extraneous race and country do the Pelasgic ages of Greece appear
particularly to refer us as their type, the answer, as it would seem,
though it can only be given with reserve, must be, that Egypt and its
people appear most nearly to supply the pattern. A variety of notes,
indicative of affinity, are traceable at a variety of points where we
find reason to suspect a Pelasgian character: particularly in Troy,
and in the early Roman history, more or less in Hesiod and his school,
and in certain parts of Greece. Many of these notes, and likewise the
general character that they indicate, appear to belong to Egypt also.
The direct signs of connection between Egypt and Greece are far less
palpable in Homer, than between Greece and Phœnicia. We have no account
from him of Egyptians settled among the Greeks, or of Greeks among
the Egyptians. The evidence of a trading intercourse between the two
countries is confined to the case of the pseudo-Ulysses, who ventures
thither from Crete under circumstances[230] which seem to show that
it was hardly within the ordinary circle of Greek communications.
He arrives indeed in five days, by the aid of a steady north-west
wind: but a voyage of five days[231] across the open sea, which
might be indefinitely prolonged by variation or want of wind, was
highly formidable to a people whose only safety during their maritime
enterprises lay in the power of hauling up their vessels whenever
needful upon a beach. It was near twice the length of the voyage
to Troy[232]. Hence we find that Menelaus was carried to Egypt not
voluntarily, but by stress of weather: and Nestor speaks with horror of
his crossing such an expanse, a passage that even the birds make but
once a year[233]. If this be deemed inconsistent with the five days’
passage, yet even inconsistency on this point in Homer would be a proof
that the voyage to Egypt was in his time rare, strange, and mysterious
to his countrymen, and so was dealt with freely by him as lying beyond
experience and measurement.
There is nothing in Homer absolutely to contradict the opinion that
Danaus was Egyptian; but neither is there anything which suffices
conclusively to establish it. And if he considered the Egyptians to
approach to the Pelasgian type, this may cast some slight doubt on
the Egyptian origin of Danaus. The Poet certainly would not choose a
Pelasgian name, unless fully naturalized, for one of the characteristic
national designations of the Achæans. But he is too good a Greek to
give us particular information about any foreign eminence within his
fatherland. It seems, however, possible that in the name ἀπίη, given
to Peloponnesus, there may lie a relation to the Egyptian Apis. Apis
was the first of the four divine bulls of Egypt[234]; and the ox was
the symbol of agriculture which, according to the tradition conveyed by
Æschylus[235], Danaus introduced into the Peloponnesus.
The paucity of intercourse however between Greece and Egypt in the time
of Homer does not put a negative on the supposition that there may have
been early migration from the latter country to the former.
It has been questioned how far the ancient Egyptians were conversant
with the art of navigation. The affirmative is fully argued by Mr.
M’Culloch[236] in his commentaries on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
But it is plain that the Egyptians were not known to Homer as a
nautical people. Not only do we never on any occasion hear of them
in connection with the use of ships, but we hear of the plunder of
their coast by pirates, when they confined themselves to resistance by
land. This want of nautical genius agrees with all that we learn of
them in Holy Scripture. And it places them in marked resemblance to
the Pelasgian races generally: to the Arcadians[237]; to the Trojans;
to the early Romans, who paid no serious attention to the creation of
a fleet until the second Samnite War B.C. 311, or, as Niebuhr thinks,
then only first had a fleet at all[238]: and again, to the landsmanlike
spirit of Hesiod, who calls himself
οὔτε τι ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος, οὔτε τι νηῶν,
limits it entirely to a certain season, never was at sea except
crossing from Aulis to Eubœa, and considers the whole business of going
to sea one that had better be avoided[239].
That with Homer the fabulous element enters into his view of the
Egyptians seems plain, from his calling them the race of Paieon, in the
same way as he calls the Phæacians the race of Neptune: and in some
degree also from the place which he gives them in the wanderings of
Menelaus, since they lay, like those of Ulysses, in the exterior and
unascertained sphere of geography.
