IT may safely be said that the difficult question as to the relative influences of the external effects of soil, climate, physical conditions, the admixture of foreign blood, and the introduction of foreign examples on the one side, and those of what is called race on the other, never rises to a greater degree of importance than it does in the ethnology of Ancient Greece. For, in our current language, we consider race to mean certain original differences of organization, faculties, and capacities stamped upon different divisions of the human species from the beginning; innate qualities, as distinguished from mere developments; internal elements of the original material upon which the external agencies of climate, soil, and examples act in the different degrees of its receptivity, as contrasted with the various agencies themselves; and in this current language, many writers, who would shrink from the conclusions to which the term logically leads, unconsciously indulge. I say unconsciously, because it is nearly certain that, out of ten writers who talk about race, and assign to the word a meaning essentially the same as the one just exhibited, nine would be unwilling to deny the unity of our species—unity meaning descent from the same pair. Yet between this and a system of special interpositions the advocate of the effects of race has no alternative. How can there be two original capabilities for the reception of either moral or physical influences, and the evolution of intellectual phenomena out of them, in different members of a family descended from a single pair?

All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first; and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations, when he talks about race, only throws back the evolution of the distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to race, as an ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect—an effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an effect. For it is evident that of race, as it is called, there can be but three causes—original difference of parentage, preternatural changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate, nutrition, and ideas.

I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes the search that the number of writers who write about race, and who are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third, and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?

In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they were a race at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course, viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been different from that of the father—the one Italian, the other native to the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature, an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.

Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.

The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance. Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the English character of the counties in question at the time referred to. Four centuries—or even less—of migration may easily have given us all the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more impracticable.

Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area, no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and Northumberland have been from British to English.

And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly, satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans, the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but Britons. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied that they must always have been what they were in their own days, superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered that, even in the third century B.C.—nay even at the present moment—the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.

Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the nearly opposite island of Corcyra—Greek in the time of the historian, but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.

So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have been small enough for the purposes suggested, i.e., small enough to have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few centuries.

On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the confederation are the Thessalians and PerrhÆbi; but whether the latter were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so. Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, non-Hellenic; so much so, that it is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi what may be called Hellenoeid—or Greek-like—that the semblance of any close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the Homeric confederacy can be obtained.

If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos, Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.

Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have received the whole of its population from some other country, and that by means of boats and ships.

The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form, are—1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis out of the question.

One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus, Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf, and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.

Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and Phoenicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.

The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.

I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much which is really Phoenician, or Jewish, may have been considered as Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.

a. The name of the city ThebÆ, common to both Greece and Egypt, is one of these.

b. The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is another.

c. The word Barbaros, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of Egypt being Berber at the present moment, induces me to consider it as an absolute Egyptian word.

d. The word Africa is easily explained by supposing that the Egyptians took it from the Afer nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic source.

e. The names Iolchos and Colchis.—How comes Jason, in sailing from a part of Thessaly named Iolchos, to reach a part of Asia with a name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence, however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis (evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement) supplies an explanation. Both Colchos and Iolchos may have been Egyptian.

Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phoenicians only (and not the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of Crete.

The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phoenician or Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phoenician. The selling of the sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive Danai was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if they were adscripti gleboe, and ignore the share they may have taken in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity, they are known in the holy places only—yet the seaports between Tyre and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing. What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name Pelop-o-nesus, and the history of the Pelop-id family, if a bon fide nation of Pelopes, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no one connects them.

In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.

That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are Phoenician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in favour of the coasts of Phoenicia, and the Philistine country having supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to have been so.

The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.

If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course, exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in Boeotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.

The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then, other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized portions into Æolia, Ionia, and Doris is unnoticed—probably it was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term Hellenes.

From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the state of Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus—European and Continental Greece—is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos. Hellas, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political importance, into two classes—the Dorian and Ionian. These differences between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind, for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are best explained and accounted for by supposing, either—

1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or—

2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.

Thus—admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In the first and last instances, there may also have been a different starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which Æolus was the eponymus.

