the settlement and favorite
abode of Athênê, jointly with Poseidôn; the latter being the inferior,
though the chosen companion of the former, and therefore exchanging
his divine appellation for the cognomen of Erechtheus. But the country
called Attica, which, during the historical ages, forms one social and
political aggregate with Athens, was originally distributed into many
independent dêmes or cantons, and included, besides, various religious
clans or hereditary sects (if the expression may be permitted); that
is, a multitude of persons not necessarily living together in the same
locality, but bound together by an hereditary communion of sacred
rites, and claiming privileges, as well as performing obligations,
founded upon the traditional authority of divine persons for whom
they had a common veneration. Even down to the beginning of the
Peloponnesian war, the demots of the various Attic dêmes, though long
since embodied in the larger political union of Attica, and having no
wish for separation, still retained the recollection of their original
political autonomy. They lived in their own separate localities,
resorted habitually to their own temples, and visited Athens only
occasionally for private or political business, or for the great public
festivals. Each of these aggregates, political as well as religious,
had its own eponymous god or hero, with a genealogy more or less
extended, and a train of mythical incidents more or less copious,
attached to his name, according to the fancy of the local exegetes and
poets. The eponymous heroes Marathôn, Dekelus, Kolônus, or Phlius, had
each their own title to worship, and their own position as themes of
legendary narrative, independent of Erechtheus, or Poseidôn, or Athênê,
the patrons of the acropolis common to all of them.
But neither the archæology of Attica, nor that of its various component
fractions, was much dwelt upon by the ancient epic poets of Greece.
Theseus is noticed both in the Iliad and Odyssey as having carried
off from Krête Ariadnê, the daughter of Minos—thus commencing that
connection between the Krêtan and Athenian legends which we afterwards
find so largely amplified—and the sons of Thêseus take part in the
Trojan war.[457] The chief collectors and narrators of the Attic mythes
were, the prose logographers, authors of the many compositions called
Atthides, or works on Attic archæology. These writers—Hellanikus,
the contemporary of Herodotus, is the earliest composer of an
Atthis expressly named, though Pherekydês also touched upon the
Attic fables—these writers, I say, interwove into one chronological
series the legends which either greatly occupied their own fancy, or
commanded the most general reverence among their countrymen. In this
way the religious and political legends of Eleusis, a town originally
independent of Athens, but incorporated with it before the historical
age, were worked into one continuous sequence along with those of the
Erechtheids. In this way, Kekrops, the eponymous hero of the portion of
Attica called Kekropia, came to be placed in the mythical chronology at
a higher point even than the primitive god or hero Erechtheus.
[457] Æthra, mother of Theseus, is also mentioned (Homer, Iliad,
iii. 144).
Ogygês is said to have reigned in Attica[458] 1020 years before the
first Olympiad, or 1796 years B. C. In his time happened the deluge
of Deukaliôn, which destroyed most of the inhabitants of the country:
after a long interval, Kekrops, an indigenous person, half man and
half serpent, is given to us by Apollodôrus as the first king of the
country: he bestowed upon the land, which had before been called
Actê, the name of Kekropia. In his day there ensued a dispute between
Athênê and Poseidôn respecting the possession of the acropolis at
Athens, which each of them coveted. First, Poseidôn struck the rock
with his trident, and produced the well of salt water which existed
in it, called the Erechthêis: next came Athênê, who planted the
sacred olive-tree ever afterwards seen and venerated in the portion
of Erechtheion called the cell of Pandrosus. The twelve gods decided
the dispute; and Kekrops having testified before them that Athênê
had rendered this inestimable service, they adjudged the spot to
her in preference to Poseidôn. Both the ancient olive-tree and the
well produced by Poseidôn were seen on the acropolis, in the temple
consecrated jointly to Athênê and Erechtheus, throughout the historical
ages. Poseidôn, as a mark of his wrath for the preference given to
Athênê, inundated the Thriasian plain with water.[459]
[458] Hellanikus, Fragm. 62; Philochor. Fragm. 8, ap. Euseb.
Præp. Evang. x. 10. p. 489. Larcher (Chronologie d'Hérodote, ch.
ix. s. 1. p. 278) treats both the historical personality and the
date of Ogygês as perfectly well authenticated.
It is not probable that Philochorus should have given any
calculation of time having reference to Olympiads; and hardly
conceivable that Hellanikus should have done so. Justin Martyr
quotes Hellanikus and Philochorus as having mentioned Moses,—ὡς
σφόδρα ἀρχαίου καὶ παλαιοῦ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἄρχοντος Μωϋσέως
μέμνηνται—which is still more incredible even than the assertion
of Eusebius about their having fixed the date of Ogygês by
Olympiads (see Philochor. Fragm. 9).
[459] Apollod. iii. 14, 1; Herodot. viii. 55; Ovid. Metam. vi.
72. The story current among the Athenians represented Kekrops as
the judge of this controversy (Xenoph. Memor. iii. 5, 10).
The impressions of the trident of Poseidôn were still shown
upon the rock in the time of Pausanias (Pausan. i. 26, 4). For
the sanctity of the ancient olive-tree, see the narrative of
Herodotus (_l. c._), relating what happened to it when Xerxes
occupied the acropolis. As this tale seems to have attached
itself specially to the local peculiarities of the Erechtheion,
the part which Poseidôn plays in it is somewhat mean: that god
appears to greater advantage in the neighborhood of the Ἱπποτὴς
Κολωνὸς, as described in the beautiful Chorus of Sophoklês (Œdip.
Colon. 690-712).
A curious rationalization of the monstrous form ascribed to
Kekrops διφυὴς in Plutarch (Sera Num. Vindict. p. 551).
During the reign of Kekrops, Attica was laid waste by Karian pirates
on the coast, and by invasions of the Aônian inhabitants from Bœôtia.
Kekrops distributed the inhabitants of Attica into twelve local
sections—Kekropia, Tetrapolis, Epakria, Dekeleia, Eleusis, Aphidna,
Thorikus, Braurôn, Kythêrus, Sphêttus, Kêphisius, Phalerus. Wishing to
ascertain the number of inhabitants, he commanded each man to cast a
single stone into a general heap: the number of stones was counted, and
it was found that there were twenty thousand.[460]
[460] Philochor. ap. Strabo. ix. p. 397.
Kekrops married the daughter of Aktæus, who (according to Pausanias's
version) had been king of the country before him, and had called it by
the name of Aktæa.[461] By her he had three daughters, Aglaurus, Ersê
and Pandrosus, and a son, Erysichthôn. Kekrops is called by Pausanias
contemporary of the Arcadian Lykaôn, and is favorably contrasted with
that savage prince in respect of his piety and humanity.[462] Though
he has been often designated in modern histories as an immigrant from
Egypt into Attica, yet the far greater number of ancient authorities
represent him as indigenous or earth-born.[463]
[461] The Parian chronological marble designates Aktæus as an
autochthonous person. Marmor Parium, Epoch. 3. Pausan. i. 2, 5.
Philochorus treated Aktæus as a fictitious name (Fragm. 8, _ut
sup._).
[462] Pausan. viii. 2. 2. The three daughters of Kekrops were
not unnoticed in the mythes (Ovid, Metam. ii. 739): the tale of
Kephalus, son of Hersê by Hermês, who was stolen away by the
goddess Eôs or Hêmera in consequence of his surpassing beauty,
was told in more than one of the Hesiodic poems (Pausan. i. 3, 1;
Hesiod. Theog. 986). See also Eurip. Ion. 269.
[463] Jul. Africanus also (ap. Euseb. x. 9. p. 486-488) calls
Kekrops γηγενὴς and αὐτοχθών.
Erysichthôn died without issue, and Kranaus succeeded him,—another
autochthonous person and another eponymus,—for the name Kranai was
an old denomination of the inhabitants of Attica.[464] Kranaus was
dethroned by Amphiktyôn, by some called an autochthonous man; by
others, a son of Deukaliôn: Amphiktyôn in his turn was expelled
by Erichthonius, son of Hêphæstos and the Earth,—the same person
apparently as Erechtheus, but inserted by Apollodôrus at this point of
the series. Erichthonius, the pupil and favored companion of Athênê,
placed in the acropolis the original Palladium or wooden statue of
that goddess, said to have dropped from heaven: he was moreover the
first to celebrate the festival of the Panathenæa. He married the nymph
Pasithea, and had for his son and successor Pandiôn.[465] Erichthonius
was the first person who taught the art of breaking in horses to the
yoke, and who drove a chariot and four.[466]
[464] Herod. viii. 44. Κρανααὶ Ἀθῆναι, Pindar.
[465] Apollod. iii. 14. Pausan. i. 26, 7.
[466] Virgil, Georgic iii. 114.
In the time of Pandiôn, who succeeded to Erichthonius, Dionysus and
Dêmêtêr both came into Attica: the latter was received by Keleos at
Eleusis.[467] Pandiôn married the nymph Zeuxippê, and had twin sons,
Erechtheus and Butês, and two daughters, Proknê and Philomêla. The two
latter are the subjects of a memorable and well-known legend. Pandiôn
having received aid in repelling the Thêbans from Têreus, king of
Thrace, gave him his daughter Proknê in marriage, by whom he had a son,
Itys. The beautiful Philomêla, going to visit her sister, inspired
the barbarous Thracian with an irresistible passion: he violated her
person, confined her in a distant pastoral hut, and pretended that she
was dead, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from revealing the
truth. After a long interval, Philomêla found means to acquaint her
sister of the cruel deed which had been perpetrated; she wove into a
garment words describing her melancholy condition, and despatched it
by a trusty messenger. Proknê, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger, took
advantage of the free egress enjoyed by women during the Bacchanalian
festival to go and release her sister: the two sisters then revenged
themselves upon Têreus by killing the boy Itys, and serving him up
for his father to eat: after the meal had been finished, the horrid
truth was revealed to him. Têreus snatched a hatchet to put Proknê to
death: she fled, along with Philomêla, and all the three were changed
into birds—Proknê became a swallow, Philomêla a nightingale, and
Têreus an hoopoe.[468] This tale, so popular with the poets, and so
illustrative of the general character of Grecian legend, is not less
remarkable in another point of view—that the great historian Thucydidês
seems to allude to it as an historical fact,[469] not however directly
mentioning the final metamorphosis.
[467] The mythe of the visit of Dêmêtêr to Eleusis, on which
occasion she vouchsafed to teach her holy rites to the leading
Eleusinians, is more fully touched upon in a previous chapter
(see _ante_, p. 50).
[468] Apollod. iii. 14, 8; Æsch. Supplic. 61; Soph. Elektr. 107;
Ovid, Metamorph. vi. 425-670. Hyginus gives the fable with some
additional circumstances, fab. 45. Antoninus Liberalis (Narr.
11), or Bœus, from whom he copies, has composed a new narrative
by combining together the names of Pandareos and Aêdôn, as given
in the Odyssey, xix. 523, and the adventures of the old Attic
fable. The hoopoe still continued the habit of chasing the
nightingale; it was to the Athenians a present fact. See Schol.
Aristoph. Aves, 212.
[469] Thucyd. ii. 29. He makes express mention of the nightingale
in connection with the story, though not of the metamorphosis.
See below, chap. xvi. p. 544, note 2. So also does Pausanias
mention and reason upon it as a real incident: he founds upon it
several moral reflections (i. 5, 4; x. 4, 5): the author of the
Λόγος Ἐπιτάφιος, ascribed to Demosthenês, treats it in the same
manner, as a fact ennobling the tribe Pandionis, of which Pandiôn
was the eponymus. The same author, in touching upon Kekrops, the
eponymus of the Kekropis tribe, cannot believe literally the
story of his being half man and half serpent: he rationalizes it
by saying that Kekrops was so called because in wisdom he was
like a man, in strength like a serpent (Demosth. p. 1397, 1398,
Reiske). Hesiod glances at the fable (Opp. Di. 566), ὀρθογόη
Πανδιονὶς ὦρτο χελιδών; see also Ælian., V. H. xii. 20. The
subject was handled by Sophoklês in his lost Têreus.
After the death of Pandiôn, Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom,
and his brother, Butês, became priest of Poseidôn Erichthonius, a
function which his descendants ever afterwards exercised, the Butadæ
or Eteobutadæ. Erechtheus seems to appear in three characters in the
fabulous history of Athens—as a god, Poseidôn Erechtheus[470]—as a
hero, Erechtheus, son of the Earth—and now, as a king, son of Pandiôn:
so much did the ideas of divine and human rule become confounded and
blended together in the imagination of the Greeks in reviewing their
early times.
[470] Poseidôn is sometimes spoken of under the name of
Erechtheus simply (Lycophrôn, 158). See Hesychius, v. Ἐρεχθεύς.
The daughters of Erechtheus were not less celebrated in Athenian legend
than those of Pandiôn. Prokris, one of them, is among the heroines seen
by Odysseus in Hadês: she became the wife of Kephalus, son of Deionês,
and lived in the Attic dême of Thorikus. Kephalus tried her fidelity
by pretending that he was going away for a long period; but shortly
returned, disguising his person and bringing with him a splendid
necklace. He presented himself to Prokris without being recognized, and
succeeded in triumphing over her chastity. Having accomplished this
object, he revealed to her his true character: she earnestly besought
his forgiveness, and prevailed upon him to grant it. Nevertheless he
became shortly afterwards the unintentional author of her death: for
he was fond of hunting, and staid out a long time on his excursions,
so that Prokris suspected him of visiting some rival. She determined
to watch him by concealing herself in a thicket near the place of his
midday repose; and when Kephalus implored the presence of Nephelê (a
cloud) to protect him from the sun's rays, she suddenly started from
her hiding-place: Kephalus, thus disturbed, cast his hunting-spear
unknowingly into the thicket and slew his wife. Erechtheus interred her
with great magnificence, and Kephalus was tried for the act before the
court of Areopagus, which condemned him to exile.[471]
[471] Pherekydês, Fragm. 77, Didot; ap. Schol. ad Odyss. xi. 320;
Hellanikus Fr. 82; ap. Schol. Eurip. Orest. 1648. Apollodôrus
(iii. 15, 1) gives the story differently.
Kreüsa, another daughter of Erechtheus, seduced by Apollo, becomes the
mother of Iôn, whom she exposes immediately after his birth in the cave
north of the acropolis, concealing the fact from every one. Apollo
prevails upon Hermês to convey the new-born child to Delphi, where he
is brought up as a servant of the temple, without knowing his parents.
Kreüsa marries Xuthus, son of Æolus, but continuing childless, she goes
with Xuthus to the Delphian oracle to inquire for a remedy. The god
presents to them Iôn, and desires them to adopt him as their son: their
son Achæus is afterwards born to them, and Iôn and Achæus become the
eponyms of the Iônians and Achæans.[472]
[472] Upon this story of Iôn is founded the tragedy of Euripidês
which bears that name. I conceive many of the points of that
tragedy to be of the invention of Euripidês himself: but to
represent Iôn as son of Apollo, not of Xuthus, seems a genuine
Attic legend. Respecting this drama, see O. Müller, Hist. of
Dorians, ii. 2. 13-15. I doubt however the distinction which he
draws between the Ionians and the other population of Attica.
Oreithyia, the third daughter of Erechtheus, was stolen away by the god
Boreas while amusing herself on the banks of the Ilissus, and carried
to his residence in Thrace. The two sons of this marriage, Zêtês
and Kalaïs, were born with wings: they took part in the Argonautic
expedition, and engaged in the pursuit of the Harpies: they were slain
at Tênos by Hêraklês. Kleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia,
was married to Phineus, and had two sons, Plexippus and Pandiôn; but
Phineus afterwards espoused a second wife, Idæa, the daughter of
Dardanus, who, detesting the two sons of the former bed, accused them
falsely of attempting her chastity, and persuaded Phineus in his wrath
to put out the eyes of both. For this cruel proceeding he was punished
by the Argonauts in the course of their voyage.[473]
[473] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 2; Plato, Phædr. c. 3; Sophok. Antig.
984; also the copious Scholion on Apollôn. Rhod. i. 212.
The tale of Phineus is told very differently in the Argonautic
expedition as given by Apollônius Rhodius, ii. 180. From
Sophoklês we learn that this was the Attic version.
The two winged sons of Boreas and their chase of the Harpies were
noticed in the Hesiodic Catalogue (see Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii.
296). But whether the Attic legend of Oreithyia was recognized in
the Hesiodic poems seems not certain.
Both Æschylus and Sophoklês composed dramas on the subject of
Oreithyia (Longin. de Sublimit. c. 3). "Orithyia Atheniensis,
filia Terrigenæ, et a Borea in Thraciam rapta." (Servius ad Virg.
Æneid. xii. 83). Terrigenæ is the γηγενὴς Ἐρεχθεύς. Philochorus
(Fragm. 30) rationalized the story, and said that it alluded to
the effects of a violent wind.
On more than one occasion the Athenians derived, or at least
believed themselves to have derived, important benefits from this
marriage of Boreas with the daughter of their primæval hero: one
inestimable service, rendered at a juncture highly critical for
Grecian independence, deserves to be specified.[474] At the time of
the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, the Grecian fleet was assembled at
Chalcis and Artemision in Eubœa, awaiting the approach of the Persian
force, so overwhelming in its numbers as well by sea as on land. The
Persian fleet had reached the coast of Magnêsia and the south-eastern
corner of Thessaly without any material damage, when the Athenians
were instructed by an oracle "to invoke the aid of their son-in-law."
Understanding the advice to point to Boreas, they supplicated his
aid and that of Oreithyia, most earnestly, as well by prayer as by
sacrifice,[475] and the event corresponded to their wishes. A furious
north-easterly wind immediately arose, and continued for three days
to afflict the Persian fleet as it lay on an unprotected coast: the
number of ships driven ashore, both vessels of war and of provision,
was immense, and the injury done to the armament was never thoroughly
repaired. Such was the powerful succor which the Athenians derived, at
a time of their utmost need, from their son-in-law Boreas; and their
gratitude was shown by consecrating to him a new temple on the banks of
the Ilissus.
[474] Herodot. vii. 189. Οἱ δ᾽ ὦν Ἀθηναῖοί σφι λέγουσι βοηθήσαντα
τὸν Βορῆν πρότερον, καὶ τότε ἐκεῖνα κατεργάσασθαι· καὶ ἱρὸν
ἀπελθόντες Βορέω ἱδρύσαντο παρὰ ποταμὸν Ἴλισσον.
[475] Herodot. _l. c._ Ἀθηναῖοι τὸν Βορῆν ἐκ θεοπροπίου
ἐπεκαλέσαντο, ἐλθόντος σφι ἄλλου χρηστηρίου, τὸν γαμβρὸν
ἐπίκουρον καλέσασθαι. Βορῆς δὲ, κατὰ τὸν Ἑλλήνων λόγον ἔχει
γυναῖκα Ἀττικὴν, Ὠρειθυίην τὴν Ἐρεχθῆος. Κατὰ δὴ τὸ κῆδος τοῦτο,
οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, συμβαλλεόμενοί σφι τὸν Βορῆν γαμβρὸν εἶναι, etc.
The three remaining daughters of Erechtheus—he had six in all[476]—were
in Athenian legend yet more venerated than their sisters, on account of
having voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the safety of their
country. Eumolpus of Eleusis was the son of Poseidôn and the eponymous
hero of the sacred gens called the Eumolpids, in whom the principal
functions, appertaining to the mysterious rites of Dêmêtêr at Eleusis,
were vested by hereditary privilege: he made war upon Erechtheus and
the Athenians, with the aid of a body of Thracian allies; indeed it
appears that the legends of Athens, originally foreign and unfriendly
to those of Eleusis, represented him as having been himself a Thracian
born and an immigrant into Attica.[477] Respecting Eumolpus however
and his parentage, the discrepancies much exceed even the measure of
license usual in the legendary genealogies, and some critics, both
ancient and modern, have sought to reconcile these contradictions
by the usual stratagem of supposing two or three different persons
of the same name. Even Pausanias, so familiar with this class of
unsworn witnesses, complains of the want of native Eleusinian
genealogists,[478] and of the extreme license of fiction in which other
authors had indulged.
[476] Suidas and Photius, v. Πάρθενοι: Protogeneia and Pandôra
are given as the names of two of them. The sacrifice of Pandôra,
in the Iambi of Hippônax (Hippônact. Fragm. xxi. Welck. ap.
Athen. ix. p. 370), seems to allude to this daughter of
Erechtheus.
[477] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 3; Thucyd. ii. 15; Isokratês (Panegyr.
t. i. p. 206; Panathenaic. t. ii. p. 560, Auger), Lykurgus,
cont. Leocrat. p. 201, Reiske, Pausan. i. 38, 3; Euripid.
Erechth. Fragm. The Schol. ad. Soph. Œd. Col. 1048 gives valuable
citations from Ister, Akestodôrus and Androtiôn: we see that
the inquirers of antiquity found it difficult to explain how
the Eumolpids could have acquired their ascendant privileges in
the management of the Eleusinia, seeing that Eumolpus himself
was a foreigner.—Ζητεῖται, τί δήποτε οἱ Εὐμολπίδαι τῶν τελετῶν
ἐξάρχουσι, ξένοι ὄντες. Thucydidês does _not_ call Eumolpus
a Thracian: Strabo's language is very large and vague (vii.
p. 321): Isokratês says that he assailed Athens in order to
vindicate the rights of his father Poseidôn to the sovereign
patronage of the city. Hyginus copies this (fab. 46).
[478] Pausan. i. 38. 3. Ἐλευσίνιοί τε ἀρχαῖοι, ἅτε οὐ προσόντων
σφισι γενεαλόγων, ἄλλα τε πλάσασθαι δεδώκασι καὶ μάλιστα ἐς τὰ
γένη τῶν ἡρώων. See Heyne ad Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4. "Eumolpi
nomen modo communicatum pluribus, modo plurium hominum res et
facta cumulata in unum. Is ad quem Hercules venisse dicitur,
serior ætate fuit: antiquior est is de quo hoc loco agitur ...
antecessisse tamen hunc debet alius, qui cum Triptolemo vixit,"
etc. See the learned and valuable comments of Lobeck in his
Aglaophamus, tom. i. p. 206-213: in regard to the discrepancies
of this narrative he observes, I think, with great justice (p.
211), "quo uno exemplo ex innumerabilibus delecto, arguitur
eorum temeritas, qui ex variis discordibusque poetarum et
mythographorum narratiunculis, antiquæ famæ formam et quasi
lineamenta recognosci posse sperant."
In the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr, the most ancient testimony before
us,—composed, to all appearance, earlier than the complete
incorporation of Eleusis with Athens,—Eumolpus appears (to repeat
briefly what has been stated in a previous chapter) as one of the
native chiefs or princes of Eleusis, along with Triptolemus, Dioklês,
Polyxeinus and Dolichus: Keleos is the king, or principal among these
chiefs, the son or lineal descendant of the eponymous Eleusis himself.
To these chiefs, and to the three daughters of Keleos, the goddess
Dêmêtêr comes in her sorrow for the loss of her daughter Persephonê:
being hospitably entertained by Keleos she reveals her true character,
commands that a temple shall be built to her at Eleusis, and prescribes
to them the rites according to which they are to worship her.[479] Such
seems to have been the ancient story of the Eleusinians respecting
their own religious antiquities: Keleos, with Metaneira his wife, and
the other chiefs here mentioned, were worshipped at Eleusis, and from
thence transferred to Athens as local gods or heroes.[480] Eleusis
became incorporated with Athens, apparently not very long before the
time of Solôn; and the Eleusinian worship of Dêmêtêr was then received
into the great religious solemnities of the Athenian state, to which
it owes its remarkable subsequent extension and commanding influence.
In the Atticized worship of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr, the Eumolpids and
the Kêrŷkes were the principal hereditary functionaries: Eumolpus, the
eponym of this great family, came thus to play the principal part in
the Athenian legendary version of the war between Athens and Eleusis.
An oracle had pronounced that Athens could only be rescued from his
attack by the death of the three daughters of Erechtheus; their
generous patriotism consented to the sacrifice, and their father put
them to death. He then went forth confidently to the battle, totally
vanquished the enemy, and killed Eumolpus with his own hand.[481]
Erechtheus was worshipped as a god, and his daughters as goddesses,
at Athens.[482] Their names and their exalted devotion were cited
along with those of the warriors of Marathôn, in the public assembly
of Athens, by orators who sought to arouse the languid patriot, or to
denounce the cowardly deserter; and the people listened both to one and
the other with analogous feelings of grateful veneration, as well as
with equally unsuspecting faith in the matter of fact.[483]
[479] Homer, Hymn, ad Cerer. 153-475.—
... Ἡ δὲ κίουσα θεμιστοπόλοις βασιλεῦσι
Δεῖξεν Τριπτολέμῳ τε, Διόκλεΐ τε πληξίππῳ,
Εὐμόλπου τε βίῃ, Κελέῳ θ᾽ ἡγήτορι λαῶν,
Δρησμοσύνην ἱερῶν.
Also v. 105.
Τὴν δὲ ἴδον Κελέοιο Ἐλευσινίδαο θύγατρες.
The hero Eleusis is mentioned in Pausanias, i. 38, 7: some said
that he was the son of Hermês, others that he was the son of
Ogygus. Compare Hygin. f. 147.
[480] Keleos and Metaneira were worshipped by the Athenians
with divine honors (Athenagoras, Legat. p. 53, ed. Oxon.):
perhaps he confounds divine and heroic honors, as the Christian
controversialists against Paganism were disposed to do.
Triptolemus had a temple at Eleusis (Pausan. i. 38, 6).
[481] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4. Some said that Immaradus, son of
Eumolpus, had been killed by Erechtheus (Pausan. i. 5, 2);
others, that both Eumolpus and his son had experienced this fate
(Schol. ad Eurip. Phœniss. 854). But we learn from Pausanias
himself what the story in the interior of the Erechtheion
was,—that Erechtheus killed Eumolpus (i. 27, 3).
[482] Cicero, Nat. Deor. iii. 19; Philochor. ap. Schol. Œdip.
Col. 100. Three daughters of Erechtheus perished, and three
daughters were worshipped (Apollodôr. iii. 15, 4; Hesychius,
Ζεῦγος τριπάρθενον; Eurip. Erechtheus, Fragm. 3, Dindorf); but
both Euripidês and Apollodôrus said that Erechtheus was only
required to sacrifice, and only did sacrifice, _one_,—the other
two slew themselves voluntarily, from affection for their sister.
I cannot but think (in spite of the opinion of Welcker to the
contrary, Griechisch. Tragöd. ii. p. 722) that the genuine legend
represented Erechtheus as having sacrificed all three, as appears
in the Iôn of Euripidês (276):—
IÔN. Πατὴρ Ἐρεχθεὺς σὰς ἔθυσε συγγόνους;
CREÜSA. Ἔτλη πρὸ γαίας σφάγια παρθένους κτανεῖν.
IÔN. Σὺ δ᾽ ἐξεσώθης πῶς κασιγνήτων μόνη;
CREÜSA. Βρέφος νέογνον μητρὸς ἦν ἐν ἀγκάλαις.
Compare with this passage, Demosthen. Λόγος Ἐπιταφ. p. 1397,
Reisk. Just before, the death of the three daughters of Kekrops,
for infringing the commands of Athênê, had been mentioned.
Euripidês modified this in his Erechtheus, for he there
introduced the mother Praxithea consenting to the immolation
of one daughter, for the rescue of the country from a foreign
invader: to propose to a mother the immolation of three daughters
at once, would have been too revolting. In most instances we find
the strongly marked features, the distinct and glaring incidents
as well as the dark contrasts, belong to the Hesiodic or old
Post-Homeric legend; the changes made afterwards go to soften,
dilute, and to complicate, in proportion as the feelings of the
public become milder and more humane; sometimes however the later
poets add new horrors.
[483] See the striking evidence contained in the oration of
Lykurgus against Leocratês (p. 201-204. Reiske; Demosthen. Λόγ.
Ἐπιταφ. _l. c._; and Xenophon, Memor. iii. 5, 9): from the two
latter passages we see that the Athenian story represented the
invasion under Eumolpus as a combined assault from the western
continent.
Though Erechtheus gained the victory over Eumolpus, yet the story
represents Poseidôn as having put an end to the life and reign of
Erechtheus, who was (it seems) slain in the battle. He was succeeded
by his son Kekrops II., and the latter again by his son Pandiôn
II.,[484]—two names unmarked by any incidents, and which appear to be
mere duplication of the former Kekrops and Pandiôn, placed there by
the genealogizers for the purpose of filling up what seemed to them a
chronological chasm. The Attic legends were associated chiefly with
a few names of respected eponymous personages; and if the persons
called the children of Pandiôn were too numerous to admit of their
being conveniently ascribed to one father, there was no difficulty in
supposing a second prince of the same name.
[484] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 5; Eurip. Iôn, 282; Erechth. Fragm. 20,
Dindorf.
Apollodôrus passes at once from Erechtheus to his son Kekrops II., then
to Pandiôn II., next to the four sons of the latter, Ægeus, Pallas,
Nisus and Lykus. But the tragedians here insert the story of Xuthus,
Kreüsa and Iôn; the latter being the son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but given
by the god to Xuthus, and adopted by the latter as his own. Iôn becomes
the successor of Erechtheus, and his sons Teleon, Hoplês, Argadês and
Aigikorês become the eponyms of the four ancient tribes of Athens,
which subsisted until the revolution of Kleisthenês. Iôn himself is
the eponym of the Iônic race both in Asia, in Europe, and in the Ægean
islands: Dôrus and Achæus are the sons of Kreüsa by Xuthus, so that Iôn
is distinguished from both of them by being of divine parentage.[485]
According to the story given by Philochorus, Iôn rendered such
essential service in rescuing the Athenians from the attack of the
Thracians under Eumolpus, that he was afterwards made king of the
country, and distributed all the inhabitants into four tribes or
castes, corresponding to different modes of life,—soldiers, husbandmen,
goatherds, and artisans.[486] And it seems that the legend explanatory
of the origin of the festival Boëdromia, originally important enough to
furnish a name to one of the Athenian months, was attached to the aid
thus rendered by Iôn.[487]
[485] Eurip. Iôn. 1570-1595. The Kreüsa of Sophoklês, a lost
tragedy, seems to have related to the same subject.
Pausanias (vii. 1, 2) tells us that Xuthus was chosen to
arbitrate between the contending claims of the sons of Erechtheus.
[486] Philochor. ap. Harpocrat. v. Βοηδρόμια; Strabo, viii. p.
383.
[487] Philochor. ap. Harpocrat. v. Βοηδρόμια.
We pass from Iôn to persons of far greater mythical dignity and
interest,—Ægeus and his son Thêseus.
Pandiôn had four sons, Ægeus, Nisus, Lykus, and Pallas, between whom
he divided his dominions. Nisus received the territory of Megaris,
which had been under the sway of Pandiôn, and there founded the seaport
of Nisæa. Lykus was made king of the eastern coast, but a dispute
afterwards ensued, and he quitted the country altogether, to establish
himself on the southern coast of Asia Minor among the Termilæ, to
whom he gave the name of Lykians.[488] Ægeus, as the eldest of the
four, became king of Athens; but Pallas received a portion both of the
south-western coast and the interior, and he as well as his children
appear as frequent enemies both to Ægeus and to Thêseus. Pallas is
the eponym of the dême Pallênê, and the stories respecting him and
his sons seem to be connected with old and standing feuds among the
different dêmes of Attica, originally independent communities. These
feuds penetrated into the legend, and explain the story which we find
that Ægeus and Thêseus were not genuine Erechtheids, the former being
denominated a supposititious child to Pandiôn.[489]
[488] Sophokl. ap. Strab. ix. p. 392; Herodot. i. 173; Strabo,
xii. p. 573.
[489] Plutarch, Thêseus, c. 13. Αἰγεὺς θετὸς γενόμενος Πανδίονι,
καὶ μηδὲν τοῖς Ἐρεχθείδαις προσήκων. Apollodôr. iii. 15, 6.
Ægeus[490] has little importance in the mythical history except as
the father of Thêseus: it may even be doubted whether his name is
anything more than a mere cognomen of the god Poseidôn, who was (as we
are told) the real father of this great Attic Hêraklês. As I pretend
only to give a very brief outline of the general territory of Grecian
legend, I cannot permit myself to recount in detail the chivalrous
career of Thêseus, who is found both in the Kalydônian boar-hunt and
in the Argonautic expedition—his personal and victorious encounters
with the robbers Sinnis, Procrustês, Periphêtês, Scirôn and others—his
valuable service in ridding his country of the Krommyonian sow and
the Marathônian bull—his conquest of the Minotaur in Krête, and his
escape from the dangers of the labyrinth by the aid of Ariadnê, whom he
subsequently carries off and abandons—his many amorous adventures, and
his expeditions both against the Amazons and into the under-world along
with Peirithous.[491]
[490] Ægeus had by Mêdea (who took refuge at Athens after her
flight from Corinth) a son named Mêdus, who passed into Asia,
and was considered as the eponymus and progenitor of the Median
people. Datis, the general who commanded the invading Persian
army at the battle of Marathôn, sent a formal communication to
the Athenians announcing himself as the descendant of Mêdus, and
requiring to be admitted as king of Attica: such is the statement
of Diodôrus (Exc. Vatic. vii.-x. 48: see also Schol. Aristophan.
Pac. 289).
[491] Ovid, Metamorph. vii. 433.—
... "Te, maxime Theseu,
Mirata est Marathon Cretæi sanguine Tauri:
Quodque Suis securus arat Cromyona colonus,
Munus opusque tuum est. Tellus Epidauria per te
Clavigeram vidit Vulcani occumbere prolem:
Vidit et immanem Cephisias ora Procrustem.
Cercyonis letum vidit Cerealis Eleusin.
Occidit ille Sinis," etc.
Respecting the amours of Thêseus, Ister especially seems to have
entered into great details; but some of them were noticed both
in the Hesiodic poems and by Kekrops, not to mention Pherekydês
(Athen. xiii. p. 557). Peirithous, the intimate friend and
companion of Thêseus, is the eponymous hero of the Attic dême or
gens Perithoidæ (Ephorus ap. Photium, v. Περιθοῖδαι).
Thucydidês delineates the character of Thêseus as a man who combined
sagacity with political power, and who conferred upon his country the
inestimable benefit of uniting all the separate and self-governing
dêmes of Attica into one common political society.[492] From the
well-earned reverence attached to the assertion of Thucydidês, it
has been customary to reason upon this assertion as if it were
historically authentic, and to treat the romantic attributes which we
find in Plutarch and Diodôrus as if they were fiction superinduced
upon this basis of fact. Such a view of the case is in my judgment
erroneous. The athletic and amorous knight-errant is the old version
of the character—the profound and long-sighted politician is a
subsequent correction, introduced indeed by men of superior mind, but
destitute of historical warranty, and arising out of their desire to
find reasons of their own for concurring in the veneration which the
general public paid more easily and heartily to their national hero.
Thêseus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, fights with the Lapithæ against the
Centaurs: Thêseus, in the Hesiodic poems, is misguided by his passion
for the beautiful Æglê, daughter of Panopeus:[493] and the Thêseus
described in Plutarch's biography is in great part a continuation
and expansion of these same or similar attributes, mingled with many
local legends, explaining, like the Fasti of Ovid, or the lost Aitia
of Kallimachus, the original genesis of prevalent religious and social
customs.[494] Plutarch has doubtless greatly softened down and modified
the adventures which he found in the Attic logographers as well as
in the poetical epics called Thêsêis. For in his preface to the life
of Thêseus, after having emphatically declared that he is about to
transcend the boundary both of the known and the knowable, but that the
temptation of comparing the founder of Athens with the founder of Rome
is irresistible, he concludes with the following remarkable words: "I
pray that this fabulous matter may be so far obedient to my endeavors
as to receive, when purified by reason, the aspect of history: in those
cases where it haughtily scorns plausibility and will admit no alliance
with what is probable, I shall beg for indulgent hearers, willing to
receive antique narrative in a mild spirit."[495] We see here that
Plutarch sat down, not to recount the old fables as he found them, but
to purify them by reason and to impart to them the aspect of history.
We have to thank him for having retained, after this purification,
so much of what is romantic and marvellous; but we may be sure that
the sources from which he borrowed were more romantic and marvellous
still. It was the tendency of the enlightened men of Athens, from
the days of Solôn downwards, to refine and politicize the character
of Thêseus:[496] even Peisistratus expunged from one of the Hesiodic
poems the line which described the violent passion of the hero for the
fair Æglê:[497] and the tragic poets found it more congenial to the
feelings of their audience to exhibit him as a dignified and liberal
sovereign, rather than as an adventurous single-handed fighter. But the
logographers and the Alexandrine poets remained more faithful to the
old fables. The story of Hekalê, the hospitable old woman who received
and blessed Thêseus when he went against the Marathônian bull, and whom
he found dead when he came back to recount the news of his success, was
treated by Kallimachus:[498] and Virgil must have had his mind full of
the unrefined legends when he numbered this Attic Hêraklês among the
unhappy sufferers condemned to endless penance in the under-world.[499]
[492] Thuc. ii. 15. Ἐπειδὴ δὲ Θησεὺς ἐβασίλευσε, γενόμενος μετὰ
τοῦ ξυνετοῦ καὶ δυνατὸς, τά τε ἄλλα διεκόσμησε τὴν χώραν, καὶ
κατάλυσας τῶν ἄλλων πόλεων τά τε βουλευτήρια καὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς, ἐς
τὴν νῦν πόλιν ... ξυνῴκισε πάντας.
[493] Iliad, i. 265; Odyss. xi. 321. I do not notice the
suspected line, Odyss. xi. 630.
[494] Diodôrus also, from his disposition to assimilate Thêseus
to Hêraklês, has given us his chivalrous as well as his political
attributes (iv. 61).
[495] Plutarch, Thêseus, i. Εἴη μὲν οὖν ἡμῖν, ἐκκαθαιρόμενον
λόγῳ τὸ μυθῶδες ὑπακοῦσαι καὶ λαβεῖν ἱστορίας ὄψιν· ὅπου δ᾽ ἂν
αὐθαδῶς τοῦ πιθανοῦ περιφρονῇ, καὶ μὴ δέχηται ~τὴν πρὸς τὸ εἰκὸς
μίξιν~, εὐγνωμόνων ἀκροατῶν δεησόμεθα, καὶ πρᾴως τὴν ἀρχαιολογίαν
προσδεχομένων.
[496] See Isokratês, Panathenaic. (t. ii. p. 510-512, Auger);
Xenoph. Memor. iii. 5, 10. In the Helenæ Encomium, Isokratês
enlarges more upon the personal exploits of Thêseus in
conjunction with his great political merits (t. ii. p. 342-350,
Auger).
[497] Plutarch, Thêseus, 20.
[498] See the epigram of Krinagoras, Antholog. Pal. vol. ii. p.
144; ep. xv. ed. Brunck. and Kallimach. Frag. 40.
Ἀείδει δ᾽ (Kallimachus) Ἑκάλης τε φιλοξείνοιο καλιὴν,
Καὶ Θησεῖ Μαραθὼν οὓς ἐπέθηκε πόνους.
Some beautiful lines are preserved by Suidas, v. Ἐπαύλια,
περὶ Ἑκάλης θανούσης (probably spoken by Thêseus himself, see
Plutarch, Theseus, c. 14).
Ἴθι, πρηεῖα γυναικῶν,
Τὴν ὁδὸν, ἣν ἀνίαι θυμαλγέες οὐ περόωσιν·
Πόλλακι σεῖ᾽, ὦ μαῖα, φιλοξείνοιο καλιῆς
Μνησόμεθα· ξυνὸν γὰρ ἐπαύλιον ἔσκεν ἅπασι.
[499] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 617. "Sedet æternumque sedebit Infelix
Thêseus."
Two however among the Thêseian fables cannot be dismissed without
some special notice,—the war against the Amazons, and the expedition
against Krête. The former strikingly illustrates the facility as well
as the tenacity of Grecian legendary faith; the latter embraces the
story of Dædalus and Minos, two of the most eminent among Grecian
ante-historical personages.
The Amazons, daughters of Arês and Harmonia,[500] are both early
creations and frequent reproductions of the ancient epic—which
was indeed, we may generally remark, largely occupied both with
the exploits and sufferings of women, or heroines, the wives and
daughters of the Grecian heroes—and which recognized in Pallas Athênê
the finished type of an irresistible female warrior. A nation of
courageous, hardy and indefatigable women, dwelling apart from men,
permitting only a short temporary intercourse for the purpose of
renovating their numbers, and burning out their right breast with
a view of enabling themselves to draw the bow freely,—this was at
once a general type stimulating to the fancy of the poet and a theme
eminently popular with his hearers. Nor was it at all repugnant to
the faith of the latter—who had no recorded facts to guide them, and
no other standard of credibility as to the past except such poetical
narratives themselves—to conceive communities of Amazons as having
actually existed in anterior time. Accordingly we find these warlike
females constantly reappearing in the ancient poems, and universally
accepted as past realities. In the Iliad, when Priam wishes to
illustrate emphatically the most numerous host in which he ever found
himself included, he tells us that it was assembled in Phyrgia, on the
banks of the Sangarius, for the purpose of resisting the formidable
Amazons. When Bellerophôn is to be employed on a deadly and perilous
undertaking,[501] by those who indirectly wish to procure his death,
he is despatched against the Amazons. In the Æthiopis of Arktinus,
describing the post-Homeric war of Troy, Penthesileia, queen of the
Amazons, appears as the most effective ally of the besieged city,
and as the most formidable enemy of the Greeks, succumbing only to
the invincible might of Achilles.[502] The Argonautic heroes find
the Amazons on the river Thermôdon, in their expedition along the
southern coast of the Euxine. To the same spot Hêraclês goes to attack
them, in the performance of the ninth labor imposed upon him by
Eurystheus, for the purpose of procuring the girdle of the Amazonian
queen, Hippolytê;[503] and we are told that they had not yet recovered
from the losses sustained in this severe aggression when Thêseus also
assaulted and defeated them, carrying off their queen, Antiopê.[504]
This injury they avenged by invading Attica,—an undertaking (as
Plutarch justly observes) "neither trifling nor feminine," especially
if according to the statement of Hellanikus, they crossed the Cimmerian
Bosporus on the winter ice, beginning their march from the Asiatic
side of the Paulus Mæotis.[505] They overcame all the resistances
and difficulties of this prodigious march, and penetrated even into
Athens itself, where the final battle, hard-fought and at one time
doubtful, by which Theseus crushed them, was fought—in the very heart
of the city. Attic antiquaries confidently pointed out the exact
position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons
rested upon the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the
Amazoneion; the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the
public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held. The
details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the final triumph
and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as complete
faith and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Platæa
by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb
or pillar of Antiopê near the western gate of the city—the spot called
the Horkomosion near the temple of Thêseus—even the hill of Areiopagus
itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the
Amazons at the periodical festival of the Thêseia—were all so many
religious mementos of this victory;[506] which was moreover a favorite
subject of art both with the sculptor and the painter, at Athens as
well as in other parts of Greece.
[500] Pherekyd. Fragm. 25, Didot.
[501] Iliad, iii. 186; vi. 152.
[502] See Proclus's Argument of the lost Æthiopis (Fragm. Epicor.
Græcor. ed. Düntzer, p. 16). We are reduced to the first book of
Quintus Smyrnæus for some idea of the valor of Penthesileia; it
is supposed to be copied more or less closely from the Æthiopis.
See Tychsen's Dissertation prefixed to his edition of Quintus,
sections 5 and 12. Compare Dio. Chrysostom. Or. xi. p. 350,
Reiske. Philostratus (Heroica, c. 19, p. 751) gives a strange
transformation of this old epical narrative into a descent of
Amazons upon the island sacred to Achilles.
[503] Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 966, 1004; Apollod. ii. 5-9; Diodôr.
ii. 46; iv. 16. The Amazons were supposed to speak the Thracian
language (Schol. Apoll Rhod. ii. 953), though some authors
asserted them to be natives of Libyia, others of Æthiopia (_ib._
965).
Hellanikus (Frag. 33, ap. Schol. Pindar. Nem. iii. 65) said that
all the Argonauts had assisted Hêraklês in this expedition: the
fragment of the old epic poem (perhaps the Ἀμαζόνια) there quoted
mentions Telamôn specially.
[504] The many diversities in the story respecting Thêseus and
the Amazon Antiopê are well set forth in Bachet de Meziriac
(Commentaires sur Ovide, t. i. p. 317).
Welcker (Der Epische Cyclus, p. 313) supposes that the ancient
epic poem called by Suidas Ἀμαζόνια, related to the invasion of
Attica by the Amazons, and that this poem is the same, under
another title, as the Ἀτθὶς of Hegesinous cited by Pausanias: I
cannot say that he establishes this conjecture satisfactorily,
but the chapter is well worth consulting. The epic Thêsêis seems
to have given a version of the Amazonian contest in many respects
different from that which Plutarch has put together out of the
logographers (see Plut. Thês. 28): it contained a narrative of
many unconnected exploits belonging to Thêseus, and Aristotle
censures it on that account as ill-constructed (Poetic. c. 17).
The Ἀμαζονὶς or Ἀμαζονικὰ of Onasus can hardly have been (as
Heyne supposes, ad Apollod. ii. 5, 9) an epic poem: we may infer
from the rationalizing tendency of the citation from it (Schol.
ad Theocrit. xiii. 46, and Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1207) that it
was a work in prose. There was an Ἀμαζονὶς by Possis of Magnêsia
(Athenæus, vii. p. 296).
[505] Plutarch, Thêseus, 27. Pindar (Olymp. xiii. 84) represents
the Amazons as having come from the extreme north, when
Bellerophôn conquers them.
[506] Plutarch, Thêseus, 27-28; Pausan. i. 2, 4; Plato, Axiochus,
c. 2; Harpocratiôn, v. Ἀμαζονεῖον; Aristophan. Lysistrat. 678,
with the Scholia. Æschyl. (Eumenid. 685) says that the Amazons
assaulted the citadel from the Areiopagus:—
Πάγον τ᾽ Ἄρειον τόνδ᾽, Ἀμαζόνων ἕδραν
Σκηνάς τ᾽, ὅτ᾽ ἦλθον Θησέως κατὰ φθόνον
Στρατηλατοῦσαι, καὶ πόλιν νεόπτολιν
Τήνδ᾽ ὑψίπυργον ἀντεπύργωσάν ποτε.
No portion of the ante-historical epic appears to have been more deeply
worked into the national mind of Greece than this invasion and defeat
of the Amazons. It was not only a constant theme of the logographers,
but was also familiarly appealed to by the popular orators along
with Marathôn and Salamis, among those antique exploits of which
their fellow-citizens might justly be proud. It formed a part of the
retrospective faith of Herodotus, Lysias, Plato and Isokratês,[507] and
the exact date of the event was settled by the chronologists.[508] Nor
did the Athenians stand alone in such a belief. Throughout many other
regions of Greece, both European and Asiatic, traditions and memorials
of the Amazons were found. At Megara, at Trœzen, in Laconia near Cape
Tænarus, at Chæroneia in Bœôtia, and in more than one part of Thessaly,
sepulchres or monuments of the Amazons were preserved. The warlike
women (it was said), on their way to Attica, had not traversed those
countries, without leaving some evidences of their passage.[509]
[507] Herodot. ix. 27, Lysias (Epitaph, c. 3) represents the
Amazons as ἄρχουσαι πολλῶν ἔθνων: the whole race, according to
him, was nearly extinguished in their unsuccessful and calamitous
invasion of Attica. Isokratês (Panegyric. t. i. p. 206, Auger)
says the same; also Panathênaic. t. iii. p. 560, Auger; Demosth.
Epitaph, p. 1391. Reisk. Pausanias quotes Pindar's notice of the
invasion, and with the fullest belief of its historical reality
(vii. 2, 4) Plato mentions the invasion of Attica by the Amazons
in the Menexenus (c. 9), but the passage in the treatise De Legg.
c. ii. p. 804,—ἀκούων γὰρ δὴ μύθους παλαιοὺς πέπεισμαι, etc.—is
even a stronger evidence of his own belief. And Xenophon in the
Anabasis, when he compares the quiver and the hatchet of his
barbarous enemies to "those which the Amazons carry," evidently
believed himself to be speaking of real persons, though he could
have seen only the costumes and armature of those painted by
Mikôn and others (Anabas. iv. 4, 10; compare Æschyl. Supplic.
293, and Aristophan. Lysistr. 678; Lucian. Anachars, c. 34. v.
iii. p. 318).
How copiously the tale was enlarged upon by the authors of the
Atthides, we see in Plutarch, Thêseus, 27-28.
Hekatæus (ap. Steph. Byz. Ἀμαζονεῖον; also Fragm. 350, 351, 352,
Didot) and Xanthus (ap. Hesychium, v. Βουλεψίη) both treated
of the Amazons: the latter passage ought to be added to the
collection of the Fragments of Xanthus by Didot.
[508] Clemens Alexandr. Stromat, i. p. 336; Marmor Parium, Epoch.
21.
[509] Plutarch, Thês. 27-28. Steph. Byz. v. Ἀμαζονεῖον. Pausan.
ii. 32, 8; iii. 25, 2.
Amongst the Asiatic Greeks the supposed traces of the Amazons were yet
more numerous. Their proper territory was asserted to be the town and
plain of Themiskyra, near the Grecian colony of Amisus, on the river
Thermôdôn, a region called, after their name by Roman historians and
geographers.[510] But they were believed to have conquered and occupied
in early times a much wider range of territory, extending even to the
coast of Iônia and Æolis. Ephesus, Smyrna, Kymê, Myrina, Paphos and
Sinopê were affirmed to have been founded and denominated by them.[511]
Some authors placed them in Libya or Ethiopia; and when the Pontic
Greeks on the north-western shore of the Euxine had become acquainted
with the hardy and daring character of the Sarmatian maidens,—who were
obliged to have slain each an enemy in battle as the condition of
obtaining a husband, and who artificially prevented the growth of the
right breast during childhood,—they could imagine no more satisfactory
mode of accounting for such attributes than by deducing the Sarmatians
from a colony of vagrant Amazons, expelled by the Grecian heroes from
their territory on the Thermôdôn.[512] Pindar ascribed the first
establishment of the memorable temple of Artemis at Ephesus to the
Amazons. And Pausanias explains in part the preëminence which this
temple enjoyed over every other in Greece by the widely diffused renown
of its female founders,[513] respecting whom he observes (with perfect
truth, if we admit the historical character of the old epic), that
women possess an unparalleled force of resolution in resisting adverse
events, since the Amazons, after having been first roughly handled
by Hêraklês and then completely defeated by Thêseus, could yet find
courage to play so conspicuous a part in the defence of Troy against
the Grecian besiegers.[514]
[510] Pherekydês ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rh. ii. 373-992; Justin, ii.
4; Strabo, xii. p. 547, Θεμίσκυραν, τὸ τῶν Ἀμαζόνων οἰκητήριον;
Diodôr. ii. 45-46; Sallust ap. Serv. ad Virgil. Æneid. xi. 659;
Pompon. Mela, i. 19; Plin. H. N. vi. 4. The geography of Quintus
Curtius (vi. 4) and of Philostratus (Heroic c. 19) is on this
point indefinite, and even inconsistent.
[511] Ephor. Fragm. 87, Didot. Strabo, xi. p. 505; xiii p. 573;
xiii. p. 622. Pausan. iv. 31, 6; vii. 2. 4. Tacit. Ann. iii. 61.
Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 965.
The derivation of the name Sinopê from an Amazon was given by
Hekatæus (Fragm. 352). Themiskyra also had one of the Amazons for
its eponymus (Appian, Bell. Mithridat. 78).
Some of the most venerated religious legends at Sinopê were
attached to the expedition of Hêraklês against the Amazons:
Autolykus, the oracle-giving hero, worshipped with great
solemnity even at the time when the town was besieged by
Lucullus, was the companion of Hêraclês (Appian, _ib._ c. 83).
Even a small mountain village in the territory of Ephesus, called
Latoreia, derived its name from one of the Amazons (Athenæ. i. p.
31).
[512] Herodot. iv. 108-117, where he gives the long tale,
imagined by the Pontic Greeks, of the origin of the Sarmatian
nation. Compare Hippokratês, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, c. 17;
Ephorus, Fragm. 103; Skymn. Chius, v. 102; Plato, Legg. vii. p.
804; Diodôr. ii. 34.
The testimony of Hippokrates certifies the practice of the
Sarmatian women to check the growth of the right breast: Τὸν
δέξιον δὲ μαζὸν οὐκ ἔχουσιν. Παιδίοισι γὰρ ἐοῦσιν ἔτι νηπίοισιν
αἱ μητέρες χαλκεῖον τετεχνήμενον ἐπ᾽ αὐτέῳ τούτῳ διάπυρον
ποιέουσαι, πρὸς τὸν μαζὸν τιθέασι τὸν δέξιον· καὶ ἐπικαίεται,
ὥστε τὴν αὔξησιν φθείρεσθαι, ἐς δὲ τὸν δέξιον ὦμον καὶ βραχίονα
πᾶσαν τὴν ἴσχυν καὶ τὸ πλῆθος ἐκδιδόναι.
Ktêsias also compares a warlike Sakian woman to the Amazons
(Fragm. Persic. ii. pp. 221, 449, Bähr).
[513] Pausan. iv. 31, 6; vii. 2, 4. Dionys. Periêgêt. 828.
[514] Pausan. i. 15, 2.
It is thus that in what is called early Grecian history, as the
Greeks themselves looked back upon it, the Amazons were among the
most prominent and undisputed personages. Nor will the circumstance
appear wonderful if we reflect, that the belief in them was first
established at a time when the Grecian mind was fed with nothing else
but religious legend and epic poetry, and that the incidents of the
supposed past, as received from these sources, were addressed to their
faith and feelings, without being required to adapt themselves to any
canons of credibility drawn from present experience. But the time came
when the historians of Alexander the Great audaciously abused this
ancient credence. Amongst other tales calculated to exalt the dignity
of that monarch, they affirmed that after his conquest and subjugation
of the Persian empire, he had been visited in Hyrcania by Thalestris,
queen of the Amazons, who admiring his warlike prowess, was anxious to
be enabled to return into her own country in a condition to produce
offspring of a breed so invincible.[515] But the Greeks had now been
accustomed for a century and a half to historical and philosophical
criticism—and that uninquiring faith, which was readily accorded to the
wonders of the past, could no longer be invoked for them when tendered
as present reality. For the fable of the Amazons was here reproduced in
its naked simplicity, without being rationalized or painted over with
historical colors.
[515] Arrian, Exped. Alex. vii. 13; compare iv. 15; Quint. Curt.
vi. 4; Justin, xlii. 4. The note of Freinshemius on the above
passage of Quintus Curtius is full of valuable references on the
subject of the Amazons.
Some literary men indeed, among whom were Dêmêtrius of Skepsis, and
the Mitylenæan Theophanês, the companion of Pompey in his expeditions,
still continued their belief both in Amazons present and Amazons past;
and when it becomes notorious that at least there were none such on the
banks of the Thermôdôn, these authors supposed them to have migrated
from their original locality, and to have settled in the unvisited
regions north of Mount Caucasus.[516] Strabo, on the contrary, feeling
that the grounds of disbelief applied with equal force to the ancient
stories and to the modern, rejected both the one and the other. But
he remarks at the same time, not without some surprise, that it was
usual with most persons to adopt a middle course,—to retain the Amazons
as historical phænomena of the remote past, but to disallow them as
realities of the present, and to maintain that the breed had died
out.[517] The accomplished intellect of Julius Cæsar did not scruple
to acknowledge them as having once conquered and held in dominion
a large portion of Asia;[518] and the compromise between early,
traditional, and religious faith on the one hand, and established
habits of critical research on the other, adopted by the historian
Arrian, deserves to be transcribed in his own words, as illustrating
strikingly the powerful sway of the old legends even over the most
positive-minded Greeks:—"Neither Aristobulus nor Ptolemy (he observes),
nor any other competent witness, has recounted this (visit of the
Amazons and their queen to Alexander): nor does it seem to me that the
race of the Amazons was preserved down to that time, nor have they been
noticed either by any one before Alexander, or by Xenophôn, though he
mentions both the Phasians and the Kolchians, and the other barbarous
nations which the Greeks saw both before and after their arrival at
Trapezus, in which marches they must have met with the Amazons, if the
latter had been still in existence. Yet _it is incredible to me_ that
this race of women, celebrated as they have been by authors so many
and so commanding, _should never have existed at all_. The story tells
of Hêraklês, that he set out from Greece and brought back with him the
girdle of their queen Hippolytê; also of Thêseus and the Athenians,
that they were the first who defeated in battle and repelled these
women in their invasion of Europe; and the combat of the Athenians
with the Amazons has been painted by Mikôn, not less than that between
the Athenians and the Persians. Moreover Herodotus has spoken in many
places of these women, and those Athenian orators who have pronounced
panegyrics on the citizens slain in battle, have dwelt upon the victory
over the Amazons as among the most memorable of Athenian exploits. If
the satrap of Media sent any equestrian women at all to Alexander, I
think that they must have come from some of the neighboring tribes,
practised in riding and equipped in the costume generally called
Amazonian."[519]
[516] Strabo, xi. p. 503-504; Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 103;
Plutarch, Pompeius, c. 35. Plin. N. H. vi. 7. Plutarch still
retains the old description of Amazons from the mountains near
the Thermôdôn. Appian keeps clear of this geographical error,
probably copying more exactly the language of Theophanês, who
must have been well aware that when Lucullus besieged Themiskyra,
he did not find it defended by the Amazons (see Appian, Bell.
Mithridat. c. 78). Ptolemy (v. 9) places the Amazons in the
imperfectly known regions of Asiatic Sarmatia, north of the
Caspian and near the river Rha (Volga). "This fabulous community
of women (observes Forbiger, Handbuch der alten Geographie,
ii. 77, p. 457) was a phænomenon much too interesting for the
geographers easily to relinquish."
[517] Strabo, xi. p. 505. Ἴδιον δέ τι συμβέβηκε τῷ λόγῳ τῷ περὶ
τῶν Ἀμαζόνων. Οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλοι τὸ μυθῶδες καὶ τὸ ἱστορικὸν
διωρίσμενον ἔχουσι· τὰ γὰρ παλαιὰ καὶ ψευδῆ καὶ τερατώδη, μῦθοι
καλοῦνται· [_Note._ Strabo does not always speak of the μῦθοι in
this disrespectful tone; he is sometimes much displeased with
those who dispute the existence of an historical kernel in the
inside, especially with regard to Homer.] ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία βούλεται
τἀληθὲς, ἄντε παλαιὸν, ἄντε νέον· καὶ τὸ τερατῶδες ἢ οὐκ ἔχει, ἢ
σπάνιον. Περὶ δὲ τῶν Ἀμαζόνων τὰ αὐτὰ λέγεται καὶ νῦν καὶ παλαὶ,
τερατώδη τ᾽ ὄντα, καὶ πίστεως πόῤῥω. Τίς γὰρ ἂν πιστεύσειεν,
ὡς γυναικῶν στράτος, ἢ πόλις, ἢ ἔθνος, συσταίη ἂν πότε χωρὶς
ἀνδρῶν; καὶ οὐ μόνον συσταίη, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐφόδους ποιήσαιτο ἐπὶ τὴν
ἀλλοτρίαν, καὶ κρατήσειεν οὐ τῶν ἐγγὺς μόνον, ὥστε καὶ μέχρι τῆς
νῦν Ἰωνίας προελθεῖν, ἀλλὰ καὶ διαπόντιον στείλαιτο στρατίαν
μέχρι τῆς Ἀττικῆς; Ἀλλὰ μὴν ταῦτά γε αὐτὰ καὶ νῦν λέγεται περὶ
αὐτῶν· ~ἐπιτείνει δὲ τὴν ἰδιότητα καὶ τὸ πιστεύεσθαι τὰ παλαιὰ
μᾶλλον ἢ τὰ νῦν~. There are however, other passages in which he
speaks of the Amazons as realities.
Justin (ii. 4) recognizes the great power and extensive conquests
of the Amazons in very early times, but says that they gradually
declined down to the reign of Alexander, in whose time there
were _just a few remaining_; the queen with these few visited
Alexander, but shortly afterwards the whole breed became extinct.
This hypothesis has the merit of convenience, perhaps of
ingenuity.
[518] Suetonius, Jul. Cæsar, c. 22. "In Syriâ quoque regnasse
Semiramin (Julius Cæsar said this), magnamque Asiæ partem
Amazonas tenuisse quondam."
In the splendid triumph of the emperor Aurelian at Rome after the
defeat of Zenobia, a few Gothic women who had been taken in arms
were exhibited among the prisoners; the official placard carried
along with them announced them as _Amazons_ (Vopiscus Aurel. in
Histor. August. Scrip. p. 260, ed. Paris).
[519] Arrian, Expedit. Alexand. vii. 13.
There cannot be a more striking evidence of the indelible force with
which these ancient legends were worked into the national faith and
feelings of the Greeks, than these remarks of a judicious historian
upon the fable of the Amazons. Probably if any plausible mode of
rationalizing it, and of transforming it into a quasi-political event,
had been offered to Arrian, he would have been better pleased to
adopt such a middle term, and would have rested comfortably in the
supposition that he believed the legend in its true meaning, while his
less inquiring countrymen were imposed upon by the exaggerations of
poets. But as the story was presented to him plain and unvarnished,
either for acceptance or rejection, his feelings as a patriot
and a religious man prevented him from applying to the past such
tests of credibility as his untrammelled reason acknowledged to be
paramount in regard to the present. When we see moreover how much
his belief was strengthened, and all tendency to scepticism shut out
by the familiarity of his eye and memory with sculptured or painted
Amazons[520]—we may calculate the irresistible force of this sensible
demonstration on the convictions of the unlettered public, at once
more deeply retentive of passive impressions, and unaccustomed to the
countervailing habit of rational investigation into evidence. Had the
march of an army of warlike women, from the Thermôdôn or the Tanais
into the heart of Attica, been recounted to Arrian as an incident
belonging to the time of Alexander the Great, he would have rejected
it no less emphatically than Strabô; but cast back as it was into an
undefined past, it took rank among the hallowed traditions of divine
or heroic antiquity,—gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to
scrutinize in argument.[521]
[520] Ktêsias described as real animals, existing in wild and
distant regions, the heterogeneous and fantastic combinations
which he saw sculptured in the East (see this stated and
illustrated in Bähr, Preface to the Fragm. of Ktêsias, pp. 58,
59).
[521] Heyne observes (Apollodôr. ii. 5, 9) with respect to the
fable of the Amazons, "In his historiarum fidem aut vestigia nemo
quæsiverit." Admitting the wisdom of this counsel (and I think
it indisputable), why are we required to presume, in the absence
of all proof, an historical basis for each of those _other_
narratives, such as the Kalydônian boar-hunt, the Argonautic
expedition, or the siege of Troy, which go to make up, along
with the story of the Amazons, the aggregate matter of Grecian
legendary faith? If the tale of the Amazons could gain currency
without any such support, why not other portions of the ancient
epic?
An author of easy belief, Dr. F. Nagel, vindicates the historical
reality of the Amazons (Geschichte der Amazonen, Stutgart,
1838). I subjoin here a different explanation of the Amazonian
tale, proceeding from another author who rejects the historical
basis, and contained in a work of learning and value (Guhl,
_Ephesiaca_, Berlin, 1843. p. 132):—
"Id tantum monendum videtur, Amazonas nequaquam historice
accipiendas esse, sed e contrario totas ad mythologiam pertinere.
Earum enim fabulas quum ex frequentium hierodularum gregibus in
cultibus et sacris Asiaticis ortas esse ingeniose ostenderit
Tolken, jam _inter omnes mythologiæ peritos constat_, Amazonibus
nihil fere nisi peregrini cujusdam cultus notionem expressum
esse, ejusque cum Græcorum religione certamen frequentibus istis
pugnis designatum esse, quas cum Amazonibus tot Græcorum heroes
habuisse credebantur, Hercules, Bellerophon, Theseus, Achilles,
et vel ipse, quem Ephesi cultum fuisse supra ostendimus,
Dionysus. Quæ Amazonum notio primaria, quum paulatim Euemeristicâ
(ut ita dicam) ratione ita transformaretur, ut Amazones pro vero
feminarum populo haberentur, necesse quoque erat, ut omnibus
fere locis, ubi ejusmodi religionum certamina locum habuerunt,
Amazones habitasse, vel eo usque processisse, crederentur.
Quod cum nusquam manifestius fuerit, quam in Asiâ minore, et
potissimum in eâ parte quæ Græciam versus vergit, haud mirandum
est omnes fere ejus oræ urbes ab Amazonibus conditas putari."
I do not know the evidence upon which this conjectural
interpretation rests, but the statement of it, though it boasts
so many supporters among mythological critics, carries no
appearance of probability to my mind. Priam fights against the
Amazons as well as the Grecian heroes.
CHAPTER XII.
KRETAN LEGENDS.—MINOS AND HIS FAMILY.
To understand the adventures of Thêseus in Krête, it will be necessary
to touch briefly upon Minôs and the Krêtan heroic genealogy.
Minôs and Rhadamanthus, according to Homer, are sons of Zeus, by
Europê,[522] daughter of the widely-celebrated Phœnix, born in Krête.
Minôs is the father of Deukaliôn, whose son Idomeneus, in conjunction
with Mêrionês, conducts the Krêtan troops to the host of Agamemnôn
before Troy. Minôs is ruler of Knossus, and familiar companion of
the great Zeus. He is spoken of as holding guardianship in Krête—not
necessarily meaning the whole of the island: he is farther decorated
with a golden sceptre, and constituted judge over the dead in the
under-world to settle their disputes, in which function Odysseus finds
him—this however by a passage of comparatively late interpolation into
the Odyssey. He also had a daughter named Ariadnê, for whom the artist
Dædalus fabricated in the town of Knossus the representation of a
complicated dance, and who was ultimately carried off by Thêseus: she
died in the island of Dia, deserted by Thêseus and betrayed by Dionysos
to the fatal wrath of Artemis. Rhadamanthus seems to approach to Minôs
both in judicial functions and posthumous dignity. He is conveyed
expressly to Eubœa, by the semi-divine sea-carriers the Phæacians, to
inspect the gigantic corpse of the earth-born Tityus—the longest voyage
they ever undertook. He is moreover after death promoted to an abode
of undisturbed bliss in the Elysian plain at the extremity of the
earth.[523]
[522] Europê was worshipped with very peculiar solemnity in the
island of Krête (see Dictys Cretensis, De Bello Trojano, i. c. 2).
The venerable plane-tree, under which Zeus and Europê had
reposed, was still shown, hard by a fountain at Gortyn in
Krête, in the time of Theophrastus: it was said to be the only
plane-tree in the neighborhood which never cast its leaves
(Theophrast. Hist. Plant. i. 9).
[523] Homer, Iliad, xiii. 249, 450; xiv. 321. Odyss. xi. 322-568;
xix. 179; iv. 564-vii. 321.
The Homeric Minôs in the under-world is not a judge of the
previous lives of the dead, so as to determine whether they
deserve reward or punishment for their conduct on earth: such
functions are not assigned to him earlier than the time of Plato.
He administers justice _among_ the dead, who are conceived as a
sort of society, requiring some presiding judge: θεμιστεύοντα
νεκύεσσι, with regard to Minôs, is said very much like (Odyss.
xi. 484) νῦν αὖτε μέγα κρατέεις νεκύεσσι with regard to Achilles.
See this matter partially illustrated in Heyne's Excursus xi. to
the sixth book of the Æneid of Virgil.
According to poets later than Homer, Europê is brought over by Zeus
from Phœnicia to Krête, where she bears to him three sons, Minôs,
Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. The latter leaves Krête and settles in
Lykia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions
of Asia Minor, is connected by various mythical genealogies with
Krête, though the Sarpêdôn of the Iliad has no connection with Krête,
and is not the son of Europê. Sarpêdôn having become king of Lykia,
was favored by his father, Zeus, with permission to live for three
generations.[524] At the same time the youthful Milêtus, a favorite
of Sarpêdôn, quitted Krête, and established the city which bore his
name on the coast of Asia Minor. Rhadamanthus became sovereign of
and lawgiver among the islands in the Ægean: he subsequently went to
Bœôtia, where he married the widowed Alkmênê, mother of Hêraklês.
[524] Apollodôr. iii. 1, 2. Καὶ αὐτῷ δίδωσι Ζεὺς ἐπὶ τρεῖς γενεὰς
ζῇν. This circumstance is evidently imagined by the logographers
to account for the appearance of Sarpêdôn in the Trojan war,
fighting against Idomeneus, the grandson of Minôs. Nisus is the
eponymus of Nisæa, the port of the town of Megara: his tomb
was shown at Athens (Pausan. i. 19, 5). Minôs is the eponym of
the island of Minoa (opposite the port of Nisæa), where it was
affirmed that the fleet of Minôs was stationed (Pausan. i. 44, 5).
Europê finds in Krête a king Astêrius, who marries her and adopts her
children by Zeus: this Astêrius is the son of Krês, the eponym of the
island, or (according to another genealogy by which it was attempted to
be made out that Minôs was of Dôrian race) he was a son of the daughter
of Krês by Tektamus, the son of Dôrus, who had migrated into the island
from Greece.
Minôs married Pasiphaê, daughter of the god Hêlios and Perseïs, by
whom he had Katreus, Deukaliôn, Glaukus, Androgeos, names marked in
the legendary narrative,—together with several daughters, among whom
were Ariadnê and Phædra. He offended Poseidôn by neglecting to fulfil a
solemnly-made vow, and the displeased god afflicted his wife Pasiphaê
with a monstrous passion for a bull. The great artist Dædalus, son of
Eupalamus, a fugitive from Athens, became the confidant of this amour,
from which sprang the Minôtaur, a creature half man and half bull.[525]
This Minôtaur was imprisoned by Minôs in the labyrinth, an inextricable
inclosure constructed by Dædalus for that express purpose, by order of
Minôs.
[525] Apollodôr iii. 1, 2.
Minôs acquired great nautical power, and expelled the Karian
inhabitants from many of the islands of the Ægean, which he placed
under the government of his sons on the footing of tributaries. He
undertook several expeditions against various places on the coast—one
against Nisus, the son of Pandiôn, king of Megara, who had amongst
the hair of his head one peculiar lock of a purple color: an oracle
had pronounced that his life and reign would never be in danger so
long as he preserved this precious lock. The city would have remained
inexpugnable, if Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, had not conceived a
violent passion for Minôs. While her father was asleep, she cut off
the lock on which his safety hung, so that the Krêtan king soon became
victorious. Instead of performing his promise to carry Scylla away
with him to Krête, he cast her from the stern of his vessel into the
sea:[526] both Scylla and Nisus were changed into birds.
[526] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 8. See the Ciris of Virgil, a juvenile
poem on the subject of this fable; also Hyginus, f. 198; Schol.
Eurip. Hippol. 1200. Propertius (iii. 19, 21) gives the features
of the story with tolerable fidelity; Ovid takes considerable
liberties with it (Metam. viii. 5-150).
Androgeos, son of Minôs having displayed such rare qualities as to
vanquish all his competitors at the Panathenaic festival in Athens,
was sent by Ægeus the Athenian king to contend against the bull of
Marathôn,—an enterprise in which he perished, and Minôs made war upon
Athens to avenge his death. He was for a long time unable to take the
city: at length he prayed to his father Zeus to aid him in obtaining
redress from the Athenians, and Zeus sent upon them pestilence and
famine. In vain did they endeavor to avert these calamities by offering
up as propitiatory sacrifices the four daughters of Hyacinthus. Their
sufferings still continued, and the oracle directed them to submit to
any terms which Minôs might exact. He required that they should send
to Krête a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, periodically,
to be devoured by the Minôtaur,[527]—offered to him in a labyrinth
constructed by Dædalus, including countless different passages, out of
which no person could escape.
[527] Apollodôr. iii. 15, 8.
Every ninth year this offering was to be despatched. The more common
story was, that the youths and maidens thus destined to destruction
were selected by lot—but the logographer Hellanikus said that Minôs
came to Athens and chose them himself.[528] The third period for
despatching the victims had arrived, and Athens was plunged in the
deepest affliction, when Thêseus determined to devote himself as one
of them, and either to terminate the sanguinary tribute or to perish.
He prayed to Poseidôn for help, and the Delphian god assured him that
Aphroditê would sustain and extricate him. On arriving at Knossus
he was fortunate enough to captivate the affections of Ariadnê, the
daughter of Minôs, who supplied him with a sword and a clue of thread.
With the former he contrived to kill the Minôtaur, the latter served to
guide his footsteps in escaping from the labyrinth. Having accomplished
this triumph, he left Krête with his ship and companions unhurt,
carrying off Ariadnê, whom however he soon abandoned on the island of
Naxos. On his way home to Athens, he stopped at Dêlos, where he offered
a grateful sacrifice to Apollo for his escape, and danced along with
the young men and maidens whom he had rescued from the Minôtaur, a
dance called the Geranus, imitated from the twists and convolutions
of the Krêtan labyrinth. It had been concerted with his father Ægeus,
that if he succeeded in his enterprise against the Minôtaur, he should
on his return hoist white sails in his ship in place of the black
canvas which she habitually carried when employed on this mournful
embassy. But Thêseus forgot to make the change of sails; so that Ægeus,
seeing the ship return with her equipment of mourning unaltered, was
impressed with the sorrowful conviction that his son had perished,
and cast himself into the sea. The ship which made this voyage was
preserved by the Athenians with careful solicitude, being constantly
repaired with new timbers, down to the time of the Phalerian Dêmêtrius:
every year she was sent from Athens to Dêlos with a solemn sacrifice
and specially-nominated envoys. The priest of Apollo decked her stern
with garlands before she quitted the port, and during the time which
elapsed until her return, the city was understood to abstain from all
acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was unlawful to put
to death any person even under formal sentence by the dikastery. This
accidental circumstance becomes especially memorable, from its having
postponed for thirty days the death of the lamented Socratês.[529]
[528] See, on the subject of Thêseus and the Minôtaur, Eckermann,
Lehrbuch der Religions Geschichte und Mythologie, vol. ii. ch.
xiii. p. 133. He maintains that the tribute of these human
victims paid by Athens to Minôs is an historical fact. Upon what
this belief is grounded, I confess I do not see.
[529] Plato, Phædon, c. 2, 3; Xenoph. Memor. iv. 8. 2. Plato
especially noticed τοὺς δὶς ἕπτα ἐκείνους, the seven youths and
the seven maidens whom Thêseus conveyed to Krête and brought
back safely: this number seems an old and constant feature in
the legend, maintained by Sappho and Bacchylidês as well as by
Euripidês (Herc. Fur. 1318). See Servius ad Virgil Æneid. vi. 21.
The legend respecting Thêseus, and his heroic rescue of the seven
noble youths and maidens from the jaws of the Minôtaur, was thus both
commemorated and certified to the Athenian public, by the annual holy
ceremony and by the unquestioned identity of the vessel employed in it.
There were indeed many varieties in the mode of narrating the incident;
and some of the Attic logographers tried to rationalize the fable by
transforming the Minôtaur into a general or a powerful athlete, named
Taurus, whom Thêseus vanquished in Krête.[530] But this altered version
never overbore the old fanciful character of the tale as maintained by
the poets. A great number of other religious ceremonies and customs,
as well as several chapels or sacred enclosures in honor of different
heroes, were connected with different acts and special ordinances
of Thêseus. To every Athênian who took part in the festivals of
the Oschophoria, the Pyanepsia, or the Kybernêsia, the name of this
great hero was familiar, and the motives for offering to him solemn
worship at his own special festival of the Thêseia, became evident and
impressive.
[530] For the general narrative and its discrepancies, see
Plutarch, Thês. c. 15-19; Diodôr. iv. 60-62; Pausan. i. 17, 3;
Ovid, Epist. Ariadn. Thês. 104. In that other portion of the
work of Diodôrus which relates more especially to Krête, and is
borrowed from Kretan logographers and historians (v. 64-80), he
mentions nothing at all respecting the war of Minôs with Athens.
In the drama of Euripidês called Thêseus, the genuine story
of the youths and maidens about to be offered as food to the
Minotaur was introduced (Schol. ad Aristoph. Vesp. 312).
Ariadnê figures in the Odyssey along with Thêseus: she is the
daughter of Minôs, carried off by Thêseus from Krête, and killed
by Artemis in the way home: there is no allusion to Minôtaur, or
tribute, or self-devotion of Thêseus (Odyss. xi. 324). This is
probably the oldest and simplest form of the legend—one of the
many amorous (compare Theognis, 1232) adventures of Thêseus: the
rest is added by post-Homeric poets.
The respect of Aristotle for Minôs induces him to adopt the
hypothesis that the Athenian youths and maidens were not put
to death in Krête, but grew old in servitude (Aristot. Fragm.
Βοττιαίων Πολιτεία, p. 106. ed. Neumann. of the Fragments of the
treatise Περὶ Πολιτειῶν, Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. p. 298).
The same Athenian legends which ennobled and decorated the character
of Thêseus, painted in repulsive colors the attributes of Minôs; and
the traits of the old Homeric comrade of Zeus were buried under those
of the conqueror and oppressor of Athens. His history like that of
the other legendary personages of Greece, consists almost entirely of
a string of family romances and tragedies. His son Katreus, father
of Aëropê, wife of Atreus, was apprized by an oracle that he would
perish by the hand of one of his own children: he accordingly sent them
out of the island, and Althæmenês, his son, established himself in
Rhodes. Katreus having become old, and fancying that he had outlived
the warning of the oracle, went over to Rhodes to see Althæmenês.
In an accidental dispute which arose between his attendants and the
islanders, Althæmenês inadvertently took part and slew his father
without knowing him. Glaukus, the youngest son of Minôs, pursuing a
mouse, fell into a reservoir of honey and was drowned. No one knew
what had become of him, and his father was inconsolable; at length the
Argeian Polyeidus, a prophet wonderfully endowed by the gods, both
discovered the boy and restored him to life, to the exceeding joy of
Minôs.[531]
[531] Apollodôr. iii. cap. 2-3.
The latter at last found his death in an eager attempt to overtake and
punish Dædalus. This great artist, the eponymous hero of the Attic gens
or dême called the Dædalidæ, and the descendant of Erechtheus through
Mêtion, had been tried at the tribunal of Areiopagus and banished for
killing his nephew Talos, whose rapidly improving skill excited his
envy.[532] He took refuge in Krête, where he acquired the confidence of
Minôs, and was employed (as has been already mentioned) in constructing
the labyrinth; subsequently however he fell under the displeasure
of Minôs, and was confined as a close prisoner in the inextricable
windings of his own edifice. His unrivalled skill and resource however
did not forsake him. He manufactured wings both for himself and for
his son Ikarus, with which they flew over the sea: the father arrived
safely in Sicily at Kamikus, the residence of the Sikanian king
Kokalus, but the son, disdaining paternal example and admonition, flew
so high that his wings were melted by the sun and he fell into the sea,
which from him was called the Ikarian sea.[533]
[532] Pherekyd. Fragm. 105; Hellanik. Fragm. 82 (Didot); Pausan.
vii. 4, 5.
[533] Diodôr. iv. 79; Ovid, Metamorph. viii. 181. Both Ephorus
and Philistus mentioned the coming of Dædalus to Kokalus in
Sicily (Ephor. Fr. 99; Philist. Fragm. 1, Didot): probably
Antiochus noticed it also (Diodôr. xii. 71). Kokalus was the
point of commencement for the Sicilian historians.
Dædalus remained for some time in Sicily, leaving in various parts of
the island many prodigious evidences of mechanical and architectural
skill.[534] At length Minôs bent upon regaining possession of his
person, undertook an expedition against Kokalus with a numerous fleet
and army. Kokalus affecting readiness to deliver up the fugitive, and
receiving Minôs with apparent friendship, ordered a bath to be prepared
for him by his three daughters, who, eager to protect Dædalus at any
price, drowned the Krêtan king in the bath with hot water.[535] Many
of the Krêtans who had accompanied him remained in Sicily and founded
the town of Minoa, which they denominated after him. But not long
afterwards Zeus roused all the inhabitants of Krête (except the towns
of Polichna and Præsus) to undertake with one accord an expedition
against Kamikus for the purpose of avenging the death of Minôs. They
besieged Kamikus in vain for five years, until at last famine compelled
them to return. On their way along the coast of Italy, in the Gulf
of Tarentum, a terrible storm destroyed their fleet and obliged them
to settle permanently in the country: they founded Hyria with other
cities, and became Messapian Iapygians. Other settlers, for the most
part Greeks, immigrated into Krête to the spots which this movement
had left vacant, and in the second generation after Minôs occurred
the Trojan war. The departed Minôs was exceedingly offended with the
Krêtans for coöperating in avenging the injury to Menelaus, since the
Greeks generally had lent no aid to the Krêtans in their expedition
against the town of Kamikus. He sent upon Krête, after the return
of Idomeneus from Troy, such terrible visitations of famine and
pestilence, that the population again died out or expatriated, and was
again renovated by fresh immigrations. The intolerable suffering[536]
thus brought upon the Krêtans by the anger of Minôs, for having
coöperated in the general Grecian aid to Menelaus, was urged by them to
the Greeks as the reason why they could take no part in resisting the
invasion of Xerxês; and it is even pretended that they were advised and
encouraged to adopt this ground of excuse by the Delphian oracle.[537]
[534] Diodôr. iv. 80.
[535] Pausan. vii. 4, 5; Schol. Pindar. Nem. iv. 95; Hygin. fab.
44; Conon, Narr. 25; Ovid, Ibis, 291.—
"Vel tua maturet, sicut Minoia fata,
Per caput infusæ fervidus humor aquæ."
This story formed the subject of a lost drama of Sophoklês,
Καμίκιοι or Μίνως; it was also told by Kallimachus, ἐν Αἰτίοις,
as well as by Philostephanus (Schol. Iliad, ii. 145).
[536] This curious and very characteristic narrative is given by
Herodot. vii. 169-171.
[537] Herodot. vii. 169. The answer ascribed to the Delphian
oracle, on the question being put by the Krêtan envoys whether it
would be better for them to aid the Greeks against Xerxês or not,
is highly emphatic and poetical: Ὦ νήπιοι, ἐπιμέμφεσθε ὅσα ὑμῖν
ἐκ τῶν Μενελέω τιμωρημάτων Μίνως ἔπεμψε μηνίων δακρύματα, ὅτι
οἱ μὲν οὐ ξυνεξεπρήξαντο αὐτῷ τὸν ἐν Καμίκῳ θάνατον γενόμενον,
ὑμεῖς δὲ κείνοισι τὴν ἐκ Σπάρτης ἁρπασθεῖσαν ὑπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς βαρβάρου
γυναῖκα.
If such an answer was ever returned at all, I cannot but think
that it must have been from some oracle in Krête itself, not from
Delphi. The Delphian oracle could never have so far forgotten
its obligations to the general cause of Greece, at that critical
moment, which involved moreover the safety of all its own
treasures, as to deter the Krêtans from giving assistance.
Such is the Minôs of the poets and logographers, with his legendary and
romantic attributes: the familiar comrade of the great Zeus,—the judge
among the dead in Hadês,—the husband of Pasiphaê, daughter of the god
Hêlios,—the father of the goddess Ariadnê, as well as of Androgeos,
who perishes and is worshipped at Athens,[538] and of the boy Glaukus,
who is miraculously restored to life by a prophet,—the person
beloved by Scylla, and the amorous pursuer of the nymph or goddess
Britomartis,[539]—the proprietor of the Labyrinth and of the Minôtaur,
and the exacter of a periodical tribute of youths and maidens from
Athens as food for this monster,—lastly, the follower of the fugitive
artist Dædalus to Kamikus, and the victim of the three ill-disposed
daughters of Kokalus in a bath. With this strongly-marked portrait,
the Minôs of Thucydidês and Aristotle has scarcely anything in common
except the name. He is the first to acquire _Thalassokraty_, or command
of the Ægean sea: he expels the Karian inhabitants from the Cyclades
islands, and sends thither fresh colonists under his own sons; he
puts down piracy, in order that he may receive his tribute regularly;
lastly, he attempts to conquer Sicily, but fails in the enterprise and
perishes.[540] Here we have conjectures, derived from the analogy of
the Athenian maritime empire in the historical times, substituted in
place of the fabulous incidents, and attached to the name of Minôs.
[538] Hesiod, Theogon. 949; Pausan. i. 1, 4.
[539] Kallimach. Hymn. ad Dian. 189. Strabo (x. p. 476) dwells
also upon the strange contradiction of the legends concerning
Minôs: I agree with Hoeckh (Kreta, ii. p. 93) that δασμόλογος in
this passage refers to the tribute exacted from Athens for the
Minôtaur.
[540] Thucyd. i. 4. Μίνως γὰρ, παλαίτατος ὧν ἀκοῇ ἴσμεν,
ναυτικὸν ἐκτήσατο, καὶ τῆς νῦν Ἑλληνικῆς θαλάσσης ἐπὶ πλεῖστον
ἐκράτησε, καὶ τῶν Κυκλάδων νήσων ἦρξέ τε καὶ οἰκιστὴς αὐτὸς τῶν
πλείστων ἐγένετο, Κᾶρας ἐξελάσας καὶ τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας ἡγεμόνας
ἐγκαταστήσας· τό τε λῃστικὸν, ὡς εἰκὸς, καθῄρει ἐκ τῆς θαλάσσης,
ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἠδύνατο, τοῦ τὰς προσόδους μᾶλλον ἰέναι αὐτῷ. See also
c. 8.
Aristot. Polit. ii. 7, 2, Δοκεῖ δ᾽ ἡ νῆσος καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν
τὴν Ἑλληνικὴν πεφυκέναι καὶ κεῖσθαι καλῶς ... διὸ καὶ τὴν
τῆς θαλάσσης ἀρχὴν κατέσχεν ὁ Μίνως, καὶ τὰς νήσους τὰς μὲν
ἐχειρώσατο, τὰς δὲ ᾤκισε· τέλος δ᾽ ἐπιθέμενος τῇ Σικελίᾳ τὸν βίον
ἐτελεύτησεν ἐκεῖ περὶ Κάμικον.
Ephorus (ap. Skymn. Chi. 542) repeated the same statement: he
mentioned also the autochthonous king Krês.
In the fable, a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens is paid
to him periodically by the Athenians; in the historicized narrative
this character of a tribute-collector is preserved, but the tribute
is money collected from dependent islands;[541] and Aristotle points
out to us how conveniently Krête is situated to exercise empire over
the Ægean. The expedition against Kamikus, instead of being directed
to the recovery of the fugitive Dædalus, is an attempt on the part of
the great thalassokrat to conquer Sicily. Herodotus gives us generally
the same view of the character of Minôs as a great maritime king, but
his notice of the expedition against Kamikus includes the mention of
Dædalus as the intended object of it.[542] Ephorus, while he described
Minôs as a commanding and comprehensive lawgiver imposing his commands
under the sanction of Zeus, represented him as the imitator of an
earlier lawgiver named Rhadamanthus, and also as an immigrant into
Krête from the Æolic Mount Ida, along with the priests or sacred
companions of Zeus called the Idæi Dactyli. Aristotle too points him
out as the author of the Syssitia, or public meals common in Krête as
well as at Sparta,—other divergences in a new direction from the spirit
of the old fables.[543]
[541] It is curious that Herodotus expressly denies this, and in
language which shows that he had made special inquiries about it:
he says that the Karians or Leleges in the islands (who were,
according to Thucydidês, expelled by Minôs) paid no tribute to
Minôs, but manned his navy, _i. e._ they stood to Minôs much in
the same relation as Chios and <DW26>s stood to Athens (Herodot.
i. 171). One may trace here the influence of those discussions
which must have been prevalent at that time respecting the
maritime empire of Athens.
[542] Herodot. vii. 170. Λέγεται γὰρ Μίνω κατὰ ζήτησιν Δαιδάλου
ἀπικόμενον ἐς Σικανίην, τὴν νῦν Σικελίην καλουμένην, ἀποθανεῖν
βιαίῳ θανάτῳ. Ἀνὰ δὲ χρόνον Κρῆτας, θεοῦ σφὶ ἐποτρύνοντος, etc.
[543] Aristot. Polit. ii. 7, 1; vii. 9, 2. Ephorus, Fragm. 63,
64, 65. He set aside altogether the Homeric genealogy of Minôs,
which makes him brother of Rhadamanthus and born in Krête.
Strabo, in pointing out the many contradictions respecting Minôs,
remarks, Ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἄλλος λόγος οὐχ ὁμολογούμενος, τῶν μὲν ξένον
τῆς νήσου τὸν Μίνω λεγόντων, τῶν δὲ ἐπιχώριον.. By the former he
doubtless means Ephorus, though he has not here specified him (x.
p. 477).
The contradictory attributes ascribed to Minôs, together with the
perplexities experienced by those who wished to introduce a regular
chronological arrangement into these legendary events, has led both
in ancient and in modern times to the supposition of two kings
named Minôs, one the grandson of the other,—Minôs I., the son of
Zeus, lawgiver and judge,—Minôs II., the thalassokrat,—a gratuitous
conjecture, which, without solving the problem required, only adds
one to the numerous artifices employed for imparting the semblance of
history to the disparate matter of legend. The Krêtans were at all
times, from Homer downward, expert and practised seamen. But that they
were ever united under one government, or ever exercised maritime
dominion in the Ægean is a fact which we are neither able to affirm
nor to deny. The Odyssey, in so far as it justifies any inference at
all, points against such a supposition, since it recognizes a great
diversity both of inhabitants and of languages in the island, and
designates Minôs as king specially of Knôssus: it refutes still more
positively the idea that Minôs put down piracy, which the Homeric
Krêtans as well as others continue to practise without scruple.
Herodotus, though he in some places speaks of Minôs as a person
historically cognizable, yet in one passage severs him pointedly from
the generation of man. The Samian despot "Polykratês (he tells us) was
the first person who aspired to nautical dominion, excepting Minôs
of Knôssus, and others before him (if any such there ever were) who
may have ruled the sea; but Polykratês is the first of that which is
called _the generation of man_ who aspired with much chance of success
to govern Iônia and the islands of the Ægean."[544] Here we find it
manifestly intimated that Minôs did not belong to the generation of
man, and the tale given by the historian respecting the tremendous
calamities which the wrath of the departed Minôs inflicted on Krête
confirms the impression. The king of Knôssus is a god or a hero, but
not a man; he belongs to legend, not to history. He is the son as
well as the familiar companion of Zeus; he marries the daughter of
Hêlios, and Ariadnê is numbered among his offspring. To this superhuman
person are ascribed the oldest and most revered institutions of the
island, religious and political, together with a period of supposed
ante-historical dominion. That there is much of Krêtan religious ideas
and practice embodied in the fables concerning Minôs can hardly be
doubted: nor is it improbable that the tale of the youths and maidens
sent from Athens may be based in some expiatory offerings rendered to
a Krêtan divinity. The orgiastic worship of Zeus, solemnized by the
armed priests with impassioned motions and violent excitement, was
of ancient date in that island, as well as the connection with the
worship of Apollo both at Delphi and at Dêlos. To analyze the fables
and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to
me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic
invention, and the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must
forever remain indissolubly amalgamated as the poet originally blended
them, for the amusement or edification of his auditors. Hoeckh, in his
instructive and learned collection of facts respecting ancient Krête,
construes the mythical genealogy of Minôs to denote a combination
of the orgiastic worship of Zeus, indigenous among the Eteokrêtes,
with the worship of the moon imported from Phœnicia, and signified by
the names Europê, Pasiphaê, and Ariadnê.[545] This is specious as a
conjecture, but I do not venture to speak of it in terms of greater
confidence.
[544] Herodot. iii. 122. Πολυκράτης γὰρ ἐστὶ πρῶτος τῶν ἡμεῖς
ἴδμεν Ἑλλήνων, ὃς θαλασσοκρατέειν ἐπενοήθη, παρὲξ Μίνωός τε τοῦ
Κνωσσίου, καὶ εἰ δή τις ἄλλος πρότερος τούτου ἦρξε τῆς θαλάττης·
~τῆς δὲ ἀνθρωπηΐης λεγομένης γενεῆς~ Πολυκράτης ἐστὶ πρῶτος
ἐλπίδας πολλὰς ἔχων Ἰωνίης τε καὶ νήσων ἄρξειν.
The expression exactly corresponds to that of Pausanias, ix. 5,
1, ἐπὶ τῶν καλουμένων Ἡρώων, for the age preceding the ἀνθρωπηΐη
γενέη; also viii. 2. 1, ἐς τὰ ἀνωτέρω τοῦ ἀνθρώπων γένους.
[545] Hoeckh, Kreta, vol. ii. pp. 56-67. K. O. Müller also
(Dorier. ii. 2, 14) puts a religious interpretation upon these
Kreto-Attic legends, but he explains them in a manner totally
different from Hoeckh.
From the connection of religious worship and legendary tales between
Krête and various parts of Asia Minor,—the Trôad, the coast of Milêtus
and Lykia, especially between Mount Ida in Krête and Mount Ida in
Æôlis,—it seems reasonable to infer an ethnographical kindred or
relationship between the inhabitants anterior to the period of Hellenic
occupation. The tales of Krêtan settlement at Minoa and Engyiôn on
the south-western coast of Sicily, and in Iapygia on the Gulf of
Tarentum, conduct us to a similar presumption, though the want of
evidence forbids our tracing it farther. In the time of Herodotus, the
Eteokrêtes, or aboriginal inhabitants of the island, were confined to
Polichna and Præsus; but in earlier times, prior to the encroachments
of the Hellênes, they had occupied the larger portion, if not the whole
of the island. Minôs was originally their hero, subsequently adopted by
the immigrant Hellênes,—at least Herodotus considers him as barbarian,
not Hellenic.[546]
[546] Herodot. i. 173.
CHAPTER XIII.
ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.
The ship Argô was the theme of many songs during the oldest periods
of the Grecian epic, even earlier than the Odyssey. The king Æêtês,
from whom she is departing, the hero Jasôn, who commands her, and the
goddess Hêrê, who watches over him, enabling the Argô to traverse
distances and to escape dangers which no ship had ever before
encountered, are all circumstances briefly glanced at by Odysseus in
his narrative to Alkinous. Moreover, Eunêus, the son of Jasôn and
Hypsipylê, governs Lemnos during the siege of Troy by Agamemnôn, and
carries on a friendly traffic with the Grecian camp, purchasing from
them their Trojan prisoners.[547]
[547] Odyss. xii. 69.—
Οἴη δὴ κείνη γε παρέπλει ποντόπορος νῆυς,
Ἀργὼ πασιμέλουσα, παρ᾽ Αἰήταο πλέουσα·
Καὶ νύ κε τὴν ἔνθ᾽ ὦκα βάλεν μεγάλας ποτὶ πέτρας,
Ἀλλ᾽ Ἥρη παρέπεμψεν, ἐπεὶ φίλος ἦεν Ἰήσων.
See also Iliad, vii. 470.
The legend of Halus in Achaia Phthiôtis, respecting the religious
solemnities connected with the family of Athamas and Phryxus (related
in a previous chapter), is also interwoven with the voyage of the
Argonauts; and both the legend and the solemnities seem evidently of
great antiquity. We know further, that the adventures of the Argô were
narrated not only by Hesiod and in the Hesiodic poems, but also by
Eumêlus and the author of the Naupactian verses—by the latter seemingly
at considerable length.[548] But these poems are unfortunately lost,
nor have we any means of determining what the original story was; for
the narrative, as we have it, borrowed from later sources, is enlarged
by local tales from the subsequent Greek colonies—Kyzikus, Heraklêia,
Sinopê, and others.
[548] See Hesiod, Fragm. _Catalog._ Fr. 6. p. 33, Düntz.;
_Eoiai_, Frag. 36. p. 39; Frag. 72. p. 47. Compare Schol. ad
Apollôn. Rhod. i. 45; ii. 178-297, 1125; iv. 254-284. Other
poetical sources—
The old epic poem _Ægimius_, Frag. 5. p. 57, Düntz.
_Kinæthôn_ in the _Hêraklêia_ touched upon the death of Hylas
near Kius in Mysia (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1357).
The epic poem _Naupactia_, Frag. 1 to 6, Düntz. p. 61.
_Eumêlus_, Frag. 2, 3, 5, p. 65, Düntz.
_Epimenidês_, the Krêtan prophet and poet, composed a poem in
6500 lines, Ἀργοῦς ναυπηγίαν τε, καὶ Ἰάσονος εἰς Κόλχους ἀποπλοῦν
(Diogen. Laër. i. 10, 5), which is noticed more than once in the
Scholia on Apollônius, on subjects connected with the poem (ii.
1125; iii. 42). See Mimnerm. Frag. 10, Schneidewin, p. 15.
_Antimachus_, in his poem _Lydê_, touched upon the Argonautic
expedition, and has been partially copied by Apollônius Rhod.
(Schol. Ap. Rh. i. 1290; ii. 296: iii. 410; iv. 1153).
The logographers Pherekydês and Hekatæus seem to have related the
expedition at considerable length.
The Bibliothek der alten Literatur und Kunst (Göttingen, 1786,
2tes Stück, p. 61) contains an instructive Dissertation by
Groddeck, Ueber die Argonautika, a summary of the various
authorities respecting this expedition.
Jasôn, commanded by Pelias to depart in quest of the golden fleece
belonging to the speaking ram which had carried away Phryxus and
Hellê, was encouraged by the oracle to invite the noblest youth
of Greece to his aid, and fifty of the most distinguished amongst
them obeyed the call. Hêraklês, Thêseus, Telamôn and Pêleus, Kastôr
and Pollux, Idas and Lynkeus—Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of
Boreas—Meleager, Amphiaraus, Kêpheus, Laertês, Autolykus, Menœtius,
Aktôr, Erginus, Euphêmus, Ankæus, Pœas, Periklymenus, Augeas, Eurytus,
Admêtus, Akastus, Kæneus, Euryalus, Pêneleôs and Lêitus, Askalaphus and
Ialmenus, were among them. Argus the son of Phryxus, directed by the
promptings of Athênê, built the ship, inserting in the prow a piece of
timber from the celebrated oak of Dodona, which was endued with the
faculty of speech:[549] Tiphys was the steersman, Idmôn the son of
Apollo and Mopsus accompanied them as prophets, while Orpheus came to
amuse their weariness and reconcile their quarrels with his harp.[550]
[549] Apollôn. Rhod. i. 525; iv. 580. Apollodôr. i. 9, 16.
Valerius Flaccus (i. 300) softens down the speech of the ship
Argô into a dream of Jasôn. Alexander Polyhistor explained what
wood was used (Plin. H. N. xiii. 22).
[550] Apollônius Rhodius, Apollodôrus, Valerius Flaccus, the
Orphic Argonautica, and Hyginus, have all given Catalogues of
the Argonautic heroes (there was one also in the lost tragedy
called Λήμνιαι of Sophoklês, see Welcker Gr. Trag. i. 327):
the discrepancies among them are numerous and irreconcilable.
Burmann, in the Catalogus Argonautarum, prefixed to his edition
of Valerius Flaccus, has discussed them copiously. I transcribe
one or two of the remarks of this conscientious and laborious
critic, out of many of a similar tenor, on the impracticability
of a fabulous chronology. Immediately before the first article,
_Acastus_—"Neque enim in ætatibus Argonautarum ullam rationem
temporum constare, neque in stirpe et stemmate deducenda ordinem
ipsum naturæ congruere videbam. Nam et huic militiæ adscribi
videbam Heroas, qui per naturæ leges et ordinem fati eo usque
vitam extrahere non potuêre, ut aliis ab hac expeditione
remotis Heroum militiis nomina dedisse narrari deberent a
Poetis et Mythologis. In idem etiam tempus avos et Nepotes
conjici, consanguineos ætate longe inferiores prioribus ut
æquales adjungi, concoquere vix posse videtur."—Art. _Ancæus_:
"Scio objici posse, si seriem illam majorem respiciamus,
hunc Ancæum simul cum proavo suo Talao in eandem profectum
fuisse expeditionem. Sed similia exempla in aliis occurrent,
et in fabulis rationem temporum non semper accuratam licet
deducere."—Art. _Jasôn_: "Herculi enim jam provectâ ætate
adhæsit Theseus juvenis, et in Amazoniâ expeditione socius fuit,
interfuit huic expeditioni, venatui apri Calydonii, et rapuit
Helenam, quæ circa Trojanum bellum maxime floruit: quæ omnia si
Theseus tot temporum intervallis distincta egit, secula duo vel
tria vixisse debuit. Certe Jason Hypsipylem neptem Ariadnes, nec
videre, nec Lemni cognoscere potuit."—Art. _Meleager_: "Unum
est quod alicui longum ordinem majorum recensenti scrupulum
movere possit: nimis longum intervallum inter Æolum et Meleagrum
intercedere, ut potuerit interfuisse huic expeditioni: cum
nonus fere numeretur ab Æolo, et plurimi ut Jason, Argus, et
alii tertiâ tantum ab Æolo generatione distent. Sed sæpe jam
notavimus, frustra temporum concordiam in fabulis quæri."
Read also the articles _Castôr and Pollux_, _Nestôr Pêleus_,
_Staphylus_, etc.
We may stand excused for keeping clear of a chronology which is
fertile only in difficulties, and ends in nothing but illusions.
First they touched at the island of Lêmnos, in which at that time there
were no men; for the women, infuriated by jealousy and ill-treatment,
had put to death their fathers, husbands and brothers. The Argonauts,
after some difficulty, were received with friendship, and even admitted
into the greatest intimacy. They staid some months, and the subsequent
population of the island was the fruit of their visit. Hypsipylê, the
queen of the island, bore to Jasôn two sons.[551]
[551] Apollodôr. i. 9, 17; Apollôn. Rhod. i. 609-915; Herodot.
iv. 145. Theocritus (Idyll, xiii. 29) omits all mention of
Lêmnos, and represents the Argô as arriving on the third day
from Iôlkos at the Hellespont. Diodôrus (iv. 41) also leaves out
Lêmnos.
They then proceeded onward along the coast of Thrace, up the
Hellespont, to the southern coast of the Propontis, inhabited by the
Doliones and their king Kyzikus. Here they were kindly entertained, but
after their departure were driven back to the same spot by a storm; and
as they landed in the dark, the inhabitants did not know them. A battle
took place, in which the chief, Kyzikus, was killed by Jasôn; whereby
much grief was occasioned as soon as the real facts became known.
After Kyzikus had been interred with every demonstration of mourning
and solemnity, the Argonauts proceeded along the coast of Mysia.[552]
In this part of the voyage they left Hêraklês behind. For Hylas, his
favorite youthful companion, had been stolen away by the nymphs of a
fountain, and Hêraklês, wandering about in search of him, neglected
to return. At last he sorrowfully retired, exacting hostages from the
inhabitants of the neighboring town of Kius that they would persist in
the search.[553]
[552] Apollôn. Rhod. 940-1020; Apollodôr. i. 9, 18.
[553] Apollodôr. i. 9, 19. This was the religious legend,
explanatory of a ceremony performed for many centuries by the
people of Prusa: they ran round the lake Askanias shouting and
clamoring for Hylas—"ut littus Hyla, Hyla omne sonaret." (Virgil,
Eclog.) ... "in cujus memoriam adhuc solemni cursatione lacum
populus circuit et Hylam voce clamat." Solinus, c. 42.
There is endless discrepancy as to the concern of Hêraklês with
the Argonautic expedition. A story is alluded to in Aristotle
(Politic, iii. 9) that the ship Argô herself refused to take him
on board, because he was so much superior in stature and power
to all the other heroes—οὐ γὰρ ἐθέλειν αὐτὸν ἄγειν τὴν Ἀργὼ μετὰ
τῶν ἄλλων, ὡς ὑπερβάλλοντα πολὺ τῶν πλωτήρων. This was the story
of Pherekydês (Fr. 67, Didot) as well as of Antimachus (Schol.
Apoll. Rhod. i. 1290): it is probably a very ancient portion of
the legend, inasmuch as it ascribes to the ship sentient powers,
in consonance with her other miraculous properties. The etymology
of Aphetæ in Thessaly was connected with the tale of Hêraklês
having there been put on shore from the Argô (Herodot. vii. 193):
Ephorus said that he staid away voluntarily from fondness for
Omphalê (Frag. 9, Didot). The old epic poet Kinæthôn said that
Hêraklês had placed the Kian hostages at Trachin, and that the
Kians ever afterwards maintained a respectful correspondence with
that place (Schol. Ap. Rh. i. 1357). This is the explanatory
legend connected with some existing custom, which we are unable
further to unravel.
They next stopped in the country of the Bebrykians, where the
boxing contest took place between the king Amykus and the Argonaut
Pollux:[554] they then proceeded onward to Bithynia, the residence of
the blind prophet Phineus. His blindness had been inflicted by Poseidôn
as a punishment for having communicated to Phryxus the way to Kolchis.
The choice had been allowed to him between death and blindness, and he
had preferred the latter.[555] He was also tormented by the harpies,
winged monsters who came down from the clouds whenever his table
was set, snatched the food from his lips and imparted to it a foul
and unapproachable odor. In the midst of this misery, he hailed the
Argonauts as his deliverers—his prophetic powers having enabled him
to foresee their coming. The meal being prepared for him, the harpies
approached as usual, but Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas,
drove them away and pursued them. They put forth all their speed, and
prayed to Zeus to be enabled to overtake the monsters; when Hermês
appeared and directed them to desist, the harpies being forbidden
further to molest Phineus,[556] and retiring again to their native
cavern in Krête.[557]
[554] See above, chap. viii. p. 169.
[555] Such was the old narrative of the Hesiodic Catalogue and
Eoiai. See Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 181-296.
[556] This again was the old Hesiodic story (Schol. Apoll. Rhod.
ii. 296),—
Ἐνθ᾽ οἵγ᾽ εὔχεσθον Αἰνηΐῳ ὑψιμέδοντι.
Apollodôrus (i. 9, 21), Apollônius (178-300), and Valerius Flacc.
(iv. 428-530) agree in most of the circumstances.
[557] Such was the fate of the harpies as given in the old
Naupaktian Verses (See Fragm. Ep. Græc. Düntzer, Naupakt. Fr. 2.
p. 61).
The adventure of the Argonauts with Phineus is given by Diodôrus
in a manner totally different (Diodôr. iv. 44): he seems to
follow Dionysius of Mitylênê (see Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 207).
Phineus, grateful for the relief afforded to him by the Argonauts,
forewarned them of the dangers of their voyage and of the precautions
necessary for their safety; and through his suggestions they were
enabled to pass through the terrific rocks called Symplêgades. These
were two rocks which alternately opened and shut, with a swift and
violent collision, so that it was difficult even for a bird to fly
through during the short interval. When the Argô arrived at the
dangerous spot, Euphêmus let loose a dove. which flew through and just
escaped with the loss of a few feathers of her tail. This was a signal
to the Argonauts, according to the prediction of Phineus, that they
might attempt the passage with confidence. Accordingly they rowed with
all their might, and passed safely through: the closing rocks, held
for a moment asunder by the powerful arms of Athênê just crushed the
ornaments at the stern of their vessel. It had been decreed by the
gods, that so soon as any ship once got through, the passage should
forever afterwards be safe and easy to all. The rocks became fixed in
their separate places, and never again closed.[558]
[558] Apollodôr. i. 9, 22. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 310-615.
After again halting on the coast of the Mariandynians, where their
steersman Tiphys died, as well as in the country of the Amazons,
and after picking up the sons of Phryxus, who had been cast away by
Poseidôn in their attempt to return from Kolchis to Greece, they
arrived in safety at the river Phasis and the residence of Æêtês. In
passing by Mount Caucasus, they saw the eagle which gnawed the liver
of Prometheus nailed to the rock, and heard the groans of the sufferer
himself. The sons of Phryxus were cordially welcomed by their mother
Chalciopê.[559] Application was made to Æêtês, that he would grant to
the Argonauts, heroes of divine parentage and sent forth by the mandate
of the gods, possession of the golden fleece: their aid in return was
proffered to him against any or all of his enemies. But the king was
wroth, and peremptorily refused, except upon conditions which seemed
impracticable.[560] Hêphæstos had given him two ferocious and untamable
bulls, with brazen feet, which breathed fire from their nostrils:
Jasôn was invited, as a proof both of his illustrious descent and
of the sanction of the gods to his voyage, to harness these animals
to the yoke, so as to plough a large field and sow it with dragon's
teeth.[561] Perilous as the condition was, each one of the heroes
volunteered to make the attempt. Idmôn especially encouraged Jasôn to
undertake it,[562] and the goddesses Hêrê and Aphroditê made straight
the way for him.[563] Mêdea, the daughter of Æêtês and Eidyia, having
seen the youthful hero in his interview with her father, had conceived
towards him a passion which disposed her to employ every means for his
salvation and success. She had received from Hekatê preëminent magical
powers, and she prepared for Jasôn the powerful Prometheian unguent,
extracted from an herb which had grown where the blood of Promêtheus
dropped. The body of Jasôn having been thus pre-medicated, became
invulnerable[564] either by fire or by warlike weapons. He undertook
the enterprise, yoked the bulls without suffering injury, and ploughed
the field: when he had sown the dragon's teeth, armed men sprung out of
the furrows. But he had been forewarned by Mêdea to cast a vast rock
into the midst of them, upon which they began to fight with each other,
so that he was easily enabled to subdue them all.[565]
[559] Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 850-1257.
[560] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 320-385.
[561] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 410. Apollodôr. i. 9, 23.
[562] This was the story of the Naupaktian Verses (Schol.
Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 515-525): Apollônius and others altered it.
Idmôn, according to them, died in the voyage before the arrival
at Kolchis.
[563] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 50-200. Valer. Flacc. vi. 440-480.
Hygin. fab. 22.
[564] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 835. Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Valer. Flacc
vii. 356 Ovid, Epist. xii. 15.
"Isset anhelatos non præmedicatus in ignes
Immemor Æsonides, oraque adunca boum."
[565] Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1230-1400.
The task prescribed had thus been triumphantly performed. Yet Æêtês not
only refused to hand over the golden fleece, but even took measures for
secretly destroying the Argonauts and burning their vessel. He designed
to murder them during the night after a festal banquet; but Aphroditê,
watchful for the safety of Jasôn,[566] inspired the Kolchian king at
the critical moment with an irresistible inclination for his nuptial
bed. While he slept, the wise Idmôn counselled the Argonauts to make
their escape, and Mêdea agreed to accompany them.[567] She lulled to
sleep by a magic potion the dragon who guarded the golden fleece,
placed that much-desired prize on board the vessel, and accompanied
Jasôn with his companions in their flight, carrying along with her the
young Apsyrtus, her brother.[568]
[566] The Naupaktian Verses stated this (see the Fragm. 6, ed.
Düntzer, p. 61, ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 59-86).
[567] Such was the story of the Naupaktian Verses (See Fragm. 6.
p 61 Düntzer ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 59, 86, 87).
[568] Apollodôr. i. 9, 23. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 220.
Pherekydês said that Jasôn killed the dragon (Fr. 74, Did.).
Æêtês, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his
daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit
of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the
retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the
stratagem of Mêdea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in
pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Æêtês on reaching
the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he
tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body
an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped.[569] The spot on which
the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi.[570]
This fratricide of Mêdea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation
of Zeus, that he condemned the Argô and her crew to a trying voyage,
full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home.
The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and
of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round
the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until
its junction with the Nile,[571] they came down the Nile into Egypt,
from whence they carried the Argô on their shoulders by a fatiguing
land-journey to the lake Tritônis in Libya. Here they were rescued from
the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god
Tritôn, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphêmus a
clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one
day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed
by the flourishing and powerful city of Kyrênê,[572] whose princes the
Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphêmus.
[569] This is the story of Apollodôrus (i. 9, 24), who seems
to follow Pherekydês (Fr. 73, Didot). Apollônius (iv. 225-480)
and Valerius Flaccus (viii. 262 _seq._) give totally different
circumstances respecting the death of Apsyrtus; but the narrative
of Pherekydês seems the oldest: so revolting a story as that of
the cutting up of the little boy cannot have been imagined in
later times.
Sophoklês composed two tragedies on the adventures of Jasôn and
Mêdea, both lost—the Κολχίδες and the Σκύθαι. In the former he
represented the murder of the child Apsyrtus as having taken
place in the house of Æêtês: in the latter he introduced the
mitigating circumstance, that Apsyrtus was the son of Æêtês by a
different mother from Mêdea (Schol. Apollôn Rhod. iv. 223).
[570] Apollodôr. i. 9, 24, τὸν τόπον προσηγόρευσε Τόμους. Ovid.
Trist. iii. 9. The story that Apsyrtus was cut in pieces, is the
etymological legend explanatory of the name Tomi.
There was however a place called Apsarus, on the southern coast
of the Euxine, west of Trapezus, where the tomb of Apsyrtus was
shown, and where it was affirmed that he had been put to death.
He was the eponymus of the town, which was said to have been once
called Apsyrtus, and only corrupted by a barbarian pronunciation
(Arrian. Periplus, Euxin. p. 6; Geogr. Min. v. 1). Compare
Procop. Bell. Goth. iv. 2.
Strabo connects the death of Apsyrtus with the Apsyrtides,
islands off the coast of Illyria, in the Adriatic (vii p. 315).
[571] The original narrative was, that the Argô returned by
navigating the circumfluous ocean. This would be almost certain,
even without positive testimony, from the early ideas entertained
by the Greeks respecting geography; but we know further that
it was the representation of the Hesiodic poems, as well as of
Mimnermus, Hekatæus and Pindar, and even of Antimachus. Schol.
Parisina Ap. Rhod. iv. 254. Ἑκαταῖος δὲ ὁ Μιλήσιος διὰ τοῦ
Φάσιδος ἀνελθεῖν φησὶν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸν Ὠκεανόν· διὰ δὲ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ
κατελθεῖν εἰς τὸν Νεῖλον· ἐκ δὲ τοῦ Νείλου εἰς τὴν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς
θάλασσαν. Ἡσίοδος δὲ καὶ Πίνδαρος ἐν Πυθιονίκαις καὶ Ἀντίμαχος
ἐν Λυδῇ διὰ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ φασὶν ἐλθεῖν αὐτοὺς εἰς Λιβύην· εἶτα
βαστάσαντας τὴν Ἀργὼ εἰς τὸ ἡμέτερον ἀφικέσθαι πέλαγος. Compare
the Schol. Edit. ad iv. 259.
[572] See the fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar, and Apollôn. Rhod.
iv. 1551-1756.
The tripod of Jasôn was preserved by the Euesperitæ in Libya,
Diod. iv. 56: but the legend, connecting the Argonauts with
the lake Tritônis in Libya, is given with some considerable
differences in Herodotus, iv. 179.
Refreshed by the hospitality of Tritôn, the Argonauts found themselves
again on the waters of the Mediterranean in their way homeward. But
before they arrived at Iôlkos they visited Circê, at the island of Ææa,
where Mêdea was purified for the murder of Apsyrtus: they also stopped
at Korkyra, then called Drepanê, where Alkinous received and protected
them. The cave in that island where the marriage of Mêdea with Jasôn
was consummated, was still shown in the time of the historian Timæus,
as well as the altars to Apollo which she had erected, and the rites
and sacrifices which she had first instituted.[573] After leaving
Korkyra, the Argô was overtaken by a perilous storm near the island of
Thêra. The heroes were saved from imminent peril by the supernatural
aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an arrow which pierced
the waves like a track of light, caused a new island suddenly to spring
up in their track and present to them a port of refuge. The island was
called Anaphê; and the grateful Argonauts established upon it an altar
and sacrifices in honor of Apollo Æglêtês, which were ever afterwards
continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating
adventure.[574]
[573] Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1153-1217. Timæus, Fr. 7-8, Didot.
Τίμαιος ἐν Κερκύρᾳ λέγων γενέσθαι τοὺς γάμους, καὶ περὶ τῆς
θυσίας ἱστορεῖ, ἔτι καὶ νῦν λέγων ἄγεσθαι αὐτὴν κατ᾽ ἐνιαυτὸν,
Μηδείας πρῶτον θυσάσης ἐν τῷ τοῦ Απολλῶνος ἱερῷ. Καὶ Βωμοὺς δέ
φησι μνημεῖα τῶν γάμων ἱδρύσασθαι συνεγγὺς μὲν τῆς θαλάσσης, οὐ
μακρὰν δὲ τῆς πόλεως. Ὀνομάζουσι δὲ τὸν μὲν, Νυμφῶν· τὸν δὲ,
Νηρηΐδων.
[574] Apollodôr. i. 9, 25. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1700-1725.
On approaching the coast of Krête, the Argonauts were prevented
from landing by Talôs, a man of brass, fabricated by Hêphæstos, and
presented by him to Minôs for the protection of the island.[575] This
vigilant sentinel hurled against the approaching vessel fragments of
rock, and menaced the heroes with destruction. But Mêdea deceived
him by a stratagem and killed him; detecting and assailing the one
vulnerable point in his body. The Argonauts were thus enabled to land
and refresh themselves. They next proceeded onward to Ægina, where
however they again experienced resistance before they could obtain
water—then along the coast of Eubœa and Locris back to Iôlkos in the
gulf of Pagasæ, the place from whence they had started. The proceedings
of Pelias during their absence, and the signal revenge taken upon him
by Mêdea after their return, have already been narrated in a preceding
section.[576] The ship Argô herself, in which the chosen heroes of
Greece had performed so long a voyage and braved so many dangers, was
consecrated by Jasôn to Poseidôn at the isthmus of Corinth. According
to another account, she was translated to the stars by Athênê, and
became a constellation.[577]
[575] Some called Talôs a remnant of the brazen race of men
(Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 1641).
[576] Apollodôr. i. 9, 26. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 1638.
[577] Diodôr. iv. 53. Eratosth. Catasterism. c. 35.
Traces of the presence of the Argonauts were found not only in the
regions which lay between Iôlkos and Kolchis, but also in the western
portion of the Grecian world—distributed more or less over all the
spots visited by Grecian mariners or settled by Grecian colonists, and
scarcely less numerous than the wanderings of the dispersed Greeks
and Trojans after the capture of Troy. The number of Jasonia, or
temples for the heroic worship of Jasôn, was very great, from Abdêra
in Thrace,[578] eastward along the coast of the Euxine, to Armenia
and Media. The Argonauts had left their anchoring-stone on the coast
of Bebrykia, near Kyzikus, and there it was preserved during the
historical ages in the temple of the Jasonian Athênê.[579] They had
founded the great temple of the Idæan mother on the mountain Dindymon,
near Kyzikus, and the Hieron of Zeus Urios on the Asiatic point at the
mouth of the Euxine, near which was also the harbor of Phryxus.[580]
Idmôn, the prophet of the expedition, who was believed to have died
of a wound by a wild boar on the Mariandynian coast, was worshipped
by the inhabitants of the Pontic Hêrakleia with great solemnity, as
their Heros Poliuchus, and that too by the special direction of the
Delphian god. Autolykus, another companion of Jasôn, was worshipped
as Œkist by the inhabitants of Sinopê. Moreover, the historians of
Hêrakleia pointed out a temple of Hekatê in the neighboring country of
Paphlagonia, first erected by Mêdea;[581] and the important town of
Pantikapæon, on the European side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, ascribed
its first settlement to a son of Æêtês.[582] When the returning ten
thousand Greeks sailed along the coast, called the Jasonian shore,
from Sinopê to Hêrakleia, they were told that the grandson of Æêtês
was reigning king of the territory at the mouth of the Phasis, and the
anchoring-places where the Argô had stopped were specially pointed
out to them.[583] In the lofty regions of the Moschi, near Kolchis,
stood the temple of Leukothea, founded by Phryxus, which remained
both rich and respected down to the times of the kings of Pontus, and
where it was an inviolable rule not to offer up a ram.[584] The town
of Dioskurias, north of the river Phasis, was believed to have been
hallowed by the presence of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô, and to have
received from them its appellation.[585] Even the interior of Mêdea and
Armenia was full of memorials of Jasôn and Mêdea and their son Mêdus,
or of Armenus the son of Jasôn, from whom the Greeks deduced not only
the name and foundation of the Medes and Armenians, but also the great
operation of cutting a channel through the mountains for the efflux
of the river Araxes, which they compared to that of the Peneius in
Thessaly.[586] And the Roman general Pompey, after having completed
the conquest and expulsion of Mithridatês, made long marches through
Kolchis into the regions of Caucasus, for the express purpose of
contemplating the spots which had been ennobled by the exploits of the
Argonauts, the Dioskuri and Hêraklês.[587]
[578] Strabo. xi. p. 526-531.
[579] Apollôn. Rhod. i. 955-960, and the Scholia.
There was in Kyzikus a temple of Apollo under different
ἐπικλήσεις; some called it the temple of the Jasonian Apollo.
Another anchor however was preserved in the temple of Rhea on the
banks of the Phasis, which was affirmed to be the anchor of the
ship Argô. Arrian saw it there, but seems to have doubted its
authenticity (Periplus, Euxin. Pont. p. 9. Geogr. Min. v. 1).
[580] Neanthês ap. Strabo. i. p. 45. Apollôn. Rhod. i. 1125, and
Schol. Steph. Byz. v. Φρίξος.
Apollônius mentions the fountain called Jasoneæ, on the hill
of Dindymon. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 532, and the citations from
Timosthenês and Herodôrus in the Scholia. See also Appian.
Syriac. c. 63.
[581] See the historians of Hêrakleia, Nymphis and Promathidas,
Fragm. Orelli, pp. 99, 100-104. Schol. ad Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 247.
Strabo, xii. p. 546. Autolykus, whom he calls companion of Jasôn,
was, according to another legend, comrade of Hêraklês in his
expedition against the Amazons.
[582] Stephan. Byz. v. Παντικαπαῖον, Eustath. ad Dionys.
Periêgêt. 311.
[583] Xenophôn, Anabas. vi. 2, 1; v. 7, 37.
[584] Strabo, xi. p. 499.
[585] Appian, Mithridatic. c. 101.
[586] Strabo, xi. p. 499, 503, 526, 531; i. p. 45-48. Justin,
xlii. 3, whose statements illustrate the way in which men found a
present home and application for the old fables,—"Jason, primus
humanorum post Herculem et Liberum, qui reges Orientis fuisse
traduntur, eam cœli plagam domuisse dicitur. Cum Albanis fœdus
percussit, qui Herculem ex Italiâ ab Albano monte, cum, Geryone
extincto, armenta ejus per Italiam duceret, secuti dicuntur;
quique, memores Italicæ originis, exercitum Cn. Pompeii bello
Mithridatico fratres consalutavêre. Itaque Jasoni totus fere
Oriens, ut conditori, divinos honores templaque constituit; quæ
Parmenio, dux Alexandri Magni, post multos annos dirui jussit, ne
cujusquam nomen in Oriente venerabilius quam Alexandri esset."
The Thessalian companions of Alexander the Great, placed by his
victories in possession of rich acquisitions in these regions,
pleased themselves by vivifying and multiplying all these
old fables, proving an ancient kindred between the Medes and
Thessalians. See Strabo, xi. p. 530. The temples of Jasôn were
τιμώμενα σφόδρα ὑπὸ τῶν βαρβάρων (_ib._ p. 526).
The able and inquisitive geographer Eratosthenês was among those
who fully believed that Jasôn had left his ships in the Phasis,
and had undertaken a land expedition into the interior country,
in which he had conquered Media and Armenia (Strabo, i. p. 48).
[587] Appian, Mithridatic. 103: τοὺς Κόλχους ἐπήει, καθ᾽ ἰστορίαν
τῆς Ἀργοναυτῶν καὶ Διοσκούρων καὶ Ἡρακλέους ἐπιδημίας, καὶ
μάλιστα τὸ πάθος ἰδεῖν ἐθέλων, ὃ Προμηθεῖ φασὶ γενέσθαι περὶ τὸ
Καύκασον ὄρος. The lofty crag of Caucasus called Strobilus, to
which Promêtheus had been attached, was pointed out to Arrian
himself in his Periplus (p. 12. Geogr. Minor vol. i.).
In the west, memorials either of the Argonauts or of the pursuing
Kolchians were pointed out in Korkyra, in Krête, in Epirus near the
Akrokeraunian mountains, in the islands called Apsyrtides near the
Illyrian coast, at the bay of Caieta as well as at Poseidônia on the
southern coast of Italy, in the island of Æthalia or Elba, and in
Libya.[588]
[588] Strabo, i. pp. 21, 45, 46; v. 224-252. Pompon. Mel. ii. 3.
Diodôr. iv. 56. Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 656. Lycophron, 1273.—
Τύρσιν μακεδνὰς ἀμφὶ Κιρκαίου νάπας
Ἀργοῦς τε κλεινὸν ὅρμον Αἰήτην μέγαν.
Such is a brief outline of the Argonautic expedition, one of the most
celebrated and widely-diffused among the ancient tales of Greece. Since
so many able men have treated it as an undisputed reality, and even
made it the pivot of systematic chronological calculations, I may here
repeat the opinion long ago expressed by Heyne, and even indicated by
Burmann, that the process of dissecting the story, in search of a basis
of fact, is one altogether fruitless.[589] Not only are we unable to
assign the date or identify the crew, or decipher the log-book, of the
Argô, but we have no means of settling even the preliminary question,
whether the voyage be matter of fact badly reported, or legend from
the beginning. The widely-distant spots in which the monuments of the
voyage were shown, no less than the incidents of the voyage itself,
suggests no other parentage than epical fancy. The supernatural and the
romantic not only constitute an inseparable portion of the narrative,
but even embrace all the prominent and characteristic features; if they
do not comprise the whole, and if there be intermingled along with
them any sprinkling of historical or geographical fact,—a question
to us indeterminable,—there is at least no solvent by which it can
be disengaged, and no test by which it can be recognized. Wherever
the Grecian mariner sailed, he carried his religious and patriotic
mythes along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of
the long wanderings of Jasôn, Odysseus, Perseus, Hêraklês, Dionysus,
Triptolemus or Iô; it was pleasing to him in success, and consoling
to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them
over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale
amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular
with the seaman, than the history of the primæval ship Argô and her
distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and
especially the Tyndarids Kastôr and Pollux, the heavenly protectors
invoked during storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever
he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his
own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious
possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his
native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate
commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed
every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served
to keep alive the legend of the Argô in the minds of future comers or
inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that
this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.
[589] Heyne, Observ. ad Apollodôr. i. 9, 16. p. 72. "Mirum in
modum fallitur, qui in his commentis certum fundum historicum
vel geographicum aut exquirere studet, aut se reperisse, atque
historicam vel geographicam aliquam doctrinam, systema nos
dicimus, inde procudi posse, putat," etc.
See also the observations interspersed in Burmann's Catalogus
Argonautarum, prefixed to his edition of Valerius Flaccus.
The Persian antiquarians whom Herodotus cites at the beginning
of his history (i. 2-4—it is much to be regretted that Herodotus
did not inform us who they were, and whether they were the same
as those who said that Perseus was an Assyrian by birth and
had become a Greek, vi. 54), joined together the abductions of
Iô and of Eurôpê, of Mêdea and of Helen, as pairs of connected
proceedings, the second injury being a retaliation for the
first,—they drew up a debtor and creditor account of abductions
between Asia and Europe. The Kolchian king (they said) had sent a
herald to Greece to ask for his satisfaction for the wrong done
to him by Jasôn and to re-demand his daughter Mêdea; but he was
told in reply that the Greeks had received no satisfaction for
the previous rape of Iô.
There was some ingenuity in thus binding together the old
fables, so as to represent the invasions of Greece by Darius and
Xerxês as retaliations for the unexpiated destruction wrought by
Agamemnôn.
The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident
and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown
space in the same manner as with past and unrecorded time. They created
a mythical geography for the former, and a mythical history for the
latter. But there was this material difference between the two: that
while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the
unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as
authentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify
the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old mythes; and
this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians
and geographers of antiquity,—for it was painful to them to abandon any
portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable
basis of truth.
Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod,
and the other Greek poets and logographers,—Erytheia, the garden of
the Hesperides, the garden of Phœbus,[590] to which Boreas transported
the Attic maiden Orithyia, the delicious country of the Hyperboreans,
the Elysian plain,[591] the fleeting island of Æolus, Thrinakia,
the country of the Æthiopians, the Læstrygones, the Kyklôpes, the
Lotophagi, the Sirens, the Cimmerians and the Gorgons,[592] etc. These
are places which (to use the expression of Pindar respecting the
Hyperboreans) you cannot approach either by sea or by land:[593] the
wings of the poet alone can carry you thither. They were not introduced
into the Greek mind by incorrect geographical reports, but, on the
contrary, had their origin in the legend, and passed from thence
into the realities of geography,[594] which they contributed much to
pervert and confuse. For the navigator or emigrant, starting with an
unsuspicious faith in their real existence, looked out for them in
his distant voyages, and constantly fancied that he had seen or heard
of them, so as to be able to identify their exact situation. The most
contradictory accounts indeed, as might be expected, were often given
respecting the latitude and longitude of such fanciful spots, but this
did not put an end to the general belief in their real existence.
