Dorian and the Pelasgian. He takes the Greeks of the Trojan Epoch to
have been Pelasgian, and so to have continued until the return of the
Heraclidæ. Then, according to him, began the Hellenic, which he treats
as synonymous with the Doric, preponderance; and, having Sparta before
him as the one great Hellic type, he observes that the race was far
better adapted “for the arts of war and self-government, than for the
softer arts of poetry and peace[588].”
But the supposition of a Pelasgic supremacy in Homeric Greece, is
contrary to all the evidence afforded by the text of Homer, and, I
think we may add, to the belief alike of ancient and of modern times.
Even the limited part of the Homeric evidence which is connected with
the names Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες, seems large enough to overthrow any such
hypothesis. Though the Dorian race was Hellenic, it was apparently
a late outgrowth from the stock, and has no pretension whatever to
be considered as the universal type of its products. In Sparta, the
excessive development of policy was doubtless unfavourable to human
excellence in other forms; among others, to poetry and art. Still,
neither verse, music, nor architecture are disconnected from the Dorian
name and race. It seems quite impossible to refer the war-poetry of
the Iliad, the grandest in the world, for its origin to a people so
unwarlike, in reference especially to the changeful, romantic, and
poetic side of war, as the Pelasgi.
The adventurous tone and tenour of the Odyssey, and its wide range over
the world, and over the sea, are as little in keeping with what we can
see of Pelasgic habits in the heroic age. Above all, that largeness and
unimpaired universality of type, which belongs to human character as
drawn by Homer, and especially to Achilles and Ulysses, demonstrate (I
cannot use a weaker word) that all the materials of Grecian greatness
were in his time fully ripened.
_Pelasgian sense of beauty._
At the same time it is not necessary to deny, that the Pelasgians
may have been endowed with a high sense of beauty. Not that Homer
appears to have had a vivid conception of beauty in connection with
architecture, their great reputed accomplishment; for he seems, on the
contrary, to have had little idea of ornament in buildings, beyond
the blaze of plates of polished metal: far different here from what
he shows himself to be in dealing with dress, or armour, or the forms
of men and horses. But we have before us the fact that through Athens
itself preeminently, and likewise through its colonies to the east, the
Greek race earned in after-times the very highest honours in poetry
and the fine arts. On the one hand, however, a large share of these
honours, especially in early times, fell to the share of the race
called Æolian, which was clearly Hellic, and a principal part of the
Hellic family. On the other hand, Arcadia, which remained more purely
Pelasgian, while Athens received all sorts of mixtures, never attained
to high distinction in art, nor rose above a modest and tranquil strain
of verse. The great tragedians and the great artists were of a race
the most composite in all Greece. The natural inference would seem to
be, that whatever the Pelasgians may have contributed to the general
result, however they may have afforded for poetry and art (as also they
did for war) a good raw material, it was only when in combination with
other elements from other sources, that they could attain to great
practical excellence. A lively sense of beauty is, doubtless, not only
a condition, but even a foundation: yet a great organising power is as
necessary for the production of the great works of imagination, as
it was to Lycurgus for the Spartan constitution, or to Aristotle for
philosophical analysis and construction; and this was the commanding
and sovereign faculty in a mind such as that of Homer.
The connection between the Homeric Greeks and the traditions of
huntsmen is, I think, sufficiently evident from Homer. His hunting
legends, and the multitude of his hunting similes, are so many signs of
it; and many indications, I think, concur towards forming a belief that
the Greeks owed their fondness for the chace to their Hellic, not to
their Pelasgic habits and blood.
I take first the relation between Achilles and his instructors.
Chiron was the teacher of Achilles in the surgical art, while Phœnix
had charge of his higher education. Surgery and war would obviously
go together. But Chiron too gave his father the ashen spear from
Pelion, which none but Achilles could wield: he was the most civilized
(δικαιότατος) of the Centaurs, the one to whom the ideas of right, on
which society is founded, were most congenial. But he seems to dwell
on Mount Pelion, not like Phœnix, in the court of Peleus; he is,
therefore, without doubt, a huntsman, and is in fact a link between the
old and rude, and the new and more civilized life of the Hellic tribes.
