which gave to Cinyres, and so far as we know to Cinyres alone, among
princes, this very peculiar attitude at a critical juncture. It is
obvious, that in proportion as his situation was remote from the Greek
rendezvous, and from the scene of action, the service became more
burdensome: but on the other hand, in proportion as he was distant
from the centre of Achæan power, he was little likely to be coerced.
How comes it then that Agamemnon had over Cinyres an influence which
he does not seem to have possessed over the tribes of Macedonia and
Thrace, though these lay nearer both to him, and to the way between him
and the Troad, which he had to traverse by sea?
The hypothesis, that the population of Cyprus was purely or generally
Pelasgian, appears to square remarkably with the facts. For then, upon
the one hand, they would naturally be disinclined to interfere on
behalf of the Greeks in a war where all purely Pelasgian sympathies
would (as we must for the present take for granted) incline them
towards Troy.
But further, we find among other notes of the Pelasgians this, that
they were characterised by a want of nautical genius, while the more
enterprising character of the Hellenes at once made them, and has kept
them down to this very day, an eminently maritime people; and Homer
himself, with his whole soul, evidently gloried and delighted in the
sea. If then the population of Cyprus was Pelasgian, we can readily
understand how, notwithstanding its sympathies and its remoteness,
it might be worth the while of its ruler to propitiate Agamemnon
by a valuable gift in order to avert a visit which his ships might
otherwise be expected to pay; and how the Pelopid power over Cyprus,
as an island, might be greater than over nearer tribes, which were
continental.
It may aid us to comprehend the relation between Cyprus and Agamemnon,
if we call to recollection the insular empire which Athens afterwards
acquired.
There is another sign, which strongly tends to connect Cyprus with
the Pelasgian races, especially those which belong to Asia. It is the
worship of Venus, who had in that island her especial sanctuary, and
who, upon her detection in the Odyssey[351], takes refuge there. In
the war, she is keenly interested on the Trojan side: and the Trojan
history is too plainly marked with the influence of the idea, that
exalted her to Olympian rank. That Venus was known mythologically among
the Hellenic tribes, we see from the lay of Demodocus. That she was
worshipped among them, seems to be rendered extremely improbable by the
fact, that Diomed wounds her in his ἀριστεῖα[352]. We must consider
her as a peculiarly, and perhaps in Homer’s time almost exclusively
Pelasgian deity; and her local abode at Paphos may be taken as a marked
sign, accordingly, of the Pelasgianism of Cyprus.
We have already seen Agapenor, a stranger, placed by Agamemnon in
command of the Pelasgian forces of Arcadia; and Minos, a stranger,
acquire dominion over the partially, and perhaps mainly, Pelasgian
population of Crete. It seems probable, that Cyprus in this too
affords us a parallel. We have the following considerations to guide
us in the question. First, the Pelasgians, not being a maritime, were
consequently not a mercantile people. Secondly, from the description
of the gift sent by Cinyres, we must understand it, on account of
the preciousness of its materials and its ornaments, to have been
a first rate example of the skill of the workers in metal of the
period. Such things were not produced by Pelasgians; and we must, to
be consistent with all the other Homeric indications, suppose this
breastplate to have been of Sidonian or Phœnician workmanship. This
supposition connects Cinyres himself with Phœnicia, while his people
were Pelasgian. Again, on examining his name we find in it no Pelasgian
characteristics; but it appears to be Asiatic, and to signify a musical
instrument with strings, which was used in Asia[353]. All this makes it
likely, upon Homeric presumptions, that he was a Phœnician, or a person
of Phœnician connections, and that into his hands the old Pelasgic
sovereignty of Minos had passed over from the Iasid family, which had
reigned there shortly before the _Troica_.
The Homeric tradition with respect to Cinyres is supported to some
extent from without[354]. Apollodorus so far agrees with it as to
report, that Cinyres migrated from the neighbouring Asiatic continent
into Cyprus with a body of followers, founded Paphos, and married the
daughter of the king of the island. Apollodorus, Pindar, and Ovid, all
treat Cinyres in a way which especially connects him with the worship
of Venus, as though he had introduced it into the island; and it is
observable, that the points at which we find this deity in contact with
the race are all in Asia, or on the way from it, that is to say, Troas,
Cyprus, and lastly, Cythera: as if it were not original to the Greeks,
but engrafted, and gradually taking its hold. Sandacus was, according
to Apollodorus, the father of Cinyres, and had come from Syria into
Cilicia.
