IMPORTANCE OF CLEARNESS OF IDEA RESPECTING THE IMPORT OF THE WORD
“RACE.”--THE PELASGI.--AREA OF HOMERIC GREECE.--ACARNANIA NOT
HELLENIC.--THE DORIANS.--EGYPTIAN, SEMITIC, AND OTHER
INFLUENCES.--HISTORICAL GREECE.--MACEDONIANS.--GREECE UNDER ROME
AND BYZANTIUM.--INROADS OF BARBARIANS.--THE SLAVONIC
CONQUEST.--RECENT ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.
It may safely be said that the difficult question as to the relative
influences of the external effects of soil, climate, physical
conditions, the admixture of foreign blood, and the introduction of
foreign examples on the one side, and those of what is called _race_ on
the other, never rises to a greater degree of importance than it does in
the ethnology of Ancient Greece. For, in our current language, we
consider _race_ to mean certain original differences of organization,
faculties, and capacities stamped upon different divisions of the human
species from the beginning; innate qualities, as distinguished from mere
developments; internal elements of the original material upon which the
external agencies of climate, soil, and examples act in the different
degrees of its receptivity, as contrasted with the various agencies
themselves; and in this current language, many writers, who would shrink
from the conclusions to which the term logically leads, unconsciously
indulge. I say _unconsciously_, because it is nearly certain that, out
of ten writers who talk about _race_, and assign to the word a meaning
essentially the same as the one just exhibited, nine would be unwilling
to deny the unity of our species--unity meaning descent from the same
pair. Yet between this and a system of special interpositions the
advocate of the effects of race has no alternative. How can there be two
original capabilities for the reception of either moral or physical
influences, and the evolution of intellectual phenomena out of them, in
different members of a family descended from a single pair?
All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species
itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and
appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first;
and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to
external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit
either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural
changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations,
when he talks about _race_, only throws back the evolution of the
distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some
period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the
remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it
is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to _race_, as an
ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect--an
effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an
effect. For it is evident that of _race_, as it is called, there can be
but three causes--original difference of parentage, preternatural
changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one
common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate,
nutrition, and ideas.
I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true
one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very
little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes
the search that the number of writers who write about _race_, and who
are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two
explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third,
and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?
In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing
this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the
highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called
Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they
were a _race_ at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the
Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been
overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple
extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary
consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course,
viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been
different from that of the father--the one Italian, the other native to
the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature,
an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic
stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.
Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was
the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place
for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two
Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical
period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever
the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest
occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with
the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes
aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.
The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance.
Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as
Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it
prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the
English character of the counties in question at the time referred to.
Four centuries--or even less--of migration may easily have given us all
the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of
Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more
impracticable.
Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area,
no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic
population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily
convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and
Northumberland have been from British to English.
And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any
inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions
in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only
which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must
draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and
Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about
interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of
whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the
migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly,
satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest
geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more
likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any
that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine
that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the
Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the
strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred
years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans,
the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so
cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it
by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the
Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more
than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the
present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to
the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only
people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the
Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an
anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the
time in question, no Saxons at all, but _Britons_. The same reason
applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is
highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks,
because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It
was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they
became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied
that they must always have been what they were in their own days,
superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of
their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered
that, even in the third century B.C.--nay even at the present
moment--the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the
non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the
nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their
absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No
passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in
the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at
home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.
Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the
nearly opposite island of Corcyra--Greek in the time of the historian,
but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.
So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the
earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical
piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the
size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have
been small enough for the purposes suggested, _i.e._, small enough to
have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few
centuries.
On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the
confederation are the Thessalians and Perrhæbi; but whether the latter
were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so.
Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, _non_-Hellenic; so much so, that it
is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi
what may be called Hellenoeid--or Greek-like--that the semblance of any
close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the
Homeric confederacy can be obtained.
If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of
the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In
the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos,
Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.
Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic
area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have
received the whole of its population from some other country, and that
by means of boats and ships.
The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form,
are--1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more
or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis
out of the question.
One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one
of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being
the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus,
Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants
whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf,
and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having
done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or
Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially
Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.
Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and
Phœnicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to
Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on
Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have
a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from
this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the
islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were
partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.
The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been
closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the
introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and
definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue
extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of
the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real
importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the
criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement,
which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to
their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its
literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a
certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At
any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic
population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the
Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.
I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the
parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than
Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much
which is really Phœnician, or Jewish, may have been considered as
Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true
introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.
_a._ The name of the city _Thebæ_, common to both Greece and Egypt, is
one of these.
_b._ The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to
Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which
is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is
another.
_c._ The word _Barbaros_, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with
the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of
Egypt being _Berber_ at the present moment, induces me to consider it
as an absolute Egyptian word.
_d._ The word _Africa_ is easily explained by supposing that the
Egyptians took it from the _Afer_ nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it
the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic
source.
_e._ The names _Iolchos_ and _Colchis_.--How comes Jason, in sailing
from a part of Thessaly named _Iolchos_, to reach a part of Asia with a
name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the
Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like
that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however
little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely
accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence,
however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis
(evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian
stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement)
supplies an explanation. Both _Colchos_ and _Iolchos_ may have been
Egyptian.
Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phœnicians only (and not
the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of
Crete.
The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phœnician or
Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phœnician. The selling of the
sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact
attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive
_Danai_ was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are
so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our
consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if
they were _adscripti glebœ_, and ignore the share they may have taken
in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity,
they are known in the holy places only--yet the seaports between Tyre
and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history
of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing.
