in which Homer speaks of Hellas, and bear in mind that in some among
them it cannot be construed as meaning less than, with a certain amount
of indeterminateness as to boundaries, Northern and Middle Greece
generally, we shall also find, that there is not one of all those
passages, in which it will not at least admit of the same sense. I
do not deny that it is open to us to hold that the Hellas, in which
Chalcon dwelt, was a mere district of Thessaly, and that Homer attaches
in different places different senses to the word. But if there is a
sense, substantially one, which will suit the word in every place
where it is used, it seems most reasonable to adhere generally to
that sense. Such a meaning we have, I think, found for Hellas, in
concluding that it is used to signify Northern and Middle Greece. In
this sense it overrides and includes Phthia, as France overrides Alsace
or Burgundy. But as there was a time when Alsace and Burgundy might,
before the present state of incorporation, have been either said to be
in France or not in France, without an outrageous license of speech
either way, so perhaps the land of Phthia was for Homer either a part
of Hellas, or a province carved out of Hellas by the special occupation
of the Myrmidons, as occasion might chance to demand. Not that he
did not conform to the facts, but that the facts were themselves
indeterminate. To our habits, under which every inch of ground belongs
to somebody, this indefiniteness is wholly strange; but in times
when only spots here and there were appropriated, and there was no
universal occupation, it was thoroughly natural, and the thing really
strange would be the absence of it. Accordingly, when Phœnix says he
left Hellas, he gives to Phthia, the name of the place he reached,
its exclusive force. When he says Chalcon dwelt in Hellas among the
Myrmidons, he probably means in Phthia, but now regards Phthia as
covered by the larger designation. When Homer tells us the soldiers
of Achilles were those who inhabited Alos, and Alope, and Trachin,
and who occupied Phthia and Hellas, we understand by the three first,
particular spots which the Myrmidons had settled, by Phthia a larger
district which they had so far dotted with their occupancy as to make
it peculiarly theirs, and by Hellas the surrounding country, into which
they had more or less ramified.
Assuming then the sense of the word Hellas to be now sufficiently
ascertained, the next question is, how came this country, which has
been described, to bear the name of Hellas? And the question admits of
but one answer. It could only be called Hellas because tribes of Helli
had become its masters, its governing race, the depositaries, through
its various regions, of political and military power.
We must therefore understand that, according to Homer, tribes reputed
to be of Hellic origin were so far distributed over this country, as to
have begun at least to affix their name to it: though without having
absolutely effaced every older name, like Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος and though
not precluding the introduction of names perhaps more recent, certainly
more specific, such as Phthia.
_The Hellenes of Homer._
We may now proceed to consider the force, according to Homer’s use, of
the names derived from Hellas. These are, as commonly understood,
1. Ἕλληνες,
2. Πανέλληνες,
and to these I shall presume to add,
3. Κεφάλληνες.
The first of these is found only in Il. ii. 684. Here, after the
description of the places from which the forces of Achilles came, the
poet proceeds to give them their designation:
Μυρμίδονες δὲ καλεῦντο καὶ Ἕλληνες καὶ Ἀχαιοί.
We find an exclusive use[501] of the word Myrmidons for the force
of Achilles throughout the Iliad, except in this one place;
notwithstanding that Phœnix, who was lord of the Dolopes, commanded one
of the five divisions[502], and that we may therefore presume a certain
part of the force to have been Dolopian. From this exclusive use, we
cannot doubt that the name of Myrmidons was that which appertained to
them in particular, as the ruling tribe among the subjects of Peleus.
Had we found reason to construe the word Ἕλλας in the preceding line as
meaning only a district of his dominions, it would have followed, that
Ἕλληνες meant the inhabitants of that district; and that a part of the
soldiers of Achilles were Hellenes rather than Myrmidons, in virtue of
a local name. But it follows from what we have already concluded about
Hellas, that the name of Hellenes was applicable to all the Myrmidons
as being themselves inhabitants of Hellas, that is, of Phthia, which
belonged to Hellas.