The process which we thus seem to see going forward in the Pelasgian
countries, and which was probably further exemplified in the Greek
migrations to the coast of Asia Minor, was grounded in the natural,
if we mean by the natural the ordinary, course of things. In the last
century, John Wesley said, that the religious and orderly habits of
his followers would make them wealthy, and that then their wealth
would destroy their religion. So in all likelihood it was the peaceful
habits of the Pelasgians that made their settlements attractive to the
spoiler. They thus invited aggression, which their political genius and
organization were not strong enough to repel; and the power of their
ancient but feeble sovereignties passed over into the hands of families
or tribes more capable of permanently retaining it, and of wielding it
with vigour and effect.
_Negative argument from Homer._
I must not, however, pass from the subject of Homeric testimony
respecting the Pelasgi, without adverting to one important negative
part of it.
It must be observed, that, as anterior to the three appellatives which
he ordinarily applies to the Greeks of the Trojan war collectively,
Homer uses no name whatever other than the Pelasgic, which is not of
limited and local application. Neither Ἀχαιοὶ, Ἀργεῖοι, nor Δαναοὶ,
bear any one sign of being the proper designation of the original
settlers and inhabitants of all Greece: and if the name for them be
not Πελασγοὶ, there certainly is no other name whatever which can
compete for the honour, none which has the same marks at once of great
antiquity, and of covering a wide range of the country. And if, as I
trust, it shall hereafter be shown, that all these came from abroad
as strangers into a country already occupied, there then will be a
presumption of no mean force arising even out of this negative, to the
effect that the Pelasgians were the original base of the Greek nation,
while we are also entitled to affirm, upon the evidence of Homer, that
their race extended beyond the limits of Greece.
Such is the supposition upon which we already begin to find that
the testimony of the poems as a whole appears to converge. It is, I
grant, indirect, and fragmentary, and much of it conjectural; we may
greatly enlarge its quantity from sources not yet opened: but I wish to
direct particular attention to its unity and harmony, to the multitude
of indications which, though separate and individually slight, all
coincide with the theory that the Pelasgi supplied the _substratum_ of
the Greek population subsisting under dominant Hellic influences; and
to the fact, I would almost venture to add, that they can coincide with
nothing else.
_The Pelasgians; post-Homeric evidence._
We must proceed, however, to consider that portion of the evidence in
the case, which is external to the Homeric Poems.
Besides what has been up to this point incidentally touched, there is
a great mass of extra-Homeric testimony, which tends, when read in the
light of Homer, to corroborate the views which have here been taken of
the Pelasgi, as one of the main coefficients of the Greek nation.
In the first chapter of the able work of Bishop Marsh, entitled, _Horæ
Pelasgicæ_[355], will be found an ample collection of passages from
Greek writers, which, though many of them are in themselves slight,
and any one if taken singly could be of little weight for the purpose
of proof, yet collectively indicate that the possession of the entire
country at the remotest period by the Pelasgi was little less than an
universal and invariable tradition. I will here collect some portion of
the evidence which may be cited to this effect.
Coming next to Homer in time and in authority, Hesiod supports him, as
we have seen above[356], in associating Dodona both with the Pelasgic
and with the Hellic races; placing it, just as Homer does, in the midst
of the latter, and more distinctly than Homer indicating its foundation
by the former. It may be observed that, in a Fragment, he questionably
personifies Pelasgus[357].
Next we find the very ancient poet Asius, according to the quotation of
Pausanias[358], assigning the very highest antiquity to the Pelasgian
race, by making Pelasgus the father of men;
ἀντίθεον δὲ Πελασγὸν ἐν ὑψικόμοισιν ὄρεσσι
γαῖα μέλαιν’ ἀνέδωκεν, ἵνα θνητῶν γένος εἴη.