Again. Of the Hellic legends of Homer, which are not in all very
numerous, two have hunting for their subject: as,
1. That of the Calydonian Boar in Il. ix.
2. That of the visit of Ulysses to the court of Autolycus, in Od. xix.
Now these two legends are the only ones in the poems, that do not
relate to war. Though the Trojans dwelt by Ida, we never hear of their
hunts: but their princes feed sheep upon its slopes, or tend horses in
the plain below.
_Evidence as to hunting._
Even apart from particular evidence, we might presume that, if the
nation derived its warlike turn from a Hellic source, so it must
likewise have been with hunting, which was next of kin to war.
Lastly, if this supposition be correct, it helps to account for what
is otherwise an anomaly in the poems. Diana fights on the Trojan side:
yet we find no evidence that she was worshipped among the Trojans, or
even known to them in the character, in which she has the greatest
mythical celebrity. She is mentioned but once, I think, among them; it
is by Andromache, and that is as having put a period to her mother’s
life[589], nowhere in her character as a huntress. But among the Greeks
she constantly appears otherwise than as in connection with death. Her
epithets, ἀγροτέρη, κελαδεινὴ, ἰοχέαιρα, are far more suitable to the
huntress, than to the more solemn function of the ministry of Death
among human beings. Again, Helen is compared to her in appearance.
The calamities of the Kalydonians came upon them in consequence of
their neglect as to her worship on a particular occasion[590]; and the
particular punishment inflicted is the sending a wild boar upon them.
Nausicaa[591] is elaborately compared to her, and in this simile she is
described as hunting in Taygetus and Erymanthus. Thus while among the
more Pelasgic Trojans, she appears only in virtue of the relation to
death which (we shall find) she holds from a traditive source[592]; it
is the Hellic influence, which superadds the mythical and imaginative
attributes of the beautiful huntress: and which, in so doing, supplies
a marked proof of the addiction of the Hellic tribes to that pursuit.
_Evidence as to navigation._
It is not easy to judge whether the turn of the Greeks for navigation
ought to be referred in any degree to a Pelasgian source. Plainly, if
there was such a source, it was not the main one. We have seen that
only the most elementary words connected with propulsion by rowing,
appear to bear any sign on them of proceeding from that stock. We
cannot argue from the maritime excellence of the Athenians at a much
later date to their nautical character in the time of Homer, on account
of the important ethnical changes, which in the mean time they had
gradually, but most thoroughly, undergone. On the other hand, our
finding the pure Pelasgian population of Arcadia resorting to the
inland country, and wholly destitute of ships, affords a negative
indication. A stronger, and indeed very remarkable one, is supplied by
the total want of ships among the Trojans, notwithstanding that their
situation was one highly favourable to the acquisition of maritime
power. Yet Paris needed to have ships built for him in order to effect
his tour[593], and the building of them appears in the Iliad as
having been an event of much note in Troy. On the other hand, Homer
is full of indications of the locomotive tendencies of the Hellic
races. Among these may be mentioned, the wide circle embraced in
the adventures of Hercules: the offer of Menelaus[594] to accompany
Telemachus on a journey about Greece: the sojourn of Neoptolemus[595]
in Scyros: the frequent visits of Idomeneus[596] to Sparta before
the war: the marriage of Theseus[597] to a daughter of the king of
Crete: the journey of Nestor[598] into Thessaly: the pleasure visits
of Autolycus to Ithaca, and of the young Ulysses[599] to Autolycus:
the evident familiarity of the Poet with the idea of travelling to
recover debts[600]: the existence of places of wide resort for Games
and Oracles[601]: the custom of assembling from a group of districts
at the funerals of great men[602]: nay, the very choice of the voyages
of Ulysses for the subject of so great a part of the Odyssey, and the
lengthened tour of Menelaus. And while the Pelasgians appear to be akin
to the land-loving Egyptians, we have found the Hellenes to be strongly
sympathetic in character with the Phœnicians, the great masters of
navigation in the heroic age.
From the speech of the Pseudo-Ulysses in the Fourteenth Odyssey, we
have the strongest evidence that navigation and agricultural pursuits,
which were those of the Pelasgians, stood in sharp opposition to one
another. He could not bear tillage, but loved ships and war[603].