And in passing it should be noticed that, although the Myrmidons
inhabited Phthia, they are never called Phthians; nor do we ever hear
of Phthians at all in Homer, except only in that passage where they
are described as engaged with Locrians and others in repelling the
Trojan assault[503]. They are there described as under the command of
Medon and Podarces. But in the Catalogue Podarces and Medon[504], as
substitutes for Protesilaus and Philoctetes respectively, command the
second and fourth Thessalian contingents, which came from districts
lying near the kingdom of Peleus. Either therefore the Phthian name
extended beyond the limits of Phthia, or the Phthians were those
whom the Myrmidons had recently driven out, and whose lands they had
occupied.
We cannot conclusively settle the sense of the word Ἀχαιοὶ in this
passage, except by anticipating the results of an examination, on which
we have not yet entered. But it may be observed even at this point,
that the bearings of the passage are somewhat adverse to a merely
local construction for it. If Myrmidon was the strictly proper name,
then Achæan must have been a designation which was not proper to the
Myrmidons only, but which they enjoyed in common with others. And yet,
on the other hand, not in common with all the Greeks, but in some
sense more restricted than that, in which it is habitually applied to
the whole army. For in that large and general sense every contingent
of the army was Achæan, and Homer would certainly therefore not have
mentioned the Achæan name with respect to one in particular. It can
hardly escape observation that, studying great clearness and precision
in the Catalogue, he systematically avoids the introduction of his
general names for the army. We never read of Danaans or Argeians in
it at all, and of Achæans only twice[505]. So far then as the passage
itself guides us, it points to the supposition that those who were
called Myrmidons properly, to distinguish them from all others, and
Hellenes because they were (in common with others) inhabitants of
Hellas, belonged likewise to a particular class or race of Greeks, to
whom the name of Ἀχαιοὶ was applicable in some distinctive sense. The
three appellations, accordingly, are not so many synonyms; but each has
probably its own proper scope.
Thucydides[506] speaks with his usual accuracy, when he says that Homer
has given the name of Hellenes to no portion of the army except the
troops of Achilles from Phthiotis. He does not however go beyond the
assertion that this word had not yet grown into an appellation for the
Greeks universally, an assertion which, as far as Homer’s evidence
goes, is undeniable. But it does not require us also to deny that the
Hellas of Homer extends beyond Phthia, and that the name of Hellenes
may even then have been beginning to attach to the inhabitants of other
parts of Hellas, though perhaps less fixedly, as yet, than to the
Myrmidons.
_The Panhellenes of Homer._
With these facts in view, I am wholly unable to follow those who have
condemned, upon internal evidence, that verse of the Catalogue in which
we find mention of the Panhellenes.
Speaking of Oilean Ajax, commander of the Locrians, the poet says (Il.
ii. 530),
ἐγχείῃ δ’ ἐκέκαστο Πανέλληνας καὶ Ἀχαιούς.
It is not grammatically necessary that we should make these two words
coextensive; and I do not believe that either of them separately,
as here used, conveys the whole force of the two, though perhaps
conjointly they may carry the assertion that he was the best spearman
in the army.
If there was a Hellas in the time of Homer, which was inhabited by a
variety of tribes, then, as these tribes dispersedly might be called
with propriety Hellenes, even apart from the authority of constant
use, so they might with equal propriety be combined into the term
Panhellenes, which would mean all the tribes, including the Locrians,
that inhabited Hellas, or Northern and Mid-Greece. Thus, as the
Achæan name was at this time more prominent and distinguished in the
Peloponnesus[507] than in any other part of the country, the poet may
in this place by Ἀχαιοὶ mean the Southern or Peloponnesian Greece; so
as, by the two epithets conjointly, to signify the whole army. Or he
may mean all those who, in Hellas or beyond it, were of the pure Achæan
race (assuming, for the moment, that such a race existed); and thus may
here assert, that Ajax excelled all Hellas, and even all Achæans in or
out of Hellas, using the last of the two words by way of climax. I do
not deny that he may also be construed to mean the whole host in the
gross by Ἀχαιοὶ, agreeably to the common use of it; but this is less
likely; as the name, so understood, would not be distinctive.