Among the Greek writers, not being historians themselves, of the
historic period, there is none whose testimony bears, to my perception,
so much of the true archaic stamp, as Æschylus. It seems as if we could
trace in him a greater piety towards Homer, and we certainly find a
more careful regard both to his characters and his facts, than were
afterwards commonly paid to them. Nay he excels in this respect the
Cyclic poets. They were much nearer in date to the great master, but
he, as it were, outran them, by a deeper and nobler sympathy. In him,
too, the drama had not yet acquired the character, which effaces or
impairs its claims to historical authority: which earned for it the
ἐκτραγῳδεῖν of Aristotle[359] and Polybius[360], and on which was
founded the declaration of Socrates in the Minos, Ἀττικὸν λέγεις μῦθον
καὶ τραγικόν[361]. Even where he speaks allegorically, he seems to
represent the first form of allegory, in which it is traceably moulded
upon history, and serves for its key. It is not therefore unreasonable
to attach importance to his rendering of the public tradition
respecting the Pelasgi, which we find in a remarkable passage of the
Supplices;
τοῦ γηγενοῦς γάρ εἰμ’ ἐγὼ Παλαίχθονος
ἶνις Πελασγὸς, τῆσδε γῆς ἀρχηγέτης.
ἐμοῦ δ’ ἄνακτος εὐλόγως ἐπώνυμον
γένος Πελασγῶν τήνδε καρποῦται χθόνα[362].
Pelasgus, himself the speaker, then describes his dominions as reaching
from Peloponnesus (χώρη Ἀπίη) in the south to the river Strymon in
the north (πρὸς δύνοντος ἡλίου), and declares how Apis, coming from
Acarnania, had fitted the country for the abode of man by clearing it
of wild beasts. Acarnania marks the line of country, which formed the
ordinary route from Thessaly to Peloponnesus. Taken literally, Pelasgus
is the son of the Earthborn, and the name-giver of the Pelasgian race.
What the passage signifies evidently is, that by ancient tradition
the Pelasgians were the first occupants of the country, and that they
reached from the north to the south of Greece. It is in the reign of
this mythical Pelasgus, that Danaus reaches the Peloponnesus.
Of such an _eponymus_ Thessaly, Argos, and Arcadia had each their
separate tradition in its appropriate dress. Pausanias reports the
Arcadian one very fully: and according to its tenour Pelasgus taught
the use of dwellings and clothes, and to eat chestnuts instead of
roots, grass, and leaves[363]. The tomb of Pelasgus was pretended to be
shown at Argos.
Herodotus states that the Hellas of his day was formerly called
Πελασγία[364]: gives to the Peloponnesian women of the era of Danaus
the name of Πελασγιωτίδες γυναῖκες[365]: he denominates the Arcadians
Πελασγοὶ Ἀρκάδες[366], the people of what was afterwards Achaia
Πελασγοὶ Αἰγιαλέες[367], the Athenians Πελασγοὶ Κραναοὶ[368], whom also
he describes as autochthonic[369]: and he shows, that recollections
of the Pelasgian worship were preserved in his day at Dodona[370].
He furthermore mentions the Πελασγικὸν τεῖχος[371] at Athens; and he
places the Pelasgian race in Samothrace, and Lemnos, and mentions their
settlements upon the Hellespont, named Placia and Scylace.
Thucydides describes the spot or building called Πελασγικὸν under
the Acropolis at Athens, the very situation, in which the original
town would in all likelihood be placed for safety. This historian
also sustains, with the weight of his judgment, the opinion that
in pre-Hellenic times the prevailing race and name in Greece were
Pelasgic; κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον[372].
It is true, that in another passage[373], among the races of the
βάρβαροι, he enumerates the Pelasgi: but the epithet itself, which
was wholly inapplicable to the heroic age, shows that he spoke with
reference to the demarcation established in his own time, which made
every thing barbarous that was not Greek, either geographically or
by known derivation. Barbarian with him and his contemporaries meant
simply foreign, with the addition of a strong dash of depreciation.
The full-grown Hellenic character no longer owned kindred with the
particular races, which nevertheless might have contributed, each in
its own time and place, to the formation of that remarkable product.
The relationship is, however, established by Thucydides himself; for he
says these Pelasgi were of the same Tyrseni, who occupied Athens at an
earlier period.
Theocritus, who flourished early in the third century B. C., has a
passage where he distinguishes chronologically between different
persons and races. He begins with the heroes of the Troica, and then
goes back to the ἔτι πρότεροι, in which capacity he names the Lapithæ,
the Deucalidæ, the Pelopids, and lastly the Ἄργεος ἄκρα Πελασγοί[374].
The word ἄκρα might mean either (1) the flower of Greece, or (2)
the very oldest and earliest inhabitants of Greece[375]. Now as the
Pelasgians were by no means the flower of Greece, we can only choose
the latter meaning for this particular passage. The word Ἄργος is
perhaps taken here in its largest sense[376].
