[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.
Οὐδ᾽ εἰ Τανταλίδεω Πέλοπος βασιλεύτερος εἴη, etc.
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.