Nor do I see any reason to hesitate about treating the Homeric name
Κεφάλληνες as one of his Hellenic group of names. As in the case of
Πελασγοὶ, so here we have a name formed by a combination of different
words. The word _head_ seems to have been represented by a root of
flexible structure. In Sanscrit it is _kapâla_[508], in Greek κεφάλη,
in Latin _caput_: but it also appears in the German _kopf_, and in the
Greek κόπτειν, ‘to butt,’ and in κύβη, κυβιστάω, κυβερνάω. The word
Κεφάλληνες seems, then, to be formed in the most direct manner from the
root κεφ, signifying ‘head,’ and Ἕλληνες: and thus it both attaches
Ulysses, with at least the dominant race among his subjects, to the
Hellic stock, and indicates the tendency of the Hellenic name, even in
Homer’s time, to reproduce itself and to spread abroad.
Again, we observe in his rare use of Κεφάλληνες the same signs as in
Ἕλληνες and Πανέλληνες, that the power of the name was only growing up
from its infancy. For the word is used but twice in the Iliad, and no
more than four times in the Odyssey, where there is constant occasion
for addressing, or for speaking of, the subjects of Ulysses. We find in
that poem Ἰθακήσιοι eleven times, and Ἀχαιοὶ constantly.
Having dealt with the Homeric derivations of Hellas[509], let us now
ascend to the word, from which it is itself derived; Hellas being
evidently, in the Greek tongue, the country which had been occupied by
the Helli.
Of the people who are so termed, either under the form beginning with
the aspirate, or else under that of Σελλοὶ, we find obvious Homeric
vestiges in the Hellespont, Ἑλλήσποντος; in various rivers termed
Σελληείς; and in the invocation of Achilles to Jupiter, which places
the Selli in the north of Thessaly, about wintry Dodona, and seems to
stamp them as then still remaining a people of the rudest habits in
their mountain home[510];
Δωδώνης μεδέων δυσχειμέρου· ἀμφὶ δὲ Σελλοὶ
σοὶ ναίουσ’ ὑποφῆται ἀνιπτόποδες, χαμαιεῦναι.
_The Σελλοὶ of Homer._
The word Ἕλλοι would appear to be not the most probable reading of
the text of this invocation; for it presumes an inconvenient loading
of the sentence with the double pronoun σε and σοι. But there can be
no doubt whatever as to its identity with Σελλοί. Independently of
philological argument, there is the strongest presumption that in this
place Achilles intends to name his own national ancestry, as being the
ministers of the god; who give him, as it were, the right to invoke
the aid of the Pelasgic indeed, but therefore genuine and original,
Jupiter of Dodona. But no circumstance seems to be better established
by philological research, than that in many cases of Greek words,
which now begin with the aspirate, there was one (or more than one)
initial letter, and that frequently that letter was the _sigma_. Much
obscurity has hung about this subject, from the fact that discovery has
proceeded piecemeal, and that for a length of time the word _digamma_
was used to signify what had originally filled the void now existing
in so many places of the Homeric versification. What this _digamma_
might have been was disputed; but it was, almost insensibly perhaps,
assumed to be some one letter or sound only. But as inquiry has made
further advances, many forms of a lost letter or letters have been
discovered: and it has also been made clear that the gaps ought to be
filled up variously, and not by any one uniform expedient. To take
very simple examples, there can be no doubt about the identity of
ἓξ, ἕπτα, ὓς, with _sex_, _septem_, _sus_: nor any doubt about the
essential identity of ὕδωρ and _sudor_, ἡδὺς and _suavis_, ἑκυρὸς and
_socer_: none therefore that the σ ought to be supplied, and not _f_,
_w_, or _v_, in the passage φίλε ἑκυρέ[511]. While indeed a presumption
arises[512] from the German words _schwieger_ and _schwäger_, that a
double or even treble loss may have occurred, and that the passage may
have run φίλε σϝεκυρέ. Under these circumstances, in the case before
us, where we have both forms represented, there can be no hesitation as
to the identity of Ἑλλοὶ and Σελλοί: the first represented in Ἕλλας,
Ἕλληνες, Ἑλλήσποντος, and the Ἑλλοπία of Hesiod: the other and older
one supported by Σελληείς.