Apollonius Rhodius, nearly a century later, adheres to part at
least of the same tradition, and calls Thessaly the πολυλήïος αἶα
Πελασγῶν[377]. The Scholiast on this passage adds an older testimony,
stating that Sophocles, in the Inachus, declared that the Πελασγοὶ and
Ἀργεῖοι were the same.
According to Strabo, the Pelasgi were the most ancient race which
had held power in Greece: τῶν περὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα δυναστευσάντων
ἀρχαιότατοι[378]. In the same place he calls the oracle of Dodona
Πελασγῶν ἵδρυμα, a Pelasgian foundation. He expressly supports the
construction which has been given above to the Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος of
Homer[379], in the words τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἡ Θετταλία λέγεται, and he
defines the country by the Peneus, Pindus, and Thermopylæ. He traces
the Pelasgi in a multitude of particular places, and, on the authority
of Ephorus, mentions Πελασγία as a name of Peloponnesus. He also gives
us that fragment of Euripides, which states, in harmony with the
testimony of Æschylus, that Danaus came to Greece, founded the city of
Inachus, and changed the name of the inhabitants from Pelasgiotes to
Danaans.
Πελασγιώτας δ’ ὠνομασμένους τὸ πρὶν
Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ’ ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα.
And Strabo considers that both the Pelasgiote and the Danaan name,
together with that of the Hellenes, were covered by the Argive or
Argeian name on account of the fame, to which the city of Argos
rose[380].
The writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus probably represent all, that
a sound judgment could gather from the records and traditions extant in
his time[381]. He pronounces confidently, that the Pelasgian race was
Hellenic; which I take to mean, that it was one of the component parts
of the body afterwards called Hellenic, not that the early Pelasgi were
included among the early Hellenes. He considers that the race came from
Peloponnesus, where many believed it to be autochthonic, into Thessaly,
under Achæus, Phthius, and Pelasgus. It was unfortunate, as in other
respects, so in being driven to frequent migrations. This idea of the
frequent displacement of the Pelasgians was probably the product in the
main of the two facts, first, that traces of them were found at many
widely separated points, and secondly, that, according to tradition,
they had sunk into a position of inferiority.
K. O. Müller, proceeding chiefly on the post-Homeric tradition, has
strongly summed up the evidence as to the Pelasgi, to the following
effect.
They were the original inhabitants of the plains and flat bottoms of
the valleys, any one of which the ancients called by the name Ἄργος, as
we see by the plains of the Peneus, and of the Inachus. If, as Strabo
holds, this use of the word was in his time modern, and Macedonian or
Thessalian, it may still have been a revival of a primitive usage,
even as the very old word Γραικὸς had come back into use with the
Alexandrian poets, through the old common tongue of Macedonia.
Their oldest towns were the Larissæ[382], and the number of these
points out the Pelasgians as a city-founding people, expert in raising
considerable and durable structures. These Larissæ were upon alluvial
soils by rivers, and the Pelasgians were early diggers of canals[383].
Their pursuits were agricultural; hence they occupy the richest soils:
hence Pelasgus is the host of Ceres, and the inventor of bread: hence
Tyrrhenian Pelasgi convert the stony ground by Hymettus into fruitful
fields. The shepherd life of the Pelasgians is an Arcadian tradition,
but Arcadia was not their only original seat, and, when displaced by
Achæans and Dorians, they may have been driven to the hills. Such seats
we find in Argos, Achaia, Peloponnesus generally, Thessalia, Epirus,
and Attica, where they may be traced in the division of the tribes.
Treating as an error the tradition of their vagrant character, he
conceives them to be generally and above all autochthonic. He quotes
from Asius in Pausanias the lines which have already been quoted.
There is no record, he says, of their coming into Greece by
colonization. They are a people distinct, he thinks, from Lelegians
and Carians, as well as from the northern immigrants, Achæans, and
Thessalians: and they are the basis and groundwork of the Greek
nation[384].
In Niebuhr[385] will be found a comprehensive outline of the wide range
of Pelasgian occupancy in Italy: and Cramer supplies a similar sketch
for Asia Minor and for Greece[386].
I forbear to quote Latin authorities as to the Pelasgi of Greece. The
strong Pelasgian character of Magna Græcia will of itself naturally
account for the free use of the name by Romans to designate the Greek
nation, and cannot therefore greatly serve to show even the later
tradition concerning the ancient position of the Pelasgians in Greece,
and their relations to its other inhabitants.