ἔργον δέ μοι οὐ φίλον ἦεν,
οὐδ’ οἰκωφελίη, ἥτε τρέφει ἀγλαὰ τέκνα·
ἀλλά μοι αἰεὶ νῆες ἐπήρετμοι φίλοι ἦσαν
καὶ πόλεμοι καὶ ἄκοντες ἐΰξεστοι καὶ ὀïστοί.
It is also plain, from two circumstances at least, that Homer regarded
travelling as one great means of mental and practical culture. One is,
that he describes this benefit as attained in the case of his great
hero Ulysses;
ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη ...
πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα, καὶ νόον ἔγνω[604].
The other is that, in the very remarkable simile of the Thought, he
treats travelling as the great stimulus to the growth of the mind of
man:
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀΐξῃ νόος ἀνέρος, ὅς τ’ ἐπὶ πολλήν
γαῖαν ἐληλουθὼς φρεσὶ πευκαλίμῃσι νοήσῃ·
ἔνθ’ εἴην, ἢ ἔνθα· μενοινήῃσί τε πολλά[605].
Both as to navigation then, and as to locomotion, which stand nearly
related to each other, it would seem that we ought probably to regard
the Hellic stock as the parent of the Greek accomplishment.
_Summary of the case._
After this laborious and microscopic investigation, we may now be
justified in taking a survey more at ease of the ground which we have
traversed so slowly, and in endeavouring to embody our general results
in a rude sketch of the succession, places, and functions of the two
great races of early Greece.
Relying, therefore, upon what has been produced in the way of proof,
I will proceed to fill up its interstices with such conjectures as
probable reasoning will supply.
The Greek nation was originally formed of two great coefficients, the
Hellic and Pelasgic races respectively: and there is no evidence, that
any other race entered largely into its composition, or modified it
sensibly: although individual foreigners or companies of emigrants,
which left little impression on the names of districts or races, may
notwithstanding have exercised a powerful influence from time to time.
We may consider the Leleges, Caucones, and other pre-Hellenic tribes as
branches of the Pelasgian family, or as akin to it rather than to the
Hellic stem.
There is Homeric and post-Homeric evidence, which seems to shew us the
Pelasgians established through Greece from Macedonia in the north,
to Crete in the south: as well as in Italy, and elsewhere beyond the
borders of Greece.
It is on the whole most probable, that the Pelasgians principally
entered Greece from the south by Crete; but they may have entered
it in both directions. In either case, there is no other people
to dispute with them in continental Greece the title of its first
regular settlers. They chose their habitations in the plains, and
were essentially a lowland people. It is even likely that they derive
their name from this characteristic, and that it marks them at once as
agriculturists.
As respects the religion of Greece, its most essential features were
probably common to the two races: a principle illustrated by the fact
that the Helli, by a kind of natural succession, become the wardens and
interpreters of the great Pelasgian shrine of Jupiter at Dodona.
The first form of the religion of Greece was probably due to
the Pelasgians; and moreover it would appear to be from them
that it received, in the main, its ritual and hierarchical, as
contradistinguished from its imaginative, development. They appear to
have incorporated it in visible institutions, and to have given social
order to the country; probably in that form in which men live sparsely,
and not in the large aggregations of considerable cities. But social
order in any form implies some means of defence against the lawless:
and we must view the Pelasgians as having introduced the construction
of works of this class, which were then of prime necessity to the
existence of communities. Their standing pursuit was evidently that of
agriculture: the only link of connection established by Homer between
them and the beautiful in art, is the doubtful one of the epithets
περικαλλέα and καλὰ[606] applied to the architecture of the palaces of
Priam and Paris respectively.
In general, the Pelasgian race, though without the vivid temperament of
the Hellic tribes, yet would appear to have been both brave and solid
in character.
The stream of Pelasgic immigration, flowing chiefly northward, is met
by the counter-stream of Hellic tribes, proceeding from the highland
nation of the Helli, which had taken its seat in the mountains to the
north of Thessaly.
They in their southward course overspread the same countries which the
Pelasgi had already occupied; successive tribes of immigrants going
forth from the parent stock at different times, as the pressure of
population on the means of subsistence required it, and under different
names, taken in all likelihood from their leaders.
In the nest of mountaineers, barbarism, or at least rudeness,
continues: but as the young broods go forth, and make their way into
more favourable conditions of physical and social life, their great
capacities for development find scope, and they rapidly assume a new
character.