[590] Sophokl. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 295.—
Ὑπέρ τε πόντον πάντ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἔσχατα χθονὸς,
Νυκτός τε πηγὰς οὐρανοῦ τ᾽ ἀναπτυχὰς,
Φοίβου τε παλαιὸν κῆπον.
[591] Odyss. iv. 562. The Islands of the Blessed, in Hesiod, are
near the ocean (Opp. Di. 169).
[592] Hesiod, Theogon. 275-290. Homer, Iliad, i. 423. Odyss. i.
23; ix 86-206; x 4-83; xii. 135. Mimnerm. Fragm. 13, Schneidewin.
[593] Pindar, Pyth. x. 29.—
Ναυσὶ δ᾽ οὔτε πεζὸς ἰὼν ἂν εὕροις
Ἐς Ὑπερβορέων ἀγῶνα θαυματὰν ὁδόν.
Παρ᾽ οἷς ποτε Περσεὺς ἐδαίσατο λαγετὰς, etc.
Hesiod, and the old epic poem called the Epigoni, both mentioned
the Hyperboreans (Herod. iv. 32-34).
[594] This idea is well stated and sustained by Völcker
(Mythische Geographie der Griechen und Römer, cap. i. p. 11),
and by Nitzsch in his Comments on the Odyssey—Introduct. Remarks
to b. ix. p. xii.-xxxiii. The twelfth and thirteenth chapters of
the History of Orchomenos, by O. Müller, are also full of good
remarks on the geography of the Argonautic voyage (pp. 274-299).
The most striking evidence of this disposition of the Greeks is
to be found in the legendary discoveries of Alexander and his
companions, when they marched over the untrodden regions in the
east of the Persian empire (see Arrian, Hist. Al. v. 3: compare
Lucian. Dialog. Mortuor. xiv. vol. i. p. 212. Tauch) because
these ideas were first broached at a time when geographical
science was sufficiently advanced to canvass and criticize them.
The early settlers in Italy, Sicily and the Euxine, indulged
their fanciful vision without the fear of any such monitor: there
was no such thing as a map before the days of Anaximander, the
disciple of Thalês.
In the present advanced state of geographical knowledge, the story of
that man who after reading Gulliver's Travels went to look in his
map for Lilliput, appears an absurdity. But those who fixed the exact
locality of the floating island of Æolus or the rocks of the Sirens
did much the same,[595] and, with their ignorance of geography and
imperfect appreciation of historical evidence, the error was hardly to
be avoided. The ancient belief which fixed the Sirens on the islands
of Sirenusæ off the coast of Naples—the Kyklôpes, Erytheia, and the
Læstrygones in Sicily—the Lotophagi on the island of Mêninx[596] near
the Lesser Syrtis—the Phæakians at Korkyra—and the goddess Circê at the
promontory of Circeium—took its rise at a time when these regions were
first Hellenized and comparatively little visited. Once embodied in the
local legends, and attested by visible monuments and ceremonies, it
continued for a long time unassailed; and Thucydidês seems to adopt it,
in reference to Korkyra and Sicily before the Hellenic colonization, as
matter of fact generally unquestionable,[597] though little avouched as
to details. But when geographical knowledge became extended, and the
criticism upon the ancient epic was more or less systematized by the
literary men of Alexandria and Pergamus, it appeared to many of them
impossible that Odysseus could have seen so many wonders, or undergone
such monstrous dangers, within limits so narrow, and in the familiar
track between the Nile and the Tiber. The scene of his weather-driven
course was then shifted further westward. Many convincing evidences
were discovered, especially by Asklepiadês of Myrlea, of his having
visited various places in Ibêria:[598] several critics imagined that
he had wandered about in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Strait of
Gibraltar,[599] and they recognized a section of Lotophagi on the
coast of Mauritania, over and above those who dwelt on the island of
Mêninx.[600] On the other hand, Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus treated
the places visited by Odysseus as altogether unreal, for which
scepticism they incurred much reproach.[601]
[595] See Mr. Payne Knight, Prolegg. ad Homer. c. 49. Compare
Spohn—"de extremâ Odysseæ parte"—p. 97.
[596] Strabo. xvii. p. 834. An altar of Odysseus was shown upon
this island, as well as some other evidences (σύμβολα) of his
visit to the place.
Apollônius Rhodius copies the Odyssey in speaking of the island
of Thrinakia and the cattle of Helios (iv. 965, with Schol.). He
conceives Sicily as Thrinakia, a name afterwards exchanged for
Trinakria. The Scholiast ad Apoll. (1. c.) speaks of Trinax king
of Sicily. Compare iv. 291 with the Scholia.
[597] Thucyd. i. 25-vi. 2. These local legends appear in the eyes
of Strabo convincing evidence (i. p. 23-26),—the tomb of the
siren Parthenopê at Naples, the stories at Cumæ and Dikæarchia
about the νεκυομαντεῖον of Avernus, and the existence of places
named after Baius and Misênus, the companions of Odysseus, etc.
[598] Strabo, iii. p. 150-157. Οὐ γὰρ μόνον οἱ κατὰ τὴν
Ἰταλίαν καὶ Σικελίαν τόποι καὶ ἄλλοι τινὲς τῶν τοιούτων
σημεῖα ὑπογράφουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἰβηρίᾳ Ὀδύσσεια πόλις
δείκνυται, καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς ἱερὸν, καὶ ἄλλα μύρια ἴχνη τῆς τε ἐκείνου
πλάνης, καὶ ἄλλων τῶν ἐκ τοῦ Τρωϊκοῦ πολέμου περιγενομένων (I
adopt Grosskurd's correction of the text from γενομένων to
περιγενομένων, in the note to his German translation of Strabo).
Asklepiadês (of Myrlea in Bithynia, about 170 B. C.) resided
some time in Turditania, the south-western region of Spain along
the Guadalquivir, as a teacher of Greek literature (παιδεύσας τὰ
γραμματικὰ), and composed a periegesis of the Iberian tribes,
which unfortunately has not been preserved. He made various
discoveries in archæology, and successfully connected his old
legends with several portions of the territory before him. His
discoveries were,—1. In the temple of Athênê, at this Iberian
town of Odysseia, there were shields and beaks of ships affixed
to the walls, monuments of the visit of Odysseus himself. 2.
Among the Kallæki, in the northern part of Portugal, several of
the companions of Teukros had settled and left descendants: there
were in that region two Grecian cities, one called Hellenês,
the other called Amphilochi; for Amphilochus also, the son of
Amphiaraus, had died in Iberia, and many of his soldiers had
taken up their permanent residence in the interior. 3. Many new
inhabitants had come into Iberia with the expedition of Hêraklês;
some also after the conquest of Messênê by the Lacedæmonians. 4.
In Cantabria, on the north. coast of Spain, there was a town and
region of Lacedæmonian colonists. 5. In the same portion of the
country there was the town of Opsikella, founded by Opsikellas,
one of the companions of Antenôr in his emigration from Troy
(Strabo, iii. p. 157).
This is a specimen of the manner in which the seeds of Grecian
mythus came to be distributed over so large a surface. To an
ordinary Greek reader, these legendary discoveries of Asklepiadês
would probably be more interesting than the positive facts
which he communicated respecting the Iberian tribes; and his
Turditanian auditors would be delighted to hear—while he was
reciting and explaining to them the animated passage of the
Iliad, in which Agamemnôn extols the inestimable value of the bow
of Teukros (viii. 281)—that the heroic archer and his companions
had actually set foot in the Iberian peninsula.
[599] This was the opinion of Kratês of Mallus, one of the
most distinguished of the critics on Homer: it was the subject
of an animated controversy between him and Aristarchus (Aulus
Gellius, N. A. xiv. 6; Strabo, iii. p. 157). See the instructive
treatise of Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studiis, c. v. § 4. p. 251.
Much controversy also took place among the critics respecting
the ground which Menelaus went over in his wanderings (Odyss.
iv.). Kratês affirmed that he had circumnavigated the southern
extremity of Africa and gone to India: the critic Aristonikus,
Strabo's contemporary, enumerated all the different opinions
(Strabo, i. p. 38).
[600] Strabo, iii. p. 157.
[601] Strabo, i. p. 22-44; vii. p. 299.
The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed
Geryôn with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the
two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of
the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the
circumfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of
Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region
of Spain called Tartêssus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gadês. But
the historian Hekatæus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable,
took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus.
He thought it incredible that Hêraklês should have traversed Europe
from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryôn to
Eurystheus at Mykênæ, and he pronounced Geryôn to have been a king of
Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood
were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and
bring them to Mykênæ (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian,
who cites this passage from Hekatæus, concurs in the same view,—an
illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their
fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the
ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.[602]
[602] Stesichori Fragm. ed. Kleine; Geryonis, Fr. 5. p. 60; ap.
Strabo. iii. p. 148; Herodot. iv. 8. It seems very doubtful
whether Stesichorus meant to indicate any neighboring island as
Erytheia, if we compare Fragm. 10. p. 67 of the Geryonis, and the
passages of Athenæus and Eustathius there cited. He seems to have
adhered to the old fable, placing Erytheia on the opposite side
of the ocean-stream, for Hêraklês crosses the ocean to get to it.
Hekatæus, ap. Arrian. Histor. Alex. ii. 16. Skylax places
Erytheia, "whither Geryôn is said to have come to feed his oxen,"
in the Kastid territory near the Greek city of Apollônia on the
Ionic Gulf, northward of the Keraunian mountains. There were
splendid cattle consecrated to Hêlios near Apollônia, watched
by the citizens of the place with great care (Herodot. ix. 93;
Skylax, c. 26).
About Erytheia, Cellerius observes (Geogr. Ant. ii. 1, 227),
"Insula Erytheia, quam veteres adjungunt Gadibus, vel demersa
est, vel in scopulis quærenda, vel pars est ipsarum Gadium, neque
hodie ejus formæ aliqua, uti descripta est, fertur superesse." To
make the disjunctive catalogue complete, he ought to have added,
"or it never really existed,"—not the least probable supposition
of all.
Both the track and the terminus of the Argonautic voyage appear in the
most ancient epic as little within the conditions of reality, as the
speaking timbers or the semi-divine crew of the vessel. In the Odyssey,
Æêtês and Circê (Hesiod names Mêdea also) are brother and sister,
offspring of Hêlios. The Ææan island, adjoining the circumfluous ocean,
"where the house and dancing-ground of Eôs are situated, and where
Hêlios rises," is both the residence of Circê and of Æêtês, inasmuch
as Odysseus, in returning from the former, follows the same course as
the Argô had previously taken in returning from the latter.[603] Even
in the conception of Mimnermus, about 600 B. C., Æa still retained
its fabulous attributes in conjunction with the ocean and Hêlios,
without having been yet identified with any known portion of the
solid earth;[604] and it was justly remarked by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis
in antiquity[605] (though Strabo vainly tries to refute him), that
neither Homer nor Mimnermus designates Kolchis either as the residence
of Æêtês, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried
the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But
some of the poems ascribed to Eumêlus were the first which mentioned
Æêtês and Kolchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian
mythical genealogy.[606] These poems seem to have been composed
subsequent to the foundation of Sinopê, and to the commencement of
Grecian settlement on the Borysthenês, between the years 600 and 500 B.
C. The Greek mariners who explored and colonized the southern coast of
the Euxine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and
its barbarous inhabitants: it was the easternmost point which Grecian
navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained,
and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus.[607]
They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found "the house of
Eôs (the morning) and the rising place of the sun," and that the river
Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct
them to the circumfluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of Æa,
and the fabulous and real title gradually became associated together
into one compound appellation,—the Kolchian Æa, or Æa of Kolchis.[608]
While Kolchis was thus entered on the map as a fit representative for
the Homeric "house of the morning," the narrow strait of the Thracian
Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplêgades,
or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argô had been
the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Hêrakleia and
Sinopê, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to
give this direction to the voyage; so that in the time of Hekatæus it
had become the established belief that the Argô had started from Iôlkos
and gone to Kolchis.
[603] Hesiod, Theogon. 956-992; Homer, Odyss. xii. 3-69.—
Νῆσον ἐς Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ᾽ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης
Οἴκια καὶ χόροι εἰσὶ, καὶ ἀντολαὶ ἠελίοιο.
[604] Mimnerm. Fragm. 10-11, Schneidewin; Athenæ. vii. p. 277.—
Οὐδέ κοτ᾽ ἂν μέγα κῶας ἀνήγαγεν αὐτὸς Ἰήσων
Ἐξ Αἴης τελέσας ἀλγινόεσσαν ὁδὸν,
Ὑβρίστῃ Πελίῃ τελέων χαλεπῆρες ἄεθλον,
Οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἐπ᾽ Ὠκεανοῦ καλὸν ἵκοντο ῥόον.
· · · · ·
Αἰήταο πόλιν, τόθι τ᾽ ὠκέος Ἠελίοιο
Ἀκτῖνες χρυσέῳ κείαται ἐν θαλάμῳ,
Ὠκεανοῦ παρὰ χείλεσ᾽, ἵν᾽ ὤχετο θεῖος Ἰήσων.
[605] Strabo, i. p. 45-46. Δημήτριος ὁ Σκήψιος ... πρὸς Νεάνθη
τὸν Κυζικηνὸν ~φιλοτιμοτέρως~ ἀντιλέγων, εἰπόντα, ὅτι οἱ
Ἀργοναῦται πλέοντες εἰς Φᾶσιν τὸν ὑφ᾽ Ὁμήρου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων
ὁμολογούμενον πλοῦν, ἱδρύσαντο τὰ τῆς Ἰδαίας μητρὸς ἱερὰ ἐπὶ
Κύζικον ... ~ἀρχήν φησὶ μηδ᾽ εἰδέναι τὴν εἰς Φᾶσιν ἀποδημίαν τοῦ
Ἰάσονος Ὅμηρον~. Again, p. 46, παραλαβὼν μάρτυρα Μίμνερμον, ὃς ἐν
τῷ Ὠκεανῷ ποιήσας οἴκησιν Αἰήτου, etc.
The adverb φιλοτιμοτέρως reveals to us the municipal rivalry
and contention between the small town Skêpsis and its powerful
neighbor Kyzikus, respecting points of comparative archæology.
[606] Eumêlus, Fragm. Εὐρωπία 7, Κορινθιακὰ 2-5. pp. 63-68,
Düntzer.
[607] Arrian, Periplus Pont. Euxin. p. 12; ap. Geogr. Minor. vol.
i. He saw the Caucasus from Dioskurias.
[608] Herodot i. 2; vii. 193-197. Eurip. Mêd. 2. Valer. Flacc. v.
51.
Æêtês thus received his home from the legendary faith and fancy
of the eastern Greek navigators: his sister Circê, originally his
fellow-resident, was localized by the western. The Hesiodic and other
poems, giving expression to the imaginative impulses of the inhabitants
of Cumæ and other early Grecian settlers in Italy and Sicily,[609] had
referred the wanderings of Odysseus to the western or Tyrrhenian sea,
and had planted the Cyclôpes, the Læstrygones, the floating island of
Æolus, the Lotophagi, the Phæacians, etc., about the coast of Sicily,
Italy, Libya, and Korkyra. In this way the Ææan island,—the residence
of Circê, and the extreme point of the wanderings of Odysseus, from
whence he passes only to the ocean and into Hadês—came to be placed in
the far west, while the Æa of Æêtês was in the far east,—not unlike our
East and West Indies. The Homeric brother and sister were separated and
sent to opposite extremities of the Grecian terrestrial horizon.[610]
[609] Strabo, i. p. 23. Völcker (Ueber Homerische Geographie,
v. 66) is instructive upon this point, as upon the geography
of the Greek poets generally. He recognizes the purely
mythical character of Æa in Homer and Hesiod, but he tries to
prove—unsuccessfully, in my judgment—that Homer places Æêtês in
the east, while Circê is in the west, and that Homer refers the
Argonautic voyage to the Euxine Sea.
[610] Strabo (or Polybius, whom he has just been citing) contends
that Homer knew the existence of Æêtês in Kolchis, and of Circê
at Circeium, as historical persons, as well as the voyage of
Jasôn to Æa as an historical fact. Upon this he (Homer) built
a superstructure of fiction (προσμύθευμα): he invented the
brotherhood between them, and he placed both the one and the
other in the exterior ocean (συγγενείας τε ἔπλασε τῶν οὕτω
διῳκισμένων, καὶ ἐξωκεανισμὸν ἀμφοῖν, i. p. 20); perhaps also
Jasôn might have wandered as far as Italy, as evidences (σημεῖά
τινα) are shown that he did (_ib._).
But the idea that Homer conceived Æêtês in the extreme east and
Circê in the extreme west, is not reconcilable with the Odyssey.
The supposition of Strabo is alike violent and unsatisfactory.
Circê was worshipped as a goddess at Circeii (Cicero, Nat. Deor.
iii. 19). Hesiod, in the Theogony, represents the two sons of
Circê by Odysseus as reigning over all the warlike Tyrrhenians
(Theog. 1012), an undefined western sovereignty. The great
Mamilian gens at Tusculum traced their descent to Odysseus and
Circê (Dionys. Hal. iv. 45).
The track from Iôlkos to Kolchis, however, though plausible as far as
it went, did not realize all the conditions of the genuine fabulous
voyage: it did not explain the evidences of the visit of these
maritime heroes which were to be found in Libya, in Krêtê in Anaphê,
in Korkyra, in the Adriatic Gulf, in Italy and in Æthalia. It became
necessary to devise another route for them in their return, and the
Hesiodic narrative was (as I have before observed), that they came back
by the circumfluous ocean; first going up the river Phasis into the
circumfluous ocean; following that deep and gentle stream until they
entered the Nile, and came down its course to the coast of Libya. This
seems also to have been the belief of Hekatæus.[611] But presently
several Greeks (and Herodotus among them) began to discard the idea of
a circumfluous ocean-stream, which had pervaded their old geographical
and astronomical fables, and which explained the supposed easy
communication between one extremity of the earth and another. Another
idea was then started for the returning voyage of the Argonauts.
It was supposed that the river Ister, or Danube, flowing from the
Rhipæan mountains in the north-west of Europe, divided itself into two
branches, one of which fell into the Euxine Sea, and the other into the
Adriatic.
[611] See above, p. 239. There is an opinion cited from Hekatæus
in Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 284. contrary to this, which is given
by the same scholiast on iv. 259. But, in spite of the remarks
of Klausen (ad. Fragment. Hekatæi, 187. p. 98), I think that the
Schol. ad. iv. 284 has made a mistake in citing Hekatæus; the
more so as the scholiast, as printed from the Codex Parisinus,
cites the same opinion without mentioning Hekatæus. According
to the old Homeric idea, the ocean stream flowed all round the
earth, and was the source of all the principal rivers which
flowed into the great internal sea, or Mediterranean (see
Hekatæus, Fr. 349; Klausen, ap. Arrian. ii. 16, where he speaks
of the Mediterranean as the μεγάλη θάλασσα). Retaining this old
idea of the ocean-stream, Hekatæus would naturally believe that
the Phasis joined it: nor can I agree with Klausen (ad Fr. 187)
that this implies a degree of ignorance too gross to impute to
him.
The Argonauts, fleeing from the pursuit of Æêtês, had been obliged to
abandon their regular course homeward, and had gone from the Euxine
Sea up the Ister; then passing down the other branch of that river,
they had entered into the Adriatic, the Kolchian pursuers following
them. Such is the story given by Apollônius Rhodius from Timagêtus,
and accepted even by so able a geographer as Eratosthenês—who preceded
him by one generation, and who, though sceptical in regard to the
localities visited by Odysseus, seems to have been a firm believer in
the reality of the Argonautic voyage.[612] Other historians again,
among whom was Timæus, though they considered the ocean as an
outer sea, and no longer admitted the existence of the old Homeric
ocean-stream, yet imagined a story for the return-voyage of the
Argonauts somewhat resembling the old tale of Hesiod and Hekatæus.
They alleged that the Argô, after entering into the Palus Mæotis, had
followed the upward course of the river Tanais; that she had then been
carried overland and launched in a river which had its mouth in the
ocean or great outer sea. When in the ocean, she had coasted along
the north and west of Europe until she reached Gadês and the Strait
of Gibraltar, where she entered into the Mediterranean, and there
visited the many places specified in the fable. Of this long voyage,
in the outer sea to the north and west of Europe, many traces were
affirmed to exist along the coast of the ocean.[613] There was again
a third version, according to which the Argonauts came back as they
went, through the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont. In this way
geographical plausibility was indeed maintained, but a large portion of
the fabulous matter was thrown overboard.[614]
[612] Apollôn. Rhod. iv. 287; Schol. ad iv. 284; Pindar, Pyth.
iv. 447, with Schol.; Strabo, i. p. 46-57; Aristot. Mirabil.
Auscult. c. 105. Altars were shown in the Adriatic, which had
been erected both by Jasôn and by Mêdea (_ib._).
Aristotle believed in the forked course of the Ister, with one
embouchure in the Euxine and another in the Adriatic: he notices
certain fishes called τρίχιαι, who entered the river (like the
Argonauts) from the Euxine, went up it as far as the point of
bifurcation and descended into the Adriatic (Histor. Animal.
viii. 15). Compare Ukert, Geographie der Griech. und Römer, vol.
iii. p. 145-147, about the supposed course of the Ister.
[613] Diodôr. iv. 56; Timæus, Fragm. 53. Göller. Skymnus the
geographer also adopted this opinion (Schol. Apoll. Rhod.
284-287). The pseudo-Orpheus in the poem called Argonautica seems
to give a jumble of all the different stories.
[614] Diodôr. iv. 49. This was the tale both of Sophoklês and of
Kallimachus (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 284).
See the Dissertation of Ukert, Beylage iv. vol. i. part 2, p. 320
of his Geographie der Griechen und Römer, which treats of the
Argonautic voyage at some length; also J. H. Voss, Alte Weltkunde
über die Gestalt der Erde, published in the second volume of the
Kritische Blätter, pp. 162, 314-326; and Forbiger, Handbuch der
Alten Geographie-Einleitung, p. 8.
Such were the various attempts made to reconcile the Argonautic
legend with enlarged geographical knowledge and improved historical
criticism. The problem remained unsolved, but the faith in the legend
did not the less continue. It was a faith originally generated at
a time when the unassisted narrative of the inspired poet sufficed
for the conviction of his hearers; it consecrated one among the
capital exploits of that heroic and superhuman race, whom the Greek
was accustomed at once to look back upon as his ancestors and to
worship conjointly with his gods: it lay too deep in his mind either
to require historical evidence for its support, or to be overthrown
by geographical difficulties as they were then appreciated. Supposed
traces of the past event, either preserved in the names of places, or
embodied in standing religious customs with their explanatory comments,
served as sufficient authentication in the eyes of the curious
inquirer. And even men trained in a more severe school of criticism
contented themselves with eliminating the palpable contradictions
and softening down the supernatural and romantic events, so as to
produce an Argonautic expedition of their own invention as the true
and accredited history. Strabo, though he can neither overlook nor
explain the geographical impossibilities of the narrative, supposes
himself to have discovered the basis of actual fact, which the original
poets had embellished or exaggerated. The golden fleece was typical
of the great wealth of Kolchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by
the rivers; and the voyage of Jasôn was in reality an expedition at
the head of a considerable army, with which he plundered this wealthy
country and made extensive conquests in the interior.[615] Strabo has
nowhere laid down what he supposes to have been the exact measure and
direction of Jasôn's march, but he must have regarded it as very long,
since he classes Jasôn with Dionysus and Hêraklês, and emphatically
characterizes all the three as having traversed wider spaces of ground
than any moderns could equal.[616] Such was the compromise which a
mind like that of Strabo made with the ancient legends. He shaped or
cut them down to the level of his own credence, and in this waste of
historical criticism, without any positive evidence, he took to himself
the credit of greater penetration than the literal believers, while he
escaped the necessity of breaking formally with the bygone heroic world.
[615] Strabo, i. p. 45. He speaks here of the voyage of Phryxus,
as well as that of Jasôn, as having been a military undertaking
(στρατεία): so again, iii. p. 149, he speaks of the military
expedition of Odysseus—ἡ τοῦ Ὀδυσσέως στρατία, and ἡ Ἡρακλέους
στρατία (_ib._). Again xi. p. 498. Οἱ μῦθοι, αἰνιττόμενοι τὴν
Ἰάσονος στρατείαν προελθόντος μέχρι καὶ Μηδίας· ἔτι δὲ πρότερον
τὴν Φρίξου. Compare also Justin, xlii. 2-3; Tacit. Annal. vi. 34.
Strabo cannot speak of the old fables with literal fidelity: he
unconsciously transforms them into quasi-historical incidents of
his own imagination. Diodôrus gives a narrative of the same kind,
with decent substitutes for the fabulous elements (iv. 40-47-56).
[616] Strabo, i. p. 48. The far-extending expeditions undertaken
in the eastern regions by Dionysus and Hêraklês were constantly
present to the mind of Alexander the Great as subjects of
comparison with himself: he imposed upon his followers perilous
and trying marches, from anxiety to equal or surpass the alleged
exploits of Semiramis, Cyrus, Perseus, and Hêraklês. (Arrian, v.
2, 3; vi. 24, 3; vii. 10, 12. Strabo, iii. p. 171; xv. p. 686;
xvii. p. 81).
CHAPTER XIV.
LEGENDS OF THEBES.
The Bϙtians generally, throughout the historical age, though well
endowed with bodily strength and courage,[617] are represented as
proverbially deficient in intelligence, taste and fancy. But the
legendary population of Thêbes, the Kadmeians, are rich in mythical
antiquities, divine as well as heroic. Both Dionysus and Hêraklês
recognize Thêbes as their natal city. Moreover, the two sieges of
Thêbes by Adrastus, even taken apart from Kadmus, Antiopê, Amphiôn and
Zethus, etc., are the most prominent and most characteristic exploits,
next to the siege of Troy, of that preëxisting race of heroes who lived
in the imagination of the historical Hellênes.
[617] The eponym Bœôtus is son of Poseidôn and Arnê (Euphorion
ap. Eustath. ad Iliad. ii. 507). It was from Arnê in Thessaly
that the Bϙtians were said to have come, when they invaded
and occupied Bœôtia. Euripidês made him son of Poseidôn and
Melanippê. Another legend recited Bœôtus and Hellên as sons of
Poseidôn and Antiopê (Hygin. f. 157-186).
The Tanagræan poetess Korinna (the rival of Pindar, whose
compositions in the Bϙtian dialect are unfortunately lost)
appears to have dwelt upon this native Bϙtian genealogy: she
derived the Ogygian gates of Thêbes from Ogygus, son of Bœôtus
(Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1178), also the Fragments of Korinna
in Schneidewin's edition, fr. 2. p. 432.
It is not Kadmus, but the brothers Amphiôn and Zethus, who are given
to us in the Odyssey as the first founders of Thêbes and the first
builders of its celebrated walls. They are the sons of Zeus by Antiopê,
daughter of Asôpus. The scholiasts who desire to reconcile this tale
with the more current account of the foundation of Thêbes by Kadmus,
tell us that after the death of Amphiôn and Zethus, Eurymachus, the
warlike king of the Phlegyæ, invaded and ruined the newly-settled
town, so that Kadmus on arriving was obliged to re-found it.[618] But
Apollodôrus, and seemingly the older logographers before him, placed
Kadmus at the top, and inserted the two brothers at a lower point
in the series. According to them, Bêlus and Agenôr were the sons of
Epaphus, son of the Argeian Iô, by Libya. Agenôr went to Phœnicia and
there became king: he had for his offspring Kadmus, Phœnix, Kilix,
and a daughter Eurôpa; though in the Iliad Eurôpa is called daughter
of Phœnix.[619] Zeus fell in love with Eurôpa, and assuming the shape
of a bull, carried her across the sea upon his back from Egypt to
Krête, where she bore to him Minôs, Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. Two out
of the three sons sent out by Agenôr in search of their lost sister,
wearied out by a long-protracted as well as fruitless voyage, abandoned
the idea of returning home: Kilix settled in Kilikia, and Kadmus
in Thrace.[620] Thasus, the brother or nephew of Kadmus, who had
accompanied them in the voyage, settled and gave name to the island of
Phasus.
[618] Homer, Odyss. xi. 262, and Eustath. _ad loc._ Compare
Schol. ad Iliad. xiii. 301.
[619] Iliad, xiv. 321. Iô is κερόεσσα προμάτωρ of the Thêbans.
Eurip. Phœniss. 247-676.
[620] Apollodôr. ii. 1, 3; iii. 1, 8. In the Hesiodic poems
(ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 178), Phœnix was recognized as son
of Agenôr. Pherekydês also described both Phœnix and Kadmus as
sons of Agenôr (Pherekyd. Fragm. 40, Didot). Compare Servius
ad. Virgil. Æneid. 1. 338. Pherekydês expressly mentioned
Kilix (Apollod. _ib._). Besides the Εὐρώπεια of Stesichorus
(see Stesichor. Fragm. xv. p. 73, ed. Kleine), there were
several other ancient poems on the adventures of Europa; one in
particular by Eumêlus (Schol. ad Iliad. vi. 138), which however
can hardly be the same as the τὰ ἔπη τὰ εἰς Εὐρώπην alluded to by
Pausanias (ix. 5, 4). See Wüllner de Cyclo Epico, p. 57 (Münster
1825).
Both Herodotus and Euripidês represent Kadmus as an emigrant from
Phœnicia, conducting a body of followers in quest of Eurôpa. The
account of Apollodôrus describes him as having come originally from
Libya or Egypt to Phœnicia: we may presume that this was also the
statement of the earlier logographers Pherekydês and Hellanikus. Conôn,
who historicizes and politicizes the whole legend, seems to have found
two different accounts; one connecting Kadmus with Egypt, another
bringing him from Phœnicia. He tries to melt down the two into one, by
representing that the Phœnicians, who sent out Kadmus, had acquired
great power in Egypt—that the seat of their kingdom was the Egyptian
Thêbes—that Kadmus was despatched, under pretence indeed of finding
his lost sister, but really on a project of conquest—and that the name
Thêbes, which he gave to his new establishment in Bœôtia, was borrowed
from Thêbes in Egypt, his ancestorial seat.[621]
[621] Conôn, Narrat. 37. Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all
is the tone of unbounded self-confidence with which Conôn winds
up this tissue of uncertified suppositions—περὶ μὲν Κάδμου καὶ
Θηβῶν οἰκίσεως οὗτος ὁ ἀληθὴς λόγος· τὸ δὲ ἄλλο μῦθος καὶ γοητεία
ἀκοῆς.
Kadmus went from Thrace to Delphi to procure information respecting
his sister Eurôpa, but the god directed him to take no further trouble
about her; he was to follow the guidance of a cow, and to found a
city on the spot where the animal should lie down. The condition was
realized on the site of Thêbes. The neighboring fountain Areia was
guarded by a fierce dragon, the offspring of Arês, who destroyed all
the persons sent to fetch water. Kadmus killed the dragon, and at
the suggestion of Athênê sowed his teeth in the earth:[622] there
sprang up at once the armed men called the Sparti, among whom he flung
stones, and they immediately began to assault each other until all
were slain except five. Arês, indignant at this slaughter, was about to
kill Kadmus; but Zeus appeased him, condemning Kadmus to an expiatory
servitude of eight years, after which he married Harmonia, the
daughter of Arês and Aphroditê—presenting to her the splendid necklace
fabricated by the hand of Hêphæstos, which had been given by Zeus to
Eurôpa.[623] All the gods came to the Kadmeia, the citadel of Thêbes,
to present congratulations and gifts at these nuptials, which seem to
have been hardly less celebrated in the mythical world than those of
Pêleus and Thetis. The issue of the marriage was one son, Polydôrus,
and four daughters, Autonoê, Inô, Semelê and Agavê.[624]
[622] Stesichor. (Fragm. 16; Kleine) ap. Schol. Eurip. Phœniss.
680. The place where the heifer had lain down was still shown in
the time of Pausanias (ix. 12, 1).
Lysimachus, a lost author who wrote Thebaïca, mentioned Eurôpa
as having come with Kadmus to Thêbes, and told the story in many
other respects very differently (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iii. 1179).
[623] Apollodôr. iii. 4, 1-3. Pherekydês gave this account of
the necklace, which seems to imply that Kadmus must have found
his sister Eurôpa. The narrative here given is from Hellanikus;
that of Pherekydês differed from it in some respects: compare
Hellanik. Fragm. 8 and 9, and Pherekyd. Frag. 44. The resemblance
of this story with that of Jasôn and Æêtês (see above, chap.
xiii. p. 237) will strike everyone. It is curious to observe how
the old logographer Pherekydês explained this analogy in his
narrative; he said that Athênê had given half the dragon's teeth
to Kadmus and half to Æêtês (see Schol. Pindar. Isthm. vi. 13).
[624] Hesiod, Theogon. 976. Leukothea, the sea-goddess, daughter
of Kadmus, is mentioned in the Odyssey, v. 334; Diodôr. iv. 2.
From the five who alone survived of the warriors sprung from the
dragon's teeth, arose five great families or gentes in Thêbes; the
oldest and noblest of its inhabitants, coeval with the foundation of
the town. They were called Sparti, and their name seems to have given
rise, not only to the fable of the sowing of the teeth, but also to
other etymological narratives.[625]
[625] Eurip. Phœniss. 680, with the Scholia; Pherekydês, Fragm.
44; Androtiôn, ap. Schol. Pindar. Isthm. vi. 13. Dionysius (?)
called the Sparti an ἔθνος Βοιωτίας (Schol. Phœniss. 1. c).
Even in the days of Plutarch, there were persons living who
traced their descent to the Sparti of Thêbes (Plutarch, Ser. Num.
Vindict. p. 563).
All the four daughters of Kadmus are illustrious in fabulous history.
Inô, wife of Athamas, the son of Æolus, has already been included among
the legends of the Æolids. Semelê became the mistress of Zeus, and
inspired Hêrê with jealousy. Misguided by the malicious suggestions of
that goddess, she solicited Zeus to visit her with all the solemnity
and terrors which surrounded him when he approached Hêrê herself.
The god unwillingly consented, and came in his chariot in the midst
of thunder and lightning, under which awful accompaniments the mortal
frame of Semelê perished. Zeus, taking from her the child of which she
was pregnant, sewed it into his own thigh: after the proper interval
the child was brought out and born, and became the great god Dionysus
or Bacchus. Hermês took him to Inô and Athamas to receive their
protection. Afterwards, however, Zeus having transformed him into a kid
to conceal him from the persecution of Hêrê, the nymphs of the mountain
Nysa became his nurses.[626]
[626] Apollodôr. iii. 4, 2-9; Diodôr. iv. 2.
Autonoê, the third daughter of Kadmus, married the pastoral hero or god
Aristæus, and was mother of Aktæôn, a devoted hunter and a favorite
companion of the goddess Artemis. She however became displeased with
him—either because he looked into a fountain while she was bathing
and saw her naked—or according to the legend set forth by the poet
Stesichorus, because he loved and courted Semelê—or according to
Euripidês, because he presumptuously vaunted himself as her superior in
the chase. She transformed him into a stag, so that his own dogs set
upon and devoured him. The rock upon which Aktæôn used to sleep when
fatigued with the chase, and the spring whose transparent waters had
too clearly revealed the form of the goddess, were shown to Pausanias
near Platæa, on the road to Megara.[627]
[627] See Apollodôr. iii. 4, 3; Stesichor. Fragm. xvii. Kleine;
Pausan. ix. 2, 3; Eurip. Bacch. 337; Diodôr. iv. 81. The old
logographer Akusilaus copied Stesichorus.
Upon this well-known story it is unnecessary to multiply
references. I shall however briefly notice the remarks made upon
it by Diodôrus and by Pausanias, as an illustration of the manner
in which the literary Greeks of a later day dealt with their old
national legends.
Both of them appear implicitly to believe the fact, that Aktæôn
was devoured by his own dogs, but they differ materially in the
explanation of it.
Diodôrus accepts and vindicates the miraculous interposition
of the displeased goddess to punish Aktæôn, who, according
to one story, had boasted of his superiority in the chase to
Artemis,—according to another story, had presumed to solicit the
goddess in marriage, emboldened by the great numbers of the feet
of animals slain in the chase which he had hung up as offerings
in her temple. "It is not improbable (observes Diodôrus) that
the goddess was angry on both these accounts. For whether Aktæôn
abused these hunting presents so far as to make them the means
of gratifying his own desires towards one unapproachable in
wedlock, or whether he presumed to call himself an abler hunter
than her with whom the gods themselves will not compete in this
department,—in either case the wrath of the goddess against him
was just and legitimate (ὁμολογουμένην καὶ δικαίαν ὀργὴν ἔσχε
πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ θεός). With perfect propriety therefore (Καθόλου δὲ
πιθανῶς) was he transformed into an animal such as those he had
hunted, and torn to pieces by the very dogs who had killed them."
(Didot. iv. 80.)
Pausanias, a man of exemplary piety, and generally less inclined
to scepticism than Diodôrus, thinks the occasion unsuitable for
a miracle or special interference. Having alluded to the two
causes assigned for the displeasure of Artemis (they are the two
first-mentioned in my text, and distinct from the two noticed
by Diodôrus), he proceeds to say, "But I believe that the dogs
of Aktæôn went mad, without the interference of the goddess: in
this state of madness they would have torn in pieces without
distinction any one whom they met (Paus. ix. 2, 3. ἐγὼ δὲ ἄνευ
θεοῦ πείθομαι νόσον λύσσαν ἐπιβαλεῖν τοῦ Ἀκταίωνος τοὺς κύνας)."
He retains the truth of the final catastrophe, but rationalizes
it, excluding the special intervention of Artemis.
Agavê, the remaining daughter of Kadmus, married Echiôn, one of the
Sparti. The issue of these nuptials was Pentheus, who, when Kadmus
became old succeeded him as king of Thêbes. In his reign Dionysus
appeared as a god, the author or discoverer of the vine with all its
blessings. He had wandered over Asia, India and Thrace, at the head of
an excited troop of female enthusiasts—communicating and inculcating
everywhere the Bacchic ceremonies, and rousing in the minds of women
that impassioned religious emotion which led them to ramble in solitary
mountains at particular seasons, there to give vent to violent
fanatical excitement, apart from the men, clothed in fawn-skins and
armed with the thyrsus. The obtrusion of a male spectator upon these
solemnities was esteemed sacrilegious. Though the rites had been
rapidly disseminated and fervently welcomed in many parts of Thrace,
yet there were some places in which they had been obstinately resisted
and their votaries treated with rudeness; especially by Lykurgus, king
of the Edonian Thracians, upon whom a sharp and exemplary punishment
was inflicted by Dionysus.
Thêbes was the first city of Greece to which Dionysus came, at the
head of his Asiatic troop of females, to obtain divine honors and
to establish his peculiar rites in his native city. The venerable
Kadmus, together with his daughters and the prophet Teiresias, at once
acknowledged the divinity of the new god, and began to offer their
worship and praise to him along with the solemnities which he enjoined.
But Pentheus vehemently opposed the new ceremonies, reproving and
maltreating the god who introduced them: nor was his unbelief at all
softened by the miracles which Dionysus wrought for his own protection
and for that of his followers. His mother Agavê, with her sisters, and
a large body of other women from Thêbes, had gone out from Thêbes to
Mount Kithærôn to celebrate their solemnities under the influence of
the Bacchic frenzy. Thither Pentheus followed to watch them, and there
the punishment due to his impiety overtook him. The avenging touch of
the god having robbed him of his senses, he climbed a tall pine for the
purpose of overlooking the feminine multitude, who detected him in this
position, pulled down the tree, and tore him in pieces. Agavê, mad and
bereft of consciousness, made herself the foremost in this assault, and
carried back in triumph to Thêbes the head of her slaughtered son. The
aged Kadmus, with his wife Harmonia, retired among the Illyrians, and
at the end of their lives were changed into serpents, Zeus permitting
them to be transferred to the Elysian fields.[628]
[628] Apollod. iii. 5, 3-4; Theocrit. Idyll. xxvi. Eurip. Bacch.
_passim_. Such is the tragical plot of this memorable drama. It
is a striking proof of the deep-seated reverence of the people
of Athens for the sanctity of the Bacchic ceremonies, that they
could have borne the spectacle of Agavê on the stage with her
dead son's head, and the expressions of triumphant sympathy in
her action on the part of the Chorus (1168), Μάκαιρ᾽ Ἀγαύη! This
drama, written near the close of the life of Euripidês, and
exhibited by his son after his death (Schol. Aristoph. Ran. 67,),
contains passages strongly inculcating the necessity of implicit
deference to ancestorial authority in matters of religion, and
favorably contrasting the uninquiring faith of the vulgar with
the dissenting and inquisitive tendencies of superior minds: see
v. 196; compare vv. 389 and 422.—
Οὐδὲν σοφιζόμεσθα τοῖσι δαίμοσιν.
Πατρίους παραδοχὰς, ἅς θ᾽ ὁμήλικας χρόνῳ
Κεκτήμεθ᾽, οὐδεὶς αὐτὰ καταβαλεῖ λόγος,
Οὐδ᾽ ἢν δι᾽ ἄκρων τὸ σοφὸν εὕρηται φρένων.
Such reproofs "insanientis sapientiæ" certainly do not fall in
with the plot of the drama itself, in which Pentheus appears as
a Conservative, resisting the introduction of the new religious
rites. Taken in conjunction with the emphatic and submissive
piety which reigns through the drama, they countenance the
supposition of Tyrwhitt, that Euripidês was anxious to repel the
imputations, so often made against him, of commerce with the
philosophers and participation in sundry heretical opinions.
Pacuvius in his Pentheus seems to have closely copied Euripidês;
see Servius ad Virg. Æneid. iv. 469.
The old Thespis had composed a tragedy on the subject of
Pentheus: Suidas, Θέσπις; also Æschylus; compare his Eumenidês,
25.
According to Apollodôrus (iii. 5, 5), Labdakus also perished in a
similar way to Pentheus, and from the like impiety,—ἐκείνῳ φρονῶν
παραπλήσια.
Polydôrus and Labdakus successively became kings of Thêbes: the latter
at his death left an infant son, Laius, who was deprived of his throne
by Lykus. And here we approach the legend of Antiopê, Zêthus and
Amphiôn, whom the fabulists insert at this point of the Thêban series.
Antiopê is here the daughter of Nykteus, the brother of Lykus. She is
deflowered by Zeus, and then, while pregnant, flies to Epôpeus king of
Sikyôn: Nykteus dying entreats his brother to avenge the injury, and
Lykus accordingly invades Sikyôn, defeats and kills Epôpeus, and brings
back Antiopê prisoner to Thêbes. In her way thither, in a cave near
Eleutheræ, which was shown to Pausanias,[629] she is delivered of the
twin sons of Zeus—Amphiôn and Zêthus—who, exposed to perish, are taken
up and nourished by a shepherd, and pass their youth amidst herdsmen,
ignorant of their lofty descent.
[629] Pausan. i. 38, 9.
Antiopê is conveyed to Thêbes, where, after undergoing a long
persecution from Lykus and his cruel wife Dirkê, she at length escapes,
and takes refuge in the pastoral dwelling of her sons, now grown to
manhood. Dirkê pursues and requires her to be delivered up; but the
sons recognize and protect their mother, taking an ample revenge upon
her persecutors. Lykus is slain, and Dirkê is dragged to death, tied to
the horns of a bull.[630] Amphiôn and Zêthus, having banished Laius,
become kings of Thêbes. The former, taught by Hermês, and possessing
exquisite skill on the lyre, employs it in fortifying the city, the
stones of the walls arranging themselves spontaneously in obedience to
the rhythm of his song.[631]
[630] For the adventures of Antiopê and her sons, see Apollodôr.
iii. 5; Pausan. ii. 6, 2; ix. 5, 2.
The narrative given respecting Epôpeus in the ancient Cyprian
verses seems to have been very different from this, as far as we
can judge from the brief notice in Proclus's Argument,—ὡς Ἐπωπεὺς
φθείρας τὴν Λυκούργου (Λύκου) γυναῖκα ἐξεπορθήθη: it approaches
more nearly to the story given in the seventh fable of Hyginus,
and followed by Propertius (iii. 15); the eighth fable of Hyginus
contains the tale of Antiopê as given by Euripidês and Ennius.
The story of Pausanias differs from both.
The Scholiast ad Apollôn. Rhod. i. 735. says that there were
two persons named Antiopê; one, daughter of Asôpus, the other,
daughter of Nykteus. Pausanias is content with supposing one
only, really the daughter of Nykteus, but there was a φήμη
that she was daughter of Asôpus (ii. 6, 2). Asius made Antiopê
daughter of Asôpus, and mother (both by Zeus and by Epôpeus: such
a junction of divine and human paternity is of common occurrence
in the Greek legends) of Zêthus and Amphiôn (ap. Paus. 1. c).
The contradictory versions of the story are brought together,
though not very perfectly, in Sterk's Essay De Labdacidarum
Historiâ, p. 38-43 (Leyden, 1829).
[631] This story about the lyre of Amphiôn is not noticed in
Homer, but it was narrated in the ancient ἔπη ἐς Εὐρώπην which
Pausanias had read: the wild beasts as well as the stones were
obedient to his strains (Paus. ix. 5, 4). Pherekydês also
recounted it (Pherekyd. Fragm. 102, Didot). The tablet of
inscription (Ἀναγραφὴ) at Sikyôn recognized Amphiôn as the first
composer of poetry and harp-music (Plutarch, de Musicâ, c. 3. p.
1132).
Zêthus marries Aêdôn, who, in the dark and under a fatal mistake, kills
her son Itylus: she is transformed into a nightingale, while Zêthus
dies of grief.[632] Amphiôn becomes the husband of Niobê, daughter
of Tantalus, and the father of a numerous offspring, the complete
extinction of which by the hands of Apollo and Artemis has already been
recounted in these pages.
[632] The tale of the wife and son of Zêthus is as old as the
Odyssey (xix. 525). Pausanias adds the statement that Zêthus died
of grief (ix. 5, 5; Pherekydês, Fragm. 102, Did.). Pausanias,
however, as well as Apollodôrus, tells us that Zêthus married
Thêbê, from whom the name Thêbes was given to the city. To
reconcile the conflicting pretensions of Zêthus and Amphiôn with
those of Kadmus, as founders of Thêbes, Pausanias supposes that
the latter was the original settler of the hill of the Kadmeia,
while the two former extended the settlement to the lower city
(ix. 5, 1-3).
Here ends the legend of the beautiful Antiopê and her twin sons—the
rude and unpolished, but energetic, Zêthus—and the refined and amiable,
but dreamy, Amphiôn. For so Euripidês, in the drama of Antiopê
unfortunately lost, presented the two brothers, in affectionate union
as well as in striking contrast.[633] It is evident that the whole
story stood originally quite apart from the Kadmeian family, and so
the rudiments of it yet stand in the Odyssey; but the logographers, by
their ordinary connecting artifices, have opened a vacant place for it
in the descending series of Thêban mythes. And they have here proceeded
in a manner not usual with them. For whereas they are generally fond
of multiplying entities, and supposing different historical personages
of the same name, in order to introduce an apparent smoothness in
the chronology—they have here blended into one person Amphiôn the
son of Antiopê and Amphiôn the father of Chlôris, who seem clearly
distinguished from each other in the Odyssey. They have further
assigned to the same person all the circumstances of the legend of
Niobê, which seems to have been originally framed quite apart from the
sons of Antiopê.
[633] See Valckenaer. Diatribe in Eurip. Reliq. cap. 7, p. 58;
Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. ii. p. 811. There is a striking
resemblance between the Antiopê of Euripidês and the Tyrô of
Sophoklês in many points.
Plato in his Gorgias has preserved a few fragments, and a
tolerably clear general idea of the characters of Zêthus and
Amphiôn (Gorg. 90-92); see also Horat. Epist. i. 18, 42.
Both Livius and Pacuvius had tragedies on the scheme of this of
Euripidês, the former seemingly a translation.
Amphiôn and Zêthus being removed, Laius became king of Thêbes. With
him commences the ever-celebrated series of adventures of Œdipus and
his family. Laius forewarned by the oracle that any son whom he might
beget would kill him, caused Œdipus as soon as he was born to be
exposed on Mount Kithærôn. Here the herdsmen of Polybus king of Corinth
accidentally found him and conveyed him to their master, who brought
him up as his own child. In spite of the kindest treatment, however,
Œdipus when he grew up found himself exposed to taunts on the score of
his unknown parentage, and went to Delphi to inquire of the god the
name of his real father. He received for answer an admonition not to
go back to his country; if he did so, it was his destiny to kill his
father and become the husband of his mother. Knowing no other country
but Corinth, he accordingly determined to keep away from that city,
and quitted Delphi by the road towards Bœôtia and Phôkis. At the exact
spot where the roads leading to these two countries forked, he met
Laius in a chariot drawn by mules, when the insolence of one of the
attendants brought on an angry quarrel, in which Œdipus killed Laius,
not knowing him to be his father. The exact place where this event
happened, called the Divided Way[634], was memorable in the eyes of
all literary Greeks, and is specially adverted to by Pausanias in his
periegesis.
[634] See the description of the locality in K. O. Müller
(Orchomenos, c. i. p. 37).
The tombs of Laius and his attendant were still seen there in the
days of Pausanias (x. 5, 2).
On the death of Laius, Kreôn, the brother of Jokasta, succeeded
to the kingdom of Thêbes. At this time the country was under the
displeasure of the gods, and was vexed by a terrible monster, with
the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a lion,
called the Sphinx[635]—sent by the wrath of Hêrê and occupying the
neighboring mountain of Phikium. The Sphinx had learned from the
Muses a riddle, which she proposed to the Thêbans to resolve: on
every occasion of failure she took away one of the citizens and ate
him up. Still no person could solve the riddle; and so great was the
suffering occasioned, that Kreôn was obliged to offer both the crown
and the nuptials of his sister Jokasta to any one who could achieve
the salvation of the city. At this juncture Œdipus arrived and solved
the riddle: upon which the Sphinx immediately threw herself from the
acropolis and disappeared. As a recompense for this service, Œdipus was
made king of Thêbes, and married Jokasta, not aware that she was his
mother.
[635] Apollodôr. iii. 5, 8. An author named Lykus, in his work
entitled _Thêbaïca_, ascribed this visitation to the anger of
Dionysus (Schol. Hesiod, Theogon. 326). The Sphinx (or _Phix_,
from the Bϙtian Mount Phikium) is as old as the Hesiodic
Theogony,—Φῖκ᾽ ὀλόην τέκε, Καδμείοισιν ὄλεθρον (Theog. 326).
These main tragical circumstances—that Œdipus had ignorantly killed
his father and married his mother—belong to the oldest form of the
legend as it stands in the Odyssey. The gods (it is added in that poem)
quickly made the facts known to mankind. Epikasta (so Jokasta is here
called) in an agony of sorrow hanged herself: Œdipus remained king of
the Kadmeians, but underwent many and great miseries, such as the
Erinnyes, who avenge an injured mother, inflict.[636] A passage in the
Iliad implies that he died at Thêbes, since it mentions the funeral
games which were celebrated there in honor of him. His misfortunes
were recounted by Nestôr, in the old Cyprian verses, among the stories
of aforetime.[637] A fatal curse hung both upon himself and upon his
children, Eteoklês, Polynikês, Antigonê and Ismênê. According to
that narrative which the Attic tragedians have rendered universally
current, they were his children by Jokasta, the disclosure of her true
relationship to him having been very long deferred. But the ancient
epic called Œdipodia, treading more closely in the footsteps of Homer,
represented him as having after her death married a second wife,
Euryganeia, by whom the four children were born to him: and the painter
Onatas adopted this story in preference to that of Sophoklês.[638]
[636] Odyss. xi. 270. Odysseus, describing what he saw in the
under-world, says,—
Μητέρα τ᾽ Οἰδιπόδαο ἴδον, καλὴν Ἐπικάστην,
Ἣ μέγα ἔργον ἔρεξεν αἰδρεΐῃσι νόοιο,
Γημαμένη ᾧ υἱεῖ· ὁ δ᾽ ὃν πατέρ᾽ ἐξεναρίξας
Γῆμεν· ἄφαρ δ᾽ ἀνάπυστα θεοὶ θέσαν ἀνθρώποισι.
Ἀλλ᾽ ὁ μὲν ἐν Θήβῃ πολυηράτῳ ἄλγεα πάσχων,
Καδμείων ἤνασσε, θεῶν ὀλοὰς διὰ βουλάς·
Ἡ δ᾽ ἔβη εἰς Αἰδάο πυλάρταο κρατεροῖο
Ἁψαμένη βρόχον αἰπὺν ἀφ᾽ ὑψήλοιο μελάθρου,
Ὧ ἄχεϊ σχομένη· τῷ δ᾽ ἄλγεα κάλλιπ᾽ ὀπίσσω
Πολλὰ μάλ᾽, ὅσσα τε μητρὸς Ἐριννύες ἐκτελέουσιν.
[637] Iliad, xxiii. 680, with the scholiast who cites Hesiod.
Proclus, Argum. ad Cypria, ap. Düntzer, Fragm. Epic. Græc. p. 10.
Νέστωρ δὲ ἐν παρεκβάσει διηγεῖται ... καὶ τὰ περὶ Οἰδίπουν, etc.
[638] Pausan. ix. 5, 5. Compare the narrative from Peisander in
Schol. ad Eurip. Phœniss. 1773; where, however, the blindness
of Œdipus seems to be unconsciously interpolated out of the
tragedians. In the old narrative of the Cyclic Thêbaïs, Œdipus
does not seem to be represented as blind (Leutsch, Thebaidis
Cyclici Reliquiæ, Götting. 1830, p. 42).
Pherekydês (ap. Schol. Eurip. Phœniss. 52) tells us that Œdipus
had three children by Jokasta, who were all killed by Erginus
and the Minyæ (this must refer to incidents in the old poems
which we cannot now recover); then the four celebrated children
by Euryganeia; lastly, that he married a third wife, Astymedusa.
Apollodôrus follows the narrative of the tragedians, but alludes
to the different version about Euryganeia,—εἰσὶ δ᾽ οἵ φασιν, etc.
(iii. 5, 8).
Hellanikus (ap. Schol. Eur. Phœniss. 59) mentioned the
self-inflicted blindness of Œdipus; but it seems doubtful whether
this circumstance was included in the narrative of Pherekydês.
The disputes of Eteoklês and Polynikês for the throne of their father
gave occasion not only to a series of tragical family incidents,
but also to one of the great quasi-historical events of legendary
Greece—the two sieges of Thêbes by Adrastus, king of Argos. The two
ancient epic poems called the Thêbaïs and the Epigoni (if indeed both
were not parts of one very comprehensive poem) detailed these events
at great length, and as it appears, with distinguished poetical merit;
for Pausanias pronounces the Cyclic Thêbaïs (so it was called by the
subsequent critics to distinguish it from the more modern Thêbaïs of
Antimachus) inferior only to the Iliad and Odyssey; and the ancient
elegiac poet Kallinus treated it as an Homeric composition.[639] Of
this once-valued poem we unfortunately possess nothing but a few
scanty fragments. The leading points of the legend are briefly glanced
at in the Iliad; but our knowledge of the details is chiefly derived
from the Attic tragedians, who transformed the narratives of their
predecessors at pleasure, and whose popularity constantly eclipsed and
obliterated the ancient version. Antimachus of Kolophôn, contemporary
with Euripidês, in his long epic, probably took no less liberties
with the old narrative. His Thêbaïd never became generally popular,
but it exhibited marks of study and elaboration which recommended it
to the esteem of the Alexandrine critics, and probably contributed to
discredit in their eyes the old cyclic poem.
[639] Pausan. ix. 9. 3. Ἐποιήθη δὲ ἐς τὸν πόλεμον τοῦτον καὶ ἔπη,
Θηβαΐς· τὰ δὲ ἔπη ταῦτα Καλλῖνος, ἀφικόμενος αὐτῶν ἐς μνήμην,
ἔφησεν Ὅμηρον τὸν ποιήσαντα εἶναι. Καλλίνῳ δὲ πολλοί τε καὶ
ἄξιοι λόγου κατὰ ταῦτα ἔγνωσαν· ἐγὼ δὲ τὴν ποίησιν ταύτην μετά
γε Ἰλιάδα καὶ τὰ ἔπη τὰ ἐς Ὀδυσσέα ἐπαινῶ μάλιστα. The name in
the text of Pausanias stands Καλαῖνος, an unknown person: most of
the critics recognize the propriety of substituting Καλλῖνος, and
Leutsch and Welcker have given very sufficient reasons for doing
so.
The Ἀμφιάρεω ἐξελασία ἐς Θέβας, alluded to in the
pseudo-Herodotean life of Homer, seems to be the description of a
special passage in this Thêbaïs.
The logographers, who gave a continuous history of this siege of
Thêbes, had at least three preëxisting epic poems—the Thêbaïs, the
Œdipodia, and the Alkmæônis,—from which they could borrow. The subject
was also handled in some of the Hesiodic poems, but we do not know to
what extent.[640] The Thêbaïs was composed more in honor of Argos than
of Thêbes, as the first line of it, one of the few fragments still
preserved, betokens.[641]
[640] Hesiod, ap. Schol. Iliad. xxiii. 680, which passage does
not seem to me so much at variance with the incidents stated in
other poets as Leutsch imagines.
[641] Ἄργος ἄειδε, θεὰ, πολυδίψιον, ἔνθεν ἄνακτες (see Leutsch,
_ib._ c. 4. p. 29).
SIEGES OF THEBES.
The legend, about to recount fraternal dissension of the most
implacable kind, comprehending in its results not only the immediate
relations of the infuriated brothers, but many chosen companions of the
heroic race along with them, takes its start from the paternal curse of
Œdipus, which overhangs and determines all the gloomy sequel.
Œdipus, though king of Thêbes and father of four children by Euryganeia
(according to the Œdipodia), has become the devoted victim of the
Erinnyes, in consequence of the self-inflicted death of his mother,
which he has unconsciously caused, as well as of his unintentional
parricide. Though he had long forsworn the use of all the ornaments and
luxuries which his father had inherited from his kingly progenitors,
yet when through age he had come to be dependent upon his two sons,
Polynikês one day broke through this interdict, and set before him
the silver table and the splendid wine-cup of Kadmus, which Laius had
always been accustomed to employ. The old king had no sooner seen these
precious appendages of the regal life of his father, than his mind was
overrun by a calamitous phrenzy, and he imprecated terrible curses on
his sons, predicting that there would be bitter and endless warfare
between them. The goddess Erinnys heard and heeded him; and he repeated
the curse again on another occasion, when his sons, who had always
been accustomed to send to him the shoulder of the victims sacrificed
on the altar, caused the buttock to be served to him in place of
it.[642] He resented this as an insult, and prayed the gods that they
might perish each by the hand of the other. Throughout the tragedians
as well as in the old epic, the paternal curse, springing immediately
from the misguided Œdipus himself, but remotely from the parricide
and incest with which he has tainted his breed, is seen to domineer
over the course of events—the Erinnys who executes that curse being
the irresistible, though concealed, agent. Æschylus not only preserves
the fatal efficiency of the paternal curse, but even briefly glances
at the causes assigned for it in the Thêbaïs, without superadding any
new motives. In the judgment of Sophoklês, or of his audience, the
conception of a father cursing his sons upon such apparently trifling
grounds was odious; and that great poet introduced many aggravating
circumstances, describing the old blind father as having been
barbarously turned out of doors by his sons to wander abroad in exile
and poverty. Though by this change he rendered his poem more coherent
and self-justifying, yet he departed, from the spirit of the old
legend, according to which Œdipus has contracted by his unconscious
misdeeds an incurable taint destined to pass onward to his progeny.
His mind is alienated, and he curses them, not because he has suffered
seriously by their guilt, but because he is made the blind instrument
of an avenging Erinnys for the ruin of the house of Laius.[643]
[642] Fragm. of the Thêbaïs, ap. Athenæ. xii. p. 465, ὅτι αὐτῷ
παρέθηκαν ἐκπώματα ἃ ἀπηγορεύκει, λέγων οὕτως·
Αὐτὰρ ὁ διογένης ἥρως ξανθὸς Πολυνείκης
Πρῶτα μὲν Οἰδίποδι καλὴν παρέθηκε τράπεζαν
Ἀργυρέην Κάδμοιο θεόφρονος· αὐταρ ἔπειτα
Χρύσεον ἔμπλησεν καλὸν δέπας ἥδεος οἴνου·
Αὐτὰρ ὅγ᾽ ὡς φράσθη παρακείμενα πατρὸς ἑοῖο
Τιμήεντα γέρα, μέγα οἱ κακὸν ἔμπεσε θυμῷ.
Αἶψα δὲ παισὶν ἑοῖσι μετ᾽ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἐπαρὰς
Ἀργαλέας ἠρᾶτο· θεὸν δ᾽ οὐ λάνθαν᾽ Ἐριννύν·
Ὡς οὐ οἱ πατρῷα γ᾽ ἐνὶ φιλότητι δάσαιντο,
Εἶεν δ᾽ αμφοτέροις αἰεὶ πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε.
See Leutsch, Thebaid. Cycl. Reliq. p. 38.
The other fragment from the same Thêbaïs is cited by the Schol.
ad Soph. Œdip. Colon. 1378.—
Ἴσχιον ὡς ἐνόησε, χαμαὶ βάλεν, εἶπέ τε μῦθον·
Ὦ μοι ἐγὼ, παῖδές μοι ὀνειδείοντες ἔπεμψαν.
Εὐκτο Διῒ βασιλῆϊ καὶ ἄλλοις ἀθανάτοισι,
Χερσὶν ὑπ᾽ ἀλλήλων καταβήμεναι Ἄϊδος εἴσω.
Τὰ δὲ παραπλήσια τῷ ἐποποιῷ καὶ Αἴσχυλος ἐν τοῖς Ἕπτα ἐπι Θήβας.
In spite of the protest of Schutz, in his note, I think that the
scholiast has understood the words ἐπίκοτος τροφᾶς (Sept. ad
Theb. 787) in their plain and just meaning.
[643] The curses of Œdipus are very frequently and emphatically
dwelt upon both by Æschylus and Sophoklês (Sept. ad Theb. 70-586,
655-697, etc.; Œdip. Colon. 1293-1378). The former continues the
same point of view as the Thêbaïs, when he mentions—
... Τὰς περιθύμους
Κατάρας βλαψίφρονος Οἰδιπόδα (727);
or, λόγου τ᾽ ἄνοια καὶ φρενῶν Ἐριννύς (Soph. Antig. 584).
The Scholiast on Sophoklês (Œd. Col. 1378) treats the cause
assigned by the ancient Thêbaïs for the curse vented by Œdipus as
trivial and ludicrous.
The Ægeids at Sparta, who traced their descent to Kadmus,
suffered from terrible maladies which destroyed the lives of
their children; an oracle directed them to appease the Erinnyes
of Laius and Œdipus by erecting a temple, upon which the maladies
speedily ceased (Herodot. iv.).
After the death of Œdipus and the celebration of his funeral games,
at which amongst others, Argeia, daughter of Adrastus (afterwards the
wife of Polynikês), was present,[644] his two sons soon quarrelled
respecting the succession. The circumstances are differently related;
but it appears that, according to the original narrative, the wrong and
injustice was on the part of Polynikês, who, however, was obliged to
leave Thêbes and to seek shelter with Adrastus, king of Argos. Here he
met Tydeus, a fugitive, at the same time, from Ætôlia: it was dark when
they arrived, and a broil ensued between the two exiles, but Adrastus
came out and parted them. He had been enjoined by an oracle to give his
two daughters in marriage to a lion and a boar, and he thought this
occasion had now arrived, inasmuch as one of the combatants carried on
his shield a lion, the other a boar. He accordingly gave Deipylê in
marriage to Tydeus, and Argeia to Polynikês: moreover, he resolved to
restore by armed resistance both his sons-in-law to their respective
countries.[645]
[644] Hesiod. ap. Schol. Iliad. xxiii. 680.
[645] Apollodôr. iii. 5, 9; Hygin. f. 69; Æschyl. Sept. ad Theb.
573. Hyginus says that Polynikês came clothed in the skin of a
lion, and Tydeus in that of a boar; perhaps after Antimachus, who
said that Tydeus had been brought up by swineherds (Antimach.
Fragm. 27, ed. Düntzer; ap. Schol. Iliad. iv. 400). Very
probably, however, the old Thêbaïs compared Tydeus and Polynikês
to a lion and a boar, on account of their courage and fierceness;
a simile quite in the Homeric character. Mnaseas gave the words
of the oracle (ap. Schol. Eurip. Phœniss. 411).
On proposing the expedition to the Argeian chiefs around him he
found most of them willing auxiliaries; but Amphiaräus—formerly his
bitter opponent, but now reconciled to him, and husband of his sister
Eriphylê—strongly opposed him.[646] He denounced the enterprise
as unjust and contrary to the will of the gods. Again, being of a
prophetic stock, descended from Melampus, he foretold the certain
death both of himself and of the principal leaders, should they
involve themselves as accomplices in the mad violence of Tydeus or
the criminal ambition of Polynikês. Amphiaräus, already distinguished
both in the Kalydônian boar-hunt and in the funeral games of Pelias,
was in the Thêban war the most conspicuous of all the heroes, and
absolutely indispensable to its success. But his reluctance to engage
in it was invincible, nor was it possible to prevail upon him except
through the influence of his wife Eriphylê. Polynikês, having brought
with him from Thêbes the splendid robe and necklace given by the
gods to Harmonia on her marriage with Kadmus, offered it as a bribe
to Eriphylê, on condition that she would influence the determination
of Amphiaräus. The sordid wife, seduced by so matchless a present,
betrayed the lurking-place of her husband, and involved him in the
fatal expedition.[647] Amphiaräus, reluctantly dragged forth, and
foreknowing the disastrous issue of the expedition both to himself and
to his associates, addressed his last injunctions, at the moment of
mounting his chariot, to his sons Alkmæôn and Amphilochus, commanding
Alkmæôn to avenge his approaching death by killing the venal Eriphylê,
and by undertaking a second expedition against Thêbes.
[646] See Pindar, Nem. ix. 30, with the instructive Scholium.
[647] Apollodôr. iii. 6, 2. The treachery of "the hateful
Eriphylê" is noticed in the Odyssey, xi. 327: Odysseus sees her
in the under-world along with the many wives and daughters of the
heroes.
The Attic dramatists describe this expedition as having been conducted
by seven chiefs, one to each of the seven celebrated gates of Thêbes.
But the Cyclic Thêbaïs gave to it a much more comprehensive character,
mentioning auxiliaries from Arcadia, Messênê, and various parts of
Peloponnêsus;[648] and the application of Tydeus and Polynikês at
Mykênæ in the course of their circuit made to collect allies, is
mentioned in the Iliad. They were well received at Mykênæ; but the
warning signals given by the gods were so terrible that no Mykenæan
could venture to accompany them.[649] The seven principal chiefs
however were Adrastus, Amphiaräus, Kapaneus, Hippomedôn, Parthenopæus,
Tydeus and Polynikês.[650] When the army had advanced as far as the
river Asôpus, a halt was made for sacrifice and banquet; while Tydeus
was sent to Thêbes as envoy to demand the restoration of Polynikês to
his rights. His demand was refused; but finding the chief Kadmeians
assembled at the banquet in the house of Eteoklês, he challenged them
all to contend with him in boxing or wrestling. So efficacious was the
aid of the goddess Athênê that he overcame them all; and the Kadmeians
were so indignant at their defeat, that they placed an ambuscade of
fifty men to intercept him in his way back to the army. All of them
perished by the hand of this warrior, small in stature and of few
words, but desperate and irresistible in the fight. One alone was
spared, Mæon, in consequence of special signals from the gods.[651]
[648] Pausan. ii. 20, 4; ix. 9, 1. His testimony to this, as he
had read and admired the Cyclic Thêbaïs, seems quite sufficient,
in spite of the opinion of Welcker to the contrary (Æschylische
Trilogie. p. 375).
[649] Iliad, iv. 376.
[650] There are differences in respect to the names of the
seven: Æschylus (Sept. ad Theb. 461) leaves out Adrastus as one
of the seven, and includes Eteoklus instead of him; others left
out Tydeus and Polynikês, and inserted Eteoklus and Mekisteus
(Apollodôr. iii. 6, 3). Antimachus, in his poetical _Thêbaïs_,
called Parthenopæus an Argeian, not an Arcadian (Schol. ad
Æschyl. Sept. ad. Theb. 532).
[651] Iliad, iv. 381-400, with the Schol. The first celebration
of the Nemean games is connected with this march of the army
of Adrastus against Thêbes; they were celebrated in honor of
Archemorus, the infant son of Lykurgus, who had been killed by a
serpent while his nurse Hypsipylê went to show the fountain to
the thirsty Argeian chiefs (Apollod. iii. 6, 4; Schol. ad Pindar
Nem. 1).
The Kadmeians, assisted by their allies the Phôkians and the Phlegyæ,
marched out to resist the invaders, and fought a battle near the
Ismênian hill, in which they were defeated and forced to retire within
the walls. The prophet Teiresias acquainted them that if Menœkeus,
son of Kreôn, would offer himself as a victim to Arês, victory would
be assured to Thêbes. The generous youth, as soon as he learnt that
his life was to be the price of safely to his country, went and slew
himself before the gates. The heroes along with Adrastus now commenced
a vigorous attack upon the town, each of the seven selecting one of the
gates to assault. The contest was long and strenuously maintained but
the devotion of Menœkeus had procured for the Thêbans the protection
of the gods. Parthenopæus was killed with a stone by Periklymenus;
and when the furious Kapaneus, having planted a scaling-ladder, had
mounted the walls, he was smitten by a thunderbolt from Zeus and
cast down dead upon the earth. This event struck terror into the
Argeians, and Adrastus called back his troops from the attack. The
Thêbans now sallied forth to pursue them, when Eteoklês, arresting
the battle, proposed to decide the controversy by single combat with
his brother. The challenge, eagerly accepted by Polynikês, was agreed
to by Adrastus: a single combat ensued between the two brothers, in
which both were exasperated to fury and both ultimately slain by each
other's hand. This equal termination left the result of the general
contest still undetermined, and the bulk of the two armies renewed the
fight. In the sanguinary struggle which ensued the sons of Astakus on
the Thêban side displayed the most conspicuous and successful valor.
One of them,[652] Melanippus, mortally wounded Tydeus—while two others,
Leades and Amphidikus, killed Eteoklus and Hippomedôn. Amphiaräus
avenged Tydeus by killing Melanippus; but unable to arrest the rout of
the army, he fled with the rest, closely pursued by Periklymenus. The
latter was about to pierce him with his spear, when the beneficence
of Zeus rescued him from this disgrace—miraculously opening the earth
under him, so that Amphiaräus with his chariot and horses was received
unscathed into her bosom.[653] The exact spot where this memorable
incident happened was indicated by a sepulchral building, and shown by
the Thêbans down to the days of Pausanias—its sanctity being attested
by the fact, that no animal would consent to touch the herbage which
grew within the sacred inclosure. Amphiaräus, rendered immortal by
Zeus, was worshipped as a god at Argos, at Thêbes and at Orôpus—and for
many centuries gave answers at his oracle to the questions of the pious
applicant.[654]
[652] The story recounted that the head of Melanippus was brought
to Tydeus as he was about to expire of his wound, and that he
gnawed it with his teeth, a story touched upon by Sophoklês (apud
Herodian. in Rhetor. Græc. t. viii. p. 601, Walz.).
The lyric poet Bacchylidês (ap. Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 1535)
seems to have handled the story even earlier than Sophoklês.
We find the same allegation embodied in charges against real
historical men: the invective of Montanus against Aquilius
Regulus, at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian, affirmed,
"datam interfectori Pisonis pecuniam a Regulo, appetitumque morsu
Pisonis caput" (Tacit. Hist. iv. 42).
[653] Apollodôr. iii. 6, 8. Pindar, Olymp. vi. 11; Nem. ix.
13-27. Pausan. ix. 8, 2; 18, 2-4.
Euripidês, in the Phœnissæ (1122 _seqq._), describes the battle
generally; see also Æsch. S. Th. 392. It appears by Pausanias
that the Thêbans had poems or legends of their own, relative
to this war: they dissented in various points from the Cyclic
Thêbaïs (ix. 18, 4). The Thêbaïs said that Periklymenus had
killed Parthenopæus; the Thêbans assigned this exploit to
Asphodikus, a warrior not commemorated by any of the poets known
to us.
The village of Harma, between Tanagra and Mykalêssus, was
affirmed by some to have been the spot where Amphiaräus closed
his life (Strabo, ix. p. 404): Sophoklês placed the scene at the
Amphiaræium near Orôpus (ap Strabon. ix. p. 399).
[654] Pindar, Olymp. vi. 16. Ἕπτα δ᾽ ἔπειτα πυρᾶν νέκρων
τελεσθέντων Ταλαϊονίδας Εἶπεν ἐν Θήβαισι τοιοῦτόν τι ἔπος· Ποθέω
στρατιᾶς ὀφθαλμὸν ἐμᾶς Ἀμφότερον, μάντιν τ᾽ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δουρὶ
μάχεσθαι.
The scholiast affirms that these last expressions are borrowed by
Pindar from the Cyclic Thêbaïs.
The temple of Amphiaräus (Pausan. ii. 23, 2), his oracle,
seems to have been inferior in estimation only to that of
Delphi (Herodot. i. 52; Pausan. i. 34; Cicero, Divin. i. 40).
Crœsus sent a rich present to Amphiaräus, πυθόμενος αὐτοῦ
τήν τε ἀρετὴν καὶ τὴν πάθην (Herod. l. c); a striking proof
how these interesting legends were recounted and believed as
genuine historical facts. Other adventures of Amphiaräus in the
expedition against Thêbes were commemorated in the carvings on
the Thronus at Amyklæ (Pausan. iii. 18, 4).
Æschylus (Sept. Theb. 611) seems to enter into the Thêban view,
doubtless highly respectful towards Amphiaräus, when he places in
the mouth of the Kadmeian king Eteoklês such high encomiums on
Amphiaräus, and so marked a contrast with the other chiefs from
Argos.
Adrastus, thus deprived of the prophet and warrior whom he regarded as
"the eye of his army," and having seen the other chiefs killed in the
disastrous fight, was forced to take flight singly, and was preserved
by the matchless swiftness of his horse Areiôn, the offspring of
Poseidôn. He reached Argos on his return, bringing with him nothing
except "his garments of woe and his black-maned steed."[655]
[655] Pausan. viii. 25, 5, from the Cyclic Thêbaïs, Εἵματα λυγρὰ
φέρων σὺν Ἀρείονι κυανοχαίτῃ; also Apollodôr. iii. 6, 8.
The celebrity of the horse Areiôn was extolled in the Iliad
(xxiii. 346), in the Cyclic Thêbaïs, and also in the Thêbaïs of
Antimachus (Pausan. l. c.): by the Arcadians of Thelpusia he
was said to be the offspring of Dêmêtêr by Poseidôn,—he, and
a daughter whose name Pausanias will not communicate to the
uninitiated (ἧς τὸ ὄνομα ἐς ἀτελέστους λέγειν οὐ νομίζουσι, _l.
c._). A different story is in the Schol. Iliad, xxiii. 346; and
in Antimachus, who affirmed that "Gæa herself had produced him,
as a wonder to mortal men" (see Antimach. Frag. 16. p. 102; Epic.
Græc. Frag. ed. Düntzer).
Kreôn, father of the heroic youth Menœkeus, succeeding to the
administration of Thêbes after the death of the two hostile brothers
and the repulse of Adrastus, caused Eteoklês to be buried with
distinguished honor, but cast out ignominiously the body of Polynikês
as a traitor to his country, forbidding every one on pain of death to
consign it to the tomb. He likewise refused permission to Adrastus to
inter the bodies of his fallen comrades. This proceeding, so offensive
to Grecian feeling, gave rise to two further tales; one of them at
least of the highest pathos and interest. Antigonê, the sister of
Polynikês, heard with indignation the revolting edict consigning her
brother's body to the dogs and vultures, and depriving it of those
rites which were considered essential to the repose of the dead.
Unmoved by the dissuading counsel of an affectionate but timid sister,
and unable to procure assistance, she determined to brave the hazard
and to bury the body with her own hands. She was detected in the act;
and Kreôn, though forewarned by Teiresias of the consequences, gave
orders that she should be buried alive, as having deliberately set
at naught the solemn edict of the city. His son Hæmôn, to whom she
was engaged to be married, in vain interceded for her life. In an
agony of despair he slew himself in the sepulchre to which the living
Antigonê had been consigned; and his mother Eurydikê, the wife of
Kreôn, inconsolable for his death, perished by her own hand. And thus
the new light which seemed to be springing up over the last remaining
scion of the devoted family of Œdipus, is extinguished amidst gloom and
horrors—which overshadowed also the house and dynasty of Kreôn.[656]
[656] Sophokl. Antigon. 581. Νῦν γὰρ ἐσχάτας ὑπὲρ Ῥίζας ἐτέτατο
φάος ἐν Οἰδίπου δόμοις, etc.
The pathetic tale here briefly recounted forms the subject of
this beautiful tragedy of Sophoklês, the argument of which is
supposed by Boeckh to have been borrowed in its primary rudiments
from the Cyclic Thêbaïs or the Œdipodia (Boeckh, Dissertation
appended to his translation of the Antigonê, c. x. p. 146); see
Apollodôr. iii. 7, 1.
Æschylus also touches upon the heroism of Antigonê (Sep. Theb.
984).
The other tale stands more apart from the original legend, and seems to
have had its origin in the patriotic pride of the Athenians. Adrastus,
unable to obtain permission from the Thêbans to inter the fallen
chieftains, presented himself in suppliant guise, accompanied by their
disconsolate mothers, to Thêseus at Eleusis. He implored the Athenian
warrior to extort from the perverse Thêbans that last melancholy
privilege which no decent or pious Greeks ever thought of withholding,
and thus to stand forth as the champion of Grecian public morality in
one of its most essential points, not less than of the rights of the
subterranean gods. The Thêbans obstinately persisting in their refusal,
Thêseus undertook an expedition against their city, vanquished them in
the field, and compelled them by force of arms to permit the sepulture
of their fallen enemies. This chivalrous interposition, celebrated in
one of the preserved dramas of Euripidês, formed a subject of glorious
recollection to the Athenians throughout the historical age: their
orators dwelt upon it in terms of animated panegyric; and it seems
to have been accepted as a real fact of the past time, with not less
implicit conviction than the battle of Marathôn.[657] But the Thêbans,
though equally persuaded of the truth of the main story, dissented
from the Athenian version of it, maintaining that they had given up
the bodies for sepulture voluntarily and of their own accord. The
tomb of the chieftains was shown near Eleusis even in the days of
Pausanias.[658]
[657] Apollodôr. iii. 7, 1; Eurip. Supp. _passim_; Herodot. ix.
27; Plato, Menexen. c. 9; Lysias, Epitaph. c. 4; Isokrat. Orat.
Panegyr. p. 196, Auger.
[658] Pausan. i. 39, 2.
A large proportion both of the interesting persons and of the exalted
acts of legendary Greece belongs to the female sex. Nor can we on this
occasion pass over the name of Evadnê, the devoted widow of Kapaneus,
who cast herself on the funeral pile of her husband and perished.[659]
[659] Eurip. Supplic. 1004-1110.
The defeat of the seven chiefs before Thêbes was amply avenged by
their sons, again under the guidance of Adrastus:—Ægialeus son of
Adrastus, Thersander son of Polynikês, Alkmæôn and Amphilochus, sons
of Amphiaräus, Diomêdês son of Tydeus, Sthenelus son of Kapaneus,
Promachus son of Parthenopæus, and Euryalus son of Mekistheus, joined
in this expedition. Though all these youthful warriors, called the
Epigoni, took part in the expedition, the grand and prominent place
appears to have been occupied by Alkmæôn, son of Amphiaräus. Assistance
was given to them from Corinth and Megara, as well as from Messênê and
Arcadia; while Zeus manifested his favorable dispositions by signals
not to be mistaken.[660] At the river Glisas the Epigoni were met by
the Thêbans in arms, and a battle took place in which the latter were
completely defeated. Laodamas, son of Eteoklês, killed Ægialeus, son of
Adrastus; but he and his army were routed and driven within the walls
by the valor and energy of Alkmæôn. The defeated Kadmeians consulted
the prophet Teiresias, who informed them that the gods had declared
for their enemies, and that there was no longer any hope of successful
resistance. By his advice they sent a herald to the assailants offering
to surrender the town, while they themselves conveyed away their
wives and children, and fled under the command of Laodamas to the
Illyrians,[661] upon which the Epigoni entered Thêbes, and established
Thersander, son of Polynikês, on the throne.
[660] Homer, Iliad, iv. 406. Sthenelus, the companion of Diomêdês
and one of the Epigoni, says to Agamemnôn,—
Ἡμεῖς τοι πατέρων μέγ᾽ ἀμείνονες εὐχόμεθ᾽ εἶναι·
Ἡμεῖς καὶ Θήβης ἕδος εἵλομεν ἑπταπύλοιο,
Παυρότερον λαὸν ἀγαγόνθ᾽ ὑπὸ τεῖχος Ἄρειον,
Πειθόμενοι τεράεσσι θεῶν καὶ Ζηνὸς ἀρωγῇ·
Αὐτοὶ δὲ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο.
[661] Apollodôr. iii. 7, 4. Herodot. v. 57-61. Pausan. ix. 5, 7;
9, 2. Diodôr. iv. 65-66.
Pindar represents Adrastus as concerned in the second expedition
against Thêbes (Pyth. viii. 40-58).
Adrastus, who in the former expedition had been the single survivor
amongst so many fallen companions, now found himself the only exception
to the general triumph and joy of the conquerors: he had lost his son
Ægialeus, and the violent sorrow arising from the event prematurely cut
short his life. His soft voice and persuasive eloquence were proverbial
in the ancient epic.[662] He was worshipped as a hero both at Argos and
at Sikyôn, but with especial solemnity in the last-mentioned place,
where his Herôum stood in the public agora, and where his exploits as
well as his sufferings were celebrated periodically in lyric tragedies.
Melanippus, son of Astakus, the brave defender of Thêbes, who had slain
both Tydeus and Mekistheus, was worshipped with no less solemnity
by the Thêbans.[663] The enmity of these two heroes rendered it
impossible for both of them to be worshipped close upon the same spot.
Accordingly it came to pass during the historical period, about the
time of the Solonian legislation at Athens, that Kleisthenês, despot of
Sikyôn, wishing to banish the hero Adrastus and abolish the religious
solemnities celebrated in honor of the latter by the Sikyonians, first
applied to the Delphian oracle for permission to carry this banishment
into effect directly and forcibly. That permission being refused, he
next sent to Thêbes an intimation that he was anxious to introduce
their hero Melanippus into Sikyôn. The Thêbans willingly consented, and
he assigned to the new hero a consecrated spot in the strongest and
most commanding portion of the Sikyonian prytaneium. He did this (says
the historian) "knowing that Adrastus would forthwith go away of his
own accord; since Melanippus was of all persons the most odious to
him, as having slain both his son-in-law and his brother." Kleisthenês
moreover diverted the festivals and sacrifices which had been offered
to Adrastus, to the newly established hero Melanippus; and the lyric
tragedies from the worship of Adrastus to that of Dionysus. But his
dynasty did not long continue after his decease, and the Sikyonians
then reëstablished their ancient solemnities.[664]
[662] Γλῶσσαν τ᾽ Ἀδρήστου μειλιχόγηρυν ἔχοι (Tyrtæus, Eleg. 9, 7,
Schneidewin); compare Plato, Phædr. c. 118. "Adrasti pallentis
imago" meets the eye of Æneas in the under-world (Æneid, vi. 480).
[663] About Melanippus, see Pindar, Nem. x. 36. His sepulchre was
shown near the Prœtid gates of Thêbes (Pausan. ix. 18, 1).
[664] This very carious and illustrative story is contained
in Herodot. v. 67. Ἐπεὶ δὲ ὁ θεὸς τοῦτο οὐ παρεδίδου, ἀπελθὼν
ὀπίσω (Kleisthenês, returning from Delphi) ἐφρόντιζε μηχανὴν
τῇ ~αὐτὸς ὁ Ἀδρήστος ἀπαλλάξεται~. Ὡς δὲ οἱ ἐξευρῆσθαι ἐδόκεε,
πέμψας ἐς Θήβας τὰς Βοιωτίας, ἔφη θέλειν ἐπαγαγέσθαι Μελάνιππον
τὸν Ἀστακοῦ· οἱ δὲ Θηβαῖοι ἔδοσαν. Ἐπηγάγετο δὲ τὸν Μελάνιππον
ὁ Κλεισθένης, καὶ γὰρ τοῦτο δεῖ ἀπηγήσασθαι, ὡς ἔχθιστον ἐόντα
Ἀδρήστῳ· ὃς τόν τε ἀδέλφεον Μηκιστέα ἀπεκτόνεε, καὶ τὸν γαμβρὸν
Τυδέα.
The Sikyonians (Herodotus says) τά τε δὴ ἄλλα ἐτίμων τὸν
Ἄδρηστον, καὶ πρὸς τὰ πάθεα αὐτοῦ τραγικοῖσι χόροισι ἐγέραιρον·
τὸν μὲν Διόνυσον οὐ τιμέωντες, τὸν δὲ Ἄδρηστον.
Adrastus was worshipped as a hero at Megara as well as at Sikyôn:
the Megarians affirmed that he had died there on his way back
from Thêbes (Pausan. i. 43, 1; Dieuchidas, ap. Schol. ad Pindar.
Nem. ix. 31). His house at Argos was still shown when Pausanias
visited the town (ii. 23, 2).
Near the Prœtid gate of Thêbes were seen the tombs of two combatants
who had hated each other during life even more than Adrastus and
Melanippus—the two brothers Eteoklês and Polynikês. Even as heroes
and objects of worship, they still continued to manifest their
inextinguishable hostility: those who offered sacrifices to them
observed that the flame and the smoke from the two adjoining altars
abhorred all communion, and flew off in directions exactly opposite.
The Thêban exegetes assured Pausanias of this fact. And though he did
not himself witness it, yet having seen with his own eyes a miracle not
very dissimilar at Pioniæ in Mysia, he had no difficulty in crediting
their assertion.[665]
[665] Pausan. ix. 18, 3. Τὰ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς δρώμενα οὐ θεασάμενος
πιστὰ ὅμως ὑπείληφα εἶναι. Compare Hygin. f. 68.
"Et nova fraterno veniet concordia fumo,
Quem vetus accensâ separat ira pyrâ." (Ovid, Ibis, 35.)
The tale was copied by Ovid from Kallimachus (Trist. v. 5, 38.)
Amphiaräus when forced into the first attack of Thêbes—against his own
foreknowledge and against the warnings of the gods—had enjoined his
sons Alkmæôn and Amphilochus not only to avenge his death upon the
Thêbans, but also to punish the treachery of their mother, "Eriphylê,
the destroyer of her husband."[666] In obedience to this command, and
having obtained the sanction of the Delphian oracle, Alkmæôn slew his
mother;[667] but the awful Erinnys, the avenger of matricide, inflicted
on him a long and terrible punishment, depriving him of his reason,
and chasing him about from place to place without the possibility of
repose or peace of mind. He craved protection and cure from the god at
Delphi, who required him to dedicate at the temple, as an offering,
the precious necklace of Kadmus, that irresistible bribe which had
originally corrupted Eriphylê.[668] He further intimated to the unhappy
sufferer, that though the whole earth was tainted with his crime,
and had become uninhabitable for him, yet there was a spot of ground
which was not under the eye of the sun at the time when the matricide
was committed, and where therefore Alkmæôn yet might find a tranquil
shelter. The promise was realized at the mouth of the river Achelôus,
whose turbid stream was perpetually depositing new earth and forming
additional islands. Upon one of these, near Œniadæ, Alkmæôn settled,
permanently and in peace: he became the primitive hero of Akarnania,
to which his son Akarnan gave name.[669] The necklace was found among
the treasures of Delphi, together with that which had been given by
Aphroditê to Helen, by the Phôkian plunderers who stripped the temple
in the time of Philip of Macedôn. The Phôkian women quarrelled about
these valuable ornaments: and we are told that the necklace of Eriphylê
was allotted to a woman of gloomy and malignant disposition, who ended
by putting her husband to death; that of Helen to a beautiful but
volatile wife, who abandoned her husband from a preference for a young
Epirot.[670]
[666] Ἀνδροδάμαντ᾽ Ἐριφύλην (Pindar, Nem. ix. 16). A poem
_Eryphilê_ was included among the mythical compositions of
Stesichorus: he mentioned in it that Asklêpius had restored
Kapaneus to life, and that he was for that reason struck dead
by thunder from Zeus (Stesichor. Fragm. Kleine, 18, p. 74). Two
tragedies of Sophoklês once existed, _Epigoni_ and _Alkmæôn_
(Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. i. p. 269): a few fragments also
remain of the Latin _Epigoni_ and _Alphesibæa_ of Attius: Ennius
and Attius both composed or translated from the Greek a Latin
_Alkmæôn_ (Poet. Scenic. Latin. ed. Both. pp. 33, 164, 198).
[667] Hyginus gives the fable briefly (f. 73; see also
Asclepiadês, ap. Schol. Odyss. xi. 326). In like manner, in the
case of the matricide of Orestês, Apollo not only sanctions,
but enjoins the deed; but his protection against the avenging
Erinnyês is very tardy, not taking effect until after Orestês has
been long persecuted and tormented by them (see Æschyl. Eumen.
76, 197 462).
In the _Alkmæôn_ of the later tragic writer Thodektês, a
distinction was drawn: the gods had decreed that Eriphylê should
die, but not that Alkmæôn should kill her (Aristot. Rhetoric.
ii. 24). Astydamas altered the story still more in his tragedy,
and introduced Alkmæôn as killing his mother ignorantly and
without being aware who she was (Aristot. Poetic. c. 27). The
murder of Eriphylê by her son was one of the παρειλήμμενοι
μῦθοι which could not be departed from; but interpretations
and qualifications were resorted to, in order to prevent it
from shocking the softened feelings of the spectators: see the
criticism of Aristotle on the _Alkmæôn_ of Euripidês (Ethic.
Nicom. iii. 1, 8).
[668] Ephorus ap. Athenæ. vi. p. 232.
[669] Thucyd. ii. 68-102.
[670] Athenæ. _l. c._
There were several other legends respecting the distracted Alkmæôn,
either appropriated or invented by the Attic tragedians. He went to
Phêgeus, king of Psôphis in Arcadia, whose daughter Arsinoê he married,
giving as a nuptial present the necklace of Eriphylê. Being however
unable to remain there, in consequence of the unremitting persecutions
of the maternal Erinnys, he sought shelter at the residence of king
Achelôus, whose daughter Kallirhoê he made his wife, and on whose soil
he obtained repose.[671] But Kallirhoê would not be satisfied without
the possession of the necklace of Eriphylê, and Alkmæôn went back to
Psôphis to fetch it, where Phêgeus and his sons slew him. He had left
twin sons, infants, with Kallirhoê, who prayed fervently to Zeus that
they might be preternaturally invested with immediate manhood, in order
to revenge the murder of their father. Her prayer was granted, and
her sons Amphoterus and Akarnan, having instantaneously sprung up to
manhood, proceeded into Arcadia, slew the murderers of their father,
and brought away the necklace of Eriphylê, which they carried to
Delphi.[672]
[671] Apollodôr. iii. 7, 5-6; Pausan. viii. 24, 4. These two
authors have preserved the story of the Akarnanians and the old
form of the legend, representing Alkmæôn as having found shelter
at the abode of the person or king Achelôus, and married his
daughter: Thucydidês omits the _personality_ of Achelôus, and
merely announces the wanderer as having settled on certain new
islands deposited by the river.
I may remark that this is a singularly happy adaptation of a
legend to an existing topographical fact. Generally speaking,
before any such adaptation can be rendered plausible, the legend
is of necessity much transformed; here it is taken exactly as it
stands, and still fits on with great precision.
Ephorus recounted the whole sequence of events as so much
political history, divesting it altogether of the legendary
character. Alkmæôn and Diomêdês, after having taken Thêbes with
the other Epigoni, jointly undertook an expedition into Ætôlia
and Akarnania: they first punished the enemies of the old Œneus,
grandfather of Diomêdês, and established the latter as king in
Kalydôn: next they conquered Akarnania for Alkmæôn. Alkmæôn,
though invited by Agamemnôn to join in the Trojan war, would not
consent to do so (Ephor. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 326; x. p. 462).
[672] Apollodôr. iii. 7, 7; Pausan. viii. 24, 3-4. His remarks
upon the mischievous longing of Kallirhoê for the necklace are
curious: he ushers them in by saying, that "many men, and still
more women, are given to fall into absurd desires," etc. He
recounts it with all the _bonne foi_ which belongs to the most
assured matter of fact.
A short allusion is in Ovid's Metamorphoses (ix. 412).
Euripidês deviated still more widely from the ancient epic, by making
Alkmæôn the husband of Mantô, daughter of Teiresias, and the father of
Amphilochus. According to the Cyclic Thêbaïs, Mantô was consigned by
the victorious Epigoni as a special offering to the Delphian god; and
Amphilochus was son of Amphiaräus, not son of Alkmæôn.[673] He was the
eponymous hero of the town called the Amphilochian Argos, in Akarnania,
on the shore of the Gulf of Ambrakia. Thucydidês tells us that he went
thither on his return from the Trojan war, being dissatisfied with
the state of affairs which he found at the Peloponnêsian Argos.[674]
The Akarnanians were remarkable for the numerous prophets which they
supplied to the rest of Greece: their heroes were naturally drawn from
the great prophetic race of the Melampodids.
[673] Thêbaïd, Cy. Reliqu. p. 70, Leutsch; Schol. Apollôn. Rhod.
i. 408. The following lines cited in Athenæus (vii. p. 317) are
supposed by Boeckh, with probable reason, to be taken from the
Cyclic Thêbaïs; a portion of the advice of Amphiaräus to his sons
at the time of setting out on his last expedition,—
Πουλύποδός μοι, τέκνον, ἔχων νόον, Ἀμφίλοχ᾽ ἥρως,
Τοῖσιν ἐφαρμόζου, τῶν ἂν κατὰ δῆμον ἵκηαι.
There were two tragedies composed by Euripidês, under the
title of Ἀλκμαίων, ὁ διὰ Ψωφῖδος, and Ἀλκμαίων, ὁ διὰ Κορίνθου
(Dindorf, Fragm. Eurip. p. 77).
[674] Apollodôr. iii. 7, 7; Thucyd. ii. 68.
Thus ends the legend of the two sieges of Thêbes; the greatest event,
except the siege of Troy, in the ancient epic; the greatest enterprise
of war, between Greeks and Greeks, during the time of those who are
called the Heroes.
CHAPTER XV.
LEGEND OF TROY.
We now arrive at the capital and culminating point of the Grecian
epic,—the two sieges and capture of Troy, with the destinies of the
dispersed heroes, Trojan as well as Grecian, after the second and most
celebrated capture and destruction of the city.
It would require a large volume to convey any tolerable idea of
the vast extent and expansion of this interesting fable, first
handled by so many poets, epic, lyric and tragic, with their endless
additions, transformations and contradictions,—then purged and
recast by historical inquirers, who under color of setting aside
the exaggerations of the poets, introduced a new vein of prosaic
invention,—lastly, moralized and allegorized by philosophers. In the
present brief outline of the general field of Grecian legend, or of
that which the Greeks believed to be their antiquities, the Trojan
war can be regarded as only one among a large number of incidents
upon which Hekatæus and Herodotus looked back as constituting their
fore-time. Taken as a special legendary event, it is indeed of wider
and larger interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it
out from the rest as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy
basis. I must therefore confine myself to an abridged narrative of
the current and leading facts; and amidst the numerous contradictory
statements which are to be found respecting every one of them, I
know no better ground of preference than comparative antiquity,
though even the oldest tales which we possess—those contained in the
Iliad—evidently presuppose others of prior date.
The primitive ancestor of the Trojan line of kings is Dardanus, son of
Zeus, founder and eponymus of Dardania:[675] in the account of later
authors, Dardanus was called the son of Zeus by Elektra, daughter of
Atlas, and was further said to have come from Samothrace, or from
Arcadia, or from Italy;[676] but of this Homer mentions nothing. The
first Dardanian town founded by him was in a lofty position on the
descent of Mount Ida; for he was not yet strong enough to establish
himself on the plain. But his son Erichthonius, by the favor of
Zeus, became the wealthiest of mankind. His flocks and herds having
multiplied, he had in his pastures three thousand mares, the offspring
of some of whom, by Boreas, produced horses of preternatural swiftness.
Trôs, the son of Erichthonius, and the eponym of the Trojans, had three
sons—Ilus, Assaracus, and the beautiful Ganymêdês, whom Zeus stole away
to become his cup-bearer in Olympus, giving to his father Trôs, as the
price of the youth, a team of immortal horses.[677]
[675] Iliad, xx. 215.
[676] Hellanik. Fragm. 129, Didot; Dionys. Hal. i. 50-61;
Apollodôr. iii. 12, 1; Schol. Iliad. xviii. 486; Varro, ap.
Servium ad Virgil. Æneid. iii. 167. Kephalôn. Gergithius ap.
Steph. Byz. v. Ἀρίσβη.
[677] Iliad, v. 265; Hellanik. Fr. 146; Apollod. ii. 5, 9.
From Ilus and Assaracus the Trojan and Dardanian lines diverge; the
former passing from Ilus to Laomedôn, Priam and Hectôr; the latter from
Assaracus to Capys, Anchisês and Æneas. Ilus founded in the plain of
Troy the holy city of Ilium; Assaracus and his descendants remained
sovereigns of Dardania.[678]
[678] Iliad, xx. 236.
It was under the proud Laomedôn, son of Ilus, that Poseidôn and Apollo
underwent, by command of Zeus, a temporary servitude; the former
building the walls of the town, the latter tending the flocks and
herds. When their task was completed and the penal period had expired,
they claimed the stipulated reward; but Laomedôn angrily repudiated
their demand, and even threatened to cut off their ears, to tie them
hand and foot, and to sell them in some distant island as slaves.[679]
He was punished for this treachery by a sea-monster, whom Poseidôn
sent to ravage his fields and to destroy his subjects. Laomedôn
publicly offered the immortal horses given by Zeus to his father Trôs,
as a reward to any one who would destroy the monster. But an oracle
declared that a virgin of noble blood must be surrendered to him, and
the lot fell upon Hesionê, daughter of Laomedôn himself. Hêraklês
arriving at this critical moment, killed the monster by the aid of a
fort built for him by Athênê and the Trojans,[680] so as to rescue
both the exposed maiden and the people; but Laomedôn, by a second act
of perfidy, gave him mortal horses in place of the matchless animals
which had been promised. Thus defrauded of his due, Hêraklês equipped
six ships, attacked and captured Troy and killed Laomedôn,[681] giving
Hesionê to his friend and auxiliary Telamôn, to whom she bore the
celebrated archer Teukros.[682] A painful sense of this expedition was
preserved among the inhabitants of the historical town of Ilium, who
offered no worship to Hêraklês.[683]
[679] Iliad, vii. 451; xxi. 456. Hesiod. ap. Schol. Lycophr. 393.
[680] Iliad, xx. 145; Dionys. Hal. i. 52.
[681] Iliad, v. 640. Meneklês (ap. Schol. Venet. _ad loc._)
affirmed that this expedition of Hêraklês was a fiction; but
Dikæarchus gave, besides, other exploits of the hero in the same
neighborhood, at Thêbê Hypoplakiê (Schol. Iliad, vi. 396).
[682] Diodôr. iv. 32-49. Compare Venet. Schol. ad Iliad. viii.
284.
[683] Strabo, xiii. p. 596.
Among all the sons of Laomedôn, Priam[684] was the only one who
had remonstrated against the refusal of the well-earned guerdon of
Hêraklês; for which the hero recompensed him by placing him on the
throne. Many and distinguished were his sons and daughters, as well by
his wife Hekabê, daughter of Kisseus, as by other women.[685] Among the
sons were Hectôr,[686] Paris, Dêiphobus, Helenus, Trôilus, Politês,
Polydôrus; among the daughters Laodikê, Kreüsa, Polyxena, and Kassandra.
[684] As Dardanus, Trôs and Ilus are respectively eponyms of
Dardania, Troy and Ilium, so Priam is eponym of the acropolis
_Pergamum_. Πρίαμος is in the Æolic dialect Πέῤῥαμος (Hesychius):
upon which Ahrens remarks, "Cæterum ex hac Æolicâ nominis formâ
apparet, Priamum non minus arcis Περγάμων eponymum esse, quam
Ilum urbis, Troem populi: Πέργαμα enim a Περίαμα natum est, ι
in γ mutato." (Ahrens, De Dialecto Æolicâ, 8, 7. p. 56: compare
_ibid._ 28, 8. p. 150, πεῤῥ᾽ ἁπάλω).
[685] Iliad, vi. 245; xxiv. 495.
[686] Hectôr was affirmed, both by Stesichorus and Ibykus, to be
the son of Apollo (Stesichorus, ap. Schol. Ven. ad Iliad. xxiv.
259; Ibyki Fragm. xiv. ed. Schneidewin): both Euphoriôn (Fr. 125,
Meineke) and Alexander Ætôlus follow the same idea. Stesichorus
further stated, that after the siege Apollo had carried Hekabê
away into Lykia to rescue her from captivity (Pausanias, x. 27,
1): according to Euripidês, Apollo had promised that she should
die in Troy (Troad. 427).
By Sapphô, Hectôr was given as a surname of Zeus, Ζεὺς Ἕκτωρ
(Hesychius, v. Ἕκτορες); a prince belonging to the regal family
of Chios, anterior to the Ionic settlement, as mentioned by the
Chian poet Iôn (Pausan. vii. 3, 3), was so called.
The birth of Paris was preceded by formidable presages; for Hekabê
dreamt that she was delivered of a firebrand, and Priam, on consulting
the soothsayers, was informed that the son about to be born would prove
fatal to him. Accordingly he directed the child to be exposed on Mount
Ida; but the inauspicious kindness of the gods preserved him, and he
grew up amidst the flocks and herds, active and beautiful, fair of hair
and symmetrical in person, and the special favorite of Aphroditê.[687]
[687] Iliad, iii. 45-55; Schol. Iliad. iii. 325; Hygin. fab. 91;
Apollodôr. iii. 12, 5.
It was to this youth, in his solitary shepherd's walk on Mount Ida,
that the three goddesses Hêrê, Athênê, and Aphroditê were conducted,
in order that he might determine the dispute respecting their
comparative beauty, which had arisen at the nuptials of Pêleus and
Thetis,—a dispute brought about in pursuance of the arrangement, and in
accomplishment of the deep-laid designs, of Zeus. For Zeus, remarking
with pain the immoderate numbers of the then existing heroic race,
pitied the earth for the overwhelming burden which she was compelled
to bear, and determined to lighten it by exciting a destructive
and long-continued war.[688] Paris awarded the palm of beauty to
Aphroditê, who promised him in recompense the possession of Helena,
wife of the Spartan Menelaus,—the daughter of Zeus and the fairest of
living women. At the instance of Aphroditê, ships were built for him,
and he embarked on the enterprise so fraught with eventual disaster to
his native city, in spite of the menacing prophecies of his brother
Helenus, and the always neglected warnings of Kassandra.[689]
[688] This was the motive assigned to Zeus by the old epic poem,
the Cyprian Verses (Frag. 1. Düntz. p. 12; ap. Schol. ad Iliad.
i. 4):—
Ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ Στασίνῳ τῷ τὰ Κύπρια πεποιηκότι εἰπόντι οὕτως·
Ἦν ὅτε μύρια φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμενα ...
... βαρυστέρνου πλάτος αἴης.
Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε, καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσι
Σύνθετο κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα γαῖαν,
Ῥιπίσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο,
Ὄφρα κενώσειεν θάνατῳ βάρος· οἱ δ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ
Ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή.
The same motive is touched upon by Eurip. Orest, 1635; Helen.
38; and seriously maintained, as it seems, by Chrysippus, ap.
Plutarch. Stoic. Rep. p. 1049: but the poets do not commonly go
back farther than the passion of Paris for Helen (Theognis, 1232;
Simonid. Amorg. Fragm. 6, 118).
The judgment of Paris was one of the scenes represented on the
ancient chest of Kypselus at Olympia (Pausan. v. 19, 1).
[689] Argument of the Ἔπη Κύπρια (ap. Düntzer, p. 10). These
warnings of Kassandra form the subject of the obscure and
affected poem of Lycophrôn.
Paris, on arriving at Sparta, was hospitably entertained by Menelaus
as well as by Kastôr and Pollux, and was enabled to present the rich
gifts which he had brought to Helen.[690] Menelaus then departed to
Krête, leaving Helen to entertain his Trojan guest—a favorable moment
which was employed by Aphroditê to bring about the intrigue and the
elopement. Paris carried away with him both Helen and a large sum
of money belonging to Menelaus—made a prosperous voyage to Troy—and
arrived there safely with his prize on the third day.[691]
[690] According to the Cyprian Verses, Helena was daughter of
Zeus by Nemesis, who had in vain tried to evade the connection
(Athenæ. viii. 334). Hesiod (Schol. Pindar. Nem. x. 150)
represented her as daughter of Oceanus and Têthys, an oceanic
nymph: Sapphô (Fragm. 17, Schneidewin), Pausanias (i. 33, 7),
Apollodôrus (iii. 10, 7), and Isokratês (Encom. Helen. v. ii. p.
366, Auger) reconcile the pretensions of Lêda and Nemesis to a
sort of joint maternity (see Heinrichsen, De Carminibus Cypriis,
p. 45-46).
[691] Herodot. ii. 117. He gives distinctly the assertion of
the Cyprian Verses, which contradicts the argument of the poem
as it appears in Proclus (Fragm. 1, 1), according to which
latter, Paris is driven out of his course by a storm and captures
the city of Sidôn. Homer (Iliad, vi. 293) seems however to
countenance the statement in the argument.
That Paris was guilty of robbery, as well as of the abduction of
Helen, is several times mentioned in the Iliad (iii. 144; vii.
350-363), also in the argument of the Cyprian Verses (see Æschyl.
Agam. 534).
Menelaus, informed by Iris in Krête of the perfidious return made by
Paris for his hospitality, hastened home in grief and indignation
to consult with his brother Agamemnôn, as well as with the venerable
Nestôr, on the means of avenging the outrage. They made known the
event to the Greek chiefs around them, among whom they found universal
sympathy: Nestôr, Palamêdês and others went round to solicit aid in
a contemplated attack of Troy, under the command of Agamemnôn, to
whom each chief promised both obedience and unwearied exertion until
Helen should be recovered.[692] Ten years were spent in equipping the
expedition. The goddesses Hêrê and Athênê, incensed at the preference
given by Paris to Aphroditê, and animated by steady attachment to
Argos, Sparta and Mykênæ, took an active part in the cause; and the
horses of Hêrê were fatigued with her repeated visits to the different
parts of Greece.[693]
[692] The ancient epic (Schol. ad Il. ii. 286-339) does not
recognize the story of the numerous suitors of Helen, and
the oath by which Tyndareus bound them all before he made
the selection among them, that each should swear not only to
acquiesce, but even to aid in maintaining undisturbed possession
to the husband whom she should choose. This story seems to have
been first told by Stesichorus (see Fragm. 20. ed. Kleine;
Apollod. iii. 10, 8). Yet it was evidently one of the prominent
features of the current legend in the time of Thucydidês (i. 9;
Euripid. Iphig. Aul. 51-80; Soph. Ajax, 1100).
The exact spot in which Tyndareus exacted this oath from the
suitors, near Sparta, was pointed out even in the time of
Pausanias (iii. 20, 9).
[693] Iliad, iv. 27-55; xxiv. 765. Argument. Carm. Cypri. The
point is emphatically touched upon by Dio Chrysostom (Orat.
xi. p. 335-336) in his assault upon the old legend. Two years'
preparation—in Dictys Cret. i. 16.
By such efforts a force was at length assembled at Aulis[694] in
Bœôtia, consisting of 1186 ships and more than 100,000 men,—a force
outnumbering by more than ten to one anything that the Trojans
themselves could oppose, and superior to the defenders of Troy even
with all her allies included.[695] It comprised heroes with their
followers from the extreme points of Greece—from the north-western
portions of Thessaly under Mount Olympus, as well as the western
islands of Dulichium and Ithaca, and the eastern islands of Krête
and Rhodes. Agamemnôn himself contributed 100 ships manned with the
subjects of his kingdom of Mykênæ, besides furnishing 60 ships to the
Arcadians, who possessed none of their own. Menelaus brought with him
60 ships, Nestôr from Pylus 90, Idomeneus from Krête and Diomêdês from
Argos 80 each. Forty ships were manned by the Eleians, under four
different chiefs; the like number under Megês from Dulichium and the
Echinades, and under Thoas from Kalydôn and the other Ætôlian towns.
Odysseus from Ithaca, and Ajax from Salamis, brought 12 ships each. The
Abantes from Eubœa, under Elephênôr, filled 40 vessels; the Bœôtians,
under Peneleôs and Lêitus, 50; the inhabitants of Orchomenos and
Aspledôn, 30; the light-armed Locrians, under Ajax son of Oileus,[696]
40; the Phôkians as many. The Athenians, under Menestheus, a chief
distinguished for his skill in marshalling an army, mustered 50 ships;
the Myrmidons from Phthia and Hellas, under Achilles, assembled in
50 ships; Protesilaus from Phylakê and Pyrasus, and Eurypylus from
Ormenium, each came with 40 ships; Machaôn and Podaleirius, from
Trikka, with 30; Admêtus, from Pheræ and the lake Bœbêis, with 11;
and Philoktêtês from Melibœa with 7: the Lapithæ, under Polypœtês,
son of Peirithous, filled 40 vessels; the Ænianes and Perrhæbians,
under Guneus,[697] 22; and the Magnêtês under Prothous, 40; these last
two were from the northernmost parts of Thessaly, near the mountains
Pêlion and Olympus. From Rhodes, under Tlêpolemus, son of Hêraklês,
appeared 9 ships; from Symê under the comely but effeminate Nireus,
3; from Kôs, Krapathus and the neighboring islands, 30, under the
orders of Pheidippus and Antiphus, sons of Thessalus and grandsons of
Hêraklês.[698]
[694] The Spartan king Agesilaus, when about to start from Greece
on his expedition into Asia Minor (396 B. C.) went to Aulis
personally, in order that he too might sacrifice on the spot
where Agamemnôn had sacrificed when he sailed for Troy (Xenoph.
Hellen. iii. 4, 4).
Skylax (c. 60) notices the ἱερὸν at Aulis, and nothing else: it
seems to have been like the adjoining Delium, a temple with a
small village grown up around it.
Aulis is recognized as the port from which the expedition
started, in the Hesiodic Works and Days (v. 650).
[695] Iliad, ii. 128. Uschold (Geschichte des Trojanischen
Kriegs, p. 9, Stutgart 1836) makes the total 135,000 men.
[696] The Hesiodic Catalogue notices Oileus, or Ileus, with a
singular etymology of his name (Fragm. 136, ed. Marktscheffel).
[697] Γουνεὺς is the Heros Eponymus of the town of Gonnus in
Thessaly; the duplication of the consonant and shortening of the
vowel belong to the Æolic dialect (Ahrens, De Dialect. Æolic. 50,
4. p. 220).
[698] See the Catalogue in the second book of the Iliad. There
must probably have been a Catalogue of the Greeks also in
the Cyprian Verses; for a Catalogue of the allies of Troy is
specially noticed in the Argument of Proclus (p. 12. Düntzer).
Euripidês (Iphig. Aul. 165-300) devotes one of the songs of the
Chorus to a partial Catalogue of the chief heroes.
According to Dictys Cretensis, all the principal heroes engaged
in the expedition were kinsmen, all Pelopids (i. 14): they take
an oath not to lay down their arms until Helen shall have been
recovered, and they receive from Agamemnôn a large sum of gold.
Among this band of heroes were included the distinguished warriors
Ajax and Diomêdês, and the sagacious Nestôr; while Agamemnôn himself,
scarcely inferior to either of them in prowess, brought with him a high
reputation for prudence in command. But the most marked and conspicuous
of all were Achilles and Odysseus; the former a beautiful youth born of
a divine mother, swift in the race, of fierce temper and irresistible
might; the latter not less efficient as an ally from his eloquence,
his untiring endurance, his inexhaustible resources under difficulty,
and the mixture of daring courage with deep-laid cunning which never
deserted him:[699] the blood of the arch-deceiver Sisyphus, through
an illicit connection with his mother Antikleia, was said to flow in
his veins,[700] and he was especially patronized and protected by
the goddess Athênê. Odysseus, unwilling at first to take part in the
expedition, had even simulated insanity; but Palamêdês, sent to Ithaca
to invite him, tested the reality of his madness by placing in the
furrow where Odysseus was ploughing, his infant son Telemachus. Thus
detected, Odysseus could not refuse to join the Achæan host, but the
prophet Halithersês predicted to him that twenty years would elapse
before he revisited his native land.[701] To Achilles the gods had
promised the full effulgence of heroic glory before the walls of Troy;
nor could the place be taken without both his coöperation and that of
his son after him. But they had forewarned him that this brilliant
career would be rapidly brought to a close; and that if he desired a
long life, he must remain tranquil and inglorious in his native land.
In spite of the reluctance of his mother Thetis, he preferred few years
with bright renown, and joined the Achæan host.[702] When Nestôr and
Odysseus came to Phthia to invite him, both he and his intimate friend
Patroclus eagerly obeyed the call.[703]
[699] For the character of Odysseus, Iliad, iii. 202-220; x. 247.
Odyss. xiii. 295.
The Philoktêtês of Sophoklês carries out very justly the
character of the Homeric Odysseus (see v. 1035)—more exactly than
the Ajax of the same poet depicts it.
[700] Sophokl. Philoktêt. 417, and Schol.—also Schol. ad Soph.
Ajac. 190.
[701] Homer, Odyss. xxiv. 115; Æschyl. Agam. 841; Sophokl.
Philoktêt. 1011, with the Schol. Argument of the Cypria in
Heinrichsen, De Carmin. Cypr. p. 23 (the sentence is left out in
Düntzer, p. 11).
A lost tragedy of Sophoklês, Ὀδυσσεὺς Μαινόμενος, handled this
subject.
Other Greek chiefs were not less reluctant than Odysseus to take
part in the expedition: see the tale of Pœmandrus, forming a
part of the temple-legend of the Achilleium at Tanagra in Bϙtia
(Plutarch, Quæstion. Græc. p. 299).
[702] Iliad, i. 352; ix. 411.
[703] Iliad, xi. 782.
Agamemnôn and his powerful host set sail from Aulis; but being
ignorant of the locality and the direction, they landed by mistake in
Teuthrania, a part of Mysia near the river Kaïkus, and began to ravage
the country under the persuasion that it was the neighborhood of Troy.
Telephus, the king of the country,[704] opposed and repelled them, but
was ultimately defeated and severely wounded by Achilles. The Greeks
now, discovering their mistake, retired; but their fleet was dispersed
by a storm and driven back to Greece. Achilles attacked and took
Skyrus, and there married Deidamia, the daughter of Lycomêdês.[705]
Telephus, suffering from his wounds, was directed by the oracle to come
to Greece and present himself to Achilles to be healed, by applying
the scrapings of the spear with which the wound had been given: thus
restored, he became the guide of the Greeks when they were prepared to
renew their expedition.[706]
[704] Telephus was the son of Augê, daughter of king Aleus
of Tegea in Arcadia, by Hêraklês: respecting her romantic
adventures, see the previous chapter on Arcadian legends—Strabo's
faith in the story (xii. p. 572).
The spot called the Harbor of the Achæans, near Gryneium, was
stated to be the place where Agamemnôn and the chiefs took
counsel whether they should attack Telephus or not (Skylax, c.
97; compare Strabo, xiv. p. 622).
[705] Iliad, xi. 664; Argum. Cypr. p. 11, Düntzer; Diktys Cret.
ii. 3-4.
[706] Euripid. Telephus, Frag. 26, Dindorf; Hygin. f. 101;
Diktys, ii. 10. Euripidês had treated the adventure of Telephus
in this lost tragedy: he gave the miraculous cure with the dust
of the spear, πριστοῖσι λογχῆς θέλγεται ῥινήμασι. Diktys softens
down the prodigy: "Achilles cum Machaone et Podalirio adhibeutes
curam vulneri," etc. Pliny (xxxiv. 15) gives to the rust of brass
or iron a place in the list of genuine remedies.
"Longe omnino a Tiberi ad Caicum: quo in loco etiam Agamemnôn
errasset, nisi ducem Telephum invenisset" (Cicero, Pro L. Flacco,
c. 29). The portions of the Trojan legend treated in the lost
epics and the tragedians, seem to have been just as familiar to
Cicero as those noticed in the Iliad.
Strabo pays comparatively little attention to any portion of the
Trojan war except what appears in Homer. He even goes so far as
to give a reason why the Amazons _did not_ come to the aid of
Priam: they were at enmity with him, because Priam had aided
the Phrygians against them (Iliad, iii. 188: in Strabo, τοῖς
Ἰῶσιν must be a mistake for τοῖς Φρυξίν). Strabo can hardly have
read, and never alludes to, Arktinus; in whose poem the brave
and beautiful Penthesileia, at the head of her Amazons, forms a
marked epoch and incident of the war (Strabo, xii. 552).
The armament was again assembled at Aulis, but the goddess Artemis,
displeased with the boastful language of Agamemnôn, prolonged the
duration of adverse winds, and the offending chief was compelled
to appease her by the well-known sacrifice of his daughter
Iphigeneia.[707] They then proceeded to Tenedos, from whence Odysseus
and Menelaus were despatched as envoys to Troy, to redemand Helen and
the stolen property. In spite of the prudent counsels of Antenôr,
who received the two Grecian chiefs with friendly hospitality, the
Trojans rejected the demand, and the attack was resolved upon. It was
foredoomed by the gods that the Greek who first landed should perish:
Protesilaus was generous enough to put himself upon this forlorn hope,
and accordingly fell by the hand of Hectôr.
[707] Nothing occurs in Homer respecting the sacrifice of
Iphigeneia (see Schol. Ven. ad Il. ix. 145).
Meanwhile the Trojans had assembled a large body of allies from various
parts of Asia Minor and Thrace: Dardanians under Æneas, Lykians under
Sarpedôn, Mysians, Karians, Mæonians, Alizonians,[708] Phrygians,
Thracians, and Pæonians.[709] But vain was the attempt to oppose
the landing of the Greeks: the Trojans were routed, and even the
invulnerable Cycnus,[710] son of Poseidôn, one of the great bulwarks of
the defence, was slain by Achilles. Having driven the Trojans within
their walls, Achilles attacked and stormed Lyrnêssus, Pêdasus, <DW26>s
and other places in the neighborhood, twelve towns on the sea-coast
and eleven in the interior; he drove off the oxen of Æneas and pursued
the hero himself, who narrowly escaped with his life: he surprised
and killed the youthful Trôilus, son of Priam, and captured several
of the other sons, whom he sold as prisoners into the islands of the
Ægean.[711] He acquired as his captive the fair Brisêis, while Chrysêis
was awarded to Agamemnôn: he was moreover eager to see the divine
Helen, the prize and stimulus of this memorable struggle; and Aphroditê
and Thetis contrived to bring about an interview between them.[712]
[708] No portion of the Homeric Catalogue gave more trouble
to Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis and the other expositors than these
Alizonians (Strabo, xii. p. 549; xiii. p. 603): a fictitious
place called Alizonium, in the region of Ida, was got up to meet
the difficulty (εἶτ᾽ Ἀλιζώνιον, τοῦτ᾽ ἤδη ~πεπλασμένον~ πρὸς τὴν
τῶν Ἀλιζώνων ὑπόθεσιν, etc., Strabo, _l. c._).
[709] See the Catalogue of the Trojans (Iliad, ii. 815-877).
[710] Cycnus was said by later writers to be king of Kolônæ
in the Troad (Strabo, xiii. p. 589-603; Aristotel. Rhetoric.
ii. 23). Æschylus introduced upon the Attic stage both Cycnus
and Memnôn in terrific equipments (Aristophan. Ran. 957. Οὐδ᾽
ἐξέπληττον αὐτοὺς Κύκνους ἄγων καὶ Μέμνονας κωδωνοφαλαροπώλους).
Compare Welcker, Æschyl. Trilogie, p. 433.
[711] Iliad, xxiv. 752; Argument of the Cypria, pp. 11, 12,
Düntzer. These desultory exploits of Achilles furnished much
interesting romance to the later Greek poets (see Parthênius,
Narrat. 21). See the neat summary of the principal events of the
war in Quintus Smyrn. xiv. 125-140; Dio Chrysost. Or. xi. p.
338-342.
Trôilus is only once named in the Iliad (xxiv. 253); he was
mentioned also in the Cypria; but his youth, beauty, and untimely
end made him an object of great interest with the subsequent
poets. Sophoklês had a tragedy called _Trôilus_ (Welcker,
Griechisch. Tragöd. i. p. 124); Τὸν ἀνδρόπαιδα δεσπότην ἀπώλεσα,
one of the Fragm. Even earlier than Sophoklês, his beauty was
celebrated by the tragedian Phrynichus (Athenæ, xiii. p. 564;
Virgil, Æneid, i. 474; Lycophrôn, 307).
[712] Argument. Cypr. p. 11, Düntz. Καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα Ἀχιλλεὺς
Ἑλένην ἐπιθυμεῖ θεάσασθαι, καὶ συνήγαγον αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ
Ἀφροδίτη καὶ Θέτις. A scene which would have been highly
interesting in the hands of Homer.
At this period of the war the Grecian army was deprived of Palamêdês,
one of its ablest chiefs. Odysseus had not forgiven the artifice
by which Palamêdês had detected his simulated insanity, nor was he
without jealousy of a rival clever and cunning in a degree equal, if
not superior, to himself; one who had enriched the Greeks with the
invention of letters, of dice for amusement, of night-watches, as
well as with other useful suggestions. According to the old Cyprian
epic, Palamêdês was drowned while fishing, by the hands of Odysseus
and Diomêdês.[713] Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey does the name
of Palamêdês occur: the lofty position which Odysseus occupies in both
those poems—noticed with some degree of displeasure even by Pindar,
who described Palamêdês as the wiser man of the two—is sufficient to
explain the omission.[714] But in the more advanced period of the
Greek mind, when intellectual superiority came to acquire a higher
place in the public esteem as compared with military prowess, the
character of Palamêdês, combined with his unhappy fate, rendered him
one of the most interesting personages in the Trojan legend. Æschylus,
Sophoklês and Euripidês each consecrated to him a special tragedy; but
the mode of his death as described in the old epic was not suitable
to Athenian ideas, and accordingly he was represented as having been
falsely accused of treason by Odysseus, who caused gold to be buried
in his tent, and persuaded Agamemnôn and the Grecian chiefs that
Palamêdês had received it from the Trojans.[715] He thus forfeited his
life, a victim to the calumny of Odysseus and to the delusion of the
leading Greeks. In the last speech made by the philosopher Socratês to
his Athenian judges, he alludes with solemnity and fellow-feeling to
the unjust condemnation of Palamêdês, as analogous to that which he
himself was about to suffer, and his companions seem to have dwelt with
satisfaction on the comparison. Palamêdês passed for an instance of
the slanderous enmity and misfortune which so often wait upon superior
genius.[716]
[713] Argum. Cypr. 1. 1.; Pausan. x. 31. The concluding portion
of the Cypria seems to have passed under the title of Παλαμηδεία
(see Fragm. 16 and 18. p. 15, Düntz.; Welcker, Der Episch. Cycl.
p. 459; Eustath. ad Hom. Odyss. i. 107).
The allusion of Quintus Smyrnæus (v. 197) seems rather to point
to the story in the Cypria, which Strabo (viii. p. 368) appears
not to have read.
[714] Pindar, Nem. vii. 21; Aristidês, Orat. 46. p. 260.
[715] See the Fragments of the three tragedians,
Παλαμήδης—Aristeidês, Or. xlvi. p. 260; Philostrat. Heroic. x.;
Hygin. fab. 95-105. Discourses for and against Palamêdês, one
by Alkidamas, and one under the name of Gorgias, are printed in
Reiske's Orr. Græc. t. viii. pp. 64, 102; Virgil, Æneid, ii. 82,
with the ample commentary of Servius—Polyæn. Proœ. p. 6.
Welcker (Griechisch. Tragöd. v. i. p. 130, vol. ii. p. 500)
has evolved with ingenuity the remaining fragments of the lost
tragedies.
According to Diktys, Odysseus and Diomêdês prevail upon Palamêdês
to be let down into a deep well, and then cast stones upon him
(ii. 15).
Xenophôn (De Venatione, c. 1) evidently recognizes the story
in the Cypria, that Odysseus and Diomêdês caused the death of
Palamêdês; but he _cannot_ believe that two such exemplary men
were really guilty of so iniquitous an act—κακοὶ δὲ ἔπραξαν τὸ
ἔργον.
One of the eminences near Napoli still bears the name of
_Palamidhi_.
[716] Plato, Apolog. Socr. c. 32; Xenoph. Apol. Socr. 26; Memor.
iv. 2, 33; Liban. pro Socr. p. 242, ed. Morell.; Lucian, Dial.
Mort 20.
In these expeditions the Grecian army consumed nine years, during which
the subdued Trojans dared not give battle without their walls for fear
of Achilles. Ten years was the fixed epical duration of the siege of
Troy, just as five years was the duration of the siege of Kamikus by
the Krêtan armament which came to avenge the death of Minôs:[717] ten
years of preparation, ten years of siege, and ten years of wandering
for Odysseus, were periods suited to the rough chronological dashes of
the ancient epic, and suggesting no doubts nor difficulties with the
original hearers. But it was otherwise when the same events came to be
contemplated by the historicizing Greeks, who could not be satisfied
without either finding or inventing satisfactory bonds of coherence
between the separate events. Thucydidês tells us that the Greeks
were less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being
moreover very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant
provisions: hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to
employ a part of it in cultivating the Chersonese,—a part in marauding
expeditions over the neighborhood. Could the whole army have been
employed against Troy at once (he says), the siege would have been much
more speedily and easily concluded.[718] If the great historian could
permit himself thus to amend the legend in so many points, we might
have imagined that the simpler course would have been to include the
duration of the siege among the list of poetical exaggerations, and to
affirm that the real siege had lasted only one year instead of ten.
But it seems that the ten years' duration was so capital a feature in
the ancient tale, that no critic ventured to meddle with it.
[717] Herodot. vii. 170. Ten years is a proper mythical period
for a great war to last: the war between the Olympic gods and the
Titan gods lasts ten years (Hesiod, Theogon. 636). Compare δεκάτῳ
ἐνιαυτῷ (Hom. Odyss. xvi. 17).
[718] Thucyd. i. 11.
A period of comparative intermission however was now at hand for the
Trojans. The gods brought about the memorable fit of anger of Achilles,
under the influence of which he refused to put on his armor, and kept
his Myrmidons in camp. According to the Cypria, this was the behest of
Zeus, who had compassion on the Trojans: according to the Iliad, Apollo
was the originating cause,[719] from anxiety to avenge the injury which
his priest Chrysês had endured from Agamemnôn. For a considerable
time, the combats of the Greeks against Troy were conducted without
their best warrior, and severe indeed was the humiliation which they
underwent in consequence. How the remaining Grecian chiefs vainly
strove to make amends for his absence—how Hectôr and the Trojans
defeated and drove them to their ships—how the actual blaze of the
destroying flame, applied by Hectôr to the ship of Protesilaus, roused
up the anxious and sympathizing Patroclus, and extorted a reluctant
consent from Achilles, to allow his friend and his followers to go
forth and avert the last extremity of ruin—how Achilles, when Patroclus
had been killed by Hectôr, forgetting his anger in grief for the death
of his friend, reëntered the fight, drove the Trojans within their
walls with immense slaughter, and satiated his revenge both upon the
living and the dead Hectôr—all these events have been chronicled,
together with those divine dispensations on which most of them are made
to depend, in the immortal verse of the Iliad.
[719] Homer, Iliad, i. 21.
