Polynices

“ The first book recapitulates the history given above, and then goes on to say that Polynicês went straight to Argos, and laid his grievance before King Adrastos (bk. i.) . While at Argos he married one of the king’s daughters, and Tydeus the other. ”

“ Giving and taking death in close embrace,
Or, if thou 'scapest, flinging upon thee,
As robber of his honour and his home,
The doom of exile such as he has borne.
So clamours he and so invokes the gods
Who guard his race and home, to hear and heed
The curse that sounds in Polynices' name!
He bears a round shield, fresh from forge and fire,
And wrought upon it is a twofold sign—
For lo, a woman leads decorously
The figure of a warrior wrought in gold ”

“ Polynesian chiefs sacred, iii. 136
—— mothers, their way of infusing a divine spirit into their unborn babes, iii. 69
—— myth of the separation of earth and sky, v. 283
Polynesians, oracular inspiration of priests among the, i. 377;
their mode of kindling fire, ii. 258;
their way of ridding themselves of sacred contagion, viii. 28
Polynices and Eteocles, their grave at Thebes, ii. 33
Polytheism evolved out of animism, ii. ”

“ Entombing shamefully a living soul. The whole plot of the Antigone really turns on the question of the burial of Polyneices, just as that of the Ajax depends upon the problem of the burial of Ajax. Eteocles and Polyneices had fallen in mutual combat as leaders in a war between the Argives and the Thebans, a combat which, from the existence of blood-relationship between the leaders, assumed the external aspect of civil war. The problem of guilt is obscured by political complications. ”

“ After the repulse of his foes, King Creon caused the body of Eteocles to be buried with the highest honors; but that of Polynikes was cast outside the gates as the corpse of a traitor, and death was threatened to any one who should dare to give it burial. This cruel edict, which no one else ventured to ignore, was set aside by Antigone, the sister of Polynikes. This brave maiden, with warm filial affection, had accompanied her blind father during his exile to Attica, and was now returned to Thebes to perform another holy duty. ”

“ From Caria stretched out, like a string of stepping-stones between Asia and Europe, the hundred islets of the Ægean, Cyclades, and Sporades, and others, inviting settlers, and conducting to the large islands of Crete and Euboea, and the shores of Attica and the Peloponnese. It is impossible to trace with any exactness the order in which the Phoenician colonies were founded. A thousand incidental circumstances—a thousand caprices—may have deranged what may be called the natural or geographical order, and have caused the historical order to diverge from it ”

“ In spite of their diffusion over a multitude of islands separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of miles of ocean, the Polynesians are on the whole a remarkably homogeneous race in physical type, language, and forms of society and religion. ”

“ The Greeks, as a general rule, made their advances by slow degrees, stealing on from point to point, and having always friendly cities near at hand, like an army that rests on its supports. The Phoenicians left long intervals of space between one settlement and another, boldly planted them on barbarous shores, where they had nothing to rely on but themselves, and carried them into regions where the natives were in a state of almost savagery. The commercial motive was predominant with them, and gave them the courage to plunge into wild seas and venture themselves among even wilder men. ”

“ Those who are familiar with these legends, and have studied native manners and customs, see many unmistakable proofs that the Polynesians had, at their migration, considerable knowledge and culture, and that the race has greatly deteriorated.
The Polynesians are physically a very fine race. On some islands they average 5 ft. 10 in. in height. De Quatrefages, in a table giving the stature of different races of men, [3] puts the natives of Samoa and Tonga as the tallest people in the world. ”

“ The inhabitants of Polynesia, are, like all those whose faith is primitive and simple, devoted to the worship of the Sun, which they regard as a divinity; and which they imagine at one time to have been a human being: they believe he married his sister, who, when all the rest of her family came upon earth, remained by herself in the skies, and from their union sprang the months. ”

“ But love was too strong for him. Nor indeed, were there wanting arguments on the other side. “Actually,” he said to himself, “I am a Greek no more; a Greek without a city is only not a barbarian in name.” This argument, of little weight, perhaps, in itself, gained force from the loveliness and mental charms of the young Pontia. She had long felt a distaste for the rough, uncultured life into which she had been born. The culture and refinement of her father’s young Greek guest charmed her. ”

“ And the things which civilisation has left behind or missed by the way are there, too, among the Polynesians: beauty and courtesy and mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or body that the wise value which these people lack. A man I met in some other islands, who had travelled much all over the world, said to me, "I have found no man, in or out of Europe, with the good manners and dignity of the Samoan, with the possible exception of the Irish peasant." ”

“ The new comer turned out to be a Portuguese deserter, who had abandoned his ship twenty years before, and had married the daughter of a chief of the island on which he now was. At the present moment, he filled the part of prime minister to the king, an office be could not have held in his own ungrateful country, since he could neither read nor write. These accomplishments, it appeared, were not, however, absolutely indispensable in Polynesia. It has been found that when a savage is transferred to Europe, he readily acquires the habits of civilized life. ”

“ Her father was a Greek of the Greeks. Poseidonia had been founded by Dorian settlers from Sybaris, who could not contrive to live on good terms with the Achaean Greeks that had become the predominant element in that city; and Hippocles, who claimed descent from the Messenian kings, yielded to none in nobility of birth. A purer type of the genuine Hellenes it would have been impossible to find. Pontia brought from the Lucanian hills, among which she had been reared, some of the best qualities, moral and physical, of the Italian race. ”

“ The universal belief in the passing of the spirits of the dead to the west, is to my mind a complete answer to those who hold that the Polynesian migrations were from the east. It is an essential part of Polynesian belief that the spirits rejoin those of the ancient dead and there dwell in a land of beauty and plenty, where the gods supply every want, and with whom communication is constant. The Polynesians would not locate this Paradise in the west, if their ancestral home was in the east. ”