By their greater energy and activity, they became everywhere the
dominant race. Policy and war fell into their hands: they supplied the
more vigorous, intellectual, and imaginative element in the wonderful
composition of the Greek mind. Of the Pelasgian imagination it is
difficult to speak in a definite manner: but it probably had not that
masculine tone, and energetic movement, when alone, which marks the
mind of Greece.
Far more expansive than their Pelasgian antecessors, the Hellic tribes
availed themselves of the great advantages which the country offers
for extended navigation, which was so essential as a means both of
communication, and of attracting the elements of civilization from
abroad. They were apt pupils under apt instructors, the Phœnician
mariners. They developed the Pelasgic religion into their more enlarged
and diversified mythology: they idealized the visible world together
with human nature, and established those peculiar and pervasively
poetical relations between the seen and the unseen spheres of
existence, which are the basis of the Greek mythology. Their keen sense
of the beautiful led them to adorn both the body and the mind of man
with the attributes of deity, while their imaginative power continually
prompted them both to clothe celestial objects in shapes borrowed from
the visible world, and to equip the gods with sentiments and passions
drawn from the sphere of every day experience.
They likewise brought with them the gymnastic element of the Greek
system, the education of the body; and they made provision for this
education, in conjunction with a powerful means of national union, in
the Games which became so famous through so many ages.
The same qualities which found employment in fashioning the relations
of earth to heaven, were likewise busy in uniting the past with the
present, by the agency of history in the form of song.
Of this race were the Achæans, who by their power and extension through
Greece, gave to it and to its people their first famous designation,
that which they bore in the Homeric times. From the same source
proceeded all the Hellenes, derivatively so called, and the Myrmidons.
Under the great Achæan name, understood in its special sense, are
probably included with the Pelopids, the Pylians, Cephallenians,
Epeans, Myrmidons, Loerians. Nor can we be certain that it did not also
include those Æolid families whose power and extension subsequently
impressed large portions of Greece with the Æolian name.
While imperial cares and aims, and the refinements and enjoyments,
together with the stir, movement, and solicitude of life, fell to the
Hellic portion of the Greek societies, and took its form from them,
the Pelasgian element, though depressed below the surface, continued
to live and act with vigour; it predominated in the classes which form
the solid _substratum_ of society, those on which rural industry, if
not those on which mechanical pursuits depended, and from which the
upper surface, when exhausted by the prolonged performance of its
functions, may draw in every society successive stocks of new materials
to renovate its vital forces.
While Homer himself seems to represent the unbounded wealth and
fulness, and the manifold and versatile power, of the composite Greek
mind, we appear to have, in the rural strains of Hesiod, if not in the
unenlivened theogonic traditions ascribed to him, the just and natural
exemplification of all that we might expect in a Pelasgic poet.
_States especially Hellic or Pelasgic._
In later, as well as in Homeric times, the Arcadians seem in the most
marked manner to have exhibited the Pelasgic aspect of the Greek mind
and life: and they show it much in the same relation to the Hellic
races, as that of the Saxons to the Norman chivalry. Like the Saxons,
it was not in bravery that they failed: they were ἐγχεσίμωροι and
ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν: but in energy and passion, and likewise in
governing and organizing powers, they were beneath the competing race,
and therefore they gave way: while, from their enduring and solid
qualities, they were well qualified in after generations to supply the
greater waste caused by a more vivid temperament and keener action in
the soil above them.
Among the Spartans we find developed, in a very peculiar degree, two
of the imperial elements of the Greek character. The first is that
political faculty of the Hellic races, by which, as Strabo says, they
preserved their ἡγεμονία from the time of Lycurgus, down to the fifth
century.
And the second is, the idea of the education of the body, as an
essential and main part of human training: a sentiment which to us may
seem narrow, but we must remember that the Greeks kept fully in their
view what we have dropped from our theories, though it may be hoped,
not wholly from our practice, namely, the influence of bodily exercise
and discipline in forming mental qualities and habits.
It was to Attica, however, that was reserved the offices of exhibiting
in the fullest degree the manysidedness of the Greek character: and
the efficient cause, by which she was fitted to fulfil this function,
probably may have been that constant infusion of new blood by the
successive immigrations of the different Greek races, without the
absolute displacement of any of them on a large scale, which, as we
have seen, Thucydides remarks to have been her special characteristic.