Homer breaks off with the burial of Hectôr, whose body has just been
ransomed by the disconsolate Priam; while the lost poem of Arktinus,
entitled the Æthiopis, so far as we can judge from the argument still
remaining of it, handled only the subsequent events of the siege. The
poem of Quintus Smyrnæus, composed about the fourth century of the
Christian æra, seems in its first books to coincide with the Æthiopis,
in the subsequent books partly with the Ilias Minor of Leschês.[720]
[720] Tychsen, Commentat. de Quinto Smyrnæo, § iii. c. 5-7. The
Ἰλίου Πέρσις was treated both by Arktinus and by Leschês: with
the latter it formed a part of the Ilias Minor.
The Trojans, dismayed by the death of Hectôr, were again animated
with hope by the appearance of the warlike and beautiful queen of the
Amazons, Penthesileia, daughter of Arês, hitherto invincible in the
field, who came to their assistance from Thrace at the head of a band
of her countrywomen. She again led the besieged without the walls
to encounter the Greeks in the open field; and under her auspices
the latter were at first driven back, until she too was slain by the
invincible arm of Achilles. The victor, on taking off the helmet of
his fair enemy as she lay on the ground, was profoundly affected and
captivated by her charms, for which he was scornfully taunted by
Thersitês: exasperated by this rash insult, he killed Thersitês on
the spot with a blow of his fist. A violent dispute among the Grecian
chiefs was the result, for Diomêdês, the kinsman of Thersitês, warmly
resented the proceeding; and Achilles was obliged to go to Lesbus,
where he was purified from the act of homicide by Odysseus.[721]
[721] Argument of the Æthiopis, p. 16, Düntzer; Quint. Smyrn.
lib. i.; Diktys Cret. iv. 2-3.
In the Philoktêtês, of Sophoklês, Thersitês survives Achilles
(Soph. Phil. 358-445).
Next arrived Memnôn, son of Tithônus and Eôs, the most stately of
living men, with a powerful band of black Æthiopians, to the assistance
of Troy. Sallying forth against the Greeks, he made great havoc among
them: the brave and popular Antilochus perished by his hand, a victim
to filial devotion in defence of Nestôr.[722] Achilles at length
attacked him, and for a long time the combat was doubtful between
them: the prowess of Achilles and the supplication of Thetis with Zeus
finally prevailed; whilst Eôs obtained for her vanquished son the
consoling gift of immortality. His tomb, however,[723] was shown near
the Propontis, within a few miles of the mouth of the river Æsêpus,
and was visited annually by the birds called Memnonides, who swept it
and bedewed it with water from the stream. So the traveller Pausanias
was told, even in the second century after the Christian æra, by the
Hellespontine Greeks.
[722] Odyss. xi. 522. Κεῖνον δὴ κάλλιστον ἴδον, μετὰ Μέμνονα
δῖον: see also Odyss. iv. 187; Pindar, Pyth. vi. 31. Æschylus
(ap. Strabo. xv. p. 728) conceives Memnôn as a Persian starting
from Susa.
Ktêsias gave in his history full details respecting the
expedition of Memnôn, sent by the king of Assyria to the relief
of his dependent, Priam of Troy; all this was said to be recorded
in the royal archives. The Egyptians affirmed that Memnôn had
come from Egypt (Diodôr. ii. 22; compare iv. 77): the two stories
are blended together in Pausanias, x. 31, 2. The Phrygians
pointed out the road along which he had marched.
[723] Argum. Æth. _ut sup._; Quint. Smyrn. ii. 396-550; Pausan.
x. 31, 1. Pindar, in praising Achilles, dwells much on his
triumphs over Hectôr, Têlephus, Memnôn, and Cycnus, but never
notices Penthesileia (Olymp. ii. 90; Nem. iii. 60; vi. 52. Isthm.
v. 43).
Æschylus, in the Ψυχοστασία, introduced Thetis and Eôs, each in
an attitude of supplication for her son, and Zeus weighing in his
golden scales the souls of Achilles and Memnôn (Schol. Ven. ad
Iliad, viii. 70: Pollux, iv. 130; Plutarch, De Audiend. Poet. p.
17). In the combat between Achilles and Memnôn, represented on
the chest of Kypselus at Olympia, Thetis and Eôs were given each
as aiding her son (Pausan. v. 19, 1).
But the fate of Achilles himself was now at hand. After routing the
Trojans and chasing them into the town, he was slain near the Skæan
gate by an arrow from the quiver of Paris, directed under the unerring
auspices of Apollo.[724] The greatest efforts were made by the Trojans
to possess themselves of the body, which was however rescued and borne
off to the Grecian camp by the valor of Ajax and Odysseus. Bitter
was the grief of Thetis for the loss of her son: she came into the
camp with the Muses and the Nêreids to mourn over him; and when a
magnificent funeral-pile had been prepared by the Greeks to burn him
with every mark of honor, she stole away the body and conveyed it to
a renewed and immortal life in the island of Leukê in the Euxine Sea.
According to some accounts he was there blest with the nuptials and
company of Helen.[725]
[724] Iliad, xxii. 360; Sophokl. Philokt. 334; Virgil, Æneid, vi.
56.
[725] Argum. Æthiop. _ut sup._; Quint. Smyrn. 151-583; Homer,
Odyss. v. 310; Ovid, Metam. xiii. 284; Eurip. Androm. 1262;
Pausan. iii. 19, 13. According to Diktys (iv. 11), Paris and
Deiphobus entrap Achilles by the promise of an interview with
Polyxena and kill him.
A minute and curious description of the island Leukê, or Ἀχιλλέως
νῆσος, is given in Arrian (Periplus, Pont. Euxin. p. 21; ap.
Geogr. Min. t. 1).
The heroic or divine empire of Achilles in Scythia was recognized
by Alkæus the poet (Alkæi Fragm. Schneidew. Fr. 46), Ἀχιλλεῦ, ὃς
γᾶς Σκυθικᾶς μέδεις. Eustathius (ad Dionys. Periêgêt. 307) gives
the story of his having followed Iphigeneia thither: compare
Antonin. Liberal. 27.
Ibykus represented Achilles as having espoused Mêdea in the
Elysian Field (Idyk. Fragm. 18. Schneidewin). Simonidês followed
this story (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 815).
Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and
offered the unrivalled panoply, which Hêphæstos had forged and wrought
for him, as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian
army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when
Athênê, together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which
of the two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in
favor of the former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and
humiliation: in a fit of phrenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for
the men who had wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.[726]
[726] Argument of Æthiopis and Ilias Minor, and Fragm. 2 of the
latter, pp. 17, 18, Düntz.; Quint. Smyrn. v. 120-482; Hom. Odyss.
xi. 550; Pindar, Nem. vii. 26. The Ajax of Sophoklês, and the
contending speeches between Ajax and Ulysses in the beginning of
the thirteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, are too well known
to need special reference.
The suicide of Ajax seems to have been described in detail in
the Æthiopis: compare Pindar. Isthm. iii. 51, and the Scholia
_ad loc._, which show the attention paid by Pindar to the minute
circumstances of the old epic. See Fragm. 2 of the Ἰλίου Πέρσις
of Arktinus, in Düntz. p. 22, which would seem more properly to
belong to the Æthiopis. Diktys relates the suicide of Ajax, as a
consequence of his unsuccessful competition with Odysseus, not
about the arms of Achilles, but about the Palladium, after the
taking of the city (v. 14).
There were, however, many different accounts of the manner in
which Ajax had died, some of which are enumerated in the argument
to the drama of Sophoklês. Ajax is never wounded in the Iliad:
Æschylus made him invulnerable except under the armpits (see
Schol. ad Sophok. Ajac. 833); the Trojans pelted him with mud—εἴ
πως βαρηθείῃ ὑπὸ τοῦ πήλου (Schol. Iliad. xiv. 404).
Odysseus now learnt from Helenus son of Priam, whom he had captured
in an ambuscade,[727] that Troy could not be taken unless both
Philoktêtês, and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, could be prevailed
upon to join the besiegers. The former, having been stung in the
foot by a serpent, and becoming insupportable to the Greeks from the
stench of his wound, had been left at Lemnus in the commencement
of the expedition, and had spent ten years[728] in misery on that
desolate island; but he still possessed the peerless bow and arrows
of Hêraklês, which were said to be essential to the capture of Troy.
Diomêdês fetched Philoktêtês from Lemnus to the Grecian camp, where
he was healed by the skill of Machaôn,[729] and took an active part
against the Trojans—engaging in single combat with Paris, and killing
him with one of the Hêrakleian arrows. The Trojans were allowed to
carry away for burial the body of this prince, the fatal cause of
all their sufferings; but not until it had been mangled by the hand
of Menelaus.[730] Odysseus went to the island of Skyrus to invite
Neoptolemus to the army. The untried but impetuous youth gladly obeyed
the call, and received from Odysseus his father's armor, while on the
other hand, Eurypylus, son of Têlephus, came from Mysia as auxiliary
to the Trojans and rendered to them valuable service—turning the tide
of fortune for a time against the Greeks, and killing some of their
bravest chiefs, amongst whom was numbered Peneleôs, and the unrivalled
leech Machaôn.[731] The exploits of Neoptolemus were numerous, worthy
of the glory of his race and the renown of his father. He encountered
and slew Eurypylus, together with numbers of the Mysian warriors: he
routed the Trojans and drove them within their walls, from whence they
never again emerged to give battle: nor was he less distinguished for
his good sense and persuasive diction, than for forward energy in the
field.[732]
[727] Soph. Philokt. 604.
[728] Soph. Philokt. 703. Ὦ μελέα ψυχὰ, Ὃς μηδ᾽ οἰνοχύτου πόματος
Ἥσθη δεκετῆ χρόνον, etc.
In the narrative of Diktys (ii. 47), Philoktêtês returns from
Lemnus to Troy much earlier in the war before the death of
Achilles, and without any assigned cause.
[729] According to Sophoklês, Hêraklês sends Asklêpius to Troy to
heal Philoktêtês (Soph. Philokt. 1415).
The subject of Philoktêtês formed the subject of a tragedy both
by Æschylus and by Euripidês (both lost) as well as by Sophoklês.
[730] Argument. Iliad. Minor. Düntz. _l. c._ Καὶ τὸν νεκρὸν
ὑπὸ Μενελάου καταικισθέντα ἀνελόμενοι θάπτουσιν οἱ Τρῶες. See
Quint. Smyrn. x. 240: he differs here in many respects from the
arguments of the old poems as given by Proclus, both as to the
incidents and as to their order in time (Diktys, iv. 20). The
wounded Paris flees to Œnônê, whom he had deserted in order
to follow Helen, and entreats her to cure him by her skill in
simples: she refuses, and permits him to die; she is afterwards
stung with remorse, and hangs herself (Quint. Smyrn. x. 285-331;
Apollodôr. iii. 12, 6; Conôn. Narrat. 23; see Bachet de Meziriac,
Comment. sur les Epîtres d'Ovide, t. i. p. 456). The story of
Œnônê is as old as Hellanikus and Kephalôn of Gergis (see Hellan.
Fragm. 126, Didot).
[731] To mark the way in which these legendary events pervaded
and became embodied in the local worship, I may mention the
received practice in the great temple of Asklêpius (father of
Machaôn) at Pergamus, even in the time of Pausanias. Têlephus,
father of Eurypylus, was the local hero and mythical king of
Teuthrania, in which Pergamus was situated. In the hymns there
sung, the poem and the invocation were addressed to Têlephus; but
nothing was said in them about Eurypylus, nor was it permitted
even to mention his name in the temple,—"they knew him to be
the slayer of Machaôn:" ἄρχονται μὲν ἀπὸ Τηλέφου τῶν ὕμνων,
προσᾴδουσι δὲ οὐδὲν ἐς τὸν Εὐρύπυλον, οὐδὲ ἀρχὴν ἐν τῷ ναῷ
θέλουσιν ὀνομάζειν αὐτὸν, οἷα ἐπιστάμενοι φονέα ὄντα Μαχάονος
(Pausan. iii. 26, 7).
The combination of these qualities in other Homeric chiefs is
noted in a subsequent chapter of his work, ch. xx. vol. ii.
[732] Argument. Iliad. Minor. p. 17, Düntzer. Homer, Odyss. xi.
510-520. Pausan. iii. 26, 7. Quint. Smyrn. vii. 553; viii. 201.
Troy however was still impregnable so long as the Palladium, a statue
given by Zeus himself to Dardanus, remained in the citadel; and great
care had been taken by the Trojans not only to conceal this valuable
present, but to construct other statues so like it as to mislead any
intruding robber. Nevertheless the enterprising Odysseus, having
disguised his person with miserable clothing and self-inflicted
injuries, found means to penetrate into the city and to convey the
Palladium by stealth away: Helen alone recognized him; but she was now
anxious to return to Greece, and even assisted Odysseus in concerting
means for the capture of the town.[733]
[733] Argument. Iliad. Minor, p. 18, Düntz.; _Arktinus_ ap.
Dionys. Hal. i. 69; Homer, Odyss. iv. 246; Quint. Smyrn. x. 354:
Virgil, Æneid, ii. 164, and the 9th Excursus of Heyne on that
book.
Compare with this legend about the Palladium, the Roman legend
respecting the Ancylia (Ovid, Fasti, III. 381).
To accomplish this object, one final stratagem was resorted to. By
the hands of Epeius of Panopeus, and at the suggestion of Athênê, a
capacious hollow wooden horse was constructed, capable of containing
one hundred men: the _élite_ of the Grecian heroes, Neoptolemus,
Odysseus, Menelaus and others, concealed themselves in the inside
of it, and the entire Grecian army sailed away to Tenedos, burning
their tents and pretending to have abandoned the siege. The Trojans,
overjoyed to find themselves free, issued from the city and
contemplated with astonishment the fabric which their enemies had left
behind: they long doubted what should be done with it; and the anxious
heroes from within heard the surrounding consultations, as well as
the voice of Helen when she pronounced their names and counterfeited
the accents of their wives.[734] Many of the Trojans were anxious to
dedicate it to the gods in the city as a token of gratitude for their
deliverance; but the more cautious spirits inculcated distrust of an
enemy's legacy; and Laocoôn, the priest of Poseidôn, manifested his
aversion by striking the side of the horse with his spear. The sound
revealed that the horse was hollow, but the Trojans heeded not this
warning of possible fraud; and the unfortunate Laocoôn, a victim to
his own sagacity and patriotism, miserably perished before the eyes of
his countrymen, together with one of his sons,—two serpents being sent
expressly by the gods out of the sea to destroy him. By this terrific
spectacle, together with the perfidious counsels of Sinon, a traitor
whom the Greeks had left behind for the special purpose of giving false
information, the Trojans were induced to make a breach in their own
walls, and to drag the fatal fabric with triumph and exultation into
their city.[735]
[734] Odyss. iv. 275; Virgil, Æneid, ii. 14; Heyne, Excurs. 3. ad
Æneid. ii. Stesichorus, in his Ἰλίου Πέρσις, gave the number of
heroes in the wooden horse as one hundred (Stesichor. Fragm. 26,
ed. Kleine; compare Athenæ. xiii. p. 610).
[735] Odyss. viii. 492; xi. 522. Argument of the Ἰλίου Πέρσις
of Arktinus, p. 21. Düntz. Hydin. f. 108-135. Bacchylidês and
Euphorion ap. Servium ad Virgil. Æneid. ii. 201.
Both Sinon and Laocoôn came originally from the old epic poem of
Arktinus, though Virgil may perhaps have immediately borrowed
both them, and other matters in his second book, from a poem
passing under the name of Pisander (see Macrob. Satur. v. 2;
Heyne, Excurs. 1. ad Æn. ii.; Welcker, Der Episch. Kyklus, v.
97). We cannot give credit either to Arktinus or Pisander for the
masterly specimen of oratory which is put into the mouth of Sinon
in the Æneid.
In Quintus Smyrnæus (xii. 366), the Trojans torture and mutilate
Sinon to extort from him the truth: his endurance, sustained
by the inspiration of Hêrê, is proof against the extremity of
suffering, and he adheres to his false tale. This is probably an
incident of the old epic, though the delicate taste of Virgil,
and his sympathy with the Trojans, has induced him to omit it.
Euphorion ascribed the proceedings of Sinon to Odysseus: he also
gave a different cause for the death of Laocoôn (Fr. 33-36. p.
55, ed. Düntz., in the Fragments of Epic Poets after Alexander
the Great). Sinon is ἐταῖρος Ὀδυσσέως in Pausan. x. 27, 1.
The destruction of Troy, according to the decree of the gods, was now
irrevocably sealed. While the Trojans indulged in a night of riotous
festivity, Sinon kindled the fire-signal to the Greeks at Tenedos,
loosening the bolts of the wooden horse, from out of which the enclosed
heroes descended. The city, assailed both from within and from without,
was thoroughly sacked and destroyed, with the slaughter or captivity of
the larger portion of its heroes as well as its people. The venerable
Priam perished by the hand of Neoptolemus, having in vain sought
shelter at the domestic altar of Zeus Herkeios; but his son Deiphobus,
who since the death of Paris had become the husband of Helen, defended
his house desperately against Odysseus and Menelaus, and sold his life
dearly. After he was slain, his body was fearfully mutilated by the
latter.[736]
[736] Odyss. viii. 515; Argument of Arktinas, _ut sup._; Euripid.
Hecub. 903; Virg. Æn. vi. 497; Quint. Smyrn. xiii. 35-229;
Leschês ap. Pausan. x. 27, 2; Diktys, v. 12. Ibykus and Simonidês
also represented Deiphobus as the ἀντεράστης Ἑλένης (Schol. Hom.
Iliad. xiii. 517).
The night-battle in the interior of Troy was described with all
its fearful details both by Leschês and Arktinus: the Ἰλίου
Πέρσις of the latter seems to have been a separate poem, that of
the former constituted a portion of the Ilias Minor (see Welcker,
Der Epische Kyklus, p. 215): the Ἰλίου Πέρσις by the lyric poets
Sakadas and Stesichorus probably added many new incidents.
Polygnôtus had painted a succession of the various calamitous
scenes, drawn from the poem of Leschês, on the walls of the
leschê at Delphi, with the name written over each figure (Pausan.
x. 25-26).
Hellanikus fixed the precise day of the month on which the
capture took place (Hellan. Fr. 143-144), the twelfth day of
Thargeliôn.
Thus was Troy utterly destroyed—the city, the altars and temples,[737]
and the population. Æneas and Antenôr were permitted to escape, with
their families, having been always more favorably regarded by the
Greeks than the remaining Trojans. According to one version of the
story, they had betrayed the city to the Greeks: a panther's skin
had been hung over the door of Antenôr's house as a signal for the
victorious besiegers to spare it in the general plunder.[738] In the
distribution of the principal captives, Astyanax, the infant son of
Hectôr, was cast from the top of the wall and killed, by Odysseus or
Neoptolemus: Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, was immolated on the tomb
of Achilles, in compliance with a requisition made by the shade of
the deceased hero to his countrymen;[739] while her sister Kassandra
was presented as a prize to Agamemnôn. She had sought sanctuary at
the altar of Athênê, where Ajax, the son of Oileus, making a guilty
attempt to seize her, had drawn both upon himself and upon the army the
serious wrath of the goddess, insomuch that the Greeks could hardly be
restrained from stoning him to death.[740] Andromachê and Helenus were
both given to Neoptolemus, who, according to the Ilias Minor, carried
away also Æneas as his captive.[741]
[737] Æschyl. Agamemn. 527.—
Βωμοὶ δ᾽ ἄϊστοι καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματα,
Καὶ σπέρμα πάσης ἐξαπόλλυται χθονός.
[738] This symbol of treachery also figured in the picture of
Polygnôtus. A different story appears in Schol. Iliad. iii. 206.
[739] Euripid. Hecub. 38-114, and Troad. 716; Leschês ap. Pausan.
x. 25, 9; Virgil, Æneid, iii. 322, and Servius _ad loc._
A romantic tale is found in Diktys respecting the passion of
Achilles for Polyxena (iii. 2).
[740] Odyss. xi. 422. Arktinus, Argum. p. 21, Düntz. Theognis,
1232. Pausan. i. 15, 2; x. 26, 3; 31, 1. As an expiation of
this sin of their national hero, the Lokrians sent to Ilium
periodically some of their maidens, to do menial service in the
temple of Athênê (Plutarch. Ser. Numin. Vindict. p. 557, with the
citation from Euphorion or Kallimachus, Düntzer, Epicc. Vet. p.
118).
[741] Leschês, Fr. 7, Düntz.; ap. Schol. Lycophr. 1263. Compare
Schol. ad. 1232, for the respectful recollection of Andromachê,
among the traditions of the Molossian kings, as their heroic
mother, and Strabo, xiii. p. 594.
Helen gladly resumed her union with Menelaus: she accompanied him
back to Sparta, and lived with him there many years in comfort and
dignity,[742] passing afterwards to a happy immortality in the Elysian
fields. She was worshipped as a goddess with her brothers the Dioskuri
and her husband, having her temple, statue and altar at Therapnæ and
elsewhere, and various examples of her miraculous interventions were
cited among the Greeks.[743] The lyric poet Stesichorus had ventured
to denounce her, conjointly with her sister Klytæmnêstra, in a tone
of rude and plain-spoken severity, resembling that of Euripidês
and Lycophrôn afterwards, but strikingly opposite to the delicacy
and respect with which she is always handled by Homer, who never
admits reproaches against her except from her own lips.[744] He was
smitten with blindness, and made sensible of his impiety; but having
repented and composed a special poem formally retracting the calumny,
was permitted to recover his sight. In his poem of recantation (the
famous palinode now unfortunately lost) he pointedly contradicted the
Homeric narrative, affirming that Helen had never been to Troy at
all, and that the Trojans had carried thither nothing but her image
or _eidôlon_.[745] It is, probably, to the excited religious feelings
of Stesichorus that we owe the first idea of this glaring deviation
from the old legend, which could never have been recommended by any
considerations of poetical interest.
[742] Such is the story of the old epic (see Odyss. iv. 260,
and the fourth book generally; Argument of Ilias Minor, p. 20.
Düntz.). Polygnôtus, in the paintings above alluded to, followed
the same tale (Pausan. x. 25, 3).
The anger of the Greeks against Helen, and the statement that
Menelaus after the capture of Troy approached her with revengeful
purposes, but was so mollified by her surpassing beauty as
to cast away his uplifted sword, belongs to the age of the
tragedians (Æschyl. Agamem. 685-1455: Eurip. Androm. 600-629;
Helen. 75-120; Troad. 890-1057; compare also the fine lines in
the Æneid, ii. 567-588).
[743] See the description in Herodot. vi. 61, of the prayers
offered to her, and of the miracle which she wrought, to remove
the repulsive ugliness of a little Spartan girl of high family.
Compare also Pindar, Olymp. iii. 2, and the Scholia at the
beginning of the ode; Eurip. Helen. 1662, and Orest. 1652-1706;
Isokrat. Encom. Helen. ii. p. 368, Auger; Dio Chrysost. Or. xi.
p. 311. θεὸς ἐνομίσθη παρὰ τοῖς Ἕλλησι; Theodectês ap. Aristot.
Pol. i. 2, 19. Θείων ἀπ᾽ ἀμφοῖν ἔκγονον ῥιζωμάτων.
[744] Euripid. Troad. 982 _seq._; Lycophrôn ap. Steph. Byz. v.
Αἰγύς; Stesichorus ap. Schol. Eurip. Orest. 239; Fragm. 9 and 10
of the Ἰλίου Πέρσις, Schneidewin:—
Οὕνεκα Τυνδάρεως ῥέζων ἁπᾶσι θεοῖς μιᾶς λαθετ᾽ ἠπιοδώρου
Κύπριδος· κείνα δὲ Τυνδάρεω κούραισι χολωσαμένα
Διγάμους τριγάμους τίθησι
Καὶ λιπεσάνορας ...
Further
... Ἑλένη ἑκοῦσ᾽ ἄπηρε, etc.
He had probably contrasted her with other females carried away by
force.
Stesichorus also affirmed that Iphigeneia was the daughter
of Helen, by Thêseus, born at Argos before her marriage with
Menelaus and made over to Klytæmnêstra: this tale was perpetuated
by the temple of Eileithyia at Argos, which the Argeians affirmed
to have been erected by Helen (Pausan. ii. 22, 7). The ages
ascribed by Hellanikus and other logographers (Hellan. Fr. 74)
to Thêseus and Helen—he fifty years of age and she a child of
seven—when he carried her off to Aphidnæ, can never have been the
original form of any poetical legend: these ages were probably
imagined in order to make the mythical chronology run smoothly;
for Thêseus belongs to the generation before the Trojan war. But
we ought always to recollect that Helen never grows old (τὴν γὰρ
φάτις ἔμμεν᾽ ἀγήρω—Quint. Smyrn. x. 312), and that her chronology
consists only with an immortal being. Servius observes (ad Æneid.
ii. 601)—"Helenam _immortalem_ fuisse indicat tempus. Nam constat
fratres ejus cum Argonautis fuisse. Argonautarum filii cum
Thebanis (Thebano Eteoclis et Polynicis bello) dimicaverunt. Item
illorum filii contra Trojam bella gesserunt. Ergo, si immortalis
Helena non fuisset, tot sine dubio seculis durare non posset." So
Xenophon, after enumerating many heroes of different ages, all
pupils of Cheirôn, says that the life of Cheirôn suffices for
all, he being brother of Zeus (De Venatione, c. 1).
The daughters of Tyndareus are Klytæmnêstra, Helen, and Timandra,
all open to the charge advanced by Stesichorus: see about
Timandra, wife of the Tegeate Echemus, the new fragment of the
Hesiodic Catalogue, recently restored by Geel (Göttling, Pref.
Hesiod. p. lxi.).
It is curious to read, in Bayle's article _Hélène_, his critical
discussion of the adventures ascribed to her—as if they were
genuine matter of history, more or less correctly reported.
[745] Plato, Republic. ix. p. 587. c. 10. ὥσπερ τὸ τῆς Ἑλένης
εἴδωλον Στησίχορός φησι περιμάχητον γενέσθαι ἐν Τροίῃ, ἀγνοίᾳ τοῦ
ἀληθοῦς.
Isokrat. Encom. Helen. t. ii. p. 370, Auger; Plato, Phædr. c. 44.
p. 243-244; Max. Tyr. Diss. xi. p. 320, Davis; Conôn, Narr. 18;
Dio Chrysost. Or. xi. p. 323. Τὸν μὲν Στησίχορον ἐν τῇ ὕστερον
ὠδῇ λέγειν, ὡς ~τὸ παράπαν οὐδὲ πλεύσειεν ἡ Ἑλένη οὐδάμοσε~.
Horace, Od. i. 17, Epod. xvii. 42.—
"Infamis Helenæ Castor offensus vice,
Fraterque magni Castoris, victi prece,
Adempta vati reddidere lumina."
Pausan. iii. 19, 5. Virgil, surveying the war from the point
of view of the Trojans, had no motive to look upon Helen with
particular tenderness: Deiphobus imputes to her the basest
treachery (Æneid, vi. 511. "_scelus exitiale Lacænæ_;" compare
ii. 567).
Other versions were afterwards started, forming a sort of compromise
between Homer and Stesichorus, admitting that Helen had never really
been at Troy, without altogether denying her elopement. Such is the
story of her having been detained in Egypt during the whole term of the
siege. Paris, on his departure from Sparta, had been driven thither by
storms, and the Egyptian king Prôteus, hearing of the grievous wrong
which he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him away from the
country with severe menaces, detaining Helen until her lawful husband
should come to seek her. When the Greeks reclaimed Helen from Troy, the
Trojans assured them solemnly, that she neither was, nor ever had been,
in the town; but the Greeks, treating this allegation as fraudulent,
prosecuted the siege until their ultimate success confirmed the
correctness of the statement, nor did Menelaus recover Helen until, on
his return from Troy, he visited Egypt.[746] Such was the story told by
the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, and it appeared satisfactory to his
historicizing mind. "For if Helen had really been at Troy (he argues)
she would certainly have been given up, even had she been mistress of
Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family
and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and
irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her: their
misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could
not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks
that such was the fact." Assuming the historical character of the war
of Troy, the remark of Herodotus admits of no reply; nor can we greatly
wonder that he acquiesced in the tale of Helen's Egyptian detention, as
a substitute for the "incredible insanity" which the genuine legend
imputes to Priam and the Trojans. Pausanias, upon the same ground
and by the same mode of reasoning, pronounces that the Trojan horse
must have been in point of fact a battering-engine, because to admit
the literal narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the
defenders of the city. And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as
the real cause of the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext
of it; for he thinks that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans could have
been so mad and silly as to endure calamities of such magnitude "for
one little woman."[747] Mr. Knight suggests various political causes as
substitutes; these might deserve consideration, either if any evidence
could be produced to countenance them, or if the subject on which they
are brought to bear could be shown to belong to the domain of history.
[746] Herodot. ii. 120. οὐ γὰρ δὴ οὕτω γε φρενοβλαβὴς ἦν ὁ
Πρίαμος, οὐδ᾽ οἱ ἄλλοι οἱ προσήκοντες αὐτῷ, etc. The passage is
too long to cite, but is highly curious: not the least remarkable
part is the religious coloring which he gives to the new version
of the story which he is adopting,—"the Trojans, though they
had not got Helen, yet could not persuade the Greeks that this
was the fact; for it was the divine will that they should be
destroyed root and branch, in order to make it plain to mankind
that upon great crimes the gods inflict great punishments."
Dio Chrysostom (Or. xi. p. 333) reasons in the same way as
Herodotus against the credibility of the received narrative. On
the other hand, Isokratês, in extolling Helen, dwells on the
calamities of the Trojan war as a test of the peerless value
of the prize (Encom. Hel. p. 360, Aug.): in the view of Pindar
(Olymp. xiii. 56), as well as in that of Hesiod (Opp. Di. 165),
Helen is the one prize contended for.
Euripidês, in his tragedy of Helen, recognizes the detention of
Helen in Egypt and the presence of her εἴδωλον at Troy, but he
follows Stesichorus in denying her elopement altogether,—Hermês
had carried her to Egypt in a cloud (Helen. 35-45, 706): compare
Von Hoff, De Mytho Helenæ Euripideæ, cap. 2. p. 35 (Leyden, 1843).
[747] Pausan. i. 23, 8; Payne Knight, Prolegg. ad Homer. c. 53.
Euphorion construed the wooden horse into a Grecian ship called
Ἵππος, "_The Horse_" (Euphorion, Fragm. 34. ap. Düntzer, Fragm.
Epicc. Græc. p. 55).
See Thucyd. i. 12; vi. 2.
The return of the Grecian chiefs from Troy furnished matter to the
ancient epic hardly less copious than the siege itself, and the more
susceptible of indefinite diversity, inasmuch as those who had before
acted in concert were now dispersed and isolated. Moreover the stormy
voyages and compulsory wanderings of the heroes exactly fell in with
the common aspirations after an heroic founder, and enabled even the
most remote Hellenic settlers to connect the origin of their town with
this prominent event of their ante-historical and semi-divine world.
And an absence of ten years afforded room for the supposition of many
domestic changes in their native abode, and many family misfortunes and
misdeeds during the interval. One of these heroic "Returns," that of
Odysseus, has been immortalized by the verse of Homer. The hero, after
a series of long-protracted suffering and expatriation, inflicted on
him by the anger of Poseidôn, at last reaches his native island, but
finds his wife beset, his youthful son insulted, and his substance
plundered, by a troop of insolent suitors; he is forced to appear as
a wretched beggar, and to endure in his own person their scornful
treatment; but finally, by the interference of Athênê coming in aid of
his own courage and stratagem, he is enabled to overwhelm his enemies,
to resume his family position, and to recover his property. The return
of several other Grecian chiefs was the subject of an epic poem by
Hagias, which is now lost, but of which a brief abstract or argument
still remains: there were in antiquity various other poems of similar
title and analogous matter.[748]
[748] Suidas, v. Νόστος. Wüllner, De Cyclo Epico, p. 93. Also a
poem Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος (Athenæ. vii. p. 281).
As usual with the ancient epic, the multiplied sufferings of this
back-voyage are traced to divine wrath, justly provoked by the sins of
the Greeks; who, in the fierce exultation of a victory purchased by so
many hardships, had neither respected nor even[749] spared the altars
of the gods in Troy; and Athênê, who had been their most zealous ally
during the siege, was so incensed by their final recklessness, more
especially by the outrage of Ajax, son of Oïleus, that she actively
harassed and embittered their return, in spite of every effort to
appease her. The chiefs began to quarrel among themselves; their
formal assembly became a scene of drunkenness; even Agamemnôn and
Menelaus lost their fraternal harmony, and each man acted on his own
separate resolution.[750] Nevertheless, according to the Odyssey,
Nestôr, Diomêdês, Neoptolemus, Idomeneus and Philoktêtês reached
home speedily and safely: Agamemnôn also arrived in Peloponnêsus, to
perish by the hand of a treacherous wife; but Menelaus was condemned
to long wanderings and to the severest privations in Egypt, Cyprus and
elsewhere, before he could set foot in his native land. The Lokrian
Ajax perished on the Gyræan rock.[751] Though exposed to a terrible
storm, he had already reached this place of safety, when he indulged
in the rash boast of having escaped in defiance of the gods: no sooner
did Poseidôn hear this language, than he struck with his trident the
rock which Ajax was grasping and precipitated both into the sea.[752]
Kalchas the soothsayer, together with Leonteus and Polypœtês, proceeded
by land from Troy to Kolophôn.[753]
[749] Upon this the turn of fortune in Grecian affairs depends
(Æschyl. Agamemn. 338; Odyss. iii. 130; Eurip. Troad. 69-95).
[750] Odyss. iii. 130-161; Æschyl. Agamemn. 650-662.
[751] Odyss. iii. 188-196; iv. 5-87. The Egyptian city of
Kanopus, at the mouth of the Nile, was believed to have taken
its name from the pilot of Menelaus, who had died and was buried
there (Strabo, xvii. p. 801; Tacit. Ann. ii. 60). Μενελάϊος
νόμος, so called after Menelaus (Dio Chrysost. xi p. 361).
[752] Odyss. iv. 500. The epic Νόστοι of Hagias placed this
adventure of Ajax on the rocks of Kaphareus, a southern
promontory of Eubœa (Argum. Νόστοι, p. 23, Düntzer). Deceptive
lights were kindled on the dangerous rocks by Nauplius, the
father of Palamêdês, in revenge for the death of his son
(Sophoklês, Ναύπιος Πυρκαεὺς, a lost tragedy; Hygin. f. 116;
Senec. Agamemn. 567).
[753] Argument. Νόστοι _ut sup._ There were monuments of Kalchas
near Sipontum in Italy also (Strabo, vi. p. 284), as well as at
Selgê in Pisidia (Strabo, xii. p. 570).
In respect however to these and other Grecian heroes, tales were
told different from those in the Odyssey, assigning to them a long
expatriation and a distant home. Nestôr went to Italy, where he
founded Metapontum, Pisa and Hêrakleia:[754] Philoktêtês[755] also
went to Italy, founded Petilia and Krimisa, and sent settlers to
Egesta in Sicily. Neoptolemus, under the advice of Thetis, marched
by land across Thrace, met with Odysseus, who had come by sea, at
Maroneia, and then pursued his journey to Epirus, where he became
king of the Molossians.[756] Idomeneus came to Italy, and founded
Uria in the Salentine peninsula. Diomêdês, after wandering far and
wide, went along the Italian coast into the innermost Adriatic gulf,
and finally settled in Daunia, founding the cities of Argyrippa,
Beneventum, Atria and Diomêdeia: by the favor of Athênê he became
immortal, and was worshipped as a god in many different places.[757]
The Lokrian followers of Ajax founded the Epizephyrian Lokri on
the southernmost corner of Italy,[758] besides another settlement
in Libya. I have spoken in another place of the compulsory exile of
Teukros, who, besides founding the city of Salamis in Cyprus, is said
to have established some settlements in the Iberian peninsula.[759]
Menestheus the Athenian did the like, and also founded both Elæa in
Mysia and Skylletium in Italy.[760] The Arcadian chief Agapenôr founded
Paphus in Cyprus.[761] Epeius, of Panopeus in Phôkis, the constructor
of the Trojan horse with the aid of the goddess Athênê, settled at
Lagaria near Sybaris on the coast of Italy; and the very tools which
he had employed in that remarkable fabric were shown down to a late
date in the temple of Athênê at Metapontum.[762] Temples, altars and
towns were also pointed out in Asia Minor, in Samos and in Krête, the
foundation of Agamemnôn or of his followers.[763] The inhabitants of
the Grecian town of Skionê, in the Thracian peninsula called Pallênê
or Pellênê, accounted themselves the offspring of the Pellênians from
Achæa in Peloponnêsus, who had served under Agamemnôn before Troy,
and who on their return from the siege had been driven on the spot
by a storm and there settled.[764] The Pamphylians, on the southern
coast of Asia Minor, deduced their origin from the wanderings of
Amphilochus and Kalchas after the siege of Troy: the inhabitants of the
Amphilochian Argos on the Gulf of Ambrakia revered the same Amphilochus
as their founder.[765] The Orchomenians under Ialmenus, on quitting
the conquered city, wandered or were driven to the eastern extremity
of the Euxine Sea; and the barbarous Achæans under Mount Caucasus
were supposed to have derived their first establishment from this
source.[766] Merionês with his Krêtan followers settled at Engyion in
Sicily, along with the preceding Krêtans who had remained there after
the invasion of Minôs. The Elyminians in Sicily also were composed
of Trojans and Greeks separately driven to the spot, who, forgetting
their previous differences, united in the joint settlements of Eryx
and Egesta.[767] We hear of Podaleirius both in Italy and on the coast
of Karia;[768] of Akamas son of Thêseus, at Amphipolis in Thrace, at
Soli in Cyprus, and at Synnada in Phrygia;[769] of Guneus, Prothous
and Eurypylus, in Krête as well as in Libya.[770] The obscure poem of
Lycophrôn enumerates many of these dispersed and expatriated heroes,
whose conquest of Troy was indeed a Kadmeian victory (according to
the proverbial phrase of the Greeks), wherein the sufferings of the
victor were little inferior to those of the vanquished.[771] It was
particularly among the Italian Greeks, where they were worshipped with
very special solemnity, that their presence as wanderers from Troy was
reported and believed.[772]
[754] Strabo, v. p. 222; vi. p. 264. Vellei. Paterc. i. 1;
Servius ad Æn. x. 179. He had built a temple to Athênê in the
island of Keôs (Strabo, x. p. 487).
[755] Strabo, vi. pp. 254, 272; Virgil, Æn. iii. 401, and Servius
_ad loc._; Lycophrôn, 912.
Both the tomb of Philoktêtês and the arrows of Hêraklês which
he had used against Troy, were for a long time shown at Thurium
(Justin, xx. 1).
[756] Argument. Νόστοι, p. 23, Düntz.; Pindar, Nem. iv. 51.
According to Pindar, however, Neoptolemus comes from Troy by sea,
misses the island of Skyrus, and sails round to the Epeirotic
Ephyra (Nem. vii. 37).
[757] Pindar, Nem. x. 7, with the Scholia. Strabo, iii. p. 150;
v. p. 214-215; vi, p. 284. Stephan. Byz. Ἀργύριππα, Διομηδεία.
Aristotle recognizes him as buried in the Diomedean islands in
the Adriatic (Anthol. Gr. Brunck. i. p. 178).
The identical tripod which had been gained by Diomêdês, as victor
in the chariot-race at the funeral games of Patroclus, was shown
at Delphi in the time of Phanias, attested by an inscription,
as well as the dagger which had been worn by Helikaôn, son of
Antenôr (Athenæ. vi. p. 232).
[758] Virgil, Æneid, iii. 399.; xi. 265; and Servius, _ibid._
Ajax, the son of Oïleus, was worshipped there as a hero (Conôn,
Narr. 18).
[759] Strabo, iii. p. 257; Isokratês, Evagor. Encom. p. 192;
Justin, xliv. 3. Ajax, the son of Teukros, established a temple
of Zeus, and an hereditary priesthood always held by his
descendants (who mostly bore the name of Ajax or Teukros), at
Olbê in Kilikia (Strabo, xiv. p. 672). Teukros carried with him
his Trojan captives to Cyprus (Athenæ. vi. p. 256).
[760] Strabo, iii. p. 140-150; vi. p. 261; xiii. p. 622. See the
epitaphs on Teukros and Agapenôr by Aristotle (Antholog. Gr. ed.
Brunck. i. p. 179-180).
[761] Strabo, xiv. p. 683; Pausan. viii. 5, 2.
[762] Strabo, vi. p. 263; Justin, xx. 2; Aristot. Mirab. Ausc.
c. 108. Also the epigram of the Rhodian Simmias called Πελεκύς
(Antholog. Gr. Brunck. i. p. 210).
[763] Vellei. Patercul. i. 1. Stephan. Byz. v. Λάμπη. Strabo,
xiii. p. 605; xiv p. 639. Theopompus (Fragm. III, Didot)
recounted that Agamemnôn and his followers had possessed
themselves of the larger portion of Cyprus.
[764] Thucydid. iv. 120.
[765] Herodot. vii. 91; Thucyd. ii. 68. According to the old
elegiac poet Kallinos, Kalchas himself had died at Klarus near
Kolophôn after his march from Troy, but Mopsus, his rival in the
prophetic function, had conducted his followers into Pamphylia
and Kilikia (Strabo, xii. p. 570; xiv.p. 668). The oracle of
Amphilochus at Mallus in Kilikia bore the highest character for
exactness and truth-telling in the time of Pausanias, μαντεῖον
ἀψευδέστατον τῶν ἐπ᾽ ἐμοῦ. (Paus. i. 34, 2). Another story
recognized Leonteus and Polypætês as the founders of Aspendus in
Kilikia (Eustath. ad Iliad. ii. 138).
[766] Strabo, ix. p. 416.
[767] Diodôr. iv. 79; Thucyd. vi. 2.
[768] Stephan, Byz. v. Σύρνα; Lycophrôn, 1047.
[769] Æschines, De Falsâ Legat. c. 14; Strabo, xiv. p. 683;
Stephan. Byz. v. Σύνναδα.
[770] Lycophrôn, 877-902, with Scholia; Apollodôr. Fragm. p.
386, Heyne. There is also a long enumeration of these returning
wanderers and founders of new settlements in Solinus (Polyhist.
c. 2).
[771] Strabo, iii. p. 150.
[772] Aristot. Mirabil. Auscult. 79, 106, 107, 109, 111.
I pass over the numerous other tales which circulated among the
ancients, illustrating the ubiquity of the Grecian and Trojan heroes as
well as that of the Argonauts,—one of the most striking features in the
Hellenic legendary world.[773] Amongst them all, the most interesting,
individually, is Odysseus, whose romantic adventures in fabulous
places and among fabulous persons have been made familiarly known by
Homer. The goddesses Kalypso and Circê; the semi-divine mariners of
Phæacia, whose ships are endowed with consciousness and obey without
a steersman; the one-eyed Cyclôpes, the gigantic Læstrygones, and
the wind-ruler Æolus; the Sirens who ensnare by their song, as the
Lotophagi fascinate by their food—all these pictures formed integral
and interesting portions of the old epic. Homer leaves Odysseus
reëstablished in his house and family; but so marked a personage could
never be permitted to remain in the tameness of domestic life: the
epic poem called the Telegonia ascribed to him a subsequent series of
adventures. After the suitors had been buried by their relatives, he
offered sacrifice to the Nymphs, and then went to Elis to inspect his
herds of cattle there pasturing: the Eleian Polyxenus welcomed him
hospitably, and made him a present of a bowl: Odysseus then returned
to Ithaka, and fulfilled the rites and sacrifices prescribed to him by
Teiresias in his visit to the under-world. This obligation discharged,
he went to the country of the Thesprotians, and there married the
queen Kallidikê: he headed the Thesprotians in a war against the
Brygians, the latter being conducted by Arês himself, who fiercely
assailed Odysseus; but the goddess Athênê stood by him, and he was
enabled to make head against Arês until Apollo came and parted them.
Odysseus then returned to Ithaka, leaving the Thesprotian kingdom to
Polypœtês, his son by Kallidikê. Telegonus, his son by Circê, coming to
Ithaka in search of his father, ravaged the island and killed Odysseus
without knowing who he was. Bitter repentance overtook the son for
his undesigned parricide: at his prayer and by the intervention of
his mother Circê, both Penelopê and Têlemachus were made immortal:
Telegonus married Penelopê, and Têlemachus married Circê.[774]
[773] Strabo, i. p. 48. After dwelling emphatically on the long
voyages of Dionysus, Hêraklês, Jasôn, Odysseus, and Menelaus,
he says, Αἰνείαν δὲ καὶ Ἀντήνορα καὶ Ἐνετοὺς, καὶ ἁπλῶς τοὺς
ἐκ τοῦ Τρωϊκοῦ πολέμου πλανηθέντας εἰς ~πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην~,
ἄξιον μὴ τῶν παλαιῶν ἀνθρώπων νομίσαι; Συνέβη γὰρ δὴ τοῖς τότε
Ἕλλησιν, ὁμοίως καὶ τοῖς βαρβάροις, διὰ τὸν τῆς στρατείας
χρόνον, ἀποβαλεῖν τά τε ἐν οἴκῳ καὶ τῇ στρατείᾳ πορισθέντα· ὥστε
μετὰ τὴν τοῦ Ἰλίου καταστροφὴν τούς τε νικήσαντας ἐπὶ λῄστειαν
τραπέσθαι διὰ τὰς ἀπορίας, καὶ πολλῷ μᾶλλον τοὺς ἡττηθέντας καὶ
περιγενομένους ἐκ τοῦ πολέμου. Καὶ δὴ καὶ πόλεις ὑπὸ ~τούτων
κτισθῆναι~ λέγονται ~κατὰ πᾶσαν τὴν ἔξω τῆς Ἑλλάδος παραλίαν~,
ἔστι δ᾽ ὅπου καὶ τὴν μεσόγαιαν.
[774] The Telegonia, composed by Eugammôn of Kyrênê, is lost, but
the Argument of it has been preserved by Proclus (p. 25, Düntzer;
Dictys, vi. 15).
Pausanias quotes a statement from the poem called _Thesprôtis_,
respecting a son of Odysseus and Penelopê, called Ptoliporthus,
born after his return from Troy (viii. 12, 3). Nitzsch (Hist.
Homer. p. 97) as well as Lobeck seem to imagine that this is the
same poem as the Telegonia, under another title.
Aristotle notices an oracle of Odysseus among the Eurytanes, a
branch of the Ætôlian nation: there were also places in Epirus
which boasted of Odysseus as their founder (Schol. ad Lycophrôn.
800; Stephan. Byz. v. Βούνειμα; Etymolog. Mag. Ἀρκείσιος;
Plutarch, Quæst. Gr. c. 14).
We see by this poem that Odysseus was represented as the mythical
ancestor of the Thesprotian kings, just as Neoptolemus was of the
Molossian.
It has already been mentioned that Antenôr and Æneas stand
distinguished from the other Trojans by a dissatisfaction with Priam
and a sympathy with the Greeks, which is by Sophoklês and others
construed as treacherous collusion,[775]—a suspicion indirectly
glanced, though emphatically repelled, by the Æneas of Virgil.[776]
In the old epic of Arktinus, next in age to the Iliad and Odyssey,
Æneas abandons Troy and retires to Mount Ida, in terror at the
miraculous death of Laocoôn, before the entry of the Greeks into the
town and the last night-battle: yet Leschês, in another of the ancient
epic poems, represented him as having been carried away captive by
Neoptolemus.[777] In a remarkable passage of the Iliad, Poseidôn
describes the family of Priam as having incurred the hatred of Zeus,
and predicts that Æneas and his descendants shall reign over the
Trojans: the race of Dardanus, beloved by Zeus more than all his other
sons, would thus be preserved, since Æneas belonged to it. Accordingly,
when Æneas is in imminent peril from the hands of Achilles, Poseidôn
specially interferes to rescue him, and even the implacable miso-Trojan
goddess Hêrê assents to the proceeding.[778] These passages have
been construed by various able critics to refer to a family of
philo-Hellenic or semi-Hellenic Æneadæ, known even in the time of the
early singers of the Iliad as masters of some territory in or near the
Troad, and professing to be descended from, as well as worshipping,
Æneas. In the town of Skêpsis, situated in the mountainous range of
Ida, about thirty miles eastward of Ilium, there existed two noble and
priestly families who professed to be descended, the one from Hectôr,
the other from Æneas. The Skêpsian critic Dêmêtrius (in whose time both
these families were still to be found) informs us that Skamandrius son
of Hectôr, and Ascanius son of Æneas, were the archegets or heroic
founders of his native city, which had been originally situated on
one of the highest ranges of Ida, and was subsequently transferred
by them to the less lofty spot on which it stood in his time.[779]
In Arisbê and Gentinus there seem to have been families professing
the same descent, since the same archegets were acknowledged.[780] In
Ophrynium, Hectôr had his consecrated edifice, and in Ilium both he and
Æneas were worshipped as gods:[781] and it was the remarkable statement
of the Lesbian Menekratês, that Æneas, "having been wronged by Paris
and stripped of the sacred privileges which belonged to him, avenged
himself by betraying the city, and then became one of the Greeks."[782]
[775] Dionys. Hal. i. 46-48; Sophokl. ap. Strab. xiii. p. 608;
Livy, i. 1; Xenophon, Venat. i. 15.
[776] Æn. ii. 433.
[777] Argument of Ἰλίου Πέρσις; Fragm. 7. of Leschês, in
Düntzer's Collection, p. 19-21.
Hellanikus seems to have adopted this retirement of Æneas to the
strongest parts of Mount Ida, but to have reconciled it with
the stories of the migration of Æneas, by saying that he only
remained in Ida a little time, and then quitted the country
altogether by virtue of a convention concluded with the Greeks
(Dionys. Hal. i. 47-48). Among the infinite variety of stories
respecting this hero, one was, that after having effected his
settlement in Italy, he had returned to Troy and resumed the
sceptre, bequeathing it at his death to Ascanius (Dionys. Hal. i.
53): this was a comprehensive scheme for apparently reconciling
_all_ the legends.
[778] Iliad, xx. 300. Poseidôn speaks, respecting Æneas—
Ἀλλ᾽ ἄγεθ᾽ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπ᾽ ἐκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν,
Μήπως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴκεν Ἀχιλλεὺς
Τόνδε κατακτείνῃ· μόριμον δέ οἱ ἐστ᾽ ἀλέασθαι,
Ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται
Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων,
Οἱ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο, γυναικῶν τε θνητάων.
Ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἤχθῃρε Κρονίων·
Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει,
Καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται.
Again, v. 339, Poseidôn tells Æneas that he has nothing to dread
from any other Greek than Achilles.
[779] See O. Müller, on the causes of the mythe of Æneas and
his voyage to Italy, in Classical Journal, vol. xxvi. p. 308;
Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, vol. i. p. 43-52.
Dêmêtrius Skêps. ab. Strab. xiii. p. 607; Nicolaus ap. Steph.
Byz. v. Ἀσκανία. Dêmêtrius conjectured that Skêpsis had been the
regal seat of Æneas: there was a village called Æneia near to it
(Strabo, xiii. p. 603).
[780] Steph. Byz. v. Ἀρίσβη, Γεντῖνος. Ascanius is king of Ida
after the departure of the Greeks (Conôn, Narr. 41; Mela, i. 18).
_Ascanius portus_ between Phokæ and Kymê.
[781] Strabo, xiii. p. 595; Lycophrôn, 1208, and Sch.;
Athenagoras, Legat. 1. Inscription in Clarke's Travels, vol. ii.
p. 86, Οἱ Ἰλιεῖς τὸν πάτριον θεὸν Αἰνείαν. Lucian, Deor. Concil.
c. 12. i. 111. p. 534, Hemst.
[782] Menekrat. ap. Dionys. Hal. i. 48. Ἀχαιοὺς δὲ ἀνίη εἶχε
(after the burial) καὶ ἐδόκεον τῆς στρατιῆς τὴν κεφαλὴν
ἀπηράχθαι. Ὅμως δὲ τάφον αὐτῷ δαίσαντες, ἐπολέμεον γῇ πάσῃ,
ἄχρις Ἴλιος ἑάλω Αἰνείεω ἐνδόντος. Αἰνείης γὰρ ἄτιτος ἐὼν ὑπὸ
Ἀλεξάνδρου, καὶ ἀπὸ γερέων ἱερῶν ἐξειργόμενος, ἀνέτρεψε Πρίαμον,
ἐργασάμενος δὲ ταῦτα, εἷς Ἀχαιῶν ἐγεγόνει.
Abas, in his _Troica_, gave a narrative different from any
other preserved: "Quidam ab Abante, qui _Troica_ scripsit,
relatum ferunt, post discessum a Trojâ Græcorum Astyanacti ibi
datum regnum, hunc ab Antenore expulsum sociatis sibi finitimis
civitatibus, inter quas et Arisba fuit: Ænean hoc ægre tulisse,
et pro Astyanacte arma cepisse ac prospere gestâ re Astyanact
restituisse regnum" (Servius ad Virg. Æneid. ix. 264). According
to Diktys, Antenôr remains king and Æneas goes away (Dikt. v.
17): Antenôr brings the Palladium to the Greeks (Dikt. v. 8).
Syncellus, on the contrary, tells us that the sons of Hectôr
recovered Ilium by the suggestions of Helenus, expelling the
Atenorids (Syncell. p. 322, ed. Bonn).
One tale thus among many respecting Æneas, and that too the most
ancient of all, preserved among the natives of the Troad, who
worshipped him as their heroic ancestor, was, that after the capture
of Troy he continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans,
on friendly terms with the Greeks. But there were other tales
respecting him, alike numerous and irreconcilable: the hand of
destiny marked him as a wanderer (_fato profugus_), and his ubiquity
is not exceeded even by that of Odysseus. We hear of him at Ænus
in Thrace, in Pallênê, at Æneia in the Thermaic Gulf, in Delus, at
Orchomenos and Mantineia in Arcadia, in the islands of Kythêra and
Zakynthus, in Leukas and Ambrakia, at Buthrotum in Epirus, on the
Salentine peninsula and various other places in the southern region
of Italy; at Drepana and Segesta in Sicily, at Carthage, at Cape
Palinurus, Cumæ, Misenum, Caieta, and finally in Latium, where he lays
the first humble foundation of the mighty Rome and her empire.[783]
And the reason why his wanderings were not continued still further
was, that the oracles and the pronounced will of the gods directed
him to settle in Latium.[784] In each of these numerous places his
visit was commemorated and certified by local monuments or special
legends, particularly by temples and permanent ceremonies in honor of
his mother Aphroditê, whose worship accompanied him everywhere: there
were also many temples and many different tombs of Æneas himself.[785]
The vast ascendency acquired by Rome, the ardor with which all the
literary Romans espoused the idea of a Trojan origin, and the fact
that the Julian family recognized Æneas as their gentile primary
ancestor,—all contributed to give to the Roman version of his legend
the preponderance over every other. The various other places in which
monuments of Æneas were found came thus to be represented as places
where he had halted for a time on his way from Troy to Latium. But
though the legendary pretensions of these places were thus eclipsed
in the eyes of those who constituted the literary public, the local
belief was not extinguished: they claimed the hero as their permanent
property, and his tomb was to them a proof that he had lived and died
among them.
[783] Dionys. Halic. A. R. i. 48-54; Heyne, Excurs. 1 ad Æneid.
iii.; De Æneæ Erroribus, and Excurs. 1 ad Æn. v.; Conôn. Narr.
46; Livy, xl. 4; Stephan. Byz. Αἴνεια. The inhabitants of Æneia
in the Thermaic Gulf worshipped him with great solemnity as their
heroic founder (Pausan. iii. 22, 4; viii. 12, 4). The tomb of
Anchisês was shown on the confines of the Arcadian Orchomenus and
Mantineia (compare Steph. Byz. v. Κάφυαι), under the mountain
called Anchisia, near a temple of Aphroditê: on the discrepancies
respecting the death of Anchisês (Heyne. Excurs. 17 ad Æn. iii.):
Segesta in Sicily founded by Æneas (Cicero, Verr. iv. 33).
[784] Τοῦ δὲ μηκέτι προσωτέρω τῆς Εὐρώπης πλεῦσαι τὸν Τρωϊκὸν
στόλον, οἵ τε χρησμοὶ ἐγένοντο αἴτιοι, etc. (Dionys. Hal. i. 55).
[785] Dionys. Hal. i. 54. Among other places, his tomb was shown
at Berecynthia, in Phrygia (Festus, v. _Romam_, p. 224, ed.
Müller): a curious article, which contains an assemblage of the
most contradictory statements respecting both Æneas and Latinus.
Antenôr, who shares with Æneas the favorable sympathy of the Greeks,
is said by Pindar to have gone from Troy along with Menelaus and Helen
into the region of Kyrênê in Libya.[786] But according to the more
current narrative, he placed himself at the head of a body of Eneti or
Veneti from Paphlagonia, who had come as allies of Troy, and went by
sea into the inner part of the Adriatic Gulf, where he conquered the
neighboring barbarians and founded the town of Patavium (the modern
Padua); the Veneti in this region were said to owe their origin to his
immigration.[787] We learn further from Strabo, that Opsikellas, one
of the companions of Antenôr, had continued his wanderings even into
Ibêria, and that he had there established a settlement bearing his
name.[788]
[786] Pindar, Pyth. v., and the citation from the Νόστοι of
Lysimachus in the Scholia; given still more fully in the Scholia
ad Lycophrôn. 875. There was a λόφος Ἀντηνορίδων at Kyrênê.
[787] Livy, i. 1. Servius ad Æneid. i. 242. Strabo, i. 48; v.
212. Ovid, Fasti, iv. 75.
[788] Strabo, iii. p. 157.
Thus endeth the Trojan war; together with its sequel, the dispersion
of the heroes, victors as well as vanquished. The account here
given of it has been unavoidably brief and imperfect; for in a work
intended to follow consecutively the real history of the Greeks, no
greater space can be allotted even to the most splendid gem of their
legendary period. Indeed, although it would be easy to fill a large
volume with the separate incidents which have been introduced into the
"Trojan cycle," the misfortune is that they are for the most part so
contradictory as to exclude all possibility of weaving them into one
connected narrative. We are compelled to select one out of the number,
generally without any solid ground of preference, and then to note
the variations of the rest. No one who has not studied the original
documents can imagine the extent to which this discrepancy proceeds;
it covers almost every portion and fragment of the tale.[789]
[789] These diversities are well set forth in the useful
Dissertation of Fuchs De Varietate Fabularum Troicarum (Cologne,
1830).
Of the number of romantic statements put forth respecting Helen
and Achilles especially, some idea may be formed from the fourth,
fifth and sixth chapters of Ptolemy Hêphæstion (apud Westermann,
Scriptt. Mythograph. p. 188, etc.).
But though much may have been thus omitted of what the reader
might expect to find in an account of the Trojan war, its genuine
character has been studiously preserved, without either exaggeration
or abatement. The real Trojan war is that which was recounted by
Homer and the old epic poets, and continued by all the lyric and
tragic composers. For the latter, though they took great liberties
with the particular incidents, and introduced to some extent a new
moral tone, yet worked more or less faithfully on the Homeric scale:
and even Euripidês, who departed the most widely from the feeling
of the old legend, never lowered down his matter to the analogy
of contemporary life. They preserved its well-defined object, at
once righteous and romantic, the recovery of the daughter of Zeus
and sister of the Dioskuri—its mixed agencies, divine, heroic and
human—the colossal force and deeds of its chief actors—its vast
magnitude and long duration, as well as the toils which the conquerors
underwent, and the Nemesis which followed upon their success. And
these were the circumstances which, set forth in the full blaze of
epic and tragic poetry, bestowed upon the legend its powerful and
imperishable influence over the Hellenic mind. The enterprise was one
comprehending all the members of the Hellenic body, of which each
individually might be proud, and in which, nevertheless, those feelings
of jealous and narrow patriotism, so lamentably prevalent in many of
the towns, were as much as possible excluded. It supplied them with
a grand and inexhaustible object of common sympathy, common faith,
and common admiration; and when occasions arose for bringing together
a Pan-Hellenic force against the barbarians, the precedent of the
Homeric expedition was one upon which the elevated minds of Greece
could dwell with the certainty of rousing an unanimous impulse, if not
always of counterworking sinister by-motives, among their audience.
And the incidents comprised in the Trojan cycle were familiarized, not
only to the public mind but also to the public eye, by innumerable
representations both of the sculptor and the painter,—those which were
romantic and chivalrous being better adapted for this purpose, and
therefore more constantly employed, than any other.
Of such events the genuine Trojan war of the old epic was for the most
part composed. Though literally believed, reverentially cherished,
and numbered among the gigantic phænomena of the past, by the
Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a
legend and nothing more. If we are asked whether it be not a legend
embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of
truth,—whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of
the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods,
without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians
under the beautiful son of Eôs, without the wooden horse, without the
characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war,—like
the mutilated trunk of Deïphobus in the under-world; if we are asked
whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this,
our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied,
so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but
the ancient epic itself without any independent evidence: had it
been an age of records indeed, the Homeric epic in its exquisite and
unsuspecting simplicity would probably never have come into existence.
Whoever therefore ventures to dissect Homer, Arktinus and Leschês,
and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets
aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own
powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving
or verifying his conclusions. Among many attempts, ancient as well as
modern, to identify real objects in this historical darkness, that of
Dio Chrysostom deserves attention for its extraordinary boldness. In
his oration addressed to the inhabitants of Ilium, and intended to
demonstrate that the Trojans were not only blameless as to the origin
of the war, but victorious in its issue—he overthrows all the leading
points of the Homeric narrative, and re-writes nearly the whole from
beginning to end: Paris is the lawful husband of Helen, Achilles is
slain by Hectôr, and the Greeks retire without taking Troy, disgraced
as well as baffled. Having shown without difficulty that the Iliad,
if it be looked at as a history, is full of gaps, incongruities and
absurdities, he proceeds to compose a more plausible narrative of his
own, which he tenders as so much authentic matter of fact. The most
important point, however, which his Oration brings to view is, the
literal and confiding belief with which the Homeric narrative was
regarded, as if it were actual history, not only by the inhabitants of
Ilium, but also by the general Grecian public.[790]
[790] Dio Chrysost. Or. xi. p. 310-322.
The small town of Ilium, inhabited by Æolic Greeks,[791] and raised
into importance only by the legendary reverence attached to it, stood
upon an elevated ridge forming a spur from Mount Ida, rather more than
three miles from the town and promontory of Sigeium, and about twelve
stadia, or less than two miles, from the sea at its nearest point.
From Sigeium and the neighboring town of Achilleium (with its monument
and temple of Achilles), to the town of Rhœteium on a hill higher
up the Hellespont (with its monument and chapel of Ajax called the
Aianteium[792]), was a distance of sixty stadia, or seven miles and a
half in the straight course by sea: in the intermediate space was a bay
and an adjoining plain, comprehending the embouchure of the Scamander,
and extending to the base of the ridge on which Ilium stood. This plain
was the celebrated plain of Troy, in which the great Homeric battles
were believed to have taken place: the portion of the bay near to
Sigeium went by the name of the Naustathmon of the Achæans (_i. e._ the
spot where they dragged their ships ashore), and was accounted to have
been the camp of Agamemnôn and his vast army.[793]
[791] Herodot. v. 122. Pausan. v. 8, 3: viii. 12, 4. Αἰολεὺς ἐκ
πόλεως Τρῴαδος, the title proclaimed at the Olympic games; like
Αἰολεὺς ἀπὸ Μουρίνας, from Myrina in the more southerly region of
Æolis, as we find in the list of visitors at the Charitêsia, at
Orchomenos in Bϙtia (Corp. Inscrip. Boeckh. No. 1583).
[792] See Pausanias, i. 35, 3, for the legends current at Ilium
respecting the vast size of the bones of Ajax in his tomb. The
inhabitants affirmed that after the shipwreck of Odysseus, the
arms of Achilles, which he was carrying away with him, were
washed up by the sea against the tomb of Ajax. Pliny gives the
distance at thirty stadia: modern travellers make it some thing
more than Pliny, but considerably less than Strabo.
[793] Strabo, xiii. p. 596-598. Strabo distinguishes the Ἀχαιῶν
Ναύσταθμον, which was near to Sigeium, from the Ἀχαιῶν λιμήν,
which was more towards the middle of the bay between Sigeium and
Rhœteium; but we gather from his language that this distinction
was not universally recognized. Alexander landed at the Ἀχαιῶν
λιμήν (Arrian, i. 11).
Historical Ilium was founded, according to the questionable statement
of Strabo, during the last dynasty of the Lydian kings,[794] that is,
at some period later than 720 B. C. Until after the days of Alexander
the Great—indeed until the period of Roman preponderance—it always
remained a place of inconsiderable power and importance, as we learn
not only from the assertion of the geographer, but also from the fact
that Achilleium, Sigeium and Rhœteium were all independent of it.[795]
But inconsiderable as it might be, it was the only place which ever
bore the venerable name immortalized by Homer. Like the Homeric Ilium,
it had its temple of Athênê,[796] wherein she was worshipped as the
presiding goddess of the town: the inhabitants affirmed that Agamemnôn
had not altogether destroyed the town, but that it had been reoccupied
after his departure, and had never ceased to exist.[797] Their
acropolis was called Pergamum, and in it was shown the house of Priam
and the altar of Zeus Herkeius where that unhappy old man had been
slain: moreover there were exhibited, in the temples, panoplies which
had been worn by the Homeric heroes,[798] and doubtless many other
relics appreciated by admirers of the Iliad.
[794] Strabo, xiii. p. 593.
[795] Herodot. v. 95 (his account of the war between the
Athenians and Mitylenæans about Sigeium and Achilleium); Strabo,
xiii. p. 593. Τὴν δὲ τῶν Ἰλιέων πόλιν τὴν νῦν τέως μὲν κωμόπολιν
εἶναί φασι, τὸ ἱερὸν ἔχουσαν τῆς Ἀθηνᾶς μικρὸν καὶ εὐτελές.
Ἀλέξανδρον δὲ ἀναβάντα μετὰ τὴν ἐπὶ Γρανίκῳ νίκην, ἀναθήμασι τε
κοσμῆσαι τὸ ἱερὸν καὶ προσαγορεῦσαι πόλιν, etc.
Again, Καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον, ὃ νῦν ἐστὶ, κωμόπολίς τις ἦν ὅτε πρῶτον
Ῥωμαῖοι τῆς Ἀσίας ἐπέβησαν.
[796] Besides Athênê, the Inscriptions authenticate Ζεὺς Πολιεὺς
at Ilium (Corp. Inscrip. Bœckh. No. 3599).
[797] Strabo, xiii. p. 600. Λέγουσι δ᾽ οἱ νῦν Ἰλιεῖς καὶ τοῦτο,
ὡς οὐδὲ τέλεως συνέβαινεν ἠφανίσθαι τὴν πόλιν κατὰ τὴν ἅλωσιν ὑπὸ
τῶν Ἀχαιῶν, οὐδ᾽ ἐξηλείφθη οὐδέποτε.
The situation of Ilium (or as it is commonly, but erroneously,
termed, _New Ilium_) appears to be pretty well ascertained, about
two miles from the sea (Rennell, On the Topography of Troy, p.
41-71; Dr. Clarke's Travels, vol. ii. p. 102).
[798] Xerxês passing by Adramyttium, and leaving the range of
Mount Ida on his left hand, ἤϊε ἐς τὴν Ἰλιάδα γῆν.... Ἀπικομένου
δὲ τοῦ στρατοῦ ἐπὶ τὸν Σκάμανδρον ... ἐς τὸ Πριάμου Πέργαμον
ἀνέβη, ἵμερον ἔχων θεήσασθαι. Θεησάμενος δὲ, καὶ ~πυθόμενος
κείνων ἕκαστα~, τῇ Ἀθηναίῃ τῇ Ἰλιάδι ἔθυσε βοῦς χιλίας· χοὰς δὲ
οἱ μάγοι τοῖσιν ἥρωσιν ἐχέαντο.... Ἅμα ἡμέρῃ δὲ ἐπορεύετο, ἐν
ἀριστερῇ μὲν ἀπέργων Ῥοιτεῖον πόλιν καὶ Ὀφρυνεῖον καὶ Δάρδανον,
ἥπερ δὴ Ἀβύδῳ ὅμουρος ἐστιν· ἐν δεξιῇ δὲ, Γέργιθας Τευκρούς
(Herod. vii. 43).
Respecting Alexander (Arrian, i. 11), Ἀνελθόντα δὲ ἐς Ἴλιον, τῇ
Ἀθηνᾷ θῦσαι τῇ Ἰλιάδι, καὶ τὴν πανοπλίαν τὴν αὑτοῦ ἀναθεῖναι ἐς
τὸν ναὸν, καὶ καθελεῖν ἀντὶ ταύτης τῶν ἱερῶν τινα ὅπλων ἔτι ἐκ
τοῦ Τρωϊκοῦ ἔργου σωζόμενα· καὶ ταῦτα λέγουσιν ὅτι οἱ ὑπασπισταὶ
ἔφερον πρὸ αὐτοῦ ἐς τὰς μάχας. Θῦσαι δὲ αὐτὸν ἐπὶ τοῦ βωμοῦ τοῦ
Διὸς τοῦ Ἑρκείου λόγος κατέχει, μῆνιν Πριάμου παραιτούμενον τῷ
Νεοπτολέμου γένει, ὃ δὴ ἐς αὐτὸν καθῆκε.
The inhabitants of Ilium also showed the lyre which had belonged
to Paris (Plutarch, Alexand. c. 15).
Chandler, in his History of Ilium, chap. xxii. p. 89, seems to
think that the place called by Herodotus the Pergamum of Priam
is different from the historical Ilium. But the mention of the
Iliean Athênê identifies them as the same.
These were testimonies which few persons in those ages were inclined
to question, when combined with the identity of name and general
locality; nor does it seem that any one did question them until the
time of Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis. Hellanikus expressly described this Ilium
as being the Ilium of Homer, for which assertion Strabo (or probably
Dêmêtrius, from whom the narrative seems to be copied) imputes to him
very gratuitously an undue partiality towards the inhabitants of the
town.[799] Herodotus relates, that Xerxês in his march into Greece
visited the place, went up to the Pergamum of Priam, inquired with
much interest into the details of the Homeric siege, made libations to
the fallen heroes, and offered to the Athênê of Ilium his magnificent
sacrifice of a thousand oxen: he probably represented and believed
himself to be attacking Greece as the avenger of the Priamid family.
The Lacedæmonian admiral Mindarus, while his fleet lay at Abydus, went
personally to Ilium to offer sacrifice to Athênê, and saw from that
elevated spot the battle fought between the squadron of Dorieus and
the Athenians, on the shore near Rhœteium.[800] During the interval
between the Peloponnesian war and the Macedonian invasion of Persia,
Ilium was always garrisoned as a strong position; but its domain was
still narrow, and did not extend even to the sea which was so near to
it.[801] Alexander, on crossing the Hellespont, sent his army from
Sestus to Abydus, under Parmenio, and sailed personally from Elæeus
in the Chersonese, after having solemnly sacrificed at the Elæuntian
shrine of Prôtesilaus, to the harbor of the Achæans between Sigeium and
Rhœteium. He then ascended to Ilium, sacrificed to the Iliean Athênê,
and consecrated in her temple his own panoply, in exchange for which
he took some of the sacred arms there suspended, which were said to
have been preserved from the time of the Trojan war. These arms were
carried before him when he went to battle by his armor-bearers. It is
a fact still more curious, and illustrative of the strong working of
the old legend on an impressible and eminently religious mind, that he
also sacrificed to Priam himself, on the very altar of Zeus Herkeius
from which the old king was believed to have been torn by Neoptolemus.
As that fierce warrior was his heroic ancestor by the maternal side, he
desired to avert from himself the anger of Priam against the Achilleid
race.[802]
[799] Strabo, xiii. p. 602. Ἑλλάνικος δὲ χαριζόμενος τοῖς
Ἰλιεῦσιν, οἷος ὁ ἐκείνου μῦθος, συνηγορεῖ τῷ τὴν αὐτὴν εἶναι
πόλιν τὴν νῦν τῇ τότε. Hellanikus had written a work called
Τρωϊκά.
[800] Xenoph. Hellen. i. 1, 10. Skylax places Ilium twenty-five
stadia, or about three miles, from the sea (c. 94). But I do not
understand how he can call Skêpsis and Kebrên πόλεις ἐπὶ θαλάσσῃ.
[801] See Xenoph. Hellen. iii. i. 16; and the description of the
seizure of Ilium, along with Skêpsis and Kebrên, by the chief of
mercenaries, Charidêmus, in Demosthen. cont. Aristocrat. c. 38.
p. 671: compare Æneas Poliorcetic. c. 24, and Polyæn. iii. 14.
[802] Arrian, _l. c._ Dikæarchus composed a separate work
respecting this sacrifice of Alexander, περὶ τῆς ἐν Ἰλίῳ θυσίας
(Athenæ. xiii. p. 603; Dikæarch. Fragm. p. 114, ed. Fuhr).
Theophrastus, in noticing old and venerable trees, mentions the
φηγοὶ (_Quercus æsculus_) on the tomb of Ilus at Ilium, without
any doubt of the authenticity of the place (De Plant. iv. 14);
and his contemporary, the harper Stratonikos, intimates the same
feeling, in his jest on the visit of a bad sophist to Ilium
during the festival of the Ilieia (Athenæ. viii. p. 351). The
same may be said respecting the author of the tenth epistle
ascribed to the orator Æschinês (p. 737), in which his visit of
curiosity to Ilium is described—as well as about Apollônius of
Tyana, or the writer who describes his life and his visit to the
Trôad; it is evident that he did not distrust the ἀρχαιολογία
of the Ilieans, who affirmed their town to be the real Troy
(Philostrat. Vit. Apollôn. Tyan. iv. 11).
The goddess Athênê of Ilium was reported to have rendered
valuable assistance to the inhabitants of Kyzikus, when they were
besieged by Mithridatês, commemorated by inscriptions set up in
Ilium (Plutarch, Lucull. 10).
Alexander made to the inhabitants of Ilium many munificent promises,
which he probably would have executed, had he not been prevented
by untimely death: for the Trojan war was amongst all the Grecian
legends the most thoroughly Pan-Hellenic, and the young king of
Macedôn, besides his own sincere legendary faith, was anxious to
merge the local patriotism of the separate Greek towns in one general
Hellenic sentiment under himself as chief. One of his successors,
Antigonus,[803] founded the city of Alexandreia in the Trôad, between
Sigeium and the more southerly promontory of Lektum; compressing into
it the inhabitants of many of the neighboring Æolic towns in the region
of Ida,—Skêpsis, Kebrên, Hamaxitus, Kolônæ, and Neandria, though the
inhabitants of Skêpsis were subsequently permitted by Lysimachus to
resume their own city and autonomous government. Ilium however remained
without any special mark of favor until the arrival of the Romans in
Asia and their triumph over Antiochus (about 190 B. C.). Though it
retained its walls and its defensible position, Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis,
who visited it shortly before that event, described it as being then
in a state of neglect and poverty, many of the houses not even having
tiled roofs.[804] In this dilapidated condition, however, it was still
mythically recognized both by Antiochus and by the Roman consul
Livius, who went up thither to sacrifice to the Iliean Athênê. The
Romans, proud of their origin from Troy and Æneas, treated Ilium with
signal munificence; not only granting to it immunity from tribute,
but also adding to its domain the neighboring territories of Gergis,
Rhœteium and Sigeium—and making the Ilieans masters of the whole
coast[805] from the Peræa (or continental possessions) of Tenedos
(southward of Sigeium) to the boundaries of Dardanus, which had its own
title to legendary reverence as the special sovereignty of Æneas. The
inhabitants of Sigeium could not peaceably acquiesce in this loss of
their autonomy, and their city was destroyed by the Ilieans.
[803] Strabo, xiii. p. 603-607.
[804] Livy, xxxv. 43; xxxvii. 9. Polyb. v. 78-111 (passages which
prove that Ilium was fortified and defensible about B. C. 218).
Strabo, xiii. p. 594. Καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον δ᾽, ὃ νῦν ἐστι, κωμόπολίς τις
ἦν, ὅτε πρῶτον Ῥωμαῖοι τῆς Ἀσίας ἐπέβησαν καὶ ἐξέβαλον Ἀντίοχον
τὸν μέγαν ἐκ τῆς ἐντὸς τοῦ Ταύρου. Φησὶ γοῦν Δημήτριος ὁ Σκήψιος,
μειράκιον ἐπιδημήσας εἰς τὴν πόλιν κατ᾽ ἐκείνους τοὺς καιροὺς,
οὕτως ὠλιγωρημένην ἰδεῖν τὴν κατοικίαν, ὥστε μηδὲ κεραμωτὰς
ἔχειν τὰς στέγας. Ἡγησιάναξ δὲ, τοὺς Γαλάτας περαιωθέντας ἐκ τῆς
Εὐρώπης, ἀναβῆναι μὲν εἰς τὴν πόλιν δεομένους ἐρύματος, παραχρῆμα
δ᾽ ἐκλιπεῖν διὰ τὸ ἀτείχιστον· ὕστερον δ᾽ ἐπανόρθωσιν ἔσχε
πολλήν. Εἶτ᾽ ἐκάκωσαν αὐτὴν πάλιν οἱ μετὰ Φιμβρίου, etc.
This is a very clear and precise statement, attested by an
eye-witness. But it is thoroughly inconsistent with the statement
made by Strabo in the previous chapter, a dozen lines before, as
the text now stands; for he there informs us that Lysimachus,
after the death of Alexander, paid great attention to Ilium,
surrounded it with a wall of forty stadia in circumference,
erected a temple, and aggregated to Ilium the ancient cities
around, which were in a state of decay. We know from Livy that
the aggregation of Gergis and Rhœteium to Ilium was effected, not
by Lysimachus, but by the Romans (Livy, xxxviii. 37); so that the
_first_ statement of Strabo is not only inconsistent with his
second, but is contradicted by an independent authority.
I cannot but think that this contradiction arises from a
confusion of the text in Strabo's _first_ passage, and that
in that passage Strabo really meant to speak only of the
improvements brought about by Lysimachus in _Alexandreia Trôas_;
that he never meant to ascribe to Lysimachus any improvements in
_Ilium_, but, on the contrary, to assign the remarkable attention
paid by Lysimachus to _Alexandreia Trôas_, as the reason why
he had neglected to fulfil the promises held out by Alexander
to _Ilium_. The series of facts runs thus:—1. Ilium is nothing
better than a κώμη; at the landing of Alexander; 2. Alexander
promises great additions, but never returns from Persia to
accomplish them; 3. Lysimachus is absorbed in Alexandreia Trôas,
into which he aggregates several of the adjoining old towns,
and which flourishes under his hands; 4. Hence Ilium remained a
κώμη when the Romans entered Asia, as it had been when Alexander
entered.
This alteration in the text of Strabo might be effected by the
simple transposition of the words as they now stand, and by
omitting ὅτε καὶ, ἤδη ἐπεμελήθη, without introducing a single
new or conjectural word, so that the passage would read thus:
Μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἐκείνου (Alexander's) τελευτὴν Λυσίμαχος μάλιστα τῆς
Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐπεμελήθη, συνῳκισμένης μὲν ἤδη ὑπ᾽ Ἀντιγόνου, καὶ
προσηγορευμένης Ἀντιγόνιας, μεταβαλούσης δὲ τοὔνομα· (ἔδοξε γὰρ
εὐσεβὲς εἶναι τοὺς Ἀλεξάνδρον διαδεξαμένους ἐκείνου πρότερον
κτίζειν ἐπωνύμους πόλεις, εἶθ᾽ ἑαυτῶν) καὶ νέων κατεσκεύασε καὶ
τεῖχος περιεβάλετο ὅσον 40 σταδίων· συνῴκισε δὲ εἰς αὐτὴν τὰς
κύκλῳ πόλεις ἀρχαίας, ἤδη κεκακωμένας. Καὶ δὴ καὶ συνέμεινε
... πόλεων. If this reading be adopted, the words beginning
that which stands in Tzschucke's edition as sect. 27, and which
immediately follow the last word πόλεων, will read quite suitably
and coherently,—Καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον δ᾽, ὃ νῦν ἐστὶ, κωμόπολίς τις ἦν,
ὅτε πρῶτον Ῥωμαῖοι τῆς Ἀσίας ἐπέβησαν, etc., whereas with the
present reading of the passage they show a contradiction, and the
whole passage is entirely confused.
[805] Livy, xxxviii. 39; Strabo, xiii. p. 600. Κατέσκαπται δὲ καὶ
τὸ Σίγειον ὑπὸ τῶν Ἰλιέων διὰ τὴν ἀπείθειαν· ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνοις γὰρ ἦν
ὕστερον ἡ παραλία πᾶσα ἡ μέχρι Δαρδάνου, καὶ νῦν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνοις
ἔστι.
The dignity and power of Ilium being thus prodigiously enhanced, we
cannot doubt that the inhabitants assumed to themselves exaggerated
importance as the recognized parents of all-conquering Rome. Partly,
we may naturally suppose, from the jealousies thus aroused on the
part of their neighbors at Skêpsis and Alexandreia Trôas—partly from
the pronounced tendency of the age (in which Kratês at Pergamus and
Aristarchus at Alexandria divided between them the palm of literary
celebrity) towards criticism and illustration of the old poets—a
blow was now aimed at the mythical legitimacy of Ilium. Dêmêtrius of
Skêpsis, one of the most laborious of the Homeric critics, had composed
thirty books of comment upon the Catalogue in the Iliad: Hestiæa, an
authoress of Alexandreia Trôas, had written on the same subject: both
of them, well-acquainted with the locality, remarked that the vast
battles described in the Iliad could not be packed into the narrow
space between Ilium and the Naustathmon of the Greeks; the more so,
as that space, too small even as it then stood, had been considerably
enlarged since the date of the Iliad by deposits at the mouth of the
Skamander.[806] They found no difficulty in pointing out topographical
incongruities and impossibilities as to the incidents in the Iliad,
which they professed to remove by the startling theory that the Homeric
Ilium had not occupied the site of the city so called. There was a
village, called the village of the Ilieans, situated rather less than
four miles from the city in the direction of Mount Ida, and further
removed from the sea; here, they affirmed the "holy Troy" had stood.
[806] Strabo, xiii. 599. Παρατίθησι δὲ ὁ Δημήτριος καὶ τὴν
Ἀλεξανδρίνην Ἑστίαιαν μάρτυρα, τὴν συγγράψασαν περὶ τῆς Ὁμήρου
Ἰλιάδος, πυνθανομένην, εἰ περὶ τὴν νῦν πόλιν ὁ πόλεμος συνέστη,
καὶ τὸ Τρωϊκὸν πεδίον ποῦ ἔστιν, ὃ μέταξυ τῆς πόλεως καὶ τῆς
θαλάσσης ὁ ποιητὴς φράζει· τὸ μὲν γὰρ πρὸ τῆς νῦν πόλεως
ὁρώμενον, πρόχωμα εἶναι τῶν ποταμῶν, ὕστερον γεγονός.
The words ποῦ ἔστιν are introduced conjecturally by Grosskurd,
the excellent German translator of Strabo, but they seem to me
necessary to make the sense complete.
Hesitæa is cited more than once in the Homeric Scholia (Schol.
Venet. ad Iliad, iii. 64; Enstath. ad Iliad, ii. 538).
No positive proof was produced to sustain the conclusion, for Strabo
expressly states that not a vestige of the ancient city remained at
the Village of the Ilieans:[807] but the fundamental supposition was
backed by a second accessory supposition, to explain how it happened
that all such vestiges had disappeared. Nevertheless Strabo adopts the
unsupported hypothesis of Dêmêtrius as if it were an authenticated
fact—distinguishing pointedly between Old and New Ilium, and even
censuring Hellanikus for having maintained the received local faith.
But I cannot find that Dêmêtrius and Hestiæa have been followed in
this respect by any other writer of ancient times excepting Strabo.
Ilium still continued to be talked of and treated by every one as the
genuine Homeric Troy: the cruel jests of the Roman rebel Fimbria, when
he sacked the town and massacred the inhabitants—the compensation made
by Sylla, and the pronounced favor of Julius Cæsar and Augustus,—all
prove this continued recognition of identity.[808] Arrian, though a
native of Nicomedia, holding a high appointment in Asia Minor, and
remarkable for the exactness of his topographical notices, describes
the visit of Alexander to Ilium, without any suspicion that the place
with all its relics was a mere counterfeit: Aristidês, Dio Chrysostom,
Pausanias, Appian, and Plutarch hold the same language.[809] But modern
writers seem for the most part to have taken up the supposition from
Strabo as implicitly as he took it from Dêmêtrius. They call Ilium by
the disrespectful appellation of _New_ Ilium—while the traveller in the
Trôad looks for _Old_ Ilium as if it were the unquestionable spot where
Priam had lived and moved; the name is even formally enrolled on the
best maps recently prepared of the ancient Trôad.[810]
[807] Strabo, xiii. p. 599. Οὐδὲν δ᾽ ἴχνος σώζεται τῆς ἀρχαίας
πόλεως—εἰκότως· ἅτε γὰρ ἐκπεπορθημένων τῶν κύκλῳ πόλεων, οὐ
τελέως δὲ κατεσπασμένων, οἱ λίθοι πάντες εἰς τὴν ἐκείνων ἀνάληψιν
μετηνέχθησαν.
[808] Appian, Mithridat. c. 53; Strabo, xiii. p. 594; Plutarch,
Sertorius, c. 1; Velleius Paterc. ii. 23.
The inscriptions attest Panathenaic games celebrated at Ilium
in honor of Athênê by the Ilieans conjointly with various other
neighboring cities (see Corp. Inscr. Boeckh. No. 3601-3602, with
Boeckh's observations). The valuable inscription No. 3595 attests
the liberality of Antiochus Soter towards the Iliean Athênê as
early as 278 B. C.
[809] Arrian, i. 11; Appian _ut sup._; also Aristidês, Or. 43,
Rhodiaca, p. 820 (Dindorf p. 369). The curious Oratio xi. of Dio
Chrysostom, in which he writes his new version of the Trojan war,
is addressed to the inhabitants of Ilium.
[810] The controversy, now half a century old, respecting Troy
and the Trojan war—between Bryant and his various opponents,
Morritt, Gilbert Wakefield, the British Critic, etc., seems
now nearly forgotten, and I cannot think that the pamphlets on
either side would be considered as displaying much ability, if
published at the present day. The discussion was first raised by
the publication of Le Chevalier's account of the plain of Troy,
in which the author professed to have discovered the true site of
Old Ilium (the supposed Homeric Troy), about twelve miles from
the sea near Bounarbashi. Upon this account Bryant published some
animadversions, followed up by a second treatise, in which he
denied the historical reality of the Trojan war, and advanced the
hypothesis that the tale was of Egyptian origin (Dissertation on
the War of Troy, and the Expedition of the Grecians as described
by Homer, showing that no such Expedition was ever undertaken,
and that no such city of Phrygia existed, by Jacob Bryant;
seemingly 1797, though there is no date in the title-page:
Morritt's reply was published in 1798). A reply from Mr. Bryant
and a rejoinder from Mr. Morritt, as well as a pamphlet from G.
Wakefield, appeared in 1799 and 1800, besides an Expostulation by
the former addressed to the British Critic.
Bryant, having dwelt both on the incredibilities and the
inconsistencies of the Trojan war, as it is recounted in
Grecian legend generally, nevertheless admitted that Homer had
a groundwork for his story, and maintained that that groundwork
was Egyptian. Homer (he thinks) was an Ithacan, descended
from a family originally emigrant from Egypt: the war of Troy
was originally an Egyptian war, which explains how Memnôn the
Ethiopian came to take part in it: "upon this history, which
was originally Egyptian, Homer founded the scheme of his two
principal poems, adapting things to Greece and Phrygia by an
ingenious transposition:" he derived information from priests
of Memphis or Thêbes (Bryant, pp. 102, 108, 126). The Ἥρως
Αἰγύπτιος, mentioned in the second book of the Odyssey (15), is
the Egyptian hero, who affords, in his view, an evidence that the
population of that island was in part derived from Egypt. No one
since Mr. Bryant, I apprehend, has ever construed the passage in
the same sense.
Bryant's Egyptian hypothesis is of no value; but the negative
portion of his argument, summing up the particulars of the Trojan
legend, and contending against its historical credibility, is
not so easily put aside. Few persons will share in the zealous
conviction by which Morritt tries to make it appear that the
1100 ships, the ten years of war, the large confederacy of
princes from all parts of Greece, etc., have nothing but what
is consonant with historical probability; difficulties being
occasionally eliminated by the plea of our ignorance of the time
and of the subject (Morritt, p. 7-21). Gilbert Wakefield, who
maintains the historical reality of the siege with the utmost
intensity, and even compares Bryant to Tom Paine (W. p. 17), is
still more displeased with those who propound doubts, and tells
us that "grave disputation in the midst of such darkness and
uncertainty is a conflict with chimæras" (W. p. 14).
The most plausible line of argument taken by Morritt and
Wakefield is, where they enforce the positions taken by Strabo
and so many other authors, ancient as well as modern, that a
superstructure of fiction is to be distinguished from a basis
of truth, and that the latter is to be maintained while the
former is rejected (Morritt, p. 5; Wake. p. 7-8). To this Bryant
replies, that "if we leave out every absurdity, we can make
anything plausible; that a fable may be made consistent, and we
have many romances that are very regular in the assortment of
characters and circumstances: this may be seen in plays, memoirs,
and novels. But this regularity and correspondence alone will not
ascertain the truth" (Expostulation, pp. 8, 12, 13). "That there
are a great many other fables besides that of Troy, regular and
consistent among themselves, believed and chronologized by the
Greeks, and even looked up to by them in a religious view (p.
13), which yet no one now thinks of admitting as history."
Morritt, having urged the universal belief of antiquity as
evidence that the Trojan war was historically real, is met
by Bryant, who reminds him that the same persons believed in
centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, augury, aruspicy; Homer maintaining
that horses could speak, etc. To which Morritt replies, "What has
religious belief to do with historical facts? Is not the evidence
on which our faith rests in matters of religion totally different
in all its parts from that on which we ground our belief in
history?" (Addit. Remarks, p. 47).
The separation between the grounds of religious and historical
belief is by no means so complete as Mr. Morritt supposes, even
in regard to modern times; and when we apply his position to the
ancient Greeks, it will be found completely the reverse of the
truth. The contemporaries of Herodotus and Thucydidês conceived
their early history in the most intimate conjunction with their
religion.
Strabo has here converted into geographical matter of fact an
hypothesis purely gratuitous, with a view of saving the accuracy of
the Homeric topography; though in all probability the locality of the
pretended Old Ilium would have been found open to difficulties not
less serious than those which it was introduced to obviate.[811] It
may be true that Dêmêtrius and he were justified in their negative
argument, so as to show that the battles described in the Iliad could
not possibly have taken place if the city of Priam had stood on the
hill inhabited by the Ilieans. But the legendary faith subsisted
before, and continued without abatement afterwards, notwithstanding
such topographical impossibilities. Hellanikus, Herodotus, Mindarus,
the guides of Xerxês, and Alexander, had not been shocked by them: the
case of the latter is the strongest of all, because he had received the
best education of his time under Aristotle—he was a passionate admirer
and constant reader of the Iliad—he was moreover personally familiar
with the movements of armies, and lived at a time when maps, which
began with Anaximander, the disciple of Thalês, were at least known to
all who sought instruction. Now if, notwithstanding such advantages,
Alexander fully believed in the identity of Ilium, unconscious of
these many and glaring topographical difficulties, much less would
Homer himself, or the Homeric auditors, be likely to pay attention to
them, at a period, five centuries earlier, of comparative rudeness and
ignorance, when prose records as well as geographical maps were totally
unknown.[812] The inspired poet might describe, and his hearers would
listen with delight to the tale, how Hectôr, pursued by Achilles, ran
thrice round the city of Troy, while the trembling Trojans were all
huddled into the city, not one daring to come out even at this last
extremity of their beloved prince—and while the Grecian army looked on,
restraining unwillingly their uplifted spears at the nod of Achilles,
in order that Hectôr might perish by no other hand than his; nor were
they, while absorbed by this impressive recital, disposed to measure
distances or calculate topographical possibilities with reference to
the site of the real Ilium.[813] The mistake consists in applying to
Homer and to the Homeric siege of Troy, criticisms which would be
perfectly just if brought to bear on the Athenian siege of Syracuse, as
described by Thucydidês;[814] in the Peloponnesian war[815]—but which
are not more applicable to the epic narrative than they would be to the
exploits of Amadis or Orlando.
[811] For example, adopting his own line of argument (not to
mention those battles in which the pursuit and the flight reaches
from the city to the ships and back again), it might have been
urged to him, that by supposing the Homeric Troy to be four miles
farther off from the sea, he aggravated the difficulty of rolling
the Trojan horse into the town: it was already sufficiently hard
to propel this vast wooden animal full of heroes from the Greek
Naustathmon to the town of Ilium.
The Trojan horse, with its accompaniments Sinon and Laocoôn, is
one of the capital and indispensable events in the epic: Homer,
Arktinus, Leschês, Virgil, and Quintus Smyrnæus, all dwell upon
it emphatically as the proximate cause of the capture.
The difficulties and inconsistencies of the movements ascribed to
Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, when applied to real topography,
are well set forth in Spohn, _De Agro Trojano_, Leipsic, 1814;
and Mr. Maclaren has shown (Dissertation on the Topography of the
Trojan War, Edinburgh, 1822) that these difficulties are nowise
obviated by removing Ilium a few miles further from the sea.
[812] Major Rennell argues differently from the visit of
Alexander, employing it to confute the hypothesis of Chevalier,
who had placed the Homeric Troy at Bounarbashi, the site supposed
to have been indicated by Dêmêtrius and Strabo:—
"Alexander is said to have been a passionate admirer of the
Iliad, and he had an opportunity of deciding on the spot how far
the topography was consistent with the narrative. Had he been
shown the site of Bounarbashi for that of Troy, he would probably
have questioned the fidelity either of the historical part of the
poem or his guides. It is not within credibility, that a person
of so correct a judgment as Alexander could have admired a poem,
which contained a long history of military details, and other
transactions that could not physically have had an existence.
What pleasure could he receive, in contemplating as subjects
of history, events which could not have happened? Yet he did
admire the poem, and _therefore must have found the topography
consistent_: that is, Bounarbashi, surely, was not shown to him
for Troy." (Rennell, Observations on the Plain of Troy, p. 128).
Major Rennell here supposes in Alexander a spirit of
topographical criticism quite foreign to his real character. We
have no reason to believe that the site of Bounarbashi was shown
to Alexander as the Homeric Troy, or that any site was shown
to him _except Ilium_, or what Strabo calls New Ilium. Still
less reason have we to believe that any scepticism crossed his
mind, or that his deep-seated faith required to be confirmed by
measurement of distances.
[813] Strabo, xiii. p. 599. Οὐδ᾽ ἡ τοῦ Ἕκτορος δὲ περιδρομὴ ἡ
περὶ τὴν πόλιν ἔχει τι εὔλογον· οὐ γάρ ἐστι περίδρομος ἡ νῦν, διὰ
τὴν συνεχῆ ῥάχιν· ἡ δὲ παλαιὰ ἔχει περιδρομήν.
[814] Mannert (Geographie der Griechen und Römer, th. 6. heft 3.
b. 8. cap. 8) is confused in his account of Old and New Ilium: he
represents that Alexander raised up a new spot to the dignity of
having been the Homeric Ilium, which is not the fact: Alexander
adhered to the received local belief. Indeed, as far as our
evidence goes, no one but Dêmêtrius, Hestiæa, and Strabo appears
ever to have departed from it.
[815] There can hardly be a more singular example of this same
confusion, than to find elaborate military criticisms from the
Emperor Napoleon, upon the description of the taking of Troy in
the second book of the Æneid. He shows that gross faults are
committed in it, when looked at from the point of view of a
general (see an interesting article by Mr. G. C. Lewis, in the
Classical Museum, vol. i. p. 205, "Napoleon on the Capture of
Troy").
Having cited this criticism from the highest authority on the
art of war, we may find a suitable parallel in the works of
distinguished publicists. The attack of Odysseus on the Ciconians
(described in Homer, Odyss. ix. 39-61) is cited both by Grotius
(De Jure Bell. et Pac. iii. 3, 10) and by Vattel (Droit des Gens,
iii. 202) as a case in point in international law. Odysseus is
considered to have sinned against the rules of international law
by attacking them as allies of the Trojans, without a formal
declaration of war.
There is every reason for presuming that the Ilium visited by Xerxês
and Alexander was really the "holy Ilium" present to the mind of
Homer; and if so, it must have been inhabited, either by Greeks or by
some anterior population, at a period earlier than that which Strabo
assigns. History recognizes neither Troy the city, nor Trojans, as
actually existing; but the extensive region called Trôas, or the
Trôad (more properly Trôïas), is known both to Herodotus and to
Thucydidês: it seems to include the territory westward of an imaginary
line drawn from the north-east corner of the Adramyttian gulf to the
Propontis at Parium, since both Antandrus, Kolônæ, and the district
immediately round Ilium, are regarded as belonging to the Trôad.[816]
Herodotus further notices the Teukrians of Gergis[817] (a township
conterminous with Ilium, and lying to the eastward of the road
from Ilium to Abydus), considering them as the remnant of a larger
Teukrian population which once resided in the country, and which
had in very early times undertaken a vast migration from Asia into
Europe.[818] To that Teukrian population he thinks that the Homeric
Trojans belonged:[819] and by later writers, especially by Virgil and
the other Romans, the names Teukrians and Trojans are employed as
equivalents. As the name Trojans is not mentioned in any contemporary
historical monument, so the name _Teukrians_ never once occurs in the
old epic. It appears to have been first noticed by the elegiac poet
Kallinus, about 660 B. C., who connected it by an alleged immigration
of Teukrians from Krête into the region round about Ida. Others again
denied this, asserting that the primitive ancestor, Teukrus, had come
into the country from Attica,[820] or that he was of indigenous origin,
born from Skamander and the nymph Idæa—all various manifestations of
that eager thirst after an eponymous hero which never deserted the
Greeks. Gergithians occur in more than one spot in Æolis, even so far
southward as the neighborhood of Kymê:[821] the name has no place
in Homer, but he mentions Gorgythion and Kebriones as illegitimate
sons of Priam, thus giving a sort of epical recognition both to
Gergis and Kebrên. As Herodotus calls the old epical Trojans by the
name Teukrians, so the Attic Tragedians call them Phrygians; though
the Homeric hymn to Aphroditê represents Phrygians and Trojans as
completely distinct, specially noting the diversity of language;[822]
and in the Iliad the Phrygians are simply numbered among the allies
of Troy from the far Ascania, without indication of any more intimate
relationship.[823] Nor do the tales which connect Dardanus with
Samothrace and Arcadia find countenance in the Homeric poems, wherein
Dardanus is the son of Zeus, having no root anywhere except in
Dardania.[824] The mysterious solemnities of Samothrace, afterwards so
highly venerated throughout the Grecian world, date from a period much
later than Homer; and the religious affinities of that island as well
as of Krête with the territories of Phrygia and Æolis, were certain,
according to the established tendency of the Grecian mind, to beget
stories of a common genealogy.
[816] Compare Herodot. v. 24-122; Thucyd. i. 131. The Ἰλιὰς γῆ is
a part of the Trôad.
[817] Herodot. vii. 43.
[818] Herodot. v. 122. εἷλε μὲν Αἰολέας πάντας, ὅσοι τὴν Ἰλιάδα
γῆν νέμονται, εἷλε δὲ Γέργιθας, τοὺς ἀπολειφθέντας τῶν ἀρχαίων
Τεύκρων.
For the migration of the Teukrians and Mysians into Europe, see
Herodot. vii. 20; the Pæonians, on the Strymôn, called themselves
their descendants.
[819] Herodot. ii. 118; v. 13.
[820] Strabo, xiii. p. 604; Apollodôr. iii. 12, 4.
Kephalôn of Gergis called Teukrus a Krêtan (Stephan. Byz. v.
Ἀρίσβη).
[821] Clearchus ap. Athæne. vi. p. 256; Strabo, xiii. p. 589-616.
[822] Homer, Hymn. in Vener. 116.
[823] Iliad, ii. 863. Asius, the brother of Hecabê, lives in
Phrygia on the banks of the Sangarius (Iliad, xvi. 717).
[824] See Hellanik. Fragm. 129, 130. ed. Didot; and Kephalôn
Gergithius ap. Steph. Byz. v. Ἀρισβή.
To pass from this legendary world,—an aggregate of streams distinct and
heterogeneous, which do not willingly come into confluence, and cannot
be forced to intermix,—into the clearer vision afforded by Herodotus,
we learn from him that in the year 500 B. C. the whole coast-region
from Dardanus southward to the promontory of Lektum (including the
town of Ilium), and from Lektum eastward to Adramyttium, had been
Æolized, or was occupied by Æolic Greeks—likewise the inland towns
of Skêpsis[825] and Krebên. So that if we draw a line northward from
Adramyttium to Kyzikus on the Propontis, throughout the whole territory
westward from that line, to the Hellespont and the Ægean Sea, all the
considerable towns would be Hellenic, with the exception of Gergis and
the Teukrian population around it,—all the towns worthy of note were
either Ionic or Æolic. A century earlier, the Teukrian population would
have embraced a wider range—perhaps Skêpsis and Krebên, the latter
of which places was colonized by Greeks from Kymê:[826] a century
afterwards, during the satrapy of Pharnabazus, it appears that Gergis
had become Hellenized as well as the rest. The four towns, Ilium,
Gergis, Kebrên and Skêpsis, all in lofty and strong positions, were
distinguished each by a solemn worship and temple of Athênê, and by the
recognition of that goddess as their special patroness.[827]
[825] Skêpsis received some colonists from the Ionic Miletus
(Anaximenês apud Strabo, xiv. p. 635); but the coins of the place
prove that its dialect was Æolic. See Klausen, Æneas und die
Penaten, tom. i. note 180.
Arisbê also, near Abydus, seems to have been settled from
Mitylênê (Eustath. ad Iliad. xii. 97).
The extraordinary fertility and rich black mould of the plain
around Ilium is noticed by modern travellers (see Franklin,
Remarks and Observations on the Plain of Troy, London, 1800, p.
44): it is also easily worked: "a couple of buffaloes or oxen
were sufficient to draw the plough, whereas near Constantinople
it takes twelve or fourteen."
[826] Ephôrus ap. Harpocrat. v. Κεβρῆνα.
[827] Xenoph. Hellen. i. 1, 10; iii. 1, 10-15.
One of the great motives of Dio in setting aside the Homeric
narrative of the Trojan war, is to vindicate Athênê from the
charge of having unjustly destroyed her own city of Ilium (Orat.
xi. p. 310: μάλιστα διὰ τὴν Ἀθηνᾶν ὅπως μὴ δοκῇ ἀδίκως διαφθεῖραι
τὴν ἑαυτῆς πόλιν).
The author of the Iliad conceived the whole of this region as occupied
by people not Greek,—Trojans, Dardanians, Lykians, Lelegians,
Pelasgians, and Kilikians. He recognizes a temple and worship of Athênê
in Ilium, though the goddess is bitterly hostile to the Trojans: and
Arktinus described the Palladium as the capital protection of the city.
But perhaps the most remarkable feature of identity between the Homeric
and the historical Æolis, is, the solemn and diffused worship of the
Sminthian Apollo. Chrysê, Killa and Tenedos, and more than one place
called Sminthium, maintain the surname and invoke the protection of
that god during later times, just as they are emphatically described to
do by Homer.[828]
[828] 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 Dêmêtrius of
Skêpsis): he may have witnessed the improvement in its position
effected by the Romans. He noticed the identical stone upon which
Palamêdês had taught the Greeks to play at dice.
The Sminthian Apollo appears inscribed on the coins of
Alexandreia Trôas; and the temple of the god was memorable even
down to the time of the emperor Julian (Ammian. Marcellin. xxii.
8). Compare Menander (the Rhetor) περὶ Ἐπιδεικτικῶν, iv. 14; apud
Walz. Collect. Rhetor. t. ix. p. 304; also περὶ Σμινθιακῶν, iv.
17.
Σμίνθος, both in the Krêtan and the Æolic dialect, meant a
_field-mouse_: the region seems to have been greatly plagued by
these little animals.
Polemon could not have accepted the theory of Dêmêtrius, that
Ilium was not the genuine Troy: his Periegesis, describing the
localities and relics of Ilium, implied the legitimacy of the
place as a matter of course.
When it is said that the Post-Homeric Greeks gradually Hellenized
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 communications 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 to the parties with whom they fraternized, so that the result
was not pure Hellenism; next, that even this was done only in the
towns, without being fully extended to the territorial domain around,
or to those smaller townships which stood to the town in a dependent
relation. The Æolic and Ionic Greeks borrowed from the Asiatics whom
they had Hellenized, musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and
melody, which they knew how to turn to account: they further adopted
more or less of those violent and maddening religious rites, manifested
occasionally in self-inflicted suffering and mutilation, which were
indigenous in Asia Minor in the worship of the Great Mother. The
religion of the Greeks in the region of Ida as well as at Kyzikus was
more orgiastic than the native worship of Greece Proper, just as that
of Lampsacus, Priapus and Parium was more licentious. From the Teukrian
region of Gergis, and from the Gergithes near Kymê, sprang the original
Sibylline prophecies, and the legendary Sibyll who plays so important
a part in the tale of Æneas: the mythe of the Sibyll, whose prophecies
are supposed to be heard in the hollow blast bursting out from obscure
caverns and apertures in the rocks,[829] was indigenous among the
Gergithian Teukrians, and passed from the Kymæans in Æolis, along with
the other circumstances of the tale of Æneas, to their brethren the
inhabitants of Cumæ in Italy. The date of the Gergithian Sibyll, or
rather of the circulation of her supposed prophecies, is placed during
the reign of Crœsus, a period when Gergis was thoroughly Teukrian.
Her prophecies, though embodied in Greek verses, had their root in a
Teukrian soil and feelings; and the promises of future empire which
they so liberally make to the fugitive hero escaping from the flames of
Troy into Italy, become interesting from the remarkable way in which
they were realized by Rome.[830]
[829] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 42:—
Excisum Euboicæ latus ingens rupis in antrum,
Quo lati ducunt aditus centum, ostia centum;
Unde ruunt totidem voces, responsa Sibyllæ.
[830] Pausanias, x. 12, 8; Lactantius, i. 6, 12; Steph. Byz. v.
Μέρμησσος; Schol. Plat. Phædr. p. 315, Bekker.
The date of this Gergithian Sibyll, or of the prophecies passing
under her name, is stated by Hêrakleidês of Pontus, and there
seems no reason for calling it in question.
Klausen (Æneas und die Penaten, book ii. p. 205) has worked out
copiously the circulation and legendary import of the Sibylline
prophecies.
At what time Ilium and Dardanus became Æolized we have no information.
We find the Mitylenæans in possession of Sigeium in the time of the
poet Alkæus, about 600 B. C.; and the Athenians during the reign of
Peisistratus, having wrested it from them and trying to maintain their
possession, vindicate the proceeding by saying that they had as much
right to it as the Mitylenæans, "for the latter had no more claim to
it than any of the other Greeks who had aided Menelaus in avenging
the abduction of Helen."[831] This is a very remarkable incident,
as attesting the celebrity of the legend of Troy, and the value of
a mythical title in international disputes—yet seemingly implying
that the establishment of the Mitylenæans on that spot must have been
sufficiently recent. The country near the junction of the Hellespont
and the Propontis is represented as originally held[832] by Bebrykian
Thracians, while Abydus was first occupied by Milesian colonists in
the reign and by the permission of the Lydian king Gygês[833]—to whom
the whole Trôad and the neighboring territory belonged, and upon
whom therefore the Teukrians of Ida must have been dependent. This
must have been about 700 B. C., a period considerably earlier than
the Mitylenæan occupation of Sigeium. Lampsacus and Pæsus, on the
neighboring shores of the Propontis, were also Milesian colonies,
though we do not know their date: Parium was jointly settled from
Miletus, Erythræ and Parus.
[831] Herodot. v. 94. Σίγειον ... τὸ εἷλε Πεισίστρατος αἰχμῇ
παρὰ Μιτυληναίων ... Ἀθηναῖοι, ἀποδεικνύντες λόγῳ οὐδὲν μᾶλλον
Αἰολεῦσι μετεὸν τῆς Ἰλιάδος χώρης, ἢ οὐ καὶ σφι καὶ τοῖσι
ἄλλοισι, ὅσοι Ἑλλήνων συνεξεπρήξαντο Μενέλεῳ τὰς Ἑλένης ἁρπαγάς.
In Æschylus (Eumenid. 402) the goddess Athênê claims the land
about the Skamander, as having been presented to the sons of
Thêseus by the general vote of the Grecian chiefs:—
Ἀπὸ Σκαμάνδρου γῆν καταφθατουμένη,
Ἣν δὴ τ᾽ Ἀχαιῶν ἄκτορές τε καὶ πρόμοι
Τῶν αἰχμαλώτων χρημάτων λάχος μέγα,
Ἔνειμαν αὐτόπρεμνον εἰς τὸ πᾶν ἐμοὶ,
Ἐξαιρετὸν δώρημα Θησέως τόκοις.
In the days of Peisistratus, it seems Athens was not bold enough
or powerful enough to advance this vast pretension.
[832] Charôn of Lampsacus ap. Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 2;
Bernhardy ad Dionys. Periêgêt. 805. p. 747.
[833] Such at least is the statement of Strabo (xii. p. 590);
though such an extent of Lydian role at that time seems not easy
to reconcile with the proceedings of the subsequent Lydian kings.
CHAPTER XVI.
GRECIAN MYTHES, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT AND INTERPRETED BY THE GREEKS
THEMSELVES.
The preceding sections have been intended to exhibit a sketch of that
narrative matter, so abundant, so characteristic and so interesting,
out of which early Grecian history and chronology have been extracted.
Raised originally by hands unseen and from data unassignable, it
existed first in the shape of floating talk among the people, from
whence a large portion of it passed into the song of the poets, who
multiplied, transformed and adorned it in a thousand various ways.
These mythes or current stories, the spontaneous and earliest growth of
the Grecian mind, constituted at the same time the entire intellectual
stock of the age to which they belonged. They are the common root of
all those different ramifications into which the mental activity of
the Greeks subsequently diverged; containing, as it were, the preface
and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology
and the professed romance, which we shall hereafter trace each in
its separate development. They furnished aliment to the curiosity,
and solution to the vague doubts and aspirations of the age; they
explained the origin of those customs and standing peculiarities
with which men were familiar; they impressed moral lessons, awakened
patriotic sympathies, and exhibited in detail the shadowy, but anxious
presentiments of the vulgar as to the agency of the gods: moreover they
satisfied that craving for adventure and appetite for the marvellous,
which has in modern times become the province of fiction proper.
It is difficult, we may say impossible, for a man of mature age to
carry back his mind to his conceptions such as they stood when he was a
child, growing naturally out of his imagination and feelings, working
upon a scanty stock of materials, and borrowing from authorities whom
he blindly followed but imperfectly apprehended. A similar difficulty
occurs when we attempt to place ourselves in the historical and
quasi-philosophical point of view which the ancient mythes present to
us. We can follow perfectly the imagination and feeling which dictated
these tales, and we can admire and sympathize with them as animated,
sublime, and affecting poetry; but we are too much accustomed to matter
of fact and philosophy of a positive kind, to be able to conceive a
time when these beautiful fancies were construed literally and accepted
as serious reality.
Nevertheless it is obvious that Grecian mythes cannot be either
understood or appreciated except with reference to the system of
conceptions and belief of the ages in which they arose. We must
suppose a public not reading and writing, but seeing, hearing and
telling—destitute of all records, and careless as well as ignorant of
positive history with its indispensable tests, yet at the same time
curious and full of eagerness for new or impressive incidents—strangers
even to the rudiments of positive philosophy and to the idea of
invariable sequences of nature either in the physical or moral world,
yet requiring some connecting theory to interpret and regularize the
phænomena before them. Such a theory was supplied by the spontaneous
inspirations of an early fancy, which supposed the habitual agency
of beings intelligent and voluntary like themselves, but superior in
extent of power, and different in peculiarity of attributes. In the
geographical ideas of the Homeric period, the earth was flat and round,
with the deep and gentle ocean-stream flowing around and returning into
itself: chronology, or means of measuring past time, there existed
none; but both unobserved regions might be described, the forgotten
past unfolded, and the unknown future predicted—through particular men
specially inspired by the gods, or endowed by them with that peculiar
vision which detected and interpreted passing signs and omens.
If even the rudiments of scientific geography and physics, now so
universally diffused and so invaluable as a security against error and
delusion, were wanting in this early stage of society, their place was
abundantly supplied by vivacity of imagination and by personifying
sympathy. The unbounded tendency of the Homeric Greeks to multiply
fictitious persons, and to construe the phænomena which interested them
into manifestations of design, is above all things here to be noticed,
because the form of personal narrative, universal in their mythes,
is one of its many manifestations. Their polytheism (comprising some
elements of an original fetichism, in which particular objects had
themselves been supposed to be endued with life, volition, and design)
recognized agencies of unseen beings identified and confounded with the
different localities and departments of the physical world. Of such
beings there were numerous varieties, and many gradations both in power
and attributes; there were differences of age, sex and local residence,
relations both conjugal and filial between them, and tendencies
sympathetic as well as repugnant. The gods formed a sort of political
community of their own, which had its hierarchy, its distribution of
ranks and duties, its contentions for power and occasional revolutions,
its public meetings in the agora of Olympus, and its multitudinous
banquets or festivals.[834] The great Olympic gods were in fact only
the most exalted amongst an aggregate of quasi-human or ultra-human
personages,—dæmons, heroes, nymphs, eponymous (or name-giving) genii,
identified with each river, mountain,[835] cape, town, village, or
known circumscription of territory,—besides horses, bulls, and dogs,
of immortal breed and peculiar attributes, and monsters of strange
lineaments and combinations, "Gorgons and Harpies and Chimæras dire."
As there were in every _gens_ or family special gentile deities and
foregone ancestors who watched over its members, forming in each the
characteristic symbol and recognized guarantee of their union, so there
seem to have been in each guild or trade peculiar beings whose vocation
it was to coöperate or to impede in various stages of the business.[836]
[834] Homer, Iliad, i. 603; xx. 7. Hesiod, Theogon. 802.
[835] We read in the Iliad that Asteropæus was grandson of the
beautiful river Axius, and Achilles, after having slain him,
admits the dignity of this parentage, but boasts that his own
descent from Zeus was much greater, since even the great river
Achelôus and Oceanus himself is inferior to Zeus (xxi. 157-191).
Skamander fights with Achilles, calling his brother Simoïs to his
aid (213-308). Tyrô, the daughter of Salmôneus, falls in love
with Enipeus, the most beautiful of rivers (Odyss. xi. 237).
Achelôus appears as a suitor of Deianira (Sophokl. Trach. 9).
There cannot be a better illustration of this feeling than what
is told of the New Zealanders at the present time. The chief
Heu-Heu appeals to his ancestor, the great mountain Tonga Riro:
"I am the Heu-Heu, and rule over you all, just as my ancestor
Tonga Riro, the mountain of snow, stands above all this land."
(E. J. Wakefield, Adventures in New Zealand, vol. i. ch. 17.
p. 465). Heu-Heu refused permission to any one to ascend the
mountain, on the ground that it was his _tipuna_ or ancestor: "he
constantly identified himself with the mountain and called it
his sacred ancestor" (vol. ii. c. 4. p. 113). The mountains in
New Zealand are accounted by the natives masculine and feminine:
Tonga Riro, and Taranaki, two male mountains, quarrelled about
the affections of a small volcanic female mountain in the
neighborhood (_ibid._ ii. c. 4. p. 97).
The religious imagination of the Hindoos also (as described by
Colonel Sleeman in his excellent work, Rambles and Recollections
of an Indian Official), affords a remarkable parallel to that of
the early Greeks. Colonel Sleeman says,—
"I asked some of the Hindoos about us why they called the river
Mother Nerbudda, if she was really never married. Her Majesty
(said they with great respect) would really never consent to
be married after the indignity she suffered from her affianced
bridegroom the Sohun: and we call her _mother_ because she
blesses us all, and we are anxious to accost her by the name
which we consider to be the most respectful and endearing.
"Any Englishman can easily conceive a poet in his highest
calenture of the brain, addressing the Ocean as a steed that
knows his rider, and patting the crested billow as his flowing
mane. But he must come to India to understand how every
individual of a _whole community of many millions can address
a fine river as a living being—a sovereign princess who hears
and understands all they say, and exercises a kind of local
superintendence over their affairs_, without a single temple in
which her image is worshipped, or a single priest to profit by
the delusion. As in the case of the Ganges, _it is the river
itself to whom they address themselves, and not to any deity
residing in it, or presiding over it_—the stream itself is the
deity which fills their imaginations, and receives their homage"
(Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, ch. iii. p.
20). Compare also the remarks in the same work on the sanctity
of _Mother Nerbudda_ (chapter xxvii. p. 261); also of the holy
personality of the earth. "The land is considered as the MOTHER
of the prince or chief who holds it, the great parent from
whom he derives all that maintains him, his family, and his
establishments. If well-treated, she yields this in abundance
to her son; but if he presumes to look upon her with the eye of
_desire_, she ceases to be fruitful; or the Deity sends down
hail or blight to destroy all that she yields. The measuring the
surface of the fields, and the frequently inspecting the crops
by the chief himself or his immediate agents, were considered by
the people in this light—either it should not be done at all,
or the duty should be delegated to inferior agents, whose close
inspection of the _great parent_ could not be so displeasing to
the Deity" (Ch. xxvii. p. 248).
See also about the gods who are believed to reside in trees—the
Peepultree, the cotton-tree, etc. (ch. ix. p. 112), and the
description of the annual marriage celebrated between the sacred
pebble, or pebble-god, Saligram, and the sacred shrub Toolsea,
celebrated at great expense and with a numerous procession (chap.
xix. p. 158; xxiii. p. 185).
[836] See the song to the potters, in the Homeric Epigrams (14):—
Εἰ μὲν δώσετε μίσθον, ἀείσω, ὦ κεραμῆες·
Δεῦρ᾽ ἄγ᾽ Ἀθηναίη, καὶ ὑπείρεχε χεῖρα καμίνου.
Εὖ δὲ μελανθεῖεν κότυλοι, καὶ πάντα κάναστρα
Φρυχθῆναί τε καλῶς, καὶ τιμῆς ὦνον ἀρέσθαι.
... Ἦν δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀναιδείην τρεφθέντες ψευδῆ ἄρῃσθε,
Συγκαλέω δὴ ᾽πειτα καμίνῳ δηλητῆρας·
Σύντριβ᾽ ὅμως, Σμάραγόν τε, καὶ Ἄσβετον, ἠδὲ Σαβάκτην,
Ὠμόδαμόν θ᾽, ὃς τῇδε τέχνῃ κακὰ πολλὰ πορίζει, etc.
A certain kindred between men and serpents (συγγένειάν τινα πρὸς
τοὺς ὄφεις) was recognized in the peculiar gens of the ὀφιογενεῖς
near Parion, who possessed the gift of healing by their touches
the bite of the serpent: the original hero of this gens was said
to have been transformed from a serpent into a man (Strabo, xiii.
p. 588).
The extensive and multiform personifications, here faintly sketched,
pervaded in every direction the mental system of the Greeks, and
were identified intimately both with their conception and with their
description of phenomena, present as well as past. That which to
us is interesting as the mere creation of an exuberant fancy, was
to the Greek genuine and venerated reality. Both the earth and the
solid heaven (Gæa and Uranos) were both conceived and spoken of by
him as endowed with appetite, feeling, sex, and most of the various
attributes of humanity. Instead of a sun such as we now see, subject
to astronomical laws, and forming the centre of a system the changes
of which we can ascertain and foreknow, he saw the great god Hêlios,
mounting his chariot in the morning in the east, reaching at mid-day
the height of the solid heaven, and arriving in the evening at the
western horizon, with horses fatigued and desirous of repose. Hêlios,
having favorite spots wherein his beautiful cattle grazed, took
pleasure in contemplating them during the course of his journey, and
was sorely displeased if any man slew or injured them: he had moreover
sons and daughters on earth, and as his all-seeing eye penetrated
everywhere, he was sometimes in a situation to reveal secrets even to
the gods themselves—while on other occasions he was constrained to turn
aside in order to avoid contemplating scenes of abomination.[837] To us
these now appear puerile, though pleasing fancies, but to an Homeric
Greek they seemed perfectly natural and plausible. In his view, the
description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise,
would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious.
Even in later times, when the positive spirit of inquiry had made
considerable progress, Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred the
charge of blasphemy for dispersonifying Hêlios, and trying to assign
invariable laws to the solar phænomena.[838] Personifying fiction was
in this way blended by the Homeric Greeks with their conception of
the physical phænomena before them, not simply in the way of poetical
ornament, but as a genuine portion of their every-day belief.
[837] Odyss. ii. 388; viii. 270; xii. 4, 128, 416; xxiii. 362.
Iliad, xiv. 344. The Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr expresses it neatly
(63)—
Ἡέλιον δ᾽ ἵκοντο, θεῶν σκόπον ἠδὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
Also the remarkable story of Euênius of Apollônia, his neglect
of the sacred cattle of Hêlios, and the awful consequences of it
(Herodot. ix. 93: compare Theocr. Idyll, xxv. 130).
I know no passage in which this conception of the heavenly bodies
as Persons is more strikingly set forth than in the words of
the German chief Boiocalus, pleading the cause of himself and
his tribe the Ansibarii before the Roman legate Avitus. This
tribe, expelled by other tribes from its native possessions,
had sat down upon some of that wide extent of lands on the
Lower Rhine which the Roman government reserved for the use of
its soldiers, but which remained desert, because the soldiers
had neither the means nor the inclination to occupy them. The
old chief, pleading his cause before Avitus, who had issued
an order to him to evacuate the lands, first dwelt upon his
fidelity of fifty years to the Roman cause, and next touched
upon the enormity of retaining so large an area in a state of
waste (Tacit. Ann. xiii. 55): "Quotam partem campi jacere, in
quam pecora et armenta militum aliquando transmitterentur?
Servarent sane receptos gregibus, inter hominum famam: modo ne
vastitatem et solitudinem mallent, quam amicos populos Chamavorum
quondam ea arva, mox Tubantum, et post Usipiorum fuisse. Sicuti
cœlum Diis, ita terras generi mortalium datas: quæque vacuæ,
eas publicas esse. _Solem_ deinde respiciens, et _cœtera sidera
vocans, quasi coram_ interrogabat—_vellentne contueri inane
solum? potius mare superfunderent adversus terrarum ereptores_.
Commotus his Avitus," etc. The legate refused the request, but
privately offered to Boiocalus lands for himself apart from the
tribe, which that chief indignantly spurned. He tried to maintain
himself in the lands, but was expelled by the Roman arms, and
forced to seek a home among the other German tribes, all of whom
refused it. After much wandering and privation, the whole tribe
of the Ansibarii was annihilated: its warriors were all slain,
its women and children sold as slaves.
I notice this afflicting sequel, in order to show that the
brave old chief was pleading before Avitus a matter of life and
death both to himself and his tribe, and that the occasion was
one least of all suited for a mere rhetorical prosopopœia. His
appeal is one sincere and heartfelt to the personal feelings and
sympathies of Hêlios.
Tacitus, in reporting the speech, accompanies it with the
gloss "quasi coram," to mark that the speaker here passes into
a different order of ideas from that to which himself or his
readers were accustomed. If Boiocalus could have heard, and
reported to his tribe, an astronomical lecture, he would have
introduced some explanation, in order to facilitate to his tribe
the comprehension of Hêlios under a point of view so new to them.
While Tacitus finds it necessary to illustrate by a comment the
_personification of the sun_, Boiocalus would have had some
trouble to make his tribe comprehend the _re-ification of the god
Hêlios_.
[838] Physical astronomy was both new and accounted impious
in the time of the Peloponnesian war: see Plutarch, in his
reference to that eclipse which proved so fatal to the Athenian
army at Syracuse, in consequence of the religious feelings of
Nikias: οὐ γὰρ ἠνείχοντο τοὺς φυσικοὺς καὶ μετεωρολέσχας τότε
καλουμένους ὡς, εἰς αἰτίας ἀλόγους καὶ δυνάμεις ἀπρονοήτους καὶ
κατηναγκασμένα πάθη διατρίβοντας τὸ θεῖον (Plutarch, Nikias, c.
23, and Periklês, c. 32; Diodôr. xii. 39; Dêmêtr. Phaler. ap.
Diogen. Laërt, ix. 9, 1).
"You strange man, Melêtus," said Socratês, on his trial, to his
accuser, "are you seriously affirming that I do not think Hêlios
and Selênê to be gods, as the rest of mankind think?" "Certainly
not, gentlemen of the Dikastery (_this is the reply of Melêtus_),
Socratês says that the sun is a stone, and the moon earth." "Why,
my dear Melêtus, you think you are preferring an accusation
against Anaxagoras! You account these Dikasts so contemptibly
ignorant, as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras are
full of such doctrines! Is it from me that the youth acquire
such teaching, when they may buy the books for a drachma in
the theatre, and may thus laugh me to scorn if I pretended to
announce such views as my own—_not to mention their extreme
absurdity_?" (ἄλλως τε καὶ οὕτως ἄτοπα ὄντα, Plato, Apolog.
Socrat. c. 14. p. 26).
The divinity of Hêlios and Selênê is emphatically set forth by
Plato, Legg. x. p. 886-889. He permits physical astronomy only
under great restrictions and to a limited extent. Compare Xenoph.
Memor. iv. 7, 7; Diogen. Laërt. ii. 8; Plutarch, De Stoicor.
Repugnant. c. 40. p. 1053; and Schaubach ad Anaxagoræ Fragmenta,
p. 6.
It was in this early state of the Grecian mind, stimulating so forcibly
the imagination and the feelings, and acting through them upon the
belief, that the great body of the mythes grew up and obtained
circulation. They were, from first to last, personal narratives and
adventures; and the persons who predominated as subjects of them
were the gods, the heroes, the nymphs, etc., whose names were known
and reverenced, and in whom every one felt interested. To every god
and every hero it was consistent with Grecian ideas to ascribe great
diversity of human motive and attribute: each indeed has his own
peculiar type of character, more or less strictly defined; but in all
there was a wide foundation for animated narrative and for romantic
incident. The gods and heroes of the land and the tribe belonged, in
the conception of a Greek, alike to the present and to the past: he
worshipped in their groves and at their festivals; he invoked their
protection, and believed in their superintending guardianship, even
in his own day: but their more special, intimate, and sympathizing
agency was cast back into the unrecorded past.[839] To give suitable
utterance to this general sentiment,—to furnish body and movement and
detail to these divine and heroic pre-existences, which were conceived
only in shadowy outline,—to lighten up the dreams of what the past must
have been,[840] in the minds of those who knew not what it really had
been—such was the spontaneous aim and inspiration of productive genius
in the community, and such were the purposes which the Grecian mythes
preëminently accomplished.
[839] Hesiod, Catalog. Fragm. 76. p. 48, ed. Düntzer:—
Ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δαῖτες ἔσαν ξυνοί τε θόωκει,
Ἀθανάτοις τε θοῖσι καταθνήτοις τ᾽ ἀνθρώποις.
Both the Theogonia and the Works and Days bear testimony to
the same general feeling. Even the heroes of Homer suppose a
preceding age, the inmates of which were in nearer contact with
the gods than they themselves (Odyss. viii. 223; Iliad, v. 304;
xii. 382). Compare Catullus, Carm. 64; Epithalam. Peleôs et
Thetidos, v. 382-408.
Menander the Rhetor (following generally the steps of Dionys.
Hal. Art Rhetor. cap. 1-8) suggests to his fellow-citizens at
Alexandria Trôas, proper and complimentary forms to invite a
great man to visit their festival of the Sminthia:—ὥσπερ γὰρ
Ἀπόλλωνα πολλάκις ἐδέχετο ἡ πόλις τοῖς Σμινθίοις, ~ἥνικα ἐξῆν
θεοὺς προφανῶς ἐπιδημεῖν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις~, οὕτω καὶ σὲ ἡ πόλις
νῦν προσδέχεται (περὶ Ἐπιδεικτικ. s. iv. c. 14. ap. Walz. Coll.
Rhetor, t. ix. p. 304). Menander seems to have been a native
of Alexandria Trôas, though Suidas calls him a Laodicean (see
Walz. Præf. ad t. ix. p. xv.-xx.; and περὶ Σμινθιακῶν, sect. iv.
c. 17). The festival of the Sminthia lasted down to his time,
embracing the whole duration of paganism from Homer downwards.