There is another curious and instructive case, in which we have
the older form of the word Σελλοὶ still remaining: besides that of
Προσέληνοι, to which allusion has already been made in considering
the case of the Pelasgian Arcadians. In the Birds of Aristophanes,
the dramatist satirizes Athens and the Sicilian Expedition, under the
name of a city in the clouds, called Νεφελοκοκκυγία; the object being
to expose the arrogance of great pretensions, without adequate means
to support them. There, he says, lie most of the goods of Theagenes,
and all those of Æschines. This Theagenes was called κάπνος, smoke,
because he promised much, and did nothing. Æschines was a pauper,
who pretended to wealth. The Scholiast adds, ἦν δὲ Αἰσχίνης Σελλοῦ.
Ἔλεγον δὲ ἐκ μεταφορᾶς τοιούτους Σελλούς· καὶ τὸ ἀλαζονεύεσθαι δὲ,
σελλίζειν[513]. Cary thinks the term σελλίζειν came from a Sellus, the
father of this Æschines. But in the first place, it seems difficult
to rely on the Scholiast for knowing, still less for recording with
accuracy, the name of the father of an obscure person, who had lived
in the age of Aristophanes. In the second place, if Æschines was an
obscure fellow, it is most improbable that his father’s name should
have become the root of a Greek word descriptive of a particular
habit or propensity. Such words (for example) as hectoring and
rhodomontading presuppose a great celebrity in the person on whose
name they are based. Lastly, the derivation from the ancient Σελλοὶ
seems a perfectly natural one, and also adequate to the case. It is
in some degree characteristic of those who in reduced circumstances
trace back their lineage to a very ancient stock, instead of relying
simply on the substantial honour of their descent, still to affect the
possession of the wealth which has passed away from them: to play for
themselves the part, which Caleb Balderstone desires to play, on behalf
not of himself, but of the Master of Ravenswood, in Scott’s ‘Bride
of Lammermoor’; and altogether to be sensitive, or what is called
touchy on the subject, and to lean on the whole towards a certain
boastfulness, in common with the νεοπλοῦτοι at the other extremity of
the scale. There is a broad distinction between treating the Scholiast
as a witness to the existence and force of a current phrase, and the
taking his word for the parentage of a nobody, like this Æschines,
who had lived long before him. It may, however, not be necessary to
construe σελλίζειν solely, or even specially, with reference to a pride
in wealth which had passed away. If we shall hereafter show for the
Selli[514] a Persian ancestry, then, even without any regard to change
of circumstances, the phrase at once leads us back to the description
given by Herodotus of the Persians their forefathers. Πέρσαι, φύσιν
ἐόντες ὑβρισταὶ, εἰσὶν ἀχρήματοι[515].
I shall also have occasion to notice hereafter one or two other words
apparently akin to Σελλοί.
FOOTNOTES:
[497] Lit. Greece, i. 39, note.
[498] Il. x. 267.
[499] Il. ii. 500.
[500] Il. ii. 681.
[501] Iliad _passim_: and Od. iii. 182. iv. 9. and xi. 494.
[502] Il. xvi. 171.
[503] Il. xiii. 685-700.
[504] Il. ii. 704, 727.