That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the extent whereto the reasoning which the palÆontological geologist applies to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of historical testimony) is applicable to the archÆology of the human species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian, Croatian, and other interjacent populations.

There is, then, a Greek language, a Greek literature, a Greek influence in literature; all beyond doubt. But there is no equally undoubted Greek stock. As far as there is such an entity, the speech is in Hellas, and the blood in Italy.

Up to a certain time the Hellenic influence has a northern direction, and acts upon certain populations originally barbarous, so as imperfectly to Hellenize them. Such is the case with Ætolia and Macedon. Afterwards, however, the direction of these influences changes, and Ætolia and Macedon contribute to dis-Hellenize (if so hybrid a word may be allowed) Greece. Before they do this, however, they have been taken out of the category of barbarism; just as would be the case if Anglo-Saxon England were reconquered by the half-Anglicized Ireland of the nineteenth century, and just as would not have been the case had it been conquered by the Ireland of Brian BorÚ. Rome, too, respected the land that she had reduced; so that the physical history of Greece remains but slightly altered until the period of the Gothic, Hun, and Slavonic invasions. And even Alaric but ravaged the soil and destroyed life. We nowhere find proofs of any introduction of Gothic blood. Nor yet of Hun. It is the Slavonic stock that has given Greece its greatest foreign element.

Why is it that when we compare a map of Modern with one of Ancient Greece, such a small proportion of the old classical names, either modified or unmodified in form, can be found? Such is, undoubtedly, the case. Yet subject to Turkey as Greece was until the present century, the majority of the new names is not Turkish. On the contrary, they are chiefly Slavonic. The language of the later Byzantine writers explains this.[13]

As early as the last quarter of the sixth century (A.D. 582), the movements set in towards Greece; Thrace and Macedon being overrun by Slavonians. The details here, however, are obscure, and there is an occasional confusion of the Slaves with the Avars. The latter nation, however, seems to have made no notable settlement in Southern Greece at least. In the latter half of the seventh century, Thessaly, Epirus, several of the islands, and parts of Asia Minor were overrun. In the ninth, Macedon is called Slavonia (S??a???a). In the eleventh, Athens is sacked, and the inhabitants driven to take refuge in the isle of Salamis. Under Constantine Porphyrogeneta, the presence of an Hellenic population is an exception. “In Macedon,” he writes, “the Scythians dwell, instead of the Macedonians.” Again, “the whole country is Slavonized.”

But the most remarkable passage is the following, which shows that a Slavonic population is so far the rule that where an approach to the ancient population is found it is dealt with as a remarkable phenomenon; and that by a Greek writer:—“It must be known that the inhabitants of the settlement (??st???) Maina, are not of the race of the aforesaid Slaves, but of the old Romans, and even till the present time, they are called by their neighbours Hellenes, from having been originally Pagans and idolatrers like the old Hellenes.”—De Adm. Imp. I. 50.

Latin writers, equally with the Greek, considered Greece to be Slavonic:—“Inde (i.e., Sicilia) navigantes venerunt ultra mare Adrium ad urbem Manafasiam in Sclavinica terra.”—From a Journal of St. Willibald, the writer of which, by Manafasia, means Napoli di Malvasia in the Morea.

More than this. The details of some of these Slavonic populations are given; so that we know that there were EzeritÆ and Milengi in the Morea, with DragovitÆ, SagudatÆ, VelegezetÆ, VerzetÆ, and others in Northern Greece.

In diminished numbers, the representatives of the old Laconians exist at the present time. A.D. 1573, they had fourteen, they have now but three, villages—Prasto, or the ancient PrasiÆ, Kastanitza, and Silina. With the exception of their dialect, the Romaic of modern Hellas is said to be spoken with considerable uniformity over the whole of Greece.

Without investigating the difficult question as to the proportion of Slavonic elements, it may fairly be said that Ancient Greece is the area of a greatly, and Modern Greece that of an inordinately, mixed stock. To this mixture, Italians, Albanians, and other populations of modern Europe have added.