[840] P. A. Müller observes justly, in his _Saga-Bibliothek_, in
reference to the Icelandic mythes, "In dem Mythischen wird das
Leben der Vorzeit dargestellt, wie es wirklich dem kindlichen
Verstande, der jugendlichen Einbildungskraft, und dem vollen
Herzen, erscheint."
(Lange's Untersuchungen über die Nordische und Deutsche
Heldensage, translated from P. A. Müller, Introd. p. 1.)
The love of antiquities, which Tacitus notices as so prevalent among
the Greeks of his day,[841] was one of the earliest, the most durable,
and the most widely diffused of the national propensities. But the
antiquities of every state were divine and heroic, reproducing the
lineaments, but disregarding the measure and limits, of ordinary
humanity. The gods formed the starting-point, beyond which no man
thought of looking, though some gods were more ancient than others:
their progeny, the heroes, many of them sprung from human mothers,
constitute an intermediate link between god and man. The ancient epic
usually recognizes the presence of a multitude of nameless men, but
they are introduced chiefly for the purpose of filling the scene,
and of executing the orders, celebrating the valor, and bringing
out the personality, of a few divine or heroic characters.[842] It
was the glory of bards and storytellers to be able to satisfy those
religious and patriotic predispositions of the public, which caused the
primary demand for their tales, and which were of a nature eminently
inviting and expansive. For Grecian religion was many-sided and many
; it comprised a great multiplicity of persons, together with
much diversity in the types of character; it divinized every vein
and attribute of humanity, the lofty as well as the mean—the tender
as well as the warlike—the self-devoting and adventurous as well as
the laughter-loving and sensual. We shall hereafter reach a time when
philosophers protested against such identification of the gods with
the more vulgar appetites and enjoyments, believing that nothing
except the spiritual attributes of man could properly be transferred
to superhuman beings, and drawing their predicates respecting the gods
exclusively from what was awful, majestic and terror-striking in human
affairs. Such restrictions on the religious fancy were continually
on the increase, and the mystic and didactic stamp which marked the
last century of paganism in the days of Julian and Libanius, contrasts
forcibly with the concrete and vivacious forms, full of vigorous
impulse and alive to all the capricious gusts of the human temperament,
which people the Homeric Olympus.[843] At present, however, we have
only to consider the early, or Homeric and Hesiodic paganism, and its
operation in the genesis of the mythical narratives. We cannot doubt
that it supplied the most powerful stimulus, and the only one which the
times admitted, to the creative faculty of the people; as well from the
sociability, the gradations, and the mutual action and reaction of its
gods and heroes, as from the amplitude, the variety, and the purely
human cast, of its fundamental types.
[841] Titus visited the temple of the Paphian Venus in Cyprus,
"spectatâ opulentiâ donisque regum, quæque _alia lætum_
antiquitatibus Græcorum genus _incertæ vetustati adfingit_, de
navigatione primum consuluit" (Tacit. Hist. ii. 4-5).
[842] Aristotel. Problem. xix. 48. Οἱ δὲ ἡγεμόνες τῶν ἀρχαίων
μόνοι ἦσαν ἥρωες· οἱ δὲ λαοὶ ἄνθρωποι. Istros followed this
opinion also: but the more common view seems to have considered
all who combated at Troy as heroes (see Schol. Iliad, ii. 110;
xv. 231), and so Hesiod treats them (Opp. Di. 158).
In reference to the Trojan war, Aristotle says—καθάπερ ἐν τοῖς
~Ἡρωϊκοῖς~ περὶ Πριάμου μυθεύεται (Ethic. Nicom. i. 9; compare
vii. 1).
[843] Generation by a god is treated in the old poems as an act
entirely human and physical (ἐμιγη—παρελέξατο); and this was the
common opinion in the days of Plato (Plato, Apolog. Socrat. c.
15. p. 15); the hero Astrabakus is father of the Lacedæmonian
king Demaratus (Herod. vi. 66). [Herodotus does not believe the
story told him at Babylon respecting Belus (i. 182).] Euripidês
sometimes expresses disapprobation of the idea (Ion. 350), but
Plato passed among a large portion of his admirers for the
actual son of Apollo, and his reputed father Aristo on marrying
was admonished in a dream to respect the person of his wife
Periktionê, then pregnant by Apollo, until after the birth of the
child Plato (Plutarch, Quæst. Sympos. p. 717. viii. 1; Diogen.
Laërt. iii. 2; Origen, cont. Cels. i. p. 29). Plutarch (in Life
of Numa, c. 4; compare Life of Thêseus, 2) discusses the subject,
and is inclined to disallow everything beyond mental sympathy
and tenderness in a god: Pausanias deals timidly with it, and
is not always consistent with himself; while the later rhetors
spiritualize it altogether. Meander, περὶ Ἐπιδεικτικῶν, (towards
the end of the third century B. C.) prescribes rules for praising
a king: you are to praise him for the gens to which he belongs:
perhaps you may be able to make out that he really is the son
of some god; for many who seem to be from men, are really _sent
down by God_ and are _emanations from the Supreme Potency_—πολλοὶ
τὸ μὲν δοκεῖν ἐξ ἀνθρώπων εἰσὶ, τῇ δ᾽ ἀληθείᾳ παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ
καταπέμπονται καὶ εἰσιν ἀπόῤῥοιαι ὄντως τοῦ κρείττονος· καὶ γὰρ
Ἡρακλῆς ἐνομίζετο μὲν Ἀμφιτρύωνος, τῇ δὲ ἀληθείᾳ ἦν Διός. Οὕτω
καὶ βασιλεὺς ὁ ἡμέτερος το μὲν δοκεῖν ἐξ ἀνθρώπων, τῇ δὲ ἀληθείᾳ
τὴν καταβολὴν οὐράνοθεν ἔχει, etc. (Menander ap. Walz. Collect.
Rhetor. t. ix. c. i. p. 218). Again—περὶ Σμινθιακῶν—Ζεὺς γένεσιν
παιδῶν ~δημιουργεῖν~ ἐνενόησε—Ἀπόλλων τὴν Ἀσκληπιοῦ γένεσιν
~ἐδημιούργησε~, p. 322-327; compare Hermogenês, about the story
of Apollo and Daphnê, Progymnasm. c. 4; and Julian. Orat. vii. p.
220.
The contrast of the pagan phraseology of this age (Menander had
himself composed a hymn of invocation to Apollo—περὶ Ἐγκωμίων,
c. 3. t. ix. p. 136, Walz.) with that of Homer is very worthy
of notice. In the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women much was said
respecting the marriages and amours of the gods, so as to furnish
many suggestions, like the love-songs of Sapphô, to the composers
of Epithalamic Odes (Menand. _ib._ sect. iv. c. 6. p. 268).
Menander gives a specimen of a prose hymn fit to be addressed to
the Sminthian Apollo (p. 320); the spiritual character of which
hymn forms the most pointed contrast with the Homeric hymn to the
same god.
We may remark an analogous case in which the Homeric hymn to
Apollo is modified by Plutarch. To provide for the establishment
of his temple at Delphi, Apollo was described as having himself,
in the shape of a dolphin, swam before a Krêtan vessel and guided
it to Krissa, where he directed the terrified crew to open the
Delphian temple. But Plutarch says that this old statement was
not correct: the god had not himself appeared in the shape of
a dolphin—he had sent a dolphin expressly to guide the vessel
(Plutarch. de Solertiâ Animal. p. 983). See also a contrast
between the Homeric Zeus, and the genuine Zeus, (ἀληθινὸς)
brought out in Plutarch, Defect. Oracul. c 30. p. 426.
Illicit amours seem in these later times to be ascribed to
the δαίμονες: see the singular controversy started among the
fictitious pleadings of the ancient rhetors—Νόμου ὄντος,
παρθένους καὶ καθαρὰς εἶναι τὰς ἱερείας, ἱερεία τις εὑρέθη
ἀτόκιον φέρουσα, καὶ κρίνεται.... Ἀλλ᾽ ἐρεῖ, φασὶ, διὰ τὰς τῶν
δαιμόνων ἐπιφοιτήσεις καὶ ἐπιβουλὰς περιτεθεῖσθαι. Καὶ πῶς οὐκ
ἀνόητον κομιδῆ τὸ τοιοῦτον; ἔδει γὰρ πρὸς τὸ μὴ ἀφαιρεθῆναι τὴν
παρθενίαν φορεῖν τι ἀποτρόπαιον, οὐ μὴν πρὸς τὸ τεκεῖν (Anonymi
Scholia ad Hermogen. Στάσεις, ap. Walz. Coll. Rh. t. vii. p. 162).
Apsinês of Gadara, a sophist of the time of Diocletian, pretended
to be a son of Pan (see Suidas, v. Ἀψίνης). The anecdote
respecting the rivers Skamander and Mæander, in the tenth epistle
ascribed to the orator Æschines (p. 737), is curious, but we do
not know the date of that epistle.
Though we may thus explain the mythopœic fertility of the Greeks, I am
far from pretending that we can render any sufficient account of the
supreme beauty of their chief epic and artistical productions. There is
something in the first-rate productions of individual genius which lies
beyond the compass of philosophical theory: the special breath of the
Muse (to speak the language of ancient Greece) must be present in order
to give them being. Even among her votaries, many are called, but few
are chosen; and the peculiarities of those few remain as yet her own
secret.
We shall not however forget that Grecian language was also an
indispensable requisite to the growth and beauty of Grecian mythes—its
richness, its flexibility and capacity of new combinations, its vocalic
abundance and metrical pronunciation: and many even among its proper
names, by their analogy to words really significant, gave direct
occasion to explanatory or illustrative stories. Etymological mythes
are found in sensible proportion among the whole number.
To understand properly then the Grecian mythes, we must try to
identify ourselves with the state of mind of the original mythopœic
age; a process not very easy, since it requires us to adopt a string
of poetical fancies not simply as realities, but as the governing
realities of the mental system;[844] yet a process which would only
reproduce something analogous to our own childhood. The age was one
destitute both of recorded history and of positive science, but full
of imagination and sentiment and religious impressibility; from these
sources sprung that multitude of supposed persons around whom all
combinations of sensible phænomena were grouped, and towards whom
curiosity, sympathies, and reverence were earnestly directed. The
adventures of such persons were the only aliment suited at once both
to the appetites and to the comprehension of an early Greek; and the
mythes which detailed them, while powerfully interesting his emotions,
furnished to him at the same time a quasi-history and quasi-philosophy:
they filled up the vacuum of the unrecorded past, and explained many of
the puzzling incognita of the present.[845] Nor need we wonder that the
same plausibility which captivated his imagination and his feelings
was sufficient to engender spontaneous belief; or rather, that no
question as to truth or falsehood of the narrative suggested itself to
his mind. His faith is ready, literal and uninquiring, apart from all
thought of discriminating fact from fiction, or of detecting hidden and
symbolized meaning; it is enough that what he hears be intrinsically
plausible and seductive, and that there be no special cause to provoke
doubt. And if indeed there were, the poet overrules such doubts by the
holy and all-sufficient authority of the Muse, whose omniscience is the
warrant for his recital, as her inspiration is the cause of his success.
[844] The mental analogy between the early stages of human
civilization and the childhood of the individual is forcibly
and frequently set forth in the works of Vico. That eminently
original thinker dwells upon the poetical and religious
susceptibilities as the first to develop themselves in the human
mind, and as furnishing not merely connecting threads for the
explanation of sensible phænomena, but also aliment for the
hopes and fears, and means of socializing influence to men of
genius, at a time when reason was yet asleep. He points out
the _personifying instinct_ ("istinto d' animazione") as the
spontaneous philosophy of man, "to make himself the rule of the
universe," and to suppose everywhere a quasi-human agency as
the determining cause. He remarks that in an age of fancy and
feeling, the conceptions and language of poetry coincide with
those of reality and common life, instead of standing apart as a
separate vein. These views are repeated frequently (and with some
variations of opinion as he grew older) in his Latin work _De
Uno Universi Juris Principio_, as well as in the two successive
_rédactions_ of his great Italian work, _Scienza Nuova_ (it
must be added that Vico as an expositor is prolix, and does not
do justice to his own powers of original thought): I select
the following from the second edition of the latter treatise,
published by himself in 1744, _Della Metafisica Poetica_ (see
vol. v. p. 189 of Ferrari's edition of his Works, Milan, 1836):
"Adunque la sapienza poetica, che fu la prima sapienza della
Gentilità, dovette incominciare da una Metafisica, non _ragionata
ed astratta_, qual è questa or degli addottrinati, ma _sentita
ed immaginata_, quale dovett' essere di tai primi uomini,
siccome quelli ch' erano di niun raziocinio, e tutti robusti
sensi e vigorosissime fantasie, come è stato nelle degnità (the
_Axioms_) stabilito. Questa fu la loro propria poesia, la qual
in essi fu una facultà loro connaturale, perchè erano di tali
sensi e di si fatte fantasie naturalmente forniti, nata da
_ignoranza di cagioni_—la qual fu loro madre di maraviglia di
tutte le cose, che quelli ignoranti di tutte le cose fortemente
ammiravano. Tal poesia incominciò in essi divina: perchè nello
stesso tempo ch'essi immaginavano le cagioni delle cose, che
sentivano ed ammiravano, essere Dei, come ora il confermiamo con
gli Americani, i quali tutte le cose che superano la loro picciol
capacità, dicono esser Dei ... nello stesso tempo, diciamo, alle
cose ammirate davano l'essere di sostanze dalla propria lor idea:
ch'è appunto la natura dei fanciulli, che osserviamo prendere tra
mani cose inanimate, e transtullarsi e favellarvi, come fussero
quelle persone vive. In cotal guisa i primi uomini delle nazioni
gentili, come fanciulli del nascente gener umano, dalla lor
idea creavan essi le cose ... per la loro robusta ignoranza, il
facevano in forza d'una corpolentissima fantasia, e perch' era
corpolentissima, il facevano con una maravigliosa sublimità, tal
e tanta, che perturbava all'eccesso essi medesimi, che fingendo
le si creavano.... Di questa natura di cose umane restò eterna
proprietà spiegata con nobil espressione da Tacito, che vanamente
gli uomini spaventati _fingunt simul creduntque_."
After describing the condition of rude men, terrified with
thunder and other vast atmospheric phænomena, Vico proceeds
(_ib._ p. 172)—"In tal caso la natura della mente umana porta
ch'ella attribuisca all'effetto la sua natura: e la natura loro
era in tale stato d'uomini tutti robuste forze di corpo, che
urlando, brontolando, spiegavano le loro violentissime passioni,
si finsero il cielo esser un gran corpo animato, che per tal
aspetto chiamavano Giove, che col fischio dei fulmini e col
fragore dei tuoni volesse lor dire qualche cosa.... E si fanno
di tutta la natura un vasto corpo animato, che senta passioni ed
affetti."
Now the contrast with modern habits of thought:—
"Ma siccome _ora_ per la natura delle nostre umane menti troppo
ritirata dai sensi nel medesimo volgo—con le tante astrazioni,
di quante sono piene le lingue—con tanti vocaboli astratti—e
di troppo assottigliata con l'arti dello scrivere, e quasi
spiritualezzata con la practica dei numeri—_ci e naturalmente
niegato di poter formare_ la vasta imagine di cotal donna che
dicono Natura simpatetica, che mentre con la bocca dicono, non
hanno nulla in lor mente, perocchè la lor mente è dentro il
falso, che è nulla; nè sono soccorsi dalla fantasia a poterne
formare una falsa vastissima imagine. Così _ora ci è naturalmente
niegato di poter entrare nella vasta immaginativa di quei primi
uomini_, le menti dei quali di nulla erano assottigliate, di
nulla astratte, di nulla spiritualezzate.... Onde dicemmo
sopra ch'_ora appena intender si può, affatto immaginar non sì
può_, come pensassero i primi uomini che fondarono la umanità
gentilesca."
In this citation (already almost too long for a note) I have
omitted several sentences not essential to the general meaning.
It places these early divine fables and theological poets (so
Vico calls them) in their true point of view, and assigns to them
their proper place in the ascending movement of human society:
it refers the mythes to an early religious and poetical age, in
which feeling and fancy composed the whole fund of the human
mind, over and above the powers of sense: the great mental change
which has since taken place has robbed us of the power, not
merely of believing them as they were originally believed, but
even of conceiving completely that which their first inventors
intended to express.
The views here given from this distinguished Italian (the
precursor of F. A. Wolf in regard to the Homeric poems, as well
as of Niebuhr in regard to the Roman history) appear to me no
less correct than profound; and the obvious inference from them
is, that attempts to _explain_ (as it is commonly called) the
mythes (_i. e._ to translate them into some physical, moral or
historical statements, suitable to our order of thought) are,
even as guesses, essentially unpromising. Nevertheless Vico,
inconsistently with his own general view, bestows great labor and
ingenuity in attempting to discover internal meaning symbolized
under many of the mythes; and even lays down the position, "che
i primi uomini della Gentilità essendo stati semplicissimi,
quanto i fanciulli, i quali per natura son veritieri: le prime
favole non poterono finger nulla di falso: per lo che dovettero
necessariamente essere _vere narrazioni_." (See vol. v. p. 194;
compare also p. 99, Axiom xvi.) If this position be meant simply
to exclude the idea of designed imposture, it may for the most
part be admitted; but Vico evidently intends something more. He
thinks that there lies hid under the fables a basis of matter of
fact—not literal but symbolized—which he draws out and exhibits
under the form of a civil history of the divine and heroic times:
a confusion of doctrine the more remarkable, since he distinctly
tells us (in perfect conformity with the long passage above
transcribed from him) that the special matter of these early
mythes is "impossibility accredited as truth,"—"che la di lei
propria materia è _l'impossibile credibile_" (p. 176, and still
more fully in the first _rédaction_ of the _Scienza Nuova_, b.
iii. c. 4; vol. iv. p. 187 of his Works).
When we read the _Canones Mythologici_ of Vico (De Constantia
Philologiæ, Pars Posterior, c. xxx.; vol. iii. p. 363), and
his explanation of the legends of the Olympic gods, Hercules,
Thêseus, Kadmus, etc., we see clearly that the meaning which he
professes to bring out is one previously put in by himself.
There are some just remarks to the same purpose in Karl Ritter's
_Vorhalle Europäischer Volkergeschichten_, Abschn. ii. p. 150
_seq._ (Berlin, 1820). He too points out how much the faith of
the old world (der Glaube der Vorwelt) has become foreign to our
minds, since the recent advances of "Politik und Kritik," and how
impossible it is for us to elicit history from their conceptions
by our analysis, in cases where they have not distinctly laid it
out for us. The great length of this note prevents me from citing
the passage: and he seems to me also (like Vico) to pursue his
own particular investigations in forgetfulness of the principle
laid down by himself.
[845] O. Müller, in his _Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Mythologie_ (cap. iv. p. 108), has pointed out the mistake of
supposing that there existed originally some nucleus of pure
reality as the starting-point of the mythes, and that upon this
nucleus fiction was superinduced afterwards: he maintains that
the real and the ideal were blended together in the primitive
conception of the mythes. Respecting the general state of mind
out of which the mythes grew, see especially pages 78 and 110 of
that work, which is everywhere full of instruction on the subject
of the Grecian mythes, and is eminently suggestive, even where
the positions of the author are not completely made out.
The short _Heldensage der Griechen_ by Nitzsch (Kiel, 1842, t.
v.) contains more of just and original thought on the subject
of the Grecian mythes than any work with which I am acquainted.
I embrace completely the subjective point of view in which he
regards them; and although I have profited much from reading
his short tract, I may mention that before I ever saw it, I had
enforced the same reasonings on the subject in an article in the
Westminster Review, May 1843, on the _Heroen-Geschichten_ of
Niebuhr.
Jacob Grimm, in the preface to his _Deutsche Mythologie_ (p. 1,
1st edit. Gött. 1835), pointedly insists on the distinction
between "_Sage_" and history, as well as upon the fact that the
former has its chief root in religious belief "Legend and history
(he says) are powers each by itself, adjoining indeed on the
confines, but having each its own separate and exclusive ground;"
also p. xxvii. of the same introduction.
A view substantially similar is adopted by William Grimm, the
other of the two distinguished brothers whose labors have so much
elucidated Teutonic philology and antiquities. He examines the
extent to which either historical matter of fact or historical
names can be traced in the _Deutsche Heldensage_; and he comes to
the conclusion that the former is next to nothing, the latter not
considerable. He draws particular attention to the fact, that the
audience for whom these poems were intended had not learned to
distinguish history from poetry (W. Grimm, _Deutsche Heldensage_,
pp. 8, 337, 342, 345, 399, Gött. 1829).
The state of mind, and the relation of speaker to hearers, thus
depicted, stand clearly marked in the terms and tenor of the ancient
epic, if we only put a plain meaning upon what we read. The poet—like
the prophet, whom he so much resembles—sings under heavenly guidance,
inspired by the goddess to whom he has prayed for her assisting
impulse: she puts the word into his mouth and the incidents into his
mind: he is a privileged man, chosen as her organ and speaking from
her revelations.[846] As the Muse grants the gift of song to whom she
will, so she sometimes in her anger snatches it away, and the most
consummate human genius is then left silent and helpless.[847] It is
true that these expressions, of the Muse inspiring and the poet singing
a tale of past times, have passed from the ancient epic to compositions
produced under very different circumstances, and have now degenerated
into unmeaning forms of speech; but they gained currency originally in
their genuine and literal acceptation. If poets had from the beginning
written or recited, the predicate of singing would never have been
ascribed to them; nor would it have ever become customary to employ the
name of the Muse as a die to be stamped on licensed fiction, unless the
practice had begun when her agency was invoked and hailed in perfect
good faith. Belief, the fruit of deliberate inquiry and a rational
scrutiny of evidence, is in such an age unknown: the simple faith of
the time slides in unconsciously, when the imagination and feeling are
exalted; and inspired authority is at once understood, easily admitted,
and implicitly confided in.
[846] Hesiod, Theogon. 32.—
... ἐνέπνευσαν δέ (the Muses) μοι αὐδὴν
Θείην, ὡς κλείοιμι τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα, πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα,
Καί με κέλονθ᾽ ὑμνεῖν μακάρων γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων, etc.
Odyss. xxii. 347; viii. 63, 73, 481, 489. Δημόδοκ᾽ ... ἢ σέ γε
Μοῦσ᾽ ἐδίδαξε, Διὸς παῖς, ἢ σέγ᾽ Ἀπόλλων: that is, Demodocus has
either been inspired as a poet by the Muse, or as a prophet by
Apollo: for the Homeric Apollo is not the god of song. Kalchas
the prophet receives his inspiration from Apollo, who confers
upon him the same knowledge both of past and future as the Muses
give to Hesiod (Iliad, i. 69):—
Κάλχας Θεστορίδης, οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ᾽ ἄριστος
Ὃς ᾔδη τά τ᾽ ἐόντα, τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα, πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα
Ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τὴν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων.
Also Iliad, ii. 485.
Both the μάντις and the ἀοιδὸς are standing, recognized
professions (Odyss. xvii. 383), like the physician and the
carpenter, δημιόεργοι.
[847] Iliad, ii. 599.
The word mythe (μῦθος, _fabula_, _story_), in its original meaning,
signified simply a statement or current narrative, without any
connotative implication either of truth or falsehood. Subsequently the
meaning of the word (in Latin and English as well as in Greek) changed,
and came to carry with it the idea of an old personal narrative,
always uncertified, sometimes untrue or avowedly fictitious.[848]
And this change was the result of a silent alteration in the mental
state of the society,—of a transition on the part of the superior
minds (and more or less on the part of all) to a stricter and more
elevated canon of credibility, in consequence of familiarity with
recorded history, and its essential tests, affirmative as well as
negative. Among the original hearers of the mythes, all such tests were
unknown; they had not yet learned the lesson of critical disbelief;
the mythe passed unquestioned from the mere fact of its currency, and
from its harmony with existing sentiments and preconceptions. The
very circumstances which contributed to rob it of literal belief in
after-time, strengthened its hold upon the mind of the Homeric man. He
looked for wonders and unusual combinations in the past; he expected
to hear of gods, heroes and men, moving and operating together upon
earth; he pictured to himself the fore-time as a theatre in which the
gods interfered directly, obviously and frequently, for the protection
of their favorites and the punishment of their foes. The rational
conception, then only dawning in his mind, of a systematic course of
nature was absorbed by this fervent and lively faith. And if he could
have been supplied with as perfect and philosophical a history of his
own real past time, as we are now enabled to furnish with regard to
the last century of England or France, faithfully recording all the
successive events, and accounting for them by known positive laws,
but introducing no special interventions of Zeus and Apollo—such a
history would have appeared to him not merely unholy and unimpressive,
but destitute of all plausibility or title to credence. It would
have provoked in him the same feeling of incredulous aversion as a
description of the sun (to repeat the previous illustration) in a
modern book on scientific astronomy.
[848] In this later sense it stands pointedly opposed to ἱστορία,
_history_, which seems originally to have designated matter
of fact, present and seen by the describer, or the result of
his personal inquiries (see Herodot. i. 1; Verrius Flacc. ap.
Aul. Gell. v. 18; Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iii. 12; and the
observations of Dr. Jortin, Remarks on Ecclesiastical History,
vol. i. p. 59).
The original use of the word λόγος was the same as that of
μῦθος—a current tale, true or false, as the case might be;
and the term designating a person much conversant with the
old legends (λόγιος) is derived from it (Herod. i. 1; ii. 3).
Hekatæus and Herodotus both use λόγος in this sense. Herodotus
calls both Æsop and Hekatæus λογοποιοί (ii. 134-143).
Aristotle (Metaphys. i. p. 8, ed. Brandis) seems to use μῦθος
in this sense, where he says—διὸ καὶ φιλόμυθος ὁ φιλόσοφος
πώς ἐστιν· ὁ γὰρ μῦθος συγκεῖται ἐκ θαυμασίων, etc. In the
same treatise (xi. p. 254), he uses it to signify fabulous
amplification and transformation of a doctrine true in the main.
To us these mythes are interesting fictions; to the Homeric and
Hesiodic audience they were "rerum divinarum et humanarum scientia,"—an
aggregate of religious, physical and historical revelations, rendered
more captivating, but not less true and real, by the bright coloring
and fantastic shapes in which they were presented. Throughout the
whole of "mythe-bearing Hellas"[849] they formed the staple of the
uninstructed Greek mind, upon which history and philosophy were by
so slow degrees superinduced; and they continued to be the aliment of
ordinary thought and conversation, even after history and philosophy
had partially supplanted the mythical faith among the leading men, and
disturbed it more or less in the ideas of all. The men, the women,
and the children of the remote dêmes and villages of Greece, to whom
Thucydidês, Hippocratês, Aristotle, or Hipparchus were unknown, still
continued to dwell upon the local fables which formed their religious
and patriotic antiquity. And Pausanias, even in his time, heard
everywhere divine or heroic legends yet alive, precisely of the type
of the old epic; he found the conceptions of religious and mythical
faith, coëxistent with those of positive science, and contending
against them at more or less of odds, according to the temper of the
individual. Now it is the remarkable characteristic of the Homeric age,
that no such coëxistence or contention had yet begun. The religious and
mythical point of view covers, for the most part, all the phænomena
of nature; while the conception of invariable sequence exists only
in the background, itself personified under the name of the Mœræ,
or Fates, and produced generally as an exception to the omnipotence
of Zeus for all ordinary purposes. Voluntary agents, visible and
invisible, impel and govern everything. Moreover this point of view
is universal throughout the community,—adopted with equal fervor, and
carried out with equal consistency, by the loftiest minds and by the
lowest. The great man of that day is he who, penetrated like others
with the general faith, and never once imagining any other system of
nature than the agency of these voluntary Beings, can clothe them in
suitable circumstances and details, and exhibit in living body and
action those types which his hearers dimly prefigure. Such men were
the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey; embodying in themselves the
whole measure of intellectual excellence which their age was capable of
feeling: to us, the first of poets—but to their own public, religious
teachers, historians, and philosophers besides—inasmuch as all that
then represented history and philosophy was derived from those epical
effusions and from others homogeneous with them. Herodotus recognizes
Homer and Hesiod as the main authors of Grecian belief respecting the
names and generations, the attributes and agency, the forms and the
worship of the gods.[850]
[849] M. Ampère, in his _Histoire Littéraire de la France_ (ch.
viii. v. i. p. 310) distinguishes the Saga (which corresponds
as nearly as possible with the Greek μῦθος, λόγος, ἐπιχώριος
λόγος), as a special product of the intellect, not capable of
being correctly designated either as history, or as fiction, or
as philosophy:—
"Il est un pays, la Scandinavie, où la tradition racontée s'est
développée plus complètement qu'ailleurs, où ses produits ont
été plus soigneusement recueillis et mieux conservés: dans ce
pays, ils ont reçu un nom particulier, dont l'équivalent exact ne
se trouve pas hors des langues Germaniques: c'est le mot _Saga,
Sage, ce qu'on dit, ce qu'on raconte_,—la tradition orale. Si
l'on prend ce mot non dans une acception restreinte, mais dans
le sens général où le prenait Niebuhr quand il l'appliquoit, par
exemple, aux traditions populaires qui ont pu fournir à Tite Live
une portion de son histoire, la Saga doit être comptée parmi
les produits spontanés de l'imagination humaine. La Saga a son
existence propre comme la poësie, comme l'histoire, comme le
roman. Elle n'est pas la poësie, parcequ'elle n'est pas chantée,
mais parlée; elle n'est pas l'histoire, parcequ'elle est denuée
de critique; elle n'est pas le roman, parcequ'elle est sincère,
parcequ'elle a foi à ce qu'elle raconte. Elle n'invente pas, mais
répète: elle peut se tromper, mais elle ne ment jamais. Ce récit
souvent merveilleux, que personne ne fabrique sciemment, et que
tout le monde altère et falsifie sans le vouloir, qui se perpétue
à la manière des chants primitifs et populaires,—ce récit, quand
il se rapporte non à un héros, mais à un saint, s'appelle une
légende."
[850] Herodot. ii. 53.
History, philosophy, etc., properly so called and conforming to our
ideas (of which the subsequent Greeks were the first creators), never
belonged to more than a comparatively small number of thinking men,
though their influence indirectly affected more or less the whole
national mind. But when positive science and criticism, and the idea of
an invariable sequence of events, came to supplant in the more vigorous
intellects the old mythical creed of omnipresent personification,
an inevitable scission was produced between the instructed few and
the remaining community. The opposition between the scientific and
the religious point of view was not slow in manifesting itself: in
general language, indeed, both might seem to stand together, but in
every particular case the admission of one involved the rejection of
the other. According to the theory which then became predominant,
the course of nature was held to move invariably on, by powers and
attributes of its own, unless the gods chose to interfere and reverse
it; but they had the power of interfering as often and to as great an
extent as they thought fit. Here the question was at once opened,
respecting a great variety of particular phænomena, whether they were
to be regarded as natural or miraculous. No constant or discernible
test could be suggested to discriminate the two: every man was called
upon to settle the doubt for himself, and each settled it according to
the extent of his knowledge, the force of his logic, the state of his
health, his hopes, his fears, and many other considerations affecting
his separate conclusion. In a question thus perpetually arising, and
full of practical consequences, instructed minds, like Periklês,
Thucydidês, and Euripidês, tended more and more to the scientific
point of view,[851] in cases where the general public were constantly
gravitating towards the religious.
[851] See Plutarch, Perikl. capp. 5, 32, 38; Cicero, De Republ.
i. 15-16, ed. Maii.
The phytologist Theophrastus, in his valuable collection of facts
respecting vegetable organization, is often under the necessity
of opposing his scientific interpretation of curious incidents in
the vegetable world to the religious interpretation of them which
he found current. Anomalous phænomena in the growth or decay of
trees were construed as signs from the gods, and submitted to a
prophet for explanation (see Histor. Plantar. ii. 3, iv. 16; v.
3).
We may remark, however, that the old faith had still a certain
hold over his mind. In commenting on the story of the willow-tree
at Philippi, and the venerable old plane-tree at Antandros
(more than sixty feet high, and requiring four men to grasp it
round in the girth), having been blown down by a high wind, and
afterwards spontaneously resuming their erect posture, he offers
some explanations how such a phænomenon might have happened, but
he admits, at the end, that there may be something extra-natural
in the case, Ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μὲν ἴσως ἔξω φυσικῆς αἰτίας ἔστιν, etc.
(De Caus. Plant. v. 4): see a similar miracle in reference to the
cedar-tree of Vespasian (Tacit. Hist. ii. 78).
Euripidês, in his lost tragedy called Μελανίππη Σοφὴ, placed in
the month of Melanippê a formal discussion and confutation of the
whole doctrine of τέρατα, or supernatural indications (Dionys.
Halicar. Ars Rhetoric. p. 300-356, Reisk). Compare the Fables of
Phædrus, iii. 3; Plutarch, Sept. Sap. Conviv. ch. 3. p. 149; and
the curious philosophical explanation by which the learned men of
Alexandria tranquillized the alarms of the vulgar, on occasion of
the serpent said to have been seen entwined round the head of the
crucified Kleomenês (Plutarch, Kleomen. c. 39).
It is one part of the duty of an able physician, according to
the Hippocratic treatise called Prognosticon (c. 1. t. ii. p.
112, ed. Littré), when he visits his patient, to examine whether
there is anything divine in the malady, ἅμα δὲ καὶ εἴ τι θεῖον
ἔνεστιν ἐν τῇσι νούσοισι: this, however, does not agree with the
memorable doctrine laid down in the treatise, De Aëre, Locis et
Aquis (c. 22. p. 78, ed. Littré), and cited hereafter, in this
chapter. Nor does Galen seem to have regarded it as harmonizing
with the general views of Hippocratês. In the excellent
Prolegomena of M. Littré to his edition of Hippocratês (t. i.
p. 76) will be found an inedited scholium, wherein the opinion
of Baccheius and other physicians is given, that the affections
of the plague were to be looked upon as divine, inasmuch as the
disease came from God; and also the opinion of Xenophôn, the
friend of Praxagoras, that the "genus of days of crisis" in fever
was divine; "For (said Xenophôn) just as the Dioskuri, being
gods, appear to the mariner in the storm and bring him salvation,
so also do the days of crisis, when they arrive, in fever."
Galen, in commenting upon this doctrine of Xenophôn, says that
the author "has expressed his own individual feeling, but has
no way set forth the opinion of Hippocratês:" Ὁ δὲ τῶν κρισίμων
γένος ἡμερῶν εἰπὼν εἶναι θεῖον, ἑαυτοῦ τι πάθος ὡμολόγησεν· οὐ
μὴν Ἱπποκράτους γε τὴν γνώμην ἔδειξεν (Galen, Opp. t. v. p. 120,
ed. Basil).
The comparison of the Dioskuri appealed to by Xenophôn is a
precise reproduction of their function as described in the
Homeric Hymn (Hymn xxxiii. 10): his personification of the "days
of crisis" introduces the old religious agency to fill up a gap
in his medical science.
I annex an illustration from the Hindoo vein of thought:—"It is
a rule with the Hindoos to bury, and not to burn, the bodies of
those who die of the small pox: for (say they) the small pox is
not only caused by the goddess Davey, but is, in fact, _Davey
herself_; and to burn the body of a person affected with this
disease, is, in reality, neither more nor less than _to burn the
goddess_." (Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, etc., vol. i. ch.
xxv. p. 221.)
The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition of thought is
the really mythopœic age; in which the creative faculties of the
society know no other employment, and the mass of the society no
other mental demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in
its full peculiarity and grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and
Odyssey,—poems of which we cannot determine the exact date, but which
seem both to have existed prior to the first Olympiad, 776 B. C., our
earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some time after that
event, the mythopœic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Leschês,
Eumêlus, and seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or
shortly after the first century of recorded Olympiads); but from and
after this first century, we may trace the operation of causes which
gradually enfeebled and narrowed them, altering the point of view from
which the mythes were looked at. What these causes were, it will be
necessary briefly to intimate.
The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian
intellect itself,—a quality in which this remarkable people stand
distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if
not all nations have had mythes, but no nation except the Greeks have
imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest; and the same
mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this
exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the
early faith in which the mythes had been generated and accredited.
One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual expansion,
was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, positive
and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genuine Grecian
epic, the theme was an unknown and aoristic past; but even as early
as the Works and Days of Hesiod, the present begins to figure: the
man who tills the earth appears in his own solitary nakedness, apart
from gods and heroes—bound indeed by serious obligations to the gods,
but contending against many difficulties which are not to be removed
by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in the
strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back
with reverential envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy
and Thêbes. Yet bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to
look at it along with him, and to prescribe rules for human life—with
the assurance that if a man be industrious, frugal, provident, just
and friendly in his dealings, the gods will recompense him with
affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain, while holding out
such promise, to cast herself into the most homely details of present
existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men
whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt
the poet of the Helots; and the contrast between the two is certainly
a remarkable proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present
and the positive.
Other manifestations of the same tendency become visible in the age of
Archilochus (B. C. 680-660). In an age when metrical composition and
the living voice are the only means whereby the productive minds of a
community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms
of song and recitation, or diversified accompaniments, constitute an
epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric poetry, from Archilochus
downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and impressibilities
of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic. In
all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of
present time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the
Homeric hexameter the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical
Muse—the hearers are content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents
of a foregone world, and the tale is hardly less suitable to one
time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was
first suggested to Archilochus by the bitterness of his own private
antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted by his lampoons, upon the
individuals against whom they were directed, still remain attested,
though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according
to the well-known judgment of Aristotle) most nearly approaching to
common speech, and well suited both to the coarse vein of sentiment,
and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor.[852] Simonidês
of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of Archilochus, employed the same
metre, with less bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not
less decided. His remaining fragments present a mixture of teaching
and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing upon actual life,[853] and
carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the Hesiodic Works
and Days. Of Alkæus and Sapphô, though unfortunately we are compelled
to speak of them upon hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that
their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private
or public with the contemporary world, constituted the soul of those
short effusions which gave them so much celebrity:[854] and in the
few remains of the elegiac poets preserved to us—Kallinus, Mimnermus,
Tyrtæus—the impulse of some present motive or circumstance is no
less conspicuous. The same may also be said of Solôn, Theognis and
Phokylidês, who preach, encourage, censure, or complain, but do not
recount—and in whom a profound ethical sensibility, unknown to the
Homeric poems, manifests itself: the form of poetry (to use the words
of Solôn himself) is made the substitute for the public speaking of the
agora.[855]
[852] Horat. de Art. Poet. 79:—
"Archilochum proprio rabies armavit Iambo," etc.
Compare Epist. i. 19, 23, and Epod. vi. 12; Aristot. Rhetor. iii.
8, 7, and Poetic. c. 4—also Synesius de Somniis—ὥσπερ Ἀλκαῖος καὶ
Ἀρχίλοχος, οἳ δεδαπανήκασι τὴν εὐστομίαν εἰς τὸν οἰκεῖον βίον
ἑκάτερος (Alcæi Fragment. Halle, 1810, p. 205). Quintilian speaks
in striking language of the power of expression manifested by
Archilochus (x. 1, 60).
[853] Simonidês of Amorgus touches briefly, but in a tone of
contempt upon the Trojan war—~γυναικὸς οὕνεκ᾽~ ἀμφιδηριωμένους
(Simonid. Fragm. 8. p. 36. v. 118); he seems to think it absurd
that so destructive a struggle should have taken place "_pro unâ
mulierculâ_," to use the phrase of Mr. Payne Knight.
[854] See Quintilian, x. 1, 63. Horat. Od. i. 32; ii. 13.
Aristot. Polit. iii. 10, 4. Dionys. Halic. observes (Vett.
Scriptt. Censur. v. p. 421) respecting Alkæus—πολλαχοῦ γοῦν τὸ
μέτρον εἴ τις περιέλοι, ῥητορικὴν ἂν εὕροι πολιτείαν; and Strabo
(xiii. p. 617), τὰ στασιωτικὰ καλούμενα τοῦ Ἀλκαίου ποιήματα.
There was a large dash of sarcasm and homely banter aimed at
neighbors and contemporaries in the poetry of Sapphô, apart from
her impassioned love-songs—ἄλλως σκώπτει τὸν ἄγροικον νύμφιον καὶ
τὸν θυρωρὸν τὸν ἐν τοῖς γάμοις, εὐτελέστατα καὶ ἐν πέζοις ὀνόμασι
μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν ποιητικοῖς. Ὥστε αὐτῆς μᾶλλόν ἐστι τὰ ποιήματα ταῦτα
διαλέγεσθαι ἢ ἄδειν· οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἅρμοσαι πρὸς τὸν χόρον ἢ πρὸς τὴν
λύραν, εἰ μή τις εἴη χόρος διαλεκτικός (Dêmêtr. Phaler, De
Interpret. c. 167).
Compare also Herodot. ii. 135, who mentions the satirical talent
of Sapphô, employed against her brother for an extravagance about
the courtezan Rhodôpis.
[855] Solôn, Fragm. iv. 1, ed. Schneidewin:—
Αὐτὸς κήρυξ ἦλθον ἀφ᾽ ἱμερτῆς Σαλαμῖνος
Κόσμον ἐπέων ᾠδὴν ἀντ᾽ ἀγορῆς θέμενος, etc.
See _Brandis_, Handbuch der Griechischen Philosophie, sect.
xxiv.-xxv. Plato states that Solôn, in his old age, engaged in
the composition of an epic poem, which he left unfinished, on the
subject of the supposed island of Atlantis and Attica (Plato,
Timæus, p. 21, and Kritias, p. 113). Plutarch, Solôn, c. 31.
Doubtless all these poets made abundant use of the ancient mythes, but
it was by turning them to present account, in the way of illustration,
or flattery, or contrast,—a tendency which we may usually detect even
in the compositions of Pindar, in spite of the lofty and heroic strain
which they breathe throughout. That narrative or legendary poetry still
continued to be composed during the seventh and sixth centuries before
the Christian æra is not to be questioned; but it exhibited the old
epical character without the old epical genius; both the inspiration
of the composer and the sympathies of the audience had become more
deeply enlisted in the world before them, and disposed to fasten on
incidents of their own actual experience. From Solôn and Theognis
we pass to the abandonment of all metrical restrictions and to the
introduction of prose writing,—a fact, the importance of which it is
needless to dwell upon,—marking as well the increased familiarity with
written records, as the commencement of a separate branch of literature
for the intellect, apart from the imagination and emotions wherein the
old legends had their exclusive root.
Egypt was first unreservedly opened to the Greeks during the reign of
Psammetichus, about B. C. 660; gradually it became much frequented by
them for military or commercial purposes, or for simple curiosity, and
enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations, while it also
imparted to them that vein of mysticism, which overgrew the primitive
simplicity of the Homeric religion, and of which I have spoken in a
former chapter. They found in it a long-established civilization,
colossal wonders of architecture, and a certain knowledge of astronomy
and geometry, elementary indeed, but in advance of their own. Moreover
it was a portion of their present world, and it contributed to form in
them an interest for noting and describing the actual realities before
them. A sensible progress is made in the Greek mind during the two
centuries from B. C. 700 to B. C. 500, in the record and arrangement
of historical facts: an _historical sense_ arises in the superior
intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between
fact and fiction. And this progressive tendency was further stimulated
by increased communication and by more settled and peaceful social
relations between the various members of the Hellenic world, to which
may be added material improvements, purchased at the expense of a
period of turbulence and revolution, in the internal administration
of each separate state. The Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian
games became frequented by visitors from the most distant parts of
Greece: the great periodical festival in the island of Dêlos brought
together the citizens of every Ionic community, with their wives and
children, and an ample display of wealth and ornaments.[856] Numerous
and flourishing colonies were founded in Sicily, the south of Italy,
the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea: the Phokæans explored the
whole of the Adriatic, established Massalia, and penetrated even as
far as the south of Ibêria, with which they carried on a lucrative
commerce.[857] The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both
expanded and rectified: the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander
the disciple of Thalês, is an epoch in the history of science. We may
note the ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people
called Hyperboreans and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream,
as demonstrating the progress of the age in this department of
inquiry.[858] And even earlier than Herodotus, Xanthus had noticed the
occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior of Asia Minor,
which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth's surface with
respect to land and water.[859]
[856] Homer, Hymn. ad Apollin. 155; Thucydid. iii. 104.
[857] Herodot. i. 163.
[858] Herodot. iv. 36. γελῶ δὲ ὁρέων Γῆς περιόδους γράψαντας
πολλοὺς ἤδη, καὶ οὐδένα νόον ἔχοντας ἐξηγησάμενον· οἳ Ὠκέανόν τε
ῥέοντα γράφουσι πέριξ τὴν γῆν, ἐοῦσαν κυκλοτερέα ὡς ἀπὸ τόρνου,
etc., a remark probably directed against Hekatæus.
Respecting the map of Anaximander, Strabo, i. p. 7; Diogen.
Laërt. ii. 1; Agathemer ap. Geograph. Minor. i. 1. πρῶτος
ἐτόλμησε τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν πίνακι γράψαι.
Aristagoras of Milêtus, who visited Sparta to solicit aid for the
revolted Ionians against Darius, brought with him a brazen tablet
or map, by means of which he exhibited the relative position of
places in the Persian empire (Herodot. v. 49).
[859] Xanthus ap. Strabo. i. p. 50; xii. p. 579. Compare Creuzer,
Fragmenta Xanthi, p. 162.
If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed
between the commencement of the Olympic æra and the age of
Herodotus and Thucydidês, we shall discern a striking advance in
the Greeks,—ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and
chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydidês,
the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to
recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never
since surpassed. Men's minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster
cast; and acts come to be criticized with reference to their bearing
on the internal happiness of a well-regulated community, as well as
upon the standing harmony of fraternal states. While Thucydidês
treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly alluded to in the
Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts described in
the old heroic and Theogonic legends were found not less repugnant to
this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the gods with the Giants
and Titans,—the castration of Uranus by his son Kronus,—the cruelty,
deceit and licentiousness, often supposed both in the gods and heroes,
provoked strong disapprobation. And the language of the philosopher
Xenophanês, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express
purpose of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that
of the Christian writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attacked the
whole scheme of paganism.[860]
[860] Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empiric. adv. Mathemat. ix. 193. Fragm.
1. Poet. Græc. ed. Schneidewin. Diogen. Laërt. ix. 18.
Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that Xenophanês
stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad—Thalês
and Pythagoras being the others—who, in the sixth century before the
Christian æra, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy
which occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual
energy. Of the material differences between the three I do not here
speak; I regard them only in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic
philosophy which preceded them, and from which all three deviated by a
step, perhaps the most remarkable in all the history of philosophy. In
the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the Hesiodic Theogony (as
has been already stated), we find nature distributed into a variety of
personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of different
Beings more or less analogous to man—each of these Beings having his
own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and
pleasure, and his own especial sympathies or antipathies with human
individuals; each being determined to act or forbear, to grant favor
or inflict injury in his own department of phænomena, according as
men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to himself, might conciliate or
offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those who bore a proper name
and received some public or family worship,) were the most commanding
and capital members amidst this vast network of agents visible and
invisible, spread over the universe.[861] The whole view of nature
was purely religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of
the early mind. It proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the
feelings and imagination to transport, to the world without, the
familiar type of free-will and conscious personal action: above all, it
took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely extended sympathy which
it so perpetually called forth between man and nature.[862]
[861] Hesiod, Opp. Di. 122; Homer, Hymn. ad Vener. 260.
[862] A defence of the primitive faith, on this ground, is found
in Plutarch, Quæstion. Sympos. vii. 4, 4, p. 703.
The first attempt to disenthral the philosophic intellect from this
all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a method of
interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of
untaught minds, is to be found in Thalês, Xenophanês and Pythagoras, in
the sixth century before the Christian æra. It is in them that we first
find the idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal
Nature conceived as the object of study. The divine husband and wife,
Oceanus and Têthys, parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs,
together with the avenging goddess Styx, are translated into the
material substance _water_, or, as we ought rather to say, the Fluid:
and Thalês set himself to prove that water was the primitive element,
out of which all the different natural substances had been formed.[863]
He, as well as Xenophanês and Pythagoras, started the problem of
physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws,
to be discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human
intellect. The Greek word Φύσις, denoting _nature_, and its derivatives
_physics_ and _physiology_, unknown in that large sense to Homer or
Hesiod, as well as the word _Kosmos_, to denote the mundane system,
first appears with these philosophers.[864] The elemental analysis
of Thalês—the one unchangeable cosmic substance, varying only in
appearance, but not in reality, as suggested by Xenophanês,—and the
geometrical and arithmetical combinations of Pythagoras,—all these were
different ways of approaching the explanation of physical phænomena,
and each gave rise to a distinct school or succession of philosophers.
But they all agreed in departing from the primitive method, and in
recognizing determinate properties, invariable sequences, and objective
truth, in nature—either independent of willing or designing agents, or
serving to these latter at once as an indispensable subject-matter and
as a limiting condition. Xenophanês disclaimed openly all knowledge
respecting the gods, and pronounced that no man could have any means of
ascertaining when he was right and when he was wrong, in affirmations
respecting them:[865] while Pythagoras represents in part the
scientific tendencies of his age, in part also the spirit of mysticism
and of special fraternities for religious and ascetic observance, which
became diffused throughout Greece in the sixth century before the
Christian æra. This was another point which placed him in antipathy
with the simple, unconscious and demonstrative faith of the old poets,
as well as with the current legends.
[863] Aristotel. Metaphys. i. 3.
[864] Plutarch, Placit. Philos. ii. 1; also Stobæus, Eclog.
Physic. i. 22, where the difference between the Homeric
expressions and those of the subsequent philosophers is seen.
Damm, Lexic. Homeric. v. Φύσις; Alexander von Humboldt, _Kosmos_,
p. 76, the note 9 on page 62 of that admirable work.
The title of the treatises of the early philosophers (Melissus,
Dêmokritus, Parmenidês, Empedoclês, Alkmæôn, etc.) was frequently
Περὶ Φύσεως (Galen. Opp. tom. i. p. 56, ed. Basil).
[865] Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empiric. vii. 50; viii. 326.—
Καὶ τὸ μὲν οὖν σαφὲς οὔτις ἀνὴρ ἴδεν, οὔτε τίς ἐστιν
Εἰδὼς ἀμφὶ θεῶν τε καὶ ἅσσα λέγω περὶ πάντων·
Εἰ γὰρ καὶ τὰ μάλιστα τύχοι τετελεσμένον εἰπῶν,
Αὐτος ὅμως οὐκ οἶδε, δόκος δ᾽ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τέτυκται.
Compare Aristotel. De Xenophane, Zenone, et Georgiâ, capp. 1-2.
If these distinguished men, when they ceased to follow the primitive
instinct of tracing the phænomena of nature to personal and designing
agents, passed over, not at once to induction and observation, but to a
misemployment of abstract words, substituting metaphysical _eideôla_ in
the place of polytheism, and to an exaggerated application of certain
narrow physical theories—we must remember that nothing else could be
expected from the scanty stock of facts then accessible, and that the
most profound study of the human mind points out such transition as an
inevitable law of intellectual progress.[866] At present, we have to
compare them only with that state of the Greek mind[867] which they
partially superseded, and with which they were in decided opposition.
The rudiments of physical science were conceived and developed among
superior men; but the religious feeling of the mass was averse to them;
and the aversion, though gradually mitigated, never wholly died away.
Some of the philosophers were not backward in charging others with
irreligion, while the multitude seems to have felt the same sentiment
more or less towards all—or towards that postulate of constant
sequences, with determinate conditions of occurrence, which scientific
study implies, and which they could not reconcile with their belief
in the agency of the gods, to whom they were constantly praying for
special succor and blessings.
[866] See the treatise of M. Auguste Comte (_Cours de Philosophie
Positive_), and his doctrine of the three successive stages of
the human mind in reference to scientific study—the theological,
the metaphysical, and the positive;—a doctrine laid down
generally in his first lecture (vol. i. p. 4-12), and largely
applied and illustrated throughout his instructive work. It is
also re-stated and elucidated by Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his
System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, vol. ii. p. 610.
[867] "Human wisdom (ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία), as contrasted with
the primitive theology (οἱ ἀρχαῖοι καὶ διατρίβοντες περὶ τὰς
θεολογίας)," to take the words of Aristotle (Meteorolog. ii. 1.
pp. 41-42, ed. Tauchnitz).
The discrepancy between the scientific and the religious point of
view was dealt with differently by different philosophers. Thus
Socratês openly admitted it, and assigned to each a distinct and
independent province. He distributed phænomena into two classes: one,
wherein the connection of antecedent and consequent was invariable
and ascertainable by human study, and therefore future results
accessible to a well-instructed foresight; the other, and those, too,
the most comprehensive and important, which the gods had reserved
for themselves and their own unconditional agency, wherein there was
no invariable or ascertainable sequence, and where the result could
only be foreknown by some omen, prophecy, or other special inspired
communication from themselves. Each of these classes was essentially
distinct, and required to be looked at and dealt with in a manner
radically incompatible with the other. Socratês held it wrong to
apply the scientific interpretation to the latter, or the theological
interpretation to the former. Physics and astronomy, in his opinion,
belonged to the divine class of phænomena, in which human research was
insane, fruitless, and impious.[868]
[868] Xenoph. Memor. i. 1, 6-9. Τὰ μὲν ἀναγκαῖα (Σωκράτης)
συνεβούλευε καὶ πράττειν, ὡς ἐνόμιζεν ἄριστ᾽ ἂν πραχθῆναι·
περὶ δὲ τῶν ἀδήλων ὅπως ἀποβήσοιτο, μαντευσομένους ἔπεμπεν, εἰ
ποιητέα. Καὶ τοὺς μέλλοντας οἴκους τε καὶ πόλεις καλῶς οἰκήσειν
μαντικῆς ἔφη προσδεῖσθαι· τεκτονικὸν μὲν γὰρ ἢ χαλκευτικὸν ἢ
γεωργικὸν ἢ ἀνθρώπων ἀρχικὸν, ἢ τῶν τοιούτων ἔργων ἐξεταστικὸν,
ἢ λογιστικὸν, ἢ οἰκονομικὸν, ἢ στρατηγικὸν γενέσθαι, πάντα τὰ
τοιαῦτα, μαθήματα καὶ ἀνθρώπου γνώμῃ αἱρετέα, ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι· τὰ
δὲ μέγιστα τῶν ἐν τούτοις ἔφη ~τοὺς θεοὺς ἑαυτοῖς καταλείπεσθαι~,
ὧν οὐδὲν δῆλον εἶναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις.... Τοὺς δὲ μηδὲν τῶν
τοιούτων οἰομένους εἶναι δαιμόνιον, ἀλλὰ πάντα τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης
γνώμης, δαιμονᾷν ἔφη· δαιμονᾷν δὲ καὶ τοὺς μαντευομένους ἃ τοῖς
ἀνθρώποις ἔδωκαν οἱ θεοὶ μαθοῦσι διακρίνειν.... Ἔφη δὲ δεῖν, ἃ
μὲν μαθόντας ποιεῖν ἔδωκαν οἱ θεοὶ, μανθάνειν· ἃ δὲ μὴ δῆλα τοῖς
ἀνθρώποις ἔστι, πειρᾶσθαι διὰ μαντικῆς παρὰ τῶν θεῶν πυνθάνεσθαι·
τοὺς θεοὺς γὰρ, οἷς ἂν ὦσιν ἵλεῳ, σημαίνειν. Compare also
Memorab. iv. 7. 7; and Cyropæd. i. 6, 3, 23-46.
Physical and astronomical phænomena are classified by Socratês
among the divine class, interdicted to human study (Memor. i.
1,13): τὰ θεῖα or δαιμόνια as supposed to τἀνθρώπεια. Plato
(Phileb. c. 16; Legg. x. p. 886-889; xii. p. 967) held the sun
and stars to be gods, each animated with its special soul: he
allowed astronomical investigation to the extent necessary
for avoiding blasphemy respecting these beings—μέχρι τοῦ μὴ
βλασφημεῖν περὶ αὐτά (vii. 821).
On the other hand, Hippocratês, the contemporary of Socratês,
denied the discrepancy, and merged into one those two classes of
phænomena,—the divine and the scientifically determinable,—which the
latter had put asunder. Hippocratês treated all phænomena as at once
both divine and scientifically determinable. In discussing certain
peculiar bodily disorders found among the Scythians, he observes, "The
Scythians themselves ascribe the cause of this to God, and reverence
and bow down to such sufferers, each man fearing that he may suffer
the like; and I myself think too that these affections, as well as all
others, are divine: no one among them is either more divine or more
human than another, but all are on the same footing, and all divine;
nevertheless each of them has its own physical conditions, and not one
occurs without such physical conditions."[869]
[869] Hippocratês, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, c. 22 (p. 78, ed.
Littré, sect. 106 ed. Petersen): Ἔτι τε πρὸς τουτέοισι εὐνούχιαι
γίγνονται οἱ πλεῖστοι ἐν Σκύθῃσι, καὶ γυναικηΐα ἐργάζονται καὶ
ὡς αἱ γυναῖκες διαλέγονταί τε ὁμοίως· καλεῦνταί τε οἱ τοιοῦτοι
ἀνανδριεῖς. Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἐπιχώριοι τὴν αἰτίην προστιθέασι θεῷ καὶ
σέβονται τουτέους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ προσκυνέουσι, δεδοικότες
περὶ ἑωϋτέων ἕκαστοι. Ἐμοὶ δὲ καὶ αὐτέῳ δοκέει ταῦτα τὰ πάθεα
θεῖα εἶναι, καὶ τἄλλα πάντα, καὶ οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἑτέρου θειότερον
οὐδὲ ἀνθρωπινώτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα θεῖα· ἕκαστον δὲ ἔχει φύσιν τῶν
τοιουτέων, καὶ οὐδὲν ἄνευ φύσιος γίγνεται. Καὶ τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, ὥς
μοι δοκέει γίγνεσθαι, φράσω, etc.
Again, sect. 112. Ἀλλὰ γὰρ, ὥσπερ καὶ πρότερον ἔλεξα, θεῖα μὲν
καὶ ταῦτά ἐστι ὁμοίως τοῖσι ἄλλοισι, γίγνεται δὲ κατὰ φύσιν
ἕκαστα.
Compare the remarkable treatise of Hippocratês, De Morbo Sacro,
capp. 1 and 18, vol. vi. p. 352-394, ed. Littré. See this opinion
of Hippocratês illustrated by the doctrines of some physical
philosophers stated in Aristotle, Physic. ii. 8. ὥσπερ ὕει ὁ
Ζεὺς, οὐχ ὅπως τὸν σῖτον αὐξήσῃ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ἀνάγκης, etc. Some
valuable observations on the method of Hippocratês are also found
in Plato, Phædr. p. 270.
A third distinguished philosopher of the same day, Anaxagoras,
allegorizing Zeus and the other personal gods, proclaimed the doctrine
of one common pervading Mind, as having first established order and
system in the mundane aggregate, which had once been in a state of
chaos—and as still manifesting its uninterrupted agency for wise and
good purposes. This general doctrine obtained much admiration from
Plato and Aristotle; but they at the same time remarked with surprise,
that Anaxagoras never made any use at all of his own general doctrine
for the explanation of the phænomena of nature,—that he looked for
nothing but physical causes and connecting laws,[870]—so that in fact
the spirit of his particular researches was not materially different
from those of Demokritus or Leukippus, whatever might be the difference
in their general theories. His investigations in meteorology and
astronomy, treating the heavenly bodies as subjects for calculation,
have been already noticed as offensive, not only to the general public
of Greece, but even to Socratês himself among them: he was tried at
Athens, and seems to have escaped condemnation only by voluntary
exile.[871]
[870] See the graphic picture in Plato, Phædon. p. 97-98 (cap.
46-47): compare Plato, Legg. xii. p. 967; Aristotel. Metaphysic.
i. p. 13-14 (ed. Brandis); Plutarch, Defect. Oracul. p. 435.
Simplicius, Commentar. in Aristotel. Physic. p. 38. καὶ ὅπερ
δὲ ὁ ἐν Φαίδωνι Σωκράτης ἐγκαλεῖ τῷ Ἀναξαγόρᾳ, τὸ ἐν ταῖς τῶν
κατὰ μέρος αἰτιολογίαις μὴ τῷ νῷ κεχρῆσθαι, ἀλλὰ ταῖς ὑλικαῖς
ἀποδόσεσιν, οἰκεῖον ἦν τῇ φυσιολογίᾳ. Anaxagoras thought that the
superior intelligence of men, as compared with other animals,
arose from his possession of hands (Aristot. de Part. Animal. iv.
10. p. 687, ed. Bekk.).
[871] Xenophôn, Memorab. iv. 7. Socratês said, καὶ παραφρονῆσαι
τὸν ταῦτα μεριμνῶντα οὐδὲν ἧττον ἢ Ἀναξαγόρας παρεφρόνησεν, ὁ
μέγιστον φρονήσας ἐπὶ τῷ τὰς τῶν θεῶν μηχανὰς ἐξηγεῖσθαι, etc.
Compare Schaubach, Anaxagoræ Fragment. p. 50-141; Plutarch,
Nikias, 23, and Periklês, 6-32; Diogen. Laërt. ii. 10-14.
The Ionic philosophy, from which Anaxagoras receded more in
language than in spirit, seems to have been the least popular
of all the schools, though some of the commentators treat it as
conformable to vulgar opinion, because it confined itself for the
most part to phænomenal explanations, and did not recognize the
_noumena_ of Plato, or the τὸ ἓν νοητὸν of Parmenidês,—"qualis
fuit Ionicorum, quæ tum dominabatur, ratio, vulgari opinione
et communi sensu comprobata" (Karsten, Parmenidis Fragment,
De Parmenidis Philosophiâ, p. 154). This is a mistake: the
Ionic philosophers, who constantly searched for and insisted
upon physical laws, came more directly into conflict with the
sentiment of the multitude than the Eleatic school.
The larger atmospheric phænomena were connected in the most
intimate manner with Grecian religious feeling and uneasiness
(see Demokritus ap. Sect. Empiric. ix. sect. 19-24. p. 552-554,
Fabric.): the attempts of Anaxagoras and Demokritus to explain
them were more displeasing to the public than the Platonic
speculations (Demokritus ap. Aristot. Meteorol. ii. 7; Stobæus,
Eclog. Physic. p. 594: compare Mullach, Democriti Fragmenta, lib.
iv. p. 394).
The three eminent men just named, all essentially different from
each other, may be taken as illustrations of the philosophical mind
of Greece during the last half of the fifth century B. C. Scientific
pursuits had acquired a powerful hold, and adjusted themselves in
various ways with the prevalent religious feelings of the age. Both
Hippocratês and Anaxagoras modified their ideas of the divine agency
so as to suit their thirst for scientific research. According to the
former, the gods were the really efficient agents in the production
of all phænomena,—the mean and indifferent not less than the terrific
or tutelary. Being thus alike connected with all phænomena, they were
specially associated with none—and the proper task of the inquirer
was, to find out those rules and conditions by which (he assumed)
their agency was always determined, and according to which it might
be foretold. And this led naturally to the proceeding which Plato and
Aristotle remark in Anaxagoras,—that the all-governing and Infinite
Mind, having been announced in sublime language at the beginning of
his treatise, was afterward left out of sight, and never applied to
the explanation of particular phænomena, being as much consistent with
one modification of nature as with another. Now such a view of the
divine agency could never be reconciled with the religious feelings
of the ordinary Grecian believer, even as they stood in the time
of Anaxagoras; still less could it have been reconciled with those
of the Homeric man, more than three centuries earlier. By him Zeus
and Athênê were conceived as definite Persons, objects of special
reverence, hopes, and fears, and animated with peculiar feelings,
sometimes of favor, sometimes of wrath, towards himself or his family
or country. They were propitiated by his prayers, and prevailed upon
to lend him succor in danger—but offended and disposed to bring evil
upon him if he omitted to render thanks or sacrifice. This sense of
individual communion with, and dependence upon them was the essence of
his faith; and with that faith, the all-pervading Mind proclaimed by
Anaxagoras—which had no more concern with one man or one phænomenon
than with another,—could never be brought into harmony. Nor could the
believer, while he prayed with sincerity for special blessings or
protection from the gods, acquiesce in the doctrine of Hippocratês,
that their agency was governed by constant laws and physical conditions.
That radical discord between the mental impulses of science and
religion, which manifests itself so decisively during the most
cultivated ages of Greece, and which harassed more or less so many
of the philosophers, produced its most afflicting result in the
condemnation of Socratês by the Athenians. According to the remarkable
passage recently cited from Xenophôn, it will appear that Socratês
agreed with his countrymen in denouncing physical speculations as
impious,—that he recognized the religious process of discovery as a
peculiar branch, coördinate with the scientific,—and that he laid down
a theory, of which the basis was, the confessed divergence of these
two processes from the beginning—thereby seemingly satisfying the
exigencies of religious hopes and fears on the one hand, and those of
reason, in her ardor for ascertaining the invariable laws of phænomena,
on the other. We may remark that the theory of this religious and
extra-scientific process of discovery was at that time sufficiently
complete; for Socratês could point out, that those anomalous phænomena
which the gods had reserved for themselves, and into which science was
forbidden to pry, were yet accessible to the seekings of the pious man,
through oracles, omens, and other exceptional means of communication
which divine benevolence vouchsafed to keep open. Considering thus
to how great an extent Socratês was identified in feeling with
the religious public of Athens, and considering moreover that his
performance of open religious duties was assiduous—we might wonder, as
Xenophôn does wonder,[872] how it could have happened that the Athenian
dikasts mistook him at the end of his life for an irreligious man.
But we see, by the defence which Xenophôn as well as Plato gives for
him, that the Athenian public really considered him, in spite of his
own disclaimer, as homogeneous with Anaxagoras and the other physical
inquirers, because he had applied similar scientific reasonings
to moral and social phænomena. They looked upon him with the same
displeasure as he himself felt towards the physical philosophers, and
we cannot but admit that in this respect they were more unfortunately
consistent than he was. It is true that the mode of defence adopted
by Socratês contributed much to the verdict found against him, and
that he was further weighed down by private offence given to powerful
individuals and professions; but all these separate antipathies found
their best account in swelling the cry against him as an over-curious
sceptic, and an impious innovator.
[872] Xenophôn, Memorab. i. 1.
Now the scission thus produced between the superior minds and the
multitude, in consequence of the development of science and the
scientific point of view, is a fact of great moment in the history
of Greek progress, and forms an important contrast between the age
of Homer and Hesiod and that of Thucydidês; though in point of fact
even the multitude, during this later age, were partially modified by
those very scientific views which they regarded with disfavor. And
we must keep in view the primitive religious faith, once universal
and unobstructed, but subsequently disturbed by the intrusions of
science; we must follow the great change, as well in respect to
enlarged intelligence as to refinement of social and ethical feeling,
among the Greeks, from the Hesiodic times downward, in order to render
some account of the altered manner in which the ancient mythes came
to be dealt with. These mythes, the spontaneous growth of a creative
and personifying interpretation of nature, had struck root in Grecian
associations at a time when the national faith required no support
from what we call evidence. They were _now_ submitted, not simply to a
feeling, imagining, and believing public, but also to special classes
of instructed men,—philosophers, historians, ethical teachers, and
critics,—and to a public partially modified by their ideas[873] as well
as improved by a wider practical experience. They were not intended
for such an audience; they had ceased to be in complete harmony even
with the lower strata of intellect and sentiment,—much more so with
the higher. But they were the cherished inheritance of a past time;
they were interwoven in a thousand ways with the religious faith,
the patriotic retrospect, and the national worship, of every Grecian
community; the general type of the mythe was the ancient, familiar,
and universal form of Grecian thought, which even the most cultivated
men had imbibed in their childhood from the poets,[874] and by which
they were to a certain degree unconsciously enslaved. Taken as a whole
the mythes had acquired prescriptive and ineffaceable possession: to
attack, call in question, or repudiate them, was a task painful even to
undertake, and far beyond the power of any one to accomplish.
[873] It is curious to see that some of the most recondite
doctrines of the Pythagorean philosophy were actually brought
before the general Syracusan public in the comedies of
Epicharmus: "In comœdiis suis personas sæpe ita colloqui fecit,
ut sententias Pythagoricas et in universum sublimia vitæ præcepta
immisceret" (Grysar, De Doriensium Comœdiâ, p. 111, Col. 1828).
The fragments preserved in Diogen. Laërt. (iii. 9-17) present
both criticisms upon the Hesiodic doctrine of a primæval chaos,
and an exposition of the archetypal and immutable ideas (as
opposed to the fluctuating phænomena of sense) which Plato
afterwards adopted and systematized.
Epicharmus seems to have combined with this abstruse philosophy
a strong vein of comic shrewdness and some turn to scepticism
(Cicero, Epistol. ad Attic. i. 19): "ut crebro mihi vafer ille
Siculus Epicharmus insusurret cantilenam suam." Clemens Alex.
Strom. v. p. 258. Νᾶφε καὶ μέμνασ᾽ ἀπιστεῖν· ἄρθρα ταῦτα τῶν
φρενῶν. Ζῶμεν ἀριθμῷ καὶ λογισμῷ· ταῦτα γὰρ σώζει βροτοὺς. Also
his contemptuous ridicule of the prophetesses of his time who
cheated foolish women out of their money, pretending to universal
knowledge, καὶ πάντα γιγνώσκοντι τῷ τηνᾶν λόγῳ (ap Polluc. ix.
81). See, about Epicharmus. O. Müller, Dorians, iv. 7, 4.
These dramas seem to have been exhibited at Syracuse between
480-460 B. C., anterior even to Chionidês and Magnês at Athens
(Aristot. Poet. c. 3): he says ~πολλῷ~ πρότερος, which can hardly
be literally exact. The critics of the Horatian age looked upon
Epicharmus as the prototype of Plautus (Hor. Epistol. ii. 1. 58).
[874] The third book of the republic of Plato is particularly
striking in reference to the use of the poets in education:
see also his treatise De Legg. vii. p. 810-811. Some teachers
made their pupils learn whole poets by heart (ὅλους ποιητὰς
ἐκμανθάνων), others preferred extracts and selections.
For these reasons the anti-mythic vein of criticism was of no effect
as a destroying force, but nevertheless its dissolving decomposing
and transforming influence was very considerable. To accommodate the
ancient mythes to an improved tone of sentiment and a newly created
canon of credibility, was a function which even the wisest Greeks
did not disdain, and which occupied no small proportion of the whole
intellectual activity of the nation.
The mythes were looked at from a point of view completely foreign to
the reverential curiosity and literal imaginative faith of the Homeric
man; they were broken up and recast in order to force them into new
moulds such as their authors had never conceived. We may distinguish
four distinct classes of minds, in the literary age now under
examination, as having taken them in hand—the poets, the logographers,
the philosophers, and the historians.
With the poets and logographers, the mythical persons are real
predecessors, and the mythical world an antecedent fact; but it is
divine and heroic reality, not human; the present is only half-brother
of the past (to borrow[875] an illustration from Pindar in his allusion
to gods and men), remotely and generically, but not closely and
specifically, analogous to it. As a general habit, the old feelings
and the old unconscious faith, apart from all proof or evidence,
still remain in their minds; but recent feelings have grown up which
compel them to omit, to alter, sometimes even to reject and condemn,
particular narratives.
[875] Pindar, Nem. vi. 1. Compare Simonidês, Fragm. 1 (Gaisford).
Pindar repudiates some stories and transforms others, because they
are inconsistent with his conceptions of the gods. Thus he formally
protests against the tale that Pelops had been killed and served up at
table by his father, for the immortal gods to eat; he shrinks from the
idea of imputing to them so horrid an appetite; he pronounces the tale
to have been originally fabricated by a slanderous neighbor. Nor can
he bring himself to recount the quarrels between different gods.[876]
The amours of Zeus and Apollo are no way displeasing to him; but he
occasionally suppresses some of the simple details of the old mythe,
as deficient in dignity: thus, according to the Hesiodic narrative,
Apollo was informed by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Korônis:
but the mention of the raven did not appear to Pindar consistent
with the majesty of the god, and he therefore wraps up the mode of
detection in vague and mysterious language.[877] He feels considerable
repugnance to the character of Odysseus, and intimates more than once
that Homer has unduly exalted him, by force of poetical artifice.
With the character of the Æakid Ajax, on the other hand, he has the
deepest sympathy, as well as with his untimely and inglorious death,
occasioned by the undeserved preference of a less worthy rival.[878]
He appeals for his authority usually to the Muse, but sometimes to
"ancient sayings of men," accompanied with a general allusion to
story-tellers and bards,—admitting, however, that these stories
present great discrepancy, and sometimes that they are false.[879]
Yet the marvellous and the supernatural afford no ground whatever for
rejecting a story: Pindar makes an express declaration to this effect
in reference to the romantic adventures of Perseus and the Gorgon's
head.[880] He treats even those mythical characters, which conflict
the most palpably with positive experience, as connected by a real
genealogical thread with the world before him. Not merely the heroes
of Troy and Thêbes, and the demigod seamen of Jasôn and the ship Argô,
but also the Centaur Cheirôn, the hundred-headed Typhôs, the giant
Alkyoneus, Antæus, Bellerophôn and Pegasus, the Chimæra, the Amazons
and the Hyperboreans—all appear painted on the same canvas, and touched
with the same colors, as the men of the recent and recorded past,
Phalaris and Krœsus; only they are thrown back to a greater distance
in the perspective.[881] The heroic ancestors of those great Æginetan,
Thessalian, Thêban, Argeian, etc. families, whose present members the
poet celebrates for their agonistic victories, sympathize with the
exploits and second the efforts of their descendants: the inestimable
value of a privileged breed and of the stamp of nature is powerfully
contrasted with the impotence of unassisted teaching and practice.[882]
The power and skill of the Argeian Theæus and his relatives as
wrestlers, are ascribed partly to the fact that their ancestors
Pamphaês in aforetime had hospitably entertained the Tyndarids Kastôr
and Pollux.[883] Perhaps however the strongest proof of the sincerity
of Pindar's mythical faith is afforded when he notices a guilty
incident with shame and repugnance, but with an unwilling confession of
its truth, as in the case of the fratricide committed on Phôkus by his
brothers Pêleus and Telamôn.[884]
[876] Pindar, Olymp. i. 30-55; ix. 32-45.
[877] Pyth. iii. 25. See the allusions to Semelê, Alkmêna, and
Danaê, Pyth. iii. 98; Nem. x. 10. Compare also _supra_, chap. ix.
p. 245.
[878] Pindar, Nem. vii. 20-30; viii. 23-31. Isthm. iii. 50-60.
It seems to be sympathy for Ajax, in odes addressed to noble
Æginetan victors, which induces him thus to depreciate Odysseus;
for he eulogizes Sisyphus, specially on account of his cunning
and resources (Olymp. xiii. 50) in the ode addressed to Xenophôn
the Corinthian.
[879] Olymp. i. 28; Nem. viii. 20; Pyth. i. 93; Olymp. vii. 55;
Nem. vi. 43. φάντι δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων παλαιαὶ ῥήσιες, etc.
[880] Pyth. x. 49. Compare Pyth. xii. 11-22.
[881] Pyth. i. 17; iii. 4-7; iv. 12; viii. 16. Nem. iv. 27-32;
v. 89. Isthm. v. 31; vi. 44-48. Olymp. iii. 17; viii. 63; xiii.
61-87.
[882] Nem. iii. 39; v. 40. συγγενὴς εὐδοξία—πότμος συγγενής; v.
8. Olymp. ix. 103. Pindar seems to introduce φύᾳ in cases where
Homer would have mentioned the divine assistance.
[883] Nem. x. 37-51. Compare the family legend of the Athenian
Dêmocrates, in Plato, Lysis, p. 295.
[884] Nem. v. 12-16.
Æschylus and Sophoklês exhibit the same spontaneous and uninquiring
faith as Pindar in the legendary antiquities of Greece, taken as a
whole; but they allow themselves greater license as to the details. It
was indispensable to the success of their compositions that they should
recast and group anew the legendary events, preserving the names and
general understood relation of those characters whom they introduced.
The demand for novelty of combination increased with the multiplication
of tragic spectacles at Athens: moreover the feelings of the Athenians,
ethical as well as political, had become too critical to tolerate the
literal reproduction of many among the ancient stories.
Both of them exalted rather than lowered the dignity of the mythical
world, as something divine and heroic rather than human. The
Promêtheus of Æschylus is a far more exalted conception than his
keen-witted namesake in Hesiod, and the more homely details of
the ancient Thêbaïs and Œdipodia were in like manner modified by
Sophoklês.[885] The religious agencies of the old epic are constantly
kept prominent, and the paternal curse,—the wrath of deceased persons
against those from whom they have sustained wrong,—the judgments of
the Erinnys against guilty or foredoomed persons, sometimes inflicted
directly, sometimes brought about through dementation of the sufferer
himself (like the Homeric Atê),—are frequent in their tragedies.[886]
[885] See above, chap. xiv. p. 368. on the Legend of the Siege of
Thêbes.
[886] The curse of Œdipus is the determining force in the
Sept. ad Thêb., Ἀρά τ᾽, Ἐριννὺς πατρὸς ἡ μεγασθενής (v. 70);
it reappears several times in the course of the drama, with
particular solemnity in the mouth of Eteoklês (695-709, 725, 785,
etc.); he yields to it as an irresistible force, as carrying the
family to ruin:—
Ἐπεὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα κάρτ᾽ ἐπισπέρχει θεὸς,
Ἴτω κατ᾽ οὖρον, κῦμα Κωκυτοῦ λαχὸν,
Φοίβῳ στυγηθὲν πᾶν τὸ Λαΐου γένος.
· · · · ·
Φίλου γὰρ ἐχθρά μοι πατρὸς τέλει᾽ ἄρα
Ξηροῖς ἀκλαύστοις ὄμμασιν προσιζάνει, etc.
So again at the opening of the Agamemnôn, the μνάμων μῆνις
τεκνόποινος (v. 155) and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia are dwelt
upon as leaving behind them an avenging doom upon Agamemnôn,
though he took precautions for gagging her mouth during the
sacrifice and thus preventing her from giving utterance to
imprecations—Φθόγγον ἀραῖον οἴκοις, Βίᾳ χαλινῶν τ᾽ ἀναύδῳ μένει
(κατασχεῖν), v. 346. The Erinnys awaits Agamemnôn even at the
moment of his victorious consummation at Troy (467; compare
762-990, 1336-1433): she is most to be dreaded after great
good fortune: she enforces the curse which ancestral crimes
have brought upon the house of Atreus—πρώταρχος ἄτη—παλαιαὶ
ἁμαρτίαι δόμων (1185-1197, Choëph. 692)—the curse imprecated by
the outraged Thyestês (1601). In the Choëphoræ, Apollo menaces
Orestês with the wrath of his deceased father, and all the
direful visitations of the Erinnyes, unless he undertakes to
revenge the murder (271-296). Αἶσα and Ἐριννὺς bring on blood
for blood (647). But the moment that Orestês, placed between
these conflicting obligations (925), has achieved it, he becomes
himself the victim of the Erinnyes, who drive him mad even at
the end of the Choëphoræ (ἕως δ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔμφρων εἰμὶ, 1026), and who
make their appearance bodily, and pursue him throughout the third
drama of this fearful trilogy. The Eidôlon of Klytæmnêstra impels
them to vengeance (Eumenid. 96) and even spurs them on when they
appear to relax. Apollo conveys Orestês to Athens, whither the
Erinnyes pursue him, and prosecute him before the judgment-seat
of the goddess Athênê, to whom they submit the award; Apollo
appearing as his defender. The debate between "the daughters of
Night" and the god, accusing and defending, is eminently curious
(576-730): the Erinnyes are deeply mortified at the humiliation
put upon them when Orestês is acquitted, but Athênê at length
reconciles them, and a covenant is made whereby they become
protectresses of Attica, accepting of a permanent abode and
solemn worship (1006): Orestês returns to Argos, and promises
that even in his tomb he will watch that none of his descendants
shall ever injure the land of Attica (770). The solemn trial and
acquittal of Orestês formed the consecrating legend of the Hill
and Judicature of Areiopagus.
This is the only complete trilogy of Æschylus which we possess,
and the avenging Erinnyes (416) are the movers throughout the
whole—unseen in the first two dramas, visible and appalling in
the third. And the appearance of Cassandra under the actual
prophetic fever in the first, contributes still farther to impart
to it a coloring different from common humanity.
The general view of the movement of the Oresteia given in Welcker
(Æschyl. Trilogie, p. 445) appears to me more conformable to
Hellenic ideas than that of Klausen (Theologumena Æschyli, pp.
157-169), whose valuable collection and comparison of passages
is too much affected, both here and elsewhere, by the desire to
bring the agencies of the Greek mythical world into harmony with
what a religious mind of the present day would approve. Moreover,
he sinks the personality of Athênê too much in the supreme
authority of Zeus (p. 158-168).
Æschylus in two of his remaining pieces brings forward the gods as
the chief personages, and far from sharing the objection of Pindar
to dwell upon dissensions of the gods, he introduces Promêtheus and
Zeus in the one, Apollo and the Eumenidês in the other, in marked
opposition. The dialogue, first superinduced by him upon the primitive
Chorus, gradually became the most important portion of the drama, and
is more elaborated in Sophoklês than in Æschylus. Even in Sophoklês,
however, it still generally retains its ideal majesty as contrasted
with the rhetorical and forensic tone which afterwards crept in; it
grows out of the piece, and addresses itself to the emotions more than
to the reason of the audience. Nevertheless, the effect of Athenian
political discussion and democratical feeling is visible in both these
dramatists. The idea of rights and legitimate privileges as opposed to
usurping force, is applied by Æschylus even to the society of the gods:
the Eumenidês accuse Apollo of having, with the insolence of youthful
ambition, "ridden down" their old prerogatives[887]—while the Titan
Promêtheus, the champion of suffering humanity against the unfriendly
dispositions of Zeus, ventures to depict the latter as a recent usurper
reigning only by his superior strength, exalted by one successful
revolution, and destined at some future time to be overthrown by
another,—a fate which cannot be averted except through warnings
communicable only by Promêtheus himself.[888]
[887] Eumenidês, 150.—
Ἰὼ παῖ Διὸς, ἐπίκλοπος πέλει,
Νέος δὲ γραίας δαίμονας καθιππάσω, etc.
The same metaphor again, v. 731. Æschylus seems to delight in
contrasting the young and the old gods: compare 70-162, 882.
The Erinnyes tell Apollo that he assumes functions which do not
belong to him, and will thus desecrate those which do belong to
him (715-754):—
Ἀλλ᾽ αἱματηρὰ πράγματ᾽, ~οὐ λαχὼν~, σέβεις,
Μαντεῖα δ᾽ οὐκ ἔθ᾽ ἁγνὰ μαντεύσει μένων.
The refusal of the king Pelasgos, in the Supplices, to undertake
what he feels to be the sacred duty of protecting the suppliant
Danaïdes, without first submitting the matter to his people
and obtaining their expressed consent, and the fear which he
expresses of their blame (κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς γὰρ φιλαίτιος λέως), are
more forcibly set forth than an old epic poet would probably have
thought necessary (see Supplices, 369, 397, 485, 519). The solemn
wish to exclude both anarchy and despotism from Athens bears
still more the mark of political feeling of the time—μήτ᾽ ἄναρχον
μήτε δεσποτουμένον (Eumenid. 527-696).
[888] Promêtheus, 35, 151, 170, 309, 524, 910, 940, 956.
It is commonly understood that Æschylus disapproved of the march of
democracy at Athens during his later years, and that the Eumenidês
is intended as an indirect manifestation in favor of the senate of
Areiopagus. Without inquiring at present whether such a special
purpose can be distinctly made out, we may plainly see that the poet
introduces, into the relations of the gods with each other, a feeling
of political justice, arising out of the times in which he lived and
the debates of which he was a witness. But though Æschylus incurred
reproaches of impiety from Plato, and seemingly also from the Athenian
public, for particular speeches and incidents in his tragedies,[889]
and though he does not adhere to the received vein of religious
tradition with the same strictness as Sophoklês—yet the ascendency
and interference of the gods is never out of sight, and the solemnity
with which they are represented, set off by a bold, figurative, and
elliptical style of expression (often but imperfectly intelligible to
modern readers), reaches its maximum in his tragedies. As he throws
round the gods a kind of airy grandeur, so neither do his men or
heroes appear like tenants of the common earth: the mythical world from
which he borrows his characters is peopled only with "the immediate
seed of the gods, in close contact with Zeus, in whom the divine blood
has not yet had time to degenerate:"[890] his individuals are taken,
not from the iron race whom Hesiod acknowledges with shame as his
contemporaries, but from the extinct heroic race which had fought at
Troy and Thêbes. It is to them that his conceptions aspire, and he is
even chargeable with frequent straining, beyond the limits of poetical
taste, to realize his picture. If he does not consistently succeed in
it, the reason is because consistency in such a matter is unattainable,
since, after all, the analogies of common humanity, the only materials
which the most creative imagination has to work upon, obtrude
themselves involuntarily, and the lineaments of the man are thus seen
even under a dress which promises superhuman proportions.
[889] Plato, Republ. ii. 381-383; compare Æschyl. Fragment. 159,
ed. Dindorf. He was charged also with having divulged in some of
his plays secret matters of the mysteries of Dêmêtêr, but is said
to have excused himself by alleging ignorance: he was not aware
that what he had said was comprised in the mysteries (Aristot.
Ethic. Nicom. iii. 2; Clemens Alex. Strom. ii. p. 387); the story
is different again in Ælian, V. H. v. 19.
How little can be made out distinctly respecting this last
accusation may be seen in Lobeck, Aglaopham. p. 81.
Cicero (Tusc. Dis. ii. 10) calls Æschylus "almost a Pythagorean:"
upon what the epithet is founded we do not know.
There is no evidence to prove to us that the Promêtheus Vinctus
was considered as impious by the public before whom it was
represented; but its obvious meaning has been so regarded by
modern critics, who resort to many different explanations of it,
in order to prove that when properly construed it is not impious.
But if we wish to ascertain what Æschylus really meant, we ought
not to consult the religious ideas of modern times; we have no
test except what we know of the poet's own time and that which
had preceded him. The explanations given by the ablest critics
seem generally to exhibit a predetermination to bring out Zeus
as a just, wise, merciful, and all-powerful Being; and all, in
one way or another, distort the figures, alter the perspective,
and give far-fetched interpretations of the meaning, of this
striking drama, which conveys an impression directly contrary
(see Welcker, Trilogie, Æsch. p. 90-117, with the explanation
of Dissen there given; Klausen, Theologum. Æsch. p. 140-154;
Schömann, in his recent translation of the play, and the
criticism on that Translation in the Wiener Jahrbücher, vol. cix.
1845, p. 245, by F. Ritter). On the other hand, Schutz (Excurs.
ad Prom. Vinct. p. 149) thinks that Æschylus wished by means of
this drama to enforce upon his countrymen the hatred of a despot.
Though I do not agree in this interpretation, it appears to me
less wide of the truth than the forcible methods employed by
others to bring the poet into harmony with their own religious
ideas.
Without presuming to determine whether Æschylus proposed to
himself any special purpose, if we look at the Æschylean
Promêtheus in reference only to ancient ideas, it will be found
to borrow both its characters and all its main circumstances
from the legend in the Hesiodic Theogony. Zeus acquires his
supremacy only by overthrowing Kronos and the Titans; the Titan
god Promêtheus is the pronounced champion of helpless man, and
negotiates with Zeus on their behalf: Zeus wishes to withhold
from them the most essential blessings, which Promêtheus employs
deceit and theft to procure for them, and ultimately with
success; undergoing, however, severe punishment for so doing from
the superior force of Zeus. These are the main features of the
Æschylean Promêtheus, and they are all derived from the legend
as it stands in the Theogony. As for the human race, they are
depicted as abject and helpless in an extreme degree, in Æschylus
even more than in Hesiod: they appear as a race of aboriginal
savages, having the god Promêtheus for their protector.
Æschylus has worked up the old legend, homely and unimpressive as
we read it in Hesiod, into a sublime ideal. We are not to forget
that Promêtheus is not a man, but a god,—the equal of Zeus in
race, though his inferior in power, and belonging to a family of
gods who were once superior to Zeus: he has moreover deserted his
own kindred, and lent all his aid and superior sagacity to Zeus,
whereby chiefly the latter was able to acquire supremacy (this
_last_ circumstance is an addition by Æschylus himself to the
Hesiodic legend). In spite of such essential service, Zeus had
doomed him to cruel punishment, for no other reason than because
he conferred upon helpless man the prime means of continuance and
improvement, thus thwarting the intention of Zeus to extinguish
the race.
Now Zeus, though superior to all the other gods and exercising
general control, was never considered, either in Grecian legend
or in Grecian religious belief, to be superior in so immeasurable
a degree as to supersede all free action and sentiment on the
part of gods less powerful. There were many old legends of
dissension among the gods, and several of disobedience against
Zeus: when a poet chose to dramatize one of these, he might
so turn his composition as to sympathize either with Zeus or
with the inferior god, without in either case shocking the
general religious feeling of the country. And if there ever
was an instance in which preference of the inferior god would
be admissible, it is that of Promêtheus, whose proceedings are
such as to call forth the maximum of human sympathy,—superior
intelligence pitted against superior force, and resolutely
encountering foreknown suffering, for the sole purpose of
rendering inestimable and gratuitous service to mortals.
Of the Promêtheus Solutus, which formed a sequel to the
Promêtheus Vinctus (the entire trilogy is not certainly known),
the fragments preserved are very scanty, and the guesses of
critics as to its plot have little base to proceed upon. They
contend that, in one way or other, the apparent objections which
the Promêth. Vinctus presents against the justice of Zeus were
in the Promêth. Solutus removed. Hermann, in his _Dissertatio
de Æschyli Prometheo Soluto_ (Opuscula, vol. iv. p. 256), calls
this position in question: I transcribe from his Dissertation one
passage, because it contains an important remark in reference
to the manner in which the Greek poets handled their religious
legends: "while they recounted and believed many enormities
respecting individual gods, they always described the Godhead in
the abstract as holy and faultless." ...
"Immo illud admirari oportet, quod quum de singulis Diis
indignissima quæque crederent, tamen ubi sine certo nomine Deum
dicebant, immunem ab omni vitio, summâque sanctitate præditum
intelligebant. Illam igitur Jovis sævitiam ut excusent defensores
Trilogiæ, et jure punitum volunt Prometheum—et in sequente fabulâ
reconciliato Jove, restitutam arbitrantur divinam justitiam. Quo
invento, vereor ne non optime dignitati consuluerint supremi
Deorum, quem decuerat potius non sævire omnino, quam placari eâ
lege, ut alius Promethei vice lueret."
[890] Æschyl. Fragment. 146, Dindorf; ap. Plato. Repub. iii. p.
391; compare Strabo, xii. p. 580.—
... οἱ θεῶν ἀγχίσποροι
Οἱ Ζηνὸς ἐγγὺς, οἷς ἐν Ἰδαίῳ πάγῳ
Διὸς πατρῴου βωμός ἐστ᾽ ἐν αἰθέρι,
Κοὔπω σφιν ἐξίτηλον αἷμα δαιμόνων.
There is one real exception to this statement—the Persæ—which
is founded upon an event of recent occurrence; and one apparent
exception—the Promêtheus Vinctus. But in that drama no individual
mortal is made to appear; we can hardly consider Iô as an
ἐφήμερος (253).
Sophoklês, the most illustrious ornament of Grecian tragedy, dwells
upon the same heroic characters, and maintains their grandeur, on the
whole, with little abatement, combining with it a far better dramatic
structure, and a wider appeal to human sympathies. Even in Sophoklês,
however, we find indications that an altered ethical feeling and a
more predominant sense of artistic perfection are allowed to modify
the harsher religious agencies of the old epic; occasional misplaced
effusions[891] of rhetoric, as well as of didactic prolixity, may
also be detected. It is Æschylus, not Sophoklês, who forms the marked
antithesis to Euripidês; it is Æschylus, not Sophoklês, to whom
Aristophanês awards the prize of tragedy, as the poet who assigns most
perfectly to the heroes of the past those weighty words, imposing
equipments, simplicity of great deeds with little talk, and masculine
energy superior to the corruptions of Aphroditê, which beseem the
comrades of Agamemnôn and Adrastus.[892]
[891] For the characteristics of Æschylus see Aristophan. Ran.
755, _ad fin. passim_. The competition between Æschylus and
Euripidês turns upon γνῶμαι ἀγαθαὶ, 1497; the weight and majesty
of the words, 1362; πρῶτος τῶν Ἑλλήνων πυργώσας ῥήματα σεμνά,
1001, 921, 930 ("sublimis et gravis et grandiloquus sæpe usque ad
vitium," Quintil. x. 1); the imposing appearance of his heroes,
such as Memnôn and Cycnus, 961; their reserve in speech, 908; his
dramas "full of Arês" and his lion-hearted chiefs, inspiring the
auditors with fearless spirit in defence of their country,—1014,
1019, 1040; his contempt of feminine tenderness, 1042.—
ÆSCH. Οὐδ᾽ οἶδ᾽ οὐδεὶς ἥντιν᾽ ἐρῶσαν πώποτ᾽ ἐποίησα γυναῖκα.
EURIP. Μὰ Δί᾽, οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν τῆς Ἀφροδίτης οὐδέν σοι.
ÆSCH. μηδέ γ᾽ ἐπείη·
Ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ σοί τοι καὶ τοῖς σοῖσιν πολλὴ πολλοῦ ᾽πικάθοιτο.
To the same general purpose Nubes (1347-1356), composed so many
years earlier. The weight and majesty of the Æschylean heroes
(βάρος, τὸ μεγαλοπρεπὲς) is dwelt upon in the life of Æschylus,
and Sophoklês is said to have derided it—Ὥσπερ γὰρ ὁ Σοφοκλῆς
ἔλεγε, τὸν Αἰσχύλου διαπεπαιχὼς ~ὄγκον~, etc. (Plutarch, De
Profect. in Virt. Sent. c. 7), unless we are to understand this
as a mistake of Plutarch quoting Sophoklês instead of Euripidês,
as he speaks in the Frogs of Aristophanês, which is the opinion
both of Lessing in his Life of Sophoklês and of Welcker (Æschyl.
Trilogie, p. 525).
[892] See above, Chapters xiv. and xv.
Æschylus seems to have been a greater innovator as to the matter
of the mythes than either Sophoklês or Euripidês (Dionys. Halic.
Judic. de Vett. Script. p. 422, Reisk.). For the close adherence
of Sophoklês to the Homeric epic, see Athena, vii. p. 277;
Diogen. Laërt. iv. 20; Suidas, v. Πολέμων. Æschylus puts into
the mouth of the Eumenidês a serious argument derived from the
behavior of Zeus in chaining his father Kronos (Eumen. 640).
How deeply this feeling, of the heroic character of the mythical
world, possessed the Athenian mind, may be judged by the bitter
criticisms made on Euripidês, whose compositions were pervaded, partly
by ideas of physical philosophy learnt under Anaxagoras, partly by
the altered tone of education and the wide diffusion of practical
eloquence, forensic as well as political, at Athens.[893] While
Aristophanês assails Euripidês as the representative of this "young
Athens," with the utmost keenness of sarcasm,—other critics also
concur in designating him as having vulgarized the mythical heroes,
and transformed them into mere characters of common life,—loquacious,
subtle, and savoring of the market-place.[894] In some of his plays,
sceptical expressions and sentiments were introduced, derived from his
philosophical studies, sometimes confounding two or three distinct gods
into one, sometimes translating the personal Zeus into a substantial
Æthêr with determinate attributes. He put into the mouths of some of
his unprincipled dramatic characters, apologetic speeches which were
denounced as ostentatious sophistry, and as setting out a triumphant
case for the criminal.[895] His thoughts, his words, and the rhythm
of his choric songs, were all accused of being deficient in dignity
and elevation. The mean attire and miserable attitude in which he
exhibited Œneus, Têlephus, Thyestês, Inô, and other heroic characters,
were unmercifully derided,[896] though it seems that their position and
circumstances had always been painfully melancholy; but the effeminate
pathos which Euripidês brought so nakedly into the foreground, was
accounted unworthy of the majesty of a legendary hero. And he incurred
still greater obloquy on another point, on which he is allowed even
by his enemies to have only reproduced in substance the preëxisting
tales,—the illicit and fatal passion depicted in several of his female
characters, such as Phædra and Sthenobœa. His opponents admitted that
these stories were true, but contended that they ought to be kept back
and not produced upon the stage,—a proof both of the continued mythical
faith and of the more sensitive ethical criticism of his age.[897] The
marriage of the six daughters to the six sons of Æolus is of Homeric
origin, and stands now, though briefly stated, in the Odyssey: but the
incestuous passion of Macareus and Canacê, embodied by Euripidês[898]
in the lost tragedy called _Æolus_, drew upon him severe censure.
Moreover, he often disconnected the horrors of the old legends with
those religious agencies by which they had been originally forced on,
prefacing them by motives of a more refined character, which carried
no sense of awful compulsion: thus the considerations by which the
Euripidean Alkmæôn was reduced to the necessity of killing his mother
appeared to Aristotle ridiculous.[899] After the time of this great
poet, his successors seem to have followed him in breathing into their
characters the spirit of common life, but the names and plot were still
borrowed from the stricken mythical families of Tantalus, Kadmus, etc.:
and the heroic exaltation of all the individual personages introduced,
as contrasted with the purely human character of the Chorus, is still
numbered by Aristotle among the essential points of the theory of
tragedy.[900]
[893] See Valckenaer, Diatribe in Euripid. Fragm. capp. 5 and 6.
The fourth and fifth lectures among the _Dramatische Vorlesungen_
of August Wilhelm Schlegel depict both justly and eloquently the
difference between Æschylus, Sophoklês and Euripidês, especially
on this point of the gradual sinking of the mythical colossus
into an ordinary man; about Euripidês especially in lecture 5,
vol. i. p. 206, ed. Heidelberg 1809.
[894] Aristot. Poetic. c. 46. Οἷον καὶ Σοφοκλῆς ἔφη, αὐτὸς μὲν
οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδης δὲ, οἷοί εἰσι.
The Ranæ and Acharneis of Aristophanês exhibit fully the
reproaches urged against Euripidês: the language put into
the mouth of Euripidês in the former play (vv. 935-977)
illustrates specially the point here laid down. Plutarch (De
Gloriâ Atheniens. c. 5) contrasts ἡ Εὐριπίδου σοφία καὶ ἡ
Σοφοκλεοῦς λογιότης. Sophoklês either adhered to the old mythes
or introduced alterations into them in a spirit comformable to
their original character, while Euripidês refined upon them. The
comment of Dêmêtrius Phalereus connects τὸ λόγιον expressly with
the maintenance of the dignity of the tales. Ἄρξομαι δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ
μεγαλοπρεποῦς, ὅπερ νῦν ~λόγιον~ ὀνομάζουσιν (c. 38).
[895] Aristophan. Ran. 770, 887, 1066.
Euripidês says to Æschylus, in regard to the language employed by
both of them,—
Ἦν οὖν σὺ λέγῃς Λυκαβήττους
Καὶ Παρνάσσων ἡμῖν μεγέθη, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶ τὸ χρηστὰ διδάσκειν,
Ὃν χρὴ φράζειν ἀνθρωπείως;
Æschylus replies,—
Ἀλλ᾽, ὦ κακόδαιμον, ἀνάγκη
Μεγάλων γνωμῶν καὶ διανοιῶν ἴσα καὶ τὰ ῥήματα τίκτειν.
Κἄλλως εἰκὸς τοὺς ~ἡμιθέους~ τοῖς ῥήμασι μείζοσι χρῆσθαι·
Καὶ γὰρ τοῖς ἱματίοις ἡμῶν χρῶνται πολὺ σεμνοτέροισι.
Ἃ ᾽μοῦ χρηστῶς καταδείξαντος διελυμήνω συ.
EURIP. Τί δράσας;
ÆSCH. Πρῶτον μὲν τοὺς βασιλεύοντας ῥάκι᾽ ἀμπίσχων, ἵν᾽ ἐλεινοὶ
Τοῖς ἀνθρώποις φαίνοιντ᾽ εἶναι.
For the character of the language and measures of Euripidês,
as represented by Æschylus, see also v. 1297, and Pac. 527.
Philosophical discussion was introduced by Euripidês (Dionys.
Hal. Ars Rhetor. viii. 10-ix. 11) about the Melanippê, where
the doctrine of prodigies (τέρας) appears to have been argued.
Quintilian (x. 1) remarks that to young beginners in judicial
pleading, the study of Euripidês was much more specially
profitable than that of Sophoklês: compare Dio Chrysostom, Orat.
xviii. vol. i. p. 477, Reisk.
In Euripidês the heroes themselves sometimes delivered
moralizing discourses:—εἰσάγων τὸν Βελλεροφόντην γνωμολογοῦντα
(Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. Eurip. Stheneb. p. 782). Compare
the fragments of his Bellerophôn (15-25, Matthiæ), and of his
Chrysippus (7, _ib._). A striking story is found in Seneca,
Epistol. 115; and Plutarch, de Audiend. Poetis, c. 4. t. i. p.
70, Wytt.
[896] Aristophan. Ran. 840.—
ὦ στωμυλιοσυλλεκτάδη
Καὶ πτωχοποιὲ καὶ ῥακιοσυῤῥαπτάδη·
See also Aristophan. Acharn. 385-422. For an unfavorable
criticism upon such proceeding, see Aristot. Poet. 27.
[897] Aristophan. Ran. 1050.—
EURIP. Πότερον δ᾽ ~οὐκ ὄντα λόγον~ τοῦτον περὶ τῆς Φαίδρας ξυνέθηκα;
ÆSCH. Μὰ Δί᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ὄντ᾽· ἀλλ᾽ ἀποκρύπτειν χρὴ τὸ πονηρὸν τόν γε ποιητὴν,
Καὶ μὴ παράγειν μηδὲ διδάσκειν.
In the Hercules Furens, Euripidês puts in relief and even
exaggerates the worst elements of the ancient mythes: the
implacable hatred of Hêrê towards Hêraklês is pushed so far as to
deprive him of his reason (by sending down Iris and the unwilling
Λύσσα), and thus intentionally to drive him to slay his wife and
children with his own hands.
[898] Aristoph. Ran. 849, 1041, 1080; Thesmophor. 547; Nubes,
1354. Grauert, De Mediâ Græcorum Comœdiâ in Rheinisch. Museum,
2nd Jahrs. 1 Heft, p. 51. It suited the plan of the drama of
Æolus, as composed by Euripidês, to place in the mouth of
Macareus a formal recommendation of incestuous marriages:
probably this contributed much to offend the Athenian public. See
Dionys. Hal. Rhetor. ix. p. 355.
About the liberty of intermarriage among relatives, indicated in
Homer, parents and children being alone excepted, see Terpstra,
Antiquitas Homerica, cap. xiii. p. 104.
Ovid, whose poetical tendencies led him chiefly to copy
Euripidês, observes (Trist. ii. 1, 380)—
"Omne genus scripti gravitate Tragœdia vincit,
Hæc quoque materiam semper amoris habet.
Nam quid in Hippolyto nisi cæcæ flamma novercæ?
Nobilis est Canace fratris amore sui."
This is the reverse of the truth in regard to Æschylus and
Sophoklês, and only very partially true in respect to Euripidês.
[899] Aristot. Ethic. Nicom. iii. 1, 8. καὶ γὰρ τὸν Εὐριπίδου
Ἀλκμαίωνα γελοῖα φαίνεται τὰ ἀναγκάσαντα μητροκτονῆσαι (In the
lost tragedy called Ἀλκμαίων ὁ διὰ Ψωφῖδος).
[900] Aristot. Poetic. 26-27. And in his Problemata also, in
giving the reason why the Hypo-Dorian and Hypo-Phrygian musical
modes were never assigned to the Chorus, he says—
Ταῦτα δὲ ἄμφω χόρῳ μὲν ἀναρμοστὰ, τοῖς δὲ ἀπὸ σκηνῆς οἰκειότερα.
Ἐκεῖνοι μὲν γὰρ ἡρώων μίμηται· οἱ δὲ ἡγεμόνες τῶν ἀρχαίων μόνοι
ἦσαν ἥρωες, οἱ δὲ λαοὶ ἄνθρωποι, ὧν ἐστὶν ὁ χόρος. Διὸ καὶ
ἁρμόζει αὐτῷ τὸ γοερὸν καὶ ἡσύχιον ἦθος καὶ μέλος· ἀνθρωπικὰ γάρ.
The tendency then of Athenian tragedy—powerfully manifested in
Æschylus, and never wholly lost—was to uphold an unquestioning faith
and a reverential estimate of the general mythical world and its
personages, but to treat the particular narratives rather as matter
for the emotions than as recitals of actual fact. The logographers
worked along with them to the first of these two ends, but not
to the second. Their grand object was, to cast the mythes into a
continuous readable series, and they were in consequence compelled to
make selection between inconsistent or contradictory narratives; to
reject some narratives as false, and to receive others as true. But
their preference was determined more by their sentiments as to what
was appropriate, than by any pretended historical test. Pherekydês,
Akusilaus and Hellanikus[901] did not seek to banish miraculous or
fantastic incidents from the mythical world; they regarded it as
peopled with loftier beings, and expected to find in it phænomena
not paralleled in their own degenerate days. They reproduced the
fables as they found them in the poets, rejecting little except the
discrepancies, and producing ultimately what they believed to be
not only a continuous but an exact and trustworthy history of the
past—wherein they carry indeed their precision to such a length, that
Hellanikus gives the year, and even the day of the capture of Troy.[902]
[901] See Müller, Prolegom. zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Mythologie, c. iii. p. 93.
[902] Hellanic. Fragment. 143, ed. Didot.
Hekatæus of Milêtus (500 B. C.), anterior to Pherekydês and Hellanikus,
is the earliest writer in whom we can detect any disposition to
disallow the prerogative and specialty of the mythes, and to soften
down their characteristic prodigies, some of which however still find
favor in his eyes, as in the case of the speaking ram who carried
Phryxus over the Hellespont. He pronounced the Grecian fables to be
"many and ridiculous;" whether from their discrepancies or from their
intrinsic improbabilities we do not know: and we owe to him the first
attempt to force them within the limits of historical credibility; as
where he transforms the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of Hadês, into
a serpent inhabiting a cavern on Cape Tænarus—and Geryôn of Erytheia
into a king of Epirus rich in herds of oxen.[903] Hekatæus traced the
genealogy of himself and the gens to which he belonged through a line
of fifteen progenitors up to an initial god,[904]—the clearest proof
both of his profound faith in the reality of the mythical world, and
of his religious attachment to it as the point of junction between the
human and the divine personality.
[903] Hekatæi Fragm. ed. Didot. 332, 346, 349; Schol. Apollôn.
Rhod. 1. 256; Athenæ. ii. p. 133; Skylax, c. 26.
Perhaps Hekatæus was induced to look for Erytheia in Epirus by
the brick-red color of the earth there in many places, noticed
by Pouqueville and other travellers (Voyage dans la Grèce,
vol. ii. 248: see Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, vol. i. p.
222). Ἑκαταῖος ὁ Μιλήσιος—λόγον εὖρεν εἰκότα, Pausan. iii. 25,
4. He seems to have written expressly concerning the fabulous
Hyperboreans, and to have upheld the common faith against doubts
which had begun to rise in his time: the derisory notice of
Hyperboreans in Herodotus is probably directed against Hekatæus,
iv. 36; Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 675; Diodôr. ii. 47.
It is maintained by Mr. Clinton (Fast. Hell. ii. p. 480) and
others (see not. ad Fragment. Hecatæi, p. 30, ed. Didot), that
the work on the Hyperboreans was written by Hekatæus of Abdêra, a
literary Greek of the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus—not by Hekatæus
of Milêtus. I do not concur in this opinion. I think it much more
probable that the earlier Hekatæus was the author spoken of.
The distinguished position held by Hekatæus at Milêtus is marked
not only by the notice which Herodotus takes of his opinions on
public matters, but also by his negotiation with the Persian
satrap Artaphernes on behalf of his countrymen (Diodôr. Excerpt.
xlvii. p. 41, ed. Dindorf).
[904] Herodot. ii. 143.
We have next to consider the historians, especially Herodotus and
Thucydidês. Like Hekatæus, Thucydidês belonged to a gens which traced
its descent from Ajax, and through Ajax to Æakus and Zeus.[905]
Herodotus modestly implies that he himself had no such privilege to
boast of.[906] Their curiosity respecting the past had no other
materials to work upon except the mythes; but these they found already
cast by the logographers into a continuous series, and presented as an
aggregate of antecedent history, chronologically deduced from the times
of the gods. In common with the body of the Greeks, both Herodotus
and Thucydidês had imbibed that complete and unsuspecting belief in
the general reality of mythical antiquity, which was interwoven with
the religion and the patriotism, and all the public demonstrations of
the Hellenic world. To acquaint themselves with the genuine details
of this foretime, was an inquiry highly interesting to them: but the
increased positive tendencies of their age, as well as their own habits
of personal investigation, had created in them an _historical sense_
in regard to the past as well as to the present. Having acquired a
habit of appreciating the intrinsic tests of historical credibility
and probability, they found the particular narratives of the poets and
logographers, inadmissible as a whole even in the eyes of Hekatæus,
still more at variance with their stricter canons of criticism. And we
thus observe in them the constant struggle, as well as the resulting
compromise, between these two opposite tendencies; on one hand a firm
belief in the reality of the mythical world, on the other hand an
inability to accept the details which their only witnesses, the poets
and logographers, told them respecting it.
[905] Marcellin. Vit. Thucyd. init.
[906] Herodot. ii. 143.
Each of them however performed the process in his own way. Herodotus is
a man of deep and anxious religious feeling; he often recognizes the
special judgments of the gods as determining historical events: his
piety is also partly tinged with that mystical vein which the last two
centuries had gradually infused into the religion of the Greeks—for
he is apprehensive of giving offence to the gods by reciting publicly
what he has heard respecting them; he frequently stops short in his
narrative and intimates that there is a sacred legend, but that he will
not tell it: in other cases, where he feels compelled to speak out, he
entreats forgiveness for doing so from the gods and heroes. Sometimes
he will not even mention the name of a god, though he generally
thinks himself authorized to do so, the names being matter of public
notoriety.[907] Such pious reserve, which the open-hearted Herodotus
avowedly proclaims as chaining up his tongue, affords a striking
contrast with the plain-spoken and unsuspecting tone of the ancient
epic, as well as of the popular legends, wherein the gods and their
proceedings were the familiar and interesting subjects of common talk
as well as of common sympathy, without ceasing to inspire both fear and
reverence.
[907] Herodot. ii. 3, 51, 61, 65, 170. He alludes briefly (c.
51) to an ἱρὸς λόγος which was communicated in the Samothracian
mysteries, but he does not mention what it was: also about the
Thesmophoria, or τελετὴ of Dêmêtêr (c. 171).
Καὶ περὶ μὲν τούτων τοσαῦτα ἡμῖν εἰποῦσι, καὶ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν καὶ
ἡρώων εὐμένεια εἴη (c. 45).
Compare similar scruples on the part of Pausanias (viii. 25 and
37).
The passage of Herodotus (ii. 3) is equivocal, and has been
understood in more ways than one (see Lobeck, Aglaopham. p. 1287).
The aversion of Dionysius of Halikarnassus to reveal the divine
secrets is not less powerful (see A. R. i. 67, 68), and Pausanias
_passim_.
Herodotus expressly distinguishes, in the comparison of Polykratês with
Minôs, the human race to which the former belonged, from the divine or
heroic race which comprised the latter.[908] But he has a firm belief
in the authentic personality and parentage of all the names in the
mythes, divine, heroic and human, as well as in the trustworthiness of
their chronology computed by generations. He counts back 1600 years
from his own day to that of Semelê, mother of Dionysus; 900 years to
Hêraklês, and 800 years to Penelopê, the Trojan war being a little
earlier in date.[909] Indeed even the longest of these periods must
have seemed to him comparatively short, seeing that he apparently
accepts the prodigious series of years which the Egyptians professed to
draw from a recorded chronology—17,000 years from their god Hêraklês,
and 15,000 years from their god Osiris or Dionysus, down to their king
Amasis[910] (550 B. C.) So much was his imagination familiarized with
these long chronological computations barren of events, that he treats
Homer and Hesiod as "men of yesterday," though separated from his own
age by an interval which he reckons as four hundred years.[911]
[908] Herod. iii. 122.
[909] Herod. ii. 145.
[910] Herodot. ii. 43-145. Καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶ
ἐπίστασθαι, ἀεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα.
[911] Herodot, ii. 53. μέχρι οὗ πρωήν τε καὶ χθὲς, ὡς εἰπεῖν
λόγῳ. Ἡσίοδον γὰρ καὶ Ὅμηρον ἡλικίην τετρακοσίοισι ἔτεσι δοκέω
μευ πρεσβυτέρους γενέσθαι, καὶ οὐ πλέοσι.
Herodotus had been profoundly impressed with what he saw and heard
in Egypt. The wonderful monuments, the evident antiquity, and the
peculiar civilization of that country, acquired such preponderance in
his mind over his own native legends, that he is disposed to trace
even the oldest religious names or institutions of Greece to Egyptian
or Phœnician original, setting aside in favor of this hypothesis the
Grecian legends of Dionysus and Pan.[912] The oldest Grecian mythical
genealogies are thus made ultimately to lose themselves in Egyptian
or Phœnician antiquity, and in the full extent of these genealogies
Herodotus firmly believes. It does not seem that any doubt had
ever crossed his mind as to the real personality of those who were
named or described in the popular mythes: all of them have once had
reality, either as men, as heroes, or as gods. The eponyms of cities,
dêmes and tribes, are all comprehended in this affirmative category;
the supposition of fictitious personages being apparently never
entertained. Deukaliôn, Hellên, Dôrus,[913]—Iôn, with his four sons,
the eponyms of the old Athenian tribes,[914]—the autochthonous Titakus
and Dekelus,[915]—Danaus, Lynkeus, Perseus, Amphitryôn, Alkmêna, and
Hêraklês,[916]—Talthybius, the heroic progenitor of the privileged
heraldic gens at Sparta,—the Tyndarids and Helena,[917]—Agamemnôn,
Menelaus, and Orestes,[918]—Nestôr and his son Peisistratus,—Asôpus,
Thêbê, and Ægina,—Inachus and Iô, Æêtês and Mêdea,[919]—Melanippus,
Adrastus, and Amphiaräus, as well as Jasôn and the Argô,[920]—all
these are occupants of the real past time, and predecessors of himself
and his contemporaries. In the veins of the Lacedæmonian kings flowed
the blood both of Kadmus and of Danaus, their splendid pedigree being
traceable to both of these great mythical names: Herodotus carries the
lineage up through Hêraklês first to Perseus and Danaê, then through
Danaê to Akrisios and the Egyptian Danaus; but he drops the paternal
lineage when he comes to Perseus (inasmuch as Perseus is the son of
Zeus by Danaê, without any reputed human father, such as Amphitryôn
was to Hêraklês), and then follow the higher members of the series
through Danaê alone.[921] He also pursues the same regal genealogy,
through the mother of Eurysthenês and Proclês, up to Polynikês, Œdipus,
Laius, Labdakus, Polydôrus and Kadmus; and he assigns various ancient
inscriptions which he saw in the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at
Thêbes, to the ages of Laius and Œdipus.[922] Moreover, the sieges of
Thêbes and Troy,—the Argonautic expedition,—the invasion of Attica by
the Amazons,—the protection of the Herakleids, and the defeat and death
of Eurystheus, by the Athenians,[923]—the death of Mêkisteus and Tydeus
before Thêbes by the hands of Melanippus, and the touching calamities
of Adrastus and Amphiaräus connected with the same enterprise,—the
sailing of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô,[924]—the abductions of Iô,
Eurôpa, Mêdea and Helena,—the emigration of Kadmus in quest of Eurôpa,
and his coming to Bϙtia, as well as the attack of the Greeks upon Troy
to recover Helen,[925]—all these events seem to him portions of past
history, not less unquestionably certain, though more clouded over by
distance and misrepresentation, than the battles of Salamis and Mykalê.
[912] Herodot. ii. 146.
[913] Herod. i. 56.
[914] Herod. v. 66.
[915] Herod. ix. 73.
[916] Herod. ii, 43-44, 91-98, 171-182 (the Egyptians admitted
the truth of the Greek legend, that Perseus had come to Libya to
fetch the Gorgon's head).
[917] Herod. ii. 113-120; iv. 145; vii. 134.
[918] Herod. i. 67-68; ii. 113. vii. 159.
[919] Herod. i. 1, 2, 4; v. 81, 65.
[920] Herod. i. 52; iv. 145; v. 67; vii. 193.
[921] Herod. vi. 52-53.
[922] Herod. iv. 147; v. 59-61.
[923] Herod. v. 61; ix. 27-28.
[924] Herod. i. 52; iv. 145; v. 67.
[925] Herod. i. 1-4; ii. 49, 113: iv. 147; v. 94.
But though Herodotus is thus easy of faith in regard both to the
persons and to the general facts of Grecian mythes, yet when he comes
to discuss particular facts taken separately, we find him applying
to them stricter tests of historical credibility, and often disposed
to reject as well the miraculous as the extravagant. Thus even with
respect to Hêraklês, he censures the levity of the Greeks in ascribing
to him absurd and incredible exploits; he tries their assertion by
the philosophical standard of nature, or of determinate powers and
conditions governing the course of events. "How is it consonant to
nature (he asks), that Hêraklês, being, as he was, according to the
statement of the Greeks, _a man_, should kill many thousand persons?
I pray that indulgence may be shown to me both by gods and heroes for
saying so much as this." The religious feelings of Herodotus here
told him that he was trenching upon the utmost limits of admissible
scepticism.[926]
[926] Herod. ii. 45. Λέγουσι δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ἄλλα ἀνεπισκέπτως
οἱ Ἕλληνες· εὐήθης δὲ αὐτέων καὶ ὅδε ὁ μῦθός ἐστι, τὸν περὶ
τοῦ Ἡρακλέος λέγουσι.... Ἔτι δὲ ἕνα ἐόντα τὸν Ἡρακλέα, καὶ ἔτι
ἄνθρωπον ὡς δή φασι, ~κῶς φύσιν ἔχει~ πολλὰς μυριάδας φονεῦσαι;
Καὶ περὶ μὲν τούτων τοσαῦτα ἡμῖν εἰποῦσι, καὶ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν καὶ
παρὰ τῶν ἡρώων εὐμένεια εἴη.
We may also notice the manner in which the historian criticizes
the stratagem whereby Peisistratus established himself as despot
at Athens—by dressing up the stately Athenian woman Phyê in the
costume of the goddess Athênê, and passing off her injunctions
as the commands of the goddess; the Athenians accepted her with
unsuspecting faith, and received Peisistratus at her command.
Herodotus treats the whole affair as a piece of extravagant
silliness, πρᾶγμα εὐηθέστατον μακρῷ (i. 60).
Another striking instance of the disposition of Herodotus to
rationalize the miraculous narratives of the current mythes, is to be
found in his account of the oracle of Dôdôna and its alleged Egyptian
origin. Here, if in any case, a miracle was not only in full keeping,
but apparently indispensable to satisfy the exigences of the religious
sentiment; anything less than a miracle would have appeared tame and
unimpressive to the visitors of so revered a spot, much more to the
residents themselves. Accordingly, Herodotus heard, both from the three
priestesses and from the Dodonæans generally, that two black doves had
started at the same time from Thêbes in Egypt: one of them went to
Libya, where it directed the Libyans to establish the oracle of Zeus
Ammon; the other came to the grove of Dôdôna, and perched on one of the
venerable oaks, proclaiming with a human voice that an oracle of Zeus
must be founded on that very spot. The injunction of the speaking dove
was respectfully obeyed.[927]
[927] Herod. ii. 55. Δωδωναίων δὲ αἱ ἱρηΐαι ... ἔλεγον ταῦτα,
συνωμολόγεον δέ σφι καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι Δωδωναῖοι οἱ περὶ τὸ ἱρόν.
The miracle sometimes takes another form; the oak at Dôdôna was
itself once endued with speech (Dionys. Hal. Ars. Rhetoric. i. 6;
Strabo).
Such was the tale related and believed at Dôdôna. But Herodotus had
also heard, from the priests at Thêbes in Egypt, a different tale,
ascribing the origin of all the prophetic establishments, in Greece as
well as in Libya, to two sacerdotal women, who had been carried away
from Thêbes by some Phœnician merchants and sold, the one in Greece,
the other in Libya. The Theban priests boldly assured Herodotus that
much pains had been taken to discover what had become of these women so
exported, and that the fact of their having been taken to Greece and
Libya had been accordingly verified.[928]
[928] Herod. ii. 54.
The historian of Halicarnassus cannot for a moment think of admitting
the miracle which harmonized so well with the feelings of the
priestesses and the Dodonæans.[929] "How (he asks) could a dove
speak with human voice?" But the narrative of the priests at Thêbes,
though its prodigious improbability hardly requires to be stated, yet
involved no positive departure from the laws of nature and possibility,
and therefore Herodotus makes no difficulty in accepting it. The
curious circumstance is, that he turns the native Dodonæan legend
into a figurative representation, or rather a misrepresentation, of
the supposed true story told by the Theban priests. According to his
interpretation, the woman who came from Thêbes to Dôdôna was called
a dove, and affirmed to utter sounds like a bird, because she was
non-Hellenic and spoke a foreign tongue: when she learned to speak the
language of the country, it was then said that the dove spoke with a
human voice. And the dove was moreover called black, because of the
woman's Egyptian color.
[929] Herod. ii. 57. Ἐπεὶ τέῳ ἂν τρόπῳ πελειάς γε ἀνθρωπηΐῃ φωνῇ
φθέγξαιτο;
According to one statement, the word Πελειὰς in the Thessalian
dialect meant both a dove and a prophetess (Scriptor. Rer.
Mythicarum, ed. Bode, i. 96). Had there been any truth in this,
Herodotus could hardly have failed to notice it, inasmuch as it
would exactly have helped him out of the difficulty which he felt.
That Herodotus should thus bluntly reject a miracle, recounted to him
by the prophetic women themselves as the prime circumstance in the
_origines_ of this holy place, is a proof of the hold which habits
of dealing with historical evidence had acquired over his mind; and
the awkwardness of his explanatory mediation between the dove and the
woman, marks not less his anxiety, while discarding the legend, to let
it softly down into a story quasi-historical and not intrinsically
incredible.
We may observe another example of the unconscious tendency of
Herodotus to eliminate from the mythes the idea of special aid from
the gods, in his remarks upon Melampus. He designates Melampus "as a
clever man, who had acquired for himself the art of prophecy;" and
had procured through Kadmus much information about the religious
rites and customs of Egypt, many of which he introduced into
Greece[930]—especially the name, the sacrifices, and the phallic
processions of Dionysus: he adds, "that Melampus himself did not
accurately comprehend or bring out the whole doctrine, but wise men
who came after him made the necessary additions."[931] Though the
name of Melampus is here maintained, the character described[932] is
something in the vein of Pythagoras—totally different from the great
seer and leech of the old epic mythes—the founder of the gifted family
of the Amythaonids, and the grandfather of Amphiaräus.[933] But that
which is most of all at variance with the genuine legendary spirit, is
the opinion expressed by Herodotus (and delivered with some emphasis
as _his own_), that Melampus "was a clever man, who had acquired for
himself prophetic powers." Such a supposition would have appeared
inadmissible to Homer or Hesiod, or indeed to Solôn, in the preceding
century, in whose view even inferior arts come from the gods, while
Zeus or Apollo bestows the power of prophesying.[934] The intimation
of such an opinion by Herodotus, himself a thoroughly pious man, marks
the sensibly diminished omnipresence of the gods, and the increasing
tendency to look for the explanation of phenomena among more visible
and determinate agencies.
[930] Herod. ii. 49. Ἐγὼ μὲν νύν φημι Μελάμποδα γενόμενον ἄνδρα
σοφὸν, μαντικήν τε ἑωυτῷ συστῆσαι, καὶ πυθόμενον ἀπ᾽ Αἰγύπτου,
ἄλλα τε πολλὰ ἐσηγήσασθαι Ἕλλησι, καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον, ὀλίγα
αὐτῶν παραλλάξαντα.
[931] Herod. ii. 49. Ἀτρεκέως μὲν οὐ πάντα συλλαβὼν τὸν λόγον
ἔφῃνε· (Melampus) ἀλλ᾽ οἱ ἐπιγενόμενοι τούτῳ ~σοφισταὶ~ μεζόνως
ἐξέφῃναν.
[932] Compare Herod. iv. 95; ii. 81. Ἑλλήνων οὐ τῷ ἀσθενεστάτῳ
~σοφιστῇ~ Πυθαγόρᾳ.
[933] Homer, Odyss. xi. 290; xv. 225. Apollodôr. i. 9, 11-12.
Hesiod, Eoiai, Fragm. 55, ed. Düntzer (p. 43)—
Ἀλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδησι,
~Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις~, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδησι.
also Frag. 34 (p. 38), and Frag. 65 (p. 45); Schol. Apoll. Rhod.
i. 118.
Herodotus notices the celebrated mythical narrative of Melampus
healing the deranged Argive women (ix. 34); according to the
original legend, the daughters of Prœtus. In the Hesiodic Eoiai
(Fr. 16, Düntz.; Apollod. ii. 2) the distemper of the Prœtid
females was ascribed to their having repudiated the rites and
worship of Dionysus (Akusilaus, indeed, assigned a different
cause), which shows that the old fable recognized a connection
between Melampus and these rites.
[934] Homer, Iliad, i. 72-87; xv. 412. Odyss. xv. 245-252; iv.
233. Some times the gods inspired prophecy for the special
occasion, without conferring upon the party the permanent gift
and _status_ of a prophet (compare Odyss. i. 202; xvii. 383).
Solôn, Fragm. xi. 48-53, Schneidewin:—
Ἄλλον μάντιν ἔθηκεν ἄναξ ἑκάεργος Ἀπολλὼν,
Ἔγνω δ᾽ ἀνδρὶ κακὸν τηλόθεν ἐρχόμενον,
Ὧι συνομαρτήσωσι θεοὶ....
Herodotus himself reproduces the old belief in the special gift
of prophetic power by Zeus and Apollo, in the story of Euenius of
Apollônia (ix. 94).
See the fine ode of Pindar, describing the birth and inspiration
of Jamus, eponymous father of the great prophetic family in Elis
called the Jamids (Herodot. ix. 33), Pindar, Olymp. vi. 40-75.
About Teiresias, Sophoc. Œd. Tyr. 283-410. Neither Nestôr nor
Odysseus possesses the gift of prophecy.
We may make a similar remark on the dictum of the historian respecting
the narrow defile of Tempê, forming the embouchure of the Pêneus and
the efflux of all the waters from the Thessalian basin. The Thessalians
alleged that this whole basin of Thessaly had once been a lake,
but that Poseidôn had split the chain of mountains and opened the
efflux;[935] upon which primitive belief, thoroughly conformable to
the genius of Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus comments as follows: "The
Thessalian statement is reasonable. For whoever thinks that Poseidôn
shakes the earth, and that the rifts of an earthquake are the work of
that god, will, on seeing the defile in question, say that Poseidôn
has caused it. For the rift of the mountains is, as appeared to me
(when I saw it), the work of an earthquake." Herodotus admits the
reference to Poseidôn, when pointed out to him, but it stands only in
the background: what is present to his mind is the phænomenon of the
earthquake, not as a special act, but as part of a system of habitual
operations.[936]
[935] More than one tale is found elsewhere, similar to this,
about the defile of Tempê:—
"A tradition exists that this part of the country was once a
lake, and that Solomon commanded two deeves, or genii, named
Ard and Beel, to turn off the water into the Caspian, which
they effected by cutting a passage through the mountains; and a
city, erected in the newly-formed plain, was named after them
Ard-u-beel." (Sketches on the Shores of the Caspian, by W. R.
Holmes.)