Proteus is called Αἰγύπτιος, but in all probability the meaning
is Proteus of the Nile, which is the proper Αἴγυπτος in the
masculine gender; while the country, derivatively called from it
as the γῆ Αἴγυπτος, takes the feminine. We shall hereafter see how
Proteus belongs to the circle of nautical and therefore Phœnician
tradition[240]. That deity has upon him all the marks of the outer
and non-Grecian world. He is no less an admirable type of the πρωκτής,
than a regular servant of Neptune, Ποσειδάωνος ὑποδμώς (Od. iv. 386).
This connection with Neptune by no means makes him Greek: Neptune was
the god of the θάλασσα, which extended beyond the circle of Greek
experience, even to the borders of Ocean. We see set upon the whole of
this adventure the same singular religious token as upon the remote
adventures of Ulysses, namely this, that Menelaus passes beyond the
ordinary charge of the Hellenic deities. The means of deliverance
are pointed out to him, not by Minerva, but by Eidothea, daughter of
Proteus himself, whose name, function, and relationship alike remind
us that it was Ino Leucothea, daughter of the Phœnician Cadmus,
who appeared to Ulysses for his deliverance, in a nearly similar
border-zone of the marine territory lying between the world of fable
and the world of experience; for the position of Egypt was in this
respect like that of Phæacia. It would seem, then, as if Homer himself
knew Egypt mainly through a Phœnician medium.
Of the Phœnician intercourse with that country we may safely rest
assured, from their proximity, from their resort thither mentioned in
Homer[241], and from the traces they left in Egypt itself.
It seems a probable conjecture that they had from a very early date a
colony or factory in Egypt, by which they carried on their commerce
with it. In the time of Herodotus, there was at Memphis a large and
well-cared-for τέμενος or demesne of Proteus, whom the priests reported
to be the successor of Sesostris on the Egyptian throne. This demesne
was surrounded by the habitations of the ‘Tyrian Phœnices,’ and the
whole plain in which it stood was called the Τυρίων στρατόπεδον.
There is another tradition in Herodotus, according to which the
Phœnicians furnished Egypt with the fleet, which in the time of Necho
circumnavigated Africa[242].
Homer affords us little or no direct evidence of a connection between
the religion of Greece and an Egyptian origin, to which Herodotus
conceived it to be referable; but yet it may very well be the case,
that Egypt was the fountain-head of many traditions which were carried
by the Phœnicians into Greece. In Homer, for example, we find marks
that seem to connect Dionysus with Phœnicia: but the Phœnicians
may have become acquainted with him in Egypt, where Diodorus[243]
reports that Osiris was held to be his original. There are two marks,
however, of Egyptian influence, which seem to be more deeply traced.
One is the extraordinary sacredness attached to the oxen of the Sun.
The other, the apparent relation between the Egyptian Neith and the
Athene of Attica, taken in conjunction with the Pelasgian character
of the district[244]. But certainly our positive information from
Homer respecting the Egyptians may be summed up in very brief compass.
They would appear to have been peaceful, rich, and prosperous: highly
skilled in agriculture, and also in medicine, if we are not rather
to understand by this that they knew the use of opium, which might
readily draw fervid eulogiums from a race not instructed in its
properties. But the testimony to their agricultural excellence cannot
be mistaken. Twice their fields are mentioned, and both times as
περικάλλεες ἀγροί: in exact correspondence with the tradition which we
find subsisting in Attica respecting those fields which were tilled by
the Pelasgians[245]. And this case of the Egyptians is the only one
throughout the Poems in which Homer bestows commendation upon tillage.
Again, they fought bravely when attacked[246]. We find also the name
Ægyptius naturalized in Ithaca. Lastly, they appear to have been
hospitable to strangers, and placable to enemies[247]. This is a faint
outline: but all its features appear to be in harmony with those of the
Pelasgian race.
It is worthy of remark, that the Lotophagi visited by Ulysses
correspond very much with the Egyptians, such as Homer conceived them.
