as old as Pausanias makes it) become defined and technical, like the degree of a Doctor, conferred by royal mandate. The age before the heroes, in Hesiod, is the age of the giants ; afterwards, the heroes themselves had the attribute of great size. Thus Pausanias^ says of Pulydamas, fxeyicTTo^ airavTwv eyeveTo avupcoircov^ TrArju twv rjpoooov KaKovimevooVy Kai €L crj TL aKKo rjv irpo twv rjpcocov uvr]Tov yevo^.
I can find no traces whatever of this use of the word in the Homeric Poems. They were composed (I do not speak of the hymns) at a time when the heroes were living and acting beings, or so very soon after, that no mystical associations had become connected with the name. There is no passage in them from which a mythological or tradi- tionary dignity must necessarily be inferred : the only ones to which we can apply such notions are the following. Posidaon, on beholding the bulwarks of the besiegers, com- plains:
Tov o TfTOL /cXeo9 hcTTai baov t eTrLKiovaTai rjai^' Tov o eTriXyjaoPTat^ 6 t eyco kul OoTpo9 AttoWooi^ rjpcp AaofxehovTL TroXiacra/uev aOXfjaavTe- H. vii. 451^ — 3.
This passage certainly proves nothing ; all that can be said is, that if we knew, from other sources, that Laomedon was a mythological hero, we should recognise the connection between him and the building of the walls by the gods, as a natural and consistent tradition. But the passage is gene- rally considered to belong to a later time than the body of the Iliad ; and so is the corresponding one at the begin- ning of the 12th book, in which the poet, after saying that the works of the besiegers would not long resist the Trojans, tells us that they were built without due honours being paid to the gods, and that after the destruction of Troy they were swept away by natural convulsions which the gods produced, and, among these, by the overflowing of the rivers ; and there he speaks thus of Simois,
Kal St/Jtoe^s, O0C TToXXa (ioaypia kol TpvCpaXeiac KCLTTTreaov ev KovLrjcri^ Kal rjixtOeijov yevos avopaii/. II. XII. 22 — 3.
This last expression is exactly in the spirit of the passage
8 Pausan. vi. 5. § 1.