Also about the plain of Santa Fe di Bogota, in South America,
that it was once under water, until Bochica cleft the mountains
and opened a channel of egress (Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères,
p. 87-88); and about the plateau of Kashmir (Humboldt, Asie
Centrale, vol. i. p. 102), drained in a like miraculous manner
by the saint Kâsyapa. The manner in which conjectures, derived
from local configuration or peculiarities, are often made to
assume the form of _traditions_, is well remarked by the same
illustrious traveller: "Ce qui se présente comme une tradition,
n'est souvent que le reflet de l'impression que laisse l'aspect
des lieux. Des bancs de coquilles à demi-fossiles, répandues
dans les isthmes ou sur des plateaux, font naître même chez les
hommes les moins avancés dans la culture intellectuelle, l'idée
de grandes inondations, d'anciennes communications entre des
bassins limitrophes. Des opinions, que l'on pourroit appeler
systématiques, se trouvent dans les forêts de l'Orénoque comme
dans les îles de la Mer du Sud. Dans l'une et dans l'autre de
ces contrées, elles ont pris la forme des traditions." (A. von
Humboldt, Asie Centrale, vol. ii. p. 147.) Compare a similar
remark in the same work and volume, p. 286-294.
[936] Herodot. vii. 129. (Poseidôn was worshipped as Πετραῖος
in Thessaly, in commemoration of this geological interference:
Schol. Pindar. Pyth. iv. 245.) Τὸ δὲ παλαιὸν λέγεται, οὐκ ἐόντος
κω τοῦ αὐλῶνος καὶ διεκρόου τούτου, τοὺς ποτάμους τούτους ...
ῥέοντας ποιεῖν τὴν Θεσσαλίην πᾶσαν πέλαγος. Αὐτοὶ μέν νυν
Θέσσαλοι λέγουσι Ποσειδέωνα ποιῆσαι τὸν αὐλῶνα, δι᾽ οὗ ῥέει ὁ
Πηνειὸς, οἰκότα λέγοντες. Ὅστις γὰρ νομίζει Ποσειδέωνα τὴν γῆν
σείειν, καὶ τὰ διεστεῶτα ὑπὸ σεισμοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ τούτου ἔργα εἶναι,
καὶ ἂν ἐκεῖνο ἰδὼν φαίη Ποσειδέωνα ποιῆσαι. Ἐστὶ γὰρ σεισμοῦ
ἔργον, ὡς ἐμοὶ ἐφαίνετο εἶναι, ἡ διάστασις τῶν οὐρέων. In another
case (viii. 129), Herodotus believes that Poseidôn produced a
preternaturally high tide, in order to punish the Persians, who
had insulted his temple near Potidæa: here was a special motive
for the god to exert his power.
This remark of Herodotus illustrates the hostile ridicule cast
by Aristophanês (in the Nubes) upon Socratês, on the score of
alleged impiety, because he belonged to a school of philosophers
(though in point of fact he discountenanced that line of
study) who introduced physical laws and forces in place of the
personal agency of the gods. The old man Strepsiades inquires
from Socratês, _Who rains? Who thunders?_ To which Socratês
replies, "_Not Zeus_, but the Nephelæ, _i. e. the clouds_: you
never saw rain without clouds." Strepsiades then proceeds to
inquire—"But who is it that compels the clouds to move onward?
is it not Zeus?" Socratês—"Not at all; it is æthereal rotation."
Strepsiades—"Rotation? that had escaped me: Zeus then no longer
exists, and Rotation reigns in his place."
STREPS. Ὁ δ᾽ ἀναγκάζων ἐστὶ τίς αὐτὰς (Νεφέλας), οὐχ ὁ Ζεὺς,
ὥστε φέρεσθαι;
SOCRAT. Ἥκιστ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ αἰθέριος δῖνος.
STREPS. Δῖνος; τουτί μ᾽ ἐλελήθει—
Ὁ Ζεὺς οὐκ ὢν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀντ᾽ αὐτοῦ Δῖνος νυνὶ βασιλεύων.
To the same effect v. 1454, Δῖνος βασιλεύει τὸν Δί᾽
ἐξεληλακώς—"Rotation has driven out Zeus, and reigns in his
place."
If Aristophanês had had as strong a wish to turn the public
antipathies against Herodotus as against Socratês and Euripidês,
the explanation here given would have afforded him a plausible
show of truth for doing so; and it is highly probable that the
Thessalians would have been sufficiently displeased with the view
of Herodotus to sympathize in the poet's attack upon him. The
point would have been made (waiving metrical considerations)—
~Σεισμὸς~ βασιλεύει, τὸν ~Ποσειδῶν᾽~ ἐξεληλακώς.
The comment of Herodotus upon the Thessalian view seems almost as
if it were intended to guard against this very inference.
Other accounts ascribed the cutting of the defile of Tempê to
Hêraklês (Diodôr. iv. 18).
Respecting the ancient Grecian faith, which recognized the
displeasure of Poseidôn as the cause of earthquakes, see Xenoph.
Hellen. iii. 3, 2; Thucydid. i. 127; Strabo, xii. p. 579; Diodôr.
xv. 48-49. It ceased to give universal satisfaction even so early
as the time of Thalês and Anaximenês (see Aristot. Meteorolog.
ii. 7-8; Plutarch, Placit. Philos. iii. 15; Seneca, Natural.
Quæst. vi. 6-23); and that philosopher, as well as Anaxagoras,
Democritus and others, suggested different physical explanations
of the fact. Notwithstanding a dissentient minority, however,
the old doctrine still continued to be generally received: and
Diodôrus, in describing the terrible earthquake in 373 B. C.,
by which Helikê and Bura were destroyed, while he notices those
philosophers (probably Kallisthenês, Senec. Nat. Quæst. vi. 23)
who substituted physical causes and laws in place of the divine
agency, rejects their views, and ranks himself with the religious
public, who traced this formidable phænomenon to the wrath of
Poseidôn (xv. 48-49).
The Romans recognized many different gods as producers of
earthquakes; an unfortunate creed, since it exposed them to the
danger of addressing their prayers to the wrong god: "Unde in
ritualibus et pontificiis observatur, obtemperantibus sacerdotiis
caute, ne alio Deo pro alio nominato, cum quis eorum terram
concutiat, piacula committantur." (Ammian. Marcell. xvii. 7.)
Herodotus adopts the Egyptian version of the legend of Troy, founded on
that capital variation which seems to have originated with Stesichorus,
and according to which Helen never left Sparta at all—her _eidôlon_
had been taken to Troy in her place. Upon this basis a new story had
been framed, midway between Homer and Stesichorus, representing Paris
to have really carried off Helen from Sparta, but to have been driven
by storms to Egypt, where she remained during the whole siege of
Troy, having been detained by Prôteus, the king of the country, until
Menelaus came to reclaim her after his triumph. The Egyptian priests,
with their usual boldness of assertion, professed to have heard the
whole story from Menelaus himself—the Greeks had beseiged Troy, in
the full persuasion that Helen and the stolen treasures were within
the walls, nor would they ever believe the repeated denials of the
Trojans as to the fact of her presence. In intimating his preference
for the Egyptian narrative, Herodotus betrays at once his perfect and
unsuspecting confidence that he is dealing with genuine matter of
history, and his entire distrust of the epic poets, even including
Homer, upon whose authority that supposed history rested. His reason
for rejecting the Homeric version is that it teems with historical
improbabilities. If Helen had been really in Troy (he says), Priam and
the Trojans would never have been so insane as to retain her to their
own utter ruin: but it was the divine judgment which drove them into
the miserable alternative of neither being able to surrender Helen,
nor to satisfy the Greeks of the real fact that they had never had
possession of her—in order that mankind might plainly read, in the
utter destruction of Troy, the great punishments with which the gods
visit great misdeeds. Homer (Herodotus thinks) had heard this story,
but designedly departed from it, because it was not so suitable a
subject for epic poetry.[937]
[937] Herod. ii. 116. δοκέει δέ μοι καὶ Ὅμηρος τὸν λόγον τοῦτον
πυθέσθαι· ἀλλ᾽ οὐ γὰρ ὁμοίως εὐπρεπὴς ἐς τὴν ἐποποιΐην ἦν τῷ
ἑτέρῳ τῷ περ ἐχρήσατο· ἑς ὃ μετῆκε αὐτὸν, δηλώσας ὡς καὶ τοῦτον
ἐπισταῖτο τὸν λόγον.
Herodotus then produces a passage from the Iliad, with a view to
prove that Homer knew of the voyage of Paris and Helen to Egypt;
but the passage proves nothing at all to the point.
Again (c. 120), his slender confidence in the epic poets breaks
out—εἰ χρή τι τοῖσι ἐποποιοῖσι χρεώμενον λέγειν.
It is remarkable that Herodotus is disposed to identify Helen
with the ξείνη Ἀφροδίτη whose temple he saw at Memphis (c. 112).
Enough has been said to show how wide is the difference between
Herodotus and the logographers with their literal transcript of the
ancient legends. Though he agrees with them in admitting the full
series of persons and generations, he tries the circumstances narrated
by a new standard. Scruples have arisen in his mind respecting
violations of the laws of nature: the poets are unworthy of trust, and
their narratives must be brought into conformity with historical and
ethical conditions, before they can be admitted as truth. To accomplish
this conformity, Herodotus is willing to mutilate the old legend in
one of its most vital points: he sacrifices the personal presence of
Helena in Troy, which ran through every one of the ancient epic poems
belonging to the Trojan cycle, and is indeed, under the gods, the great
and present moving force throughout.
Thucydidês places himself generally in the same point of view
as Herodotus with regard to mythical antiquity, yet with some
considerable differences. Though manifesting no belief in present
miracles or prodigies,[938] he seems to accept without reserve the
preexistent reality of all the persons mentioned in the mythes, and
of the long series of generations extending back through so many
supposed centuries: in this category, too, are included the eponymous
personages, Hellen, Kekrops, Eumolpus, Pandiôn, Amphilochus the son
of Amphiaräus, and Akarnan. But on the other hand, we find no trace
of that distinction between a human and an heroic ante-human race,
which Herodotus still admitted,—nor any respect for Egyptian legends.
Thucydidês, regarding the personages of the mythes as men of the same
breed and stature with his own contemporaries, not only tests the acts
imputed to them by the same limits of credibility, but presumes in them
the same political views and feelings as he was accustomed to trace in
the proceedings of Peisistratus or Periklês. He treats the Trojan war
as a great political enterprise, undertaken by all Greece; brought into
combination through the imposing power of Agamemnôn, not (according to
the legendary narrative) through the influence of the oath exacted by
Tyndareus. Then he explains how the predecessors of Agamemnôn arrived
at so vast a dominion—beginning with Pelops, who came over (as he
says) from Asia with great wealth among the poor Peloponnêsians, and
by means of this wealth so aggrandized himself, though a foreigner, as
to become the eponym of the peninsula. Next followed his son Atreus,
who acquired after the death of Eurystheus the dominion of Mykênæ,
which had before been possessed by the descendants of Perseus: here
the old legendary tale, which described Atreus as having been banished
by his father Pelops in consequence of the murder of his elder brother
Chrysippus, is invested with a political bearing, as explaining the
reason why Atreus retired to Mykênæ. Another legendary tale—the defeat
and death of Eurystheus by the fugitive Herakleids in Attica, so
celebrated in Attic tragedy as having given occasion to the generous
protecting intervention of Athens—is also introduced as furnishing the
cause why Atreus succeeded to the deceased Eurystheus: "for Atreus, the
maternal uncle of Eurystheus, had been entrusted by the latter with
his government during the expedition into Attica, and had effectually
courted the people, who were moreover in great fear of being attacked
by the Herakleids." Thus the Pelopids acquired the supremacy in
Peloponnêsus, and Agamemnôn was enabled to get together his 1200 ships
and 100,000 men for the expedition against Troy. Considering that
contingents were furnished from every portion of Greece, Thucydidês
regards this as a small number, treating the Homeric catalogue as an
authentic muster-roll, perhaps rather exaggerated than otherwise. He
then proceeds to tell us why the armament was not larger: many more
men could have been furnished, but there was not sufficient money to
purchase provisions for their subsistence; hence they were compelled,
after landing and gaining a victory, to fortify their camp, to divide
their army, and to send away one portion for the purpose of cultivating
the Chersonese, and another portion to sack the adjacent towns. This
was the grand reason why the siege lasted so long as ten years. For
if it had been possible to keep the whole army together, and to act
with an undivided force, Troy would have been taken both earlier and at
smaller cost.[939]
[938] "Ut conquirere fabulosa (says Tacitus, Hist. ii. 50, a
worthy parallel of Thucydidês) et fictis oblectare legentium
animos, procul gravitate cœpti operis crediderim, ita vulgatis
traditisque demere fidem non ausim. Die, quo Bebriaci
certabatur, avem inusitatâ specie, apud Regium Lepidum celebri
vico consedisse, incolæ memorant; nec deinde cœtu hominum aut
circumvolitantium alitum, territam pulsamque, donec Otho se ipse
interficeret: tum ablatam ex oculis: et tempora reputantibus,
initium finemque miraculi cum Othonis exitu competisse."
Suetonius (Vesp. 5) recounts a different miracle, in which three
eagles appear.
This passage of Tacitus occurs immediately after his magnificent
description of the suicide of the emperor Otho, a deed which he
contemplates with the most fervent admiration. His feelings were
evidently so wrought up that he was content to relax the canons
of historical credibility.
[939] Thucyd. i. 9-12.
Such is the general sketch of the war of Troy, as given by Thucydidês.
So different is it from the genuine epical narrative, that we seem
hardly to be reading a description of the same event; still less
should we imagine that the event was known, to him as well as to us,
only through the epic poets themselves. The men, the numbers, and the
duration of the siege, do indeed remain the same; but the cast and
juncture of events, the determining forces, and the characteristic
features, are altogether heterogeneous. But, like Herodotus, and
still more than Herodotus, Thucydidês was under the pressure of two
conflicting impulses—he shared the general faith in the mythical
antiquity, but at the same time he could not believe in any facts which
contradicted the laws of historical credibility or probability. He was
thus under the necessity of torturing the matter of the old mythes
into conformity with the subjective exigencies of his own mind: he
left out, altered, recombined, and supplied new connecting principles
and supposed purposes, until the story became such as no one could
have any positive reason for calling in question: though it lost the
impressive mixture of religion, romance, and individual adventure,
which constituted its original charm, it acquired a smoothness and
plausibility, and a poetical _ensemble_, which the critics were
satisfied to accept as historical truth. And historical truth it would
doubtless have been, if any independent evidence could have been found
to sustain it. Had Thucydidês been able to produce such new testimony,
we should have been pleased to satisfy ourselves that the war of Troy,
as he recounted it, was the real event; of which the war of Troy, as
sung by the epic poets, was a misreported, exaggerated, and ornamented
recital. But in this case the poets are the only real witnesses, and
the narrative of Thucydidês is a mere extract and distillation from
their incredibilities.
A few other instances may be mentioned to illustrate the views of
Thucydidês respecting various mythical incidents. 1. He treats the
residence of the Homeric Phæakians at Corkyra as an undisputed fact,
and employs it partly to explain the efficiency of the Korkyrean
navy in times preceding the Peloponnesian war.[940] 2. He notices,
with equal confidence, the story of Têreus and Proknê, daughter of
Pandiôn, and the murder of the child Itys by Proknê his mother, and
Philomêla; and he produces this ancient mythe with especial reference
to the alliance between the Athenians and Têrês, king of the Odrysian
Thracians, during the time of the Peloponnesian war, intimating that
the Odrysian Têrês was neither of the same family nor of the same
country as Têreus the husband of Proknê.[941] The conduct of Pandiôn,
in giving his daughter Proknê in marriage to Têreus, is in his view
dictated by political motives and interests. 3. He mentions the
Strait of Messina as the place through which Odysseus is said to have
sailed.[942] 4. The Cyclôpes and the Læstrygones (he says) were the
most ancient reported inhabitants of Sicily; but he cannot tell to what
race they belonged, nor whence they came.[943] 5. Italy derived its
name from Italus, king of the Sikels. 6. Eryx and Egesto in Sicily were
founded by fugitive Trojans after the capture of Troy; also Skionê,
in the Thracian peninsula of Pallênê, by Greeks from the Achæan town
of Pellênê, stopping thither in their return from the siege of Troy:
the Amphilochian Argos in the Gulf of Ambrakia was in like manner
founded by Amphilochus son of Amphiaräus, in his return from the
same enterprise. The remorse and mental derangement of the matricidal
Alkmæôn, son of Amphiaräus, is also mentioned by Thucydidês,[944] as
well as the settlement of his son Akarnan in the country called after
him Akarnania.[945]
[940] Thucyd. i. 25.
[941] Thucyd. ii. 29. Καὶ τὸ ἔργον τὸ περὶ τὸν Ἴτυν αἱ γυναῖκες
ἐν τῇ γῇ ταύτῃ ἔπραξαν· πολλοῖς δὲ καὶ τῶν ποιητῶν ἐν ἀηδόνος
μνήμῃ Δαυλιὰς ἡ ὄρνις ἐπωνόμασται. Εἰκὸς τε καὶ τὸ κῆδος Πανδίονα
ξυνάψασθαι τῆς θυγατρὸς διὰ τοσούτου, ἐπ᾽ ὠφελείᾳ τῇ πρὸς
ἀλλήλους, μᾶλλον ἢ διὰ πολλῶν ἡμερῶν ἐς Ὀδρύσας ὁδοῦ. The first
of these sentences would lead us to infer, if it came from any
other pen than that of Thucydidês, that the writer believed the
metamorphosis of Philomêla into a nightingale: see above, ch. xi.
p. 270.
The observation respecting the convenience of neighborhood for
the marriage is remarkable, and shows how completely Thucydidês
regarded the event as historical. What would he have said
respecting the marriage of Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus,
with Boreas, and the prodigious distance which she is reported
to have been carried by her husband? Ὑπέρ τε πόντον πάντ᾽, ἐπ᾽
ἔσχατα χθονὸς, etc. (Sophoklês ap. Strabo. vii. p. 295.)
From the way in which Thucydidês introduces the mention of this
event, we see that he intended to correct the misapprehension
of his countrymen, who having just made an alliance with the
Odrysian _Têrês_, were led by that circumstance to think of the
old mythical _Têreus_, and to regard him as the ancestor of
_Têrês_.
[942] Thucyd. iv. 24.
[943] Thucyd. vi. 2.
[944] Thucyd. ii. 68-102; iv. 120; vi. 2. Antiochus of Syracuse,
the contemporary of Thucydidês, also mentioned Italus as the
eponymous king of Italy: he farther named Sikelus, who came to
Morgos, son of Italus, after having been banished from Rome. He
talks about Italus, just as Thucydidês talks about Thêseus, as
a wise and powerful king, who first acquired a great dominion
(Dionys. H. A. R. i. 12, 35, 73). Aristotle also mentioned Italus
in the same general terms (Polit. vii. 9, 2).
[945] We may here notice some particulars respecting Isokratês.
He manifests entire confidence in the authenticity of the
mythical genealogies and chronology; but while he treats the
mythical personages as historically real, he regards them at the
same time not as human, but as half-gods, superior to humanity.
About Helena, Thêseus, Sarpêdôn, Cycnus, Memnôn, Achilles, etc.,
see Encom. Helen. Or. x. pp. 282, 292, 295. Bek. Helena was
worshipped in his time as a goddess at Therapnæ (_ib._ p. 295).
He recites the settlements of Danaus, Kadmus, and Pelops in
Greece, as undoubted historical facts (p. 297). In his discourse
called _Busiris_, he accuses Polykratês, the sophist, of a gross
anachronism, in having placed Busiris subsequent in point of date
to Orpheus and Æolus (Or. xi. p. 301, Bek.), and he adds that the
tale of Busiris having been slain by Hêraklês was chronologically
impossible (p. 309). Of the long Athenian genealogy from Kekrops
to Thêseus, he speaks with perfect historical confidence
(Panathenaic. p. 349, Bek.); not less so of the adventures
of Hêraklês and his mythical contemporaries, which he places
in the mouth of Archidamus as a justification of the Spartan
title to Messenia (Or. vi. _Archidamus_, p. 156, Bek.; compare
Or. v. _Philippus_, pp. 114, 138), φάσιν, οἷς περὶ τῶν παλαιῶν
πιστεύομεν, etc. He condemns the poets in strong language for
the wicked and dissolute tales which they circulated respecting
the gods: many of them (he says) had been punished for such
blasphemies by blindness, poverty, exile, and other misfortunes
(Or. xi. p. 309, Bek.).
In general, it may be said that Isokratês applies no principles
of historical criticism to the mythes; he rejects such as appear
to him discreditable or unworthy, and believes the rest.
Such are the special allusions made by this illustrious author in
the course of his history to mythical events. From the tenor of his
language we may see that he accounted all that could be known about
them to be uncertain and unsatisfactory; but he has it much at heart
to show, that even the greatest were inferior in magnitude and
importance to the Peloponnesian war.[946] In this respect his opinion
seems to have been at variance with that which was popular among his
contemporaries.
[946] Thucyd. i. 21-22.
The first two volumes of this history have been noticed in an
able article of the Quarterly Review, for October, 1846; as well
as in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur (1846. No. 41.
pp. 641-655), by Professor Kortüm.
While expressing, on several points, approbation of my work, by
which I feel much flattered—both my English and my German critic
take partial objection to the views respecting Grecian legend.
While the Quarterly Reviewer contends that the mythopœic faculty
of the human mind, though essentially loose and untrustworthy,
is never creative, but requires some basis of fact to work
upon—Kortüm thinks that I have not done justice to Thucydidês,
as regards his way of dealing with legend; that I do not allow
sufficient weight to the authority of an historian so circumspect
and so cold-blooded (den kalt-blüthigsten und besonnensten
Historiker des Alterthums, p. 653) as a satisfactory voucher for
the early facts of Grecian history in his preface (Herr G. fehlt
also, wenn er das anerkannt kritische Proœmium als Gewährsmann
verschmäht, p. 654).
No man feels more powerfully than I do the merits of Thucydidês
as an historian, or the value of the example which he set in
multiplying critical inquiries respecting matters recent and
verifiable. But the ablest judge or advocate, in investigating
specific facts, can proceed no further than he finds witnesses
having the means of knowledge, and willing more or less to tell
truth. In reference to facts prior to 776 B. C., Thucydidês had
nothing before him except the legendary poets, whose credibility
is not at all enhanced by the circumstance that he accepted them
as witnesses, applying himself only to cut down and modify their
allegations. His credibility in regard to the specific facts of
these early times depends altogether upon theirs. Now we in our
day are in a better position for appreciating their credibility
than he was in his, since the foundations of historical evidence
are so much more fully understood, and good or bad materials
for history are open to comparison in such large extent and
variety. Instead of wondering that he shared the general faith
in such delusive guides—we ought rather to give him credit for
the reserve with which he qualified that faith, and for the sound
idea of historical possibility to which he held fast as the limit
of his confidence. But it is impossible to consider Thucydidês
as a _satisfactory guarantee_ (Gewährsmann) for matters of fact
which he derives only from such sources.
Professor Kortüm considers that I am inconsistent with myself
in refusing to discriminate particular matters of historical
fact among the legends—and yet in accepting these legends (in
my chap. xx.) as giving a faithful mirror of the general state
of early Grecian society (p. 653). It appears to me that this
is no inconsistency, but a real and important distinction.
Whether Hêraklês, Agamemnôn, Odysseus, etc. were real persons,
and performed all, or a part, of the possible actions ascribed
to them—I profess myself unable to determine. But even assuming
both the persons and their exploits to be fictions, these very
fictions will have been conceived and put together in conformity
to the general social phænomena among which the describer and
his hearers lived—and will thus serve as illustrations of the
manners then prevalent. In fact, the real value of the Preface
of Thucydidês, upon which Professor Kortüm bestows such just
praise, consists, not in the particular facts which he brings out
by altering the legends, but in the rational general views which
he sets forth respecting early Grecian society, and respecting
the steps as well as the causes whereby it attained its actual
position as he saw it.
Professor Kortüm also affirms that the mythes contain "real
matter of fact along with mere conceptions:" which affirmation is
the same as that of the Quarterly Reviewer, when he says that the
mythopœic faculty is not creative. Taking the mythes in the mass,
I doubt not that this is true, nor have I anywhere denied it.
Taking them one by one, I neither affirm nor deny it. My position
is, that, whether there be matter of fact or not, we have no
test whereby it can be singled out, identified, and severed from
the accompanying fiction. And it lies upon those, who proclaim
the practicability of such severance, to exhibit some means of
verification better than any which has been yet pointed out. If
Thucydidês has failed in doing this, it is certain that none of
the many authors who have made the same attempt after him have
been more successful.
It cannot surely be denied that the mythopœic faculty is
_creative_, when we have before us so many divine legends, not
merely in Greece, but in other countries also. To suppose that
these religious legends are mere exaggerations, etc. of some
basis of actual fact—that the gods of polytheism were merely
divinized men, with qualities distorted or feigned—would be to
embrace in substance the theory of Euêmerus.
To touch a little upon the later historians by whom these mythes were
handled, we find that Anaximenês of Lampsacus composed a consecutive
history of events, beginning from the Theogony down to the battle
of Mantineia.[947] But Ephorus professed to omit all the mythical
narratives which are referred to times anterior to the return of the
Herakleids, (such restriction would of course have banished the siege
of Troy,) and even reproved those who introduced mythes into historical
writing; adding, that everywhere truth was the object to be aimed
at.[948] Yet in practice he seems often to have departed from his own
rule.[949] Theopompus, on the other hand, openly proclaimed that he
could narrate fables in his history better than Herodotus, or Ktesias,
or Hellanikus.[950] The fragments which remain to us, exhibit some
proof that this promise was performed as to quantity;[951] though as
to his style of narration, the judgment of Dionysius is unfavorable.
Xenophôn ennobled his favorite amusement of the chase by numerous
examples chosen from the heroic world, tracing their portraits with all
the simplicity of an undiminished faith. Kallisthenês, like Ephorus,
professed to omit all mythes which referred to a time anterior to the
return of the Herakleids; yet we know that he devoted a separate book
or portion of his history to the Trojan war.[952] Philistus introduced
some mythes in the earlier portions of his Sicilian history; but Timæus
was distinguished above all others for the copious and indiscriminate
way in which he collected and repeated such legends.[953] Some of
these writers employed their ingenuity in transforming the mythical
circumstances into plausible matter of history: Ephorus, in particular,
converted the serpent Pythô, slain by Apollo, into a tyrannical
king.[954]
[947] Diodôr. xv. 89. He was a contemporary of Alexander the
Great.
[948] Diodôr. iv. 1. Strabo, ix. p. 422, ἐπιτιμήσας τοῖς
φιλομυθοῦσιν ἐν τῇ τῆς ἱστωρίας γραφῇ.
[949] Ephorus recounted the principal adventures of Hêraklês
(Fragm. 8, 9, ed. Marx.), the tales of Kadmus and Harmonia
(Fragm. 12), the banishment of Ætôlus from Elis (Fragm. 15;
Strabo, viii. p. 357); he drew inferences from the chronology of
the Trojan and Theban wars (Fragm. 28); he related the coming
of Dædalus to the Sikan king Kokalus, and the expedition of the
Amazons (Fragm. 99-103).
He was particularly copious in his information about κτίσεις,
ἀποικίαι and συγγενείαι (Polyb. ix. 1).
[950] Strabo, i. p. 74.
[951] Dionys. Halic. De Vett. Scriptt. Judic. p. 428, Reisk;
Ælian, V. H. iii. 18, Θεόπομπος ... δεινὸς μυθόλογος.
Theopompus affirmed, that the bodies of those who went into the
forbidden precinct (τὸ ἄβατον) of Zeus, in Arcadia, gave no
shadow (Polyb. xvi. 12). He recounted the story of Midas and
Silênus (Fragm. 74, 75, 76, ed. Wichers); he said a good deal
about the heroes of Troy; and he seems to have assigned the
misfortunes of the Νόστοι to an historical cause—the rottenness
of the Grecian ships, from the length of the siege, while the
genuine epic ascribes it to the anger of Athênê (Fragm. 112,
113, 114; Schol. Homer. Iliad, ii. 135); he narrated an alleged
expulsion of Kinyras from Cyprus by Agamemnôn (Fragm. 111);
he gave the genealogy of the Macedonian queen Olympias up to
Achilles and Æakus (Fragm. 232).
[952] Cicero, Epist. ad Familiar. v. 12; Xenophôn de Venation. c.
1.
[953] Philistus, Fragm. 1 (Göller), Dædalus, and Kokalus; about
Liber and Juno (Fragm. 57); about the migration of the Sikels
into Sicily, eighty years after the Trojan war (ap. Dionys. Hal.
i. 3).
Timæus (Fragm. 50, 51, 52, 53, Göller) related many fables
respecting Jasôn, Mêdea, and the Argonauts generally. The
miscarriage of the Athenian armament under Nikias, before
Syracuse, is imputed to the anger of Hêraklês against the
Athenians because they came to assist the Egestans, descendants
of Troy (Plutarch, Nikias, 1),—a naked reproduction of genuine
epical agencies by an historian; also about Diomêdês and the
Daunians; Phaëthôn and the river Eridanus; the combats of the
Gigantes in the Phlegræan plains (Fragm. 97, 99, 102).
[954] Strabo, ix. p. 422.
But the author who pushed this transmutation of legend into history
to the greatest length, was the Messenian Euêmerus, contemporary of
Kassander of Macedôn. He melted down in this way the divine persons
and legends, as well as the heroic—representing both gods and heroes
as having been mere earth-born men, though superior to the ordinary
level in respect of force and capacity, and deified or heroified
after death as a recompense for services or striking exploits. In
the course of a voyage into the Indian sea, undertaken by command of
Kassander, Euêmerus professed to have discovered a fabulous country
called Panchaia, in which was a temple of the Triphylian Zeus: he there
described a golden column, with an inscription purporting to have been
put up by Zeus himself, and detailing his exploits while on earth.[955]
Some eminent men, among whom may be numbered Polybius, followed the
views of Euêmerus, and the Roman poet Ennius[956] translated his
Historia Sacra; but on the whole he never acquired favor, and the
unblushing inventions which he put into circulation were of themselves
sufficient to disgrace both the author and his opinions. The doctrine
that all the gods had once existed as mere men offended the religious
pagans, and drew upon Euêmerus the imputation of atheism; but, on the
other hand, it came to be warmly espoused by several of the Christian
assailants of paganism,—by Minucius Felix, Lactantius, and St.
Augustin, who found the ground ready prepared for them in their efforts
to strip Zeus and the other pagan gods of the attributes of deity. They
believed not only in the main theory, but also in the copious details
of Euêmerus; and the same man whom Strabo casts aside as almost a
proverb for mendacity, was extolled by them as an excellent specimen
of careful historical inquiry.[957]
[955] Compare Diodôr. v. 44-46; and Lactantius, De Falsâ Relig.
i. 11.
[956] Cicero, De Naturâ Deor. i. 42; Varro, De Re Rust. i. 48.
[957] Strabo, ii. p. 102. Οὐ πολὺ οὖν λείπεται ταῦτα τῶν Πύθεω
καὶ Εὐημέρου καὶ Ἀντιφάνους ψευσμάτων; compare also i. p. 47, and
ii. p. 104.
St. Augustin, on the contrary, tells us (Civitat. Dei, vi. 7),
"Quid de ipse Jove senserunt, qui nutricem ejus in Capitolio
posuerunt? Nonne attestati sunt omnes Euemero, qui non fabulosâ
garrulitate, sed _historicâ diligentiâ_, homines fuisse
mortalesque conscripsit?" And Minucius Felix (Octav. 20-21),
"Euemerus exequitur Deorum natales: patrias, sepulcra dinumerat,
et per provincias monstrat, Dictæi Jovis, et Apollinis Delphici,
et Phariæ Isidis, et Cereris Eleusiniæ." Compare Augustin, Civit.
Dei, xviii. 8-14; and Clemens Alexand. Cohort. ad Gent. pp.
15-18, Sylb.
Lactantius (De Falsâ Relig. c. 13, 14, 16) gives copious
citations from Ennius's translation of the Historia Sacra of
Euêmerus.
Εὐήμερος, ὁ ἐπικληθεὶς ἄθεος, Sextus Empiricus, adv. Physicos,
ix. § 17-51. Compare Cicero, De Nat. Deor. i. 42; Plutarch, De
Iside et Osiride, c. 23. tom. ii. p. 475, ed. Wytt.
Nitzsch assumes (Helden Sage der Griechen, sect. 7. p. 84) that
the voyage of Euêmerus to Panchaia was intended only as an
amusing romance, and that Strabo, Polybius, Eratosthenês and
Plutarch were mistaken in construing it as a serious recital.
Böttiger, in his Kunst-Mythologie der Griechen (Absch. ii. s. 6.
p. 190), takes the same view. But not the least reason is given
for adopting this opinion, and it seems to me far-fetched and
improbable; Lobeck (Aglaopham. p. 989), though Nitzsch alludes to
him as holding it, manifests no such tendency, as far as I can
observe.
But though the pagan world repudiated that "lowering tone of
explanation," which effaced the superhuman personality of Zeus and the
great gods of Olympus, the mythical persons and narratives generally
came to be surveyed more and more from the point of view of history,
and subjected to such alterations as might make them look more like
plausible matter of fact. Polybius, Strabo, Diodôrus, and Pausanias,
cast the mythes into historical statements—with more or less of
transformation, as the case may require, assuming always that there
is a basis of truth, which may be discovered by removing poetical
exaggerations and allowing for mistakes. Strabo, in particular, lays
down that principle broadly and unequivocally in his remarks upon
Homer. To give pure fiction, without any foundation of fact, was in his
judgment utterly unworthy of so great a genius; and he comments with
considerable acrimony on the geographer Eratosthenês, who maintains the
opposite opinion. Again, Polybius tells us that the Homeric Æolus, the
dispenser of the winds by appointment from Zeus, was in reality a man
eminently skilled in navigation, and exact in predicting the weather;
that the Cyclôpes and Læstrygones were wild and savage real men in
Sicily; and that Scylla and Charybdis were a figurative representation
of dangers arising from pirates in the Strait of Messina. Strabo speaks
of the amazing expeditions of Dionysus and Hêraklês, and of the long
wanderings of Jasôn, Menelaus, and Odysseus, in the same category
with the extended commercial range of the Phœnician merchant-ships:
he explains the report of Thêseus and Peirithöus having descended to
Hadês, by their dangerous earthly pilgrimages,—and the invocation
of the Dioskuri as the protectors of the imperiled mariner, by the
celebrity which they had acquired as real men and navigators.
Diodôrus gave at considerable length versions of the current fables
respecting the most illustrious names in the Grecian mythical world,
compiled confusedly out of distinct and incongruous authors. Sometimes
the mythe is reproduced in its primitive simplicity, but for the most
part it is partially, and sometimes wholly, historicized. Amidst this
jumble of dissentient authorities we can trace little of a systematic
view, except the general conviction that there was at the bottom of
the mythes a real chronological sequence of persons, and real matter
of fact, historical or ultra-historical. Nevertheless, there are
some few occasions on which Diodôrus brings us back a step nearer
to the point of view of the old logographers. For, in reference to
Hêraklês, he protests against the scheme of cutting down the mythes
to the level of present reality, and contends that a special standard
of ultra-historical credibility ought to be constituted, so as to
include the mythe in its native dimensions, and do fitting honor to
the grand, beneficent, and superhuman personality of Hêraklês and
other heroes or demi-gods. To apply to such persons the common measure
of humanity (he says), and to cavil at the glorious picture which
grateful man has drawn of them, is at once ungracious and irrational.
All nice criticism into the truth of the legendary narratives is
out of place: we show our reverence to the god by acquiescing in
the incredibilities of his history, and we must be content with the
best guesses which we can make, amidst the inextricable confusion
and numberless discrepancies which they present.[958] Yet though
Diodôrus here exhibits a preponderance of the religious sentiment over
the purely historical point of view, and thus reminds us of a period
earlier than Thucydidês—he in another place inserts a series of stories
which seem to be derived from Euêmerus, and in which Uranus, Kronus,
and Zeus appear reduced to the character of human kings celebrated
for their exploits and benefactions.[959] Many of the authors, whom
Diodôrus copies, have so entangled together Grecian, Asiatic, Egyptian,
and Libyan fables, that it becomes impossible to ascertain how much of
this heterogeneous mass can be considered as at all connected with the
genuine Hellenic mind.
[958] Diodôr. iv. 1-8. Ἔνιοι γὰρ τῶν ἀναγινωσκόντων, οὐ
δικαίᾳ χρώμενοι κρίσει, τἀκριβὲς ἐπιζητοῦσιν ἐν ταῖς ἀρχαίαις
μυθολογίαις, ἐπίσης τοῖς πραττομένοις ἐν τῷ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς χρόνῳ, καὶ
τὰ δισταζόμενα τῶν ἔργων διὰ τὸ μέγεθος, ἐκ τοῦ καθ᾽ αὑτοὺς βίου
τεκμαιρόμενοι, τὴν Ἡρακλέους δύναμιν ἐκ τῆς ἀσθενείας τῶν νῦν
ἀνθρώπων θεωροῦσιν, ὥστε διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τοῦ μεγέθους τῶν ἔργων
ἀπιστεῖσθαι τὴν γραφήν. Καθόλου γὰρ ἐν ταῖς ἀρχαίαις μυθολογίαις
οὐκ ἐκ παντὸς τρόπου ~πικρῶς τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐξεταστέον~. Καὶ γὰρ ἐν
τοῖς θεάτροις ~πεπεισμένοι μήτε Κενταύρους~ διφυεῖς ἐξ ἑτερογενῶν
σωμάτων ὑπάρξαι, μήτε Γηρυόνην τρισώματον, ~ὅμως προσδεχόμεθα τὰς
τοιαύτας μυθολογίας~, καὶ ~ταῖς ἐπισημασίαις συναύξομεν τὴν τοῦ
θεοῦ τιμήν~. Καὶ γὰρ ἄτοπον, Ἡρακλέα μὲν ἔτι κατ᾽ ἀνθρώπους ὄντα
τοῖς ἰδίοις πόνοις ἐξημερῶσαι τὴν οἰκουμένην, τοὺς δ᾽ ἀνθρώπους,
ἐπιλαθομένους τῆς κοινῆς εὐεργεσίας, ~συκοφαντεῖν~ τὸν ἐπὶ τοῖς
καλλίστοις ἔργοις ἔπαινον, etc.
This is a remarkable passage: first, inasmuch as it sets forth
the total inapplicability of analogies drawn from the historical
past as narratives about Hêraklês; next, inasmuch as it suspends
the employment of critical and scientific tests, and invokes an
acquiescence interwoven and identified with the feelings, as the
proper mode of evincing pious reverence for the god Hêraklês.
It aims at reproducing exactly that state of mind to which the
mythes were addressed, and with which alone they could ever be in
thorough harmony.
[959] Diodôr. iii. 45-60; v. 44-46.
Pausanias is far more strictly Hellenic in his view of the Grecian
mythes than Diodôrus: his sincere piety makes him inclined to faith
generally with regard to the mythical narratives, but subject
nevertheless to the frequent necessity of historicizing or allegorizing
them. His belief in the general reality of the mythical history and
chronology is complete, in spite of the many discrepancies which he
finds in it, and which he is unable to reconcile.
Another author who seems to have conceived clearly, and applied
consistently, the semi-historical theory of the Grecian mythes, is
Palæphatus, of whose work what appears to be a short abstract has been
preserved.[960] In the short preface of this treatise "concerning
Incredible Tales," he remarks, that some men, from want of instruction,
believe all the current narratives; while others, more searching and
cautious, disbelieve them altogether. Each of these extremes he is
anxious to avoid. On the one hand, he thinks that no narrative could
ever have acquired credence unless it had been founded in truth;
on the other, it is impossible for him to accept so much of the
existing narratives as conflicts with the analogies of present natural
phænomena. If such things ever had been, they would still continue to
be—but they never have so occurred; and the extra-analogical features
of the stories are to be ascribed to the license of the poets.
Palæphatus wishes to adopt a middle course, neither accepting all nor
rejecting all: accordingly, he had taken great pains to separate the
true from the false in many of the narratives; he had visited the
localities wherein they had taken place, and made careful inquiries
from old men and others.[961] The results of his researches are
presented in a new version of fifty legends, among the most celebrated
and the most fabulous, comprising the Centaurs, Pasiphaê, Aktæôn,
Kadmus and the Sparti, the Sphinx, Cycnus, Dædalus, the Trojan horse,
Æolus, Scylla, Geryôn, Bellerophôn, etc.
[960] The work of Palæphatus, probably this original, is alluded
to in the _Ciris_ of Virgil (88):—
"Docta Palæphatiâ testatur voce papyrus."
The date of Palæphatus is unknown—indeed this passage of the
_Ciris_ seems the only ground that there is for inference
respecting it. That which we now possess is probably an extract
from a larger work—made by another person at some later time: see
Vossius de Historicis Græcis, p. 478, ed. Westermann.
[961] Palæphat. init. ap. Script. Mythogr. ed. Westermann, p.
268. Τῶν ἀνθρώπων οἱ μὲν πείθονται πᾶσι τοῖς λεγομένοις, ὡς
ἀνομίλητοι σοφίας καὶ ἐπιστήμης—οἱ δὲ πυκνότεροι τὴν φύσιν καὶ
πολυπράγμονες ἀπιστοῦσι τὸ παράπαν μηδὲν γενέσθαι τούτων. Ἐμοὶ δὲ
δοκεῖ γενέσθαι πάντα τὰ λεγόμενα· ... γενόμενα δέ τινα οἱ ποιηταὶ
καὶ λογογράφοι παρέτρεψαν εἰς τὸ ἀπιστότερον καὶ θαυμασιώτερον
τοῦ θαυμάζειν ἕνεκα τοὺς ἀνθρώπους. Ἐγὼ δὲ γινώσκω, ὅτι οὐ
δύναται τὰ τοιαῦτα εἶναι οἷα καὶ λέγεται· τοῦτο δὲ καὶ διείληφα,
ὅτι εἰ μὴ ἐγένετο, οὐκ ἄν ἐλέγετο.
The main assumption of the semi-historical theory is here shortly
and clearly stated.
One of the early Christian writers, Minucius Felix, is astonished
at the easy belief of his pagan forefathers in miracles. If ever
such things had been done in former times (he affirms), they
would continue to be done now; as they cannot be done now, we may
be sure that they never were _really_ done formerly (Minucius
Felix, Octav. c. 20): "Majoribus enim nostris tam facilis in
mendaciis fides fuit, ut temerè crediderint etiam alia monstruosa
mira miracula, Scyllam multiplicem, Chimæram multiformem, Hydram,
et Centauros. Quid illas aniles fabulas—de hominibus aves, et
feras homines, et de hominibus arbores atque flores? _Quæ, si
essent facta, fierent; quia fieri non possunt, ideo nec facta
sunt._"
It must be confessed that Palæphatus has performed his promise of
transforming the "incredibilia" into narratives in themselves plausible
and unobjectionable, and that in doing so he always follows some
thread of analogy, real or verbal. The Centaurs (he tells us) were a
body of young men from the village of Nephelê in Thessaly, who first
trained and mounted horses for the purpose of repelling a herd of bulls
belonging to Ixiôn king of the Lapithæ, which had run wild and done
great damage: they pursued these wild bulls on horseback, and pierced
them with their spears, thus acquiring both the name of _Prickers_
(κέντορες) and the imputed attribute of joint body with the horse.
Aktæôn was an Arcadian, who neglected the cultivation of his land for
the pleasures of hunting, and was thus eaten up by the expense of
his hounds. The dragon whom Kadmus killed at Thêbes, was in reality
Drako, king of Thêbes; and the dragon's teeth which he was said to
have sown, and from whence sprung a crop of armed men, were in point
of fact elephants' teeth, which Kadmus as a rich Phœnician had brought
over with him: the sons of Drako sold these elephants' teeth and
employed the proceeds to levy troops against Kadmus. Dædalus, instead
of flying across the sea on wings, had escaped from Krête in a swift
sailing-boat under a violent storm: Kottus, Briareus, and Gygês were
not persons with one hundred hands, but inhabitants of the village of
Hekatoncheiria in Upper Macedonia, who warred with the inhabitants of
Mount Olympus against the Titans: Scylla, whom Odysseus so narrowly
escaped, was a fastsailing piratical vessel, as was also Pegasus, the
alleged winged horse of Bellerophôn.[962]
[962] Palæphat. Narrat. 1, 3, 6, 13, 20, 21, 29. Two short
treatises on the same subject as this of Palæphatus, are printed
along with it, both in the collection of Gale and of Westermann;
the one, _Heracliti de Incredibilibus_, the other _Anonymi de
Incredibilibus_. They both profess to interpret some of the
extraordinary or miraculous mythes, and proceed in a track not
unlike that of Palæphatus. Scylla was a beautiful courtezan,
surrounded with abominable parasites: she ensnared and ruined
the companions of Odysseus, though he himself was prudent enough
to escape her (Heraclit. c. 2. p. 313, West.) Atlas was a great
astronomer: Pasiphaê fell in love with a youth named Taurus; the
monster called the Chimæra was in reality a ferocious queen, who
had two brothers called Leo and Drako; the ram which carried
Phryxus and Hellê across the Ægean was a boatman named Krias
(Heraclit. c. 2, 6, 15, 24).
A great number of similar explanations are scattered throughout
the Scholia on Homer and the Commentary of Eustathius, without
specification of their authors.
Theôn considers such resolution of fable into plausible history
as a proof of surpassing ingenuity (Progymnasmata, cap. 6, ap.
Walz. Coll. Rhett. Græc. i. p. 219). Others among the Rhetors,
too, exercised their talents sometimes in vindicating, sometimes
in controverting, the probability of the ancient mythes. See the
Progymnasmata of Nicolaus—Κατασκευὴ ὅτι εἰκότα τὰ κατὰ Νιόβην,
Ἀνασκευὴ ὅτι οὐκ εἰκότα τὰ κατὰ Νιόβην (ap. Walz. Coll. Rhetor.
i. p. 284-318), where there are many specimens of this fanciful
mode of handling.
Plutarch, however, in one of his treatises, accepts Minotaurs,
Sphinxes, Centaurs, etc. as realities; he treats them as products
of the monstrous, incestuous, and ungovernable lusts of man,
which he contrasts with the simple and moderate passions of
animals (Plutarch, Gryllus, p. 990).
By such ingenious conjectures, Palæphatus eliminates all the incredible
circumstances, and leaves to us a string of tales perfectly credible
and commonplace, which we should readily believe, provided a very
moderate amount of testimony could be produced in their favor. If his
treatment not only disenchants the original mythes, but even effaces
their generic and essential character, we ought to remember that this
is not more than what is done by Thucydidês in his sketch of the
Trojan war. Palæphatus handles the mythes consistently, according to
the semi-historical theory, and his results exhibit the maximum which
that theory can ever present. By aid of conjecture, we get out of the
impossible, and arrive at matters intrinsically plausible, but totally
uncertified; beyond this point we cannot penetrate, without the light
of extrinsic evidence, since there is no intrinsic mark to distinguish
truth from plausible fiction.[963]
[963] The learned Mr. Jacob Bryant regards the explanations of
Palæphatus as if they were founded upon real fact. He admits,
for example, the city Nephelê alleged by that author in his
exposition of the fable of the Centaurs. Moreover, he speaks with
much commendation of Palæphatus generally: "He (Palæphatus) wrote
early, and seems to have been a serious and sensible person; one
who saw the absurdity of the fables upon which the theology of
his country was founded." (Ancient Mythology, vol. i. p. 411-435.)
So also Sir Thomas Brown (Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, Book I.
chap. vi. p. 221, ed. 1835) alludes to Palæphatus as having
incontestably pointed out the real basis of the fables. "And
surely the fabulous inclination of those days was greater than
any since; which swarmed so with fables, and from such slender
grounds took hints for fictions, poisoning the world ever
after: wherein how far they succeeded, may be exemplified from
Palæphatus, in his Book of Fabulous Narrations."
It remains that we should notice the manner in which the ancient
mythes were received and dealt with by the philosophers. The earliest
expression which we hear, on the part of philosophy, is the severe
censure bestowed upon them on ethical grounds by Xenophanês of
Kolophôn, and seemingly by some others of his contemporaries.[964]
It was apparently in reply to such charges, which did not admit of
being directly rebutted, that Theagenês of Rhêgium (about 520 B. C.)
first started the idea of a double meaning in the Homeric and Hesiodic
narratives,—an interior sense, different from that which the words
in their obvious meaning bore, yet to a certain extent analogous,
and discoverable by sagacious divination. Upon this principle, he
allegorized especially the battle of the gods in the Iliad.[965] In
the succeeding century, Anaxagoras and Metrodôrus carried out the
allegorical explanation more comprehensively and systematically;
the former representing the mythical personages as mere mental
conceptions, invested with name and gender, and illustrative of ethical
precepts,—the latter connecting them with physical principles and
phænomena. Metrodôrus resolved not only the persons of Zeus, Hêrê,
and Athênê, but also those of Agamemnôn, Achilles, and Hectôr, into
various elemental combinations and physical agencies, and treated
the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts concealed under the
veil of allegory.[966] Empedoklês, Prodikus, Antisthenês, Parmenidês,
Hêrakleidês of Pontus, and in a later age, Chrysippus, and the Stoic
philosophers generally,[967] followed more or less the same principle
of treating the popular gods as allegorical personages; while the
expositors of Homer (such as Stesimbrotus, Glaukôn, and others, even
down to the Alexandrine age), though none of them proceeded to the same
extreme length as Metrodôrus, employed allegory amongst other media
of explanation for the purpose of solving difficulties, or eluding
reproaches against the poet.
[964] Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empir. adv. Mathemat. ix. 193. He also
disapproved of the rites, accompanied by mourning and wailing,
with which the Eleatês worshipped Leukothea: he told them, εἰ
μὲν θεὸν ὑπολαμβάνουσι, μὴ θρηνεῖν· εἰ δὲ ἄνθρωπον, μὴ θύειν
(Aristotel. Rhet. ii. 23).
Xenophanês pronounced the battles of the Titans, Gigantes, and
Centaurs to be "fictions of our predecessors," πλάσματα τῶν
προτέρων (Xenophan. Fragm. 1. p. 42, ed. Schneidewin).
See a curious comparison of the Grecian and Roman theology in
Dionys. Halicarn. Ant. Rom. ii. 20.
[965] Schol. Iliad. xx. 67: Tatian. adv. Græc. c. 48. Hêrakleitus
indignantly repelled the impudent atheists who found fault
with the divine mythes of the Iliad, ignorant of their true
allegorical meaning: ἡ τῶν ἐπιφυομένων τῷ Ὁμήρῳ τόλμα τοὺς Ἥρας
δεσμοὺς αἰτιᾶται, καὶ νομίζουσιν ὕλην τινα δαψιλῆ τῆς ἀθέου πρὸς
Ὅμηρον ἔχειν μανίας ταῦτα—Ἦ οὐ μέμνῃ ὅτι τ᾽ ἐκρέμω ὑψόθεν, etc.
λέληθε δ᾽ αὐτοὺς ὅτι τούτοις τοῖς ἔπεσιν ἐκτεθεολόγηται ἡ τοῦ
παντὸς γένεσις, καὶ τὰ συνεχῶς ᾀδόμενα τέσσαρα στοιχεῖα τούτων
τῶν στίχων ἐστὶ τάξις (Schol. ad Hom. Iliad. xv. 18).
[966] Diogen. Laërt. ii. 11; Tatian. adv. Græc. c. 37; Hesychius,
v. Ἀγαμέμνονα. See the ethical turn given to the stories of
Circê, the Sirens, and Scylla, in Xenoph. Memorab. i. 3, 7;
ii. 6, 11-31. Syncellus, Chronic. p. 149. Ἑρμηνεύουσι δὲ οἱ
Ἀναξαγόρειοι τοὺς μυθώδεις θεοὺς, νοῦν μὲν τὸν Δία, τὴν δὲ Ἀθηνᾶν
τέχνην, etc.
Uschold and other modern German authors seem to have adopted
in its full extent the principle of interpretation proposed by
Metrodorus—treating Odysseus and Penelopê as personifications of
the Sun and Moon, etc. See Helbig, Die Sittlichen Zustände des
Griechischen Helden Alters, Einleitung, p. xxix. (Leipzig, 1839.)
Corrections of the Homeric text were also resorted to, in order
to escape the necessity of imputing falsehood to Zeus (Aristotel.
De Sophist. Elench. c. 4).
[967] Sextus Empiric. ix. 18; Diogen. viii. 76; Plutarch, De
Placit. Philosoph. i. 3-6; De Poesi Homericâ, 92-126; De Stoicor.
Repugn. p. 1050, Menander, De Encomiis, c. 5.
Cicero, De Nat. Deor. i. 14, 15, 16, 41; ii. 24-25. "Physica
ratio non inelegans inclusa in impias fabulas."
In the _Bacchæ_ of Euripidês, Pentheus is made to deride the tale
of the motherless infant Dionysus having been sewn into the thigh
of Zeus. Teiresias, while reproving him for his impiety, explains
the story away in a sort of allegory: the μηρὸς Διὸς (he says)
was a mistaken statement in place of the αἰθὴρ χθόνα ἐγκυλούμενος
(Bacch. 235-290).
Lucretius (iii. 995-1036) allegorizes the conspicuous sufferers
in Hadês,—Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and the Danaïds, as well
as the ministers of penal infliction, Cerberus and the Furies.
The first four are emblematic descriptions of various defective
or vicious characters in human nature,—the deisidæmonic, the
ambitious, the amorous, or the insatiate and querulous man; the
last two represent the mental terrors of the wicked.
In the days of Plato and Zenophôn, this allegorizing interpretation
was one of the received methods of softening down the obnoxious
mythes—though Plato himself treated it as an insufficient defence,
seeing that the bulk of youthful hearers could not see through the
allegory, but embraced the story literally as it was set forth.[968]
Pausanias tells us, that when he first began to write his work,
he treated many of the Greek legends as silly and undeserving of
serious attention; but as he proceeded, he gradually arrived at the
full conviction, that the ancient sages had designedly spoken in
enigmatical language, and that there was valuable truth wrapped up in
their narratives: it was the duty of a pious man, therefore, to study
and interpret, but not to reject, stories current and accredited
respecting the gods.[969] And others,—arguing from the analogy of the
religious mysteries, which could not be divulged without impiety to any
except such as had been specially admitted and initiated,—maintained
that it would be a profanation to reveal directly to the vulgar, the
genuine scheme of nature and the divine administration: the ancient
poets and philosophers had taken the only proper course, of talking
to the many in types and parables, and reserving the naked truth for
privileged and qualified intelligences.[970] The allegorical mode of
explaining the ancient fables[971] became more and more popular in
the third and fourth centuries after the Christian æra, especially
among the new Platonic philosophers; being both congenial to their
orientalized turn of thought, and useful as a shield against the
attacks of the Christians.
[968] Οἱ νῦν περὶ Ὅμηρον δεινοί—so Plato calls these interpreters
(Kratylus, p. 407); see also Xenoph. Sympos. iii. 6; Plato,
Ion. p. 530; Plutarch, De Audiend. Poet. p. 19. ὑπόνοια was the
original word, afterwards succeeded by ἀλληγορία.
Ἥρας δὲ δεσμοὺς καὶ Ἡφαίστου ῥίψεις ὑπὸ πατρὸς, μέλλοντος τῇ
μητρὶ τυπτομένῃ ἀμυνεῖν, καὶ θεομαχίας ὅσας Ὅμηρος πεποίηκεν, οὐ
παραδεκτέον εἰς τὴν πόλιν, ~οὔτ᾽ ἐν ὑπονοίαις πεποιημένας, οὔτ᾽
ἄνευ ὑπονοιῶν~. Ὁ γὰρ νέος οὐχ οἷός τε κρίνειν ὅ,τι τε ὑπόνοια
καὶ ὃ μὴ, ἀλλ᾽ ἃ ἂν τηλικοῦτος ὢν λάβῃ ἐν ταῖς δόξαις, δυσέκνιπτά
τε καὶ ἀμετάστατα φιλεῖ γίγνεσθαι (Plato, Republ. ii. 17. p. 378).
The idea of an interior sense and concealed purpose in the
ancient poets occurs several times in Plato (Theætet. c. 93. p.
180): παρὰ μὲν τῶν ἀρχαίων, μετὰ ποιήσεως ἐπικρυπτομένων τοὺς
πολλοὺς, etc.; also Protagor. c. 20. p. 316.
"Modo Stoicum Homerum faciunt,—modo Epicureum,—modo
Peripateticum,—modo Academicum. Apparet nihil horum esse in illo,
quia omnia sunt." (Seneca, Ep. 88.) Compare Plutarch, De Defectu
Oracul. c. 11-12. t. ii. p. 702, Wytt., and Julian, Orat. vii. p.
216.
[969] Pausan. viii. 8, 2. To the same purpose (Strabo, x. p.
474), allegory is admitted to a certain extent in the fables
by Dionys. Halic. Ant. Rom. ii. 20. The fragment of the lost
treatise of Plutarch, on the Platæan festival of the Dædala, is
very instructive respecting Grecian allegory (Fragm. ix. t. 5. p.
754-763, ed. Wyt.; ap. Euseb. Præpar. Evang. iii. 1).
[970] This doctrine is set forth in Macrobius (i. 2). He
distinguishes between _fabula_ and _fabulosa narratio_:
the former is fiction pure, intended either to amuse or to
instruct—the latter is founded upon truth, either respecting
human or respecting divine agency. The gods did not like to
be publicly talked of (according to his view) except under
the respectful veil of a fable (the same feeling as that of
Herodotus, which led him to refrain from inserting the ἱεροὶ
λόγοι in his history). The supreme god, the τἀγαθὸν, the πρῶτον
αἴτιον, could not be talked of in fables: but the other gods,
the aërial or æthereal powers and the soul, might be, and
ought to be, talked of in that manner alone. Only superior
intellects ought to be admitted to a knowledge of the secret
reality. "De Diis cæteris, et de animâ, non frustra se, nec ut
oblectent, ad fabulosa convertunt; sed quia sciunt _inimicam
esse naturæ apertam nudamque expositionem sui_: quæ sicut
vulgaribus sensibus hominum intellectum sui, vario rerum tegmine
operimentoque, subtraxit; ita à prudentibus arcana sua voluit
per fabulosa tractari.... Adeo semper ita se et sciri et coli
numina maluerunt, qualiter in vulgus antiquitus fabulata est....
Secundum hæc Pythagoras ipse atque Empedocles, Parmenides quoque
et Heraclides, de Diis fabulati sunt: nec secus Timæus." Compare
also Maximus Tyrius, Dissert. x. and xxxii. Arnobius exposes the
allegorical interpretation as mere evasion, and holds the Pagans
to literal historical fact (Adv. Gentes, v. p. 185, ed. Elm.).
Respecting the allegorical interpretation applied to the Greek
fables, Böttiger (Die Kunst—Mythologie der Griechen, Abschn. ii.
p. 176); Nitzsch (Heldensage der Griech. sect. 6. p. 78); Lobeck
(Aglaopham. p. 133-155).
[971] According to the anonymous writer ap. Westermann (Script.
Myth. p. 328), every personal or denominated god may be construed
in three different ways: either πραγματικῶς (historically, as
having been a king or a man)—or ψυχικῶς, in which theory Hêrê
signifies the soul; Athênê, _prudence_; Aphroditê, _desire_;
Zeus, _mind_, etc.—or στοιχειακῶς, in which system Apollo
signifies the _sun_; Poseidôn, the _sea_; Hêrê, the upper stratum
of the air, or _æther_; Athênê, the lower or denser stratum;
Zeus, the upper hemisphere; Kronus, the lower, etc. This writer
thinks that all the three principles of construction may be
resorted to, each on its proper occasion, and that neither of
them excludes the others. It will be seen that the first is pure
Euêmerism; the two latter are modes of allegory.
The allegorical construction of the gods and of the divine
mythes is copiously applied in the treatises, both of Phurnutus
and Sallustius, in Gale's collection of mythological writers.
Sallustius treats the mythes as of divine origin, and the chief
poets as inspired (θεόληπτοι): the gods were propitious to those
who recounted worthy and creditable mythes respecting them, and
Sallustius prays that they will accept with favor his own remarks
(cap. 3 and 4. pp. 245-251, Gale). He distributes mythes into
five classes; theological, physical, spiritual, material, and
mixed. He defends the practice of speaking of the gods under
the veil of allegory, much in the same way as Macrobius (in the
preceding note): he finds, moreover, a good excuse even for
those mythes which imputed to the gods theft, adultery, outrages
towards a father, and other enormities: such tales (he says) were
eminently suitable, since the mind _must at once see_ that the
facts as told are _not_ to be taken as being themselves the real
truth, but simply as a veil, disguising some interior truth (p.
247).
Besides the Life of Homer ascribed to Plutarch (see Gale, p.
325-332), Hêraclidês (_not_ Hêraclidês of Pontus) carries out the
process of allegorizing the Homeric mythes most earnestly and
most systematically. The application of the allegorizing theory
is, in his view, the only way of rescuing Homer from the charge
of scandalous impiety—πάντῃ γὰρ ἠσέβησεν, εἰ μηδὲν ἠλληγόρησεν
(Hêrac. _in init._ p. 407, Gale). He proves at length, that the
destructive arrows of Apollo, in the first book of the Iliad,
mean nothing at the bottom except a contagious plague, caused
by the heat of the summer sun in marshy ground (pp. 416-424).
Athênê, who darts down from Olympus at the moment when Achilles
is about to draw his sword on Agamemnôn, and seizes him by the
hair, is a personification of repentant prudence (p. 435). The
conspiracy against Zeus, which Homer (Iliad, i. 400) relates to
have been formed by the Olympic gods, and defeated by the timely
aid of Thetis and Briareus—the chains and suspension imposed upon
Hêrê—the casting of Hêphæstos by Zeus out of Olympus, and his
fall in Lêmnus—the destruction of the Grecian wall by Poseidôn,
after the departure of the Greeks—the amorous scene between Zeus
and Hêrê on Mount Gargarus—the distribution of the universe
between Zeus, Poseidôn, and Hadês—all these he resolves into
peculiar manifestations and conflicts of the elemental substances
in nature. To the much-decried battle of the gods, he gives a
turn partly physical, partly ethical (p. 481). In like manner,
he transforms and vindicates the adventures of the gods in the
Odyssey: the wanderings of Odysseus, together with the Lotophagi,
the Cyclôps, Circê, the Sirens, Æolus, Scylla, etc., he resolves
into a series of temptations, imposed as a trial upon a man of
wisdom and virtue, and emblematic of human life (p. 496). The
story of Arês, Aphroditê, and Hêphæstos, in the eighth book of
the Odyssey, seems to perplex him more than any other: he offers
two explanations, neither of which seems satisfactory even to
himself (p. 494).
An anonymous writer in the collection of Westermann (pp. 329-344)
has discussed the wanderings of Odysseus upon the same ethical
scheme of interpretation as Hêraclidês: he entitles his treatise
"A short essay on the Wanderings of Odysseus in Homer, worked
out in conjunction with ethical reflections, and rectifying what
is rotten in the story, as well as may be, for the benefit of
readers." (τὸ μύθου σαθρὸν θεραπεύουσα.) The author resolves the
adventures of Odysseus into narratives emblematic of different
situations and trials of human life. Scylla and Charybdis, for
example (c. 8. p. 338), represent, the one, the infirmities and
temptations arising out of the body, the other, those springing
from the mind, between which man is called upon to steer.
The adventure of Odysseus with Æolus, shows how little good
a virtuous man does himself by seeking, in case of distress,
aid from conjurors and evil enchanters; the assistance of such
allies, however it may at first promise well, ultimately deceives
the person who accepts it, and renders him worse off than he was
before (c. 3. p. 332). By such illustrations does the author
sustain his general position, that there is a great body of
valuable ethical teaching wrapped up in the poetry of Homer.
Proclus is full of similar allegorization, both of Homer and
Hesiod: the third Excursus of Heyne ad Iliad. xxiii. (vol. viii.
p. 563), De Allegoriâ Homericâ, contains a valuable summary of
the general subject.
The treatise De Astrologiâ, printed among the works of Lucian,
contains specimens of astrological explanations applied to many
of the Grecian μῦθοι, which the author as a pious man cannot
accept in their literal meaning. "How does it consist with
holiness (he asks) to believe that Æneas was son of Aphroditê,
Minôs of Zeus, or Askalaphus of Mars? No; these were men born
under the favorable influences of the planets Venus, Jupiter, and
Mars." He considers the principle of astrological explanation
peculiarly fit to be applied to the mythes of Homer and Hesiod
(Lucian, De Astrologiâ, c. 21-22).
It was from the same strong necessity, of accommodating the old mythes
to a new standard both of belief and of appreciation, that both the
historical and the allegorical schemes of transforming them arose;
the literal narrative being decomposed for the purpose of arriving at
a base either of particular matter of fact, or of general physical
or moral truth. Instructed men were commonly disposed to historicize
only the heroic legends, and to allegorize more or less of the divine
legends: the attempt of Euêmerus to historicize the latter was for
the most part denounced as irreligious, while that of Metrodôrus to
allegorize the former met with no success. In allegorizing, moreover,
even the divine legends, it was usual to apply the scheme of allegory
only to the inferior gods, though some of the great Stoic philosophers
carried it farther, and allegorized all the separate personal gods,
leaving only an all-pervading cosmic Mind,[972] essential as a
co-efficient along with Matter, yet not separable from Matter. But
many pious pagans seem to have perceived that allegory pushed to this
extent was fatal to all living religious faith,[973] inasmuch as it
divested the gods of their character of Persons, sympathizing with
mankind and modifiable in their dispositions according to the conduct
and prayers of the believer: and hence they permitted themselves to
employ allegorical interpretation only to some of the obnoxious legends
connected with the superior gods, leaving the personality of the latter
unimpeached.
[972] See Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, 2nd edit. part 3.
book 11. chap. 4. p. 592; Varro ap. Augustin. Civitat. Dei, vi.
5, ix. 6; Cicero, Nat. Deor. ii. 24-28.
Chrysippus admitted the most important distinction between Zeus
and the other gods (Plutarch. de Stoicor. Repugnant. p. 1052.)
[973] Plutarch. de Isid. et Osirid. c. 66. p. 377; c. 70. p.
379. Compare on this subject O. Müller, Prolegom. Mythol. p. 59
_seq._, and Eckermann, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, vol. i.
sect. ii. p. 46.
One novelty, however, introduced seemingly by the philosopher
Empedoklês and afterwards expanded by others, deserves notice,
inasmuch as it modified considerably the old religious creed by
drawing a pointed contrast between gods and dæmons,—a distinction
hardly at all manifested in Homer, but recognized in the Works and
Days of Hesiod.[974] Empedoklês widened the gap between the two,
and founded upon it important consequences. The gods were good,
immortal, and powerful agents, having free-will and intelligence,
but without appetite, passion, or infirmity: the dæmons were of
a mixed nature between gods and men, ministers and interpreters
from the former to the latter, but invested also with an agency
and dispositions of their own. They were very long-lived, but not
immortal, and subject to the passions and propensities of men, so
that there were among them beneficent and maleficent dæmons with
every shade of intermediate difference.[975] It had been the mistake
(according to these philosophers) of the old mythes to ascribe to
the gods proceedings really belonging to the dæmons, who were always
the immediate communicants with mortal nature, inspiring prophetic
power to the priestesses of the oracles, sending dreams and omens,
and perpetually interfering either for good or for evil. The wicked
and violent dæmons, having committed many enormities, had thus
sometimes incurred punishment from the gods: besides which, their bad
dispositions had imposed upon men the necessity of appeasing them by
religious ceremonies of a kind acceptable to such beings: hence, the
human sacrifices, the violent, cruel, and obscene exhibitions, the
wailings and fastings, the tearing and eating of raw flesh, which it
had become customary to practise on various consecrated occasions, and
especially in the Dionysiac solemnities. Moreover, the discreditable
actions imputed to the gods,—the terrific combats, the Typhonic and
Titanic convulsions, the rapes, abductions, flight, servitude, and
concealment,—all these were really the doings and sufferings of bad
dæmons, placed far below the sovereign agency—equable, undisturbed, and
unpolluted—of the immortal gods. The action of such dæmons upon mankind
was fitful and intermittent: they sometimes perished or changed their
local abode, so that oracles which had once been inspired became after
a time forsaken and disfranchized.[976]
[974] Hesiod, Opp. et Di. 122: to the same effect Pythagoras and
Thalês (Diogen. Laër. viii. 32; and Plutarch, Placit. Philos. i.
8).
The Hesiodic dæmons are all good: Athenagoras (Legat. Chr. p.
8) says that Thalês admitted a distinction between good and bad
dæmons, which seems very doubtful.
[975] The distinction between Θεοὶ and Δαίμονες is especially set
forth in the treatise of Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, capp.
10, 12, 13, 15, etc. He seems to suppose it traceable to the
doctrine of Zoroaster or the Orphic mysteries, and he represents
it as relieving the philosopher from great perplexities: for it
was difficult to know where to draw the line in admitting or
rejecting divine Providence: errors were committed sometimes in
affirming God to be the cause of everything, at other times in
supposing him to be the cause of nothing. Ἐπεὶ τὸ διορίσαι πῶς
χρηστέον καὶ μέχρι τίνων τῇ προνοίᾳ, χαλεπὸν, οἱ μὲν οὐδενὸς
ἁπλῶς τὸν θεὸν, οἱ δὲ ὁμοῦ τι πάντων αἴτιον ποιοῦντες, ἀστοχοῦσι
τοῦ μετρίου καὶ πρέποντος. Εὖ μὲν οὖν λέγουσιν καὶ οἱ λέγοντες,
ὅτι Πλάτων τὸ ταῖς γεννωμέναις ποιότησιν ὑποκείμενον στοιχεῖον
ἐξευρὼν, ὃ νῦν ὕλην καὶ φύσιν καλοῦσιν, πολλῶν ἀπήλλαξε καὶ
μεγάλων ἀποριῶν τοὺς φιλοσόφους· ἐμοὶ δὲ δοκοῦσι πλείονας λῦσαι
καὶ μείζονας ἀπορίας οἱ τὸ τῶν δαιμόνων γένος ἐν μέσῳ θεῶν καὶ
ἀνθρώπων, καὶ τρόπον τινὰ τὴν κοινωνίαν ἡμῶν σύναγον εἰς ταὐτὸ
καὶ σύναπτον, ἐξευρόντες (c. 10). Ἡ δαιμόνων φύσις ἔχουσα καὶ
πάθος θνητοῦ καὶ θεοῦ δύναμιν (c. 13).
Εἰσὶ γὰρ, ὡς ἐν ἀνθρώποις, καὶ δαίμοσιν ἀρετῆς διάφοραὶ, καὶ τοῦ
παθητικοῦ καὶ ἀλόγου τοῖς μὲν ἀσθενὲς καὶ ἀμαυρὸν ἔτι λείψανον,
ὥσπερ περίττωμα, τοῖς δὲ πολὺ καὶ δυσκατάσβεστον ἔνεστιν, ὧν ἴχνη
καὶ σύμβολα πολλαχοῦ θύσιαι καὶ τελεταὶ καὶ μυθολογίαι σώζουσι
καὶ διαφυλάττουσιν ἐνδιεσπαρμένα (_ib._): compare Plutarch. de
Isid. et Osir. 25. p. 360.
Καὶ μὴν ὅσας ~ἔν τε μύθοις καὶ ὕμνοις λέγουσι καὶ ᾅδουσι~, τοῦτο
μὲν ἁρπαγὰς, τοῦτο δὲ πλάνας θεῶν, κρύψεις τε καὶ φυγὰς καὶ
λατρείας, οὐ θεῶν εἰσίν ἀλλὰ δαιμόνων παθήματα, etc. (c. 15):
also c. 23; also De Isid. et Osir. c. 25. p. 366.
Human sacrifices and other objectionable rites are excused, as
necessary for the purpose of averting the anger of bad dæmons (c.
14-15).
Empedoklês is represented as the first author of the doctrine
which imputed vicious and abominable dispositions to many of the
dæmons (c. 15, 16, 17, 20), τοὺς εἰσαγομένους ὑπὸ Ἐμπεδοκλέους
δαίμονας; expelled from heaven by the gods, θεήλατοι καὶ
οὐρανοπετεὶς (Plutarch, De Vitand. Aër. Alien. p. 830); followed
by Plato, Xenokratês, and Chrysippus, c. 17: compare Plato
(Apolog. Socrat. p. 27; Politic. p. 271; Symposion, c. 28. p.
203), though he seems to treat the δαίμονες as defective and
mutable beings, rather than actively maleficent. Xenokratês
represents some of them both as wicked and powerful in a high
degree:—Ξενοκράτης καὶ τῶν ἡμερῶν τὰς ἀποφράδας, καὶ τῶν
ἑορτῶν ὅσαι πληγάς τινας ἢ κοπετοὺς, ἢ νηστείας, ἢ δυσφημίας,
ἢ αἰσχρολογίαν ἔχουσιν, οὔτε θεῶν τιμαῖς οὔτε δαιμόνων οἴεται
προσήκειν χρηστῶν, ἀλλ᾽ εἶναι φύσεις ἐν τῷ περιέχοντι μεγάλας
μὲν καὶ ἰσχυρὰς, δυστρόπους δὲ καὶ σκυθρωπὰς, αἳ ~χαίρουσι τοῖς
τοιούτοις~, καὶ ~τυγχάνουσαι πρὸς οὐθὲν ἄλλο χεῖρον τρέπονται~
(Plutarch, De Isid. ut Osir. c. 26. p. 361; Quæstion. Rom. p.
283): compare Stobæus, Eclog. Phys. i. p. 62.
[976] Plutarch, De Defect. Orac. c. 15. p. 418. Chrysippus
admitted, among the various conceivable causes to account for
the existence of evil, the supposition of some negligent and
reckless dæmons, δαιμόνια φαυλὰ ἐν οἷς τῷ ὄντι γίνονται καὶ
ἐγκλητέαι ἀμέλειαι (Plutarch, De Stoicor. Repugnant. p. 1051). A
distinction, which I do not fully understand, between θεοὶ and
δαίμονες, was also adopted among the Locrians at Opus: δαίμων
with them seems to have been equivalent to ἥρως (Plutarch,
Quæstion. Græc. c. 6. p. 292): see the note above, pp. 350-351.
This distinction between gods and dæmons appeared to save in a great
degree both the truth of the old legends and the dignity of the
gods: it obviated the necessity of pronouncing either that the gods
were unworthy, or the legends untrue. Yet although devised for the
purpose of satisfying a more scrupulous religious sensibility, it was
found inconvenient afterwards, when assailants arose against paganism
generally. For while it abandoned as indefensible a large portion of
what had once been genuine faith, it still retained the same word
_dæmons_ with an entirely altered signification. The Christian writers
in their controversies found ample warrant among the _earlier_ pagan
authors[977] for treating all the gods as dæmons—and not less ample
warrant among the _later_ pagans for denouncing the dæmons generally as
evil beings.[978]
[977] Tatian. adv. Græcos, c. 20; Clemens Alexandrin. Admonit.
ad Gentes, pp. 26-29, Sylb.; Minuc. Felix, Octav. c. 26. "Isti
igitur impuri spiritus, ut ostensum a Magis, a philosophis, a
Platone, sub statuis et imaginibus consecrati delitescunt, et
afflatu suo quasi auctoritatem præsentis numinis consequuntur,"
etc. This, like so many other of the aggressive arguments of
the Christians against paganism, was taken from the pagan
philosophers themselves.
Lactantius, De Verâ Philosophiâ, iv. 28. "Ergo iidem sunt
Dæmones, quos fatentur execrandos esse: iidem Dii, quibus
supplicant. Si nobis credendum esse non putant, credant Homero;
qui summum illum Jovem Dæmonibus aggregavit," etc.
[978] See above, Chapter II. p. 70, the remarks on the Hesiodic
Theogony.
Such were the different modes in which the ancient mythes were
treated, during the literary life of Greece, by the four classes above
named—poets, logographers, historians, and philosophers.
Literal acceptance, and unconscious, uninquiring faith, such as they
had obtained from the original auditors to whom they were addressed,
they now found only among the multitude—alike retentive of traditional
feeling[979] and fearful of criticizing the proceedings of the
gods.[980] But with instructed men they became rather subjects of
respectful and curious analysis—all agreeing that the Word as tendered
to them was inadmissible, yet all equally convinced that it contained
important meaning, though hidden yet not undiscoverable. A very large
proportion of the force of Grecian intellect was engaged in searching
after this unknown base, by guesses, in which sometimes the principle
of semi-historical interpretation was assumed, sometimes that of
allegorical, without any collateral evidence in either case, and
without possibility of verification. Out of the one assumption grew a
string of allegorized phænomenal truths, out of the other a long series
of seeming historical events and chronological persons,—both elicited
from the transformed mythes and from nothing else.[981]
[979] A destructive inundation took place at Pheneus in
Arcadia, seemingly in the time of Plutarch: the subterranean
outlet (βάραθρον) of the river had become blocked up, and the
inhabitants ascribed the stoppage to the anger of Apollo, who had
been provoked by the stealing of the Pythian tripod by Hêraklês:
the latter had carried the tripod to Pheneus and deposited it
there. Ἆρ᾽ οὖν οὐκ ἀτοπώτερος τούτων ὁ Ἀπόλλων, εἰ Φενεάτας
ἀπόλλυσι τοὺς νῦν, ἐμφράξας τὸ βάραθρον, καὶ κατακλύσας τὴν χώραν
ἅπασαν αὐτῶν, ὅτι πρὸ χιλίων ἐτῶν, ὥς φασιν, ὁ Ἡρακλῆς ἀνασπάσας
τὸν τρίποδα τὸν μαντικὸν εἰς Φενεὸν ἀπήνεγκε; (Plutarch. de
Serâ Numin. Vindictâ, p. 577; compare Pausan. viii. 14, 1.)
The expression of Plutarch, that the abstraction of the tripod
by Hêraklês had taken place 1000 years before, is that of the
critic, who thinks it needful to historicize and chronologize the
genuine legend; which, to an inhabitant of Pheneus, at the time
of the inundation, was doubtless as little questioned as if the
theft of Hêraklês had been laid in the preceding generation.
Agathoclês of Syracuse committed depredations on the coasts
of Ithaca and Korkyra: the excuse which he offered was, that
Odysseus had come to Sicily and blinded Polyphêmus, and that
on his return he had been kindly received by the Phæakians
(Plutarch, _ib._).
This is doubtless a jest, either made by Agathoclês, or more
probably invented for him; but it is founded upon a popular
belief.
[980] "Sanctiusque et reverentius visum, de actis Deorum credere
quam scire." (Tacit. German. c. 34.)
Aristidês, however, represents the Homeric theology (whether he
would have included the Hesiodic we do not know) as believed
quite literally among the multitude in his time, the second
century after Christianity (Aristid. Orat. iii. p. 25). Ἀπορῶ,
ὅπη πότε χρή με διαθέσθαι μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν, πότερα ὡς τοῖς πολλοῖς δοκεῖ
καὶ Ὁμήρῳ δὲ συνδοκεῖ, θεῶν παθήματα συμπεισθῆναι καὶ ἡμᾶς,
οἷον Ἀρέος δέσμα καὶ Ἀπόλλωνος θητείας καὶ Ἡφαίστου ῥίψεις εἰς
θάλασσαν, οὕτω δὲ καὶ Ἰνοῦς ἄχη καὶ φυγάς τινας. Compare Lucian,
Ζεὺς Τραγῶδος, c. 20, and De Luctu, c. 2; Dionys. Halicar. A. R.
ii. p. 90, Sylb.
Kallimachus (Hymn. ad Jov. 9) distinctly denied the statement
of the Kretans that they possessed in Krête the tomb of Zeus,
and treated it as an instance of Kretan mendacity; while
Celsus did not deny it, but explained it in some figurative
manner—αἰνιττόμενος τροπικὰς ὑπονοίας (Origen. cont. Celsum, iii.
p. 137).
[981] There is here a change as compared with my first edition;
I had inserted here some remarks on the allegorical theory of
interpretation, as compared with the semi-historical. An able
article on my work (in the Edinburgh Review, October 1846),
pointed out that those remarks required modification, and that
the idea of allegory in reference to the construction of the
mythes was altogether inadmissible.
The utmost which we accomplish by means of the semi-historical theory,
even in its most successful applications, is, that after leaving out
from the mythical narrative all that is miraculous or high- or
extravagant, we arrive at a series of credible incidents—incidents
which _may, perhaps_, have really occurred, and against which no
intrinsic presumption can be raised. This is exactly the character
of a well-written modern novel (as, for example, several among the
compositions of Defoe), the whole story of which is such as may well
have occurred in real life: it is plausible fiction, and nothing
beyond. To raise plausible fiction up to the superior dignity of
truth, some positive testimony or positive ground of inference must
be shown; even the highest measure of intrinsic probability is not
alone sufficient. A man who tells us that, on the day of the battle
of Platæa, rain fell on the spot of ground where the city of New York
now stands, will neither deserve nor obtain credit, because he can
have had no means of positive knowledge; though the statement is not
in the slightest degree improbable. On the other hand, statements in
themselves very improbable may well deserve belief, provided they be
supported by sufficient positive evidence; thus the canal dug by order
of Xerxês across the promontory of Mount Athos, and the sailing of
the Persian fleet through it, is a fact which I believe, because it
is well-attested—notwithstanding its remarkable improbability, which
so far misled Juvenal as to induce him to single out the narrative
as a glaring example of Grecian mendacity.[982] Again, many critics
have observed that the general tale of the Trojan war (apart from
the superhuman agencies) is not more improbable than that of the
Crusades, which every one admits to be an historical fact. But (even
if we grant this position, which is only true to a small extent), it
is not sufficient to show an analogy between the two cases in respect
to negative presumptions alone; the analogy ought to be shown to hold
between them in respect to positive certificate also. The Crusades
are a curious phænomenon in history, but we accept them, nevertheless,
as an unquestionable fact, because the antecedent improbability is
surmounted by adequate contemporary testimony. When the like testimony,
both in amount and kind, is produced to establish the historical
reality of a Trojan war, we shall not hesitate to deal with the two
events on the same footing.
[982] Juvenal, Sat. x. 174:—
"Creditur olim
Velificatus Athos, et quantum Græcia mendax
Audet in historiâ," etc.
In applying the semi-historical theory to Grecian mythical narrative,
it has been often forgotten that a certain strength of testimony, or
positive ground of belief, must first be tendered, before we can be
called upon to discuss the antecedent probability or improbability of
the incidents alleged. The belief of the Greeks themselves, without the
smallest aid of special or contemporary witnesses, has been tacitly
assumed as sufficient to support the case, provided only sufficient
deduction be made from the mythical narratives to remove all antecedent
improbabilities. It has been taken for granted that the faith of the
people must have rested originally upon some particular historical
event, involving the identical persons, things, and places which the
original mythes exhibit, or at least the most prominent among them.
But when we examine the pyschagogic influences predominant in the
society among whom this belief originally grew up, we shall see that
their belief is of little or no evidentiary value, and that the growth
and diffusion of it may be satisfactorily explained without supposing
any special basis of matters of fact. The popular faith, so far as
it counts for anything, testifies in favor of the entire and literal
mythes, which are now universally rejected as incredible.[983] We have
thus the very minimum of positive proof, and the maximum of negative
presumption: we may diminish the latter by conjectural omissions and
interpolations, but we cannot by any artifice increase the former: the
narrative ceases to be incredible, but it still remains uncertified,—a
mere commonplace possibility. Nor is fiction always, or essentially,
extravagant and incredible. It is often not only plausible and
coherent, but even more like truth (if a paradoxical phrase may be
allowed) than truth itself. Nor can we, in the absence of any extrinsic
test, reckon upon any intrinsic mark to discriminate the one from the
other.[984]
[983] Colonel Sleeman observes, respecting the Hindoo historical
mind—"History to this people is all a fairy tale." (Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official, vol. i. ch. ix. p. 70.) And
again, "The popular poem of the Ramaen describes the abduction
of the heroine by the monster king of Ceylon, Rawun; and her
recovery by means of the monkey general, Hunnooman. Every word of
this poem, the people assured me was written, if not by the hand
of the Deity himself, at least by his inspiration, which was the
same thing—and it must consequently be true. Ninety-nine out of
a hundred, among the Hindoos, implicitly believe, not only every
word of the poem, but every word of every poem that has ever been
written in Sanscrit. If you ask a man whether he really believes
any very egregious absurdity quoted from these books, he replies,
with the greatest _naïveté_ in the world, Is it not written in
the book; and how should it be there written, if not true? The
Hindoo religion reposes upon an entire prostration of mind,—that
continual and habitual surrender of the reasoning faculties,
which we are accustomed to make occasionally, while engaged at
the theatre, or in the perusal of works of fiction. We allow the
scenes, characters, and incidents, to pass before our mind's
eye, and move our feelings—without stopping a moment to ask
whether they are real or true. There is only this difference—that
with people of education among us, even in such short intervals
of illusion or _abandon_, any extravagance in the acting, or
flagrant improbability in the fiction, destroys the charm, breaks
the spell by which we have been so mysteriously bound, and
restores us to reason and the realities of ordinary life. With
the Hindoos, on the contrary, the greater the improbability, the
more monstrous and preposterous the fiction—the greater is the
charm it has over their minds; and the greater their learning
in the Sanscrit, the more are they under the influence of this
charm. Believing all to be written by the Deity, or under his
inspirations, and the men and things of former days to have
been very different from men and things of the present day, and
the heroes of these fables to have been demigods, or people
endowed with powers far superior to those of the ordinary men
of their own day—the analogies of nature are never for a moment
considered; nor do questions of probability, or possibility,
according to those analogies, ever obtrude to dispel the charm
with which they are so pleasingly bound. They go on through
life reading and talking of these monstrous fictions, which
shock the taste and understanding of other nations, without
ever questioning the truth of one single incident, or hearing
it questioned. There was a time, and that not far distant, when
it was the same in England, and in every other European nation;
and there are, I am afraid, some parts of Europe where it is
so still. But the Hindoo faith, so far as religious questions
are concerned, is not more capacious or absurd than that of the
Greeks or Romans in the days of Socrates or Cicero: the only
difference is, that among the Hindoos a greater number of the
questions which interest mankind are brought under the head of
religion." (Sleeman, Rambles, etc., vol. i. ch. xxvi. p. 227:
compare vol. ii. ch. v. p. 51; viii. p. 97.)
[984] Lord Lyttleton, in commenting on the tales of the Irish
bards, in his History of Henry II., has the following just
remarks (book iv. vol. iii. p. 13, quarto): "One may reasonably
suppose that in MSS. written since the Irish received the Roman
letters from St. Patrick, _some_ traditional truths recorded
before by the bards in their unwritten poems may have been
preserved to our times. Yet these cannot be so separated from
many fabulous stories derived from the same sources, as to obtain
a firm credit; it not being sufficient to establish the authority
of suspected traditions, that they can be shown not to be so
improbable or absurd as others with which they are mixed—_since
there may be specious as well as senseless fictions_. Nor can a
poet or bard, who lived in the sixth or seventh century after
Christ, if his poem is still extant, be any voucher for facts
supposed to have happened before the incarnation; though his
evidence (allowing for poetical license) may be received on such
matters as come within his own time, or the remembrance of old
men with whom he conversed. The most judicious historians pay no
regard to the Welsh or British traditions delivered by Geoffrey
of Monmouth, though it is not impossible but that some of these
may be true."
One definition of a mythe given by Plutarch coincides exactly
with a _specious fiction_: Ὁ μῦθος εἶναι βούλεται λόγος ψευδὴς
ἐοικὼς ἀληθινῷ (Plutarch, Bellone an pace clariores fuerunt
Athenienses, p. 348).
"Der Grund-Trieb des Mythus (Creuzer justly expresses it) das
Gedachte in ein Geschehenes umzusetzen." (Symbolik der Alten
Welt, sect. 43. p. 99.)
In the semi-historical theory respecting Grecian mythical narrative,
the critic unconsciously transports into the Homeric age those habits
of classification and distinction, and that standard of acceptance
or rejection, which he finds current in his own. Amongst us, the
distinction between historical fact and fiction is highly valued as
well as familiarly understood: we have a long history of the past,
deduced from a study of contemporary evidences; and we have a body
of fictitious literature, stamped with its own mark and interesting
in its own way. Speaking generally, no man could now hope to succeed
permanently in transferring any striking incident from the latter
category into the former, nor could any man deliberately attempt it
without incurring well-merited obloquy. But this _historical sense_,
now so deeply rooted in the modern mind that we find a difficulty
in conceiving any people to be without it, is the fruit of records
and inquiries, first applied to the present, and then preserved and
studied by subsequent generations; while in a society which has not
yet formed the habit of recording its present, the real facts of the
past can never be known; the difference between attested matter
of fact and plausible fiction—between truth and that which is like
truth—can neither be discerned nor sought for. Yet it is precisely upon
the supposition that this distinction is present to men's habitual
thoughts, that the semi-historical theory of the mythes is grounded.
It is perfectly true, as has often been stated, that the Grecian epic
contains what are called traditions respecting the past—the larger
portion of it, indeed, consists of nothing else. But what are these
traditions? They are the matter of those songs and stories which have
acquired hold on the public mind; they are the creations of the poets
and storytellers themselves, each of whom finds some preëxisting, and
adds others of his own, new and previously untold, under the impulse
and authority of the inspiring Muse. Homer doubtless found many songs
and stories current with respect to the siege of Troy; he received and
transmitted some of these traditions, recast and transformed others,
and enlarged the whole mass by new creations of his own. To the
subsequent poets, such as Arktinus and Leschês, these Homeric creations
formed portions of preëxisting tradition, with which they dealt in the
same manner; so that the whole mass of traditions constituting the tale
of Troy became larger and larger with each successive contributor. To
assume a generic difference between the older and the newer strata of
tradition—to treat the former as morsels of history, and the latter
as appendages of fiction—is an hypothesis gratuitous at the least,
not to say inadmissible. For the further we travel back into the
past, the more do we recede from the clear day of positive history,
and the deeper do we plunge into the unsteady twilight and gorgeous
clouds of fancy and feeling. It was one of the agreeable dreams of the
Grecian epic, that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond
the Rhipæan mountains, would in time reach the delicious country and
genial climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans—the votaries and favorites
of Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north beyond the chilling blasts
of Boreas. Now the hope that we may, by carrying our researches up the
stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land ultimately upon
some points of solid truth, appears to me no less illusory than this
northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean elysium.
The general disposition to adopt the semi-historical theory as to the
genesis of Grecian mythes, arises in part from reluctance in critics to
impute to the mythopœic ages extreme credulity or fraud; together with
the usual presumption, that where much is believed some portion of it
must be true. There would be some weight in these grounds of reasoning,
if the ages under discussion had been supplied with records and
accustomed to critical inquiry. But amongst a people unprovided with
the former and strangers to the latter, credulity is naturally at its
maximum, as well in the narrator himself as in his hearers: the idea
of deliberate fraud is moreover inapplicable,[985] for if the hearers
are disposed to accept what is related to them as a revelation from
the Muse, the _œstrus_ of composition is quite sufficient to impart a
similar persuasion to the poet whose mind is penetrated with it. The
belief of that day can hardly be said to stand apart by itself as an
act of reason. It becomes confounded with vivacious imagination and
earnest emotion; and in every case where these mental excitabilities
are powerfully acted upon, faith ensues unconsciously and as a matter
of course. How active and prominent such tendencies were among the
early Greeks, the extraordinary beauty and originality of their epic
poetry may teach us.
[985] In reference to the loose statements of the Highlanders,
Dr. Johnson observes, "He that goes into the Highlands with a
mind naturally acquiescent, and a credulity eager for wonders,
may perhaps come back with an opinion very different from mine;
for the inhabitants, knowing the ignorance of all strangers in
their language and antiquities, are perhaps not very scrupulous
adherents to truth; yet I do not say that they deliberately speak
studied falsehood, or have a settled purpose to deceive. They
have acquired and considered little, and do not always feel their
own ignorance. They are not much accustomed to be interrogated
by others, and seem never to have thought of interrogating
themselves; _so that if they do not know what they tell to be
true, they likewise do not distinctly perceive it to be false_.
Mr. Boswell was very diligent in his inquiries, and the result of
his investigations was, that the answer to the second question
was commonly such as nullified the answer to the first." (Journey
to the Western Islands, p. 272, 1st edit., 1775).
It is, besides, a presumption far too largely and indiscriminately
applied, even in our own advanced age, that where much is believed,
something must necessarily be true—that accredited fiction is always
traceable to some basis of historical truth.[986] The influence
of imagination and feeling is not confined simply to the process
of retouching, transforming, or magnifying narratives originally
founded on fact; it will often create new narratives of its own,
without any such preliminary basis. Where there is any general body
of sentiment pervading men living in society, whether it be religious
or political—love, admiration, or antipathy—all incidents tending to
illustrate that sentiment are eagerly welcomed, rapidly circulated
and (as a general rule) easily accredited. If real incidents are not
at hand, impressive fictions will be provided to satisfy the demand.
The perfect harmony of such fictions with the prevalent feeling stands
in the place of certifying testimony, and causes men to hear them not
merely with credence, but even with delight: to call them in question
and require proof, is a task which cannot be undertaken without
incurring obloquy. Of such tendencies in the human mind, abundant
evidence is furnished by the innumerable religious legends which
have acquired currency in various parts of the world, and of which
no country was more fertile than Greece—legends which derived their
origin, not from special facts misreported and exaggerated, but from
pious feelings pervading the society, and translated into narrative
by forward and imaginative minds—legends, in which not merely the
incidents, but often even the personages are unreal, yet in which the
generating sentiment is conspicuously discernible, providing its own
matter as well as its own form. Other sentiments also, as well as the
religious, provided they be fervent and widely diffused, will find
expression in current narrative, and become portions of the general
public belief—every celebrated and notorious character is the source
of a thousand fictions exemplifying his peculiarities. And if it be
true, as I think present observation may show us, that such creative
agencies are even now visible and effective, when the materials of
genuine history are copious and critically studied—much more are we
warranted in concluding that, in ages destitute of records, strangers
to historical testimony, and full of belief in divine inspiration both
as to the future and as to the past, narratives purely fictitious
will acquire ready and uninquiring credence, provided only they be
plausible and in harmony with the preconceptions of the auditors.
[986] I considered this position more at large in an article
in the "Westminster Review" for May, 1843, on Niebuhr's Greek
Legends, with which article much in the present chapter will be
found to coincide.
The allegorical interpretation of the mythes has been by several
learned investigators, especially by Creuzer, connected with the
hypothesis of an ancient and highly instructed body of priests, having
their origin either in Egypt or in the East, and communicating to the
rude and barbarous Greeks religious, physical, and historical knowledge
under the veil of symbols. At a time (we are told) when language was
yet in its infancy, visible symbols were the most vivid means of acting
upon the minds of ignorant hearers: the next step was to pass to
symbolical language and expressions—for a plain and literal exposition,
even if understood at all, would at least have been listened to with
indifference, as not corresponding with any mental demand. In such
allegorizing way, then, the early priests set forth their doctrines
respecting God, nature, and humanity—a refined monotheism and a
theological philosophy—and to this purpose the earliest mythes were
turned. But another class of mythes, more popular and more captivating,
grew up under the hands of the poets—mythes purely epical, and
descriptive of real or supposed past events. The allegorical mythes,
being taken up by the poets, insensibly became confounded in the same
category with the purely narrative mythes—the matter symbolized was no
longer thought of, while the symbolizing words came to be construed in
their own literal meaning—and the basis of the early allegory, thus
lost among the general public, was only preserved as a secret among
various religious fraternities, composed of members allied together
by initiation in certain mystical ceremonies, and administered by
hereditary families of presiding priests. In the Orphic and Bacchic
sects, in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries, was thus treasured
up the secret doctrine of the old theological and philosophical mythes,
which had once constituted the primitive legendary stock of Greece, in
the hands of the original priesthood and in ages anterior to Homer.
Persons who had gone through the preliminary ceremonies of initiation,
were permitted at length to hear, though under strict obligation of
secrecy, this ancient religious and cosmogonic doctrine, revealing
the destination of man and the certainty of posthumous rewards and
punishments—all disengaged from the corruptions of poets, as well as
from the symbols and allegories under which they still remained buried
in the eyes of the vulgar. The mysteries of Greece were thus traced up
to the earliest ages, and represented as the only faithful depository
channels of that purer theology and physics which had originally
been communicated, though under the unavoidable inconvenience of a
symbolical expression, by an enlightened priesthood coming from abroad
to the then rude barbarians of the country.[987]
[987] For this general character of the Grecian mysteries, with
their concealed treasure of doctrine, see _Warburton_, Divine
Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. 4.
_Payne Knight_, On the Symbolical Language of ancient Art and
Mythology, sect. 6, 10, 11, 40, etc.
_Saint Croix_, Recherches sur les Mystères du Paganisme, sect. 3,
p. 106; sect. 4, p. 404, etc.
_Creuzer_, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, sect. 2,
3, 23, 39, 42, etc. Meiners and Heeren adopt generally the same
view, though there are many divergences of opinion between these
different authors, on a subject essentially obscure. Warburton
maintained that the interior doctrine communicated in the
mysteries was the existence of one Supreme Divinity, combined
with the Euemeristic creed, that the pagan gods had been mere men.
See Clemens Alex. Strom. v. p. 582, Sylb.
The view taken by Hermann of the ancient Greek mythology is
in many points similar to that of Creuzer, though with some
considerable difference. He thinks that it is an aggregate
of doctrine—philosophical, theological, physical, and
moral—expressed under a scheme of systematic personifications,
each person being called by a name significant of the function
personified: this doctrine was imported from the East into
Greece, where the poets, retaining or translating the names, but
forgetting their meaning and connection, distorted the primitive
stories, the sense of which came to be retained only in the
ancient mysteries. That true sense, however, (he thinks,) may be
recovered by a careful analysis of the significant names: and
his two dissertations (De Mythologiâ Græcorum Antiquissimâ, in
the Opuscula, vol. ii.) exhibit a specimen of this systematic
expansion of etymology into narrative. The dissent from Creuzer
is set forth in their published correspondence, especially in his
concluding "Brief an Creuzer über das Wesen und die Behandlung
der Mythologie," Leipzig, 1819. The following citation from his
Latin dissertation sets forth his general doctrine:—
Hermann, De Mythologiâ Græcorum Antiquissimâ, p. 4 (Opuscula,
vol. ii. p. 171): "Videmus rerum divinarum humanarumque scientiam
ex Asiâ per Lyciam migrantem in Europam: videmus fabulosos
poëtas peregrinam doctrinam, monstruoso tumore orientis sive
exutam, sive nondum indutam, quasi de integro Græcâ specie
procreantes; videmus poëtas, illos, quorum omnium vera nomina
nominibus—ab arte, quâ clarebant, petitis—obliterata sunt,
diu in Thraciâ hærentes, raroque tandem etiam cum aliis
Græciæ partibus commercio junctos: qualis Pamphus, non ipse
Atheniensis, Atheniensibus hymnos Deorum fecit. Videmus denique
retrusam paulatim in mysteriorum secretam illam sapientum
doctrinam, vitiatam religionum perturbatione, corruptam inscitiâ
interpretum, obscuratam levitate amœniora sectantium—adeo ut eam
ne illi quidem intelligerent, qui hæreditariam a prioribus poësin
colentes, quum ingenii præstantiâ omnes præstinguerent, tantâ
illos oblivione merserunt, ut ipsi sint primi auctores omnis
eruditionis habiti."
Hermann thinks, however, that by pursuing the suggestions of
etymology, vestiges may still be discovered, and something like a
history compiled, of Grecian belief as it stood anterior to Homer
and Hesiod: "Est autem in hac omni ratione judicio maxime opus,
quia non testibus res agitur, sed ad interpretandi solertiam
omnia revocanda sunt" (p. 172). To the same general purpose
the French work of M. Emérie David, Recherches sur le Dieu
Jupiter—reviewed by O. Müller: see the Kleine Schriften of the
latter, vol. ii. p. 82.
Mr. Bryant has also employed a profusion of learning, and
numerous etymological conjectures, to resolve the Greek mythes
into mistakes, perversions, and mutilations, of the exploits and
doctrines of oriental tribes long-lost and by-gone,—Amonians,
Cuthites, Arkites, etc. "It was Noah (he thinks) who was
represented under the different names of Thoth, Hermês, Menês,
Osiris, Zeuth, Atlas, Phorôneus, Promêtheus, to which list a
farther number of great extent might be added: the Νοῦς of
Anaxagoras was in reality the patriarch Noah" (Ant. Mythol. vol.
ii. pp. 253, 272). "The Cuthites or Amonians, descendants of
Noah, settled in Greece from the east, celebrated for their skill
in building and the arts" (_ib._ i. p. 502; ii. p. 187). "The
greatest part of the Grecian theology arose from misconception
and blunders, the stories concerning their gods and heroes were
founded on terms misinterpreted or abused" (_ib._ i. p. 452).
"The number of different actions ascribed to the various Grecian
gods or heroes all relate to one people or family, and are at
bottom one and the same history" (_ib._ ii. p. 57). "The fables
of Promêtheus and Tityus were taken from ancient Amonian temples,
from hieroglyphics misunderstood and badly explained" (i. p.
426): see especially vol. ii. p. 160.
But this theory, though advocated by several learned men, has been
shown to be unsupported and erroneous. It implies a mistaken view
both of the antiquity and the purport of the mysteries, which cannot
be safely carried up even to the age of Hesiod, and which, though
imposing and venerable as religious ceremonies, included no recondite
or esoteric teaching.[988]
[988] The Anti-Symbolik of Voss, and still more the Aglaophamus
of Lobeck, are full of instruction on the subject of this
supposed interior doctrine, and on the ancient mysteries
in general: the latter treatise, especially, is not less
distinguished for its judicious and circumspect criticism than
for its copious learning.
Mr. Halhed (Preface to the Gentoo Code of Laws, pp. xiii.-xiv.)
has good observations on the vanity of all attempts to allegorize
the Hindu mythology: he observes, with perfect truth, "The
vulgar and illiterate have always understood the mythology of
their country in its literal sense; and there was a time to
every nation, when the highest rank in it was equally vulgar and
illiterate with the lowest.... A Hindu esteems the astonishing
miracles attributed to a Brima, or a Kishen, as facts of the
most indubitable authenticity, and the relation of them as most
strictly historical."
Compare also Gibbon's remarks on the allegorizing tendencies of
the later Platonists (Hist. Decl. and Fall, vol. iv. p. 71).
The doctrine, supposed to have been originally symbolized and
subsequently overclouded, in the Greek mythes, was in reality first
intruded into them by the unconscious fancies of later interpreters. It
was one of the various roads which instructed men took to escape from
the literal admission of the ancient mythes, and to arrive at some new
form of belief, more consonant with their ideas of what the attributes
and character of the gods ought to be. It was one of the ways of
constituting, by help of the mysteries, a philosophical religion apart
from the general public, and of connecting that distinction with the
earliest periods of Grecian society. Such a distinction was both avowed
and justified among the superior men of the later pagan world. Varro
and Scævola distributed theology into three distinct departments,—the
mythical or fabulous, the civil, and the physical. The first had
its place in the theatre, and was left without any interference to
the poets; the second belonged to the city of political community
as such,—it comprised the regulation of all the public worship and
religious rites, and was consigned altogether to the direction of
the magistrate; the third was the privilege of philosophers, but was
reserved altogether for private discussion in the schools, apart from
the general public.[989] As a member of the city, the philosopher
sympathized with the audience in the theatre, and took a devout share
in the established ceremonies, nor was he justified in trying what
he heard in the one or saw in the other by his own ethical standard.
But in the private assemblies of instructed or inquisitive men, he
enjoyed the fullest liberty of canvassing every received tenet, and
of broaching his own theories unreservedly, respecting the existence
and nature of the gods. By these discussions, the activity of the
philosophical mind was maintained and truth elicited; but it was such
truth as the body of the people ought not to hear, lest their faith in
their own established religious worship should be overthrown. In thus
distinguishing the civil theology from the fabulous, Varro was enabled
to cast upon the poets all the blame of the objectionable points in the
popular theology, and to avoid the necessity of pronouncing censure on
the magistrates, who (he contended) had made as good a compromise with
the settled prejudices of the public as the case permitted.
[989] Varro, ap. Augustin. De Civ. Dei, iv. 27; vi. 5-6. "Dicis
fabulosos Deos accommodatos esse ad theatrum, naturales ad
mundum, civiles ad urbem." "Varro, de religionibus loquens, multa
esse vera dixit, quæ non modo vulgo scire non sit utile, sed
etiam tametsi falsa sint, aliter existimare populum expediat:
et ideo Græcos teletas et mysteria taciturnitate parietibusque
clausisse" (_ibid._ iv. 31). See Villoison, De Triplici Theologiâ
Commentatio, p. 8; and Lactantius, De Origin. Error. ii. 3. The
doctrine of the Stoic Chrysippus, ap. Etymologicon Magn. v.
Τελεταί—Χρύσιππος δέ φησι, τοὺς περὶ τῶν θείων λόγους εἰκότως
καλεῖσθαι τελετὰς, χρῆναι γὰρ τούτους τελευταίους καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι
διδάσκεσθαι, τῆς ψυχῆς ἐχούσης ἕρμα καὶ κεκρατημένης, καὶ πρὸς
τοὺς ἀμυήτους σιωπᾷν δυναμένης· μέγα γὰρ εἶναι τὸ ἆθλον ὑπὲρ θεῶν
ἀκοῦσαί τε ὀρθὰ, καὶ ἐγκρατεῖς γενέσθαι αὐτῶν.
The triple division of Varro is reproduced in Plutarch,
Amatorius, p. 763. τὰ μὲν μύθῳ, τὰ δὲ νόμῳ, τὰ δὲ λόγῳ, πίστιν ἐξ
ἀρχῆς ἔσχηκε· τῆς δ᾽ οὖν περὶ θεῶν δόξης καὶ παντάπασιν ἡγεμόνες
καὶ διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασιν ἡμῖν οἵ τε ποιηταὶ, καὶ οἱ νομοθέται,
καὶ τρίτον, οἱ φιλόσοφοι.
The same conflicting sentiments which led the philosophers to decompose
the divine mythes into allegory, impelled the historians to melt down
the heroic mythes into something like continuous political history,
with a long series of chronology calculated upon the heroic pedigrees.
The one process as well as the other was interpretative guesswork,
proceeding upon unauthorized assumptions, and without any verifying
test or evidence: while it frittered away the characteristic beauty
of the mythe into something essentially anti-mythical, it sought to
arrive both at history and philosophy by impracticable roads. That the
superior men of antiquity should have striven hard to save the dignity
of legends which constituted the charm of their literature as well as
the substance of the popular religion, we cannot be at all surprised;
but it is gratifying to find Plato discussing the subject in a more
philosophical spirit. The Platonic Socratês, being asked whether he
believed the current Attic fable respecting the abduction of Oreithyia
(daughter of Erechtheus) by Boreas, replies, in substance,—"It would
not be strange if I disbelieved it, as the clever men do; I might
then show my cleverness by saying that a gust of Boreas blew her down
from the rocks above while she was at play, and that, having been
killed in this manner, she was reported to have been carried off by
Boreas. Such speculations are amusing enough, but they belong to men
ingenious and busy-minded overmuch, and not greatly to be envied, if
it be only for this reason, _that, after having set right one fable,
they are under the necessity of applying the same process to a host of
others_—Hippocentaurs, Chimæras, Gorgons, Pegasus, and numberless other
monsters and incredibilities. A man, who, disbelieving these stories,
shall try to find a probable basis for each of them, will display an
ill-placed acuteness and take upon himself an endless burden, for which
I at least have no leisure: accordingly, I forego such researches, and
believe in the current version of the stories."[990]
[990] Plato, Phædr. c. 7. p. 229:—
PHÆDRUS. Εἶπέ μοι, ὦ Σώκρατες, σὺ τοῦτο τὸ μυθολόγημα πείθει
ἀληθὲς εἶναι;
SOCRATES. Ἀλλ᾽ εἰ ἀπιστοίην, ὥσπερ οἱ σοφοὶ, οὐκ ἂν ἄτοπος εἴην,
εἶτα σοφιζόμενος φαίην αὐτὴν πνεῦμα Βορέου κατὰ τῶν πλησίον
πετρῶν σὺν φαρμακείᾳ παίζουσαν ὦσαι, καὶ οὕτω δὴ τελευτήσασαν
λεχθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ Βορέου ἀναρπαστὸν γεγονέναι.... Ἐγὼ δὲ, ὦ
Φαῖδρε, ἄλλως μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα χαρίεντα ἡγοῦμαι, λίαν δὲ δεινοῦ καὶ
ἐπιπόνου καὶ οὐ πάνυ εὐτυχοῦς ἀνδρὸς, κατ᾽ ἄλλο μὲν οὐδὲν, ὅτι δ᾽
αὐτῷ ἀνάγκη μετὰ τοῦτο τὸ τῶν Ἱπποκενταύρων εἶδος ἐπανορθοῦσθαι,
καὶ αὖθις τὸ τῆς Χιμαίρας. Καὶ ἐπιῤῥεῖ δὲ ὄχλος τοιούτων Γοργόνων
καὶ Πηγάσων, καὶ ἄλλων ἀμηχάνων πλήθη τε καὶ ἀτοπίαι τερατολόγων
τινῶν φύσεων· αἷς εἴ τις ἀπιστῶν προσβιβᾷ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἕκαστον,
ἅτε ἀγροίκῳ τινὶ σοφίᾳ χρώμενος, πολλῆς αὐτῷ σχολῆς δεήσει. Ἐμοὶ
δὲ πρὸς ταῦτα οὐδαμῶς ἐστι σχολή.... Ὅθεν δὴ χαίρειν ἐάσας ταῦτα,
πειθόμενος δὲ τῷ νομιζομένῳ περὶ αὐτῶν, ὃ νῦν δὴ ἔλεγον, σκοπῶ οὐ
ταῦτα ἀλλ᾽ ἐμαυτὸν, etc.
These remarks of Plato are valuable, not simply because they point
out the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of truth in the
mythes, but because they at the same time suggest the true reason
for mistrusting all such tentatives. The mythes form a class apart,
abundant as well as peculiar: to remove any individual mythe from its
own class into that of history or philosophy, by simple conjecture,
and without any collateral evidence, is of no advantage, unless you
can perform a similar process on the remainder. If the process be
trustworthy, it ought to be applied to all; and _e converso_, if it
be not applicable to all, it is not trustworthy as applied to any one
specially; always assuming no special evidence to be accessible. To
detach any individual mythe from the class to which it belongs, is to
present it in an erroneous point of view; we have no choice except to
admit them as they stand, by putting ourselves approximatively into the
frame of mind of those for whom they were destined and to whom they
appeared worthy of credit.
If Plato thus discountenances all attempts to transform the mythes by
interpretation into history or philosophy, indirectly recognizing the
generic difference between them—we find substantially the same view
pervading the elaborate precepts in his treatise on the Republic. He
there regards the mythes, not as embodying either matter-of-fact or
philosophical principle, but as portions of religious and patriotic
faith, and instruments of ethical tuition. Instead of allowing the
poets to frame them according to the impulses of their own genius,
and with a view to immediate popularity, he directs the legislator to
provide types of his own for the characters of the gods and heroes,
and to suppress all such divine and heroic legends as are not in
harmony with these preëstablished canons. In the Platonic system, the
mythes are not to be matters of history, nor yet of spontaneous or
casual fiction, but of prescribed faith: he supposes that the people
will believe, as a thing of course, what the poets circulate, and he
therefore directs that the latter shall circulate nothing which does
not tend to ennoble and improve the feelings. He conceives the mythes
as stories composed to illustrate the general sentiments of the poets
and the community, respecting the character and attributes of the gods
and heroes, or respecting the social relations, and ethical duties as
well as motives of mankind: hence the obligation upon the legislator to
prescribe beforehand the types of character which shall be illustrated,
and to restrain the poets from following out any opposing fancies.
"Let us neither believe ourselves (he exclaims), nor permit any one to
circulate, that Thêseus son of Poseidôn and Peirithöus son of Zeus, or
any other hero or son of a god, could ever have brought themselves to
commit abductions or other enormities such as are now falsely ascribed
to them. We must compel the poets to say, either that such persons were
not the sons of gods, or that they were not the perpetrators of such
misdeeds."[991]
[991] Plato, Repub. iii. 5. p. 391. The perfect ignorance of
all men respecting the gods, rendered the task of fiction easy
(Plato, Kritias, p. 107).
Most of the mythes which the youth hear and repeat (according to Plato)
are false, but some of them are true: the great and prominent mythes
which appear in Homer and Hesiod are no less fictions than the rest.
But fiction constitutes one of the indispensable instruments of mental
training as well as truth; only the legislator must take care that
the fiction so employed shall be beneficent and not mischievous.[992]
As the mischievous fictions (he says) take their rise from wrong
preconceptions respecting the character of the gods and heroes, so the
way to correct them is to enforce, by authorized compositions, the
adoption of a more correct standard.[993]
[992] Plato, Repub. ii. 16. p. 377. Λόγων δὲ διττὸν εἶδος, τὸ
μὲν ἀληθὲς, ψεῦδος δ᾽ ἕτερον; Ναί. Παιδευτέον δ᾽ ἐν ἀμφοτέροις,
πρότερον δ᾽ ἐν τοῖς ψεύδεσιν· ... Οὐ μανθάνεις, ὅτι πρῶτον τοῖς
παιδίοις μύθους λέγομεν· τοῦτο δέ που ὡς τὸ ὅλον εἰπεῖν ψεῦδος,
ἔνι δὲ καὶ ἀληθῆ.... Πρῶτον ἡμῖν ἐπιστατητέον τοῖς μυθοποιοῖς,
καὶ ὃν μὲν ἂν καλὸν μῦθον ποιήσωσιν, ἐγκριτέον, ὃν δ᾽ ἂν μὴ,
ἀποκριτέον ... ὧν δὲ νῦν λέγουσι, τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐκβλητέον ... οὓς
Ἡσίοδος καὶ Ὅμηρος ἡμῖν ἐλεγέτην, καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι ποιηταί. Οὗτοι
γάρ που μύθους τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ψευδεῖς συντιθέντες ἔλεγόν τε καὶ
λέγουσι. Ποίους δὴ, ἦ δ᾽ ὅς, καὶ τί αὐτῶν μεμφόμενος λέγεις;
Ὅπερ, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγὼ, χρὴ καὶ πρῶτον καὶ μάλιστα μέμφεσθαι, ἄλλως τε
καὶ ἐάν τις μὴ καλῶς ψεύδηται. Τί τοῦτο; Ὅταν τις εἰκάζῃ κακῶς
τῷ λόγῳ περὶ θεῶν τε καὶ ἡρώων, οἷοί εἰσιν, ὥσπερ γραφεὺς μηδὲν
ἐοικότα γράφων οἷς ἂν ὅμοια βουληθῇ γράψαι.
The same train of thought, and the precepts founded upon it, are
followed up through chaps. 17, 18, and 19; compare De Legg. xii.
p. 941.
Instead of recognizing the popular or dramatic theology as
something distinct from the civil (as Varro did), Plato
suppresses the former as a separate department and merges it in
the latter.
[993] Plato, Repub. ii. c. 21. p. 382. Τὸ ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ψεῦδος
πότε καὶ τί χρήσιμον, ὥστε μὴ ἄξιον εἶναι μίσους; Ἆρ᾽ οὐ πρός
τε τοὺς πολεμίους καὶ τῶν καλουμένων φίλων, ὅταν διὰ μανίαν ἤ
τινα ἄνοιαν κακόν τι ἐπιχειρῶσι πράττειν, τότε ἀποτροπῆς ἕνεκα
ὡς φάρμακον χρήσιμον γίγνεται; ~Καὶ ἐν αἷς νῦν δὴ ἐλέγομεν ταῖς
μυθολογίαις, διὰ τὸ μὴ εἰδέναι ὅπῃ τἀληθὲς ἔχει περὶ τῶν παλαιῶν,
ἀφομοιοῦντες τῷ ἀληθεῖ τὸ ψεῦδος~, ὅτι μάλιστα, οὕτω χρήσιμον
ποιοῦμεν;
The comments which Plato has delivered with so much force in his
Republic, and the enactments which he deduces from them, are in the
main an expansion of that sentiment of condemnation, which he shared
with so many other philosophers, towards a large portion of the Homeric
and Hesiodic stories.[994] But the manner in which he has set forth
this opinion, unfolds to us more clearly the real character of the
mythical narratives. They are creations of the productive minds in the
community, deduced from the supposed attributes of the gods and heroes:
so Plato views them, and in such character he proposes to amend them.
The legislator would cause to be prepared a better and truer picture of
the foretime, because he would start from truer (that is to say, more
creditable) conceptions of the gods and heroes. For Plato rejects the
mythes respecting Zeus and Hêrê, or Thêseus and Peirithöus, not from
any want of evidence, but because they are unworthy of gods and heroes:
he proposes to call forth new mythes, which, though he admits them at
the outset to be fiction, he knows will soon be received as true, and
supply more valuable lessons of conduct.
[994] The censure which Xenophanês pronounced upon the Homeric
legends has already been noticed: Herakleitus (Diogen. Laërt. ix.
1) and Metrodôrus, the companion and follower of Epicurus, were
not less profuse in their invectives, ἐν γράμμασι τοσούτοις τῷ
ποιητῇ λελοιδόρηται (Plutarch, Non posse suaviter vivi secundum
Epicurum, p. 1086). He even advised persons not to be ashamed
to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not
knowing whether Hectôr was a Greek or a Trojan (Plut. _ib._ p.
1094).
We may consider, then, that Plato disapproves of the attempt to
identify the old mythes either with exaggerated history or with
disguised philosophy. He shares in the current faith, without any
suspicion or criticism, as to Orpheus, Palamêdês, Dædalus, Amphiôn,
Thêseus, Achilles, Cheirôn, and other mythical personages;[995] but
what chiefly fills his mind is, the inherited sentiment of deep
reverence for these superhuman characters and for the age to which they
belonged,—a sentiment sufficiently strong to render him not only an
unbeliever in such legends as conflict with it, but also a deliberate
creator of new legends for the purpose of expanding and gratifying it.
The more we examine this sentiment, both in the mind of Plato as well
as in that of the Greeks generally, the more shall we be convinced
that it formed essentially and inseparably a portion of Hellenic
religious faith. The mythe both presupposes, and springs out of, a
settled basis, and a strong expansive force of religious, social, and
patriotic feeling, operating upon a past which is little better than
a blank as to positive knowledge. It resembles history, in so far as
its form is narrative; it resembles philosophy, in so far as it is
occasionally illustrative; but in its essence and substance, in the
mental tendencies by which it is created as well as in those by which
it is judged and upheld, it is a popularized expression of the divine
and heroic faith of the people.
[995] Plato, Republic iii. 4-5. p. 391; De Legg. iii. 1. p. 677.
Grecian antiquity cannot be at all understood except in connection
with Grecian religion. It begins with gods and it ends with historical
men, the former being recognized not simply as gods, but as primitive
ancestors, and connected with the latter by a long mythical genealogy,
partly heroic and partly human. Now the whole value of such genealogies
arises from their being taken entire; the god or hero at the top is
in point of fact the most important member of the whole;[996] for
the length and continuity of the series arises from anxiety on the
part of historical men to join themselves by a thread of descent
with the being whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices.
Without the ancestorial god, the whole pedigree would have become not
only acephalous, but worthless and uninteresting. The pride of the
Herakleids, Asklêpiads, Æakids, Nêleids, Dædalids, etc. was attached
to the primitive eponymous hero and to the god from whom they sprung,
not to the line of names, generally long and barren, through which the
divine or heroic dignity gradually dwindled down into common manhood.
Indeed, the length of the genealogy (as I have before remarked) was an
evidence of the humility of the historical man, which led him to place
himself at a respectful distance from the gods or heroes; for Hekatæus
of Milêtus, who ranked himself as the fifteenth descendant of a god,
might perhaps have accounted it an overweening impiety in any living
man to claim a god for his immediate father.
[996] For a description of similar tendencies in the Asiatic
religions, see Mövers, Die Phönizier, ch. v. p. 153 (Bonn, 1841):
he points out the same phænomena as in the Greek,—coalescence
between the ideas of ancestry and worship,—confusion between
gods and men in the past,—increasing tendency to Euêmerize (pp.
156-157).
The whole chronology of Greece, anterior to 776 B. C., consists of
calculations founded upon these mythical genealogies, especially upon
that of the Spartan kings and their descent from Hêraklês,—thirty
years being commonly taken as the equivalent of a generation, or
about three generations to a century. This process of computation
was altogether illusory, as applying historical and chronological
conditions to a case on which they had no bearing. Though the domain
of history was seemingly enlarged, the religious element was tacitly
set aside: when the heroes and gods were chronologized, they became
insensibly approximated to the limits of humanity, and the process
indirectly gave encouragement to the theory of Euêmerus. Personages
originally legendary and poetical were erected into definite landmarks
for measuring the duration of the foretime, thus gaining in respect to
historical distinctness, but not without loss on the score of religious
association. Both Euêmerus and the subsequent Christian writers, who
denied the original and inherent divinity of the pagan gods, had a
great advantage in carrying their chronological researches strictly and
consistently upwards—for all chronology fails as soon as we suppose a
race superior to common humanity.
Moreover, it is to be remarked that the pedigree of the Spartan kings,
which Apollodôrus and Eratosthenês selected as the basis of their
estimate of time, is nowise superior in credibility and trustworthiness
to the thousand other gentile and family pedigrees with which Greece
abounded; it is rather indeed to be numbered among the most incredible
of all, seeing that Hêraklês as a progenitor is placed at the head of
perhaps more pedigrees than any other Grecian god or hero.[997] The
descent of the Spartan king Leonidas from Hêraklês rests upon no better
evidence than that of Aristotle or Hippocratês from Asklêpius,[998]—of
Evagoras or Thucydidês from Æakus,—of Socratês from Dædalus,—of the
Spartan heraldic family from Talthybius,—of the prophetic Iamid family
in Elis from Iamus,—of the root-gatherers in Pêlion from Cheirôn,—and
of Hekatæus and his gens from some god in the sixteenth ascending
line of the series. There is little exaggeration in saying, indeed,
that no permanent combination of men in Greece, religious, social, or
professional, was without a similar pedigree; all arising out of the
same exigences of the feelings and imagination, to personify as well
as to sanctify the bond of union among the members. Every one of these
_gentes_ began with a religious and ended with an historical person.
At some point or other in the upward series, entities of history were
exchanged for entities of religion; but where that point is to be
found we are unable to say, nor had the wisest of the ancient Greeks
any means of determining. Thus much, however, we know, that the series
taken as a whole, though dear and precious to the believing Greek,
possesses no value as chronological evidence to the historian.
[997] According to that which Aristotle seems to recognize
(Histor. Animal. vii. 6), Hêraklês was father of seventy-two
sons, but of only one daughter—he was essentially ἀῤῥενόγονος,
illustrating one of the physical peculiarities noticed by
Aristotle. Euripidês, however, mentions daughters of Hêraklês in
the plural number (Euripid. Herakleid. 45).
[998] Hippocratês was twentieth in descent from Hêraklês,
and nineteenth from Asklêpius (Vita Hippocr. by Soranus, ap.
Westermann, Scriptor. Biographic. viii. 1); about Aristotle,
see Diogen. Laërt. v. 1. Xenophôn, the physician of the emperor
Claudius, was also an Asklêpiad (Tacit. Ann. xii. 61).
In Rhodes, the neighboring island to Kôs, was the gens Ἁλιάδαι,
or sons of Hêlios, specially distinguished from the Ἁλιασταὶ of
mere associated worshippers of Hêlios, τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἁλιαδῶν καὶ
τῶν Ἁλιαστῶν (see the Inscription in Boeckh's Collection, No.
2525, with Boeckh's comment).
When Hekatæus visited Thêbes in Egypt, he mentioned to the Egyptian
priests, doubtless with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, the
imposing pedigree of the gens to which he belonged,—with fifteen
ancestors in ascending line, and a god as the initial progenitor. But
he found himself immeasurably overdone by the priests "who genealogized
against him."[999] They showed to him three hundred and forty-one
wooden colossal statues, representing the succession of chief priests
in the temple in uninterrupted series from father to son, through a
space of 11,300 years. Prior to the commencement of this long period
(they said), the gods dwelling along with men, had exercised sway in
Egypt; but they repudiated altogether the idea of men begotten by gods
or of heroes.[1000]
[999] Herodot. ii. 144. Ἑκαταίῳ δὲ γενεηλογήσαντι ἑωϋτὸν,
καὶ ἀναδήσαντι ἐς ἑκκαιδέκατον θεὸν, ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν ἐπὶ τῇ
ἀριθμήσει, οὐ δεκόμενοι παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ, ἀπὸ θεοῦ γένεσθαι ἄνθρωπον·
ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν δὲ ὧδε, etc.
[1000] Herod. ii. 143-145. Καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶν
ἐπίστασθαι, αἰεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ αἰεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα.
But these counter-genealogies, are, in respect to trustworthiness and
evidence, on the same footing. Each represents partly the religious
faith, partly the retrospective imagination, of the persons from whom
it emanated; in each, the lower members of the series (to what extent
we cannot tell) are real, the upper members fabulous; but in each also
the series derived all its interest and all its imposing effect from
being conceived unbroken and entire. Herodotus is much perplexed by the
capital discrepancy between the Grecian and Egyptian chronologies, and
vainly employs his ingenuity in reconciling them. There is no standard
of objective evidence by which either the one or the other of them can
be tried: each has its own subjective value, in conjunction with the
faith and feelings of Egyptians and Greeks, and each presupposes in the
believer certain mental prepossessions which are not to be found beyond
its own local limits. Nor is the greater or less extent of duration at
all important, when we once pass the limits of evidence and verifiable
reality. One century of recorded time, adequately studded with
authentic and orderly events, presents a greater mass and a greater
difficulty of transition to the imagination than a hundred centuries of
barren genealogy. Herodotus, in discussing the age of Homer and Hesiod,
treats an anterior point of 400 years as if it were only yesterday;
the reign of Henry VI. is separated from us by an equal interval, and
the reader will not require to be reminded how long that interval now
appears.
The mythical age was peopled with a mingled aggregate of gods, heroes,
and men, so confounded together that it was often impossible to
distinguish to which class any individual name belonged. In regard
to the Thracian god Zalmoxis, the Hellespontic Greeks interpreted
his character and attributes according to the scheme of Euêmerism.
They affirmed that he had been a man, the slave of the philosopher
Pythagoras at Samos, and that he had by abilities and artifice
established a religious ascendency over the minds of the Thracians,
and obtained from them divine honors. Herodotus cannot bring himself
to believe this story, but he frankly avows his inability to determine
whether Zalmoxis was a god or a man,[1001] nor can he extricate
himself from a similar embarrassment in respect to Dionysus and Pan.
Amidst the confusion of the Homeric fight, the goddess Athênê confers
upon Diomêdês the miraculous favor of dispelling the mist from his
eyes, so as to enable him to discriminate gods from men; and nothing
less than a similar miracle could enable a critical reader of the
mythical narratives to draw an ascertained boundary-line between
the two.[1002] But the original hearers of the mythes felt neither
surprise nor displeasure from this confusion of the divine with the
human individual. They looked at the past with a film of faith over
their eyes—neither knowing the value, nor desiring the attainment, of
an unclouded vision. The intimate companionship, and the occasional
mistake of identity between gods and men, were in full harmony with
their reverential retrospect. And we, accordingly, see the poet Ovid
in his Fasti, when he undertakes the task of unfolding the legendary
antiquities of early Rome, re-acquiring, by the inspiration of Juno,
the power of seeing gods and men in immediate vicinity and conjunct
action, such as it existed before the development of the critical and
historical sense.[1003]
[1001] Herod. iv. 94-96. After having related the Euemeristic
version given by the Hellespontic Greeks, he concludes with his
characteristic frankness and simplicity—Ἐγὼ δὲ, περὶ μὲν τούτου
καὶ τοῦ καταγαίου οἰκήματος, οὔτε ἀπιστέω, οὔτε ὦν πιστεύω τι
λίην, δοκέω δὲ πολλοῖσι ἔτεσι πρότερον τὸν Ζάλμοξιν τοῦτον
γενέσθαι Πυθαγόρεω. Εἴτε δὲ ἐγένετό τις Ζάλμοξις ἄνθρωπος, εἴτ᾽
ἐστὶ δαίμων τις Γέτησι οὗτος ἐπιχώριος, χαιρέτω. So Plutarch
(Numa c. 19) will not undertake to determine whether Janus was a
god or a king εἴτε δαίμων, εἴτε βασιλεὺς γενόμενος, etc.
Herakleitus the philosopher said that men were θεοὶ θνητοὶ, and
the gods were ἄνθρωποι ἀθάνατοι (Lucian, Vitar. Auctio. c. 13.
vol. i. p. 303, Tauch.: compare the same author, Dialog. Mortuor.
iii. vol. i. p. 182, ed. Tauchn).
