Memnon, 147 which it gradually assumes or discloses under the hands through which it successively passed. We have reason to congratulate ourselves on the pre- servation of the few lines in which Memnon is named or alluded to in the Odyssey (iv. 188. xi. 521). But for this lucky chance some critics would probably have asserted that the legend was wholly unknown in the age of Homer, and it would have been impossible to refute them. That it does not occur in the Iliad, where there would have been some difficulty in introducing it, cannot raise a reasonable doubt. Eustathius indeed informs us that there were persons who instead of /uer afxij/uLova^ AiOLowfjasj II. A. 423, read jnerd Mejuvovas AlOLowrja^:, imagining that the hero had given his name to an Ethiopian tribe ^ ! But we may very well dis- pense with this conceit, and still believe that the exploits of Memnon before Troy were as familiar to the poet of the Iliad as those of Achilles. The Odyssey however only speaks of Memnon as the son of Eos, as the most beautiful of mor- tals, and as the vanquisher of Antilochus. Hesiod, who calls him king of the Ethiopians (Th. 985), adds the name of his father Tithonus, whose history is related in the Homeric hymn (Ad Venerem 219 — 239). It may have been about the same time that Arctinus made the adventures of the Ethio- pian warrior the most prominent subject of an epic poem, the ^thiopis, of which we only know that it described the combat in which Memnon was slain by Achilles, and how his mother obtained Jupiter's leave to endow her son, as she had his father, with immortality. But as there is good reason for believing that Quintus Calaber in the first five books of his poem followed the JEthiopis very closely, it is highly pro- bable that most of the features of his narrative were drawn from Arctinus, and formed a part of the earliest tradition. In his second book, after the hopes of the Trojans have been dashed to the ground by the death of Penthesilea and her Amazons, Memnon arrives to the relief of the city with a countless host of Ethiopians. In his first interview with Priam he describes the immortal life of his father, and his ' Steph. Byz. Me/Jivove'S edvo9 AWlottikov o epfxijueveraL oJs 6 TloXviaTuyp (fiiiaiv dypiov^ Tiva's i; fiayifwv^, Kal xaXeirov^,