[505] Il. ii. 530. 562. 684.
[506] Thuc. i. 3.
[507] Vid. inf. sect. viii.
[508] Donaldson’s New Cratylus, p. 291.
[509] It is not necessary to trace in this place, with precision, the
various applications of the name Hellas, after the time of Homer.
Stanley (on Æsch. Suppl. 263) states, that what I have termed Middle
Greece was the Hellas of Ptolemy: that with Strabo the word includes
most of the islands of the Ægean: and, finally, that it also came to
include Asia Minor, and parts even of the African coast, as well as
places elsewhere, which had been colonised by the Greek race. According
to Cramer (Geogr. Greece, i. 2), at the epoch of the Peloponnesian
war, Hellas meant everything south of the Peneus and the gulf of
Ambracia. He considers that Herodotus also meant by it a portion of
Thesprotia (Herod. ii. 56. viii. 47). It is interesting to observe how
this domestic name, taken from the race which made Greece so great and
famous, has retained its vitality through so many vicissitudes, and
is now the national name of Greece, in opposition to that which was
probably drawn from a Pelasgian source, and which, as proceeding from
the Roman masters of the country, told its people the tale of their
subjugation.
[510] Il. xvi. 234.
[511] Il. iii. 172.
[512] I follow the acute and sagacious notes of Professor Malden to a
valuable paper contributed by Mr. James Yates, during the year 1856, to
the Philological Transactions: also Donaldson’s Cratylus, p. 120.
[513] In loc. Cary’s Birds, p. 77.
[514] See sect. x.
[515] i. 89.
SECT. VII.
_On the respective contributions of the Pelasgian and Hellenic factors
to the compound of the Greek nation._
_Contributions to the mythology._
In this attempt at an ethnological survey, we have now come down to the
point, at which the Greek Peninsula passes over from its old Pelasgian
character, and becomes subject to predominating Hellenic influences.
Now therefore, and before we examine the relations and succession of
the great Homeric appellations for the Hellenes, appears to be the
time for considering how the account stands between these tribes and
the Pelasgians, and what were, so far as by probable evidence we can
ascertain it, the respective contributions from the two sources to the
integral character of the Greeks and of their institutions.
In the case of Greece, as it is known to us in history, we have the
most remarkable disproportion between moral and physical power, and
between the green and the full grown product, which is offered to
view in the whole range of human experience. A circumscribed country,
with a small population, throws forth, without loss of vital power,
to the East and to the West, colonies greatly transcending itself, as
would appear, in wealth and population; continues for many centuries
to exercise a primary influence in the world; at one time resists and
repels, at another invades and terrifies, at a third overthrows and
crushes to atoms the great colossus of Eastern empire, and continues
to exercise, through the medium of mind, a singular mastery, enduring
down to our own time, and likely still to endure, over civilized man.
And even the miniature organization of Greece presents to us, within
its own limits, diversities of character almost enough for a quarter of
the globe.
Many of these diversities connect themselves with the ethnological
formation of the different communities. In the course of that process,
so far as can be discerned, certain admixtures of foreign influence
were supplied direct from Phœnicia, Egypt, or elsewhere: but the grand
component parts or factors in this composite product are two, the
Hellenic and the Pelasgic. To this dual combination, perhaps the double
invocation of Achilles (Il. xvi. 233, 4) is a witness.
The development of the national character is the most large and varied
in Attica, where the population, from successive immigrations of
bodies of refugees, and from the free general resort and reception of
strangers, presented also the largest and most varied ethnical compound.
In analysing that national character which thus resulted from the
amalgamation of ingredients chiefly Hellic and Pelasgic, we have now to
ask how far its different elements are referable to the Pelasgic or to
the Hellic root respectively? We have traced in some degree the course
and local circumscription of the races: can we affiliate upon them any
of the contributions which they severally made to the varied manners
and to the institutions of Greece?