[1002] Iliad, v. 127:—
Ἀχλὺν δ᾽ αὖ τοι ἀπ᾽ ὀφθαλμῶν ἕλον, ἣ πρὶν ἐπῆεν,
Ὄφρ᾽ εὖ γιγνώσκῃς ἠμὲν θεὸν, ἠδὲ καὶ ἄνδρα.
Of this undistinguishable confusion between gods and men,
striking illustrations are to be found both in the third book of
Cicero de Naturâ Deorum (16-21), and in the long disquisition of
Strabo (x. pp. 467-474) respecting the Kabeiri, the Korybantes,
the Dactyls of Ida; the more so, as he cites the statements of
Pherekydês, Akusilaus, Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis, and others. Under
the Roman empire, the lands in Greece belonging to the immortal
gods were exempted from tribute. The Roman tax-collectors
refused to recognize as immortal gods any persons who had once
been men; but this rule could not be clearly applied (Cicero,
Nat. Deor. iii. 20). See the remarks of Pausanias (ii. 26, 7)
about Asklêpius: Galen, too, is doubtful about Asklêpius and
Dionysus—Ἀσκληπιός γέ τοι καὶ Διόνυσος, εἶτ᾽ ἄνθρωποι πρότερον
ἤστην, εἴτε καὶ ἀρχῆθεν θεοί (Galen in Protreptic. 9. tom. i. p.
22, ed. Kühn). Xenophôn (De Venat. c. i.) considers Cheirôn as
the brother of Zeus.
The ridicule of Lucian (Deorum Concilium, t. iii. p 527-538,
Hems.) brings out still more forcibly the confusion here
indicated.
[1003] Ovid, Fasti, vi. 6-20:—
"Fas mihi præcipue vultus vidisse Deorum,
Vel quia sum vates, vel quia sacra cano ...
... Ecce Deas vidi....
Horrueram, tacitoque animum pallore fatebar:
Cum Dea, quos fecit, sustulit ipsa metus.
Namque ait—O vates, Romani conditor anni,
Ause per exiguos magna referre modos;
Jus tibi fecisti numen cœleste videndi,
Cum placuit numeris condere festa tuis."
To resume, in brief, what has been laid down in this and the preceding
chapters respecting the Grecian mythes:—
1. They are a special product of the imagination and feelings,
radically distinct both from history and philosophy: they cannot be
broken down and decomposed into the one, nor allegorized into the
other. There are indeed some particular and even assignable mythes,
which raise intrinsic presumption of an allegorizing tendency; and
there are doubtless some others, though not specially assignable, which
contain portions of matter of fact, or names of real persons, embodied
in them. But such matter of fact cannot be verified by any intrinsic
mark, nor we are entitled to presume its existence in any given case
unless some collateral evidence can be produced.
2. We are not warranted in applying to the mythical world the rules
either of historical credibility or chronological sequence. Its
personages are gods, heroes, and men, in constant juxtaposition and
reciprocal sympathy; men, too, of whom we know a large proportion to
be fictitious, and of whom we can never ascertain how many may have
been real. No series of such personages can serve as materials for
chronological calculation.
3. The mythes were originally produced in an age which had no records,
no philosophy, no criticism, no canon of belief, and scarcely any
tincture either of astronomy or geography—but which, on the other hand,
was full of religious faith, distinguished for quick and susceptible
imagination, seeing personal agents where we look only for objects and
connecting laws;—an age, moreover, eager for new narrative, accepting
with the unconscious impressibility of children (the question of truth
or falsehood being never formally raised) all which ran in harmony
with its pre-existing feelings, and penetrable by inspired prophets
and poets in the same proportion that it was indifferent to positive
evidence. To such hearers did the primitive poet or story-teller
address himself: it was the glory of his productive genius to provide
suitable narrative expression for the faith and emotions which he
shared in common with them, and the rich stock of Grecian mythes
attests how admirably he performed his task. As the gods and the heroes
formed the conspicuous object of national reverence, so the mythes were
partly divine, partly heroic, partly both in one.[1004] The adventures
of Achilles, Helen, and Diomêdês, of Œdipus and Adrastus, of Meleager
and Athæa, of Jasôn and the Argô, were recounted by the same tongues,
and accepted with the same unsuspecting confidence, as those of Apollo
and Artemis, of Arês and Aphroditê, of Poseidôn and Hêraklês.
[1004] The fourth Eclogue of Virgil, under the form of a
prophecy, gives a faithful picture of the heroic and divine past,
to which the legends of Troy and the Argonauts belonged:—
"Ille Deûm vitam accipiet, Divisque videbit
Permixtos heroas," etc.
"Alter erit tum Tiphys et altera quæ vehat Argo
Delectos heroas: erunt etiam altera bella,
Atque iterum ad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles."
4. The time however came, when this plausibility ceased to be complete.
The Grecian mind made an important advance, socially, ethically, and
intellectually. Philosophy and history were constituted, prose writing
and chronological records became familiar; a canon of belief more
or less critical came to be tacitly recognized. Moreover, superior
men profited more largely by the stimulus, and contracted habits of
judging different from the vulgar: the god Elenchus[1005] (to use a
personification of Menander) the giver and prover of truth, descended
into their minds. Into the new intellectual medium, thus altered in its
elements, and no longer uniform in its quality, the mythes descended by
inheritance; but they were found, to a certain extent, out of harmony
even with the feelings of the people, and altogether dissonant with
those of instructed men. But the most superior Greek was still a Greek,
and cherished the common reverential sentiment towards the foretime of
his country. Though he could neither believe nor respect the mythes as
they stood, he was under an imperious mental necessity to transform
them into a state worthy of his belief and respect. Whilst the literal
mythe still continued to float among the poets and the people, critical
men interpreted, altered, decomposed, and added, until they found
something which satisfied their minds as a supposed real basis. They
manufactured some dogmas of supposed original philosophy, and a long
series of fancied history and chronology, retaining the mythical names
and generations even when they were obliged to discard or recast
the mythical events. The interpreted mythe was thus promoted into a
reality, while the literal mythe was degraded into a fiction.[1006]
[1005] Lucian, Pseudol. c. 4. Παρακλητέος ἡμῖν τῶν Μενάνδρου
προλόγων εἷς, ὁ Ἔλεγχος, φίλος ἀληθείᾳ καὶ παῤῥησίᾳ θεὸς, οὐχ
ὁ ἀσημότατος τῶν ἐπὶ τὴν σκήνην ἀναβαινόντων. (See Meineke ad
Menandr. p. 284.)
[1006] The following passage from Dr. Ferguson's Essay on Civil
Society (part ii. sect. i. p. 126) bears well on the subject
before us:—
"If conjectures and opinions formed at a distance have not a
sufficient authority in the history of mankind, the domestic
antiquities of every nation must for this very reason be received
with caution. They are, for the most part, the mere conjectures
or the fictions of subsequent ages; and even where at first they
contained some resemblance of truth, they still vary with the
imagination of those by whom they were transmitted, and in every
generation receive a different form. They are made to bear the
stamp of the times through which they have passed in the form of
tradition, not of the ages to which their pretended descriptions
relate.... When traditionary fables are rehearsed by the vulgar,
they bear the marks of a national character, and though mixed
with absurdities, often raise the imagination and move the heart:
when made the materials of poetry, and adorned by the skill and
the eloquence of an ardent and superior mind, they instruct the
understanding as well as engage the passions. It is only in the
management of mere antiquaries, or stript of the ornaments which
the laws of history forbid them to wear, that _they become unfit
even to amuse the fancy or to serve any purpose whatever_.
"It were absurd to quote the fable of the Iliad or the Odyssey,
the legend of Hercules, Theseus, and Œdipus, as authorities
in matters of fact relating to the history of mankind; but
they may, with great justice, be cited to ascertain what were
the conceptions and sentiments of the age in which they were
composed, or to characterize the genius of that people with whose
imaginations they were blended, and by whom they were fondly
rehearsed and admired. In this manner, fiction may be admitted
to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to
offer worthy of credit."
To the same purpose, M. Paulin Paris (in his Lettre à M. H. de
Monmerqué, prefixed to the Roman de Berte aux Grans Piés, Paris,
1836), respecting the "romans" of the Middle Ages: "Pour bien
connaître l'histoire du moyen âge, non pas celle des faits, mais
celle des mœurs qui rendent les faits vraisemblables, il faut
l'avoir étudiée dans les romans, et voilà pourquoi l'Histoire de
France n'est pas encore faite." (p. xxi.)
The habit of distinguishing the interpreted from the literal mythe
has passed from the literary men of antiquity to those of the modern
world, who have for the most part construed the divine mythes as
allegorized philosophy, and the heroic mythes as exaggerated, adorned,
and over- history. The early ages of Greece have thus been
peopled with quasi-historical persons and quasi-historical events,
all extracted from the mythes after making certain allowances for
poetical ornament. But we must not treat this extracted product as
if it were the original substance; we cannot properly understand it
except by viewing it in connection with the literal mythes out of
which it was obtained, in their primitive age and appropriate medium,
before the superior minds had yet outgrown the common faith in an
all-personified Nature, and learned to restrict the divine free-agency
by the supposition of invariable physical laws. It is in this point
of view that the mythes are important for any one who would correctly
appreciate the general tone of Grecian thought and feeling; for they
were the universal mental stock of the Hellenic world—common to men and
women, rich and poor, instructed and ignorant; they were in every one's
memory and in every one's mouth,[1007] while science and history were
confined to comparatively few. We know from Thucydidês how erroneously
and carelessly the Athenian public of his day retained the history
of Peisistratus, only one century past;[1008] but the adventures of
the gods and heroes, the numberless explanatory legends attached to
visible objects and periodical ceremonies, were the theme of general
talk, and any man unacquainted with them would have found himself
partially excluded from the sympathy of his neighbors. The theatrical
representations, exhibited to the entire city population, and listened
to with enthusiastic interest, both presupposed and perpetuated
acquaintance with the great lines of heroic fable: indeed, in later
times even the pantomimic dancers embraced in their representations
the whole field of mythical incident, and their immense success proves
at once how popular and how well known such subjects were. The names
and attributes of the heroes were incessantly alluded to in the way
of illustration, to point out a consoling, admonitory, or repressive
moral: the simple mention of any of them sufficed to call up in every
one's mind the principal events of his life, and the poet or rhapsode
could thus calculate on touching chords not less familiar than
susceptible.[1009]
[1007] A curious evidence of the undiminished popularity of
the Grecian mythes to the exclusion even of recent history, is
preserved by Vopiscus at the beginning of his Life of Aurelian.
The præfect of the city of Rome, Junius Tiberianus, took Vopiscus
into his carriage on the festival-day of the Hilaria; he was
connected by the ties of relationship with Aurelian, who had
died about a generation before—and as the carriage passed by the
splendid Temple of the Sun, which Aurelian had consecrated, he
asked Vopiscus, what author had written the life of that emperor?
To which Vopiscus replied, that he had read some Greek works
which touched upon Aurelian, but nothing in Latin. Whereat the
venerable præfect was profoundly grieved: "Dolorem gemitûs sui
vir sanctus per hæc verba profudit: Ergo _Thersitem, Sinonem,
cæteraque illa prodigia vetustatis, et nos bene scimus, et
posteri frequentabunt_: divum Aurelianum, clarissimum principem,
severissimum Imperatorem, per quem totus Romano nomini orbis est
restitutus, posteri nescient? Deus avertat hanc amentiam! Et
tamen, si bene memini, ephemeridas illius viri scriptas habemus,"
etc. (Historiæ August. Scriptt. p. 209, ed. Salmas.)
This impressive remonstrance produced the Life of Aurelian by
Vopiscus. The materials seem to have been ample and authentic; it
is to be regretted that they did not fall into the hands of an
author qualified to turn them to better account.
[1008] Thucyd. vi. 56.
[1009] Pausan. i. 3, 3. Λέγεται μὲν δὴ καὶ ἄλλα οὐκ ἀληθῆ παρὰ
τοῖς πολλοῖς, οἷα ἱστορίας ἀνηκόοις οὖσι, καὶ ὅποσα ἤκουον εὐθὺς
ἐκ παιδῶν ἔν τε χόροις καὶ τραγῳδίαις πιστὰ ἡγουμένοις, etc.
The treatise of Lucian, De Saltatione, is a curious proof how
much these mythes were in every one's memory, and how large the
range of knowledge of them was which a good dancer possessed (see
particularly c. 76-79. t. ii. p. 308-310, Hemst).
Antiphanês ap. Athenæ. vi. p. 223:—
Μακάριόν ἐστιν ἡ τραγῳδία
ποίημα κατὰ πάντ᾽, εἴ γε πρῶτον οἱ λόγοι
ὑπὸ τῶν θεατῶν εἰσιν ἐγνωρίσμενοι
πρὶν καί τιν᾽ εἰπεῖν· ὡς ὑπομνῆσαι μόνον
δεῖ τὸν ποιητήν. Οἰδίπουν γὰρ ἂν γε φῶ,
τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντ᾽ ἴσασιν· ὁ πατὴρ Λάϊος,
μήτηρ Ἰοκάστη, θυγατέρες, παῖδες τίνες·
τί πείσεθ᾽ οὗτος, τί πεποίηκεν. Ἂν πάλιν
εἴπῃ τις Ἀλκμαίωνα, καὶ τὰ παιδία
πάντ᾽ εὐθὺς εἴρηχ᾽, ὅτι μανεὶς ἀπέκτονε
τὴν μήτερ᾽· ἀγανακτῶν δ᾽ Ἄδραστος εὐθέως
ἥξει, πάλιν δ᾽ ἄπεισιν, etc.
The first pages of the eleventh Oration of Dio Chrysostom contain
some striking passages both as to the universal acquaintance
with the mythes, and as to their extreme popularity (Or. xi. p.
307-312, Reisk). See also the commencement of Heraklidês, De
Allegoriâ Homericâ (ap. Scriptt. Myth. ed. Gale, p. 408), about
the familiarity with Homer.
The Lydê of the poet Antimachus was composed for his own
consolation under sorrow, by enumerating the ἡρωϊκὰς συμφοράς
(Plutarch, Consolat. ad Apollôn. c. 9. p. 106: compare Æschines
cont. Ktesiph. c. 48): a sepulchral inscription in Thêra, on the
untimely death of Admêtus, a youth of the heroic gens Ægidae,
makes a touching allusion to his ancestors Pêleus and Pherês
(Boeckh, C. I. t. ii. p. 1087).
A curious passage of Aristotle is preserved by Dêmêtrius
Phalereus (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, c. 144),—Ὅσῳ γὰρ αὐτίτης καὶ
μονώτης εἰμὶ, φιλομυθότερος γέγονα (compare the passage in the
Nikomachean Ethics, i. 9, μονώτης καὶ ἄτεκνος). Stahr refers this
to a letter of Aristotle written in his old age, the mythes being
the consolation of his solitude (Aristotelia, i. p. 201).
For the employment of the mythical names and incidents as
topics of pleasing and familiar comparison, see Menander, Περὶ
Ἐπιδεικτῖκ. § iv. capp. 9 and 11, ap. Walz. Coll. Rhett. t. ix.
pp. 283-294. The degree in which they passed into the ordinary
songs of women is illustrated by a touching epigram contained
among the Chian Inscriptions published in Boeckh's Collection
(No. 2236):—
Βιττὼ καὶ Φαινὶς, φίλη ἡμέρη (?), αἱ συνέριθοι,
Αἱ πενιχραὶ, γραῖαι, τῆδ᾽ ἐκλίθημεν ὁμοῦ.
Ἀμφότεραι Κώαι, πρῶται γένος—ὦ γλυκὺς ὄρθρος,
Πρὸς λύχνον ᾧ μύθους ᾔδομεν ἡμιθέων.
These two poor women were not afraid to boast of their family
descent. They probably belonged to some noble gens which traced
its origin to a god or a hero. About the songs of women, see also
Agathias, i. 7. p. 29, ed. Bonn.
In the family of the wealthy Athenian Dêmocratês was a legend,
that his primitive ancestor (son of Zeus by the daughter of
the Archêgetês of the dême Aixôneis, to which he belonged) had
received Hêraklês at his table: this legend was so rife that the
old women sung it,—ἅπερ αἱ γραῖαι ᾄδουσι (Plato, Lysis, p. 205).
Compare also a legend of the dême Ἀναγυροῦς, mentioned in Suidas
_ad voc._
"Who is this virgin?" asks Orestês from Pyladês in the Iphigeneia
in Tauris of Euripidês (662), respecting his sister Iphigeneia,
whom he does not know as priestess of Artemis in a foreign land:—
Τίς ἐστιν ἡ νεᾶνις; ὡς ~Ἑλληνικῶς~
Ἀνήρεθ᾽ ἡμᾶς τούς τ᾽ ἐν Ἰλίῳ πόνους
Νόστον τ᾽ Ἀχαιῶν τόν τ᾽ ἐν οἰωνοῖς σοφὸν
Κάλχαντ᾽, Ἀχιλλέως τ᾽ οὔνομ᾽, etc.
... ἐστὶν ἡ ξένη γένος
Ἐκεῖθεν. Ἀργεία τις, etc.
A similar effect was produced by the multiplied religious festivals
and processions, as well as by the oracles and prophecies which
circulated in every city. The annual departure of the Theôric ship
from Athens to the sacred island of Dêlos, kept alive, in the minds
of Athenians generally, the legend of Thêseus and his adventurous
enterprise in Krete;[1010] and in like manner most of the other
public rites and ceremonies were of a commemorative character,
deduced from some mythical person or incident familiarly known to
natives, and forming to strangers a portion of the curiosities of
the place.[1011] During the period of Grecian subjection under the
Romans, these curiosities, together with their works of art and
their legends, were especially clung to as a set-off against present
degradation. The Thêban citizen who found himself restrained from the
liberty enjoyed by all other Greeks, of consulting Amphiaräus as a
prophet, though the sanctuary and chapel of the hero stood in his own
city—could not be satisfied without a knowledge of the story which
explained the origin of such prohibition,[1012] and which conducted
him back to the originally hostile relations between Amphiaräus and
Thêbes. Nor can we suppose among the citizens of Sikyôn anything less
than a perfect and reverential conception of the legend of Thêbes,
when we read the account given by Herodotus of the conduct of the
despot Kleisthenês in regard to Adrastus and Melanippus.[1013] The
Trœzenian youths and maidens,[1014] who universally, when on the eve
of marriage, consecrated an offering of their hair at the Herôon of
Hippolytus, maintained a lively recollection of the legend of that
unhappy recusant whom Aphroditê had so cruelly punished. Abundant
relics preserved in many Grecian cities and temples, served both as
mementos and attestations of other legendary events; and the tombs
of the heroes counted among the most powerful stimulants of mythical
reminiscence. The sceptre of Pelops and Agamemnôn, still preserved in
the days of Pausanias at Chæroneia in Bœôtia, was the work of the god
Hêphæstos. While many other alleged productions of the same divine hand
were preserved in different cities of Greece, this is the only one
which Pausanias himself believed to be genuine: it had been carried
by Elektra, daughter of Agamemnôn to Phôkis, and received divine
honors from the citizens of Chæroneia.[1015] The spears of Mêrionês
and Odysseus were treasured up at Engyium in Sicily, that of Achilles
at Phasêlis; the sword of Memnôn adorned the temple of Asklêpius at
Nicomêdia; and Pausanias, with unsuspecting confidence, adduces the two
latter as proofs that the arms of the heroes were made of brass.[1016]
The hide of the Kalydônian boar was guarded and shown by the Tegeates
as a precious possession; the shield of Euphorbus was in like manner
suspended in the temple of Branchidæ near Milêtus, as well as in the
temple of Hêrê in Argos. Visible relics of Epeius and Philoktêtês
were not wanting, while Strabo raises his voice with indignation
against the numerous Palladia which were shown in different cities,
each pretending to be the genuine image from Troy.[1017] It would be
impossible to specify the number of chapels, sanctuaries, solemnities,
foundations of one sort or another, said to have been first commenced
by heroic or mythical personages,—by Hêraklês, Jasôn, Mêdea, Alkmæôn,
Diomêdês, Odysseus, Danaus, and his daughters,[1018] etc. Perhaps in
some of these cases particular critics might raise objections, but the
great bulk of the people entertained a firm and undoubted belief in the
current legend.
[1010] Plato, Phædo, c. 2.
[1011] The Philopseudes of Lucian (t. iii. p. 31, Hemst. cap.
2, 3, 4) shows not only the pride which the general public of
Athens and Thêbes took in their old mythes (Triptolemus, Boreas,
and Oreithyia, the Sparti, etc.), but the way in which they
treated every man who called the stories in question as a fool
or as an atheist. He remarks, that if the guides who showed the
antiquities had been restrained to tell nothing but what was
true, they would have died of hunger; for the visiting strangers
would not care to hear plain truth, even if they could have got
it for nothing (μηδὲ ἀμισθὶ τῶν ξένων ἀληθὲς ἀκούειν ἐθελησάντων).
[1012] Herodot. viii. 134.
[1013] Herodot. v. 67.
[1014] Euripid. Hippolyt. 1424; Pausan. ii. 32, 1; Lucian, De Deâ
Syriâ, c. 60. vol. iv. p. 287, Tauch.
It is curious to see in the account of Pausanias how all the
petty peculiarities of the objects around became connected with
explanatory details growing out of this affecting legend. Compare
Pausan. i. 22, 2.
[1015] Pausan. ix. 40, 6.
[1016] Plutarch, Marcell. c. 20; Pausan. iii. 3, 6.
[1017] Pausan. viii. 46, 1; Diogen. Laër. viii. 5; Strabo, vi. p.
263; Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 77; Æschyl. Eumen. 380.
Wachsmuth has collected the numerous citations out of Pausanias
on this subject (Hellenische Alterthumskunde, part ii. sect. 115.
p. 111).
[1018] Herodot. ii. 182; Plutarch, Pyrrh. c. 32; Schol. Apoll.
Rhod iv. 1217; Diodôr. iv. 56.
If we analyze the intellectual acquisitions of a common Grecian
townsman, from the rude communities of Arcadia or Phôkis even up to the
enlightened Athens, we shall find that, over and above the rules of
art or capacities requisite for his daily wants, it consisted chiefly
of the various mythes connected with his gens, his city, his religious
festivals, and the mysteries in which he might have chosen to initiate
himself, as well as with the works of art and the more striking
natural objects which he might see around him,—the whole set off and
decorated by some knowledge of the epic and dramatic poets. Such was
the intellectual and imaginative reach of an ordinary Greek, considered
apart from the instructed few: it was an aggregate of religion, of
social and patriotic retrospect, and of romantic fancy, blended into
one indivisible faith. And thus the subjective value of the mythes,
looking at them purely as elements of Grecian thought and feeling, will
appear indisputably great, however little there may be of objective
reality, either historical or philosophical, discoverable under them.
Nor must we omit the incalculable importance of the mythes as
stimulants to the imagination of the Grecian artist in sculpture, in
painting, in carving, and in architecture. From the divine and heroic
legends and personages were borrowed those paintings, statues, and
reliefs, which rendered the temples, porticos, and public buildings,
at Athens and elsewhere, objects of surpassing admiration; and such
visible reproduction contributed again to fix the types of the gods and
heroes familiarly and indelibly on the public mind.[1019] The figures
delineated on cups and vases, as well as on the walls of private
houses, were chiefly drawn from the same source—the mythes being the
great storehouse of artistic scenes and composition.
[1019] Ἡμιθέων ἀρεταῖς, the subjects of the works of Polygnotus
at Athens (Melanthius ap. Plutarch. Cimôn. c. 4): compare
Theocrit. xv. 138.
To enlarge on the characteristic excellence of Grecian art would here
be out of place: I regard it only in so far as, having originally drawn
its materials from the mythes, it reacted upon the mythical faith and
imagination—the reaction imparting strength to the former as well
as distinctness to the latter. To one who saw constantly before him
representations of the battles of the Centaurs or the Amazons,[1020]
of the exploits performed by Perseus and Bellerophôn, of the incidents
composing the Trojan war or the Kalydônian boar-hunt—the process of
belief, even in the more fantastic of these conceptions, became easy
in proportion as the conception was familiarized. And if any person
had been slow to believe in the efficacy of the prayers of Æakus,
whereby that devout hero once obtained special relief from Zeus, at a
moment when Greece was perishing with long-continued sterility, his
doubts would probably vanish when, on visiting the Æakeion at Ægina,
there were exhibited to him the statues of the very envoys who had
come on the behalf of the distressed Greeks to solicit that Æakus
would pray for them.[1021] A Grecian temple[1022] was not simply a
place of worship, but the actual dwelling-place of a god, who was
believed to be introduced by the solemn dedicatory ceremony, and whom
the imagination of the people identified in the most intimate manner
with his statue. The presence or removal of the statue was conceived
as identical with that of the being represented,—and while the statue
was solemnly washed, dressed, and tended with all the respectful
solicitude which would have been bestowed upon a real person,[1023]
miraculous tales were often rife respecting the manifestation of real
internal feeling in the wood and the marble. At perilous or critical
moments, the statue was affirmed to have sweated, to have wept, to have
closed its eyes, or brandished the spear in its hands, in token of
sympathy or indignation.[1024] Such legends, springing up usually in
times of suffering and danger, and finding few men bold enough openly
to contradict them, ran in complete harmony with the general mythical
faith, and tended to strengthen it in all its various ramifications.
The renewed activity of the god or hero both brought to mind and
accredited the preëxisting mythes connected with his name. When Boreas,
during the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, and in compliance with the
fervent prayers of the Athenians, had sent forth a providential storm,
to the irreparable damage of the Persian armada,[1025] the sceptical
minority (alluded to by Plato), who doubted the mythe of Boreas and
Oreithyia, and his close connection thus acquired with Erechtheus,
and the Erechtheids generally, must for the time have been reduced to
absolute silence.
[1020] The Centauromachia and the Amazonomachia are constantly
associated together in the ancient Grecian reliefs (see
the Expedition Scientifique de Morée, t. ii. p. 16, in the
explanation of the temple of Apollo Epikureius at Phigaleia).
[1021] Pausan. ii. 29, 6.
[1022] Ernst Curtius, Die Akropolis von Athen, Berlin, 1844, p.
18. Arnobius adv. Gentes, vi. p. 203, ed. Elmenhorst.
[1023] See the case of the Æginêtans lending the Æakids for a
time to the Thebans (Herodot. v. 80), who soon, however, returned
them: likewise sending the Æakids to the battle of Salamis (viii.
64-80). The Spartans, when they decreed that only one of their
two kings should be out on military service, decreed at the same
time that only one of the Tyndarids should go out with them
(v. 75): they once lent the Tyndarids as aids to the envoys of
Epizephyrian Locri, who prepared for them a couch on board their
ship (Diodôr. Excerpt. xvi. p. 15, Dindorf). The Thebans grant
their hero Melanippus to Kleisthenês of Sikyôn (v. 68). What was
sent, must probably have been a consecrated copy of the genuine
statue.
Respecting the solemnities practised towards the statues, see
Plutarch, Alkibiad. 34; Kallimach. Hymn. ad Lavacr. Palladis,
init. with the note of Spanheim; K. O. Müller, Archæologie der
Kunst, § 69; compare Plutarch, Quæstion. Romaic. § 61. p. 279;
and Tacit. Mor. Germ. c. 40; Diodôr. xvii. 49.
The manner in which the real presence of a hero was identified
with his statue (τὸν δίκαιον δεῖ θεὸν οἴκοι μένειν σώζοντα
ροὺς ἱδρυμένους.—Menander, Fragm. Ἡνίοχος, p. 71, Meineke),
consecrated ground, and oracle, is nowhere more powerfully
attested than in the Heroïca of Philostratus (capp. 2-20.
pp. 674-692; also De Vit Apollôn. Tyan. iv. 11), respecting
Prôtesilaus at Elæus, Ajax at the Aianteium, and Hectôr at
Ilium: Prôtesilaus appeared exactly in the equipment of his
statue,—χλαμύδα ἐνῆπται, ξένε, τὸν Θετταλικὸν τρόπον, ὥσπερ καὶ
τὸ ἄγαλμα τοῦτο (p. 674). The presence and sympathy of the hero
Lykus is essential to the satisfaction of the Athenian dikasts
(Aristophan. Vesp. 389-820): the fragment of Lucilius, quoted by
Lactantius, De Falsâ Religione (i. 22), is curious.—Τοῖς ἥρωσι
τοῖς κατὰ τὴν πόλιν καὶ τὴν χώραν ~ἱδρυμένοις~ (Lycurgus cont.
Leocrat. c. 1).
[1024] Plutarch, Timoleon, c. 12; Strabo, vi. p. 264.
Theophrastus treats the perspiration as a natural phænomenon in
the statues made of cedar-wood (Histor. Plant. v. 10). Plutarch
discusses the credibility of this sort of miracles in his Life of
Coriolanus, c. 37-38.
[1025] Herodot. vii. 189. Compare the gratitude of the
Megalopolitans to Boreas for having preserved them from the
attack of the Lacedæmonian king Agis (Pausan. viii. 27, 4.—viii.
36, 4). When the Ten Thousand Greeks were on their retreat
through the cold mountains of Armenia, Boreas blew in their
faces, "parching and freezing intolerably." One of the prophets
recommended that a sacrifice should be offered to him, which was
done, "and the painful effect of the wind appeared to every one
forthwith to cease in a marked manner;" (καὶ πᾶσι δὴ περιφανῶς
ἔδοξε λῆξαι τὸ χαλεπὸν τοῦ πνεύματος.—Xenoph. Anab. iv. 5, 3.)
CHAPTER XVII.
THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.
I have already remarked that the existence of that popular narrative
talk, which the Germans express by the significant word _Sage_
or _Volks-Sage_, in a greater or less degree of perfection or
development, is a phænomenon common to almost all stages of society
and to almost all quarters of the globe. It is the natural effusion
of the unlettered, imaginative, and believing man, and its maximum
of influence belongs to an early state of the human mind; for the
multiplication of recorded facts, the diffusion of positive science,
and the formation of a critical standard of belief, tend to discredit
its dignity and to repress its easy and abundant flow. It supplies to
the poet both materials to recombine and adorn, and a basis as well
as a stimulus for further inventions of his own; and this at a time
when the poet is religious teacher, historian, and philosopher, all in
one,—not, as he becomes at a more advanced period, the mere purveyor of
avowed, though interesting, fiction.
Such popular stories, and such historical songs (meaning by historical,
simply that which is accepted as history) are found in most quarters
of the globe, and especially among the Teutonic and Celtic populations
of early Europe. The old Gothic songs were cast into a continuous
history by the historian Ablavius;[1026] and the poems of the Germans
respecting Tuisto the earth-born god, his son Mannus, and his
descendants the eponyms of the various German tribes,[1027] as they
are briefly described by Tacitus, remind us of Hesiod, or Eumêlus, or
the Homeric Hymns. Jacob Grimm, in his learned and valuable Deutsche
Mythologie, has exhibited copious evidence of the great fundamental
analogy, along with many special differences, between the German,
Scandinavian, and Grecian mythical world; and the Dissertation of
Mr. Price (prefixed to his edition of Warton's History of English
Poetry) sustains and illustrates Grimm's view. The same personifying
imagination—the same ever-present conception of the will, sympathies,
and antipathies of the gods as the producing causes of phænomena,
and as distinguished from a course of nature with its invariable
sequence—the same relations between gods, heroes, and men, with the
like difficulty of discriminating the one from the other in many
individual names—a similar wholesale transfer of human attributes to
the gods, with the absence of human limits and liabilities—a like
belief in Nymphs, Giants, and other beings, neither gods nor men—the
same coalescence of the religious with the patriotic feeling and
faith—these are positive features common to the early Greeks with
the early Germans: and the negative conditions of the two are not
less analogous—the absence of prose writing, positive records, and
scientific culture. The preliminary basis and encouragements for the
mythopœic faculty were thus extremely similar.
[1026] Jornandes, De Reb. Geticis, capp. 4-6.
[1027] Tacit. Mor. German. c. 2. "Celebrant carminibus antiquis,
quod unum apud eos memoriæ et annalium genus est, Tuistonem Deum
terrâ editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque.
Quidam licentiâ vetustatis, plures Deo ortos, pluresque gentis
appellationes, Marsos, Gambrivios, Suevos, Vandaliosque
affirmant: eaque vera et antiqua nomina."
But though the prolific forces were the same in kind, the results were
very different in degree, and the developing circumstances were more
different still.
First, the abundance, the beauty, and the long continuance of early
Grecian poetry, in the purely poetical age, is a phænomenon which has
no parallel elsewhere.
Secondly, the transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its
comparatively positive state was self-operated, accomplished by its
own inherent and expansive force—aided indeed, but by no means either
impressed or provoked, from without. From the poetry of Homer, to
the history of Thucydidês and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
was a prodigious step, but it was the native growth of the Hellenic
youth into an Hellenic man; and what is of still greater moment, it
was brought about without breaking the thread either of religious
or patriotic tradition—without any coercive innovation or violent
change in the mental feelings. The legendary world, though the ethical
judgments and rational criticisms of superior men had outgrown
it, still retained its hold upon their feelings as an object of
affectionate and reverential retrospect.
Far different from this was the development of the early Germans. We
know little about their early poetry, but we shall run no risk of
error in affirming that they had nothing to compare with either Iliad
or Odyssey. Whether, if left to themselves, they would have possessed
sufficient progressive power to make a step similar to that of the
Greeks, is a question which we cannot answer. Their condition, mental
as well as political, was violently changed by a foreign action from
without. The influence of the Roman empire introduced artificially
among them new institutions, new opinions, habits, and luxuries, and,
above all, a new religion; the Romanized Germans becoming themselves
successively the instruments of this revolution with regard to such of
their brethren as still remained heathen. It was a revolution often
brought about by penal and coercive means: the old gods Thor and Woden
were formally deposed and renounced, their images were crumbled into
dust, and the sacred oaks of worship and prophecy hewn down. But even
where conversion was the fruit of preaching and persuasion, it did not
the less break up all the associations of a German with respect to
that mythical world which he called his past, and of which the ancient
gods constituted both the charm and the sanctity: he had now only the
alternative of treating them either as men or as dæmons.[1028] That
mixed religious and patriotic retrospect, formed by the coalescence
of piety with ancestral feeling, which constituted the appropriate
sentiment both of Greeks and of Germans towards their unrecorded
antiquity, was among the latter banished by Christianity: and while
the root of the old mythes was thus cankered, the commemorative
ceremonies and customs with which they were connected, either lost
their consecrated character or disappeared altogether. Moreover, new
influences of great importance were at the same time brought to bear.
The Latin language, together with some tinge of Latin literature—the
habit of writing and of recording present events—the idea of a
systematic law and pacific adjudication of disputes,—all these formed
a part of the general working of Roman civilization, even after the
decline of the Roman empire, upon the Teutonic and Celtic tribes. A
class of specially-educated men was formed, upon a Latin basis and upon
Christian principles, consisting too almost entirely of priests, who
were opposed, as well by motives of rivalry as by religious feeling,
to the ancient bards and storytellers of the community: the "lettered
men"[1029] were constituted apart from "the men of story," and Latin
literature contributed along with religion to sink the mythes of
untaught heathenism. Charlemagne, indeed, at the same time that he
employed aggressive and violent proceedings to introduce Christianity
among the Saxons, also took special care to commit to writing and
preserve the old heathen songs. But there can be little doubt that
this step was the suggestion of a large and enlightened understanding
peculiar to himself. The disposition general among lettered Christians
of that age is more accurately represented by his son Louis le
Debonnaire, who, having learned these songs as a boy, came to abhor
them when he arrived at mature years, and could never be induced either
to repeat or tolerate them.[1030]
[1028] On the hostile influence exercised by the change of
religion on the old Scandinavian poetry, see an interesting
article of Jacob Grimm in the Göttingen Gelehrte Anzeigen, Feb.
1830, pp. 268-273; a review of Olaf Tryggvson's Saga. The article
_Helden_, in his Deutsche Mythologie, is also full of instruction
on the same subject: see also the Einleitung to the book, p. 11,
2nd edition.
A similar observation has been made with respect to the old
mythes of the pagan Russians by Eichhoff: "L'établissement du
Christianisme, ce gage du bonheur des nations, fut vivement
apprécié par les Russes, qui dans leur juste reconnaissance, le
personnifièrent dans un héros. Vladimir le Grand, ami des arts,
protecteur de la religion qu'il protégea, et dont les fruits
firent oublier les fautes, devint l'Arthus et le Charlemagne de
la Russie, et ses hauts faits furent un mythe national qui domina
tous ceux du paganisme. Autour de lui se groupèrent ces guerriers
aux formes athlétiques, au cœur généreux, dont la poésie aime à
entourer le berceau mystérieux des peuples: et les exploits du
vaillant Dobrinia, de Rogdai, d'Ilia, de Curilo, animèrent les
ballades nationales, et vivent encore dans de naïfs récits."
(Eichhoff, Histoire de la Langue et Littérature des Slaves,
Paris, 1839, part iii. ch. 2. p. 190.)
[1029] This distinction is curiously brought to view by Saxo
Grammaticus, where he says of an Englishman named Lucas, that
he was "literis quidem tenuiter instructus, sed historiarum
scientiâ apprime eruditus" (p. 330, apud Dahlmann's Historische
Forschungen, vol. i. p. 176).
[1030] "Barbara et antiquissima carmina (says Eginhart, in
his Life of Charlemagne), quibus veterum regum actus et bella
canebantur, conscripsit."
Theganus says of Louis le Debonnaire, "Poetica carmina gentilia,
quæ in juventute didicerat, respuit, nec legere, nec audire, nec
docere, voluit." (De Gestis Ludovici Imperatoris ap. Pithœum, p.
304, c. xix.)
According to the old heathen faith, the pedigree of the Saxon, Anglian,
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish kings,—probably also those of the German
and Scandinavian kings generally,—was traced to Odin, or to some of
his immediate companions or heroic sons.[1031] I have already observed
that the value of these genealogies consisted not so much in their
length, as in the reverence attached to the name serving as primitive
source. After the worship attached to Odin had been extinguished, the
genealogical line was lengthened up to Japhet or Noah,—and Odin, no
longer accounted worthy to stand at the top, was degraded into one of
the simple human members of it.[1032] And we find this alteration of
the original mythical genealogies to have taken place even among the
Scandinavians, although the introduction of Christianity was in those
parts both longer deferred, so as to leave time for a more ample
development of the heathen poetical vein—and seems to have created a
less decided feeling of antipathy (especially in Iceland) towards the
extinct faith.[1033] The poems and tales composing the Edda, though
first committed to writing after the period of Christianity, do not
present the ancient gods in a point of view intentionally odious or
degrading.
[1031] See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, art. _Helden_, p. 356,
2nd edit. Hengist and Horsa were fourth in descent from Odin
(Venerable Bede, Hist. i. 15). Thiodolff, the Scald of Harold
Haarfager king of Norway, traced the pedigree of his sovereign
through thirty generations to Yngarfrey, the son of Niord,
companion of Odin at Upsal; the kings of Upsal were called
Ynglinger, and the song of Thiodolff, Ynglingatal (Dahlmann,
Histor. Forschung. i. p. 379). Eyvind, another Scald, a century
afterwards, deduced the pedigree of Jarl Hacon from Saming,
son of Yngwifrey (p. 381). Are Frode, the Icelandic historian,
carried up his own genealogy through thirty-six generations to
Yngwe; a genealogy which Torfæus accepts as trustworthy, opposing
it to the line of kings given by Saxo Grammaticus (p. 352).
Torfæus makes Harold Haarfager a descendant from Odin through
twenty-seven generations; Alfred of England through twenty-three
generations; Offa of Mercia through fifteen (p. 362). See also
the translation by Lange of P. A. Müller's Saga Bibliothek,
Introd. p. xxviii. and the genealogical tables prefixed to Snorro
Sturleson's Edda.
Mr. Sharon Turner conceives the human existence of Odin to
be distinctly proved, seemingly upon the same evidence as
Euêmerus believed in the human existence of Zeus (History of the
Anglo-Saxons, Appendix to b. ii. ch. 3. p. 219, 5th edit.).
[1032] Dahlmann, Histor. Forschung. t. i. p. 220. There is
a valuable article on this subject in the Zeitschrift für
Geschichts Wissenschaft (Berlin, vol. i. pp. 237-282) by Stuhr,
"Über einige Hauptfragen des Nordischen Alterthums," wherein
the writer illustrates both the strong motive and the effective
tendency, on the part of the Christian clergy who had to deal
with these newly-converted Teutonic pagans, to Euêmerize the old
gods, and to represent a genealogy, which they were unable to
efface from men's minds, as if it consisted only of mere men.
Mr. John Kemble (Über die Stammtafel der Westsachsen, ap. Stuhr,
p. 254) remarks, that "nobilitas," among that people, consisted
in descent from Odin and the other gods.
Colonel Sleeman also deals in the same manner with the religious
legends of the Hindoos,—so natural is the proceeding of Euêmerus,
towards any religion in which a critic does not believe:—
"They (the Hindoos) of course think that the incarnation of
their three great divinities were beings infinitely superior to
prophets, being in all their attributes and prerogatives equal
to the divinities themselves. _But we are disposed to think that
these incarnations were nothing more than great men whom their
flatterers and poets have exalted into gods,—this was the way
in which men made their gods in ancient Greece and Egypt._—All
that the poets have sung of the actions of these men is now
received as revelation from heaven: though nothing can be more
monstrous than the actions ascribed to the best incarnation,
Krishna, of the best of the gods, Vishnoo." (Sleeman, Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official, vol. i. ch. viii. 61.)
[1033] See P. E. Müller, Über den Ursprung und Verfall der
Isländischen Historiographie, p. 63.
In the Leitfaden zur Nordischen Alterthumskunde, pp. 4-5
(Copenhagen, 1837), is an instructive summary of the different
schemes of interpretation applied to the northern mythes: 1, the
historical; 2, the geographical; 3, the astronomical; 4, the
physical; 5, the allegorical.
The transposition above alluded to, of the genealogical root from Odin
to Noah, is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates the genuine
character of these genealogies, and shows that they sprung, not from
any erroneous historical data, but from the turn of the religious
feeling; also that their true value is derived from their being taken
entire, as connecting the existing race of men with a divine original.
If we could imagine that Grecian paganism had been superseded by
Christianity in the year 500 B. C., the great and venerated gentile
genealogies of Greece would have undergone the like modification; the
Herakleids, Pelopids, Æakids, Asklêpiads, etc., would have been merged
in some larger aggregate branching out from the archæology of the Old
Testament. The old heroic legends connected with these ancestral names
would either have been forgotten, or so transformed as to suit the new
vein of thought; for the altered worship, ceremonies, and customs would
have been altogether at variance with them, and the mythical feeling
would have ceased to dwell upon those to whom prayers were no longer
offered. If the oak of Dôdôna had been cut down, or the Theôric ship
had ceased to be sent from Athens to Dêlos, the mythes of Theseus and
of the two black doves would have lost their pertinence, and died away.
As it was, the change from Homer to Thucydidês and Aristotle took place
internally, gradually, and imperceptibly. Philosophy and history were
superinduced in the minds of the superior few, but the feelings of
the general public continued unshaken—the sacred objects remained the
same both to the eye and to the heart—and the worship of the ancient
gods was even adorned by new architects and sculptors who greatly
strengthened its imposing effect.
While then in Greece the mythopœic stream continued in the same course,
only with abated current and influence, in modern Europe its ancient
bed was blocked up, and it was turned into new and divided channels.
The old religion—though as an ascendent faith, unanimously and publicly
manifested, it became extinct—still continued in detached scraps and
fragments, and under various alterations of name and form. The heathen
gods and goddesses, deprived as they were of divinity, did not pass
out of the recollection and fears of their former worshippers, but
were sometimes represented (on principles like those of Euêmerus) as
having been eminent and glorious men—sometimes degraded into dæmons,
magicians, elfs, fairies, and other supernatural agents, of an inferior
grade and generally mischievous cast. Christian writers, such as Saxo
Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson, committed to writing the ancient oral
songs of the Scandinavian Scalds, and digested the events contained
in them into continuous narrative—performing in this respect a task
similar to that of the Grecian logographers Pherekydês and Hellanikus,
in reference to Hesiod and the Cyclic poets. But while Pherekydês and
Hellanikus compiled under the influence of feelings substantially
the same as those of the poets on whom they bestowed their care,
the Christian logographers felt it their duty to point out the Odin
and Thor of the old Scalds as evil dæmons, or cunning enchanters,
who had fascinated the minds of men into a false belief in their
divinity.[1034] In some cases, the heathen recitals and ideas were
modified so as to suit Christian feeling. But when preserved without
such a change, they exhibited themselves palpably, and were designated
by their compilers, as at variance with the religious belief of the
people, and as associated either with imposture or with evil spirits.
[1034] "Interea tamen homines Christiani in numina non credant
ethnica, nec aliter fidem narrationibus hisce adstruere vel
adhibere debent, quam in libri hujus proœmio monitum est de
causis et occasionibus cur et quomodo genus humanum a verâ fide
aberraverit." (Extract from the Prose Edda, p. 75, in the Lexicon
Mythologicum ad calcem Eddæ Sæmund. vol. iii. p. 357, Copenhag.
edit.)
A similar warning is to be found in another passage cited by
P. E. Müller, Über den Ursprung und Verfall der Isländischen
Historiographie, p. 138, Copenhagen, 1813; compare the Prologue
to the Prose Edda, p. 6, and Mallet, Introduction à l'Histoire de
Dannemarc, ch. vii. pp. 114-132.
Saxo Grammaticus represents Odin sometimes as a magician,
sometimes as an evil dæmon, sometimes as a high priest or pontiff
of heathenism, who imposed so powerfully upon the people around
him as to receive divine honors. Thor also is treated as having
been an evil dæmon. (See Lexicon Mythologic. ut supra, pp. 567,
915.)
Respecting the function of Snorro as logographer, see Præfat.
ad Eddam, ut supra, p. xi. He is much more faithful, and less
unfriendly to the old religion, than the other logographers
of the ancient Scandinavian Sagas. (Leitfaden der Nordischen
Alterthümer, p. 14, by the Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen,
1837.)
By a singular transformation, dependent upon the same tone
of mind, the authors of the French Chansons de Geste, in the
twelfth century, turned Apollo into an evil dæmon, patron of the
Mussulmans (see the Roman of Garin le Loherain, par M. Paulin
Paris, 1833, p. 31): "Car mieux vaut Dieux que ne fait Apollis."
M. Paris observes, "Cet ancien Dieu des beaux arts est l'un des
démons le plus souvent désignés dans nos poëmes, comme patron des
Musulmans."
The prophet Mahomet, too, anathematized the old Persian epic
anterior to his religion. "C'est à l'occasion de Naser Ibn
al-Hareth, qui avait apporté de Perse l'Histoire de Rustem et
d'Isfendiar, et la faisait réciter par des chanteuses dans
les assemblées des Koreischites, que Mahomet prononça le vers
suivant (of the Koran): Il y a des hommes qui achètent des contes
frivoles, pour détourner par-là les hommes de la voie de Dieu,
d'une manière insensée, et pour la livrer à la risée: mais leur
punition les couvrira de honte." (Mohl, Préface au Livre des Rois
de Ferdousi, p. xiii.)
A new vein of sentiment had arisen in Europe, unsuitable indeed to
the old mythes, yet leaving still in force the demand for mythical
narrative generally. And this demand was satisfied, speaking generally,
by two classes of narratives,—the legends of the Catholic Saints and
the Romances of Chivalry, corresponding to two types of character, both
perfectly accommodated to the feelings of the time,—the saintly ideal
and the chivalrous ideal.
Both these two classes of narrative correspond, in character as well
as in general purpose, to the Grecian mythes—being stories accepted
as realities, from their full conformity with the predispositions and
deep-seated faith of an uncritical audience, and prepared beforehand by
their authors, not with any reference to the conditions of historical
proof, but for the purpose of calling forth sympathy, emotion, or
reverence. The type of the saintly character belongs to Christianity,
being the history of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels, and
that of the prophets in the Old Testament; whilst the lives of holy
men, who acquired a religious reputation from the fourth to the
fourteenth century of the Christian æra, were invested with attributes,
and illustrated with ample details, tending to assimilate them to
this revered model. The numerous miracles, the cure of diseases, the
expulsion of dæmons, the temptations and sufferings, the teachings
and commands, with which the biography of Catholic saints abounds,
grew chiefly out of this pious feeling, common to the writer and
to his readers. Many of the other incidents, recounted in the same
performances, take their rise from misinterpreted allegories, from
ceremonies and customs of which it was pleasing to find a consecrated
origin, or from the disposition to convert the etymology of a name
into matter of history: many have also been suggested by local
peculiarities, and by the desire of stimulating or justifying the
devotional emotions of pilgrims who visited some consecrated chapel or
image. The dove was connected, in the faith of the age, with the Holy
Ghost, the serpent with Satan; lions, wolves, stags, unicorns, etc.
were the subjects of other emblematic associations; and such modes of
belief found expression for themselves in many narratives which brought
the saints into conflict or conjoint action with these various animals.
Legends of this kind, so indefinitely multiplied and so preëminently
popular and affecting, in the Middle Ages, are not exaggerations of
particular matters of fact, but emanations in detail of some current
faith or feeling, which they served to satisfy, and by which they were
in turn amply sustained and accredited.[1035]
[1035] The legends of the Saints have been touched upon by M.
Guizot (Cours d'Histoire Moderne, leçon xvii.) and by M. Ampère
(Histoire Littéraire de la France, t. ii. cap. 14, 15, 16); but
a far more copious and elaborate account of them, coupled with
much just criticism, is to be found in the valuable Essai sur les
Légendes Pieuses du Moyen Age, par L. F. Alfred Maury, Paris,
1843.
M. Guizot scarcely adverts at all to the more or less of
matter of fact contained in these biographies: he regards them
altogether as they grew out of and answered to the predominant
emotions and mental exigences of the age: "Au milieu d'un déluge
de fables absurdes, la morale éclate avec un grand empire" (p.
159, ed. 1829). "Les légendes ont été pour les Chrétiens de ce
temps (qu'on me permette cette comparaison purement littéraire)
ce que sont pour les Orientaux ces longs récits, ces histoires
si brillantes et si variées, dont les Mille et une Nuits nous
donnent un échantillon. C'était là que l'imagination populaire
errait librement dans un monde inconnu, merveilleux, plein de
mouvement et de poésie" (p. 175, _ibid._).
M. Guizot takes his comparison with the tales of the Arabian
Nights, as heard by an Oriental with uninquiring and unsuspicious
credence. Viewed with reference to an instructed European, who
reads these narratives as pleasing but recognized fiction, the
comparison would not be just; for no one in that age dreamed of
questioning the truth of the biographies. All the remarks of M.
Guizot assume this implicit faith in them as literal histories:
perhaps, in estimating the feelings to which they owed their
extraordinary popularity, he allows too little predominance to
the religious feeling, and too much influence to other mental
exigences which then went along with it; more especially as he
remarks, in the preceding lecture (p. 116), "Le caractère général
de l'époque est la concentration du développement intellectuel
dans la sphère religieuse."
How this absorbing religious sentiment operated in generating
and accrediting new matter of narrative, is shown with great
fulness of detail in the work of M. Maury: "Tous les écrits
du moyen âge nous apportent la preuve de cette préoccupation
exclusive des esprits vers l'Histoire Sainte et les prodiges qui
avaient signalé l'avènement du Christianisme. Tous nous montrent
la pensée de Dieu et du Ciel, dominant les moindres œuvres de
cette époque de naïve et de crédule simplicité. D'ailleurs,
n'était-ce pas le moine, le clerc, qui constituaient alors les
seuls écrivains? Qu'y a-t-il d'étonnant que le sujet habituel de
leurs méditations, de leurs études, se reflétât sans cesse dans
leurs ouvrages? Partout reparaissait à l'imagination Jésus et ses
Saints: cette image, l'esprit l'accueillait avec soumission et
obéissance: il n'osait pas encore envisager ces célestes pensées
avec l'œil de la critique, armé de défiance et de doute; au
contraire, l'intelligence les acceptait toutes indistinctement
et s'en nourrissait avec avidité. Ainsi s'accréditaient tous
les jours de nouvelles fables. _Une foi vive veut sans cesse de
nouveaux faits qu'elle puisse croire_, comme la charité veut de
nouveaux bienfaits pour s'exercer" (p. 43). The remarks on the
History of St. Christopher, whose personality was allegorized by
Luther and Melancthon, are curious (p. 57).
Every reader of Pausanias will recognize the great general analogy
between the stories recounted to him at the temples which he visited,
and these legends of the Middle Ages. Though the type of character
which the latter illustrate is indeed materially different, yet the
source as well as the circulation, the generating as well as the
sustaining forces, were in both cases the same. Such legends were
the natural growth of a religious faith, earnest, unexamining, and
interwoven with the feelings at a time when the reason does not need
to be cheated. The lives of the Saints bring us even back to the
simple and ever-operative theology of the Homeric age; so constantly
is the hand of God exhibited even in the minutest details, for the
succor of a favored individual,—so completely is the scientific
point of view, respecting the phænomena of nature, absorbed into the
religious.[1036] During the intellectual vigor of Greece and Rome,
a sense of the invariable course of nature and of the scientific
explanation of phænomena had been created among the superior minds, and
through them indirectly among the remaining community; thus limiting
to a certain extent the ground open to be occupied by a religious
legend. With the decline of the pagan literature and philosophy, before
the sixth century of the Christian æra, this scientific conception
gradually passed out of sight, and left the mind free to a religious
interpretation of nature not less simple and _naïf_ than that which
had prevailed under the Homeric paganism.[1037] The great religious
movement of the Reformation, and the gradual formation, of critical
and philosophical habits in the modern mind, have caused these legends
of the Saints,—once the charm and cherished creed of a numerous
public,[1038] to pass altogether out of credit, without even being
regarded, among Protestants at least, as worthy of a formal scrutiny
into the evidence,—a proof of the transitory value of public belief,
however sincere and fervent, as a certificate of historical truth, if
it be blended with religious predispositions.
[1036] "Dans les prodiges que l'on admettait avoir dû
nécessairement s'opérer au tombeau du saint nouvellement
canonisé, l'expression, 'Cæci visum, claudi gressum, muti
loquelam, surdi auditum, paralytici debitum membrorum officium,
recuperabant,' était devenue plûtot une formule d'usage que la
rélation littérale du fait." (Maury, Essai sur les Légendes
Pieuses du Moyen Age, p. 5.)
To the same purpose M. Ampère, ch. 14. p. 361: "Il y a un certain
nombre de faits que l'agiographie reproduit constamment, quelque
soit son héros: ordinairement ce personnage a eu dans sa jeunesse
une vision qui lui a révélé son avenir: ou bien, une prophétie
lui a annoncé ce qu'il serait un jour. Plus tard, il opère un
certain nombre de miracles, toujours les mêmes; il exorcise des
possédés, ressuscite des morts, il est averti de sa fin par un
songe. Puis sur son tombeau s'accomplissent d'autres merveilles
à-peu-près semblables."
[1037] A few words from M. Ampère to illustrate this: "C'est
donc au sixième siècle que la légende se constitue: c'est alors
qu'elle prend complètement le caractère naïf qui lui appartient:
qu'elle est elle-même, qu'elle se sépare de toute influence
étrangère. En même temps, l'ignorance devient de plus en plus
grossière, et par suite la crédulité s'accroit: les calamités du
temps sont plus lourdes, et l'on a un plus grand besoin de remède
et de consolation.... Les récits miraculeux se substituent aux
argumens de la théologie. Les miracles sont devenus la meilleure
démonstration du Christianisme: c'est la seule que puissent
comprendre les esprits grossiers des barbares" (c. 15. p. 373).
Again, c. 17. p. 401: "Un des caractères de la légende est de
mêler constamment le puéril au grand: il faut l'avouer, elle
défigure parfois un peu ces hommes d'une trempe si forte, en
mettant sur leur compte des anecdotes dont le caractère n'est pas
toujours sérieux; elle en a usé ainsi pour St. Columban, dont
nous verrons tout à l'heure le rôle vis-à-vis de Brunehaut et des
chefs Mérovingiens. La légende auroit pu se dispenser de nous
apprendre, comment un jour, il se fit rapporter par un corbeau
les gants qu'il avait perdus: comment, un autre jour, il empêcha
la bière de couler d'un tonneau percé, et diverses merveilles,
certainement indignes de sa mémoire."
The miracle by which St. Columban employed the raven to fetch
back his lost gloves, is exactly in the character of the Homeric
and Hesiodic age: the earnest faith, as well as the reverential
sympathy, between the Homeric man and Zeus or Athênê, is
indicated by the invocation of their aid for his own sufferings
of detail, and in his own need and danger. The criticism of
M. Ampère, on the other hand, is analogous to that of the
later pagans, after the conception of a course of nature had
become established in men's minds, so far as that exceptional
interference by the gods was understood to be, comparatively
speaking, rare, and only supposable upon what were called great
emergences.
In the old Hesiodic legend (see above, ch. ix. p. 245), Apollo
is apprized by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Korônis
to him—τῷ μὲν ἄρ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε κόραξ, etc. (the raven appears
elsewhere as companion of Apollo, Plutarch, de Isid. et Os.
p. 379, Herod. iv. 5.) Pindar, in his version of the legend,
eliminated the raven, without specifying _how_ Apollo got his
knowledge of the circumstance. The Scholiasts praise Pindar much
for having rejected the puerile version of the story—ἐπαινεῖ
τὸν Πίνδαρον ὁ Ἀρτέμων ὅτι παρακρουσάμενος τὴν περὶ τὸν κόρακα
ἱστορἱαν, αὐτὸν δι᾽ ἑαυτοῦ ἐγνωκέναι φησὶ τὸν Ἀπόλλω ... χαίρειν
οὖν ἐάσας τῷ τοιούτῳ μύθῳ ~τέλεως ὄντι ληρώδει~, etc.—compare
also the criticisms of the Schol. ad Soph. Œdip. Kol. 1378, on
the old epic Thebaïs; and the remarks of Arrian (Exp. Al. iii. 4)
on the divine interference by which Alexander and his army were
enabled to find their way across the sand of the desert to the
temple of Ammon.
In the eyes of M. Ampère, the recital of the biographer of
St. Columban appears puerile (οὔπω ἴδον ὧδε θεοὺς ἀνάφανδρα
φιλεῦντας, Odyss. iii. 221); in the eyes of that biographer,
the criticism of M. Ampère would have appeared impious. When
it is once conceded that phænomena are distributable under two
denominations, the natural and the miraculous, it must be left to
the feelings of each individual to determine what is and what is
not, a suitable occasion for a miracle. Diodôrus and Pausanias
differed in opinion (as stated in a previous chapter) about the
death of Actæôn by his own hounds,—the former maintaining that
the case was one fit for the special intervention of the goddess
Artemis; the latter, that it was not so. The question is one
determinable only by the religious feelings and conscience of the
two dissentients: no common standard of judgment can be imposed
upon them; for no reasonings derived from science or philosophy
are available, inasmuch as in this case the very point in dispute
is, whether the scientific point of view be admissible. Those
who are disposed to adopt the supernatural belief, will find
in every case the language open to them wherewith Dionysius of
Halicarnassus (in recounting a miracle wrought by Vesta, in
the early times of Roman history, for the purpose of rescuing
an unjustly accused virgin) reproves the sceptics of his time:
"It is well worth while (he observes) to recount the special
manifestation (ἐπιφάνειαν) which the goddess showed to these
unjustly accused virgins. For these circumstances, extraordinary
as they are, have been held worthy of belief by the Romans, and
historians have talked much about them. Those persons, indeed,
who adopt the atheistical schemes of philosophy (if, indeed, we
must call them _philosophy_), pulling in pieces as they do _all_
the special manifestations (ἁπάσας διασύροντες τὰς ἐπιφανείας
τῶν θεῶν) of the gods which have taken place among Greeks or
barbarians, will of course turn _these_ stories also into
ridicule, ascribing them to the vain talk of men, as if none of
the gods cared at all for mankind. But those who, having pushed
their researches farther, believe the gods not to be indifferent
to human affairs, but favorable to good men and hostile to
bad—will not treat _these_ special manifestations as _more_
incredible than others." (Dionys. Halic. ii. 68-69.) Plutarch,
after noticing the great number of miraculous statements in
circulation, expresses his anxiety to draw a line between the
true and the false, but cannot find where: "excess, both of
credulity and of incredulity (he tells us) in such matters is
dangerous; caution, and nothing too much, is the best course."
(Camillus, c. 6.) Polybius is for granting permission to
historians to recount a sufficient number of miracles to keep up
a feeling of piety in the multitude, but not more: to measure
out the proper quantity (he observes) is difficult, but not
impossible (δυσπαράγραφός ἐστι ἡ ποσότης, οὐ μὴν ἀπαράγραφός γε,
xvi. 12).
[1038] The great Bollandist collection of the Lives of the
Saints, intended to comprise the whole year, did not extend
beyond the nine months from January to October, which occupy
fifty-three large volumes. The month of April fills three of
those volumes, and exhibits the lives of 1472 saints. Had the
collection run over the entire year, the total number of such
biographies could hardly have been less than 25,000, and might
have been even greater (see Guizot, Cours d'Histoire Moderne,
leçon xvii. p. 157).
The same mythopœic vein, and the same susceptibility and facility of
belief, which had created both supply and demand for the legends of the
Saints, also provided the abundant stock of romantic narrative poetry,
in amplification and illustration of the chivalrous ideal. What the
legends of Troy, of Thêbes, of the Kalydônian boar, of Œdipus, Thêseus,
etc. were to an early Greek, the tales of Arthur, of Charlemagne,
of the Niebelungen, were to an Englishman, or Frenchman, or German,
of the twelfth or thirteenth century. They were neither recognized
fiction nor authenticated history: they were history, as it is felt and
welcomed by minds unaccustomed to investigate evidence, and unconscious
of the necessity of doing so. That the Chronicle of Turpin, a mere
compilation of poetical legends respecting Charlemagne, was accepted
as genuine history, and even pronounced to be such by papal authority,
is well known; and the authors of the Romances announce themselves,
not less than those of the old Grecian epic, as being about to recount
real matter of fact.[1039] It is certain that Charlemagne is a great
historical name, and it is possible, though not certain, that the
name of Arthur may be historical also. But the Charlemagne of history,
and the Charlemagne of romance, have little except the name in common
nor could we ever determine, except by independent evidence (which in
this case we happen to possess), whether Charlemagne was a real or a
fictitious person.[1040] That illustrious name, as well as the more
problematical Arthur, is taken up by the romancers, not with a view to
celebrate realities previously verified, but for the purpose of setting
forth or amplifying an ideal of their own, in such manner as both to
rouse the feelings and captivate the faith of their hearers.
[1039] See Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. i. dissert.
i. p. xvii. Again, in sect. iii. p. 140: "Vincent de Beauvais,
who lived under Louis IX. of France (about 1260), and who, on
account of his extraordinary erudition, was appointed preceptor
to that king's sons, very gravely classes Archbishop Turpin's
Charlemagne among the real histories, and places it on a level
with Suetonius and Cæsar. He was himself an historian, and has
left a large history of the world, fraught with a variety of
reading, and of high repute in the Middle Ages; but edifying and
entertaining as this work might have been to his contemporaries,
at present it serves only to record their prejudices and to
characterize their credulity." About the full belief in Arthur
and the Tales of the Round Table during the fourteenth century,
and about the strange historical mistakes of the poet Gower in
the fifteenth, see the same work, sect. 7. vol. ii. p. 33; sect.
19. vol. ii. p. 239.
"L'auteur de la Chronique de Turpin (says M. Sismondi,
Littérature du Midi, vol. i. ch. 7. p. 289) n'avait point
l'intention de briller aux yeux du public par une invention
heureuse, ni d'amuser les oisifs par des contes merveilleux
qu'ils reconnoitroient pour tels: il présentait aux Français
tous ces faits étranges comme de l'histoire, et la lecture des
légendes fabuleuses avait accoutumé à croire à de plus grandes
merveilles encore; aussi plusieurs de ces fables furent-elles
reproduites dans la Chronique de St. Denis."
Again, _ib._ p. 290: "Souvent les anciens romanciers, lorsqu'ils
entreprennent un récit de la cour de Charlemagne, prennent un ton
plus élevé: ce ne sont point des fables qu'ils vont conter, c'est
de l'histoire nationale,—c'est la gloire de leurs ancêtres qu'ils
veulent célébrer, et ils ont droit alors à demander qu'on les
écoute avec respect."
The Chronicle of Turpin was inserted, even so late as the year
1566, in the collection printed by Scardius at Frankfort of
early German historians (Ginguené, Histoire Littéraire d'Italie,
vol. iv. part ii. ch. 3. p. 157).
To the same point—that these romances were listened to as real
stories—see Sir Walter Scott's Preface to Sir Tristram, p. lxvii.
The authors of the Legends of the Saints are not less explicit in
their assertions that everything which they recount is true and
well-attested (Ampère, c. 14. p. 358).
[1040] The series of articles by M. Fauriel, published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. are full of instruction
respecting the origin, tenor, and influence of the Romances of
Chivalry. Though the name of Charlemagne appears, the romancers
are really unable to distinguish him from Charles Martel or
from Charles the Bald (pp. 537-539). They ascribe to him an
expedition to the Holy Land, in which he conquered Jerusalem from
the Saracens, obtained possession of the relics of the passion
of Christ, the crown of thorns, etc. These precious relics he
carried to Rome, from whence they were taken to Spain by a
Saracen emir, named Balan, at the head of an army. The expedition
of Charlemagne against the Saracens in Spain was undertaken for
the purpose of recovering the relics: "Ces divers romans peuvent
être regardés comme la suite, comme le développement, de la
fiction de la conquête de Jérusalem par Charlemagne."
Respecting the Romance of Rinaldo of Montauban (describing the
struggles of a feudal lord against the emperor) M. Fauriel
observes, "Il n'y a, je crois, aucun fondement historique: c'est
selon toute apparence, la pure expression poétique du fait
général," etc. (p. 542.)
To inquire which of the personages of the Carlovingian epic were real
and which were fictitious,—to examine whether the expedition ascribed
to Charlemagne against Jerusalem had ever taken place or not,—to
separate truth from exaggeration in the exploits of the Knights of the
Round Table,—these were problems which an audience of that day had
neither disposition to undertake nor means to resolve. They accepted
the narrative as they heard it, without suspicion or reserve; the
incidents related, as well as the connecting links between them, were
in full harmony with their feelings, and gratifying as well to their
sympathies as to their curiosity: nor was anything farther wanting to
induce them to believe it, though the historical basis might be ever so
slight or even non-existent.[1041]
[1041] Among the "formules consacrées" (observes M. Fauriel)
of the romancers of the Carlovingian epic, are asseverations
of their own veracity, and of the accuracy of what they are
about to relate—specification of witnesses whom they have
consulted—appeals to pretended chronicles: "Que ces citations,
ces indications, soient parfois sérieuses et sincères, cela peut
être; mais c'est une exception et une exception rare. De telles
allégations de la part des romanciers, sont en général un pur et
simple mensonge, mais non toutefois un mensonge gratuit. C'est
un mensonge qui a sa raison et sa convenance: il tient au désir
et au besoin de satisfaire une opinion accoutumée à supposer
et à chercher du vrai dans les fictions du genre de celles où
l'on allègue ces prétendues autorités. La manière dont les
auteurs de ces fictions les qualifient souvent eux-mêmes, est
une conséquence naturelle de leur prétention d'y avoir suivi des
documens vénérables. Ils les qualifient de chansons de _vieille
histoire_, de _haute histoire_, de _bonne geste_, de _grande
baronnie_: et ce n'est pas pour se vanter qu'ils parlent ainsi:
la vanité d'auteur n'est rien chez eux, en comparaison du besoin
qu'ils ont d'être crus, de passer pour de simples traducteurs,
de simples répétiteurs de légendes ou d'histoire consacrée. Ces
protestations de véracité, qui, plus ou moins expresses, sont de
rigueur dans les romans Carlovingiens, y sont aussi fréquemment
accompagnées de protestations accessoires contre les romanciers,
qui, ayant déjà traité un sujet donné, sont accusés d'y avoir
faussé la vérité." (Fauriel, Orig. de l'Epopée Chevaleresque, in
the Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. p. 554.)
About the Cycle of the Round Table, see the same series of
articles (Rev. D. M. t. xiv. pp. 170-184). The Chevaliers of the
Saint Graal were a sort of _idéal_ of the Knights Templars: "Une
race de princes héroïques, originaires de l'Asie, fut prédestinée
par le ciel même à la garde du Saint Graal. Perille fut le
premier de cette race, qui s'étant converti au Christianisme,
passa en Europe sous l'Empereur Vespasien," etc.; then follows
a string of fabulous incidents: the epical agency is similar to
that of Homer—Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή.
M. Paulin Paris, in his Prefaces to the Romans des Douze Pairs
de France, has controverted many of the positions of M. Fauriel,
and with success, so far as regards the Provençal origin of
the Chansons de Geste, asserted by the latter. In regard to
the Romances of the Round Table, he agrees substantially with
M. Fauriel; but he tries to assign a greater historical value
to the poems of the Carlovingian epic,—very unsuccessfully, in
my opinion. But his own analysis of the old poem of Garin de
Loherain bears out the very opinion which he is confuting: "Nous
sommes au règne de Charles Martel, et nous reconnaissons sous
d'autres noms les détails exacts de la fameuse défaite d'Attila
dans les champs Catalauniques. Saint Loup et Saint Nicaise,
glorieux prélats du quatrième siècle, reviennent figurer autour
du père de Pépin le Bref: enfin pour compléter la confusion,
Charles Martel meurt sur le champ de bataille, à la place du roi
des Visigoths, Theodoric.... _Toutes les parties de la narration
sont vraies_: seulement _toutes s'y trouvent déplacées_. En
général, les peuples n'entendent rien à la chronologie: les
evènemens restent: les individus, les lieux et les époques, ne
laissent aucune trace: c'est pour ainsi dire, une décoration
scénique que l'on applique indifféremment à des récits souvent
contraires." (Preface to the Roman de Garin le Loherain, pp.
xvi.-xx.: Paris, 1833.) Compare also his Lettre à M. Monmerqué,
prefixed to the Roman de Berthe aux Grans Piés, Paris, 1836.
To say that _all_ the parts of the narrative are true, is
contrary to M. Paris's own showing: _some_ parts may be true,
separately taken, but these fragments of truth are melted down
with a large mass of fiction, and cannot be discriminated unless
we possess some independent test. The poet who picks out one
incident from the fourth century, another from the fifth, and
a few more from the eighth, and then blends them all into a
continuous tale along with many additions of his own, shows that
he takes the items of fact because they suit the purposes of his
narrative, not because they happen to be attested by historical
evidence. His hearers are not critical: they desire to have their
imaginations and feelings affected, and they are content to
accept without question whatever accomplishes this end.
The romances of chivalry represented, to those who heard them, real
deeds of the foretime—"glories of the foregone men," to use the
Hesiodic expression[1042]—at the same time that they embodied and
filled up the details of an heroic ideal, such as that age could
conceive and admire—a fervent piety, combined with strength, bravery,
and the love of adventurous aggression, directed sometimes against
infidels, sometimes against enchanters or monsters, sometimes in
defence of the fair sex. Such characteristics wore naturally popular,
in a century of feudal struggles and universal insecurity, when the
grand subjects of common respect and interest were the Church and
the Crusades, and when the latter especially were embraced with an
enthusiasm truly astonishing.
[1042] Hesiod, Theogon. 100—κλέα προτέρων ἀνθρώπων. Puttenham
talks of the remnant of bards existing in his time (1589): "Blind
Harpers, or such like Taverne Minstrels, whose matters are for
the most part _stories of old time_, as the Tale of Sir Topaze,
the Reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Adam Bell, Clymme of the
Clough, and such other old Romances or _Historical Rhymes_."
(Arte of English Poesie, book ii. cap. 9.)
The long German poem of the Niebelungen Lied, as well as the Volsunga
Saga and a portion of the songs of the Edda, relate to a common
fund of mythical, superhuman personages, and of fabulous adventure,
identified with the earliest antiquity of the Teutonic and Scandinavian
race, and representing their primitive sentiment towards ancestors
of divine origin. Sigurd, Brynhilde, Gudrun, and Atle, are mythical
characters celebrated as well by the Scandinavian Scalds as by the
German epic poets, but with many varieties and separate additions to
distinguish the one from the other. The German epic, later and more
elaborated, includes various persons not known to the songs in the
Edda, in particular the prominent name of Dieterich of Bern—presenting,
moreover, the principal characters and circumstances as Christian,
while in the Edda there is no trace of anything but heathenism. There
is, indeed, in this the old and heathen version, a remarkable analogy
with many points of Grecian mythical narrative. As in the case of the
short life of Achilles, and of the miserable Labdakids of Thêbes—so
in the family of the Volsungs, though sprung from and protected by
the gods—a curse of destiny hangs upon them and brings on their ruin,
in spite of preëminent personal qualities.[1043] The more thoroughly
this old Teutonic story has been traced and compared, in its various
transformations and accompaniments, the less can any well-established
connection be made out for it with authentic historical names or
events. We must acquiesce in its personages as distinct in original
conception from common humanity, and as belonging to the subjective
mythical world of the race by whom they were sung.
[1043] Respecting the Volsunga Saga and the Niebelungen Lied,
the work of Lange—Untersuchungen über die Geschichte und das
Verhältniss der Nordischen und Deutschen Heldensage—is a valuable
translation from the Danish Saga-Bibliothek of P. E. Müller.
P. E. Müller maintains, indeed, the historical basis of the tales
respecting the Volsungs (see pp. 102-107)—upon arguments very
unsatisfactory; though the genuine Scandinavian origin of the
tale is perfectly made out. The chapter added by Lange himself,
at the close (see p. 432, etc.), contains juster views as to the
character of the primitive mythology, though he too advances
some positions respecting a something "reinsymbolisches" in the
background, which I find it difficult to follow (see p. 477,
etc.).—There are very ancient epical ballads still sung by the
people in the Faro Islands, many of them relating to Sigurd and
his adventures (p. 412).
Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie, maintains the purely
mythical character, as opposed to the historical, of Siegfried
and Dieterich (Art. _Helden_, pp. 344-346).
So, too, in the great Persian epic of Ferdousi, the principal
characters are religious and mythical. M. Mohl observes,—"Les
caractères des personnages principaux de l'ancienne histoire de
Perse se retrouvent dans le livre des Rois (de Ferdousi) tels
que les indiquent les parties des livres de Zoroaster que nous
possédons encore. Kaioumors, Djemschid, Feridoun, Gushtasp,
Isfendiar, etc. jouent dans le poème épique le même rôle que dans
les Livres sacrés: à cela près, que dans les derniers ils nous
apparaissent à travers une atmosphere mythologique qui grandit
tous leurs traits: mais cette difference est précisément celle
qu'on devait s'attendre à trouver entre la tradition religieuse
et la tradition épique." (Mohl, Livre des Rois par Ferdousi,
Preface, p. 1.)
The Persian historians subsequent to Ferdousi have all taken
his poem as the basis of their histories, and have even copied
him faithfully and literally (Mohl, p. 53). Many of his heroes
became the subjects of long epical biographies, written and
recited without any art or grace, often by writers whose names
are unknown (_ib._ pp. 54-70). Mr. Morier tells us that "the
Shah Nameh is still believed by the present Persians to contain
their ancient history" (Adventures of Hadgi Baba, c. 32). As
the Christian romancers transformed Apollo into the patron of
Mussulmans, so Ferdousi makes Alexander the Great a Christian:
"La critique historique (observes M. Mohl) était du temps de
Ferdousi chose presqu'inconnue." (_ib._ p. xlviii.) About the
absence not only of all historiography, but also of all idea of
it, or taste for it among the early Indians, Persians, Arabians,
etc., see the learned book of Nork, _Die Götter Syriens_,
Preface, p. viii. _seqq._ (Stuttgart, 1842.)
Such were the compositions which not only interested the emotions,
but also satisfied the undistinguishing historical curiosity, of the
ordinary public in the middle ages. The exploits of many of these
romantic heroes resemble in several points those of the Grecian: the
adventures of Perseus, Achilles, Odysseus, Atalanta, Bellerophôn,
Jasôn, and the Trojan war, or Argonautic expedition generally, would
have fitted in perfectly to the Carlovingian or other epics of the
period.[1044] That of the middle ages, like the Grecian, was eminently
expansive in its nature: new stories were successively attached to the
names and companions of Charlemagne and Arthur, just as the legend
of Troy was enlarged by Arktinus, Leschês, and Stesichorus,—that of
Thêbes, by fresh miseries entailed on the fated head of Œdipus,—and
that of the Kalydônian boar, by the addition of Atalanta. Altogether,
the state of mind of the hearers seems in both cases to have been much
the same,—eager for emotion and sympathy, and receiving any narrative
attuned to their feelings, not merely with hearty welcome, but also
with unsuspecting belief.
[1044] Several of the heroes of the ancient world were indeed
themselves popular subjects with the romancers of the middle
ages, Thêseus, Jasôn, etc.; Alexander the Great, more so than any
of them.
Dr. Warton observes, respecting the Argonautic expedition,
"Few stories of antiquity have more the cast of one of the old
romances than this of Jasôn. An expedition of a new kind is
made into a strange and distant country, attended with infinite
dangers and difficulties. The king's daughter of the new country
is an enchantress; she falls in love with the young prince, who
is the chief adventurer. The prize which he seeks is guarded by
brazen-footed bulls, who breathe fire, and by a hideous dragon,
who never sleeps. The princess lends him the assistance of her
charms and incantations to conquer these obstacles; she gives him
possession of the prize, leaves her father's court, and follows
him into his native country." (Warton, Observations on Spenser,
vol. i. p. 178.)
To the same purpose M. Ginguené: "Le premier modèle des Fées
n'est-il pas dans Circé, dans Calypso, dans Médée? Celui des
géans, dans Polyphème, dans Cacus, et dans les géans, ou les
Titans, cette race ennemie de Jupiter? Les serpens et les
dragons des romans ne sont-ils pas des successeurs du dragon
des Hesperides et de celui de la Toison d'or? Les Magiciens! la
Thessalie en étoit pleine. Les armes enchantées impénétrables!
elles sont de la même trempe, et l'on peut les croire forgées
au même fourneau que celles d'Achille et d'Enée." (Ginguené,
Histoire Littéraire d'Italie, vol. iv. part ii. ch. 3, p. 151.)
Nevertheless, there were distinctions deserving of notice, which render
the foregoing proposition more absolutely exact with regard to Greece
than with regard to the middle ages. The tales of the epic, and the
mythes in their most popular and extended signification, were the only
intellectual nourishment with which the Grecian public was supplied,
until the sixth century before the Christian æra: there was no prose
writing, no history, no philosophy. But such was not exactly the
case at the time when the epic of the middle ages appeared. At that
time, a portion of society possessed the Latin language, the habit of
writing, and some tinge both of history and philosophy: there were a
series of chronicles, scanty, indeed, and imperfect, but referring
to contemporary events and preventing the real history of the past
from passing into oblivion: there were even individual scholars, in
the twelfth century, whose acquaintance with Latin literature was
sufficiently considerable to enlarge their minds and to improve their
judgments. Moreover, the epic of the middle ages, though deeply imbued
with religious ideas, was not directly amalgamated with the religion
of the people, and did not always find favor with the clergy; while
the heroes of the Grecian epic were not only linked in a thousand ways
with existing worship, practices, and sacred localities, but Homer and
Hesiod pass with Herodotus for the constructors of Grecian theology. We
thus see that the ancient epic was both exempt from certain distracting
influences by which that of the middle ages was surrounded, and more
closely identified with the veins of thought and feeling prevalent in
the Grecian public. Yet these counteracting influences did not prevent
Pope Calixtus II. from declaring the Chronicle of Turpin to be a
genuine history.
If we take the history of our own country as it was conceived and
written from the twelfth to the seventeenth century by Hardyng,
Fabyan, Grafton, Hollinshed, and others, we shall find that it was
supposed to begin with Brute the Trojan, and was carried down from
thence, for many ages and through a long succession of kings, to the
times of Julius Cæsar. A similar belief of descent from Troy, arising
seemingly from a reverential imitation of the Romans and of their
Trojan origin, was cherished in the fancy of other European nations.
With regard to the English, the chief circulator of it was Geoffrey
of Monmouth, and it passed with little resistance or dispute into
the national faith—the kings from Brute downward being enrolled in
regular chronological series with their respective dates annexed. In
a dispute which took place during the reign of Edward I. (A. D. 1301)
between England and Scotland, the descent of the kings of England
from Brute the Trojan was solemnly embodied in a document put forth
to sustain the rights of the crown of England, as an argument bearing
on the case then in discussion: and it passed without attack from the
opposing party,[1045]—an incident which reminds us of the appeal
made by Æschinês, in the contention between the Athenians and Philip
of Macedôn, respecting Amphipolis, to the primitive dotal rights of
Akamas son of Thêseus—and also of the defence urged by the Athenians
to sustain their conquest of Sigeium, against the reclamations of the
Mitylenæans, therein the former alleged that they had as much right
to the place as any of the other Greeks who had formed part of the
victorious armament of Agamemnôn.[1046]
[1045] See Warton's History of English Poetry, sect. iii. p. 131,
note. "No man before the sixteenth century presumed to doubt
that the Francs derived their origin from Francus son of Hector;
that the Spaniards were descended from Japhet, the Britons from
Brutus, and the Scotch from Fergus." (_Ibid._ p. 140.)
According to the Prologue of the prose Edda, Odin was the
supreme king of Troy in Asia, "in eâ terrâ quam nos Turciam
appellamus.... Hinc omnes Borealis plagæ magnates vel primores
genealogias suas referunt, atque principes illius urbis inter
numina locant: sed in primis ipsum Priamum pro Odeno ponunt,"
etc. They also identified _Tros_ with _Thor_. (See Lexicon
Mythologicum ad calcem Eddæ Sæmund, p. 552. vol. iii.)
[1046] See above, ch. xv. p. 458; also Æschinês, De Falsâ
Legatione, c. 14, Herodot. v. 94. The Herakleids pretended a
right to the territory in Sicily near Mount Eryx, in consequence
of the victory gained by their progenitor Hêraklês over Eryx, the
eponymous hero of the place. (Herodot. v. 43.)
The tenacity with which this early series of British kings was
defended, is no less remarkable than the facility with which it was
admitted. The chroniclers at the beginning of the seventeenth century
warmly protested against the intrusive scepticism which would cashier
so many venerable sovereigns and efface so many noble deeds. They
appealed to the patriotic feelings of their hearers, represented the
enormity of thus setting up a presumptuous criticism against the belief
of ages, and insisted on the danger of the precedent as regarded
history generally.[1047] How this controversy stood, at the time and
in the view of the illustrious author of Paradise Lost, I shall give
in his own words, as they appear in the second page of his History of
England. After having briefly touched upon the stories of Samothes son
of Japhet, Albion son of Neptune, etc., he proceeds:—
[1047] The remarks in Speed's Chronicle (book v. c. 3. sect.
11-12), and the preface to Howes's Continuation of Stow's
Chronicle, published in 1631, are curious as illustrating this
earnest feeling. The Chancellor Fortescue, in impressing upon
his royal pupil, the son of Henry VI., the limited character of
English monarchy, deduces it from Brute the Trojan: "Concerning
the different powers which kings claim over their subjects, I am
firmly of opinion that it arises solely from the different nature
of their original institution. So the kingdom of England had its
original from Brute and the Trojans, who attended him from Italy
and Greece, and became a mixed kind of government, compounded of
the regal and the political." (Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ages, ch. viii.
P. 3, page 230.)
"But now of Brutus and his line, with the whole progeny of kings to the
entrance of Julius Cæsar, we cannot so easily be discharged: descents
of ancestry long continued, laws and exploits not plainly seeming to
be borrowed or devised, which on the common belief have wrought no
small impression: _defended by many, denied utterly by few_. For what
though Brutus and the whole Trojan pretence were yielded up, seeing
they, who first devised to bring us some noble ancestor, were content
at first with Brutus the Consul, till better invention, though not
willing to forego the name, taught them to remove it higher into a more
fabulous age, and by the same remove lighting on the Trojan tales, in
affectation to make the Briton of one original with the Roman, pitched
there: _Yet those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real
persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath
been remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity._
For these, and those causes above mentioned, that which hath received
approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or
uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow: _so far
as keeps aloof from impossible or absurd_, attested by ancient writers
from books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of
story."[1048]
[1048] "Antiquitas enim recepit fabulas fictas etiam nonnunquam
incondite: hæc ætas autem jam exculta, præsertim eludens omne
quod fieri non potest, respuit," etc. (Cicero, De Republicâ, ii.
10, p. 147, ed. Maii.)
Yet in spite of the general belief of so many centuries—in spite of
the concurrent persuasion of historians and poets—in spite of the
declaration of Milton, extorted from his feelings rather than from his
reason, that this long line of quasi-historical kings and exploits
could not be _all_ unworthy of belief—in spite of so large a body of
authority and precedent, the historians of the nineteenth century begin
the history of England with Julius Cæsar. They do not attempt either to
settle the date of king Bladud's accession, or to determine what may
be the basis of truth in the affecting narrative of Lear.[1049] The
standard of historical credibility, especially with regard to modern
events, has indeed been greatly and sensibly raised within the last
hundred years.
[1049] Dr. Zachary Grey has the following observations in his
Notes on Shakspeare (London, 1754, vol. i. p. 112). In commenting
on the passage in King Lear, _Nero is an angler in the lake of
darkness_, he says, "This is one of Shakspeare's most remarkable
_anachronisms_. King Lear succeeded his father Bladud anno mundi
3105; and Nero, anno mundi 4017, was sixteen years old, when he
married Octavia, Cæsar's daughter. See Funcii Chronologia, p. 94."
Such a supposed chronological discrepancy would hardly be pointed
out in any commentary now written.
The introduction prefixed by Mr. Giles, to his recent translation
of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1842), gives a just view both of the
use which our old poets made of his tales, and of the general
credence so long and so unsuspectingly accorded to them. The
list of old British kings given by Mr. Giles also deserves
attention, as a parallel to the Grecian genealogies anterior to
the Olympiads.
But in regard to ancient Grecian history, the rules of evidence still
continue relaxed. The dictum of Milton, regarding the ante-Cæsarian
history of England, still represents pretty exactly the feeling now
prevalent respecting the mythical history of Greece: "Yet those old
and inborn kings (Agamemnôn, Achilles, Odysseus, Jasôn, Adrastus,
Amphiaräus, Meleager, etc.), never any to have been real persons,
or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been
remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity." Amidst
much fiction (we are still told), there must be some truth: but how is
such truth to be singled out? Milton does not even attempt to make the
severance: he contents himself with "keeping aloof from the impossible
and the absurd," and ends in a narrative which has indeed the merit
of being sober-, but which he never for a moment thinks of
recommending to his readers as true. So in regard to the legends of
Greece,—Troy, Thêbes, the Argonauts, the Boar of Kalydôn, Hêraklês,
Thêseus, Œdipus,—the conviction still holds in men's minds, that there
must be something true at the bottom; and many readers of this work may
be displeased, I fear, not to see conjured up before them the Eidôlon
of an authentic history, even though the vital spark of evidence be
altogether wanting.[1050]
[1050] The following passage, from the Preface of Mr. Price
to Warton's History of English Poetry, is alike just and
forcibly characterized; the whole Preface is, indeed, full of
philosophical reflection on popular fables generally. Mr. Price
observes (p. 79):—
"The great evil with which this long-contested question appears
to be threatened at the present day, is an extreme equally
dangerous with the incredulity of Mr. Ritson,—a disposition to
receive as authentic history, under a slightly fabulous coloring,
every incident recorded in the British Chronicle. An allegorical
interpretation is now inflicted upon all the marvellous
circumstances; a forced construction imposed upon the less
glaring deviations from probability; and the usual subterfuge
of baffled research,—erroneous readings and etymological
sophistry,—is made to reduce every stubborn and intractable text
to something like the consistency required. It might have been
expected that the notorious failures of Dionysius and Plutarch,
in Roman history, would have prevented the repetition of an
error, which neither learning nor ingenuity can render palatable;
and that the havoc and deadly ruin effected by these ancient
writers (in other respects so valuable) in one of the most
beautiful and interesting monuments of traditional story, would
have acted as sufficient corrective on all future aspirants.
The favorers of this system might at least have been instructed
by the philosophic example of Livy,—if it be lawful to ascribe
to philosophy a line of conduct which perhaps was prompted by
a powerful sense of poetic beauty,—that traditional record can
only gain in the hands of the future historian by one attractive
aid,—the grandeur and lofty graces of that incomparable style in
which the first decade is written; and that the best duty towards
antiquity, and the most agreeable one towards posterity, is to
transmit the narrative received as an unsophisticated tradition,
in all the plenitude of its marvels and the awful dignity of its
supernatural agency. For, however largely we may concede that
real events have supplied the substance of any traditive story,
yet the amount of absolute facts, and the manner of those facts,
the period of their occurrence, the names of the agents, and the
locality given to the scene, are all combined upon principles so
wholly beyond our knowledge, that it becomes impossible to fix
with certainty upon any single point better authenticated than
its fellow. Probability in such decisions will often prove the
most fallacious guide we can follow; for, independently of the
acknowledged historical axiom, that 'le vrai n'est pas toujours
le vraisemblable,' innumerable instances might be adduced, where
tradition has had recourse to this very probability to confer
a plausible sanction upon her most fictitious and romantic
incidents. It will be a much more useful labor, wherever it can
be effected, to trace the progress of this traditional story in
the country where it has become located, by a reference to those
natural or artificial monuments which are the unvarying sources
of fictitious events; and, by a strict comparison of its details
with the analogous memorials of other nations, to separate
those elements which are obviously of a native growth, from the
occurrences bearing the impress of a foreign origin. _We shall
gain little, perhaps, by such a course for the history of human
events_; but it will be an important accession to our stock of
knowledge on the _history of the human mind_. It will infallibly
display, as in the analysis of every similar record, the
operations of that refining principle which is ever obliterating
the monotonous deeds of violence that fill the chronicle of a
nation's early career, and exhibit the brightest attribute in
the catalogue of man's intellectual endowments,—a glowing and
vigorous imagination,—bestowing upon all the impulses of the
mind a splendor and virtuous dignity, which, however fallacious
historically considered, are never without a powerfully redeeming
good, the ethical tendency of all their lessons."
I presume to think that our great poet has proceeded upon mistaken
views with respect to the old British fables, not less in that which
he leaves out than in that which he retains. To omit the miraculous and
the fantastic, (it is that which he really means by "the impossible
and the absurd,") is to suck the lifeblood out of these once popular
narratives,—to divest them at once both of their genuine distinguishing
mark, and the charm by which they acted on the feelings of believers.
Still less ought we to consent to break up and disenchant in a similar
manner the mythes of ancient Greece,—partly because they possess the
mythical beauties and characteristics in far higher perfection, partly
because they sank deeper into the mind of a Greek, and pervaded both
the public and private sentiment of the country to a much greater
degree than the British fables in England.
Two courses, and two only, are open; either to pass over the mythes
altogether, which is the way in which modern historians treat the
old British fables, or else to give an account of them as mythes;
to recognize and respect their specific nature, and to abstain from
confounding them with ordinary and certifiable history. There are good
reasons for pursuing this second method in reference to the Grecian
mythes; and when so considered, they constitute an important chapter
in the history of the Grecian mind, and indeed in that of the human
race generally. The historical faith of the Greeks, as well as that
of other people, in reference to early and unrecorded times, is as
much subjective and peculiar to themselves as their religious faith:
among the Greeks, especially, the two are confounded with an intimacy
which nothing less than great violence can disjoin. Gods, heroes, and
men—religion and patriotism—matters divine, heroic, and human—were
all woven together by the Greeks into one indivisible web, in which
the threads of truth and reality, whatever they might originally have
been, were neither intended to be, nor were actually, distinguishable.
Composed of such materials, and animated by the electric spark of
genius, the mythical antiquities of Greece formed a whole at once
trustworthy and captivating to the faith and feelings of the people;
but neither trustworthy nor captivating, when we sever it from these
subjective conditions, and expose its naked elements to the scrutiny
of an objective criticism. Moreover, the separate portions of Grecian
mythical foretime ought to be considered with reference to that
aggregate of which they form a part: to detach the divine from the
heroic legends, or some one of the heroic legends from the remainder,
as if there were an essential and generic difference between them, is
to present the whole under an erroneous point of view. The mythes of
Troy and Thêbes are no more to be handled objectively, with a view to
detect an historical base, than those of Zeus in Krête, of Apollo and
Artemis in Dêlos, of Hermês, or of Promêtheus. To single out the Siege
of Troy from the other mythes, as if it were entitled to preëminence
as an ascertained historical and chronological event, is a proceeding
which destroys the true character and coherence of the mythical world:
we only transfer the story (as has been remarked in the preceding
chapter) from a class with which it is connected by every tie both of
common origin and fraternal affinity, to another with which it has
no relationship, except such as violent and gratuitous criticism may
enforce.
By drawing this marked distinction between the mythical and the
historical world,—between matter appropriate only for subjective
history, and matter in which objective evidence is attainable,—we
shall only carry out to its proper length the just and well-known
position long ago laid down by Varro. That learned man recognized three
distinguishable periods in the time preceding his own age: "First, the
time from the beginning of mankind down to the first deluge; a time
wholly unknown. Secondly, the period from the first deluge down to the
first Olympiad, which is called _the mythical period_, because many
fabulous things are recounted in it. Thirdly, the time from the first
Olympiad down to ourselves, which is called _the historical period_,
because the things done in it are comprised in true histories."[1051]
[1051] Varro ap. Censorin. de Die Natali; Varronis Fragm. p. 219,
ed. Scaliger, 1623. "Varro tria discrimina temporum esse tradit.
Primum ab hominum principio usque ad cataclysmum priorem, quod
propter ignorantiam vocatur ἄδηλον. Secundum, a cataclysmo priore
ad Olympiadem primam, quod quia in eo multa fabulosa referuntur,
_Mythicon_ nominatur. Tertium a primâ Olympiade ad nos; quod
dicitur _Historicon_, quia res in eo gestæ veris historiis
continentur."
To the same purpose Africanus, ap. Eusebium, Præp. Ev. xx.
p. 487: Μέχρι μὲν Ὀλυμπιάδων, οὐδὲν ἀκριβὲς ἱστόρηται τοῖς
Ἕλλησι, πάντων συγκεχυμένων, καὶ κατὰ μηδὲν αὐτοῖς τῶν πρὸ τοῦ
συμφωνούντων, etc.
Taking the commencement of true or objective history at the point
indicated by Varro, I still consider the mythical and historical
periods to be separated by a wider gap than he would have admitted. To
select any one year as an absolute point of commencement, is of course
not to be understood literally: but in point of fact, this is of very
little importance in reference to the present question, seeing that the
great mythical events—the sieges of Thêbes and Troy, the Argonautic
expedition, the Kalydônian boar-hunt, the Return of the Hêrakleids,
etc.—are all placed long anterior to the first Olympiad, by those who
have applied chronological boundaries to the mythical narratives. The
period immediately preceding the first Olympiad is one exceedingly
barren of events; the received chronology recognizes four hundred
years, and Herodotus admitted five hundred years, from that date back
to the Trojan war.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of History of Greece, Volume 1 (of 12), by
George Grote
*** | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 8,552 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intr}
The self-regulation of star formation in galaxies by gas accretion and galactic outflows is a fundamental ingredient in the modern framework of galaxy evolution.
Both the analysis of large galaxy surveys and the direct observation of high-velocity clouds
(e.g. \citealt{fraternali2002,oosterloo2007,heald2011,gentile2013}), as well as hydrodynamical simulations
\citep{prochaska2009,faucher2011,vandevoort2011,dekel2013,fraternali2015}
point towards the need for continuous accretion of pristine gas onto galaxies (see also \citealt{fraternali2008,putman2012}). Moreover, historically,
the so-called
`G-dwarf problem' \citep{vandenbergh1962,schmidt1963,tinsley1980} was solved by relaxing the hypothesis of a closed-box evolution of the solar neighborhood and
allowing the accretion of pristine gas onto the disk,
which acts in diluting the abundances; in this way, one can reconcile the predicted frequency
of metal-poor Galactic disk stars (which are too many in the framework of the simple closed-box model) with the observed one.
Large scale galactic winds and outflows are also necessary to reproduce the overall properties of the observed galaxy population and
to match the observed chemical enrichment of the intergalactic medium (IGM; see, for example, \citealt{finlator2008,erb2008,fabian2012,hopkins2012}).
Several observations of galactic outflows in the literature have demonstrated the
ubiquity of the outflow phenomenon, both locally and at high redshift (see, for example,
\citealt{pettini2001,bolatto2013,geach2014,erb2015,cicone2014,cicone2015}),
however understanding their impact on galaxy properties over cosmic time remains a
daunting task.
\par Since metals are a direct product of star formation in galaxies, chemical abundances are a powerful probe of the feedback processes driving the evolution of galaxies.
Oxygen occupies a key role in this type of studies, since its gas phase abundance can be inferred from strong nebular lines easily observed in the optical
wavelength
range in the low redshift Universe. Since oxygen is the most common metal by mass, its abundance is also an excellent proxy for the total metallicity of the gas. Moreover, since
oxygen is mostly produced by massive stars, dying as core-collapse supernovae (SNe), its enrichment is relatively simple to model and does not require, to first approximation, taking into
account the effect of stellar lifetimes (under the so-called instantaneous recycling approximation, IRA).
\par The study of the relation between oxygen abundance and other fundamental galaxy parameters like stellar mass \citep{lequeux1979,tremonti2004}, star formation rate
(SFR, \citealt{mannucci2010,andrews2013}), gas content \citep{hughes2013,bothwell2013} and environment \citep{pasquali2010,peng2014} has paved the way to the development
of a new generation of chemical evolution models \citep{dave2012,lilly2013,peng2014,lu2015,belfiore2016},
which succeed, to various extents, at reproducing the general trends observed in the data with cosmological inflow rates and various simple outflow prescriptions.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{data.png}
\caption{ In this figure, the SDSS data sample for the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern (density plot in greyscale)
is compared with a data sample which includes the (N/O) and (O/H) abundances as observed in blue, diffuse star forming dwarf galaxies
by \citet[red data]{berg2012}, \citet[black data]{izotov2012} and \citet[blue data]{james2015}.
}
\label{fig:data_all}
\end{figure*}
\par Since different chemical elements are released in the interstellar medium (ISM) on different time-scales, the study of abundance ratios of some key elements can provide
tighter constraints on the star formation and gas flow history of a system. For example, large galaxy surveys have demonstrated that the [O/Fe] ratios
in elliptical galaxies are consistent with the paradigm requiring these objects to form stars vigorously over a short timescale at high redshift \citep{matteucci1994,bernardi2003,pipino2004,thomas2005,thomas2010}. Moreover, detailed analysis of chemical abundance ratios of n-capture, $\alpha-$ and iron-peak elements
in individual stars in the Milky Way (MW)
have been instrumental in showing that the various components of our Galaxy (halo, bulge, thick and thin disk) have had different chemical evolution histories with respect to each
other (see, for example, \citealt{pagel2009,matteucci2001book,matteucci2012}).
\par In the context of star forming galaxies, strong nebular lines in the optical range allow reliable measurement of the (N/O) abundance ratio when both the
[OII]$\lambda3726$,$3729$ and [NII]$\lambda6548$,$6584$ doublets are measured. The (N/O) abundance ratio has been studied by several authors
\citep{vila-costas1992,thuan1995,henry2000,chiappini2003,chiappini2005,perez-montero2009,perez-montero2013,belfiore2015} since it is a promising tool to
shed light on the relative
role of pristine gas inflows and outflows, which appear degenerate when only the abundance of one chemical element is traced
(see \citealt{koppen2005}, but also the discussion in the Appendix of \citealt{belfiore2016}).
\par Unlike oxygen, nitrogen is a chemical element mostly produced by low- and intermediate-mass stars (LIMS), with the nucleosynthetic yields depending
on metallicity in a complex fashion.
In particular, a stellar generation can release into the galaxy ISM both primary and secondary N.
The secondary N component increases with metallicity, being a product of the CNO cycle and formed at expenses of the C and O
already present in the star. Concerning LIMS, the primary N component is produced during the third dredge-up, occurring
along the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase,
if nuclear burning at the base of the convective envelope is efficient \citep{renzini1981}.
The latter is particularly important for very metal-poor LIMS, which would not be capable otherwise of synthesizing significant amounts of secondary N.
On the other hand, the computation of the N stellar yields for massive stars still suffers of large uncertainty, especially at very low metallicity,
and none of the current existing stellar evolutionary codes
is able to provide the right amount of primary N which is needed to reproduce the observed (N/O) plateau at very low metallicities.
\par All the aforementioned complications prevent one from using IRA
and a constant yield for the study
of nitrogen abundances in galaxies,
and have prevented the community so far from taking full advantage of the large nitrogen abundance datasets now available both through large spectroscopic surveys of local
(like SDSS, \citealt{york2000}, or GAMA, \citealt{driver2011}) and high-redshift (e.g. zCOSMOS, \citealt{lilly2009}) galaxies.
In this work we critically revise the different assumptions affecting the interpretation of the (N/O) versus (O/H) abundance patterns, making use of a large dataset of star forming galaxies
from the SDSS, complemented by data from metal-poor dwarf galaxies to explore the low-metallicity regime. While considerable uncertainties still persist in some of the basic model
parameters (nitrogen yields, stellar initial mass function, IMF) we aim here at setting new constraints on pristine gas inflows and the
models of outflows.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section \ref{sec:data}, we present the dataset used in this work for the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance diagram.
In Section \ref{sec:nucl}, we summarize the current knowledge about the nucleosynthetic origin of nitrogen in stars.
In Section \ref{sec:descr}, we describe the basic equations and the assumptions of the numerical model of chemical evolution adopted in this work.
Our results are presented in Section \ref{sec:sdss_model} and \ref{sec:low_Z_tail}; in particular, in Section \ref{sec:sdss_model}, we focus on the results of our models for
the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern of the ensemble of the SDSS galaxies;
in Section \ref{sec:low_Z_tail}, we present the results of our models for the low metallicity plateau, which a complementary sample of metal-poor, diffuse and
star-forming dwarf galaxies exhibit in the (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram. Finally, in Section \ref{conclusions}, we end with our conclusions.
\section{Overview of the data}
\label{sec:data}
In order to study the characteristic gas-phase oxygen and nitrogen abundances in local galaxies, we make use of the data from SDSS Data Release 7 \citep[DR7]{abazajian2009}
and the emission line fluxes, stellar masses and SFR estimates presented in the MPA-JHU catalogue\footnote{The MPA-JHU catalogue is available
online at \url{https://www.sdss3.org/dr8/spectro/galspec.php} } \citep{brinchmann2004,tremonti2004,kauffmann2003} released as part of DR 8
\citep{aihara2011}.
\par We select galaxies to have $0.023<z<0.3$ and S/N$>$3 on the following emission lines: [OII]$\lambda\lambda3726$,$28$; [OIII]$\lambda5007$; H$\beta$; H$\alpha$;
[NII]$\lambda6584$, and [SII]$\lambda\lambda6717$,$31$. We use the standard Baldwin-Philipps-Terlevich (BPT) diagram \citep{baldwin1981,veilleux1987,kauffmann2003}
to exclude sources where the gas ionisation is not dominated by star formation, since available metallicity calibrations are only tailored to star forming regions. In this work we use the
[OIII]/H$\beta$ versus [SII]/H$\alpha$ diagnostic diagram and the demarcation curve of \citet{kewley2001}. We do not make use of the popular [OIII]/H$\beta$ versus [NII]/H$\alpha$
to avoid a bias against nitrogen enriched H\textsc{ii} regions \citep{sanchez2015,belfiore2015}.
\par Emission line fluxes are then corrected for dust extinction using the Balmer decrement and the \citet{calzetti2001} reddening curve with $\rm R_V = 4.05$. The theoretical value for
the Balmer line ratio is taken from \citet{osterbrock2006}, assuming case B recombination ($ \mathrm{H \alpha / H \beta=2.87 }$).
We note that the use of extinction curves of \citet{cardelli1989} or \citet{charlot2000} yield very similar results for the wavelength range considered in this work.
\par Inferring gas phase oxygen abundance from strong nebular line ratios is a difficult problem, since the line ratios depend not only on ionic abundances, but also on other parameters, such as ionisation parameter, density and hardness of ionisation field. It is well known in the literature that different oxygen abundance calibrations based on strong nebular lines can lead to systematic discrepancies of up to $0.6$ dex \citep{kewley2008,lopezsanchez2012,blanc2015}. In particular, strong line calibrations based on an extrapolation to high metallicity of abundances
measured with the $\tau_{\mathrm{e}}$ method (which makes use of the faint oxygen auroral line [OIII]$\lambda4363$
to directly infer the electron temperature of the nebula) generally lead to lower
abundances than calibrations based on photoionisation models.
Moreover, several metallicity calibrators make use of the nitrogen line fluxes, thus implicitly assuming that the relationship between the (N/O) ratio
and metallicity varies monotonically with oxygen abundance.
\par In this work, we infer the oxygen and nitrogen abundances using the self-consistent framework presented in
\citet{pilyugin2010}, which calibrates various strong line ratios through the electron temperature method. An alternative calibration taking both oxygen and nitrogen abundance into account has been recently presented in \citet{perez-montero2014}.
\par In order to sample the low metallicity regime, which is poorly populated in SDSS, we make use of the data from \citet{izotov2012,berg2012,james2015} for a collection of blue, diffuse and star forming dwarf galaxies. We note that the abundances reported by \citet{izotov2012,berg2012,james2015} correspond to the chemical abundances as measured using the direct method and hence should fall onto the same scale of chemical abundances we inferred from the SDSS data with the adopted calibration.
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:data_all} we show the trend of the observed (N/O) ratios as a function of the (O/H) abundances. The density plot in greyscale
represents the abundance pattern as
observed in the ensemble of the SDSS galaxies, whereas the data with error bars represent the compilation of star forming dwarf galaxies from \cite{berg2012,izotov2012,james2015}. The latter data extend towards lower (O/H) abundances than the SDSS data and clearly exhibits the well-known
low metallicity plateau. The SDSS data show an abrupt change of the slope at oxygen abundances higher than $\rm 12+log(O/H) \sim 8.4\,\mathrm{dex}$ .
\subsection{Estimating the dust depletion} \label{subsec:dust}
Oxygen abundance calibrations based on nebular lines only trace the oxygen abundance of the gaseous phase of the ISM.
However, chemical elements in real galaxies are partially depleted on to dust grains. Since chemical evolution models only
predict the total metallicity, depletion onto dust grains must be taken into account when comparing models with our data.
From an observational point of view, the dust content can differ among galaxies of different metallicity and SFR \citep{dacunha2010,fisher2014,hjorth2014}.
In the framework of chemical evolution studies,
the most important physical process affecting the dust cycle in galaxies is the star formation history, which regulates the main feedback processes responsible for the
dust production and destruction and hence the run of the galaxy dust-to-gas ratio with metallicity
\citep{wang1991,dwek1998,lisenfeld1998,edmunds2001,calura2008,dwek2011,feldmann2015}.
\begin{figure*}
\label{fig:lims_yield}
\includegraphics[width=14cm]{LIMS.png}
\caption{In this figure, we show the \citet{ventura2013} stellar yields of LIMS for carbon (dashed blue line), oxygen (dashed-dotted red line), primary nitrogen (dotted black line)
and secondary nitrogen (solid black line), as computed at $Z=0.0003,\,0.001,\,0.004,\,0.008,\,0.018$, and $0.04$. The various quantities do not include the amount of ejected mass which was initially
present in the star and has not been nuclearly processed; so the finding of negative values for the stellar yields means that the final total ejected amount of the generic element $X$ is
smaller than the one which was initially present in the star at its birth and has been later ejected into the ISM without any nuclear processing.}
\end{figure*}
\par In the literature a mean oxygen depletion\footnote{The depletion factor $D(X)$ is the logarithmic decrement
between the observed abundance of a chemical element and its predicted total abundance,
$A(X)$, namely $ D(X) \equiv \log(N_{X}/N_{H})_\text{obs} - A(X)$.
} of $D(\text{O}) \approx -0.1\,\text{dex}$ is often assumed (see also \citealt{whittet2003,jenkins2009,whittet2010}).
Although oxygen depletion is likely to have a dependance on metallicity
(differential depletion), for simplicity we do not consider this effect in this work.
Although \cite{jenkins2009} suggests an average nitrogen depletion of $\sim-0.1\,\mathrm{dex}$,
the large uncertainty in this estimate means that nitrogen is also consistent with zero depletion. Indeed most of the studies indicate that
nitrogen is not a refractory element and
does not deplete onto grains even in the densest molecular clouds (e.g. \citealt{meyer1997,caselli2002}).
In light of this, in our work, we do not consider any nitrogen depletion onto dust.
While the depletion corrections applied in this work are rather arbitrary, none of our conclusions depend on the exact values of the depletion factors.
\section{The nucleosynthetic origin of nitrogen}
\label{sec:nucl}
According to its mass and initial chemical composition, each star pollutes the ISM with different amounts of a given chemical element. Since stellar lifetimes
primarily depend upon the stellar mass, each chemical element is expected to enrich the ISM of galaxies on different typical timescales.
\subsection{Primary and secondary nucleosynthetic products}
\label{sec:primary}
\par A fundamental aspect to take into account in chemical evolution models is the nature of the physical processes which give rise to the production of the various chemical elements in stars.
In particular:
\begin{enumerate}
\item If a sequence of nuclear reactions involves as initial seed only the H and He present in the gas mixture of the star at its birth, then the nucleosynthetic
products of that sequence do not depend upon the initial stellar metallicity. The chemical products of these reactions are then named \textit{primary} elements.
\item If the presence of metals in the initial gas mixture of the star is necessary for some nuclear reactions to occur, then the
nucleosynthetic products of those nuclear reactions depend on the metallicity. These chemical products are named \textit{secondary} elements.
\end{enumerate}
In modern chemical evolution studies, the importance of distinguishing between the secondary and primary nature has been simplified for most of the chemical
elements, since their yields are computed as a function of the initial metallicity.
Nevertheless, for chemical elements like nitrogen, which have both a primary and secondary origin (see, for example, \citealt{edmunds1978,alloin1979,renzini1981,matteucci1986,gavilan2006,molla2006}),
it can be conceptually useful to separate the two components, even in the presence of yields computed for different metallicities.
\subsection{The production of nitrogen in the CNO cycle}
\par Nitrogen is mainly produced during the CNO cycle, whose main branch consists in a series of $p$-captures and $\beta^{+}$ decays starting from an atom of $^{12}$C
and converting four protons into a nucleus of He (with two $e^{+}$ and two $\nu_{e}$ as byproducts).
Since the inner reaction $^{14}\text{N}(p,\gamma)^{15}\text{O}$ proceeds with the slowest rate among the other in the sequence, when the equilibrium condition is reached
(namely, when the rate of production of each CNO nucleus equals its rate of destruction), the ultimate effect of the CNO cycle is to convert most of the CNO isotopes
into $^{14}$N. The origin of the initial $^{12}$C seed in the CNO cycle is a discriminating factor. In fact, if the atom of $^{12}$C was initially present in the gas
mixture from which the star originated, then the synthesized nitrogen behaves as a secondary element. On the other hand, if some physical mechanism is able to carry
the C and O nuclei produced in the He-burning zones out to the H-burning zones, then the synthesized nitrogen behaves like a primary element.
\subsection{Nitrogen yields in low- and intermediate-mass stars}
\par Low- and intermediate-mass (LIM) stars during the AGB phase eject into the ISM significant amounts of He, C and N.
The ejected masses reflect important abundance variations. The main physical mechanism for the transport of the C and O nuclei to the outer zones
of the star is given by the so-called third dredge-up, which is the transfer of the nucleosynthetic products of the triple-$\alpha$ process by the surface
convection which proceeds after each thermal pulse. Primary nitrogen can then be produced when the hot-bottom burning (CNO burning at the base of the
convective envelope) occurs in combination with the third dredge-up (see, for example, \citealt{ventura2013}).
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:lims_yield}, we show how the stellar yields of \citet{ventura2013} for C, O, and primary and secondary N vary as a function of the initial stellar mass,
for different metalliticities. The stellar yield of a given chemical element $X$ is defined as the ejected amount of mass of the newly formed $X$. By looking at the figure,
the stellar yields of secondary N increase with metallicity, by means of the consumption of the C and O nuclei originally present in the star. In fact, during the CNO cycle,
the global abundance of the CNO nuclei remains constant, while the relative abundances of each CNO element can significantly vary. By looking at Fig. \ref{fig:lims_yield},
the stellar producers of primary N have masses in the range between $\sim3\,\text{M}_{\sun}$ and $6\,\text{M}_{\sun}$. Furthermore, the production of primary N does not show
any correlation with the consumption of the original C and O in the star, as expected.
\begin{table*}
\caption[]{ \footnotesize{In this Table, the various columns report the following quantities:
i) Z, metallicity; ii) $\overline{M}_{\mathrm{O,R10}}$, the IMF-averaged stellar yield of oxygen
in the mass range $M=11$-$100\,\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$, by assuming the stellar yields of \citet[R10]{romano2010} and
the \citet{kroupa1993} IMF; iii) $\overline{M}_{\mathrm{N,R10}}$, the IMF-averaged stellar yield of nitrogen, defined as in the
previous column; iv) predicted average $\log(\text{N/O})$ ratios, when considering only the contributions of massive stars;
v) average stellar yield of primary N which should be provided by massive stars
to reproduce the observed low-metallicity plateau with $\log(\text{N/O})\approx-1.6\,\text{dex}$. This empirically-derived yield is used as the reference stellar yield for primary nitrogen
at low metallicity in this work.
}}
\begin{tabular}{c | c c c | c }
\hline
Z & \small{$\overline{M}_{\mathrm{O,R10}}$ [$\text{M}_{\sun}$] } & \small{$\overline{ M}_{\mathrm{N,R10}}$ [$\text{M}_{\sun}$] } & \small{$\log(\text{N/O})_\text{R10}$}
& \small{$\overline{M}_{\text{N,prim}}$ [$\text{M}_{\sun}$]} \\
\hline
\rule{0pt}{4ex}
$1.0\times10^{-10}$ & $3.025$ & $0.014$ & $-2.27$ & $0.066$ \\
\rule{0pt}{2.5ex}
$1.0\times10^{-8}$ & $3.105$ & $0.082$ & $-1.52$ & $0.068$ \\
\rule{0pt}{2.5ex}
$1.0\times10^{-5}$ & $1.995$ & $0.0005$ & $-3.53$ & $0.043$ \\
\rule{0pt}{2.5ex}
$1.0\times10^{-3}$ & $1.999$ & $0.005$ & $-2.55$ & $0.044$ \\
\rule{0pt}{2.5ex}
$4.0\times10^{-3}$ & $2.013$ & $0.018$ & $-1.99$ & $0.044$ \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{table_yields}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Nitrogen yields in massive stars}
\par In order to reproduce the observed plateau in the (N/O) ratio for the MW halo stars, \citet{matteucci1986} proposed that massive
stars should produce only primary N at all metallicities, at variance with standard nucleosynthesis models predicting only secondary N
from massive stars.
This plateau was also later observed in damped Ly$\alpha$ (DLA) systems \citep{pettini2002,pettini2008} and blue, low
metallicity star forming dwarf galaxies \citep[see Fig. \ref{fig:data_all}]{thuan1995,izotov2012,berg2012,james2015}, thus confirming that
there should be primary N production in massive stars.
\par \citet{maeder2000} and \citet{meynet2002b} found that primary N can be produced in rapidly rotating massive stars,
but only at very low metallicity.
Their proposed main physical mechanism is given by the so-called rotational mixing, particularly efficient at very low metallicity,
where stars are expected to rotate faster and to be much more compact than their metal-rich counterparts.
Rotational mixing allows the nucleosynthetic products of the
triple-$\alpha$ reaction (mainly C and O nuclei) to efficiently diffuse towards the outer CNO burning zone, where a pure primary nitrogen
can then be synthesized \citep{chiappini2008, maeder2009}.
\par This unfortunately cannot solve the problem of the observed (N/O) plateau,
which extends all over the metallicity range of MW halo stars. In fact, Geneva stellar evolutionary models predict
fast rotating massive stars to produce primary N only in a narrow range at very low metallicity;
as the metallicity $Z>10^{-8}$, these stars resume producing only secondary N.
Therefore, by assuming the theoretical stellar yields of the Geneva group,
chemical evolution models predicted a `dip' in the (N/O) ratio
at low (O/H) abundances, which is never observed (see, for example, \citealt{chiappini2005}, and the further discussion in
Section \ref{sec:empirical_yield} and \ref{sec:low_Z_tail}).
To solve this discrepancy and be able to explain the observed trends in the data,
all previous chemical evolution models \citep{matteucci1986,chiappini2005}
had to assume artificially a pure primary N yield from massive stars.
\subsection{Empirically fixing the nitrogen yield from massive stars at low metallicity}
\label{sec:empirical_yield}
In order to re-assess the problem of primary nitrogen production in massive stars, we suggest a revised primary N stellar yield at low metallicity.
\par In Table \ref{table_yields} we report the IMF-averaged stellar yields of N and O from massive stars, $\overline{M}_{\mathrm{N,R10}}$ and $\overline{M}_{\mathrm{O,R10}}$, respectively,
as computed by using the \citet{romano2010} compilation of stellar yields and assuming the \citet{kroupa1993} IMF.
We also report how the values of $\log(\text{N/O})$ are predicted to vary for different metallicities, when considering only the contributions of massive stars to the nitrogen and oxygen
chemical enrichment of the ISM.
We observe that the Geneva stellar models predict a dip in the (N/O) ratios for $\mathrm{Z}>10^{-8}$. This dip is never observed and it stems
from the lack of primary N production by massive stars for $\mathrm{Z}>10^{-8}$.
\par In order to reproduce the low-metallicity plateau, we therefore calculate the average amount of primary N that massive stars should provide to
reproduce the observed (N/O) plateau
at very low metallicities. We assume that the oxygen yields in this regime are reliable and we require the predicted (N/O) ratios to match the observed
$\log(\text{N/O})\approx-1.6\,\mathrm{dex}$ at low metallicity.
In particular, we empirically derive the needed average stellar yield of primary nitrogen by massive stars as
\begin{equation} \label{eq:Nprim}
\overline{M}_{\text{N,prim}}(\text{Z})= \overline{M}_{\text{O,R10}}(\text{Z})\times10^{-1.6}\times\frac{A_\text{N}}{A_\text{O}},
\end{equation} where $A_\text{N}$ and $A_\text{O}$ represent the atomic weight of N and O, respectively.
The calculated values of $\overline{M}_{\text{N,prim}}(\text{Z})$ are reported in the last column of Table \ref{table_yields}. Interestingly, at extremely low Z,
the latter are of the same order of magnitude as the value of $0.065\,\text{M}_{\sun}$ originally adopted in chemical evolution models to reproduce the low-metallicity plateau (see also \citealt{chiappini2005}, and references therein).
\par For the rest of this work, in our reference chemical evolution models, we assume a pure primary N production by massive stars,
with the stellar yields at the various metallicities being the quantity $\overline{M}_{\text{N,prim}}(\text{Z})$, as given in Eq. (\ref{eq:Nprim}) and reported in the last column of Table \ref{table_yields}.
We remark on the fact that, because of the way we have defined it, this quantity depends on the assumed IMF and stellar yields of oxygen.
\section{The chemical evolution framework} \label{sec:descr}
In this work, we study the nitrogen and oxygen evolution in the ISM of galaxies by adopting a chemical evolution model
in which the galaxy is assumed to be composed of a single zone within which the various chemical elements are assumed to mix instantaneously and uniformly.
The basic ingredients of the model are described in detail in \citet{matteucci2012}. In summary, the model is capable of following the temporal evolution of
the abundances of various chemical elements within the ISM of galaxies, by taking into account the main physical processes driving chemical evolution,
such as star formation, inflows and outflows of gas.
\subsection{Star formation and chemical evolution}
\par By defining $M_{\text{g},i}(t)$ as the gas mass in the galaxy which is in the form of the $i$-th chemical element at time $t$, its temporal evolution follows:
\begin{multline}
\label{eq:chem_mod}
\frac{\text{d}{M}_{\text{g},i}(t)}{\text{d}t} = \underbrace{-X_{i}(t)~\text{SFR}(t)}_{\text{SF}} + \underbrace{R_{i}(t)}_{\text{yields}} -
\underbrace{\Psi_{i}(t)}_{\text{outflow}} + \underbrace{\Phi_{i}(t)}_{\text{infall}},
\end{multline} where $X_{i}(t)=M_{\text{g,}i}(t)/M_{\text{g}}(t)$ is the abundance by mass of the $i$-th chemical element, defined such that $\sum_{i}{X_{i}(t)}=1$, and $M_{\text{g}}(t)$ is the total gas mass in the galaxy at time $t$. In our models, we assume the stellar lifetimes of \citet{padovani1993}.
\par We assume a star formation law of the form $ \text{SFR}(t)=\nu M_{\text{g}}(t)$, with $\nu$ being the star formation efficiency (SFE), a free parameter of our models.
\par The term $R_{i}(t)$ in equation \ref{eq:chem_mod} represents the rate at which stars return the $i$-th chemical element back to the ISM at their death.
This term subsumes all our prescriptions about the stellar yields as well as the assumptions concerning SN progenitors.
In particular, for Type Ia SNe, we assume the `single degenerate scenario' with the same prescriptions as in \citet{matteucci2001, matteucci2001book,matteucci2012}, however the details of the treatment of Type Ia SNe are largely irrelevant to this work, since they only have a very minor effect in the enrichment of oxygen and nitrogen.
\subsection{The infall rate}
\par In our model, the galaxy is assumed to assemble by means of accretion of gas from an external reservoir
into the potential well of an underlying dark matter (DM) halo.
\par The gas infall rate, $\Phi_{i}(t)$, follows an exponential form with time given by
\begin{equation}
\Phi_{i}(t)=\frac{X_{\text{inf},i}\,M_{\mathrm{inf}}\,e^{-t/\tau_{\text{inf}}}}{\tau_{\text{inf}}\left( 1-e^{-t_{\text{G}}/\tau_{\text{inf}}} \right)}, \;\text{with}
\sum_{i}{\int_{0}^{t_{\text{G}}}{\Phi_{i}(t)dt}}=M_{\text{inf}},
\end{equation} where $t_{\text{G}}$ is the age of the galaxy and $X_{\text{inf},i}$ is the abundance by mass of the $i$-th chemical element in the infalling gas ($M_{\text{inf}}$),
whose chemical composition is assumed to be primordial.
\subsection{The outflow model}
In equation \ref{eq:chem_mod} the outflow rate is modelled by $\Psi_{i}(t)=\omega_{i}~\text{SFR}(t)$, where $\omega_{i}$ is the so-called \textit{mass loading factor}.
Observations generally suggest that star-forming galaxies experience time-averaged outflow loading factors of order unity \citep{lilly2013,peng2015,belfiore2015,lu2015}
at stellar masses around $\log(M_{\star} / M_{\sun}) \sim 10$, close to the knee of the luminosity function. It is, however, likely that less massive galaxies experience much higher loading factors.
\par In this work, we assume the galactic wind to be \textit{differential}; namely, the outflow carries only the main nucleosynthetic products of core-collapse SNe (mainly $\alpha$-elements),
for which $\omega_{i}$ is a constant value. For chemical elements such as nitrogen and carbon, which have a very minor contribution from SNe, we assume a null mass loading factor,
i.e. $\omega_{i}=0$. The assumption of a differential outflow is justified by the fact that massive stars (the progenitors of core-collapse SNe
and the most important oxygen producers in the Universe) are observed to be highly clustered and so, as they explode, they create a region of the ISM in which the filling factor closely approaches to unity (see \citealt{marconi1994,recchi2001}).
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{reference_model.png}
\caption{The reference chemical evolution model used in this work to reproduce the abundance pattern in the (N/O) vs (O/H) plane (black solid line). The distribution of SDSS galaxies is shown
as a 2D histogram, with the bin size in both the (N/O) and (O/H) dimensions being $0.025\,\mathrm{dex}$, and the colour-coding represents the number of galaxies in each bin.
The changes in slope of the observed (N/O) vs (O/H) relation are linked to different physical properties of the model. The plateau at low metallicity is due to the pure primary N production
by massive stars. The slope of the (N/O) vs (O/H) relation increases when LIMS start dying, producing both primary and secondary nitrogen. A further steepening of the relation is
obtained after the onset of a differential galactic wind, which here is assumed to expel oxygen preferentially. }
\label{fig:ref_model}
\end{figure*}
Interestingly, the first works suggesting a differential metal-enhanced galactic wind in the context of the study of chemical evolution of galaxies were those of \citet{pilyugin1993} and \citet{marconi1994}, which addressed also the issue of explaining the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern observed in dwarf irregular galaxies (see \citealt{recchi2008} for a detailed study and references).
We are aware that our assumption of a differential galactic wind is highly uncertain and it does not rely on firm
theoretical and observational findings; further detailed investigations are needed, by looking -- for example -- at the chemical abundances in the halo of the
MW or in quasar absorption lines, which were also related in the past to galactic winds.
\par Following the formalism of \citet{bradamante1998}, the time for the onset of the galactic outflow is calculated by requiring the thermal energy of the gas (supplied by SNe
and stellar winds to the galaxy ISM) to be larger than the binding energy of the gas to the galaxy potential well.
\subsection{Summary of the stellar yields for O and N}
In this work we assume for oxygen and nitrogen the following set of stellar yields.
\begin{enumerate}
\item For massive stars, we assume the metallicity-dependent compilation of stellar yields of \citet{romano2010}, in which the nitrogen and oxygen yields have been computed
by the Geneva group, by including the combined effect of rotation and mass loss (see, for more details, \citealt{meynet2002,hirschi2005,hirschi2007,ekstrom2008}).
For $ \text{Z} < 10^{-3}$ we make use of the empirically-motivated nitrogen yield of massive stars derived in Sec. \ref{sec:empirical_yield}.
\item For low- and intermediate-mass (LIM) stars, we assume the stellar yields at the various metallicities computed by means of the ATON numerical code of stellar evolution
(see, for a detailed description, \citealt{mazzitelli1989,ventura1998, ventura2009, ventura2013}).
We have chosen the \citet{ventura2013} stellar yields because they provide separately the primary and secondary components of the nitrogen stellar yield for a large range of
metallicities ($3.0\times10^{-4}\leq \text{Z} \leq 0.04$; see the discussion in Sec \ref{sec:primary}).
Other works which also separate the two components are those of \citet{gavilan2005,gavilan2006}, however they span a too narrow metallicity
range for the purpose of our work.
\end{enumerate}
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{multiple_figure.png}
\label{fig:param}
\caption{Chemical evolution model track in the (N/O) vs (O/H) plane. Abundances for SDSS galaxies are shown as a 2D histogram, with the colour-coding corresponding
to the number of galaxies in each bin, with the bin size in both the (N/O) and (O/H) dimensions being 0.025 dex.
The reference model is always plotted in black solid line.
In different panels we vary different free parameters of the chemical evolution model. In panel a) we change the infall mass $\rm M_{inf}$,
in panel b) the infall timescale $\rm \tau_\mathrm{inf}$, in panel c) the SFE $\nu$ and in panel d) the outflow loading factor $\omega$.
In panel d) the dashed lines correspond to a non-differential outflow (where both N and O are expelled with the same efficiency) while the solid lines refer to the reference
assumption of a differential outflow where N is not expelled (with $\omega_{N}=0$). }
\end{figure*}
\section{Modelling the SDSS data}
\label{sec:sdss_model}
In this section, we compare the predictions of our chemical evolution models with the set of data discussed in Sec. \ref{sec:data} (see Fig. \ref{fig:data_all}) focusing on reproducing the high-metallicity regime of the (N/O) versus (O/H) diagram. We will address the question of reproducing the low metallicity tail of the (N/O) distribution in the next section.
\subsection{The reference model}
\label{sec:reference}
\par Given the relatively large number of free parameters in our detailed chemical evolution model, we take a qualitative, staged approach. We first choose a set of reference parameters. We then investigate the effect of changing each of them, while keeping the other ones fixed.