Locally, they belonged to the Egyptian quarter of the globe: they
received the companions of Ulysses with kindness[248]; and they gave
them to eat of the lotus, which appears in its essential and remarkable
properties exactly to correspond with the νήπενθες[249] that Helen
had obtained from Egypt. As every figure of the Phœnician traditions,
except perhaps Æolus, is essentially either hard, or cruel, or
deceitful, even so, whether on account of neighbourhood or otherwise,
it seems to have been the poet’s intention to impress the less
energetic but more kindly character of the Egyptians on this particular
people, which perhaps he conceived to be allied to them.
There is indeed one suggestive passage of the Odyssey from which it is
open to us to conjecture that there was more of substantive relation
between Greece and Egypt than Homer’s purpose as a national poet led
him fully to disclose. Menelaus, when he returns to Egypt after hearing
from Proteus of the death of Agamemnon, raises in Egypt a mound in
honour of his brother[250], ἵν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. But this mound
could not contribute to the glory of the slain king, unless Greece and
its inhabitants were tolerably well known in Egypt.
Upon the whole, the evidence of the Homeric poems does not correspond
with those later traditions which refer principally to Egypt as the
origin of what is Greek. In considering this subject, we ought indeed
to bear in mind Homer’s systematic silence as to the channels by
which foreign influences found their way into Greece. For it throws
us entirely upon such indirect evidence as he may (so to speak)
involuntarily afford. And we must also recollect firstly that the
Egyptian influence, whatever it may have been, may perhaps have
operated more in the Pelasgian period, than in that Achæan age to which
the representations of Homer belong. Secondly, that much may have
reached Greece, as to religion or otherwise, in a Phœnician dress,
which the Phœnicians themselves may have derived from Egypt.
There are other features, well known from all history to be Egyptian,
though not traced for them by the hand of Homer, which tend strongly
to confirm their relationship to the Pelasgian race, partly as it is
delineated in the Homeric outlines, and partly as it is known from
later tradition. One of these points is the comparatively hard and
unimaginative character of its mythology, conforming to that of the
race. It is interesting to notice how the Greeks, with their fine sense
of beauty, got rid at once, in whatever they derived from Egypt, of the
mythological deformities of gods incarnate in beasts, and threw them
into the shapes of more graceful fable.
A second point of Pelasgian resemblance is the strong ritual and
sacerdotal development of religion. A third is the want of the
political energies which build and maintain extensive Empire. With
all its wealth, and its early civilization, this opulent state could
never make acquisitions beyond its own border, and has usually been
in subordination to some more masculine Power. A fourth is, the early
use of solid masonry in public edifices. The remains in Greece and
Italy which are referred to the Pelasgians are indeed of much smaller
dimensions than those of Egypt: but the Pelasgians of these countries,
so far as we know, had not time to attain any higher political
organization than that of small communities, with comparatively
contracted means of commanding labour. A fifth is their wealth itself,
which causes Egyptian Thebes to be celebrated both in the Iliad and in
the Odyssey, perhaps the only case in which the poet has thus repeated
himself, Il. ix. 381, and Od. iv. 126.
Lastly, the reputed derivation of the oracle at Dodona from Egypt
harmonises with the Pelasgian character assigned to that seat
of worship by Homer. The tradition to this effect reported by
Herodotus[251] was Greek, and not Egyptian: it was obtained by him on
the spot: and if Homer’s countrymen partook of the poet’s reserve,
and his dislike of assigning a foreign source to anything established
in Greece, a presumption arises that this particular statement would
not have been made, had it not rested on a respectable course of
traditionary authority.
_Silence of the Iliad._
It may however be asked, if the Pelasgians are to be regarded as
Greeks, and as the base of the Greek nation, and if Homer was familiar
with their name and position in that character, how happens it that he
never calls the Greeks Pelasgians, as he calls them Danaans, Argeians,
and Achæans, and never even gives us in the Iliad a Pelasgian race or
tribe by name as numbered among the Greeks?