Marsh appears to assert too much, when he says that we may set down as
peculiarly Pelasgian those places which retained the Pelasgian name in
the historic ages. It does not follow from this retention, that Placia
and Scylace were more genuinely Pelasgian than Thessaly, any more than
we are entitled to say from Homer, that Thessaly was originally more
Pelasgian than Attica or Peloponnesus, though it retained the name
longer. The reason may have been, that no such powerful pressure from a
superior race was brought to bear in the one class of cases, as in the
other[387].
In holding that the Pelasgians were the base, so to speak, of the
Greek nation, I mean to indicate it as a probable opinion, that they
continued to form the mass of the inhabitants throughout all the
changes of name which succeeded the period of their rule. But it would
appear, that a succession of other more vigorous influences from the
Hellic stock must have contributed far more powerfully in all respects,
excepting as to numbers, to compose and shape the nationality of the
people. The chief part of the Pelasgians of Attica may perhaps have
lain among the 400,000 slaves, who formed the unheeded herd of its
population; much as in Italy the serfs of the Greek colonists bore the
Pelasgian name[388]. So large a body could scarcely have been formed
in that limited territory, except out of the original inhabitants of
the country. In early stages of society the bulk of society takes its
impress from one, or from a few, of superior force: and the ruling
families and tribes of a smaller, but more energetic and warlike race,
finding for themselves a natural place at the head of societies already
constituted, assume the undisputed direction of their fortunes, and
become, by a spontaneous law, their sole representatives in the face of
the world, and in the annals of its history.
_Language of the Pelasgians._
We may, however, find no inconsiderable proof of the presence of a
strong Pelasgian element in the Greek nation, in that portion of the
evidence upon the case which is supplied by language. Those numerous
and important words in the Latin tongue, which correspond with the
words belonging to the same ideas in Greek, could only have come from
the Pelasgian ancestry common to both countries; and, if coming from
them, must demonstrate in the one case, as in the other, the strong
Pelasgian tincture of the nation.
And as the language of a country cannot be extensively impregnated
in this manner, except either by numbers, or by political and social
ascendancy (as was the case of the French tongue with the English), or
by literary influence (as is now the case with us in respect to the
Greek and Latin tongues), we must ask to which of these causes it was
owing, that the Pelasgians so deeply marked the Greek language with the
traces of their own tongue. It was not literary influence, for we may
be sure that there existed none. It was not political ascendancy, for
they were either enslaved, or at the least subordinate. It could only
be the influence of their numbers, through which their manner of speech
could in any measure hold its ground; and thus we arrive again at the
conclusion, that they must have supplied the substratum of the nation.
It is true that Herodotus, as well as Thucydides, spoke of the
Pelasgians as using a foreign tongue. So a German writer would
naturally describe the English, and yet the English language, by
one of its main ingredients, bears conclusive testimony to the Saxon
element of the English nation, and also illustrates the relative
positions, which the Saxon and Norman races are known in history to
have occupied. The tongue of the Pelasgians had been subject within
Greece to influence and admixture from the language of the Hellic
tribes: beyond Greece it had received impressions from different
sources; and naturally, after the consequences of this severance had
worked for centuries, the speech of the Pelasgians would be barbarous
in the eyes of the Greeks. Again, Marsh[389] observes that, in the very
chapter where he distinguishes Pelasgic from Hellenic, Herodotus (i.
56) declares the Ionians to belong to one of these stocks, the Dorians
to the other: both of which populations were in his time undoubtedly
Greek. And the historian gives another strong proof that the Pelasgians
were Greek, where he assigns to this parentage (ii. 52) the Greek name
of the gods: θεοὺς δὲ προσωνόμασάν σφεας ἀπὸ τοῦ τοιούτου, ὅτι κόσμῳ
θέντες τὰ πάντα πρήγματα κ.τ.λ.
Even if we suppose, as may have been the case, that the Pelasgi
mentioned by Herodotus, and by Thucydides, spoke a tongue as far from
the Greek actually known to either of them, as is German from the
English language at the present day, yet by its affinities that tongue
might still remain a conclusive proof, that the ancestors of those who
spoke it must have formed an essential ingredient in the composition
of the nation. The evidence, which we know to be good in the one case,
might be equally valid in the other.