Our reference model assumes:
\begin{enumerate}
\item fixed SFE $\nu=1.5\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$,
\item fixed mass loading factor $\omega=0.8$ for oxygen,
\item differential galactic outflow, with $\omega=0.0$ for nitrogen,
\item infall mass $\log(\text{M}_\text{inf} / \text{M}_{\sun})=10.25$,
\item infall time-scale $\tau_\text{inf}=1\,\text{Gyr}$,
\item \citet{kroupa1993} IMF,
\end{enumerate}
and the star formation history is assumed to be extended over all the galaxy lifetime (i.e. we do not introduce a quenching phase).
In Fig. \ref{fig:ref_model} we plot this reference model in the (N/O) versus (O/H) plane, together with the distribution of SDSS galaxies. The observed (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern is shown as a density plot, with the bin size in both the (N/O) and (O/H) dimensions being $0.025\,\mathrm{dex}$; we show only the bins which contain more than ten galaxies and the colour-coding represents the number of galaxies within each bin.
\par It is remarkable to note that our simple reference model in Fig. \ref{fig:ref_model} can well reproduce the main features of the data.
The predicted low-metallicity plateau is the effect of our assumption of a pure primary N production by massive stars.
The increase of the (N/O) ratios from $12+\log(\text{O/H}) \sim 8.0\,\mathrm{dex}$ is due to the delayed chemical feedback of LIMS,
which pollute the ISM with primary \textit{and} secondary nitrogen; we will refer to this change in slope as the `first break point'.
By definition, the production of secondary nitrogen by LIMS increases as the metallicity increases.
Although the production of primary N is smaller than the one of secondary N (see Fig. \ref{fig:lims_yield}),
the main primary N producers turns out to be, on average, less massive and hence more long-living than the bulk of the secondary N producers.
In this way, the pollution of the ISM with primary N by LIMS mimics and amplifies the secondary N component.
At $12+\log(\text{O/H}) \sim 8.6\,\mathrm{dex}$, we see in Fig. \ref{fig:ref_model} a new change in slope (`second break point'),
which is caused by the onset of the galactic wind.
Since we assume a differential outflow, the loss of oxygen per unit time is more efficient than the loss of nitrogen (which is set to zero).
In this way, the accumulation of oxygen within the galaxy ISM slows down and the net effect of the galactic wind is to steepen the (N/O) ratios
as the chemical evolution proceeds. We remark that the increase of the (N/O) ratios after the second break point is also crucially bolstered by
the larger amounts of secondary N which LIMS are able to synthesize at higher Z.
\subsection{Exploring the parameter space}
In this section we discuss the effect of varying the free parameters in the reference model. In particular,
we show that the main parameters influencing the shape of
the (N/O) vs (O/H) relation are the star formation efficiency, the outflow loading factor and the assumptions
regarding the differential outflow loading for N and O.
Other parameters, such as the infall mass and the infall timescale do not have a significant effect on the abundance trends studied.
\subsubsection{The infall mass}
In Fig. \ref{fig:param}a), we explore the effect of varying the infall mass, in the range $\log(\text{M}_\text{inf}/\text{M}_{\sun})=9.75$-$11.0$.
The common evolution of all the galaxies
before the onset of the galactic wind stems from the fact that all these models assume a fixed SFE ($\nu=1.5\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$).
The models developing the galactic wind first are the ones with the smallest infall mass, which depart from the common track at the lowest (O/H) abundances;
in fact, such models are characterized by a lower galaxy potential well, and hence they develop the outflow at earlier times.
Overall the infall mass in our models does not play a key role in defining the shape of the (N/O) vs (O/H) relation.
\subsubsection{The infall timescale}
The infall time-scale regulates the rate of accretion of the gas into the system. In particular, by fixing the values of the other parameters,
models with longer infall time-scales predict the galactic wind to develop at earlier times, since the binding energy of the gas to the whole galaxy is lower,
at any time of the galaxy evolution.
This can be appreciated by looking at Fig. \ref{fig:param}b), where models assuming different infall time-scales are compared.
Before the onset of the galactic wind, all the models evolve on the same track in the (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram because
the SFE is kept fixed.
\subsubsection{The star formation efficiency}
The SFE ($\nu$) is a key parameter in driving the star formation history of the system and has a complex effect on the balance of the different stellar populations that contribute
to the nitrogen and oxygen abundance in galaxies.
Increasing the SFE speeds up the production of oxygen per unit time by massive stars in the earliest stages of the galaxy chemical evolution.
Since we assume that nitrogen is synthesized by massive stars as a pure primary element,
the increasing of the SFE does not affect much the (N/O) ratio in the low metallicity regime.
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:param}c), we explore the effect of varying the SFE in the range $\nu=0.5-3\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$.
The first large effect in the (N/O) vs (O/H) diagram can be seen at the first break point;
in particular, the higher the SFE, the larger is the metal content within the galaxy as first LIMS die, causing the (N/O) ratios to increase. In conclusion, an increase of the SFE
determines a wider range in metallicity of the initial (N/O) plateau due to the chemical enrichment of massive stars.
This is a sort of application of the so-called `time-delay model'\citep{tinsley1979,greggio1983,matteucci_greggio1986} to the (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram.
We remind the reader that by \textit{time-delay model} we mean the classical way of interpreting the trend of the observed [$\alpha$/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] abundance patterns in galaxies, where
key roles are played by the assumed SFE and
the delayed chemical enrichment by Type Ia SNe; in particular,
the higher the SFE in galaxies, the larger is the [Fe/H] abundance of the ISM as first Type Ia SNe explode and hence
the [$\alpha$/Fe] ratios steeply decrease.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=9.3cm]{figure_time.png}
\caption{ In this figure, in panel a) and b), we show how the (O/H) abundances and the (N/O) ratios, respectively, are predicted to vary as functions of the galaxy time. The various curves
correspond to models with different star formation efficiency, with the reference model being the blue solid line. }
\label{fig:time_evol}
\end{figure}
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:time_evol}a), we show the relations between the age of the galaxy and the metallicity of the ISM, as predicted by our models with varying SFEs.
Galaxies with very low SFEs struggle to reach high (O/H) abundances, spending most of their evolutionary time at low metallicities. Conversely, models
with higher SFEs predict galaxies to reach the (O/H) abundances of the SDSS data at earlier times.
Once the galactic wind develops, there is an interplay between the rate of restitution of oxygen into the galaxy ISM by dying stars and the rate of removal of
oxygen by galactic wind and star formation;
this causes the (O/H) abundances to increase more gradually with time than before the onset of the galactic wind.
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:time_evol}b), we show how the predicted (N/O) ratios vary as a function of the time, when varying the SFE.
In the earliest stages of the galaxy evolution, all the models tend towards $\log(\text{N/O})\sim-1.6\,\mathrm{dex}$,
which corresponds to the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio
of the low metallicity plateau.
As first LIMS die, the (N/O) ratio is predicted to suddenly increase, because of the large amounts of both primary and secondary N which LIMS are capable of
synthesize. In summary, the higher the SFE, the earlier and the higher are the metallicities (as discussed above) when LIMS start dying,
causing the (N/O) ratio to increase.
The effect of the onset of the galactic wind is less visible in this figure, and it corresponds to the gradual change in the slope of the (N/O) vs. time relation occurring at later times.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=9.3cm]{IMF.png}
\caption{ In this figure, we explore the effect of changing the IMF on the predicted (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram. The black solid curve corresponds to our reference model with
the \citet{kroupa1993} IMF, the dashed curve in dark red to the \citet{salpeter1955} IMF, and the dotted curve in blue to the \citet{chabrier2003}
and \citet{kroupa2001} IMFs, which provide very similar final results.
}
\label{fig:imf}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{The outflow loading factor}
Our reference model assumes a differential outflow, which carries only the nucleosynthetic products of core-collapse SNe (mainly $\alpha$-elements) out of the galaxy potential well.
Hence the mass loading factor, $\omega$, quoted in the reference model only refers to oxygen, since nitrogen is assumed not to be expelled.
Obviously, in reality, some nitrogen would be lost to the IGM, but here we consider its mass loading factor to be much lower than the one of oxygen,
since core-collapse SNe are minor contributors of N in galaxies and the galactic wind (mainly triggered by SN explosions) develops when LIMS have already heavily polluted the ISM with nitrogen, overcoming the N enrichment from massive stars.
\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{dwarf_m9.png}
\caption{ In this figure, we show chemical evolution models for dwarf galaxies. We assume $\text{M}_{\text{inf}}=10^{9}\,\text{M}_{\sun}$, varying SFEs, an infall timescale
$\tau_{\text{inf}}=0.1\,\text{Gyr}$ and the IMF of \citet{kroupa1993}. The grey points correspond to the SDSS galaxies with $M_{\star}\le 10^{9}\,{M_{\sun}}$,
in the same range of stellar mass as the metal-poor, star forming dwarf galaxies from \citet{berg2012,izotov2012,james2015}, which are represented by
the data with error bars.
}
\label{fig:dwarf}
\end{figure*}
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:param}d), we show the effect of almost doubling the mass loading factor on the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern.
By definition this parameter only has an effect after the galactic wind has started; this
occurs at $12 + \log(\text{O/H}) \sim 8.6\,\mathrm{dex}$ in our reference model.
The requirement of a differential outflow to reproduce the observed trend of the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern can be appreciated
by comparing the solid and dashed curves in Fig. \ref{fig:param}d), corresponding to models with differential and non-differential outflow, respectively.
Concerning the model with a differential outflow, $\omega$ has the clear effect of changing the slope of the (N/O) vs (O/H) relation at high metallicity.
Importantly, even in the case of the reference model, this slope is much steeper than unity, which is the naive prediction for the secondary nitrogen enrichment.
By looking at Eq. \ref{eq:chem_mod}, the slope is crucially determined by the balance between the loss of oxygen via galactic winds (and star formation)
and the restitution of oxygen by massive stars. If the latter exceeds the former, the slope is positive, otherwise it is negative.
Concerning the model with a non-differential outflow, the transition between the SF-dominated regime and the outflow-dominated regime is smooth, since both oxygen and nitrogen are lost from the
galaxy potential well with the same efficiency $\omega$.
\subsubsection{The IMF}
In Fig. \ref{fig:imf}, we explore the effect of changing the IMF on the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance diagram.
Our reference IMF, which is \citet[the best IMF for the MW disk; see \citealt{romano2010}]{kroupa1993}, hosts a large number of LIMS and a much smaller number of massive stars
than the \citet{salpeter1955} IMF, and it provides the best
agreement with the observed dataset among the classical IMFs considered in this work. IMFs like \citet{chabrier2003} and \citet{kroupa2001},
which are very similar among each other, host a larger number of
massive stars and hence an enhanced oxygen-production is predicted at the early stages of galaxy evolution; so the first break point occurs at higher metallicities
when the \citet{chabrier2003} or the \citet{kroupa2001} IMF are assumed.
The main effect of the IMF is to shift the chemical evolution tracks along the (O/H) axis. In fact, the main role of the IMF is to assign different weights to stars in different mass ranges.
\section{Modelling the low metallicity tail} \label{sec:low_Z_tail}
In this subsection, we present chemical evolution models for star forming, metal-poor dwarf galaxies, in order to reproduce the observed low metallicity tail of the (N/O) ratios. The data of \citet{berg2012,izotov2012,james2015} clearly exhibit a plateau in the (N/O) ratios, which extends towards low (O/H) abundances. None of the models developed in the past has been capable of reproducing this trend (see \citealt{chiappini2005}).
\par In Fig. \ref{fig:dwarf}, we show the predictions of models with $M_{\mathrm{inf}}=10^{9}\,\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$, $\tau_\mathrm{inf}=0.1\,\mathrm{Gyr}$
and SFEs in the range $\nu=0.05-5\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$, with the purpose of reproducing the trend of the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundances
which are observed in metal-poor star forming dwarf galaxies (data with error bars) and in the SDSS galaxies with stellar mass $M_{\star}\le10^{9}\,\text{M}_{\sun}$.
The other parameters are the reference ones, as described at the beginning of Section \ref{sec:sdss_model}. In these models, we assume that massive stars produce
pure primary N; our stellar yields for N are summarized in Table \ref{table_yields},
and they have been computed as a function of the metallicity, starting from the observational constraint that metal-poor dwarf galaxies share a common
nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio which is $\log(\text{N/O})\approx-1.6\,\text{dex}$.
\par The trend of the various models in Fig. \ref{fig:dwarf} can be explained by means of the same mechanism which has been mentioned
throughout all the text: very low SFEs cause a slow production of oxygen by massive stars;
this fact allows the ISM to be quite metal-poor when LIMS begin to highly pollute the ISM with nitrogen. Therefore, lowering the SFEs causes the plateau of the (N/O) ratios
to be less extended in metallicity and hence the first break to occur at lower Z.
This explanation is a sort of application of the time-delay model to the (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram.
By comparing models and data, we can obtain a good qualitative agreement, clearly suggesting that a pure primary N production by massive stars
is needed to explain and reproduce the low-metallicity plateau.
\par By assuming the N stellar yields of massive stars collected by \citet{romano2010}, which include the results of
the stellar evolutionary code of the Geneva group taking
into account the effects of mass loss and rotation,
all our chemical evolution models predict a dip in the (N/O) ratios when going towards low (O/H) abundances
(see also Table \ref{table_yields}),
at variance with observations.
This can be appreciated by looking at Fig. \ref{fig:dwarf_originalN}, where the predictions of a model with pure primary N production
by massive stars is compared with a similar model assuming the Geneva stellar yields for massive stars, as given in \citet[their model 15]{romano2010}.
Both models assume $\nu=1.5\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$, $M_{\mathrm{inf}}=10^{9}\,\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$ and $\tau_\mathrm{inf}=0.1\,\mathrm{Gyr}$. Fig. \ref{fig:dwarf_originalN} clearly points out the still open problem of standard stellar nucleosynthesis calculations as well as of stellar evolutionary models
to predict the right amount of pure primary N which massive stars should provide to reproduce the observed (N/O) plateau at very low metallicity.
\section{Conclusions} \label{conclusions}
In this article, we have presented a set of chemical evolution models with the purpose of reproducing the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern, as
observed in a sample of SDSS galaxies \citep{abazajian2009} and metal-poor, star forming dwarf galaxies \citep{izotov2012,berg2012,james2015}.
Our collection of data spans a wide metallicity range ($7.1\,\mathrm{dex} \la \log(\mathrm{O/H})+12 \la 8.9 \,\mathrm{dex}$), enabling us to recover the trend
of the observed (N/O) vs. (O/H) relation with a precision never reached before.
At very low metallicity, the data clearly demonstrate the existence of a plateau in the (N/O) ratio,
followed by an increase of this ratio which steepens as the metallicity increases. We summarize our main conclusions in what follows.
\begin{enumerate}
\item The low metallicity plateau in the
nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio represents the imprint of pure primary N from massive stars, as originally suggested by \citet{matteucci1986}.
Such plateau is also observed
all over the metallicity range of MW halo stars and in low metallicity DLAs.
From a theoretical point of view, standard nucleosynthesis calculations have shown that the rotational mixing
in very-metal poor massive stars can allow a pure primary N production
(see \citealt{maeder2000}, and subsequent papers from the Geneva group);
nevertheless, as the metallicity becomes $Z>10^{-8}$, massive stars resume producing
only secondary N. This still represents an open problem in
stellar nucleosynthesis calculations, since all the chemical evolution models with the current stellar yields of massive stars, including standard
mass loss and rotation, predict a ``dip'' in the (N/O) ratios for $\mathrm{Z}>10^{-8}$,
at variance with observations (see, for example, \citealt{chiappini2005,romano2010}).
\item In this work, we have computed the primary N stellar yields
of massive stars which are needed, as functions of the metallicity, to reproduce the observational constraint suggesting that
$\log(\text{N/O})\approx-1.6\,\text{dex}$ in metal-poor, star forming
dwarf galaxies. Our results are given in the last column of Table \ref{table_yields}.
In this way, we have been able to reproduce the observed flat trend of the data.
\item A fundamental aspect to take into account
for explaining the trend of the observed (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern is the time-delay with which LIMS start enriching the ISM with both primary
and secondary N. In fact, before the first LIMS die, massive stars are the only nitrogen and oxygen producers in galaxies.
When LIMS start dying, the N abundance within the galaxy ISM steeply increases. Since the stellar yields of the secondary N component by LIMS increase with metallicity, then the (N/O) ratios continuously grow as a function of the (O/H) abundance.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=9.3cm]{dwarf_m9_originalN.png}
\caption{ In this figure, we compare the predictions of a model with pure primary N production
by massive stars with a similar model assuming the Geneva stellar yields for massive stars, as given in \citet[their model 15]{romano2010}.
Both models assume $\nu=1.5\,\text{Gyr}^{-1}$, $M_{\mathrm{inf}}=10^{9}\,\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$ and $\tau_\mathrm{inf}=0.1\,\mathrm{Gyr}$. The
data are same as in Fig. \ref{fig:dwarf}.
}
\label{fig:dwarf_originalN}
\end{figure}
\item The range in metallicity of the initial (N/O) plateau in the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance diagram is determined by the SFE; in particular,
the higher the SFE, the larger is the extension in metallicity of the plateau. In fact, the SFE is the main parameter driving the rate of metal production from massive stars,
hence regulating the metallicity of the system when LIMS
begin to heavily pollute the ISM with nitrogen. Therefore, if the SFE is high, the change in slope of the (N/O) ratio occurs at higher metallicity than in the case with low SFE.
This is a consequence of the so-called time-delay model on the (N/O) vs. (O/H) diagram.
In conclusion, the position of the galaxies along the observed (N/O) vs. (O/H) sequence is mostly determined by the SFE.
\item Only by assuming differential galactic winds, removing exclusively chemical elements produced in core-collapse SNe, we have been able to reproduce the steep increasing trend of
(N/O) ratios at high metallicity. Nevertheless, the larger amounts of secondary N provided by LIMS as the metallicity increases is necessary to reach the
high observed (N/O) ratios at high metallicity. In our reference model, we have assumed a mass loading factor of the order of the unity;
the variation of this parameter crucially determines the slope with which the (N/O) ratios are observed to increase at high metallicity.
On the other hand, all our models with normal galactic wind -- in which all the chemical elements are carried out of the galaxy potential well
with the same efficiency -- fail in explaining the observed trend of the (N/O) vs. (O/H) abundance pattern.
\item The role of the IMF consists in giving different weights to stars as functions of their mass, when the star formation process takes place.
If the IMF is rich in massive stars, then an enhanced O production is predicted (see also \citealt{vincenzo2015}), letting the (N/O) ratios start to increase at high
(O/H) abundances. So the main effect of the IMF is to shift the (N/O) vs. (O/H) relations over the (O/H) axis.
Our chemical evolution models with the \citet{kroupa1993} IMF provide the best agreement with the observed dataset.
\end{enumerate}
\section*{Acknowledgements}
FV thanks the Cavendish Astrophysics Group at the University of Cambridge for kindly supporting his visit
during September 2014.
FB acknowledges funding from the United Kingdom Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
RM acknowledges funding from the United Kingdom STFC through grant ST/M001172/1.
FM acknowledges financial support from PRIN-MIUR~2010-2011 project
`The Chemical and Dynamical Evolution of the Milky Way and Local Group Galaxies', prot.~2010LY5N2T.
We thank an anonymous referee for his/her constructive comments, which have improved the clarity of the paper.
The data used in this paper can be retrieved at the
MPA-JHU DR7 release of spectrum measurements web page:
\url{http://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/SDSS/DR7/}.
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{"url":"https:\/\/www.ias.ac.in\/describe\/article\/pmsc\/130\/0058","text":"\u2022 The $x$-coordinates of Pell equations and sums of two Fibonacci numbers II\n\n\u2022 # Fulltext\n\nhttps:\/\/www.ias.ac.in\/article\/fulltext\/pmsc\/130\/0058\n\n\u2022 # Keywords\n\nFibonacci number; Pell equation; linear form in logarithm; reduction method.\n\n\u2022 # Abstract\n\nLet $\\{Fn\\}_{n\u22650}$ be the sequence of Fibonacci numbers defined by $F_0 = 0$, $F_1 = 1$ and $F_{n+2} = F_{n+1}+F_n$ for all $n\\geq 0$. In this paper, for an integer $d \\geq 2$ which is square-free, we show that there is at most one value of the positive integer $x$ participating in the Pell equation $x^2 \u2212 dy^2 = \\pm 4$ which is a sum of two Fibonacci numbers, with a few exceptions that we completely characterize.\n\n\u2022 # Author Affiliations\n\n1. Institute of Analysis and Number Theory, Graz University of Technology, Kopernikusgasse 24\/II, 8010 Graz, Austria\n2. School of Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa\n3. Research Group in Algebraic Structures and Applications, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia\n4. Centro de Ciencias Matem\u00e1ticas, UNAM, Morelia, Mexico\n\n\u2022 # Proceedings \u2013 Mathematical Sciences\n\nVolume 131, 2021\nAll articles\nContinuous Article Publishing mode\n\n\u2022 # Editorial Note on Continuous Article Publication\n\nPosted on July 25, 2019","date":"2021-09-26 06:13:38","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.34745052456855774, \"perplexity\": 1349.8261095530247}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-39\/segments\/1631780057830.70\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210926053229-20210926083229-00529.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Breakthrough Way to Prevent Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia!
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which leads to dementia for 20% of people who have it, can be prevented by keeping blood pressure low. Learn more.
Quick screenings in your doctor's office can be surprisingly flawed. Here's the one step to make them more accurate.
Why Is Your Loved One Suddenly So Paranoid?
Increased paranoia is common among the elderly…but it is not a normal part of healthy aging. Here, what might be causing it…and what you can do about it.
"Lifestyle programs" that aim to cut dementia risk by changing a single behavior such as exercise have flopped. But combining healthy habits? Success!
Study: Researchers at University of Southern California and elsewhere combined two different kinds of studies—a large-scale, long-term observational human study, and a series of lab animal experiments designed to shed light on biological mechanisms.
On the human end, researchers analyzed data from 3,647 women enrolled in the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study. They ranged in age from 65 to 79 when the study began in the 1990s. The women lived all across the US—in 48 states. None had dementia when the study began, and everyone was screened for cognitive health every year.
As part of regular health screenings, they were also tested for APOE genetic mutations. About one in five people have the APOE "4" gene variant, which affects blood fats and greatly increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, especially in women. (It also increases heart disease risk). They were followed for about 10 years.
On the lab end, the subjects were mice. About half were exposed to microscopically small fine particulant pollutants for 15 weeks, while those in the control group breathed clean air. Some of the mice in both groups carried the APOE4 gene mutation. | {
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using namespace llvm;
llvm::Value* TxLiteralElementaryValueNode::code_gen_dyn_value( LlvmGenerationContext& context, GenScope* scope ) const {
return this->code_gen_const_value( context );
}
// FUTURE: Implement integer and float constant code-gen using APInt and APFloat.
Constant* TxIntegerLitNode::code_gen_const_value( LlvmGenerationContext& context ) const {
TRACE_CODEGEN( this, context, this->constValue.value.i64 );
switch ( this->constValue.typeId ) {
case TXBT_BYTE:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt8Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.i64, true );
case TXBT_SHORT:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt16Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.i64, true );
case TXBT_INT:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt32Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.i64, true );
case TXBT_LONG:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt64Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.i64, true );
case TXBT_UBYTE:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt8Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.u64, false );
case TXBT_USHORT:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt16Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.u64, false );
case TXBT_UINT:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt32Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.u64, false );
case TXBT_ULONG:
return ConstantInt::get( IntegerType::getInt64Ty( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value.u64, false );
default:
THROW_LOGIC( "Unhandled type id " << this->constValue.typeId << " in " << this );
}
}
Constant* TxFloatingLitNode::code_gen_const_value( LlvmGenerationContext& context ) const {
TRACE_CODEGEN( this, context, this->constValue.value );
switch ( this->constValue.typeId ) {
case TXBT_HALF:
return ConstantFP::get( Type::getHalfTy( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value );
case TXBT_FLOAT:
return ConstantFP::get( Type::getFloatTy( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value );
case TXBT_DOUBLE:
return ConstantFP::get( Type::getDoubleTy( context.llvmContext ), this->constValue.value );
default:
THROW_LOGIC( "Unhandled type id " << this->constValue.typeId << " in " << this );
}
}
Constant* TxBoolLitNode::code_gen_const_value( LlvmGenerationContext& context ) const {
TRACE_CODEGEN( this, context, std::to_string(this->value) );
return ( this->value ? ConstantInt::getTrue( context.llvmContext ) : ConstantInt::getFalse( context.llvmContext ) );
}
Constant* TxCharacterLitNode::code_gen_const_value( LlvmGenerationContext& context ) const {
TRACE_CODEGEN( this, context, '\'' << this->value << "' == " << (int)this->value );
auto value = ConstantInt::get( context.llvmContext, APInt( 8, this->value, false ) );
return value;
}
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\section*{Introduction}
Over the past few decades, gravimetry has proven a powerful tool for geoscience. Its potential in many different fields has been discussed in detail\cite{van_camp_2017}. The value of gravity at the Earth's surface is directly related to sub-surface mass distribution, and the analysis of both the temporal and spatial variations of the gravitational field has allowed for the characterization of several geophysical phenomena -- including ice mass changes\cite{makinen_2007,van_dam_2017}, the monitoring of volcanoes\cite{carbone_2017} and ground water resources \cite{kennedy_2016,fores_2017}, the study of subsidence in low-lying areas\cite{van_camp_2011}, the monitoring of geothermal reservoirs\cite{pearson_2017} and the detection of underground cavities\cite{romaides_2001}.
Earth's gravitational acceleration $g$ varies roughly between 9.78~m.s$^{-2}$ and 9.83~m.s$^{-2}$ over the whole Earth. The daily fluctuation, induced by the deformation of the planet by tides, is about $10^{-7}~g$. The variations of $g$ investigated in geoscience are usually at a smaller level and the level of relative precision required for an operational instrument is of the order of one part per billion, or 10~nm.s$^{-2}$ (1~$\mu$Gal). Several technological solutions have been developed to reach this demanding requirement, and the instruments used over the past 50 years were reviewed by Van Camp et al\cite{van_camp_2017}. Absolute gravimeters yield an accurate value of $g$ and are necessary to calibrate relative instruments and measure their drift. They are usually based on the measurement of the distance traveled by a free-falling corner-cube reflector in a vacuum chamber by laser interferometry \cite{niebauer_1995}. While such absolute gravimeters can nowadays be operated in the field, the technology still makes it difficult to reach both the best operability and sensitivity. In particular, these instruments have moving mechanical parts that make them unsuitable for long-term continuous measurements.
Absolute measurements at the level of 10~nm.s$^{-2}$ have also been demonstrated with gravimeters based on atom interferometry\cite{kasevich_1991,peters_1999,pereira_2016}, which rely on the wave nature of matter postulated by quantum mechanics. Similar to classical absolute gravimeters, they measure the acceleration of free-fall test masses (in this case cold atoms) compared to the local ground reference frame. Atomic gravimeters have already demonstrated top-level performance in terms of sensitivity, long-term stability and accuracy in international comparisons \cite{gillot_2014,farah_2014,freier_2016,zhou_2015,jiang_2012,francis_2013,wang_2018}, and several demonstrations have shown promise for in-field and onboard applications \cite{freier_2016,bidel_2013,wu_2014,bidel_2018}. However, these instruments were not practically suited for geophysical surveys because of their limited transportability and high complexity.
Here, we report on both operability and sensitivity at the level of 10~nm.s$^{-2}$ with an atomic gravimeter. Our novel Absolute Quantum Gravimeter (AQG) includes conceptual and technological developments that made it possible to reach compactness, transportability, low maintenance and non-expert operation, both for continuous observatory measurements and gravity mapping. These developments include a hollow pyramid reflector \cite{bodart_2010,bouyer_2010} and a compact telecom based laser system. The resulting sensor measures gravity at a 2~Hz repetition rate with a sensitivity of 500~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ and a long term stability below 10~nm.s$^{-2}$ with a short installation and warm-up time. Combined, these features represent a significant technological step forward, and have enabled the first long-term measurement campaign with a quantum gravimeter in a geophysical observatory, which comprised several weeks of continuous gravity measurements on the Larzac plateau in France.
\section*{The Absolute Quantum Gravimeter}
\subsection*{Measurement principle}
The AQG measurement sequence is based on matter-wave interferometry with Rubidium atoms using two-photon stimulated Raman transitions\cite{kasevich_1991}. This type of sequence has been extensively studied and used for precision measurements\cite{peters_1999,gillot_2014,farah_2014,freier_2016}. Here, we give a brief description of the measurement principle; the step-by-step procedure can be found in the Supplementary Methods.
The sequence consists of three counterpropagating Raman pulses of duration 10, 20 and 10~$\mu$s in a $\pi/2 - \pi - \pi/2$ configuration. Between these pulses, the the atoms are in near-perfect free fall for an interrogation time of $T=60$~ms. The output ports of the interferometer are labeled by the internal states $\lvert 5^2S_{1/2}, F=1, m_\mathrm{F}=0 \rangle$ and $\lvert 5^2S_{1/2}, F=2, m_\mathrm{F}=0 \rangle$ of the atom \cite{borde_1989}. Fluorescence detection is used to count the number of atoms in each level and measure the interferometric phase shift. For cooling, Raman and fluorescence detection, the lasers are tuned close to the D$_2$ line of $^{87}$Rb, with a wavelength $\lambda \approx 780$~nm. The proportion of atoms in the $F=2$ state is given by
\begin{equation}
P =0.5 \times \left( 1 - C \cos \Phi \right)
\end{equation}
where $C$ is the contrast of the fringes and $\Phi$ the interferometric phase shift. The contrast of the fringes is lower than 1, mainly because of velocity selection effects during the Raman pulses \cite{kasevich_1991b}. The phase shift $\Phi$ is given by
\begin{equation}
\Phi = (k_\mathrm{eff}g - 2\pi\alpha)T^2,
\end{equation}
where $k_\mathrm{eff} = 4\pi/\lambda \approx 16 \times 10^6$~m$^{-1}$ is the effective wavevector of the two-photon transition and $\alpha \approx 25$~MHz.s$^{-1}$ is a frequency chirp applied to the Raman lasers to compensate the Doppler effect. We operate the instrument around the null phase shift by servo-locking the frequency chirp $\alpha$ on the detection ratio $P$ so as to constantly maintain $k_\mathrm{eff}g - 2\pi\alpha = 0$ and stay on the central fringe of the interferometer \cite{louchet_2011}. From there we derive
\begin{equation}
g = 2\pi\frac{\alpha}{k_\mathrm{eff}}.
\label{eq:g}
\end{equation}
The sensitivity of the instrument is limited both by the signal-to-noise ratio of the detection and by the contrast. A contrast $C$ of 40\% and a detection signal-to-noise ratio of 150 correspond to an effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of $0.4 \times 150 = 60$. At mid-fringe, the sensitivity is given by
\begin{equation}
\frac{\delta g}{g} = \frac{1}{k_\mathrm{eff}gT^2 \mathrm{SNR}}.
\end{equation}
With the previous parameters, $\delta g/g\approx 3 \times 10^{-8}$. This constitutes the single-shot sensitivity floor of the instrument, but this quantity can be deteriorated by other factors, such as laser phase noise or vibrations\cite{farah_2014}. However, since the instrument's repetition rate is on the order of 2~Hz, the performance is improved by averaging over time to reach a long-term relative stability close to $1 \times 10^{-9}$.
\subsection*{Instrument description}
The AQG is made of two sub-units, the sensor head and the control system (fig. \ref{fig:visuel_AQG}). The sensor head houses the vacuum chamber where the measurement of gravity is performed. It can easily be set up at the measurement location, and is separated from the laser system and control electronics by a 5~m set of cables, which includes an optical fiber. The instrument can be installed in less than 20~min and is ready to measure after 1~h of warm-up time. The only adjustment to be performed by the operator during the installation process is setting the verticality of the sensor head. The angle is measured by two tiltmeters and the software indicates how the leveling tripod screws should be turned. Using this procedure, an operator can reach a verticality error of approximately 100~$\mu$rad. When not in use, the gravimeter can be completely powered off for several weeks with no significant impact on its vacuum level or warm-up time.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig1}
\caption{Left: picture of the first Absolute Quantum Gravimeter (AQG-A01). The system can be setup at a measurement location in less than 20~min, warm-up time is of the order of 1~h. The sensor head weighs approximately 30~kg. It is mounted on an adjustable tripod with precision leveling titanium-tipped feet that can be adapted to various terrains. The measurement height is 55~cm. Right: sketch of the sensor head and measurement principle\cite{bodart_2010}. Approximately $10^7$~atoms are loaded in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) inside the pyramid and cooled down to 2~$\mu \mathrm{K}$. The $\pi/2 - \pi - \pi/2$ atom interferometry sequence is performed once the atoms are in free-fall. At the end of the sequence, we collect fluorescence on a set of photodiodes and compute the proportion of atoms in each output port of the interferometer, labeled by their internal state. A high-precision accelerometer is attached to the top of the vacuum chamber, as close as possible to the pyramidal reflector. Its signal is used to apply a real-time correction to the laser phase, in order to reject seismic noise. Two tiltmeters and a barometer are also attached to the sensor to ensure high accuracy and long-term stability of the gravity measurement.}
\label{fig:visuel_AQG}
\end{figure}
Using a pyramidal reflector and a single-beam geometry, we load $10^7$~$^{87}$Rb atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) in 250~ms and cool them down below 2~$\mu$K in an optical molasses. We then select the atoms in the $\vert F = 1, m_F = 0 \rangle$ state by using a microwave selection. After approximately 30~ms (4.4~mm) of free-fall, the atoms exit the pyramidal reflector and we apply the $\pi/2 - \pi - \pi/2$ sequence of Raman laser pulses with the parameters described above ($\tau=10$~$\mu$s, $T=60$~ms, $C = 40$\%). The interferometer pulses are delivered by the same laser as the one used for cooling and detection, the compact configuration with the pyramidal reflector allows the use of a single beam as demonstrated by Bodart et al\cite{bodart_2010}. At the bottom of the chamber (150~mm below the position of the trap), we measure the proportion of atoms in each output port of the interferometer with a detection signal-to-noise ratio of 150. We lock the frequency chirp to the atomic signal in order to stay on the central fringe of the interferometer and derive $g$ from the values of $\alpha$ and $k_\mathrm{eff}$. To measure gravity at the $10^{-9}$ level, both of these parameters must be known with an uncertainty lower than 1 part in $10^9$. We also periodically reverse the orientation of the effective Raman wavevector to reject the systematic effects that do not depend on the sign of $k_\mathrm{eff}$ \cite{louchet_2011}.
\subsection*{Laser system}
The stability and performance of the laser system and control electronics are crucial for both the quality of the gravity measurement and the way the instrument is operated. In particular, the spectral properties of the laser will have an influence on the signal-to-noise ratio and long-term stability of the measurement. Its size, weight, robustness and ease of use determine the level of transportability and convenience for a daily operation of the gravimeter.
Our laser system complies with these constraints by using a frequency-doubled telecom solution \cite{leveque_2014,theron_2015}. Lasers operating in the telecom C-band around 1560~nm are amplified and converted to 780~nm in nonlinear crystals. The laser system is completely fibered, making it insensitive to misalignments and vibrations. Our architecture is based on a fixed-frequency reference laser, and two independent tunable slave lasers.
A master reference laser diode, emitting at 1560~nm, is frequency-doubled in a periodically-poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide crystal and frequency locked to the $F=3$ to $F=4$ crossover transition of $^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$ using saturated absorption spectroscopy. Two slave lasers, used for both cooling and Raman excitation are frequency offset-locked to the master laser. Their frequency can be tuned up to 1~GHz in 200~$\mu$s. The first slave laser addresses the $\lvert 5^2S_{1/2}, F=1 \rangle$ level (repumping and Raman 1) and the second one is near-resonant with the $\lvert 5^2S_{1/2}, F=2 \rangle$ level (cooling and Raman 2). At the beginning of the Raman interferometer, the lasers are detuned by approximately 700~MHz and the frequency lock loop of the cooling and Raman 2 laser is switched to a phase lock loop on the Raman 1 laser, which remains frequency-locked to the reference laser. The phase difference between the two Raman lasers has a direct influence on the phase shift $\Phi$ of the atom interferometer \cite{kasevich_1991,cheinet_2008}. The phase lock loop is therefore necessary to ensure that that the level of residual phase noise does not deteriorate the sensitivity of the gravimeter.
To amplify the lasers, we have developed custom Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA) that deliver an output of approximately 500~mW. The power efficiency of these EDFAs has been optimized to around 10 \% and their Amplified Spontaneous Emission kept to a low level, with a noise figure below 6~dB. After amplification, we use waveguide PPLN crystals to convert light from 1560 to 780~nm. For each slave laser, we obtain a power of approximately 250~mW at 780~nm, corresponding to a conversion efficiency of the order of 50\%. The two lasers are then combined in the same fiber using a polarization multiplexer and injected in a custom-made fibered AOM that sets the total output power and drives the Raman pulses. Light is finally sent in a polarization-maintaining fiber to the sensor head. At the fiber output, the power in each wavelength is approximately 150~mW and polarization extinction ratio is higher than 20~dB. We have characterized the linewidth of the laser by recording a beatnote between the gravimeter and a similar independent laser system (see Methods). We find a lorentzian linewidth of 12~kHz (Fig. \ref{fig:barbus}), which is low enough not to limit atomic cooling and detection.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig2}
\caption{Laser linewidth (left) and long-term frequency stability measurements (right). We make a beatnote between the laser of the gravimeter and a similar independent laser. A Lorentzian fit of the tails of the beatnote gives a linewidth of less than 12~kHz for each laser. By recording the frequency of the beatnote over time on a frequency counter, we can estimate the long-term frequency stability of the lasers. Here, the standard deviation over four days is 27~kHz, and no significant drift is visible on the measurement.}
\label{fig:barbus}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Sensor head}
As the sensor head is intended to be installed in the field, its overall weight, compactness and ease of manipulation are essential. In this respect, we use a hollow pyramidal reflector inspired by the one described by Bodart et al.\cite{bodart_2010} to implement all the functions required by the measurement sequence with a single laser beam, leading to a significant reduction in volume, complexity and risk of misalignment (Fig. \ref{fig:visuel_AQG}).
The optical characteristics of the reflector are critical for the performance of the instrument, both in terms of polarization and wavefront aberrations\cite{trimeche_2017}. The inner faces of the reflector are coated for maximum reflection at $45^{\circ}$ and for equal phase-shift between the two orthogonal polarizations. Therefore, reflections of the single circularly-polarized beam onto the four inner faces of the pyramid create the required polarization configuration for the magneto-optical trap and molasses inside the pyramid. In addition, below the pyramid the retro-reflected laser beam can drive counter-propagating Raman transitions in a $\sigma^+ / \sigma^+$ or $\sigma^- / \sigma^-$ configuration to create the matter-wave interferometer. This polarization configuration is also suitable for fluorescence detection. The wavefront of the retroreflected beam has been characterized in detail and its quality is better than $\lambda /80$ (peak-to-valley, 780~nm) in the center region used for the atom interferometer.
The vacuum chamber is protected from external magnetic fields by two layers of mu-metal shields. A high-performance accelerometer is attached to the top of the vacuum chamber in order to implement an active compensation of vibrations and to make the instrument robust against seismic noise without the need of an isolation device\cite{merlet_2009,lautier_2014}. Two tiltmeters are also included in the sensor head to ensure the AQG is perfectly vertical, and are used to measure any long-term angular drift. Finally, a barometer is used to monitor the atmospheric pressure and correct its effect on the measurement. Because gravity gradients are of the order of 3000~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{m}^{-1}$, it is important to know the effective measurement height of the instrument. On the AQG this is, on average, 55~cm above ground level. The measurement height above the leveling tripod is precisely known by design to be 48.8~cm and the height of the tripod above the ground can be measured with a precision of 1~mm during the installation of the instrument.
\subsection*{Instrument control}
Field conditions require the instrument to be stable and simple to operate. The control software of the AQG takes these constraints into account. All the operations required to start the gravimeter are automated: the software automatically locks the lasers to a predefined setpoint, turns on the EDFAs and starts the measurement sequence. Monitoring of several parameters, such as optical powers and lock stability, has been implemented and corrections are automatically applied when necessary. We have demonstrated that the laser and electronics system can run continuously for several months without breaking out of lock. At the start of the measurement sequence, the software checks additional parameters such as atom number and laser intensity, and selects the central fringe of the interferometer that gives the initial value of $g$ required to initiate the gravity measurement (see Supplementary Methods). By monitoring critical parameters over time, the software is able to detect if the instrument is unstable or requires attention.
In addition to these features, the software also calculates tilts, atmospheric pressure, vertical gravity gradients, polar motion and quartz oscillator frequency drifts. Earth tide and ocean loading corrections are also implemented, by calling a TSoft routine \cite{van_camp_2005}. Several display options are available to check the quality of the measurement in real time. Remote access to the gravimeter is possible using an internet connection, both to retrieve data and to control the instrument.
\section*{Results}
\subsection*{Scale factor verification}
The value of gravity is computed from the effective wavevector and the frequency chirp as indicated in equation (\ref{eq:g}). Both of these parameters contribute to the scale factor of the gravimeter and to the final precision of the measurement. We have measured their mean values and long-term stability at the level of a few $10^{-10}$.
The frequency chirp $\alpha$ is generated using a compact microwave synthesizer with a quartz reference oscillator. The absolute value and long-term stability of the output frequency can be calibrated using the gravimeter itself, by operating it as an atomic clock. At given time intervals, the gravity measurement is paused for approximately 30~s and the instrument switches from a Raman to a Ramsey $\pi/2 - \pi/2$ sequence where microwave pulses are driven by the microwave synthesizer. The resulting signal allows us to measure the frequency of the oscillator with an uncertainty lower than 1 part in $10^{10}$. We correct the value of $\alpha$ and $g$ accordingly, making the residual contribution lower than 1~nm.s$^{-2}$.
To ensure an absolute calibration of the laser frequencies, the system is referenced to a Rubidium optical transition at a frequency $f=c/\lambda\approx 384$~THz using saturated absorption spectroscopy. Therefore, measuring gravity with a long-term relative stability better than $10^{-9}$ requires the laser frequencies to be known with an uncertainty below 384~kHz. To characterize laser frequency stability, we use the same setup as for the linewidth measurement (see Methods). We find that the long-term frequency stability is lower than 30~kHz rms over several days (Fig. \ref{fig:barbus}), and that the effective wavector is both accurate and stable enough for the operation of the gravimeter.
\subsection*{Mitigation of external effects}
In order to avoid a degradation of the instrument's sensitivity by seismic noise, we have implemented an active compensation of vibrations, originally described by Merlet et al.\cite{merlet_2009} and Lautier et al. \cite{lautier_2014}. A high-performance classical accelerometer is attached to the top of the vacuum flange that supports the pyramidal reflector. This mechanical structure is very rigid by design so that the recorded signal is not distorted by resonances or deflections. The signal is filtered, digitized and weighed by the acceleration transfer function of the atom interferometer in real time (see Methods). Just before the last pulse of the interferometer a phase correction corresponding to the integrated acceleration noise is applied to the Raman lasers. The value of phase correction can be stored so that no information is lost in the process. In our laboratory in Talence (France), there is a high level of vibration noise. The integrated seismic noise typically corresponds to phase shifts of 2.3~rad rms (20~rad peak-to-peak), meaning the interference fringes are completely blurred. Using this real-time compensation, we recover the fringes and keep the residual acceleration noise to a level of approximately 36~mrad rms (250~mrad pk-pk), corresponding to a rejection factor higher than 60 (Fig. \ref{fig:comp_vib}). This techniques allows the AQG to perform sub $10^{-9}g$ measurements even in these noisy conditions.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig3}
\caption{Active compensation of vibrations. Left: atom interferometer fringes scanned by varying the Raman chirp $\alpha$. Blue crosses: without active compensation. Red line: with active compensation. Error bars correspond to the standard deviation over 20 measurements. Right: the gravimeter is operated close to mid-fringe and we measure the ratio of atoms in each internal state. During the first 1000 cycles, the compensation is turned off. Phase noise due to vibrations is 2.3~rad~rms, and the interference signal is washed out over several fringes. During the last 1000 cycles, active compensation is turned on and the vibration phase noise is greatly reduced to 36~mrad~rms, allowing the interferometer to remain close to mid-fringe.}
\label{fig:comp_vib}
\end{figure}
The two high-precision tiltmeters are used to measure the tilts of the instrument in the horizontal plane and derive the vertical angle. An initial absolute calibration of the tiltmeters has been performed with the gravimeter itself (see Methods). This calibration ensures that the angle is known with an uncertainty better than 10~$\mu\mathrm{rad}$, which keeps the error on the value of $g$ below 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. The tiltmeters are first used during the installation phase to make sure the gravimeter is vertical. When the instrument is running, tilt values are continuously monitored and the corresponding correction is applied to $g$ so as to correct any long-term deviation from verticality and maintain the stability of the AQG below 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. Similarly, we use the barometer to measure atmospheric pressure variations with an accuracy better than 1~hPa. Since pressure admittance\cite{hinderer_2014} is of the order of $-3$~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{hPa}^{-1}$, this is sufficient to ensure that the residual effect due to the barometer is lower than 10~nm.s$^{-2}$.
\subsection*{Sensitivity and stability measurements}
We have operated the AQG-A01 in several locations to validate its operability and transportability. In this section we discuss measurements obtained in two locations with different levels of vibration noise. The first one is the laboratory of Muquans, located in Talence (suburb of Bordeaux, France). This site features a high level of microseismic noise due to its proximity to the ocean and its location on the second floor of an inner-city building constructed on sediments. The second site is the Larzac observatory in the south of France\cite{jacob_2010,fores_2017}. This site is dedicated to hydrology studies and local gravity has been measured there by absolute and relative gravimeters on a regular basis since 2006. The Larzac observatory has a very low level of high-frequency vibration noise (i.e.~above 1~Hz) compared to Talence. A comparison of noise levels measured with the accelerometer of the AQG in both locations is shown in the Methods section. In both cases, gravity data are acquired by the AQG at a rate of approximately 2~Hz. These data are then averaged to improve statistical uncertainty, and corrected for tilt variations, drifts of the microwave oscillator, and atmospheric pressure using the admittance. Gravity data are also corrected by a synthetic tide, with parameters determined by analyzing a 9-month recording by a CG5 relative gravimeter in Talence, and a 3-year recording performed by a superconducting gravimeter in Larzac.
In Talence, we show the results of a 5~day measurement during a quiet period around Christmas 2016 (Fig. \ref{fig:residus}, left). With gravity data averaged over 1 hour, the standard deviation of these measurements is 10.7~nm.s$^{-2}$. During the best 24 hours, this deviation reduces to 8.5~nm.s$^{-2}$. The sensitivity of the instrument during the five days was approximately 600~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$, mainly limited by the residual vibration noise (See the Methods section for the definition of the sensitivity). When the noise is higher, the sensitivity is typically 700~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig4}
\caption{Gravity measurements in Talence (left) and in Larzac (right). Gravity residuals are shown after correction for tides and atmospheric pressure variations. Grey: data averaged over 10~min. Blue: data averaged over 1~h. Green: data averaged over 1~day. Top left: gravity residuals in Talence. The standard deviation over the series is 25.2~nm.s$^{-2}$ (resp. 10.7~nm.s$^{-2}$) when data is averaged over 10~min (resp. 1~h). Bottom left: zoom on the best 24 hours of data. Error bars correspond to the value of the Allan deviation at 1~h of the series (8.5~nm.s$^{-2}$). Top right: tide model (red) and raw gravity in Larzac. Bottom right: residuals. When data is averaged over 1~day, the standard deviation of the series is 9.4~nm.s$^{-2}$.}
\label{fig:residus}
\end{figure}
During the summer of 2017 the instrument was setup in the Larzac observatory for a month-long continuous measurement. The AQG-A01 was installed on a dedicated concrete pillar directly built on the bedrock. The best sensitivity achieved by our instrument in Larzac is 500~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ and is mainly limited by imperfections in the compensation of vibrations. During the measurement campaign of 2017, the gravimeter was operated at a slightly lower sensitivity of 750~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ due to a decrease of the number of atoms loaded in the interferometer. This issue has since been resolved since, and we estimate that the instrument can now operate continuously with the nominal atom number and sensitivity for several years. We show that the instrument was able to continuously measure gravity for one month without interruption (Fig. \ref{fig:residus}, right). When data are averaged over 1 day (Fig. \ref{fig:residus}, bottom right, green circles), the standard deviation over the series reaches 9.4~nm.s$^{-2}$. As gravity was simply corrected for atmospheric effects and tides, residual fluctuations on the scale of 10~nm.s$^{-2}$ or less could come from instrumental effects, from imperfections in the correction of pressure or from hydrological and geophysical effects not predicted by the tide model. There is no measurable long-term drift in the data. This was confirmed by two measurements carried out with FG5$\#228$ absolute gravimeter on July 25$^{\rm th}$ 2017 and September 4$^{\rm th}$ 2017. The second FG5 value is lower by 20~nm.s$^{-2}$ (within statistical uncertainty), which shows that there has been no significant long-term gravity change over this period.
The performance of the AQG during these two measurements can be characterized using the Allan deviation and the Power Spectral Density (PSD), as shown in Fig. \ref{fig:Allan_PSD}. We also show for comparison the results from the 32~hour long measurement carried out with FG5$\#228$ on September 4$^{\rm th}$ 2017. The measurement consisted of 32 sets of 100 drops. Drops were separated by 10~s and sets by 1~h, with a resulting set-scatter of 9~nm.s$^{-2}$. To plot the Allan deviation and PSD, we assumed that all the FG5 drops were continuous, with an effective measurement rate of 36~s. This reflects the performance of the instrument with the chosen settings, which include significant dead times. The results show that although the FG5 has a slightly better short-term sensitivity of approximately 450~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$, the long-term stabilities of the two instruments reach similar levels, below 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. If the FG5 had measured continuously every 10~s, the sensitivity would have been improved by a factor $\sqrt{3.6} \approx 1.9$ (reaching approximately 240~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$) and the PSD would have been lower by almost 6~dB. This means that despite having an intrinsically lower single-shot sensitivity, the higher repetition rate of the AQG makes averaging more efficient. At timescales longer than $10^4$~s, the data are no longer described by white noise. However, in the three datasets presented here, no significant low-frequency drift is visible. This is mainly due to the fact that absolute instruments do not experience drifts. This effect is also enhanced because the tide models we use on both sites are precise enough at these frequencies, and because there were no measurable hydrological or geophysical events during our measurements. Over the whole spectrum, the PSDs and Allan deviations show that the performances of both instruments are comparable with values typically obtained with absolute gravimeters \cite{van_camp_2017,van_camp_2005b,freier_2016}. Furthermore, despite the high level of vibrations in Talence, the AQG can be operated without significant degradation of its performance.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig5}
\caption{Allan deviation (left) and power spectral density (right) of the gravity measurements with AQG-A01 in Larzac (solid red) and Talence (blue), and with FG5$\#228$ in Larzac (solid green). The effective sampling interval of the FG5 was taken as 36~s. The red (resp. green) dashed line in the Allan plot indicates a sensitivity of 750 (resp. 450)~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$. This corresponds to a white noise level of 1.1 (resp. 0.41)~$\times 10^6$~$(\mathrm{nm.s}^{-2})^2.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ in the PSD plot (see Methods). The two black lines indicate the New High and Low Noise Models from Peterson\cite{peterson_1993}. The decrease in the PSD of the AQG at frequencies higher than 0.05~Hz comes from the bandwidth of the servo-loop used to lock the frequency chirp (approximately 4~s). The sensitivity of the AQG was slightly lower in Larzac because of a decrease of the number of atoms loaded in the interferometer.}
\label{fig:Allan_PSD}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Repeatability assessment}
After the one-month measurement in Larzac, we moved the sensor head of the AQG six times within the Larzac observatory to measure gravity on three pillars labeled North-East (NE), North-West (NW) and South-East (SE), to estimate the repeatability of the instrument when returning to a given location. Each pillar was measured twice, in the conditions indicated in Table \ref{tab:larzac}. On each pillar, the difference between the two measurements is within statistical uncertainty without any measurable offset (Fig. \ref{fig:Earthquake}, left).
\begin{table}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|l|l|}
\hline
Measurement & Pillar & Date & Duration (h) & $g - g_0$ (nm.s$^{-2}$) & Statistical uncertainty (nm.s$^{-2}$)\\
\hline
\hline
1 & NE & 6 Sept 2017 & 124 & 40.5 & 24.3\\
\hline
2 & NW & 11 Sept 2017 & 20 & 44.3 & 16.9\\
\hline
3 & SE & 12 Sept 2017 & 23.5 & -76.5 & 15.8\\
\hline
4 & NE & 13 Sept 2017 & 7.5 & 16.9 & 34.5\\
\hline
5 & SE & 13 Sept 2017 & 18.5 & -74.7 & 13.9\\
\hline
6 & NW & 14 Sept 2017 & 18 & 49.4 & 19.6\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{\label{tab:larzac}Measurement conditions and results of the AQG repeatability assessment, sorted in chronological order. For convenience, measurements are expressed relative to $g_0$, which is taken arbitrarily as the average of the six measurements. The statistical uncertainty indicated in the table and used for the error bars in Fig. \ref{fig:Earthquake} is the standard deviation of the corresponding dataset, calculated after averaging the data over 1~h. The difference between the two measurements for each pillar is $16.9 - 40.5 = -23.6$~nm.s$^{-2}$ for NE, 5.1~nm.s$^{-2}$ for NW and 1.8~nm.s$^{-2}$ for SE.}
\end{table}
During this measurement campaign, the AQG also recorded several earthquakes, including the 8.1~magnitude event that occurred in Mexico on September 8$^{\rm th}$, 2017. Although the noise on gravity measurements was higher during this period, the instrument itself was not affected and did not require any specific supervision, illustrating the immunity of the AQG to external perturbations. Furthermore, the high repetition rate (2~Hz) allows for significant sampling of the accelerations caused by seismic waves, indicating that the mean gravity value is only weakly affected and that seismic signature is very clear and can be easily removed in post-processing (Fig. \ref{fig:Earthquake}, right).
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig6}
\caption{Left: results of the repeatability measurement. The numbers next to the points indicate the order in which data were recorded (see Table \ref{tab:larzac} for details and numerical values). Right: gravity residuals measured in the Larzac observatory during the 8.1~magnitude earthquake in Mexico on September 8$^{\rm th}$, 2017. Each point corresponds to 1 measurement cycle (approx. 500~ms). Because seismic signal occurs at frequencies that are close to the high-pass cutoff of the vibration correction (see Methods), there are significant phase shifts on the acceleration signal, meaning that the resulting AQG signal is not an accurate representation of the seismic waves.}
\label{fig:Earthquake}
\end{figure}
\section*{Discussion}
We have presented the results obtained with an atomic quantum gravimeter (AQG-A01) based on matter-wave interferometry, enabling absolute measurements of Earth's gravity. By accounting for all operational constraints from the early stages of the design, we were able to implement several innovative developments that allowed for a mobile instrument. It is highly sensitive, stable, and compatible with a daily operation by geophysicists either for repeated short-term or continuous long-term measurements. We were able to demonstrate a high level of performance for such a compact system by achieving a continuous operation over one month with a long-term stability better than 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. A preliminary study also shows that the repeatability of the instrument is at the level of 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. As systematic effects and accuracy can only be precisely evaluated on an instrument that is stable, we are now working on their quantification in order to establish a complete accuracy budget. Our target is to characterize all the systematic effects so that the absolute value of $g$ is known with an uncertainty better than 50~nm.s$^{-2}$ and can be measured with a repeatability and stability of 10~nm.s$^{-2}$. Once a full assessment has been made, we will test it by comparing our instrument with other absolute gravimeters.
The operation of the gravimeter relies on the use of a classical accelerometer that is utilized to filter out seismic noise. This allows the instrument to be installed directly on the ground without any vibration damping, which is a clear advantage in terms of size, weight and installation time. It also means that our AQG is robust to acceleration noise and can be used even in the event of earthquakes. Furthermore, the raw signal from the classical accelerometer, which can be recorded and stored, provides access to high-frequency accelerations (typically above 0.1~Hz), which could prove relevant in applications where these signals give complementary information to that of the gravimeter.
After years of pioneering laboratory developments and proof-of-principle experiments, the results presented here represent a significant advance in cold-atom-based technology and the use of matter-wave interferometry in geophysics. Simplified operation and continuous data acquisition capability over long periods of time open new pathways for long-term absolute gravity monitoring. The AQG can also improve and accelerate gravity surveys by removing the need for repeated measurements that are necessary to eliminate the drift of relative meters \cite{jacob_2010}.
We believe that the limits have not yet been reached with the instrument presented here \cite{farah_2014,freier_2016}. Short-term sensitivity is currently limited by imperfections in the compensation of vibrations. We are working on new low-noise electronics and real-time data processing to improve this point and to increase the SNR of the instrument. Ongoing technological developments will also reduce the overall size, weight and power consumption of the gravimeter. This includes increasing the level of integration of the electronics and simplifying the system and the connection between the various parts. Thermal management will also extend its operating temperature range from $18-30^\circ$C to $0-40^\circ$C and make it compatible with outdoor operation. To facilitate surveys, the instrument will be battery-powered, with the possibility to keep it turned on during transportation from one site to the next. With these improvements, the AQG could be used for geophysical measurements that often take place in uncontrolled environments.
\section*{Methods}
\subsection*{Atomic temperature measurement}
To estimate the temperature of the atomic cloud, we use Raman spectroscopy. After cooling and preparation, the atoms are dropped. We drive a Raman transition with a 80~$\mu \mathrm{s}$ pulse and detect fluorescence at the bottom of the chamber. The resulting profile is the convolution of the atomic velocity distribution by the Raman pulse width. Assuming the latter to be negligible we measure the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the distribution and derive the corresponding temperature, below 2~$\mu$K.
\subsection*{Vibration acquisition and compensation}
The signal from the classical accelerometer (Nanometrics Titan) is filtered by a bandpass filter with cut-off frequencies $f_\mathrm{hp} = 0.05$~Hz and $f_\mathrm{lp} = 1$~kHz. The high-pass filter removes any long-term drift of the accelerometer and makes sure that the mean gravity value only comes from the atomic measurement. $f_\mathrm{hp}$ has been chosen much lower than the cycle frequency of the AQG (2~Hz), so that there is no significant phase shift of the signal at 2~Hz. The low-pass filter essentially eliminates high-frequency electronic noise before the signal is digitized. Since the atom interferometer behaves as a second-order filter with a low-pass cut-off frequency of $1/2T = 8.3$~Hz, $f_\mathrm{lp}$ is chosen significantly higher. This way, we make sure the electronic low-pass filter does not impact the measurement at frequencies where the atom interferometer has a residual sensitivity.
The filtered signal is digitized and weighted in real-time by the transfer function of the atom interferometer\cite{cheinet_2008,geiger_2011}. The acceleration response function has a simple triangle shape so the real-time calculation is straightforward. It has been demonstrated that a convenient and yet robust way of taking into account the response function of the system is to introduce a delay on the application of the sensitivity function\cite{lautier_2014}. This delay is simply calculated by optimizing the signal-to-noise ratio of the instrument. Less than 1~ms before the last Raman pulse, the calculated correction is applied to the phase lock loop of the Raman lasers to compensate the vibration phase shift.
Acceleration data can also be used to perform an analysis of the acceleration PSD, which can be useful to estimate the quality of a measurement location in terms of high-frequency vibrations. For example, spectra recorded in the laboratory of Muquans in Talence and at the Larzac observatory show significant differences, especially at frequencies between 2 and 60~Hz (Fig. \ref{fig:vibrations}). This can be explained by several effects such as the proximity to the Atlantic ocean (50~km from Talence) which produces microseismic noise, oscillations of the building and the fact that it is built on sediments rather than solid bedrock. The high level of human activity in Talence (second-floor of a city building with a nearby tramway line) could also be a contributor. Note that effects below $f_\mathrm{hp}$ are not measured in the data of Fig. \ref{fig:vibrations} because they are rejected by the filter. Some of them have a direct impact on the value of $g$, while others are measured and corrected by the software (e.g.~tilts and atmospheric pressure variations).
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{fig7}
\caption{Vibration spectra measured with the classical accelerometer attached to the AQG in Talence and Larzac, France.}
\label{fig:vibrations}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Linewidth and long-term frequency stability measurement}
We record the beatnote between the laser of the AQG and a similar independent laser to estimate the linewidth and frequency stability of the gravimeter laser. The two lasers are in a master / slave configurations, so they have adjustable setpoints. We typically use a frequency difference on the order of 80~MHz.
The beatnote is recorded on a fast photodiode and sent to an RF spectrum analyzer. The center of the spectrum can be fitted by a Gaussian function accounting for technical noise. The tails (more than $5 \sigma$ away from the center) are fitted by a Lorentzian function. Assuming the two lasers to be independent, the width of the fitted function is the sum of the two individual widths. Also assuming the two lasers to be identical, we estimate their linewidth as half of this. In the case of Fig. \ref{fig:barbus}, the fitted Lorentzian width is 23.2~kHz, meaning that both lasers have a linewidth of less than 12~kHz.
To measure the long-term frequency stability, the beatnote signal is sent to a frequency counter and compared to a stable RF reference. We measure the standard deviation of the beatnote frequency and expect that each of the two lasers has a stability lower than this value (27~kHz in the case of Fig. \ref{fig:barbus}). Assuming similarity and independence of the two lasers as above, this corresponds to a worst-case estimation.
\subsection*{Tiltmeter offset correction}
We measure the offset of the tiltmeters by performing an in-situ calibration that also takes into account any additional angle due to imperfect alignments between the tiltmeters and the pyramid reflector. This calibration only has to be performed once, after assembling the sensor head.
We apply known tilts in both directions to the instrument and measure the resulting value of gravity. Applied tilts typically range from 0 to 1.5~mrad, corresponding to gravity variations of approximately 10~$\mu$m.s$^{-2}$. We fit the data to find the position of the maximum, that corresponds to verticality.
The measurement sensitivity is limited by statistical uncertainties on the values of $g$, giving an estimation of the tiltmeter offsets with a precision lower than 10~$\mu\mathrm{rad}$. This is sufficient to ensure that tilts can be corrected from the final gravity measurements with a precision better than 10~nm.s$^{-2}$.
\subsection*{Sensitivity estimation}
We use the Allan deviation and PSD of the data to estimate the sensitivity and stability of the instrument \cite{riley_2008}.
The data we obtain from both the AQG and the FG5 display a classical white noise behaviour over a large frequency range. In this regime, the Allan deviation decreases in proportion with the square root of the averaging time $\tau$. In the log-log plot of Fig. \ref{fig:Allan_PSD} this behaviour is characterized by a linear decrease with a slope of $-1/2$. The sensitivity $\mathcal{S}$ of the instrument, expressed in nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$, is the extrapolation of the white noise behaviour to $\tau = 1$~s. This can be conveniently interpreted as the statistical uncertainty obtained after averaging data over 1~s.
In the Allan deviation plot, all three data sets exhibit a clear white-noise signature between 100 and 2000~s. The corresponding sensitivities are indicated by the dashed lines: approximately 450~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ for the FG5 and 750~nm.s$^{-2}.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ for the AQG measurement in Larzac. In the PSD plot, this corresponds to constant levels between $5 \times 10^{-4}$ and $1 \times 10^{-2}$~Hz. The value $S$ of the PSD (expressed in $(\mathrm{nm.s}^{-2})^2.\mathrm{Hz}^{-1}$) in this white noise region is related to the sensitivity by \cite{riley_2008}
\begin{equation}
S = 2 \times \mathcal{S}^2.
\end{equation}
At longer timescales, both the PSD and Allan deviation show that the data can no longer be described as white noise, indicating instrumental drifts or long-term geophysical effects\cite{van_camp_2017}.
\subsection*{Data availability}
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 9,426 |
package com.github.icedland.iced.x86.fmt.nasm;
final class MemorySizeInfo {
private MemorySizeInfo() {
}
static final int NONE = 0;
static final int WORD = 1;
static final int DWORD = 2;
static final int QWORD = 3;
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 1,803 |
Message From Fr. Uribe
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Home January Virtue and Saint
Welcome to Oblate Academy!
Introducing our children to stories and experiences that model the virtues are important for their development in cultivating a virtuous and purposeful life.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us:
A virtue is a firm attitude to do what is right. Its direct opposite is a vice. A vice is a habit to do what is wrong. Prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance are called the human or cardinal virtues because they forge our human character. These four habits assist us in developing a pure heart that is open to God's will.
"The moral virtues grow through education, deliberate acts and perseverance in struggle. Divine grace (God's special help that strengthens us) purifies and elevates the virtues in our lives."
Catechism of the Catholic Church #1839
I hope you will enjoy the straightforward and easily understandable explanations and resources we have prepared to help you teach and model the virtues.
Fr. David P. Uribe, OMI
This Month's Virtue is: Fortitude
"Endure your trials as "discipline," God treats you as sons. For what "son" is there whom his father does not discipline?" (Hebrews 12:7)
Teaching Tips:
Explain to your child the meaning of fortitude. Fortitude is the strength of character that enables a person to endure pain or adversity with courage. Words like endurance, strength and perseverance are often used in the Bible.
Share with your child the story of Moses. Moses gained courage because God promised He would be with him through his journey. Moses' bravery inspired the Hebrews to follow his lead through the parting of the Red Sea to escape the Egyptians. Ask your child if they would have the fortitude to follow Moses' example.
Explain to your child that you must have fortitude in life to follow the Lord. Faith guides you to trust in His decisions and know that His love is enough to help you through the toughest of times. Ask your child to pray for others facing trials in their lives, so that they may be blessed with the fortitude to persevere and continue down the path God has chosen for them.
Volunteer to take a meal to a sick person in your church or someone in your family that is facing a tough time due to illness. Pray for them that they have the strength to overcome their illness.
Teach your child that fortitude involves practicing what is good — doing what is right, even when others criticize them. A person of fortitude practices "quiet courage" when facing obstacles. One example of this could be bullying. In school, children need to be able to stand up for others and not participate in teasing or bullying. Children who are displaying the virtue of fortitude are capable of standing up to others who bully.
Use the worksheet linked here to make a List of Fears and Worries. Discuss things you can do to make you stronger when these fears and worries arise.
Practice this prayer with your children and younger loved ones: 'Jesus, take my hand.' Encourage them to pray this prayer whenever they are scared or worried, so they know that the faithful are never alone.
Prayer: Jesus Take My Hand
Jesus, take my hand
Jesus, lead the way
Jesus, keep me safe from fear and worry today
Skillsheet #1 – List of Fears and Worries
Skillsheet #2 – Build Your Own Fortitude Prayer
Skillsheet #3 – Who do You Know That Shows Fortitude?
Skillsheet #4 – My Story of Fortitude
Exposing our children to stories of the Saints is important for their faith development. The Saints are heroes of the faith! We are called to be like them and to live for Jesus.
I hope you will enjoy the story of St. Bernadette and be inspired by God's loving presence as she was!
Much like St. Bernadette, my brother Missionary Oblates spend their lives in faithful service to our Lord Jesus Christ, ministering to the poorest and most abandoned throughout the world.
Saint of the Month for January:
St. Bernadette of Lourdes
"He has thrown down the rulers from their thrown but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; he has sent away empty." (Luke1:52-53)
St. Bernadette was born January 7, 1844, the child of a miller and a laundress. She was the eldest of nine children. She was born into poverty and was a sickly child, contracting cholera as a toddler and suffering from severe asthma for the rest of her life. She learned very little French as a child, only studying it in school at age 13. She spoke the language of Occitan, which was spoken by the local population where she lived.
As a result of living in extreme poverty, she herded sheep for a family friend in nearby Barters. She also waited tables in her aunt's tavern. In 1858, she returned to Lourdes to attend free school run by the Sisters of Charity and Christian instruction to finish learning the Catechism and receive her first Holy Communion. While gathering firewood in February 1858, fourteen-year-old Bernadette, her younger sister, and friend while gathering firewood saw a beautiful lady above a rose bush in a grotto called Massabielle.
Her sister and friend could not see the lady, but Bernadette described her as a small lady wearing blue and white with a rosary of ivory and gold. Bernadette fell to her knees and began to pray while holding her own rosary. Three days later while at the grotto Bernadette immediately knelt, saying she could see the lady again. She fell into a trance, and one of the girls threw holy water at the niche and another threw a rock. The apparition disappeared.
Bernadette said the lady told her to return to the grotto each day for a fortnight. As she visited, Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary and the period of daily visions became known as "Holy Fortnight." Bernadette's parents were embarrassed and attempted to stop her from visiting. However, they were unable to and on February 25, Bernadette experienced a life-changing vision. The vision told her to drink the water of the spring, to wash in it, and eat the herbs that grew there as an act of penance. The next day, the grotto's muddy water had been cleared and fresh water flowed.
On March 2, on the 13th of the sightings, Bernadette told her family that the lady said a chapel should be built and so a procession formed. On the 16th vision, Bernadette asked the lady's name, the lady only smiled. Bernadette asked three more times, and the lady answered, "I am the Immaculate Conception". The visions created a division in town, as some believed she saw the Holy Virgin, and others believed she had mental illness.
Church authorities and French government rigorously interviewed Bernadette, and by 1862, they confirmed she spoke the truth. After Bernadette first caused the spring to have clean water, 69 people were cured — and Lourdes Medical Bureau and the Church could find no earthly explanation for the cures, even after conducting extremely rigorous scientific and medical examinations. Bernadette asked the priest to build a chapel at the site of her visions — and today, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is now one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world.
Bernadette spent the rest of her life working in the infirmary. People admired her humility and spirit of sacrifice. She died in the Holy Cross Infirmary of the Convent of Saint Gildard at the age of 35 on April 16, 1879, while praying the rosary. Bernadette was beatified in 1925 and canonized by Pope Pius XI in December 1933. St. Bernadette is the patron of illness, people ridiculed for their piety, poverty, shepherds, shepherdesses, and Lourdes, France. Her Feast day is April 16.
St. Bernadette, Prayer for Students
St. Bernadette, please be my friend.
Help me to be like you and practice charity with others
and share the gifts God has given me every day.
Pray for me so I might serve the poor
and others in their time of need. St. Bernadette, pray for us!
Download the activity sheet and please send me your prayer requests and petitions in the form below!
323 Oblate Drive
mami@oblatesusa.org | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,934 |
Under the Fig Trees (Originaltitel Taht el Karmouss beziehungsweise Taht alshajra ()) ist ein Filmdrama von Erige Sehiri, das im Mai 2022 bei den Cannes Filmfestspiele 2022 seine Premiere feierte. Under the Fig Trees wurde von Tunesien als Beitrag für die Oscarverleihung 2023 als bester Internationaler Film eingereicht.
Handlung
Für Malek, Fidé, Sana und Mariem sind die langen Arbeitstage auf den Feldern im Sommer eine Möglichkeit, ihre Familien zu unterstützen, doch vor allem auch um zusammen zu sein und der Monotonie ihres Landlebens zu entfliehen. Die vier Teenager finden immer einen Weg, sich zu amüsieren, manchmal auf Kosten anderer, insbesondere der älteren Arbeiter.
Produktion
Regie führte Erige Sehiri, die gemeinsam mit Ghalya Lacroix und Peggy Hamann auch das Drehbuch schrieb.
Feten Fdhili spielt Malek, Fide Fdhili Fidé, Ameni Fdhili Sana und Samar Sifi Mariem.
Die Premiere erfolgte am 21. Mai 2022 bei der Quinzaine des réalisateurs der Internationalen Filmfestspiele von Cannes und in der Semaine de la Critique gezeigt. Ende Juni 2022 wurde Under the Fig Trees beim Filmfest München gezeigt und Anfang Juli 2022 beim Internationalen Filmfestival Karlovy Vary in der Sektion Horizons. Im August 2022 wird er beim Melbourne International Film Festival vorgestellt und im September 2022 beim Toronto International Film Festival. Hiernach wird er beim Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur gezeigt. Im Oktober 2022 wird er beim Chicago International Film Festival und bei der Viennale gezeigt. Im Dezember 2022 soll er in Berlin bei Around the World in 14 Films gezeigt werden. Ebenfalls im Dezember 2022 erfolgten Vorstellungen beim Red Sea International Film Festival. Im Januar 2023 wird er beim Palm Springs International Film Festival vorgestellt.
Rezeption
Kritiken
Die bei Rotten Tomatoes aufgeführten Kritiken sind alle positiv.
Auszeichnungen
Under the Fig Trees wurde von Tunesien als Beitrag für die Oscarverleihung 2023 in der Kategorie Bester Internationaler Film eingereicht. Im Folgenden weitere Auszeichnungen und Nominierungen.
Chicago International Film Festival 2022
Nominierung im New Directors Competition (Erige Sehiri und Taht el Karmouss)
Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur 2022
Auszeichnung als Bester Film mit dem Golden Bayard
Mostra de València-Cinema del Mediterrani 2022
Auszeichnung für die Beste Filmmusik (Amin Bouhafa)
Tromsø Internasjonale Filmfestival 2023
Nominierung im Wettbewerb
Weblinks
Einzelnachweise
Filmtitel 2021
Tunesischer Film
Französischer Film
Schweizer Film
Filmdrama | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 474 |
More than 30 MEPs from all political groups and most of the EU's Member States protested this week against a campaign being waged in the European Parliament by the Iranian regime.
In a letter addressed to the President of the Parliament Antonio Tajani, the MEPs objected to the use of the Parliament's premises to permit the organisation of a meeting by Portuguese Socialist MEP Ana Gomes and French Liberal MEP Patricia Lalonde on 10th April.
"We deeply regret that this meeting with such speakers is taking place in our parliament and strongly condemn the Iranian regime's misinformation campaign against the Iranian democratic opposition," they said.
Notwithstanding the MEPs' protests, the meeting went ahead anyway; so out of curiosity to see how deliberate misinformation is organised in Brussels by an oppressive regime, I went along voluntarily to join the audience to be brain-washed.
The meeting was in a small room down a maze of corridors, hidden in the bowels of the European Parliament, with no signage or directions for how to find it. It was pretty clear from the outset that the meeting was not intended to be public at all; it was meant to be a private affair aimed at the supporters of the Iranian government.
It was not particularly well attended, but there was a bank of cameramen to film and record the proceedings, presumably for propaganda purposes back in Tehran, as there was absolutely nothing of any news value happening.
You could have been excused for thinking that you were attending a debate in the Iranian Parliament. There was no discussion, but a procession of one sided monologues all aimed at the common campaign purpose, which was to undermine the status of Iran's opposition in exile, and demonise them as a subversive threat to Europe.
The speakers were blatantly opinionated and scarcely credible. Not even a squeak of a contrary view or opinion was to be heard. No normal thinking person could possibly have been taken in by such unconvincing and biased rhetoric. Normally in the European Parliament most people simply ignore such meetings and pay no attention to the drone of the speakers who are paid to deliver their campaign messages.
But there is an inherent danger in turning a blind eye to such misinformation practices. Whilst such campaigns may have minimal effect on the European public, we should never underestimate the sinister manipulation that can take place with audiences outside the EU where biased reports which are economical with the truth about "debates in the European Parliament" can be used to prop up totalitarian regimes and deter political opposition.
Former MEP Struan Stevenson, who is now an international lecturer on the Middle East, was highly critical of this week's Ana Gomes meeting. "I believe it is very unwise to allow the Iranian regime and its agents to misuse the European Parliament. The 1997 decision of the European Union to expel Iranian intelligence agents from Europe must be implemented in the European Parliament with greater emphasis and these agents should not be allowed to appear there," he said.
At a time when the EU is taking steps to halt the spread of fake news, the European Parliament should perhaps pay attention to his views, and take action to stop its premises from being abused by oppressive regimes for the production of malign and manipulative disinformation campaigns of this type. However, a contrary view which deserves to also be considered, would be to still allow such practices to continue, but in a controlled way, so that at least you know what kind of people Europe has to deal with. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 3,662 |
\section{Introduction}
Gels are mechanically stable structures which have a low volume
fraction. They are usually made of colloids or of macromolecules, such
as assemblies of proteins, clays or of a colloid-polymer mixture. Their
structure can be characterized as an open but percolating network of
particles having a fractal dimension~\cite{weitz_fractal}. Due to their
importance in technology and fundamental science, gels have been studied
extensively by means of experiments and theory as well as numerical
simulations \cite{reviewPuertas-Fuchs}.
Various models have been proposed to describe gels on the microscopic
level. Predominantly, a short-range attractive potential between
particles is used, often complemented by a long-range repulsion
\cite{delgado, sciortino}. Gels have also been obtained from so-called
``patchy'' colloids, in which the particles do not interact through a
spherically symmetric potential, but rather carry ``active spots'' in
which a strong attraction is localised~\cite{active spots,delgadokob}.
Alternatively, a gel can be produced by requiring that the maximum
number of neighbors of any given particle remain below a given
threshold~\cite{maxneighbours} or by introducing many-body interactions
\cite{delgadokob}. Note that all these interactions are very different
from the one found in dense glass-forming systems (atomic or molecular)
for which the relevant potential is dominated by a hard sphere-like
interaction~\cite{pusey,vanmegen}.
Furthermore, the question about the thermodynamic stability of gels
has been extensively studied recently. In particular it is still a
matter of debate in which cases a gel results from an arrested phase
separation process, and in which cases it may arise as a truly stable
thermodynamical phase \cite{delgadokob,zaccarellireview,nature_lu}.
In practice, gels are often out-of-equilibrium systems and, therefore,
undergo aging. Some of them are entirely impossible to synthesize in
equilibrium. In contrast to the structure and relaxation dynamics of
gels, which have been extensively studied, much less is known on their
aging dynamics \cite{faraday,cipelletti-2005-17}, with the exception
of aging in dense glass-formers, which benefit from previous studies
in spin-glasses and disordered systems \cite{leticia}. It is remarkable
that in these systems quantities like the dynamic response do show strong
aging dynamics whereas the structure hardly changes during aging since
it is only weakly dependent on $T$.
The goal of the present work is to investigate the aging dynamics of a
fractal gel. Such out-of-equilibrium studies of gels are rare, although
a few exist, using an approach which is slightly different from ours
\cite{lemans}. Here, we investigate how the structure and the dynamics
change with the age of the system and show that, depending on temperature,
different aging regimes can be distinguished. In Sec.~2 we give the
details of the model we have used and of the simulations. In Sec.~3
we will present the results for the structural quantities, and in the
subsequent section~4 we discuss the relaxation and aging dynamics. Finally
we conclude with a summary of our results and discuss some open questions.
\section{Model and Simulation Methods}
Experiments show that colloidal gels occur at low volume fraction
\cite{reviewPuertas-Fuchs,cipelletti-2005-17,PhysRevLett.84.2275} and show
a fractal-like open network structure which is usually preserved over
a timescale of a typical experiment. Our approach consists therefore of
three steps, the details of which will be discussed below in more detail:
First, we construct a fractal initial configuration, using a purely
kinetic particle diffusion algorithm. Second, we switch on an interaction
potential between the particles and allow the initial structure to relax
locally in order to adapt to the interactions. Finally, we follow the
dynamics of the system via constant temperature Molecular Dynamics (MD)
simulations in order to investigate the structural and the dynamical
properties of the system as a function of the waiting time.
\paragraph{Initial configuration:}
We construct the initial fractal configuration for our MD simulations
using the so-called ``diffusion limited cluster aggregation''
(DLCA) algorithm \cite{PhysRevLett.51.1119, PhysRevLett.51.1123,
PhysRevB.50.6006}. This procedure involves letting each particle diffuse
freely until it touches another particle, i.e. until the distance to
the other particle is equal to a certain fixed length, $R_{min}$. The
touching particles then form a permanent and rigid bond. The resulting
cluster diffuses as such and can subsequently collide and bind to
another particle or particle cluster. This algorithm is known to lead
to fractal structures of rather low volume fraction. In practice, we
have used a method which combines the algorithm just described with the
so-called ``Dangling Bond Deflection algorithm'' (DLCA-DEF algorithm)
\cite{PhysRevE.65.041403}, which includes rotational diffusion of
clusters around particles chosen at random, thereby allowing the
formation of extended loops in the network structure. The configurations
obtained in this way not only retain the fractal structure created
from DLCA, but also have more realistic structural and mechanical
properties such as the dependence of the elastic modulus on density
\cite{PhysRevE.65.041403,JourNon-CrystSol_Ma_Jullien}. Specifically,
we produce our configurations with $N=2388$ particles, at a particle
density $\rho=0.019$, and a maximum coordination number $c_{max} = 4$.
The resulting configurations are only retained if they percolate with
respect to a periodic simulation box in all three spatial directions,
which is the case in roughly $25\, \%$ of the cases.
\paragraph{Interaction potential and initial relaxation:}
The cluster obtained by the DLCA-DEF algorithm is a purely geometrical
object: The particles are permanently bound and do not evolve under
the effect of an interaction potential. In order to be able to study
the {\it dynamical} properties of such a cluster it is therefore
necessary to introduce such an interaction, but without jeopardizing
the fractal network. In the past it has been recognized that open
network structures resembling those found in real gels can be obtained
by using an interaction potential involving a pure two-body term with
an attractive well as well as a repulsive barrier at somewhat larger
distances~\cite{delgado,sciortino}, even though this possibility is
not the only one~\cite{active spots, maxneighbours,delgadokob}. The
attractive well is needed in order to give cohesion to the structure. The
barrier, on the other hand, is necessary in order to energetically
penalize certain inter-particle distances, thereby preventing the open
structure of the gel phase from becoming thermodynamically unstable
with respect to a collapse via creation of a dense phase and subsequent
phase separation into gas and liquid. At the same time the presence
of the barrier also contributes to preventing the disintegration of
the cluster~\cite{sciortino}. The interaction potential we use thus
has a repulsion term of a soft sphere and two additional terms for the
attractive well and the repulsive barrier:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq1}
V(r) = \epsilon \left[ \left(\frac{\sigma}{r}\right)^{12}
- A_{0} \, g(r; R_0, l_0, f_0)
+ A_{1} \, g(r; R_1, l_1, f_1)
\right] \quad .
\end{equation}
\noindent
Here, the function
\begin{equation}
\label{eq2}
g(r; R,l,f )
=
\tanh(\frac{r-R}{l}+f)-\tanh(\frac{r-R}{l}-f)
\end{equation}
\noindent
is used twice to create the peak and the well, and where the parameters
$R_{0,1}$, $l_{0,1}$, and $f_{0,1}$ allow to adjust their position,
width and shape. For the present work we used the following set of
parameters: $\sigma=1.0$ (i.e. $\sigma$ is our unit of length), $R_0 =
1.3$, $R_1 = 1.8$, $l_0=0.285$, $l_1=0.2$, $f_0=f_1=0.5$, $A_0=1.22$,
$A_1 = 2.87$. These parameters produce a potential with a well of depth
$\epsilon$ (and in the following we will set $\epsilon=1$, i.e. use
$\epsilon$ as our energy unit) which is located at $R_{min} \approx
1.2$9, and a barrier with height of approximately $1.5$ and which
is located at $R_{max} = 1.81$. The full potential is shown in Fig.
\ref{Fig_Potential}. Note that $R_{min}$ is chosen so as to coincide
with the distance separating two particles in contact, as defined in
the DLCA process.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.8]{./fig/Fig_potential_publi.eps}
\caption{
The potential used in the molecular dynamics consists of a repulsive core
of a soft sphere, an attractive potential well and a repulsive barrier
which stabilizes the structure. See Eqs.~(\ref{eq1}) and (\ref{eq2})
for details.
}
\label{Fig_Potential}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.5,angle=0]{./fig/Fig_cluster2.eps}
\caption{
Example of an initial structure used for the simulations. A fractal
cluster is grown using particle diffusion kinetics and then allowed to
relax to a local minimum under the effect of the particle interactions. We
use periodic boundary conditions and only clusters percolating in all
three spatial directions are retained. The main cluster is shown in dark
gray (red online), whereas slices of periodic copies are reproduced in light gray (yellow online)
in
order to allow to see the percolating structure.
}
\label{Fig_cluster2}
\end{figure}
Although the interaction potential given by Eq.~(\ref{eq1}) is potentially
compatible with gel-like structures, it is evident that the cluster
produced by the DLCA-DEF construction will in general be far from an
energetic optimum since it does not take into account the particle
interaction and in particular we must expect to find particles at,
or close to, the unfavourable distance $R_{max}$ corresponding to the
potential barrier. Using the DLCA-DEF cluster directly as an initial
configuration for a MD run at constant energy with the interaction
potential given by Eq.~(\ref{eq1}) would therefore very likely lead to
a quick disintegration of the cluster.
In order to avoid this problem we first allowed the DLCA-DEF cluster
to adapt to the interaction between particles by letting it relax
toward a (local) energy minimum. In practice this was done by running
a MD simulation at zero temperature (using a time step of $h=0.001$),
thereby allowing unfavorably placed particles to adapt their positions
before starting the actual simulations. We found that in general the
overall fractal, open structure of the cluster remains unaffected by this
process (details of structural changes at this stage will be discussed
below), and only rarely the relaxation led to the breaking of a chain,
in which case the resulting structure was discarded. We also discarded
the configuration in the case where this adaptation led to a loss of
percolation in any spatial direction. In Fig.~\ref{Fig_cluster2}
we show a typical resulting cluster used as initial configuration for
the MD simulations at constant temperature.
\paragraph{Molecular Dynamics}
Using the relaxed clusters as initial configurations, we carried out
molecular dynamics simulations to study their structural evolution at
various temperatures ($T=0.05$, $0.10$, $0.15$, $0.20$, $0.25$, $0.30$,
$0.35$, $0.40$, $0.45$, $0.50$, $0.55$ and $0.65$). Furthermore we
investigated dynamic quantities. Since at the start of the simulation
the system is out of equilibrium one has to use two-times quantities in
order to characterize the relaxation dynamics~\cite{leticia}, which depend
on both the waiting time $t_w$ (also called the ``age of the system'',
which is the time which has elapsed between the initial zero-temperature
adaptation of the cluster and the beginning of the dynamical measurement),
as well as the time lag $\tau$ since the beginning of the dynamical
measurement.
As already mentioned, we use $\sigma$ and $\epsilon$ as units of
length and energy, respectively. Temperature is thus measured in units
of $\epsilon$, whereas time is measured in units of $\sqrt{\sigma^2
m/\epsilon}$, with $m$ being the mass of a particle.
We use the standard velocity-Verlet algorithm~\cite{Allen_Tildesley}
to propagate the system in phase space. Since it is out of equilibrium,
coupling it to a heat bath is required in order to prevent it from heating
up. We use a variant of Andersen's thermostat \cite{Allen_Tildesley}
by randomizing periodically all velocities according to the appropriate
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (in practice every $\Delta_{therm}=0.25$
time units). Thus this type of dynamics is Newtonian for short times,
but resembles Brownian dynamics for times longer than $\Delta_{therm}$.
For computational efficiency the interaction potential is truncated
and shifted at a cutoff radius of $R_c=2.58$. All simulations were
carried out with a time step of $h=0.005$, except for intervals of
duration $\Delta_{therm}$ after selected waiting times, where a time
step of $h=0.001$ was used in order to improve the resolution for the
mean square displacement (see below).
In order to improve the statistics of the results, we have furthermore
averaged over ten runs with independent initial configurations.
\section{Structure}
We start the discussion of the properties of the gel by considering its
structure and its evolution as a function of the waiting time $t_w$.
\paragraph{Radial distribution function}
We first of all analyze the distribution of inter-particle
distances, through the radial distribution function $g(r)$, defined
as~\cite{hansenmacdonald86}
\begin{equation}
g(r) = \frac{1}{4\pi r^2 \rho N}
\sum_k \sum_{j\neq k} \langle \delta(r-|\vec{r}_j-\vec{r}_k|)\rangle \quad .
\label{eq3}
\end{equation}
\noindent
The inset in Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}, shows the radial
distribution function of the original DLCA-DEF structure, i.e. before
the zero-temperature adaptation to the interaction potential given
by Eq.~(\ref{eq1}). We see that the first nearest neighbor peak at
$R_{min}\approx 1.29$ is very high and narrow, as is to be expected
in view of the DLCA-DEF algorithm used to construct the structure.
Furthermore we notice that $g(r)$ is non-zero for all distances larger
than $R_{min}$ and that there are distances at which singularities
arise, e.g. around $r=2.5$. These features are also directly related
to the algorithm, and they highlight that the DLCA-DEF structure is
very different from that of simple liquids such as hard spheres or
Lennard-Jones particles.
In the main panel of the figure we show the radial distribution
function at $t_w=0$, i.e. immediately after the DLCA-DEF structure has
been allowed to relax to the nearest minimum of the potential given by
Eq.~(\ref{eq1}). At this stage the structure has changed significantly and
several peaks are present, which we have labelled by the local particle
configurations responsible for these peaks. Due to the low dimensionality
of the structure, this correspondence can be established up to relatively
large distances, unlike what is the case in dense simple liquids. We may
furthermore deduce from this figure that particles have been expelled
from the inter-particle distance corresponding to the position of the
repulsive barrier ($R_{max}\approx 1.8$), as is witnessed through the
drastical suppression of $g(r)$ around these values. In this sense, too,
the local structure of our model gel is therefore very different from
a simple liquid. In the following the presence of this gap in $g(r)$
will allow for a straightforward definition of first nearest neighbor
pairs in the following.
Finally we point out that the location of the main peak is at $r\approx
1.33$, i.e. at a distance slightly larger than the location of the
minimum in $V(r)$ (which occurs at $R_{min}\approx 1.29$), implying that
the system is under weak tension, i.e. that the pressure is negative.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.08, angle=0]{./fig/Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF.eps}
\caption{
The radial distribution function, $g(r)$, corresponding to the fractal
clusters after initial adaptation to the interaction potential. The main
peaks are labeled by the corresponding local particle arrangements, the
distance $r$ referring to the separation between particles displayed in
dark gray. For comparison, the inset shows $g(r)$ for the configurations
obtained from the DLCA-DEF algorithm, i.e. before adaptation to the
potential.
}
\label{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Static structure factor}
Complementary information on the structure can be obtained from the
static structure factor $S(q)$ which is given by~\cite{hansenmacdonald86}
\begin{equation}
S(q)= \frac{1}{N}\sum_j\sum_{k} \exp[i \vec{q} \cdot (\vec{r}_j - \vec{r}_k)] \quad ,
\label{eq4}
\end{equation}
\noindent
where $q=|\vec{q}|$ is the modulus of the wave-vector. The $q-$dependence
of $S(q)$ is presented in Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_SSF} where we
compare the static structure factors for the DLCA-DEF cluster before the
zero-temperature relaxation with the one after the relaxation. We see
that the small wave-vector regimes are identical within the noise of the
data, and thus we conclude that the relaxation process has not changed
the large scale structure of the cluster. On these length scales the
$q-$dependence is described well by a power-law, $S(q) \sim q^{-d_f}$,
with an exponent $d_f\approx 1.8$. This confirms that the system is
fractal, as is the case for experimentally observed colloidal gels
\cite{PhysRevLett.84.2275,Pine2000}. Effects of the zero-temperature
relaxation are visible at intermediate and large wave-vectors ($q \geq
1$) showing that rearrangements arise on the scale of a few particles,
in agreement with the conclusions from $g(r)$. However, the differences
in $S(q)$ are much less pronounced than the ones found in $g(r)$ (see
Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}), which shows that in this case the
radial distribution function is more sensitive to the modifications than
the static structure factor. From Figs.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}
and \ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_SSF} we can conclude that the structure
of the DLCA-DEF clusters as well as the relaxed clusters form an
open and percolating network structure with a fractal dimension,
which is compatible with the structure found in real colloidal gels
\cite{PhysRevLett.84.2275}.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics [scale=0.8, angle=0]{./fig/Fig_Structure_Initial_SSF.eps}
\caption{
Static structure factor as function of the wave-vector. The thin and bold
lines are for the DLCA-DEF and the relaxed structures, respectively.
The power-law fit yields the fractal dimension. The inset shows an
enlargement at intermediate $q$ in order to illustrate the change of
the structure on the scale of the filament thickness, i.e. several particle
diameters.
}
\label{Fig_Structure_Initial_SSF}
\end{figure}
The zero-temperature adaptation to the interaction potential can,
however, only be expected to produce a metastable structure, which will
evolve with time. In the following we therefore discuss the waiting
time dependence of $S(q)$. In Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_SSF_Evolution}
we show $S(q)$ for a waiting time $t_w\approx 75000$. The different
curves correspond to different temperatures and we see that $S(q)$ for
low $T$ is very different from the one at high $T$. The structure for
the lowest temperatures has not changed much from the relaxed initial
configuration, despite this long waiting time, suggesting that the
structure is essentially frozen at these $T$ and $t_w$. This changes with
increasing $T$, curves for $T=0.25$ and $T=0.3$, where the amplitude of
$S(q)$ at low $q$ decreases rapidly, which shows that the large scale
structure starts to change significantly. The structure at intermediate
and large wave-vectors is, however, much less affected by this increase
of $T$. Thus we can conclude that the large scale structure of the network
has broken up, whereas the local structure is still relatively `intact' as
compared to the initial structure of the relaxed cluster. As temperature
is increased even further the structure factor becomes essentially flat,
i.e. the network structure of the system has broken up completely into
a gas of particles and small clusters.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.8, angle=0]{./fig/Fig_Structure_SSF_Evolution.eps}
\caption{
Static structure factor $S(q)$ after the waiting time time $t_w \approx
75000$ for all temperatures considered ($T=0.05, ... , 0.65$, with an
increment of $0.05$). For moderate temperatures the fractal structure is
lost on large scales, but remains intact over intermediate distances. For
higher temperatures, all structure is lost as the initial cluster decomposes
into a gas of particles and small clusters.
}
\label{Fig_Structure_SSF_Evolution}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=1.0, angle=0]{./fig/Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters.eps}
\includegraphics[scale=1.0, angle=0]{./fig/Fig_clusters_normalized.eps}
\caption{
a) Number of clusters vs. waiting time, illustrating the breakup of
a single, percolating cluster, for various temperatures. b) The same
quantity as in a) but now normalized such that at $t_w\to \infty$ all
the curves converge to 1.0.
}
\label{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Cluster statistics}
The aging of the structure can also be analyzed by considering $n(t_w)$,
the number of clusters in the system as a function of the waiting time,
as shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters} for medium
and high temperatures ($T\ge0.20$). For $t_w=0$ we have a single
(percolating) cluster. Then $n(t_w)$ increases with the waiting time
$t_w$, and the associated time-scale strongly depends on temperature,
see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}a. Finally the number of
clusters $n(t_w)$ saturates for large $t_w$, showing that the system
has completely relaxed, and the saturation value of $n(t_w)$ indicates
the number of clusters in equilibrium. Note that the saturation value
$n(t_w \to \infty)$ depends on temperature, since most of the particles
are isolated at high $T$ whereas they prefer to form clusters at low $T$.
Figure~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}a suggests that the shape
of $n(t_w)$ is independent of temperature, such that the only effect of
temperature would be a change in the relaxation time. In order to test
this we consider the number of clusters (minus one), normalized by its
long time limit:
\begin{equation}
\frac{n(t_w)-1}{n(t_w \to \infty)}
\quad.
\end{equation}
\noindent
Note that this is of course only possible for those temperatures for which
there is a long-time plateau in Fig.\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}a,
i.e. for $T\geq 0.3$.
This quantity is shown as a function of $t_w$ in
Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}b, confirming that the
shape of the normalized curves is indeed only a very weak function
of $T$. Furthermore we can conclude that the initial increase
of $(n(t_w)-1)/n(t_w \to \infty)$ is approximately a power-law
with an exponent close to 0.5. Although we do not have a complete
explanation for this particular exponent, it does demonstrate that
the initial increase is {\it not} exponential, as would be expected
for a process in which the initial cluster breaks up on a fixed
time-scale $\tau_{break}$ into sub-clusters, which in turn break up into
subclusters, etc., with a fixed time-scale for breakup. On the contrary,
Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}b suggests that clusters break
up in a heterogeneous manner regarding sizes and time scales.
As mentioned above, the initial percolating cluster disintegrates into
smaller clusters and reaches an equilibrium for long times. Beyond the
asymptotic value of the number of clusters already mentioned above,
we can also analyze the breakup in terms of the evolution of the
cluster distribution $P(s)$ as a function of cluster size $s$. $P(s)$
depends on temperature (and at short and intermediate times also on
$t_w$). In Fig.~\ref{Fig_PsT0.40} we present $P(s)$ at $T=0.4$ for
various waiting times $t_w$. For $t_w=0$ the cluster size distribution
has a single peak at $s=N$, corresponding to the initial percolating
cluster. Even for small $t_w$ the distribution very quickly flattens
out, i.e. all cluster sizes become essentially equally likely (see curve
for $t_w=16$). As $t_w$ is increased further the proportion of small
clusters increases quickly whereas that of large clusters diminishes.
For sufficiently long times, i.e. when the system has equilibrated, the
(asymptotic) distribution function is described well by an exponential
(solid line), since the particles just form random aggregation clusters
which follow Poisson statistics. Below we will make use of this result
when we discuss the relaxation dynamics of the system.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{./fig/Fig_PsT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Cluster size distribution for high temperature ($T=0.40$), represented for
various ages. $P(s)$ is the probability of finding a cluster consisting of
$s$ particles in the system. Initially only one big cluster is present,
which decomposes progressively. The final regime is stationary (the last
two curves for large ages superpose), and are well described by
an exponential distribution, solid line, as one would expect in a
gas of attractive particles.
}
\label{Fig_PsT0.40}
\end{figure}
\section{Relaxation Dynamics}
After the discussion of the static structure of our model gel,
we now focus on its dynamical properties. As we will see below,
for intermediate and low temperatures, one can distinguish three time
regimes: (i) For $t_w$ much shorter than the time scale for the breakup
of the percolating cluster, the behavior is dominated by vibrational and
quasi-elastic effects. (ii) This is followed by a regime in which the
system ages strongly as its structure changes while the percolating
cluster breaks up. (iii) Finally, at very long times, the system has
reached equilibrium and we thus observe the relaxation dynamics of a
system consisting of small clusters. Although these three regimes are also
reflected in the time evolution of structural quantities, such as the
number of clusters shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}a,
we will show that the aging of the system affects the time correlation
functions much more strongly than the static quantities, in agreement
with previous investigations on glass-forming systems out of equilibrium
\cite{KobBarrat2000}. We will first analyze the average mean squared
displacement of the particles to extract information on the diffusive
(or non-diffusive) nature of the dynamics, before presenting a complete
study of the self-intermediate scattering function, and reporting on
the spatio-temporal characteristics of the relaxation processes.
\subsection{Mean squared displacement}
Since we are dealing with an out-of-equilibrium situation, the usual mean
squared displacement (MSD) has to be generalized by explicitly taking
into account the time at which the measurement is started. We thus define
\begin{equation}
\Delta^2 (t_w,t_w+\tau) =
\frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \langle(\vec{r}_i(t_w+\tau) - \vec{r}_i(t_w))^2\rangle
\qquad .
\end{equation}
Since in aging glass-forming systems the relaxation dynamics has been
found to slow down with increasing $t_w$~\cite{leticia} we may expect
the same behavior in the present system. However, before addressing
this point it is useful to discuss the temperature dependence of
$\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau)$ . To this end we select a waiting time which is
relatively long, $t_w=13446$, and show in Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_tw13446.329}
$\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau)$ for different temperatures. At short times $\tau$
we find the ballistic behavior, $\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau) \propto \tau^2$
(dashed-dotted line) as it is seen for all systems with Newtonian
dynamics. This ballistic regime ends at $\tau=0.25$, the time at which
the thermostat acts for the first time\footnote{In order to have a good
resolution for these values of $\tau$, a smaller time step, namely $h =
0.001$, has been chosen for this interval of the simulation.}.
\paragraph{Temperature dependence}
At high temperatures, $T=0.65$, this ballistic regime immediately
crosses over into a diffusive regime, $\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau) \propto
\tau$ (dotted line in Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_tw13446.329}). A look at
Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters} shows that for this temperature
and at this waiting time the initial percolating gel has already fallen
apart into many small clusters which have completely equilibrated, and
the observed $\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau)$ is therefore just the MSD of the
disintegrated system consisting of clusters {\it in equilibrium}.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.8]{./fig/Fig_msd_tw13446.329.eps}
\caption{
Mean squared displacement $\Delta^2 (t_w,t_w+\tau)$ of the particles as
a function of time $\tau$ for different temperatures, for $t_w=13446$. Also included are
power-laws found in the ballistic regime at small $\tau$ (dash-dotted
line), in the diffusive regime at large $\tau$ (dotted line), and in
the sub-diffusive regime (solid line).
}
\label{Fig_msd_tw13446.329}
\end{figure}
At low temperatures, on the other hand, the MSD shows a different
$\tau-$dependence once the ballistic regime is over. In this case the
MSD is sub-diffusive and can be well approximated by the power-law
$\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau) \propto \tau^\alpha$ with an exponent $\alpha$
around 2/3 (solid line). Note that for sufficiently low temperatures $T$
this exponent appears to be independent of temperature: the curves for
$T=0.15$ and $T=0.05$ are parallel, and it is only for intermediate
temperatures, $T=0.3$, that the exponent of the sub-diffusive
regime exceeds 2/3. We observe furthermore that at this $T$ this
sub-diffusive regime ends at around $\tau \approx 10^4$ where the
MSD starts to bend upwards, and from here on it grows proportionally
to $\tau$, which we rationalize as follows. A comparison with Fig
\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters} shows that, at this temperature,
the system starts to show significant aging effects on the time
scale of $\tau\approx 10^4$, i.e. the number of clusters is already
relatively large although it has not yet reached the final (equilibrium)
distribution. It can be expected that many of these clusters are
relatively small and consequently move fast. Since the (average) MSD is
dominated by fast moving entities, it is therefore not surprising that
at $\tau \approx 10^4$ the MSD already shows diffusive behavior even
though the system is not in equilibrium yet.
Last but not least, we point out the absence of plateaus in the MSD
in Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_tw13446.329} at intermediate time scales. Such
a plateau is a typical feature of most glass-forming systems at {\it
high} density~\cite{leticia}, where it is related to the so-called cage
effect, i.e. the temporary trapping of a particle by its surrounding
neighbors. In contrast to this the present gel has the structure of
a very open network, cf. the snapshot in Fig.~\ref{Fig_cluster2}.
Whereas in this system the cage effect may indeed be expected to be
present along the chains, we may conclude that the particle movements
from transverse motion, ie. orthogonal to the chains, is sufficiently
strong as to mask the plateau in the MSD, in agreement with previous
findings~\cite{delgado,zaccarellireview,LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob}.
\paragraph{Waiting time dependence}
We now turn to the waiting-time dependence of the MSD. In
Fig.~\ref{Fig_msdT0.40} we show the $\tau-$dependence of
$\Delta^2(t_w,t_w+\tau)$ for different waiting times $t_w$,
all at a relatively high temperature of $T=0.4$, allowing us to
study the behavior of $\Delta^2$ in the aging regime as well as in
equilibrium (see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}). For short
waiting times, $t_w=4$, we see that after the ballistic regime (not
shown in the figure) $\Delta^2$ shows a $\tau-$dependence which is
compatible with $\tau^{2/3}$, i.e. the same power-law which we have
found for the MSD at {\it low} temperatures and long waiting times
(see Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_tw13446.329}). Thus we can conclude that this
sub-diffusive behavior is not only limited to low temperatures, but can
be observed at all temperatures in the time window which corresponds to
the onset of aging. In contrast to this for intermediate times $\tau$
the MSD is super-diffusive, and compatible with a power-law with exponent
$\alpha\approx 1.5$. This behavior arises in the time regime in which
the structure of the system changes rapidly, leading to the complete
breakup of the gel (see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}). At
even longer times the MSD shows simple diffusive behavior, i.e. $\Delta^2
\propto \tau$.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale= 0.8]{./fig/Fig_msdT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Mean squared displacement at $T = 0.40$ for different waiting times $t_w$.
Note that for reasons of clarity we do not show the ballistic regime
present at very small times ($\tau < 0.25$). Also included are power-law
fits with exponent 1.0, characterizing the diffusive regime seen for
$t_w=72317$, as well as with exponents 2/3 and 1.5 characterizing the
MSD at small $t_w$ at short and long times $\tau$, respectively.
}
\label{Fig_msdT0.40}
\end{figure}
For a larger waiting time, $t_w=464$, the MSD no longer shows the
intermediate $\tau^{2/3}$ behavior seen for intermediate times;
instead we observe a power-law with an exponent between 2/3 and 1.0.
On the other hand, the long time behavior is again compatible with a
$\tau^{3/2}$ behavior for the MSD. Thus we can conclude that for this
waiting time the initial relaxation dynamics is faster than that for short
waiting times, and once the initial structure of the system has changed
significantly it once more shows the same super-diffusive dynamics as
for small $t_w$. Finally, for a long waiting time, $t_w=72317$, the
MSD enters the diffusive behavior right after the initial ballistic
regime, which is expected for a system in equilibrium at long times.
In summary, we thus observe that, after the initial ballistic regime,
the MSD of the system shows a power-law with exponent of roughly 2/3 at
an intermediate time window, as long as the gel has not yet undergone
major restructuring with respect to its initial state. At intermediate
times, as the structure starts to change significantly, the MSD shows
a super-diffusive power-law with an exponent around 3/2. Finally,
for very long times, the MSD shows the linear $\tau-$dependence found
in equilibrium systems.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_msdT0.05.eps}
\caption{
Mean squared displacement at $T= 0.05$ for different waiting times $t_w$.
Note that for reasons of clarity we do not show the ballistic regime
present at very small times ($\tau < 0.25$). Also included is a power-law
fit to the MSD for large $t_w$ with an exponent 2/3.
}
\label{Fig_msdT0.05}
\end{figure}
For the sake of completeness we also show the $\tau-$dependence of
the MSD at low temperature ($T=0.05$) and different waiting times,
see Fig.~\ref{Fig_msdT0.05}. For large waiting times we again find a
power-law with an exponent around 2/3. However, for smaller waiting
times, $t_w \leq 464$, the MSD shows a small (positive) deviation from
this power-law at intermediate times. The reason for this is probably
the fact that at $t_w=0$ the structure is under weak tension (see the
discussion in the context of Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}), so
that the resulting forces lead to a somewhat faster relaxation dynamics
than what is observed at large waiting times, for which the tension has
already relaxed.
\paragraph{Dynamics of particle chains}
We devote the following paragraphs to the discussion of the mechanisms
which may give rise to a power-law dependence of the MSD with an
exponent around 2/3, which we have pointed out in various time windows
(Figs.~\ref{Fig_msdT0.40} and \ref{Fig_msdT0.05}). In particular,
we explore the role of the dynamics of particle chains forming
the gel network. We recall that, at short and intermediate times,
the dynamics of the nodes in the gel network is much slower than the
transverse fluctuations of the chains. We may thus hope to understand
the anomalous $\tau-$dependence of the MSD by considering ``clamped''
individual chains, i.e. chains with endpoints that are fixed in space.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale= 0.8]{./fig/Fig_msd_L1linear100.eps}
\caption{
Mean squared displacement $\Delta^2 (t_w,t_w+\tau)$ of a single chain
whose endpoints are clamped at a distance $L = R_{min}N$. $T=0.05$ and
$N=100$. The solid lines are fits with power-laws $\tau^2$ for short
times and $\tau^{0.5}$ at intermediate times. Note that the chains
have been equilibrated before starting the calculation of the MSD and
hence $\Delta^2$ does not depend on $t_w$. Inset: Snapshot of a clamped
equilibrated chain of $N=100$ particles with length $L = 0.6 R_{min}N$,
obtained at $T=0.05$.
}
\label{Fig_msd_L1linear100}
\end{figure}
To this end we have performed MD simulations of isolated chains of
particles. As starting configurations we used individual straight
linear chains of $N=100$ particles placed at their preferential distance
$R_{min}\approx 1.29$, which thus have a total length of $L=R_{min}N$.
Apart from holding the chain ends fixed, all other simulation details
(time step, heat bath, etc.) were identical to those used for simulating
the entire gel. The chains were thermalized at $T=0.05$ before starting
to acquire data for the MSD. In order to improve the statistics of the
results we have done 10 independent runs.
In Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_L1linear100} we show $\Delta^2(\tau)$ as a function
of $\tau$ (note that, since this is a system in equilibrium, the MSD
does not depend on the waiting time, and we therefore omit the variable
$t_w$). At short times we have $\Delta^2(\tau) \propto \tau^2$ (ballistic
regime), whereas for long times $\Delta^2(\tau) \propto \tau^{1/2}$,
as is expected for a Rouse chain~\cite{doi_and_edwards}. For very long
times the MSD saturates, since the chain is clamped at its ends which
in turn limits the displacement of particles in the chain to a certain
distance which depends on $L$, $N$, and $T$. The small oscillations
seen at $\tau \approx 10^4$ are also related to the clamping through
fixed endpoints, since they are due to the excitation of the fundamental
mode of the chain. Last but not least we point out that the mentioned
Rouse behavior is in fact not expected to be observable for chains
that are not very long, since it is known that for {\it free} short
chains the exponent 0.5 in the power-law is replaced by an exponent
around 0.6-0.7~\cite{baschnagelchong}. Since in our gel the length of
the connecting chains is not very large, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_cluster2},
it can be speculated that the exponent 2/3 found at short waiting times
is related to the relaxation dynamics of such (short) chains. However,
below we will discuss other mechanisms which potentially explain the
observed behavior.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale= 0.8]{./fig/Fig_alfa_vs_LN.eps}
\caption{
The exponent $\alpha$ defined via $\Delta^2 (t_w,t_w+\tau)\propto
\tau^{\alpha}$ as a function of the end-to-end distance of a clamped
chain. $T=0.05$. See text for a detailed description of how the
initial configurations have been prepared. Note that the chain has
been equilibrated and hence the $\Delta^2$ does not depend on $t_w$.
The point labeled ``Free end chain'' corresponds to a chain in which
only one end was fixed, i.e. the value of the abscissa is irrelevant.
}
\label{Fig_alfa_vs_LN}
\end{figure}
The chains considered so far were not under tension, i.e. the distance
between the fixed ends was given by $L=R_{min}N$. In reality, however,
we have found the chains of the network to be under weak tension (see
the discussion in the context of Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_Initial_RDF}),
and it is therefore of interest to determine the extent to which
the presence of such a tension modifies the relaxation dynamics. We
have therefore performed simulations in which the distance between
the end points of the chain were fixed at $L$ which differed from
$N \,R_{min}$. A typical snapshot of such a chain is shown in the
inset of Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_L1linear100}. For all cases we have found
that at intermediate and long times the MSD is given by a power-law
with an exponent $\alpha$ (and for very long times the MSD of course
saturates). In Fig.~\ref{Fig_alfa_vs_LN} we show the $L-$dependence of
this exponent and we see that for strongly compressed chains, $L< 0.7 <
R_{min}$, $\alpha$ is around 2/3. This limiting value can be rationalized
by the fact that most of the monomers of a significantly compressed
chain will not really feel that the ends of the chain are held fixed,
and therefore the MSD will behave very similarly to a semi-free chain. In
order to determine the value of $\alpha$ for such a semi-free chain,
we have run a simulation in which only one end of the chain was kept
fixed and, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_alfa_vs_LN}, we find that such a chain
indeed gives rise to an exponent $\alpha=2/3$.
If the distance between the ends of the chain is increased to $L=
R_{min}N$, on finds the exponent $\alpha=0.5$, in agreement with the
result shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_L1linear100}. If the chain is extended
even further, $L> R_{min}N$, the exponent becomes smaller than 0.5. Thus
we can conclude that a chain which is not clamped at its equilibrium
length shows a relaxation dynamic which differs from Rouse chain dynamics.
In order to check to what extent these results depend on the number of
monomers in the chain we have included in Fig.~\ref{Fig_alfa_vs_LN} also
the exponents for a chain of length $N=200$. We see that this dependence
is not strong, in that the two curves are essentially identical for
chains at their equilibrium length, stretched chains or significantly
compressed chains. The only appreciable difference arises for slightly
compressed chains ($L/NR_{min}$ somewhat smaller than 1.0), for which
the exponent appears to increase with chain length. This effect is due
to the fact that a longer chain will allow the particles far away from
the ends to undergo a relaxation dynamics which is less constrained than
in shorter chain, i.e. the dynamics is more similar to a free chain,
for which the exponent is 2/3.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale= 0.8]{./fig/Fig_msd_break.eps}
\caption{
Mean squared displacement $\Delta^2 (t_w,t_w+\tau)$ for a single
clamped chain of $N=100$ particles, obtained at $T = 0.05$. After having been
equilibrated, the chain, keeping its endpoints fixed, is artificially
cut in the middle at time $\tau=100$. Note that the ballistic part
is not shown.
}
\label{Fig_msd_break}
\end{figure}
In addition to the clamped chains we have also considered chains that
break up, as we must expect to happen naturally in the gel structure,
in order to study the contribution of such chain-breaking to aging.
For this we have used the equilibrated chains discussed above and started
an equilibrium simulation at time $t_0$. At time $t_0+100$ the chains were
then artificially broken in the middle and we have followed their out of
equilibrium dynamics from this point on. Figure~\ref{Fig_msd_break} shows
the MSD for different waiting times $t_w$. The data for $t_w=0.001$ shows
a crossover, at short times, from the ballistic regime to the dynamics
shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_L1linear100} which follow the $\tau^{0.5}$
power-law. At $\tau=100$, the time at which the chain is broken, this
regime is interrupted and the MSD shows a super-diffusive dynamics
before it appears to slowly approach an asymptotic behavior. This
asymptotic long-time regime is more readily deduced from the data
for longer waiting times, see curve for $t_w=36896$, for which the
overall time which has elapsed since the chain was broken is much
larger. Consequently, although the behavior for small $\tau$ is as just
described, the asymptotic regime is attained over a much longer interval,
and we may deduce that the long-time chain relaxation of a broken chain
is compatible with a power-law $\Delta^2\propto \tau^{2/3}$. For even
longer times $\tau$, not easily accessible in our simulations, the MSD
must of course saturate again. We can therefore conclude that the out of
equilibrium relaxation of a chain following breakage obeys a power-law
with exponent 2/3. Consequently, chain breakage constitutes another
potential explanation fore the a $\tau-$dependence of MSD observed in
the model gel.
In summary one can conclude that the exponent 2/3 observed in the MSD
for the system at low temperatures and long waiting times can have at
least three origins: (i) rare ruptures of chains in the network, (ii)
large transverse fluctuations of floppy clamped chain-like filaments,
and (iii) fluctuations of dangling filaments. Currently we have not
attributed the anomalous diffusion effects to a dominant contribution
from either of these mechanism, which may in principle all coexist.
\subsection{Self-intermediate scattering function}
In order to obtain more detailed information on the relaxation
processes, in particular regarding the length-scale at which
they occur, we have investigated the self-intermediate scattering
function~\cite{hansenmacdonald86} generalized to a two-time quantity:
\begin{equation}
F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau) = \frac{1}{N} \sum^N_{j=1}
\langle \exp[i\vec{q} \cdot (\vec{r}_j(t_w+\tau)-\vec{r}_j(t_w))] \rangle
\quad .
\label{eq5}
\end{equation}
\noindent
Here we have assumed that the system is isotropic and therefore $F_s$
depends only on $q=|\vec{q}|$. Recall that this function can be measured
experimentally via scattering techniques~\cite{Pine2000}, and therefore
it is not only of theoretical interest but allows also to compare the
results from simulation with experimental data.
Since the relaxation dynamics at high temperature (where we have
interrupted aging~\cite{leticia}) is very different from the one at low
temperatures, we discuss them in two separate subsections.
\subsubsection{High temperature regime}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.8]{./fig/Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.40.eps}
\caption{
Time dependence of the generalized self-intermediate scattering function
$F_s(q,t_w, t_w+\tau)$ at a high temperature ($T=0.4$). The waiting
times are $t_w$ = 0.001, 4, 16, 44, 86, 237, 464, 1275, 4900, 13446,
26354, 51655, and 72317. Note that the relaxation time decreases with
increasing age.
}
\label{Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.40}
\end{figure}
In Fig.~\ref{Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.40} we show the $\tau-$dependence of
$F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ for $T=0.40$, i.e. a temperature at which we can
see strong aging of the system, but which is still sufficiently high
to allow reaching equilibrium within the time span of the simulations,
see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters} (higher temperatures give
a qualitatively similar relaxation dynamics). Data are shown for two
wave-vectors: $q=0.24$, corresponding to a distance which is about 20
times larger than the typical nearest-neighbor distance (first peak
in the structure factor, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_SSF_Evolution}),
and $q=2.41$, corresponding to 2-3 particle diameters. For each
of these wave-vectors we show several curves, which correspond to
different waiting times. One sees immediately that the shape of the
curves as well as the associated relaxation time depends on the age
of the system, and in the following we will discuss this dependence in
more detail. Even without any detailed analysis it is, however, evident
that the relaxation dynamics accelerates with the sample age, as is
expected from the picture of an initially percolating structure which
disintegrates through clusters breaking up into ever smaller clusters,
which in turn break up themselves etc. Note that this $t_w-$dependence
is different from the one found in {\it dense} aging glass-formers,
for which the relaxation time {\it increases} with age~\cite{leticia}.
In order to discuss the $q$ and $t_w$ dependence of the
relaxation dynamics we have fitted $F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ with a
Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts (KWW) function, $A\exp(-(\tau/\tau_{f})^\beta)$,
using the time range in which the time correlation function has fallen
below 0.8. Although there is no theoretical justification for this
functional form, we have found that the fits are indeed very good, and
consequently the parameters $\tau_f(q,t_w)$ and $\beta(q,t_w)$ can be used
to characterize the relaxation time and the stretching of the dynamics.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale= 0.8]{./fig/Fig_m_vs_qT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Wave-vector dependence of the KWW exponent $\beta$ at a high temperature
($T=0.4$). The waiting times are $t_w$ = 0.001, 4, 16, 44, 86, 237, 464,
1275, 4900, 13446, 26354, 51655, and 72317. Note that at small and large
$t_w$ the curves depend only weakly on $t_w$ whereas a significant
$t_w-$dependence is seen at intermediate waiting times.
}
\label{Fig_m_vs_qT0.40}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Stretching exponent}
In Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_qT0.40} we show the wave-vector dependence of the
KWW exponent $\beta$ for different waiting times. At short waiting times,
$t_w\leq 86$, the curves depend only weakly on $t_w$, since on this time
scale the gel ages only weakly. For intermediate times, however, $\beta$
depends strongly on $t_w$, since the system ages significantly in this
regime. Finally, for large $t_w$, the different curves fall onto a master
curve which describes the equilibrium dynamics of the system. Note
that at small waiting times the KWW exponent $\beta$ depends quite
strongly on $q$: We have $\beta \approx 1.2$ at large length scales,
which corresponds to a so-called {\it compressed} exponential, whereas
$\beta \approx 0.4$ at small length scales, corresponding to a strongly
{\it stretched} exponential. We attribute this $q-$dependence to the
fact that the network structure is still intact at short $t_w$, such that
the high temperature imposes strong deformations on the filaments, and
therefore strong tensions. Such stresses ultimately lead to an elastic
relaxation at a large scale (small $q$), which superposes and dominates
diffusive relaxation. Such a compressed exponential, with exponent
$\beta = 3/2$, has indeed been predicted from an internal stress model
\cite{cipelletti-2005-17,PhysRevLett.84.2275}. A more refined microscopic
approach \cite{Bouchaud_Pitard_Eur.Phys.J.E} has lead, under certain
conditions, to predictions of $\beta = 5/4$, which is indeed close to
the exponents represented in Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_qT0.40} at small $q$,
corresponding to length-scales on which one may hope that concepts of
elasticity apply.
We can furthermore rationalize why $\beta$ is small for large wave-vectors
and short $t_w$, by recalling that the short-time structure of the system
must locally retain some frustration, since it has been created by what
is essentially a steepest descent procedure in the potential energy. The
resulting local geometry is therefore very heterogeneous and includes
regions with high stress and others with low stress, and which thus will
relax on quite different time-scales. We may therefore expect the {\it
average} relaxation dynamics to be a function which extends over many
time scales and which can be well fitted with a KWW function with a {\it
small} $\beta$. For long times, on the other hand, these local stresses
have successively homogenized, and therefore the typical relaxation
times no longer cover a large time window: the KWW exponent increases,
in agreement with what is seen in Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_qT0.40}.
Interestingly, a strong $q-$dependence of the exponent
$\beta$ has also been observed in experiments of aging
gels~\cite{faraday} as well as in simulations of gels in
equilibrium~\cite{LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob}. These experiments show
that, at small $q$, the stretching exponent $\beta$ is indeed larger than
unity and decreases as a function of the wave-vector. This dependence is
thus qualitatively similar to the one found in the present study. However,
in the simulations of Ref.~\cite{LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob} the
trend is opposite, i.e. where $\beta$ {\it increases} with $q$, and
consequently we have $\beta>1$ only at large wave-vectors. The reason
for this difference probably resides in the fact that in the latter
work the microscopic dynamics was entirely Newtonian, i.e. there was
no coupling to a heat bath as in the present simulation. Consequently
the particles could follow a ballistic motion at small length-scales,
whereas such a time dependence is not possible here due to the presence
of the thermostat (which mimics the solvent of a real system, in a
rough way). Furthermore, caution is in order when drawing parallels with
the dynamics of a gel in {\it equilibrium}, such as the one studied in
Ref.~\cite{LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob}, since it is very different
from the out-of-equilibrium dynamics considered here.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_m_vs_twT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Aging time dependence of the Kohlrausch exponent $\beta$ at a high
temperature ($T=0.4$). The different curves correspond to different
wave-vectors.
}
\label{Fig_m_vs_twT0.40}
\end{figure}
In Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_twT0.40} we show the age dependence of the
Kohlrausch stretching exponent for different length-scales identified
through $q$, all at $T=0.4$, in order to understand how aging affects the
dynamics on different length-scales. For very short times the exponent
$\beta$ is constant for all $q$, i.e. the out-of-equilibrium situation of
the system does not yet affect its relaxation dynamics. For intermediate
times $\beta$ decreases, i.e. the dynamics becomes more stretched,
and from the data we see that the time window in which this decrease is
observed depends strongly on $q$. For large wave-vectors the increase of
the stretching is observed very early and followed by a zone of roughly
constant $\beta$ for intermediate times ($10^1 \leq t_w \leq 10^3$). For
small $q$, in contrast, the decrease of $\beta$ starts only at around
$t_w \approx 10^2$ and stops at $t_w \approx 10^4$. These results are
quite reasonable since the relaxation times strongly decrease with the
wave-vector $q$ (see Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40}). Consequently, aging
will affect the relaxation dynamics first on a small length-scale,
and only later on a large length-scale.
For even larger times the structure starts to break up and hence $\beta$
increases again. This acceleration is seen first at large wave-vectors,
since the system will equilibrate faster on small length-scales than
on large ones. For very long waiting times the exponent $\beta$
becomes independent of $t_w$, since the system has equilibrated, and
converges to a value smaller than unity. In the Appendix we show
that this limiting value (around $\beta \approx 0.8$) can be directly
deduced from the equilibrium distribution of the cluster size shown
in Fig.~\ref{Fig_PsT0.40}.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale =0.8]{fig/Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Relaxation time $\tau_f$ as a function of the age of the system for
different wave-vectors $q$ ($q=0.17, 0.31, 0.49, 0.80, 1.22, 1.82, 2.41,
3.50, 4.88,$ and $5.89$, top to bottom). The temperature is $T=0.4$.
}
\label{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Relaxation time}
We now turn to the relaxation time $\tau_f$ and discuss its dependence
on waiting time and wave-vector. In Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40} we
show $\tau_f$ as a function of $t_w$ for different wave-vectors. In
agreement with the results for the stretching exponent, we see three
different regimes: (i) For short waiting times $t_w$ the relaxation
time $\tau_f$ is constant. (ii) For intermediate $t_w$ the relaxation
time starts to decrease; note that the time at which this decrease is
seen depends significantly on $q$ and occurs much earlier for the short
length scales. (iii) Finally the relaxation time becomes independent
of $t_w$ since the system has reached equilibrium. The time at which
this happens is independent of $q$. Thus we can conclude that the time
window in which the aging occurs is large for large $q$ whereas it is
relatively narrow for small $q$, which is again in agreement with the
findings for the stretching exponent $\beta$.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_tf_vs_qT0.40.eps}
\caption{
Wave-vector dependence of the relaxation time $\tau_f$ for different
waiting times $t_w$ at $T=0.4$. In order to check for the presence of
the hydrodynamic regime we plot $\tau_f q^2$.
}
\label{Fig_tf_vs_qT0.40}
\end{figure}
Finally we discuss the $q-$dependence of the relaxation time $\tau_f$. For
sufficiently long times we can expect hydrodynamic behavior, and we
therefore plot the rescaled relaxation time $\tau_fq^2$ as a function of
$q$, for different values of $t_w$, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_qT0.40}. The
data for short waiting times all collapse onto a master curve if
$q$ is small ($q \leq 3$), in agreement with the result shown in
Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40}, whereas aging is observed only at the
largest values of $q$. Note that we do not see a proper hydrodynamic
regime in this time window, since the rescaled curves are not flat even
at the smallest $q$. This is because the system is still in a gel phase,
and hence has a more complex dynamics. For large $t_w$, however, we do
see the hydrodynamic behavior, i.e. $t_f \propto q^{-2}$ at small $q$, and
the hydrodynamic regime extends to relatively large wave-vectors. This
is probably related to the fact that the asymptotic equilibrium system
consists of small clusters, which relax by a simple diffusion mechanism.
\subsubsection{Low temperature regime}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.05.eps}
\caption{
Time dependence of the intermediate scattering function
$F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ at a low temperature ($T=0.05$). The wave-vectors
are $q=2.41$ and $q=0.81$. The different curves correspond to the waiting
times $t_w$ = 0.001, 4, 16, 44, 86, 237, 464, 1275, 4900, 13446, 26354,
51655, and 72317.
}
\label{Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.05}
\end{figure}
Having discussed the (interrupted) aging dynamics of the system at high
and intermediate temperatures, we now address the gel dynamics at low
temperatures, at which the system is not able to equilibrate within the
time span of the simulations.
In Fig.~\ref{Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.05} we show the time dependence of
$F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ at $T=0.05$. Two different wave-vectors are
shown, and the different curves correspond to different waiting times
$t_w$. From this graph we see immediately that the dynamics {\it
slows down} with increasing $t_w$, in contrast to what we have found
for intermediate and high $T$ (see Figs.~\ref{Fig_Fs_vs_tau_T0.40}
and \ref{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40}). Thus we can conclude that the aging
dynamics at low temperatures is very different from the one seen at
intermediate and high temperatures. In particular, it is not possible
to interpret the low-temperature dynamics as a special case of the high
temperature dynamics at intermediate times, i.e. before the aging is
interrupted. This difference can be understood by recalling that the
intermediate and high $T$ aging dynamics is dominated by the breakup of
the percolating cluster, whereas at low $T$ this cluster stays intact
within the simulation time and aging is related to the rearranging of
its structure, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}.
In order to discuss the details of the $q$ and $t_w-$dependence
of $F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ we deduce a relaxation time $\tau_f$
and a stretching exponent $\beta$ by fitting the correlator to a
KWW-function. The resulting fit characterizes the shape of $F_s$
sufficiently well to justify using these parameters, provided we exclude
the smallest wave-vectors ($q\leq 0.5$); for these, the correlators
$F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$ do not decay significantly for the low temperatures
under consideration, and a KWW fit would be clearly inappropriate since
the fit parameters would be determined essentially from the short time
dynamics and not from the $\alpha-$relaxation.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05.eps}
\caption{
Waiting time dependence of the relaxation time at $T=0.05$. The different
curves correspond to the wave-vectors $q=0.59, 0.80, 1.22, 2.41,
4.88, 7.50, 10.66$, and $15.22$ (from top to bottom).
}
\label{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Relaxation time}
The waiting time dependence of the relaxation time $\tau_f$ is shown in
Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05}, for various wave-vectors. We see that
for all $q\leq 11$ the dynamics slows down with increasing age, whereas
a slight acceleration is observed for the highest $q$. The increase of
$\tau_f$ with age is the typical behavior found in many glassy systems
which are aging. However, in those systems $\tau_f(t_w)$ is usually seen
to obey power-law dependence on $t_w$, or at least so whenever $t_w$
is sufficiently large~\cite{leticia}. This is not really the case for
the system studied here, since from Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05} we can
conclude that $\tau_f$ shows three regimes: (i) At short waiting times the
relaxation time is independent of $t_w$; the system has not yet had time
to react to its changing structure, in agreement with the $t_w-$dependence
of $\tau_f$ found at high $T$ (see Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_twT0.40}).