“ Speaking of their beliefs touching the souls of the dead, the same writer says that the Polynesians “imagined they lived in a world of spirits, which surrounded them night and day, watching every action of their lives, and ready to avenge the slightest neglect or the least disobedience to their injunctions, as proclaimed by their priests. ”

“ Such a number of Greeks settled in Syria and Phoenicia under the Seleucidæ that to be a Tyrian or a Sidonian in the Græco-Roman period furnished no evidence at all of a man having any Phoenician blood in his veins. It will have been observed that the names of the Tyrian, Sidonian, and Berytian learned men and authors of the time—Antipater, Apollonius, Boëthus, Diodotus, Philo, Hermippus, Marinus, Paulus, Maximus, Porphyrius—are without exception either Latin or Greek. ”

“ Neither is it, in general, much easier to escape pursuit at the isles of Polynesia. Those of them which have felt a civilizing influence present the same difficulty to the runaway with the Peruvian ports, the advanced natives being quite as mercenary and keen of knife and scent as the retrograde Spaniards; while, owing to the bad odor in which all Europeans lie, in the minds of aboriginal savages who have chanced to hear aught of them, to desert the ship among primitive Polynesians, is, in most cases, a hope not unforlorn. ”

“ But when we come to inquire into the causes which operated to inspire this migration, we get little information beyond the explanation commonly given as the root of all Polynesian movements, that "great wars prevailed." If this be the true reason why a whole nation should move en masse, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that the future Polynesians were the defeated people, and were forced by irresistible waves of invasion to abandon their home in India. Slowly they were pushed southward and eastward by the more warlike tribes who came down from the north ”

“ Much, too, had those slaves to tell of all the splendid scenes which were hourly taking place in Constantinople, and the high favour and honour of their master, Paulinus, at the imperial court. Each feeling his importance increased by the honours and virtues of his lord, exalted in no measured terms the power and dignity of Paulinus; and to have heard the praises of his menials, one might believe that he excelled in learning and in talents the greatest men of literature's most golden days, and rivalled in the field the most renowned warriors of either Greece or Rome. ”

“ Polynesian Family.
The tribes included by Dumont d’Urville under the name of Polynesians inhabit the entire eastern part of Oceania, namely, the Sandwich Islands, the Marquesas, the Friendly and Society groups, the Low Archipelago, New Zealand, etc.
The people of all these bear the closest affinity to each other. Their complexion is olive, verging on brown, but not copper-coloured; they are tall in stature, and have sinewy limbs, high foreheads, black, lively, and expressive eyes, and but slightly flattened noses. ”

“ That they are of the same race that now inhabit the eastern and southern parts of Polynesia is beyond a doubt. That that race was settled in the Asiatic Archipelago centuries before the Christian era, I believe to be equally certain; but whether the emigration into Polynesia took place before the Christian era, or was occasioned by the invasion of the forefathers of the Malay family from India about the commencement of that era, there is nothing, that I am aware of, either in Polynesian, Malayan or Hindu traditions to throw any light upon. ”

“ I am thus led back to the proposition which I have already enunciated, that, whichever was the branch of the great Polynesian family, that in ages long past first settled upon these islands and here remained and increased, yet about twenty-eight generations ago, and for several generations succeeding, there arrived here an influx of new-comers from the same Polynesian family, who through their superior intellectual and physical prowess obtained the supremacy,—politically, morally and socially,—brought with them their genealogies, their religion, and their customs ”

“ From first to last under the Persian régime, Phoenician monarchs bear rule in the Phoenician cities,14259 and command the contingents which the cities furnish to any combined Persian fleet.
The friendly arrangement concluded between Phoenicia and Persia was followed, very naturally, by a further accession to the Persian power. Cyprus, whose population was in great part Phoenician, had for centuries been connected politically in the closest manner with the Phoenician towns on the Asiatic mainland, especially with Tyre and Sidon. ”

“ How soon or how long after that occupation the first adventurous Polynesians debouched into the Pacific, it is impossible to even conjecture. But we know that, about the commencement of the Christian era, new swarms of emigrants from middle and eastern India invaded the area occupied by the Polynesians and spread themselves from Sumatra to Timor, from Java to Manila, expelling, subjugating or isolating the previous occupants. ”

“ From this period, down through the ages until the day of their discovery by the Spaniards, the gulf which separated them from the rest of the human family remained unbridged, and the Polynesians were suffered to evolve their own racial peculiarities and develop their own national spirit, untrammelled by exterior influences. ”

“ Even those who were careless as to the great truths which the Polynesians had to learn, must feel, upon reflection, that merely to unteach the brutal and defiling lesson of ages of darkness was to confer a priceless blessing. ”

“ And the reason seems to be, that the Phoenicians, even more than the Greeks, affected a city autonomy. Each little band of immigrants, as soon as it had pushed its way into the sheltered tract between the mountains and the sea, settled itself upon some attractive spot, constructed habitations, and having surrounded its habitations with walls, claimed to be—and found none to dispute the claim—a distinct political entity. ”

“ Some short epigraphs on Assyrian gems, tablets, and cylinders belong apparently to about the same period. The series of Phoenician and Cilician coins begins soon after this, and continues to the time of the Roman supremacy in Western Asia. The soil of Phoenicia Proper, and of the various countries where the Phoenicians established settlements or factories, as Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, has also yielded a large crop of somewhat brief legends, the “inscription of Marseilles"0134 being the most important of them. ”