What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name _Pelop_-o-nesus,
and the history of the _Pelop_-id family, if a _bonâ fide_ nation of
_Pelopes_, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had
existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the
two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no
one connects them.
In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not
accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that
a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had
been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.
That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are
Phœnician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the
habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in
favour of the coasts of Phœnicia, and the Philistine country having
supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to
the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details
of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to
have been so.
The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of
Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.
If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course,
exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet
to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still
stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian
musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted
by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then
there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its
details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the
beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in
Bœotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present
is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere
strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the
ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the
Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.
The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of
Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then,
other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what
was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna
are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized
portions into _Æolia_, _Ionia_, and _Doris_ is unnoticed--probably it
was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The
Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the
Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the
nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term _Hellenes_.
From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices
of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the
state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus--European and
Continental Greece--is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the
parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos.
_Hellas_, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of
Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes
look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there
is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political
importance, into two classes--the Dorian and Ionian. These differences
between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the
Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we
bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can
get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind,
for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot
believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that
nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce
it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one
objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the
doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are
best explained and accounted for by supposing, either--
1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or--
2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.
Thus--admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly
and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined
the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes
rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In
the first and last instances, there may also have been a different
starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that
gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which
Æolus was the eponymus.
That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are
in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek
historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until
he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question
ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the
extent whereto the reasoning which the palæontological geologist applies
to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of
historical testimony) is applicable to the archæology of the human
species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully
appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological
connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has
experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena
presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian,
Croatian, and other interjacent populations.
There is, then, a Greek language, a Greek literature, a Greek influence
in literature; all beyond doubt. But there is no equally undoubted Greek
stock. As far as there is such an entity, the speech is in Hellas, and
the blood in Italy.
Up to a certain time the Hellenic influence has a northern direction,
and acts upon certain populations originally barbarous, so as
imperfectly to Hellenize them. Such is the case with Ætolia and Macedon.
Afterwards, however, the direction of these influences changes, and
Ætolia and Macedon contribute to dis-Hellenize (if so hybrid a word may
be allowed) Greece. Before they do this, however, they have been taken
out of the category of barbarism; just as would be the case if
Anglo-Saxon England were reconquered by the half-Anglicized Ireland of
the nineteenth century, and just as would _not_ have been the case had
it been conquered by the Ireland of Brian Ború. Rome, too, respected the
land that she had reduced; so that the physical history of Greece
remains but slightly altered until the period of the Gothic, Hun, and
Slavonic invasions. And even Alaric but ravaged the soil and destroyed
life. We nowhere find proofs of any introduction of Gothic blood. Nor
yet of Hun. It is the Slavonic stock that has given Greece its greatest
foreign element.
Why is it that when we compare a map of Modern with one of Ancient
Greece, such a small proportion of the old classical names, either
modified or unmodified in form, can be found? Such is, undoubtedly, the
case. Yet subject to Turkey as Greece was until the present century, the
majority of the new names is not Turkish. On the contrary, they are
chiefly Slavonic. The language of the later Byzantine writers explains
this.[13]
As early as the last quarter of the sixth century (A.D. 582), the
movements set in towards Greece; Thrace and Macedon being overrun by
Slavonians. The details here, however, are obscure, and there is an
occasional confusion of the Slaves with the Avars. The latter nation,
however, seems to have made no notable settlement in Southern Greece at
least. In the latter half of the seventh century, Thessaly, Epirus,
several of the islands, and parts of Asia Minor were overrun. In the
ninth, Macedon is called Slavonia (Σκλαβἱνια). In the
eleventh, Athens is sacked, and the inhabitants driven to take refuge in
the isle of Salamis. Under Constantine Porphyrogeneta, the presence of
an Hellenic population is an exception. “In Macedon,” he writes, “the
Scythians dwell, instead of the Macedonians.” Again, “the whole country
is Slavonized.”
But the most remarkable passage is the following, which shows that a
Slavonic population is so far the rule that where an approach to the
ancient population is found it is dealt with as a remarkable phenomenon;
and that by a Greek writer:--“It must be known that the inhabitants of
the settlement (κἁστρον) Maina, are not of the race of the
aforesaid Slaves, but of the old Romans, and even till the present time,
they are called by their neighbours _Hellenes_, from having been
originally Pagans and idolatrers like the old Hellenes.”--De Adm. Imp.
I. 50.
Latin writers, equally with the Greek, considered Greece to be
Slavonic:--“Inde (_i.e._, Sicilia) navigantes venerunt ultra mare Adrium
ad urbem _Manafasiam_ in Sclavinica terra.”--From a Journal of St.
Willibald, the writer of which, by Manafasia, means Napoli di _Malvasia_
in the Morea.
More than this. The details of some of these Slavonic populations are
given; so that we know that there were Ezeritæ and Milengi in the
Morea, with Dragovitæ, Sagudatæ, Velegezetæ, Verzetæ, and others in
Northern Greece.
In diminished numbers, the representatives of the old Laconians exist at
the present time. A.D. 1573, they had fourteen, they have now but three,
villages--Prasto, or the ancient Prasiæ, Kastanitza, and Silina. With
the exception of their dialect, the Romaic of modern Hellas is said to
be spoken with considerable uniformity over the whole of Greece.
Without investigating the difficult question as to the proportion of
Slavonic elements, it may fairly be said that Ancient Greece is the area
of a greatly, and Modern Greece that of an inordinately, mixed stock. To
this mixture, Italians, Albanians, and other populations of modern
Europe have added.