(ii) Subsequently aging starts to modify the structure; the stress
present in the initial cluster spreads, but does so without breaking
off smaller clusters (see Fig.~\ref{Fig_Structure_NumberOfClusters}b);
this second regime is therefore essentially an elastic relaxation which
allows the cluster to accommodate the interaction potential. Note that
this regime lasts only for about two decades in time, before it crosses
over to (iii) a regime in which, for intermediate wave-vectors, $\tau_f$
becomes independent of $t_w$. From Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05} we
see that the times at which the second regime starts and ends depend
quite strongly on $q$, and that for the smallest wave-vector we are not
able to see the third regime at all within the time span accessible to
the simulation. This is evidence that the stiffening of the structure,
which results in an increasing relaxation time, occurs on the local
scale before it affects the system on large length-scales. Since the
simulated system is rather limited in size, this aging regime does not
last very long, and the relaxation times do not increase very much (by
less than a factor of five). Although we have not explicitly checked for
the presence of finite size effects, we are thus led to think that in
the thermodynamic limit the length of the second regime, as well as the
increase of $\tau_f$, must be much larger than the effects seen in our
small sample. This would be in agreement with the experimental findings
in real gels~\cite{cipelletti-2005-17}, for which the sample sizes are
much larger than the ones accessible to any simulation.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_tf_vs_qT0.05.eps}
\caption{
Relaxation time $\tau_f$ as a function of the wave-vector $q$ for
$T=0.05$. The different curves correspond to the waiting times $t_w =
0.001$, 8, 44, 237, 1275, 13446, and 72317.
}
\label{Fig_tf_vs_qT0.05}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_tfq2_vs_qT0.05.eps}
\caption{
Relaxation time $\tau_f$ times $q^2$ as a function of the wave-vector $q$
for $T=0.05$. The different curves correspond to the waiting times $t_w
= 0.001$, 8, 44, 237, 1275, 13446, and 72317 (from bottom to top). The
solid curve correspond to a $q^{-3}-$dependence of $\tau_f$.
}
\label{Fig_tfq2_vs_qT0.05}
\end{figure}
Next we analyze the wave-vector dependence of the relaxation time
$\tau_f$, which is shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_qT0.05} for several
ages $t_w$ ($0.001\leqslant t_w\leqslant 72317$). We first consider
short waiting times. For intermediate and large wave-vectors we find
a $q^{-2}$ scaling for $\tau_f(q)$, corresponding to a diffusive motion
(dotted line). For small wave-vectors, $q\leq 2.0$, this crosses over
to a stronger dependence, and we find approximately $\tau_f(q) \propto
q^{-3}$ (solid line). For long waiting times, on the other hand, we
find that $\tau_f(q)$ is given by a power-law $q^{-3}$ in essentially the
entire accessible $q$-range (small deviations arise only at the largest
$q$). Note that this $q-$dependence implies that the relaxation time on
a scale $r$ is proportional to $r^3$, and that for a given time scale
$\tau$ the particles will therefore reach a typical distance $r(\tau)
\propto \tau^{1/3}$. This implies that the mean squared displacement
increases like $\tau^{2/3}$, a result that is indeed in agreement with
the $\tau$-dependence we have found for the MSD for long waiting times
and low $T$, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_msd_tw13446.329}.
In order to analyze in more detail the diffusive behavior for
large wave-vectors $q$ and short waiting times, as identified
from Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_qT0.05}, we re-scale the data by plotting
$\tau_f q^2$, see Fig. \ref{Fig_tfq2_vs_qT0.05}. This confirms that
the relaxation dynamics is indeed diffusive on intermediate and large
length-scales for short waiting times (bottom curves). For larger waiting
times $t_w$ the $q$-window for diffusion shifts to smaller wave-vectors
and shrinks, finally giving way to a $\tau_f \propto q^{-3}$ scaling
over the whole accessible $q-$range for the largest waiting times.
This graph thus nicely highlights that the relaxation dynamics strongly
depends on the wave-vector and on the age considered.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_m_vs_tw_T0.05.eps}
\caption{
The Kohlrausch exponent $\beta$ as a function of the age $t_w$.
$T=0.05$. The different curves correspond to different wave-vectors
$q$. Note that with increasing $q$ the maximum of $\beta$ moves toward
smaller values of $t_w$.
}
\label{Fig_m_vs_tw_T0.05}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_m_vs_q_T0.05.eps}
\caption{
The Kohlrausch exponent $\beta$ as a function of the wave-vector
$q$. $T=0.05$. The different curves correspond to different ages $t_w$.
}
\label{Fig_m_vs_qT0.05}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Kohlrausch exponent}
Finally we analyze how the Kohlrausch exponent $\beta$ depends on the
wave-vector and on the waiting time. In Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_tw_T0.05} we
show $\beta$ as a function of $t_w$ for different values of $q$. First
of all we see that $\beta<1$ for all ages $t_w$ and all wave-vectors
$q$, i.e. the relaxation dynamics is always stretched. This finding
is in contrast to experimental and theoretical results for aging
gels, for which compressed exponentials ($\beta>1$) have been reported
\cite{PhysRevLett.84.2275,cipelletti-2005-17,Bouchaud_Pitard_Eur.Phys.J.E,LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob}.
One possible explanation for this difference is the fact that the length
scales accessible here are much smaller than the ones considered in
the experiments or through theoretical arguments. In the cited studies
the compressed exponentials have been related to the presence of a local
rupture of the network and its subsequent elastic relaxation, which leads
to a ballistic motion. An elastic relaxation here means that the part of
the gel which has undergone rupture is pulled by a constant force. Due
to the presence of the solvent the resulting motion is balanced by a
frictional force, and therefore the resulting motion is linear in time,
i.e. ballistic. Since in our simulation the network does not break at
$T=0.05$ and on the time scales considered, this type of relaxation is not
present and hence $\beta<1$. Let us point out that our results are {\it
not} in contradiction with the results from a computer simulation of a gel
{\it in equilibrium} mentioned above~\cite{LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob},
for which $\beta>1$ was found for large wave-vectors. Since the
simulations in Ref.~\cite{LengthRelaxation_DelGado_Kob} were conducted
with Newtonian dynamics (unlike our Brownian-like dynamics due to the
thermostat), they trivially give rise to a ballistic motion at small
length-scales, which in turn imply a compressed exponential relaxation
\cite{Bouchaud_Pitard_Eur.Phys.J.E}.
>From Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_tw_T0.05} we can further deduce that the
stretching at small $t_w$ increases continuously with decreasing $q$
(as long as $q$ is not too large), which is evidence that the system
becomes increasingly heterogeneous on increasing length-scales. For all
values of $q$ we see that, as a function of $t_w$, the exponent $\beta$
is essentially constant at small $t_w$, then goes through a local maximum
before converging to a constant value for large $t_w$. Remarkably, this
constant of around 0.55 is independent of $q$. The age at which $\beta$
shows its local maximum corresponds roughly to the aging time at which
the relaxation time $\tau_f(t_w)$ shows an inflection point, i.e. a
strong $t_w-$dependence, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05}. Thus we are
lead to conclude that in the time window in which the relaxation time
changes significantly (and which depends on the length-scale considered,
see Fig.~\ref{Fig_tf_vs_tw_T0_05}) the stretching is weaker than in
the regime where the system is not aging quickly. Put differently,
rapid aging dynamics is associated with weak stretching, and is probably
linked to elastic rearrangements.
Finally we show the wave-vector dependence of $\beta$ for different
waiting times, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_qT0.05}. For small $t_w$, the
dynamics is not very stretched at a length-scale corresponding to $q
\approx 10$ (pronounced maximum in $\beta(q)$), whereas the stretching
is much stronger for $q \approx 1$. With increasing age of the system
the maximum in $\beta(q)$ shifts to smaller wave-vectors, i.e. the
length-scale on which the system relaxes increases with age. For very
long waiting times, $\beta(q)$ appears to converge towards a master
function showing a pronounced decrease of $\beta$ at intermediate and
large $q$. This master curve is furthermore qualitatively similar
to the behavior seen for $\beta(q)$ at higher temperatures, see
Fig.~\ref{Fig_m_vs_qT0.40}, where we observe a local maximum around $q=2$,
and an increase for smaller $q$'s. The complex shape of $\beta(q)$
seen at long times therefore reflects the relaxation dynamics of the
disordered elastic network, in which several relevant length-scales
interfere simultaneously.
\section{Conclusions}
In this article we have studied a system of particles designed to mimic
a physical gel. We started from an ad hoc fractal structure, constructed
from a modified DLCA algorithm and therefore known to reproduce the
structure of dilute, fractal colloidal gels. Although this approach is
clearly not inspired by thermodynamics -DCLA-DEF is a purely kinetic
algorithm- it has been shown to produce structures which successfully
reproduce several measurable quantities of gels, such as the density
dependence and the rigidity modulus \cite{JourNon-CrystSol_Ma_Jullien}.
It was by no means granted, however, that this way of making a gel-like
structure could also be a satisfactory starting point regarding the
thermodynamics, left alone the (equilibrium or out-of-equilibrium)
dynamics, as we have shown to be the case.
In this study we have investigated the stability of the initial
DLCA structure as a physically reasonable particle pair potential is
imposed onto the kinetic DLCA structure. Letting the system adapt
to this potential, via an initial zero-temperature relaxation, led to
significant changes in local ordering while leaving the fractal exponent
essentially unaffected. The subsequent relaxation at a given temperature
$T$ evolves according to one of the following scenarios.
At high temperature ($T>0.2$), the gel is unstable and ultimately breaks
up into small clusters of particles. At low temperature ($T<0.2$) the gel
is stable and ages slowly, i.e its aging slows down with observation time.
For high $T$, two regimes for the waiting time must be distinguished.
For small $t_w$, the self-intermediate scattering function $F_s$ is
a stretched exponential in time on small length-scales -reflecting
the frustrated local structure- and a compressed exponential on large
length-scales, where the high temperature imposes strong deformations,
such that elastic relaxation dominates. At large $t_w$, when the
initial structure has decomposed into small pieces, $F_s$ is a stretched
exponential with essentially a constant exponent $\beta=0.8$ for all
wave-vectors, which can be rationalized from the measured long-time
distribution of cluster sizes (see Appendix).
The low-temperature relaxation is rather complex. At large $t_w$, the mean
squared displacement behaves like $\tau^{2/3}$, a behavior which reflects
the dynamics of chain-like filaments connecting the nodes of the gel
network. We showed that the reason for this dynamics could be related to
a combination of large transverse fluctuations of floppy, clamped chains,
to fluctuations of dangling filaments and also to rare rupture events of
clamped chains. This behavior of the mean squared displacement translates,
in the study of relaxation times in Fourier space, as $\tau_f(q) \propto
q^{-3}$ for large $t_w$ and small wave-vector. At low $T$, the exponent
$\beta$ of the self-scattering function is always smaller than unity and,
for small $t_w$, it decreases as $q$ decreases: Dynamical heterogeneity
increases with the length-scale. For larger $t_w$, $\beta$ goes through
a maximum (corresponding to the timescale where the aging of the gel is
most pronounced). On this timescale, elastic rearrangements are probably
important, but do not dominate over heterogeneity.
In conclusion, we have investigated the properties of the system as a
function of temperature, both in terms of structure and dynamics, using
a particle volume fraction comparable to experimental colloidal gels. We
have not studied the effect of the volume fractions, as could be done in
future work. From the present study, we have established a body of results
which are suitable for confrontation with experimental measurements. In
particular, to our knowledge, the breaking dynamics of a gel at high $T$
has not been reported experimentally. Concerning gels at low $T$, where
the gel structure is (meta)stable but ages, our study presents detailed
results concerning relaxation on a local length-scale. Experiments on soft
gels mostly reveal compressed exponential relaxation (light scattering
experiments \cite{faraday,cipelletti-2005-17,PhysRevLett.84.2275}, and
X-ray scattering experiments \cite{ranjini,carbonblack}), and highlight
the importance of internal elastic stresses. In our model system this
behavior is seen only at high temperatures, implying that the relaxation
of internal stresses is still hard to tackle within numerical simulations
with Brownian dynamics.
Finally, we hope that our results will hint at a novel and more
refined interpretation of relaxation measurements in gels, in particular
concerning the fluctuations of particle filaments. To this end, deducing
the fluctuation parameter $\chi(q,T,t_w,\tau)$, which measures the
variance of the self-intermediate scattering function, from numerical
simulations would greatly help in understanding the underlying microscopic
and/or mesoscopic mechanisms.
\section{Appendix}
\label{appendix}
In this Appendix we show that the relaxation dynamics of the system at
intermediate and high temperatures and at long times can be calculated
directly from the measured cluster size distribution presented in
Fig.~\ref{Fig_PsT0.40}. For this we consider a cluster of particles
having size $s$. For times shorter than $\Delta_{therm}$, the period
for the thermostat, this cluster will essentially move on a straight
trajectory since $\Delta_{therm}$ is shorter than the mean free collision
time. The length of this ballistic trajectory is of the order of $\ell =
v \Delta_{therm}$, where $v$ is the velocity of the cluster. From the
equipartition theorem we can estimate $v$ to be given by
\begin{equation}
\frac{1}{2} sm v^2 = \frac{3}{2}k_BT \quad .
\label{eqa1}
\end{equation}
\noindent
Since after time $\Delta_{therm}$ all particles are coupled to the heat
bath, the velocities of all particles, and hence the one of the cluster,
are randomized. Hence the cluster will perform a random walk with mean step
size $\ell$. After a time $t$ the cluster will therefore have made a mean
squared displacement $R^2(t)$ given by
\begin{equation}
R^2(t)= \frac{t}{\Delta_{therm}} \ell^2
= \frac{t}{\Delta_{therm}} v^2 \Delta_{therm}^2
= \frac{3 k_B T \Delta_{therm} t}{ms} \quad .
\label{eqa2}
\end{equation}
For a random walk the self-intermediate scattering function $F_s(q,t)$ is
given by~\cite{hansenmacdonald86}
\begin{equation}
F_s(q,t) = \exp(-q^2 R^2(t)/6) = \exp(-q^2 k_B T \Delta_{therm}t/2ms) \quad .
\label{eqa3}
\end{equation}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.8]{fig/Fig_beta_rmsT0.4.eps}
\caption{
Time dependence of the self-intermediate scattering function at $T=0.4$ for
waiting times that are sufficiently large to allow the system to reach
equilibrium (squares). Also included is a theoretical curve for $F_s(q,t)$ as
calculated from the cluster size distribution using Eq.~(\ref{eqa4}) (filled
circles). Both functions can be fitted very well by a stretched exponential
with a parameter $\beta=0.84$ (solid line).
}
\label{Fig_beta_rmsT0.4}
\end{figure}
Thus if we have a system that is composed of a collection of clusters with a
size distribution $P(s)$, the self-intermediate scattering function is
given by
\begin{equation}
F_s(q,t) = \frac{1}{\sum_{s=1}^\infty s P(s)} \sum_{s=1}^{\infty} s P(s)
\exp(-q^2 k_B T \Delta_{therm} t/2ms) \quad .
\label{eqa4}
\end{equation}
Since we have seen that {\it in equilibrium} our system has an exponential
distribution of cluster sizes, see Fig.~\ref{Fig_PsT0.40}, we have
\begin{equation}
P(s)= \exp(-\alpha s) \qquad ,
\label{eqa5}
\end{equation}
\noindent
where the parameter $\alpha$ is given by 1.52 (for $T=0.4$). Using
this value and Eq.~(\ref{eqa4}) we can calculate $F_s(q,t)$
and compare it to the time dependence of the self-intermediate
scattering function as determined directly from the simulation of
the system {\it in equilibrium}, i.e. for large $t_w$. This is done in
Fig.~\ref{Fig_beta_rmsT0.4}. We see that the correlator as determined from
Eq.~(\ref{eqa4}) (filled circles) describes indeed very well the data from
the simulation for long waiting times, i.e. the equilibrium
dynamics (open squares). Both functions can be fitted very well by a
stretched exponential with a stretching parameter $\beta=0.84$ (solid
line). Thus we can conclude that the stretching of $F_s(q,t_w,t_w+\tau)$
at long waiting times is related to the motion of the individual clusters
that have a size distribution given by an exponential, and therefore should not be related to any kind of glassy dynamics.
\vspace*{4mm}
{\bf Acknowledgments:}
We thank R. Jullien, H-S. Ma
for providing the code for the DLCA-DEF and
E. Del Gado and L. Cipelletti for useful discussions. This work has been
supported by the French Ministry of Education through ANR TSANET, ANR
JCJC-CHEF.
\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 4,375 |
LSU student Madison Brooks case: Four people charged in alleged rape before she died after being hit by car
Landon Mion
Four males were arrested in connection with the rape of LSU student Madison Brooks, which preceded her dying after being hit by a car, according to deputies.
The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said Brooks was raped before she was hit and killed by a car on Jan. 15.
Kaivon Deondre Washington, 18, and a 17-year-old unidentified minor were charged with third-degree rape. Everett Lee, 28, and Casen Carver, 18, were charged with principal to third-degree rape, which means they were present but did not participate in the alleged crime.
According to investigators, Carver admitted that he and the other males went to Reggie's Bar near the LSU campus and drank alcohol. He said Brooks left the bar with them and was "very unstable on her feet, was not able to keep her balance, and was unable to speak clearly without slurring her words," the arrest document states, according to FOX 8.
NEW ORLEANS DA ANNOUNCES NO RETRIAL IN DOUBLE-MURDER CASE "RIDDLED" WITH PROBLEMS
LSU sorority student Madison Brooks, 19, was fatally hit by a car on Jan. 15, shortly after she was allegedly raped.
Carver allegedly told investigators that the 17-year-old and Brooks were "hugging and walking together."
READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP
He said Brooks asked for a ride home with them, according to the warrant. He said Washington and the 17-year-old asked Brooks to have sex with them and that she agreed.
Carver told investigators he believed that Brooks was too drunk to understand that she was consenting to sex and he "hated it," the warrant reads. He said they later dropped Brooks off in a neighborhood near the scene where she was hit and killed.
The driver that hit her isn't being charged in the incident, according to a spokesperson East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, who said that the individual driving wasn't impaired and contacted emergency personnel immediately.
The attorney representing two of the people charged for the alleged incident claims a video shows no rape occurred.
"She willfully got into the car, said that her rides had left her, and she got in," attorney Ron Haley told FOX 8. "Absolutely not a rape. Listen, this is a tragedy, definitely not a crime."
NEW ORLEANS CLOSES 2022 WITH SKY-HIGH HOMICIDE RATE NOT SEEN IN DECADES: 'HORRIFIC'
Investigators said Brooks had a blood-alcohol level of .319 percent, nearly four times the legal limit. However, Haley said she was not too intoxicated to where she could not give consent.
"Can you tell that she was intoxicated? Yes. To the point under the law that you say you're in a drunken stupor, to the point that you cannot lawfully give consent or answer questions? Absolutely that was not the case," Haley said.
The attorney claims Brooks and the driver were involved in an argument after they drove to several places.
"Based on a disagreement, she got out of the vehicle. She indicated she was getting an Uber," Haley said. "I want the public to know, these young men or really the driver of the vehicle and the young men that were in there did not put her off on the side of the road."
According to arrest documents, the driver believed the girl was too drunk to consent.
Haley believes the video evidence from inside the car will prove his clients are innocent and that bars selling alcohol to underage drinkers are to blame for the incident. Haley intends to hand over the video to investigators and the district attorney's office.
Brooks was a sophomore at LSU, where she was a member of the Alpha Phi sorority.
"We are grieving the sudden and tragic loss of our sister, Madison Brooks, following the accident that took her life," the sorority wrote on Instagram. "Madison was a sophomore and made a lasting impact on all of us. She was also a hero and was able to donate her heart and kidneys to save others. We send our deepest sympathies to her family and friends during this incredibly difficult time. We respectfully ask for time and space so we may support each other in our healing process."
LSU President William F. Tate IV said the university's "collective grief and outrage cannot be put into mere words."
"Madison was a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a niece, a classmate, and a friend to many of you," he wrote in a statement. "By all accounts, she was an amazing young woman with limitless potential. She should not have been taken from us in this way. What happened to her was evil, and our legal system will parcel out justice."
Zach Edey had 15 of his 19 points in the first half and Fletcher Loyer finished with 17 points to help No. 1 Purdue hold off Michigan 75-70 on Thursday night. The Boilermakers (20-1, 9-1 Big Ten) had a 15-0 run to go ahead 41-28 lead in the first half after there were 10 lead changes and four ties, but they couldn't pull away. The Wolverines (11-9, 5-4) were without standout freshman Jett Howard, who missed the game with an ankle injury, and still hung around until the final seconds.
Poole beats buzzer with layup, lifts Warriors past Grizzlies
Stephen Curry threw his mouthpiece into the seats in frustration and got tossed himself for the surprising episode late in the game. Jordan Poole made the winning layup with a second remaining to cap a crazy, back-and-forth final minute, and the Warriors fought back to beat Ja Morant and Memphis 122-120 on Wednesday night. "Incredible, heady play by Jordan," Klay Thompson said.
Florida Today
Space Coast fishing: Anglers will have brief cooler weather before warm up
Space Coast anglers will find good fishing for pompano, blackfin tuna & black drum
Madison Brooks case: Timeline of LSU student's alleged rape, death near Baton Rouge campus
Madison Brooks, a 19-year-old LSU student, died after she was struck by a car in East Baton Rouge Parish early on Jan. 15. She posthumously donated several organs.
Packard Auto Plant Is the Largest Abandoned Factory in the World. It's Finally Coming Down
The gigantic Packard Auto Plant has been a 3,500,000-square-foot cancer in the heart of Detroit's Eastside since the brand shuttered the facility in 1956 — two years before the brand would also disappear. After decades of neglect, the looming ruin is finally coming down.
No Knicks rebuild necessary: Why this 2022-23 roster is a foundation to build on
With Julius Randle, Jalen Brunson, RJ Barrett and Tom Thibodeau, this group has the starting point of a winning roster. Of course, the Knicks have to make the right moves to build a contender from here. That starts with their decisions ahead of the Feb. 9 trade deadline.
WTTG
"Infinity Pool" now playing in theaters
Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgard star in Infinity Pool, in theaters now.
DA: Children strangled inside Duxbury home, mother to be charged with murder
The mother of two children found dead inside a Duxbury home Tuesday night will be charged with murder "as soon as she is able," authorities said.
Travelers opting for rail again as Amtrak expands options
Amtrak has announced a major upgrade to its fleet, with the new "Amtrak Airo" trains set to roll out in the next three years.
WOFL
Amazon delivery driver robbed at gunpoint
Two Florida men were arrested after robbing an Amazon delivery driver at gunpoint in Orlando
A New Jersey man who joined a mob's attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced Friday to more than six years in prison for using pepper spray to assault police officers, one of whom died a day after the siege. Julian Khater didn't mention the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick or address the officer's family in a written statement he read aloud before U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan sentenced him to six years and eight months of imprisonment. Khater wasn't charged in the officer's death.
LSU student Madison Brooks was given CPR by two strangers after being struck by car following alleged rape
Prosecutors seek to upgrade charges against four men accused of LSU student Madison Brooks' rape
LSU student Madison Brooks killed in car wreck after alleged rape
KRIV | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 6,742 |
namespace IECoreMaya
{
/// An abstract ViewportPostProcess suitable for subclassing in Python which operates on ImagePrimitive objects. This is much
/// slower than ViewportPostProcess due to the MImage<->ImagePrimitive conversions which need to occur.
class ImageViewportPostProcess : public ViewportPostProcess
{
public:
IE_CORE_DECLAREMEMBERPTR( ImageViewportPostProcess )
ImageViewportPostProcess();
virtual ~ImageViewportPostProcess();
protected:
/// Performs in-place modification of the given ImagePrimitive. Derived classes need to implement this.
virtual void postRender( const std::string &panelName, IECore::ImagePrimitivePtr image ) = 0;
private :
/// Performs the appropriate MImage<->ImagePrimitive conversions around call through to abstract ImageViewportPostProcess::postRender()
virtual void postRender( const std::string &panelName, MImage &image );
};
IE_CORE_DECLAREPTR( ImageViewportPostProcess );
} // namespace IECoreMaya
#endif // IE_COREMAYA_IMAGEVIEWPORTPOSTPROCESS_H
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 1,217 |
\section{Introduction}
Fugaku \cite{fugakuurl}, the presently fastest computer in the world, and its associated processor technology \cite{fujitsuA64FXurl} have achieved an {\em unprecedented sweep} of five major benchmarks \cite{fugakufastest} --- Top 500 \cite{fugakutop500}, Graph-500 \cite{fugakugraph}, HPCG \cite {hpcgurl}, HPL-AI \cite{hplaiurl}, and, in 2019, Green-500 \cite{fugakugreen}. The Fujitsu Tofu-D communication fabric \cite{fujistutofud} certainly contributes to these successes. But central is the novel A64FX processor \cite{fujitsuA64FXurl}, which is a significant reversal in the global trend to supercomputers being powered by graphical processing units (GPUs) that typically burden the programmer with proprietary programming models and complex memory hierarchies. The Ookami test bed gives US researchers free access to evaluate this exciting processor technology. It is also an opportunity to explore the potential of this technology for deployment in multiple settings including at extreme scale in national supercomputer centers or on campus at the network edge.
The 48-core, 64-bit ARM processor is the first to deploy the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) SIMD-vector instruction set, employing 512-bit wide vectors matched with 32~Gbyte of high-bandwidth memory (1~Tbyte/s). Designed specifically for leadership supercomputers, this processor+memory system promises to retain familiar and successful programming models while achieving very high performance for a wide range of applications. It supports 64/32/16-bit floating-point representations and fast partial dot-product of 8-bit integers to 32-bit results, and hence enables both HPC and big data. As demonstrated by the HPCG and Top500 benchmarks, A64FX offers strong performance on memory-intensive applications such as sparse-matrix solvers, while also being competitive on floating-point-intensive codes. We will see below that for some software this transformational performance is available nearly out of the box --- MPI+OpenMP vectorized code should just compile and immediately run well, with additional performance possible from tuning.
The applications that will benefit most are those sensitive to memory bandwidth with a memory footprint less than 32 GB/node --- these two features capture the vast majority of NSF's workload. In 2017, team members conducted a workload study \cite{simakovworkload} of NSF's computing resources including large-memory queues. The study found that 86\% of all jobs (corresponding to 85\% of cycles) will fit within the available memory per node (including O/S) and that the majority of jobs are memory-bandwidth intensive.
\section{Ookami technology and system architecture}
\subsection{System configuration}
The Ookami HPE Apollo 80 system has 174 1.8~Ghz A64FX compute nodes each with 32GB of high-bandwidth memory and a 512 Gbyte SSD. The latter is a post-market addition made by the project. A high-performance Lustre filesystem employing the Cray ClusterStor E1000 provides about 0.8Pbyte storage. Nodes are connected by an HDR 200~Gbit/s Infiniband network configured as a full fat tree. Using a Y-cable, the HDR 100 Gbit/s NICs of two compute nodes are connected to each HDR 200 Gbit/s switch port. This recognizes the bandwidth limitation of the on-chip PCIe interface and also reduces cable density. The login nodes were originally x86 but are now dual socket ThunderX2 with 256~Gbyte memory to eliminate most cross-compilation issues. In addition, Ookami includes servers powered by dual-socket AMD Rome, Intel SkyLake, and Intel Haswell (two with NVIDIA V100 GPUs) for performance comparisons across architectures.
\subsection{ARM background}
ARM is a RISC processor designed by ARM Ltd. but specialized and manufactured by other companies leading to much greater diversity than exists for X86. Annual processor production of ARM is well over 20 billion, which dwarfs X86 at 3-400 million \cite{satoA64FX}.
The development of 64-bit and other features with a deliberate push, including by the U.S. DOE FastForward program, made the processor relevant to HPC.
More recently, systems on the Top500 \cite{Ast} have been powered by the 64-bit Cavium ThunderX2 specifically optimized for HPC including 128-bit SIMD units and more cores. A detailed evaluation \cite{McS} of a Cray XC50 system (dual-socket ThunderX2), examined a wide range of applications relevant to NSF users with four compelling conclusions:
(1) ARM can now provide performance competitive with mainstream processors; (2) with significant increases in price performance; (3) most benchmarks ran successfully out of the box; and (4) with no special tuning necessary for high performance.
This closely mirrors our experience with A64FX, with the exception that only well-vectorized applications attain a substantial fraction of peak speed on A64FX primarily due to (1) the 512-bit vector width that is 4x that of NEON, and (2) the relatively higher latency of many instructions.
\begin{table*}[t]
\caption{Available compilers.}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l c c c}
\hline \hline
Compiler
& Compiler names & Version & Vectorization Flag \\
\hline
GCC & gcc / g++ / gfortran & 10.2.1 & -mcpu=A64FX \\
Arm & armclang / armclang++ / armflang & 20.3 & -mcpu=A64FX -armpl=sve \\
LLVM & clang / clang++ / flang & 11.0.0 & -mccpu=A64FX \\
Cray & cc / CC / ftn & 10.0.1 & -h vec3 \\
NVIDIA & nvc / nvc++ / nvfortran & 21.2.0 & -Mvect[=options] \\
Fujitsu (will be installed soon) & fcc / FCC / frt & 4.5.0 & -KSVE \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:compilers}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Processor architecture}
The A64FX processor comprises 4 non-uniform memory access (NUMA) regions or core memory groups (CMGs) with on-package, stacked, high-bandwidth memory (8 Gbyte). A CMG consists of 12 cores\footnote{The processor in Fugaku includes an additional core for O/S services.} with private L1 cache (64~Kbyte), a shared L2 cache (8~Mbyte), and a memory controller. The four CMGs keep cache coherency by ccNUMA with an on-chip directory. A cross-bar connection in a CMG maximizes high efficiency for throughput of the L2 cache (>115 GB/s/core read, >57 GB/s/core write). Out-of-order mechanisms in cores, caches, and memory controllers maximize the utilization of bandwidth at each level. The cache line is 256 bytes.
The A64FX core has a superscalar architecture with out-of-order execution and branch prediction. Peak execution rate is provided by issuing 2x512-bit wide SIMD FMA + predicate op + 4x ALU (shared with 2x address generation) instructions per cycle. The theoretical peak double precision speed in FLOP/s is computed as 1.8~GHz$\times$2~FMA/cycle$\times$2~FLOPs/FMA$\times$8 64-bit words/vector~=~57.6 GFLOP/s/core. Rates for other precisions are obtained by adjusting the number of words per vector. Machine learning applications are enabled by the FP16 high performance and the INT8 partial dot product that computes the elementwise product of vectors of 8-bit integers, reducing in groups of 4 into a vector of 32-bit results.
Each cycle 2x512-bit SIMD load or 1x512-bit SIMD store are supported and are enabled by the L1 data cache that can sustain 128 bytes/cycle even for unaligned SIMD load. The L1 "combined gather" doubles the gather (indirect) load's data throughput, when target elements are within a 128-byte aligned block for a pair of two registers, similar to the coalescing of out-of-order loads within a warp on some GPGPUs. The sector cache (scratchpad) feature is a valuable optimization for a library writer by enabling the programmer to modify how the cache replacement policy treats data, including forcing data to be kept in cache. There are 6 hardware barriers per CMG.
\subsection{Scalable vector extension (SVE)}
SVE supports vector widths from 128 to 2048 bits in 128-bit increments and was designed for HPC. With full per-lane predication, it superficially appears similar to Intel's AVX/AVX2/AVX512 instruction sets, however, there are important differences. SVE instructions can be generated to be vector-length agnostic (VLA), enabling a binary to run on any implementation regardless of vector width, and eliminating the need for loop tails. The instruction set also includes gather/scatter, vector partitioning, software-managed speculation, horizontal reductions, and scalarized intra-vector sub-loops, which all facilitate compilers vectorizing more loops.
\section{Software environment}
The operating system on Ookami is the industry-standard and stable Linux distribution CentOS 8, and all features and tools work as expected. Indeed, outside of different performance tuning concerns one usually has little awareness of being on an A64FX platform. The industry standard Bright Cluster Manager, which has supported ARM for many years, is used to provision the hardware, operating system, and workload manager from a unified interface.
SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, version 19.05.7) is employed to schedule jobs and manage the resources with nodes allocated exclusively to one job. Fair-share scheduling is presently used, rather than quotas, in order to encourage utilization. There are various partitions available covering different job duration, job sizes and architectures.
Following our practice on other clusters at Stony Brook, each user has a personal home and scratch directory that are forced to be private. Each project has a shared directory accessible only by project members. The home and project directories are backed up daily.
\subsection{Development environment}
Users have access to a continuously growing software stack, organized into modules to simplify use, management, and version control. The available compilers are listed in Table \ref{tab:compilers}. All of these, except for the NVIDIA and mainstream LLVM compilers, are capable of generating optimized SVE code. However, there are significant differences in capability and performance. We do not yet have substantial experience with the Fujitsu compiler. The ARM and Cray compilers can generate SVE instructions for loops containing standard math functions, with the Cray compiler typically generating faster code. However, the Cray C++ compiler front end is limited in its support for modern C++ standards, and, similarly for the ARM Fortan compiler front end. Only the ARM and recent GNU compilers support the SVE intrinsics, with the GNU compiler typically generating faster code. The ARM, Cray, and recent GNU compilers can all vectorize "if-tests" using the SVE predicated instruction set. Starting with version 10.2.1, the GNU chain is aware of the A64FX processor, and similarly for the upcoming LLVM version 11.0.0 that will add support for SVE intrinsics but will still lack SVE autovectorization.
Thus, for C and C++ the choice of compiler is complicated. Code using recent language standards or SVE intrinsics must use ARM or GNU, with the former recommended for kernels using math functions and the latter for SVE intrinsics. For FORTRAN, the Cray compiler is typically the best choice for both performance and standard compliance.
Other available modules include anaconda, archiconda, armpl, libsci, lapack, openblas, fftw, papi, cmake, etc. Various MPI versions are available, e.g. openmpi 4.0.5 and 4.1.0 and openshemem (Section \ref{sec:OpenSHMEM}).
\subsection{Performance analysis and debugging}
Multiple toolchains enable the user to analyze and optimize their code. Arm Forge includes the Arm ddt debugger, the profiling tool ARM MAP and ARM performance reports for advanced reporting capabilities. The Cray toolchain includes CrayPat, Apprentice and Reveal tools for performance analysis/tuning, and the debugging tools gdb4hpc (general debugger), valgrind4hpc (for detecting memory leaks and errors in parallel applications) and atp (first-line tool to diagnose crashing applications). The GNU gdb command-line debugger is also available. The Fujitsu toolchain is not yet installed on Ookami, but will be provided in the near future.
\section{Initial experience}
Our standing joke is that the system is "ARM-less" (i.e., "harmless") in that standard-compliant applications in FORTRAN, C, or C++ simply compile and run out of the box, once mundane issues such as compiler flags and library paths have been addressed. This is due to (1) the standard and complete Linux distribution, (2) the extensive selection of standard-compliant tool chains, (3) a growing library of linear algebra and scientific kernels, and (4) the availability of multiple MPI implementations (Cray, MVAPICH, OpenMPI) all optimized for A64FX and SVE. More nuanced is what must be done to obtain high performance from the processor along with selection of the appropriate tool chain(s), as discussed above.
Early concerns included that InfiniBand performance would be inferior due to the depth of instruction pipelines and cache architecture --- these have proven unfounded (Section \ref{sec:OpenSHMEM}).
Performance measurements deliver highly reproducible results between runs on the same or different sets of nodes. For instance, whole-node DGEMM benchmarks run by HPE/Cray during the burn-in phase detected two slow nodes, which were replaced, and the performance of all other nodes had a spread reproducible less than 1\%. This is due to the fixed clock speed and absence of turbo modes or thermal throttling. Multi-node runs are similarly reproducible due to fixed clock speed and the full fat tree that eliminates network contention.
The most important early discovery was the need to install an SSD on all nodes to store the root file system. As shipped, only two nodes targeted for software development and debugging had SSDs. All other nodes had a memory-resident system image --- but this consumed \textasciitilde 14~Gbyte instead of the anticipated \textasciitilde 2~Gbyte. This turned out to be due to the 64~Kbyte page size, which is the minimum space consumed by even a 1~byte file. The SSDs open the door to new data-intensive applications, and in the near future may be upgraded from 512~Gbyte to 2~Tbyte.
So far the system has been very reliable. The two slow nodes were were replaced along with one NIC and 3 SSDs. Unscheduled outages have been due to power failures and non-A64FX-specific system software including a memory leak in a SLURM demon.
\begin{table}[b]
\caption{OSU MPI Benchmarks}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lllll}
\hline \hline
Benchmark & Msg Size & Est. & Measured \\
\hline
Two-sided uni-dir B/W & 1MB & 12.3 GB/s & 12.3 \\
Two-sided bi-dir B/W & 1MB & 24.4 GB/s & 19.4 \\
Two-sided latency & 8B & \SI{1.8}{\micro\second} & 2.7 \\
Put latency & 8B & \SI{2.8}{\micro\second} & 3.9 \\
Put BW & 1MB & 12 GB/s & 12.3 \\
Get latency & 8B & \SI{3.8}{\micro\second} & 5.2 \\
Get BW & 1MB & 9.5 GB/s & 12.3 \\
Injection Rate & 1MB & 12.3 GB/s & 12.3 \\
Saturation Point & 1MB & 1 thread & 1 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:osu-mpi}
\end{table}
\subsection{Micro and standard benchmarks}
\subsubsection{Single-node DGEMM and STREAM}
Single-node DGEMM was measured by Cray on Ookami at 24.2~TFLOP/s, which is 88\% of peak single processor speed. We are anticipating this to increase as Cray scilib is further optimized, and when we get access to the Fujitsu library. Fujitsu has reported 94\% of peak single processor speed. At SBU, we have developed a code generator for AVX2, AVX512, NEON, and SVE instrinsics for the matrix-transpose times matrix kernel that is important in high-order spectral-element methods. This code attains 53.24~GFLOP/s on a single core, which is 92.4\% of peak speed.
Single-node STREAM TRIAD was measured by Cray on Ookami at 830~Gbyte/s, and a simple compiled DAXPY kernel with careful binding of threads+memory to cores achieved 840 Gbyte/s. Manually-tuned kernels were needed to achieve close to peak L1 bandwidth. About six threads are required to saturate the memory bandwidth of a single CMG. The observed 840~Gbyte/s is 84\% of peak memory bandwidth, 93\% of what we understand to be the L2-memory bandwidth, and is about 5x a dual-socket Intel Skylake. The measured single-core DAXPY bandwidth is 53 Gbyte/s, which is 2.5X Intel SkyLake. This memory bandwidth contributes greatly to the empirically observed strong thread scaling within a node.
\subsubsection{OSU Benchmarks with MPI and OpenSHMEM} \label{sec:OpenSHMEM}
The Message Passing Interface~\cite{MPI:Forum,Dongarra1995AnIT} (MPI) is a widely-used parallel programming library. It includes both two-sided rendezvous-based communication, and one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA). OpenSHMEM~\cite{chapman2010introducing,openshmem-website} is a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) library that focuses on one-sided, decoupled, communication and uses RMA to expose memory directly to network interconnects such as Infiniband. The Ohio State University benchmark suite~\cite{OSU:bench} tests bandwidth and latency for both point-to-point and collective operations using MPI and OpenSHMEM (UPC/UPC++ were not tested). We used Open-MPI~\cite{Open-MPI} (version 4.0.5) as it provides both MPI and OpenSHMEM in the same package.
Of particular interest was the point-to-point latency and bandwidth performance as we wanted to investigate the thread-to-network behavior on the A64FX processor. Tests were between 2 nodes, 1 rank or processing element (PE) per node. In Table~\ref{tab:osu-mpi} are the results for the MPI one- and two-sided tests. The "put" and "get" latencies are slightly higher than anticipated. In Table~\ref{tab:osu-openshmem} are the results for the OpenSHMEM tests. Included here are representative latencies recorded for the 1-sided RMA operations, the posting and fetching atomics, and swaps.
The estimated time comes from comparisons made on a similar A64FX cluster~\cite{ORNL:Wombat} at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
\begin{table}[b]
\caption{OSU OpenSHMEM Benchmarks: Latency}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lllll}
\hline \hline
Benchmark & Est. & Measured \\
\hline
Put (8B) & \SI{5.4}{\micro\second} & 4.5 \\
Get (8B) & \SI{4.2}{\micro\second} & 4.1 \\
Atomics (add) & \SI{0.0}{\micro\second} & 0.8 \\
Fetching atomics (fadd) & \SI{5.2}{\micro\second} & 5.2 \\
Swap & \SI{4.4}{\micro\second} & 4.3 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:osu-openshmem}
\end{table}
Installing the open-source Open-MPI and
MVAPICH2~\cite{mvapich2-website}
worked "out of the box". Both are configured to use the Infiniband network and the on-node cross-memory-attach provided by
KNEM~\cite{knem-website}
and
XPMEM~\cite{xpmem-website}.
Our OpenSHMEM work involves a separate, reference, implementation of OpenSHMEM (although based on UCX~\cite{OpenUCX} like Open-MPI). This installed without issue as we have worked with ARM on the OpenSHMEM project for a number of years, and it has components in common with Open-MPI, and can take advantage of the on-node modules KNEM and XPMEM. Compilation with the stock GCC, a new GCC with more SVE support, and the ARM compilers were also without issue. UCX includes a number of ARM-specific optimizations, e.g. low-power wait states, high-precision timers, and vectorized memory copy.
\subsubsection{HPC Challenge Benchmark suite}(HPCC)~\cite{hpcc} combines a large number of benchmarks allowing a convenient way to test multiple subsystems of HPC resource in a single run. Several of the tests rely on linear algebra and FFT libraries that are often used within scientific and engineering applications. To benchmark these important libraries, we concentrated on matrix-matrix multiplication, High-Performance LINPACK (HPL)~\cite{hpl}, and Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) benchmarks. Several linear algebra libraries are available on Ookami: Cray LibSci, ARM Perfomance Library (ARMPL), and OpenBLAS. The first two already have SVE support, while the last one does not. These libraries' performance is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:HPCC}.A-B. ARMPL has the best performance while OpenBLAS has the smallest due to lack of SVE support.
To HPCC we added a test of the most recent version of FFTW as well as other libraries providing the FFTW-3 API. Within the FFT benchmark, we compared ARMPL and several version of FFTW library: official (no SVE support), provided by Dolbeau, Cray, and Fujitsu. The results are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:HPCC}.C. ARMPL (20.3) show extremely low FFT performance, suggesting falling back to a completely non-SIMD version.
The Fujitsu version of FFTW shows the best results, followed by Dolbeau and Cray. It is worth mentioning that Dolbeau developed his version of FFTW without access to actual hardware using emulators; and two other versions with SVE support are most likely based on his work.
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/hpcc.pdf}
\caption{HPCC benchmark. Performance is shown in GFLOP/s, a number next to the bar corresponds to absolute value, and value in paranthesis corresponds to percentage of theoretical FLOP/s. A) Matrix-matrix multiplication, executed on a single core, B) High Performance LINPACK (HPL), executed on a single node, C) FFT, executed on a single node}
\label{fig:HPCC}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Mini-apps and Applications}
\subsubsection{Minimod}
Minimod \cite{meng2020minimod} is a seismic modeling mini-app developed by Total. Minimod extracts the stencil computation from a production seismic imaging application. The stencil is used to numerically solve the acoustic wave equation. The goal of Minimod is to offer a benchmark to test new and emerging hardware and programming models for geophysics applications.
We evaluated the Minimod OpenMP loop-based and task-based implementations \cite{EricIWOMP2020} on Ookami. Results are shown in Figure \ref{fig:Minimod-tasksxy} for the task-based implementation. While armgcc shows a performance improvement over armclang at low thread counts, at higher counts the advantage is mostly eliminated.
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/Minimod1.PNG}
\caption{Minimod: Runtime results between 2 different compilers with SVE optimizations on Ookami}
\label{fig:Minimod-tasksxy}
\end{figure}
We also ported \cite{raut2021porting} Minimod to use the Legion task-based parallel programming framework \cite{bauer2012legion} and compared the result to MPI. We also compared the performance to Summit using only Summit's POWER9 CPUs. Throughput is shown in Figure \ref{fig:Minimod-legion}.
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/Minimod2.PNG}
\caption{Minimod: Comparison of Legion and MPI throughput on Ookami and Summit}
\label{fig:Minimod-legion}
\end{figure}
Although the MPI version of Minimod on Ookami (MVAPICH 2.3.4) achieves throughput and speedup comparable to Summit, the Legion version (Figure \ref{fig:Minimod-legion}) suffers a performance penalty in both weak scaling and strong scaling --- we are still investigating the cause.
\subsubsection{SWIM}
SWIM ~\cite{Swim} is a weather forecasting benchmark (FORTRAN OpenMP) that solves the shallow-water equations using finite difference, and tracks FP speed, bandwidth, and cache characteristics, and is now included in the SPEC CPU2000 Benchmark suite. In our experiment, we used the default test problem \verb+swim.ref.in+ as the sample problem on two different clusters of different architectures. One is the A64FX cluster "Ookami" and the other is a SkyLake x86 cluster from Stony Brook Exasca||ab. Seven different compilers were tested on Ookami. To avoid clutter and data overlap, we have chosen 3 representatives: ARM's GNU-based compiler based on GCC 9.3.0 , ARM's LLVM-based compiler based on 9.0.1, and Cray 10.0.1. The times are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:SWIM-Ookami}. Times on the X86 cluster using GNU compiler 10.2.1 and on Ookami using Cray 10.0.1 are shown in Fig~\ref{fig:SWIM-Skylake}. As the results shown in Fig~\ref{fig:SWIM-Ookami}, the Cray Compiler obtained the best performance on Ookami. Ookami has a clear performance advantage with a single socket of A64FX being 4.3x faster at 32 threads compared with dual socket SkyLake x86. We ascribe the slight slow down at 48 threads on SkyLake to oversubscription (there are only 40 physical cores).
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/SWIM1.PNG}
\caption{SWIM: Runtime results for three compilers with SVE optimizations on Ookami.}
\label{fig:SWIM-Ookami}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/SWIM2.PNG}
\caption{SWIM: Runtime results for the Cray compiler on A64FX and the GNU compiler on dual socket SkyLake x86.}
\label{fig:SWIM-Skylake}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{PENNANT} PENNANT is an unstructured mesh, MPI+OpenMP, physics mini-application~\cite{LANLPennant} designed for advanced architecture research.
It is a challenge the A64FX processor due to the lack of locality and the architectures 256~byte cache line. This is particularly evident with the largest of the mesh inputs, each having at least 3 billion points and sides, with at least 11 billion edges.
MPI handles
inter-node gather/scatters and reductions, while OpenMP is used for intra-node activities like mesh initialization, summing energy usage, and data allocation.
To explore the scalability of PENNANT on A64FX and compare its performance to other processors, we tested one of PENNANT's smaller tests (LeblancBig).
MPI scaling experiments
were run on the Ookami and SBU SeaWulf clusters, using the Cray (Ookami), Intel, and GNU (SeaWulf) compiler toolchains. Tests used an 8 node configuration, running from 2 to 32 MPI ranks/node, and with one OpenMP thread per process. While run-times begin converging at larger process counts,
the Intel system is faster, as shown in Figure ~\ref{fig:PENNANT-MPI}.
We also tested single-node, OpenMP scaling on Ookami, comparing it to an Intel Haswell processor, with experiments using thread counts from 1 to 64 and using the GNU compiler on both platforms to facilitate direct comparison.
The runtime spike from 11 seconds to nearly 600 once more than 48 OpenMP threads are requested is attributed to oversubscription, which is handled less gracefully by A64FX due to the lack of hyperthreading and current settings for O/S thread scheduling policies .
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/PENNANT1.PNG}
\caption{PENNANT: Run-time vs. no. cores between 3 different compilers with optimizations}
\label{fig:PENNANT-MPI}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{GROMACS}\cite{GROMACS} is a molecular dynamics simulation package for modeling biomolecular systems such as proteins, DNA, RNA, and lipid membrane. The code extensively utilizes features of the C++17 language. Due to this, we were only able to build binaries with GCC(10.2.0) but not with ARM(20.3) and Cray(10.0.1) compilers and with other versions of GCC failing due to language constructs. SVE support was introduced to GROMACS in 2021 version by specialists from Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (Japan). Before that, GROMACS had optimization for ARM NEON. Below, we compare Ookami no-SIMD/NEON/SVE performances with no-SIMD/SSE2/AVX512 on dual socket 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 (TACC Stampede-2). From the GROMACS benchmark set\cite{GROMACSBench} we report results for a protein embedded into a membrane, consisting of 87k atoms.
On a single Ookami node, the performance for no-SIMD, NEON and SVE versions are 3.6, 13.8 and 20.2 ns/day, respectively. On Stampede-2 system the performance for no-SIMD, SSE2 and AVX512 versions are 12.7, 47.8 and 75.6 ns/day. In both cases (Ookami and Stampede 2) the gain from utilizing wider SIMD is very similar, a fascinating, 3.8 times performance increase by moving from no-SIMD to 128-bit wide SIMD and moderate 50\% increase by moving from 128-bits wide to 512-bits wide SIMD. What makes it interesting is that although Ookami and Stampede 2 theoretical flops are similar and aforementioned similar scaling on SIMD width increase, the absolute performance of Ookami is significantly smaller. It is not clear whether this is due to architectural differences or immature compiler support (including the inability of GCC to vectorize math functions).
\subsubsection{FLASH}
The FLASH code is a large, component-based package written primarily in modern FORTRAN that has a wide user base addressing a variety of multi-scale, multi-physics applications, especially astrophysics~\cite{Fryxetal00,calder.fryxell.ea:on,flash_development}.
The current release version of FLASH (4.6.2) is parallelized using MPI, and utilizes PARAMESH \cite{macneice.olson.ea:paramesh}
to support its block-structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) scheme.
FLASH is able to tune the amount of memory per processor it uses, and be paused and restarted on a different number of cores. All of these features make FLASH a promising platform to take advantage of the A64FX's HBM, NUMA architecture, and SVE instructions.
We successfully tested multiple combinations of compilers and MPI implementations (MVAPICH 2.3.4 and OpenMPI 4.0.5), initially without optimization to assess ease of porting and correctness. The GCC (9.2.0 and 10.2.1) and NVIDIA (20.9) compilers worked out of the box, while using the ARM (20.3.0) and Cray (10.0.3) compilers just required setting proper options and MPI environment variables. We were also able to demonstrate strong scaling of our supernova simulation without optimization on 12--140 cores using the GCC 9.2.0 compiler with MVAPICH 2.3.4. However, the SeaWulf cluster currently provides over double the speedup. Our next goal is to enable SVE, however the ARM and Cray compilers generate runtime errors, and the GCC compiler provides no significant speedup. The application chosen for this study was an explosive astrophysical event known as a thermonuclear or Type Ia supernova. We are exploring the dimmest of these events, known as a Type Iax, which is thought to be produced by a pure deflagration (subsonic burning front) occurring in a special ``hybrid" white dwarf \cite{Foley_2013,Kromer_2015}, which leaves behind a bound remnant.
\subsection{XDMoD}
Ookami is monitored with XDMoD~\cite{Palmer:2015}, with the
XDMoD job performance and application kernel modules also installed.
The XDMoD instance is hosted in CCR's cloud computing cluster at the
University at Buffalo. Ookami users can access the XDMoD instance
using their Stony Brook accounts via Globus Auth. The default XDMoD install worked without requiring
any customization. However, we did modify the XDMoD software to monitor
A64FX-specific metrics.
Performance data are collected using
performance co-pilot (PCP)~\cite{pcp}. We used the PCP version
supplied with CentOS 8 but recompiled the performance monitoring
module against the latest version of \texttt{libpfm4} to
log data from the A64FX hardware counters.
We also backported the latest version of the module that records
information from Lustre because Ookami uses a newer version of the
Lustre driver than is supplied with CentOS.
The XDMoD job summarization software was updated to handle the ARM
SVE hardware counters, and time-series plots of the instruction rate
are available in XDMoD's job viewer. Figure~\ref{fig:xdmod_job_viewer_sve}.A shows
an example plot of the SVE instruction rate exported from the XDMoD
job viewer.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/SVE_instructions_AK.pdf}
\caption{A) XDMoD job viewer plot of the SVE instruction rate for a 150 node run of the MADNESS software. At each time point the SVE instruction rate for the compute nodes with the maximum, median and minimum value is shown. B) Daily execution of GROMACS application kernel shows the performance improvement due to version update from 2020.4 to 2021 (first release with SVE support).}
\label{fig:xdmod_job_viewer_sve}
\end{figure}
Within XDMoD, application kernels are used to proactively monitor HPC resource performance by daily benchmarks. For Ookami, a goal is to see how the performance of benchmarks and real applications change as the compiler
toolchains improve. Figure~\ref{fig:xdmod_job_viewer_sve}.B illustrates a performance improvement for the GROMACS application.
We plan to add a power data collector so that we can analyse job level
power usage in XDMoD, and also adding new job-efficiency analytics that take into
account the extra ARM hardware counters, e.g., to identify floating-point intensive codes not using SVE.
\section{Summary}
In conclusion, we have had very positive initial experience with A64FX. It should be viewed as a ``leadership processor'' that trades high performance and high power efficiency on a large class of well-vectorized scientific applications for reduced performance (especially if not vectorized) and reduced applicability (primarily due to memory capacity) on more general codes. The peak processor vector speed and peak memory bandwidth are indeed readily accessible to compiled codes that are well vectorized and pay attention to localizing memory references within a CMG. The latter is readily accomplished by running four multi-threaded MPI processes per node, with one per CMG. So far, it is living up to the expectation that most such software can deliver great performance out of the box. However, the relative immaturity of the SVE software ecosystem (again noting that we do not yet have the Fujitsu stack) makes it hard to generalize this statement.
\begin{acks}
Ookami is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant OAC 1927880, XDMoD by NSF OAC 1445806, and Seawulf by NSF OAC 1531492. OpenSHMEM is funded through Los Alamos National Laboratory, Grant \#367958.
FLASH was developed in part by the US Department of Energy (DOE) NNSA-ASC and OSC-ASCR-supported Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago. Work involving supernovae research was supported in part by the DOE under grant DE-FG02-87ER40317. We would like to thank Total Exploration and Production Research and Technologies for their support of experimentation using MiniMod.
Use of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was supported by the Office of Science of the DOE under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. Use of XSEDE systems is supported by XSEDE grant TG-CCR120014.
We also thank the MVAPICH and Open-MPI teams for their assistance in tuning and deploying their software.
\end{acks}
\balance
\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,337 |
Q: Reset a class instance to its previous state in ios I am working on a application, that read a xml file and create and init classes based on xml data.
when needed classes create UIViews based on their variables and send that to parent classes.
The hierarchy of classes is something like this: book -> page -> layer -> character -> part
I need pages reset and recreate themselves every time need to be shown but it is not possible because the inner classes like layers and character have been changed (the books are interactives)
how can i do that?
A: If you're just reverting to a previous state, then start with Undo Architecture.
When you're presenting a new object graph, it's usually easiest to initialize a new object graph rather than convert one graph to another representation.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 8,336 |
\section{Introduction} \label{sec:intro}
The history of formation of the Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos is still an open question. It has been the subject of several studies which point to a capture origin, in-situ or impact generated formation \citep[and references therein]{2011A&ARv..19...44R,2015Icar..252..334C,2016NatGe...9..581R}. Accretion within an impact-generated disk scenario \citep[]{2011Icar..211.1150C,2016NatGe...9..581R} is gaining more support as it can explains several properties of the Mars' moons such as the mass and the orbital parameters \citep{2016NatGe...9..581R,hesselbrock2017ongoing,2017ApJ...845..125H,2017ApJ...845..125HBIS}.
Phobos has a very peculiar infrared spectra. Although mid-infrared (MIDIR) show different features, the visibile (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) spectra are characterized by a lack of absorption features \citep[]{1999JGR...104.9069M,2011P&SS...59.1308G,2011A&ARv..19...44R,2015aste.book..451M}. \citet{1999JGR...104.9069M} isolated two main regions named ``red" and ``blue" on the Phobos' surface that have different spectral characteristics which can be best matched by D- and T-type asteroids respectively \citep[]{1991JGR....96.5925M,1999JGR...104.9069M,2002Icar..156...64R}. \citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G} presented a detailed investigation on the possible chemistry of Phobos' surface. They found that the ``blue" region can be fitted with a phyllosilicates-rich material, while the ``red" region has a best fit when tectosilicates, mainly feldspar, are included in the model. Moreover they found that no class of chondritic material can match the observed spectra. Nevertheless, they pointed out that different more complex mixtures of dust could be able to reproduce the observed trends.
The featureless VIS-NIR spectra are often associated with a strong space weathering \citep{1999JGR...104.9069M,2011A&ARv..19...44R}. However, \citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G} following the spectroscopical studies of \citet{1981JGR....86.7967S}, \citet{1989JGR....94.9192S},\citet{1990JGR....95.8323C}, \citet{1990JGR....95..281C}, \citet{1990Icar...84..315C}, \citet{1990Icar...86..383C}, \citet{burns1993mineralogical}, \citet{2007M&PS...42..235K} list a series of possible mechanisms that can reduce the strength of the spectra and match the observation: i) as the 1-2$\mu$m feature arise from iron-bearing material such as pyroxene and olivine, the absence of those compounds may reduce the spectra; ii) a mixture of opaque material such as metallic iron, iron oxides and amorphous carbon mixed with olivine and pyroxene can reduce dramatically the VIS/NIR bands; iii) solids which results from quenching from the liquids state may have their reflectance properties reduced as they lack of perfect crystalline structure; iv) the reflectance of fine-grain materials decreases as the size of the grains decreases.
\citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} presented detailed Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations in which they determined the dynamical, physical and thermodynamical properties of an impact-generated disk. They found that the material that populate the disk is initially a mixture of gas ($\sim 5$\%) and melts ($\sim 95$\%). These information together with the Martian composition and hypothesis on the impactors, can be used for modelling the building blocks of Phobos and Deimos.
In this work we present a study of the bulk composition of the Mars's moons following the giant-impact scenario. Our aim is to provide more clues on the origin of the moons, their chemical composition, infrared spectra, and the nature of the impactor itself.
Furthermore, the JAXA's MMX\footnote{http://mmx.isas.jaxa.jp/en/index.html} mission plans to observe Phobos and Deimos in detail, and return samples (at least 10g) from the surface of Phobos. Our results could be then used as guidelines for helping in their analysis and interpretation.
Starting from different initial compositions of the impactor (from mars-like to chondritic-like), we compute thermodynamic equilibrium \citep{DeHoff1993} to solve for stable phases that may condense from the gas in the impact-generated disk. Additionally, we compute the composition of the cooling melt to investigate how it will eventually differs from condensates. The resulting condensates and solidified melt are then taken as proxies for the building block of Phobos and Deimos and further discussion are made.
In this work we will mainly focus on Phobos, as more observation are available and as it will be the main sampling target of the JAXA's MMX mission. Nevertheless, the formation of Deimos follows the same proposed scenario.
The paper is structured as follow: in section~\ref{methods} we describe the techniques and the model we use in our calculations. In section~\ref{results} we present our results that will be discussed in section~\ref{discussion}. Conclusions are summarized in section~\ref{conclusions}.
\section{Model and methods}
\label{methods}
\citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} calculated that the temperature in the Mars' moons forming region of the disk reaches $T\sim2000$~K just after the impact. The value of $P\sim10^{-4}$~bar is chosen as our fiducial pressure as it is, for the given temperature, the average saturation pressure for several mixtures calculated in \citet{2013ApJ...767L..12V} and the average pressure in the disk profile in \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R} and \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} where gas and melt coexist. Under these conditions the material in the disk that comes from Mars and from the impactor will result in a mixture composed of gas and melt \citep{2017ApJ...845..125H}.
\begin{figure}
\center
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig1.pdf}}
\caption{This cartoon describes the considered scenario. After the impact, part of Mars material will be ejected out at high temperature and will vaporize into gas as well as part of the impactor. The gas mixture will then condense into dust. On the other hand, the not vaporized material from Mars and the impactor will form a melt and then solidify. Phobos and Deimos will be the result of the accretion of these two components. The yellow region represents the part of disk within the Roche limit \citep{2017ApJ...845..125H}.}
\label{fig1}
\end{figure}
\citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} showed that the building blocks of Phobos and Deimos would be composed of a mixture of about half-martian material and half-impactor material. We, thus, assume that the gas is made of a well mixed two-components: the gas that is released by heating up Mars-material plus the gas that is released by heating up impactor-material. We then assume that the melt is a mixture of the not vaporized material from the two bodies \citep{2017ApJ...845..125H}. Figure~\ref{fig1} shows a cartoon of the proposed model.
As the disk cools down, the gas will eventually re-condense and the melt will solidify. In this work, we define, for ease of understanding, {\it dust} as the condensates from the gas phase and {\it solids} as the material that result from the solidification of the melt.
In order to determine the composition of the dust that will condense from the gas phase we assume thermodynamic equilibrium \citep{DeHoff1993}: at constant temperature and pressure, the stability of a system is determined by its Gibbs free energy, and, in fact, by the composition which minimizes the potential of the system. Although it is an approximation, thermodynamic equilibrium is a powerful tool to understand the evolution of the chemical composition of complex systems. This technique has been extensively used in the study of the chemistry of gas and dust in several astrophysical environments: from the Solar Nebula, meteorites and protoplanetary disks \citep{1979Icar...40..446L,Yoneda1995,2003ApJ...591.1220L,2006mess.book..253E,2016MNRAS.457.1359P} to stars dusty envelopes \citep{1999A&A...347..594G,1997AIPC..402..391L,2001GeCoA..65..469E} and exoplanets composition \citep{2010ApJ...715.1050B}.
To compute the thermodynamic equilibrium we use the HSC software package (version 8) \citep{roine2002outokumpu}, which includes the Gibbs free energy minimisation method of \citet{White1958}. Thermodynamic data for each compound are taken from the database provided by HSC \citep[and references therein]{roine2002outokumpu}. HSC has been widely used in material science and it has been already tested in astrophysics showing very good reliability in predicting the composition of different systems \citep{2005Icar..175....1P,2011MNRAS.414.2386P,2010ApJ...715.1050B,2012ApJ...759L..40M}.
To calculate the composition of the solids from the cooling melts we use the normative mineralogy (CIPW-norm) \citep{10.2307/30060535} and the work of \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R} as benchmark. CIPW-norm is one of the most used technique to determine, in a first approximation, the equilibrium composition of a multicomponent melt \citep{10.2307/30060535}.
\citep{2017ApJ...845..125H} showed that the melt phase of Mars and the impactor will likely never completely equilibrate between each other. Mars-only and impactor-only melt with different degrees of equilibration in between are indeed expected. Nevertheless, calculating the resulting compositions of a equilibrated melt represents a first interesting add-on to investigate the differences that condensation and solidification would bring to the final Phobos bulk composition. Moreover, our model suggests that the MMX may be confronted with two distinguishable family of material, the $\it{dust}$ and the $\it{solids}$. As a consequence, this investigation can bring further information and clues that can be used in the MMX samples analysis.
During the planet formation, Mars and the other inner rocky planets experienced impacts with other bodies. The impact histories strongly depend on the timing and location of the planets \citep{2017E&PSL.468...85B,2017Icar..297..134R,2017GeoRL..44.5978B,bottke2017post}. The nature of the impactors is unconstrained as the dynamical interactions of Jupiter and Saturn with the surrounding minor bodies may have scattered and delivered in the inner Solar System material of different nature and of chondritic origin \citep{2017Icar..297..134R,2017GeoRL..44.5978B,bottke2017post}. Our aim is to determine the changes that different impactors would bring in the chemical composition of Phobos, and if these differences can be traceable. In order to keep our selection as chemically heterogeneous as possible we, thus, consider the following types of impactor: Mars$_{type}$, CV$_{type}$, EH$_{type}$, CI$_{type}$, comet$_{type}$. As a proxy of Mars composition we take the Bulk-Silicates-Mars (BSM) from \citet{2013ApJ...767L..12V}. Compositions for the EH, CV and CI chondrites are taken from \citet{1988RSPTA.325..535W}. Elemental composition for the comet is taken from \citet{Huebner1997}. Table~\ref{table1} shows the elemental distribution for all considered impactors. In order to help to understand the differences between the impactors we also report several elemental ratios such as the Mg/Si, Fe/O, C/O ratios. These ratios play an important role in determining the resulting chemical composition of a mixture. This will be discussed in section~\ref{discussion}.
We also report values from the Sun photosphere\footnote{We take the elemental abundances from \citet{2009ARA&A..47..481A} for the given set of elements. Please note that \ce{He} is not included in the system and, as a consequence, the abundance of \ce{H} raises to $\sim$99\% of the total.} as reference \citep{2009ARA&A..47..481A}. Note the H/O ratio of the solar nebula (Sun) and the abundances of other elements relatives to O and C. Looking at table~\ref{table1}, we can already notice that we will deal with wide different environments. Moreover, the relative abundances between elements clearly indicate that our systems will return chemical distributions that are far from that one predicted for a solar composition.
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Elemental abundances (mol\%) for single impactors. Abundances of the solar photosphere (Sun) are also shown.}
\begin{tabular} {l c c c c c c }
\hline
& Mars & CV & CI & EH & comet & Sun \\
\hline
Element & \multicolumn{4}{c}{Abundances (mol\%)} & & \\
\hline
Al & 1.250E+00 & 1.356E+00 & 4.668E-01 & 7.596E-01 & 7.000E-02 & 2.82E-04 \\
C & 0.000E+00 & 9.747E-01 & 3.902E+00 & 8.427E-01 & 1.137E+01 & 2.69E-02 \\
Ca & 9.300E-01 & 9.911E-01 & 3.362E-01 & 5.367E-01 & 6.000E-02 & 2.19E-04\\
Fe & 5.440E+00 & 8.797E+00 & 4.773E+00 & 1.314E+01 & 5.200E-01 & 3.16E-03 \\
H & 0.000E+00 & 5.808E+00 & 2.906E+01 & 0.000E+00 & 5.464E+01 & 99.9 \\
K & 4.800E-02 & 1.658E-02 & 2.098E-02 & 5.177E-02 & 0.000E+00 & 1.07E-05 \\
Mg & 1.632E+01 & 1.247E+01 & 5.845E+00 & 1.104E+01 & 9.900E-01 & 3.98E-03 \\
Na & 7.000E-01 & 3.001E-01 & 3.121E-01 & 7.484E-01 & 1.000E-01 & 1.74E-04 \\
O & 5.815E+01 & 5.157E+01 & 4.491E+01 & 4.724E+01 & 2.834E+01 & 4.89E-02\\
S & 0.000E+00 & 1.434E+00 & 2.695E+00 & 4.577E+00 & 7.100E-01 & 1.32E-03 \\
Si & 1.673E+01 & 1.624E+01 & 7.656E+00 & 2.104E+01 & 1.830E+00 & 3.23E-03 \\
Ti & 4.000E-02 & 4.280E-02 & 1.285E-02 & 2.379E-02 & 0.000E+00 & 8.90E-06 \\
Zn & 2.000E-04 & 3.709E-03 & 6.988E-03 & 9.674E-03 & 0.000E+00 & 3.63E-06 \\
\hline
Mg/Si & 0.98 & 0.77 & 0.76 & 0.52 & 0.54 & 1.25 \\
Fe/O & 0.09 & 0.17 & 0.11 & 0.28 & 0.02 & 0.06 \\
Fe/Si & 0.33 & 0.54 & 0.62 & 0.62 & 0.28 & 0.98 \\
(Fe+Si)/O & 0.38 & 0.49 & 0.28 & 0.72 & 0.08 & 0.13 \\
C/O & 0.00 & 0.02 & 0.09 & 0.02 & 0.40 & 0.54 \\
H/O & 0.00 & 0.11 & 0.65 & 0.00 & 1.93 & 2041 \\
\end{tabular}
\label{table1}
\end{table*}
The 13 considered elements in Table~\ref{table1} can form $\sim$6800 possible compounds, including complex organics, gas and solids (and excluding liquids). Most of these compounds are not stable at our chosen $T$ and $P$. We derive our fiducial list of compounds starting from the list reported in \citet{2013ApJ...767L..12V} and the set of compounds in \citet{2011MNRAS.414.2386P}. Complex organics have been excluded from calculations as their chemistry is driven more by kinetics rather than thermodynamic equilibrium. \ce{C}-graphite is taken as representative of the main carbon condensates together with \ce{Fe3C}, \ce{Fe2C} and \ce{SiC}. Calcium and aluminium refractory species, all main oxides and main silicates (Mg and Fe silicates) have been taken into account. Sulfides are included as well as water-vapour and water-ice. We report the complete list of considered species in Table~\ref{table2}. The following nomenclature will be used: olivine (forsterite, \ce{Mg2SiO4}, and fayalite, \ce{Fe2SiO4}), pyroxene (enstatite, \ce{MgSiO3}, and ferrosilite, \ce{FeSiO3}), plagioclase (anorthite, \ce{CaAl2Si2O8} and albite, \ce{NaAlSi3O8}), melilite (gehlenite, \ce{Ca2Al2SiO7}, and akermanite, \ce{Ca2MgSi2O7}), fassaite (Ca-Tschermak, \ce{CaAl2SiO6}, and diopside, \ce{CaMgSi2O6}), spinel (\ce{MgAl2O4} and \ce{FeAl2O4}), magnesiowustite (\ce{MgO} and \ce{FeO}), sulfide (\ce{FeS}, \ce{MgS} and \ce{CaS}), metal (\ce{Fe}, \ce{Al} and \ce{Zn}). Only the endmembers of each solids solution are considered and no predictions of intermediate compositions are made.
To summarize, we calculate the thermodynamic equilibrium for each of the considered cases in table~\ref{table1} at the given temperature ($T=2000$~K) and pressure ($P=10^{-4}$~bar).
The resulting gas phase of Mars plus the gas phase of the selected impactor will constitute the gas mixture from which the ${\it dust}$ will condense. The material that is not in the gas phase will form the melt from which the ${\it solids}$ will form. To derive the ${\it dust}$ composition we then proceed to the computation of the condensation sequence in the interval of temperatures of $150< T\rm(K)<2000$ with a constant pressure of $P=10^{-4}$~bar. To derive the ${\it solids}$ composition we compute the CIPW-norm.
In order to test our thermodynamic model we also run equilibrium calculation using the solar abundances in Table~\ref{table1} and compare the results with previous calculations available in the literature. Results of the test and a brief discussion are presented in Appendix~\ref{solar}.
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Complete list of gas and dust species in the equilibrium calculations.}
\begin{tabular} {c}
\hline
Gas \\
\hline
Al(g) Al2O2(g) Al2O3(g) AlO(g) AlO2(g) \\
C(g) Ca(g) CaO(g) CH4(g) CO(g) \\
Fe Fe(g) FeO(g) FeS(g) \\
H(g) H2(g) H2O(g) H2S(g) HS(g) \\
K(g) K2(g) K2O(g) KO(g) Mg(g) MgO(g) \\
Na(g) Na2(g) Na2O(g) NaO(g) \\
O(g) O2(g) OH(g) \\
S(g) Si(g) SiO(g) SiO2(g) \\
Ti(g) TiO(g) TiO2(g) \\
Zn(g) ZnO(g) \\
\hline
Dust \\
\hline
Al2O3 \\
C \\
Ca2Al2SiO7 Ca2MgSi2O7 Ca2SiO4 CaAl12O19 CaAl2O4 CaAl2Si2O8 \\
CaAl2SiO6 CaAl4O7 CaMgSi2O6 CaO CaS CaSiO3 CaTiSiO5 \\
Fe Fe2C Fe2O3 Fe2SiO4 Fe3C Fe3O4 \\
FeAl2O4 FeO FeSiO3 FeTiO3\\
H2O \\
K K2O K2Si4O9 KAlSi2O6 KAlSi3O8 KAlSiO4\\
Mg2Al4Si5O18 Mg2SiO4 Mg2TiO4 MgAl2O4 MgO MgS MgSiO3 MgTi2O5 MgTiO3\\
Na2O Na2SiO3 NaAlSi3O8 \\
Si SiC SiO2 \\
TiO2 \\
Zn Zn2SiO4 Zn2TiO4 ZnO ZnSiO3\\
\end{tabular}
\label{table2}
\end{table*}
\section{Results}
\label{results}
Table~\ref{table3} shows the elemental abundances (mol\%) of the gas mixture that results from equilibrium calculation at $T=2000$~K and $P=10^{-4}$~bar of Mars plus the considered impactor (Mars+Mars, Mars+CV, Mars+CI, Mars+EH, Mars+comet). These abundances are used as input to compute the condensation sequence. Table~\ref{table4} show the oxides budget of different melt mixtures in case of complete equilibration between Mars and given impactors. These budgets are used to compute the CIPW-norm.
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Elemental abundances (mol\%) of the gas mixture which is released after the impact assuming $T=2000~K$, $P=10^{-4}$~bar, different types of impactors, and equal contribution between Mars and the considered impactor.}
\begin{tabular} {l c c c c c}
\hline
Gas mixture & +Mars & +CV & +CI & +EH & +comet \\
\hline
Element & \multicolumn{4}{c}{Abundances (mol\%)} & \\
\hline
Al & 8.059E-06 & 1.382E-05 & 5.058E-06 & 2.336E-05 & 1.412E-05 \\
C & 0.000E+00 & 3.762E+00 & 5.791E+00 & 2.060E+00 & 1.141E+01 \\
Ca & 2.348E-05 & 4.508E-05 & 9.962E-06 & 8.897E-05 & 1.804E-04 \\
Fe & 1.974E+01 & 2.972E+01 & 6.652E+00 & 3.117E+01 & 8.041E-01 \\
H & 0.000E+00 & 2.241E+01 & 4.314E+01 & 0.000E+00 & 5.481E+01 \\
K & 3.360E+00 & 2.489E-01 & 1.008E-01 & 2.423E-01 & 4.808E-02 \\
Mg & 3.539E-01 & 4.512E-01 & 1.000E-01 & 8.458E-01 & 9.982E-01 \\
Na & 4.905E+01 & 3.859E+00 & 1.502E+00 & 3.543E+00 & 8.026E-01 \\
O & 2.608E+01 & 2.501E+01 & 3.695E+01 & 2.775E+01 & 2.858E+01 \\
S & 0.000E+00 & 5.519E+00 & 4.000E+00 & 1.120E+01 & 7.121E-01 \\
Si & 1.146E+00 & 8.663E+00 & 1.735E+00 & 2.310E+01 & 1.825E+00 \\
Ti & 2.663E-01 & 3.370E-01 & 2.347E-02 & 6.733E-02 & 3.844E-03 \\
Zn & 1.051E-02 & 1.505E-02 & 1.158E-02 & 2.398E-02 & 2.007E-04 \\
\hline
Mg/Si & 0.31 & 0.05 & 0.06 & 0.04 & 0.55 \\
Fe/O & 0.76 & 1.19 & 0.18 & 1.12 & 0.03 \\
Fe/Si & 17.23 & 3.43 & 3.83 & 1.35 & 0.44 \\
(Fe+Si)/O & 0.80 & 1.53 & 0.23 & 1.96 & 0.09 \\
C/O & 0.00 & 0.15 & 0.16 & 0.07 & 0.40 \\
H/O & 0.00 & 0.90 & 1.17 & 0.00 & 1.92 \\
\end{tabular}
\label{table3}
\end{table*}
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Oxide composition (wt\%) of the melt that results after the impact assuming $T=2000~K$, $P=10^{-4}$~bar and different types of impactor. Total equilibration between Mars and impactor is also assumed. The Mg/Si and Fe/O ratios are the elemental mole ratios.}
\begin{tabular} {l c c c c c}
\hline
& +Mars & +CV & +CI & +EH & +comet \\
\hline
\ce{Al2O3} & 2.96 & 3.55 & 3.06 & 3.02 & 3.10 \\
\ce{CO2} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\ce{CaO} & 2.40 & 2.87 & 2.47 & 2.41 & 0.28 \\
\ce{FeO} & 17.16 & 12.55 & 14.42 & 12.35 & 17.06 \\
\ce{H2O} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\ce{K2O} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\ce{MgO} & 30.60 & 30.88 & 31.15 & 32.04 & 31.09 \\
\ce{Na2O} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\ce{SiO2} & 46.75 & 49.35 & 48.80 & 50.10 & 45.11 \\
\ce{TiO2} & 0.13 & 0.80 & 0.10 & 0.09 & 3.37 \\
\ce{ZnO} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\ce{SO3} & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 \\
\hline
Mg/Si & 0.98 & 0.93 & 0.95 & 0.95 & 1.03 \\
Fe/O & 0.09 & 0.06 & 0.07 & 0.06 & 0.09 \\
\end{tabular}
\label{table4}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Dust from condensing gas}
\label{condensationsequence}
Figure~\ref{fig2} shows the dust distribution for all the considered impactors in mol\% (being 100 gas+dust) as a function of temperature. From left to right and from top to bottom, the different cases are ordered with decreasing Fe/O ratio of the initial gas mixture (see Table~\ref{table3}).
Mars+CV impact results in large quantities of metallic iron, \ce{FeS} and \ce{SiO_2}. Small amount of pyroxene (enstatite (\ce{MgSiO3}) and ferrosilite (\ce{FeSiO3})), $\sim1$~mol\%, is distributed all along the temperature range. At $T~\sim700$~K, we see the appearance of \ce{Fe2C} and C (graphite). Similarly to Mars+CV, the Mars+EH impact shows large quantities of metallic iron, \ce{FeS} and \ce{SiO_2}. Moreover, we do see small percentage of Si, MgS and SiC. Traces of pyroxenes are seen at high temperatures only.
The Mars+Mars impact produces several oxides such as FeO, \ce{Fe3O4}, metallic iron and volatiles such as \ce{Na2O}, \ce{Na2SiO3}. Traces of olivine (forsterite (\ce{Mg2SiO4}) and fayalite (\ce{Fe2SiO4})) are present at high temperature.
Mars+CI impact returns iron-rich olivine such as fayalite (\ce{Fe2SiO4}), then FeO, \ce{Fe3O4}, \ce{Fe2O3}, \ce{FeS} and smaller amount of \ce{SiO2}. At lower temperature we see the condensation of C and \ce{H2O}. The dust from Mars+comet impact is mainly made of pyroxene, \ce{SiO2} and FeS. Mars+comet impact is that one that produces, as expected, a large amount of water ice together with solid carbon.
Figure~\ref{fig3} shows the condensation sequence for the more volatiles species. All the considered cases return a very similar behaviour as these volatiles are less effected by the changes of other elemental ratios. Na(g) has higher condensation temperature than K(g) and Z(g) is the last one to condense. \ce{Na2SiO3}, \ce{K2Si4O9} and \ce{Zn2SiO4} are the main respective condensates, together with Zn in case of Mars+CV, Mars+EH, and Zn and K for Mars+Mars.
\begin{figure}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig2a.pdf}}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig2b.pdf}} \\
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig2c.pdf}}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig2d.pdf}} \\
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig2e.pdf}}
\caption{Condensation sequences for major dust species (mol\%) that result from the gas mixtures in Table~\ref{table3}. Note the changes of colours when different compounds are considered.}
\label{fig2}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig3a.pdf}}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig3b.pdf}} \\
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig3c.pdf}}
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig3d.pdf}} \\
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig3e.pdf}}
\caption{Condensation sequences for K, Zn, and Na compounds (mol\%) that result from the gas mixtures in Table~\ref{table3}. Sodium compounds for Mars+Mars were included in Fig.~\ref{fig2} as, in that case, they represent major species. Note the changes of scales in the y-axis.}
\label{fig3}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Solids from cooling melts}
\label{CIPWmelts}
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Resulting CIPW-norm of the melt phase. Calculations for the BSM are also performed to compare the resulting CIWP-norm with values derived by \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R}.}
\begin{tabular} {l c c c c c c c}
\hline
&+Mars & +CV & +EH & +CI & +COMET & BSM & BSM \citep{2016ApJ...828..109R}\\
\hline
Anorthite &8.08 & 9.69 & 8.24 & 8.35 & 1.39 & 3.16 & \\
Diopside &3.08 & 3.63 & 2.97 & 3.13 & 0.00 & 6.89 & 6.97 \\
Pyroxene & 43.41 & 55.48 & 57.58 & 52.35 & 54.97 & 21.03& 21.29\\
Albite& 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 8.29 & \\
Orthoclase& 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.65& 0.66\\
Olivine& 45.19 & 29.68 & 31.05 & 35.98 & 34.66 & 58.50& 59.22 \\
Ilmenite& 0.25 & 1.52 & 0.17& 0.19 & 6.40 & 0.27&0.00\\
Corundum &0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 2.59 & 0.00 & 0.00\\
Anorth+Alb& 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & 0.00 & (11.45) & 11.59\\
\hline
Oli/Pyr & 1.04 & 0.53 & 0.62 & 0.68 & 0.63 & 2.78 & 2.78\\
\end{tabular}
\label{table5}
\end{table*}
Table~\ref{table5} reports the resulting CIPW-norm if complete equilibration between the melt belonging to Mars and to the impactor occurs (see Table~\ref{table4}). To establish the reliability of our CIPW-algorithm, we performed calculation using the BSM and compare our result with that in \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R} finding a very good agreement (see the last two columns in Table~\ref{table5}).
The resulting solids will be generally characterized by pyroxene\footnote{hypersthene in \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R}.} and olivine, with the former in larger abundances, except for the Mars+Mars case for which olivine is slightly more abundant. Although our selected impactors have initially different chemical composition, the resulting CIPW-norm is quite similar for all cases. It is interesting to note that diposide (\ce{CaMgSi2O6}) is not predicted for a cometary impactor, while corundum (\ce{Al2O3}) is a tracer of that impact. Enstatite and forsterite will be largely stable and common compounds for all the considered cases. Albite (\ce{ NaAlSi3O8}) and orthoclase (\ce{ KAlSi3O8}) are not present in the solids because Na and K are totally vaporized after the impact (see Tables~\ref{table3} and~\ref{table4}).
\section{Discussion}
\label{discussion}
\subsection{Dust composition}
\label{outlook}
Our calculations clearly show different behaviour when compared with the classical condensation sequence with a solar composition (see Fig.~\ref{fig5}). One of the main reasons is the amount of H, C and O in our systems that is very different from the solar values. Moreover, in our calculations the amount of Fe, Mg, and Si is of the same order of magnitude as O. This is not the case for the Solar Nebula where H is predominant, C is comparable with O and Fe, Mg, Si are orders of magnitude smaller than O \citep{2009ARA&A..47..481A}. Here we try to qualitatively understand our results and emphasize the differences from the well known condensation sequence of the Solar Nebula.
The stability of forsterite (\ce{Mg2SiO4}) and enstatite (\ce{MgSiO3}) is driven by the Mg/Si ratio where higher Mg/Si ratios ($>1$) favour forsterite while lower Mg/Si ratios ($<1$) favour enstatite \citep{2001A&A...371..133F}. However, at very high temperature, forsterite can still be the first magnesium silicates that condenses out before being converted in enstatite \citep{2001A&A...371..133F}. From Table~\ref{table3} we see that the Mg/Si is well below 1 in all cases and, as expected the dust is generally enstatite-rich (see Fig.~\ref{fig2}). The excess of Si that is not consumed in the magnesio-silicates will then be bound with O to form stable \ce{SiO2}. Generally \ce{SiO2} tends to be more stable than iron-oxides (see for example ellingham diagrams in \citet{DeHoff1993}). Fe and \ce{SiO2} can then react to form iron-rich silicates. If oxygen is still available for reaction it will start to bind iron to form iron-oxides. If there is lack of oxygen, iron will be mainly in the metallic form. The presence of sulfur further modifies the expected composition as sulfidation of Fe occurs.
As a consequence, looking at the elemental ratios reported in Table~\ref{table3} the behaviours found in Fig.~\ref{fig2} become clearer. Let us consider the two extreme cases of the Fe/O ratio, Mars+comet (Fe/O=0.03) and Mars+CV (Fe/O=1.19). In the case of Mars+comet we have Mg/Si=0.55. As such we expect the oxygen to form mainly enstatite \ce{MgSiO3}. Then we expect the appearance of \ce{SiO2} as there is Si in excess with Si more abundant than Fe (Fe/Si=0.44). As Fe/O=0.03 and (Fe+Si)/O=0.09, there is a large reservoir of oxygen to oxidise the iron which, indeed, is found in ferrosilite \ce{FeSiO3}.
On the other hand, let us focus to the Mars+CV case. Here the small amount of Mg will form magnesium-silicates, then the excess of Si will form \ce{SiO2} and \ce{FeSiO3}. The Fe/Si=3.43 tells us that there is iron in excess compared to Si. The Fe/O=1.19 and (Fe+Si)/O=1.53 also tell us that there is not enough oxygen available to oxidise all the iron. As a consequence, we expect to see a certain amount of iron to be stable in its metallic form, and \ce{FeS} given the presence of sulfure in the mixture. Sulfur is also present in the case for Mars+EH, Mars+CI and Mars+Comet. If large amount of sulfur is available, as in the the Mars+EH impact, MgS also becomes a stable sulfide.
Interesting cases are also the Mars+Mars and Mars+CI. Here, the high Fe/Si ratios but low Fe/O ratios return large amount of several iron oxides: there is no enough Si to form large amount of iron-silicates, thus the O binds directly the iron in several iron-oxides. The Mars+EH impact clearly shows the effect of the sulfide-rich impactor given the presence of MgS together with FeS.
Our calculations show that different impactors result in dust with traceable different composition. This open the possibility to identify the individual composition of the impactor from the determination of the dust composition of Phobos and from the samples collected by the MMX mission.
In conclusion, dust from different bodies will be characterized by different i) degrees of iron-oxidation, ii) presence of iron-silicates and/or iron-oxides, iii) amount of sulfides, iv) amount of carbon and ice. All the condensation sequences return a generally poor content of olivine and pyroxene, with a preference of the latter. A qualitative analysis of different elemental ratios can then be useful to derive the chemistry of impactors that are not considered in this work.
\subsubsection{Carbon, water ice and other volatiles}
\label{carbonwater}
In our calculations we see the appearance of solid C in the case of Mars+CV, Mars+CI and Mars+comet, while \ce{SiC} is the most stable C-bearing compound in the case of Mars+EH . Mars+CV, Mars+CI and Mars+comet have carbon and hydrogen in the gas mixture, while in the Mars+EH case there is carbon only.
The carbon-to-oxygen ratio (C/O) is an important parameter that determines the presence of solid carbon, water vapour and other oxides. At high temperature CO(g) will consume all the C available before allowing the formation of water vapour \citep{1975GeCoA..39..389L}. This has strong implication in the formation of complex organics and water (if hydrogen is present in the system).
The chemistry of carbon cannot be totally determined by thermodynamic equilibrium. The behaviour of CO(g) in a \ce{H2O}(g)-\ce{H2}(g) gas in the temperature range of $100< T\rm{(K)}<700$~K is ruled by kinetics and the environmental condition. The classical transition around $T\sim700$~K where \ce{CO}(g) is transformed in \ce{CH4} can be described, for example, by a reaction of the type $n\ce{CO}+(1+2n)\ce{H2} \rightleftharpoons \ce{C_{n}H_{2n+2}} + n\ce{H2O}$. This can be noticed in Fig.\ref{fig5}(right) where $n=1$ and the reaction is $\ce{CO}(g)+3\ce{H2}(g)\rightleftharpoons \ce{CH4}(g) + \ce{H2O}(g)$.
In fact, this reaction is just a first simplified transcription of the many Fischer-Tropsh-like reactions that can occur in this temperature range and at different \ce{H2}/\ce{CO} ratios \citep{2006M&PS...41..715S,2008ApJ...673L.225N}. Fischer-Tropsh processes produce complex organics on the surface of dusty grains in the presence of the right catalyst. There are different catalysts with their own properties, but usually, in astrophysics context, the iron-based Fischer-Tropsh is the most considered because the abundances of this element in the Solar Nebula \citep{1988oss..conf...51F,2009ARA&A..47..481A}.
There are numerous competitive reactions that determine the rate and the production of organics \citep{1988oss..conf...51F} and several theoretical models have been largely described in material science (see for example the work of \citet{Zimmerman1990}). However, the resulting amount of organics is extremely difficult to calculate theoretically when an astrophysical environment is considered. This comes from the large uncertainty in determining, for example, the amount and the surface of catalyst available.
\begin{figure}
\center
{\includegraphics[width=0.5\columnwidth]{fig4.pdf}}
\caption{Thermodynamic calculations in the +comet case shows a possible pathway for the condensation of graphite. In fact, together with the well known transformation of \ce{CO}(g) in \ce{CH4}(g) ($\ce{CO}(g)+3\ce{H2}(g)\rightleftharpoons \ce{CH4}(g) + \ce{H2O}(g)$), we do see the following reaction: $\ce{CO}(g)+\ce{H2}(g)\rightleftharpoons \ce{C} + \ce{H2O}(g)$ that occurs at temperature lower than T=600~K.}
\label{fig4}
\end{figure}
Nevertheless, the possible pathways to the formation of carbon-rich material are vastly more numerous. In our Mars+comet case, for example, the reaction $\ce{CO}(g)+\ce{H2}(g)\rightleftharpoons \ce{C} + \ce{H2O}(g)$ becomes active as well. This is clearly seen in figure~\ref{fig4} where \ce{H2}(g) and \ce{CO{g}} are depleting as \ce{CH4}(g), \ce{H2O}(g) and C become more stable. In this work we do not perform any kinetics calculation and, since we have only few carbon-solids in our list, we can only suggest that the presence of C and H in Mars+CI, Mars+Comet and Mars+CV impacts can produce complex organics and carbon-enriched dust. The case of Mars+CV is then extremely interesting because there may be enough metallic iron, together with carbon, to enhance the production of complex organics.
Equilibrium calculations return an efficient evaporation of the carbon rich dust present in the impactor. However, the rate of vaporisation will be driven by the physical and chemical properties of the carbon species. For example, carbon rich insoluble organic material (IOM), if present, could survive the impact as it is refractory \citep{2006mess.book..625P}. This could reduce the amount of carbon released in the gas phase. Nevertheless, the presence of carbon in the MMX samples in the form of new condensates and/or in IOM will still be tracer of the nature of the impactor.
In section~\ref{results} we pointed out that the gas-mixture is volatile-enriched. Figure~\ref{fig3} shows that K-, Na-, and Zn-silicates are stable as the temperature drops. Mono atomic Zn is also predicted for the Mars+EH and Mars+Mars case. There are no dramatic differences between the considered impactors when K, Na and Zn are taken into account.
In conclusion, the condensing dust will be volatile (and in some cases, also carbon) enriched compared to the solids that result from the cooling melts. The presence of volatile-rich dust in MMX samples will thus indicate that vaporization followed by condensation had occurred and no volatiles left the system. Moreover, since Na, K and Zn condense at different temperature, their presence/absence could return information on the temperature at which aggregation of a given sample occurred.
Mars+CI and Mars+comet are the only cases for which, at low temperature, we see condensation of water vapour into ice. The presence of ice will favour secondary alteration of the dust allowing, for example, the formation of phyllosilicates \citep{1998M&PS...33.1113B}.
\subsection{Solids composition}
\label{melts}
In table~\ref{table5} we reported the resulting CIPW-norm of the solids if complete equilibration between Mars and impactor occurred. The composition of the solids generally comprises olivine (forsterite and fayalite) and pyroxene (enstatite and ferrosilite). \citet{2016ApJ...828..109R} calculated the CIPW normative mineralogy for a Mars, Moon and IDP like impactor. They found that the resulting composition of a mars-like impactor would be olivine and pyroxene rich. In particular their CIPW-norm for Mars is characterized by high olivine content ($olivine/pyroxene > 1$).
Our results for the Mars+Mars case show that the solids (deprived of all the vaporized material) will have an $olivine/pyroxene \sim 1$, whereas the other cases return a $olivine/pyroxene < 1$.
There are no dramatic differences between the solids that results from different impactors (except for the aforementioned corundum in the comet case). It is interesting to note that solids that result form cooling melts do not show as much as variation in their composition compared to the dust. The resulting composition of solids appears, thus, to contain less information on the origin of the impactor compared to the large quantities of clues that can be derived from condensed dust. Nonetheless, the composition of melts can be affected by different cooling conditions, microgravity and gas fugacities. \citet{NAGASHIMA2006193} and \citet{2008070620c} performed laboratory experiments on cooling forsterite and enstatite melts. They found that different cooling rates and microgravity can alter and even suppress crystallisation only allowing the formation of glass material. Further experimental investigations are already planned in order to derive predictions of the composition of the cooling melts.
On the physical point of view, condensates and solids from melts may be distinguished by their different crystalline structure, microporosity, zoning, interconnections between different phases. Indeed, the resulting physical properties of dust from gas and solids from melts are determined by many factors \citep{nishinaga2014handbook}. Furthermore \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} showed that while the size of dust would be in the order of 0.1$\sim$10$\mu$m, solids from melts can reach 1$\sim$10m in size and then they can be grinded down to $\sim$100$\mu$m. We could, thus, expect to find different size distributions when dust and solids are compared.
\subsection{Infrared spectra of Phobos}
\label{infraredspectra}
\citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G} presented a detailed investigation on the possible composition of the dust and rocks present on the Phobos surface. They suggested that the ``blue'' part of Phobos is consistent with phyllosilicates while the ``red'' region is compatible with the presence of feldspar. No bulk chondrite compositions are able to reproduce the current observation \citep{2011P&SS...59.1308G}.
Phyllosilicates are not product of condensations but derive from secondary alterations of silicates \citep{1998M&PS...33.1113B} and, as a consequence, they are not predictable with our calculations, although we do have all the dust (silicates) at the base of their formation. The major feldspar compounds are orthoclase (\ce{KAlSi3O8}), albite (\ce{NaAlSi3O8}), and anorthite (\ce{CaAl2Si2O8}). Not all of them are compatible with our model as Na and K are separated from Al after the impact and others are the predicted stable compounds. On the other hand we do see the formation of anorthite (see Table~\ref{table5}).
Nevertheless \citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G} stressed that more fine modelling is needed as a mixture of different materials made of fine grains could also produce the observed trends. This becomes important as previous modelling focused on the analysis of the spectral properties of ``external'' objects (such as different types of asteroids) to match the observed spectra, as the capture scenario suggests. The impact-generated scenario imposes to re-think this approach.
\citet{2016ApJ...828..109R} analysed the resulting composition of the melts generated by different impactors in order to find a match with the observations. They concluded that more than the melt, the gas-to-dust condensation in the outer part of an impact-generated disk could be able to explain the Phobos and Deimos spectral properties. This further suggests that our derived dust may play an important part in producing the observed trends. Moreover, since the \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} disc model shows that melt would be mixed with the gas, the combined effect of {\it dust} and {\it solids} should be taken into account.
In this section we try to predict the effects of our mixed material (dust plus solids) on the infrared spectra. In the introduction we presented possible mechanisms listed by \citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G} that could be able to reproduce the observed trend in the VIS-NIR. Here we recall them and compare with our results:
i) {\it Low percentage of iron-rich olivine and pyroxene can reduce the spectra}. Our resulting dust mixtures generally have a very low concentration ($\sim 1/$~mol\% ) of iron-rich olivine (fayalite, \ce{Fe2SiO4}) and pyroxene (ferrosilite, \ce{FeSiO3}). Only the high temperature region of Mars+CI shows a larger amount of fayalite (see Fig.~\ref{fig2}).
ii) {\it A mixture of opaque material (metal iron, iron-oxide, and carbon) reduce the emissivity}. We do have a metallic iron-rich dust that results from several impactors (Mars+CV, Mars+EH, and Mars+Mars only at low temperature). Carbon dust is also seen in our calculations (Mars+CV, Mars+CI, Mars+comet). Moreover, together with Fe, iron sulfide (\ce{FeS}), that we see in Mars+CV, Mars+EH, Mars+CI, Mars+comet, is opaque and featureless in the NIR , but may be recognizable in the MID-IR \citep{Wooden2008,2011ppcd.book..114H}.
iii) {\it Quenched material lacks of perfect crystalline structure and, thus, reflectance}. Solids from the melts, in our final assemblage, can have the characteristics suggested by \citet{2011P&SS...59.1308G}.
iv) {\it The reflectance of fine grains is reduced}. The average size of the condensed dust is in the order of 0.1$\sim$10$\mu$m \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H}.
Our proposed model of Phobos as a result of accretion of dust from gas condensation and solids from melts, together with our derived chemical composition looks promising when discussing spectra. Nevertheless there are some aspects that needs further investigation: i) it is important, at this point, to derive the MIDIR spectra of our propose mixtures, and then ii) estimate the effect of space weathering on it and on the resulting albedo. These points can be set as main topic for future works.
\subsection{Limitations}
\label{limitations}
In this work we assume thermodynamic equilibrium (where all the reactions rates are much shorter than the disk cooling timescale) and mass conservation. All the material is available for reaction until the equilibrium is reached at any given temperature. This may be not always the case. As dust condenses out from the gas, it can be subject to different drag forces and it can separate from the current environment. This process can lead to the so called ``fractionated'' condensation sequence. If this is the case, a given dust grain can become representative of the temperature, pressure, gas mixture and dust species that were present when its condensation occurred.
Moreover, dust from secondary condensations (from a now fractionated gas) may then form. These fractionated and incomplete condensation sequences have been the subject of several studies \citep{2000M&PS...35..601H,2009M&PS...44..531B,2016MNRAS.457.1359P} which all show that different pathways of condensation can depart from the main line. For example, \citet{2016MNRAS.457.1359P} showed that, starting with a gas of solar composition, a mixture of enstatite-rich and \ce{SiO2}-rich dust can be produced in case of systematic sharp separation between dust and gas. \ce{SiO2} is a condensate that is not predicted (``incompatible'') when solar abundances are considered.
In this work we do not perform fractionated condensation sequences as numerous are the possible pathways. However, in the same way, the presence of some ``incompatible'' condensates together with ``predictable'' dust in the same MMX sample may point out to incomplete or secondary condensation.
As mentioned, \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H} demonstrated that there will be likely no complete equilibration between the melts of Mars and the melts of the impactor. What is likely to occur is a wide spectrum with different degrees of equilibration. A random sampling of solids may, thus, show material that come from Mars, the impactor or several degrees of mixing.
In our calculations we kept the pressure constant and fixed at $P=10^{-4}$~bar as in \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H}. In general, lower pressures (in order of magnitude) move the condensation of the dust toward lower temperatures \citep{Yoneda1995,1998A&A...332.1099G}. In this case, for our given temperature, more material could vaporize and go into the gas-phase. Increasing the pressure (in order of magnitude) has the opposite effect as the condensation temperature increases. As a consequence, we could observe different amount of Fe, Mg, and Si moving to the gas phase. Changes in disk pressure may also occur if large amount of volatiles are injected in the system after the impact. This could be the case of the Mars+comet impact where the release of \ce{H2O}(g) and \ce{CO(g)} could change the total pressure in the disk increasing it, or when a water-rich Mars is considered \citep{2017ApJ...845..125H}. Observed deviations from the predicted trends could then be associated to strong variation in the pressure in the Mars' Moons formation region of the disk or, in fact, to a radial gradient of temperature and pressure in the disk. As reference for future experimental work we report in appendix B (see Fig.\ref{fig6}) the partial pressures of the major gas component for Mars+CI, Mars+CV, and Mars+comet impacts. These are the impacts that produce the larger amount of gas such as \ce{H2O}(g) and \ce{CO}(g). These values can be used to set up the conditions in which experiments can be performed.
\section{Conclusions}
\label{conclusions}
In this work we used thermodynamic equilibrium calculation to investigate the chemical composition of dust (from condensing gas) and solids (from cooling melt) as the building blocks of Phobos and Deimos in the impact-generated scenario with the thermodynamic conditions of \citet{2017ApJ...845..125H}.
We found that dust and solids have different chemical and physical properties. Dust carries more information on the impactor than the solids. Our results show that it would be possible to distinguish from different types of impactors as each case returns several unique tracers in the dust: a Mars+CV has large quantities of metallic iron, \ce{SiO2}, iron sulfides and carbon; Mars+Comet has pyroxenes and the largest carbon and ice reservoir. Mars+EH impact has dust with high metallic iron content, \ce{SiO2}, sulfides (\ce{FeS} and \ce{MgS}) and traces of \ce{SiC}. Impact with Mars-like objects returns several iron-oxides, and the dust in Mars+CI has iron-oxides, water ice and carbon.
The presence/absence of metallic iron, iron-silicates, iron-oxides, sulfides, carbon and water ice can be considered as clues of different impactors. Deviations from the derived compositions can be then ascribed to fractionated condensation sequences and/or strong variations in the disk pressure and/or impactors with different elemental composition than investigated in this study.
The giant impact scenario imposes to re-think the dust modelling for the infrared spectra, as Phobos, in this case, would be made of a complex mixture of dust and solids and not of a pre-built object as the capture scenario suggests. A qualitative analysis suggests that our derived composition of dust and solid can be compatible with the characteristic of the Phobos VIS-NIR spectra.
In conclusion, the proposed scenario of Phobos as the result of accretion of dust and solid in an impact-generated disk can reconcile with both the dynamical and spectral properties of the Mars' moon. Our dust tracers can be then used in the analysis of the samples returned by the JAXA's MMX mission.
\software{HSC (v8; \citet{roine2002outokumpu})}
\acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions that let us investigate our assumptions in more details which improved the manuscript. The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of ANR-15-CE31-0004-1 (ANR CRADLE), INFINITI (INterFaces Interdisciplinaires Num\`erIque et Th\`eorIque), UnivEarthS Labex program at Sorbonne Paris Cit´e (ANR-10-
LABX-0023 and ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02). PR has been financially supported, for his preliminary contribution to this work, by the Belgian PRODEX programme managed by the European Space Agency in collaboration with the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office. SC, RH, and HG acknowledge the financial support of the JSPS-MAEDI bilateral joint research project (SAKURA program). HG also acknowledges JSPS KAKENHI Grant Nos. JP17H02990 and JP17H06457, and thanks the Astrobiolgy Center of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS).
\vspace{5mm}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,443 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/density-operator-quantum-mechanics.662959\/","text":"Density operator quantum mechanics\n\n1. Jan 7, 2013\n\npere\n\nI have the following situation: About the polarization of the photon, I introduce the basis:\n\nHorizontal polarization $|\\leftrightarrow>=\\binom{1}{0}$\nVertical polarization $|\\updownarrow>=\\binom{0}{1}$\n\nThe density matrix in this problem is:\n\n$$\\rho =\\frac{1}{2}\\begin{pmatrix} 1+\\xi _{1} & \\xi_{2}-i\\xi _{3}\\\\ \\xi_{2}+i\\xi _{3} & 1-\\xi _{1} \\end{pmatrix}$$\n\nThe Stokes parameters are: $\\xi _{1}, \\xi _{2}, \\xi _{3}$\n\nThe probability that if the photon has got lineal polarization whose axis forms an angle $\\theta$ with de horizontal is:\n\n$$|w>=cos\\theta |\\leftrightarrow>+sin\\theta|\\updownarrow>$$\n\n$$P_{\\theta}=<w|\\rho|w>=\\frac{1}{2}\\left ( 1+\\xi_{1}cos(2\\theta)+\\xi_{2}sin(2\\theta) \\right )$$\n\nIs there any value of the [Stokes parameters](http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stokes_parameters) for which this probability is zero?\n1. The problem statement, all variables and given\/known data\n\n2. Relevant equations\n\n3. The attempt at a solution","date":"2018-01-16 20:23:10","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7966485619544983, \"perplexity\": 1463.4958771528616}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 5, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2018-05\/segments\/1516084886639.11\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20180116184540-20180116204540-00287.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
/*
* Hibernate, Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java
*
* License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1 or later
* See the lgpl.txt file in the root directory or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html
*/
package org.hibernate.query.sqm.tree.expression;
import org.hibernate.persister.queryable.spi.BasicValuedExpressableType;
import org.hibernate.query.sqm.consume.spi.SemanticQueryWalker;
/**
* @author Steve Ebersole
*/
public class LiteralStringSqmExpression extends AbstractLiteralSqmExpressionImpl<String> {
public LiteralStringSqmExpression(String value, BasicValuedExpressableType sqmExpressableTypeBasic) {
super( value, sqmExpressableTypeBasic );
}
@Override
public <T> T accept(SemanticQueryWalker<T> walker) {
return walker.visitLiteralStringExpression( this );
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 5,273 |
import React from 'react'
import HTML5Backend from 'react-dnd-html5-backend'
import {DndProvider} from 'react-dnd'
export default function<TProps extends {}>(
Component: React.ComponentClass<TProps> | React.StatelessComponent<TProps>
) {
return (props: TProps) => (
<DndProvider backend={HTML5Backend}>
<Component {...props} />
</DndProvider>
)
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,794 |
package com.spectralogic.ds3autogen.java.generators.requestmodels;
import com.google.common.collect.ImmutableList;
import com.spectralogic.ds3autogen.api.models.Arguments;
import com.spectralogic.ds3autogen.api.models.Ds3Request;
import static com.spectralogic.ds3autogen.utils.Helper.removeVoidArguments;
import static com.spectralogic.ds3autogen.utils.RequestConverterUtil.getRequiredArgsFromRequestHeader;
public class StringRequestPayloadGenerator extends BaseRequestGenerator {
/**
* Gets the list of Arguments needed to create the request constructor. This
* includes all non-void required parameters, request header arguments, and
* the RequestPayload
*/
@Override
public ImmutableList<Arguments> toConstructorArgumentsList(
final Ds3Request ds3Request) {
final ImmutableList.Builder<Arguments> builder = ImmutableList.builder();
builder.addAll(getRequiredArgsFromRequestHeader(ds3Request));
builder.addAll(removeVoidArguments(toArgumentsList(ds3Request.getRequiredQueryParams())));
builder.add(new Arguments("String", "RequestPayload"));
return builder.build();
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,921 |
Эксперимент с уровнем Бедфорда — это серия наблюдений за уровнем расположенной в Кембриджширских болотах реки , длина которой составляет 6 миль (9,7 км), в XIX и начале XX века с целью измерения кривизны Земли. Британский изобретатель и писатель Сэмюэл Бирли Роуботэм, который провёл первые наблюдения в 1838 году, утверждал, что доказал плоскую форму Земли. Однако в 1870 году, скорректировав метод Роуботэма, чтобы избежать влияния атмосферной рефракции, натуралист Альфред Рассел Уоллес обнаружил кривизну, соответствующую шарообразной Земле. Несмотря на это, эксперимент повлиял на возникновение псевдонаучного Общества плоской Земли и в целом на дениалистские представления о плоской Земле в XX—XXI веках.
Уровень Бедфорда
В точке, выбранной для всех экспериментов, река представляет собой медленно текущий дренажный канал, идущий по непрерывной прямой линии на протяжении 9,7 км к северо-востоку от деревни . Это делает её идеальным местом для прямого измерения кривизны Земли, как писал Роуботэм в книге «Зететическая астрономия» ().
Эксперимент Роуботэма
Первый эксперимент был проведён Роуботэмом летом 1838 года. Он зашёл в реку и с помощью телескопа, установленного на высоте 8 дюймов (20 см) над водой, наблюдал за лодкой с флагом на мачте на высоте 3 футов (91 см) над водой, которая медленно отплывала от него. Он сообщил, что судно постоянно оставалось в поле его зрения на протяжении всех 6 миль (9,7 км) до моста Уэлни, тогда как, если бы поверхность воды была изогнута в соответствии с принятой окружностью шарообразной Земли, верхушка мачты должна была находиться на расстоянии около 11 футов (3,4 м) ниже линии его зрения. Он опубликовал это наблюдение под псевдонимом Параллакс в 1849 году и впоследствии расширил его в книге «Земля — не глобус» (), опубликованной в 1865 году.
Атмосферная рефракция
Атмосферная рефракция может привести к результатам, отмеченным Роуботэмом и Блаунт. Поскольку плотность воздуха в земной атмосфере уменьшается с высотой над поверхностью Земли, все лучи света, идущие почти горизонтально, отклоняются вниз, так что линия визирования становится кривой. Это явление регулярно учитывается при нивелировании и астрономической навигации.
Аналогичные эксперименты
25 июля 1896 года Улисс Грант Морроу, редактор газеты, провел аналогичный эксперимент на Старом Иллинойском дренажном канале () в поселении , штат Иллинойс. В отличие от Роуботэма, он стремился продемонстрировать, что поверхность Земли искривлена: когда он тоже обнаружил, что его целевой ориентир, расположенный на высоте 18 дюймов (46 см) над уровнем воды и на расстоянии 5 миль (8 км), хорошо виден, он пришел к выводу, что поверхность Земли имеет вогнутую форму, что соответствовало ожиданиям его спонсоров, общества «». Полученные результаты были отвергнуты критиками как результат атмосферной рефракции.
См. также
Примечания
Источники
Физические эксперименты
История геодезии
Теория плоской Земли
История географии | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,279 |
Q: I changed my system path in system variables, how can I bring it back to what it was? I've been trying to unlock my htc device's bootloader and I couldn't get a fastboot command from the cmd to work. I had tried everything and eventually I found this site which said that I just have to change the path in the system variables to C:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools;. I did not save the original one (it was something with ''java'' and ''oracle'', I only remember that). Now it looks like this:
It didn't help a thing and when I tried to download a torrent, I got an error saying ''The system cannot find the path specified. (WriteToDisk)'' so I assumed I messed something up by altering the path in the system variables.
I'm kinda new to this stuff, please help!
A: Option 1: Copy from last known good configuration
Environment variables are stored in this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment
Whenever you shut down Windows successfully, a backup copy of the current control set is created, which is called the "last known good configuration". This is typically stored in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002
So, if you have not rebooted since this happened, you should be able to find your old path in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Session Manager\Environment\Path
Just copy that to the Path value in the current control set (the key at the top of this post).
Caveat:
Typically, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM contains CurrentControlSet, ControlSet001, and ControlSet002. CurrentControlSet is actually a pointer to whichever control set is currently being used, which is usually ControlSet001, and the last known good configuration is usually ControlSet002.
However, this is not guaranteed to be the case. You may also have ControlSet000 and/or ControlSet003 (maybe even 004 or more, but that's the most I've ever seen). It's also possible that the current control set won't be 001 and the last known good won't be 002.
To be on the safe side, you can check this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select
The value LastKnownGood within this key stores the number of the control set that has the last known good configuration. So, if LastKnownGood contains the number 0x00000002, that means that the last known good configuration is in ControlSet002 (similarly, the value Current stores the number of the control set to which CurrentControlSet points).
You can find more information about how control sets work in this KB article.
Option 2: Copy from the automatic registry backups
If you can't get the old path from the last known good config, all is not lost. Once per week, windows automatically backs up the registry. The backups can be found in this directory:
C:\Windows\System32\config\RegBack
The file named SYSTEM contains everything in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM (the system hive). However, retrieving data from this file can be a major pain, because it's locked open while Windows is running (beats my why it needs be constantly open, since it's a backup, but that's the way it is).
Note that Option 2 is not only a lot more difficult, it also takes away Option 1, because it requires you to shut down Windows, and if you do that the last known good config will be overwritten by your current config. So, definitely try Option 1 first. If you have to resort to the second option, here's how you can do it:
*
*Create a system repair disk. To do that, simply open the Start menu and type "system repair" into the search box, then select Create a System Repair Disc from the top of the search results.
*Boot with the repair disk. When you see the System Recovery Options wizard, click Next, then wait for it to search for Windows installations and click Next again. Under Choose a recovery tool, select Command Prompt.
*In the command prompt, find your system drive. C: will be something different, and your system's C: drive will probably be D:. You can check by listing the directory with dir d: and seeing if it looks like a Windows installation (has directories named Program Files, Windows, Users, and other stuff). Copy the system hive file somewhere else, for example
copy D:\Windows\system32\config\RegBack\SYSTEM D:\Temp\SYSTEM_backup_copy
The destination can be any directory and filename you choose, just make sure you remember where it is.
*Reboot. You can close the command prompt and click the Restart button, or simply power cycle the computer.
*Download regfileexport and unzip.
*Open a command prompt and change to the directory where you unzipped regfileexport. Export the copy of the system hive to a text file. Using the locations from my examples, the commands would be:
cd \DirectoryWhereYouUnzippedRegfileexport
regfileexport C:\Temp\SYSTEM_backup_copy C:\Temp\system_hive_backup.txt
Again, the destination can be any directory and filename of your choice. The file will be a reg file, but I think it's safer to give it a .txt extension instead of .reg, since you're not planning on exporting it.
*Open the text file and search for Session Manager\Environment. You'll see the key name in brackets. All the values, including Path, will be listed underneath it.
Note that Option 2 is only available if you take action before the next automatic weekly registry backup. To find out when that will happen, just look at the dates of the most recent files in the RegBack directory and add a week.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 8,951 |
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/dillonconsulting /lifeatdillon | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,388 |
Characteristics: Noise free, mounts to any structure from outside any bin, won't damage the vessel.
Description: eliminates flow problems, restores bin capacity.
An Airsweep® System consists of strategically located aerator head assemblies, solenoid valves, electronic sequence controller, and air receiver. The system can operate independently, or can be easily integrated with other equipment or automation system. Based on requirements, the system is set to sequentially pulse burst of high velocity air along the container wall; each pulse with the ability to dislodge up to an 8' diameter area. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,978 |
Q: How to make a class available to Spring within Tomcat? I'm working with an application which has a modular architecture - each module is contained in a WAR file running on top of Tomcat. One of the modules allows users to extend its functionality with a request Interceptor interface, which is @Autowired into the class by Spring.
I'm working on a custom Interceptor and would like to make it available to Spring for autowiring within the module. Until now I've been building a custom version of the module's WAR which contains my interceptor, but I do not feel that this is a clean approach because the idea was to make the application easily extensible, and building my own fork for this reason seems to almost eliminate the benefits of the Interceptor interface.
I know one possibility is to crack the WAR open (it's just a ZIP archive) and drop a custom JAR in there, but that doesn't feel right either. Perhaps there is a way of adding custom JARs using Maven? Is there an industry-standard way of doing this?
A: I think I have at least a partial answer, everyone is welcome to provide a better one.
There is a helpful documentation page about class loading in Tomcat. It describes where classes are loaded from, snippets which are most interesting to a casual reader are reproduced below:
unpacked classes and resources in $CATALINA_BASE/lib
JAR files in $CATALINA_BASE/lib
unpacked classes and resources in $CATALINA_HOME/lib
JAR files in $CATALINA_HOME/lib
WebappX — A class loader is created for each web application that is deployed in a single Tomcat instance. All unpacked classes and resources in the /WEB-INF/classes directory of your web application, plus classes and resources in JAR files under the /WEB-INF/lib directory of your web application, are made visible to this web application, but not to other ones.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 274 |
using Entitas;
public class AnalyticsServiceComponent : IComponent
{
public IAnalyticsService service;
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 733 |
{"url":"https:\/\/docs.espressif.com\/projects\/esp-idf\/zh_CN\/latest\/esp32s2\/api-guides\/performance\/speed.html","text":"# Maximizing Execution Speed\u00b6\n\n## Overview\u00b6\n\nOptimizing execution speed is a key element of software performance. Code that executes faster can also have other positive effects, like reducing overall power consumption. However, improving execution speed may have trade-offs with other aspects of performance such as Minimizing Binary Size.\n\n## Choose What To Optimize\u00b6\n\nIf a function in the application firmware is executed once per week in the background, it may not matter if that function takes 10 ms or 100 ms to execute. If a function is executed constantly at 10 Hz, it matters greatly if it takes 10 ms or 100 ms to execute.\n\nMost application firmwares will only have a small set of functions which require optimal performance. Perhaps those functions are executed very often, or have to meet some application requirements for latency or throughput. Optimization efforts should be targeted at these particular functions.\n\n## Measuring Performance\u00b6\n\nThe first step to improving something is to measure it.\n\n### Basic Performance Measurements\u00b6\n\nIf measuring performance relative to an external interaction with the world, you may be able to measure this directly (for example see the examples wifi\/iperf and ethernet\/iperf for measuring general network performance, or you can use an oscilloscope or logic analyzer to measure timing of an interaction with a device peripheral.)\n\nOtherwise, one way to measure performance is to augment the code to take timing measurements:\n\n#include \"esp_timer.h\"\n\nvoid measure_important_function(void) {\nconst unsigned MEASUREMENTS = 5000;\nuint64_t start = esp_timer_get_time();\n\nfor (int retries = 0; retries < MEASUREMENTS; retries++) {\nimportant_function(); \/\/ This is the thing you need to measure\n}\n\nuint64_t end = esp_timer_get_time();\n\nprintf(\"%u iterations took %ull milliseconds (%ull microseconds per invocation)\\n\",\nMEASUREMENTS, (end - start)\/1000, (end - start)\/MEASUREMENTS);\n}\n\n\nExecuting the target multiple times can help average out factors like RTOS context switches, overhead of measurements, etc.\n\n\u2022 Using esp_timer_get_time() generates \u201cwall clock\u201d timestamps with microsecond precision, but has moderate overhead each time the timing functions are called.\n\n\u2022 It\u2019s also possible to use the standard Unix gettimeofday() and utime() functions, although the overhead is slightly higher.\n\n\u2022 Otherwise, including hal\/cpu_hal.h and calling the HAL function cpu_hal_get_cycle_count() will return the number of CPU cycles executed. This function has lower overhead than the others. It is good for measuring very short execution times with high precision.\n\n\u2022 If making \u201cmicrobenchmarks\u201d (i.e. benchmarking only a very small routine of code that runs in less than 1-2 milliseconds) then flash cache performance can sometimes cause big variations in timing measurements depending on the binary. This happens because binary layout can cause different patterns of cache misses in a particular sequence of execution. If the test code is larger then this effect usually averages out. Executing a small function multiple times when benchmarking can help reduce the impact of flash cache misses. Alternatively, move this code to IRAM (see Targeted Optimizations).\n\n### External Tracing\u00b6\n\nThe \u5e94\u7528\u5c42\u8ddf\u8e2a\u5e93 allows measuring code execution with minimal impact on the code itself.\n\nIf the option CONFIG_FREERTOS_GENERATE_RUN_TIME_STATS is enabled then the FreeRTOS API vTaskGetRunTimeStats() can be used to retrieve runtime information about the processor time used by each FreeRTOS task.\n\nSEGGER SystemView is an excellent tool for visualizing task execution and looking for performance issues or improvements in the system as a whole.\n\n## Improving Overall Speed\u00b6\n\nThe following optimizations will improve the execution of nearly all code - including boot times, throughput, latency, etc:\n\n\u2022 Set CONFIG_ESPTOOLPY_FLASHMODE to QIO or QOUT mode (Quad I\/O). Both will almost double the speed at which code is loaded or executed from flash compared to the default DIO mode. QIO is slightly faster than QOUT if both are supported. Note that both the flash chip model and the electrical connections between the ESP32-S2 and the flash chip must support quad I\/O modes or the SoC will not work correctly.\n\n\u2022 Set CONFIG_COMPILER_OPTIMIZATION to \u201cOptimize for performance (-O2)\u201d. This may slightly increase binary size compared to the default setting, but will almost certainly increase performance of some code. Note that if your code contains C or C++ Undefined Behaviour then increasing the compiler optimization level may expose bugs that otherwise are not seen.\n\n\u2022 Avoid using floating point arithmetic (float). On ESP32-S2 these calculations are emulated in software and are very slow. If possible then use fixed point representations, a different method of integer representation, or convert part of the calculation to be integer only before switching to floating point.\n\n\u2022 Avoid using double precision floating point arithmetic (double). These calculations are emulated in software and are very slow. If possible then use an integer-based representation, or single-precision floating point.\n\n### Reduce Logging Overhead\u00b6\n\nAlthough standard output is buffered, it\u2019s possible for an application to be limited by the rate at which it can print data to log output once buffers are full. This is particularly relevant for startup time if a lot of output is logged, but can happen at other times as well. There are multiple ways to solve this problem:\n\n\u2022 Reduce the volume of log output by lowering the app CONFIG_LOG_DEFAULT_LEVEL (the equivalent bootloader setting is CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_LOG_LEVEL). This also reduces the binary size, and saves some CPU time spent on string formatting.\n\n\u2022 Increase the speed of logging output by increasing the CONFIG_ESP_CONSOLE_UART_BAUDRATE. (Unless using internal USB-CDC for serial console, in which case the serial throughput doesn\u2019t depend on the configured baud rate.)\n\n## Targeted Optimizations\u00b6\n\nThe following changes will increase the speed of a chosen part of the firmware application:\n\n\u2022 Move frequently executed code to IRAM. By default, all code in the app is executed from flash cache. This means that it\u2019s possible for the CPU to have to wait on a \u201ccache miss\u201d while the next instructions are loaded from flash. Functions which are copied into IRAM are loaded once at boot time, and then will always execute at full speed.\n\nIRAM is a limited resource, and using more IRAM may reduce available DRAM, so a strategic approach is needed when moving code to IRAM. See IRAM\uff08\u6307\u4ee4 RAM\uff09 for more information.\n\n\u2022 Jump table optimizations can be re-enabled for individual source files that don\u2019t need to be placed in IRAM. For hot paths in large switch cases this will improve performance. For instructions on how to add the -fjump-tables -ftree-switch-conversion options when compiling individual source files, see \u7ec4\u4ef6\u7f16\u8bd1\u63a7\u5236\n\n## Improving Startup Time\u00b6\n\nIn addition to the overall performance improvements shown above, the following options can be tweaked to specifically reduce startup time:\n\n\u2022 Minimizing the CONFIG_LOG_DEFAULT_LEVEL and CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_LOG_LEVEL has a large impact on startup time. To enable more logging after the app starts up, set the CONFIG_LOG_MAXIMUM_LEVEL as well and then call esp_log_set_level() to restore higher level logs. The system\/startup_time main function shows how to do this.\n\n\u2022 If using deep sleep, setting CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_SKIP_VALIDATE_IN_DEEP_SLEEP allows a faster wake from sleep. Note that if using Secure Boot this represents a security compromise, as Secure Boot validation will not be performed on wake.\n\n\u2022 Setting CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_SKIP_VALIDATE_ON_POWER_ON will skip verifying the binary on every boot from power-on reset. How much time this saves depends on the binary size and the flash settings. Note that this setting carries some risk if the flash becomes corrupt unexpectedly. Read the help text of the config item for an explanation and recommendations if using this option.\n\n\u2022 It\u2019s possible to save a small amount of time during boot by disabling RTC slow clock calibration. To do so, set CONFIG_ESP32S2_RTC_CLK_CAL_CYCLES to 0. Any part of the firmware that uses RTC slow clock as a timing source will be less accurate as a result.\n\nThe example project system\/startup_time is pre-configured to optimize startup time. The files system\/startup_time\/sdkconfig.defaults and system\/startup_time\/sdkconfig.defaults.esp32s2 contain all of these settings. You can append these to the end of your project\u2019s own sdkconfig file to merge the settings, but please read the documentation for each setting first.\n\nAs ESP-IDF FreeRTOS is a real-time operating system, it\u2019s necessary to ensure that high throughput or low latency tasks are granted a high priority in order to run immediately. Priority is set when calling xTaskCreate() or xTaskCreatePinnedToCore() and can be changed at runtime by calling vTaskPrioritySet().\n\nIt\u2019s also necessary to ensure that tasks yield CPU (by calling vTaskDelay(), sleep(), or by blocking on semaphores, queues, task notifications, etc) in order to not starve lower priority tasks and cause problems for the overall system. The Task Watchdog Timer provides a mechanism to automatically detect if task starvation happens, however note that a Task WDT timeout does not always indicate a problem (sometimes the correct operation of the firmware requires some long-running computation). In these cases tweaking the Task WDT timeout or even disabling the Task WDT may be necessary.\n\n### Built-In Task Priorities\u00b6\n\nESP-IDF starts a number of system tasks at fixed priority levels. Some are automatically started during the boot process, some are started only if the application firmware initializes a particular feature. To optimize performance, structure application task priorities so that they are not delayed by system tasks, while also not starving system tasks and impacting other functions of the system.\n\nThis may require splitting up a particular task. For example, perform a time-critical operation in a high priority task or an interrupt handler and do the non-time-critical part in a lower priority task.\n\nHeader components\/esp_system\/include\/esp_task.h contains macros for the priority levels used for built-in ESP-IDF tasks system.\n\nCommon priorities are:\n\n\u2022 Main task that executes app_main function has minimum priority (1).\n\n\u2022 High Resolution Timer system task to manage timer events and execute callbacks has high priority (22, ESP_TASK_TIMER_PRIO)\n\n\u2022 FreeRTOS Timer Task to handle FreeRTOS timer callbacks is created when the scheduler initializes and has minimum task priority (1, configurable).\n\n\u2022 Event Handling system task to manage the default system event loop and execute callbacks has high priority (20, ESP_TASK_EVENT_PRIO). This configuration is only used if the application calls esp_event_loop_create_default(), it\u2019s possible to call esp_event_loop_create() with a custom task configuration instead.\n\n\u2022 lwIP TCP\/IP task has high priority (18, ESP_TASK_TCPIP_PRIO).\n\n\u2022 Wi-Fi Driver task has high priority (23).\n\n\u2022 Wi-Fi wpa_supplicant component may create dedicated tasks while the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), WPA2 EAP-TLS, Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP) or BSS Transition Management (BTM) features are in use. These tasks all have low priority (2).\n\n\u2022 The Ethernet driver creates a task for the MAC to receive Ethernet frames. If using the default config ETH_MAC_DEFAULT_CONFIG then the priority is medium-high (15). This setting can be changed by passing a custom eth_mac_config_t struct when initializing the Ethernet MAC.\n\n\u2022 If using the mDNS component, it creates a task with default low priority 1 (configurable.\n\n\u2022 If using the MQTT component, it creates a task with default priority 5 (configurable, depends on CONFIG_MQTT_USE_CUSTOM_CONFIG (also configurable runtime by task_prio field in the esp_mqtt_client_config_t)\n\n### Choosing application task priorities\u00b6\n\nIn general, it\u2019s not recommended to set task priorities higher than the built-in Wi-Fi operations as starving them of CPU may make the system unstable. For very short timing-critical operations that don\u2019t use the network, use an ISR or a very restricted task (very short bursts of runtime only) at highest priority (24). Choosing priority 19 will allow lower layer Wi-Fi functionality to run without delays, but still preempts the lwIP TCP\/IP stack and other less time-critical internal functionality - this is the best option for time-critical tasks that don\u2019t perform network operations. Any task that does TCP\/IP network operations should run at lower priority than the lwIP TCP\/IP task (18) to avoid priority inversion issues.\n\nTask execution is always completely suspended when writing to the built-in SPI flash chip. Only IRAM \u5b89\u5168\u4e2d\u65ad\u5904\u7406\u7a0b\u5e8f will continue executing.\n\n## Improving Interrupt Performance\u00b6\n\nESP-IDF supports dynamic Interrupt allocation with interrupt preemption. Each interrupt in the system has a priority, and higher priority interrupts will preempt lower priority ones.\n\nInterrupt handlers will execute in preference to any task (provided the task is not inside a critical section). For this reason, it\u2019s important to minimize the amount of time spent executing in an interrupt handler.\n\nTo obtain the best performance for a particular interrupt handler:\n\n\u2022 Assign more important interrupts a higher priority using a flag such as ESP_INTR_FLAG_LEVEL2 or ESP_INTR_FLAG_LEVEL3 when calling esp_intr_alloc().\n\n\u2022 If you\u2019re sure the entire interrupt handler can run from IRAM (see IRAM \u5b89\u5168\u4e2d\u65ad\u5904\u7406\u7a0b\u5e8f) then set the ESP_INTR_FLAG_IRAM flag when calling esp_intr_alloc() to assign the interrupt. This prevents it being temporarily disabled if the application firmware writes to the internal SPI flash.\n\n\u2022 Even if the interrupt handler is not IRAM safe, if it is going to be executed frequently then consider moving the handler function to IRAM anyhow. This minimizes the chance of a flash cache miss when the interrupt code is executed (see Targeted Optimizations). It\u2019s possible to do this without adding the ESP_INTR_FLAG_IRAM flag to mark the interrupt as IRAM-safe, if only part of the handler is guaranteed to be in IRAM.","date":"2022-01-17 21:58:24","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.2044462263584137, \"perplexity\": 3963.5287278681512}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-05\/segments\/1642320300624.10\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220117212242-20220118002242-00025.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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