Now it is not a sufficient answer to say, that the Pelasgian race and
name were falling under eclipse in the age of Homer; for we shall
see reason hereafter to suppose that the appellations of Danaan and
Argeian were likewise (so to speak) preterite, though not yet obsolete,
appellations; still Homer employs them freely.
Their case is essentially different, however, as we shall find, from
that of the Pelasgians, since those two names do not imply either any
blood different from that of the Achæan or properly Greek body, or any
particular race which had supplied an element in its composition: one
of these the Pelasgian name certainly does imply. Those names too,
without doubt, would not be used, unless they shed glory on the Greeks:
the Pelasgian name could have no such treasure to dispense.
It should, however, here be observed, that an examination presently
to be made of the force of the Argeian name will help us to account
for the disappearance from Greece of the Pelasgian name, which it may
perhaps have supplanted.
Let me observe, that if the Pelasgians did, in point of fact, supply
an element to the Greek nationality, which had, while still remaining
perceptibly distinct, become politically subordinate in Homer’s time,
that is precisely the case in which he would be sure not to apply the
name to the Greeks at large, nor to any Greek state, as its application
could not under such circumstances be popular. His non-employment of
it, therefore, for Greeks is _pro tanto_ a confirmation to the general
argument of these pages.
If, again, there were a distinct people of Pelasgians among the Trojan
auxiliaries, and on the Greek side a large but subordinate Pelasgic
element, this would be ample reason both for his naming the Pelasgic
allies of the Trojans, with a view to the truth of his recital, and for
his not using the Pelasgic name in connection with the Greeks; for in
no instance has he placed branches of the same race or tribe on both
sides in the struggle. Glaucus and Sarpedon, the transplanted Æolids,
cannot be considered as exceptions, first, from the old date of their
Greek extraction: and secondly, because they are individuals, whereas
we now speak of tribes and races. The name, too, was more suited to the
unmixed Pelasgians of the Trojan alliance, than to a people, among whom
it had grown pale beneath the greater splendour of famous dynasties and
of more energetic tribes.
The application of this reasoning to the Pelasgi is fortified by its
being applicable to other Homeric names.
_Thraces and Threicii._
It can hardly be doubted that the name Θρῇξ is akin to Τραχὶν and
τρῆχυς[252], that it means a highlander, or inhabitant of a rough
and mountainous country, and that it included the inhabitants of
territories clearly Greek. This extended signification of the term
explains the assertion of Herodotus[253], that the Thracians were the
most numerous of all nations, after the Indians.
Now Homer makes Thamyris the Bard a Thracian; yet it is clear from his
having to do with the Muses, and from the geographical points with
which Homer connects his name, that he must be a Greek[254]. They
are, Δώριον in the dominions of Pylos, where he met his calamity, and
the Œchalia of Eurytus in Thessaly, from whence he was making his
journey[255]. Strabo tells us that Pieria and Olympus were anciently
Thracian[256], and moreover, that the Thracians of Bœotia consecrated
Helicon to the Muses. Orpheus, Musæus, Eumolpus, were held to be
Thracians by tradition, yet it also made them write in Greek. I think
we may trace this descriptive character of the name Θρῇκες, and its not
yet having acquired fully the force of a proper name with Homer, in his
employment of it as an adjective, and not a substantive. It is very
frequently joined in the poems with the affix ἄνδρες, which he does
not employ with such proper names as are in familiar and established
use, such as Danaan, Argive, or Achæan. He says Achæan or Danaan
heroes, but never joins the names to the simple predicate ‘men.’ When
he says Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ, it is with a different force; it is in pointing
out an individual among a multitude. Indeed in Homer it is not Θρῇξ but
Θρηίκιος which means Thracian, of or belonging to the country called
Thrace, Θρῄκη. There is then sufficient evidence that Greeks of the
highlands might be Thraces; and there may very probably have been whole
tribes so called among the Greeks. Yet we never have Thracians named
by Homer on the Greek side, while on the Trojan side they appear as
supplying no less than two contingents of allies: one in the Catalogue,
and another which had just arrived at the period of the Δολώνεια[257].
