Ares . . . began the fray, and first leapt upon Athene, brazen spear in hand, and spake a word of reviling: "Wherefore now again, thou dog-fly, art thou making gods to clash with gods in strife .
. . ? Rememberest thou not what time . . . thyself in sight of all didst grasp the spear and let drive straight at me, and didst rend my fair flesh?"
This second encounter between Ares and Athene was also lost by Ares.
He [Ares] smote upon her tasselled aegis. . . . Thereon bloodstained Ares smote with his long spear. But she gave ground, and seized with her stout hand a stone that lay upon the plain, black and jagged and great. . . . Therewith she smote furious Ares on the neck, and loosed his limbs. . .
.
Pallas Athene broke into a laugh. . . . "Fool, not even yet hast thou learned how much mightier than thou I avow me to be, that thou matchest thy strength with mine."
Aphrodite came to wounded Ares, "took [him] by the hand, and sought to lead [him] away." But
"Athene sped in pursuit. . . . She smote Aphrodite on the breast with her stout hand . . . and her heart melted."
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These excerpts from the Iliad show that some cosmic drama was projected upon the fields of Troy. The commentators were aware that originally Ares was not merely the god of war, and that this quality is a deduced and secondary one. The Greek Ares is the Latin planet Mars; it is so stated in classic literature a multitude of times. In the so-called Homeric poems, too, it is said that Ares is a planet. The Homeric hymn to Ares reads:
Most mighty Ares . . . chieftain of valor, revolving thy fiery circle in ether among the seven wandering stars [planets], where thy flaming steeds ever uplift thee above the third chariot.6
But what might it mean, that the planet Mars destroys cities, or that the planet Mars is ascending the sky in a darkened cloud, or that it engages Athene (the planet Venus) in battle? Ares must have represented some element in nature, guessed the commentators. Ares must have been the personification of the raging storm, or the god of the sky, or the god of light, or a sun-god, and so on.7 These explanations are futile. Ares-Mars is what his name says—the planet Mars.
robin-bobin
I find in Lucian a statement which corroborates my interpretation of the cosmic drama in the Iliad. This author of the second century of the present era writes in his work On Astrology this most significant and most neglected commentary on the Homeric epics:
"All that he [Homer] hath said of Venus and of Mars his passion, is also manifestly composed from no other source than this science [astrology]. Indeed, it is the conjuncture of Venus and Mars that creates the poetry of Homer." 8
Lucian is unaware that Athene is the goddess of the planet Venus,9
6 The Odyssey of Homer with the Hymns (transl. Buckley), p. 399. The translation by H.
Evelyn-White (Hesiod volume in the Loeb Classical Library) is: "Who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the ether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear you above the third firmament of heaven." Allen, Holliday, and Sikes, The Homeric Hymns (1936), p. 385, regard the hymn to Ares as post-Homeric.
7 These divergent views are offered by L. Preller (Griechische Myihologie [1894]), G. F. Lauer
{System der griechischen Myihologie [1853], p. 224), F. G. Welcker (Griechische Gotterlehre, I
[1857], 415), and H. W. Stoll (Die urspriingliche Bedeutung des Ares [1855]).
8 Lucian. Astrology (transl. A. M. Harmon, 1936), Sec. 22.
9 In the same sentence Lucian identifies Venus with Aphrodite of the Iliad.
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and yet he knows the real meaning of the cosmic plot of the Homeric epic, which shows that the sources of his instruction in astrology were cognizant of the facts of the celestial drama.
My interpretation of the Homeric poem, I find, has been anticipated by still others. Who they were, it is impossible to say. However, Heraclitus, a little known author of the first century, who should not be confused with the philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, wrote a work on Homeric allegories.10 In his opinion, Homer and Plato were the two greatest spirits of Greece, and he tried to reconcile the anthropomorphic and satiric description of gods by Homer with the idealistic and metaphysical approach of Plato. In Paragraph 53 of his Allegories, Heraclitus confutes those who think that the battles of the gods in the Iliad signify collisions of the planets.
Thus I find that some of the ancient philosophers must have held the same opinion at which I arrived independently after a series of deductions.
The problem of the date when the Homeric epics originated was raised here, to be solved with the help of this criterion: If the cosmic battle between the planets Venus and Mars is mentioned there, then the epics could not have originated much before the year —800. If the earth and the moon are involved in this struggle, the time of the birth of the Iliad must be lowered to —747 at least and probably to an even later date. The first earthshaking contact with our planet had already taken place, and for this reason Ares is repeatedly called "bane of mortals, blood-stained stormer of walls."
Homer was thus, at the earliest, a contemporary of the prophets Amos and Isaiah, or more likely he lived shortly after them. The Trojan War and the cosmic conflict were synchronous; the time of Homer was not separated from the time of the Trojan war by several centuries, possibly not even by a single one.
The statement by Lucian regarding the inspiring drama of the Homeric epics—the conjunction of the planets Venus and Mars—can be refined. There was more than one fateful conjunction between Venus and Mars—at least two are described in the Iliad, in the fifth i° Heracliti questiones Homericae (Teubner's ed. 1910). Cf. F. Boll, Stemglaube und Sterndienst (ed. W. Gundel, 1926), p. 201.
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and the twenty-first books. The conjunctions were near contacts; the mere passage of one planet in front of another could not have provided material for a cosmic drama.
Huitzilopochtli
The Greeks chose Athene, the goddess of the planet Venus, as their patron, but the people of Troy looked to Ares-Mars as their protector. A similar situation existed in ancient Mexico.
Quetzal-cohuatl, known as the planet Venus, was the patron of the Toltecs. But the Aztecs, who robin-bobin
later came to Mexico and supplanted the Toltecs, revered Huitzilopochtli (Vitchilupuchtli) as their protector-god.1
Sahagun says that Huitzilopochtli was "a great destroyer of towns and killer of people." The epithet "blood-stained stormer of walls" is familiar to us from the Iliad, where it is regularly applied to Mars. "In warfare he [Huitzilopochtli] was like live-fire, greatly feared by his enemies," writes Sahagun.2
In his large work on the Indians of America, H. H. Bancroft writes:
"Huitzilopochtli had, like Mars and Odin, the spear or a bow in his right hand, and in the left, sometimes a bundle of arrows, sometimes a round white shield. . . . On these weapons depended the welfare of the state, just as on the ancile of the Roman Mars, which had fallen from the sky, or on the palladium of the warlike Pallas Athene. Bynames also point out Huitzilopochtli as war god; so he is called the terrible god Tetzateotl, or the raging Tetzahuitl."3 Bancroft proceeds:
"One niight be led to compare the capital of the Aztecs with ancient Rome, on account of its warlike spirit, and therefore it was right to make the national god of Aztecs a war god like the Roman Mars." 4
But Huitzilopochtli was not like Mars, he was Mars. The identity of their appearance, character, and action is dictated by the fact that Mars and Huitzilopochtli were one and the same planet-god.
1 J. G. Miiller, Der mexikanische Nationalgott Huitzilopochtli (1847).