How different is this from the case of Virgil, who has introduced a most beautiful and winning description of her in the Second Æneid[490], just when he brings her into action that she may acquit both Helen and Paris of all responsibility for the fall of Troy. It would have been not only natural for Homer, but, unless he was restrained by some strong reason, we may almost say it would have been inevitable, that he should have done for Venus what has been done in our own day, with very high classical effect, by Tennyson in his Œnone:
Idalian Aphrodite beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new bathed in Paphian wells, With rosy slender fingers backward drew From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And shoulder: from the violets her light foot Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form Between the shadows of the vine-branches Floated the glowing sun-light as she moved.
Upon the whole, I should confidently cite the treatment of Venus in the poems as being among the most satisfactory indications of the state of heroic Greece, and one of the most honourable tokens of the disposition of her Poet.
Besides Juno and Bacchus, Hephæstus or Vulcan is the only Homeric deity who bears upon him this unequivocal, or at least significant, mark of novelty, that we are supplied with a distinct tradition of his childhood[491]. In his youth he was rickety and lame. His mother Juno wished to conceal him, and she let him fall into the sea. Here Thetis and Eurynome received him, and reared him in a submarine cave, not, however, under the Mediterranean, but the Ocean; and in that cave for nine years the boy-smith employed himself in making ornaments for women.
He is thus associated by his traditions with the two opposing elements of water and fire; with water by the history of his childhood, and with fire as the grand instrument and condition of his art. The latter was by much the stronger association, for it was continually fed by the history and progress of the art itself; so that he became the impersonation of that element itself, and in the phrase φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο it is his name which gives the distinctive force; for φλὸξ in Homer seems to mean the flame or light of fire[492], and is not used to signify fire proper, except with some other word in conjunction to it or near it. But the explanation of the seeming contrariety is probably to be found in the hypothesis, that his worship was of Phœnician introduction; as the Phœnicians seem to have made the Greeks acquainted with the use of fire in working metals. If they made the deity known to the Greeks, this will account for his association with the idea of fire: and as accounts and traditions, which they had supplied, were evidently the source of all the more remote maritime delineations of Homer, (since they alone frequented Ocean and the distant seas,) this is the natural and easy explanation for the tradition of his childish arts in the oceanic cave. That he is thus, like the Phœnicians, for Homer, the meeting point of fire and water, appears clearly to stamp him as Phœnician or oriental in his origin, relatively to Greece.