These two appear to be entirely distinct tribes: because no connection
is mentioned between them; because the first contingent is described
as being composed not of all the Thracians, but of all the Thracians
within the Hellespont: and lastly, because the new comers have their
own βασιλεὺς with them, as the first contingent had its leaders,
Acamas and Peirous. The Hellespont meant here seems to be the strait,
because it is ἀγαρρόος. And it is therefore possible, that while the
first contingent was supplied by the nearer tribes, the second may have
been composed of those Thracians who lay nearer the Greek border.
Notwithstanding that Mars, who is so inseparably associated with
Thrace, fights on the Trojan side, we have no evidence from Homer which
would warrant the assumption that he intended to connect the Thracians
more intimately with the Pelasgians than with the Hellenes. It may be
that the poet’s ethnical knowledge failed him. The wavering of Mars
seems to indicate a corresponding uncertainty in his own mind. Perhaps
with both the Thracian and Pelasgian names it was the breadth of their
range that constituted the difficulty. Some part of Thrace is with him
ἐριβώλαξ[258]; it is the part from which the first contingent came, as
the son of Peirous belonged to it. And that part is less mountainous
than the quarter which I have presumed may have supplied the contingent
of Rhesus. The epithet is the very same as is applied to the Pelasgian
Larissa[259]: and the Larissan Pelasgians are placed next to the first
Thracian contingent in the Trojan Catalogue.
The most probable supposition for Thracians as well as Pelasgians
is, that they had affinities in both directions; that they existed
among the Greeks diffusively, and were absorbed in names of greater
splendour: but that on the Trojan side they still had distinct national
existence, and therefore they are named on that side, while to avoid
confusion silence is studiously maintained about them on the other.
The whole race, says Grote, present a character more Asiatic than
European[260].
_Caucones and Leleges._
Many other races have been recorded in the later traditions as having
in pre-historic times inhabited various parts of Greece. Such are
Temnices, Aones, Hyantes, Teleboi. Of these Homer makes no mention.
But there are two other races whom he names, the Leleges and Caucones,
and with respect to whom Strabo[261] has affirmed, that they were
extensively diffused over Greece as well as over Asia Minor.
Homer has proceeded, with respect to the Caucones, exactly in the same
way as with respect to the Pelasgi. In the Iliad he names them[262]
among the Trojan allies, and is wholly silent about them in dealing
with the Greek races. But in the Odyssey, where he had no national
distinctions to keep in view, he names them as a people apparently
Greek, and dwelling on the western side of Greece. The pseudo-Mentor is
going among them on business, to obtain payment of a debt[263]: and the
manner in which they are mentioned, without explanation, shows that the
name must have been familiar to Nestor and the other persons addressed.
Probably therefore they were a neighbouring tribe: certainly a Greek
tribe, for we do not find proof that the Homeric Greeks carried on
commerce except with their own race.
The poet names them with a laudatory epithet: they are the Καύκωνες
μεγάθυμοι. This may remind us of his bounty in the same kind to the
Pelasgians: and it seems as though he had had a reverence for the
remains of the ancient possessors of the country.
We have abundant signs of the Leleges on the Trojan side in the war.
In the Tenth Book they appear as a contingent: but besides this,
Priam had for one of his wives Laothee, daughter of Altes, king of
the Lelegians, who are here called φιλοπτόλεμοι[264]. What is more
important, we find the expressions Λέλεγες καὶ Τρῶες[265] used together
in such a way, as implies the wide extension of the former as a race.
In the Twentieth Iliad, Æneas in speaking of Achilles refers to his
former escape from the great warrior. He fought, says Æneas, under
the auspices of Minerva: who shed light before him, and bid him slay
Lelegians and Trojans,
ἠδ’ ἐκέλευεν
ἔγχεï χαλκείῳ Λέλεγας καὶ Τρῶας ἐναίρειν.