The proof, as far as it is specific, can be only that which probable
and conjectural evidence afford: but that evidence is supported by the
fact, that it tends, as a whole, to an orderly result.
While they proceed from different sources, and present visible and
even permanent distinctions of character, there is no violent disparity
between the Hellic and the Pelasgic races: they afford a good material
for coalescence. We are not to suppose that whatever the one had,
the other had not. Of what belongs historically to the Pelasgi, much
may stand as theirs only through their priority of entrance into the
country.
I propose to inquire what evidence can be drawn, either from
philological sources, or from the text of Homer, to throw light on the
several pursuits and tendencies of these races, under the heads of
Religion, Policy, War, the Games, Poetry, the Chase, and Navigation.
Under some of these heads, however, we must in a measure anticipate
results which will be only obtained in full from later inquiries.
The Poems afford us no complete and decisive test for discriminating
between the Hellene and the Pelasgian contributions respectively to the
Greek religion.
We shall, however, hereafter find many details of evidence bearing upon
this subject.
For the present I must confine myself to two very general propositions,
which are founded on the relations of the Greek religion with those of
Troy and of Italy.
First, there seems to be a presumption, which may weigh with us to
a certain extent in the absence of counter-evidence, that those
parts of the Greek religion which were common to the Greeks with the
Trojans were Pelasgian, and that those which were not common, were not
Pelasgian. But of the parts which were common, and therefore Pelasgian,
many may have been originally Hellene too.
Again, a relationship subsists between Greece and Italy, as to the
component parts of their respective populations, which, without being
unduly strained, will throw considerable light upon the question of
Hellic and Pelasgic attributes.
The Greek or the Italian of the classic times could not be expected
to own relationship with what lay to the northward, on each of those
two peninsulas. The Roman, therefore, whose investigations led him
to suppose there were Pelasgians in Italy, would only derive them
from Greece. For us the case stands far otherwise; and we must simply
consider the Pelasgians of Greece, and the Pelasgians of Italy, as two
among a variety of branches, which struck out at different times from
the main trunk of an extended race, probably diffusing itself over
many parts of Asia and Europe. In Greece and Italy respectively these
Pelasgic tribes entered into new combinations, probably not wholly
different, nor, on the other hand, by any means in exact correspondence.
We may perhaps be found not to go beyond the limits of the modesty
which the case requires, when we simply lay down this rule: that
correspondences in religion or in language between Greece and ancient
Italy raise a presumption, that those features of each country, in
which the correspondence is observed, are of Pelasgic origin.
Something of such correspondence we may perceive in regard to religion.
The religion of Homeric Greece differs from that of Rome, not only
as to minor deities, but in the names given to many of the greater
deities, and especially in the far more imaginative character of its
traditions.
Those parts of the religion of Greece and Rome which were common to
both were probably Pelasgian.
Let us take first the names which correspond, and then those which are
different.
(I.) Names of deities that correspond in the Greek and Latin tongues:
1. Ζεύς Deus.
2. Ζεὺς-πάτηρ Jupiter.
3. Ἀπόλλων Apollo.
4. Ἱστιή Vesta.
5. Λήτω Latona.
6. Περσεφόνη Proserpina.
7. Ἄρης Mars or Mavors.
(II.) Names of deities which do not in any manner correspond in the
Greek and Latin tongues:
1. Ἥρη Juno.
2. Ποσειδὼν Neptune.
3. Ἀιδώνευς Pluto.
4. Ἀθήνη Minerva.
5. Ἥφαιστος Vulcan.
6. Ἑρμῆς Mercury.
7. Ἀφροδίτη Venus.
8. Ἄρτεμις Diana.
9. Δημήτηρ Ceres.
10. Διόνυσος Bacchus.
Two remarks may be made on the deities of the first list.
First, that it comprehends generally the gods whom we shall find to
bear marks of being the most ancient among the Greek deities; with the
marked exception, however, of Minerva[516].