Hence she always exhibited both the ancient and the fresh; both, too,
in the highest degree; urging, like Arcadia, the autochthonic origin of
her population, which must refer to its Pelasgic element; contending
with that state, and with Argos[607], for the honour of the traditions
touching Pelasgus and the worship of Ceres; but richer at the same time
than any other Greek State, in the varied aggregate of the qualities,
which the composite or entire Greek mind appears to have owed to
Hellic infusion. Hence the breadth of the transition which, according
to Herodotus[608], she had made from the Pelasgic to the Hellenic
character: and yet she had made it without any visible breach in the
continuity of her social and political traditions.
Though Thessaly was the country in which, to all appearance, the Hellic
tribes, coming down from the poverty and rudeness of their highland
life, first began to develope their amazing powers, and to acquire
civilization, yet it was rather, so to speak, their caravansera or
halting house, than their abode.
The Helli, thus travelling through Hellas, give it a name, and receive
from it one in return; so that when they pass on to the southward,
they are no longer Helli but Hellenes, and have only a secondary
and derivative relation to their original home and stock. It is
intelligible, that they should not wish to claim too close a kindred
with the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι of Homer[609], although most ready to
own the relationship in solemn appeals to the ancient seat of Jupiter.
Even in Homer’s time, they had advanced very far ahead of the habits
thus ascribed to them: for when the Greek chiefs return from the
Doloneia, they first wash in the sea, then pass into the bath, and
thirdly are anointed, before they begin their well-earned meal[610].
The rapidity of their growth in numbers, and of their propagation
southwards, might be due to their having settled on a fertile plain;
while necessities, arising from the vicissitudes of climate, would
be the probable and less copious cause of migration from the hills.
But in any case, whether from the rapidity of their passage through
Thessaly, or from their having actually occupied no more than a small
portion of it, they left it in the Homeric, and apparently also in
the Hesiodic period, still partly impressed, as they must have found
it, with the Pelasgic name[611]. The prolonged existence of this
appellation indicates in part perhaps the predominance of the Pelasgic
element in this country, in part the fugacious character of the Hellic
settlement, of which only the Achæan portion lived through the historic
times in such a degree of force as to maintain its visible identity:
this, too, according to post-Homeric tradition, was peopled by the
Myrmidons from the south, and not directly from the region of the Helli.
Thessaly, then, was the nursery or cradle of the Hellic or Hellenic
races, but it was no more. Consequently with the lapse of time, as it
wanted the true mixture of ingredients, Thessaly became less and less
Greek in its essential habits and sympathies: while from its preserving
a federal constitution, under a federal head, the τάγος, we may also
refer to its more Pelasgian character the apparent fact, that it was
not so liable to political change, or νεωτέρισις, as were the less
Pelasgian parts of Greece. When, after centuries of vicissitude, the
outward notes of its original blood were almost gone, Pelasgian feeling
still survived: for Thucydides relates that, when Brasidas entered
Thessaly at the head of the Lacedæmonian army, he found the mass of the
people attached by affection to the Athenian cause, and had to rely on
aristocratic influence to furnish him with guides[612].
FOOTNOTES:
[516] See Studies on the Theo-mythology of Homer.
[517] Fasti, i. 39.
[518] De Nat. Deor. ii. 27.
[519] Liv. Hist. Rom. iv. 25, 29.
[520] Exc. iv. ad Æn. vii. See Browne’s History of Roman Literature,
chap. viii. p. 129, and chap. iii. p. 41. Also Dunlop’s Hist. Rom.
Literature, vol. iii. p. 56.
[521] See ‘The Trojans.’
[522] Polyb. vi. 56, sect. 6-12.
[523] Dionysius, b. ii. 18-21.
[524] Id., b. viii. 38. See also Cic. Div. i. 2.
[525] Smith’s Dict., Art. ‘Fasti.’
[526] Acts xvii. 22.
[527] Outram de Sacrif. b. i. ch. iv. sect. 3.
[528] Exodus xi. 12-16, and Levit. viii. 1-13. 1 Sam. xvi. 2, &c. See
Calmet’s Dict. Taylor’s Edition, 1838. Art. Priest.
[529] Heb. v. 4.
[530] Browne’s Roman Classical Literature, ch. i. p. 13.